The Bad Place Part 28

"I remember,"

Frank said, and he shuddered.

"Where did that blood come from, Frank?"

"I don't know," he said miserably.

,It was cat blood, Frank. Did you know it was cat blood?"

"No." His eyelids fluttered, but he did not open his eyes. "I just cat blood? Really?"

"Do you remember encountering a cat that day?"

"No." Clearly, a more aggressive technique would be require get the answers they needed. Jackie began to talk Frank!" ward in time, gradually regressing him to his admission to hospital yesterday evening, -then farther back toward the moment when he had awakened in that Anaheim alleyway in the early hours of Thursday morning, knowing nothing but his name Beyond that point might lie his memory, if he could be induced to step through the veil of amnesia and recover his past.

Julie leaned slightly forward in her chair and looked Jackie Jaxx, wondering how Bobby was enjoying the show.

figured the spinning crystal and other hocus-pocus would peal to his boyish spirit of adventure, and that he would smiling and bright-eyed.

Instead he was somber. His teeth must have been clenched for his jaw muscles bulged. He had told her what they learned at Dyson Manfred's house, and she had been as astonished and shaken as he and Clint. But that didn't seem to explain his mood. Maybe he was still unnerved by the memory of bugs in the entomologist's study. Or maybe he continued to be troubled by that dream he'd had last week: the bad Thing is coming, the bad thing...

She had dismissed his dream as unimportant. Now she wondered if it had been genuinely prophetic. After all the mess that Frank had brought into their lives, she was willing to give credence to such things as omens, visions, prescient dreams.

The bad thing is coming, the bad thing...

Maybe the bad thing was Mr. Blue.

Jackie regressed Frank to the alleyway, to the very morning when he had first awakened in a strange place, disoriented confused.

"Now go back further, Frank, just a little further back just a few more seconds, and a few more, back, back, beyond the total darkness in your mind, beyond that black in your mind...." Since the questioning had begun, Frank had appeared to dwindle in Julie's desk chair, as if made of wax and subjected to a flame. He had grown paler, too, if that was possible, as white as candle paraffin. But now, as he was forced backward through the darkness in his mind, toward the light of memory on the other side, he sat up straighter, put his hands on the arms of the chair and clutched the vinyl almost tightly enough to cause the upholstery to split. He seemed to be growing, returning to his former size, as if he had drunk one of the magic elixirs that Alice had consumed in her adventures at the far end of the rabbit hole.

"Where are you now?" Jackie asked.

Frank's eyes twitched beneath his closed lids. An inarticulate, strangled sound issued from him.

"Uh... uh...

"Where are you now?" Jackie insisted gently but firmly.

"Fireflies," Frank said shakily.

"Fireflies in a windstorm!" He began to breathe rapidly, raggedly, as if he were having trouble drawing air into his lungs.

"What do you mean by that, Frank?"

"Fireflies.

"Where are you, Frank?"

"Everywhere. Nowhere."

"We don't have fireflies in southern California, Frank, so you must be somewhere else. Think, Frank. Look around yourself now and tell me where you are."

"Nowhere." Jackie made a few more attempts to get Frank to describe his surroundings and be more specific as to the nature of the fireflies, all to no avail.

"Move him on from there," Bobby said.

"Farther back." Julie glanced at the recorder in Clint's hand and saw the spools turning behind the plastic window in the tapedeck.

With his melodic and vibrant voice, in seductively rhythmic cadences, Jackie ordered Frank to regress past the firefly speckled darkness.

Suddenly Frank said, "What am I doing here?" He was not referring to the offices of Dakota & Dakota, but to the place that Jackie Jaxx had drawn him to in his memory.

"Why here?"

"Where are you, Frank?"

"The house. What in the h.e.l.l am I doing here, why did I come here? This is crazy, I shouldn't be here."

"Whose house is it, Frank?" Bobby asked.

Because he had been instructed to hear only the hypnotists voice, Frank did not respond until Jackie repeated the question. Then: "Her house. It's her house. She's dead, of course, been dead seven years, but it's still her house, always will, the b.i.t.c.h will haunt the place, you can't destroy that kind of evil, not entirely, part of it lingers in the rooms where she lived, in everything she touched."

"Who was she, Frank?",Mother." -Your mother? What was her name?"

