The Bad Place (32 page)

“It’s adjacent to Santa Barbara,” Julie said.

“So Bobby tells me. But I don’t remember being there. Except ...”

“What?”

Frank went to the window and looked out toward the distant sea, above which the sky was now entirely blue. A few early gulls swooped in arcs so huge and smoothly described that their exuberance was thrilling to watch. Clearly, Frank was neither thrilled by the birds nor charmed by the view.

Finally, still facing the window, he said, “I don’t recall being in El Encanto Heights ... except that every time I hear the name, my stomach sort of sinks, you know, like I’m on a roller coaster that’s just taken a plunge. And when I try to think about El Encanto, strain to remember it, my heart pounds, and my mouth goes dry, and it’s a little harder to get my breath. So I think I must be repressing any memories I have of the place, maybe because something happened to me there, something bad ... something I’m too scared to remember.”

Bobby said, “His driver’s license expired seven years ago, and according to the DMV’s records, he never tried to renew it. In fact, sometime this year he’d have been weeded out of even their dead files, so we were lucky to find this before they expunged it.” He laid two more printouts on the desk. “Move over, Holmes
and
Sam Spade.”

“What’re these?”

“Arrest reports. Frank was stopped for traffic violations, once in San Francisco a little more than six years ago. The second time was on Highway 101, north of Ventura, five years ago. He didn’t have a valid driver’s license either time and, because of odd behavior, was taken into custody.”

The photographs that were a part of both arrest records showed a slightly younger, even pudgier man who was without a doubt their current client.

Bobby pushed aside some of the money and sat on the edge of her desk. “He escaped from jail both times, so they’re looking for him even after all these years, though probably not too hard, since he wasn’t arrested for a major crime.”

Frank said, “I draw a blank on that too.”

“Neither report indicates
how
he escaped,” Bobby said, “but I suspect he didn’t saw his way through the bars or dig a tunnel or whittle a gun out of a bar of soap or use any of the long-accepted, traditional methods of jailbreak. Oh, no, not our Frank.”

“He teleported,” Hal guessed. “Vanished when no one was looking.”

“I’d bet on it,” Bobby agreed. “And after that he began to carry false ID good enough to satisfy any cop who pulled him over.”

Looking at the papers before her, Julie said, “Well, Frank, at least we know this is your real name, and we’ve nailed down a real address for you up there in Santa Barbara County, not just another motel room. We’re beginning to make headway.”

Bobby said, “Move over, Holmes, Spade,
and
Miss Marple.”

Unable to embrace their optimism, Frank returned to the chair in which he’d been sitting earlier. “Headway. But not enough. And not fast enough.” He leaned forward with his arms on his thighs, hands clasped between his spread knees, and stared morosely at the floor. “Something unpleasant just occurred to me. What if I’m not only making mistakes with my clothes when I reconstitute myself? What if I’ve
already
begun to make mistakes with my own biology too? Nothing major. Nothing visible. Hundreds or thousands of tiny mistakes on a cellular level. That would explain why I feel so lousy, so tired and sore. And if my brain tissue isn’t coming back together right ... that would explain why I’m confused, fuzzy-headed, unable to read or do math.”

Julie looked at Hal, at Bobby, and knew that both men wanted to allay Frank’s fear but were unable to do so because the scenario that he had outlined was not only possible but likely.

Frank said, “The brass buckle looked perfectly normal until Bobby touched it ... then it turned to dust.”

ALL NIGHT long, when sleep made Thomas’s head empty, ugly dreams filled it up. Dreams of eating small live things. Dreams of drinking blood. Dreams of being the Bad Thing.

He finished sleeping all of a sudden, sitting up in bed, trying to scream but unable to find any sounds in himself. For a while he sat there, shaking, being afraid, breathing so hard and fast his chest ached.

The sun was back, and the night was gone away, and that made him feel better. Getting out of bed, he stepped into his slippers. His pajamas were cold with sweat. He shivered. He pulled on a robe. He went to the window, looked out and up, liking the blue sky very much. Leftover rain made the green lawn look soggy, the sidewalks darker than usual, and the dirt in the flowerbeds almost black, and in the puddles you could see the blue sky again like a face in a mirror. He liked all of that, too, because the whole world looked clean and new after all the rain emptied out of the sky.

