Koontz, Dean R. - The Bad Place Page 7

  just bright enough for Candy to see two doors on the right of the hall,

  two on the left, and one at the far end.

  He crept to the first door on the right, eased it open, and slipped into

  the room beyond. He closed the door again and stood with his back to

  it.

  Although his need was great, he forced himself to wait for his eyes to

  adjust to the gloom.

  Ashen light, from a street lamp at least half a block away, glimmered

  faintly at the two windows. He noticed the mirror, first, a frosty

  rectangle in which the meager radiance was murkily reflected; then he

  began to make out the shape of the dresser beneath it. A moment later

  he was also able to see the bed and, dimly, the huddled form of someone

  lying under a light-colored blanket that was vaguely phosphorescent.

  Candy stepped cautiously to the bed, took hold of the blanket and sheets

  and hesitated, listening to the soft rhythmic breathing of the sleeper.

  He detected a trace of perfume mingled with a pleasant scent of warm

  skin and recently shampooed hair. A girl. He could always tell

  girl-smell from boy smell. He also sensed that this one was young,

  perhaps a teenager. If his need had not been so intense, he would have

  hesitated much longer than he did, for the moments preceding a kill were

  exciting, almost better than the act itself.

  With a dramatic flick of his arm, as if he were a magician throwing back

  the cloth that had covered an empty cage to reveal a captive dove of

  sorcerous origins, he uncovered the sleeper. He fell upon her, crushing

  her into the mattress with his body.

  She woke instantly and tried to scream, even though he surely knocked

  the wind out of her. Fortunately, he had unhumanly large and powerful

  hands, and he had found her face as she began to raise her voice, so he

  was able to thrust palm under her chin and hook his fingers in her

  cheeks clamp her mouth shut.

  "Be quiet, or I'll kill you," he whispered, his lips brushing against

  her delicate ear.

  Making a muffled, panicky sound, she squirmed under him to no avail.

  Judging by the feel of her, she was not yet a woman, perhaps no younger

  than twelve, certainly not older than fifteen.

  She was no match for him.

  "I don't want to hurt you. I just want you, and when i'm done with you,

  I'll leave." That was a lie, for he had no desire to rape her. Sex was

  no interest to him. Indeed, sex disgusted him; involving unmentionable

  fluids, depending upon the shameless useless organs associated with

  urination, sex was an unspeakable repulsive act. Other people's

  fascination with it only proved to Candy that men and women were members

  of a fallen humanity and that the world was a cesspool of sin and

  madness Either because she believed his pledge not to kill her cause she

  was now half-paralyzed with fear, she stopped resisting. Maybe she just

  needed all of her energy to breath with Candy's full weight-two hundred

  and twenty pounds pressing on her chest, restricting her lungs. Against

  his hand with which he clamped her mouth shut, he could feel her

  inhalations as her nostrils flared, followed by short, hot exhalations.

  His vision had continued to adapt to the poor light.

  though he still could not make out the details of her face, he could see

  her eyes shining darkly in the gloom, glistening terror. He could also

  see that she was a blonde; her pale caught even the dull gray glow from

  the windows and with burnished-silver highlights.

  With his free hand, he gently pushed her hair back from the right side

  of her neck. He shifted his position slightly, moved down on her in

  order to bring his lips to her throat. He kissed the tender flesh, felt

  the strong throb of her pulse against his lips, then bit deep and found

  the blood.

  She bucked and thrashed beneath him, but he held her down and held her

  fast, and she could not dislodge his greedy mouth from the wound he had

  made. He swallowed rapidly but could not consume the thick, sweet fluid

  as fast as it was offered. Soon, however, the flow diminished. The

  girl's convulsions became less violent, as well, then faded altogether,

  until she was as still beneath him as if she had been nothing more than

  a tangled mound of bedclothes.

  He rose from her and switched on the bedside lamp just long enough to

  see her face. He always wanted to see their faces, after their

  sacrifices if not before. He also liked to look into their eyes, which

  seemed not sightless but gifted with a vision of the far place to which

  their souls had gone. He did not entirely understand his curiosity.

  After all, when he ate a steak, he did not wonder what the cow had

  looked like. This girl and each of the others on whom he'd fed-should

  have been nothing more than one of the cattle to him. Once, in a dream,

  when he had finished drinking from a ravaged throat, his victim,

  although dead, had spoken to him, asking him why he wanted to look upon

  her in death. When he had said that he didn't know the answer to her

  question, she had suggested that perhaps, on those occasions when he had

  killed in the dark, he later needed to see his victims' faces because,

  in some unlit corner of his heart, he half expected to find his own face

  looking up at him, ice-white and dead-eyed.

