The Bad Place (23 page)

“In addition to dry-cleaning,” Chinh said, “we remodel houses, sell them. This is fourth. We will live here maybe another year, remodeling room by room, then sell, take a profit.”

Tuong said, “Because of murders, some people would not consider moving here after the Farrises. But danger is also opportunity.”

“When we finish with the house,” Chinh said, “it won’t just be remodeled. It will be clean, spiritually clean. Do you understand? The innocence of the house will be restored. We will have chased out the evil that the killer brought here, and we’ll have left our own spiritual imprint on these rooms.”

Nodding, Tuong said, “That is a satisfaction.”

Removing the forged driver’s license from his pocket, Bobby held it so his fingers covered the name and address, leaving the photograph visible. “Do you recognize this man?”

“No,” Tuong said, and Chinh agreed.

As Bobby put the license away, Julie said, “Do you know what George Farris looked like?”

“No,” Tuong said. “As I told you, he died of cancer, many years before his family was killed.”

“I thought maybe you’d seen a photo of him here in the house, before the Farrises’ belongings were removed.”

“No. Sorry.”

Bobby said, “You mentioned earlier that you didn’t buy the house through a realtor. You worked with the estate?”

“Yes. Mrs. Farris’s other brother inherited everything.”

“Do you happen to have his name and address?” Bobby asked. “I think we’ll need to talk to him.”

DINNERTIME CAME. Derek woke up. He was groggy but hungry too. He leaned on Thomas when they walked to the dining room. Food got eaten. Spaghetti. Meat-balls. Salad. Good bread. Chocolate cake. Cold milk.

Back in their room, they watched TV. Derek fell asleep again. It was a bad night on TV. Thomas sighed with disgust. After an hour or so, he stopped the set. None of the shows was smart enough to care about. They were too stupid-silly even for a moron, which Mary said he was. Maybe imbeciles would like them. Probably not.

He used the bathroom. Brushed his teeth. Washed his face. He didn’t look in the mirror. He didn’t like mirrors because they showed him what he was.

After changing into pajamas, he got in bed and made the lamp go dark, even though it was only eight-thirty. He turned on his side, with his head propped on two pillows, and studied the night sky framed by the nearest window. No stars. Clouds. Rain. He liked rain. When a storm came down, it was like a lid on the night, and you didn’t feel like you might float up in all that darkness and just disappear.

He listened to the rain. It whispered. It cried tears on the window.

Far away, the Bad Thing was loose. Ugly-nasty waves spread out from it the way ripples spread across a pond when you dropped a stone in the water. The Bad Thing was like a big stone dropped into the night, a thing that didn’t belong in this world, and with a little effort Thomas could sense the waves from it breaking over him.

He reached out. Felt it. A throbbing thing. Cold and full of anger. Mean. He wanted to get closer. Learn what it was.

He tried TVing questions at it. What are you? Where are you? What do you want? Why are you going to hurt Julie?

Suddenly, like a big magnet, the Bad Thing began pulling him. He’d never felt anything like that before. When he tried to TV his thoughts to Bobby or Julie, they didn’t grab him and pull at him the way this Bad Thing did.

A part of his mind seemed to unravel like a ball of string, and the loose end sailed through the window and way up into the night, through the darkness, until it found the Bad Thing. Suddenly Thomas was very close to the Bad Thing, too close. It was all around him, big ugly and so strange that Thomas felt like he’d dropped into a swimming pool full of ice and razor blades. He didn’t know if it was a man, couldn’t see its shape, only feel it; it might be pretty on the outside, but on the inside it was throbbing and dark and deep nasty. He sensed the Bad Thing was eating. The food was still alive and squirming. Thomas was scared big, and right away he tried to pull back, but for a moment the ugly mind held him tight, and he could get away only by picturing the mind-string rewinding itself onto the ball.

When the mind-string was all wound up again, Thomas turned away from the window, onto his stomach. He was breathing real fast. He listened to his heart boom.

He had a sick-making taste in his mouth. The same taste he got sometimes when he bit his tongue, not meaning to, and the same taste as when the dentist yanked one of his teeth, meaning to. Blood.

Sick and scared, he sat up in bed and made the lamp come on right away. He took a tissue from the box on the nightstand. He spit into it and looked to see if there was blood. There wasn’t. Just spit.

He tried again. No blood.

