by Dean Koontz
“Oh.” Julie turned to look at Hal and Bobby. “Coffee?”
“No,” the two men said simultaneously. Then, speaking over each other, Hal said, “No, thank you,” and Bobby said, “Very kind of you.”
“I’m wide awake,” Julie said, frantic to be rid of the woman, but trying to sound casual, “and Hal doesn’t drink coffee, and Bobby, my husband, can’t handle caffeine because of prostate problems.” I’m babbling, she thought. “Anyway, we’ll be leaving soon now, I’m sure.”
“Well,” the nurse said, “if you change your mind....”
After Fulgham left, letting the door close behind her, Bobby whispered, “Prostate trouble?”
Julie said, “Too much caffeine causes prostate trouble. Seemed like a convincing detail to explain why, with all your yawning, you didn’t want coffee.”
“But I don’t have a prostate problem. Makes me sound like an old fart.”
“I have it,” Hal said. “And I’m not an old fart.”
“What is this?” Julie said. “We’re all babbling.”
She pushed the chair in front of the door and returned to the bed, where she picked up the pillowcase-bag that Frank Pollard had brought from ... from wherever he had been.
“Careful,” Bobby said. “Last time Frank mentioned a pillowcase, it was the one he trapped that insect in.”
Julie gingerly set the bag on a chair and watched it closely. “Doesn’t seem to be anything squirming around in it.” She started to untie the knotted cord from the neck of the sack.
Grimacing, Bobby said, “If you let out something big as a house cat, with a lot of legs and feelers, I’m going straight to a divorce lawyer.”
The cord slipped free. She pulled open the pillowcase, and looked inside. “Oh, God.”
Bobby took a couple of steps backward.
“No, not that,” she assured him. “No bugs. Just more cash.” She reached into the sack and withdrew a couple of bundles of hundred-dollar bills. “If it’s all hundreds, there could be as much as a quarter of a million in here.”
“What’s Frank doing?” Bobby wondered. “Laundering money for the mob in the Twilight Zone?”
Hollow, lonely, tuneless piping pierced the air again, and like a needle pulling thread, the sound brought with it a draft that rustled the curtain.
Shivering, Julie turned to look at the bed.
The flutelike notes faded with the draft, then soon rose again, faded, rose, and faded a fourth time as Frank Pollard reappeared. He was on his side, arms against his chest, hands fisted, grimacing, his eyes squeezed shut, as if he were preparing himself to receive the killing blow of an ax.
Julie stepped toward the bed, and again Hal stopped her.
Frank sucked in a deep breath, shuddered, made a low anguished mewling, opened his eyes—and vanished. Within two or three seconds, he appeared yet again, still shuddering. But immediately he vanished, reappeared, vanished, reappeared, vanished, as if he were an image flickering on a television set with poor signal reception. At last he stuck fast to the fabric of reality and lay on the bed, moaning.
After rolling off his side, onto his back, he gazed at the ceiling. He raised his fists from his chest, uncurled them, and stared at his hands, baffled, as if he had never seen fingers before.
“Frank?” Julie said.
He did not respond to her. With his fingertips he explored the contours of his face, as if a Braille reading of his features would recall to him the forgotten specifics of his appearance.
Julie’s heart was racing, and every muscle in her body felt as if it had been twisted up as tight as an overwound clock spring. She was not afraid, really. It was not a tension engendered by fear but by the sheer strangeness of what had happened. “Frank, are you okay?”
Blinking through the interstices of his fingers, he said, “Oh. It’s you, Mrs. Dakota. Yeah ... Dakota. What’s happened? Where am I?”
“You’re in the hospital now,” Bobby said. “Listen, the important question isn’t where you are, but where the hell have you been?”
“Been? Well ... what do you mean?”
Frank tried to sit up in bed, but he seemed temporarily to lack the strength to get off his back.
Picking up the bed controls, Bobby elevated the upper half of the mattress. “You weren’t in this room during most of the last few hours. It’s almost five in the morning, and you’ve been jumping in and out of here like ... like ... like a crew member of the Starship Enterprise who keeps beaming back up to the mothership!”
“Enterprise? Beaming up? What’re you talking about?”
Bobby looked at Julie. “Whoever this guy is, wherever he comes from, we now know for sure that he’s been living out past the edge of modem culture, on the fringe. You ever known a modem American who hasn’t at least heard of Star Trek?”
To Bobby, Julie said, “Thanks for your analysis, Mr. Spock.”
“Mr. Spock?” Frank said.
“See!” Bobby said.
“We can question Frank later,” Julie said. “He’s confused right now, anyway. We’ve got to get him out of here. If that nurse comes back and sees him, how do we explain his reappearance ? Is she really going to believe he wandered back into the hospital, past security and the nursing staff, up six floors, with nobody spotting him?”
