Elsewhere

Good Boy shrieking.

Amity cried out, “Dad!”

Beyond the rain-streaked window, the creature bounced up and down on the porch roof, his shadow leaping with him as lightning flared, capering like the freakish jester in the court of a mad monarch in a tale about an evil kingdom.

Impatiently, Jeffy pressed the home circle again before he realized that the screen had filled with soft gray light. It went black. He had turned it off.

“Shit!”

As someone kicked the door harder and some part of the bracing chair cracked, Jeffy pressed the home circle.

Another four-second wait.

The window glass exploded into the room, and Good Boy clambered across the sill, eyes wild and teeth bared, dripping rain, oblivious of the shards of glass still bristling in the frame.

“Daddy!”

The hideous mascot of the Justice Wolves had smashed the window with a fireplace poker perhaps taken from another bedroom. Now the hateful thing sprang at Jeffy, holding the pointed brass poker in both hands, like a spear with which it intended to stab through his gut and shatter his spine.

Once more, the screen turned gray, but there were no buttons yet.

Jeffy dodged, and the goblin drove the poker into the footboard of the bed, splitting a handsome inlaid panel of oak burl, but also colliding hard with his intended target. Jeffy stumbled and fell. The key to everything slipped from his hand and tumbled across the carpet, as he and Amity simultaneously said, “Shit!”

24

Good Boy was a total demonic whack job, like some orc straight out of the bowels of Mordor, not only physically horrific, but also a mental mess, neither as smart as a boy nor as intuitive as an ape. In that moment when Daddy fell and the fabulous key flipped across the floor to the nightstand, the freak could have attacked them, strong as it was, could have bitten them and gouged out their eyes and torn off their ears in a murderous frenzy, but it was fixated on the fireplace poker, which it had driven clean through the footboard of the bed and now struggled to extract. You might have thought this rain-soaked hairy mutant must be familiar with the legend of good King Arthur and imagined that the poker stuck in the wood was its version of the magic sword Excalibur locked in stone, with a throne as the reward for anyone who was able to pull it free. Good Boy worked the poker up and down, back and forth, spitting, hissing, shrieking like a wild animal, but also cursing like a boy who had fallen in with the wrong crowd and given himself to all kinds of vices that would have shocked dada-mama.

Such noise, cacophony. The hard rush of rain and the crack of thunder, the boot kicking and kicking the defiant door, someone shouting “Police,” the transspecies laboratory-born thing snarling and shrieking . . .

In the grip of a terror that motivated rather than paralyzed her, heart knocking so hard that her vision pulsed, Amity went after the key and plucked it off the carpet and turned to her father. Daddy got to his feet as the bracing chair cracked and came apart.

The door flew open, knocking the remains of the chair aside, and the big uniformed man at the threshold, who had done all the kicking, froze for a moment, as if surprised by his own success. A smaller guy pushed past the kicker, one of the thugs who dressed in soft, black fatigues. He had the face of a weasel, the eyes of a snake, and a pistol in hand.

The three buttons glowed on the screen, the entire multiverse awaiting her, infinite worlds with infinite dangers.

“Blue,” Daddy said, which was labeled Home, and though the goon in black surely didn’t know what the key to everything could do,

he said, “Drop it,” and aimed his pistol at her.

Daddy reached out and put a hand on her shoulder as her finger descended toward blue. The sudden collapse of the chair and the door crashing open had broken the ape-boy’s obsession with the poker stuck in the footboard. Screeching, it flung itself at Amity and her father. The thing clutched Daddy’s arm to pull him down, and Amity pressed the button.

They had thought perhaps skin needed to be touching skin—or mouse fur—in order for a passenger to accompany the holder of the key. However, Daddy’s hand was on her jacket, and Good Boy’s hand clutched Daddy’s sleeve, and Snowball remained in Amity’s pocket when the bedroom vanished, leaving all of them seeming almost to float in a white void, a snowy nothingness, glimmering flakes passing through them, like radiation that they could see.

Being penetrated by snow scared the bejesus out of the freak, and though it held fast to Daddy with one hand, it covered its eyes with its other hand and curled its lip over its lower teeth and issued a miserable wail of terror.

As before, with a whoosh, the veil of light blew away. They were in the bedroom again. Not exactly the same bedroom. No police, no thug in black, no ruined chair, no shattered window. No storm darkened the sky. The furniture was placed pretty much as before, but the pieces were more harmonious and the fabrics subtler than those in the bedroom from which they had just come. Whoever lived here in Earth Prime had much better taste than dada-mama, whose decor had favored a carnival of chintz and plaids and damask to match the riotous colors of their English garden.

In the sudden silence, Good Boy lowered its hand from its face and opened its eyes. However limited its intelligence and therefore its imagination might be, the freak knew at once that something big had happened, that it was in the same room yet not the same, that it was in a different reality. Baffled, it glanced at the door, where no chair lay broken, where no cop or guy in black loomed menacingly. It looked at the window, which hadn’t been shattered, beyond which no rain fell and no lightning flashed, and slowly its expression of astonishment soured.

As far as Amity was concerned, Good Boy really and truly didn’t deserve its name. In her experience, the freak had been bad to the bone. Maybe the fault lay with the idiot scientists who played God, Cuisinarting human and chimpanzee genes. Or maybe poor nurturing had turned the thing bad. After all, dada-mama, the geriatric couple who had attacked Amity and her father in the English garden, were nasty pieces of work; as Good Boy’s owners or guardians or adopted parents or whatever the hell they were, they didn’t seem to be the kind who would strive to ensure that a young mutant would be raised with fine manners and morals. Indeed, as Good Boy realized, however dimly, the extent of the change that had occurred, the beast didn’t politely express its puzzlement and request an explanation, but instead went batshit crazy.

25

Jeffy Coltrane had never claimed to be psychic or especially intuitive, and he never would. However, as the ape-boy stood in bewilderment, slowly turning its lumpy head left and right, Jeffy knew, as surely as he had ever known anything, that the creature would not be humbled or experience a conversion to pacifism because of its miraculous experience. A response to their abrupt relocation was building in the beast, and it was going to be more like critical mass being achieved in a nuclear bomb than like crisp brown bread suddenly popping out of a toaster.

As the pressure built in Good Boy, Jeffy stepped to the nearest nightstand and yanked open the drawer. A low-profile box of Kleenex. A paperback of a John Grisham novel. A transparent container holding a dental bite guard. A tube of lubricating gel in anticipation of a romantic moment.

Good Boy began to make a thin keening sound of deep emotional distress.