The Bad Place Part 21

"Traveling," Julie said. Under the circ.u.mstances, that ordinary word seemed as exotic and full of mystery as any in the language.

CAREFUL NOT to wake the patients, they borrowed two additional chairs from other rooms along the corridor. Hal sat tensely just inside the closed door of room 638, in a position to prevent any of the hospital staff from walking in unimpeded. Julie sat at the foot of the bed, and Bobby stationed himself at the side of it nearest the window, where the railing was still in place.

They waited.

From her chair, Julie only had to turn her head slightly to look across the room at Hal. When she glanced the other way she could see Bobby.

But because of the privacy curtain that was drawn along the side of the bed with the missing railing, Hal and Bobby were not in each other's line of sight.

She wondered if Hal would have been astonished to see how quickly Bobby went to sleep. Hal was still pumped up by what had happened, and Julie, only having heard about Frank's sorcerous disappearance second-hand, was nonetheless eagerly nervously-antic.i.p.ating the chance to witness the same bit of magic herself. Bobby was a man of considerable imaginative powers, with a childlike sense of wonder, so he was probably more excited about these events than either she or Hal was; furthermore, because of his premonition of trouble, he suspected that the case was going to be full of surprises, some nasty, and these events no doubt alarmed him. Yet he could slump against the inadequately padded arm of his chair, let his chin drop against his chest, and doze off. He would never be felled by stress. At times his sense of proportion, his ability to put anything in a manageable perspective, seemed superhuman.

When Bobby McFerrin's song "Don't Worry, Be Happy" had been a hit a couple of years ago, she had not been surprised that her own Bobby had been enamored of it; the tune was essentially his personal anthem.

Apparently by an act of will, he could readily achieve serenity, and she admired that.

By 4:40, when Bobby had been slumbering contentedly for nearly an hour, she watched him doze with admiration that rapidly escalated to unhealthy envy. She had the urge to give his chair a kick, toppling him out of it. She restrained herself only because she suspected that he would merely yawn, up on his side, and sleep even more comfortably on the floor at which point her envy would become so all-consuming she would simply have to kill him where he lay. She imagined herself in court: I know murder is wrong, Judge, but he was just too laid-back to live.

A cascade of soft, almost melancholy notes fell out of the air in front of her.

"The flute!" Hal said, leaving his chair with the suddeness of a popcorn kernel bursting off a heated pan.

Simultaneously, a breath of cool air stirred through the room, without apparent source.

Getting to her feet, Julie whispered, "Bobby!" She shook him by the shoulder, and he came awake just as the music faded and the air turned crypt-still.

Bobby rubbed his eyes with his palms, and yawned.

"What's wrong?"

Even as he spoke, the haunting music swelled again, but louder than before. Not music, actually, just noise. Hal was right: listening closely, you could also tell it was a flute.

She stepped toward the bed.

Hal had left his station by the door. He put a hand on her shoulder, halting her.

"Be careful." Frank had reported three-maybe four-separate trips of the faux flute, and as many agitations of the air, before Blue Light had appeared on his trail that night in Anaheim and Hal had noticed that three episodes had preceded each of Frank's own reappearances. However, those accompanying phenomena evidently could not be expected in an exact pattern, for when the second rivulet of unharmonious finished spilling out of the wether, the air immediately above the bed shimmered, as if a double handful of pale tarnished sand had been swept up and set aflutter in rising currents of air and suddenly Frank Pollard winked into existence atop rumpled sheets.

Julie's ears popped.

"Holy cow!" Bobby said, which was just what Julie would have expected him to say.

She, on the other hand, was unable to speak.

Gasping, Frank Pollard sat up in bed. His face was bloodless. Around his rheumy eyes, the skin looked bruised. Sour perspiration glistened on his face and beaded in his beard stubble.

He was holding a pillowcase half filled with something. The end was twisted and held shut with a length of cord. He let go of it, and it fell off the side of the bed where the railing was missing, striking the floor with a soft plop.

When he spoke, his voice was hoa.r.s.e and strange.

"Where am I?"

"You're in the hospital, Frank," Bobby said.

"It's all right. You're where you belong now."

