Elsewhere, p.16
Elsewhere, page 16
As his men waited for instructions, Falkirk’s attention was drawn to the shadow of a moth, swelling and shrinking across the floor, and then to the moth itself, which abruptly abandoned its adoration of a porch light and winged out into the night. His gaze took flight with the moth just long enough for him to see the Bonner house on the far side of the street and recall that its owners were on vacation.
45
Dimly backlighted by the luminous windows of the bungalow, the home invader who came off the porch and onto the steps remained a moving darkness within the dark of night. Jeffy couldn’t be certain that it was Falkirk, but something about the way the man moved—with a practiced grace that suggested arrogance—was reminiscent of the NSA agent or whatever he might really be.
He faced the street, but whether he was focused on the Bonner residence or on the neighborhood in general couldn’t be discerned. Three others of the black-clad legion came out onto the porch, and two appeared in the driveway, such fearsome death figures that it seemed their masks might cover not faces but instead fleshless skulls. They waited in place, as though in anticipation of orders, and no doubt their uniforms were equipped with earpiece receivers and button mics.
Reluctant to step entirely away from his view of the scene, Jeffy said, “Amity. Wake up.” When she slept on, he spoke louder, though in a stage whisper, as if the men in the street might hear.
She sat up in the dark. “What’s wrong?”
“Maybe nothing. Probably nothing. But put your shoes on.”
Getting off the bed, she said, “I slept with them on.”
“Get the tote bag.”
“I’ve already got it.”
The tote contained what cash he had, Ed Harkenbach’s book, and a few other essential items.
In the darkness, Amity came to his side and saw why he had called her from sleep. “Holy sugar, they’re here.”
He said, “They searched the house.” That much was true. What he said next was no more than a desperate hope. “They probably think we split town.”
The three men on the porch, the one on the steps, the two in the driveway were as motionless as if a paralyzing spell had been cast on them.
Amity whispered. “What are they doing?”
“Maybe conferencing electronically, deciding what to do next.”
“You wondered if they were really government,” she said, “so now you know for sure they are.”
“How do I know for sure?”
“Only the government would send six big dudes to search a little bungalow, when two could’ve done the job.”
“There aren’t six. I saw maybe a dozen when it started. They weren’t here just to search. They were going to take us into custody like they took away all those homeless people from the camps up the canyon.”
“A dozen? So where are the other six?”
“Still in our house, poking through things, reading Snowball his rights, or maybe out back, behind the place.” A chill of presentiment quivered through him. “Or . . .”
The Bonner house had an alarm system, and Jeffy had set it in the at-home mode.
However, his bungalow had an alarm system, too, and those men had foiled it.
Where were the other six invaders who, like demons conjured, had risen from the pooled darkness? He didn’t see any of them through the front windows of the bungalow.
No lights had come on here in the Bonner house. However, lights wouldn’t be necessary if the intruders possessed night-vision gear.
A soft thump and a brief rattling rose from downstairs.
Although it might have been a settling noise or the work of a critter far below Snowball’s exalted position in the rodent caste system, Amity said, “Daddy!”
“Plan B,” he replied, his heart quickening.
They moved together through the darkness to the nearby walk-in closet. Jeffy eased the door shut behind them and put his pistol on a shelf.
Amity produced a flashlight and switched it on, keeping a grip on the tote with her left hand. The beam trembled for a moment, but she steadied it.
“Gonna be all right,” Jeffy reassured her as he took the key to everything from a jacket pocket, and she bravely said, “I know,” and he activated the device.
The screen filled with ashen light. They waited for the three buttons to appear. With dread he pressed the red one labeled Select.
He could be mistaken regarding the whereabouts of the six men in the strike force who had not gathered in front of the bungalow. They might even now be leaving with those who had been last seen standing on the porch and driveway. In the absence of certainty about the necessity of this action, jumping to an unknowable world seemed reckless.
A keypad appeared on the screen, and above it the words Enter Timeline Catalog Number. Neither he nor Amity wanted to return to the universe that had spawned Good Boy. He thought it wise to move a lot of timelines beyond that blighted realm.
What might have been the creak of a trodden floorboard drew his attention to the rear wall of the walk-in closet, which backed up to the second-floor hall. Perhaps searchers were progressing along that passageway at this very moment.
“Quick,” Amity whispered.
He typed 1.77, without calculating that the address was most likely sixty-four worlds removed from the totalitarian America of the Justice Wolves, and perhaps seventy-seven worlds from Earth Prime. He chose those numbers not with sober intent, but for the same reason he might have included them in the numbers he selected for a lottery ticket—because seven was universally thought to be lucky. Even as he entered those digits, he realized that this resort to superstition proved he was too unsophisticated to be trusted with technology as powerful as the key to everything.
Amity retrieved his pistol from the shelf, put it in the tote.
Above the on-screen keypad, a directive appeared: Press Star To Launch. He would have tapped the asterisk, except that under those four words was an advisory that made him pause: the word Warning followed by a skull and crossbones.
