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  “I don’t know all that much,” Jeffy assured him. “I’m more likely to be undone by ignorance.”

  Saying nothing, Ed leaned forward in his chair, his grizzled head thrust out like that of a tortoise craning its neck from its shell, regarding his host as if Jeffy were an avant-garde sculpture, the meaning of which couldn’t be discerned.

  Having undergone such intense scrutiny on other occasions, Jeffy knew that Ed would not engage in further conversation until he was ready to initiate it. This penetrating stare must be met with a smile and patience.

  Filtered by distance and trees, the irregular susurration of the traffic on Oak Hollow Road was a mournful sound, like the exhalations of some noble leviathan slowly dying.

  Among the oaks, owls expressed their curiosity to one another.

  At last Ed leaned back in his chair, though his scowl did not relent. His luxuriant eyebrows were still interlaced, as if engaged in copulation.

  From the porch floor beside his chair, he picked up a package that Jeffy had not previously noticed. The twelve-inch-square white pasteboard gift box was discolored by time and soiled. The matching lid had been secured with a length of string.

  Ed placed the item on his lap and held it in both hands. As he stared at the package, his solemn scowl seemed to shade into dread. Occasionally he was afflicted by a benign tremor in his left hand, and now the pads of his fingers tapped spastically against the box.

  He raised his head and met Jeffy’s eyes again and said, “This contains the key.”

  After an ensuing silence, Jeffy said, “What key?”

  “The key to everything.”

  “Sounds important.”

  “They must never get their hands on it.”

  “They who?”

  “Better you don’t know,” Ed said again. “I’m giving it to you.”

  Jeffy raised his hands, palms toward his guest in a gesture of polite decline. “That’s kind of you, Ed, but I can’t accept. I’ve got a house key, a car key. That’s all I need. I wouldn’t know what to do with a key to everything.”

  Snatching the box off his lap and holding it against his chest, Ed declared, “No, no. You must do nothing with it! Nothing! You must not open it. Never! ”

  Previously just quaint and quirky, Ed seemed to be crossing a mental bridge from eccentric to a condition more disturbing.

  3

  Mr. Spooky wasn’t scary, just odd, and Amity had no concern that he would attack them with a chain saw or hack them to pieces with a meat cleaver or anything like that. She didn’t need to lock the front door, but Daddy was paranoid in a nice way, always looking out for her. She figured that, even after seven years, he hadn’t gotten over losing his wife and half expected to lose his daughter, as well. He would probably forever be overprotective. Amity would be forty and married to Justin Dakota—who lived three doors away and might one day develop into suitable husband material—and they would have three kids of their own and be living in a fabulous house on a hill overlooking the sea, and because Justin would be a movie star or a rich technology wizard, and because Amity would be a famous novelist, they would have beaucoup security, like a squadron of bodyguards, but Daddy would still show up every night to check that all the doors and windows were locked, tuck her into bed, and warn her not to take candy from strangers. He was the dearest man, and she loved him with all her heart, really and truly. But she knew that the day was coming, a few years from now, when she would need to sit him down and patiently explain that too much concern on his part could be suffocating and could put a serious strain on their relationship. Already, this was somewhat true; after all, she was closer to twelve than to eleven.

  After locking the door and turning on the lights, she passed the living room with its big armchairs and its shelves containing the fantasy novels they enjoyed. She followed the hallway that was lined with original Art Deco posters for products like Taittinger champagne and Angelus “white shoe dressing” and the 1934 Plymouth automobile, and a 1925 nightclub show starring Josephine Baker in Paris. Beyond her father’s workshop, in which he restored function and luster to beautiful old Bakelite radios and other collectible Art Deco–period objects, she came to her bedroom at the back of the house, where Snowball waited for her.

