The Bad Place

Page 43

“Why do they let people like you live?” the Bad Thing asked.
It let go of Thomas, and Thomas dropped on the floor. The Bad Thing looked down at him in a mean way that made Thomas angry almost as much as it made him scared. Which was funny-weird, because he almost never was angry. And this was the first time he was ever angry and scared both at the same time. But the Bad Thing was looking at him like he was just a bug or some dirt on the floor that had to be made clean.
“Why don’t they kill you people at birth? What’re you good for? Why don’t they kill you at birth and chop you up and make dog food out of you?”
Thomas had memories of how people, out there in the world, looked at him that way or said mean things, and how Julie always Told Them Off. She said Thomas didn’t have to be nice to people like that, said he could tell them they were Being Rude. Now Thomas was angry like he had Every Right To Be, and even if Julie never told him he could be angry about these things, he probably would be angry anyway, because some things you just knew were right or wrong.
The Bad Thing kicked him in the leg, and was going to kick him again, you could tell, but a noise was made at the window. Some of the aides were at the window. They broke a little square of glass and reached through, wanting to find the lock.
When the glass made a breaking sound, the Bad Thing turned from Thomas and held its hands up at the window, like it was asking the aides to stop wanting in. But Thomas knew what it was going to do was make the blue light.
Thomas wanted to warn the aides, but he figured nobody would hear him or listen to him until it was too late. So while the Bad Thing’s back was turned, he crawled across the floor, away from the Bad Thing, even if crawling hurt, even if he had to go through spots of Derek’s blood, all wet, and it made him sick on top of being angry and scared.
Blue light. Very bright.
Something exploded.
He heard glass falling and worse, like maybe not just the whole window blew out on the aides but part of the wall too.
People screamed. Most of the screams cut off quick-like, but one of them went on, it was real bad, like somebody out in the dark past the blown-up window was made to hurt even worse than Thomas.
Thomas didn’t look back because he was all the way around the side of Derek’s bed now, where he couldn’t see the window anyway from where he was on the floor. And, besides, he knew what he wanted now, where he wanted to go, and he had to get there before the Bad Thing got interested in him again.
Quick-like, he crawled to the top end of the bed and looked up and saw Derek’s arm hanging over the side, blood running down under his shirtsleeve and across his hand and drip-drip-dripping off his fingers. He didn’t want to touch a dead person, not even a dead person he liked. But this was what he had to do, and he was used to having to do all sorts of things he wished he didn’t—that was what life was like. So he grabbed the edge of the bed and pulled himself up as fast as he could, trying not to feel the bad hurt in his back and in his kicked leg, because feeling it would make him stiff and slow. Derek was right there, eyes open, mouth open, blood-wet, so sad, so scary, on top of the pictures of his folks that fell off the wall, still dead, off for always and ever to the Bad Place. Thomas grabbed the scissors sticking out of Derek, pulled them loose, telling himself it was okay because Derek couldn’t feel anything now, or ever.
“You!” the Bad Thing said.
Thomas turned to see where the Bad Thing was, and where it was was right behind him, all the way around the bed, coming at him. So he shoved the scissors at it, hard as he could, and the Bad Thing’s face made a surprised look. The scissors went in the front of the Bad Thing’s shoulder. The Bad Thing looked even more surprised. The blood came.
Letting go of the scissors, Thomas said, “For Derek,” then said, “for me.” .
He wasn’t sure what would happen, but he figured that making the blood come would hurt the Bad Thing and maybe make it dead, like it made Derek dead. Across the room he saw where the window wasn’t any more and where part of the wall wasn’t any more, some smoke coming from the broken ends of things. He figured he was going to run over there and go through the hole, even if the night was out there on the other side.
But he never figured on what did happen, because the Bad Thing acted like the scissors weren’t even in it, like blood wasn’t being let loose from it, and it grabbed him and lifted him up again. It slammed him into Derek’s dresser, which was a lot more hurt than the wall because the dresser was made with knobs and edges the wall didn’t have.
He heard something crack in him, heard something tear. But the funny thing was, he wasn’t crying any more and didn’t want to cry any more, like he’d used up all the tears in himself.