The squeak of hinges softly protesting, a tightly fitted door scraping against the jamb, muffled footsteps on carpet as one or more searchers entered the bedroom . . .
Amity switched off the flashlight and dropped it in the tote, the only illumination now emanating from the key to everything, bleaching her father’s face.
“Go!” she whispered, grabbing his arm.
The keypad offered another option: Cancel.
Behind them, the doorknob clicked as someone on the other side turned it.
Jeffy had no time to cancel 1.77 and enter a new destination. As the door opened and a man loomed—“They’re here!”—Jeffy pressed the star key.
46
An all-encompassing whiteness. A blizzard of light. Bright particles passing through them by the millions.
While in transit, maybe they were outside of time, outside of space-time where God resided. Or maybe they were speeding through a black hole, a wormhole, some kind of space-time tunnel that served as a shortcut between universes. Jeffy didn’t want to think about that because it scared the shit out of him; it was a lot scarier than just stepping through the back of a wardrobe into Narnia or being sucked into the virtual reality of a Jumanji video game or riding a mystery train to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
He felt something this time that he hadn’t felt during their previous two jaunts, which had been to and from Earth 1.13. He felt that he and Amity had been dissolved into a soup of atoms and were about to be reassembled at their destination, that while en route, they were not flesh-and-blood people, but only data streams, a set of plans for replicating Jeffy and Amity Coltrane in their daunting complexity. Well, he didn’t truly feel this. He wasn’t aware of disintegrating; he experienced no pain. He suspected this might be happening, and if indeed it was, he was adamantly opposed to it, not to the reassembly, no, but to the disintegration in the first place, not that he could do anything about it.
With a soft whoosh, the blizzard of light blew away, as before. They were in the walk-in closet of the master bedroom of the Bonner house, across the street from their cozy bungalow, seemingly where they had begun, but in fact seventy-seven universes away.
The only light issued from the key to everything. The keypad had disappeared, but the word Warning and the skull-and-crossbones remained on the screen for a moment before being replaced by the admonition Hostile Timeline: Advise Retreat. Under those ominous words, the only button offered was blue and labeled Home.
“We can’t retreat,” Amity said. “On our world, the bad guys are in the closet, they have us trapped. If we go back there, we’re done for sure, we’re caught, we’re toast.”
Here, the closet door stood open, but no one loomed at the threshold. The dark bedroom lay beyond.
Jeffy said, “Maybe we just stay right where we are, wait a couple hours, then go home.”
He knew the problem with that plan even as he proposed it, and Amity knew it, too. “Dad, no, that freaking thug opened the closet door and saw us kneeling together. He said, ‘They’re here!’ They know for sure we have the key to everything. They aren’t going to leave our house or the Bonners’ place for days, if they ever leave, waiting for us to return.”
When he didn’t respond to the advisory to retreat, the screen blinked off.
In the pitch-black consequence, Jeffy realized that the closet smelled different from the closet in their world. Less wholesome. Musty. And a faint scent of something more offensive than mold but not quite identifiable.
Scrabbling in her tote for the flashlight, Amity said, “Do you hear something, I don’t hear anything, there’s no one in the house, it’s super quiet,” but the anxiety in her voice and the nervous rush of words suggested either that she thought she had heard a noise or expected to hear something that would unsettle her.
She switched on the flashlight, revealing what the soft glow of the screen had not been bright enough to illuminate. On their world, the Bonners’ master bedroom closet contained neatly pressed clothes on hangers and sweaters precisely folded on shelves, polished shoes and belts and ties and colorful scarves and hats all organized and ready for use. But here, the shoes on the lower, slanted shelves were mottled with mold. Garments hung askew, and some were moth-eaten. A layer of dust had settled on everything. In the highest corners, fat spiders crawled their trembling webs, silken structures so elaborate that the current tenants and generations before them must have ruled this space for years, with never a concern of being swept away in a housecleaning.
“What happened to Mr. and Mrs. Bonner?” Amity asked. “They’re not just on vacation in this world.”
“They’re all right. They’ve gone somewhere safe,” Jeffy said, but his reassurances sounded so insincere that he decided to make no more of them, to stick to the truth, or to what little he knew of it. “Doesn’t look good, but we can’t know for sure.”
“Safe from what?” she asked, while the beam of her flashlight tracked the plumpest of the spiders across a gossamer bridge to a larder hung with silk-bound moths and silverfish, provisions against those days when nothing fresh and wriggling ventured into the sticky trap that had been spun for it. “Safe from what?”
“I don’t know. What I do know is we’ve got to leave this place and go somewhere else in town, somewhere that Falkirk and his thugs, back in our world, won’t be waiting for us when we return to that timeline.”
From the tote, Amity retrieved the pistol and handed it to him.
As they got to their feet, he pocketed the key to everything. “We stay close at all times. Never leave my side.”
She nodded, trying to appear brave and collected, and maybe she was both those things, but she was also small, a child, and so very vulnerable.
