The Bad Place Part 31

"I lived here, too, for a while." They were alone in the garden. Bobby realized that Frank always materialized in sheltered places where he was unlikely to be seen in the act, or in circ.u.mstances-such as the middle of a cloudburst-that almost ensured even a public place like a beach would be conveniently deserted. Evidently, in addition to the unimaginably demanding task of deconstruction-rather than reconstruction, his mind was also capable of scouting the way ahead and choosing a discreet point of arrival.

Frank said, "I was the longest-residing guest they'd ever had. It's a traditional j.a.panese inn on the outskirts of Kyoto." Bobby became aware that they were both totally dry. their clothes were wrinkled, in need of an ironing, but when Frank had deconstructed them in Hawaii, he had not teleported the molecules of water that had saturated their clothes.

"They were so kind here," Frank said, "respectful of my privacy, yet so attentive and kind." He sounded wistful and eternally weary, as if he would have liked to have stopped traveling right there, even if stopping meant dying at the hand of his brother.

Bobby was relieved to see that Frank also had not brought with them any of the slime from the narrow alley in Calcutta or wherever. Their shoes and pants were clean.

Then he noticed something on the toe of his right shoe.

He bent forward to look at it.

"I wish we could stay here," Frank said.

"Forever."

One of the roaches from that filth-choked alley was now part of Bobby's footwear.

One of the biggest advantages being self-employed was freedom from neckties and uncomfortable shoes, so he was wearing, as usual, a pair of soft Rock port Supersports, and the roach was not merely stuck on the putty-colored leather but bristling from it and melded with it.

The roach was not squirming, obviously dead, but it was the or at least part of it was, some bits of it apparently having been left behind.

"But we've got to keep moving," Frank said, oblivious to the roach.

"He's trying to follow us. We have to lose him by Darkness.

Fireflies.

Velocity.

They were on a high place, a rocky trail, with an incredible panorama below them.

"Mount Fuji," Frank said, not as if he had known where they were going but as if pleasantly surprised to be there, "About halfway up." Bobby was not interested in the exotic view or concerned about the chill in the air. He was entirely preoccupied by the discovery that the roach was no longer a part of the toe of his shoe.

"The j.a.panese once thought Fuji was sacred. I guess they still do, or some of them do. And you can see why. It's magnificent."

"Frank, what happened to the roach?"

"What roach?"

"There was a roach welded into the leather of this shoe. I saw it back there in the garden. You evidently brought it along from that disgusting alleyway. Where is it now?"

"I don't know."

"Did you just drop its atoms along the way?" 'I don't know." 'Or are its atoms still with me but somewhere else?"

"Bobby, I just don't know."

In Bobby's mind was an image of his own heart, hidden within the dark cavity of his chest, beating with the mystery of all hearts but with a new secret all its own-the bristling legs and shiny carapace of a roach embedded in the muscle tissue that formed the walls of the atrium or a ventricle.

An insect might be inside of him, and even if the thing was dead, its presence within was intolerable. An attack of entomophobia hit him with the equivalent force of a hammer blow to the gut, knocking the wind out of him, sending undulate waves of nausea through him. He struggled to breathe, at the same time striving not to vomit on the sacred ground of Mount Fuji.

Darkness.

Fireflies.

Velocity.

They hit more violently this time, as if they had materialized in midair and had fallen a few feet onto the ground. They didn't manage to hold on to each other, and they didn't land on their feet, either. Separated from Frank, Bobby rolled dow a gentle incline, over small objects that clattered and clicked under him and poked painfully into his flesh. When he tumble to a halt, gasping and frightened, he was face down on gray soil almost as powdery as ashes. Scattered around him, sparkling brightly against that ashen backdrop, were hundreds if not thousands of red diamonds in the rough.

Raising his head, he saw that the diamond miners were the in unnerving numbers: a score of huge insects just like the ones they had taken to Dyson Manfred. Caught, as he was, in whirlpool of panic, Bobby believed that every one of those bugs was fixated on him, all those multifaceted eyes turned toward him, all those tarantula legs churning through the powder gray soil in his direction.

