Koontz, Dean R. - The Bad Place Read online

  The Bad Place

  by Dean R. Koontz

  Every eye sees its own special vision; every ear hears a most different

  song. In each man's troubled heart, an incision would reveal a unique,

  shameful wrong.

  Stranger friends hide here in human guise than reside in the valleys of

  Hell. But goodness, kindness and love arise in the heart of the poor

  beast, as well.

  -The Book of Counted Sorrows

  THE NIGHT was becalmed and curiously silent. A faint scent of smoke

  hung on the motionless air though no smoke was visible.

  Sprawled face down on the cold pavement, Frank Pollard did not move when

  he regained consciousness; he waited in the hope that his confusion

  would dissipate. He blinked, trying to focus. Veils seemed to flutter

  within his eyes. He sucked deep breaths of the cool air, tasting the

  invisible smoke, grimacing at the acrid tang of it.

  Shadows loomed like a convocation of robed figures, crowding around him.

  Gradually his vision cleared, but in the yellowish light that came from

  far behind him, little was revealed. A large trash dumpster, six or

  eight feet from him, so dimly outlined that for a moment it seemed

  strange, as though it were an artifact of an alien civilization. Frank

  stared at it for a while before he realized what it was. He did not

  know where he was or how he had gotten there. He could not have been

  unconscious longer than a few seconds for his heart was pounding as if

  he had been running for his life only moments ago.

  Fireflies in a windstorm....

  That phrase took flight through his mind, but he had no idea what it

  meant. When he tried to concentrate on it and make sense of it, a dull

  headache developed above his right eye.

  Fireflies in a windstorm....

  He groaned softly.

  Between him and the dumpster, a shadow among shadows moved, quick and

  sinuous. Small but radiant green eyes regarded him with icy interest.

  Frightened, Frank pushed up onto his knees. A thin, involuntary cry

  issued from him, almost less like a human sound than like the muted wail

  of a reed instrument.

  The green-eyed observer scampered away. A cat. Just an ordinary black

  cat.

  Frank got to his feet, swayed dizzily, and nearly fell over an object

  that had been on the blacktop beside him. Gingerly he bent down and

  picked it up: a flight bag made of supple leather, packed full,

  surprisingly heavy. He supposed it was his. He could not remember.

  Carrying the bag, he tottered to the dumpster and leaned against its

  rusted flank.

  Looking back, he saw that he was between rows of what seemed to be

  two-story stucco apartment buildings. All of the windows were black. On

  both sides, the tenants' cars were pulled nose-first into covered

  parking stalls. The queer yellow glow, sour and sulfurous, almost more

  like the product of a gas flame than the luminescence of an incandescent

  electric bulb, came from a street lamp at the end of the block, too far

  away to reveal the details of the alleyway in which he stood.

  As his rapid breathing slowed and as his heartbeat decelerated, he

  abruptly realized that he did not know who he was. He knew his

  name-Frank Pollard-but that was all. He did not know how old he was,

  what he did for a living, where he had come from, where he was going, or

  why. He was so startled by his predicament that for a moment his breath

  caught in his throat; then his heartbeat soared again, and he let his

  breath out in a rush.

  Fireflies in a windstorm...

  What the hell did that mean?

  The headache above his right eye corkscrewed across his forehead.

  He looked frantically left and right, searching for an object or an

  aspect of the scene that he might recognize, anything, an anchor in a

  world that was suddenly too strange. When the night offered nothing to

  reassure him, he turned his quest inward, desperately seeking something

  familiar in himself, but his own memory was even darker than the

  passageway around him.

  Gradually he became aware that the scent of smoke had faded, replaced by

  a vague but nauseating smell of rotting garbage in the dumpster. The

  stench of decomposition filled him with thoughts of death, which seemed

  to trigger a vague recollection that he was on the run from someone-or

  something that wanted to kill him. When he tried to recall why he was

  fleeing, and from whom, he could not further illuminate any scrap of

  memory; in fact, it seemed more an awareness on instinct than a genuine

  recollection.

  A puff of wind swirled around him. Then calm returned as if the dead

  night was trying to come back to life but had aged just one shuddering

  breath. A single piece of waste paper, swept up by that suffocating air

  clicked along the cement and scraped to a stop against his right shoe.

  Then another puff.

  The paper whirled away.

  Again the night was dead calm.

  Something was happening. Frank sensed that these silent whiffs of wind

  had some malevolent source, or meaning.

