“No. You saying you do?”
“I know.”
“Tell me.”
“You’ll figure it out eventually.”
“Don’t be mysterious. That’s not like you.”
She swung the company Toyota into their development, then onto their street. “I tell you what I think, it’ll upset you. You’ll deny it, we’ll argue, and I don’t want to argue with you.”
“Why will we argue?”
She pulled into their driveway, put the car in park, switched off the lights and engine, and turned to him. Her eyes shone in the dark. “When you understand why we can’t let go, you won’t like what it says about us, and you’ll argue that I’m wrong, that we’re just a couple of sweet kids, really. You like to see us as a couple of sweet kids, savvy but basically innocent at the same time, like a young Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed. I really love you for that, for being such a dreamer about the world and us, and it’ll hurt me when you want to argue.”
He almost started to argue with her about whether he would argue with her. Then he stared at her for a moment and finally said, “I’ve had this feeling that I’m not facing up to something, that when this is all over and I realize why I was so determined to see this through to the end, my motivations won’t be as noble as I think they are now. It’s a weird damn feeling. As if I don’t really know myself.”
“Maybe we spend all our lives learning to know ourselves. And maybe we never really do—completely.”
She kissed him lightly, quickly, and got out of the car.
As he followed her up the sidewalk to the front door, he glanced at the sky. The clarity of the day had been short-lived. A pall of clouds concealed the moon and stars. The sky was very dark, and he was gripped by the curious certainty that a great and terrible weight was falling toward them, black against the black heavens and therefore invisible, but falling fast, faster....
51
CANDY KEPT a chokehold on his fury, which strained like an attack dog trying to break its leash.
He rocked and rocked, and gradually the shy visitor grew bolder. Repeatedly he felt the invisible hand on his head. Initially it lay upon him as lightly as an empty silk glove, and it stayed only briefly before flitting away. But as he pretended to be disinterested in both the hand and the person to whom it belonged, the visitor grew more daring, the hand heavier and less nervous.
Though Candy made no effort to probe at the mind of the intruder, for fear of scaring him away, some of the stranger’s thoughts came to him nonetheless. He did not think the visitor was aware that images and words from his own mind were slipping into Candy’s; they were just leaking out of him as if they were trickles of water seeping from pin-size holes in a rusty bucket.
The name “Julie” came several times. And once an image floated along with the name—an attractive woman with brown hair and dark eyes. Candy wasn’t sure if it was the visitor’s face or the face of someone the visitor knew—or even if it was the face of anyone who really existed. There were aspects that made it seem unreal: a pale light radiated from it, and the features were so kind and serene that it looked like the holy countenance of a saint in an illustrated Bible.
The word “flutterby” leaked out of the visitor’s mind more than once, sometimes with other words, like “remember the flutterby” or “don’t be a flutterby.” And each time that word flitted through his mind, the visitor quickly withdrew.
But he kept coming back. Because Candy did nothing to make him feel unwelcome.
Candy rocked and rocked. The chair made a soft sound: creak ... creak ... creak ... creak.
He waited.
He kept an open mind.
... creak ... creak ... creak ...
Twice the name “Bobby” seeped from the visitor’s mind, and the second time a fuzzy image of a face was linked to it, another very kind face. It was idealized, like Julie’s face. Recognition stirred in Candy, but Bobby’s visage was not as clear or detailed as Julie’s, and Candy did not want to concentrate on it because the visitor might notice his interest and be frightened off.
During his long and patient courtship of the shy intruder, many other words and images came to Candy, but he didn’t know what to make of them:
—men in spacesuits—
—“Bad Thing”—
—a guy in a hockey mask—
—“The Home”—
—“Dumb People”—
—a bathrobe, a half-eaten Hershey’s bar, and a sudden frantic thought: Draw Bugs, no good, Draw Bugs, got to Be Neat—
More than ten minutes passed without contact, and Candy started to worry that the intruder had gone away for good. But suddenly he was back. This time the contact was strong, more intimate than ever.
