The Bad Place

by Dean Koontz

  lint flying toward some vacuum cleaner of cosmic power, and all around him the fireflies swirled and tumbled. It was like being on an amusement park ride so huge and fast that only God could have designed it for His own pleasure, though there was no pleasure whatsoever in it for Bobby as he roller-coastered through pitch blackness, trying to scream.

  He hit the forest floor on his feet, swayed, and almost fell against Frank, in front of whom he was standing. Frank still had a painfully tight grip on his hand.

  Bobby was desperate for air. His chest ached; his lungs seemed to have shriveled up. He sucked in a deep breath, another, exhaling explosively.

  He saw the blood, which was on both of their hands now. An image of torn upholstery flashed through his mind. Jackie Jaxx. Bobby remembered.

  When Bobby tried to pull loose of his client, Frank held him fast and said, “Not here. No, I can’t risk this. Too dangerous. Why am I here?”

  Steeped in the scent of pines, Bobby surveyed the surrounding primeval forest, which was thick with shadows as dusk introduced night to the world. The air was frigid, and the bristling boughs of the giant evergreens drooped under a weight of snow, but he saw nothing frightening in that scene.

  Then he realized that Frank was staring past him. He turned to discover they were on the edge of the forest. A snow-covered meadow sloped up gently behind them. At the top was a log cabin, not a rustic shack but an elaborate structure that clearly showed the input of an architect, a vacation retreat for someone with plenty of disposable income. A mantle of snow was draped over the main roof, another over the porch roof, each decorated with a fringe of icicles that glittered in the last beams of cold sunlight. No lights glowed at the windows. No smoke curled up from any of the three chimneys. The place appeared to be deserted.

  “He knows about this,” Frank said, still panicked. “I bought it under another name, but he found out about it, and he came here, almost killed me here, and he’s probably keeping tabs on it, checking in regularly, hoping to catch me again.”

  Bobby was numbed less by the subzero cold than by the realization that he had teleported out of their office and onto this slope in the Sierras or some other mountains. He finally found his voice and said, “Frank, what—”

  Darkness.

  Fireflies.

  Velocity.

  He hit the floor rolling, slammed into a coffee table, and felt Frank let go of his hand. The table crashed over, spilling a vase and other decorative—and breakable—items onto a hardwood floor.

  He’d sustained a solid knock to the head. When he pushed onto his knees and tried to stand, he was too dizzy to get up.

  Frank was already on his feet, looking around, breathing hard. “San Diego. This was my apartment once. He found out about it. Had to get out fast.”

  When Frank reached down to help Bobby get up, Bobby unthinkingly accepted his hand, the uninjured one.

  “Someone else lives here now,” Frank said. “Must be off at work, we’re lucky.”

  Darkness.

  Fireflies.

  Velocity.

  Bobby found himself standing at a rusted iron gate between two stone pilasters, looking at a Victorian-style house with a sagging porch roof, broken balusters, and swaybacked steps. The sidewalk was cracked and canted, and weeds flourished in an unmown lawn. In the gloaming it looked like every kid’s conception of a seriously haunted house, and he suspected it would look even worse in broad daylight.

  Frank gasped. “Jesus, no, not here!”

  Darkness.

  Fireflies.

  Velocity.

  Papers fluttered to the floor from a massive mahogany desk, as if a wind had swept through the room, though the air was still now. They were in a book-lined study with French windows. An old man had risen from a wing-backed leather chair. He was wearing gray flannel slacks, a white shirt, a blue cardigan, and a look of surprise.

  Frank said, “Doc,” and with his free hand reached toward the startled elder.

  Darkness.

  Bobby had figured out that all was lightless and featureless because, for the moment, he did not exist as a coherent physical entity; he had no eyes, no ears, no nerve endings with which to feel. But understanding brought no diminishment of his fear.

  Fireflies.

  The millions of tiny, whirling points of light were probably the atomic particles of which his flesh was constructed, being shepherded along sheerly by the power of Frank’s mind.

  Velocity.

  They were teleporting, and the process was probably just about instantaneous, requiring only microseconds from physical dissolution to reconstitution, though subjectively it seemed longer.

  The decrepit house again. It must be the place in the hills north of Santa Barbara. They were upslope from the gate, along the Eugenia hedge that encircled the property.

  Frank let out a low cry of terror the instant that he saw where he was.

  Bobby was afraid of running into Candy just as much as Frank was, but also afraid of Frank, and of teleporting—

  Darkness.

  Fireflies.

  Velocity.

