Elsewhere Page 4

  As Jeffy expected, they searched the place top to bottom, turning everything upside down, or almost everything.

  In the workroom, as two of his other men opened and closed drawers and cabinet doors, Falkirk looked around at the radios and at the collection of costume jewelry also made out of Bakelite, everything sitting on open shelves. His expression was not one of investigative interest, but rather that of an elitist of the ruling class who found himself in a humble thrift shop with inadequately deodorized plebian customers. “What’s all this stuff?”

  “I polish the jewelry, fix broken clasps. I put new vacuum tubes in the radios. Sell it all to collectors.”

  “Collectors? For kitsch like this? People actually buy it?”

  Jeffy pointed to the discolored shell of the Bendix, under which the key to everything was hidden. “This potential jewel cost me sixty bucks at a swap meet. Cleaned and polished, it’ll look like that”—he pointed to a radio on which he had worked—“and then I’ll sell it for maybe six thousand at an antique show. And I’ve seen women fight over the best Bakelite necklaces.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “That was my mouse,” Amity said, her hands folded around Snowball.

  Falkirk’s face stiffened with contempt, his expression out of proportion to the moment. “You think you’re pretty funny, do you?”

  “No, sir. Not as funny as some.”

  At his sides, the man’s hands formed into fists. His lips were pale, his stare icy. “I know your type.”

  Jeffy was disquieted by Falkirk’s sudden, acidic antipathy toward the girl. To distract the agent, he plugged in one of the fully restored radios, a Fada.

  The vacuum tubes warmed, and the AM-only dial brightened. The radio’s sleek rounded form and rich golden plastic with the grain and depth of quartzite spoke of an age when even everyday items were designed to please the eye; the object embodied a desire to charm that had been lost in this era of bleak utilitarianism.

  Falkirk stared at the radio with puzzlement and disdain.

  When Taylor Swift sang forth from the nearly century-old set, he said, “She’s hot, but she doesn’t sound hot coming through those speakers. They sure aren’t Bose.”

  “I’m selling nostalgia. This is a little bit how music sounded back then,” Jeffy said.

  “Nostalgia is a dead end. We either progress or slide backward. Slide far enough backward, everything collapses.”

  Jeffy smiled and nodded. “I understand that point of view. I just want to slide back a little ways to when people didn’t spend all day staring at screens and trying to tell other people what to do and think, back to when a day seemed twenty-four hours long instead of twelve, when you could breathe.”

  “If that’s what you want,” said Falkirk, “better stay here in your little house, never go outside. This is the closest you’ll get to living forever in yesterday. The world turns faster every year. The human race is on a rocket ride, Mr. Coltrane. A rocket ride. That’s our destiny.”

  10

  Walking up the lane toward the next house in the company of two subordinates, Falkirk counseled himself not to allow his suspicion to settle on the Coltranes, father and daughter, to the exclusion of their neighbors. The little bitch had mocked him, maybe because she knew where Harkenbach could be found, or maybe because it was just her nature to be a wiseass.

  She reminded him too much of his younger half sister, Phoebe, that smug and snarky pig who, with his half brother, Philip, had long ago screwed him over and changed his life for the worse. He would like nothing better than to punch the hateful smirk off Amity Coltrane’s face. Over the years, there had been a few others like her, surrogate Phoebes who mocked him and lived to regret it—or died regretting it. Every blow he struck against one of their kind was like an orgasm.

  If Jeffrey Coltrane and his smart-ass brat proved to be friends of Harkenbach, they would be subjected to hard interrogation, during which Falkirk could do whatever he wanted to the little bitch, as well as to her father. His National Security Agency credentials were merely operational cover. He didn’t answer to the NSA or to any of the government agencies known to the public. He served the masters of the shadow state, and like his masters, he was above the law.

  Indeed, all his life, as far back as he could remember, he had known that laws were for others, not for him. He was born wise to the truth of the world: The only virtue is vice, and the acquisition of power justifies all things.

  11

  Falkirk and company had left disarray behind them. In an hour and a half, the Coltranes, father and daughter, restored order to their little world.

  Beyond the windows, sunshine flaring off their windshields, racing black Suburbans returned from the wilds, carrying luckless vagrants as passengers. They were possibly bound for facilities established to serve the homeless, although more likely they would wind up at a ghastly, isolated warehouse on the edge of the Mojave where tough interrogations could be carried out in an atmosphere such that the words “I have a right to an attorney” would elicit only their jailers’ amusement.

