The Bad Place

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.

Julie hurried to the bottom of the stairwell to see what lay beyond the lower door. With the thump and scrape of their footsteps echoing hollowly off the bare concrete walls, the three men went down four flights without much difficulty. At the fourth-floor landing, however, they had to pause to let Frank catch his breath.

“Are you always this weak when you wake up and don’t remember where you’ve been?” Bobby asked.

Frank shook his head. His words issued in a thin wheeze: “No. -Always frightened ... tired, but not as bad ... as this. I feel like ... whatever I’m doing ... wherever I’m going ... it’s taking a bigger and bigger toll. I’m not ... not going to survive ... a lot more of this.”

As Frank was talking, Bobby noticed something peculiar about the man’s blue cotton sweater. The pattern of the cable knit was wildly irregular in places, as if the knitting machine had briefly gone berserk. And on the back, near his right shoulderblade, a patch of fibers was missing; the hole was the size of a block of four postage stamps, though with irregular rather than straight edges. But it wasn’t just a hole. A piece of what appeared to be khaki filled the gap, not merely sewn on but woven tightly into the surrounding cotton yarn, as if at the garment factory itself. Khaki of the same shade and hard finish as the pants that Frank was wearing.

A shiver of dread pierced Bobby, although he was not sure why. His subconscious mind seemed to understand how the patch had come to be and what it meant, and grasped some hideous consequence not yet fulfilled, while his conscious mind was baffled.

He saw that Hal, on the other side of Frank, had noticed the patch, too, and was frowning.

Julie ascended the stairs while Bobby was staring in puzzlement at the khaki swatch. “We’re in luck,” she said. “There’re two doors at the bottom. One leads into a hallway off the lobby, where we’d probably run into a security man, even though they aren’t looking for Frank any more. But the other door leads into the parking garage, the same level our car’s on. How you doing, Frank? You going to be okay?”

“Getting my ... second wind,” he said less wheezily than before.

“Look at this,” Bobby said, calling Julie’s attention to the khaki woven into the blue cotton sweater.

While Julie studied the peculiar patch, Bobby let go of Frank and, on a hunch, stooped down to examine the legs of his client’s pants. He found a corresponding irregularity: blue cotton yarn from the sweater was woven into the slacks. It was not one spot of the same size and shape as that in the sweater, but a series of three smaller holes near the cuff on the right leg; however, he was sure that more accurate measurements would confirm what he knew from a quick look—that the total amount of blue yarn in those three holes would just about fill the hole in the shoulder of the sweater.

“What’s wrong?” Frank asked.

Bobby didn’t respond but took hold of the somewhat baggy leg of the pants and pulled it taut, so he could get a better look at the three patches. Actually, “patches” was an inaccurate word because these abnormalities in the fabric did not look like repairs; they were too well blended with the material around them to be handwork.

Julie squatted beside him and said, “First, we’ve got to get Frank out of here, back to the office.”

“Yeah, but this is real strange,” Bobby said, indicating the irregularities in the pants. “Strange and ... important somehow.”

“What’s wrong?” Frank repeated.

“Where’d you get these clothes?” Bobby asked him.

“Well ... I don’t know.”

Julie pointed to the white athletic sock on Frank’s right foot, and Bobby saw at once what had caught her attention: several blue threads, precisely the color of the sweater. They were not loose, clinging to the sock. They were woven into the very fabric of it.

Then he noticed Frank’s left shoe. It was a dark brown hiking shoe, but a few thin, squiggly white lines marred the leather on the toe. When he studied them closely, he saw that the lines appeared to be coarse threads like those in the athletic socks; scraping at them with one fingernail, he discovered they were not stuck to the shoe, but were an integral part of the surface of the leather.

The missing yarn of the sweater had somehow become a part of both the khaki pants and one of the socks; the displaced threads of the sock had become part of the shoe on the other foot.

“What’s wrong?” Frank repeated, more fearfully than before.

Bobby hesitated to look up, expecting to see that the filaments of displaced shoe leather were embedded in Frank’s face, and that the displaced flesh was magically entwined with the cable knit of the sweater. He stood and forced himself to confront his client.

Aside from the dark and puffy rings around his eyes, the sickly pallor relieved only by the flush on his upper cheeks, and the fear and confusion that gave him a tormented look, nothing was wrong with his face. No leather ornamentation. No khaki stitched into his lips. No filaments of blue yarn or plastic shoelace tips or button fragments bristling from his eyeballs.

