The Bad Place

by Dean Koontz

  Fogarty raised his glass of bourbon in a toast that they did not return. “To God’s mysterious ways.”

  LIKE THE ARCHANGEL come to declare the end of the world in the Book of the Apocalypse, Candy arrived just as the heavens sundered and the rain began to fall in earnest, although this was not black rain as would be the deluge of Armageddon, nor was it a storm of fire. Not yet. Not yet.

  He materialized in the darkness between two widely spaced streetlamps, almost a block from the doctor’s house, to be sure that the soft trumpets that unfailingly announced his arrival would not be audible to anyone in Fogarty’s library. As he walked toward the house through the hammering rain, he believed that his power, provided by God, had now grown so enormous that nothing could prevent him from taking or achieving anything he desired.

  “IN SIXTY-SIX, the twins were born, and physically they were as normal as Frank,” Fogarty said as rain suddenly splattered noisily against the window. “No fun in that. I couldn’t believe it, really. Three out of four of the kids, perfectly healthy. I’d been expecting all sorts of cute twists—harelips at the very least, misshapen skulls, cleft faces, withered limbs, or extra heads!”

  Bobby took Julie’s hand. He needed the contact.

  He wanted to get out of there. He felt burnt out. Hadn’t they heard enough?

  But that was the problem: he didn’t know what was left to hear, or how much of it might be crucial to finding a way of dealing with the Pollards.

  “Of course, when Roselle brought me that suitcase full of money, I began to learn that the children were all freaks, mentally if not physically. And seven years ago, when Frank killed her, he came to me, as if I owed him something—understanding, shelter. He told me more about them than I wanted to know, too much. For the next two years, he’d periodically return here, just appear like a ghost that wanted to haunt me instead of a place. But he finally understood there was nothing for him here, and for five years he stayed out of my life. Until today, tonight.”

  In his wingback chair, Frank moved. He shifted his body and tipped his head from the right to the left. Otherwise, he was no more alert than he had been since they had entered the room. The old man had said that Frank had come around a few times and had been talkative, but it couldn’t be proved by his behavior during the past hour or so.

  Julie, who was the closest to Frank, frowned and leaned toward him, peering at the right side of his head.

  “Oh, my God.”

  She spoke those three words in a bleak tone of voice that was as effective a refrigerant as anything used in an air conditioner.

  With a chill skittering up his spine, Bobby slid along the sofa, crowding her against the other end, and looked past her at the side of Frank’s head. Wished he had not. Tried to look away. Couldn’t.

  When Frank’s head had been tilted to his right, almost lying against his shoulder, they had not been able to see that temple. After leaving Bobby at the office, still out of control, traveling against his will, Frank evidently had returned to one of those craters where the engineered insects shat out their diamonds. His flesh was lumpy all the way along his temple to his jaw, and in some places the rough gemstones that were the cause of the lumpiness poked through, gleaming, intimately melded with his tissue. For whatever reason, he had scooped up a handful to bring with him, but when reconstituting himself he had made a mistake.

  Bobby wondered what treasures might be buried in the soft gray matter within Frank’s skull.

  “I saw that too,” Fogarty said. “And look at the palm of his right hand.”

  Although Julie protested, Bobby pinched the sleeve of Frank’s jacket and pulled until he twisted the man’s arm off the chair and revealed his palm. He had found the partial roach that had once been welded into his own shoe. At least it appeared to be the same one. It was sprouting from the meaty part of Frank’s hand, carapace gleaming, dead eyes staring up toward Frank’s index finger.

  CANDY CIRCLED the house in the rain, passing a black cat on a windowsill. It turned its head to glance at him, then put its face to the windowpane again.

  At the rear of the house, he stepped quietly onto the porch and tried the back door. It was locked.

  Vague blue light pulsed from his hand as he gripped the knob. The lock slipped, the door opened, and he stepped inside.

  JULIE HAD heard and seen enough, too much.

  Eager to get away from Frank, she rose from the sofa and walked to the desk, where she considered her unfinished bourbon. But that was no answer. She was dreadfully tired, struggling to repress her grief for Thomas, striving even harder to make some sense out of the grotesque family history that Fogarty had revealed to them. She did not need the complication of any more bourbon, appealing as it might look there in the glass.

  She said to the old man, “So what hope do we have of dealing with Candy?”

  “None.”

  “There must be a way.”

  “No.”

  “There must be.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he can’t be allowed to win.”

  Fogarty smiled. “Why not?”

  “Because he’s the bad guy, dammit! And we’re the good guys. Not perfect, maybe, not without flaws, but we’re the good guys, all right. And that’s why we have to win, because if we don’t, then the whole game is meaningless.”

  Fogarty leaned back in his chair. “My point exactly. It is all meaningless. We’re not good, and we’re not bad, we’re just meat. We don’t have souls, there’s no hope of transcendence for a slab of meat, you wouldn’t expect a hamburger to go to Heaven after someone ate it.”

