Elsewhere, page 17
When Jeffy put a hand on Amity’s shoulder with the intent of reassuring her, she whispered, “Yeah, yuch, but they’re only rats.”
He would have preferred to direct the flashlight himself. But until he understood why this place warranted a skull and crossbones, he would keep the pistol in a two-handed grip. Amity did well enough, first sweeping the space to get an overall sense of it, then probing odd shapes and suspicious corners with quick efficiency.
In the hallway, the ceiling plasterboard swagged, and the stained wallpaper scrolled off the walls in places, evidence of water damage caused by a roof leak or the failure of the plumbing. Veins of dark mold branched in varicose patterns on the baseboard.
At the head of the stairs, they stood listening. Although Jeffy expected that such a decrepit house should be alive with settling noises as it ever so slowly crumbled toward ruin, the silence was complete until they started down the warped treads of the staircase, which groaned and creaked under them.
Downstairs, the front door lay on the foyer floor, wrenched from its mountings with such violence that the frame leafs of the hinges had been torn out of the jamb, buckled as if they were made of tinfoil. Someone had been determined to get inside.
Someone or something.
That thought would have seemed ludicrous a mere two days ago. Monsters were for spooky movies and novels, not part of real life—until Good Boy. And whatever might be responsible for this world being declared a hostile timeline, it must be something far worse than that pathetic ape-human hybrid.
With the light, Amity broomed the living room beyond the archway and then the ground-floor hallway behind them, where the ruin and decay matched that on the second floor.
They stepped past the fallen door, out of the house, onto the porch. At the head of the four steps to the front walk, they stood listening, watchful.
In this world, as in their own, Shadow Canyon Lane lacked streetlamps. At such a dead hour of the night, Jeffy would not have expected to see signs of life in any of his neighbors’ houses unless someone suffered from a case of the whim-whams, which modern life so often inspired, and was unable to sleep. Therefore, the absence of light in all those windows didn’t disturb him.
Fresh apprehension arose instead from a sense, at first intuitive, that the night was darker than ever before. As always, the diamond-bright stars offered no significant illumination. The downbound moon was still afloat, but screened by higher branches of the oaks, which concealed its roundness and revealed only fragments of its glow. Although the houses along the lane were usually pale-gray shapes at this hour, they were less visible now, as if the very darkness had condensed on their walls as surely as dew formed a film on other nights. The gloom was such that he thought, but couldn’t confirm, that all the structures, including their bungalow across the street, were in disrepair, perhaps abandoned.
As they descended the steps, observation confirmed intuition when he looked to the west—southwest, due west, northwest—and realized that the electric incandescence of the citied coast was gone, as though the many hundreds of thousands who lived from San Clemente in the south to Huntington Beach in the north had turned off all the lights and gone away.
On both sides of the front walkway, what once had been a well-tended lawn had become a tangled weed patch.
Amity said, “What happened to all the people?”
He had no answer. As his perplexity darkened into foreboding, he halted and took the key to everything from his pocket and touched the home circle at the bottom of the screen.
The device filled with soft gray light, and Amity said, “What are you doing?”
He didn’t want to go farther into this world. If Shadow Canyon Lane, their bungalow, their safe corner of the world now was—and for some time had been—uninhabited and crumbling into ruins, if Suavidad Beach was a ghost town, whatever had depopulated it might still be active—whether a disease, a death cult of deranged people, or some strange beast no other world had known.
Without need of an explanation, Amity understood what he meant to do. “No, Dad, no, we don’t dare jump back to Prime from here. You said there were at least like a dozen of those freaking bad guys back there. And now they know for sure we have the key, so they’ll lock down Shadow Canyon Lane. If we go back, we’re like totally screwed.”
“So then we have to jump to another world,” he said, tapping the Select button, “any world that doesn’t come with a skull and crossbones.”
But he hesitated when the keyboard appeared. Earth 1.13 hadn’t rated a hostile-timeline warning, and yet the world of Good Boy had been as rife with danger as any he could have conceived before the damn key to everything had been entrusted to him. No matter where he and Amity went next, they would be flying blind. They might jump into the middle of a firefight or worse.
She extracted something from a pocket of her jeans, displaying it on the palm of her hand, focusing the flashlight on it. “I found this yesterday.”
For a moment, he didn’t understand what she was showing him. Then he realized she held three teeth in a fragment of jawbone.
She said, “They were in the grass. The park by the beach. You were on a bench, reading Harkenbach’s book. There were a lot of brass cartridges in the grass. I think maybe people were executed there. These teeth must’ve belonged to someone who was executed.”
Looking from the grisly relic to his daughter’s face, Jeffy realized that she had depths until now unknown to him. “Why didn’t you show me then?”
“I wanted to go to that house on Bastoncherry and meet my mother. I knew if you saw these, you’d take us straight back to Prime. I did wrong, I guess.”
