The Bad Place (42 page)

Frank grabbed at his outstretched hand and seized it.

Nothing had ever felt better to Bobby than Frank’s firm grip, and for a moment he felt safe. Then he became aware that Frank had risen from the ground too. They were both being drawn upward in the wake of the insects and diamonds, toward the belly of the alien vessel, toward God-only-knew what nightmare inside.

Darkness.

Fireflies.

Velocity.

They were on Punaluu beach again, and the rain was coming down harder than before.

“Where the hell was that last place?” Bobby demanded, still holding fast to his client.

“I don’t know,” Frank said. “It scares the hell out of me, it’s so weird, but sometimes I seem to be ... drawn there.”

He hated Frank for having taken him there; he loved Frank for having returned for him. When he shouted above the rain, neither love nor hate was in his voice, just borderline hysteria: “I thought you could only travel to places you’ve been?”

“Not necessarily. Anyway, I’ve been there before.”

“But how did you get there the first time, it’s another world, it can’t have been familiar to you-right, Frank?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t understand any of it, Bobby.”

Though face to face with Frank, Bobby took a while to notice how much the man’s appearance had deteriorated since they had teleported from the Dakota & Dakota offices in Newport Beach. Although the storm once more had soaked him to the skin in seconds and left his clothes hanging on him shapelessly, it wasn’t just the rain that made him look disheveled, beaten, and sickly. His eyes were more sunken than ever; the whites of them were yellow, as if he had contracted jaundice, and the flesh around them was so darkly bruised that he appeared to have painted a pair of fake shiners on himself with black shoe polish. His skin was paler than pale, a deathly gray, and his lips were bluish, as though his circulatory system was failing. Bobby felt guilty about having shouted at him, so he put his free hand on Frank’s shoulder and told him he was sorry, that it was all right, that they were still fighting on the same side of this war, and that everything would turn out just fine—as long as Frank didn’t take them back to that crater.

Frank said, “Sometimes it’s like I’m almost in touch with ... with the minds of those people, creatures, whatever they are in that ship.” They were leaning on each other now, forehead to forehead, seeking mutual support in their exhaustion. “Maybe I’ve got another gift I’m not aware of, like for most of my life I wasn’t aware of being able to teleport until Candy backed me into a corner and tried to kill me. Maybe I’m mildly telepathic. Maybe the wavelength my telepathy functions on is the major wavelength of that race’s brain activity. Maybe I feel them out there, even across billions of light-years of space. Maybe that’s why I feel as if I’m being drawn to them, called to them.”

Pulling back a few inches from Frank, Bobby looked into his tortured eyes for a long moment. Then he smiled and pinched Frank’s cheek, and said, “You devil, you’ve really done a lot of thinking about this, haven’t you, really put the old noodle to work on it, huh?”

Frank smiled.

Bobby laughed.

Then they were both laughing, holding each other up by leaning into each other, the way teepee poles held one another up, and a part of their laugh was healthy, a release of tension, but part of it was that mad laughter that had troubled Bobby earlier. Clinging to his client, he said, “Frank, your life is chaos, you’re
living
in chaos, and you can’t go on like this. It’s going to destroy you.”

“I know.”

“You’ve got to find a way to stop it.”

“There is no way.”

“You’ve got to try, buddy, you’ve got to try. Nobody can handle this. I couldn’t live like this for one day, and you’ve done it for seven years!”

“No. It wasn’t this bad most of that time. It’s just lately, the last few months, it’s accelerated.”

“A few months,” Bobby said wonderingly. “Hell, if we don’t give your brother the slip soon and get back to the office and step off this merry-go-ground in the next few minutes, I swear to God I’m going to crack. Frank, I need order, order and stability, familiarity. I need to know that what I do today will determine where I am and who I am and what I have to show for it tomorrow. Nice orderly progression, Frank, cause and effect, logic and reason.”

Darkness.

Fireflies.

Velocity.

“HOW LONG?”

“Twenty-seven ... almost twenty-eight minutes.”

“Where the hell
are
they?”

“Julie,” Clint said, “I think you ought to sit down. You’re shaking like a leaf, your color’s not good.”

“I’m all right.”

Lee Chen handed her a glass of Scotch. “Have a drink.”

“No.”

“It might help,” Clint said.

She grabbed the glass from Lee, drained it in a couple of long swallows, and shoved it back into his hand.

“I’ll get you another,” he said.

“Thanks.”

From the sofa, Jackie Jaxx said, “Listen, is anyone going to sue me over this?”