  She had never hated anyone as much as she hated Fogarty at that moment, partly because he was so smug and hateful, but partly because she recognized, in his arguments, something perilously close to the things she had said to Bobby in the motel, after she had learned about Thomas’s death. She had said there was no point in having dreams, that they never came true, that death was always there watching even if you were lucky enough to grasp your personal brass ring. And loathing life, just because it led sooner or later to death ... well, that was the same as saying people were nothing but meat.

  “We have just pleasure and pain,” the old physician said,. “so it doesn’t matter who’s right or who’s wrong, who wins or loses.”

  “What’s his weakness?” she demanded angrily.

  “None I can see.” Fogarty seemed pleased by the hopeless-ness of their position. If he had been practicing medicine in the early 1940s, he had to be nearing eighty, though he looked younger. He was acutely aware of how little time remained to him, and was no doubt resentful of anyone younger; and given his cold perspective on life, their deaths at Candy Pollard’s hands would entertain him. “No weaknesses at all.”

  Bobby disagreed, or tried to. “Some might say that his weakness is his mind, his screwed-up psychology.”

  Fogarty shook his head. “And I’d argue that he’s made a strength of his screwed-up psychology. He’s used this business about being the instrument of God’s vengeance to armor himself very effectively from depression and self-doubt and anything else that might trip him up.”

  In the wingback chair, Frank abruptly sat up straighter, shook himself as if to cast off his mental confusion the way a dog might shake water from its sodden coat after coming in from the rain. He said, “Where ... Why do I ... Is it ... is it... is it ... ?”

  “Is it what, Frank?” Bobby asked.

  “Is it happening?” Frank said. His eyes seemed slowly to be clearing. “Is it finally happening?”

  “Is what finally happening, Frank?”

  His voice was hoarse. “Death. Is it finally happening? Is it?”

  CANDY HAD crept quietly through the house, into the hallway that led to the library. As he moved toward the open door on the left, he heard voices. When he recognized one of them as Frank’s, he could barely contain himself.

  According to Violet, Frank was crippled. His control of his telekinetic talent had
always been erratic, which is why Candy had enjoyed some hope of one day catching him and finishing him before he could travel to a place of safety. Perhaps the moment of triumph had arrived.

  When he reached the door, he found himself looking at the woman’s back. He could not see her face, but he was sure that it would be the same one that had been suffused in a beatific glow in Thomas’s mind.

  Beyond her he glimpsed Frank, and saw Frank’s eyes widen at the sight of him. If the mother-killer had been too mentally confused to teleport out of Candy’s reach, as Violet had claimed, he was now casting off that confusion. He looked as if he might pop out of there long before Candy could lay a hand on him.

  Candy had intended to throw the library into a turmoil by sending a wave of energy through the doorway ahead of him, setting the books on fire and shattering the lamps, with the purpose of panicking and distracting the Dakotas and Doc Fogarty, giving him a chance to go straight for Frank. But now he was forced to change his plans by the sight of his brother trembling on the edge of dematerialization.

  He entered the room in a rush and seized the woman from behind, curling his right arm around her neck and jerking her head back, so she—and the two men—would understand at once that he could snap her neck in an instant, whenever he chose. Even so, she slashed backward with one foot, scraping the heel of her shoe down his shin, stomping on his foot, all of which hurt like hell; it was some martial-art move, and he could tell by the way she tried to counterbalance his grip and stance that she had a lot of training in such things. So he jerked her head back again, even harder, and flexed his biceps, which pinched her windpipe, hurting her enough to make her realize that resistance was suicidal.

  Fogarty watched from his chair, alarmed but not sufficiently to rise to his feet, and the husband came off the sofa with a gun in his hand, Mr. Quick-Draw Artist, but Candy was not concerned about either of them. His attention was on Frank, who had risen from his chair and appeared about to blink out of there, off to Punaluu and Kyoto and a score of other places.

  “Don’t do it, Frank!” he said sharply. “Don’t run away. It’s time we settled, time you paid for what you did to our mother. You come to the house, accept God’s punishment, and end it now, tonight. I’m going there with this bitch. She tried to help you, I guess, so maybe you won’t want to see her suffer.”

  The husband was going to do something crazy; seeing Julie in Candy’s grip had clearly unhinged him. He was searching for a shot, a way to get Candy without getting her, and he might even risk firing at Candy’s head, though Candy was half crouching behind the woman. Time to get out of there.

  “Come to the house,” he told Frank. “You come into the kitchen, let me end it for you, and I’ll let her go. I swear on our mother’s name, I’ll let her go. But if you don’t come in fifteen minutes, I’ll put this bitch on the table, and I’ll have my dinner, Frank. You want me to feed on her after she tried to help you, Frank?”

