The Bad Place
Page 36

But after floundering a few steps through the sand, Frank stopped and said, “No, I can’t, I’m worn out. I’m going to have to pray that I pop out of here in time.”
He looked worse than worn out. He looked half dead.
Bobby turned toward Candy again, and saw the dark brother slogging through the soft, wet sand much faster than they had managed but still with some difficulty. “Why doesn’t he just teleport from there to here in a flash, overwhelm us?”
Frank’s horror at the sight of his oncoming nemesis was so complete that he didn’t appear capable of speech. Yet the words came with the shallow breaths that rasped out of him: “Short hops, under a few hundred feet, aren’t possible. Don’t know why.”
Maybe if the trip was too short, the mind had a fraction of a second less than the minimum time required to deconstruct and fully reconstruct the body. It didn’t matter what the reason was. Even if he couldn’t teleport across the remaining stretch of sand, Candy was going to reach them in seconds.
He was only thirty feet away and closing, a massive juggernaut of a man, with a neck thick enough to support a car balanced on his head, and arms that would give him an advantage in a wrestling match with a four-ton industrial robot. His blond hair was almost white. His face was broad and sharp-featured and hard—and as cruel as the face of one of those pre-psychotic young boys who liked to set ants on fire with matches and test the effects of full-strength lye on neighborhood dogs. Charging through the storm, kicking up gouts of wet black sand with each step, he looked less like a man than like a demon with a fierce hunger for human souls.
Holding fast to his client’s hand, Bobby said, “Frank, for God’s sake, let’s get out of here.”
When Candy was close enough for Bobby to see blue eyes as wild and vicious as those of a rattlesnake on Benzedrine, he let out a wordless roar of triumph. He flung himself at them.
Darkness.
Fireflies.
Velocity.
Pale morning light filtered from a clear sky into the narrow pass-through between two rotting, ramshackle buildings so crusted in the filth of ages that it was impossible to determine what material had been used to construct their walls. Bobby and Frank were standing in knee-deep garbage that had been tossed out of the windows of the two-story structures and left to decompose into a reeking sludge that steamed like a compost pile. Their magical arrival had startled a colony of roaches that scuttled away from them, and caused swarms of fat black flies to leap up from their breakfast. Several sleek rats sat up on their haunches to see what had arrived among them, but they were too bold to be scared off.
The tenements on both sides had some windows completely open to the outside, some covered with what looked like oiled paper, none with glass. Though no people were in sight, from the rooms within the aged walls came voices: laughter here; an angry exchange there; chanting, as of a mantra, softly drifting down from the second floor of the building on the right. It was all in a foreign tongue with which Bobby was not familiar, though he suspected they might be in India, perhaps Bombay or Calcutta.
Because of the ineluctable stench, which by comparison made the stink of a slaughterhouse seem like a new perfume by Calvin Klein, and because of the insistently buzzing flies that exhibited great interest in an open mouth and nostrils, Bobby was unable to get his breath. He choked, put his free hand over his mouth, still could not breathe, and knew he was going to faint facefirst into the vile, steaming muck.
Darkness.
Fireflies.
Velocity.
In a place of stillness and silence, shafts of afternoon sunshine pierced mimosa branches and dappled the ground with golden light. They stood on a red oriental footbridge over a koi pond in a Japanese garden, where sculpted bonsai and other meticulously tended plants were positioned among carefully raked beds of pebbles.
“Oh, yes,” Frank said with a mixture of wonder and pleasure and relief. “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 circumstances—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-travel-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 Japanese 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 and hair.
“They were so kind here,” Frank said, “respectful of my privacy, yet so attentive and kind.” He sounded wistful and terminally weary, as if he would have liked to have stopped his traveling right there, even if stopping meant dying at the hands 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 a part of Bobby’s footwear. One of the biggest advantages of being self-employed was freedom from neckties and uncomfortable shoes, so he was wearing, as usual, a pair of soft Rockport 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 there, 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 of the roach. “He’s trying to follow us. We have to lose him if—”
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 Japanese 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 down a gentle incline, over small objects that clattered and clicked under him and poked painfully into his flesh. When he tumbled to a halt, gasping and frightened, he was facedown 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 there in unnerving numbers: a score of huge insects just like the one they had taken to Dyson Manfred. Caught, as he was, in a 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 powdery 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. Propelled 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-footed 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 as 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 clean, 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 sour 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 spaced 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 spaced 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 altitude 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.
47
As DAY dimmed and dark 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 wasn’t coming closer. Bobby was worried when he visited, so Thomas was 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. Not 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 flutterby, pretty and quick, bounced from leaf to leaf, flower to flower, back and forth, round and round, close to the toad, then not 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 flutterby felt safe, or maybe it just liked the game too much, and it came even closer. Wham! The toad’s tongue shot out like one of those roll-up tooters they’d let the dumb people have one New Year’s Eve, and it caught the flutterby, and the green toad ate the yellow flutterby, 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 flutterby.
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 jetplane 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 jetplane.
Thomas tried some more to find the Bad Thing. Then, by the time 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 massive spines but markings, remote sensors, portholes, airlocks, and all the other apparatus one might expect.