  This time they didn’t materialize with the balance and stability of their arrival in the old man’s study or at the peeling house with the rusted gate, but with the clumsiness of their intrusion into that apartment in San Diego. Bobby stumbled a few steps up a slope, still in Frank’s grip as firmly as if they had been handcuffed, and they both fell to their knees on the plush, well-cropped grass.

  Frantically Bobby tried to wrench loose of Frank. But Frank held fast with superhuman strength and pointed to a grave-stone only a few feet in front of them. Bobby looked around and saw that they were alone in a cemetery, where massive coral trees and palms loomed eerily in the purple-gray twilight.

  “He was our neighbor,” Frank said.

  Gasping for breath, unable to speak, still twisting his hand in an attempt to escape Frank’s iron grip, Bobby saw the name NORBERT JAMES KOLREEN in the granite headstone.

  “She had him killed,” Frank said, “had her precious Candy kill him just because she felt he’d been rude to her. Rude to her! The crazy bitch.”

  Darkness.

  Fireflies.

  Velocity.

  The book-lined study. The old man in the doorway now, looking into the room at them.

  Bobby felt as if he had been on a corkscrew roller coaster for hours, turning upside down at high speed, again and again, until he couldn’t be sure any more if he was actually moving ... or standing still while the rest of the world spun and looped around him.

  “I shouldn’t have come here, Dr. Fogarty,” Frank said worriedly. Blood dripped off his injured hand, spotting a pale-green section of the Chinese carpet. “Candy might’ve seen me at the house, might be trying to follow. Don’t want to lead him to you.”

  Fogarty said, “Frank, wait—”

  Darkness.

  Fireflies.

  Velocity.

  They were in the backyard of the decaying house, thirty or forty feet from steps and a porch that were as spavined and dilapidated as those at the front of the place. Lights shone in the first-floor windows.

  “I want to go, I want to be out of here,” Frank said.

  Bobby expected to teleport at once, and steeled himself for it, but nothing happened.

  “I want out of here,” Frank said again. When they did not pop from that place to another, Frank cursed in frustration.

  Suddenly the kitchen door opened, and a woman stepped into sight. She stopped on the threshold and stared at them. The fading, muddy purple twilight barely exposed her, and the light from the kitchen silhouetted her but did not reveal any details of her face. Whether it was a trick of the strange illumination or an accurate revelation of her form, Bobby could not know, but when starkly outlined, she presented a powerfully erotic picture: sylphlike, gracefully thin yet clearly and lushly feminine, a smoky phantom that seemed either thinly clad or nude, and that issued a call of desire without making a sound. T
here was a powerful lubricity in this mysterious woman that made her the equal of any siren that had ever induced sailors to run their ships onto hull-gouging rocks.

  “My sister Violet,” Frank said with obvious dread and disgust.

  Bobby noticed movement around her feet, a swarming of shadows. They poured down the steps, onto the lawn, and he saw they were cats. Their eyes were iridescent in the gloom.

  He was gripping Frank every bit as hard as Frank was gripping him, for now he feared release as much as he had previously feared continued captivity. “Frank, get us out of here.”

  “I can’t. I don’t have control of this, of myself.”

  There were a dozen cats, two dozen, still more. As they rushed off the porch and across the first few yards of unmown grass, they were silent. Then, simultaneously, they cried out, as if they were a single creature. Their wail of anger and hunger instantly cured Bobby of his nausea and made his stomach quiver, instead, with terror.

  “Frank!”

  He wished he hadn’t taken off his shoulder holster back at the office. His gun was back there on Julie’s desk, of no use to him, but as he glimpsed the bared teeth of the oncoming horde, he figured the revolver wouldn’t stop them anyway, at least not enough of them.

  The nearest of the cats leaped—

  JULIE WAS standing by her office chair, where it had been moved into the center of the room for the session of hypnotic therapy. She was unable to step away from it because she had last seen Bobby when he had been next to that chair, and it was where she felt closest to him. “How long now?”

  Clint was standing at her side. He looked at his watch. “Less than six minutes.”

  Jackie Jaxx was in the bathroom, splashing his face with cold water. Still on the sofa with a sheaf of printouts, Lee Chen was not as relaxed as he had been six and a half minutes ago. His Zen calm had been shattered. He was holding those papers in both hands, as if afraid they would vanish from his grasp, and his eyes were as wide now as they had been the moment that Bobby and Frank disappeared.

  Julie was lightheaded with fear, but she was determined not to lose control of herself. Though there seemed to be nothing that she could do to help Bobby, an opportunity for action might arise when she least expected it, and she wanted to be calm and ready. “Last night, Hal said that Frank returned the first time about eighteen minutes after he’d left.”