He wondered if the Bad Thing was still far away, or closer, but he didn’t reach out to it. Because last night it tried to hold him. Because it was so strong he almost couldn’t get away from it. And because even when he did get away, it tried to follow him. He’d felt it hanging on, coming back across the night with him, and he’d shaken it off real quick like, but maybe next time he wouldn’t be so lucky, and maybe it would come all the way, right into his room with him, not just its mind but the Bad Thing itself. He didn’t understand how that could happen, but somehow he knew it might. And if the Bad Thing came to The Home, being awake would be like being asleep with a nightmare filling up your head. Terrible things would happen, and there would be no hope.

Turning away from the window, starting toward the closed door to the bathroom, Thomas glanced at Derek’s bed and saw Derek dead. He was on his back. His face was bashed, bruised, swollen. His eyes were open big, you could see them shine in the light from the window and the low light from the lamp beside the bed. His mouth was open, too, like he was shouting, but all the sound was out of him like air out of a popped balloon, and he would not have any more sound in him ever again, you could tell. Blood was let out of him, too, lots of it, and a pair of scissors were stuck in his belly, deep in, with not much more than the handles showing, the same scissors Thomas used to clip pictures from magazines for his poems.

He felt a big twist of pain in his heart, like maybe somebody was sticking scissors in him too. But it wasn’t hurt-pain so much as what he called “feel-pain,” because it was losing Derek that he was feeling, not real hurt. It was as bad as real hurt, though, because Derek was his friend, he liked Derek. He was scared, too, because he somehow knew the Bad Thing had let the life out of Derek, the Bad Thing was here at The Home. Then he realized this could happen just the way things sometimes happened in TV stories, with the cops coming and believing that Thomas killed Derek, blaming Thomas, and everyone hating Thomas for what he’d done, but he hadn’t done it, and all the while the Bad Thing was still loose to do more killing, maybe even doing to Julie what it’d done to Derek.

The hurt, the fear for himself, the fear for Julie—all of it was too much. Thomas gripped the footboard of his own bed and closed his eyes and tried to get air into himself. It wouldn’t come. His chest was tight. Then the air came in, and so did an ugly-nasty smell, which in a while he realized was the stink of Derek’s blood, so he gagged and almost puked.

He knew he had to Get Control of Himself. The aides didn’t like it when you Lost Control of Yourself, so they Gave You Something For Your Own Good. He’d never Lost Control before and didn’t want to lose it now.

He tried not to smell the blood. Took long deep breaths. Made himself open his eyes to look at the dead body. He figured looking at it the second time wouldn’t be as bad as the first. He knew it was going to be there this time, so it wouldn’t be such a big surprise.

The surprise was—the body was gone.

Thomas closed his eyes, put one hand to his face, looked again between spread fingers. The body still wasn’t there.

He started shaking because what he thought, first, was that this was like some other TV stories he’d seen where nasty-dead bodies were walking around like live bodies, rotting and getting wormy, with bones showing in places, killing people for no reason and even sometimes eating them. He could never watch much of one of those stories. He sure didn’t want to be in one.

He was so scared he almost TVed to Bobby—
Dead people, look out, look out, dead people hungry and mean and walking around—
but stopped himself when he saw there wasn’t blood on Derek’s blankets and sheets. The bed wasn’t rumpled, either. Neatly made. No walking dead person was quick enough to get out of bed, change sheets and blankets, make everything right just in the few little seconds while Thomas’s eyes were closed. Then he heard the shower pouring down on the floor of the stall in the bathroom, and he heard Derek singing soft the way he always did when he washed himself. For just a moment, in his head, Thomas had a picture of a dead person taking a shower, trying to be neat, but rotten chunks were falling off with the dirt, showing more bones, clogging the drain. Then he realized Derek was never really dead. Thomas hadn’t really seen a body on the bed. What he’d seen was something else he’d learned from TV stories—he’d seen a vision. A sidekick vision. He was a sidekick.

