Elsewhere, page 18
About twenty feet before Forest Avenue ended at Pacific Coast Highway, a child’s stroller was overturned on the street. As if the moon were in the service of some satanic set designer, it spilled its silver between the trees, pouring a pool of pale light into a gutter otherwise brimming with darkness. In this lunar pin spot lay a miniature Converse sneaker suitable perhaps for a two-year-old. No other sign remained of the child who’d once worn the black-and-white shoe, nor of the parents who had pushed the stroller.
Jeffy was riveted by this mundane footwear, which seemed to radiate an occult power as might have the first apple in Eden. It didn’t tempt him toward transgression, but pierced him with the recognition that he had failed his daughter when he had taken the key to everything from the box that Ed Harkenbach had warned him never to open. And again when he had not returned it to the box the moment that Falkirk and his men had left the house after searching it. Curious about the object’s purpose, intrigued by what power might have been instilled in it by the expenditure of seventy-six billion dollars’ worth of research, he’d put the damn thing on the kitchen table to indulge his ever-active imagination, his taste for fantasy. If he wanted to blame Snowball, he could not. Imagination combined the products of knowledge in new or ideal forms. Fantasy combined them without regard for reason and rationality—imagination in its lower form. Fantasy enlivened life, but it was best confined to the pages of books and the images on a movie screen, and was often dangerous when it served as the basis for action. He knew this. The novels that he loved frequently told him this truth. But for a few minutes in his kitchen, he had forgotten what he knew—or had wished to forget it. Now Amity’s life was at risk, and by his own judgment he was damned forever if she died.
A girl of extraordinary sensitivity, his daughter put a hand on his arm. As if Jeffy had criticized and condemned himself aloud, she said, “The key to everything is spooky old Ed’s responsibility, and he messed up. Snowball is my mouse, and he’s forbidden to be on the kitchen table, but I didn’t control him. So you’re not first in line to be spanked and sent to bed without dessert. You’re third.”
For a moment he didn’t trust himself to speak. Her love and understanding humbled him. Then he managed to say, “Bullsugar.”
She grinned, and the moonlight made an elf of her. “Let’s split this dump.”
“Not here,” he said. “At home, even at this hour, there’ll be a few people taking a walk on Forest Avenue. We can’t just materialize in front of them. Especially if one happens to be a policeman on patrol.”
“Where then?”
With the key to everything in one hand and the pistol in the other, with his daughter remaining close by his side, Jeffy walked twenty feet to the end of Forest Avenue and stepped onto Pacific Coast Highway.
They were in the flat center of town, with the park across the highway, the beach beyond the park, the deep black ocean rumbling as breakers broke upon the pale sand of the shore.
This close to the water, he felt the barest breath of a cool onshore breeze. It smelled fresh and clean—and then he remembered that in the nearby park, on a parallel world, Amity had found the three teeth in a chunk of jawbone.
The lanes of blacktop rose both to the left and right, littered with half a dozen vehicles, devoid of moving traffic, with not one pedestrian in sight.
To the south, about a block uphill, on the far side of the highway, rose Hotel Suavidad, an Art Deco structure built in the 1930s and renovated several times since. It looked much the same as on their own world, though sleeker in ways that he could not quite define. He and Amity had often eaten dinner in one of the hotel’s two restaurants, which overlooked the sea.
“The hotel,” he said. “I know just where we can hide out in there to make the jump and not risk being seen when we pop up on Earth Prime.”
He couldn’t help but consider how absurd those words would have seemed a few days ago, and how sane they sounded now. Oz was always right here, if unseen, waiting only for a tornado or a megabillion-dollar device to be made manifest.
Crossing the wide highway, Jeffy became more aware than he’d been on Forest Avenue that the darkness was uniquely disturbing. Its vastness seemed to confirm not merely the death of a town but also the end of civilization. To Newport Beach in the north and beyond, to San Clemente in the south and beyond, no light rose to dim the gleam of stars. If California was gone, so was the United States, and if the nation was finished, so might be the world.
As they reached the entrance to the hotel, something like a foghorn issued a warning in the distance, a haunting voice that halted Jeffy and Amity. After a few seconds of silence, the note throbbed in a steady rhythm, lower and more reverberant, pulsing through the hollows of the town. Then with the sound came waves of soft purple light, washing across the rooftops, racing over the walls of the buildings, rippling along the pavement like the cleansing tides of an antiseptic rinse.
He felt the sound quivering the marrow of his bones, trembling the blood in his veins, and he felt the light purling through him like a laser scanner reading the spirals of his genome. Some entity yet occupied this Suavidad Beach and suspected their presence. The sound and the light were somehow search instruments. Either he and Amity had already been found or shortly would be.
“Run!” he said, and Amity kept pace with him through the last hundred feet, to the front door of the hotel.
51
The stainless-steel revolving door, with its four compartments, required no power other than human effort. It spun them smoothly off the sidewalk into a large vestibule, where the flashlight revealed a dead palm tree in a center planter. An upscale women’s dress shop lay to the left, a men’s store to the right, display windows peopled by mannequins wearing once-stylish clothes that moths and rot had converted into rags.
