Koontz, Dean R. - The Bad Place

by The Bad Place(Lit)

  usually do. in his case somestrange genetic damage. Then, when you add

  in the factthe gene pool was very limited, being as Cynthia was his

  sister You might expect there's a high chance the offspring will be a

  freak of some kind." Frank made a low sound, then sighed. They all

  looked at him, but he was still detached. Thou his eyes blinked rapidly

  for a moment, they did not come back into focus. Saliva still drooled

  from the right corner of his mouth; a string of it hung from his chin.

  Though Bobby felt that he should get some Kleenex and blot Frank's face,

  he restrained himself, largely because he was afraid of Julie's

  reaction.

  "So about a year after their parents died, Yarnell and Cynthia came to

  me, and she was pregnant," Fogarty said.

  "They had this story about some itinerant farmworker raping her, but it

  didn't ring true, and I pretty much figured out the real story just

  watching how they were with each other. She'd tried to conceal the

  pregnancy by wearing loose clothes and by staying in the house entirely

  during her last few months, and I never could understand that behavior;

  it was as if they thought the problem would just go away one day. By

  the time they came to me, abortion was out of the question. Hell, she

  was in the early stages of labor." The longer he listened to Fogarty,

  the more it seemed to Bobby that the air in the library was foul and

  growing fouler, thick with a humidity as sour as sweat.

  "Claiming that he wanted to protect Cynthia as much as possible from

  public scorn, Yarnell offered me a pretty fat fee if I'd keep her out of

  the hospital and deliver the baby right in my office, which was a little

  risky, in case there were complications. But I needed the money, and if

  anything went really wrong, there were ways to cover it. I had this

  nurse at the time who could assist me-Norma, she was pretty flexible

  about things." great, Bobby thought. The sociopathic physician had

  Just found himself a sociopathic nurse, a couple who would be right in

  the social swing of things among the medical staff at Dachau or

  Auschwitz.

  Julie put a hand on Bobby's knee and squeezed, as if the contact

  reassured her that she was not listening to a mad doctor in a dream.

  "What came out of that girl'

  "You should have seen it, Fogarty said.

  "A freak it was, just as you'd expect."

  "Wait a minute," Julie said.

  "I thought you said the baby was Roselle. Frank's mother."

  "It was," Fogarty said.

  "And she was such a spectacular little freak that she'd have been worth

  a fortune to any carnival or sideshow willing to risk the anger of the

  law to exhibit he He paused, enjoying their anticipation.

  "She was an hermap rodite.

  For a moment the word meant nothing to Bobby, and then he said,

  "You don't mean-she had both sexes, male and male?"

  "Oh, but that's exactly what I mean." Fogarty bounced frorp his chair

  and began to pace, suddenly energized by conversation.

  "Hermaphroditism is an extremely rare birth defect in humans, it's an

  amazing thing to have the opportunity to deliver one. You have traverse

  hermaphroditism, wherehave the external organs of one sex and the

  internal ofother, lateral hermaphroditism... several other types. But

  one thing is... Roselle was the rarest of all, she possessed the

  complete internal and external organs of both sexes." He pluck a thick

  medical reference book from one of the shelves a handed it to Julie.

  "Check page one forty-six for photos ofkind of thing I'm talking about."

  Julie handed the volume to Bobby so fast it seemed as ifthought it was a

  snake.

  Bobby, in turn, put it beside himself on the sofa, unopen The last thing

  he needed, with his imagination, was the ass tance of clinical

  photographs.

  His hands and feet had gone cold, as though the blood had rushed from

  his extremities to his head, to nourish his bra which was spinning

  furiously. He wished that he couldthinking about what Fogarty was

  telling them. It was gro But the worst thing about it was, judging by

  the physicia strange smile, Bobby sensed that what they had heard thus

  was all just the bread on this horror sandwich; the meatyet to come.

  Pacing again, Fogarty said,

  "Her vagina was about who you'd expect, the male equipment somewhat

  displaced. Urination was through the male part, but the female appeared

  rep ductively complete."

  "I think we get the picture," Julie said.

  "We don't need the technical details." Fogarty came to them, stood

  looking down at them, and eyes were as bright and lively as if he were

  recounting a chaing medical anecdote that had bewitched legions of

  delight companions at dinner parties over the years.

  "No, no,z x must understand what she was, if you're going to understand

  all that happened next." THOUGH HER OWN Mlnd was split into many

  parts-sharing the bodies of Verbina, all the cats, and the owl on

  Fogarty's porch roof-Violet was most acutely aware of what she was

  receiving through the senses of Darkle, as he perched upon the

  windowsill outside the study. With the cat's sharp hearing, Violet

  missed not a word of the conversation, in spite of the intervening pane

  of glass. She was enthralled.