“Yeah,” Hal said, “and though he seems to be back for good, what if he pops away again, in front of her eyes?”
“Okay, so we’ll get him out of bed and sneak him down those stairs at the end of the hall,” Julie said, “out to the car.”
As they talked about him, Frank turned his head back and forth, following the conversation. He appeared to be watching a tennis match for the first time, unable to comprehend the rules of the game.
Bobby said, “Once we’ve gotten him out of here, we can tell Fulgham he’s been found just a few blocks away and that we’re meeting with him to determine whether he wants—or even needs—to be returned to the hospital. He’s our client, after all, not our ward, and we have to respect his wishes.”
Without having to wait for tests to be conducted, they now knew that Frank was not suffering strictly from physical ailments like cerebral abscesses, clots, aneurysms, cysts, or neoplasms. His amnesia did not spring from brain tumors, but from something far stranger and more exotic than that. No malignancy, regardless of how singular its nature, would invest its victim with the power to step into the fourth dimension—or to wherever Frank was stepping when he vanished.
“Hal,” Julie said, “get Frank’s other clothes from the closet, bundle them up, and stuff them in the pillowcase with the money.”
“Will do.”
“Bobby, help me get Frank out of bed, see if he can stand on his own feet. He looks awful weak.”
The remaining bed railing stuck for a moment when Bobby tried to lower it, but he struggled with it because they could not take Frank out of bed on the other side without drawing back the privacy curtain and exposing him to anyone who might push open the door.
“You could’ve done me a big favor and packed this rail off to Oz with the other one,” Bobby told Frank, and Frank said, “Oz?”
When the railing finally folded down, out of the way, Julie found that she was hesitant to touch Frank, for fear of what might happen to her—or parts of her—if he pulled another disappearing act. She had seen the shattered hinges of the bed railing; she was also keenly aware that Frank had not brought the railing back with him, but had abandoned it in the other-where or otherwhen to which he traveled.
Bobby hesitated, too, but overcame his apprehension, grabbing the man’s legs and swinging them over the edge of the bed, taking hold of his arm and helping him into a sitting position. In some ways she might be tougher than Bobby, but when it came to encounters with the unknown, he was clearly more flexible and quick to adapt than she was.
Finally she quelled her fear, and together she and Bobby assisted Frank off the bed and onto his feet. His legs buckled under him, and they had to suppor
t him. He complained of weakness and dizziness.
Stuffing the other set of clothes in the pillowcase, Hal said, “If we have to, Bobby and I can carry him.”
“I’m sorry to be so much trouble,” Frank said.
To Julie, he had never sounded or looked more pathetic, and she felt a flush of guilt about her reluctance to touch him.
Flanking Frank, their arms around him to provide support, Julie and Bobby walked him back and forth, past the rain-washed window, giving him a chance to recover the use of his legs. Gradually his strength and balance returned.
“But my pants keep trying to fall down,” Frank said.
They propped him against the bed, and he leaned on Julie while Bobby lifted the blue cotton sweater to see if the belt needed to be cinched in one notch. The tongue end of the belt was weakened by scores of small holes, as if industrious insects had been boring at it. But what insects ate leather? When Bobby touched the tarnished brass buckle, it crumbled as though made of flaky pastry dough.
Gaping at the glittering crumbs of metal on his fingers, Bobby said, “Where do you shop for clothes, Frank? In a dumpster?”
In spite of Bobby’s light tone, Julie knew he was unnerved. What substance or circumstances could so profoundly alter the composition of brass? When he brushed his fingers against the bed sheets to wipe off the curious residue, she flinched, half expecting his flesh to have been contaminated by the contact with the brass, and to crumble as the buckle had done.
AFTER CINCHING Frank’s pants with the belt that he had worn when he’d checked into the hospital, Hal helped Bobby slip their client out of the room. With Julie scouting the way, they went quickly and quietly along the hall and through the fire door at the head of the emergency stairs. Frank’s skin remained cold to the touch, and he was still clammy with perspiration ; but the effort brought a flush to his cheeks, which made him look less like a walking corpse.
Julie hurried to the bottom of the stairwell to see what lay beyond the lower door. With the thump and scrape of their footsteps echoing hollowly off the bare concrete walls, the three men went down four flights without much difficulty. At the fourth-floor landing, however, they had to pause to let Frank catch his breath.
“Are you always this weak when you wake up and don’t remember where you’ve been?” Bobby asked.
Frank shook his head. His words issued in a thin wheeze: “No. -Always frightened ... tired, but not as bad ... as this. I feel like ... whatever I’m doing ... wherever I’m going ... it’s taking a bigger and bigger toll. I’m not ... not going to survive ... a lot more of this.”