"Hospital... " Frank said, savoring the word as if he had just heard it-and was now p.r.o.nouncing it-for the first time. He looked around, obviously bewildered; he still didn't know where he was.

"Don't let me slip-" He vanished mid-sentence. A brief hiss accompanied his abrupt departure, as if the air in the room was escaping through a puncture in the skin of reality.

"d.a.m.n!" Julie said.

"Where were his pajamas?" Hal said.

"What?"

"He was wearing shoes, khaki pants, a shirt and sweater," Hal said, "but the last time I saw him, a couple of hours ago, he still had on his pajamas." At the far end of the room, the door began to open but b.u.mped against Hal's empty chair. Nurse Fulgham poked her head through the gap. She looked down at the chair, then across the room at Hal and Julie, then at Bobby, who stepped to the foot of the bed to peer past his two a.s.sociates and the half-drawn privacy curtain.

Their astonishment at Frank's vanishing act must have been ill concealed, for the woman frowned and said, "What's wrong?"

Julie quickly crossed the room as Grace Fulgham slid the chair aside and opened the door all the way.

"Everything's fine. We just spoke by phone with our man heading up the search, and he says they've found someone who saw Mr. Pollard earlier tonight. We know which way he was heading, so now it's only a matter of time until we find him."

"We didn't expect you'd be here so long," Fulgham said frowning past Julie at the curtained bed.

Even through the heavy door, maybe she had heard the faint warble of the flute that wasn't a flute.

"Well," Julie said, "this is the easiest place from which to coordinate the search." By standing just inside the door, with Hal's empty chair between them, Julie was trying to block the nurse's advance with out appearing to do so. If Fulgham got past the curtain, she might notice the missing railing, the black sand in the bed, a the pillowcase that was filled with G.o.d-knew-what. Questions about any of those things might be difficult to answer convincingly, and if the nurse remained in the room too long, she might be there when Frank returned.

Julie said, "I'm sure we haven't disturbed any of the other patients.

We've been very quiet."

"No, no," Nurse Fulgham said, "you haven't disturbed any one. We just wondered if you might like some coffee to help keep you awake."

"Oh."

Julie turned to look at Hal and Bobby.

"Coffee?'

"No,"

the two men said simultaneously. Then, speaking over each other, Hal said, "No, thank you,"

and Bobby said, "Very kind of you."

"I'm wide awake," Julie said, frantic to be rid of the nurse but trying to sound casual, "and Hal doesn't drink coffee, and Bobby, my husband, can't handle caffeine because of prostrate problems." I'm babbling, she thought.

"Anyway, we'll be leaving soon now, I'm sure."

"Well," the nurse said, "if you change your mind.

After Fulgham left, letting the door close behind her, Bobby whispered, "Prostate trouble?"

Julie said, "Too much caffeine causes prostate trouble Seemed like a convincing detail to explain why, with everything going on, you didn't want coffee."

"But I don't have a prostate problem. Makes me sound like an old fart."

"I have it," Hal said.

"And I'm not an old fart."

"What is this?" Julie said.

"We're all babbling." She pushed the chair in front of the door and returned to the bed, where she picked up the pillowcase-bag that Frank Pollard had brought from... from where ever he had been "Careful," Bobby said.

"Last time Frank mentioned a pillowcase, it was the one he trapped that insect in." Julie gingerly set the bag on a chair and watched it closely.

"Doesn't seem to be anything squirming around in it." She started to untie the knotted cord from the neck of the sack.

Grimacing, Bobby said, "If you let out something big as a house cat, with a lot of legs and feelers, I'm going straight to a divorce lawyer."

The cord slipped free. She pulled open the pillowcase, and looked inside.

"Oh, G.o.d." Bobby took a couple of steps backward.

"No, not that," she a.s.sured him.

"No bugs. Just more cash." She reached into the sack and withdrew a couple of bundles of hundred-dollar bills.

"If it's all hundreds, there could be as much as a quarter of a million in here."

"What's Frank doing?" Bobby wondered.

"Laundering money for the mob in the Twilight Zone?" Hollow, lonely, tuneless piping pierced the air again, and like a needle pulling thread, the sound brought with it a draft that rustled the curtain.