When Candy sensed that the visitor was more confident, he knew the time had come to act. He pictured his mind as a steel trap, the visitor as an inquisitive mouse, and he pictured the trap springing, the bar pinning the visitor to the killplate.
Shocked, the visitor tried to pull away. Candy held him and pushed across the telepathic bridge between them, trying to storm his adversary’s mind to find out who he was, where he was, and what he wanted.
Candy had no telepathic power of his own, nothing to equal even the weak telepathic gifts of the intruder; he had never read anyone’s mind before, and he did not know how to go about it. As it turned out, he did not need to do anything except open himself and receive what the visitor gave him. Thomas was his name, and he was terrified of Candy, of having Done Something Really Dumb, and of putting Julie in danger; that trinity of terrors shattered his mental defenses and caused him to disgorge a flood of information.
In fact, there was too much information for Candy to make sense of it, a babble of words and images. He tried desperately to sort through it for clues to Thomas’s identity and location.
Dumb People, Cielo Vista, The Home, everybody here has bad eye cues, Care Home, good food, TV, The Best Place For Us, Cielo Vista, the aides are nice, we watch the hummingbirds, the world is bad out there, too bad for us out there, Cielo Vista Care Home....
With some astonishment, Candy realized that the visitor was someone with a subnormal intellect—he even picked up the term “Down’s syndrome”—and he was afraid that he was not going to be able to sort enough meaningful thoughts from the babble to get a fix on Thomas’s location. Depending on the size of his IQ, Thomas might not know where Cielo Vista Care Home was, even though he apparently lived there.
Then a series of images spun out of Thomas’s mind, a well-linked chain of serial memories that still caused him some emotional pain: the trip to Cielo Vista in a car with Julie and Bobby, on the day they first checked him into the place. This was different from most of Thomas’s other thoughts and memories, in that it was richly detailed and so clearly retained that it unreeled like a length of motion-picture film, giving Candy all he needed to know. He saw the highways over which they had driven that day, saw the route markers flashing past the car window, saw every landmark at every turn, all of which Thomas had struggled mightily to memorize because all through the trip he kept thinking, If I don’t like it there, if people are mean there, if it’s too scary there, if it’s too much being alone there, I got to know how I find the way back to Bobby and Julie anytime I want, remember this, remember all of this, turn there at the 7-11, right there at the 7-11, don’t forget that 7-11, and now go past those three palm trees. What if they don’t come visit me? No, that’s a bad thing to think, they love me, they’ll come. But what if they don’t? Look there, remember that house, you go past that house, remember that house with the blue roof—
Candy got it all, as precise a fix as he could have obtained from a geographer who would have spoken precisely in degrees and minutes of longitude and latitude. It was more than he needed to know to make use of his gift. He opened the trap and let Thomas go.
He got up from the rocker.
He pictured Cielo Vista Care Home as it appeared so exquisitely detailed in Thoma
s’s memory.
He pictured Thomas’s room on the first floor of the north wing, at the northwest comer.
Darkness, billions of hot sparks spinning in the void, velocity.
BECAUSE JULIE was in a let‘s-move-and-get-it-done mood, they had stopped at the house only fifteen minutes, long enough to throw toiletries and a change of clothes in an overnight bag. At McDonald’s, on Chapman Avenue in Orange, she swung by the drive-through window and got dinner to eat on the way: Big Macs, fries, diet colas. Before they reached the Costa Mesa Freeway, while Bobby was still divvying up the extra packets of mustard and opening the containers that held the Big Macs, Julie had clipped the radar detector to the rearview mirror, plugged it in the Toyota’s cigarette lighter, and switched it on. Bobby had never before eaten fast food at high speed, but he figured they averaged eighty-five miles an hour north on the Costa Mesa to the Riverside Freeway west to the Orange Freeway north, and he was still finishing his french fries when they were only a couple of exits away from the Foothill Freeway east of Los Angeles. Though the rush hour was well past and the traffic unusually light, maintaining that pace required a lot of lane changing and nerve.
