Elsewhere, page 11
Daddy turned away from the front door. “Out the back.”
They hurried through the house, across the porch, and into the yard, which lacked the English garden and the birdbath so prominent on Earth 1.13. Neither was there an elderly couple bent on mayhem.
But there was sun, glorious sun, and no rain.
Beside the detached garage, a gate opened into an alley, where they didn’t encounter a black van or creepy guys dressed like Nazi ninjas or any brainwashed young boys in Justice Wolves uniforms.
As they passed through town, they saw no stores that had gone out of business. The streets were busy with locals and tourists, and a general air of prosperity lay over Suavidad Beach.
They were home. They were safe.
“We have to stop at the library,” her father said.
“What?” The suggestion alarmed her. “Why? That’s where the creep said Snowball wasn’t an appropriate animal.”
“That wasn’t in this world, remember. That was . . . elsewhere.”
“Oh. Yeah. That’s right, huh?” She still felt uneasy.
“We need to check out Ed Harkenbach’s book, Infinite Worlds.”
“You had it already. What happened to it?”
“I dropped it somewhere, maybe scrambling up a garden wall or running from Good Boy. It’s been a pretty physical day, in case you hadn’t noticed. They’ll probably have a copy in this library, too.”
The woman with the Mrs. Frankenstein hair wasn’t at the front desk. The librarian on duty, Mrs. Rockwell, was the wife of Vince Rockwell, who taught history and coached the high school football team.
No faintest scent of burning paper tainted the air. The aisles between the stacks were better lighted than those in the Library of the Weird. A copy of Infinite Worlds: Parallel Universes and Quantum Reality waited where she and her father had found it before.
This time they didn’t informally borrow the book. They took it to the checkout desk, and Daddy presented his library card, and Mrs. Rockwell processed everything properly while chatting about the weather and the latest foolishness in Sacramento. She liked unique earrings, and today she wore a dangly pair of brightly colored enamel parrots.
Mrs. Rockwell seemed totally normal. Amity loved how normal the librarian seemed.
On this beautiful sunny afternoon, the twelfth of April, they had found again the world as it was supposed to be. They were home. They were safe.
The Visitor in the Dead of Night
In more than one world, he has done a great wrong. When he’d been a boy, his mother had taught him always to do the right thing, but he had done the wrong thing with the best of intentions. The wrong is so enormous that he can’t rectify it in all the worlds where it has happened, but he hopes to do a small good here and there to honor the memory of his mother.
Now, in the early morning hours of the eleventh day of April, the same night that he also visits libraries in search of what he needs to know about the Coltranes, he journeys to the oak woods past the end of Shadow Canyon Lane. An hour before dawn, he travels across worlds from the trees around a clearing to the same trees around the same clearing elsewhere, in that specific elsewhere in which Jeffrey Coltrane legally dissolved his marriage to Michelle because she vanished seven years earlier. The existence of this inflatable tent, which he watches from the cover of the oaks, is evidence that there is an Edwin Harkenbach hiding out from the forces of evil in this Suavidad Beach, just as in certain others.
Further evidence is the aroma of strong coffee in the absence of a campfire. The declining moon gives off a smoky light like a sorcerer’s brew steaming from a hot chalice, and the visitor’s eyes take time to adapt to the witchy light before he is able to discern a jerry-rigged battery-powered hot plate in front of the tent. In more than one world, various Harkenbachs have invented this clever appliance to provide a favorite beverage without risking a fire in such dry land.
From within the tent comes whistling that only Edwin Harkenbach would attempt: a signature passage from a Mozart concerto, K. 453. Mozart had once purchased a starling that could whistle K. 453. But in none of the worlds that Harkenbach inhabits is he as talented as the bird.
The visitor doesn’t know if this version of the scientist has interacted with Jeffrey Coltrane, but the possibility is real. Everywhere that he is known to exist, Harkenbach is a sociable man, though in some cases more distressed about his situation than in others. If he and Coltrane are acquainted here, the ground might already have been laid for the success of the visitor’s plan.
The visitor, who is Ed Harkenbach from a parallel world, could approach this version of himself and collude with him to ensure the success of his mission here, but he has no intention of doing that. In some worlds, sad to say, there are versions of himself who have come unglued because of what he’s done and because of being hunted by agents of the shadow state. It’s too distressing—and potentially dangerous—for this Ed to come face-to-face with one of those Eds.
Before the Harkenbach on this world might throw back the tent flap and step into sight, the visiting Ed makes his way through the woods, which are familiar to him, and proceeds downslope to Shadow Canyon Lane. This neighborhood lacks streetlamps, and the last hour of night suits him well as he walks past the widely separated, dark houses.
The Coltranes, father and daughter and mouse, are early risers. Their bungalow is the only residence with light in some windows.
The visitor quietly makes his way around the side of the house to one of the kitchen windows. Together, father and daughter are making breakfast.
