The Bad Place (13 page)

During the musicians’ break, Bobby and Julie sipped beer at a table near the edge of the parquet dance floor. They talked about everything except Thomas, and eventually they got around to The Dream—specifically, how to furnish the seaside bungalow if they ever bought it. Though they would not spend a fortune on furniture, they agreed that they could indulge themselves with two pieces from the swing era: maybe a bronze and marble Art Deco cabinet by Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann, and
definitely
a Wurlitzer jukebox.

“The model 950,” Julie said. “It was gorgeous. Bubble tubes. Leaping gazelles on the front panels.”

“Fewer than four thousand were made. Hitler’s fault. Wurlitzer retooled for war production. The model 500 is pretty too —or the 700.”

“Nice, but they’re not the 950.”

“Not as
expensive
as the 950, either.”

“You’re counting pennies when we’re talking ultimate beauty?”

He said, “Ultimate beauty is the Wurlitzer 950?”

“That’s right. What else?”

“To me, you’re the ultimate beauty.”

“Sweet,” she said. “But I still want the 950.”

“To you, aren’t
I
the ultimate beauty?” He batted his eyelashes.

“To me, you’re just a difficult man who won’t let me have my Wurlitzer 950,” she said, enjoying the game.

“What about a Seeburg? A Packard Pla-mor? Okay. A Rock-ola?”

“Rock-ola made some beautiful boxes,” she agreed. “We’ll buy one of those
and
the Wurlitzer 950.”

“You’ll spend our money like a drunken sailor.”

“I was born to be rich. Stork got confused. Didn’t deliver me to the Rockefellers.”

“Wouldn’t you like to get your hands on that stork now?”

“Got him years ago. Cooked him, ate him for Christmas dinner. He was delicious, but I’d still rather be a Rockefeller.”

“Happy?” Bobby asked.

“Delirious. And it’s not just the beer. I don’t know why, but tonight I feel better than I’ve felt in ages. I think we’re going to get where we want to go, Bobby. I think we’re going to retire early and live a long happy life by the sea.”

His smile faded as she talked. Now he was frowning.

She said, “What’s wrong with you, Sourpuss?”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t kid me. You’ve been a little strange all day. You’ve tried to hide it, but something’s on your mind.”

He sipped his beer. Then: “Well, you’ve got this good feeling that everything’s going to be fine, but I’ve got a bad feeling.”

“You? Mr. Blue Skies?”

He was still frowning. “Maybe you should confine yourself to office work for a while, stay off the firing line.”

“Why?”

“My bad feeling.”

“Which is?”

“That I’m going to lose you.”

“Just try.”

WITH ITS invisible baton, the wind conducted a chorus of whispery voices in the hedgerow. The dense Eugenias formed a seven-foot-high wall around three sides of the two-acre property, and they would have been higher than the house itself if Candy had not used power trimmers to chop off the tops of them a couple of times each year.

He opened the waist-high, wrought-iron gate between the two stone pilasters, and stepped out onto the graveled shoulder of the county road. To his left, the two-lane blacktop wound up into the hills for another couple of miles. To his right, it dropped down toward the distant coast, past houses on lots that were more parsimoniously proportioned the nearer they were to the shore, until in town they were only a tenth as big as the Pollard place. As the land descended westward, lights were clustered in ever greater concentration—then stopped abruptly, several miles away, as if crowding against a black wall; that wall was the night sky and the lightless expanse of the deep, cold sea.

Candy moved along the high hedge, until he sensed that he had reached the place where Frank had stood. He held up both big hands, letting the wind-fluttered leaves tremble against his palms, as if the foliage might impart to him some psychic residue of his brother’s brief visit. Nothing.

Parting the branches, he peered through the gap at the house, which looked larger at night than it really was, as if it had eighteen or twenty rooms instead of ten. The front windows were dark; along the side, toward the back, where the light was filtered through greasy chintz curtains, a kitchen window was filled with a yellow glow. But for that one light, the house might have appeared abandoned. Some of the Victorian gingerbread had warped and broken away from the eaves. The porch roof was sagging, and a few railing balusters were broken, and the front steps were swaybacked. Even by the meager light of the low crescent moon, he could see the house needed painting; bare wood, like glimpses of dark bone, showed in many places, and the remaining paint was either peeling or as translucent as an albino’s skin.