  Irrationally, he was sure that he was about to be crushed by a great

  weight. He looked up into the clear sky, at the empty blackness of

  space and at the malignant brilliant of the distant stars. If something

  was descending toward Frank he could not see it.

  The night exhaled once more. Harder this time. Its breath was sharp

  and dank.

  He was wearing running shoes, white athletic socks, and a long-sleeved

  blue-plaid shirt. He had no jacket, an could have used one. The air

  was not frigid, just mildly cooling. But a coldness was in him, too, a

  staggering fear, and he shivered uncontrollably between the cool caress

  of the night and that inner chill.

  The gust of wind died.

  Stillness reclaimed the night.

  Convinced that he had to get out of there-and fast, he pushed away from

  the dumpster. He staggered along the alley retreating from the end of

  the block where the street lamp glowed, into darker realms, with no

  destination in mind, directed only by the sense that this place was

  dangerous and that was if indeed safety could be found, lay elsewhere.

  The wind rose again, and with it, this time, came a whistling, barely

  audible, like the distant music of a flute of some strange bone

  instrument.

  Within a few steps, as Frank became surefooted and as his eyes adapted

  to the murky night, he arrived at a confluence of passageways.

  Wrought-iron gates in pale stucco arches lay to his left and right.

  He tried the gate on the left. It was unlocked, secured only by a

  simple gravity latch. The hinges squeaked, eliciting a wince from

  Frank, who hoped the sound had not been heard by his pursuer.

  By now, although no adversary was in sight, Frank had no doubt that he

  was the object of a chase. He knew
it was surely as a hare knew when a

  fox was in the field.

  The wind shuttered again at his back, and the flowerlike music, though

  barely audible and lacking a discernible melody, was haunting. It

  pierced him. It sharpened his fear.

  Beyond the black iron gate, flanked by feathery ferns and bushes, a

  walkway led between a pair of two-story apartment buildings. Frank

  followed it into a rectangular courtyard somewhat revealed by

  low-wattage security lamps at each end. First-floor apartments opened

  onto a covered promenade; the doors of the second-floor units were under

  the tile roof of an iron-railed balcony. Lightless windows faced a

  swath of grass, beds of azaleas and a few palms.

  A frieze of spiky palm-frond shadows lay across one palely illuminated

  wall, as motionless as if they were carved on a stone tablet. Then the

  mysterious flute warbled softly again, the reborn wind huffed harder

  than before, and the shadows danced, danced. Frank's own distorted,

  dark reflection whirled briefly over the stucco, among the silhouettes,

  as he hurried across the courtyard. He found another walkway, another

  gate, and ultimately the street on which the apartment complex faced.

  It was a side street without lampposts. There, the reign of the night

  was undisputed.

  The blustery wind lasted longer than before, churned harder. When the

  gust ended abruptly, with an equally abrupt cessation of the unmelodic

  flute, the night seemed to have been left in a vacuum, as though the

  departing turbulence had taken with it every wisp of breathable air.

  Then Frank's ears popped as if from a sudden altitude change; as he

  rushed across the deserted street toward the cars parked along the far

  curb, air poured in around him again.

  He tried four cars before finding one unlocked, a Ford. Slipping behind

  the wheel, he left the door open to provide some light.

  He looked back the way he had come.

  The apartment complex was dead-of-the-night and Wrapped in darkness. An

  ordinary building yet inexplicably sinister.

  No one was in sight.

  Nevertheless, Frank knew someone was closing in on him. He reached

  under the dashboard, pulled out a tangle of wires, and hastily

  jump-started the engine before realizing such a larcenous skill

  suggested a life outside of the law.

  he didn't feel like a thief. He had no sense of guilt and no apathy

  for-or fear of-the police. In fact, at the moment, would have welcomed

  a cop to help him deal with whoever or whatever was on his tail. He

  felt not like a criminal, like a man who had been on the run for an

  exhaustingly long time, from an implacable and relentless enemy.

  As he reached for the handle of the open door, a brief pale blue light

  washed over him, and the driver's-side window of the Ford exploded.

  Tempered glass showered into the rear seat, gummy and minutely

  fragmented. Since the front door was not closed, that window didn't

  spray over him; instead, most of it fell out of the frame, onto the

  pavement Yanking the door shut, he glanced through the gap where the

  glass had been, toward the gloom-enfolded apartment and saw no one.

  Frank threw the Ford in gear, popped the brake, tramped hard on the

  accelerator. Swinging away from the curb, he clipped the rear bumper of

  the car parked in front of him. A brief peal of tortured metal rang

  sharply across the night.