He felt something crawling on his back, knew what it must be, and rolled over, pinning the thing between him and the ground. He felt it squirming frantically beneath him. Propel by repulsion, he was suddenly on his feet, without quite remembering how he had gotten up. The bug was still clinging to the back of his shirt; he could feel its weight, its quick-foot advance from the small of his back to his neck. He reached behind, tore it off himself, cried out in disgust as it kicked against his hand, and pitched it was far away as he could.

He heard himself breathing hard and making queer little sounds of fear and desperation. He didn't like what he heard but he was unable to silence himself.

A foul taste filled his mouth. He figured he had ingested some of the powdery soil. He spat, but his spittle looked clear and he realized that the air itself was what he tasted. The warm air was thick, not humid exactly but thick, like nothing he had experienced before. And in addition to the bitter taste, it had a distinctly different but equally unpleasant smell, like some milk with a whiff of sulfur.

Turning around, surveying the terrain, he realized that he was standing in a shallow bowl in the land, about four feet deep at its lowest point, and about a hundred feet in diameter. The sloped walls were marked by evenly s.p.a.ced holes, a double layer of them, and more of the biologically engineered insects were squirming into some of those bores, out of others, no doubt seeking-and returning with-diamonds.

Because it was only four feet deep, he could see above the rim of the bowl. Across the huge, barren, and slightly sloped plain in which this depression was set, he saw what appeared to be scores of similar features, like age-smoothed meteor craters, though they were so evenly s.p.a.ced that they had to be unnatural. He was in the middle of a giant mining operation.

Kicking at an insect that had crept too close to him, Bobby turned to look at the last quarter of his surroundings. Frank was there, at the far side of the crater, on his hands and knees. Bobby was relieved by the sight of him, but he was definitely not relieved by what he saw in the sky beyond Frank.

The moon was visible in broad daylight, but it was not like the gossamer ghost moon that sometimes could be seen in a clear sky. It was a mottled gray-yellow sphere six times normal size, looming ominously over the land, as if about to collide with the larger world around which it should have been revolving at a respectable distance.

But that was not the worst. A huge and strangely shaped aircraft hung silently at perhaps an alt.i.tude of four or five hundred feet, so alien in every aspect that it brought home to Bobby the understanding that had thus far eluded him. He was not on his own world any longer.

"Julie," he said, because suddenly he realized how terribly far from her he had traveled.

At the far side of the crater, as he was getting to his feet, Frank Pollard vanished.

AS DAY dimmed and darkness came, Thomas stood at the window or sat in his chair or stretched out on his bed sometimes reaching toward the Bad Thing to be sure it was coming closer. Bobby was worried when he visited, so was Thomas worried too. A lump of fear kept rising in his throat, but he kept swallowing it because he had to be brave and protect Julie.

He didn't get as close to the Bad Thing as last night. N close enough to let it grab him with its mind. Not close enough to let it follow him when he quick-like reeled his own mind string back to The Home. But close. A lot closer than Thomas liked.

Every time he pushed at the Bad Thing to make sure it was still there, up north someplace, where it belonged, he knew the Bad Thing felt him snooping. That spooked Thomas. The Bad Thing knew he was snooping around, but didn't do anything and sometimes Thomas felt maybe the Bad Thing was waiting like a toad.

Once, in the garden behind The Home, Thomas watched a toad sit real still for a long time, while a bright yellow b.u.t.terfly fluttered pretty and quick, bounced from leaf to leaf, flower to flower back and forth, round and round, close to the toad, then so close, then closer than ever, then way out of reach, then closer again, like it was teasing the toad, but the toad didn't move, not an inch, like maybe it was a fake toad or just a stone that looked like a toad. So the b.u.t.terfly felt safe, or maybe just liked the game too much, and it came even closer.

When The toad's tongue shot out like one of those roll-up tootes they'd let the dumb people have one New Year's Eve, and caught the b.u.t.terfly, and the green toad ate the yellow b.u.t.terfly, every bit, and that was the end of the game.