Jeffrey is dressed for the day, but Amity still wears Rocket Raccoon pajamas. He is cracking eggs into a bowl, evidently with the intention of scrambling them. The girl is preparing bread for the toaster, trimming the crusts off the slices for herself but leaving those for her father in their natural condition.
The visitor is thrilled to think how profoundly Jeffrey’s and Amity’s lives will be changed within the next few days. The key to everything has shown him horrific worlds of blood and terror and catastrophe. Now he looks forward to what he can bring into the lives of these two innocents.
Dawn will soon brighten the horizon on this eleventh day of April.
31
The sight of the little stone house with the slate roof, in the shadows of the breeze-stirred palms, filled Amity with nothing less than joy, really and truly. Her heart seemed to swell, and she felt impossibly light, like a helium-filled balloon, as if her feet were barely touching the ground, as if instead she were gliding up the flagstone walkway.
There wasn’t a Daddy Doppelgänger mowing the lawn. Birds sat on the fence, singing as if to welcome her, and a cute little lizard skittered up the walkway, leading her home.
Inside, she rushed to her room. It wasn’t empty, as it had been on Earth 1.13. Her furniture stood where it belonged. Anime posters. Yellow walls and white ceiling, instead of everything dreary beige. In this world, she had been born and lived, and a snotty boy named Rudy Starkman—in a uniform for wannabe fascists or communists or whatever—had never existed.
She extracted Snowball from her pocket and took him to his enormous cage. Safe within that wire fortress, he scampered to his water dish, took a drink, pooped in a corner where he usually left his little pellets, and then went to his exercise wheel. He ran like a maniac, his face squinched up strangely, more intense than usual, as if he might be stressed out and trying to find his bliss again.
Of course Snowball’s brain was too tiny for him to have a clue that he had been to another world and back. Nevertheless, he might be somewhat psychic and aware of the extreme emotional chaos that Amity had endured. Animals often seemed to have a sixth sense, or maybe it was just instinct.
“I won’t put you through that again,” she promised the furry white marathoner. “But just remember, you’re the one who activated the key to everything and parked your bottom on the Return button.”
As she stepped out of her room, she was skewered by a needle of paranoia, suddenly certain that Good Boy waited in the hallway for her. She didn’t have hackles, not like dogs did, but the nape of her neck prickled; and if she’d been equipped with hackles, they would have been standing up straight and stiff.
She knew Good Boy was dead. Daddy had said so. Evidently, she was suffering post-traumatic stress. She would probably be looking for bogeymen under the bed for weeks and weeks.
Not that she would let her father know she was still spooked. Mother—Michelle—had been afraid of losing her identity, destiny, dreams, or something, and she had run out on her husband and child. Amity was never going to run from anything, unless it had big teeth and there was murder in its eyes. She didn’t want her father to entertain the slightest doubt about her.
She heard him in the kitchen and went to see what he might be doing. He was sitting at the breakfast table with Ed Harkenbach’s book and a bottle of beer.
The key to everything lay on the table.
Indicating her father’s Heineken, Amity said, “I’ll have one, too.”
“Yeah, okay, as long as the word Coke is on the label.”
She retrieved a can of the parent-approved beverage from the refrigerator and sat at the table. “Why’re you reading that?”
“To find answers to some questions, if there are any answers.”
“Like what questions?”
“The key doesn’t have a charging port. There must be a battery, but there’s nothing that opens so you can replace it. What happens if you’re on some other world and this gismo goes dead?”
“Keep reading. Maybe the book tells you.”
“Well, it’s not a book about the key to everything. It doesn’t have diagrams. Ed hadn’t invented the damn thing when he wrote it. This is all about theory. I have to take the theory and extrapolate from it, think how it might be practically applied, and the strain is giving me a migraine.”
After a hesitation, she said, “Are we going to use the key again?”
He frowned. “No. No, no. Too dangerous.”
“But just maybe we will.”
“Never.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
“Then why do you need to know about the battery?”
“Just in case.”
“In case what?”
“In case . . .” He exhaled as much exasperation as air, and he inhaled resignation. “In case, in some kind of crisis, we have to use it again.”
“What crisis?”
He marked his place in the book with a jacket flap and set the volume aside.
Amity thought he was going to go totally adult on her and deliver a gentle lecture regarding an aspect of life about which he thought she was clueless. Most likely, she would already understand what he strove earnestly to explain to her. She would pretend to be gradually enlightened, until he was proud of her and felt that he had fulfilled his fatherly duty. He was such a good, sweet man that Amity found these sessions endearing rather than frustrating. And of course maybe 20 percent of the time she was clueless, and he did enlighten her, so it was always worth really and truly listening.
This time, however, she misjudged his intention.
After setting the book aside and taking a long pull on his beer, he stared at the key to everything, his brow furrowed, his face drawn with worry.
“What crisis?” Amity repeated.
“One crisis could be John Falkirk. From the National Security Agency. With his helicopters and fleet of Suburbans and armed search teams.”
