He eased the door open. Although he oiled the hinges from time to time so they never creaked, they creaked now.
In his workroom, the sheer curtain at the window was gone, replaced by a pleated shade that was at the moment raised. He might not have noticed this change if the previously bright day beyond the glass had not now been sunless. The sky bellied with dark clouds swollen with impending rain. Seemingly in an instant, the weather had drastically changed.
He went to the shelves of radios that needed to be refurbished, intending to hide the key to everything under the old Bendix, where he should have left it after Falkirk departed.
The Bendix wasn’t there. He inventoried the other radios, sure that he must have moved the one he needed.
Then he saw it standing on his workbench. Cleaned. Meticulously polished. Its color was as vibrant as the day it had first appeared for sale more than ninety years earlier.
Painstakingly restoring this much-discolored Bakelite to its original luster would have taken him at least a week.
The Bendix was plugged in to the power strip that ran along the back of his workbench. He hesitated, then switched it on. A glow filled the tuning window. The radio was no longer just a shell. The vacuum tubes warmed, and music came forth.
Johnny Mathis sang “The Twelfth of Never.”
The skin on the nape of Jeffy’s neck crinkled like crepe paper.
He clicked off the old radio, and the ensuing silence seemed uncanny, lacking even the sound of his breathing, as if he were the embalmed resident of a mausoleum.
“I feel it, too,” he told Amity. “Like I don’t . . . don’t belong here.”
When he turned, the girl was no longer with him.
“Amity?” he cried out, and she did not answer. Still gripping the key to everything, he hurried into the hall. She was not there.
13
Intelligent and homeschooled, Amity had been reading well above her grade level ever since she’d known what a grade level was. She’d read scads of fantasy novels with Daddy and on her own, and both she and her father preferred stories in which the female characters were as adventurous and competent and kick-ass as the men. The heroines in all those books taught her to be strong and independent. By their example, she had learned among other things that it was all right to be afraid as long as you didn’t allow your fear to paralyze or in any significant way dispirit you. Evil people thrived on your fear; they fed on it; they could defeat you only if you made yourself a banquet of fear and were consumed by your enemies. When she walked into her room and saw that she didn’t exist, she strove to repress her fear, but it wasn’t quite as easy as it was for girls in novels.
She had intended to return Snowball to his cage, where he would be safe; however, his cage was gone. Amity no longer had a bed or other furniture. Her anime posters had been stripped from the walls. The room was not, as before, a cheerful shade of yellow with a white ceiling, but instead a dreary beige. The closet door stood open, and she could see that no clothes hung in there, as if she had died of some tragic tropical fever, all covered with suppurating sores, and everything of hers had been sterilized and given to Goodwill.
When Daddy hurried into the room, calling her name—and said, “Oh, thank God,” at the sight of her—she wanted to run to him and hug him and be hugged, but she restrained herself. There was a time to take refuge in the arms of those you loved, and there was a time to stand up to great evil and be not bowed. If you didn’t know the difference, then you were doomed to perish about two-thirds of the way through the story, when the narrative needed a jolt of violence and emotion. (As a reader who hoped one day to be a writer, she was always alert to authors’ techniques.) She couldn’t yet figure out the identity of the current evil, but she had met its minions when Falkirk and his toadies had come calling. Whoever Spooky Ed might be and whatever the key to everything could do, she and her father were in deep merde, and extraordinary courage would be required of them.
Her father came to her, and maybe unshed tears were sta
nding in his eyes, so she quickly looked away from him. This was the totally wrong time for either of them to show weakness. Being no less of an avid reader than Amity, her father surely knew what the weirdness of their situation required. If she gave him a moment, he would regain his balance.
Before Daddy could say the wrong thing, a loud noise drew their attention to a window. The racket of a machine.
Amity went to the window, and her father joined her, and they looked out at the backyard, where a man was mowing the grass, intent as if determined to finish the task before the storm broke. They didn’t have a gardener. Daddy mowed the lawn himself. And in fact the guy out there pushing the mower back and forth was Daddy. He had to be Daddy, because Daddy didn’t have an identical twin.
Just when you thought you were getting a grip on your fear, it became as hard to subdue as a crazed cat. Amity had one father and no mother and a big hole in her life, but the emptiness couldn’t be filled in and paved over by having two dads. The guy out there must be a doppelgänger, a ghostly double of a living person. She and Daddy had once read a story about a doppelgänger, and things hadn’t gone well for the luckless living man whose place in the world the freaking doppelgänger wanted for itself. After disposing of the true father, the evil impersonator had schemed to have the two children—one a girl rather like Amity—swallowed whole by a huge mystical crocodile and carried into an infinite swamp, where they would live forever in its bowels, screaming for help that would never come. Fortunately, a bird named Pickitt, who served the crocodile by feeding on scraps of meat stuck between its teeth, took pity on the kids before they could be eaten. Pickitt stole all the reptile’s ivories while it slept, so that it couldn’t devour the children. In the real world, however, if a doppelgänger took her father’s place, there wouldn’t be a mystical crocodile or a bird sympathetic to her plight. The evil double would just strangle her and stuff her in a liquid cremation machine full of concentrated lye water, reduce her to the consistency of soup, and flush her down a toilet. The real world had become weirder than even the darkest fairy tales.
Watching the man with the mower, she shuddered. “This isn’t our house. It’s his house.”
“He’s me,” her father said with a note of astonishment, but under the circumstances, Amity could forgive him for stating the obvious. Really and truly, she could.
She stepped back from the window, afraid of being seen by the doppelgänger if he should look up from the lawn. Surveying this transformed space, she said, “My room isn’t my room. There’s nothing in it that belongs to me. Maybe I’ve never lived here. Either Mom took me away with her—”
“I’d never have allowed that.”
“—or you never married her and I was never born.”
When she glanced at her father, she wished she hadn’t. His shocked expression, the horror in his eyes, the sudden softness of his mouth and the way it trembled nearly undid her.
Holding out one hand, she said, “Let me see the stupid thing, the key, the whatever.”
He showed it to her but didn’t give her the device. Three on-screen buttons offered Home, Select, Return. In smaller letters, a data bar at the bottom provided information even harder to confidently interpret than the words on the buttons: Elsewhere 1.13—Cataloged.