  Clint nodded. “Then we’ve twelve minutes to go.”

  “After his second disappearance, he didn’t return for hours.”

  “Listen,” Clint said, “if they don’t show up here again in twelve minutes or an hour or three hours, that doesn’t mean anything terrible has happened to Bobby. It’s not going to be the same every time.”

  “I know. What I’m more worried about is ... the damn bed railing.”

  Clint said nothing.

  Unable to keep her voice even, she said, “Frank never did bring it back. What happened to it?”

  “He’ll bring Bobby back,” Clint said. “He won’t let Bobby out there ... wherever he goes.”

  She wished she felt confident about that.

  DARKNESS.

  Fireflies.

  Velocity.

  Rain poured straight down in warm torrents, as if Bobby and Frank had materialized under a waterfall. It pasted their clothes to them in an instant. There was no wind whatsoever, as if the tremendous weight and ferocity of the rainfall had drowned the wind as it would a fire; the air was steamy-humid. They had traveled far enough around the globe to have left twilight behind; the sun was up there somewhere behind the steely plating of gray clouds.

  They were on their sides this time, facing each other like two inebriates who had been arm wrestling and had fallen drunkenly off their stools onto the floor of the barroom, where they still lay with their hands locked in competition. They were not in a bar, however, but in lush tropical foliage: ferns; dark green plants with rubbery, deeply crenulated foliage; ground-hugging succulent vines with leaves as plump as gum candies and berries the same shade as the flesh of a Mandarin orange.

  Bobby pulled away from Frank, and this time his client let him go without a struggle. He scrambled to his feet and pushed through the slick, spongy, clinging flora.

  He didn’t know where he was going and didn’t care. He just had to put a little space between himself and Frank, distance himself from the danger that Frank now represented to him. He was overwhelmed by what had happened, overloaded with new experiences that he needed to consider and to which he had to adapt before he could go on.

  Within half a dozen steps he broke out of the tropical brush and onto a dark expanse of land, the nature of which at first eluded him. The rain came down not in droplets and not in sheets, but in roaring, silver-gray cascades that dramatically reduced visibility; it swept his hair over his eyes, too, which didn’t help. He supposed some people, sitting by windows in dry rooms, might even have seen beauty in the storm, but there was just too damned much rain, a flood; it met the earth and the greenery with a cacophonous roar that threatened to deafen him. The rain not only exhausted him but made him wildly and irrationally angry, as if he was being pelted not by rain but by spittle, great gobs of phlegmy spit, and as if the roar was actually the combined voices of thousands of onlookers showering him with insults and other abuse. He stumbled forward through the peculiarly mushy soil—not muddy, but mushy—looking for someone to blame for the rain, someone to shout at and shake and maybe even punch. In six or eight steps, however, he saw the breakers rolling ashore in a tumult of white foam, and he knew he was standing on a black-sand beach. That realization stopped him cold.

  “Frank!” he shouted, and when he turned to look back the way he had come, he saw that Frank was following him, a few steps behind and round-backed, as if he were an old man unable to stand up to the force of the rain, or as if his spine had been warped by all the moisture. “Frank, dammit, where are we?”

  Frank stopped, unbent his back slightly, lifted his head, and blinked stupidly. “What?”

  Raising his voice even further, Bobby shouted above the tumult : “Where are we!”

  Pointing to Bobby’s left, Frank indicated an enigmatic, rain-shrouded structure that stood like the ancient shrine of a long-dead religion, perhaps a hundred feet farther down the black beach. “Lifeguard station!” He pointed the other direction, up the beach, indicating a large wooden building considerably farther from them but less mysterious because its size made it easier to see. “Restaurant. One of the most popular on the island.”

  “What island?”

  “The big island.”

  “What big island?”

  “Hawaii. We’re standing on Punaluu Beach.”

  “This was where Clint was supposed to take me,” Bobby said. He laughed, but it was a strange, wild laugh that spooked him, so he stopped.

  Frank said, “The house I bought and abandoned is back there.” He indicated the direction from which they had come. “Overlooking a golf course. I loved the place. I was happy there for eight months. Then he found me. Bobby, we have to get out of here.”

  Frank took a few steps toward Bobby, out of the mushy area and onto that section of the beach where the sand was better compacted.

  “That’s far enough,” Bobby ordered when Frank was six or eight feet from him. “Don’t come any closer.”

  “Bobby, we have to go now, right away. I can’t teleport exactly when I want. That’ll happen when it happens, but at least we have to get away from this part of the island. He knows I lived here. He’s familiar with this area. And he may be following us.”