  "Deep down," the dream-victim had said, "you know that you're already

  dead yourself, burnt out inside. You realize that you have far more in

  common with your victims after you've killed them than before."

  Those words, though spoken only in a dream, and though amounting to the

  purest nonsense, had nevertheless brought him awake with a sharp cry. He

  was alive, not dead, powerful and vital, a man with appetites as strong

  as they were unusual. The dream-victim's words stayed with him over the

  years, and when they echoed through his memory at times like this, they

  made him anxious. Now, as always, he refused to dwell on them. He

  turned his attention, instead, to the girl on the bed.

  She appeared to be about fourteen, quite pretty. Captivated by her

  flawless complexion, he wondered if her skin would feel as perfect as it

  looked, as smooth as porcelain, if he dared to stroke it with his

  fingertips. Her lips were slightly parted, as if they had been gently

  prised open by her spirit was it departed wonderfully blue, clear eyes

  seemed enormous, big for her face-and as wide as a winter sky.

  He would have liked to gaze upon her for hours. Letting a sigh of

  regret escape him, he switched off the lamp. He stood for a while in

  the darkness, enveloped by the gent aroma of blood.

  When his eyes had readjusted to the gloom, he returned to the hall, not

  bothering to close the girl's door behind him.

  He entered the room across from hers and found it unoccupied But in the

  room next to that one, Candy smelled stale sweat, and heard snoring.

  This one was a boy, seven or eighteen, not a big kid but not small

  either, and he put up more of a struggle than his sister. However, he

  was sleeping on his stomach, and when Candy threw back the covers fell

  upon him, the boy's face was ja
mmed hard into the pit of the mattress,

  smothering him and making it difficult for him to shout a warning. The

  fight was violent but brief. The boy passed out from lack of oxygen,

  and Candy flopped him over When he went for the throat, Candy let out a

  low eager cry that was louder than any sound the boy had made. Later,

  when he opened the door to the fourth bedroom, first pewter light of

  dawn had pierced the windows. shadows still huddled in the corners, but

  the deeper darkness had been chased off. The early light was too thin

  to elicit color from objects, and everything in the room seemed to be

  one shadow of gray or another.

  An attractive blonde in her late thirties was asleep on her side of a

  king-size bed. The sheets and blanket on the other half of the bed were

  hardly disturbed, so he figured the woman's husband and had either moved

  out or was away on business. He noted a half-full glass of water and a

  plastic bottle of prescription drugs on the night stand. He picked up

  the pharmacy bottle and saw that it was two-thirds full of small pills.

  A sedative, according to the label. From the label, he learned her

  name: Roseanne Lofton.

  Candy stood for a while, staring down at her face, an old longing for

  maternal solace stirred in him. Need continued to drive him, but he did

  not want to take her violently, not want to rip her open and drain her

  in a few minutes.

  He wanted this one to last.

  He had the urge to suckle on this woman as he had suckled on his

  mother's blood when she would permit him that grace. Occasionally, when

  he was in her favor, his mother would make a shallow cut in the palm of

  her hand or puncture one of her fingers, then allow him to curl up

  against her and be nursed on her blood for an hour or longer. During

  that time a great peace stole over him, a bliss so profound that the

  world and all its pain ceased to be real to him, because his mother's

  blood was like no other, untainted, pure as the tears of a saint.

  Through such small wounds, of course, he was able to drink no more than

  an ounce or two of her, but that meager dribble was more precious and

  more nourishing to him than the gallons he might have drained from a

  score of other people. The woman before him would not have such

  ambrosia within her veins, but if he closed his eyes while he suckled on

  her, and if he let his mind reel backward to memories of the days before

  his mother's death, he might recapture at least some of the exquisite

  serenity he had known then... and experience a faint echo of that old

  thrill.

  At last, without casting the covers aside, Candy gently lowered himself

  to the bed and stretched out beside the woman, watching as her

  heavy-lidded eyes fluttered and then opened. She blinked at him as he

  cuddled next to her, and for a moment she seemed to think that she was

  still dreaming, for no expression tightened the muscles of her slack

  face.

  "All I want is your blood," he said softly.

  Abruptly she cast off the lingering effects of the sedative, and her

  eyes filled with alarm.

  Before she could spoil the beauty of the moment by screaming or

  resisting, thereby shattering the illusion that she was his mother and

  was giving voluntarily of herself, he struck the side of her neck with

  his heavy fist. Then he struck her again. Then he hammered the side of

  her face twice. She slumped unconscious against the pillow.