  Catercorner to each other at the kitchen table were Amity with a morning orange juice and Jeffy with black coffee so strong that its smell alone was sufficient to wake anyone in a coma.

  Perched on Amity’s right shoulder, Snowball nibbled on a kernel of cheese popcorn that appeared enormous in his tiny pink paws.

  On the table lay the key to everything.

  Jeffy didn’t know what hell the device might be capable of bringing down on them. He was pretty sure, however, that the wise thing to do was purchase a barrel, mix a few batches of cement before lunch, and forget about waiting a year.

  Never open the box, Jeffrey. Keep your promise. The thing in that box can bring you only misery.

  As the clatter of helicopters faded and a fragile sense of normalcy settled on the canyon, Amity said, “Looks like a phone.”

  “If you study it closely, it’s not a phone. No switches on the sides. No charging port, so then maybe no battery. No camera.”

  “It’s got a home circle you can touch at the bottom of the screen.”

  “That’s not enough to make it a phone.”

  She reached for the device, and Jeffy lightly slapped her fingers. “Don’t touch.”

  “You touched it.”

  “Very carefully. Holding it by the sides with thumb and forefinger. Anyway, I’m the adult in the room. Adults make the rules. It’s been that way since time immemorial.”

  “Is that why the world is in such deep poop?”

  “Maybe.”

  After a slug of orange juice, she said, “All those SUVs and helicopters and tough guys . . . I guess the stupid thing probably did cost seventy-six billion.”

  “Government research money,” Jeffy agreed.

  Attracted by the silvery glimmer of the mysterious object, Snowball dropped the popcorn, raced down Amity’s arm, scurried across the table, from which he was usually banished, and sat on what seemed to be the screen of the device.

  The girl gasped, and both she and Jeffy shot up from their chairs, reacting as though Edwin Harkenbach hadn’t entrusted them with any kind of key, but instead with a compact nuclear bomb.

  Snowball peered at the dark mirrored surface under him, in which he could see his murky reflection.

  After a few seconds, a soft gray light filled the previously glossy black screen.

  Jeffy held his breath, and Amity coaxed the mouse to come to her. “Here, boy, come to Mommy. Come to Mommy, Snowball.”

  Something appeared on the screen under the mouse. Jeffy could see two large buttons—one blue, the other red—that contained white lettering half obscured by the rodent.

  Simultaneously, Jeffy and Amity reached for Snowball. Her h
and grasped the mouse, and her father’s hand seized hers—

  —and the kitchen vanished, leaving them in an all-encompassing whiteness. A nearly blinding blizzard showered down. They could see only themselves and each other—and the mouse. The glittering flakes were not cold; they passed through Jeffy, through Amity.

  Particles of light, he thought, and was chilled by the sheer strangeness of the experience.

  He also thought of the lines of verse quoted by Ed just before the old man walked away into the night, something about a pale door and a hideous throng rushing out through it. The key to everything had opened a door, this pale door of light, and although they were not at once swept up in a hideous throng, Jeffy felt great peril coming, sensed that they were now known and being sought by someone, something.

  12

  With a soft windless whoosh, the obscuring light blew away, and the familiar kitchen became visible again. However, because it had vanished once, the place seemed less than entirely real, as though it might be a construct of Jeffy’s imagination.

  Amity plucked the mouse off the dangerous device, and with one trembling hand, Jeffy took the key to everything from the table.

  “What was that, what happened?” the girl asked.

  “I don’t know. It was . . . maybe . . . I don’t know.”

  He saw three buttons on the screen now: a blue one labeled Home, a red one bearing the word Select, and a green one marked Return.

  “W-w-where did they go?” Amity asked, a tremor in her voice.

  Looking up from the device, Jeffy said, “What?”

  Holding Snowball in both hands, against her chest, as though terrified that she had almost lost the mouse and might still lose him, the girl said, “My orange juice. Your coffee.”

  Her glass and Jeffy’s mug were gone. They hadn’t been knocked off the table; there was no mess on the floor.

  He turned toward the counter where the coffee machine had stood, but it was no longer anywhere to be seen.

  Understanding eluded him. Whatever the explanation might prove to be, the disappearance of the glass and the mug contributed to his unsettling apprehension that the material world must be immaterial to some degree.

  He could only say, “I better put this damn thing away before something happens.”

  Circling the table, scanning the room for the missing coffee and juice, Amity said ominously, “Something’s already happened.”

