He felt something this time that he hadn’t felt during their previous two jaunts, which had been to and from Earth 1.13. He felt that he and Amity had been dissolved into a soup of atoms and were about to be reassembled at their destination, that while en route, they were not flesh-and-blood people, but only data streams, a set of plans for replicating Jeffy and Amity Coltrane in their daunting complexity. Well, he didn’t truly feel this. He wasn’t aware of disintegrating; he experienced no pai
n. He suspected this might be happening, and if indeed it was, he was adamantly opposed to it, not to the reassembly, no, but to the disintegration in the first place, not that he could do anything about it.
With a soft whoosh, the blizzard of light blew away, as before. They were in the walk-in closet of the master bedroom of the Bonner house, across the street from their cozy bungalow, seemingly where they had begun, but in fact seventy-seven universes away.
The only light issued from the key to everything. The keypad had disappeared, but the word Warning and the skull-and-crossbones remained on the screen for a moment before being replaced by the admonition Hostile Timeline: Advise Retreat. Under those ominous words, the only button offered was blue and labeled Home.
“We can’t retreat,” Amity said. “On our world, the bad guys are in the closet, they have us trapped. If we go back there, we’re done for sure, we’re caught, we’re toast.”
Here, the closet door stood open, but no one loomed at the threshold. The dark bedroom lay beyond.
Jeffy said, “Maybe we just stay right where we are, wait a couple hours, then go home.”
He knew the problem with that plan even as he proposed it, and Amity knew it, too. “Dad, no, that freaking thug opened the closet door and saw us kneeling together. He said, ‘They’re here!’ They know for sure we have the key to everything. They aren’t going to leave our house or the Bonners’ place for days, if they ever leave, waiting for us to return.”
When he didn’t respond to the advisory to retreat, the screen blinked off.
In the pitch-black consequence, Jeffy realized that the closet smelled different from the closet in their world. Less wholesome. Musty. And a faint scent of something more offensive than mold but not quite identifiable.
Scrabbling in her tote for the flashlight, Amity said, “Do you hear something, I don’t hear anything, there’s no one in the house, it’s super quiet,” but the anxiety in her voice and the nervous rush of words suggested either that she thought she had heard a noise or expected to hear something that would unsettle her.
She switched on the flashlight, revealing what the soft glow of the screen had not been bright enough to illuminate. On their world, the Bonners’ master bedroom closet contained neatly pressed clothes on hangers and sweaters precisely folded on shelves, polished shoes and belts and ties and colorful scarves and hats all organized and ready for use. But here, the shoes on the lower, slanted shelves were mottled with mold. Garments hung askew, and some were moth-eaten. A layer of dust had settled on everything. In the highest corners, fat spiders crawled their trembling webs, silken structures so elaborate that the current tenants and generations before them must have ruled this space for years, with never a concern of being swept away in a housecleaning.
“What happened to Mr. and Mrs. Bonner?” Amity asked. “They’re not just on vacation in this world.”
“They’re all right. They’ve gone somewhere safe,” Jeffy said, but his reassurances sounded so insincere that he decided to make no more of them, to stick to the truth, or to what little he knew of it. “Doesn’t look good, but we can’t know for sure.”
“Safe from what?” she asked, while the beam of her flashlight tracked the plumpest of the spiders across a gossamer bridge to a larder hung with silk-bound moths and silverfish, provisions against those days when nothing fresh and wriggling ventured into the sticky trap that had been spun for it. “Safe from what?”
“I don’t know. What I do know is we’ve got to leave this place and go somewhere else in town, somewhere that Falkirk and his thugs, back in our world, won’t be waiting for us when we return to that timeline.”
From the tote, Amity retrieved the pistol and handed it to him.
As they got to their feet, he pocketed the key to everything. “We stay close at all times. Never leave my side.”
She nodded, trying to appear brave and collected, and maybe she was both those things, but she was also small, a child, and so very vulnerable.
Jeffy hugged her tightly. “You’re the best.”
“You, too.”
What might wait beyond this closet, seventy-seven worlds away from home, wasn’t what most frightened him. His greater fear was that when they returned to Earth Prime, to a part of Suavidad Beach where Falkirk would not be looking for them, they would be fugitives from the law, from whatever deep-state secret police Falkirk had at his disposal. And they would have no vehicle, little money, no one to whom they dared turn for help.
47
After Michelle ported with Ed to Earth 1.10 and back again, she was able to sleep no more than thirty minutes at a time, repeatedly waking from dreams of reunion and joy, from the imagined warmth of her daughter in her arms and her husband’s lips on hers. Between dreams, she walked the house barefoot, in pajamas, like a revenant who hadn’t the courage to pass over to a life after life.
Those whom Michelle loved, those she’d lost, those who died were still alive elsewhere, worlds away. The concept should have rocked her, but it seemed no more amazing than that trees produced oxygen to sustain her life while she produced the CO2 that sustained theirs. From the start, she found Ed Harkenbach convincing, because she’d grown up in a media saturated with fantasy, therefore she had been prepared to believe. And then Ed had proved himself.
As her sleep was filled with bright visions of reunification, so her waking rambles were characterized by worry that Jeffy and Amity would not accept her as readily as she would accept them. In this world, they had perished, but in their world, she’d walked out on them. Even if they longed for her, as Ed swore they did, as she longed for them, they might harbor some resentment, might take a long time to fully trust their hearts to her.
Worse, the concept of infinite parallel worlds said something both reassuring and profoundly disturbing about destiny. If every fate to which you could be subjected—those that befell you through no fault of your own and those that you could earn by your actions—unfurled across a multitude of timelines, then your life was like an immense tree of uncountable branches, some leafed and flourishing, others deformed and hung with sick or even poisonous foliage. In the sum of all your lives, you would have known uncountable joys—but also uncountable losses, periods of pain, and fear.
By relocating from this world to the one where Jeffy and Amity yearned for her, she’d be taking an action that would spawn other parallel lives for herself, of which she, in this incarnation, had no knowledge. Other than her husband and daughter, whose lives would be affected by her action, how many others would live additional lives that branched from her action, and did it matter?
She wasn’t a religious person, but she believed in the ultimate judgment of the soul. It was this conviction that made it possible for her to feel guilt over the deaths of Jeffy and Amity—and that gave her the motivation to reform herself. If every life was a tree of, say, a billion branches, more being added all the time until you were at last dead in all timelines, then perhaps it was not the way you lived just one life that mattered; instead, perhaps it was the shape and beauty of your spiritual oak, the full pattern of all your lives, on which judgment was passed. For every life in which you made a ruinous or wicked decision, there was another parallel life where you had the chance to do the right thing. Her mind spun with such considerations, and between rambles she returned to bed in a state of mental exhaustion, falling at once into sleep—only to wake in twenty minutes or half an hour.
During those periods when she paced through the bungalow, she often passed the archway to the living room and saw Edwin Harkenbach in an armchair, his stocking feet on a footstool. His slumber was deep and uninterrupted, marked by a soft bearish snore. Evidently, he had no doubt about the right thing for her to do.