  At night and when she and her father went to a restaurant, Snowball lived in a cage. This wasn’t cruel, because the cage was large, with an exercise wheel. Snowball was a white mouse, small enough to sit in the palm of her hand. He was very well behaved. She could take him anywhere in a jacket pocket, and he would not come out on his own, but only when she retrieved him. He never even once peed or pooped in her pocket. Even if eventually he had an accident, it wouldn’t be a catastrophe, considering that he weighed like four ounces and didn’t generate a humongous amount of end product.

  His coat was white, his eyes as black as ink, his tail pale pink. He was cuter than the kind of mice you didn’t want in your house, an elegant little gentleman. If Amity were Cinderella, Snowball would morph into a magnificent stallion to pull her carriage. That’s the kind of special mouse he was.

  Now, after she turned on her TV and streamed an animated Disney movie that she had seen many times and that didn’t have a cat in it, she took Snowball out of his cage. She sat in an armchair, and for a while he ran up and down her arms and across her shoulders, pausing now and then to stare at her with what she believed was affection. Then he settled in her lap, on his back. She rubbed his tummy with one finger, and he relaxed into an ecstatic trance.

  With Snowball, she was practicing for a dog.

  She wanted a dog, and Daddy was willing to buy a puppy, but she needed to find out if she could be a good mother. What if she got a dog, which could live twelve or fourteen years, and then discovered, after a year, that she didn’t want to walk the poor thing any longer or exercise it or even just hang out with it. People changed, didn’t want the same things anymore, and then they broke hearts. If she failed a dog, broke its heart, Amity would hate herself, she really would, totally and forever.

  The man at the pet store had said that Snowball, a unique breed with a glossy coat, would live maybe four years. She’d had him two years, and she wasn’t the least bored with him yet. She loved him to the extent that a person could love a mouse that didn’t have a big personality like a dog.

  Before she risked getting a dog, she also had to find out how she would deal with the loss of Snowball when he died. If losing a mouse wrecked her, then a dog’s death would absolutely destroy her, no doubt about it, none at all. She’d been only four, much too little to understand what was happening, when her mother walked out. She hardly remembered Michelle. Yet the loss was still with her, not really a pain, more like an emptiness, as if something that ought to be inside of her were missing. She worried that more losses would leave other empty spaces in her, until she would be as hollow as a shell from which the egg had been drained through a pinhole.

  Sometimes, like now, she couldn’t remember what her mother looked like, which kind of scared her. A few weeks ago, in a mood, she had taken the framed photograph of Michelle off her desk, where Daddy encouraged her to keep it, and put it in a bottom drawer. Maybe the time had come to display the photo again.

  On her lap, Snowball had closed his eyes. His mouth hung open. He was a picture of bliss as she stroked his belly.

  His chisel-edged teeth were bared. The teeth of mice never stopped growing. Snowball had to gnaw at something for a significant part of every day to keep his teeth from becoming so long that they inhibited his ability to eat, which was why his cage featured three gnawing blocks.

  No living thing on the earth was without its burdens.

  Daddy said our burdens made our spirits stronger and therefore were blessings. He knew a lot and was right about most things, but this burdens-as-blessings business was bu
llsugar, really and truly, at least based on her experience. Daddy probably believed it. He said that beyond every darkness, dawn approached. He was crazy patient and rarely got angry.

  Amity wasn’t as patient as her father, though she wanted to be. A lot of things pissed her off. Recently, she’d made a list of what pissed her off, so she wouldn’t forget anything and go all squishy like one of those morning-TV kid-show puppets that always wanted you to be “nicer than twice as nice as nice.” The list looked stupid, so she tore it up and threw it away. But she remembered everything on it, including that it pissed her off, really and truly, not to have a mother. When you were angry about something, you couldn’t at the same time be crushingly sad about it, which was a blessing.

  As she continued to stroke Snowball’s tummy, she wondered what bullsugar Mr. Spooky was spouting out there on the porch with her patient father.

  4

  The eerie ululation of coyotes on the hunt issued from the farther end of the canyon, and a scrim of cloud diminished the moon, so that the silvered yard grew tarnished.