If the Bad Thing was playing a toad, Thomas was going to be real careful not to be a b.u.t.terfly.

Then, just when Thomas figured he should start washing himself and changing clothes for supper, just when he was going to pull back from the Bad Thing, it went somewhere. He felt it go, bang, there one second and far away the next, slipping past where he could keep a watch on it, out across the world, going the same place where the sun was taking the last of the daylight. He couldn't figure how it could go so fast, unless maybe it was on a jet plane having good food and a fine whine, smiling at pretty girls in uniforms who put little pillows behind the Bad Thing's seat and gave it magazines and smiled back at it so nice and so much you expected them to kiss it like everybody was always kissing on daytime TV. Okay, yeah, probably a jet plane.

Thomas tried some more to find the Bad Thing. Then, by the time the day was all gone and night all there, he gave up. He got off his bed and got ready for supper, hoping maybe the Bad Thing was gone away and never coming back, hoping Julie was safe forever now, and hoping there was chocolate cake for dessert.

BOBBY CHARGED across the floor of the diamond-strewn crater, kicking at the bugs in his way. As he ran he told himself that his eyes had deceived him and that his mind was playing nasty tricks, that Frank had not actually teleported out of there without him. But when he arrived at the spot where Frank had been, he found only a couple of footprints in the powdery soil.

A shadow fell across him, and he looked up as the alien craft drifted in blimplike silence over the crater, coming to a full stop directly above him, still about five hundred feet overhead. It was nothing like starships in the movies, neither organic looking nor a flying chandelier. It was lozenge shaped, at least five hundred feet long, and perhaps two hundred feet in diameter. Immense. On the ends, sides, and top, it bristled with hundreds if not thousands of pointed black metal spines, big as church spires, which made it look a little like a mechanical porcupine in a permanent defensive posture. The underside, which Bobby could see best of all, was smooth, black, and featureless, lacking not only the ma.s.sive spines but markings, remotesors, portholes, airlocks, and all the other apparatus one might expect.

Bobby did not know if the ship's repositioning was coincidental or whether he was under observation. If he was being watched, he didn't want to think about the nature of the creatures that might be peering down at him, and he sure as h.e.l.l didn't want to consider what their intentions toward him might be. For every movie that featured an adorable alien with the power to turn kids' bicycles into airborne vehicles, that were ten others in which the aliens were ravenous flesh eat with dispositions so vicious as to make any New York he waiter think twice about being rude, and Bobby was certain that this was one thing Hollywood had gotten right. It was hostile universe out there, and dealing with his fellow human beings was scary enough for him; he didn't need to make contact with a whole new race that had devised countless new ways of its own.

Besides, his capacity for terror was already filled to the brim running over; he could contain no more. He was abandon on a distant world, where the air-he began to suspect-might contain only enough oxygen and other required gases to keep him alive only for a short while, insects the size of kittens crawling all around him, and there was a possibility that much smaller dead insects was actually fused with the tinicals of one of his internal organs, and a psychotic blond giant super human powers and a taste for blood was on his trail-and the odds were billions to one that he would ever see Julie again or kiss her, or touch her, or see her smile.

A series of tremendous, throbbing vibrations issued from the ship and shook the ground around Bobby. His teeth chattered and he nearly fell.

He looked for somewhere to hide. There was nothing in the crater to afford concealment, and nowhere to run on the plain beyond.

The vibrations stopped.

Even in the deep shadows thrown by the ship, Bobby noticed a horde of identical insects begin to scuttle out of the bore holes in the crater walls, one after the other. They had been called forth.

Though no apparent openings appeared in the belly of the ship, a score or more of low-energy lasers-some yellow, some white, some blue, some red-began to play over the floor of the crater. Each beam was the diameter of a silver dollar, and each moved independently of the others.