  But he was still under attack: A scintillant blue light, at one second

  in duration, lit up the car; over its entire interior. The windshield

  cracked with thousands of jagged lines, though it had been struck by

  nothing he could see. Frank averted his face and squeezed his eyes shut

  just in time to avoid being blinded by flying fragments. For a moment

  he could not remember where he was going, but he didn't let up on the

  accelerator preferring the danger of collision to the greater risk of

  breaking and giving his unseen enemy time to reach him. Glass rained

  over him, spattered across the top of his bent head; luckily, it was

  safety glass, and none of the fragments cut him.

  He opened his eyes, squinting into the gale that rushed through the now

  empty windshield frame. He saw that he'd gone half a block and had

  reached the intersection. He whipped the wheel to the right, tapping

  the brake pedal only lightly, and turned onto a more brightly lighted

  thoroughfare.

  Like Saint Elm's fire, sapphire-blue light glimmered on the chrome, and

  when the Ford was halfway around the corner, one of the rear tires blew.

  He had heard no gunfire. A fraction of a second later, the other rear

  tire blew.

  The car rocked, slewed to the left, began to fishtail.

  Frank fought the steering wheel.

  Both front tires ruptured simultaneously.

  The car rocked again, even as it glided sideways, and the sudden

  collapse of the front tires compensated for the leftward slide of the

  rear end, giving Frank a chance to grapple the spinning steering wheel

  into submission.

  Again, he had heard no gunfire. He didn't know why all of,this was

  happening-yet he did.

  That was the truly frightening part: On some deep subconscious level he

  did know what was happening, what strange force was swiftly destroying

  the car around him, and he also knew that his chances of escaping were

  poor.

  A flicker of twilight blue...

  The rear window imploded. Gummy yet prickly wads of safety glass flew

  past him. Some smacked the back of his head, stuck in his hair.

  Frank made the corner and kept going on four flats. The sound of

  flapping rubber, already shredded, and the grinding of metal wheel rims

  could be heard even above the roar of the wind that buffeted his face.

  He glanced at the rear view mirror. The night was a great black ocean

  behind him, relieved only by widely spaced street lamps that dwindled

  into the gloom like the lights of a double convoy of ships.

  According to the speedometer, he was doing thirty miles an hour just

  after coming out of the turn. He tried to push it up to forty in spite

  of the ruined tires, but something clanged and clinked under the hood,

  rattled and whined, and the engine coughed, and he could not coax any

  more speed out of it.

  When he was halfway to the next intersection, the street lamp either

  burst or winked out. Frank couldn't tell which one it was because the

  street lamps were widely spaced, he could see enough to drive.

  The engine coughed, then again, and the Ford began to gain speed. He

  didn't brake for the stop sign at the next intersection Instead he

  pumped the accelerator but to no avail.

  Finally the steering failed too. The wheel spun uselessly in his sweaty

  hands.

  Evidently the tires had been completely torn apart. The contact of the

  steel wheel rims with the pavement flung up turquoise sparks.

  Fireflies in a windstorm....

  He still didn't know what that meant.

  Now moving about twenty miles an hour, the car headed straight toward

  the right-hand curb. Frank tramped the brakes, but they no longer

  funct
ioned.

  The car hit the curb, jumped it, grazed a lamppost with a sound of sheet

  metal kissing steel, and thudded against the bark of an immense date

  palm in front of a white bungalow. Lights came on in the house even as

  the final crash was echoing in the cool night air.

  Frank threw the door open, grabbed the leather flight bag from the seat

  beside him, and got out, shedding fragments of gummy yet splintery

  safety glass.

  Though only mildly cool, the air chilled his face because sweat trickled

  down from his forehead. He could taste it when he licked his lips.

  A man had opened the front door of the bungalow as he stepped onto the

  porch. Lights flicked on at the house door.

  Frank looked back the way he had come. A thin cloud of luminous

  sapphire dust seemed to blow through the street.

  As though shattered by a tremendous surge of current, the bulbs in

  street lamps exploded along the two blocks behind him, the shards of

  glass, glinting like ice, rained on the blacktop. In resultant gloom,

  he thought he saw a tall, shadowy figure more than a block away, coming

  after him, but he couldn't be sure.

  To Frank's left, the guy from the bungalow was hurrying down the walk

  toward the palm tree where the Ford had come to rest. He was talking,

  but Frank wasn't listening to him.

  Clutching the leather satchel, Frank turned and ran. He was not sure