“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.
BOUNCING like two balls in tandem, they traveled to an empty lot in Las Vegas, where a cool desert wind spun a tumbleweed past them and where Frank said he had once lived in a house that was now demolished; to that cabin at the top of a snowy mountain meadow, where they had first teleported after leaving the office; to the graveyard in Santa Barbara; to the top of an Aztec ziggurat in the lush Mexican jungles, where the humid night air was full of buzzing mosquitoes and the cries of unknown beasts, and where Bobby almost fell down the terraced side of the pyramidal structure before he realized how high they were and how precariously perched; to the offices of Dakota & Dakota—
They were popping around so quickly, remaining in each place such a brief time—in fact, briefer with each stop—that for a moment he stood in a corner of his own office, blinking stupidly, before he realized where he was and what he had to do. He tore his hand away from Frank, and he said, “Stop it now, stop here.” But Frank vanished even as Bobby spoke.
Julie was all over him an instant later, hugging him so tightly that she hurt his ribs. He hugged her, too, and kissed her a long time before coming up for air. Her hair smelled clean, and her skin smelled sweeter than he remembered. Her eyes were brighter than memory allowed, and more beautiful.
Though by nature he was not much of a toucher, Clint put a hand on Bobby’s shoulder. “God, it’s good to see you, good to have you back.” There was even a catch in his voice. “Had us worried there for a while.”
Lee Chen handed him a glass of Scotch on the rocks. “Don’t do that again, okay?”
“Don’t plan to,” Bobby said.
No longer the smooth and self-assured performer, Jackie Jaxx had had enough for one night. “Listen, Bobby, I’m sure that whatever you have to tell us is fascinating, and you’re bound to’ve come back with a lot of boffo anecdotes, wherever you went, but I for one don’t want to hear about it.”
“Boffo anecdotes?” Bobby said.
Jackie shook his head. “Don’t want to hear ‘em. Sorry. It’s my fault, not yours. I like show biz ’cause it’s a narrow life, you know? A thin little slice of the real world, but exciting ‘cause it’s all bright colors and loud music. You don’t have to think in show biz, you can just be. I just want to be, you know. Perform, hang out, have fun. I got opinions, sure, colorful and loud opinions about everything, show-biz opinions, but I don’t know a damn thing, and I don’t want to know a damn thing, and I sure as hell don’t want to know about what happened here tonight, ’cause it’s the kind of thing that turns your world upside down, makes you curious, makes you think, and then pretty soon you’re no longer happy with all the things that made you happy before.” He raised both hands, as if to forestall argument, and said, “I’m outta here,” and a moment later he was.
At first, as he told the others what had happened to him, Bobby walked slowly around the room, marveling at ordinary items, finding wonder in the mundane, relishing the solidity of things. He put his hand on Julie’s desk, and it seemed to him that nothing in the world was more wondrous than humble Formica—all those molecules of man-made chemicals lined up in perfect, stable order. The framed prints of Disney characters, the inexpensive furniture, the half-empty bottle of Scotch, the flourishing pothos plant on a stand by the windows—all of those things were suddenly precious to him.
He had been traveling only thirty-nine minutes. He took almost as long to tell them a condensed version. He had popped out of the office at 4:47 and returned at 5:26, but he’d done enough traveling—via teleportation or otherwise—to last the rest of his life.
On the sofa, with Julie and Clint and Lee gathered around, Bobby said, “I want to stay right here in California. I don’t need to see Paris. Don’t need London. Not any more. I want to stay where I have my favorite chair, sleep every night in a bed that’s familiar—”
“Damn right you will,” Julie interjected.
“—drive my little yellow Samurai, open a medicine cabinet where the Anacin and toothpaste and mouthwash and styptic pencil and Bactine and Band-Aids are exactly where they ought to be.”
By 6:15 Frank had not reappeared. During Bobby’s account of his adventures, no one mentioned Frank’s second disappearance or wondered aloud when he would return. But all of them kept glancing at the chair from which he had vanished initially and at the comer of the room from which he had dematerialized the second time.
“How long do we wait here for him?” Julie finally asked.
“I don’t know,” Bobby said. “But I have a feeling ... a real bad feeling ... that maybe Frank’s not going to regain control of himself this time, that he’s just going to keep popping from one place to another, faster and faster, until sooner or later he’s unable to put himself back together again.”
48
WHEN HE came straight from Japan into the kitchen of his mother’s house, Candy was seething with anger, and when he saw the cats on the table, where he ate his meals, his anger grew into a full-blown rage. Violet was sitting in a chair at the table; her ever-silent sister was in another chair beside her, hanging on her. Cats lay under their chairs and around their feet, and five of the biggest were on the table, eating bits of ham that Violet fed them.
“What’re you doing?” he demanded.
Violet did not acknowledge him either with a word or a glance. Her gaze was locked with that of a dark gray mongrel that was sitting as erect as a statue of an Egyptian temple cat, patiently nibbling at a few small bits of meat offered on her pale palm.
