The Bad Place (47 page)

More than ten minutes passed without contact, and Candy started to worry that the intruder had gone away for good. But suddenly he was back. This time the contact was strong, more intimate than ever.

When Candy sensed that the visitor was more confident, he knew the time had come to act. He pictured his mind as a steel trap, the visitor as an inquisitive mouse, and he pictured the trap springing, the bar pinning the visitor to the killplate.

Shocked, the visitor tried to pull away. Candy held him and pushed across the telepathic bridge between them, trying to storm his adversary’s mind to find out who he was, where he was, and what he wanted.

Candy had no telepathic power of his own, nothing to equal even the weak telepathic gifts of the intruder; he had never read anyone’s mind before, and he did not know how to go about it. As it turned out, he did not need to do anything except open himself and receive what the visitor gave him. Thomas was his name, and he was terrified of Candy, of having Done Something Really Dumb, and of putting Julie in danger; that trinity of terrors shattered his mental defenses and caused him to disgorge a flood of information.

In fact, there was too much information for Candy to make sense of it, a babble of words and images. He tried desperately to sort through it for clues to Thomas’s identity and location.

With some astonishment, Candy realized that the visitor was someone with a subnormal intellect—he even picked up the term “Down’s syndrome”—and he was afraid that he was not going to be able to sort enough meaningful thoughts from the babble to get a fix on Thomas’s location. Depending on the size of his IQ, Thomas might not know where Cielo Vista Care Home was, even though he apparently lived there.

Then a series of images spun out of Thomas’s mind, a well-linked chain of serial memories that still caused him some emotional pain: the trip to Cielo Vista in a car with Julie and Bobby, on the day they first checked him into the place. This was different from most of Thomas’s other thoughts and memories, in that it was richly detailed and so clearly retained that it unreeled like a length of motion-picture film, giving Candy all he needed to know. He saw the highways over which they had driven that day, saw the route markers flashing past the car window, saw every landmark at every turn, all of which Thomas had struggled mightily to memorize because all through the trip he kept thinking,
If I don’t like it there, if people are mean there, if it’s too scary there, if it’s too much being alone there, I got to know how I find the way back to Bobby and Julie anytime I want, remember this, remember all of this, turn there at the 7-11, right there at the 7-11, don’t forget that 7-11, and now go past those three palm trees. What if they don’t come visit me? No, that’s a bad thing to think, they love me, they’ll come. But what if they don’t? Look there, remember that house, you go past that house, remember that house with the blue roof—

Candy got it all, as precise a fix as he could have obtained from a geographer who would have spoken precisely in degrees and minutes of longitude and latitude. It was more than he needed to know to make use of his gift. He opened the trap and let Thomas go.

He got up from the rocker.

He pictured Cielo Vista Care Home as it appeared so exquisitely detailed in Thomas’s memory.

He pictured Thomas’s room on the first floor of the north wing, at the northwest corner.

Darkness, billions of hot sparks spinning in the void, velocity.

BECAUSE JULIE was in a let‘s-move-and-get-it-done mood, they had stopped at the house only fifteen minutes, long enough to throw toiletries and a change of clothes in an overnight bag. At McDonald’s, on Chapman Avenue in Orange, she swung by the drive-through window and got dinner to eat on the way: Big Macs, fries, diet colas. Before they reached the Costa Mesa Freeway, while Bobby was still divvying up the extra packets of mustard and opening the containers that held the Big Macs, Julie had clipped the radar detector to the rearview mirror, plugged it in the Toyota’s cigarette lighter, and switched it on. Bobby had never before eaten fast food at high speed, but he figured they averaged eighty-five miles an hour north on the Costa Mesa to the Riverside Freeway west to the Orange Freeway north, and he was still finishing his french fries when they were only a couple of exits away from the Foothill Freeway east of Los Angeles. Though the rush hour was well past and the traffic unusually light, maintaining that pace required a lot of lane changing and nerve.

He said, “We keep this up, I’ll never have a chance to die from the cholesterol in this Big Mac.”

“Lee says cholesterol doesn’t kill us.”

“Is that what he says?”

“He says we live forever, and all cholesterol can do is move us out of this life a little sooner. Same thing must be true if I slip up and roll this sucker a few times.”

“I don’t think that’ll happen,” he said. “You’re the best driver I’ve ever seen.”

“Thank you, Bobby. You’re the best passenger.”

“The only thing I wonder ...”

“Yeah?”

“If we don’t really die, just move on, and I don’t have to worry about anything—why the hell did I bother to get
diet
colas?”

THOMAS ROLLED off the bed, onto his feet. “Derek, go, get out, he’s coming!”

Derek was watching a horse talking on TV, and he didn’t hear Thomas.

The TV was in the room’s middle, between the beds, and by the time Thomas got there and grabbed Derek to make him listen, a funny sound was all around them, not funny ha-ha but funny weird, like somebody whistling but not whistling. There was wind, too, a couple of puffs, not warm or cold either, but it made Thomas shiver when it blew on him.

Pulling Derek off his chair, Thomas said, “Bad Thing’s coming, you get out, you go, like I said before,
now!”

Derek just made a dumb face at him, then smiled, like he figured Thomas was pretending to be funny the way the Three Stooges pretended. He’d forgot all about the promise he made Thomas. He’d thought the Bad Thing was going to be poached eggs for breakfast, and when poached eggs never showed up on his plate, he figured he was safe, but now he wasn’t safe and didn’t know it.

