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  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.

  On Earth 1.13, from which they had so recently escaped, all the guns were probably in the possession of the fascist government. Here on Earth Prime, the FBI said that four out of ten Americans kept at least one gun for home defense, and a major pro-gun organization said it was five out of ten. Because people never answered such surveys truthfully, Jeffy figured it was more like seven out of ten, with the other three relying on baseball bats, Tasers, pepper spray, faithful dogs, and sharp-tongued ridicule to deal with dangerous intruders.

  Scrambling across the bed, he didn’t know whose house this was, but he hoped that they were in the 40 or 50 or 70 percent thought to possess a firearm. Many people who owned a pistol kept it in a nightstand drawer. For safety, they should keep it in a locked gun safe that opened quickly when a four-digit code was entered on a keypad. If the residents of this house were safety conscious, Jeffy was screwed.

  Good Boy didn’t literally blow its top, but its sudden shriek was so explosive that it sounded as if the crown of its skull had detached as violently as a failing heat shield on a space shuttle reentering Earth’s atmosphere. And the beast was off like a rocket, trying to quell its fear with rage. It streaked first to the vanity, where it swept a small silver tray and three perfume bottles to the floor, and then a handled mirror, a porcelain vase, a decorative tissue box, a set of hairbrushes. It snatched up a straight-backed chair from the vanity, one similar to the chair that Amity had used to brace the door in that other bedroom. Good Boy scampered to the window and swung the chair, intent on breaking the glass that, in a parallel universe, it had smashed with a fireplace poker from the outside. As Amity hurried to the door of the adjoining bathroom, evidently intending to take sanctuary there, the lower half of the double-hung window dissolved, fragments spilling onto the sill and out onto the porch roof.

  All of that happened in the time Jeffy took to scramble across the bed, jerk open the second nightstand, and seize a pistol from among the contents. He found the safety, clicked it off, and turned with the weapon in a two-handed grip.

  The rain-soaked creature had discarded the chair and escaped through the window, onto the porch roof. Now it capered in a circle, long shaggy arms raised, shaking its fists as it searched the sky. Maybe it was demanding to know what had happened to the storm, why it remained wet while the entire day had gone dry. Jeffy had no way of knowing what this monster was thinking any more than he could predict what it might do next.

  He didn’t dare fire at Good Boy while it was outside. A stray round might hit someone across the street.

  What the infuriated beast did next, after just half a minute on the porch roof, was plunge into the room again, panting and hooting, neither chimp nor boy, as alien as anything that might step out of a spaceship. It was so quick, Jeffy couldn’t track it with a pistol. Running on all fours, the beast shot across the room, through the open door, and vanished into the hall, its cries diminishing as it raced to the back of the house, where it fell silent.

  Evidently, no one was home. Had people been in residence, they would have reacted to the uproar by now.

  Amity started toward her father, and he said, “Get back, shut yourself in the bathroom.”

  “Daddy, don’t go out there,” she pleaded as he moved toward the hall door.

  “If it isn’t gone, I need to find it and deal with it.”

  “Don’t go out there,” she begged, her voice breaking.

  “If it’s gone, then we’ll go, too, we’ll go straight home and lock the doors and hunker down for the duration. Bathroom doors have locks, Amity. Now get in there and lock it! ”

  He had never before raised his voice to her, so when he raised it this time, she flinched as if she’d been slapped. But she retreated into the bathroom and closed the door.

  Truth be known, he didn’t want to leave this room and find Good Boy. A freak hunt had about as much appeal as handling a live cobra while playing Russian roulette with a revolver. He wanted to wait here until the police arrived. Someone might have heard the breaking glass. In the brief time the creature was raging on the porch roof, someone might have seen it. The police would be on the way.

  Then he realized that the last thing he and Amity dared attempt was to explain to the cops what they were doing here in a stranger’s house, why this bedroom had been vandalized. Talk of parallel worlds and an ape-boy hybrid would get them a psychiatric evaluation unless they proved their story with the key to everything. But admitting that Ed Harkenbach had left the device in their care would bring John Falkirk back into their lives with a vengeance, he who had NSA credentials and eyes the gray of steel and a piercing stare that dissected your soul.

  Assisting spooky Ed had once seemed amusing, a bit of a lark. Now Jeffy abruptly recognized the dire legal consequences. If the authorities arrested him, convicted him, and sent him to prison, maybe the government wouldn’t allow his parents to have custody of Amity. Even in the good old USA, government could be vindictive, using the legal system as a weapon. If Amity were sent to an institution or placed in a home with abusive foster parents . . .

  He stepped into the hallway.

  26

  Hiding in the bathroom, sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, Amity felt stupid and inadequate and scared. Snowball must have sensed her fear, for he shivered continuously as she held him in her cupped hands.

  The key to everything lay on the counter beside the nearby sink, and she wasn’t going to let the adventurous mouse anywhere near it.

  “This is all because of you,” she told him, though she knew that was unfair. One of the good things about a mouse was that he wasn’t as perceptive as a dog; he didn’t know when you were unjustly chastising him or that you were chastising him at all.

  In fact, this was entirely her fault, really and truly, because she had wanted to see her mother and have a chance to bring Michelle back to this world. If she could have done that—wow—it would have been like raising Lazarus, except that her mother wasn’t dead like Lazarus, and except that Lazarus was a man who was brought back to life with a miracle, while her mother was a woman who would have been brought back by science, not by anyone supernatural. Actually, now that she had a moment to think about it, the Lazarus analogy
made no sense, and she felt even more stupid and inadequate because she had entertained it even for a moment.

  Her fear was increasing, too, because every second without Daddy was another second in which he might be killed. He was her world. If he died, she couldn’t go on, she really couldn’t, because what happened to him would be her fault. She wouldn’t kill herself or anything like that, because suicide was wrong. She would just become anorexic and wither away, until she was skin and bones, until she was dust that a cold wind would blow into Hell. If Hell existed. She was of two minds about that.

  Daddy had been gone almost a minute. Hell was right here. She’d already spent almost a minute in Hell.

  27

  Pistol at the ready, stepping into the hallway, Jeffy saw the ladder at the farther end from the stairs, a counterweighted folding model attached to a ceiling trapdoor from which dangled a pull cord. Good Boy had leaped and seized the cord and pulled down the ladder. The creature had climbed up where perhaps it had in days past spent time haunting that raftered space in the version of this house that existed on Earth 1.13.

  Jeffy had no intention of following the freak into that dark, higher realm. But if he lifted the lowest segment of the ladder and gave it a shove, it would automatically fold upward, and the trap would close behind it. Good Boy could still push it open from above, though that was harder than opening it from below and would take more time. The noise would alert them that the beast was coming.

  And maybe the thing didn’t want to come down. Maybe it wished to stay up there in the dusty dark, with spiders friendlier than the people it knew, up where it had retreated when dada-mama scolded or punished it. The creature’s mental landscape must be black and gray, brightened alternately by the lightning of fear and a feeble foxfire of hope never to be fulfilled, a bleak terrain of endless loneliness and confusion. It was forever an outsider, natural to none of the worlds in the multiverse, belonging not even on Earth 1.13, where arrogant men and cruel science had conjured it into being.

  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.