place, partly because the insanely high value such upscale real estate
ensured the construction of immense houses out of proportion to the tiny
lots they stood on, partly because Tudor and French architectural styles
clashed with the semitropical landscape. It was all part of the Cali
nia circus, some of which he hated, most of which he loved. Those
houses never bothered him before, and given the serious problems he and
Julie faced, he couldn't figure why they bothered him now. Maybe he was
so jumpy that even these misharmonies reminded him of the chaos that had
almost engulfed him during his travels with Frank.
He said,
"Do you have to drive so fast)"
"Yes," she said curtly.
"I want to get home, get packed, to Santa Barbara, learn what we can
about the Pollard family, get finished with this whole damn creepy
case."
"If you feel that way, why don't we just drop it here? Frank comes
back, we give him his money, his jar of red diamonds, tell him we're
sorry, we think he's a prince of a guy, but we're out of it."
"We can't," she said.
He chewed on his lower lip, then said,
"I know. But I can't figure why we're compelled to hang in there with
this one." They crested the hill and speeded north, past the entrance
to Rocking Horse Ridge. Their own development was only a couple of
streets ahead, on the left. As she finally began to brake for the turn,
she glanced at him and said,
"You really don't know why we can't bug out of it?"
"No. You saying you do?"
"I know."
"Tell me."
"You'll figure it out eventually."
"Don't be mysterious. That's not like you." She swung the company
Toyota into their development, then onto their street.
"I tell you what I think, it'll upset you. You'll deny it, we'll argue,
and I don't want to argue with you."
"Why will we argue?" She pulled into their driveway, put the car in
park, switched off the lights and engine, and turned to him. Her eyes
shone in the dark.
"When you understand why we can't let go, you won't like what it says
about us, and you'll argue that I'm wrong, that we're just a couple of
sweet kids, really. You like to see us as a couple of sweet kids, savvy
but basically innocent at the same time, like a young Jimmy Stewart and
Donna Reed. I really love you for that, for being such a dreamer about
the world and us, and it'll hurt me when you want to argue." He almost
started to argue with her about whether he would argue with her. Then
he stared at her for a moment and finally said,
"I've had this feeling that I'm not facing up to something, that when
this is all over and I realize why I was so determined to see this
through to the end, my motivations won't be as noble as I think they are
now. It's a weird damn feeling. As if I don't really know myself."
"Maybe we spend all our lives learning to know ourselves.
And maybe we never really will completely." She kissed him lightly,
quickly, and got out of the car.
As he followed her up the sidewalk to the front door, glanced at the
sky. The clarity of the day had been short-lived A pall of clouds
concealed the moon and stars. The sky very dark, and he was gripped by
the curious certainty great and terrible weight was falling toward them,
bright against the black heavens and therefore invisible, but falling
fast, faster....
CANDY KEPT a choke hold on his fury, which reacted its leash. strained
like an attack dog trying to!" He rocked and rocked, and gradually the
shy visitor grew bolder. Repeatedly he felt the invisible hand on his
head. Initially it lay upon him as lightly as an empty silk glove, and
it stayed only briefly before flitting away. But as he pretended to be
disinterested in both the hand and the person to whom it belonged, the
visitor grew more daring, the hand heavier and less nervous.
Though Candy made no effort to probe at the mind of the intruder, for
fear of scaring him away, some of the stranger's thoughts came to him
nonetheless. He did not think the visitor was aware that images and
words from his own mind were slipping into Candy's; they were just
leaking out of him as if they were trickles of water seeping from
pin-size holes in a rusty bucket.
The name
"Julie" came several times. And once an image floated along with the
name-an attractive woman with brown hair and dark eyes. Candy wasn't
sure if it was the visitor's face or the face of someone the visitor
knew even if it was the face of anyone who really existed. There were
aspects that made it seem unreal: a pale light radiated from it, and the
features were so kind and serene that it looked like the holy
countenance of a saint in an illustrated Bible.
The word
"flutterby" leaked out of the visitor's mind more than once, sometimes
with other words, like
"remember the flutterby" or "don't be a flutterby." And each time that
word flitted through his mind, the visitor quickly withdrew.
But he kept coming back. Because Candy did nothing to make him feel
unwelcome.
Candy rocked and rocked. The chair made a soft sound creak... creak...
creak... creak.
He waited.
He kept an open mind.
... creak... creak... creak...
