The Bad Place

Page 12

The wind, which had been declining since late afternoon, suddenly stopped altogether. The cool air would have carried the faintest sound a great distance; but the night was hushed.
Usually Candy could touch an object and see who had recently handled it before him. Sometimes he could even see where some of those people had gone after putting the object down, and when he went looking for them, they were always to be found where his clairvoyance had led him. Frank had killed the cat, and Candy hoped that contact with the remains would spark an inner vision that would put him on his brother’s trail again.
Every speck of flesh had been stripped from Samantha’s broken pate, and its contents had been emptied as well. Picked clean, licked smooth, dried by the wind, it might have been a portion of a fossil from a distant age. Candy’s mind was filled not with images of Frank but of the other cats and Verbina and Violet, and finally he threw down the damaged skull in disgust.
His frustration sharpened his anger. He felt the need rising in him. He dared not let the need bloom ... but resisting it was infinitely harder than resisting the charms of women and other sins. He hated Frank. He hated him so much, so deeply, had hated him so constantly for seven years, that he could not bear the thought that he had slept through an opportunity to destroy him.
Need....
He dropped to his knees on the weedy lawn. He fisted his hands and hunched his shoulders and clenched his teeth, trying to make a rock of himself, an unmovable mass that would not be swayed one inch by the most urgent need, not one hair’s width by even the most dire necessity, the most demanding hunger, the most passionate craving. He prayed to his mother to give him strength. The wind began to pick up again, and he believed it was a devil wind that would blow him toward temptation, so he fell forward on the ground and dug his fingers into the yielding earth, and he repeated his mother’s sacred name—Roselle—whispered her name furiously into the grass and dirt, again and again, desperate to quell the germination of his dark need. Then he wept. Then he got up. And went hunting.
21
FRANK WENT to a theater and sat through a movie but was unable to concentrate on the story. He ate dinner at El Torito, though he didn’t really taste the food; he just pushed down the enchiladas and rice as if feeding fuel to a furnace. For a couple of hours he drove aimlessly back and forth across the middle and southern reaches of Orange County, staying on the move only because, for the time being, he felt safer when in motion. Finally he returned to the motel.
He kept probing at the dark wall in his mind, behind which his entire life was concealed. Diligently, he sought the tiniest chink through which he might glimpse a memory. If he could find one crack, he was sure that the entire façade of amnesia would come tumbling down. But the barrier was smooth and flawless.
When he switched off the lights, he could not sleep.
The Santa Anas had abated. He could not blame his insomnia on the noisy winds.
Although the amount of blood on the sheets had been minimal and though it had dried since he’d awakened from his nap earlier in the day, he decided that the thought of lying in blood-stained bedclothes was preventing him from nodding off. He snapped on a lamp, stripped the bed, turned up the heat, stretched out in the darkness again, and tried to sleep without covers. No good.
He told himself that his amnesia—and the resultant loneliness and sense of isolation—was keeping him awake. Although there was some truth in that, he knew that he was kidding himself.
The real reason he could not sleep was fear. Fear of where he might go while sleepwalking. Fear of what he might do. Fear of what he might find in his hands when he woke up.
22
DEREK SLEPT. In the other bed. Snoring softly.
Thomas couldn’t sleep. He got up and stood by the window, looking out. The moon was gone. The dark was very big.
He didn’t like the night. It scared him. He liked sunshine, and flowers all bright, and grass looking green, and blue sky all over so you felt like there was a lid on the world keeping everything down here on the ground and in place. At night all the colors were gone, and the world was empty, like somebody took the lid off and let in a lot of nothingness, and you looked up at all that nothingness and you felt you might just float away like the colors, float up and away and out of the world, and then in the morning when they put the lid back on, you wouldn’t be here, you’d be out there somewhere, and you could never get back in again. Never.
He put his fingertips against the window. The glass was cool.
He wished he could sleep away the night. Usually he slept okay. Not tonight.
He was worried about Julie. He always worried about her a little. A brother was supposed to worry. But this wasn’t a little worry. This was a lot.
It started just that morning. A funny feeling. Not funny ha-ha. Funny strange. Funny scary. Something real bad’s going to happen to Julie, the feeling said. Thomas got so upset, he tried to warn her. He TVed a warning to her. They said the pictures and voices and music on the TV were sent through the air, which he first thought was a lie, that they were making fun of his being dumb, expecting him to believe anything, but then Julie said it was true, so sometimes he tried to TV his thoughts to her, because if you could send pictures and music and voices through the air, thoughts ought to be easy. Be careful, Julie, he TVed. Look out, be careful, something bad’s going to happen.
