She desperately hoped to avoid making another mortal mistake involving Jeffy and Amity. She didn’t want to jump from
one world to another until she had thought through all the ramifications.
However, near three o’clock in the morning, she realized that it was impossible to do that, since the ramifications were infinite. No world in the multiverse had ever contained a genius smart enough to foresee how best to grow such a complex tree of life; and while she was not a stupid woman, she was no Einstein.
This was a decision that must be made not on the basis of rigorous intellectual analysis, but with the guidance of the heart. Her heart said, Do it. And though the heart was deceitful above all things, she must trust it or spend the rest of this life regretting that she had lacked the courage to leave a world where Jeffy and Amity were lying in graves and go to one where Death as yet had no dominion over them.
48
Jeffy kept his pistol in his right hand, and Amity carried the flashlight, sweeping the beam across the bedroom as they entered from the walk-in closet.
Two windows were clouded with pale dust, but the third was broken out. Birds had ventured here from time to time; perhaps some had been seized by panic, fluttering into walls and furniture before finding their way out, because feathers littered the floor. Having blown in from the giant live oak beyond the shattered pane, small oval leaves, all brown and crisp, were layered over the carpet and drifted in one corner, so many that surely a few years of wind had contributed to the collection. They crunched underfoot, and from the crushed debris emanated a wheat-like scent.
As they proceeded past the bed, another smell arose, a urinous stink. The crackling leaves and the flashlight inspired thin, sharp squeaks of animal protest. The beam found two rats atop the mattress of the king-size bed. Over the years, invasive wind and much rodent activity had caused the bedclothes to slide to the floor, where they lay in rotting cascades. The rats vanished into different holes in the mattress ticking; judging by the noise arising from within that slab of padding, they had constructed a densely populated warren maze.
When Jeffy put a hand on Amity’s shoulder with the intent of reassuring her, she whispered, “Yeah, yuch, but they’re only rats.”
He would have preferred to direct the flashlight himself. But until he understood why this place warranted a skull and crossbones, he would keep the pistol in a two-handed grip. Amity did well enough, first sweeping the space to get an overall sense of it, then probing odd shapes and suspicious corners with quick efficiency.
In the hallway, the ceiling plasterboard swagged, and the stained wallpaper scrolled off the walls in places, evidence of water damage caused by a roof leak or the failure of the plumbing. Veins of dark mold branched in varicose patterns on the baseboard.
At the head of the stairs, they stood listening. Although Jeffy expected that such a decrepit house should be alive with settling noises as it ever so slowly crumbled toward ruin, the silence was complete until they started down the warped treads of the staircase, which groaned and creaked under them.
Downstairs, the front door lay on the foyer floor, wrenched from its mountings with such violence that the frame leafs of the hinges had been torn out of the jamb, buckled as if they were made of tinfoil. Someone had been determined to get inside.
Someone or something.
That thought would have seemed ludicrous a mere two days ago. Monsters were for spooky movies and novels, not part of real life—until Good Boy. And whatever might be responsible for this world being declared a hostile timeline, it must be something far worse than that pathetic ape-human hybrid.
With the light, Amity broomed the living room beyond the archway and then the ground-floor hallway behind them, where the ruin and decay matched that on the second floor.
They stepped past the fallen door, out of the house, onto the porch. At the head of the four steps to the front walk, they stood listening, watchful.
In this world, as in their own, Shadow Canyon Lane lacked streetlamps. At such a dead hour of the night, Jeffy would not have expected to see signs of life in any of his neighbors’ houses unless someone suffered from a case of the whim-whams, which modern life so often inspired, and was unable to sleep. Therefore, the absence of light in all those windows didn’t disturb him.
Fresh apprehension arose instead from a sense, at first intuitive, that the night was darker than ever before. As always, the diamond-bright stars offered no significant illumination. The downbound moon was still afloat, but screened by higher branches of the oaks, which concealed its roundness and revealed only fragments of its glow. Although the houses along the lane were usually pale-gray shapes at this hour, they were less visible now, as if the very darkness had condensed on their walls as surely as dew formed a film on other nights. The gloom was such that he thought, but couldn’t confirm, that all the structures, including their bungalow across the street, were in disrepair, perhaps abandoned.
As they descended the steps, observation confirmed intuition when he looked to the west—southwest, due west, northwest—and realized that the electric incandescence of the citied coast was gone, as though the many hundreds of thousands who lived from San Clemente in the south to Huntington Beach in the north had turned off all the lights and gone away.
On both sides of the front walkway, what once had been a well-tended lawn had become a tangled weed patch.
Amity said, “What happened to all the people?”
He had no answer. As his perplexity darkened into foreboding, he halted and took the key to everything from his pocket and touched the home circle at the bottom of the screen.
The device filled with soft gray light, and Amity said, “What are you doing?”
He didn’t want to go farther into this world. If Shadow Canyon Lane, their bungalow, their safe corner of the world now was—and for some time had been—uninhabited and crumbling into ruins, if Suavidad Beach was a ghost town, whatever had depopulated it might still be active—whether a disease, a death cult of deranged people, or some strange beast no other world had known.
Without need of an explanation, Amity understood what he meant to do. “No, Dad, no, we don’t dare jump back to Prime from here. You said there were at least like a dozen of those freaking bad guys back there. And now they know for sure we have the key, so they’ll lock down Shadow Canyon Lane. If we go back, we’re like totally screwed.”
“So then we have to jump to another world,” he said, tapping the Select button, “any world that doesn’t come with a skull and crossbones.”
But he hesitated when the keyboard appeared. Earth 1.13 hadn’t rated a hostile-timeline warning, and yet the world of Good Boy had been as rife with danger as any he could have conceived before the damn key to everything had been entrusted to him. No matter where he and Amity went next, they would be flying blind. They might jump into the middle of a firefight or worse.
She extracted something from a pocket of her jeans, displaying it on the palm of her hand, focusing the flashlight on it. “I found this yesterday.”
For a moment, he didn’t understand what she was showing him. Then he realized she held three teeth in a fragment of jawbone.