Jeffy hugged her tightly. “You’re the best.”
“You, too.”
What might wait beyond this closet, seventy-seven worlds away from home, wasn’t what most frightened him. His greater fear was that when they returned to Earth Prime, to a part of Suavidad Beach where Falkirk would not be looking for them, they would be fugitives from the law, from whatever deep-state secret police Falkirk had at his disposal. And they would have no vehicle, little money, no one to whom they dared turn for help.
47
After Michelle ported with Ed to Earth 1.10 and back again, she was able to sleep no more than thirty minutes at a time, repeatedly waking from dreams of reunion and joy, from the imagined warmth of her daughter in her arms and her husband’s lips on hers. Between dreams, she walked the house barefoot, in pajamas, like a revenant who hadn’t the courage to pass over to a life after life.
Those whom Michelle loved, those she’d lost, those who died were still alive elsewhere, worlds away. The concept should have rocked her, but it seemed no more amazing than that trees produced oxygen to sustain her life while she produced the CO2 that sustained theirs. From the start, she found Ed Harkenbach convincing, because she’d grown up in a media saturated with fantasy, therefore she had been prepared to believe. And then Ed had proved himself.
As her sleep was filled with bright visions of reunification, so her waking rambles were characterized by worry that Jeffy and Amity would not accept her as readily as she would accept them. In this world, they had perished, but in their world, she’d walked out on them. Even if they longed for her, as Ed swore they did, as she longed for them, they might harbor some resentment, might take a long time to fully trust their hearts to her.
Worse, the concept of infinite parallel worlds said something both reassuring and profoundly disturbing about destiny. If every fate to which you could be subjected—those that befell you through no fault of your own and those that you could earn by your actions—unfurled across a multitude of timelines, then your life was like an immense tree of uncountable branches, some leafed and flourishing, others deformed and hung with sick or even poisonous foliage. In the sum of all your lives, you would have known uncountable joys—but also uncountable losses, periods of pain, and fear.
By relocating from this world to the one where Jeffy and Amity yearned for her, she’d be taking an action that would spawn other parallel lives for herself, of which she, in this incarnation, had no knowledge. Other than her husband and daughter, whose lives would be affected by her action, how many others would live additional lives that branched from her action, and did it matter?
She wasn’t a religious person, but she believed in the ultimate judgment of the soul. It was this conviction that made it possible for her to feel guilt over the deaths of Jeffy and Amity—and that gave her the motivation to reform herself. If every life was a tree of, say, a billion branches, more being added all the time until you were at last dead in all timelines, then perhaps it was not the way you lived just one life that mattered; instead, perhaps it was the shape and beauty of your spiritual oak, the full pattern of all your lives, on which judgment was passed. For every life in which you made a ruinous or wicked decision, there was another parallel life where you had the chance to do the right thing. Her mind spun with such considerations, and between rambles she returned to bed in a state of mental exhaustion, falling at once into sleep—only to wake in twenty minutes or half an hour.
During those periods when she paced through the bungalow, she often passed the archway to the living room and saw Edwin Harkenbach in an armchair, his stocking feet on a footstool. His slumber was deep and uninterrupted, marked by a soft bearish snore. Evidently, he had no doubt about the right thing for her to do.
She desperately hoped to avoid making another mortal mistake involving Jeffy and Amity. She didn’t want to jump from one world to another until she had thought through all the ramifications.
However, near three o’clock in the morning, she realized that it was impossible to do that, since the ramifications were infinite. No world in the multiverse had ever contained a genius smart enough to foresee how best to grow such a complex tree of life; and while she was not a stupid woman, she was no Einstein.
This was a decision that must be made not on the basis of rigorous intellectual analysis, but with the guidance of the heart. Her heart said, Do it. And though the heart was deceitful above all things, she must trust it or spend the rest of this life regretting that she had lacked the courage to leave a world where Jeffy and Amity were lying in graves and go to one where Death as yet had no dominion over them.
48
Jeffy kept his pistol in his right hand, and Amity carried the flashlight, sweeping the beam across the bedroom as they entered from the walk-in closet.
Two windows were clouded with pale dust, but the third was broken out. Birds had ventured here from time to time; perhaps some had been seized by panic, fluttering into walls and furniture before finding their way out, because feathers littered the floor. Having blown in from the giant live oak beyond the shattered pane, small oval leaves, all brown and crisp, were layered over the carpet and drifted in one corner, so many that surely a few years of wind had contributed to the collection. They crunched underfoot, and from the crushed debris emanated a wheat-like scent.
As they proceeded past the bed, another smell arose, a urinous stink. The crackling leaves and the flashlight inspired thin, sharp squeaks of animal protest. The beam found two rats atop the mattress of the king-size bed. Over the years, invasive wind and much rodent activity had caused the bedclothes to slide to the floor, where they lay in rotting cascades. The rats vanished into different holes in the mattress ticking; judging by the noise arising from within that slab of padding, they had constructed a densely populated warren maze.
