The Bad Place (11 page)

“We’ll have fun.”

“It’s bad out,” he repeated. He chewed on his lower lip.

At times he was eager to venture out into the world, but at other times he withdrew from the prospect as if the air beyond Cielo Vista was purest poison. Thomas could never be argued or cajoled out of that agoraphobic mood, and Julie knew not to push the issue.

“Maybe next time,” she said.

“Maybe,” Thomas said, looking at the floor. “But today’s
really
bad. I ... sort of feel it ... the badness . . . cold all over my skin.”

For a while Bobby and Julie tried various subjects, but Thomas was talked out. He said nothing, did not make eye contact, and gave no indication that he even heard them.

They sat together in silence, then, until after a few minutes Thomas said, “Don’t go yet.”

“We’re not going,” Bobby assured him.

“Just ’cause I can’t talk ... don’t mean I want you gone.”

“We know that, kiddo,” Julie said.

“I ... need you.”

“I need you too,” Julie said. She lifted one of her brother’s thick-fingered hands and kissed his knuckles.

AFTER BUYING an electric razor at a drugstore, Frank Pollard shaved and washed as best he could in a service-station restroom. He stopped at a shopping mall and bought a suitcase, underwear, socks, a couple of shirts, another pair of jeans, and incidentals. In the mall parking lot, with the stolen Chevy rocking slightly in the gusting wind, he packed the other purchases in the suitcase. Then he drove to a motel in Irvine, where he checked in under the name of George Farris, using one of the sets of ID he possessed, making a cash deposit because he lacked a credit card. He had cash in abundance.

He could have stayed in the Laguna area; but he sensed that he should not remain in one place too long. Maybe his wariness was based on hard experience. Or maybe he had been on the run for so long that he had become a creature of motion who could never again be truly comfortable at rest.

The motel room was large, clean, and tastefully decorated. The designer had been swept up in the southwest craze: whitewashed wood, rattan side chairs with cushions upholstered in peach and pale-blue patterns, seafoam-green drapes. Only the mottled-brown carpet, evidently chosen for its ability to conceal stains and wear, spoiled the effect; by contrast, the lighthued furnishings seemed not merely to stand on the dark carpet but to float above it, creating spatial illusions that were disconcerting, even slightly eerie.

For most of the afternoon Frank sat on the bed, using a pile of pillows as a backrest. The television was on, but he did not watch it. Instead, he probed at the black hole of his past. Hard as he tried, he could still not recall anything of his life prior to waking in the alleyway the previous night. Some strange and exceedingly malevolent shape loomed at the edge of recollection, however, and he wondered uneasily if forgetfulness actually might be a blessing.

He needed help. Given the cash in the flight bag and his two sets of ID, he suspected that he would be unwise to seek assistance from the authorities. He withdrew the Yellow Pages from one of the nightstands and studied the listings for private investigators. But a PI called to mind old Humphrey Bogart movies and seemed like an anachronism in this modern age. How could a guy in a trenchcoat and a snap-brimmed fedora help him recover his memory?

Eventually, with the wind singing threnodies at the window, Frank stretched out to get some of the sleep he had missed last night.

A few hours later, just an hour before dusk, he woke suddenly, whimpering, gasping for breath. His heart pounded furiously.

When he sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed, he saw that his hands were wet and scarlet. His shirt and jeans were smeared with blood. Some, though surely not all of it, was his own blood, for both of his hands bore deep, oozing scratches. His face stung, and in the bathroom, the mirror revealed two long scratches on his right cheek, one on his left cheek, and a fourth on his chin.

He could not understand how this could have happened in his sleep. If he had torn at himself in some bizarre dream frenzy—and he could recall no dream—or if someone else had clawed him while he slept, he would have awakened at once. Which meant that he had been awake when it had happened, then had stretched out on the bed again and gone back to sleep—and had forgotten the incident, just as he had forgotten his life prior to that alleyway last night.

He returned in panic to the bedroom and looked on the other side of the bed, then in the closet. He was not sure what he was looking for. Maybe a dead body. He found nothing.

