The Bad Place Part 40

What spooked him was not this particular creature, but the memory of the feline horde at the Pollard house, which raced to attack him and Frank, in eerie silence initially then with the shrill single-voiced squeal of a banshee regime and with a most uncatlike unanimity of purpose. On the prowl alone, swift and curious, this cat was quite ordinary, posses only of the mystery and haughtiness common to every remember of his species.

At the end of the walk, three front steps led up to an archway, through which they entered a small veranda.

Julie rang the bell, which was soft and musical, and no one answered after half a minute, she rang it again.

As the second set of chimes faded, the stillness was disturb by the rustle of feathered wings, as some night bird settled on the veranda roof above them.

When Julie was about to reach for the bell push again, porch light came on, and Bobby sensed they were being scrutinized through the security lens. After a moment the door opened, and Dr. Fogarty stood before them in an outfall light from the hall behind him.

He looked the same as Bobby remembered him, and he recognized Bobby as well.

"Come in," he said, stepping aside to admit them.

"I half expected you. Come in-not that an you is welcome."

"IN THE library," Fogarty said, leading them back through the hall to a room on the left.

The library, where Frank had taken him during their travels, was the place Bobby had referred to as the study when he had described it to Julie. As the exterior of the house had a Hobbity-fantasy coziness in spite of its Spanish style, so this room seemed exactly the sort of place where one imagined that Tolkien, on many a long Oxford evening, had taken pen to paper to create the adventures of Frodo. That warm and welcoming s.p.a.ce was gently illuminated by a bra.s.s floor lamp and a stained-gla.s.s table lamp that was either a genuine Tiffany or an excellent imitation. Books lined the walls under a deeply coffered ceiling, and a thick Chinese carpet dark green and beige around the border, mostly pale green in the middlegraced a dark tongue-and-groove oak floor. The water-clear finish on the large mahogany desk had a deep l.u.s.ter; oil the green felt blotter, the elements of a gold-plated, bone-handled desk set-including a letter opener, magnifying gla.s.s, and scissors-were lined up neatly behind a gold fountain pen in a square marble holder. The Queen Anne sofa was upholstered in a tapestry that perfectly complemented the carpet, and when Bobby turned to look at the wing-backed chair where he'd first seen Fogarty earlier in the day-he twitched with astonishment at the sight of Frank.

"Something's happened to him," Fogarty said, pointing to Frank. He was unaware of Bobby's and Julie's surprise, apparently operating under the a.s.sumption that they had come to his house specifically because they had known they would find Frank there.

Frank's physical appearance had deteriorated since Bobby had last seen him at 5:26 that afternoon, in the office in Newport Beach. If his eyes had been sunken then, they were as dark as pits now; the dark rings around them had widened, too, some of the blackness seemed to have leeched out of the bruises to impart a deathly gray tint to the rest of his face.

previous pallor had looked healthy by comparison.

The worst thing about him, however, was the blank expression with which he regarded them. No recognition lit his eyes he seemed to be staring through them. His facial muscles were slack. His mouth hung open about an inch, as if he had star to speak a long time ago but had not yet managed to remember the first word of what he had wanted to say. At Cielo Vista Care Home, Bobby had seen only a few patients with face empty as this, but they had been among the most severely r.e.t.a.r.ded, several steps-down the ladder from Thomas.

"How long has he been here?" Bobby asked, moving tow Frank.

Julie seized his arm and held him back.

"Don't!"

"He arrived shortly before seven o'clock," Fogarty said So Frank had traveled for nearly another hour and a after he had returned Bobby to the office.

Fogarty said, "He's been here over three hours, and I do know what the blazing h.e.l.l I'm supposed to do with him. N and then he comes around a little bit, looks at you when talk to him, even responds more or less to what you say. Though sometimes he's positively garrulous, runs on and on, won't swear your questions but sure wants to talk at a person, couldn't shut him up with a two-by-four. He's told me a lot about you, for instance, more than I care to know." frowned and shook his head.

