shattered. He was holding those papers in both hands, as if afraid they
would vanish from his grasp, and his eyes were as wide now as they had
been the moment that Bobby and Frank disappeared.
Julie was lightheaded with fear, but she was determined not to lose
control of herself. Though there seemed to be nothing that she could do
to help Bobby, an opportunity for action might arise when she least
expected it, and she wanted to be calm and ready.
“Last night, Hal said that Frank returned the first time about eighteen
minutes after he’d left.” Clint nodded.
“Then we’ve twelve minutes to go.”
“After his second disappearance, he didn’t return for hours.”
“Listen,” Clint said,
“if they don’t show up here again in twelve minutes or an hour or three
hours, that doesn’t me anything terrible has happened to Bobby. It’s
not going to be the same every time.”
“I know. What I’m more worried about is… the damn railing.” Clint
said nothing.
Unable to keep her voice even, she said,
“Frank never did bring it back. What happened to it?”
“He’ll bring Bobby back,” Clint said.
“He won’t let Bobby out there… wherever he goes.” She wished she
felt confident about that.
DARKNESS.
Fireflies.
Velocity.
Rain poured straight down in warm torrents, as if Bobby and Frank had
materialized under a waterfall. It pasted their clothes to them in an
instant. There was no wind whatsoever as if the tremendous weight and
ferocity of the rainfall had drowned the wind as it would a fire; the
air was steamy-humid They had traveled far enough around the globe to
have left twilight behind; the sun was up there somewhere behind steely
plating of gray clouds.
They were on their sides this time, facing each other like inebriates
who had been arm wrestling and had fallen drunkenly off their stools
onto the floor of the barroom, where they still lay with their hands
locked in competition. They were in a bar, however, but in lush
tropical foliage: ferns; dark grey plants with rubbery, deeply
granulated foliage; ground hugging succulent vines with leaves as plump
as gum candy and berries the same shade as the flesh of a Mandarin
orange.
Bobby pulled away from Frank, and this time his client let him go
without a struggle. He scrambled to his feet and push through the
slick, spongy, clinging flora.
He didn’t know where he was going and didn’t care. He just had to put a
little space between himself and Frank, distance himself from the danger
that Frank now represented to him. He was overwhelmed by what had
happened, overloaded with new experiences that he needed to consider and
to which he had to adapt before he could go on.
Within half a dozen steps he broke out of the tropical brush and onto a
dark expanse of land, the nature of which at first eluded him. The rain
came down not in droplets and not in sheets, but in roaring, silver-gray
cascades that dramatically reduced visibility; it swept his hair over
his eyes, too, which didn’t help. He supposed some people, sitting by
windows in dry rooms, might even have seen beauty in the storm, but
there was just too damned much rain, a flood; it met the earth and the
greenery with a cacophonous roar that threatened to deafen him. The
rain not only exhausted him but made him wildly and irrationally angry,
as if he was being pelted not by rain but by spittle, great gobs of
phlegm spit, and as if the roar was actually the combined voices of
thousands of onlookers showering him with insults and other abuse. He
stumbled forward through the peculiarly mushy soil-not muddy, but
mushy-looking for someone to blame for the rain, someone to shout at and
shake and maybe even punch. In six or eight steps, however, he saw the
breakers rolling ashore in a tumult of white foam, and he knew he was
standing on a black-sand beach. That realization stopped him cold.
“Frank!” he shouted, and when he turned to look back the way he had
come, he saw that Frank was following him, a few steps behind and