Silently castigating himself for his overactive imagination, Bobby patted Frank’s shoulder. “It’s okay. It’s all right. We’ll figure it out later. Come on, let’s get you out of here.”

38

IN THE embrace of darkness, enwrapped by the scent of Chanel No. 5, under the very blankets and sheets that had once warmed his mother and that he had so carefully preserved, Candy dozed and awakened repeatedly with a start, though he could not remember any nightmares.

Between periods of fitful sleep, he dwelt on the incident in the canyon, earlier that night, when he had been hunting and had felt an unseen presence put a hand on his head. He’d never before experienced anything like that. He was disturbed by the encounter, unsure whether it was threatening or benign, and anxious to understand it.

He first wondered if it had been his mother’s angelic presence, hovering above him. But he quickly dismissed that explanation. If his mother had stepped through the veil between this world and the next, he would have recognized her spirit, her singular aura of love, warmth, and compassion. He would have fallen to his knees under the weight of her ghostly hand and wept with joy at her visitation.

Briefly he had considered that one or both of his inscrutable sisters possessed a heretofore unrevealed talent for psychic contact and reached out to him for unknown reasons. After all, somehow they controlled their cats and appeared to have equal influence over other small animals. Maybe they could enter human minds as well. He didn’t want that pale, cold-eyed pair invading his privacy. At times he looked at them and thought of snakes—sinuous albino snakes, silent and watchful-with desires as alien as any that motivated reptiles. The possibility that they could intrude into his mind was chilling, even if they could not control him.

But between bouts of sleep, he abandoned that idea. If Violet and Verbina possessed such abilities, they would have enslaved him long ago, as thoroughly as they had enslaved the cats. They would have forced him to do degrading, obscene things; they did not possess his self-control in matters of the flesh and would live, if they could, in constant violation of God’s most fundamental commandments.

He could not understand why his mother had sworn him to keep and protect them, any more than he could understand how she could love them. Of course her compassion for those miscreant offspring was only one more example of her saintly nature. Forgiveness and understanding flowed from her like clear, cool water from an artesian well.

For a while he dozed. When he woke with a start again, he turned on his side and watched the faint light of dawn appear along the edges of the drawn blinds.

He considered the possibility that the presence in the canyon had been his brother Frank. But that was also unlikely. If Frank had possessed telepathic abilities, he would have found a way to employ them to destroy Candy a long, long time ago. Frank was less talented than his sisters and much less talented than his brother Candy.

Then who had approached him twice in the canyon, insistently pressing into his mind? Who sent the disconnected words that echoed in his head: What... where ... what ... why ... what... where ... what ... why ...?

Last night, he’d tried to get a mental grip on the presence. When it hastily withdrew from him, he had tried to let part of his consciousness soar up into the night with it, but he had been unable to sustain a pursuit on that psychic plane. He sensed, however, that he might be able to develop that ability.

If the unwelcome presence ever returned, he would try to knot a filament of his mind to it and trace it to its source. In his twenty-nine years, his own siblings were the only people he had encountered with what might be called psychic abilities. If someone out there in the world was also gifted, he must learn who it was. Such a person, not born of his sainted mother, was a rival, a threat, an enemy.

Though the sun beyond the blinded windows had not fully risen, he knew that he would not be able to doze again. He threw back the covers, crossed the dark and furniture-crowded room with the assurance of a blind man in a familiar place, and went into the adjoining bath. After locking the door, he undressed without glancing in the mirror. He peed forcefully without looking down at his hateful organ. When he showered, he soaped and rinsed the sex thing only with the washcloth mitten that he’d made and that protected his innocent hand from being corrupted by the monstrous, wicked flesh below.

39

FROM THE hospital in Orange, they went directly to their offices in Newport Beach. They had a lot of work to do on Frank’s behalf, and his worsening plight evoked in them a greater sense of urgency than ever. Frank rode with Hal, and Julie followed in order to be able to offer assistance if unforeseen developments occurred during the trip. The entire case seemed to be a series of unforeseen developments.

