The Bad Place Part 29

Fireflies.

Velocity.

He hit the floor rolling, slammed into a coffee table, and felt Frank let go of his hand. The table crashed over, spilling a vase and other decorative-and breakable-items onto a hard floor.

He'd sustained a solid knock to the head. When he pushed himself onto his knees and tried to stand, he was too dizzy to get up. Frank was already on his feet, looking around, breathing hard.

"San Diego. This was my apartment once. He found out about it. Had to get out fast." When Frank reached down to help Bobby get up, Bobby unthinkingly accepted his hand, the uninjured one.

"Someone else lives here now," Frank said.

"Must be working, we're lucky." Darkness.

Fireflies.

Velocity.

Bobby found himself standing at a rusted iron gate between two stone pilasters, looking at a Victorian-style house wit sagging porch roof, broken bal.u.s.ters, and swaybacked steps. The sidewalk was cracked and canted, and weeds flourished in an unmown lawn. In the gloaming it looked like every kids conception of a seriously haunted house, and he suspected it would look even worse in broad daylight.

Frank gasped.

"Jesus, no, not here!" Darkness.

Fireflies.

Velocity.

Papers fluttered to the floor from a ma.s.sive mahogany desk as if a wind had swept through the room, though the air was still now. They were in a book-lined study with French windows. An old man had risen from a wing-backed leather chair. He was wearing gray flannel slacks, a white shirt, a blue cardigan, and a look of surprise.

Frank said, "Doc," and with his free hand reached toward the startled elder.

Darkness.

Bobby had figured out that all was lightless and featureless because, for the moment, he did not exist as a coherent ent.i.ty; he had no eyes, no ears, no nerve endings with which to feel. But understanding brought no diminishment of his fears.

Fireflies.

The millions of tiny, whirling points of light were probably the atomic particles of which his flesh was constructed, being shepherded along sheerly by the power of Frank's mind.

Velocity.

They were teleporting, and the process was probably just about instantaneous, requiring only microseconds from physical dissolution to reconst.i.tution, though subjectively it seemed longer.

The decrepit house again. It must be the place in the hills north of Santa Barbara. They were upslope from the gate, along the Eugenia hedge that encircled the property.

Frank let out a low cry of terror the instant that he saw where he was.

Bobby was afraid of running into Candy just as much as Frank was, but also afraid of Frank, and of teleporting.

Darkness.

Fireflies.

Velocity.

This time they didn't materialize with the balance and stability of their arrival in the old man's study or at the peeling house with the rusted gate, but with the clumsiness of their intrusion into that apartment in San Diego. Bobby stumbled a few steps up a slope, still in Frank's grip as firmly as if they had been handcuffed, and they both fell to their knees on the plush, well cropped gra.s.s.

Frantically Bobby tried to wrench loose of Frank. But Frank held fast with superhuman strength and pointed to a gravestone only a few feet in front of them. Bobby looked around and saw that they were alone in a cemetery, where ma.s.sive coral trees and palms loomed eerily in the purple-gray twilight.

"He was our neighbor," Frank said.

Gasping for breath, unable to speak, still twisting his hand in an attempt to escape Frank's iron grip, Bobby saw the name NORBERT JAMES KOLREEN in the granite headstone.

"She had him killed," Frank said, "had her precious Candy kill him just because she felt he'd been rude to her. Rude to her! The crazy b.i.t.c.h."

Darkness.

Fireflies.

Velocity.

The book-lined study. The old man in the doorway now, looking into the room at them.

Bobby felt as if he had been on a corks.c.r.e.w.i.n.g roller coaster for hours, turning upside down at high speed, again and again until he couldn't be sure any more if he was actually moving or standing still while the rest of the world spun and loo around him.

"I shouldn't have come here, Dr. Fogarty," Frank said unsteadily. Blood dripped off his injured hand, spotting a pale green section of the Chinese carpet.

"Candy might've seen us at the house, might be trying to follow. Don't want to lead him to YOU."

Fogarty said, "Frank, wait-", Darkness.

Fireflies.

Velocity.

They were in the backyard of the decaying house, thirty or forty feet from steps and a porch that were as dilapidated as those at the front of the place. Lights shone in the first-floor windows.

"I want to go, I want to be out of here," Frank said.

Bobby expected to teleport at once, and steeled himself against it, but nothing happened.

"I want out of here," Frank said again.

When they did pop from that place to another, Frank cursed in frustration. Suddenly the kitchen door opened, and a woman stepped into sight. She stopped on the threshold and stared at them.

The fading, muddy purple twilight barely exposed her, and the light from the kitchen silhouetted her but did not reveal any details of her face.

Whether it was a trick of the strange illumination or an accurate revelation of her form, Bobby couldn't know, but when starkly outlined, she presented a powerful erotic picture: sylphlike, gracefully thing yet clearly and feminine, a smoky phantom that seemed either thinly clad nude, and that issued a call of desire without making a sound.

There was a powerful lubricity in this mysterious woman which made her the equal of any siren that had ever induced sail to run their ships onto hull-gouging rocks.

"My sister Violet," Frank said with obvious dread and disgust.

Bobby noticed movement, around her feet, a swarming of shadows. They poured down the steps, onto the lawn, and he saw they were cats. Their eyes were iridescent in the gloom. He was gripping Frank every bit was hard as Frank was gripping him, for now he feared release as much as he had previously feared continued captivity.

"Frank, get us out of here."

"I can't. I don't have control of this, of myself."