Derek hadn’t been killed. What Thomas saw, just for a moment, was Derek being dead tomorrow or some other day after tomorrow. It might be something that would happen no matter what Thomas did to stop it, or it might be something that would happen only if he let it happen, but at least it wasn’t something that
already
happened.

He let go of the footboard and went to his worktable. His legs were shaky. He was glad to sit down. He opened the top drawer of the cabinet that stood beside the table. He saw his scissors in there, where they should be, with his colored pencils and pens and paper clips and Scotch tape and stapler—and a half-eaten Hershey’s bar in an open wrapper, which
shouldn’t
be in there because it would Draw Bugs. He took the candy out of the drawer and stuffed it in a pocket of his robe, reminding himself to put it in the refrigerator later.

For a while he stared at the scissors, listened to Derek sing in the shower, and thought how the scissors were jammed in Derek’s belly, letting all the music and other sounds out of him forever, sending him to the Bad Place. Finally he touched the black plastic handles. They felt all right, so he touched the metal blades, but that was bad, real bad, as if leftover lightning from a storm was in the blades and jumped into him when he touched them. Sizzling, crackling white light flashed through him. He snatched his hand back. His fingers tingled. He closed the drawer and hurried back to bed and sat there with the covers pulled around his shoulders the way TV Indians wrapped themselves in blankets when they sat at TV campfires.

The shower stopped. So did the singing. After a while Derek came out of the bathroom, followed by a cloud of damp, soapy-smelling air. He was dressed for the day. His wet hair was combed back from his forehead.

He was not a rotting dead person. He was all alive, every part of him, at least every part you could see, and no bones poked out anywhere.

“Good morning,” Derek said, the words slurred and muffled by his crooked mouth and too-big tongue. He smiled.

“Good morning.”

“You sleep good?”

“Yeah,” Thomas said.

“Breakfast soon.”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe sticky buns.”

“Maybe.”

“I like sticky buns.”

“Derek?”

“Huh?”

“If I ever tell you ...”

Derek waited, smiling.

Thomas thought out what he wanted to say, then continued: “If I ever tell you the Bad Thing’s coming, and I tell you to run, don’t just stand around like a dumb person. You just run. ”

Derek stared at him, thinking about it, still smiling, then after a while he said, “Sure, okay.”

“Promise?”

“Promise. But what’s a bad thing?”

“I don’t know really, for sure, but I’ll feel when it’s coming, I think, and tell you, and you’ll run.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere. Down the hall. Find some aides, stay with them.”

“Sure. You better wash. Breakfast soon. Maybe sticky buns.”

Thomas unwrapped himself from the blanket and got out of bed. He stepped into his slippers again and walked to the bathroom.

Just as Thomas was opening the bathroom door, Derek said, “You mean at breakfast?”

Thomas turned. “Huh?”

“You mean a bad thing might come at breakfast?”

“Might,” Thomas said.

“Could it be ... poached eggs?”

“Huh?”

“The bad thing—could it be poached eggs? I don’t like poached eggs, all slimy, yuck, that’d be real bad, not good at all like cereal and bananas and sticky buns.”

“No, no,” Thomas said. “The bad thing isn’t poached eggs. It’s a person, some funny-weird person. I’ll feel when it’s coming, and tell you, and you’ll run.”

“Oh. Yeah, sure. A person.”

Thomas went into the bathroom, closed the door. He didn’t have much beard. He had an electric razor, but he only used it a couple-few times a month, and today he didn’t need it. He brushed his teeth, though. And he peed. He made the water start in the shower. Only then did he let himself laugh, because enough time had passed so Derek wouldn’t even wonder if Thomas was laughing at him.

Poached eggs!

Though Thomas usually didn’t like seeing himself, seeing how lumpy and wrong and dumb his face was, he peeked at the steam-streaked mirror. One time long ago, past when he could remember, he’d been laughing when he’d happened to see himself in a mirror, and for once—surprise!—he hadn’t felt so bad about how he looked. When he laughed he looked more like a normal person. Just pretending to laugh didn’t make him look more normal, it had to be real laughing, and smiling didn’t do it, either, because a smile wasn’t enough of a laugh to change his face. In fact, a smile could sometimes look so sad, he couldn’t stand seeing himself at all.