"Roselle. Roselle Pollard."

"This is the house on Pacific Hill Road?"

"Yeah. Look at it, my G.o.d, what a place, what a dark place what a bad place. Can't people see what a bad place it is? can't they see that something terrible lives in there?"

He was crying. Tears glimmered in his eyes, then streamed down his cheeks. Anguish twisted his voice.

"Can't they see what's in their what lives there, what hides there and breeds in that bad place? Are people blind? Or do they just not want to see?"

Julie was riveted by Frank's tortured voice and by the agony that had wrenched his face into an approximation of the pain countenance of a lost and frightened child. But she turned away from him and peered past the hypnotist to see if Bobby had reacted to the words "bad place." He was looking at her. The expression of distress that darkened his blue eyes was proof enough that the reference had not escaped him.

At the other end of the room, carrying a sheaf of printout Lee Chen entered from the reception lounge. He closed the door quietly. Julie put a finger to her lips, then motioned him to the sofa.

Jackie spoke soothingly to Frank, trying to allay the fear that had electrified him.

Suddenly Frank let out a sharp cry of fear. He sounded more like a frightened animal than like a man. He sat up even straighter. He was trembling. He opened his eyes, but obviously did not see anything in the room; he was still in a trance "Oh, my G.o.d, he's coming, he's coming now, the twins must've told him I'm here, he's coming!"

Frank's unalloyed terror was so pure and intense that some of it was communicated to Julie. Her heartbeat speeded up, and she began to breathe more rapidly, shallowly.

Trying to keep his subject relaxed enough to be cooperative, Jackie said, "Calm down, Frank. Relax and be calm. n.o.body can hurt you. Nothing unpleasant will happen. Be calm, relaxed, calm.

Frank shook his head.

"No. No, he's coming, he's coming, he's going to get me this time.

Dammit, why did I come back here? Why did I come back and give him a chance at me?"

"Relax now-"

"He's there!" Frank tried to rise to his feet, seemed unable to find the strength, and dug his fingers even deeper into the vinyl padding on the arms of the chair.

"He's right there, and he sees me, he sees me."

Bobby said, "Who is he, Frank?"

and Jackie repeated the question.

"Candy. It's Candy!"

When he was asked again for the name of this person he feared, he repeated: "Candy."

"His name is Candy?"

"He sees me!"

In a more forceful and commanding voice than before, Jackie said, "You will relax, Frank. You will be calm and relaxed." But Frank only grew more agitated. He had broken into a sweat. Fixed on something in a far place and time, his eyes were wild. His terror seemed to be sweeping him into a heartbursting panic.

"I don't have much control of him," Jackie said worriedly.

"I'm going to have to bring him out of it."

Bobby slid forward to the edge of his chair.

"No, not yet' In a minute but not yet. Ask him about this Candy. Who is the guy?"

Jackie repeated the question.

Frank said, "He's death."

Frowning, Jackie said, "That's not a clear answer, Frank."

"He's death walking, he's death living, he's my brother, her child, her favorite child, her sp.a.w.n, and I hate him, he wants to kill me, here he comes!" With a wretched bleat of terror, Frank started to push up from the chair.

Jackie ordered him to stay where he was.

Frank sat down reluctantly, but his terror only grew, cause he could still see Candy coming toward him.

Jackie tried to bring him out of that place in the past, toward the present, and out of his trance, but to no avail.

"Got to get away now, now, now, " Frank said desperately.

Julie was frightened for him. She'd never seen anyone more pathetic or vulnerable. He was drenched in sweat, s.h.i.+vering violently. His hair had fallen over his forehead, into his eyes, but it did not interfere with the vision of terror that had been called up from his past. He clutched the arms of the chair so fiercely that a fingernail on his right hand finally punctured the vinyl upholstery.

"I've got to get out of here," Frank repeated urgently.

Jackie told him to stay put.

"No, I've got to get away from him!"

To Bobby, Jackie Jaxx said, "This has never happened to me, I've lost control of him. Jesus, look at him, I'm afraid the guy's going to have a heart attack."

"Come on, Jackie, you've got to help him," Bobby said sharply. He got off his chair, squatted beside Frank, putt his hand on Frank's in a gesture of comfort and rea.s.surance.