Twice the name
"Bobby" seeped from the visitor's mind and the second time a fuzzy image
of a face was linked to another very kind face. It was idealized, like
Julie's face. Recognition stirred in Candy, but Bobby's visage was not
as clear or detailed as Julie's, and Candy did not want to concentrate
on it because the visitor might notice his interest and be frightened
off.
During his long and patient courtship of the shy introvert many other
words and images came to Candy, but he didn't know what to make of them:
-men in spacesuits
"Bad Thing"-a guy in a hockey mask-"The Home"-"Dumb People"-a bathrobe,
a half-eaten Hershey's bar, and a sudden frantic thought: Draw Bugs, no
good, Draw Bugs, got to Be Not More than ten minutes passed without
contact, and Can started to worry that the intruder had gone away for
good. But suddenly he was back. This time the contact was strong, more
intimate than ever.
When Candy sensed that the visitor was more confident, knew the time had
come to act. He pictured his mind as a steel trap, the visitor as an
inquisitive mouse, and he pictured a trap springing, the bar pinning the
visitor to the kill plate.
Shocked, the visitor tried to pull away. Candy held him a pushed across
the telepathic bridge between them, trying storm his adversary's mind to
find out who he was, where was, and what he wanted.
Candy had no telepathic power of his own, nothing to equal; even the
weak telepathic gifts of the intruder; he had never re anyone's mind
before, and he did not know how to go about it. As it turned out, he
did not need to do anything except stop himself and receive what the
visitor gave him. Thomas was name, and he was terrified
of Candy, of
having Done Some thing Really Dumb, and of putting Julie in danger; that
kind of terrors shattered his mental defenses and caused him to disgorge
a flood of information.
in fact, there was too much information for Candy to make sense of it, a
babble of words and images. He tried desperately to sort through it for
clues to Thomas's identity and location.
Dumb People, Cielo Vista, The Home, everybody here has bad eye cues,
Care Home, good food, TV The Best Place For Us, Cielo Vista, the aides
are nice, we watch the humming birds, the world is bad out there, too
bad for us out there, Cielo Vista Care Home...
With some astonishment, Candy realized that the visitor was someone with
a subnormal intellect-he even picked up the term
"Down's syndrome"-and he was afraid that he was not going to be able to
sort enough meaningful thoughts from the babble to get a fix on Thomas's
location. Depending on the size of his IQ, Thomas might not know where
Cielo Vista Care Home was, even though he apparently lived there.
Then a series of images spun out of Thomas's mind, a well linked chain
of serial memories that still caused him some emotional pain: the trip
to Cielo Vista in a car with Julie and Bobby, on the day they first
checked him into the place. This was different from most of Thomas's
other thoughts and memories, in that it was richly detailed and so
clearly retained that it unreeled like a length of motion-picture film,
giving Candy all he needed to know. He saw the highways over which they
had driven that day, saw the route markers flashing past the car window,
saw every landmark at every turn, all of which Thomas had struggled
mightily to memorize because all through the trip he kept thinking, if I
don't like it there, if people are mean there, if it's too scary there,
if it's too much being alone there, I got to know how I find the way
back to Bobby and Julie anytime I want, remember this, remember all of
this, turn there at the I, right there at the 7-11, don't forget that
7-11, and now go past those three palm trees. What if they don't come
visit me? No, that's a bad thing to think, they love me, they said they
would come. But what if they don't? Look there, remember that house,
you go past that house, remember that house with the blue roof Candy got
it all, as precisely a fix as he could have obtained from a geographer
who would have spoken precisely in degrees and minutes of longitude and
latitude. It was more than he needed to know to make use of his gift.
He opened the trap and let Thomas go.
He got up from the rocker.
He pictured Cielo Vista Care Home as it appeared so exquisitely detailed
in Thomas's memory.
He pictured Thomas's room on the first floor of the no wing, at the
northwest corner.
Darkness, billions of hot sparks spinning in the void, velocity.
BECAUSE JULIE was in a let's-move-and-get-it-done mood they had stopped
at the house only fifteen minutes, long enough to throw toiletries and a
change of clothes in an over night bag. At McDonald's, on Chapman
Avenue in Orange she swung by the drive-through window and got dinner to
on the way: Big Macs, fries, diet colas. Before they reach the Costa
Mesa Freeway, while Bobby was still divvying the extra packets of
mustard and opening the containers that held the Big Macs, Julie had
clipped the radar detector to the rear view mirror, plugged it in the
Toyota's cigarette lighter and switched it on. Bobby had never before
eaten fast food high speed, but he figured they averaged eighty-five
miles hour north on the Costa Mesa to the Riverside Freeway to the
Orange Freeway north, and he was still finishing french fries when they
were only a couple of exits away from the Foothill Freeway east of Los
Angeles. Though the rush hour was well past and the traffic unusually
light, maintaining that pace required a lot of lane changing and nerve.