He said, “We keep this up, I’ll never have a chance to die from the cholesterol in this Big Mac.”
“Lee says cholesterol doesn’t kill us.”
“Is that what he says?”
“He says we live forever, and all cholesterol can do is move us out of this life a little sooner. Same thing must be true if I slip up and roll this sucker a few times.”
“I don’t think that’ll happen,” he said. “You’re the best driver I’ve ever seen.”
“Thank you, Bobby. You’re the best passenger.”
“The only thing I wonder ...”
“Yeah?”
“If we don’t really die, just move on, and I don’t have to worry about anything—why the hell did I bother to get diet colas?”
THOMAS ROLLED off the bed, onto his feet. “Derek, go, get out, he’s coming!”
Derek was watching a horse talking on TV, and he didn’t hear Thomas.
The TV was in the room’s middle, between the beds, and by the time Thomas got there and grabbed Derek to make him listen, a funny sound was all around them, not funny ha-ha but funny weird, like somebody whistling but not whistling. There was wind, too, a couple of puffs, not warm or cold either, but it made Thomas shiver when it blew on him.
Pulling Derek off his chair, Thomas said, “Bad Thing’s coming, you get out, you go, like I said before, now!”
Derek just made a dumb face at him, then smiled, like he figured Thomas was pretending to be funny the way the Three Stooges pretended. He’d forgot all about the promise he made Thomas. He’d thought the Bad Thing was going to be poached eggs for breakfast, and when poached eggs never showed up on his plate, he figured he was safe, but now he wasn’t safe and didn’t know it.
More funny-weird whistling. More wind.
Giving Derek a shove, making him get started for the door, Thomas shouted, “Run!”
The whistling stopped, the wind stopped, and all of a sudden from nowhere the Bad Thing was there. Between them and the open door.
It was a man, like Thomas already knew it was, but it was more than just a man. It was darkness poured in the shape of a man, like a piece of the night itself that came in through the window, and not just because it wore a black T-shirt and black pants but because it was all deep dark inside, you could tell.
Right away Derek was afraid. Nobody needed to tell him this was a Bad Thing, not now when he could see it with his own eyes. But he didn’t see it was too late to run, and he went straight at the Bad Thing, like maybe he could push past it, which must have been what he was figuring because even Derek wasn’t dumb enough to figure he could knock it down, it was so big.
The Bad Thing grabbed him and lifted him before he had any chance to get around it, lifted him right up off the floor, like he didn’t weigh any more than a pillow. Derek screamed, and the Bad Thing slammed him against the wall so hard his scream stopped, and pictures of Derek’s mom and dad and brother fell off the wall, not the one where Derek got slammed but another wall all the way around the room from him and over his bed.
The Bad Thing was so fast. That was the worst thing about it, how awful fast it was. It slammed Derek against the wall, Derek’s mouth fell open but no more sound came from him, the Bad Thing slammed him again, right away, harder, though the first time was hard enough for anybody, and Derek’s eyes went funny. The Bad Thing took him away from the wall and slammed him down on the worktable. The table kind of shivered like it would fall apart, but it didn’t. Derek’s head was over the table edge, hanging down, so Thomas was looking at his face, upside-down eyes blinking fast, upside-down mouth open real wide but no sound coming out. He looked up from Derek’s face, looked right across Derek’s body at the Bad Thing, which was looking at him and grinning, like all this was a joke, funny ha-ha, which it wasn’t, no way. Then it picked up the scissors on the edge of the worktable, the ones Thomas used to make his picture poems, the ones that almost fell on the floor when it slammed Derek on the table. It made the scissors go into Derek and bring the blood out of him, into poor Derek who wouldn’t hurt no one himself, except himself, who wouldn’t know how to hurt anyone. And the Bad Thing made the scissors go in again and bring more blood out of another place in Derek, and in again, and again. Then blood wasn’t coming out of just four places on Derek’s chest and belly where the scissors had been made to go in, but out of his mouth and nose too. The Bad Thing lifted Derek off the table, the scissors still sticking out of his front, and threw him like he was just a pillow. No, like he was a garbage bag, threw him the way the Santa Nation Men threw the garbage bags onto their Santa Nation Truck. Derek landed on his bed, on his back on his bed, with the scissors still in him, and didn’t move and was gone to the Bad Place, you could tell. And the worst thing was it all happened so fast, faster than Thomas could think what to do to stop it.
