The Bad Place

Page 44

He touched various objects and pieces of furniture, but all he could extract from them were images of Thomas and Derek and some of the aides and nurses who took care of them. Then he saw a scrapbook lying open on the floor, beside the table on which he had butchered Derek. The open pages were full of all kinds of pictures that had been pasted in lines and peculiar patterns. He picked the book up and leafed through it, wondering what it was, and when he tried to see the face of the last person who had handled it, he was rewarded with someone other than a dummy or a nurse.
A hard-looking man. Not as tall as Candy but almost as solid.
The sirens were less than a mile away now, louder by the second.
Candy let his right hand glide over the cover of the scrapbook, seeking ... seeking ...
Sometimes he could sense only a little, sometimes a lot. This time he had to be successful, or this room was going to be a dead end in his search for the meaning of the dummy’s power.
Seeking ...
He received a name. Clint.
Clint had sat in Derek’s chair sometime during the afternoon, paging through this odd collection of pictures.
When he tried to see where Clint had gone, after leaving this room, he saw a Chevy that Clint was driving on the freeway, then a place called Dakota & Dakota. Then the Chevy again, on a freeway at night, and then a small house in a place called Placentia.
The approaching sirens were very close now, probably coming up the driveway into the Cielo Vista parking lot.
Candy threw the book down. He was ready to go.
He had only one more thing to do before he teleported. When he had discovered that Thomas was a dummy, and when he had realized that Cielo Vista was a place full of them, he had been angered and offended by the home’s existence.
He held his hands two feet apart, palm facing palm. Sky-blue light glowed between them.
He remembered how neighbors and other people had talked about his sisters—and also about him when, as a boy, he had been kept out of school because of his problems. Violet and Verbina looked and acted mentally deficient, and they probably did not care if people called them retards. Ignorant people labeled him retarded, too, because they thought he was excused from school for being as learning disabled and strange as his sisters. (Only Frank attended classes like a normal child.)
The light began to coalesce into a ball. As more power poured out of his hands and into the ball, it acquired a deeper shade of blue and seemed to take on substance, as if it were a solid object floating in the air.
Candy had been bright, with no learning disabilities at all. His mother taught him to read, write, and do math; so he got angry when he overheard people say he was a deadhead. He had been excused from school for other reasons, of course, mainly because of the sex thing. When he got older and bigger, nobody called him retarded or made jokes about him, at least not within his hearing.
The sapphire-blue sphere looked almost as solid as a genuine sapphire, but as big as a basketball. It was nearly ready.
Having been unjustly tagged with the retarded label, Candy had not grown up with sympathy for the genuinely disabled, but with an intense loathing for them that he hoped would make it clear to even ignorant people that he definitely was not—and never had been—one of them. To think such a thing of him—or of his sisters, for that matter—was an insult to his sainted mother, who was incapable of bringing a moron into the world.
He cut off the flow of power and took his hands away from the sphere. For a moment he stared at it, smiling, thinking about what it would do to this offensive place.
Through the missing window and the partially shattered walls, the wail of the sirens became deafening, then suddenly subsided from a high-pitched shriek to a low growl that spiraled toward silence.
“Help’s here, Thomas,” he said, and laughed.
He put one hand against the sapphire sphere and gave it a shove. It shot across the room as if it were a ballistic missile fired from its silo. It smashed through the wall behind Derek’s bed, leaving a ragged hole as big as anything a cannonball could have made, through the wall beyond that, and through every additional wall that stood before it, spewing flames as it went, setting fire to everything along its path.
Candy heard people screaming and a hard explosion, as he did a fadeout on his way to the house in Placentia.
52
BOBBY STOOD at the side of the freeway, holding on to the open car door, gasping for breath. He had been sure he was going to throw up, but the urge had passed.
“Are you all right?” Julie asked anxiously.
“I ... think so.”
Traffic shot past. Each vehicle was trailed by a wake of wind and a roar that gave Bobby the peculiar feeling that he and Julie and the Toyota were still moving, doing eighty-five with him holding on to the open door and her with a hand on his shoulder, magically keeping their balance and avoiding roadbum as they dragged their feet along the pavement, with nobody driving.
