Koontz, Dean R. - The Bad Place

by The Bad Place(Lit)

  place, partly because the insanely high value such upscale real estate

  ensured the construction of immense houses out of proportion to the tiny

  lots they stood on, partly because Tudor and French architectural styles

  clashed with the semitropical landscape. It was all part of the Cali

  nia circus, some of which he hated, most of which he loved. Those

  houses never bothered him before, and given the serious problems he and

  Julie faced, he couldn't figure why they bothered him now. Maybe he was

  so jumpy that even these misharmonies reminded him of the chaos that had

  almost engulfed him during his travels with Frank.

  He said,

  "Do you have to drive so fast)"

  "Yes," she said curtly.

  "I want to get home, get packed, to Santa Barbara, learn what we can

  about the Pollard family, get finished with this whole damn creepy

  case."

  "If you feel that way, why don't we just drop it here? Frank comes

  back, we give him his money, his jar of red diamonds, tell him we're

  sorry, we think he's a prince of a guy, but we're out of it."

  "We can't," she said.

  He chewed on his lower lip, then said,

  "I know. But I can't figure why we're compelled to hang in there with

  this one." They crested the hill and speeded north, past the entrance

  to Rocking Horse Ridge. Their own development was only a couple of

  streets ahead, on the left. As she finally began to brake for the turn,

  she glanced at him and said,

  "You really don't know why we can't bug out of it?"

  "No. You saying you do?"

  "I know."

  "Tell me."

  "You'll figure it out eventually."

  "Don't be mysterious. That's not like you." She swung the company

  Toyota into their development, then onto their street.

  "I tell you what I think, it'll upset you. You'll deny it, we'll argue,

  and I don't want to argue with you."

  "Why will we argue?" She pulled into their driveway, put the car in

  park, switched off the lights and engine, and turned to him. Her eyes

  shone in the dark.

  "When you understand why we can't let go, you won't like what it says

  about us, and you'll argue that I'm wrong, that we're just a couple of

  sweet kids, really. You like to see us as a couple of sweet kids, savvy

  but basically innocent at the same time, like a young Jimmy Stewart and

  Donna Reed. I really love you for that, for being such a dreamer about

  the world and us, and it'll hurt me when you want to argue." He almost

  started to argue with her about whether he would argue with her. Then

  he stared at her for a moment and finally said,

  "I've had this feeling that I'm not facing up to something, that when

  this is all over and I realize why I was so determined to see this

  through to the end, my motivations won't be as noble as I think they are

  now. It's a weird damn feeling. As if I don't really know myself."

  "Maybe we spend all our lives learning to know ourselves.

  And maybe we never really will completely." She kissed him lightly,

  quickly, and got out of the car.

  As he followed her up the sidewalk to the front door, glanced at the

  sky. The clarity of the day had been short-lived A pall of clouds

  concealed the moon and stars. The sky very dark, and he was gripped by

  the curious certainty great and terrible weight was falling toward them,

  bright against the black heavens and therefore invisible, but falling

  fast, faster....

  CANDY KEPT a choke hold on his fury, which reacted its leash. strained

  like an attack dog trying to!" He rocked and rocked, and gradually the

  shy visitor grew bolder. Repeatedly he felt the invisible hand on his

  head. Initially it lay upon him as lightly as an empty silk glove, and

  it stayed only briefly before flitting away. But as he pretended to be

  disinterested in both the hand and the person to whom it belonged, the

  visitor grew more daring, the hand heavier and less nervous.

  Though Candy made no effort to probe at the mind of the intruder, for

  fear of scaring him away, some of the stranger's thoughts came to him

  nonetheless. He did not think the visitor was aware that images and

  words from his own mind were slipping into Candy's; they were just

  leaking out of him as if they were trickles of water seeping from

  pin-size holes in a rusty bucket.

  The name

  "Julie" came several times. And once an image floated along with the

  name-an attractive woman with brown hair and dark eyes. Candy wasn't

  sure if it was the visitor's face or the face of someone the visitor

  knew even if it was the face of anyone who really existed. There were

  aspects that made it seem unreal: a pale light radiated from it, and the

  features were so kind and serene that it looked like the holy

  countenance of a saint in an illustrated Bible.

  The word

  "flutterby" leaked out of the visitor's mind more than once, sometimes

  with other words, like

  "remember the flutterby" or "don't be a flutterby." And each time that

  word flitted through his mind, the visitor quickly withdrew.

  But he kept coming back. Because Candy did nothing to make him feel

  unwelcome.

  Candy rocked and rocked. The chair made a soft sound creak... creak...

  creak... creak.

  He waited.

  He kept an open mind.

  ... creak... creak... creak...