  Candy thought he heard a gunshot just as he got out of there. In any event, it had been too late. He rematerialized in the kitchen of the house on Pacific Hill Road, with Julie Dakota still locked in the crook of his arm.

  56

  No LONGER concerned about the danger of touching Frank, Bobby grabbed handsful of his jacket and shoved him backward against the wide-louvred shutters on the library window. “You heard him, Frank. Don’t run. Don’t run this time, or I’ll hang on to you and never let go, no matter where you take me, I swear to God, you’ll wish you’d put your neck on Candy’s platter instead of mine.” He slammed Frank against the shutters to make his point, and behind him he heard Lawrence Fogarty’s soft, knowing laughter.

  Registering the terror and confusion in his client’s eyes, Bobby realized that his threats would not achieve the effect he desired. In fact, threats would almost certainly frighten Frank into flight, even if he wanted to help Julie. Worse, by stooping to violence as a first resort, he was treating Frank not as a person but as meat, confirming the depraved code by which the corrupt old physician had led his entire life, and that was almost as intolerable as losing Julie.

  He let go of Frank.

  “I’m sorry. Listen, I’m sorry, I just got a little crazy.”

  He studied the man’s eyes, searching for some indication that sufficient intelligence remained in the damaged brain for the two of them to reach an understanding. He saw fear, stark and terrible, and he saw a loneliness that made him want to cry. He saw a lost look, too, hot unlike what he had sometimes seen in Thomas’s eyes when they had taken him on an excursion from Cielo Vista, “out in the world,” as he had said.

  Aware that perhaps two minutes of Candy’s fifteen-minute deadline had passed, trying to remain calm nonetheless, Bobby took Frank’s right hand, turned it palm up, and forced himself to touch the dead roach that was now integrated with the man’s soft white flesh. The insect felt crisp and bristly against his fingers, but he did not permit his disgust to show.

  “Does this hurt, Frank? This bug mixed up with your own cells here, does it hurt you?”

  Frank stared at him, finally shook his head. No.

  Heartened by the establishment of even this much dialogue, Bobby gently put his fingertips to Frank’s right temple, feeling the lumps of precious gems like unburst boils or cancerous tumors.

  “Do you hurt here, Frank? Are you in pain?”

  “No,” Frank said, and Bobby’s heart pounded with excitement at the escalation to a spoken response.

  From a pocket of his jeans, Bobby removed a folded Kleenex and gently blotted away the spittle that still glistened on Frank’s chin.

  The man blinked, and his eyes seemed to focus better.

  From behind Bobby, still in the leather chair at the desk, perhaps with a glass of bourbon in his hand, almost certainly with that infuriatingly smug smile plastered on his face, Fogarty said, “Twelve minutes left.”

  Bobby ignored the physician. Maintaining eye contact with his client, his fingertips still on Frank’s temple, he said quietly, “It’s been a hard life for you, hasn’t it? You were the normal one, the most normal one, and when you were a kid you always wanted to fit in at school, didn’t you, the way your sisters and brother never could. And it took you a long time to realize your dream wasn’t going to happen, you weren’t going to fit in, because no matter how normal you were compared to the rest of your family, you’d still come from that goddamned house, out of that cesspool, which made you forever an outsider to other people. They might not see the stain on your heart, might not know the dark memories in you, but you saw, and you remembered, and you felt yourself unworthy because of the horror that was your family. Yet you were also an outsider at home, much too sane to fit in there, too sensitive to the nightmare of it. So all your life, you’ve been alone.”

  “All my life,” Frank said. “And always will be.”

  He wasn’t going to travel now. Bobby would have bet on it.

  “Frank, I can’t help you. No one can. That’s a hard truth, but I won’t lie to you. I’m not going to con you or threaten you.”

  Frank said nothing, but maintained eye contact.

  “Ten minutes,” Fogarty said.

  “The only thing I can do for you, Frank, is show you a way to give your life meaning at last, a way to end it with purpose and dignity, and maybe find peace in death. I have an idea, a way that you might be able to kill Candy and save Julie, and if you can do that, you’ll have gone out a hero. Will you come with me, Frank, listen to me, and not let Julie die?”

  Frank didn’t say yes, but he didn’t say no, either. Bobby decided to take heart from the lack of a negative response.

  “We’ve got to get moving, Frank. But don’t try teleporting to the house, because then you’ll just lose control again, pop off to hell and back a hundred times. We’ll go in my car. We can be there in five minutes.”

  Bobby took his client’s hand. He made a point of taking the one with the roach embedded in it, hoping Frank would remember that he had a f
ear of bugs and perceive that his willingness to overrule the phobia was a testament to his sincerity.

  They crossed the room to the door.

  Rising from his chair, Fogarty said, “You’re going to your death, you know.”