"You two may be crazy enough to get involved in this nightmare, but I'm not, and I resent being dragged into it." At first glance, the impression that Dr. Lawrence, Foga made was that of a kindly grandfather who, in his day, been the type of devoted and selfless physician who became revered by his community, known and beloved by one and He was still wearing the slippers, gray slacks, white s.h.i.+rt, a blue cardigan in which Bobby had first seen him earlier, a the image was completed by a pair of half-lens reading gla.s.ses over which he regarded them. With his thick white hair, eyes, and gentle rounded features, he would have made an effective Santa Claus if he had been fifty or sixty pounds heavier But on a second and closer look, his blue eyes were steely, not warm.

His rounded features were too soft, and revealed not gentility so much as lack of character, as though they had been acquired through a lifetime of self-indulgence. His wide mouth would have given kindly old Doc Fogarty a winning smile, but its generous dimension served equally well to lend the look of a predator to the real Doc Fogarty.

"So Frank's told you about us," Bobby said.

"But we don't know anything about you, and I think we need to." Fogarty scowled.

"Better that you don't know about me.

Better by far for me. Just get him out of here, take him away."

"You want us to take Frank off your hands," Julie said coldly, "then you've got to tell us who you are, how you fit into this, what you know about it." Meeting Julie's gaze, then Bobby's, the old man said, "He's not been here in five years. Today, when he came with you, Dakota, I was shocked, I'd thRoselle's father. Supposedly her father was so itinerant who knocked up her mother, but I always knew it was a lie. Her father was Yarnell Pollard, her mother's brother Roselle was a child of rape and incest." A look of distress must have crossed Bobby's face or Julie for Fogarty let out another bark of cold laughter, clearly amused by their sympathetic response.

The old physician said, "Oh, that's nothing. That's the least of it."

THE TALLLESS MANX- Zitha by name-took up sentry duty in the concealment of an azalea shrub near the front door.

The old Spanish house had exterior window ledges, and the second cat-as black as midnight, and named Darkless-sprang to another one in search of the room to which the old man had taken the younger man and woman.

Darkle put his nose to the gla.s.s. A set of interior shutters inhibited snooping, but the wide louvres were only half closed, and Darkle was able to see several cross-sections of the room by raising or lowering his head.

Hearing Frank's name spoken, the cat stiffened, because Violet had stiffened in her bed high on Pacific Hill.

The old man was there, among the books, and the couple as well. When everyone sat down, Darkle had to lower his head to peer between another pair of tilted louvres. Then he saw that Frank was not only one of the subjects of their conversation but actually present in a high-backed chair that stood at just enough of an angle to the window to reveal part of his face, and one hand lying limply on the wide, maroon-leather arm.

LEANING OVER his desk and smiling humorlessly as he talked, Doc Fogarty resembled a troll that had crawled out from its lair beneath a bridge, not content to wait for unsuspecting children to pa.s.s by, prepared to forage for his grisly dinner.

Bobby reminded himself not to let his imagination run away with him. He needed to keep an unbiased perspective on Fogarty, in order to determine the truthfulness and value of what the old man had to tell them. Their lives might depend on it.

"The house was built in the thirties by Deeter and Elizabeth Pollard.

He'd made some money in Hollywood, producing a bunch of cheap Westerns, other junk. Not a fortune, but enough that he was fairly sure he could give up films and Los Angeles, which he hated, move up here, get into some small businesses, and do all right for the rest of his life. They had two children. Yarnell was fifteen when they came here in 1938, and Cynthia was only six years old. In forty-five, when Deeter and Elizabeth were killed in a car crash-hit head-on by drunk driving a truck full of cabbages down from the Saint Ynez valley, if you can believe it-Yarnell became the head of the house at the age of twenty-two, and the legal guard of his thirteen-year-old sister." Julie said, "And... forced himself on her, you said?" Fogarty nodded.

"I'm sure of it. Because over the next year Cynthia became withdrawn, weepy. People attributed it to death of her folks, but it was Yarnell using her, I think.

just because he wanted the s.e.x-though she was a pretty little thing, and you could hardly fault his taste-but because being man of the house appealed to him, he liked authority. And was the type who wasn't happy until his authority was absolute, his dominance complete." Bobby was horrified by the words "You could hardly fault his taste" and what they implied about the depth of the abyss in which Fogarty lived.