  She seldom paused to think about her mother, although Roselle was still

  in this old house in so many ways. She seldom thought about any human

  being, for that matter, except herself and her twin sister-less often

  Candy and Frank-because she had so little in common with other people.

  Her life was with the wild things. In them emotions were so much more

  pnmitive and intense, pleasure so much more easily found and enjoyed

  without guilt. She hadn't really known her mother or been close to her;

  and Violet would not have been close, even if her mother had been

  willing to share affection with anyone but Candy.

  But now Violet was riveted by what Fogarty was telling them, not because

  it was news to her (which it was), but because anything that had

  affected Roselle's life this completely also had profound effects on

  Violet's life. And of the countless attitudes and perceptions that

  Violet had absorbed from the myriad wild creatures whose minds and

  bodies she shared, a fascination with self was perhaps paramount. She

  had an animal's narcissistic preoccupatior. with grooming, with her own

  wants and needs. From her prnt of view, nothing in the world was of

  interest unless it served her, satisfied her, or affected the

  possibility of her future happiness.

  Dimly she realized that she should find her brother and tell him that

  Frank was less than two miles away from them. Not long ago she had

  heard the wind-music of Candy's return.

  FOGARTY TURNED away from Bobby and Julie and circled behind his desk

  again, where he walked along the bookshelf snapping his finger against

  the spines of the volumes to punctuate his story.

  As the physician spoke of this family that had seened genetic

  catastrophe, Julie could not help but think how Thomas's affliction had

  been visited upon him t
hough his parents had lived healthy and normal

  lives.

  played as cruelly with the innocent as with the guilty.

  I think Ya 'When he saw the baby's abnormability he would have killed it

  and thrown it out with the garbage at least put it in the hands of an

  institution. But she wouldn't part with it, she said it was her child,

  deformed or not, and she named it Roselle, after her dead grandmother. I

  suspect she wanted to keep it largely because she saw how it repulsed

  him, and she wanted to have Roselle around as a reminder to him of the

  consequences of what he forced her to do."

  "Couldn't surgery have been used to make her unable to have another?"

  Bobby asked.

  "Easier today. Harder then." Fogarty had stopped at the desk, where he

  had removed a bottle of Wild Turkey and a glass from one of the side

  drawers. He poured a few ounces of bourbon for himself and recap the

  bottle without offering them a drink. That was fine with Julie. Though

  Fogarty's house was spotless, she wouldn't have felt clean after

  drinking or eating anything in it.

  After taking a swallow of the warm bourbon, neat, Fogarty said,

  "Besides, wouldn't want to remove one set of organs to discover that, as

  the child grew older, it proved to look and act more like the sex you

  denied it than like the one it was born with. Secondary sex

  characteristics are visible in infants of course, but not as easily

  read-certainly not in 1946. Anyway Cynthia wouldn't have authorized

  surgery. Remember I said-she probably welcomed the child's deformity

  weapon against her brother."

  "You could have stepped between them and the bar BObby said.

  "You could've brought the child's plight to attention of the public

  health authorities."

  "Why on earth would I want to do that? For the psychological well-being

  of the child, you mean? Don't be naive." He drank some more bourbon.

  "I was paid well to make the delivery and keep my mouth shut about it,

  and that was fine by me. They took her home, stuck to their story about

  the itinerant rapist.

  Julie said, "The baby... Roselle... she had no serious medical

  problems?"

  "None," Fogarty said.

  "Other than this abnormality, she was as healthy as a horse. Her mental

  skills and her body developed right on schedule, like any child, and

  before long it became obvious that, to all outward appearances, she was

  going to look like a woman. As she grew even older, you could see she'd

  never be an attractive filly, mind you, more on the sturdy side than a

  fashion model, thick legs and all that, but quite feminine enough."

  Frank remained vacant-eyed and detached, but a muscle in his left cheek

  twitched twice.

  The bourbon apparently relaxed the physician, for he sat behind his desk

  again, leaned forward, and clasped his hands around the glass.

  "In 1959, when Roselle was thirteen, Cynthia died. Killed herself,

  actually. Blew her brains out. The following year, about seven months

  after his sister's suicide, Yarnell came to the office with his

  daughter-that is, with Roselle. He never called her his daughter,

  maintaining the fiction that she was only his bastard niece. Anyway,

  Roselle was pregnant at fourteen, same age at which Cynthia had given

  birth to her."

  "Good God!" Bobby said.

