The Bad Place (63 page)

“What are you talking about?” she demanded.

“Close your eyes.”

She did not close her eyes, of course, because she had never been one to look away or run away from anything.

The Pollards reappeared, back from the brief visit they had made in tandem to someplace as far away as Mount Fuji or as close as Doc Fogarty’s house, more likely to several places. Recklessly rapid and repeated travel was key to the success of the trick, just as Bobby had outlined it to Frank in the car. The brothers were no longer two distinct human beings, for Frank’s had been the guiding consciousness on their journeys, and his ability to shepherd them through error-free reconstitution was declining rapidly, worse with each jaunt. They were fused, more biologically tangled than any Siamese twins. Frank’s left arm disappeared into Candy’s right side, as if he had reached in there to fish among his brother’s internal organs. Candy’s right leg melted into Frank’s left, giving them only three to stand on.

There were more strangenesses, but that was all Bobby could comprehend before they vanished again. Frank needed to keep moving, stay in control, give Candy no chance to exert his own power, until the scramble was so complete that proper reconstitution of either of them would be impossible.

Realizing what was happening, Julie sat perfectly still, her broken hand curled in her lap, holding fast to Bobby with her good hand. He knew she understood, without being told, that Frank was sacrificing himself for them, and that the least they could do for him was bear witness to his courage, just as they would keep Thomas and Hal and Clint and Felina alive in memory.

That was one of the most fundamental and sacred duties good friends and family performed for one another: they tended the flame of memory, so no one’s death meant an immediate vanishment from the world; in some sense the deceased would live on after their passing, at least as long as those who loved them lived. Such memories were an essential weapon against the chaos of life and death, a way to ensure some continuity from generation to generation, an endorsement of order and of meaning.

Piping, wind: the brothers returned from another series of rapid deconstructions and reconstitutions, and now they were essentially one creature of cataclysmic biology. The body was large, well over seven feet tall, broad and hulking, for it incorporated the mass of both of them. The single head had a nightmare face: Frank’s brown eyes were badly misaligned; a slanted mouth gaped between them where a nose should have been; and a second mouth pocked the left cheek. Two tortured, screaming voices filled the kitchen. Another face was set in the chest, mouthless but with two eye sockets, in one of which lay an unblinking eye as blue as Candy’s; the other socket was filled with bristling teeth.

The slouching beast vanished, then returned once more, after less than a minute. This time it was an undifferentiated mass of tissue, dark in some places and hideously pink in others, prickled with bone fragments, tufted with sparse clumps of hair, marbled with veins that pulsed to different beats. Along the way, Frank had no doubt visited that alleyway in Calcutta or someplace like it, for he had conveyed with him dozens of roaches, not just one, and rats as well; they were incorporated into the tissue everywhere that Bobby looked, further ensuring that Candy’s flesh was too diffused and polluted ever to be properly reconstituted. The monstrous and obviously dysfunctional assemblage fell to the floor, flopped and shuddered, and finally lay still. Some of the rodents and insects continued to quiver and writhe, trying to get free; inextricably bonded to the dead mass, they also would soon perish.

THE HOUSE was simple, on a section of the coast that was not yet fashionable. The back porch faced the sea, and wooden steps led down to a scrubby yard that ended at the beach. There were twelve palm trees.

The living room was furnished with a couple of chairs, a love seat, a coffee table, and a Wurlitzer 950 stocked with records from the big-band era. The floor was bleached oak, tightly made, and sometimes they pushed the furniture to the walls, rolled up the area rug, punched up some numbers on the juke, and danced together, just the two of them.

That was mostly in the evenings.

In the mornings, if they didn’t make love, they pored through recipe books in the kitchen and whipped up baked goods together, or just sat with coffee by the window, watched the sea, and talked.

They had books, two decks of cards, an interest in the birds and animals that lived along the shore, memories both good and bad, and each other. Always, each other.