“He didn’t find anything,” Amity said. “He went away.”
“Yeah, but someone is going to discover Good Boy’s body and call the police. It’s like right out of The Twilight Zone, a chimp-human hybrid in a bizarre uniform. Falkirk didn’t storm into town before first consulting with local authorities, and although they won’t know what this is about, they’ll have been told to call Falkirk if anything unusual happens.”
“Good Boy is kind of unusual,” she conceded.
“And maybe someone saw us running away from that house. Though even if no one saw us, Falkirk’s likely to come back here and seal off the street and interrogate everyone on Shadow Canyon Lane again. He seemed sure Ed Harkenbach would have entrusted his thingumabob to someone here.”
“We can fake him out again.”
“Can we? Not if he takes . . . extreme measures.”
Amity had read enough stories involving evil kings and vermin-infested dungeons to suspect what her father feared. “Torture.”
“They won’t go that far. Maybe some kind of drug cocktail that makes us tell the truth. Or they’ll arrest me and hold me without bail, as a national-security threat or something.”
“We’d be separated?”
He met her eyes and held her stare. “I won’t let that happen.”
Of course he meant what he said, but he was just one man. The government was millions.
Daddy picked up his beer once more.
Amity was of an age when solace was taken from sugar that had not been fermented. She swilled an unladylike quantity of Cherry Coke before she spoke. “You said ‘one crisis could be Falkirk.’ What’s another one?”
He turned the empty bottle in his hand, studying it as if it were an arcane object found among a wizard’s magical instruments, containing the answer to all mysteries. “It’s not a crisis as much as a moral dilemma. And it’s less of a moral dilemma than it is a problem of the heart.”
“Well, I guess I know what it is.”
“I guess you do,” he said.
“You still love her.”
“I always will.”
Amity pushed her empty Coke can aside. “Then let’s go get her.”
His stare was as piercing as it was tender with sympathy. “She wouldn’t be likely to leave her life there, sweetheart. Besides, she’s gone down a dark road. Someone broke her spirit. Maybe that husband of hers. She’s Michelle, but she’s not the same person. She would never understand this world or want to live in it.”
Amity nodded. “Yeah, okay, that’s the way she is in Good Boy’s weird universe. But there’s like a million billion others. More than that. Some of them must be as safe as ours. Lots are probably better places, safer. Somewhere she’s the right Michelle, and she’s alone, and she needs us.”
“We can’t spend our lives looking for the right Michelle. It would be living on wishes, and if we feed ourselves with nothing but wishes, we starve. You lost your mother once. Losing her again and again . . .” He shook his head. “Honey, you’re a strong girl, but nobody could endure a hundred losses like that—or even fifty, or twenty—without being changed for the worse, forever.” He shifted his attention to the key to everything. The sorrow in Daddy’s voice saddened Amity. “I know I couldn’t handle it, sweetheart. Hoping so hard only to have the hope dashed again and again. Anyway, it’s too dangerous. You already saw how dangerous it is.”
“Then why did you mention it?”
“Mention what?”
“The other crisis, moral dilemma, problem of the heart.”
“To help you understand. Now that we might soon be back on Falkirk’s radar, we have to keep the key nearby at all times, in case we’re cornered or in some kind of jam. It’s the ultimate method of escape. But at the same time, I have to be sure you won’t ever take it and use it yourself.”
“Go off to some crazy world on my own? Why would I?”
“To find a version of your mother who will love you and come here to live with us.”
“I wouldn’t.” She bristled a little, even though she knew the bristling was calculated. “I’m not stupid, you know.”
“You’re far from stupid.”
“Besides, I never disobey you about anything important.”
“No, you don’t. And you wouldn’t mean to disobey. But ‘the heart is deceitful above all things.’”
She felt herself on the verge of tears, which made no sense, unless on some deep level, below her conscious awareness, she had hoped to do just what he warned her against—use the key, by herself, to find a mother she was meant to have—and now mourned the loss of that hope. To fend off the grief that threatened her and to defend her image as being mature beyond her years, she repeated his words with a slight note of mockery, though the sound of her voice dismayed her. “‘The heart is deceitful above all things.’ What’s that mean, anyway?”
“The mind and the heart—intellect and emotions, facts and feelings. They’re both important. But to live well, we need to make decisions based on logic and reason modified by emotion. If we’re guided only or even largely by emotion . . . Well, the heart often wants what it doesn’t really need, and sometimes it wants what it shouldn’t have, something with the potential to ruin your life. It wants something so intensely that we find it easy to do what the heart wants even if we know it’s reckless.”
She realized that he had, after all, gone totally adult on her and delivered a gentle lecture. In this case, it concerned something that she’d never thought about, but she knew what he said was true as soon as she heard it.
She also understood that the truth of his advice might not be enough to ensure that she followed it. She could have lived with the emptiness of being without a mother. Once the possibility of finding Michelle became real, however, the emptiness deteriorated into an ache that wanted relief.