Usually, when he felt things about someone, that someone was Julie. He knew when she was happy. Or sad. When she was sick, he sometimes curled up on his bed and put his hands on his own belly. He always knew when she was coming to visit.
He felt things about Bobby too. Not at first. When Julie first brought Bobby around, Thomas felt nothing. But slowly he felt more. Until now he felt almost as much about Bobby as about Julie.
He felt things about some other people too. Like Derek. Like Gina, another Down’s kid at The Home. And like a couple of the aides, one of the visiting nurses. But he didn’t feel half as much about them as he did about Bobby and Julie. He figured that maybe the more he loved somebody, the bigger he felt things—knew things—about them.
Sometimes when Julie was worried about him, Thomas wanted real bad to tell her that he knew how she felt, and that he was all right. Because just knowing he understood would make her happier. But he didn’t have the words. He couldn’t explain how or why he sometimes felt other people’s feelings. And he didn’t want to try to tell them about it because he was afraid of looking dumb.
He was dumb. He knew that. He wasn’t as dumb as Derek, who was very nice, good to room with, but who was real slow. They sometimes said “slow” instead of “dumb” when they talked in front of you. Julie never did. Bobby never did. But some people said “slow” and thought you didn’t get it. He got it. They had bigger words, too, and he really didn’t understand those, but he sure understood “slow.” He didn’t want to be dumb, nobody gave him a choice, and sometimes he TVed a message to God, asking God to make him not dumb any more, but either God wanted him to stay dumb always and forever—but why?—or God just didn’t get the messages.
Julie didn’t get the messages either. Thomas always knew when he got through to someone with a TVed thought. He never got to Julie.
But he could sometimes get through to Bobby, which was funny. Not ha-ha funny. Strange funny. Interesting funny. When Thomas TVed a thought to Julie, Bobby sometimes got it instead. Like this morning. When he’d TVed a warning to Julie—
—Something bad’s going to happen, Julie, something real bad is coming—
—Bobby had picked it up. Maybe because Thomas and Bobby both loved Julie. Thomas didn’t know. He couldn’t figure. But it sure happened. Bobby tuned in.
Now Thomas stood at the window, in his pajamas, and looked out at the scary night, and he felt the Bad Thing out there, felt it like a ripple in his blood, like a tingle in his bones. The Bad Thing was far away, not anywhere near Julie, but coming.
Today, during Julie’s visit, Thomas wanted to tell her about the Bad Thing coming. But he couldn’t find a way to say it and make sense, and he was scared of sounding dumb. Julie and Bobby knew he was dumb, sure, but he hated to sound dumb in front of them, to remind them how dumb he was. Every time he almost started to tell her about the Bad Thing, he just forgot how to use words. He had the words in his head, all lined up in a row, ready to say, but then suddenly they were mixed up, and he couldn’t make them get back in the right order, so he couldn’t say the words because they’d be just words without meaning anything, and he’d look really, really dumb.
Besides, he didn’t know what to tell her the Bad Thing was. He thought maybe it was a person, a real terrible person out there, going to do something to Julie, but it didn’t exactly feel like a person. Partly a person, but something else. Something that made Thomas feel cold not just on his outside but on his inside, too, like standing in a winter wind and eating ice cream at the same time.
He shivered.
He didn’t want to get these ugly feelings about whatever was out there, but he couldn’t just go back to bed and tune out, either, because the more he felt about the far-away Bad Thing, the better he could warn Julie and Bobby when the thing wasn’t so far away any more.
Behind him, Derek murmured in a dream.
The Home was real quiet. All the dumb people were deep asleep. Except Thomas. Sometimes he liked to be awake when everyone else wasn’t. Sometimes that made him feel smarter than all of them put together, seeing things they couldn’t see and knowing things they couldn’t know because they were asleep and he wasn’t.
He stared at the nothingness of night.
He put his forehead against the glass.
For Julie’s sake, he reached. Into the nothingness. Toward the far-away.
He opened himself. To the feelings. To the ripple-tingle.
