-the scissors went in again Then he all of a sudden knew something even
more important he had to do. He had to let Julie know that the Bad
Place was not so bad, after all, there was a light over there that love
you, you could tell. She needed to know about it because deep down she
really didn't believe it. She figured it was all dark and lonely the
way Thomas once figured it was, so she counted each clock tick and
worried about all she had to do before he time ran out, all she had to
learn and see and feel and get, a she had to do for Thomas and for Bobby
so they'd be ok if Something Happened To Her.
-and the scissors went in again And she was happy with Bobby, but she
was never going to be real happy until she knew she didn't have to be so
angry about everything ending in a big dark. She was so nice it was
hard to figure she was angry inside, but she was. Thomas only figured
it out now, as the light was filling him up, figured out how terrible
angry Julie was. She was angry that all the hard work and all the hope
and all the dreams and all the trying and doing and loving didn't matter
in the end because you were sooner or later made dead forever.
-the scissors If she knew about the light, she could stop being angry
deep down. So Thomas sent that, too, along with a warning, an with
three last words to her and to Bobby, words of his own all three things
at once, hoping they wouldn't get mixed up: The Bad Thing's coming, look
out, the Bad Thing, there ù light that loves you, the Bad Thing, I love
you too, and there ù light, there's a light, THE BAD THING'S COMING AT
8:15 they were on the Foothill Freeway, rocketing toward the junction
with the Ventura Freeway, which they would follow across the San
Fernando Valley almost to the ocean before turning north toward Oxnard,
Ventura, and eventually Santa Barbara. Julie knew she should slow down,
but she couldn't. Speed relieved her tension a little; if she stayed
even close to the fiftY-five-mile-an-hour limit, she was pretty sure
that she would start to scream before they were past Burbank.
A Benny Goodman tape was on the stereo. The exuberant melodies and
syncopated rhythms seemed in time and sympathy with the headlong rush of
the car; and if they had been in a movie, Goodman's sounds would have
been perfect background music to the tenebrous panorama of
light-speckled night hills through which they passed from city to city,
suburb to suburb.
She knew why she was so tense. In a way she could never have
anticipated, The Dream was within their grasp they could lose everything
as they reached for it. Everything. Hope.
Each other. Their lives.
Sitting in the seat beside her, Bobby trusted her so implicitly that he
could doze at more than eighty miles an hour, even though he knew that
she, too, had slept only three hours last night. From time to time she
glanced at him, just because it felt good to have him there.
He did not yet understand why they were going north to check out the
Pollard family, stretching their obligation to the client beyond reason,
but his bafflement sprang from the fact that he was nearly as good a man
as he appeared to be. He sometimes bent the rules and broke the laws on
behalf of their clients, but he was more scrupulous in his personal life
than anyone Julie had ever known. She had been with him once when a
newspaper-vending machine gave him a copy of the Sunday Los Angeles
Times, then malfunctioned and returned three of his four quarters to
him, whereupon he had repaid all three into the coin slot, even though
that same machine had malfunctioned to his disadvantage on other
occasions over the years and was into him for a couple of bucks.
"Yeah, well," he'd said, blushing when she had laughed at his
goody-goody deed,
"maybe the machine can be crooked and still live with itself, but I
can't." Julie could have told him that they were hanging with the
Pollard case because they saw a once-in-a-lifetime shot at really big
bucks, the Main Chance for which every hustler in the world was looking
and which most of them would never find.
Frank had shown them all that cash the From the moment of flight bag and
told them about the second cache back at the motel, they were locked in
like rats in a maze, drawn forward by the smell of cheese, even though
each of them had taken a turn at protesting any interest in the game.
When Frank came back to that hospital room from God-knew_where, with
another three hundred thousand, neither she nor Bobby even 7 I raised
the issue of illegality, though it was by that time longer possible to
pretend that Frank was entirely an innocent By then the smell of cheese
was too strong to be resisted a all. They were plunging ahead because
they saw the chance to use Frank to cash out of the rat race and buy
into The Dream sooner than they had expected. They were willing to use
dirty money and questionable means to get to their desire end, more
willing than they could admit to each other, though Julie supposed it
could be said in their favor that they were not yet so greedy that they
could simply steal the money an the diamonds from Frank and abandon him
to the mercy of his psychotic brother; or maybe even their sense of duty
t their client was a lie now, a virtue they could point to late when
they tried to justify, to themselves, their other less-than noble acts
and impulses.