Julie no longer sort of liked the hypnotist. She loathed him as much as she had loathed him when they had first met him in Vegas and taken on his case. She wanted to go kick his head in. Though she knew the urge to kick him was irrational, that he really had not been the cause of Bobby’s disappearance, she wanted to kick him anyway. That was the impulsive side of her, the quick-to-anger side of which she was not proud. But she couldn’t always control it, because it was part of her genetic makeup or, as Bobby suspected, a predilection to violent response that had begun to form in her on the day, in her childhood, when a drug-crazed sociopath had brutally killed her mother. Either way, she knew Bobby was sometimes dismayed by that dark side of her, much as he loved everything else, so she made a bargain with both Bobby and God:
Listen, Bobby, wherever you are—and you listen, too, God—if this just ends well, if I can just have my Bobby back with me, I won’t be this way any more, I won’t want to kick in Jackie’s head any more, or anyone else’s head, either, I’ll turn over a new leaf, I swear I will, just let Bobby come back to me safe and sound.

THEY WERE on a beach again, but this one had white sand that was slightly phosphorescent in the early darkness. The strand disappeared into a medium-thick fog in both directions. No rain was falling, and the air was not as warm as it had been at Punaluu.

Bobby shivered in the chill, moist air. “Where are we?”

“I’m not sure,” Frank said, “but I think we’re probably on the Monterey Peninsula somewhere.” A car passed on a highway a hundred yards behind them. “That’s probably Seventeen-Mile Drive. You know it? The road from Carmel through Pebble Beach—”

“I know it.”

“I love the peninsula, Big Sur to the south,” Frank said. “It’s another one of the places I was happy ... for a while.”

Their voices were strangely muffled by the mist. Bobby liked the solid ground beneath his feet, and the thought that he was not only on his own planet but in his own country and in his own state; but he would have preferred a place with more concrete details, where fog did not obscure the landscape. The white blindness of fog was another form of chaos, and he had had more than enough disorder to last him for the rest of his life.

Frank said, “Oh, and by the way, back there in Hawaii a minute ago, you were worried about giving Candy the slip, but you don’t need to be concerned. We lost him several stops ago in Kyoto, or maybe on the slopes of Mount Fuji.”

“For God’s sake, if we don’t have to worry about leading him back to the office, let’s go home.”

“Bobby, I don’t have—”

“Any control. Yeah, I know, I heard, it’s no big secret. But I’ll tell you something—you’ve got control on some level, way down deep in the subconscious, more control than you think you have.”

“No. I—”

“Yes. Because you came back to that crater for me,” Bobby said. “You told me you hate the place, that it’s more frightening than anywhere you’ve ever been, but you came back and got me. You didn’t leave me there with the bed railing.”

“Pure chance that I came back.”

“I don’t think so.”

Darkness.

Fireflies.

Velocity.

THEY MADE the soft, pretty
bing-bong
signal come out of the wall, because that was how they told all the people in The Home it was just ten minutes before supper was going to be eaten.

Derek was already out the door by the time Thomas got up from his chair. Derek liked food. Everyone liked food, of course. But Derek liked food enough for three people.

Thomas got to the doorway, and Derek was already down the hall, walking fast in that funny way he did, almost to The Dining Room. Thomas looked back at the window.

Night was at the window.

He didn’t like seeing night at the window, which was why he usually kept the drapes closed after the light went out of the world. But after he got himself ready for supper, he had tried to find the Bad Thing out there, and it helped a little to see the night when he was trying to send a mind-string into it.

The Bad Thing was still so far away it couldn’t be felt. But he wanted to try once more before going to eat food and Be Sociable. He reached out through the window, up into the big dark, spinning the mind-string toward where the Bad Thing used to be—and it was back. He felt it right away, knew it felt him, too, and he remembered the green toad eating the bouncy yellow flutterby, and he pulled back into his room faster than a toad tongue could snap out and catch him.

He didn’t know if he should be happy or scared that it was back. When it was gone away, Thomas was happy, because maybe it was going to be gone away a long time, but he was also a little scared because when it was gone away, he didn’t know exactly where it was.

It was back.

He waited in the doorway a while.

Then he went to eat food. There was roast chicken. There was frenched fries. There was carrots and peas. There was coleslaw. There was Homemade bread, and people said there was going to be some chocolate cake and ice cream for dessert, though the people that said it was dumb people, so you couldn’t be sure. It all looked good, and it smelled good, and it even tasted good. But Thomas kept thinking about how the flutterby might’ve tasted to the toad, and he couldn’t eat much of anything.