"Bobby, don't," Clint said, standing up so fast that he dropped the tape recorder he'd been balancing on his thigh.

Bobby didn't respond to Clint, for he was too focused on Frank, who seemed to be shaking himself to pieces in front of them. The guy was like a boiler with a jammed release valve filled to the bursting point not with steam pressure but manic terror. Bobby was trying to calm him, where Jackie failed.

For an instant Julie didn't understand what had made Clint shoot to his feet, But she realized that Bobby had seen some thing the rest of them had missed: fresh blood on Frank's right hand. Bobby hadn't put his hand over Frank's merely to comfort; he was trying, as gently as possible, to loosen Frank's grip on the arm of the chair, because Frank had torn open the vinyl and cut himself, perhaps repeatedly, on an exposed tack or upholstery tack.

"He's coming, got to get away!"

Frank let go of the chair and grabbed Bobby's hand, and got to his feet, pulling Bobby with him.

Suddenly Julie understood what Clint feared, and she stood up so fast that she knocked her chair over.

"Bobby, no!"

Thrown into a panic by the vision of his murderous brother, Frank screamed. With a hiss like steam escaping from a locomotive engine, he vanished. And took Bobby with him.

FIREFLIES IN a windstorm.

Bobby seemed to be floating in s.p.a.ce, for he had no sense of his body's position, couldn't tell if he was lying or sitting or standing, right side up or upside down, as if weightless in an immense void. He had no sense of smell or taste. He could hear nothing. He could feel neither heat nor cold nor texture nor weight. The only thing he could see was limitless blackness that seemed to stretch to the ends of the universe-and millions upon millions of tiny fireflies, ephemeral as sparks, that swarmed around him. Actually, he was not sure he saw them at all, because he was not aware of having eyes with which to look at them; it was more as if he was... aware of them, through any of the usual senses but through some inner sight of the mind's eye.

At first he panicked. The extreme sensory deprivation convinced him that he was paralyzed, without feeling an inch of skin, felled by a ma.s.sive cerebral hemorrhage, and blinded and trapped forever in a damaged brain that had severed all its connections to the outside world.

Then he became aware that he was in motion, not drifting in the blackness as he had first thought, but speeding through it, rocketing at a tremendous, frightening speed. He became aware of being drawn forward as if he were a bit of lint flying toward some vacuum cleaner of cosmic power, and all around him the fireflies swirled and tumbled. It was like being on amus.e.m.e.nt park ride so huge and fast that only G.o.d could have designed it for His own pleasure, though there was Pleasure whatsoever in it for Bobby as he roller-coaster through the pitch blackness, trying to scream.

He hit the forest floor on his feet, swayed, and almost slammed against Frank, in front of whom he was standing. Frank still had a painfully tight grip on his hand.

Bobby was desperate for air. His chest ached; his lungs seemed to have shriveled up. He sucked in a deep breath, another, exhaling explosively.

He saw the blood, which was on both of their hands now. An image of torn upholstery flashed through his mind. Jackie Jaxx. Bobby remembered.

When Bobby tried to pull loose of his client, Frank held him fast and said, "Not here. No, I can't risk this. Too dangerous. Why am I here?"

Steeped in the scent of pines, Bobby surveyed the surrounding primeval forest, which was thick with shadows as dusk introduced night to the world. The air was frigid, and the bristling boughs of the giant evergreens drooped under a weight of snow, but he saw nothing frightening in that scene.

Then he realized that Frank was staring past him. He turned to discover they were on the edge of the forest. A snow-covered meadow sloped up gently behind them. At the top was a log cabin, not a rustic shack but an elaborate structure that clearly showed the input of an architect, a vacation retreat for someone with plenty of disposable income. A mantle of snow was draped over the main roof, another over the porch roof, each decorated with a fringe of icicles that glittered in the last beams of cold sunlight. No lights glowed at the windows. No smoke curled up from any of the three chimneys. The place appeared to be deserted.

"He knows about this," Frank said, still panicked.

"I bought it under another name, but he found out about it, and he came here, almost killed me here, and he's probably keeping tabs on it, checking in regularly, hoping to catch me again." Bobby was numbed less by the subzero cold than by the realization that he had teleported out of their office and onto this slope in the Sierras or some other mountains. He finally found his voice and said, "Frank, what-" Darkness.