Bad Place by Dean Koontz Page A

suspected that he would be unwise to seek assistance from the authorities. He withdrew the Yellow Pages from one of the nightstands and studied the listings for private investigators. But a PI called to mind old Humphrey Bogart movies and seemed like an anachronism in this modem age. How could a guy in a trenchcoat and a snap-brimmed fedora help him recover his memory?
    Eventually, with the wind singing threnodies at the window, Frank stretched out to get some of the sleep he had missed last night.
    A few hours later, just an hour before dusk, he woke suddenly, whimpering, gasping for breath. His heart pounded furiously.
    When he sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed, he saw that his hands were wet and scarlet. His shirt and jeans were smeared with blood. Some, though surely not all of it, was his own blood, for both of his hands bore deep, oozing scratches. His face stung, and in the bathroom, the mirror revealed two long scratches on his right cheek, one on his left cheek, and a fourth on his chin.
    He could not understand how this could have happened in his sleep. If he had torn at himself in some bizarre dream frenzy—and he could recall no dream—or if someone else had clawed him while he slept, he would have awakened at once. Which meant that he had been awake when it had happened, then had stretched out on the bed again and gone back to sleep—and had forgotten the incident, just as he had forgotten his life prior to that alleyway last night.
    He returned in panic to the bedroom and looked on the other side of the bed, then in the closet. He was not sure what he was looking for. Maybe a dead body. He found nothing.
    The very thought of killing anyone made him sick. He knew he did not have the capacity to kill, except perhaps in self-defense. So who had scratched his face and hands? Whose blood was on him?
    In the bathroom again, he stripped out of his stained clothes and rolled them into a tight bundle. He washed his face and hands. He had bought a styptic pencil along with other shaving gear; he used that to stop the scratches from bleeding.
    When he met his own eyes in the mirror, they were so haunted that he had to look away.
    Frank dressed in fresh clothes and snatched the car keys off the dresser. He was afraid of what he might find in the Chevy.
    At the door, as he disengaged the dead bolt, he realized that neither the frame nor the door itself was smeared with blood. If he had left during the afternoon and returned, bleeding from his hands, he would not have had the presence of mind to wipe the door clean before climbing into bed. Anyway, he had seen no bloody washcloth or tissues with which a cleanup might have been accomplished.
    Outside, the sky was clear; the westering sun was bright. The motel’s palm trees shivered in a cool wind, and a constant susurration rose from them, punctuated by an occasional series of hard clacks as the thick spines of the fronds met like snapping, wooden teeth.
    The concrete walkway outside his room was not spotted with blood. The interior of the car was free of blood. No blood marked the dirty rubber mat in the trunk, either.
    He stood by the open trunk, blinking at the sun-washed motel and parking lot around him. Three doors down, a man and woman in their twenties were unloading luggage from their black Pontiac. Another couple and their grade-school-age daughter were hurrying along the covered walkway, apparently heading toward the motel restaurant. Frank realized that he could not have gone out and committed murder and returned, blood-soaked and in broad daylight, without being seen.
    In his room again, he went to the bed and studied the rumpled sheets. They were crimson-spotted, but not a fraction as saturated as they would have been if the attack—whatever its nature—had happened there. Of course, if all the blood was his, it might have spilled mostly on the front of his shirt and jeans. But he still could not believe that he had clawed himself in his