Oblivious of the disgust with which his visitors were regarding him, Fogarty continued: "Yarnell was strong-willed, re less, caused his folks a lot of heartache before they died, kinds of heartache but mostly related to drugs. He was an acid head before they had a name for it, before they even had LSD Peyote, mescaline... all of the natural hallucinogens you can distill from certain cactuses, mushrooms and other fun Wasn't the drug culture back then that we have now, but!" was around. He got into hallucinogens through a relations he had with a character actor who appeared in a lot of his father's movies, got started when he was fifteen, and I tellall this because my theory is it's the key to everything youneed to know."

"The fact that Yarnell was an acidhead," Julie said.

"That the key?"

"That and the fact he impregnated his own sister. The cheicals probably did genetic damage, and a lot of it, by the time he was twenty-two. They usually do. in his case somestrange genetic damage. Then, when you add in the factthe gene pool was very limited, being as Cynthia was his sister You might expect there's a high chance the offspring will be a freak of some kind." Frank made a low sound, then sighed. They all looked at him, but he was still detached. Thou his eyes blinked rapidly for a moment, they did not come back into focus. Saliva still drooled from the right corner of his mouth; a string of it hung from his chin.

Though Bobby felt that he should get some Kleenex and blot Frank's face, he restrained himself, largely because he was afraid of Julie's reaction.

"So about a year after their parents died, Yarnell and Cynthia came to me, and she was pregnant," Fogarty said.

"They had this story about some itinerant farmworker raping her, but it didn't ring true, and I pretty much figured out the real story just watching how they were with each other. She'd tried to conceal the pregnancy by wearing loose clothes and by staying in the house entirely during her last few months, and I never could understand that behavior; it was as if they thought the problem would just go away one day. By the time they came to me, abortion was out of the question. h.e.l.l, she was in the early stages of labor." The longer he listened to Fogarty, the more it seemed to Bobby that the air in the library was foul and growing fouler, thick with a humidity as sour as sweat.

"Claiming that he wanted to protect Cynthia as much as possible from public scorn, Yarnell offered me a pretty fat fee if I'd keep her out of the hospital and deliver the baby right in my office, which was a little risky, in case there were complications. But I needed the money, and if anything went really wrong, there were ways to cover it. I had this nurse at the time who could a.s.sist me-Norma, she was pretty flexible about things." great, Bobby thought. The sociopathic physician had Just found himself a sociopathic nurse, a couple who would be right in the social swing of things among the medical staff at Dachau or Auschwitz.

Julie put a hand on Bobby's knee and squeezed, as if the contact rea.s.sured her that she was not listening to a mad doctor in a dream.

"What came out of that girl'

"You should have seen it, Fogarty said.

"A freak it was, just as you'd expect."

"Wait a minute," Julie said.

"I thought you said the baby was Roselle. Frank's mother."

"It was," Fogarty said.

"And she was such a spectacular little freak that she'd have been worth a fortune to any carnival or sideshow willing to risk the anger of the law to exhibit he He paused, enjoying their antic.i.p.ation.

"She was an hermap rodite.

For a moment the word meant nothing to Bobby, and then he said, "You don't mean-she had both s.e.xes, male and male?"

"Oh, but that's exactly what I mean." Fogarty bounced frorp his chair and began to pace, suddenly energized by conversation.

"Hermaphroditism is an extremely rare birth defect in humans, it's an amazing thing to have the opportunity to deliver one. You have traverse hermaphroditism, wherehave the external organs of one s.e.x and the internal ofother, lateral hermaphroditism... several other types. But one thing is... Roselle was the rarest of all, she possessed the complete internal and external organs of both s.e.xes." He pluck a thick medical reference book from one of the shelves a handed it to Julie.

"Check page one forty-six for photos ofkind of thing I'm talking about."

Julie handed the volume to Bobby so fast it seemed as ifthought it was a snake.