Sometimes they talked about Thomas and wondered at the gift he’d possessed and had kept secret all his life. She said it made you humble to think of it, made you realize everyone and everything was more complex and mysterious than you could know.

To get the police off their backs, they had admitted working on a case for one Frank Pollard from El Encanto Heights, who believed his brother James was trying to kill him over a misunderstanding. They said they felt James may have been a complete psychotic who had killed their employees and Thomas, merely because they had dared to try to settle the matter between the brothers. Subsequently, when the Pollard house up north was found torched with gasoline, with a confusing array of skeletal remains in the aftermath, police pressure was slowly lifted from Dakota & Dakota. It was believed that Mr. James Pollard had killed his twin sisters and his brother, as well, and was currently on the run, armed and dangerous.

The agency had been sold. They didn’t miss it. She no longer felt she could save the world, and he no longer needed to help her save herself.

Money, a few more red diamonds, and negotiation had convinced Dyson Manfred and Roger Gavenall to invent another source for the biologically engineered bug when, eventually, they published their work on it. Without the cooperation of Dakota & Dakota, they would never know the actual source, anyway.

In the finished attic of the beach house, they kept the boxes and bags of cash they had brought back from Pacific Hill Road. Candy and his mother had tried to compensate for the chaos of their lives by storing up millions in a second-floor bedroom, just as Bobby and Julie had suspected before they had ever gotten to El Encanto Heights. Only a small portion of the Pollards’ treasure was now in the beach-house attic, but it was more than two people could spend; the rest had been burned, along with everything else, when they’d torched the house on Pacific Hill Road.

In time he came to accept the fact that he could be a good man and still sometimes have dark thoughts or selfish motives. She said this was maturity, and that it wasn’t such a bad thing to live outside of Disneyland by the time you reached middle age.

She said she’d like a dog.

He said fine, if they could agree on a breed..

She said you clean up its poop.

He said you clean up its poop, I’ll take care of the petting and Frisbee throwing.

She said she had been wrong that night in Santa Barbara when, in her despair, she had claimed no dreams ever came true. They came true all the time. The problem was, you sometimes had your sights set on a particular dream and missed all the others that turned out your way: like finding him, she said, and being loved.

One day she told him she was going to have a baby. He held her close for a long time before he could find the words to express his happiness. They dressed to go out for champagne and dinner at the Ritz, then decided they would rather celebrate at home, on the porch, overlooking the sea, listening to old Tommy Dorsey recordings.

They built sandcastles. Huge ones. They sat on the back porch and watched the incoming tide wreck their constructions.

Sometimes they talked about the wordburst he had received in the car on the freeway, from Thomas at the moment of his death. They wondered about the words “there is a light that loves you,” and dared to consider dreaming the biggest dream of all—that people never really die.

They got a black Labrador.

They named him Sookie, just because it sounded silly.

Some nights she was afraid. Occasionally, so was he.

They had each other. And time.

AFTERWORD

So there I was, getting up seven days a week at the ping! of dawn, showering in ice-cold water to numb my nerves for the abuses the world hurls at us each day, dressing in drab khaki, eating my pot of mush for breakfast, writing for five hours, pausing at noon for a small bowl of lukewarm gruel, writing for another six hours, having dinner (usually squash or common tubers without seasoning), spending quiet evenings with my lovely wife, just keeping my head down in the hope that cruel Fate would not notice me and, for another day, would fail to dispatch a charging rhino, a runaway train, or a machine-gun-wielding goldfish-rights activist in my direction. Then my novel,
Midnight,
exploded to number one on the bestseller lists, and Fate suffered a whiplash turning her head in my direction, and I knew that uncountable rhinos, trains, and maniacal goldfish advocates were at that moment sniffing the air and changing course, all mumbling under their breath,
Get Koontz.
(Most trains don’t breathe or mumble, of course, but the evil ones do.)