  Without glancing back at the physician, Bobby said, “Well, seems to me, you went to yours decades ago.”

  He and Frank walked out into the rain and were drenched by the time they got into the car.

  Behind the wheel, Bobby glanced at his watch. Less than eight minutes to go.

  He wondered why he accepted Candy’s word that the fifteen-minute deadline would be observed, why he was so sure that the madman had not already torn out her throat. Then he remembered something she had said to him once: Sweet-cakes, as long as you’re breathing, Tinkerbell will live.

  Gutters overflowed, and a sudden wind wound skeins of rain, like silver yam, through his headlights.

  As he drove the storm-swept streets and turned east on Pacific Hill Road, he explained how Frank, through his sacrifice of himself, could rid the world of Candy and undo his mother’s evil the way he had wanted to undo it—but had failed—when he had taken the ax to her. It was a simple concept. He was able to go over it several times even in the few minutes they had before pulling to a stop at the rusted iron gate.

  Frank did not respond to anything that Bobby said. There was no way to be sure he understood what he must do—or if he had even heard a word of it. He stared straight ahead, his mouth open an inch or so, and sometimes his head ticked back and forth, back and forth, in time with the windshield wipers, as if he were watching Jackie Jaxx’s crystal pendant swinging on its gold chain.

  By the time they got out of the car, went through the gate, and approached the decrepit house, with less than two minutes of the deadline left, Bobby was reduced to proceeding entirely on faith.

  WHEN CANDY brought her into the filthy kitchen, pushed her into one of the chairs at the table, and let go of her, Julie reached at once for the revolver in the shoulder holster under her corduroy jacket. He was too fast for her, however, and tore it from her hand, breaking two of her fingers in the process.

  The pain was excruciating, and that was on top of the soreness in her neck and throat from the ruthless treatment he had dealt out at Fogarty’s, but she refused to cry or complain. Instead, when he turned away from her to toss the gun into a drawer beyond her reach, she leapt up from the chair and sprinted for the door.

  He caught her, lifted her off her feet, swung her around, and body-slammed her onto the kitchen table so hard she nearly passed out. He brought his face close to hers and said, “You’re going to taste good, like Clint’s woman, all that vitality in your veins, all that energy, I want to feel you spurting in my mouth.”

  Her attempts at resistance and escape had not arisen from courage as much as from terror, some of which sprang from the experience of deconstruction and reconstitution, which she hoped never to have to endure again. Now her fear doubled as his lips lowered to within an inch of hers and as his charnel-house breath washed over her face. Unable to look away from his blue eyes, she thought these were what Satan’s eyes would be like, not dark as sin, not red as the fires of Hell, not crawling with maggots, but gloriously and beautifully blue—and utterly devoid of all mercy and compassion.

  If all the worst of human savagery from time immemorial could be condensed into one individual, if all of the species’ hunger for blood and violence and raw power could be embodied in one monstrous figure, it would have looked like Candy Pollard at that moment. When he finally pulled back from her, like a coiled serpent grudgingly reconsidering its decision to strike, and when he dragged her off the table and shoved her back into the chair, she was cowed, perhaps for the first time in her life. She knew that if she exhibited any further resistance, he would kill her on the spot and feed on her.

  Then he said an astonishing thing: “Later, when I’m done with Frank, you’ll tell me where Thomas got his power.”

  She was so intimidated by him that she had difficulty finding her voice. “Power? What do you mean?”

  “He’s the only one I’ve ever encountered, outside our family. The Bad Thing, he called me. And he kept trying to keep tabs on me telepathically because he knew sooner or later you and I would cross paths. How can he have had any gifts when he wasn’t born of my virgin mother? Later, you’ll explain that to me.”

  As she sat, actually too terrified either to cry or shake, in a storm’s-eye calm, cradling her injured hand in the other, she had to find room in her for a sense of wonder too. Thomas? Psychically gifted? Could it be true that all the time she worried about taking care of him, he was to some extent taking care of her?

  She heard a strange sound approaching from the front of the house. A moment later, at least twenty cats poured into the kitchen through the hall doorway, tails sweeping over one another.

  Among the pack came the Pollard twins, long-legged and barefoot, one in panties and a red T-shirt, the other in panties and a white T-shirt, as sinuous as their cats. They were as pale as spirits, but there was nothing soft or ineffectual about them. They were lean and vital, filled with that tightly coiled energy that you always knew was in a cat even when it appeared to be lazing in the sun. They were ethereal in some ways, yet at the same time earthy and strong, powerfully sensual. Their presence in the house must have cranked up the unnatural tensions in their brother, who was doubly male in the matter of testes but lacking the crucial valve that would have allowed release.

  They approached the table. One of them stared down at Julie, while the other hung on her sister and averted her eyes. The bold one said, “Are you Candy’s girlfriend?” There was unmistakable mockery of her brother in the question.