The Bad Thing put its face close to Thomas’s face, so their eyes were only a couple inches apart. He didn’t like looking in the Bad Thing’s eyes. They were scary. They were blue, but it was like they were really dark, like under the blue was a lot of stuff as black as the night out past the gone window.
But the other funny thing was, he wasn’t as scared as he was a while ago, like he’d used up all his being scared just like he’d used up his tears. He looked in the Bad Thing’s eyes, and he saw all that big dark, bigger than the dark that came over the world each day when the sun went away, and he knew it was wanting to make him dead, going to make him dead, and that was okay. He was not so afraid of being made dead as he always thought he would be. It was still a Bad Place, death, and he wished he didn’t have to go there, but he had a funny-nice feeling about the Bad Place all of a sudden, a feeling that maybe it wouldn’t be so lonely over there as he always figured it was, not even as lonely as it was on this side. He felt maybe someone was over there who loved him, someone who loved him more than even Julie loved him, even more than their dad used to love him, someone who was all bright, no dark at all, so bright you could only look at Him sideways.
The Bad Thing held Thomas against the dresser with one hand, and with its other hand it pulled the scissors out of itself.
Then it put the scissors in Thomas.
This light started to fill up Thomas, this light that loved him, and he knew he was going away. He hoped when he was all gone, Julie would know how brave he was right at the end, how he stopped crying and stopped being scared and fought back. And then all of a sudden he remembered he hadn’t TVed a warning to Bobby that the Bad Thing might be coming for them, too, and he started to do that.
—the scissors went in again—
Then he all of a sudden knew something even more important he had to do. He had to let Julie know that the Bad Place was not so bad, after all, there was a light over there that loved you, you could tell. She needed to know about it because deep down she really didn’t believe it. She figured it was all dark and lonely the way Thomas once figured it was, so she counted each clock tick and worried about all she had to do before her time ran out, all she had to learn and see and feel and get, all she had to do for Thomas and for Bobby so they’d be okay if Something Happened To Her.
—and the scissors went in again—
And she was happy with Bobby, but she was never going to be real happy until she knew she didn’t have to be so angry about everything ending in a big dark. She was so nice it was hard to figure she was angry inside, but she was. Thomas only figured it out now, as the light was filling him up, figured out how terrible angry Julie was. She was angry that all the hard work and all the hope and all the dreams and all the trying and doing and loving didn’t matter in the end because you were sooner or later made dead forever.
—the scissors—
If she knew about the light, she could stop being angry deep down. So Thomas TVed that, too, along with a warning, and with three last words to her and to Bobby, words of his own, all three things at once, hoping they wouldn’t get mixed up:
The Bad Thing’s coming, look out, the Bad Thing, there’s a light that loves you, the Bad Thing, I love you too, and there’s a light, there’s a light, THE BAD THING’S COMING—
AT 8:15 they were on the Foothill Freeway, rocketing toward the junction with the Ventura Freeway, which they would follow across the San Fernando Valley almost to the ocean before turning north toward Oxnard, Ventura, and eventually Santa Barbara. Julie knew she should slow down, but she couldn’t. Speed relieved her tension a little; if she stayed even close to the fifty-five-mile-an-hour limit, she was pretty sure that she would start to scream before they were past Burbank.
A Benny Goodman tape was on the stereo. The exuberant melodies and syncopated rhythms seemed in time and sympathy with the headlong rush of the car; and if they had been in a movie, Goodman’s sounds would have been perfect background music to the tenebrous panorama of light-speckled night hills through which they passed from city to city, suburb to suburb.
She knew why she was so tense. In a way she could never have anticipated, The Dream was within their grasp—but they could lose everything as they reached for it. Everything. Hope. Each other. Their lives.
Sitting in the seat beside her, Bobby trusted her so implicitly that he could doze at more than eighty miles an hour, even though he knew that she, too, had slept only three hours last night. From time to time she glanced at him, just because it felt good to have him there.
He did not yet understand why they were going north to check out the Pollard family, stretching their obligation to the client beyond reason, but his bafflement sprang from the fact that he was nearly as good a man as he appeared to be. He sometimes bent the rules and broke the laws on behalf of their clients, but he was more scrupulous in his personal life than anyone Julie had ever known. She had been with him once when a newspaper-vending machine gave him a copy of the Sunday Los Angeles Times, then malfunctioned and returned three of his four quarters to him, whereupon he had repaid all three into the coin slot, even though that same machine had malfunctioned to his disadvantage on other occasions over the years and was into him for a couple of bucks. “Yeah, well,” he’d said, blushing when she had laughed at his goody-goody deed, “maybe the machine can be crooked and still live with itself, but I can’t.”