Shivering, Julie turned to look at the bed.

The flowerlike notes faded with the draft, then soon rose again, faded, rose, and faded a fourth time as Frank Pollard reappeared. He was on his side, arms against his chest, hands fisted, grimacing, his eyes squeezed shut, as if he were preparing himself to receive the killing blow of an ax.

Julie stepped toward the bed, and again Hal stopped her.

Frank sucked in a deep breath, shuddered, made a low anguished mewling, opened his eyes-and vanished. Within two or three seconds, he appeared yet again, still shuddering. But immediately he vanished, reappeared, vanished, reappeared, vanished, as if he were an image flickering on a television set with poor signal reception. At last he stuck fast to the fabric of reality and lay on the bed, moaning.

After rolling off his side, onto his back, he gazed at the ceiling. He raised his fists from his chest, uncurled them, and stared at his hands, baffled, as if he had never seen fingers before.

"Frank?" Julie said. He did not respond to her. With his fingertips he explored the contours of his face, as if a Braille reading of his features would recall to him the forgotten specifics of his appearance.

Julie's heart was racing, and every muscle in her body felt as if it had been twisted up as tight as an overwound clock spring. She was not afraid, really. It was not a tension engineered by fear but by the sheer strangeness of what had happened.

"Frank, are you okay?"

Blinking through the interstices of his fingers, he said, "O It's you, Mrs. Dakota. Yeah... Dakota. What's happened Where am I?"

"You're in the hospital now," Bobby said.

"Listen, the important question isn't where you are, but where the h.e.l.l had you been?"

"Been? Well... what do you mean?" Frank tried to sit up in bed, but he seemed to temporarily lack the strength to get off his back.

Picking up the bed controls, Bobby elevated the upper half of the mattress.

"You weren't in this room during most of the last few hours. It's almost five in the morning, and you've been jumping in and out of here like... like... like a crew remember of the Starship Enterprise who keeps beaming back up to the mothership!"

"Enterprise? Beaming up? What're you talking about?"

Bobby looked at Julie. "Whoever this guy is, wherever he comes from, we now know for sure that he's been living past the edge of modern culture, on the fringe. You ever know a modern American who hasn't at least heard of Star Trek?

To Bobby, Julie said, "Thanks for your a.n.a.lysis, Mr. Spock."

"Mr. Spock?" Frank said.

"See!" Bobby said.

"We can question Frank later," Julie said.

"He's confuse right now, anyway. We've got to get him out of here. If the nurse comes back and sees him, how do we explain his reappearance?

Is she really going to believe he wandered back into the hospital, past security and the nursing staff, up six floors with n.o.body spotting him?"

"Yeah," Hal said, "and though he seems to be back good, what if he pops away again, in front of her eyes?"

"Okay, so we'll get him out of bed and sneak him dow those stairs at the end of the hall," Julie said, "out to the car.

As they talked about him, Frank turned his head back and forth, following the conversation. He appeared to be watching a tennis match for the first time, unable to comprehend the rules of the game.

Bobby said, "Once we've gotten him out of here, we can tell Fulgham he's been found just a few blocks away and that we're meeting with him to determine whether he wants-or even needs-to be returned to the hospital.

He's our client, after all, not our ward, and we have to respect his wishes."

Without having to wait for tests to be conducted, they now knew that Frank was not suffering strictly from physical ailments like cerebral abscesses, clots, aneurysms, cysts, or neoplasms. His amnesia did not spring from brain tumors, but from something far stranger and more exotic than that. No malignancy, regardless of how singular its nature, would invest its victim with the power to step into the fourth dimension or to wherever Frank was stepping when he vanished.

"Hal," Julie said, "get Frank's other clothes from the closet, bundle them up, and stuff them in the pillowcase with the money."

"Will do."

"Bobby, help me get Frank out of bed, see if he can stand on his own feet. He looks awful weak." The remaining bed railing stuck for a moment when Bobby tried to lower it, but he struggled with it because they could not take Frank out of bed on the other side without drawing back the privacy curtain and exposing him to anyone who might push open the door.