The Bad Place (48 page)

It took a step toward him, and another step. “Are you Thomas?”

For a while he still couldn’t find the way to make sounds. He could just move his mouth and sort of pretend to make sounds. Then while he was doing that, he figured maybe if he told a lie and said he wasn’t Thomas, the Bad Thing would believe him and just go away. So when all of a sudden he could make sounds, and then words, he said, “No. I ... no ... not Thomas. He’s gone out in the world now, he’s got a big eye cue, he’s a high-end moron, so they moved him out in the world.”

The Bad Thing laughed. It was a laugh that had no funny in it, the worst Thomas ever heard. The Bad Thing said, “Who the hell are you, Thomas? Where do you come from? How come a dummy like you can do something I can’t?”

Thomas didn’t answer. He didn’t know what to say. He wished the people in the hall would stop pounding on the door and find some other way to get in, because pounding wasn’t working. Maybe they could call the cops and tell them to bring the Jaws of Life, yeah, the Jaws of Life, like you saw them use on the TV news when a person was in a wrecked car and couldn’t get out. They could use the Jaws of Life to pull open the door the way they pulled at smashed-up cars to get people out of them. He hoped the cops wouldn’t say, we’re sorry but we can only open car doors with the Jaws of Life, we can’t open Care Home doors, because then he was finished for sure.

“You going to answer me, Thomas?” the Bad Thing asked.

Derek’s TV chair got turned around in the fight, and now it was between Thomas and the Bad Thing. The Bad Thing held one hand out at the chair, just one, and the blue light went
whoosh!
and the chair blew up in splinters, like all the tooth-picks in the world. Thomas threw his hands over his face just fast enough so no splinters went in his eyes. Some went in the backs of his hands and even in his cheeks and chin, and he could feel some of them in his shirt, poking his belly, but he didn’t feel any hurt because he was so busy feeling scared.

He took his hands from his eyes right away, because he had to see where the Bad Thing was. Where it was was right on top of him, with soft bits of the chair’s insides floating in the air in front of its face.

“Thomas?” it said, and it put one of its big hands on the front of Thomas’s neck the way it did Pete a while ago.

Thomas heard words coming from himself, and he couldn’t believe he was making them, but he was. Then when he heard what he said to the Bad Thing, he couldn’t believe he said it, but he did: “You’re not Being Sociable.”

The Bad Thing grabbed him by the belt and kept hold of him by the neck and lifted him off the floor and pulled him away from the wall, then slammed him into the wall, the same way it did Derek, and, oh, it hurt worse than Thomas ever before hurt in his life.

THE INTERIOR garage door had a dead bolt but no security chain. Pocketing his keys, Clint entered the kitchen at ten minutes past eight and saw Felina sitting at the table, reading a magazine while she waited for him.

She looked up and smiled, and his heart thumped faster at the sight of her, just like in every sappy love story ever written. He wondered how this could have happened to him. He had been so self-contained before Felina. He had been proud of the fact that he needed no one for intellectual stimulation or emotional support, and that he was therefore not vulnerable to the pains and disappointments of human relationships. Then he had met her. When he caught his breath, he had been as vulnerable as anyone—and glad of it.

She looked terrific in a simple blue dress with a red belt and matching red shoes. She was so strong yet so gentle, so tough yet so fragile.

He went to her, and for a while they stood by the refrigerator, next to the sink, holding each other and kissing, neither of them speaking in either of the ways they could. Clint thought they would have been happy, just then, even if both of them had been deaf and mute, capable of neither lip reading nor sign language, because at that moment what made them happy was the very fact of being together, which no words could adequately express anyway.

Finally he said, “What a day! Can’t wait to tell you all about it. Let me clean up real quick, change clothes. We’ll be out of here by eight-thirty, go over to Caprabello’s, get a corner booth, some wine, some pasta, some garlic bread—”

Some
heartburn.

He laughed because it was true. They both loved Caprabello’s, but the food was spicy. They always suffered for the indulgence.

He kissed her again, and she sat down with her magazine, and he went through the dining room and down the hall to the bathroom. While he let the water run in the sink to get it hot, he plugged in his electric razor and began to shave, grinning at himself in the mirror because he was such a damned lucky guy.

THE BAD THING was right in his face, snarling at him, lots of questions, too many for Thomas to think about and answer even if he was sitting in a chair quiet and happy, instead of lifted off the floor and held against the wall with his whole back hurting so bad he had to cry. He kept saying, “I’m full up, I’m full up.” Always when he said that, people stopped asking him things or telling him things, they let him take time to make his head clear. But the Bad Thing was not like other people. It didn’t care if his head was clear, it just wanted answers. Who was Thomas? Who was his mother? Who was his father? Where did he come from? Who was Julie? Who was Bobby? Where was Julie? Where was Bobby?

Then the Bad Thing said, “Hell, you’re just a dummy. You don’t
know
the answers, do you? You’re just as stupid as you are stupid-looking.”

It pulled Thomas away from the wall, held him off the floor with one hand on his neck, so Thomas couldn’t breathe good. It slapped Thomas in the face, hard, and Thomas didn’t want to keep crying, but he couldn’t stop, he hurt and was scared.

“Why do they let people like you live?” the Bad Thing asked.

