The Bad Place

by Dean Koontz

  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.”

  Just great, Bobby thought. The sociopathic physician had found himself a sociopathic nurse, a couple who would be right in the social swim 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.

  “You should have seen what came out of that girl’s oven,” 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 sideshow willing to risk the anger of the law to exhibit her.” He paused, enjoying their anticipation. “She was an hermaphrodite.”

  For a moment the word meant nothing to Bobby, and then he said, “You don’t mean—she had both sexes, male and female?”

  “Oh, but that’s exactly what I mean.” Fogarty bounced up from his chair and began to pace, suddenly energized by the 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, where you have the external organs of one sex and the internal of the other, lateral hermaphroditism ... several other types. But the thing is ... Roselle was the rarest of all, she possessed the complete internal and external organs of both sexes.” He plucked a thick medical reference book from one of the shelves and handed it to Julie. “Check page one forty-six for photos of the kind of thing I’m talking about.”

  Julie handed the volume to Bobby so fast it seemed as if she thought it was a snake.

  Bobby, in turn, put it beside himself on the sofa, unopened. The last thing he needed, with his imagination, was the assistance 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 brain, which was spinning furiously. He wished that he could stop thinking about what Fogarty was telling them. It was gross. But the worst thing about it was, judging by the physician’s strange smile, Bobby sensed that what they had heard thus far was all just the bread on this horror sandwich; the meat was yet to come.

  Pacing again, Fogarty said, “Her vagina was about where you’d expect, the male equipment somewhat displaced. Urination was through the male part, but the female appeared reproductively complete.”

  “I think we get the picture,” Julie said. “We don’t need all the technical details.”

  Fogarty came to them, stood looking down at them, and his eyes were as bright and lively as if he were recounting a charming medical anecdote that had bewitched legions of delighted companions at dinner parties over the years. “No, no, you must understand what she was, if you’re going to understand all that happened next.”

  THOUGH HER OWN mind 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 primitive 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 preoccupation with grooming, with her own wants and needs. From her point 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 bookshelves, snapping his finger against the spines of the volumes to punctuate his story.

  As the physician spoke of this family that had seemingly sought genetic catastrophe, Julie could not help but think of how Thomas’s affliction had been visited upon him even though his parents had lived healthy and normal lives. Fate played as cruelly with the innocent as with the guilty.

  “When he saw the baby’s abnormality, I think Yarnell would have killed it and thrown it out with the garbage—or at least put it in the hands of an institution. But Cynthia 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 permanent reminder to him of the consequences of what he had forced her to do.”

  “Couldn’t surgery have been used to make her one sex or another?” Bobby asked.

  “Easier today. Iffier 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 recapped 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 only 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 permitted. 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 what I said-she probably welcomed the child’s deformity as a weapon against her brother.”

  “You could have stepped between them and the baby,” Bobby said. “You could’ve brought the child’s plight to the attention of 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 special—that’s what she called hermaphroditism, speciall—because she was to be a pure vessel by which blessed children could be brought into the world. Therefore she had collected the semen from her male half and mechanically inserted it into her female half.”

  Bobby shot up from the sofa as if one of its springs had broken under 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 drawer only so 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 Roselle was barren. She did bear children, we know that. But I assumed 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 insemination, as I said.”

  Late that afternoon, in the office in Newport, when Bobby had tried to explain how traveling with Frank was like a bobsled 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 chaos of the Pollard family’s relationships and sexual identities made her skin crawl and filled her with a dark suspicion that nature was even stranger and more hospitable to anarchy than she had feared.

  “Yarnell wanted me to abort the fetus, and abortion was a fairly lucrative sideline in those days, though illegal and hush-hush. 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, 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: the 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 Yamell’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 seldoni 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.

  Then she remembered that she was nude, and she turned back for panties and T-shirt.