She could have told him all that, but she didn't, because she did not
want to argue with him. She had to let him figure i out at his own
pace, accept it in his own way. If she tried to tell him before he was
able to understand it, he'd deny what she said. Even if he admitted to
a fraction of the truth, he' trot out an argument about the rightness of
The Dream, the basic morality of it, and use that to justify the means
to the end. But she didn't think a noble end could remain purely noble
if arrived at by immoral means. And though she could not turn away from
this Main Chance, she worried that when they achieved The Dream it would
be sullied, not what it might have been.
Yet she drove on. Fast. Because speed relieved some of he fear and
tension. It numbed caution too. And without caution she was less
likely to retreat from the dangerous confrontation with the Pollard
family that seemed inevitable if they were to seize the opportunity to
obtain immense and liberating wealth They were in a clearing in traffic,
with nothing close behind them and trailing the nearest forward car by
about a quarter of a mile, when Bobby cried out and sat up in his seat
as i warning her of an imminent collision. He jerked forward, pulling
the shoulder harness taut, and put his hands on his head as though
stricken by a sudden migraine.
Frightened, she let up on the accelerator, lightly tapped the brake
pedal, and said,
"Bobby, what is it?" In a voice coarsened by fear and sharpened by
urgency speaking above the music of Benny Goodman, he said,
"Bathing, the Bad Thing, look out, there's a light, there's a light that
/> loves you-" CANDY LOOKED down at the bloody body at his feet and knew
that he should not have killed Thomas. Instead, he should have taken
him away to a private place and tortured the answers out of him even if
it took hours for the dummy to remember everything Candy needed to know.
It could even have been fun.
But he was in a rage greater than any he had ever known, and he was less
in control of himself than at any time in his life since the day he had
found his mother's dead body. He wanted vengeance not only for his
mother but for himself and for everyone in the world who ever deserved
revenge and never got it. God had made him an instrument of revenge,
and now Candy longed desperately to fulfill his purpose as he had never
fulfilled it before. He yearned not merely to tear open the throat and
drink the blood of one sinner, but of a great multitude of sinners. If
ever his rage was to be dissipated, he needed not only to drink blood
but to become drunk on it, bathe in it, wade through rivers of it, stand
on land saturated with it. He wanted his mother to free him from all
the rules that had restricted his rage before, wanted God to turn him
loose.
He heard sirens in the distance, and knew that he must go soon.
Hot pain throbbed in his shoulder, where the scissors had parted muscle
and scraped bone, but he would deal with that when he traveled. In
reconstituting himself, he could easily remake his flesh whole and
healthy.
Stalking through the debris that littered the floor, he looked for
something that might give him a clue to the whereabouts of either the
Julie or the Bobby of whom Thomas had spoken. They might know who
Thomas had been and why he had possessed a gift that not even Candy's
blessed mother had been able to impart.
He touched various objects and pieces of furniture, but all he could
extract from them were images of Thomas and Derek and some of the aides
and nurses who took care of them. Then he saw a scrapbook lying open on
the floor, beside the table on which he had butchered Derek. The open
pages were of all kinds of pictures that had been pasted in lines and
peculiar patterns. He picked the book up and leafed through wondering
what it was, and when he tried to see the face the last person who had
handled it, he was rewarded with someone other than a dummy or a nurse.
A hard-looking man. Not as tall as Candy but almost solid.
The sirens were less than a mile away now, louder by second.
Candy let his right hand glide over the cover of the scrapebook, seeking
... seeking...
Sometimes he could sense only a little, sometimes a lot. T time he had
to be successful, or this room was going to be dead end in his search
for the meaning of the dummy's pow Seeking...
He received a name. Clint.
Clint had sat in Derek's chair sometime during the afternoon, paging
through this odd collection Of pictures.
When he tried to see where Clint had gone, after leaving the room, he
saw a Chevy that Clint was driving on the freeway then a place called
Dakota & Dakota. Then the Chevy again on a freeway at night, and then a
small house in a place call Placentia.
The approaching sirens were very close now, probably coming up the
driveway into the Cielo Vista parking lot.
Candy threw the book down. He was ready to go.
He had only one more thing to do before he teleported When he had
discovered that Thomas was a dummy, and who he had realized that Cielo
Vista was a place full of them, had been angered and offended by the
home's existence.