At the end of the vestibule, they pushed through another door into what Jeffy knew would be the lobby with its marble floor and columns. The generous space was indeed pretty much as it had been in his world, but here it served also as a repository for human skulls.
Shock and horror brought him and Amity up short. On both sides of a pathway that had been left open, fleshless skulls were piled in ascending mounds, brain box on brain box, sans brains, sloping up to the left and right. Thousands of lipless and eternal grins. Hollow sockets blind to the atrocity of which they were a testament. The registration counter, the bellhops’ station, the concierge’s desk were buried under drifts of white bone, the discarded craniums of adults and children, gender and race and age stripped away with the flesh, yet in such numbers that were the definition of holocaust.
“Oh, shit,” Amity said.
“Don’t look,” he said.
But the grim collection was so encompassing, so compelling, that nothing else could command attention, nor was this a place where they would dare to close their eyes.
He pivoted back the way they had come and looked through the nearer doors, through the vestibule, through the outer doors. Soft purple light no longer washed the night, and he couldn’t hear the throbbing foghorn sound.
That didn’t mean they could venture outside again. Something was coming. A sound like screaming aircraft. Like jets inbound with their payloads.
Still holding the pistol but pocketing the key to everything, he grabbed his daughter’s hand. “It’s like Halloween at Knott’s, at Disneyland, think of it that way, plastic skulls and nothing real.”
She couldn’t deceive herself any more than he could, and God knew what damage this was doing to her psyche, to her soul, but he could think of nothing else to say.
They hurried along the path between the skulls, to a hallway off the lobby, to the elevators. Beyond the elevators were spacious public restrooms, from one of which he intended to make the jump out of this timeline to the one where they belonged. At 3:20 a.m., there would be no restaurant customers or arriving hotel guests who might be using those facilities when he and Amity materialized on Earth Prime.
He yanked open the men’s-room door and urged the girl in after him. Across the threshold, the flashlight revealed that whatever the nature of those who had done this, they were violent in the extreme and mad beyond the power of analysis. Here, the trophies were not skulls but human spines, curved configurations of barren vertebrae stacked everywhere, filling the toilet stalls. The chamber of skulls had contained no foul odor of which he’d been aware; but a stench filled this room. The meninges membranes as well as the gray and white matter of the spinal cords had dissolved, leaked through the vertebrae, and puddled the floor, providing a breeding ground for a foul black mold that thrived in lumpish colonies from end to end of the lavatory.
“Sorry, oh Jesus, sorry,” Jeffy chanted, pulling Amity from the room. The flashlight swooped wildly across dense abstract patterns of the interlocked vertebrae of countless stacked and tangled spines, which seemed like an intricate alien life form that might suddenly twitch and come awake and lurch at them.
In the hall again, he didn’t make a move toward the door of the women’s restroom, for he was sure that it would contain more spines or something worse. Were there trophy rooms containing skeletal arms and hands, others for hips and leg bones, for rib cages? Who flensed the flesh from the murdered bodies? Or was that work done while the victims still lived? Who unhinged the dead into their separate parts? Who boiled thousands of skulls to make them pristine white and presentable for the lobby display?
A clatter arose from the front entrance of the hotel. He was too far away to see the cause. Something was coming.
His heart knocked as if on Heaven’s door.
Holding Amity close against him, he realized they had to get out of sight. No way in hell would they go outside and face whatever forces were gathering there. Assume the ground floor of the building and maybe a few levels above it were boneyards. The hotel was seven stories high. They had to go up.
“The stairs,” he said, and Amity sprinted to the labeled door, with him close behind.
Jeffy had no illusions about the human potential for evil, but this seemed to be insanity far in excess of any human obsession ever recorded. No men or women could sustain so long the fierce intensity of hatred necessary to do all of this. A legion of sociopaths would have been required to slaughter and process so many thousands, maybe millions. The explanation could not be human, and he hoped to escape this place before he was confronted by the answer.
52
They went all the way to the fourth floor. The building was old, constructed in the days when things were built to last, so the stairs were concrete, not metal. As Jeffy and Amity ascended, the most noise they made was their rapid breathing.
The fire doors at each floor stood open, their self-closure mechanisms having been disabled. The main hallway on the fourth floor was narrower than in a more modern hotel, the carpet a pale celadon marked by stains of some kind, although none that looked like blood.
On both sides, the regularly spaced doors stood open, as though a search had once been conducted. The flashlight revealed not one trove of bones, only hotel rooms with beds and chairs and dressers.
“Where?” Amity asked.
Whoever or whatever was coming, they or it would sweep the building from bottom to top. An idea struck Jeffy. Although it might be a useless gambit if the searchers had technology that could read the heat signature of a human being through a wall, he enlisted Amity to help him execute it.
“You take the left, I’ll take the right, close all the doors.”
Perhaps because a window was broken out at the end of the hall, allowing salty sea air to enter, the hinges of the doors were badly corroded. The knuckles of the barrels grated noisily and stubbornly against the pintles, but the hinges worked.
