“Good. Me neither.” Derek pushed buttons on the raygun. A new picture came on the screen. “You don’t want to watch a game show?”

“No.” All Thomas wanted to do was snoop on the Bad Thing.

“Good.” Derek pushed buttons, and the invisible rays made the screen show a new picture. “You don’t want to watch the Three Stooges pretending to be funny?”

“No.”

“What you want to watch?”

“Don’t matter. Whatever you want to watch.”

“Really?”

“Whatever you want to watch,” Thomas repeated.

“Gee, that’s nice.” He made lots of pictures on the screen until he found a space movie where spacemen in spacesuits were poking around in some spooky place. Derek made a happy sigh and said, “This is good. I like their hats.”

“Helmets,” Thomas said. “Space helmets.”

“I wish I had a hat like that.”

When he reached out into the big dark again, Thomas decided not to picture a mind-string unraveling toward the Bad Thing. Instead he pictured a raygun, shooting some invisible rays. Boy, did that work better! Wham, he was right there with the Bad Thing in a flash, and he felt it stronger, too, so strong he got scared and clicked off the raygun and got all of himself back into his room with the rest of himself right away.

“They got telephones in their hats,” Derek said. “See, they’re talking through their hats.”

On the TV, the spacemen were in an even spookier place, poking around, which was one of the things spacemen did the most, even though something ugly-nasty was usually in those spooky places just waiting for them. Spacemen never learned.

Thomas looked away from the screen.

At the window.

The dark.

Bobby was scared for Julie. Bobby knew stuff Thomas didn’t know. If Bobby was scared for Julie, Thomas had to be brave and do What Was Right.

The raygun idea worked such a lot better it scared him, but he figured it was really good because he could easier snoop on the Bad Thing. He could get to the Bad Thing faster and get away from it faster, too, so he could snoop on it more often and not be scared about it maybe grabbing the mind-string and coming back to The Home with him. Grabbing an invisible raygun ray was harder, even for a thing as fast and smart and mean as the Bad Thing.

So he pictured pushing buttons on a raygun again, and a part of him went through the dark—wham!—and to the Bad Thing right away. He felt how mad the Bad Thing was, madder than ever, and thinking lots of thoughts about blood that made Thomas half sick. Thomas wanted to come right back to The Home. The Bad Thing felt him, you could tell. He didn’t like the Bad Thing feeling him, knowing he was there with it, but he stayed just a couple clock ticks longer, trying to see any thoughts about Julie in all those thoughts about blood. If the Bad Thing had thoughts about Julie, Thomas would TV a warning right away to Bobby. He was happy he couldn’t find Julie in the Bad Thing’s mind, and he quick raygunned back to The Home.

“Where you think I could get a hat like that?” Derek asked.

“Helmet.”

“Even has a light on it, see?”

Rising up a little from his pillows, Thomas said, “You know what kind of a story this is?”

Derek shook his head. “What kind of story?”

“It’s the kind where any second something ugly-nasty jumps up and sucks off a spaceman’s face or maybe crawls in his mouth and down his belly and makes a nest in there.”

Derek made a disgusted face. “Yuck. I don’t like that kind of stories.”

“I know,” Thomas said. “That’s why I warned you.”

While Derek made a lot of different pictures come on the screen, one quick after the other, to get far away from the spaceman who was going to get his face sucked off, Thomas tried to think how long he should wait before he snooped on the Bad Thing again. Bobby was real worried, you could tell, even if he tried to hide it, and Bobby was not a Dumb Person, so it was a good idea to check on the Bad Thing pretty regular, in case maybe it all of a sudden thought about Julie and got up and went after her.

“You want to watch this?” Derek asked.

On the screen was a picture of this guy in a hockey mask with a big knife in his hand, going quiet-like across a room where a girl was asleep in a bed.

“Better raygun up another picture,” Thomas said.

BECAUSE THE rush hour was past, because Julie knew all the best shortcuts, but mainly because she was not in a mood to be cautious or respect the traffic laws, they made great time from the office to their home on the east end of Orange.

On the way Bobby told her about the Calcutta roach that had been part of his shoe when he and Frank had arrived on that red bridge in the garden in Kyoto. “But when we popped to Mount Fuji, my shoe was okay, the roach was gone.”

She slowed at an intersection, but she was the only traffic in sight, so she didn’t obey the four-way stop. “Why didn’t you tell me about this at the office?”

“Wasn’t time for every detail.”

“What do you think happened to the roach?”

“I don’t know. That’s what bothers me.”

They were on Newport Avenue, just past Crawford Canyon. Sodium-vapor streetlamps cast a queer light on the roadway.

Atop the steep hills to the left, several huge English Tudor and French houses, blazing like giant luxury liners, looked wildly out of place, partly because the insanely high value of such upscale real estate ensured the construction of immense houses out of proportion to the tiny lots they stood on, but partly because Tudor and French architectural styles clashed with the semitropical landscape. It was all part of the California circus, some of which he hated, most of which he loved. Those houses never bothered him before, and given the serious problems he and Julie faced, he couldn’t figure why they bothered him now. Maybe he was so jumpy that even these minor disharmonies reminded him of the chaos that had almost engulfed him during his travels with Frank.

He said, “Do you have to drive so fast?”

“Yes,” she said curtly. “I want to get home, get packed, get to Santa Barbara, learn what we can about the Pollard family, get finished with this whole damn creepy case.”

“If you feel that way, why don’t we just drop it here? Frank comes back, we give him his money, his jar of red diamonds, tell him we’re sorry, we think he’s a prince of a guy, but we’re out of it.”

“We can’t,” she said.

He chewed on his lower lip, then said, “I know. But I can’t figure why we’re compelled to hang in there with this one.”

They crested the hill and speeded north, past the entrance to Rocking Horse Ridge. Their own development was only a couple of streets ahead, on the left. As she finally began to brake for the turn, she glanced at him and said, “You really don’t know why we can’t bug out of it?”

“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—