  She wasn’t afraid of Candy’s disapproval—or of Candy himself. In fact, she would welcome his violent attentions, for that would be the ultimate game of hunter and prey, hawk and mouse, brother and sister. Candy was the only wild creature into whose mind she couldn’t intrude; though wild, he was also human and beyond the reach of her powers. If he tore out her throat, however, then her blood would get into him, and she would become a part of him in the only manner she ever could. Likewise, that was the only way he could get into her: by biting his way in, by chewing into her, the only way.

  On any other night, she would have called to him and let him see her nude, with the hope that her shamelessness would at last provoke him to violence. But she could not pursue her fondest desire right now, not when Frank was nearby and still unpunished for what he had done to their poor puss, Samantha.

  When she had dressed, she returned to the hall, moved along it in the gloom—still in complete touch with Darkle and Zitha and the wild world—and stopped before the door to their mother’s room, into which Candy had moved upon her death. A thin line of light showed along the sill.

  “Candy,” she said. “Candy, are you there?”

  LIKE A MEMORY from wars past or a presentiment of an ultimate war to come, a searing flash of lightning and a sky-shattering crash of thunder shook the night. The windows of the study vibrated. It was the first thunder Bobby had heard since the faint and distant peal when they had come out of the motel, nearly an hour and a half ago. In spite of the fireworks in the sky, rain was not yet falling. But though the tempest was slow-moving, it was almost upon them. The pyrotechnics of a storm was an ideal backdrop to Fogarty’s tale.

  “I was disappointed in Frank,” Fogarty said, taking a second bottle of bourbon from his capacious desk drawer and refilling his glass. “No fun at all. So normal. But two years later, she was pregnant again! This t
ime the delivery was every bit as entertaining as I’d expected Frank’s to be. A baby boy again, and she called him James. Her second virgin birth, she said, and she didn’t mind at all that he was as much of a mess as she was. She said that was just proof that he, too, was favored by God and brought into the world without a need to wallow in the depravity of sex. I knew then that she was as mad as a hatter.”

  Bobby knew he had to remain sober, and he was aware of the danger of too much bourbon after a night of too little sleep. But he had a hunch that he was burning it off as fast as he drank it, at least for now. He took another sip before he said, “You’re not telling us that beefy hulk is hermaphroditic too?”

  “Oh, no,” Fogarty said. “Worse than that.”

  CANDY OPENED the door. “What do you want?”

  “He’s here, in town, right now,” she said.

  His eyes widened. “You mean Frank?”

  “Yes.”

  “WORSE,” Bobby said numbly.

  He got up from the sofa long enough to put his glass on the desk. It was still three-quarters full, but he suddenly decided that even bourbon would not be an effective tranquilizer in this case.

  Julie seemed to reach the same conclusion, and put her glass aside too.

  “James—or Candy, if you wish—was born with four testes instead of two, but with no male organ. Now, at birth, male infants all carry their testes safely in their abdominal cavity, and the testes descend later, during infant maturation. But Candy’s never descended and never could, because there was no scrotum for them to descend into. And for another thing, there’s a strange excrescence of bone that would prevent their descent. So they’ve remained within his abdominal cavity. But I would guess they’ve functioned well, busily producing quite large amounts of testosterone, which is related to development of musculature and partly explains his formidable size.”

  “So he’s incapable of having sex,” Bobby said.

  “With his testicles undescended and no organ for copulation, I’d say he’s got a shot at being the most chaste man who ever lived.”

  Bobby had come to loathe the old man’s laugh. “But with four gonads, he’s producing a flood of testosterone, and that does more than help build muscles—doesn’t it?”

  Fogarty nodded. “To put it in the language of a medical journal: excess testosterone, over an extended period of time, alters normal brain function, sometimes radically, and is a causative factor of socially unacceptable levels of aggression. To put it in layman’s language: this guy is seriously stoked with sexual tension he can’t possibly release, he’s rechanneled that energy into other outlets, mainly acts of incredible violence, and he’s as dangerous as any monster any moviemaker ever dreamed up.”

