Koontz, Dean R. - The Bad Place

by The Bad Place(Lit)

  -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.