He said,
"We keep this up, I'll never have a chance to from the cholesterol in
this Big Mac."
"Lee says cholesterol doesn't kill us."
"Is that what he says?"
"He says we live forever, and all cholesterol can do is move us out of
this life a little sooner. Same thing must be true I slip up and roll
this sucker a few times."
"I don't think that'll happen," he said.
"You're the best driver I've ever seen."
"Thank You, Bobby. You're the best passenger."
"The only thing I wonder.
"Yeah?"
"If we don't really die, just move on, and I don't have to worry about
anything-why the hell did I bother to get diet colas?" THOMAS ROLLED
off the bed, onto his feet.
"Derek, go, get out, he's coming!" Derek was watching a horse talking
on TV, and he didn't hear Thomas.
The TV was in the room's middle, between the beds, and by the time
Thomas got there and grabbed Derek to make him listen, a funny sound was
all around them, not funny ha-ha but funny weird, like somebody
whistling but not whistling. There was wind, too, a couple of puffs,
not warm or cold either, but it made Thomas shiver when it blew on him.
Pulling Derek off his chair, Thomas said,
"Bad Thing's coming, you get out, you go, like I said before, now!"
Derek just made a dumb face at him, then smiled, like- he figured Thomas
was pretending to be funny the way the Three Stooges pretended. He'd
forgot all about the promise he made Thomas. He'd thought the Bad Thing
was going to be poached eggs for breakfast, and when poached eggs never
showed up on his plate, he figured he was safe, but now he wasn't safe
and didn't know it.
More funny-weird whistling. More wind.
Giving Derek a shove, making him get started for the door, Thomas
shouted,
"Run!" The whistling stopped, the wind stopped, and all of a sudden
from nowhere the Bad Thing was there. Between them and the open door.
It was a man, like Thomas already knew it was, but it was more than just
a man. It was darkness poured in the shape of a man, like a piece of
the night itself that came in through the window, and not just because
it wore a black T-shirt and black pants but because it was all deep dark
inside, you could tell.
Right away Derek was afraid. Nobody needed to tell him this was a Bad
Thing, not now when he could see it with his own eyes. But he didn't
see it was too late to run, and he went straight at the Bad Thing, like
maybe he could push past it, which must have been what he was figuring
because Derek wasn't dumb enough to figure he could knock it do it was
so big.
The Bad Thing grabbed him and lifted him before he any chance to get
around it, lifted him right up off the floor like he didn't weigh any
more than a pillow. Derek scream and the Bad Thing slammed him against
the wall so hard scream stopped, and pictures of Derek's mom and dad a
brother fell off the wall, not the one where Derek got slam but another
wall all the way around the room from him a over his bed.
The Bad Thing was so fast. That was the worst thing abo
ut it, how awful
fast it was. It slammed Derek against the wall. Derek's mouth fell
open but no more sound came from him the Bad Thing slammed him again,
right away, harder, thou the first time was hard enough for anybody, and
Derek's e went funny. The Bad Thing took him away from the wall a
slammed him down on the worktable. The table kind of shuttered like it
would fall apart, but it didn't. Derek's head over the table edge,
hanging down, so Thomas was looking his face, upside-down eyes blinking
fast, upside-down more open real wide but no sound coming out. He
looked up from Derek's face, looked right across Derek's body at the Bad
Thing, which was looking at him and grinning, like all this was a joke,
funny ha-ha, which it wasn't, no way. Then it picked up the scissors on
the edge of the worktable, the ones Thomas used to make his picture
poems, the ones that almost fell on the floor when it slammed Derek on
the table. It made the scissors go into Derek and bring the blood out
of him, into Derek who wouldn't hurt no one himself, except
himself,wouldn't know how to hurt anyone. And the Bad Thing get the
scissors go in again and bring more blood out of another place in Derek,
and in again, and again. Then blood was coming Out of just four places
on Derek's chest and belly who the scissors had been made to go in, but
out of his mouth a nose too. The Bad Thing lifted Derek off the table,
the scissors still sticking out of his front, and threw him like he was
Koontz, Dean R. - The Bad Place Page 41