Footsteps in the hall, people running.
Thomas yelled for help.
Pete, one of the aides, showed up in the doorway. Pete saw Derek on the bed, scissors in him, blood coming out everywhere, and he got afraid, you could see him get it. He turned to the Bad Thing and said, “Who—”
The Bad Thing grabbed him by the neck, and Pete made a sound like something was stuck in his throat. He put both his hands on the Bad Thing’s arm, which seemed bigger than Pete’s two arms together, but he couldn’t make the Bad Thing let go. The Bad Thing lifted him by his neck, making his chin turn up and his head bend back, and then took hold of him by the belt, too, and pitched him back out the door, into the hall. Pete hit a nurse who came running up just then, and they both went down on the floor out there in the hall, all tangled up, her screaming.
All of this in a few clock ticks. So fast.
The Bad Thing made the door shut with a bang, saw you couldn’t lock it, then did the funniest thing of all, funny-weird, funny-scary. He held both his hands out at the door, and this blue light came from his hands the way not-blue came from a flashlight. Sparks flew from hinges and around the knob and all around the door edges. Everything metal smoked and turned all soft, like butter when you put it on mashed potatoes. It was a Fire Door. They said you had to keep your door closed if you ever saw fire in the hall, not try to run in the hall, but keep your door closed and stay put. They called it a Fire Door because fire couldn’t get through it, they said, and Thomas always wondered why they didn’t call it a Fire Can’t Get Through It Door, but he never asked. The thing was, a Fire Door was all metal, so it couldn’t burn, but now it melted around the edges, and so did the metal frame, they melted together, it didn’t look like you could ever get through that door again.
People started pounding on the door from out there in the hall, tried to make it open, couldn’t, and shouted for Thomas and Derek. Thomas knew some voices and who they belonged to, and he wanted to yell for them to help quick because he
was in trouble, but he couldn’t make a sound any better than poor Derek.
The Bad Thing made the blue light stop. Then it turned and looked at Thomas. It smiled at him. It didn’t have a nice smile. It said, “Thomas?”
Thomas was surprised he could stand up, he was so scared. He was against the wall by the window, and he thought of maybe making the lock open on the window and push it up and get out, which he knew how to do because of Emergency Drills. But he knew he wasn’t fast enough, no way, because the Bad Thing was the fastest he ever saw.
It took a step toward him, and another step. “Are you Thomas?”
For a while he still couldn’t find the way to make sounds. He could just move his mouth and sort of pretend to make sounds. Then while he was doing that, he figured maybe if he told a lie and said he wasn’t Thomas, the Bad Thing would believe him and just go away. So when all of a sudden he could make sounds, and then words, he said, “No. I ... no ... not Thomas. He’s gone out in the world now, he’s got a big eye cue, he’s a high-end moron, so they moved him out in the world.”
The Bad Thing laughed. It was a laugh that had no funny in it, the worst Thomas ever heard. The Bad Thing said, “Who the hell are you, Thomas? Where do you come from? How come a dummy like you can do something I can’t?”
Thomas didn’t answer. He didn’t know what to say. He wished the people in the hall would stop pounding on the door and find some other way to get in, because pounding wasn’t working. Maybe they could call the cops and tell them to bring the Jaws of Life, yeah, the Jaws of Life, like you saw them use on the TV news when a person was in a wrecked car and couldn’t get out. They could use the Jaws of Life to pull open the door the way they pulled at smashed-up cars to get people out of them. He hoped the cops wouldn’t say, we’re sorry but we can only open car doors with the Jaws of Life, we can’t open Care Home doors, because then he was finished for sure.