By the time they reached their deserted offices-the Dakota & Dakota staff would not arrive for a couple of hours yet—the sun was fully risen behind the clouds in the east. A thin strip of blue sky, like a crack under the door of the storm, was visible over the ocean to the west. As the four of them passed through the reception lounge into their inner sanctum, the rain halted abruptly, as if a godly hand had turned a celestial lever; the water on the big windows stopped flowing in shimmering sheets, and coalesced into hundreds of small beads that glimmered with a mercury-gray sheen in the cloud-dulled morning light.

Bobby indicated the bulging pillowcase that Hal was carrying. “Take Frank into the bathroom, help him change into the clothes he was wearing when we checked him into the hospital. Then we’ll have a real close look at the clothes he’s wearing now.”

Frank had recovered his balance and most of his strength. He did not need Hal’s assistance. But Julie knew Bobby wouldn’t let Frank go anywhere unchaperoned from now on. They needed to keep an eye on him constantly, in order not to miss any clues that might lead to an explanation of his sudden vanishments and reappearances.

Before attending to Frank, Hal removed the rumpled clothes from the pillowcase. He left the rest of its contents on Julie’s desk.

“Coffee?” Bobby asked.

“Desperately,” Julie said.

He went out to the pantry that opened off the lounge, to start up one of their two Mr. Coffee machines.

Sitting at her desk, Julie emptied the pillowcase. It contained thirty bundles of hundred-dollar bills in packs bound by rubber bands. She fanned the edges of the bills in ten bundles to ascertain if lower denominations were included; they were all hundreds. She chose two packets at random and counted them. Each contained one hundred bills. Ten thousand in each. By the time Bobby returned with mugs, spoons, cream, sugar, and a pot of hot coffee, all on a tray, Julie had concluded that this was the largest of Frank’s three hauls to date.

“Three hundred K,” she said, as Bobby put the tray on her desk.

He whistled softly. “What’s that bring the total to?”

“With this, we’ll be holding six hundred thousand for him.”

“Soon have to get a bigger office safe.”

HAL YAMATAKA put Frank’s other set of clothes on the coffee table. “Something’s wrong with the zipper in the pants. I don’t mean just that it doesn’t work, which it doesn’t. I mean, something’s very wrong with it.”

Hal, Frank, and Julie pulled up chairs around the low glass-topped table, and drank strong black coffee while Bobby sat on the couch and carefully inspected the garments. In addition to the oddities he had noticed at the hospital, he discovered that most of the teeth in the pants zipper were metal, as they should have been, while about forty others, interspersed at random, appeared to be hard black rubber; in fact, the slide was jammed on a couple of the rubber ones.

Bobby stared in puzzlement at the anomalous zipper, slowly moving a finger up and down one of the notched tracks, until he was suddenly struck by inspiration. He picked up one of the shoes Frank had been wearing and examined the heel. It looked perfectly normal, but in the heel of the second shoe, thirty or forty tiny, brass-bright bits of metal were embedded in the rubber, flush with the surface of it.

“Anybody have a penknife?” Bobby asked.

Hal withdrew one from his pocket. Bobby used it to pry loose a couple of the shiny rectangles, which appeared to have been set in the rubber when it was still molten. Zipper teeth. They fell onto the glass table: tink ... tink. At a glance he estimated that the amount of rubber displaced by those teeth was equal to what he had found in the zipper.

SITTING IN the Dakotas’ Disney-embellished office, Frank Pollard was overwhelmed by a weariness that was cartoonish in its extremity, the degree of utter exhaustion sufficient to render Donald Duck so limp that he might slip off a chair and pour onto the floor in a puddle of mallard flesh and feathers. It had been seeping into him day by day, hour by hour, since he had awakened in that alleyway last week; but now it suddenly poured through him as if a dike had broken. This surging flood of weariness had a density not of water but of liquid lead, and he felt enormously heavy; he could lift a foot or move a limb only with effort, and even keeping his head up was a strain on his neck. Virtually every joint in his body ached dully, even his elbow and wrist and finger joints, but especially his knees, hips, and shoulders. He felt feverish, not acutely ill, but as if his strength had been steadily sapped by a low-grade viral infection from which he had been suffering his entire life. Weariness had not dulled his senses; on the contrary, it abraded his nerve endings as surely as a fine-grade sandpaper might have done. Loud sounds made him cringe, bright light made him squint in pain, and he was exquisitely sensitive to heat and cold and the textures of everything he touched.