“You guess, huh?”
“Yeah, well, I never want to go back to that world.” She flung the teeth away into the weeds. “But if we jump now to someplace new, just to get out of here, maybe it’ll be even worse than that crazy sewer of a world with its Good Boys and Justice Wolves.”
“Maybe right here is worse. It sure seems worse to me.”
Amity slowly turned her head, surveying the night as though she were equipped with bad-guy radar. “Whatever happened here was a major crap storm, but it’s done. It’s over.”
“We don’t know that it’s over,” he disagreed.
“With this much quiet, it had to be over long ago.”
“Quiet is always a lure, and then the trap springs.”
“Not in every scene of every story. ‘He who fears to take a risk will never know reward.’”
“We’re not going to stand here quoting our favorite heroes at each other.”
“Good,” she said. “Let’s go into town and find a place that’ll be safe when we jump back to Prime.”
His soft laughter was genuine, if bleak. He would protect her at any cost. He only wished he knew when the bill would come due.
“Okay, you win. But sometimes I worry that unwittingly I’m raising a lawyer.” He pressed Cancel on the screen, and the keypad vanished, and the device went dark, and he pocketed it.
“Before we go,” Amity said, “do you see that weird car in the driveway?”
He’d been peripherally aware of the vehicle, off to the right, but in the blanketing dark, he’d not discerned anything especially strange about it.
Stepping off the brick walk, making her way through the tall grass and weeds, Amity played the beam of her flashlight over the sedan.
Following her, Jeffy felt a frisson of fear quiver across his scalp and down his spine, not because anything about the car was overtly ominous, but because it was as anachronistic as would have been Alexander Graham Bell making the first telephone call with an Apple iPhone. The car revealed something about this timeline that was as important as it was at first impossible for him to compute.
49
Because Daddy liked old things—Chiparus sculptures, Clarice Cliff ceramics, Art Deco posters—he was naturally in love with really old cars like Cords and Tuckers and Auburns and Grahams, makes that went out of business decades ago, as well as ’36 Fords and ’40 Cadillacs and all that. He couldn’t afford to own an expensive collectible car, but he had shelves of books about them.
Now and then, his automotive magazines featured articles about car shows where companies revealed concept drawings and even mock-ups of the conveyances of the future, which always looked like you might be able to fly them to the moon. The vehicle in the Bonners’ driveway was one of those, but more so: low and sleek, but also curvy in a way cars had never managed to be both before. It appeared seamless, a single piece, not assembled from parts. No visible door handles. No drip molding. No gas-tank door. The windows seemed to be made of the same material as the body; Amity’s flashlight couldn’t penetrate them, though she assumed that if you were inside, you could see out.
She followed her father around to the front of the car, which had no grille, no vents of any kind. If there were headlights and signal lights, they were flush with the body and appeared to be made of the same material as the rest of the vehicle.
“No license plate,” he said.
She said, “No side mirrors.”
“There doesn’t seem to be a hood to open.”
“Maybe it’s not a car.”
He said, “It’s a car, all right.”
“It looks like it could levitate.”
She had the creepy feeling that someone was inside the vehicle, watching them through the windshield that was opaque from this side.
Not likely. If someone was in there, he was dead; and he’d been dead for a long time, having rotted away or been mummified. The whole neighborhood felt like a graveyard. The darkness to the west, where all the lights should have been, suggested that Suavidad Beach was at best a ghost town, at worst a cemetery full of corpses.
Daddy wiped a hand across the shape of a fender. “No dust. As if somebody washed it just an hour ago.”
Amity played the flashlight beam across the driveway. Leaves and litter covered the pavement, and stiff weeds flourished through the cracks. If this car had been driven recently, the weeds would be flattened and the dry leaves crushed—but they weren’t.
The overhanging oak tree shed a leaf and then another. They fell onto what should have been the hood of the vehicle. The instant they landed, they were flung away, each in a different direction, as though conflicting currents of a breeze swept them off the car, though the strange night remained as still as it was dark.
“The thing repels stuff. It cleans itself,” said Amity.
To test that assertion, her father bent down and scooped up a handful of the small oval leaves and threw them on the hood. They whirled off the smooth, clean surface, exploded past him and Amity like a swarm of winged beetles, and rained down on the yard.
Daddy sounded spooked when he said, “I don’t get it. This technology is at least thirty years beyond anything we have today.”
“It’s totally Bradbury,” she agreed, referring to one of her favorite science-fiction authors.
Her father shook his head. “But in Ed’s book, he says that when you move from one parallel world to another, it’s always exactly the same time, down to the minute, the second. It’s impossible to travel into the past or the future, only sideways. He made that clear. He was very convincing.”