  ALTHOUGH SHE HAD released the owl as the storm drew near, Violet still inhabited Darkle and Zitha, taking their fear away from them when the lightning flared and the thunder boomed. Even as she stood before Candy, at the door to his room, she was listening to Fogarty tell the Dakotas about her brother’s deformity. She knew about it already, of course, for within the family their mother had referred to it as God’s sign that Candy was the most special of all of them. Likewise, and in some way Violet had been aware that this deformity was related to the great wildness in Candy, the thing that made him so powerfully attractive.

  Now she stood before him, wanting to touch his huge arms, feel the sculpted muscles, but she restrained herself. “He’s at Fogarty’s house.”

  That surprised him. “Mother said Fogarty was an instrument of God. He brought us into the world, four virgin births. Why would he harbor Frank? Frank’s on the dark side now.”

  “That’s where he is,” Violet said. “And a couple. His name’s Bobby. Hers is Julie.”

  “Dakota,” he whispered.

  “At Fogarty’s. Make him pay for Samantha, Candy. Bring him back here after you’ve killed him, and let us feed him to the cats. He hated the cats, and he’ll hate being part of them forever.”

  JULIE’S TEMPER, not always easily controlled, was dangerously near the flashpoint. As lightning shocked the night outside and thunder again protested, she counseled herself about the necessity for diplomacy.

  Nevertheless, she said, “You’ve known all these years that Candy is a vicious killer, and you’ve done nothing to alert anyone to the danger?”

  “Why should I?” Fogarty asked.

  “Haven’t you ever heard of social responsibility?”

  “It’s a nice phrase, but meaningless.”

  “People have been brutally murdered because you let that man—”

  “People will always and forever be brutally murdered. History is full of brutal murder. Hitler murdered millions. Stalin, many millions more. Mao Tse-tung, more millions than anyone. They’re all considered monsters now, but they had their admirers in their time, didn’t they? And there’re people even now who’ll tell you Hitler and Stalin only did what they had to do, that Mao was just keeping the public order, disposing of ruffians. So many people admire those murderers who are bold about it and who cloak their bloodlust in noble causes like brotherhood and political reform and justice—and social responsibility. We’re all meat, just meat, and in our hearts we know it, so we secretly applaud the men bold enough to treat us as, what we are. Meat.”

  By now she knew that he was a sociopath, with no conscience, no capacity for love, and no ability to empathize with other people. Not all of them were street hoodlums—or even high-class, high-tech thieves like Tom Rasmussen, who had tried to kill Bobby last week. Some got to be doctors—or lawyers, TV ministers, politicians. None of them could be reasoned with, for they had no normal human feelings.

  He said, “Why should I tell anyone about Candy Pollard? I’m safe from him because his mother always called me God’s instrument, told her wretched spawn I was to be respected. It’s none of my business. He’s covered his mother’s murder to avoid having the police tramping through the house, told people she moved to a nice oceanside condo near San Diego. I don’t think anybody believes that crazy bitch would suddenly lighten up and become a beach bunny, but nobody questions it because nobody wants to get involved. Everybody feels it’s none of their business. Same with me. Whatever outrages Candy adds to the world’s pain are negligible. At least, given his peculiar psychology and physiology, his outrages will be more imaginative than most.

  “Besides, when Candy was about eight, Roselle came to thank me for bringing her four into the world, and for keeping my own counsel, so that Satan was unaware of their blessed presence on earth. That’s exactly how she put it! And as a token of her appreciation, she gave me a suitcase full of money, enough to make early retirement possible. I couldn’t figure where she’d gotten it. The money that Deeter and Elizabeth piled up in the thirties had long ago dwindled away. So she told me a little bit about Candy’s ability, not much, but enough to explain that she’d never want for cash. That was the first time I realized there was a genetic boon tied to the genetic disaster.”