There were a dozen cats, two dozen, still more. As they rushed off the porch and across the first few yards of unmown gra.s.s, they were silent.

Then, simultaneously, they cried out, as if they were a single creature.

Their wail of anger and hunger instantly cured Bobby of his nausea and made his stomach quiver, instead, with terror.

"Frank!"

He wished he hadn't taken off his shoulder holster back at the office.

His gun was back there on Julie's desk, of no use to him, but as he glimpsed the bared teeth of the oncoming horde, he figured the revolver wouldn't stop them anyway, at least not enough of them.

The nearest of the cats leaped.

JULIE WAS standing by her office chair, where it had been moved into the center of the room for the session of hypnotic therapy. She was unable to step away from it because she had last seen Bobby when he had been next to that chair, and it was where she felt closest to him.

"How long now?"

Clint was standing at her side. He looked at his watch.

"Less than six minutes."

Jackie Jaxx was in the bathroom, splashing his face with cold water.

Still on the sofa with a sheaf of printouts, Lee Chen was not as relaxed as he had been six and a half minutes ago. His Zen calm had been shattered. He was holding those papers in both hands, as if afraid they would vanish from his grasp, and his eyes were as wide now as they had been the moment that Bobby and Frank disappeared.

Julie was lightheaded with fear, but she was determined not to lose control of herself. Though there seemed to be nothing that she could do to help Bobby, an opportunity for action might arise when she least expected it, and she wanted to be calm and ready.

"Last night, Hal said that Frank returned the first time about eighteen minutes after he'd left." Clint nodded.

"Then we've twelve minutes to go."

"After his second disappearance, he didn't return for hours."

"Listen," Clint said, "if they don't show up here again in twelve minutes or an hour or three hours, that doesn't me anything terrible has happened to Bobby. It's not going to be the same every time."

"I know. What I'm more worried about is... the d.a.m.n railing." Clint said nothing.

Unable to keep her voice even, she said, "Frank never did bring it back. What happened to it?"

"He'll bring Bobby back," Clint said.

"He won't let Bobby out there... wherever he goes." She wished she felt confident about that.

DARKNESS.

Fireflies.

Velocity.

Rain poured straight down in warm torrents, as if Bobby and Frank had materialized under a waterfall. It pasted their clothes to them in an instant. There was no wind whatsoever as if the tremendous weight and ferocity of the rainfall had drowned the wind as it would a fire; the air was steamy-humid They had traveled far enough around the globe to have left twilight behind; the sun was up there somewhere behind steely plating of gray clouds.

They were on their sides this time, facing each other like inebriates who had been arm wrestling and had fallen drunkenly off their stools onto the floor of the barroom, where they still lay with their hands locked in compet.i.tion. They were in a bar, however, but in lush tropical foliage: ferns; dark grey plants with rubbery, deeply granulated foliage; ground hugging succulent vines with leaves as plump as gum candy and berries the same shade as the flesh of a Mandarin orange.

Bobby pulled away from Frank, and this time his client let him go without a struggle. He scrambled to his feet and push through the slick, spongy, clinging flora.

He didn't know where he was going and didn't care. He just had to put a little s.p.a.ce between himself and Frank, distance himself from the danger that Frank now represented to him. He was overwhelmed by what had happened, overloaded with new experiences that he needed to consider and to which he had to adapt before he could go on.

Within half a dozen steps he broke out of the tropical brush and onto a dark expanse of land, the nature of which at first eluded him. The rain came down not in droplets and not in sheets, but in roaring, silver-gray cascades that dramatically reduced visibility; it swept his hair over his eyes, too, which didn't help. He supposed some people, sitting by windows in dry rooms, might even have seen beauty in the storm, but there was just too d.a.m.ned much rain, a flood; it met the earth and the greenery with a cacophonous roar that threatened to deafen him. The rain not only exhausted him but made him wildly and irrationally angry, as if he was being pelted not by rain but by spittle, great gobs of phlegm spit, and as if the roar was actually the combined voices of thousands of onlookers showering him with insults and other abuse. He stumbled forward through the peculiarly mushy soil-not muddy, but mushy-looking for someone to blame for the rain, someone to shout at and shake and maybe even punch. In six or eight steps, however, he saw the breakers rolling ash.o.r.e in a tumult of white foam, and he knew he was standing on a black-sand beach. That realization stopped him cold.

"Frank!" he shouted, and when he turned to look back the way he had come, he saw that Frank was following him, a few steps behind and round-backed, as if he were an old man unable to stand up to the force of the rain, or as if his spine had been warped by all the moisture.

"Frank, dammit, where are we?"

Frank stopped, unbent his back slightly, lifted his head, and blinked stupidly.

"What?"

Raising his voice even further, Bobby shouted above the tumult: "Where are we!"

Pointing to Bobby's left, Frank indicated an enigmatic, rain shrouded structure that stood like the ancient shrine of a long dead religion, perhaps a hundred feet farther down the black beach.

"Lifeguard station!" He pointed the other direction, up the beach, indicating a large wooden building considerably farther from them but less mysterious because its size made it easier to see.

"Restaurant. One of the most popular on the island."

"What island?"

"The big island."

"What big island?"

"Hawaii. We're standing on Punaluu Beach."

"This was where Clint was supposed to take me," Bobby said. He laughed, but it was a strange, wild laugh that spooked him, so he stopped.

Frank said, "The house I bought and abandoned is over there." He indicated the direction from which they had come.

"Overlooking a golf course. I loved the place. I was happy there for eight months. Then he found me. Bobby, we have to get out of here."