“You going to answer me, Thomas?” the Bad Thing asked.
Derek’s TV chair got turned around in the fight, and now it was between Thomas and the Bad Thing. The Bad Thing held one hand out at the chair, just one, and the blue light went whoosh! and the chair blew up in splinters, like all the tooth-picks in the world. Thomas threw his hands over his face just fast enough so no splinters went in his eyes. Some went in the backs of his hands and even in his cheeks and chin, and he could feel some of them in his shirt, poking his belly, but he didn’t feel any hurt because he was so busy feeling scared.
He took his hands from his eyes right away, because he had to see where the Bad Thing was. Where it was was right on top of him, with soft bits of the chair’s insides floating in the air in front of its face.
“Thomas?” it said, and it put one of its big hands on the front of Thomas’s neck the way it did Pete a while ago.
Thomas heard words coming from himself, and he couldn’t believe he was making them, but he was. Then when he heard what he said to the Bad Thing, he couldn’t believe he said it, but he did: “You’re not Being Sociable.”
The Bad Thing grabbed him by the belt and kept hold of him by the neck and lifted him off the floor and pulled him away from the wall, then slammed him into the wall, the same way it did Derek, and, oh, it hurt worse than Thomas ever before hurt in his life.
THE INTERIOR garage door had a dead bolt but no security chain. Pocketing his keys, Clint entered the kitchen at ten minutes past eight and saw Felina sitting at the table, reading a magazine while she waited for him.
She looked up and smiled, and his heart thumped faster at the sight of her, just like in every sappy love story ever written. He wondered how this could have happened to him. He had been so self-contained before Felina. He had been proud of the fact that he needed no one for intellectual stimulation or emotional support, and that he was therefore not vulnerable to the pains and disappointments of human relationships. Then he had met her. When he caught his breath, he had been as vulnerable as anyone—and glad of it.
She looked terrific in a simple blue dress with a red belt and matching red shoes. She was so strong yet so gentle, so tough yet so fragile.
He went to her, and for a while they stood by the refrigerator, next to the sink, holding each other and kissing, neither of them speaking in either of the ways they could. Clint thought they would have been happy, just then, even if both of them had been deaf and mute, capable of neither lip reading nor sign language, because at that moment what made them happy was the very fact of being together, which no words could adequately express anyway.
Finally he said, “What a day! Can’t wait to tell you all about it. Let me clean up real quick, change clothes. We’ll be out of here by eight-thirty, go over to Caprabello’s, get a comer booth, some wine, some pasta, some garlic bread—”
Some heartburn.
He laughed because it was true. They both loved Caprabello’s, but the food was spicy. They always suffered for the indulgence.
He kissed her again, and she sat down with her magazine, and he went through the dining room and down the hall to the bathroom. While he let the water run in the sink to get it hot, he plugged in his electric razor and began to shave, grinning at himself in the mirror because he was such a damned lucky guy.
THE BAD THING was right in his face, snarling at him, lots of questions, too many for Thomas to think about and answer even if he was sitting in a chair quiet and happy, instead of lifted off the floor and held against the wall with his whole back hurting so bad he had to cry. He kept saying, “I’m full up, I’m full up.” Always when he said that, people stopped asking him things or telling him things, they let him take time to make his head clear. But the Bad Thing was not like other people. It didn’t care if his head was clear, it just wanted answers. Who was Thomas? Who was his mother? Who was his father? Where did he come from? Who was Julie? Who was Bobby? Where was Julie? Where was Bobby?
Then the Bad Thing said, “Hell, you’re just a dummy. You don’t know the answers, do you? You’re just as stupid as you are stupid-looking.”
It pulled Thomas away from the wall, held him off the floor with one hand on his neck, so Thomas couldn’t breathe good. It slapped Thomas in the face, hard, and Thomas didn’t want to keep crying, but he couldn’t stop, he hurt and was scared.
“Why do they let people like you live?” the Bad Thing asked.