Elsewhere, page 21
Coltrane was an amateur, a fool playing with the biggest and hottest matches ever made, and he would commit a fatal mistake. He would not return home right away. He would be cautious. He might wait a day or two, a week, a month, but sooner or later he would return for one thing or another. He was a weak-minded homebody, a softhearted sentimentalist. He’d convince himself that he could visit, pack up whatever items of nostalgic value mattered to him, then safely port out again.
Men were stationed in the woods around Shadow Canyon Lane. Men were in the Bonner house until that family came back from vacation. Ultraquiet drones were flying around-the-clock surveillance over the area. And John Falkirk, with two of his best agents, would live in this bungalow until Coltrane dared return, whereupon they would shoot the sonofabitch in the head on his arrival, without asking questions or giving him the chance to port out again.
If Coltrane was stupid enough to bring the girl, Falkirk would shoot her in the head, too. It would be a pleasure. And then, before Falkirk left with the key to everything, he would put the white mouse down the garbage disposal, alive.
64
Ed needed a few minutes to use the bathroom, after which he washed his face and hands and combed his unruly mass of white hair, though the last bit of grooming had no effect.
In the waning light of the lowering moon, with dawn perhaps half an hour away, he met Michelle on the front porch. She was lovely and nervous.
“We’ll port from here to the porch in their world,” he said. “This is your second trip, so you know now there’s nothing painful about it.”
“Not the trip itself, but what happens on the other end . . .”
“Be positive, Michelle. I believe you’ve every reason to expect to be welcomed.”
“What if they’re not home?”
“They’re home. I was just there on the eleventh and saw them through a kitchen window, making breakfast together.”
“Yes, but this is the thirteenth. They could have gone away since the eleventh. Who knows what could have changed since the eleventh?” she fretted.
“If Jeffrey and Amity aren’t there, we’ll try again tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and the day after that.”
“But you’ve come to abhor porting.”
“Not exactly, dear. I think it’s morally wrong to meddle in the lives of people on other worlds without thought of the consequences, maybe changing their fates for the worse. And I’ve seen timelines so horrific I never want to see them again. I won’t risk subjecting myself to worlds never visited before, which may be more terrifying than some I’ve seen. But I’m not taking you anywhere dangerous.”
He extracted the key to everything from a pocket of his sport coat and switched it on.
In the distance a coyote howled sorrowfully, as if mourning the approaching end of the night hunt.
Seeing that Michelle stared at the key with as much trepidation as hope, Ed said, “The device isn’t evil, dear. It’s only a device. How bad men want to use it is where evil comes in.”
“Yes. Of course. But . . .”
“I’m not afraid of the key, and neither should you be. I’m afraid only of some places it can take me. I’ll never destroy it or let it fall into the wrong hands. There’s good I can do with it to atone for some of the wicked things that were done by others in the Everett Highways project.”
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 understand 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
The porch, then rushing whiteness, and then the same porch in a different world.
Ed was disappointed to see no lights at all in the bungalow. He expected Jeffrey and Amity to be awake and preparing breakfast, as they had been at this time on the morning of the eleventh. During the past year, in one of the many conversations that he’d had with Michelle on the porch in their world, she’d said that Jeffrey had been an early riser, up before the sun, but perhaps that was not the case with the Jeffrey in this timeline. Ed should have visited a few mornings to establish this man’s pattern rather than assuming his habits on this world were alike to those when he had been alive on Michelle’s.
He could ring the doorbell or, with Michelle, port back where they had come from and visit here again in half an hour or an hour, when perhaps there would be lights, and he would be able to proceed as planned. Rousing father and daughter from sleep to confront them with such a monumental development as the return of Michelle seemed not only inconsiderate, but also sure to diminish the emotional impact of the moment. With his flair for drama, Ed wanted this to play out just right.
Intuitively perhaps, Michelle said, “Something’s wrong here.”