  The fiery anger in Bobby was not quenched by the rain; it grew hotter than ever. “You lying bastard.”

  “It’s true, really,” Frank said, obviously surprised by Bobby’s vehemence. They were close enough to converse without shouting now, but Frank still spoke louder than usual to be heard over the crackle-hiss-patter-rumble of the deluge. “Candy came here after me, and he was worse than I’d ever seen him, m
ore horrible, more evil. He came into my house with a baby, an infant he’d picked up somewhere, only months old, he’d probably killed its parents. He bit into that poor baby’s throat, Bobby, then laughed and offered me its blood, taunted me with it. He drinks blood, you know, she taught him to drink blood, and he relishes it now, thrives on it. And when I wouldn’t join him at the baby’s throat, he threw it aside the way you’d discard an empty beer can, and he came for me, but I ... traveled.”

  “I didn’t mean you were lying about him.” A wave broke closer to shore than the others, washing around Bobby’s feet and leaving short-lived, lacelike traceries of foam on the black sand. “I mean you lied to us about your amnesia. You remember everything. You know exactly who you are.”

  “No, no.” Frank shook his head and made negating gestures with his hands. “I didn’t know. It was a blank. And maybe it’ll be a blank again when I stop traveling and stay put someplace.”

  “Lying shit!” Bobby said.

  He stooped, scooped up handsful of wet black sand and threw it at Frank in a blind fury, two more sopping handsful, then two more. He began to realize that he was behaving like a child throwing a tantrum.

  Frank flinched from the wet sand but waited patiently for Bobby to stop. “This isn’t like you,” he said, when at last Bobby relented.

  “To hell with you.”

  “Your rage is all out of proportion to anything you imagine I’ve done to you.”

  Bobby knew that was true. As he wiped his wet sand-covered hands on his shirt and tried to catch his breath, he began to understand that he was not angry at Frank but at what Frank represented to him. Chaos. Teleportation was a funhouse ride in which the monsters and dangers were not illusory, in which the constant threat of death was to be taken seriously, in which there were no rules, no verities that could be relied upon, where up was down and in was out. Chaos. They had ridden the back of a bull named Chaos, and Bobby had been flat-out terrified.

  “You okay?” Frank asked.

  Bobby nodded.

  More than fear was involved. On a level deeper than intellect or even instinct, perhaps as deep as the soul itself, Bobby had been offended by that chaos. Until now he had not realized what a powerful need he had for stability and order. He’d always thought of himself as a free spirit who thrived on change and the unexpected. But now he saw that he had limits and that, in fact, beneath the devil-may-care attitude he sometimes struck, beat the steady heart of a stability-loving traditionalist. He suddenly understood that his passion for swing music had roots of which he’d never been aware: the elegant and complex rhythms and melodies of big-band jazz appealed to his bebop surface and to the secret seeker of order who dwelt in his heart. No wonder he liked Disney cartoons, in which Donald Duck might run wild and Mickey might get in a tangled mess with Pluto, but in which order triumphed in the end. Not for him the chaotic universe of Warner Brothers’ Looney Tunes, in which reason and logic seldom won more than a temporary victory.

  “Sorry, Frank,” he said at last. “Give me a second. This sure isn’t the place for it, but I’m having an epiphany.”

  “Listen, Bobby, please, I’m telling the truth. Evidently I can remember everything when I travel. The very fact of traveling tears down the wall blocking my memory, but as soon as I stop traveling, the wall goes up again. It’s part of the degeneration I’m undergoing, I guess. Or maybe it’s just a desperate need to forget what’s happened to me in the past, what’s happening now, and what will sure as hell happen to me in the days to come.”

  Though no wind had risen, some of the breakers were larger now, washing deep onto the beach. They battered the backs of Bobby’s legs and, on retreating, buried his feet in coaly sand.

  Struggling to explain himself, Frank said, “See, traveling isn’t easy for me, like it is for Candy. He can control where he wants to go, and when. He can travel just by deciding to do it, virtually by wishing himself someplace, like you suggested I might be able to do. But I can’t. My talent for teleportation isn’t really a talent, it’s a curse.” His voice grew shaky. “I didn’t even know I could do it until seven years ago, the day that bitch died. All of us who came from her womb are cursed, we can’t escape it. I thought I could escape somehow by killing her, but that didn’t release me.”

  After the events of the past hour, Bobby thought nothing could surprise him, but he was startled by the confession Frank had made. This pathetic, sad-eyed, dimpled, comic-faced, pudgy man seemed an unlikely perpetrator of matricide. “You