Candy tried to put himself in Frank’s mind, to imagine why Frank kept returning. Frank was afraid of Candy, and he had reason to be. He was afraid of his sisters, too, and of all the memories that the house held for him, so he should have stayed away. But he crept back with frequency, in search of something
_—
perhaps something that even he did not understand.

Frustrated, Candy let the branches fall together, retraced his steps along the hedge, and stopped at one gatepost, then the other, searching for the spot where Frank had fended off the cats and smashed Samantha’s skull. Though far milder now than it had been earlier, the wind nevertheless had dried the blood that had stained the stones, and darkness hid the residue. Still, Candy was sure he could find the killing place. He gingerly touched the pilaster high and low, on all four faces, as if he expected a portion of it to be hot enough to sear his skin. But though he patiently traced the outlines of the rough stones and the mortar seams, too much time had passed; even his exceptional talents could not extract his brother’s lingering aura.

He hurried along the cracked and canted walkway, out of the chilly night and into the stiflingly warm house again, into the kitchen, where his sisters were sitting on the blankets in the cats’ corner. Verbina was behind Violet, a comb in one hand and a brush in the other, grooming her sister’s flaxen hair.

Candy said, “Where’s Samantha?”

Tilting her head, looking up at him perplexedly, Violet said, “I told you. Dead.”

“Where’s the
body?”

“Here,” Violet said, making a sweeping gesture with both hands to indicate the quiescent felines sprawled and curled around her.

“Which one?” Candy asked. Half of the creatures were so still that any of them might have been the dead one.

“All,” Violet said. “They’re all Samantha now.”

Candy had been afraid of that. Each time one of the cats died, the twins drew the rest of the pack into a circle, placed the corpse at the center, and without speaking commanded the living to partake of the dead.

“Damn,” Candy said.

“Samantha still lives, she’s still a part of us,” Violet said. Her voice was as low and whispery as before, but dreamier than usual. “None of our pusses ever really leaves us. Part of him ... or her ... stays in each of us ... and we’re all stronger because of that, stronger and purer, and always together, always and forever.”

Candy did not ask if his sisters had shared in the feast, for he already knew the answer. Violet licked the corner of her mouth, as if remembering the taste, and her moist lips glistened; a moment later Verbina’s tongue slid across her lips too.

Sometimes Candy felt as if the twins were members of an entirely different species from him, for he could seldom fathom their attitudes and behavior. And when they looked at him—Verbina, in perpetual silence—their faces and eyes revealed nothing of their thoughts or feelings; they were as inscrutable as the cats.

He only dimly grasped the twins’ bond with the cats. It was their blessed mother’s gift to them just as his many talents were his mother’s generous bequest to him, so he did not question the rightness or wholesomeness of it.

Still, he wanted to hit Violet because she hadn’t saved the body for him. She had known Frank had touched it, that it could be of use to Candy, but she had not saved it until he’d awakened, had not come to wake him early. He wanted to smash her, but she was his sister, and he couldn’t hurt his sisters; he had to provide for them, protect them. His mother was watching.

“The parts that couldn’t be eaten?” he asked.

Violet gestured toward the kitchen door.

He switched on the outside light and stepped onto the back porch. Small knobs of bone and vertebrae were scattered like queerly shaped dice on the unpainted floorboards. Only two sides of the porch were open; the house angled around the other two flanks of it, and in the niche where the house walls met, Candy found a piece of Samantha’s tail and scraps of fur, jammed there by the night wind. The half-crushed skull was on the top step. He snatched it up and moved down onto the unmown lawn.

The wind, which had been declining since late afternoon, suddenly stopped altogether. The cool air would have carried the faintest sound a great distance; but the night was hushed.

Usually Candy could touch an object and see who had recently handled it before him. Sometimes he could even see where some of those people had gone after putting the object down, and when he went looking for them, they were always to be found where his clairvoyance had led him. Frank had killed the cat, and Candy hoped that contact with the remains would spark an inner vision that would put him on his brother’s trail again.

