The Bad Place (28 page)

Julie’s ears popped.

“Holy cow!” Bobby said, which was just what Julie would have expected him to say.

She, on the other hand, was unable to speak.

Gasping, Frank Pollard sat up in bed. His face was bloodless. Around his rheumy eyes, the skin looked bruised. Sour perspiration glistened on his face and beaded in his beard stubble.

He was holding a pillowcase half filled with something. The end was twisted and held shut with a length of cord. He let go of it, and it fell off the side of the bed where the railing was missing, striking the floor with a soft
plop.

When he spoke, his voice was hoarse and strange. “Where am I?”

“You’re in the hospital, Frank,” Bobby said. “It’s all right. You’re where you belong now.”

“Hospital ... ,” Frank said, savoring the word as if he had just heard it—and was now pronouncing it—for the first time. He looked around, obviously bewildered; he still didn’t know where he was. “Don’t let me slip—”

He vanished midsentence. A brief hiss accompanied his abrupt departure, as if the air in the room was escaping through a puncture in the skin of reality.

“Damn!” Julie said.

“Where were his pajamas?” Hal said.

“What?”

“He was wearing shoes, khaki pants, a shirt and sweater,” Hal said, “but the last time I saw him, a couple of hours ago, he still had on his pajamas.”

At the far end of the room, the door began to open but bumped against Hal’s empty chair. Nurse Fulgham poked her head through the gap. She looked down at the chair, then across the room at Hal and Julie, then at Bobby, who stepped to the foot of the bed to peer past his two associates and the half-drawn privacy curtain.

Their astonishment at Frank’s vanishing act must have been ill concealed, for the woman frowned and said, “What’s wrong?”

Julie quickly crossed the room as Grace Fulgham slid the chair aside and opened the door all the way. “Everything’s fine. We just spoke by phone with our man heading up the search, and he says they’ve found someone who saw Mr. Pollard earlier tonight. We know which way he was heading, so now it’s only a matter of time until we find him.”

“We didn’t expect you’d be here so long,” Fulgham said, frowning past Julie at the curtained bed.

Even through the heavy door, maybe she had heard the faint warble of the flute that wasn’t a flute.

“Well,” Julie said, “this is the easiest place from which to coordinate the search.”

By standing just inside the door, with Hal’s empty chair between them, Julie was trying to block the nurse’s advance without appearing to do so. If Fulgham got past the curtain, she might notice the missing railing, the black sand in the bed, and the pillowcase that was filled with God-knew-what. Questions about any of those things might be difficult to answer convincingly, and if the nurse remained in the room too long, she might be there when Frank returned.

Julie said, “I’m sure we haven’t disturbed any of the other patients. We’ve been very quiet.”

“No, no,” Nurse Fulgham said, “you haven’t disturbed anyone. We just wondered if you might like some coffee to help keep you awake.”

“Oh.” Julie turned to look at Hal and Bobby. “Coffee?”

“No,” the two men said simultaneously. Then, speaking over each other, Hal said, “No, thank you,” and Bobby said, “Very kind of you.”

“I’m wide awake,” Julie said, frantic to be rid of the woman, but trying to sound casual, “and Hal doesn’t drink coffee, and Bobby, my husband, can’t handle caffeine because of prostate problems.” I’m babbling, she thought. “Anyway, we’ll be leaving soon now, I’m sure.”

“Well,” the nurse said, “if you change your mind....”

After Fulgham left, letting the door close behind her, Bobby whispered, “Prostate trouble?”

Julie said, “Too much caffeine causes prostate trouble. Seemed like a convincing detail to explain why, with all your yawning, you didn’t want coffee.”

“But I don’t have a prostate problem. Makes me sound like an old fart.”

“I have it,” Hal said. “And I’m not an old fart.”

“What is this?” Julie said. “We’re
all
babbling.”

She pushed the chair in front of the door and returned to the bed, where she picked up the pillowcase-bag that Frank Pollard had brought from ... from wherever he had been.