A big ugly-nasty hit him. Like a wave. It came out of the night and hit him, and he stumbled back from the window and fell on his butt beside the bed, and then he couldn’t feel the Bad Thing at all, it was gone, but what he had felt was so big and so ugly that his heart was pounding and he could hardly breathe, and right away he TVed to Bobby:
Run, go, get away, save Julie, the Bad Thing’s coming, the Bad Thing, run, run.
23
THE DREAM was filled with the music of Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade,” though like everything in dreams, the song was indefinably different from the real tune. Bobby was in a house that was at once familiar yet totally strange, and somehow he knew it was the seaside bungalow to which he and Julie were going to retire young. He drifted into the living room, over a dark Persian carpet, past comfortable-looking upholstered chairs, a huge old chesterfield with rounded back and thick cushions, a Ruhlmann cabinet with bronze panels, an Art Deco lamp, and overflowing bookshelves. The music was coming from outside, so he went out there. He enjoyed the easy transitions of the dream, moving through a door without opening it, crossing a wide porch and descending wooden stairs without ever quite lifting a foot. The sea rumbled to one side, and the phosphorescent foam of the breakers glowed faintly in the night. Under a palm tree, in the sand, with a scattering of shells around it, stood a Wurlitzer 950, ablaze with gold and red light, bubble tubes percolating, gazelles perpetually leaping, figures of Pan perpetually piping, record-changing mechanism gleaming like real silver, and a large black platter spinning on the turntable. Bobby felt as if “Moonlight Serenade” would go on forever, which would have been fine with him, because he had never been more mellow, more at peace, and he sensed that Julie had come out of the house behind him, that she was waiting on the damp sand near the water’s edge, and that she wanted to dance with him, so he turned, and there she was, exotically illuminated by the Wurlitzer, and he took a step toward her—
Run, go, get away, save Julie, the Bad Thing’s coming, the Bad Thing, run, run!
The indigo ocean suddenly leapt as if under the lash of a storm, and spume exploded into the night air.
Hurricane winds shook the palms.
The Bad Thing! Run! Run!
The world tilted. Bobby stumbled toward Julie. The sea surged up around her. It wanted her; it was going to seize her; it was water with a will, a thinking sea with a malevolent consciousness gleaming darkly in its depths.
The Bad Thing!
The Glenn Miller tune speeded up, whirling at double time.
The Bad Thing!
The soft, romantic light from the Wurlitzer flamed brighter, stung his eyes, yet did not drive back the night. It was radiating light as if the door to Hell had opened, but the darkness around them only intensified, yielding nothing to that supernatural blaze.
THE BAD THING! THE BAD THING!
The world tilted again. Heaved and rolled.
Bobby staggered across the carnival-ride beach, toward Julie, who seemed unable to move. She was being swallowed by the churning oil-black sea.
THE BAD THING THE BAD THING THE BAD THING!
With the hard crack of riven stone, the sky split above them, but no lightning stabbed out of that crumbling vault.
Geysers of sand erupted around Bobby. Inky water exploded out of sudden gaping holes in the beach.
He looked back. The bungalow was gone. The sea rose on all sides. The beach was dissolving under his feet.
Screaming, Julie disappeared under the water.
BADTHINGBADTHINGBADTHINGBADTHING!
A twenty-foot wave loomed over Bobby. It broke. He was swept away. He tried to swim. The flesh on his arms and hands bubbled and blistered and began to peel off, revealing glints of ice-white bone. The midnight seawater was an acid. His head went under. He gasped, broke the surface, but the corrosive sea had already kissed away his lips, and he felt his gums receding from his teeth, and his tongue turned to rancid mush in the salty rush of caustic brine that he had swallowed. Even the spray-filled air was erosive, eating away his lungs in an instant, so when he tried to breathe he could not. He went down, flailing at the waves with arms and hands that were only bone, caught in an undertow, sucked into everlasting darkness, dissolution, oblivion.
BADTHING!
Bobby sat straight up in bed.
He was screaming, but no cry issued from him. When he realized he had been dreaming, he stopped trying to scream, and finally a low and miserable sound escaped him.
He had thrown off the sheets. He sat on the edge of the bed, feet on the floor, both hands on the mattress, steadying himself as if he was still on that heaving beach or struggling to swim in those roiling tides.
The green numbers of the projection clock glowed faintly on the ceiling: 2:43.
For a while the drum-loud thud of his own heart filled him with sound from within, and he was deaf to the outer world. But after a few seconds he heard Julie breathing steadily, rhythmically, and he was surprised that he had not awakened her. Evidently he had not been thrashing in his sleep.