Every speck of flesh had been stripped from Samantha’s broken pate, and its contents had been emptied as well. Picked clean, licked smooth, dried by the wind, it might have been a portion of a fossil from a distant age. Candy’s mind was filled not with images of Frank but of the other cats and Verbina and Violet, and finally he threw down the damaged skull in disgust.

His frustration sharpened his anger. He felt the need rising in him. He dared not let the need bloom ... but resisting it was infinitely harder than resisting the charms of women and other sins. He
hated
Frank. He hated him so much, so deeply, had hated him so constantly for seven years, that he could not bear the thought that he had slept through an opportunity to destroy him.

Need....

He dropped to his knees on the weedy lawn. He fisted his hands and hunched his shoulders and clenched his teeth, trying to make a rock of himself, an unmovable mass that would not be swayed one inch by the most urgent need, not one hair’s width by even the most dire necessity, the most demanding hunger, the most passionate craving. He prayed to his mother to give him strength. The wind began to pick up again, and he believed it was a devil wind that would blow him toward temptation, so he fell forward on the ground and dug his fingers into the yielding earth, and he repeated his mother’s sacred name—Roselle—whispered her name furiously into the grass and dirt, again and again, desperate to quell the germination of his dark need. Then he wept. Then he got up. And went hunting.

FRANK WENT to a theater and sat through a movie but was unable to concentrate on the story. He ate dinner at El Torito, though he didn’t really taste the food; he just pushed down the enchiladas and rice as if feeding fuel to a furnace. For a couple of hours he drove aimlessly back and forth across the middle and southern reaches of Orange County, staying on the move only because, for the time being, he felt safer when in motion. Finally he returned to the motel.

He kept probing at the dark wall in his mind, behind which his entire life was concealed. Diligently, he sought the tiniest chink through which he might glimpse a memory. If he could find one crack, he was sure that the entire façade of amnesia would come tumbling down. But the barrier was smooth and flawless.

When he switched off the lights, he could not sleep.

The Santa Anas had abated. He could not blame his insomnia on the noisy winds.

Although the amount of blood on the sheets had been minimal and though it had dried since he’d awakened from his nap earlier in the day, he decided that the thought of lying in blood-stained bedclothes was preventing him from nodding off. He snapped on a lamp, stripped the bed, turned up the heat, stretched out in the darkness again, and tried to sleep without covers. No good.

He told himself that his amnesia—and the resultant loneliness and sense of isolation—was keeping him awake. Although there was some truth in that, he knew that he was kidding himself.

The real reason he could not sleep was fear. Fear of where he might go while sleepwalking. Fear of what he might do. Fear of what he might find in his hands when he woke up.

DEREK SLEPT. In the other bed. Snoring softly.

Thomas couldn’t sleep. He got up and stood by the window, looking out. The moon was gone. The dark was very big.

He didn’t like the night. It scared him. He liked sunshine, and flowers all bright, and grass looking green, and blue sky all over so you felt like there was a lid on the world keeping everything down here on the ground and in place. At night all the colors were gone, and the world was empty, like somebody took the lid off and let in a lot of nothingness, and you looked up at all that nothingness and you felt you might just float away like the colors, float up and away and out of the world, and then in the morning when they put the lid back on, you wouldn’t be here, you’d be out there somewhere, and you could never get back in again. Never.

He put his fingertips against the window. The glass was cool.

He wished he could sleep away the night. Usually he slept okay. Not tonight.

He was worried about Julie. He always worried about her a little. A brother was supposed to worry. But this wasn’t a little worry. This was a lot.

It started just that morning. A funny feeling. Not funny ha-ha. Funny strange. Funny scary. Something real bad’s going to happen to Julie, the feeling said. Thomas got so upset, he tried to warn her. He TVed a warning to her. They said the pictures and voices and music on the TV were sent through the air, which he first thought was a lie, that they were making fun of his being dumb, expecting him to believe
anything,
but then Julie said it was true, so sometimes he tried to TV his thoughts to her, because if you could send pictures and music and voices through the air, thoughts ought to be easy.
Be careful, Julie,
he TVed.
Look out, be careful, something bad’s going to happen.