The very thought of killing anyone made him sick. He knew he did not have the capacity to kill, except perhaps in self-defense. So who had scratched his face and hands? Whose blood was on him?

In the bathroom again, he stripped out of his stained clothes and rolled them into a tight bundle. He washed his face and hands. He had bought a styptic pencil along with other shaving gear; he used that to stop the scratches from bleeding.

When he met his own eyes in the mirror, they were so haunted that he had to look away.

Frank dressed in fresh clothes and snatched the car keys off the dresser. He was afraid of what he might find in the Chevy.

At the door, as he disengaged the dead bolt, he realized that neither the frame nor the door itself was smeared with blood. If he had left during the afternoon and returned, bleeding from his hands, he would not have had the presence of mind to wipe the door clean before climbing into bed. Anyway, he had seen no bloody washcloth or tissues with which a cleanup might have been accomplished.

Outside, the sky was clear; the westering sun was bright. The motel’s palm trees shivered in a cool wind, and a constant susurration rose from them, punctuated by an occasional series of hard clacks as the thick spines of the fronds met like snapping, wooden teeth.

The concrete walkway outside his room was not spotted with blood. The interior of the car was free of blood. No blood marked the dirty rubber mat in the trunk, either.

He stood by the open trunk, blinking at the sun-washed motel and parking lot around him. Three doors down, a man and woman in their twenties were unloading luggage from their black Pontiac. Another couple and their grade-school-age daughter were hurrying along the covered walkway, apparently heading toward the motel restaurant. Frank realized that he could not have gone out and committed murder and returned, blood-soaked and in broad daylight, without being seen.

In his room again, he went to the bed and studied the rumpled sheets. They were crimson-spotted, but not a fraction as saturated as they would have been if the attack—whatever its nature—had happened there. Of course, if all the blood was his, it might have spilled mostly on the front of his shirt and jeans. But he still could not believe that he had clawed himself in his sleep—one hand ripping at the other, both hands tearing at his face—without waking.

Besides, he had been scratched by someone with sharp fingernails. His own nails were blunt, bitten down to the quick.

SOUTH OF Cielo Vista Care Home, between Corona Del Mar and Laguna, Bobby tucked the Samurai into a corner of a parking lot at a public beach. He and Julie walked down to the shore.

The sea was marbled blue and green, with thin veins of gray. The water was dark in the troughs, lighter and more colorful where the waves rose and were half pierced by the rays of the fat, low sun. In serried ranks the breakers moved toward the strand, big but not huge, wearing caps of foam that the wind snatched from them.

Surfers in black wetsuits paddled their boards out toward where the swell rose, seeking a last ride before twilight. Others, also in wetsuits, sat around a couple of big coolers, drinking hot beverages from thermos bottles or Coors from the can. The day was too cool for sunbathing, and except for the surfers, the beach was deserted.

Bobby and Julie walked south until they found a low knoll, far enough back from the water to escape the spray. They sat on the stiff grass that flourished in patches in the sandy, salt-tinged soil.

When at last she spoke, Julie said, “A place like this, with a view like this. Not a big place.”

“Doesn’t have to be. A living room, one bedroom for us and one for Thomas, maybe a cozy little den lined with books.”

“We don’t even need a dining room, but I’d like a big kitchen.”

“Yeah. A kitchen you can really live in.”

She sighed. “Music, books, real home-cooked meals instead of junk food grabbed on the fly, lots of time to sit on the porch and enjoy the view—and the three of us together.”

That was the rest of The Dream: a place by the sea and— by otherwise living simply—enough financial security to retire twenty years early.