  He squirmed under the covers to be close against her, withdrew her hand,

  and nipped her palm with his teeth. He put his head on the pillow,

  lying face to face with her, holding her hand between them, drinking the

  slow trickle from her palm. He closed his eyes after a while and tried

  to imagine that she was his mother, and eventually a gratifying peace

  stole over him. However, though he was happier at that moment than he

  had been in a long time, it was not a deep happiness, mere a veneer of

  joy that brightened the surface of his heart but the inner chambers dark

  and cold.

  the residue on his hands troubled him as deeply as if it been fresh

  blood.

  "Who the hell am I, what's happening to me?" he wondered aloud.

  He knew that he needed help. But he didn't know to whom he could turn.

  AFTER ONLY a few hours of sleep, Frank Pollard woke in the back seat of

  the stolen Chevy. The morning sun, streaming through the windows, was

  bright enough to make him wince.

  He was stiff, achy, and unrested. His throat was dry, and his eyes

  burned as if he had not slept for days.

  Groaning, Frank swung his legs off the seat, sat up, and cleared his

  throat. He realized that both of his hands were numb; they felt cold

  and dead, and he saw that he had curled them into fists. He had

  evidently been sleeping that way for some time, because at first he

  could not unclench. With considerable effort, he opened his right

  fist-and a handful of something black and grainy poured through his

  tingling fingers.

  He stared, perplexed, at the fine grains that had spilled down the leg

  of his jeans and onto his right shoe. He raised his hand to take a

  closer look at the residue that had stuck to his palm. It looked and

  smelled like sand.

  Black sand? Where had he gotten it?

  When he opened his left hand, more sand spilled out.

  Confused, he looked through the car windows at the residential

  neighborhood around him. He saw green lawns, dark topsoil showing

  through where the grass was sparse, mulch-filled planting beds, redwood

  chips mounded around some shrubs, but nothing like what he had held in

  his tightly clenched fists.

  He was in Laguna Niguel, so the Pacific Ocean was nearby, rimmed by

  broad beaches. But those beaches were white, not black.

  As full circulation returned to his cramped fingers, he leaned back in

  the seat, raised his hands in front of his face, and stared at the black

  grains that speckled his sweat-damp skin. Sand, even black sand, was a

  humble and innocent substance.

  BOBBY WAs awakened by a Santa Ana wind blowing through the trees

  outside. It whistled under the eaves, and forced a chorus of ticks and

  creaks from the cedar-shingle roof and the attic rafters.

  He blinked sleep-matted eyes and squinted at the numbers on the bedroom

  ceiling: 12:07. Because they sometimes worked odd hours and slept

  during the day, they had installed exterior Roll-up security shutters,

  leaving the room coal-mine dark except for the projection clock's pale

  green numerals, which floated on the ceiling like some portentous spirit

  message from Beyond.

  Because he had gone to bed near dawn, and instantly to sleep, he knew

  the numbers on the ceiling meant that it was shortly past noon, not

  midnight. He had slept perhaps six hours. He lay unmoving for a

  moment, wondering if Julie was awake.

  She said, "I am."

  "You're spooky," he said.

  "You knew what I was thinking."

  "That's not spooky," she said. "That's married."

  He reached for her, and she came into his arms.

  For a while they just
held each other, satisfied to be close. But by

  mutual and unspoken desire, they began to make love.

  The projection clock's glowing green numerals were too pale to relieve

  the absolute darkness, so Bobby could see nothing of Julie as they clung

  together. However, he "saw" her through his hands. As he reveled in

  the smoothness and warmth of her skin, the elegant curves of her

  breasts, the discovery of angularity precisely where angularity was

  desirable, the tautness of muscle, and the fluid movement of muscle and

  bone, he might have been a blind man using his hands to describe an

  inner vision of ideal beauty.

  The wind shook the world outside, in sympathy with the climaxes that

  shook Julie. And when Bobby could withhold him self no longer, when he

  cried out and emptied himself into her the skirting wind cried, too, and

  a bird that had taken shelter in a nearby eave was blown from its perch

  with a rustle of wings and a spiraling shriek.

  For a while they lay side by side in the blackness, their breath

  mingling, touching each other almost reverently. They did not want or

  need to speak; talk would have diminished the moment.

  The aluminum-slat shutters vibrated softly in the huffing wind.

  Gradually the afterglow of lovemaking gave way to a curious uneasiness,

  the source of which Bobby could not identify. The enveloping blackness

  began to seem oppressive, as if a continued absence of light was somehow

  contributing to a thickening of the air, until it would become as vivid

  and unbreathable as syrup.

  Though he had just made love to her, he was stricken by the crazy notion