Jeffy held his breath, and Amity coaxed the mouse to come to her. “Here, boy, come to Mommy. Come to Mommy, Snowball.”
Something appeared on the screen under the mouse. Jeffy could see two large buttons—one blue, the other red—that contained white lettering half obscured by the rodent.
Simultaneously, Jeffy and Amity reached for Snowball. Her h
and grasped the mouse, and her father’s hand seized hers—
—and the kitchen vanished, leaving them in an all-encompassing whiteness. A nearly blinding blizzard showered down. They could see only themselves and each other—and the mouse. The glittering flakes were not cold; they passed through Jeffy, through Amity.
Particles of light, he thought, and was chilled by the sheer strangeness of the experience.
He also thought of the lines of verse quoted by Ed just before the old man walked away into the night, something about a pale door and a hideous throng rushing out through it. The key to everything had opened a door, this pale door of light, and although they were not at once swept up in a hideous throng, Jeffy felt great peril coming, sensed that they were now known and being sought by someone, something.
12
With a soft windless whoosh, the obscuring light blew away, and the familiar kitchen became visible again. However, because it had vanished once, the place seemed less than entirely real, as though it might be a construct of Jeffy’s imagination.
Amity plucked the mouse off the dangerous device, and with one trembling hand, Jeffy took the key to everything from the table.
“What was that, what happened?” the girl asked.
“I don’t know. It was . . . maybe . . . I don’t know.”
He saw three buttons on the screen now: a blue one labeled Home, a red one bearing the word Select, and a green one marked Return.
“W-w-where did they go?” Amity asked, a tremor in her voice.
Looking up from the device, Jeffy said, “What?”
Holding Snowball in both hands, against her chest, as though terrified that she had almost lost the mouse and might still lose him, the girl said, “My orange juice. Your coffee.”
Her glass and Jeffy’s mug were gone. They hadn’t been knocked off the table; there was no mess on the floor.
He turned toward the counter where the coffee machine had stood, but it was no longer anywhere to be seen.
Understanding eluded him. Whatever the explanation might prove to be, the disappearance of the glass and the mug contributed to his unsettling apprehension that the material world must be immaterial to some degree.
He could only say, “I better put this damn thing away before something happens.”
Circling the table, scanning the room for the missing coffee and juice, Amity said ominously, “Something’s already happened.”
“Nothing terrible. Nothing . . . irreplaceable. Just beverages and beverage containers.” He didn’t sound entirely sane to himself.
With Amity close behind, Jeffy followed the hall toward his workroom. Although he had taken this short walk thousands of times, the passageway seemed different from how it was before, but he was not able to identify what had changed.
“Are you scared, Daddy? I’m kind of just a little bit scared. I don’t mean like totally freaked out. Just kind of spooked.”
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he counseled her, as well as himself, though he had no way of knowing if what he said was true. “What happened, it was just . . .” Words failed him.
As he passed an open door, he hesitated and looked into his bedroom. He expected something there to surprise him, though he didn’t know why or what. Everything appeared to be in order.
Nevertheless, at his side, Amity said, “It doesn’t feel right.”
“What doesn’t?”
“I don’t know. Something about this place. I feel like . . . like I don’t belong here.”
At the door to his office, Jeffy halted, suddenly sure that they were not alone in the house. He had a sense of some presence and wouldn’t have been surprised to see a phantom form, a shadow without source, gliding toward them or crossing the hall from one room to another.