  The shocks kept piling one atop another with such speed that Julie was

  almost ready to grab the whiskey bottle off the desk, drink straight

  from it, and never mind that it was Fogarty's booze.

  Enjoying their reactions, Fogarty sipped the bourbon and gave them time

  to absorb the shock.

  Julie said,

  "Yarnell raped the daughter he had fathered by his own sister?"

  Fogarty waited a little longer, savoring the moment. Then: "No, no. He

  found the girl repellent, and I'm confident he wouldn't have touched

  her. I'm sure what Roselle told me was the truth." He sipped more

  bourbon.

  "Cynthia had developed quite a religious streak between the time she

  gave birth to Roselle and the day she killed herself, and she had passed

  on that passion for God to Roselle. The girl knew the Bible backward

  and forward. So Roselle came in here, pregnant. Said she'd decided she

  should have a child. Said God had made her cial-that's what she called

  hermaphroditism, specie bmause she was to be a pure vessel by which

  blessed child could be brought into the world. Therefore she had colled

  the semen from her male half and mechanically inserted it in her female

  half." Bobby shot up from the sofa as if one of its springs had stuck

  him, and he grabbed the bottle of Wild Turkey from the desk.

  "You have another glass?"

  Fogarty pointed to a bar cabinet in the corner, which Julie had not

  noticed before. Bobby opened the double doors, revealing not only more

  glasses but additional fifths of Wild Turkey Evidently the physician

  kept a bottle in his desk drawerso he would not have to walk across the

  room for it. Bobby poured two glasses full, with no ice, and brought

  one back to Julie.

  To Fogarty, she said,

  "Of course, I never thought Ros was barren. She did bear children, we

  know that. But I sumed you meant the male part of her was sterile."

  "Fertile as a male and as a female. She couldn't actually join herself

  to herself, so to speak. So she resorted to,artificial semination, as I

  said."

  Late that afternoon, in the office in Newport, when he had tried to

  explain how traveling with Frank was like a sled ride off the edge of

  the world, Julie had not really understood why he was so unnerved by the

  experience. Now she thought she had an inkling of what he had meant,

  for the of the Pollard family's relationships and sexual identities. Her

  skin crawled and filled her with a dark suspicion that nat was even

  stranger and more hospitable to anarchy than had feared.

  "Yarnell wanted me to abort the fetus, and abortion was fairly lucrative

  sideline in those days, though illegal and kept hushed. But the girl

  had hidden her pregnancy from him for seven months, as he and Cynthia

  had tried to hide a pregnancy fourteen years earlier. It was much too

  late for an abortion then. The girl would've died, from hemorrhaging.

  Besides, I would no more have aborted that fetus than I'd have shot

  myself in the foot. Imagine the degree of inbreeding involved here:

  hermaphroditic child of brother-sister incest impregnates herself. Her

  child's mother is also its father. Its grandmother is also its

  great-aunt, and its grandfather is its great-uncle! One tight genetic

  line-and genes damaged by Yarnell's use of hallucinogenics, remember.

  Virtually a guarantee of a freak of one kind or another, and I wouldn't

  have missed it for the world." Julie took a long swallow of the

  bourbon. It tasted sour and stung her throat. She didn't care. She

  needed it.

  "I'd become a doctor because the pay was good," Fogarty said.

  "Later, when I gravitated toward illegal abortions, the pay was better,

  and it became my main business. Not much danger, either, because I knew

  what I
was doing, and I could buy off an authority now and then if I had

  to. When you're getting those fat fees, you don't have to schedule many

  office visits, you can have a lot of free time, money and leisure, the

  best of both worlds. But having settled for a career like that, what I

  never figured was that I'd encounter anything as medically interesting,

  as fascinating, as entertaining as this Pollard mess." The only

  consideration that caused Julie to refrain from going across the room

  and kicking the crap out of the old man was not his age but the fact

  that he would leave the story unfinished and some vital piece of

  information unrevealed.

  "But the birth of Roselle's first child wasn't the event I'd thought it

  would be," Fogarty said.

  "In spite of the odds, the baby she produced was healthy and, from all

  indications, perfectly normal. That was 1960, and the baby was Frank."

  In the wingback chair, Frank whimpered softly but remained in his

  semicomatose condition.

  STILL LISTENING to Doc Fogarty through Darkle, Violet sat up and swung

  her bare legs over the edge of the bed, dispossessing some of the cats

  from their resting places, and eliciting a murmur of protest from

  Verbina, who was seldom content to share just a mental link with her

  sister and needed the reassurance of physical contact. With cats

  swarming at her feet, seeing through their eyes as well as her own and

  therefore not blinded by the darkness, Violet started toward the open

  door to the lightless upstairs hall.