Like spotlights, they repeatedly swept the crater and everything in it, sometimes moving parallel to one another, sometimes crisscrossing one another, in a display that further disoriented Bobby and gave him the feeling that he was caught in the middle of a silent fireworks show.

He remembered what Manfred and Gavenall had told him about the crimson decorations along the rim of the bug's sh.e.l.l, and he saw that the white lasers were focusing only on the insects, busily scanning the markings around each carapace. Their owners were taking roll call. He saw a white beam fidget over the broken corpus of one of the bugs he had kicked, and after a moment a red beam joined it to study the carca.s.s.

Then the red beam jumped to Bobby, and a couple of other beams of different hue also found him, as if he was a can of peas being identified and added to someone's grocery bill at a supermarket checkout.

The floor of the crater was teeming with insects now, so many that Bobby could see neither the gray soil nor the litter of excreted diamonds over which they clambered. He told himself that they were not really bugs; they were just biological machines, engineered by the same race that had built the ship hanging over him. But that didn't help much because they still looked more like bugs than like machines. They had been designed to mine diamonds; they were not attracted to him whatsoever; but their disinterest did not make him feel better, because his phobia guaranteed that he was interested in them. His shadow-chilled skin p.r.i.c.kled with gooseflesh. Short circuiting nerve endings sputtered with false reports of things crawling on him, so he felt as if bugs swarmed over him from head to foot. They were actually creeping over his shoes, but none of them tried to scurry up his legs; he was grateful, because he was sure he would go mad if they began to climb him.

He used his hand as a visor over his eyes, to avoid being dazzled by the lasers that were playing on him. He saw something gleaming in the scanner beams only a few feet away: a curved section of what appeared to be hollow steel tubing. It was sticking out of the powdery soil, partly buried, further concealed by the bugs that scurried and jittered around it. Nevertheless, at first sight Bobby knew what it was, and he was overcome with a horrible sinking feeling. He shuffled forward, trying to crush any of the insects because, for all he knew, the penalty for the additional destruction of property might be instant incineration.

When he could reach the glinting curve metal, he seized it and pulled it loose of the soft earth. It was the missing railing from the hospital bed.

"HOW LONG?" Julie demanded.

"Twenty-one minutes," Clint said.

They still stood near the chair where Frank had been sitting and beside which Bobby had been stooping.

Lee Chen had gotten off the sofa, so Jackie Jaxx could sit down. The magician-hypnotist had draped a damp washcloth over his forehead. Every couple of minutes he protested. He could not really make people disappear, though no one had accused him of being responsible for what had happened to Frank and Bobby.

Having retrieved a bottle of Scotch, gla.s.ses, and ice from the office wet bar, Lee Chen was pouring six stiff drinks,for each person in the room, as well as for Frank and Bobby "If you don't need a drink to steady your nerves now," he said, "you'll need one to celebrate when they come back safe." He had already downed one Scotch himself. The drink he poured now would be his second. This was the first time in his life he had drunk hard liquor-or needed it.

"How long?" Julie demanded.

"Twenty-two minutes," Clint said.

And I'm still sane, she thought wonderingly. Bobby, you, come back to me. Don't you leave me alone forever. How am I going to dance alone?

How am I going to live alone? How am I going to live?

BOBBY DROPPED the bed railing, and the lasers winked leaving him in the shadow of the spiny ship, which seem darker than before the beams appeared. As he looked up to see what would happen next, another light issued from the underside of the craft, too pale to make him squint.

This one was precisely the diameter of the crater. In that queer, pearly glow, the insects began to rise off the ground, as if they were weightless. At first only ten or twenty floated upward, but then twenty more and a hundred after that, rising as lazily and effortlessly as so many bits of dandelion fluff, turning slowly, their tarantula legs motionless, the eerie light gone out of their eyes, as if they had been switched off. In a minute or two, the floor of the crater was depopulated of insects, and the horde was being drawn up effortlessly in that sepulchral silence that accompanied all of the craft's maneuvers except for the base vibrations that had called the insect miners from their bores.

Then the silence was broken by a flowerlike warble.