To foil cruel Fate, I would never again be able to sleep two nights in the same bed and would need to live under a new false identity every week for the rest of my life. These considerations weighed heavily on me as I arranged to purchase a thousand forged driver’s licenses and passports on the black market, and as I took intense tutoring to become a master of disguise capable of deceiving even Fate. My greatest worry, however, was whether I would be able to write another book capable of rising to number one or whether I would become a one-shot wonder on whom even cruel Fate would soon not wish to waste a train or rhino.

By the time
Midnight
was published, I was already at work on
The Bad Place,
although it was titled
One O’Clock Jump.
I loved the characters—Bobby and Julie Dakota, the sweet and funny Thomas, the hideous Candy and his weird sisters, the supporting cast; however, I was acutely aware that the story line, as it was developing, might be described as somewhere between crazy and cockamamie, though from my point of view, it was a distillation of various genres into a novel that was
sui generis,
in a genre of its own, with a surreal sensibility developed in realistic prose.

My point of view, of course, had no more value than a gallon of swill—or a pint of swill, for that matter. The opinion that mattered ultimately was the collective reaction of the audience that had put
Midnight
at number one. And the opinions that mattered in the
short
run were those of my publisher and agent. Because my publisher (at that time) and agent (at that time) had more frequently than not been exasperated with me for failing to write the same book over and over again—their prototype first being
Whispers
and later
Watchers
—the delivery of every novel usually elicited from them long-suffering sighs, grimaces, shudders of disbelief, impatient toe tapping, meaningful throat clearing, and the words “How could you?” spoken with that guilt-inducing tone of disappointment that wise mothers use to prevent rebellious children from turning into liver-eating serial killers by the age of nine, at once followed by “What were you thinking?” spoken in a tone that implied that I couldn’t possibly have been thinking at all.

The Bad Place
engendered even more consternation from agent and publisher than usual, including the dreaded words “Is this supposed to be funny, young man?” (yes, in fact, there’s a lot of humor in this novel), “Do you realize what an opportunity you may be throwing away?” (no, but I was learning), and the absolutely terrifying “You will be very sorry about this when your father gets home.” My agent seemed to be even more seriously disturbed by the novel’s cockamamie story line than was my publisher ; we had two lengthy, solemn telephone conversations during which I was challenged to analyze myself and determine the reason for my stubborn insistence on writing books that violated every rule by which bestsellers had been created in the past half century. I underwent two months of self-analysis, but the hourly rates that I (as the analyst) was charging me (the patient) were so exorbitant that I couldn’t afford them, so I dropped out of therapy before I got any benefit from it.

To my great surprise, my agent
did
say that in the dismayingly original
The Bad Place,
there was one element that, although reckless and utterly uncommercial, she felt to be “evidence of genius.” She was referring to the character of Thomas and the voice in which his scenes are written. She was smitten by the character, charmed, and moved, and she thought that the manner in which I had used his unique narrative voice to convey his inner world was “breathtaking.” Not accustomed to such effusive praise from those closest to me in my professional life, I might have been left speechless. Those who know me best, however, will tell you that speechlessness is not a response I am likely to embrace. Instead, I told my agent the truth—that I’d had so much fun writing Thomas’s point of view that I’d been toying with the idea of writing
an entire novel
from the perspective of a Down’s syndrome person quite like him. This revelation was greeted with a silence that I first took to be reverential but which I soon realized was a symptom of stunned disbelief. “Honey,” she said, “the scenes from Thomas’s point of view are pure genius, but too much genius is not a good thing.”

The Bad Place
was published as I’d written it—though not under my original title,
One O’Clock Jump.
That is also the title of a famous big-band number by Benny Goodman, and big band music plays a role in the story. My editor on the book, Stacy Creamer, liked my title as much as I did, and because she was a good editor with her heart in the right place, she recommended that it be kept, but she was overruled, as was I. Desperate to avoid the tacky title
Berserk!,
complete with exclamation point, which my publisher wanted to use and which my agent endorsed, I came up with the mutually acceptable title that eventually appeared on the finished book.