As Frank was talking, Bobby noticed something peculiar about the man’s blue cotton sweater. The pattern of the cable knit was wildly irregular in places, as if the knitting machine had briefly gone berserk. And on the back, near his right shoulderblade, a patch of fibers was missing; the hole was the size of a block of four postage stamps, though with irregular rather than straight edges. But it wasn’t just a hole. A piece of what appeared to be khaki filled the gap, not merely sewn on but woven tightly into the surrounding cotton yarn, as if at the garment factory itself. Khaki of the same shade and hard finish as the pants that Frank was wearing.
A shiver of dread pierced Bobby, although he was not sure why. His subconscious mind seemed to understand how the patch had come to be and what it meant, and grasped some hideous consequence not yet fulfilled, while his conscious mind was baffled.
He saw that Hal, on the other side of Frank, had noticed the patch, too, and was frowning.
Julie ascended the stairs while Bobby was staring in puzzlement at the khaki swatch. “We’re in luck,” she said. “There’re two doors at the bottom. One leads into a hallway off the lobby, where we’d probably run into a security man, even though they aren’t looking for Frank any more. But the other door leads into the parking garage, the same level our car’s on. How you doing, Frank? You going to be okay?”
“Getting my ... second wind,” he said less wheezily than before.
“Look at this,” Bobby said, calling Julie’s attention to the khaki woven into the blue cotton sweater.
While Julie studied the peculiar patch, Bobby let go of Frank and, on a hunch, stooped down to examine the legs of his client’s pants. He found a corresponding irregularity: blue cotton yarn from the sweater was woven into the slacks. It was not one spot of the same size and shape as that in the sweater, but a series of three smaller holes near the cuff on the right leg; however, he was sure that more accurate measurements would confirm what he knew from a quick look—that the total amount of blue yarn in those three holes would just about fill the hole in the shoulder of the sweater.
“What’s wrong?” Frank asked.
Bobby didn’t respond but took hold of the somewhat baggy leg of the pants and pulled it taut, so he could get a better look at the three patches. Actually, “patches” was an inaccurate word because these abnormalities in the fabric did not look like repairs; they were too well blended with the material around them to be handwork.
Julie squatted beside him and said, “First, we’ve got to get Frank out of here, back to the office.”
“Yeah, but this is real strange,” Bobby said, indicating the irregularities in the pants. “Strange and ... important somehow.”
“What’s wrong?” Frank repeated.
“Where’d you get these clothes?” Bobby asked him.
“Well ... I don’t know.”
Julie pointed to the white athletic sock on Frank’s right foot, and Bobby saw at once what had caught her attention: several blue threads, precisely the color of the sweater. They were not loose, clinging to the sock. They were woven into the very fabric of it.
Then he noticed Frank’s left shoe. It was a dark brown hiking shoe, but a few thin, squiggly white lines marred the leather on the toe. When he studied them closely, he saw that the lines appeared to be coarse threads like those in the athletic socks; scraping at them with one fingernail, he discovered they were not stuck to the shoe, but were an integral part of the surface of the leather.
The missing yarn of the sweater had somehow become a part of both the khaki pants and one of the socks; the displaced threads of the sock had become part of the shoe on the other foot.
“What’s wrong?” Frank repeated, more fearfully than before.
Bobby hesitated to look up, expecting to see that the filaments of displaced shoe leather were embedded in Frank’s face, and that the displaced flesh was magically entwined with the cable knit of the sweater. He stood and forced himself to confront his client.
Aside from the dark and puffy rings around his eyes, the sickly pallor relieved only by the flush on his upper cheeks, and the fear and confusion that gave him a tormented look, nothing was wrong with his face. No leather ornamentation. No khaki stitched into his lips. No filaments of blue yarn or plastic shoelace tips or button fragments bristling from his eyeballs.
Silently castigating himself for his overactive imagination, Bobby patted Frank’s shoulder. “It’s okay. It’s all right. We’ll figure it out later. Come on, let’s get you out of here.”
38
IN THE embrace of darkness, enwrapped by the scent of Chanel No. 5, under the very blankets and sheets that had once warmed his mother and that he had so carefully preserved, Candy dozed and awakened repeatedly with a start, though he could not remember any nightmares.
Between periods of fitful sleep, he dwelt on the incident in the canyon, earlier that night, when he had been hunting and had felt an unseen presence put a hand on his head. He’d never before experienced anything like that. He was disturbed by the encounter, unsure whether it was threatening or benign, and anxious to understand it.
He first wondered if it had been his mother’s angelic presence, hovering above him. But he quickly dismissed that explanation. If his mother had stepped through the veil between this world and the next, he would have recognized her spirit, her singular aura of love, warmth, and compassion. He would have fallen
to his knees under the weight of her ghostly hand and wept with joy at her visitation.