He held his hands two feet apart, palm facing palm. Sky-blue light
glowed between them.
He remembered how neighbors and other people had talked about his
sisters-and also about him when, as a boy, he had been kept out of
school because of his problems. Violet an Verbina looked and acted
mentally deficient, and they probably did not care if people called them
retards. Ignorant people labeled him retarded, too, because they
thought he was excused from school for being as learning disabled and
strange as his sisters. (Only Frank attended classes like a normal
child.) The light began to coalesce into a ball. As more power poured
out of his hands and into the ball, it acquired a deeper shade of blue
and seemed to take on substance, as if it were a solid object floating
in the air.
Candy had been bright, with no learning disabilities at all. His mother
taught him to read, write, and do math; so he got angry when he
overheard people say he was a deadhead. He had been excused from school
for other reasons, of course, mainly because of the sex thing. When he
got older and bigger, nobody called him retarded or made jokes about
him, at least not within his hearing.
The sapphire-blue sphere looked almost as solid as a genuine sapphire,
but as big as a basketball. It was nearly ready.
Having been unjustly tagged with the retarded label, Candy had not grown
up with sympathy for the genuinely disabled, but with an intense
loathing for them that he hoped would make it clear to even ignorant
people that he definitely was not-and never had been-one of them. To
think such a thing of him-or of his sisters, for that matter-was an
insult to his sainted mother, who was incapable of bringing a moron into
the world.
He cut off the flow of power and took his hands away from the sphere.
For a moment he stared at it, smiling, thinking about what it would do
to this offensive place.
Through the missing window and the partially shattered walls, the wail
of the sirens became deafening, then suddenly subsided from a
high-pitched shriek to a low growl that spiraled toward silence.
"Help's here, Thomas," he said, and laughed.
He put one hand against the sap hire sphere and gave it a shove. It
shot across the room as if it were a ballistic missile fired from its
silo. It smashed through the wall behind Derek's bed, leaving a ragged
hole as big as anything a cannonball could have made, through the wall
beyond that, and through every additional wall that stood before it,
spewing flames as it went, setting fire to everything along its path.
Candy heard people screaming and a hard explosion, as he did a fadeout
on his way to the house in Placentia.
BOBBY STOOD at the side of the freeway, holding on to the open car door,
gasping for breath. He had been sure he was going to throw up, but the
urge had passed.
"Are you all right?" Julie asked anxiously.
"I... think so. Traffic shot past. Each vehicle was trailed by a wake
of wind and a roar that gave Bobby the peculiar feeling that he a Julie
and the Toyota were still moving, doing eighty-five with him holding on
to the open door and her with a hand on his shoulder, magically keeping
their balance and avoiding road burn as they dragged their feet along
the pavement, with body driving.
The dream had seriously unsettled and disoriented him.
"Not a dream, really," he told her. He continued to keep his head down,
peering at loose gravel on the shoulder of the highway, half expecting a
return of the cramping nausea.
"Not like the dream I had before, about us a the jukebox and the ocean
of acid."
"But about 'the bad thing' again."
"Yeah. You couldn't call it a dream, though, because it just this.. -
this burst of words, inside my head."
"From where?"
"I don't know." He dared to lift his head, and though a whirl of
dizziness swept through him, the nausea did not return.
He said,
"'Bad thing... look out... there's a light that loves You. - -." I
can't remember it all. It was so strong, so hard like somebody shouting
at me through a bullhorn that pressed against my ear. Except that's not
right, either, because I didn't really hear the words, they were just
there, in my head But they felt loud, if that makes any sense. And
there were images, like in a dream. Instead there were these feelings,
as strong as they were confused. Fear and joy, anger and forgiveness...
and right at the end of it, this strange sense of peace that I... can't
describe." A Peterbilt thundered toward them, towing the biggest
trailer the law allowed. Sweeping out of the night behind its blazing
headlights, it looked like a leviathan swimming up from a deep marine
trench, all raw power and cold rage, with a hunger that could never be
satisfied. For some reason, as it boomed past them, Bobby thought of
the man he had seen on the beach at Punaluu, and he shuddered.
Julie said,
"Are you okay?"
"Yeah."
"Are you sure?" He nodded.
Koontz, Dean R. - The Bad Place Page 43