More funny-weird whistling. More wind.

Giving Derek a shove, making him get started for the door, Thomas shouted, “Run!”

The whistling stopped, the wind stopped, and all of a sudden from nowhere the Bad Thing was there. Between them and the open door.

It was a man, like Thomas already knew it was, but it was more than just a man. It was darkness poured in the shape of a man, like a piece of the night itself that came in through the window, and not just because it wore a black T-shirt and black pants but because it was all deep dark inside, you could tell.

Right away Derek was afraid. Nobody needed to tell him this was a Bad Thing, not now when he could see it with his own eyes. But he didn’t see it was too late to run, and he went straight at the Bad Thing, like maybe he could push past it, which must have been what he was figuring because even Derek wasn’t dumb enough to figure he could knock it down, it was so big.

The Bad Thing grabbed him and lifted him before he had any chance to get around it, lifted him right up off the floor, like he didn’t weigh any more than a pillow. Derek screamed, and the Bad Thing slammed him against the wall so hard his scream stopped, and pictures of Derek’s mom and dad and brother fell off the wall, not the one where Derek got slammed but another wall all the way around the room from him and over his bed.

The Bad Thing was so fast. That was the worst thing about it, how awful fast it was. It slammed Derek against the wall, Derek’s mouth fell open but no more sound came from him, the Bad Thing slammed him again, right away, harder, though the first time was hard enough for anybody, and Derek’s eyes went funny. The Bad Thing took him away from the wall and slammed him down on the worktable. The table kind of shivered like it would fall apart, but it didn’t. Derek’s head was over the table edge, hanging down, so Thomas was looking at his face, upside-down eyes blinking fast, upside-down mouth open real wide but no sound coming out. He looked up from Derek’s face, looked right across Derek’s body at the Bad Thing, which was looking at him and grinning, like all this was a joke, funny ha-ha, which it wasn’t, no way. Then it picked up the scissors on the edge of the worktable, the ones Thomas used to make his picture poems, the ones that almost fell on the floor when it slammed Derek on the table. It made the scissors go into Derek and bring the blood out of him, into poor Derek who wouldn’t hurt no one himself, except himself, who wouldn’t know
how
to hurt anyone. And the Bad Thing made the scissors go in again and bring more blood out of another place in Derek, and in again, and again. Then blood wasn’t coming out of just four places on Derek’s chest and belly where the scissors had been made to go in, but out of his mouth and nose too. The Bad Thing lifted Derek off the table, the scissors still sticking out of his front, and threw him like he was just a pillow. No, like he was a garbage bag, threw him the way the Santa Nation Men threw the garbage bags onto their Santa Nation Truck. Derek landed on his bed, on his back on his bed, with the scissors still in him, and didn’t move and was gone to the Bad Place, you could tell. And the worst thing was it all happened so fast, faster than Thomas could think what to do to stop it.

Footsteps in the hall, people running.

Thomas yelled for help.

Pete, one of the aides, showed up in the doorway. Pete saw Derek on the bed, scissors in him, blood coming out everywhere, and he got afraid, you could see him get it. He turned to the Bad Thing and said, “Who—”

The Bad Thing grabbed him by the neck, and Pete made a sound like something was stuck in his throat. He put both his hands on the Bad Thing’s arm, which seemed bigger than Pete’s two arms together, but he couldn’t make the Bad Thing let go. The Bad Thing lifted him by his neck, making his chin turn up and his head bend back, and then took hold of him by the belt, too, and pitched him back out the door, into the hall. Pete hit a nurse who came running up just then, and they both went down on the floor out there in the hall, all tangled up, her screaming.

All of this in a few clock ticks. So
fast.

The Bad Thing made the door shut with a bang, saw you couldn’t lock it, then did the funniest thing of all, funny-weird, funny-scary. He held both his hands out at the door, and this blue light came from his hands the way not-blue came from a flashlight. Sparks flew from hinges and around the knob and all around the door edges. Everything metal smoked and turned all soft, like butter when you put it on mashed potatoes. It was a Fire Door. They said you had to keep your door closed if you ever saw fire in the hall, not try to run in the hall, but keep your door closed and stay put. They called it a Fire Door because fire couldn’t get through it, they said, and Thomas always wondered why they didn’t call it a Fire Can’t Get Through It Door, but he never asked. The thing was, a Fire Door was all metal, so it couldn’t burn, but now it melted around the edges, and so did the metal frame, they melted together, it didn’t look like you could ever get through that door again.

People started pounding on the door from out there in the hall, tried to make it open, couldn’t, and shouted for Thomas and Derek. Thomas knew some voices and who they belonged to, and he wanted to yell for them to help quick because he was in trouble, but he couldn’t make a sound any better than poor Derek.

The Bad Thing made the blue light stop. Then it turned and looked at Thomas. It smiled at him. It didn’t have a nice smile. It said, “Thomas?”

Thomas was surprised he could stand up, he was so scared. He was against the wall by the window, and he thought of maybe making the lock open on the window and push it up and get out, which he knew how to do because of Emergency Drills. But he knew he wasn’t fast enough, no way, because the Bad Thing was the fastest he ever saw.