Briefly he had considered that one or both of his inscrutable sisters possessed a heretofore unrevealed talent for psychic contact and reached out to him for unknown reasons. After all, somehow they controlled their cats and appeared to have equal influence over other small animals. Maybe they could enter human minds as well. He didn’t want that pale, cold-eyed pair invading his privacy. At times he looked at them and thought of snakes—sinuous albino snakes, silent and watchful-with desires as alien as any that motivated reptiles. The possibility that they could intrude into his mind was chilling, even if they could not control him.
But between bouts of sleep, he abandoned that idea. If Violet and Verbina possessed such abilities, they would have enslaved him long ago, as thoroughly as they had enslaved the cats. They would have forced him to do degrading, obscene things; they did not possess his self-control in matters of the flesh and would live, if they could, in constant violation of God’s most fundamental commandments.
He could not understand why his mother had sworn him to keep and protect them, any more than he could understand how she could love them. Of course her compassion for those miscreant offspring was only one more example of her saintly nature. Forgiveness and understanding flowed from her like clear, cool water from an artesian well.
For a while he dozed. When he woke with a start again, he turned on his side and watched the faint light of dawn appear along the edges of the drawn blinds.
He considered the possibility that the presence in the canyon had been his brother Frank. But that was also unlikely. If Frank had possessed telepathic abilities, he would have found a way to employ them to destroy Candy a long, long time ago. Frank was less talented than his sisters and much less talented than his brother Candy.
Then who had approached him twice in the canyon, insistently pressing into his mind? Who sent the disconnected words that echoed in his head: What... where ... what ... why ... what... where ... what ... why ...?
Last night, he’d tried to get a mental grip on the presence. When it hastily withdrew from him, he had tried to let part of his consciousness soar up into the night with it, but he had been unable to sustain a pursuit on that psychic plane. He sensed, however, that he might be able to develop that ability.
If the unwelcome presence ever returned, he would try to knot a filament of his mind to it and trace it to its source. In his twenty-nine years, his own siblings were the only people he had encountered with what might be called psychic abilities. If someone out there in the world was also gifted, he must learn who it was. Such a person, not born of his sainted mother, was a rival, a threat, an enemy.
Though the sun beyond the blinded windows had not fully risen, he knew that he would not be able to doze again. He threw back the covers, crossed the dark and furniture-crowded room with the assurance of a blind man in a familiar place, and went into the adjoining bath. After locking the door, he undressed without glancing in the mirror. He peed forcefully without looking down at his hateful organ. When he showered, he soaped and rinsed the sex thing only with the washcloth mitten that he’d made and that protected his innocent hand from being corrupted by the monstrous, wicked flesh below.
39
FROM THE hospital in Orange, they went directly to their offices in Newport Beach. They had a lot of work to do on Frank’s behalf, and his worsening plight evoked in them a greater sense of urgency than ever. Frank rode with Hal, and Julie followed in order to be able to offer assistance if unforeseen developments occurred during the trip. The entire case seemed to be a series of unforeseen developments.
By the time they reached their deserted offices-the Dakota & Dakota staff would not arrive for a couple of hours yet—the sun was fully risen behind the clouds in the east. A thin strip of blue sky, like a crack under the door of the storm, was visible over the ocean to the west. As the four of them passed through the reception lounge into their inner sanctum, the rain halted abruptly, as if a godly hand had turned a celestial lever; the water on the big windows stopped flowing in shimmering sheets, and coalesced into hundreds of small beads that glimmered with a mercury-gray sheen in the cloud-dulled morning light.
Bobby indicated the bulging pillowcase that Hal was carrying. “Take Frank into the bathroom, help him change into the clothes he was wearing when we checked him into the hospital. Then we’ll have a real close look at the clothes he’s wearing now.”
Frank had recovered his balance and most of his strength. He did not need Hal’s assistance. But Julie knew Bobby wouldn’t let Frank go anywhere unchaperoned from now on. They needed to keep an eye on him constantly, in order not to miss any clues that might lead to an explanation of his sudden vanishments and reappearances.
Before attending to Frank, Hal removed the rumpled clothes from the pillowcase. He left the rest of its contents on Julie’s desk.
“Coffee?” Bobby asked.
“Desperately,” Julie said.
He went out to the pantry that opened off the lounge, to start up one of their two Mr. Coffee machines.
Sitting at her desk, Julie emptied the pillowcase. It contained thirty bundles of hundred-dollar bills in packs bound by rubber bands. She fanned the edges of the bills in ten bundles to ascertain if lower denominations were included; they were all hundreds. She chose two packets at random and counted them. Each contained one hundred bills. Ten thousand in each. By the time Bobby returned with mugs, spoons, cream, sugar, and a pot of hot coffee, all on a tray, Julie had concluded that this was the largest of Frank’s three hauls to date.
“Three hundred K,” she said, as Bobby put the tray on her desk.
He whistled softly. “What’s that bring the total to?”