“Careful,” Bobby said. “Last time Frank mentioned a pillowcase, it was the one he trapped that insect in.”

Julie gingerly set the bag on a chair and watched it closely. “Doesn’t seem to be anything squirming around in it.” She started to untie the knotted cord from the neck of the sack.

Grimacing, Bobby said, “If you let out something big as a house cat, with a lot of legs and feelers, I’m going straight to a divorce lawyer.”

The cord slipped free. She pulled open the pillowcase, and looked inside. “Oh, God.”

Bobby took a couple of steps backward.

“No, not that,” she assured him. “No bugs. Just more cash.” She reached into the sack and withdrew a couple of bundles of hundred-dollar bills. “If it’s all hundreds, there could be as much as a quarter of a million in here.”

“What’s Frank doing?” Bobby wondered. “Laundering money for the mob in the Twilight Zone?”

Hollow, lonely, tuneless piping pierced the air again, and like a needle pulling thread, the sound brought with it a draft that rustled the curtain.

Shivering, Julie turned to look at the bed.

The flutelike notes faded with the draft, then soon rose again, faded, rose, and faded a fourth time as Frank Pollard reappeared. He was on his side, arms against his chest, hands fisted, grimacing, his eyes squeezed shut, as if he were preparing himself to receive the killing blow of an ax.

Julie stepped toward the bed, and again Hal stopped her.

Frank sucked in a deep breath, shuddered, made a low anguished mewling, opened his eyes—and vanished. Within two or three seconds, he appeared yet again, still shuddering. But immediately he vanished, reappeared, vanished, reappeared, vanished, as if he were an image flickering on a television set with poor signal reception. At last he stuck fast to the fabric of reality and lay on the bed, moaning.

After rolling off his side, onto his back, he gazed at the ceiling. He raised his fists from his chest, uncurled them, and stared at his hands, baffled, as if he had never seen fingers before.

“Frank?” Julie said.

He did not respond to her. With his fingertips he explored the contours of his face, as if a Braille reading of his features would recall to him the forgotten specifics of his appearance.

Julie’s heart was racing, and every muscle in her body felt as if it had been twisted up as tight as an overwound clock spring. She was not afraid, really. It was not a tension engendered by fear but by the sheer
strangeness
of what had happened. “Frank, are you okay?”

Blinking through the interstices of his fingers, he said, “Oh. It’s you, Mrs. Dakota. Yeah ... Dakota. What’s happened? Where am I?”

“You’re in the hospital now,” Bobby said. “Listen, the important question isn’t where you are, but where the hell have you
been?”

“Been? Well ... what do you mean?”

Frank tried to sit up in bed, but he seemed temporarily to lack the strength to get off his back.

Picking up the bed controls, Bobby elevated the upper half of the mattress. “You weren’t in this room during most of the last few hours. It’s almost five in the morning, and you’ve been jumping in and out of here like ... like ... like a crew member of the Starship
Enterprise
who keeps beaming back up to the mothership!”

“Enterprise?
Beaming up? What’re you talking about?”

Bobby looked at Julie. “Whoever this guy is, wherever he comes from, we now know for sure that he’s been living out past the edge of modern culture, on the fringe. You ever known a modern American who hasn’t at least
heard
of
Star
Trek?”

To Bobby, Julie said, “Thanks for your analysis, Mr. Spock.”

“Mr. Spock?” Frank said.

“See!” Bobby said.

“We can question Frank later,” Julie said. “He’s confused right now, anyway. We’ve got to get him out of here. If that nurse comes back and sees him, how do we explain his reappearance ? Is she really going to believe he wandered back
into
the hospital, past security and the nursing staff, up six floors, with nobody spotting him?”

“Yeah,” Hal said, “and though he seems to be back for good, what if he pops away again, in front of her eyes?”