It let go of Thomas, and Thomas dropped on the floor. The Bad Thing looked down at him in a mean way that made Thomas angry almost as much as it made him scared. Which was funny-weird, because he almost never was angry. And this was the first time he was ever angry and scared both at the same time. But the Bad Thing was looking at him like he was just a bug or some dirt on the floor that had to be made clean.

“Why don’t they kill you people at birth? What’re you good for? Why don’t they kill you at birth and chop you up and make dog food out of you?”

Thomas had memories of how people, out there in the world, looked at him that way or said mean things, and how Julie always Told Them Off. She said Thomas didn’t have to be nice to people like that, said he could tell them they were Being Rude. Now Thomas was angry like he had Every Right To Be, and even if Julie never told him he could be angry about these things, he probably would be angry anyway, because some things you just
knew
were right or wrong.

The Bad Thing kicked him in the leg, and was going to kick him again, you could tell, but a noise was made at the window. Some of the aides were at the window. They broke a little square of glass and reached through, wanting to find the lock.

When the glass made a breaking sound, the Bad Thing turned from Thomas and held its hands up at the window, like it was asking the aides to stop wanting in. But Thomas knew what it was going to do was make the blue light.

Thomas wanted to warn the aides, but he figured nobody would hear him or listen to him until it was too late. So while the Bad Thing’s back was turned, he crawled across the floor, away from the Bad Thing, even if crawling hurt, even if he had to go through spots of Derek’s blood, all wet, and it made him sick on top of being angry and scared.

Blue light. Very bright.

Something exploded.

He heard glass falling and worse, like maybe not just the whole window blew out on the aides but part of the wall too.

People screamed. Most of the screams cut off quick-like, but one of them went on, it was real bad, like somebody out in the dark past the blown-up window was made to hurt even worse than Thomas.

Thomas didn’t look back because he was all the way around the side of Derek’s bed now, where he couldn’t see the window anyway from where he was on the floor. And, besides, he knew what he wanted now, where he wanted to go, and he had to get there before the Bad Thing got interested in him again.

Quick-like, he crawled to the top end of the bed and looked up and saw Derek’s arm hanging over the side, blood running down under his shirtsleeve and across his hand and drip-drip-dripping off his fingers. He didn’t want to touch a dead person, not even a dead person he liked. But this was what he had to do, and he was used to having to do all sorts of things he wished he didn’t—that was what life was like. So he grabbed the edge of the bed and pulled himself up as fast as he could, trying not to feel the bad hurt in his back and in his kicked leg, because feeling it would make him stiff and slow. Derek was right there, eyes open, mouth open, blood-wet, so sad, so scary, on top of the pictures of his folks that fell off the wall, still dead, off for always and ever to the Bad Place. Thomas grabbed the scissors sticking out of Derek, pulled them loose, telling himself it was okay because Derek couldn’t feel anything now, or ever.

“You!” the Bad Thing said.

Thomas turned to see where the Bad Thing was, and where it was was right behind him, all the way around the bed, coming at him. So he shoved the scissors at it, hard as he could, and the Bad Thing’s face made a surprised look. The scissors went in the front of the Bad Thing’s shoulder. The Bad Thing looked even more surprised. The blood came.

Letting go of the scissors, Thomas said, “For Derek,” then said, “for me.” .

He wasn’t sure what would happen, but he figured that making the blood come would hurt the Bad Thing and maybe make it dead, like it made Derek dead. Across the room he saw where the window wasn’t any more and where part of the wall wasn’t any more, some smoke coming from the broken ends of things. He figured he was going to run over there and go through the hole, even if the night was out there on the other side.

But he never figured on what
did
happen, because the Bad Thing acted like the scissors weren’t even in it, like blood wasn’t being let loose from it, and it grabbed him and lifted him up again. It slammed him into Derek’s dresser, which was a lot more hurt than the wall because the dresser was made with knobs and edges the wall didn’t have.

He heard something crack in him, heard something tear. But the funny thing was, he wasn’t crying any more and didn’t
want
to cry any more, like he’d used up all the tears in himself.

The Bad Thing put its face close to Thomas’s face, so their eyes were only a couple inches apart. He didn’t like looking in the Bad Thing’s eyes. They were scary. They were blue, but it was like they were really dark, like under the blue was a lot of stuff as black as the night out past the gone window.

But the other funny thing was, he wasn’t as scared as he was a while ago, like he’d used up all his being scared just like he’d used up his tears. He looked in the Bad Thing’s eyes, and he saw all that big dark, bigger than the dark that came over the world each day when the sun went away, and he knew it was wanting to make him dead,
going
to make him dead, and that was okay. He was not so afraid of being made dead as he always thought he would be. It was still a Bad Place, death, and he wished he didn’t have to go there, but he had a funny-nice feeling about the Bad Place all of a sudden, a feeling that maybe it wouldn’t be so lonely over there as he always figured it was, not even as lonely as it was on this side. He felt maybe someone was over there who loved him, someone who loved him more than even Julie loved him, even more than their dad used to love him, someone who was all bright, no dark at all, so bright you could only look at Him sideways.

The Bad Thing held Thomas against the dresser with one hand, and with its other hand it pulled the scissors out of itself.