  Twice the name

  "Bobby" seeped from the visitor's mind and the second time a fuzzy image

  of a face was linked to another very kind face. It was idealized, like

  Julie's face. Recognition stirred in Candy, but Bobby's visage was not

  as clear or detailed as Julie's, and Candy did not want to concentrate

  on it because the visitor might notice his interest and be frightened

  off.

  During his long and patient courtship of the shy introvert many other

  words and images came to Candy, but he didn't know what to make of them:

  -men in spacesuits

  "Bad Thing"-a guy in a hockey mask-"The Home"-"Dumb People"-a bathrobe,

  a half-eaten Hershey's bar, and a sudden frantic thought: Draw Bugs, no

  good, Draw Bugs, got to Be Not More than ten minutes passed without

  contact, and Can started to worry that the intruder had gone away for

  good. But suddenly he was back. This time the contact was strong, more

  intimate than ever.

  When Candy sensed that the visitor was more confident, knew the time had

  come to act. He pictured his mind as a steel trap, the visitor as an

  inquisitive mouse, and he pictured a trap springing, the bar pinning the

  visitor to the kill plate.

  Shocked, the visitor tried to pull away. Candy held him a pushed across

  the telepathic bridge between them, trying storm his adversary's mind to

  find out who he was, where was, and what he wanted.

  Candy had no telepathic power of his own, nothing to equal; even the

  weak telepathic gifts of the intruder; he had never re anyone's mind

  before, and he did not know how to go about it. As it turned out, he

  did not need to do anything except stop himself and receive what the

  visitor gave him. Thomas was name, and he was terrified
of Candy, of

  having Done Some thing Really Dumb, and of putting Julie in danger; that

  kind of terrors shattered his mental defenses and caused him to disgorge

  a flood of information.

  in fact, there was too much information for Candy to make sense of it, a

  babble of words and images. He tried desperately to sort through it for

  clues to Thomas's identity and location.

  Dumb People, Cielo Vista, The Home, everybody here has bad eye cues,

  Care Home, good food, TV The Best Place For Us, Cielo Vista, the aides

  are nice, we watch the humming birds, the world is bad out there, too

  bad for us out there, Cielo Vista Care Home...

  With some astonishment, Candy realized that the visitor was someone with

  a subnormal intellect-he even picked up the term

  "Down's syndrome"-and he was afraid that he was not going to be able to

  sort enough meaningful thoughts from the babble to get a fix on Thomas's

  location. Depending on the size of his IQ, Thomas might not know where

  Cielo Vista Care Home was, even though he apparently lived there.

  Then a series of images spun out of Thomas's mind, a well linked chain

  of serial memories that still caused him some emotional pain: the trip

  to Cielo Vista in a car with Julie and Bobby, on the day they first

  checked him into the place. This was different from most of Thomas's

  other thoughts and memories, in that it was richly detailed and so

  clearly retained that it unreeled like a length of motion-picture film,

  giving Candy all he needed to know. He saw the highways over which they

  had driven that day, saw the route markers flashing past the car window,

  saw every landmark at every turn, all of which Thomas had struggled

  mightily to memorize because all through the trip he kept thinking, if I

  don't like it there, if people are mean there, if it's too scary there,

  if it's too much being alone there, I got to know how I find the way

  back to Bobby and Julie anytime I want, remember this, remember all of

  this, turn there at the I, right there at the 7-11, don't forget that

  7-11, and now go past those three palm trees. What if they don't come

  visit me? No, that's a bad thing to think, they love me, they said they

  would come. But what if they don't? Look there, remember that house,

  you go past that house, remember that house with the blue roof Candy got

  it all, as precisely a fix as he could have obtained from a geographer

  who would have spoken precisely in degrees and minutes of longitude and

  latitude. It was more than he needed to know to make use of his gift.

  He opened the trap and let Thomas go.

  He got up from the rocker.

  He pictured Cielo Vista Care Home as it appeared so exquisitely detailed

  in Thomas's memory.

  He pictured Thomas's room on the first floor of the no wing, at the

  northwest corner.

  Darkness, billions of hot sparks spinning in the void, velocity.

  BECAUSE JULIE was in a let's-move-and-get-it-done mood they had stopped

  at the house only fifteen minutes, long enough to throw toiletries and a

  change of clothes in an over night bag. At McDonald's, on Chapman

  Avenue in Orange she swung by the drive-through window and got dinner to

  on the way: Big Macs, fries, diet colas. Before they reach the Costa

  Mesa Freeway, while Bobby was still divvying the extra packets of

  mustard and opening the containers that held the Big Macs, Julie had

  clipped the radar detector to the rear view mirror, plugged it in the

  Toyota's cigarette lighter and switched it on. Bobby had never before

  eaten fast food high speed, but he figured they averaged eighty-five

  miles hour north on the Costa Mesa to the Riverside Freeway to the

  Orange Freeway north, and he was still finishing french fries when they

  were only a couple of exits away from the Foothill Freeway east of Los

  Angeles. Though the rush hour was well past and the traffic unusually

  light, maintaining that pace required a lot of lane changing and nerve.