The dream had seriously unsettled and disoriented him.
“Not a dream, really,” he told her. He continued to keep his head down, peering at bits of loose gravel on the paved shoulder of the highway, half expecting a return of the cramping nausea. “Not like the dream I had before, about us and the jukebox and the ocean of acid.”
“But about ‘the bad thing’ again.”
“Yeah. You couldn’t call it a dream, though, because it was just this ... this burst of words, inside my head.”
“From where?”
“I don’t know.”
He dared to lift his head, and though a whirl of dizziness swept through him, the nausea did not return.
He said, “ ‘Bad thing ... look out ... there’s a light that loves you....’ I can’t remember it all. It was so strong, so hard, like somebody shouting at me through a bullhorn that was pressed against my ear. Except that’s not right, either, because I didn’t really hear the words, they were just there, in my head. But they felt loud, if that makes any sense. And there weren’t images, like in a dream. Instead there were these feelings, as strong as they were confused. Fear and joy, anger and forgiveness ... and right at the end of it, this strange sense of peace that I ... can’t describe.”
A Peterbilt thundered toward them, towing the biggest trailer the law allowed. Sweeping out of the night behind its blazing headlights, it looked like a leviathan swimming up from a deep marine trench, all raw power and cold rage, with a hunger that could never be satisfied. For some reason, as it boomed past them, Bobby thought of the man he had seen on the beach at Punaluu, and he shuddered.
Julie said, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you sure?”
He nodded. “A little dizzy. That’s all.”
“What now?”
He looked at her. “What else? We go on to Santa Barbara. El Encanto Heights, bring this thing to an end ... somehow.”
CANDY ARRIVED in the archway between a living room and dining room. No one was in either place.
He heard a buzzing sound farther back in the house, and after a moment he identified it as an electric razor. It stopped. Then he heard water running in a sink, and the drone of a bathroom exhaust fan.
He intended to head straight for the hall and the bath, take the man by surprise. But he heard a rustle of paper from the opposite direction.
He crossed the dining room and stepped into the kitchen doorway. It was smaller than the kitchen in his mother’s house, but it was as spotlessly clean and orderly as his mother’s kitchen had not been since her death.
A woman in a blue dress was sitting at the table, her back to him. She was leaning over a magazine, turning the pages one after the other, as if looking for something of interest to read.
Candy possessed a far greater control of his telekinetic talents than Frank enjoyed, and in particular could teleport more efficiently and swiftly than Frank, creating less air displacement and less noise from molecular resistance. Nevertheless, he was surprised that she had not gotten up to investigate, for the sounds he had made during arrival had been only one small room away from her and, surely, odd enough to prick her curiosity.
She turned a few more pages, then leaned forward to read.
He could not see much of her from behind. Her hair was thick, lustrous, and so black it seemed to have been spun on the same loom as the night. Her shoulders and back were slender. Her legs, which were both to one side of the chair and crossed at the ankles, were shapely. If he had been a man with any interest in sex, he supposed he would have been excited by the curve of her calves.
Wondering what she looked like—and suddenly overwhelmed by a need to know how her blood would taste—he stepped out of the open doorway and took three steps to her. He made no effort to be silent, but she did not look up. The first she became aware of him was when he seized a handful of her hair and dragged her, kicking and flailing, out of her chair.
He turned her around and was instantly excited by her. He was indifferent to her shapely legs, the flare of her hips, the trimness of her waist, the fullness of her breasts. Though beautiful, it was not even her face that electrified him. Something else. A quality in her gray eyes. Call it vitality. She was more alive than most people, vibrant.
She did not scream but let out a low grunt of fear or anger, then struck him furiously with both fists. She pounded his chest, battered his face.
Vitality! Yes, this one was full of life, bursting with life, and her vitality thrilled him far more than any bounty of sexual charms.
He could still hear the distant splash of water, the rattle-hum of the bathroom exhaust fan, and he was confident that he could take her without drawing the attention of the man—as long as he could prevent her from screaming. He struck her on the side of the head with his fist, hammered her before she could scream. She slumped against him, not unconscious but dazed.