  “I’m leaving this with you,” Ed solemnly intoned, holding forth the soiled, string-tied box, “because the fate of humanity depends on it never falling into the wrong hands and because, of everyone I have known in my life, I trust no one more than you, Jeffrey Wallace Coltrane.”

  “That’s very sweet, but you hardly know me,” Jeffy said.

  “Damn if I don’t!” Ed roared. “I know your heart. I trust my gut about you. My gut, your heart. If you don’t do this, if you don’t help me, you will be condemning your daughter to a life of terror, perhaps slavery or death! ”

  Even in the soft amber glow of the porch lamps, Jeffy could see that Ed’s face had darkened with a rush of blood. His rapid pulse grew visible in both his neck and temples, as though he were working himself into a stroke or aneurysm.

  The old man slid forward on his rocking chair, holding out the box. His voice quieted to an intense whisper. “Listen to me. Listen, listen. I’ve used the key to everything over a hundred times. I’ve seen horrors indescribable. I should destroy it, but I can’t. It’s my baby, my beautiful work of genius. I can’t put it in a safe-deposit box, because they’ll search bank records coast to coast. I can’t leave it with anyone I’ve ever known in my former life. They’re watching those people. I can’t dig a hole and bury the damn thing, because what if some poor fool who hasn’t been warned about the danger of it finds it and turns it on? You must hide it well. They’ll suspect everyone in the canyon, anyone with whom I might have come into contact. They’ll skulk around, looking, searching, those swine. After all, it cost seventy-six billion dollars.”

  “What did?”

  Ed shook the box gently. “This.”

  “Expensive,” said Jeffy.

  “Oh, it’s worth much more than that. It’s worth the world. They’ll never stop looking for it.”

  If a screw had been loose in Ed’s head, it evidently had fallen away from whatever parts of his mind it had previously kept securely connected. He was wide-eyed, suddenly glistening with a thin sweat, in great distress. Jeffy felt sorry for him. Ed was a well-educated man, a scholar, perhaps once a highly regarded professor of history or literature or philosophy, now succumbing to dementia. A tragedy.

  The kind thing to do, the only thing to do, was to humor him. It would be cruel to disrespect him and treat his paranoid fantasy as the delusion that it was. Jeffy slid forward in his rocker and accepted the package.

  Ed wagged one finger in admonishment. “Never open it. Never touch it. Keep it safe for a year. If I don’t return for it in a year, I’ll be dead. I should get a gun and kill the bastards when they come to kill me, but I can’t. I’ve seen too much horror to perpetrate horrors of my own. I’m a pacifist. A helpless pacifist. If I don’t return in a year, I’ll be dead.”

  “I’m certain you’ve got a long life ahead,” Jeffy assured him.

  “After a year, obtain a barrel. Can you do that?”

  “A barrel?”

  Ed seized Jeffy by one knee and squeezed for emphasis. “Barrel, oil drum, an enclosed cylindroid of metal. Can you obtain one?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Do you know how to mix concrete?”

  “I’m a mason.”

  “Yes, exactly, I forgot, a mason. After one year, if I do not return, fill a barrel half full of concrete. Put this package in the barrel. Finish filling the barrel with concrete, so the package is encased. Can you weld?”

  “Yes. I’m quite handy.”

  “Weld the lid of the barrel shut. It will then be very heavy, don’t you think?”

  “Extremely heavy,” Jeffy agreed.

  “I doubt you have a hydraulic hand truck. Very few people possess their own hydraulic hand truck. Do you have such a thing?”

  “No, but I can rent one.”

  Ed took his hand from Jeffy’s knee and gave him two thumbs up. “Convey the barrel into a rental truck. Take it to the harbor. Can you drive a boat?”

  “Anything up to about thirty-six feet.”

  “Charter a boat and take the barrel out to sea and roll it overboard in deep water.”

  “How deep?” Jeffy asked.

  “A thousand feet should do it. No less than five hundred.”