“Okay, so we’ll get him out of bed and sneak him down those stairs at the end of the hall,” Julie said, “out to the car.”

As they talked about him, Frank turned his head back and forth, following the conversation. He appeared to be watching a tennis match for the first time, unable to comprehend the rules of the game.

Bobby said, “Once we’ve gotten him out of here, we can tell Fulgham he’s been found just a few blocks away and that we’re meeting with him to determine whether he wants—or even needs—to be returned to the hospital. He’s our client, after all, not our ward, and we have to respect his wishes.”

Without having to wait for tests to be conducted, they now knew that Frank was not suffering strictly from physical ailments like cerebral abscesses, clots, aneurysms, cysts, or neoplasms. His amnesia did not spring from brain tumors, but from something far stranger and more exotic than that. No malignancy, regardless of how singular its nature, would invest its victim with the power to step into the fourth dimension—or to wherever Frank was stepping when he vanished.

“Hal,” Julie said, “get Frank’s other clothes from the closet, bundle them up, and stuff them in the pillowcase with the money.”

“Will do.”

“Bobby, help me get Frank out of bed, see if he can stand on his own feet. He looks awful weak.”

The remaining bed railing stuck for a moment when Bobby tried to lower it, but he struggled with it because they could not take Frank out of bed on the other side without drawing back the privacy curtain and exposing him to anyone who might push open the door.

“You could’ve done me a big favor and packed this rail off to Oz with the other one,” Bobby told Frank, and Frank said, “Oz?”

When the railing finally folded down, out of the way, Julie found that she was hesitant to touch Frank, for fear of what might happen to her—or parts of her—if he pulled another disappearing act. She had seen the shattered hinges of the bed railing; she was also keenly aware that Frank had not brought the railing back with him, but had abandoned it in the other-where or otherwhen to which he traveled.

Bobby hesitated, too, but overcame his apprehension, grabbing the man’s legs and swinging them over the edge of the bed, taking hold of his arm and helping him into a sitting position. In some ways she might be tougher than Bobby, but when it came to encounters with the unknown, he was clearly more flexible and quick to adapt than she was.

Finally she quelled her fear, and together she and Bobby assisted Frank off the bed and onto his feet. His legs buckled under him, and they had to support him. He complained of weakness and dizziness.

Stuffing the other set of clothes in the pillowcase, Hal said, “If we have to, Bobby and I can carry him.”

“I’m sorry to be so much trouble,” Frank said.

To Julie, he had never sounded or looked more pathetic, and she felt a flush of guilt about her reluctance to touch him.

Flanking Frank, their arms around him to provide support, Julie and Bobby walked him back and forth, past the rain-washed window, giving him a chance to recover the use of his legs. Gradually his strength and balance returned.

“But my pants keep trying to fall down,” Frank said.

They propped him against the bed, and he leaned on Julie while Bobby lifted the blue cotton sweater to see if the belt needed to be cinched in one notch. The tongue end of the belt was weakened by scores of small holes, as if industrious insects had been boring at it. But what insects ate leather? When Bobby touched the tarnished brass buckle, it crumbled as though made of flaky pastry dough.

Gaping at the glittering crumbs of metal on his fingers, Bobby said, “Where do you shop for clothes, Frank? In a dumpster?”

In spite of Bobby’s light tone, Julie knew he was unnerved. What substance or circumstances could so profoundly alter the composition of brass? When he brushed his fingers against the bed sheets to wipe off the curious residue, she flinched, half expecting his flesh to have been contaminated by the contact with the brass, and to crumble as the buckle had done.

AFTER CINCHING Frank’s pants with the belt that he had worn when he’d checked into the hospital, Hal helped Bobby slip their client out of the room. With Julie scouting the way, they went quickly and quietly along the hall and through the fire door at the head of the emergency stairs. Frank’s skin remained cold to the touch, and he was still clammy with perspiration ; but the effort brought a flush to his cheeks, which made him look less like a walking corpse.