Shaking with the anticipation of pleasure, Candy placed her on her back, on the table, with her legs trailing over the edge. He spread her legs and leaned between them, but not to commit rape, nothing as disgusting as that. As he lowered his face toward hers, she first blinked at him in confusion, still rattle-brained from the blows she had taken. Then her eyes began to clear. He saw horrified comprehension return to her, and he went quickly for her throat, bit deep, and found the blood, which was clean and sweet, intoxicating.
She thrashed beneath him.
She was so alive. So wonderfully alive. For a while.
WHEN THE deliveryman brought the pizza, Lee Chen took it into Bobby and Julie’s office and offered some to Hal.
Putting his book aside but not taking his stockinged feet off the coffee table, Hal said, “You know what that stuff does to your arteries?”
“Why’s everyone so concerned about my arteries today?”
“You’re such a nice young man. We’d hate to see you dead before you’re thirty. Besides, we’d always wonder what clothes you might’ve worn next, if you’d lived.”
“Not anything like what you’re wearing, I assure you.”
Hal leaned over and looked in the box that Lee held down to him. “Looks pretty good. Rule of thumb—any pizza they’ll bring to you, they’re selling service instead of good food. But this doesn’t look bad at all, you can actually tell where the pizza ends and the cardboard begins.”
Lee tore the lid off the box, put it on the coffee table, and put two slices of pizza on that makeshift plate. “There.”
“You’re not going to give me half?”
“What about the cholesterol?”
“Hell, cholesterol’s just a little animal fat, it isn’t arsenic.”
WHEN THE woman’s strong heart stopped beating, Candy pulled back from her. Though blood still seeped from her ravaged throat, he did not touch another drop of it. The thought of drinking from a corpse sickened him. He remembered his sisters’ cats, eating their own each time one of the pack died, and he grimaced.
Even as he raised his wet lips from her throat, he heard a door open farther back in the house. Footsteps approached.
Candy quickly circled the table, putting it and the dead woman between himself and the doorway to the dining room. From the vision induced by the dummy’s scrapbook of pictures, Candy knew that Clint would not be as easy to handle as most people were. He preferred to put a little distance between them, give himself time to size up his opponent rather than take the guy by surprise.
Clint appeared in the doorway. Except for his outfit—gray slacks, navy-blue blazer, maroon V-neck, white shirt—he looked the same as the psychic impression he had left on the book. He had pumped a lot of iron in his time. His hair was thick, black, and combed straight back from his forehead. He had a face like carved granite, and a hard look in his eyes.
Excited by the recent kill, by the taste of blood still in his mouth, Candy watched the man with interest, wondering what would happen next. There were all sorts of ways it could go, and not one of them would be dull.
Clint did not react as Candy expected. He did not show surprise when he saw the woman sprawled dead upon the table; he did not seem horrified, shattered by the loss of her, or outraged. Something major changed in his stony face, though below the surface, like tectonic plates shifting under the mantle of the earth’s crust.
Finally he met Candy’s gaze, and said, “You.”
The note of recognition in that single word was unsettling. For a moment Candy could think of no way this man could know him—then he remembered Thomas.
The possibility that Thomas had told this man—and perhaps others—about Candy was the most frightening turn in Candy’s life since his mother’s death. His service in God’s army of avengers was a deeply private matter, a secret that should not have been spread beyond the Pollard family. His mother had warned him that it was all right to be proud of doing God’s work, but that his pride would lead him to a fall if he boasted of his divine favor to others. “Satan,” she had told him, “constantly seeks the names of lieutenants in God’s army—which is what you are—and when he finds them, he destroys them with worms that eat them alive from within, worms fat as snakes, and he rains fire on them too. If you can’t keep the secret, you’ll die and go to Hell for your big mouth.”
“Candy,” Clint said.
The use of his name erased whatever doubt remained that the secret had been passed outside the family and that Candy was in deep trouble, though he had not broken the code of silence himself.
He imagined that even now Satan, in some dark and steaming place, had tilted his head and said, “Who? Who did you say? What was his name? Candy? Candy who?”
As furious as he was frightened, Candy started around the kitchen table, wondering if Clint had learned about him from Thomas. He was determined to break the man, make him talk before killing him.