He knew what that meant. He’d been too close to the Bad Thing. Maybe even
inside
the bad thing, just for a blink. The ugly taste in his mouth was the same taste the Bad Thing tasted, tearing with its teeth at some living, squirming food. Thomas didn’t have blood in his mouth, he just had a memory of blood in his mouth. But that was bad enough; this time wasn’t at all like biting his tongue or getting a tooth yanked, because this time what he tasted wasn’t his own blood.

Though enough warm was in the room, he started shivering and couldn’t stop.

CANDY PROWLED the canyons, in the grip of urgent need, rattling wild animals out of burrows and nests. He was kneeling in the mud beside a huge oak, pummeled by rain, sucking blood from the ravished throat of a rabbit, when he felt someone place a hand atop his head.

He threw down the rabbit and sprang to his feet, turning around as he did so. Nobody was there. Two of his sisters’ blackest cats were twenty feet behind him, visible only because their eyes were luminous in the gloom; they had been following him since he’d left the house. Otherwise he was alone.

For a second or two, he still felt the hand on his head, though no hand was there. Then the queer sensation passed.

He studied the shadows on all sides and listened to the rain snapping through the oak leaves.

Finally, shrugging off the episode, driven by his fierce need, he proceeded farther east, moving upslope. A two-foot-wide stream had formed on the canyon floor, six or eight inches deep, not large enough to hamper his progress.

The drenched cats followed. He did not want them with him, but he knew from experience that he would not be able to chase them away. They did not always accompany him, but when they chose to follow in his tracks, they could not be dissuaded.

After he had gone about a hundred yards, he dropped to his knees again, held his hands in front of him, and allowed the power to erupt once more. Shimmering sapphire light swept through the night. Brush shook, trees stirred, and rocks clattered against one another. In the wake of the light, clouds of dust flew up, ghostly silver columns that rippled like wind-stirred shrouds, then vanished into the darkness.

A bevy of animals burst from cover, and some raced toward Candy. He snatched at a rabbit, missed, but seized a squirrel. It tried to bite him, but he swung it hard by one leg, bashing its head against the muddy ground, stunning it.

VIOLET WAS with Verbina in the kitchen. They were sitting on the layered blankets with twenty-three of their twenty-five cats.

Parts of her mind—and parts of her sister’s—were in Cinders and Lamia, the black cats through which they were accompanying their brother. Watching Candy seize and destroy his prey, Cinders and Lamia were excited, and Violet was excited too. Electrified.

The wet January night was deep, illumined only by the ambient light from the communities to the west, which was reflected off the bellies of the low clouds. In that wilderness, Candy was the wildest creature of them all, a fierce and powerful and merciless predator who crept swiftly and silently through the rugged canyons, taking what he needed and wanted. He was so strong and limber that he appeared to flow up the canyon, over rocks and fallen timber, around prickly brush, as if he were not a man of flesh and blood, but the rippled moonshadow of some flying creature soaring high above the earth.

When Candy seized the squirrel and bashed its head against the ground, Violet divided the part of her mind that was in Lamia and Cinders, and also entered the squirrel. It was stunned by the blow. It struggled feebly and looked at Candy with unalloyed terror.

Candy’s big, strong hands were on the squirrel, but it seemed to Violet that they were on her, as well, moving over her bare legs, hips, belly, and breasts.

Candy snapped its spine against his bent knee.

Violet shuddered. Verbina whimpered and clung to her sister.

The squirrel no longer had any feeling in its extremities.

With a low growl, Candy bit the animal’s throat. He tore at its hide, chewing open the blood-rich vessels.

Violet felt the hot blood spurting out of the squirrel, felt Candy’s mouth fastened hungrily to the wound. It almost seemed as though no surrogate lay between them, as if his lips were pressed firmly to Violet’s throat and as if her own blood was flooding into his mouth. She wished that she could enter Candy’s mind and be on both the giving and receiving end of the blood, but she could only meld with animals.

She no longer had the strength to sit up. She settled back onto the blankets, only half aware that she was softly chanting a monotonous litany:
“Yea, yes, yes, yes, yes. . . .”

Verbina rolled atop her sister.

Around them the cats tumbled together in a roiling mass of fur and tails and whiskered faces.

THOMAS TRIED again. For Julie’s sake. He reached out toward the cold. Slowing mind of the Bad Thing. Right away the Bad Thing drew him toward it. He let his mind unwind like a big ball of string. It pierced the window, zoomed into the night, made contact.

He TVed questions: What are you? Where are you? What do you want? Why are you going to hurt Julie?

JUST AS CANDY threw aside the dead squirrel and got to his feet, he felt the hand on his head again. He twitched, turned, and flailed at the darkness with both fists.