Bobby, in turn, put it beside himself on the sofa, unopen The last thing he needed, with his imagination, was the a.s.s tance of clinical photographs.

His hands and feet had gone cold, as though the blood had rushed from his extremities to his head, to nourish his bra which was spinning furiously. He wished that he couldthinking about what Fogarty was telling them. It was gro But the worst thing about it was, judging by the physicia strange smile, Bobby sensed that what they had heard thus was all just the bread on this horror sandwich; the meatyet to come.

Pacing again, Fogarty said, "Her v.a.g.i.n.a was about who you'd expect, the male equipment somewhat displaced. Urination was through the male part, but the female appeared rep ductively complete."

"I think we get the picture," Julie said.

"We don't need the technical details." Fogarty came to them, stood looking down at them, and eyes were as bright and lively as if he were recounting a chaing medical anecdote that had bewitched legions of delight companions at dinner parties over the years.

"No, no,z x must understand what she was, if you're going to understand all that happened next." THOUGH HER OWN Mlnd was split into many parts-sharing the bodies of Verbina, all the cats, and the owl on Fogarty's porch roof-Violet was most acutely aware of what she was receiving through the senses of Darkle, as he perched upon the windowsill outside the study. With the cat's sharp hearing, Violet missed not a word of the conversation, in spite of the intervening pane of gla.s.s. She was enthralled.

She seldom paused to think about her mother, although Roselle was still in this old house in so many ways. She seldom thought about any human being, for that matter, except herself and her twin sister-less often Candy and Frank-because she had so little in common with other people.

Her life was with the wild things. In them emotions were so much more pnmitive and intense, pleasure so much more easily found and enjoyed without guilt. She hadn't really known her mother or been close to her; and Violet would not have been close, even if her mother had been willing to share affection with anyone but Candy.

But now Violet was riveted by what Fogarty was telling them, not because it was news to her (which it was), but because anything that had affected Roselle's life this completely also had profound effects on Violet's life. And of the countless att.i.tudes and perceptions that Violet had absorbed from the myriad wild creatures whose minds and bodies she shared, a fascination with self was perhaps paramount. She had an animal's narcissistic preoccupatior. with grooming, with her own wants and needs. From her prnt of view, nothing in the world was of interest unless it served her, satisfied her, or affected the possibility of her future happiness.

Dimly she realized that she should find her brother and tell him that Frank was less than two miles away from them. Not long ago she had heard the wind-music of Candy's return.

FOGARTY TURNED away from Bobby and Julie and circled behind his desk again, where he walked along the bookshelf snapping his finger against the spines of the volumes to punctuate his story.

As the physician spoke of this family that had seened genetic catastrophe, Julie could not help but think how Thomas's affliction had been visited upon him though his parents had lived healthy and normal lives.

played as cruelly with the innocent as with the guilty.

I think Ya 'When he saw the baby's abnormability he would have killed it and thrown it out with the garbage at least put it in the hands of an inst.i.tution. But she wouldn't part with it, she said it was her child, deformed or not, and she named it Roselle, after her dead grandmother. I suspect she wanted to keep it largely because she saw how it repulsed him, and she wanted to have Roselle around as a reminder to him of the consequences of what he forced her to do."

"Couldn't surgery have been used to make her unable to have another?"

Bobby asked.

"Easier today. Harder then." Fogarty had stopped at the desk, where he had removed a bottle of Wild Turkey and a gla.s.s from one of the side drawers. He poured a few ounces of bourbon for himself and recap the bottle without offering them a drink. That was fine with Julie. Though Fogarty's house was spotless, she wouldn't have felt clean after drinking or eating anything in it.

After taking a swallow of the warm bourbon, neat, Fogarty said, "Besides, wouldn't want to remove one set of organs to discover that, as the child grew older, it proved to look and act more like the s.e.x you denied it than like the one it was born with. Secondary s.e.x characteristics are visible in infants of course, but not as easily read-certainly not in 1946. Anyway Cynthia wouldn't have authorized surgery. Remember I said-she probably welcomed the child's deformity weapon against her brother."