  He said,

  "We keep this up, I'll never have a chance to from the cholesterol in

  this Big Mac."

  "Lee says cholesterol doesn't kill us."

  "Is that what he says?"

  "He says we live forever, and all cholesterol can do is move us out of

  this life a little sooner. Same thing must be true I slip up and roll

  this sucker a few times."

  "I don't think that'll happen," he said.

  "You're the best driver I've ever seen."

  "Thank You, Bobby. You're the best passenger."

  "The only thing I wonder.

  "Yeah?"

  "If we don't really die, just move on, and I don't have to worry about

  anything-why the hell did I bother to get diet colas?" THOMAS ROLLED

  off the bed, onto his feet.

  "Derek, go, get out, he's coming!" Derek was watching a horse talking

  on TV, and he didn't hear Thomas.

  The TV was in the room's middle, between the beds, and by the time

  Thomas got there and grabbed Derek to make him listen, a funny sound was

  all around them, not funny ha-ha but funny weird, like somebody

  whistling but not whistling. There was wind, too, a couple of puffs,

  not warm or cold either, but it made Thomas shiver when it blew on him.

  Pulling Derek off his chair, Thomas said,

  "Bad Thing's coming, you get out, you go, like I said before, now!"

  Derek just made a dumb face at him, then smiled, like- he figured Thomas

  was pretending to be funny the way the Three Stooges pretended. He'd

  forgot all about the promise he made Thomas. He'd thought the Bad Thing

  was going to be poached eggs for breakfast, and when poached eggs never

  showed up on his plate, he figured he was safe, but now he wasn't safe

  and didn't know it.

  More funny-weird whistling. More wind.

  Giving Derek a shove, making him get started for the door, Thomas

  shouted,

  "Run!" The whistling stopped, the wind stopped, and all of a sudden

  from nowhere the Bad Thing was there. Between them and the open door.

  It was a man, like Thomas already knew it was, but it was more than just

  a man. It was darkness poured in the shape of a man, like a piece of

  the night itself that came in through the window, and not just because

  it wore a black T-shirt and black pants but because it was all deep dark

  inside, you could tell.

  Right away Derek was afraid. Nobody needed to tell him this was a Bad

  Thing, not now when he could see it with his own eyes. But he didn't

  see it was too late to run, and he went straight at the Bad Thing, like

  maybe he could push past it, which must have been what he was figuring

  because Derek wasn't dumb enough to figure he could knock it do it was

  so big.

  The Bad Thing grabbed him and lifted him before he any chance to get

  around it, lifted him right up off the floor like he didn't weigh any

  more than a pillow. Derek scream and the Bad Thing slammed him against

  the wall so hard scream stopped, and pictures of Derek's mom and dad a

  brother fell off the wall, not the one where Derek got slam but another

  wall all the way around the room from him a over his bed.

  The Bad Thing was so fast. That was the worst thing abo
ut it, how awful

  fast it was. It slammed Derek against the wall. Derek's mouth fell

  open but no more sound came from him the Bad Thing slammed him again,

  right away, harder, thou the first time was hard enough for anybody, and

  Derek's e went funny. The Bad Thing took him away from the wall a

  slammed him down on the worktable. The table kind of shuttered like it

  would fall apart, but it didn't. Derek's head over the table edge,

  hanging down, so Thomas was looking his face, upside-down eyes blinking

  fast, upside-down more open real wide but no sound coming out. He

  looked up from Derek's face, looked right across Derek's body at the Bad

  Thing, which was looking at him and grinning, like all this was a joke,

  funny ha-ha, which it wasn't, no way. Then it picked up the scissors on

  the edge of the worktable, the ones Thomas used to make his picture

  poems, the ones that almost fell on the floor when it slammed Derek on

  the table. It made the scissors go into Derek and bring the blood out

  of him, into Derek who wouldn't hurt no one himself, except

  himself,wouldn't know how to hurt anyone. And the Bad Thing get the

  scissors go in again and bring more blood out of another place in Derek,

  and in again, and again. Then blood was coming Out of just four places

  on Derek's chest and belly who the scissors had been made to go in, but

  out of his mouth a nose too. The Bad Thing lifted Derek off the table,

  the scissors still sticking out of his front, and threw him like he was