On Earth 1.13, from which they had so recently escaped, all the guns were probably in the possession of the fascist government. Here on Earth Prime, the FBI said that four out of ten Americans kept at least one gun for home defense, and a major pro-gun organization said it was five out of ten. Because people never answered such surveys truthfully, Jeffy figured it was more like seven out of ten, with the other three relying on baseball bats, Tasers, pepper spray, faithful dogs, and sharp-tongued ridicule to deal with dangerous intruders.
Scrambling across the bed, he didn’t know whose house this was, but he hoped that they were in the 40 or 50 or 70 percent thought to possess a firearm. Many people who owned a pistol kept it in a nightstand drawer. For safety, they should keep it in a locked gun safe that opened quickly when a four-digit code was entered on a keypad. If the residents of this house were safety conscious, Jeffy was screwed.
Good Boy didn’t literally blow its top, but its sudden shriek was so explosive that it sounded as if the crown of its skull had detached as violently as a failing heat shield on a space shuttle reentering Earth’s atmosphere. And the beast was off like a rocket, trying to quell its fear with rage. It streaked first to the vanity, where it swept a small silver tray and three perfume bottles to the floor, and then a handled mirror, a porcelain vase, a decorative tissue box, a set of hairbrushes. It snatched up a straight-backed chair from the vanity, one similar to the chair that Amity had used to brace the door in that other bedroom. Good Boy scampered to the window and swung the chair, intent on breaking the glass that, in a parallel universe, it had smashed with a fireplace poker from the outside. As Amity hurried to the door of the adjoining bathroom, evidently intending to take sanctuary there, the lower half of the double-hung window dissolved, fragments spilling onto the sill and out onto the porch roof.
All of that happened in the time Jeffy took to scramble across the bed, jerk open the second nightstand, and seize a pistol from among the contents. He found the safety, clicked it off, and turned with the weapon in a two-handed grip.
The rain-soaked creature had discarded the chair and escaped through the window, onto the porch roof. Now it capered in a circle, long shaggy arms raised, shaking its fists as it searched the sky. Maybe it was demanding to know what had happened to the storm, why it remained wet while the entire day had gone dry. Jeffy had no way of knowing what this monster was thinking any more than he could predict what it might do next.
He didn’t dare fire at Good Boy while it was outside. A stray round might hit someone across the street.
What the infuriated beast did next, after just half a minute on the porch roof, was plunge into the room again, panting and hooting, neither chimp nor boy, as alien as anything that might step out of a spaceship. It was so quick, Jeffy couldn’t track it with a pistol. Running on all fours, the beast shot across the room, through the open door, and vanished into the hall, its cries diminishing as it raced to the back of the house, where it fell silent.
Evidently, no one was home. Had people been in residence, they would have reacted to the uproar by now.
Amity started toward her father, and he said, “Get back, shut yourself in the bathroom.”
“Daddy, don’t go out there,” she pleaded as he moved toward the hall door.
“If it isn’t gone, I need to find it and deal with it.”
“Don’t go out there,” she begged, her voice breaking.
“If it’s gone, then we’ll go, too, we’ll go straight home and lock the doors and hunker down for the duration. Bathroom doors have locks, Amity. Now get in there and lock it! ”
He had never before raised his voice to her, so when he raised it this time, she flinched as if she’d been slapped. But she retreated into the bathroom and closed the door.
Truth be known, he didn’t want to leave this room and find Good Boy. A freak hunt had about as much appeal as handling a live cobra while playing Russian roulette with a revolver. He wanted to wait here until the police arrived. Someone might have heard the breaking glass. In the brief time the creature was raging on the porch roof, someone might have seen it. The police would be on the way.
Then he realized that the last thing he and Amity dared attempt was to explain to the cops what they were doing here in a stranger’s house, why this bedroom had been vandalized. Talk of parallel worlds and an ape-boy hybrid would get them a psychiatric evaluation unless they proved their story with the key to everything. But admitting that Ed Harkenbach had left the device in their care would bring John Falkirk back into their lives with a vengeance, he who had NSA credentials and eyes the gray of steel and a piercing stare that dissected your soul.
Assisting spooky Ed had once seemed amusing, a bit of a lark. Now Jeffy abruptly recognized the dire legal consequences. If the authorities arrested him, convicted him, and sent him to prison, maybe the government wouldn’t allow his parents to have custody of Amity. Even in the good old USA, government could be vindictive, using the legal system as a weapon. If Amity were sent to an institution or placed in a home with abusive foster parents . . .
He stepped into the hallway.
26
Hiding in the bathroom, sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, Amity felt stupid and inadequate and scared. Snowball must have sensed her fear, for he shivered continuously as she held him in her cupped hands.
The key to everything lay on the counter beside the nearby sink, and she wasn’t going to let the adventurous mouse anywhere near it.
“This is all because of you,” she told him, though she knew that was unfair. One of the good things about a mouse was that he wasn’t as perceptive as a dog; he didn’t know when you were unjustly chastising him or that you were chastising him at all.
In fact, this was entirely her fault, really and truly, because she had wanted to see her mother and have a chance to bring Michelle back to this world. If she could have done that—wow—it would have been like raising Lazarus, except that her mother wasn’t dead like Lazarus, and except that Lazarus was a man who was brought back to life with a miracle, while her mother was a woman who would have been brought back by science, not by anyone supernatural. Actually, now that she had a moment to think about it, the Lazarus analogy
made no sense, and she felt even more stupid and inadequate because she had entertained it even for a moment.
Her fear was increasing, too, because every second without Daddy was another second in which he might be killed. He was her world. If he died, she couldn’t go on, she really couldn’t, because what happened to him would be her fault. She wouldn’t kill herself or anything like that, because suicide was wrong. She would just become anorexic and wither away, until she was skin and bones, until she was dust that a cold wind would blow into Hell. If Hell existed. She was of two minds about that.
Daddy had been gone almost a minute. Hell was right here. She’d already spent almost a minute in Hell.
27
Pistol at the ready, stepping into the hallway, Jeffy saw the ladder at the farther end from the stairs, a counterweighted folding model attached to a ceiling trapdoor from which dangled a pull cord. Good Boy had leaped and seized the cord and pulled down the ladder. The creature had climbed up where perhaps it had in days past spent time haunting that raftered space in the version of this house that existed on Earth 1.13.
Jeffy had no intention of following the freak into that dark, higher realm. But if he lifted the lowest segment of the ladder and gave it a shove, it would automatically fold upward, and the trap would close behind it. Good Boy could still push it open from above, though that was harder than opening it from below and would take more time. The noise would alert them that the beast was coming.
And maybe the thing didn’t want to come down. Maybe it wished to stay up there in the dusty dark, with spiders friendlier than the people it knew, up where it had retreated when dada-mama scolded or punished it. The creature’s mental landscape must be black and gray, brightened alternately by the lightning of fear and a feeble foxfire of hope never to be fulfilled, a bleak terrain of endless loneliness and confusion. It was forever an outsider, natural to none of the worlds in the multiverse, belonging not even on Earth 1.13, where arrogant men and cruel science had conjured it into being.