"Frank!" Bobby cried in relief, and turned as a gust of vile smelling wind washed over him.

As the cold, hollow piping echoed across the crater again, there was a subtle change in the hue of the light that issued from the ship above.

Now the thousands of red diamonds rose from the ash-gray soil in which they lay and followed the insects upward, gleaming dully here and brightly there, so many of them that it seemed as if Bobby was standing in a rain of blood.

Another whirl of evil-scented wind cast up a cloud of the ashy soil, reducing visibility, and Bobby turned in eager expectation of Frank's arrival. Until he remembered that it might not be Frank but the brother.

The piping came a third time, and the subsequent puff of wind carried the dust away from him, so he saw Frank arrive less than ten feet from him.

"Thank G.o.d!" As Bobby stepped forward, the pearly light underwent a second subtle change. Reaching for Frank's hand, he felt himself suddenly weightless. When he looked down he saw his feet drift off the floor of the crater.

Frank grabbed at his outstretched hand and seized it.

Nothing had ever felt better to Bobby than Frank's firm grip, and for a moment he felt safe. Then he became aware that Frank had risen from the ground too. They were both being drawn upward in the wake of the insects and diamonds, toward the belly of the alien vessel, toward G.o.d-only-knew what nightmare inside.

Darkness.

Fireflies.

Velocity.

They were on Punaluu beach again, and the rain was coming down harder than before.

"Where the h.e.l.l was that last place?" Bobby demanded holding fast to his client.

"I don't know," Frank said.

"It scares the h.e.l.l out of me. it's so weird, but sometimes I seem to be... drawn there. He hated Frank for having taken him there; he loved him for having returned for him. When he shouted above the roar of the surf, neither love nor hate was in his voice, which was just borderline.

"I thought you could only travel to places you've been "Not necessarily. Anyway, I've been there before."

"But how did you get there the first time, it's another world. It can't have been familiar to you-right, Frank?"

"I don't know. I just don't understand any of it, Bobby turned to stand face to face with Frank, and Bobby took notice of how much the man's appearance had deteriorated they had teleported from the Dakota & Dakota offices in New port Beach. Although the storm once more had soaked them to the skin in seconds and left his clothes hanging on him shapelessly, it wasn't just the rain that made him look disheveled, beaten, and sickly. His eyes were more sunken than the whites of them were yellow, as if he had contracted a disease, and the flesh around them was so darkly bruised they appeared to as painted fake shiners with black shoe polish. His skin was paler than pale, a deathly pale and his lips were bluish, as though his circulatory system was failing. Bobby felt guilty about having shouted at him, put his free hand on Frank's shoulder and told him how sorry, that it was all right, that they were still fighting on the same side of this war, and that everything would turn out fine-as long as Frank didn't take them back to that place again. Frank said, "Sometimes it's like I'm almost in touch with the minds of those people, creatures, whatever they are in that ship." They were leaning on each other now, for to forehead, seeking mutual support in their exhaustion.

"Maybe I've got another gift I'm not aware of, like for all of my life I wasn't aware of being able to teleport until Candy backed me into a corner and tried to kill me. Maybe I'm telepathic. Maybe the wavelength my telepathy functions on is the major wavelength of that race's brain activity. Maybe I feel them out there, even across billions of light-years of s.p.a.ce. Maybe that's why I feel as if I'm being drawn to them, called to them."

Pulling back a few inches from Frank, Bobby looked into his tortured eyes for a long moment. Then he smiled and pinched Frank's cheek, and said, "You devil, you've really done a lot of thinking about this, haven't you, really put the old noodle to work on it, huh?" Frank smiled.

Bobby laughed.

Then they were both laughing, holding each other up by leaning into each other, the way teepee poles held one another up, and a part of their laugh was healthy, a release of tension, but part of it was that mad laughter that had troubled Bobby earlier. Clinging to his client, he said, "Frank, your life is chaos, you're living in chaos, and you can't go on like this. It's going to destroy you."

"I know."

"You've got to find a way to stop it."