“I’m talking to you,” he said sharply, but she did not respond.
He was sick of her silences, weary to death of her infinite strangeness. If not for the promise that he had made to his mother, he would have torn Violet open right there and fed on her. Too many years had passed since he had tasted the ambrosia in his sainted mother’s veins, and he had often thought that the blood in Violet and Verbina was, in a way, the same blood that had flowed in Roselle. He wondered—and sometimes dreamed—of how his sisters’ blood might feel upon the tongue, how it might taste.
Looming over her, staring down as she continued to commune with the gray cat, he said, “This is where I eat, damn you!”
Violet still said nothing, and Candy struck her hand, knocking the remaining bits of ham helter-skelter. He swept the plate of ham off the table, as well, and took tremendous satisfaction in the sound of it shattering on the floor.
The five cats on the table were not the least startled by his fury, and the greater number on the floor remained unfazed by the ping and clatter of china fragments.
At last Violet turned her head, tilted it back, and looked up at Candy.
Simultaneously with their mistress, the cats on the table turned their heads to look haughtily at him, too, as if they wished him to understand what a singular honor they were bestowing upon him simply by granting him their attention.
That same attitude was apparent in the disdain in Violet’s eyes and in the faint smirk that curled the edges of her ripe mouth. More than once he had found her direct gaze withering, and he had turned away from her, rattled and confused. Certain that he was her superior in every way, he was perplexed by her unfailing ability to defeat him or force him into a hasty retreat with just a look.
But this time would be different. He had never been as furious as he was at that moment, not even seven years ago when he had found his mother’s bloody, sundered body and had learned the ax had been wielded by Frank. He was angrier now because that old rage had never subsided; it had fed on itself all these years, and on the humiliation of repeatedly failing to get his hands on Frank when the opportunities to do so arose. Now it was a midnight-black bile that coursed in his veins and bathed the muscles of his heart and nourished the cells of his brain where visions of vengeance were spawned in profusion.
Refusing to be cowed by her stare, he seized her thin arm and jerked her violently to her feet.
Verbina made a soft, woeful sound upon her separation from her sister, as if they were Siamese twins, for God’s sake, as if tissue had been torn, bones split.
Shoving his face close to Violet’s, he sprayed her with spittle as he spoke: “Our mother had one cat, just one, she liked things clean and neat, she wouldn’t approve of this mess, this stinking brood of yours.”
“Who cares,” Violet said in a tone of voice that was at once disinterested and mocking. “She’s dead.”
Grabbing her by both arms, he lifted her off her feet. The chair behind her fell over as he swung her away from it. He slammed her up against the pantry door so hard that the sound was like an explosion, rattling the loose kitchen windows and some dirty silverware on a nearby counter. He had the satisfaction of seeing her face contort with pain and her eyes roll back in her head as she nearly passed out from the blow. If he had smashed her against the door any harder, her spine might have cracked. He dug his fingers cruelly into the pale flesh of her upper arms, pulled her away from the door, and slammed her into it again, though not as hard as before, just making the point that it might have been as hard, that it could be as hard the next time if she displeased him.
Her head had fallen forward, for she was teetering on the edge of consciousness. Effortlessly, he held her against the door, with her feet eight inches off the floor, as if she weighed nothing at all, thereby forcing her to consider his incredible strength. He waited for her to come around.
She was having difficulty getting her breath, and when at last she stopped gasping and raised her head to face him, he expected to see a different Violet. He had never struck her before. A fateful line had been crossed, one over which he never expected to trespass. With his promise to his mother in mind, he had kept his sisters safe from the often dangerous world outside, provided them with food, kept them warm in cold weather and cool in the heat, dry when it rained, but year after year he had performed his brotherly duties with growing frustration, appalled by their increasingly shameless and mysterious behavior. Now he realized that disciplining them was a natural part of protecting them; up in Heaven, his mother had probably despaired of his ever realizing the need for discipline. Thanks to his rage, he had stumbled upon enlightenment. It felt good to hurt Violet a little, just enough to bring her to her senses and to prevent her from spiraling further into the decadence and animal sensuality to which she had surrendered herself. He knew he was right to punish her. He waited eagerly for her to lift her head and face him, for he knew that they had entered a new relationship and that the awareness of these profound changes would be evident in her eyes.
At last, breathing somewhat normally, she raised her head and met Candy’s gaze. To his surprise, none of his own enlightenment had been visited upon his sister. Her white-blond hair had fallen across her face, and she stared through it, like a jungle animal peering through its wind-tossed mane. In her icy blue eyes, he perceived something stranger and more primitive than anything he had seen there before. A gleeful wildness. Indefinable hungers. Need. Though she had been hurt when he had thrown her against the pantry door, a smile played on her full lips again. She opened her mouth, and he felt her hot breath against his face as she said, “You’re strong. Even the cats like the feel of your strong hands on me ... and so does Verbina.”