Although Good Boy was fearsome, when Jeffy considered its life as an unloved pet or slave—or whatever its owners considered it—pity stirred in him. As he lifted the lowest segment of the ladder and then watched it fold up automatically, he thought, If a man can’t understand a monster’s suffering, then he’s something of a monster himself.
Which was when, from out of a shadowy room to his left, Good Boy attacked him.
28
Sitting on the lid of the toilet, with Snowball shivering in her trembling hands, such a small and helpless mouse, Amity realized that, if Daddy should die, letting herself wither away from anorexia was just as rotten a moral decision as suicide. It would be giving up. Giving up was for the weak of spirit, for those who couldn’t grasp that the world was filled with meaning, that everyone had a purpose he or she needed to discover and fulfill. Daddy himself taught her as much, and Daddy didn’t lie.
If something terrible happened to her father, she wouldn’t give up. Instead she’d use the key to everything to search an infinity of worlds for another Jeffy Coltrane, one who always wanted a child and never had one, a Jeffy Coltrane whom she could love with all her heart, whom she could make proud of her by being the strong and honest person he had helped her to become in this world. That was how tragedy was transformed into triumph in the very best fantasy stories, and Amity was as sure as she could be that she could make it happen if that became her only hope of happiness.
Which was when she heard the gunshot.
29
Intimidating war cries and bold assaults weren’t the beast’s only tactics, as it proved with the deception of the attic and the silence with which it watched Jeffy from a shadowy spare bedroom. When, with a twang of its springs, the ladder began to fold upward, the creature launched into the hall, a quick dark phantom in Jeffy’s peripheral vision. As he pivoted toward the threat, his assailant clarified into a bloody-eyed menace, all muscle and bone and bared teeth, clutching hands and long-toed grasping feet, its deranged-child face melded with the primal features of an infuriated ape, driven by a hatred long suppressed.
The impact knocked Jeffy backward. He slammed into the wall, crackles of pain branching up his spine and across his back, as if his bones were brittling into ruin, the dream-strange face of Good Boy inches from his. Its breath was rancid, its teeth wet, as it shrieked in triumph.
Had Good Boy been all chimpanzee, Jeffy Coltrane might have been grievously wounded already and in a moment dead; perhaps its hybrid nature rendered the thing less of an instinctive fighter. He’d somehow gotten a hand around its throat to restrain it at least for a few precious seconds. More importantly, he held fast to the pistol. Chisel-edged teeth snapped an inch short of his nose; the powerful hands clasped his head as though to crush it between them like an eggshell or to hold it steady for a series of savage bites. He brought the gun up between the creature’s arms and jammed the muzzle under the hairy chin and squeezed the trigger.
30
In the master bathroom, when she heard the gunshot, Amity sprang to her feet, and a chill pierced her from head to foot. Her hands suddenly were so cold that, by contrast, little Snowball felt as though he’d just come out of an oven, as hot as a freshly baked muffin. She tucked him in a jacket pocket and snatched the key to everything from the counter beside the sink, careful not to touch the dark screen, because maybe the Return button would transport her back to dismal old Earth 1.13, where the über–bad guys were probably standing around with their stupid mouths hanging open, wondering how a man, a girl, and a monkey could disappear before their eyes.
Her feet felt as if they were frozen in blocks of ice, and her legs were stiff with cold, although shaky, as she approached the bathroom door and touched the thumb turn of the lock. Her hands had gone as pale as ectoplasm, the stuff ghosts were made of. She didn’t dare look in the mirror, afraid that she might collapse at the sight of her bloodless death-mask face.
The shot had scared her, but what terrified her more was that there had been only one shot. Good Boy was crazy quick and crazy strong and just plain crazy, so it didn’t seem possible that her father could have killed it with a single shot. Probably not with just two, either, maybe with three, almost surely with four, but never with just one bullet. So maybe the unthinkable had happened, and though it was unthinkable, she couldn’t stop thinking it. The horror of it froze her. She was about to scream louder than Good Boy, and then her father said, “Amity, open the door.”
Terror could make an idiot of you, especially when you thought you had lost everything. Instead of unlocking the door and throwing it open, Amity stupidly asked if Good Boy was dead, and when her father said that, yes, it was dead, she said, “Who are you?”
He said, “It’s me.”
Amity knew perfectly well—perfectly, perfectly—that Good Boy had a supercreepy voice and bad grammar and terrible syntax, knew that such a half-baked mutant couldn’t convincingly imitate Daddy’s voice, but she was cold and pale and scared, so she said, “How do I know it’s you?”
After a hesitation, he said, “You want a dog, but you’ve got a mouse for practice, which was your idea, not mine. I’d have bought you a puppy.”
She hesitated, but only maybe two seconds, to collect herself before she opened the door. She and her father were still in the soup, a real witch’s brew, which meant she had to stay strong, not be a wuss like those fainthearted girls in fantasy stories who made her want to barf. She didn’t dare cry, not even with relief, and she had to keep her spine stiff, stay brave, not only because that was necessary to survive, but also because she had a reputation to protect.
When she opened the door, Daddy said, “You okay, pumpkin?”
He hadn’t called her “pumpkin” in maybe two years, since she had stopped being a full-on child, but she let that slide. She gave him two thumbs up. “You got it with just one shot. I knew you
could get that crazy monkey piece of shit.”
She startled herself by using the s word, but Daddy didn’t call her on it. He looked kind of pale, too, and his eyes were strange, as if he was surprised that it was Good Boy who was dead.
With a nonchalance that astonished Amity, her hand not even trembling, she returned the key to everything, as if to say, You did right to trust me with it. Her father shrugged as if to say, I knew I could count on you, and he put the device in a jacket pocket.
She expected a police car to shrill in the distance. Continued silence suggested that no one had heard the glass break or seen the beast on the porch roof.
Nevertheless, her father grabbed her hand. “Let’s get out of here.”
Amity wanted to hold tight to his hand forever, but of course they had to eat and use the bathroom, so sooner or later she would have to let go of him. In fact, it happened as soon as they reached the head of the stairs.
A foul smell told her that she would see the remains of Good Boy in the hall if she glanced toward the back of the house. She held her breath, didn’t look, and plunged down the stairs close behind her father.
She thought about their fingerprints, but there wasn’t time to wipe down everything they had touched. Anyway, her prints had never been taken by anyone, and though Daddy’s thumbprint was on file at the DMV, he hadn’t killed a person, only a monster, so it was best just to take their chances.
Daddy turned away from the front door. “Out the back.”