On some deep level Ed must have felt the same thing, for he had unconsciously shifted the key to everything from his right hand to his left and reached under his sport coat to draw the Springfield Armory .45 Champion from the Galco Side Snap Scabbard on his belt.
The door before them was yanked open, and John Falkirk stepped onto the threshold, a pistol in a two-handed grip, aimed at Ed’s head. Even in the poor light, the agent’s surprise was unmistakable, his gaze sliding from Ed to Michelle and then back to Ed again, eyes wider than before. “What’s this bitch doing here, where’d you find her? She’s long gone.” If not for his surprise and confusion, surely Falkirk would have squeezed the trigger as the door swung open, putting a round point-blank in Ed’s face before he could employ the key to escape.
Of course Ed knew there were John Falkirks on many worlds, just as there were Ed Harkenbachs. But two days earlier, on the eleventh, the Ed in this world had been safe in his tent in the woods, brewing his morning coffee on a battery-powered hot plate, while Jeffrey and Amity had been making breakfast without a care. There had been no reason to believe that Falkirk was in the neighborhood. A lot had happened in forty-eight hours.
If the Ed who was native to this world remained a pacifist, the Ed native to the world where Michelle was a widow had become a less peaceable guy. Maybe Falkirk delayed firing not only because of his surprise and confusion, but also because he thought the Ed before him must be the one of his acquaintance in this timeline, a meeker adversary. Whatever the case, the agent hesitated to shoot for perhaps three seconds, which gave the Ed before him—at the moment the only Ed that mattered—time to draw the .45 Champion and squeeze off three rounds in rapid succession.
Rocked off balance by the first direct hit, Falkirk fired a shot that Ed heard as both a thunderous crash and a whistling past his left ear. Falkirk was knocked off his feet by Ed’s second and third rounds, his gun flying from his hand when he slammed backward onto the foyer floor. As further proof that Ed’s ugly experiences in the darker timelines of the multiverse had purged him of pacifism, he stepped forward and squeezed off two more rounds at what he had reason to assume was already a corpse.
As shouts of alarm rose from the dark rooms at the back of the bungalow, Ed holstered the .45 and glanced at the key to everything. He’d kept one finger on the screen, so the device hadn’t switched off. Michelle clutched his arm. He pushed the button marked Return.
The human brain and the infinitely layered consciousness of the mind within that gray matter, in conjunction with a body composed of trillions of cells, each with thousands of proteins, formed the most complex structure in creation. Ed and Michelle each contained more gigabytes of data than the physical universe itself. Now those two rich data streams were transmitted from the porch of one bungalow to the porch of another bungalow, with the moon low in each world, the night quiet here as it was not elsewhere. The front door was closed; if he opened it, no corpse would be sprawled on the foyer floor.
Michelle stumbled to the porch railing and grabbed it to steady herself. She stood hunched over, making small sounds of distress and gasping for breath.
Ed sat in one of the rocking chairs and pocketed the key to everything. He drew the .45 Champion and ejected the half-depleted magazine and replaced it with one that was fully loaded.
When Michelle turned to face him, he said, “Well, that was hardly the big romantic moment I anticipated.”
Loss and seven years of widowhood had toughened this woman, but she wasn’t accustomed to being present at gunfights. “Who was that man back there?”
“The nefarious John Falkirk. I told you about him earlier when I explained all this.”
“He’s some kind of federal agent. You shot a federal agent.”
“He’s a corrupt swine who’s out for nobody but himself. He’d have killed me to get the key to everything, and then he would have killed you. He’s after me in that world to get my key, but this one would suit him just as well.”
“Where were Jeffy and Amity? That was their house in that world, right?” As the worst explanation occurred to Michelle, anxiety sharpened her voice. “Damn it, where were Jeffy and Amity?”
“That’s a question we must ponder carefully.”
She stood over him, visibly shaking. “Ponder carefully? How can you be so blasé?”
Holstering the pistol, he said, “Well, I’m a scientist, dear. As best we can, we have to put emotion aside and rely on reason. We scientists tend to ponder carefully. A few of us, anyway.”