One of the things that had drawn Bobby to Julie—and Julie to him—was their shared awareness of the shortness of life. Everyone knew that life was too short, of course, but most people pushed that thought out of mind, living as if there were endless tomorrows. If most people weren’t able to deceive themselves about death, they could not have cared so passionately about the outcome of a ball game, the plot of a soap opera, the blatherings of politicians, or a thousand other things that actually meant nothing when considered against the inevitable fall of the endless night that finally came to everyone. They could not have endured to waste a minute standing in a supermarket line and would not have suffered hours in the company of bores or fools. Maybe a world lay beyond this one, maybe even Heaven, but you couldn’t count on it; you could count only on darkness. Self-deception in this case was a blessing. Neither Bobby nor Julie was a gloom-monger. She knew how to enjoy life as well as anyone, and so did he, even if neither of them could buy the fragile illusion of immortality that served most people as a defense against the unthinkable. Their awareness expressed itself not in anxiety or depression, but in a strong resolve not to spend their lives in a hurly-burly of meaningless activity, to find a way to finance long stretches of time together in their own serene little tide pool.

As her chestnut hair streamed in the wind, Julie squinted at the far horizon, which was filling up with honey-gold light as the sinking sun drizzled toward it. “What frightens Thomas about being out in the world is people, too many people. But he’d be happy in a little house by the sea, a quiet stretch of coast, few people. I’m sure he would.”

“It’ll happen,” Bobby assured her.

“By the time we build the agency big enough to sell, the southern coast will be too expensive. But north of Santa Barbara is pretty.”

“It’s a long coast,” Bobby said, putting an arm around her. “We’ll still be able to find a place in the south. And we’ll have time to enjoy it. We’re not going to live forever, but we’re young. Our numbers aren’t going to come up for years and years yet.”

But he remembered the premonition that had shivered through him in bed that morning, after they had made love, the feeling that something malevolent was out there in the windswept world, coming to take Julie away from him.

The sun had touched the horizon and begun to melt into it. The golden light deepened swiftly to orange and then to bloody red. The grass and tall weeds behind them rustled in the wind, and Bobby looked over his shoulder at the spirals of airborne sand that swirled across the slope between the beach and the parking lot, like pale spirits that had fled a graveyard with the coming of twilight. From the east a wall of night was toppling over the world. The air had grown downright cold.

CANDY SLEPT all day in the front bedroom that had once been his mother’s, breathing her special scent. Two or three times a week, he carefully shook a few drops of her favorite perfume—Chanel No. 5—onto a white, lace-trimmed handkerchief, which he kept on the dresser beside her silver comb-and-brush set, so each breath he took in the room reminded him of her. Occasionally he half woke from slumber to readjust the pillows or pull the covers more tightly around him, and the trace of perfume always lulled him as if it were a tranquilizer; each time he happily drifted back into his dreams.

He slept in sweatpants and a T-shirt, because he had a hard time finding pajamas large enough and because he was too modest to sleep in the nude or even in his underwear. Being unclothed embarrassed Candy, even when no one was around to see him.

All of that long Thursday afternoon, hard winter sun filled the world outside, but little got past the flower-patterned shades and rose-colored drapes that guarded the two windows. The few times he woke and blinked at the shadows, Candy saw only the pearl-gray glimmer of the dresser mirror and glints from the silver-framed photographs on the nightstand. Drugged by sleep and by the freshly applied perfume on the handkerchief, he could easily imagine that his beloved mother was in her rocking chair, watching over him, and he felt safe.

He came fully awake shortly before sunset and lay for a while with his hands folded behind his head, staring up at the underside of the canopy that arched over the four-poster; he could not see it, but he knew it was there, and in his mind he could conjure up a vivid image of the fabric’s rosebud pattern. For a while he thought about his mother, about the best times of his life, now all gone, and then he thought about the girl, the boy, and the woman he had killed last night. He tried to recall the taste of their blood, but that memory was not as intense as those involving his mother.

After a while he switched on a bedside lamp and looked around at the comfortably familiar room: rosebud wallpaper; rosebud bedspread; rosebud blinds; rose-colored drapes and carpets; dark mahogany bed, dresser, and highboy. Two afghans—one green like the leaves of a rose, one the shade of the petals—were draped over the arms of the rocking chair.

He went into the adjoining bathroom, locked and tested the door. The only light came from the fluorescent panels in the soffit, over the sink, for he had long ago lathered black paint on the small high window.