  “Consider it done. That is, if you don’t return in a year.”

  At the very moment that the cloud freed the moon, a look of relief wiped the anxiety off Ed’s face. “I knew you were the right man. From the first time I ever sat on this porch with you, I knew.” He rose to his feet. “Never open the box, Jeffrey. Never touch the thing in it. Keep your promise. The thing in that box can bring you only misery. The fate of the world is in your hands.”

  Ed’s delusions were nothing if not grandiose.

  Getting up from his rocker, Jeffy said, “Well, whenever you want it back, a year from now or tomorrow, it’ll be here, Ed.”

  “A year from now or never. Tomorrow, the canyon will be crawling with those despicable swine. Hide it well.”

  After adjusting his bow tie and smoothing the panels of his sport coat, he went to the porch steps and descended and moved onto the moonlit lawn.

  He paused and gazed at the sky and then addressed Jeffy once more. “‘Like a ghastly rapid river / Through the pale door / A hideous throng rush out forever / And laugh—but smile no more.’ A few lines from Poe. Don’t use the key, Jeffrey. Don’t open the pale door.” He started to turn away but then had one more warning to deliver. “I’ve got a demonic posse on my trail. Devils, fiends! When the swine come snorting around, they won’t be who they claim to be. Even if you give them the box, you won’t be rid of them. Once they know you’ve been in possession of the key, the cursed yet wonderful key, they’ll assume you know too much. They’re ruthless. They’re murderers. Beasts. They’ll . . . make you disappear. Hide it well, Jeffrey. Save yourself and your girl! Hide it well!”

  He crossed the yard to the lane, turned right, and headed into the canyon.

  Sadness and pity took some of the shine off the moon-polished night. Perhaps the man had been an eccentric all his life, but until this evening, he’d been an engaging companion during his visits and never before wandered into alleyways of dementia.

  Ed walked out of moonbeams, and shadows engulfed him, and he disappeared under the branches of the overhanging oaks.

  5

  Amity stood at the kitchen table with Snowball perched on her right shoulder. The mouse nibbled a peanut held in his forepaws.

  The box stood on the table. It was a soiled, yellowed nothing of a box—and yet it looked ominous.

  She asked, “What’s in it?”

  “I don’t know,” her dad said as he popped the cap off a bottle of beer. “And I promised not to open it.
”

  “Maybe it’s an eight-inch Madagascar hissing cockroach, like the plague of bugs that witch conjured into her enemy’s castle.”

  “That was in a novel. In the real world, people don’t curse each other with giant hissing cockroaches. Anyway, Ed is evidently losing it, but he’s not a bad guy.”

  “If he doesn’t come back for a year, will you really put it in a barrel with cement and drop it in the ocean?”

  Her father shrugged. “I sort of promised.” He sat at the table, smiled ruefully, and shook his head. “Seventy-six billion dollars.”

  “You don’t really think anything that fits in such a little box could be worth so much, do you?” Amity wondered.

  Snowball would fit in the box. Because she loved the little dude, he was worth a lot more to her than what they had paid for him, though he wasn’t worth thousands of millions of dollars. No offense intended toward the beloved mouse or toward mousekind in general. On the other hand, Daddy was for sure worth that much. If someday her father was kidnapped, and if the bad guys demanded seventy-six billion, and if by then Amity had that much money, she would pay the ransom; she really and truly would. However, unlike Snowball, Daddy wouldn’t fit in this box.

  “Whatever it contains,” her father said, “it’s not worth ten cents to anyone but Ed. The poor man is losing his way. His mind has turned traitor on him. From things he’s said . . . I think maybe he was a college professor once, probably a great one. But now . . . he’s a very sad case. Well, whatever this thing is, he’ll be back for it tomorrow or the next day or a week from now.”

  Amity took Snowball from her shoulder and cradled him in her hands. He was just a mouse, but he was hers to keep safe in a world where nothing lasted forever, not even who you were.