The gray light from the screen frosted his face, and he smiled at Michelle, confident that his smile was reassuring, that he looked too eccentric and improbable to frighten anyone.
She said, “How will you convince them that all this is true, a multiverse of worlds?”
“Just as I convinced you. And perhaps more easily. If I know myself well—and I do—the other me, the Edwin Harkenbach in their world, is a very sociable fellow. He, too, has taken refuge from his enemies by living in a tent in the woods, past the end of Shadow Canyon Lane, and he craves human contact. As he has gone to and from town, surely he has seen and spoken to Jeffrey. He might even have sat on his porch to chat, as I sat with you on yours many a lovely evening. I suspect that when I show up at their door, I will not be entirely a stranger to them.”
Leaning against a porch post as if her legs might fail her, wrapping her arms around herself as if chilled, she said, “Okay, yeah. But . . . maybe it would be best if I just pretend to be the Michelle who left them in their world, pretend I’ve come back to them, beg to be forgiven.”
Ed didn’t frown. The dear woman didn’t deserve frowns. He gave her a different quality of smile instead, indicating he understood and sympathized with her misgiving. “But then you would be starting the relationship with a lie—one you wouldn’t be able to sustain.”
She sighed. “You’re right.”
“Allow them the magic of the truth, Michelle. Hasn’t Jeffrey always loved fantasy novels since he was a boy? Perhaps he’s shared that interest with Amity, and maybe she’s embraced it. Bring them your love, Michelle, but also bring them the truth, because in this case the truth is so magical that it will enchant them for the rest of their lives.”
Warming to the idea of that, she stopped hugging herself and said, “All right. Let’s do this.”
Ed pressed the red button, which was marked Select.
The keypad appeared.
He entered the timeline catalog number for the world where another Michelle had walked out on her family and soon thereafter vanished.
This Michelle stepped to Ed’s side. She put an arm around his ample waist.
Four words appeared on the screen: Press Star To Launch.
“The adventure begins,” he said, because he had a flair for drama. “Your new life, a tragedy undone.”
“I’m ready for it,” Michelle assured him. “After seven long years of grief, I’m so ready for it.”
He pressed the star.
65
Although Duke Pellafino towered over most people and had fists like the heads of sledgehammers and looked kind of mean even when he smiled, though he had used some unacceptably crude language back in Room 414, after he and Amity jumped there from Earth 1.77, and though he’d pulled some martial arts mojo on Daddy, the head of hotel security seemed to be one of the good guys when you got to know him better. Of course you could never be 100 percent sure who anyone was or what they might do, or when they might walk out on you. But Duke was smart enough to believe his own eyes, to grasp the concept of infinite parallel worlds and all, to understand the power and the danger and the potential evil uses of the key to everything. Smart was a good thing. Well, not always a good thing, because spooky old Ed was smart to the max, and look at the poopstorm he caused with his genius invention. Duke had been a policeman for years and years, which meant he was probably trustworthy. Not all policemen were good guys, but neither were all teachers or preachers. In the end, Amity would have liked Duke and given him the benefit of the doubt even if, in his office, discussing things with Daddy, he hadn’t referred to her as Little Miss Kick-ass. That had been a bit crude but funny, too, and was meant to be praise because of how she didn’t curl up in fear when the bug-form robot came after them.
Duke’s office in the basement of Suavidad Hotel had a bank of eight TV screens on which you could watch various public spaces in the building at the same time. An American flag was framed on one wall, and on another were pictures of eight dogs, all of which had been his companions at one time or another, golden retrievers and German shepherds. He was between dogs now, he said, because he’d had to put his most recent one to sleep a month earlier—cancer—and he needed time to mend his heart before getting another. Amity slipped her wallet from a hip pocket and showed him the photos of Michelle and explained that she was between mothers, though with any luck the mother she found would be the same one she had lost, only from a parallel timeline. Duke seemed to under
stand about mothers and family. On his desk were photographs of his older brother and two younger sisters, as well as photos of his various nieces and nephews. He said he was “too much of an asshole” to have gotten married when he was younger and someone would have had him, and though that was crude, the way he said it made Amity like him even more than when he called her a kick-ass, especially when he saw that she hadn’t put her wallet away and he asked to see her mom again.
Duke didn’t know anyone named John Falkirk, and he wasn’t aware that Suavidad Beach was crawling with agents of the shadow state. But having been to Earth 1.77, he did not have the slightest difficulty believing that Amity and her father were being hunted for the key and that they couldn’t go home again. Neither could they go to the local police for help—or so they thought—because maybe the feds would quickly show up and take custody of them, and soon thereafter they would be sleeping with the fishes or being liquefied in a sewage-processing plant after hours.
“This is going to take some heavy thinking,” Duke Pellafino said. “I’m not sure who we can call on for help, but there must be somebody. There’s always somebody. The world—this world, at least—is full of more helpers than it is shit-for-brains bastards.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve always thought so,” Daddy said, “but lately I wonder.”
What happened then was that Duke gave Amity’s father the key to his Lincoln Navigator and the key to his house. He told them to hide out there, make themselves comfortable. After his replacement came on duty, Duke would walk home, and then they would scheme up a solution to this predicament over breakfast.
Deeply touched by this generosity, Daddy launched into a little speech that made Duke uncomfortable. So to put an end to that before it got maudlin, Amity pulled the hotelman’s face down to hers and kissed him on the cheek, and said, “Thank you, Uncle Duke.” Judging by his reaction, that was the right way to end it, even though he wasn’t actually her uncle.
66
After coffee and cigarettes on the porch, John Falkirk went inside the bungalow to the kitchen and refilled his mug. He took a tablet of Zantac, his second of the night. Dr. J. Halsey Sigmoid would have faulted him for overmedicating; in fact the internist did not approve of acid-blocking medications like Zantac and Pepcid, not because of their side effects, as he claimed, but probably because he was a sadist who took pleasure in the suffering of others, who in more primitive centuries would have delighted in amputating a limb before the invention of anesthetics. When Falkirk had the key to everything, he would travel to another world and kill a version of the good doctor, just as he had killed a version of his stepmother.
Carrying the coffee, with nothing but ambient light to guide him, he proceeded to the girl’s room at the back of the house to make sure that Arthur Gumm wasn’t torturing the white mouse instead of keeping a lookout for the fugitives. Then he went to Coltrane’s workroom to see if Ivan Kosloff was standing watch or masturbating. Each of them was a brutal killer, without a conscience, but they were also perverts who were at times distracted by their various obsessions and fetishes. This new generation was as corruptible as any, but a lot of them lacked a proper work ethic.
The mouse was safely in its cage, and Kosloff’s apparatus was in his pants, so Falkirk carried his coffee to the living room and stood by a window. The porch was dark, and the yard beyond was dark, and the lane as well, but Falkirk counseled himself to remember that even in the darkest hour there was light beyond. Although he hated everybody else, he loved himself, believed in himself, and knew that in spite of his current frustration, his future was bright.
67