Julie could have told him that they were hanging with the Pollard case because they saw a once-in-a-lifetime shot at really big bucks, the Main Chance for which every hustler in the world was looking and which most of them would never find. From the moment Frank had shown them all that cash in the Sight bag and told them about the second cache back at the motel, they were locked in like rats in a maze, drawn forward by the smell of cheese, even though each of them had taken a turn at protesting any interest in the game. When Frank came back to that hospital room from God-knew-where, with another three hundred thousand, neither she nor Bobby even raised the issue of illegality, though it was by that time no longer possible to pretend that Frank was entirely an innocent. By then the smell of cheese was too strong to be resisted at all. They were plunging ahead because they saw the chance to use Frank to cash out of the rat race and buy into The Dream sooner than they had expected. They were willing to use dirty money and questionable means to get to their desired end, more willing than they could admit to each other, though Julie supposed it could be said in their favor that they were not yet so greedy that they could simply steal the money and the diamonds from Frank and abandon him to the mercies of his psychotic brother; or maybe even their sense of duty to their client was a lie now, a virtue they could point to later when they tried to justify, to themselves, their other less-than-noble acts and impulses.
She could have told him all that, but she didn’t, because she did not want to argue with him. She had to let him figure it out at his own pace, accept it in his own way. If she tried to tell him before he was able to understand it, he’d deny what she said. Even if he admitted to a fraction of the truth, he’d trot out an argument about the rightness of The Dream, the basic morality of it, and use that to justify the means to the end. But she didn’t think a noble end could remain purely noble if arrived at by immoral means. And though she could not turn away from this Main Chance, she worried that when they achieved The Dream it would be sullied, not what it might have been.
Yet she drove on. Fast. Because speed relieved some of her fear and tension. It numbed caution too. And without caution she was less likely to retreat from the dangerous confrontation with the Pollard family that seemed inevitable if they were to seize the opportunity to obtain immense and liberating wealth.
They were in a clearing in traffic, with nothing close behind them and trailing the nearest forward car by about a quarter of a mile, when Bobby cried out and sat up in his seat as if warning her of an imminent collision. He jerked forward, pulling the shoulder harness taut, and put his hands on his head, as though stricken by a sudden migraine.
Frightened, she let up on the accelerator, lightly tapped the brake pedal, and said, “Bobby, what is it?”
In a voice coarsened by fear and sharpened by urgency, speaking above the music of Benny Goodman, he said, “Bad Thing, the Bad Thing, look out, there’s a light, there’s a light that loves you—”
CANDY LOOKED down at the bloody body at his feet and knew that he should not have killed Thomas. Instead, he should have taken him away to a private place and tortured the answers out of him even if it took hours for the dummy to remember everything Candy needed to know. It could even have been fun.
But he was in a rage greater than any he had ever known, and he was less in control of himself than at any time in his life since the day he had found his mother’s dead body. He wanted vengeance not only for his mother but for himself and for everyone in the world who ever deserved revenge and never got it. God had made him an instrument of revenge, and now Candy longed desperately to fulfill his purpose as he had never fulfilled it before. He yearned not merely to tear open the throat and drink the blood of one sinner, but of a great multitude of sinners. If ever his rage was to be dissipated, he needed not only to drink blood but to become drunk on it, bathe in it, wade through rivers of it, stand on land saturated with it. He wanted his mother to free him from all the rules that had restricted his rage before, wanted God to turn him loose.
He heard sirens in the distance, and knew that he must go soon.
Hot pain throbbed in his shoulder, where the scissors had parted muscle and scraped bone, but he would deal with that when he traveled. In reconstituting himself, he could easily remake his flesh whole and healthy.
Stalking through the debris that littered the floor, he looked for something that might give him a clue to the whereabouts of either the Julie or the Bobby of whom Thomas had spoken. They might know who Thomas had been and why he had possessed a gift that not even Candy’s blessed mother had been able to impart.