Daddy knew as well as Amity did that scientists could be wrong. In fact, they were wrong more often than they were right. They were human beings, after all. She knew a lot of things, not just fantasy fiction. She knew her share of history, and some of the things that scientists believed three hundred years ago or a hundred years ago, or even fifty, were weird and sometimes laughable.
Nothing to laugh about now, however. If they had not just crossed from one timeline to another, but had also jumped into the future, maybe they would never be able to get back to their world in the decade—or the century!—in which they had been living.
Although she really and truly tried to be positive, to avoid the negative thinking that led to unhappy endings, she said, “We’re screwed.”
Looking at the Bonners’ house, her father said, “We aren’t screwed.”
“We’re so screwed,” she begged to differ.
“I’d prefer if you’d stop using that expression. It’s crude.”
“You know, some of the alternatives are a lot worse.” She was sorry for her tone of voice, wondering if it was fear that made her sound like a sulky teenager before her time.
“And some are better,” he said.
For too long, with the creepy night all around and filled with who-knew-what horrors, her father stared at the house as if it were a pyramid half buried in the sands of Egypt, a mystery wrapped in an enigma.
Finally he turned to her again. “Listen, what if we didn’t travel forward in time, after all? What if the technology of this world just advanced a lot faster than on Earth Prime? Scientific discoveries could’ve occurred decades earlier, piled on top of one another, speeding everything along.”
She hoped that was true. She didn’t want to return to Prime only to discover that Justin Dakota, the boy who might be marriage material, was now ninety years old with a pacemaker and robot knees. “But if they have cars like this, Dad, there would be all kinds of cool tech in the house, stuff we’ve never seen before.”
“Maybe there was. Underneath all the ruin. We got out of there so fast, we didn’t take time to look.”
That could be true. She didn’t want to go back into the house to investigate. It wasn’t welcoming like the Bonners’ house in her world. This Victorian hulk was freaky and decaying, like a place out of a Poe story, a house that might sink into a tarn or suddenly be full of partygoers wearing costumes and masks, hiding from the Red Death, yet already diseased and bleeding from every orifice.
“Come on,” her father said. “Let’s get done with this. Let’s go into town and find a place where we can jump back to a location in Prime where Falkirk and his thugs won’t be waiting for us.”
As they proceeded along the lane, the stars glittered as sharp as ice picks, and the cratered eyes of the moon watched them through the screen of trees. When they reached Oak Hollow Road, the four lanes of blacktop were deserted except for a few abandoned vehicles as futuristic as the one in the Bonners’ driveway. The oaks fell back from the highway, and the unmasked moon seemed to move through the sky to match their progress—pocked, pale, inscrutable, and indifferent.
50
Suavidad Beach had been quaint and picturesque for most of its existence. Official architectural guidelines were enforced with an array of laws and with the cooperation of a determined historical society. Any new construction or reconstruction that occurred in the commercial zone and in those residential neighborhoods within the historic district would, on completion, look as if they had been there since the founding of the town. Tourists greatly preferred to get away to places that soothed them with the promise of calmer and simpler times—as long as the latest amenities were available behind the well-tended facades.
Jeffy and Amity had ventured only a few steps into the first block of Forest Avenue when they were both seized by the suspicion that the depopulation of the town might be incomplete. As in Gaston Leroux’s Paris Opera House, maybe there was at all times a phantom in this labyrinth of streets and passages. If such was the case, the flashlight called attention to them that they could not afford, and she switched it off.
In the subsequent blackout, Jeffy was not easily able to see the subtle differences confirming that an advanced technology lay behind the quaint surface. Where once might have been arrays of traffic lights, however, poles were topped with something that resembled the barrel and flared muzzle of a bazooka. A quick probe with Amity’s flashlight revealed that this curious instrument was mounted on an armature allowing it to pivot 360 degrees. Although the thing wasn’t a weapon, he couldn’t be certain of its function. He wondered if motorists here were not guided by red and yellow and green lights, if perhaps at intersections vehicles were controlled and selected to stop or proceed by microwave transmissions from a traffic-command computer.
All the cars parked at an angle to the curb were variations of the sleek and mysterious conveyance they had seen in the Bonners’ driveway, as if models conceived by previous technologies had been outlawed. Within four blocks of Forest Avenue, seven vehicles that had been involved in collisions still stood in the street. Two others had plunged across sidewalks and crashed through storefronts.
The fate that befell the people of this town had been sudden and violent, though perhaps the event had been over in short order. Most shops remained undamaged, displays of desirable merchandise still on offer—if dusty and webbed—in the gloom beyond their windows, evidence that neither rioting nor looting had occurred.
The assumption of apocalyptic violence seemed to require at least a few victims of it. But there were no dead bodies either in the wrecked cars or on the street.
The immense ficus trees from which the avenue took its name, faithfully nurtured in the better version of this town that Jeffy knew and loved, were in some cases parched and dead and fractured by bad weather. An equal number were somewhat leafed out and struggling to survive.