When the task was quickly done, Jeffy led Amity to a room on the east side of the building, halfway along the corridor. He said, “Flashlight off,” and took her inside and closed the door. When searchers arrived on this floor, they were likely to start at one end of the hall and work toward the other.
At the two windows, heavy draperies were sagging and ripe with mold, but they covered all the glass.
When Amity switched on the flashlight, she nevertheless hooded the trembling beam with one hand.
“We’ll be all right,” he said.
“I know.”
“We’re almost out of here.”
“I know.”
The electronic lock on the door could be engaged and disengaged only with a coded magnetic card issued to each guest. Jeffy didn’t have a card. Anyway, the hotel no longer seemed to have electrical service. A traditional knob allowed him to brace the door with a straight-backed chair.
Amity nervously swept the finger-filtered light across the furniture, through the open doorway to the adjoining bathroom, as though reluctant to believe they were alone and even briefly safe.
Jeffy withdrew the key to everything from a coat pocket and pressed the home circle at the bottom of the screen.
Passing the flashlight beam across a wall that was fitted floor to ceiling and corner to corner with a seamless, dark, reflective surface in front of which no furniture stood, the girl said, “What’s this?”
“Maybe TV,” he said as, after a four-second delay, soft gray light appeared on the screen of Harkenbach’s device.
“A whole wall of TV?”
“Might be a screen for some kind of virtual reality system. Something we don’t have on our timeline.” The blue, red, and green buttons appeared on the key. He said, “Grab hold of me.”
She clutched his arm tightly.
When they arrived in this hotel room in their timeline, maybe it wouldn’t be booked for the night. This wasn’t the height of the beach season. Even if guests were in residence, they would most likely be asleep. Jeffy and Amity would be out of the room and running before the sleeper woke and was able to switch on a light.
With a sigh of relief, he pushed Home, and after a few seconds the buttons disappeared. They were replaced by that universal symbol familiar to every surfer of the internet—a little comet of light turning around and around like a wheel—which meant searching.
A knot of something seemed to rise into Jeffy’s throat, and he wasn’t able to swallow it.
Having seen the symbol, Amity said, “Does that mean . . . ?”
“No, it can’t. I’m not trying to connect with any damn website. I just want to go home. I pressed the button that said Home.”
“Can the thing have trouble finding home?”
“Ed never said anything about this, he never wrote anything like this in his book, not that I read.”
“It’s a big multiverse,” she said.
Out in the street, something shrieked past the building, an aircraft, nothing big, maybe a drone. Maybe a fleet of drones.
Startled, Amity let go of him and swept her light toward the windows, which was when the little turning wheel stopped turning. Jeffy was enveloped in a blizzard of white light and in an instant flashed back to Prime. Alone.
53
On Prime, the draperies were open, and the ambient light of nighttime Suavidad Beach relieved the darkness enough to reveal a neatly made bed, a hotel room that wasn’t occupied.
Jubilant, Jeffy let out a bark of laughter, but then realized an instant later that Amity wasn’t with him, whereupon celebration pivoted to desperation. Anxiety and anguish contested to disable him. He staggered backward, collided with the straight-backed chair, knocking it into the full-length mirror on the closet door. He cried out as the mirror shattered. He almost fell, dropped his pistol, almost dropped the precious key to everything, the hateful key to everything.
Of course this had to happen. He should have known it had to happen, because it was the stuff of stories, and real life was the biggest craziest story ever told, so big and so crazy that no writer in the history of the world had been able to convey even 1 percent of its bigness and craziness, so they had to shrink it down, squeeze the tiniest essence of it onto the page in the hope of finding some coherent meaning in it. If there was any meaning in an eleven-year-old girl being left alone on a world of death and horror, it escaped Jeffy and pissed him off and made him want to scream. It was nothing but a cruel and stupid and meaningless event, because real life was plotted like Tolkien on methamphetamine, an endless cascade of events events events. Something always had to be happening, and a lot of what happened was tragic, which was what most obsessed writers who wanted to understand life: Why all the loss and suffering and death, what sense could possibly be made of it?
All that and more raced through Jeffy’s mind, manic torrents of frantic thought, as he regained his balance and pressed the home circle on the key to everything and waited four seconds for the damn gray light to appear. “I’m on my way, Amity. I’ll be there, I’ll be there.” After four seconds that seemed like an eternity, the gray light filled the screen, and he was waiting for the three buttons when someone pounded on the room door and said, “Security.”
54
Charlie “Duke” Pellafino earned his nickname because he walked with an artless, sidewise swagger like that of John Wayne. Although he was a fan of the Duke’s movies and watched them repeatedly on DVD, he’d never practiced the walk; it really did come natural to him. He was tall and solid like the actor, and he had a squint that reduced bad guys to cooperation quicker than any threat could have done, and he had a laconic way of speaking, as Wayne did, which conveyed confidence and authority. He’d been a uniformed police officer, a detective in the Gang Activities Section, and then in the Homicide Special Section, during which time he’d compiled a record of arrests resulting in convictions never equaled by another officer in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department.
