The Bad Place

Page 35

“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, more 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 killed your own mother?”
“Never mind about her. We haven’t time for her.” Frank looked back toward the brush out of which they had come, and both ways along the beach, but they were still alone in the downpour. “If you’d known her, if you’d suffered under her hand,” Frank said, his voice shaking with anger, “if you’d known the atrocities she’s capable of, you’d have picked up an ax and chopped at her too.”
“You took an ax and gave your mother forty whacks?” That crazy sound burst from Bobby again, a laugh as wet as the rain but not as warm, and again he was spooked by himself.
“I discovered I could teleport when Candy had me backed into a corner, going to kill me for having killed her. And that’s the only time I can travel—when it’s a matter of survival.”
“Nobody was threatening you last night in the hospital.”
“Well, see, when I start traveling in my sleep, I think maybe I’m trying to escape from Candy in a dream, which triggers teleportation. Traveling always wakes me, but then I can’t stop, I keep popping from place to place, sometimes staying a few seconds, sometimes an hour or more, and it’s beyond my control, like I’m being bounced around inside a goddamn cosmic pinball machine. It exhausts me. It’s killing me. You can see how it’s killing me.”
Frank’s earnest persistence and the numbing, relentless roar of the rain had washed away Bobby’s rage. He was still somewhat afraid of Frank, of the potential for chaos that Frank represented, but he was no longer angry.
“Years ago,” Frank said, “dreams started me traveling maybe one night a month, but gradually the frequency increased, until the last few weeks it happens almost every time I go to sleep. And when we finally wind up in your office or wherever this episode is going to come to an end, you’ll remember everything that’s happened to us, but I won’t. And not only because I want to forget, but because what you suspected is true—I’m not always putting myself back together without mistakes.”
“Your mental confusion, loss of intellectual skills, amnesia-they’ re symptoms of those mistakes.”
“Yeah. I’m sure there’s sloppy reconstruction and cell damage every time I travel, nothing dramatic in any one trip, but the effect is incremental ... and accelerating. Sooner or later it’s going to go critical, and I’ll either die or experience some weird biological meltdown. Coming to you for help was pointless, no matter how good you are at what you do, because nobody can help me. Nobody.”
Bobby had already reached that conclusion, but he was still curious. “What is it with your family, Frank? Your brother has the power to make that car disintegrate around you, the power to blow out those streetlamps, and he can teleport. And what was that business with the cats?”
“My sisters, the twins, they have this thing with animals.”
“How come all of you possess these ... abilities? Who was your mother, your father?”
“We don’t have time for that now, Bobby. Later. I’ll try to explain later.” He held out his cut hand, which had either stopped bleeding or was sluiced free of blood by the rain. “I could pop out of here any moment, and you’d be stranded.”
“No thanks,” Bobby said, shunning his client’s hand. “Call me an old fuddy-duddy, but I’d prefer an airliner.” He patted his hip pocket. “Got my wallet, credit cards. I can be back in Orange County tomorrow, and I don’t have to take a chance that I’ll arrive there with my left ear where my nose should be.”
“But Candy’s probably going to follow us, Bobby. If you’re here when he shows up, he’ll kill you.”
Bobby turned to his right and started to walk toward the distant restaurant. “I’m not afraid of anyone named Candy.”
“You better be,” Frank said, grabbing his arm and halting him.
Jerking away as if making contact with his client was tantamount to contracting the bubonic plague, Bobby said, “How could he follow us anyway?”
When Frank worriedly surveyed the beach again, Bobby realized that because of the pounding rain and the underlying crash of the surf, they might not hear the telltale flutelike sounds that would warn them of Candy’s imminent arrival.
Frank said, “Sometimes, when he touches something you recently touched, he sees an image of you in his mind, and sometimes he can see where you went after you put the object down, and he can follow you.”
“But I didn’t touch anything back there at the house.”
“You stood on the back lawn.”
“So?”
“If he can find the place where the grass is trampled, find where we stood, he might be able to put his fingers to the grass and see us, see this place, and come after us.”
“For God’s sake, Frank, you make this guy sound supernatural.”
“He’s the next thing to it.”
Bobby almost said he would take his chances with brother Candy, regardless of his godlike powers. Then he remembered what the Phans had told him about the savage murders of the Farris family. He also remembered the Roman family, their brutalized bodies torched to cover the ragged gashes that Candy’s teeth had torn in their throats. He recalled what Frank had said about Candy offering him the fresh blood of a living baby, factored in the unmitigated terror in Frank’s eyes at that very moment, and thought of the inexplicable prophetic dream he’d had about the “bad thing.” At last said, “All right, okay, if he shows up, and if you’re able to pop out of here before he kills us both, then I’d be better off with you. I’ll take your hand, but only until we walk up to that restaurant, call a cab, and are on our way to the airport.” He gripped Frank’s hand reluctantly. “As soon as we’re out of this area, I let go.”
“All right. Good enough,” Frank said.
Squinting as the rain battered their faces, they headed toward the restaurant. The structure, which stood perhaps a hundred and fifty yards away, appeared to be made of gray, weathered wood and lots of glass. Bobby thought he saw dim lights in the place, but he could not be sure; the large windows were no doubt tinted, which filtered out what fraction of the lampglow was not already hidden by the veils of rain.
Every third or fourth incoming wave was now much larger than the others, reached farther onto the beach, and sloshed around their legs with enough force to unbalance them. They moved toward the higher end of the strand, away from the breakers, but the sand was far softer there; it sucked at their shoes and made progress more laborious.
Bobby thought of Lisa, the blond receptionist at Palomar Labs. He pictured her coming along the beach right now, taking a crazy-romantic walk in the warm rain with some guy who’d brought her to the islands, pictured her face when she saw him strolling the black-sand beach hand-in-hand with another man, cheating on Clint.
This time his laughter didn’t have a scary edge.
Frank said, “What?”
Before Bobby could even start to explain, he saw that someone actually was heading in their general direction through the obscuring rain. It was a dark figure, not Lisa, a man, and he was only about thirty yards away.
He hadn’t been there a moment ago.
“It’s him,” Frank said.
Even at a distance the guy looked big. He spotted them and turned directly toward them.
Bobby said, “Get us out of here, Frank.”
“I can’t do it on demand. You know that.”
“Then let’s run,” he urged, and he tried to pull Frank along the beach, toward the abandoned lifeguard tower and whatever lay beyond.