"You could have stepped between them and the bar BObby said.

"You could've brought the child's plight to attention of the public health authorities."

"Why on earth would I want to do that? For the psychological well-being of the child, you mean? Don't be naive." He drank some more bourbon.

"I was paid well to make the delivery and keep my mouth shut about it, and that was fine by me. They took her home, stuck to their story about the itinerant rapist.

Julie said, "The baby... Roselle... she had no serious medical problems?"

"None," Fogarty said.

"Other than this abnormality, she was as healthy as a horse. Her mental skills and her body developed right on schedule, like any child, and before long it became obvious that, to all outward appearances, she was going to look like a woman. As she grew even older, you could see she'd never be an attractive filly, mind you, more on the st.u.r.dy side than a fas.h.i.+on model, thick legs and all that, but quite feminine enough."

Frank remained vacant-eyed and detached, but a muscle in his left cheek twitched twice.

The bourbon apparently relaxed the physician, for he sat behind his desk again, leaned forward, and clasped his hands around the gla.s.s.

"In 1959, when Roselle was thirteen, Cynthia died. Killed herself, actually. Blew her brains out. The following year, about seven months after his sister's suicide, Yarnell came to the office with his daughter-that is, with Roselle. He never called her his daughter, maintaining the fiction that she was only his b.a.s.t.a.r.d niece. Anyway, Roselle was pregnant at fourteen, same age at which Cynthia had given birth to her."

"Good G.o.d!" Bobby said.

The shocks kept piling one atop another with such speed that Julie was almost ready to grab the whiskey bottle off the desk, drink straight from it, and never mind that it was Fogarty's booze.

Enjoying their reactions, Fogarty sipped the bourbon and gave them time to absorb the shock.

Julie said, "Yarnell raped the daughter he had fathered by his own sister?"

Fogarty waited a little longer, savoring the moment. Then: "No, no. He found the girl repellent, and I'm confident he wouldn't have touched her. I'm sure what Roselle told me was the truth." He sipped more bourbon.

"Cynthia had developed quite a religious streak between the time she gave birth to Roselle and the day she killed herself, and she had pa.s.sed on that pa.s.sion for G.o.d to Roselle. The girl knew the Bible backward and forward. So Roselle came in here, pregnant. Said she'd decided she should have a child. Said G.o.d had made her cial-that's what she called hermaphroditism, specie bmause she was to be a pure vessel by which blessed child could be brought into the world. Therefore she had colled the s.e.m.e.n from her male half and mechanically inserted it in her female half." Bobby shot up from the sofa as if one of its springs had stuck him, and he grabbed the bottle of Wild Turkey from the desk.

"You have another gla.s.s?"

Fogarty pointed to a bar cabinet in the corner, which Julie had not noticed before. Bobby opened the double doors, revealing not only more gla.s.ses but additional fifths of Wild Turkey Evidently the physician kept a bottle in his desk drawerso he would not have to walk across the room for it. Bobby poured two gla.s.ses full, with no ice, and brought one back to Julie.

To Fogarty, she said, "Of course, I never thought Ros was barren. She did bear children, we know that. But I sumed you meant the male part of her was sterile."

"Fertile as a male and as a female. She couldn't actually join herself to herself, so to speak. So she resorted to,artificial semination, as I said."

Late that afternoon, in the office in Newport, when he had tried to explain how traveling with Frank was like a sled ride off the edge of the world, Julie had not really understood why he was so unnerved by the experience. Now she thought she had an inkling of what he had meant, for the of the Pollard family's relations.h.i.+ps and s.e.xual ident.i.ties. Her skin crawled and filled her with a dark suspicion that nat was even stranger and more hospitable to anarchy than had feared.

"Yarnell wanted me to abort the fetus, and abortion was fairly lucrative sideline in those days, though illegal and kept hushed. But the girl had hidden her pregnancy from him for seven months, as he and Cynthia had tried to hide a pregnancy fourteen years earlier. It was much too late for an abortion then. The girl would've died, from hemorrhaging.