  “Nothing terrible. Nothing . . . irreplaceable. Just beverages and beverage containers.” He didn’t sound entirely sane to himself.

  With Amity close behind, Jeffy followed the hall toward his workroom. Although he had taken this short walk thousands of times, the passageway seemed different from how it was before, but he was not able to identify what had changed.

  “Are you scared, Daddy? I’m kind of just a little bit scared. I don’t mean like totally freaked out. Just kind of spooked.”

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he counseled her, as well as himself, though he had no way of knowing if what he said was true. “What happened, it was just . . .” Words failed him.

  As he passed an open door, he hesitated and looked into his bedroom. He expected something there to surprise him, though he didn’t know why or what. Everything appeared to be in order.

  Nevertheless, at his side, Amity said, “It doesn’t feel right.”

  “What doesn’t?”

  “I don’t know. Something about this place. I feel like . . . like I don’t belong here.”

  At the door to his office, Jeffy halted, suddenly sure that they were not alone in the house. He had a sense of some presence and wouldn’t have been surprised to see a phantom form, a shadow without source, gliding toward them or crossing the hall from one room to another.

  He eased the door open. Although he oiled the hinges from time to time so they never creaked, they creaked now.

  In his workroom, the sheer curtain at the window was gone, replaced by a pleated shade that was at the moment raised. He might not have noticed this change if the previously bright day beyond the glass had not now been sunless. The sky bellied with dark clouds swollen with impending rain. Seemingly in an instant, the weather had drastically changed.

  He went to the shelves of radios that needed to be refurbished, intending to hide the key to everything under the old Bendix, where he should have left it after Falkirk departed.

  The Bendix wasn’t there. He inventoried the other radios, sure that he must have moved the one he needed.

  Then he saw it standing on his workbench. Cleaned. Meticulously polished. Its color was as vibrant as the day it had first appeared for sale more than ninety years earlier.

  Painstakingly restoring this much-discolored Bakelite to its original luster would have taken him at least a week.

  The Bendix was plugged in to the power strip that ran along the back of his workbench. He hesitated, then switched it on. A glow filled the tuning window. The radio was no longer just a shell. The vacuum tubes warmed, and music came forth.

  Johnny Mathis sang “The Twelfth of Never.”

  The skin on the nape of Jeffy’s neck crinkled like crepe paper.

  He clicked off the old radio, and the ensuing silence seemed uncanny, lacking even the sound of his breathing, as if he were the embalmed resident of a mausoleum.

  “I feel it, too,” he told Amity. “Like I don’t . . . don’t belong here.”

  When he turned, the girl was no longer with him.

  “Amity?” he cried out, and she did not answer. Still gripping the key to everything, he hurried into the hall. She was not there.

  13

  Intelligent and homeschooled, Amity had been reading well above her grade level ever since she’d known what a grade level was. She’d read scads of fantasy novels with Daddy and on her own, and both she and her father preferred stories in which the female characters were as adventurous and competent and kick-ass as the men. The heroines in all those books taught her to be strong and independent. By their example, she had learned among other things that it was all right to be afraid as long as you didn’t allow your fear to paralyze or in any significant way dispirit you. Evil people thrived on your fear; they fed on it; they could defeat you only if you made yourself a banquet of fear and were consumed by your enemies. When she walked into her room and saw that she didn’t exist, she strove to repress her fear, but it wasn’t quite as easy as it was for girls in novels.

  She had intended to return Snowball to his cage, where he would be safe; however, his cage was gone. Amity no longer had a bed or other furniture. Her anime posters had been stripped from the walls. The room was not, as before, a cheerful shade of yellow with a white ceiling, but instead a dreary beige. The closet door stood open, and she could see that no clothes hung in there, as if she had died of some tragic tropical fever, all covered with suppurating sores, and everything of hers had been sterilized and given to Goodwill.

  When Daddy hurried into the room, calling her name—and said, “Oh, thank God,” at the sight of her—she wanted to run to him and hug him and be hugged, but she restrained herself. There was a time to take refuge in the arms of those you loved, and there was a time to stand up to great evil and be not bowed. If you didn’t know the difference, then you were doomed to perish about two-thirds of the way through the story, when the narrative needed a jolt of violence and emotion. (As a reader who hoped one day to be a writer, she was always alert to authors’ techniques.) She couldn’t yet figure out the identity of the current evil, but she had met its minions when Falkirk and his toadies had come calling. Whoever Spooky Ed might be and whatever the key to everything could do, she and her father were in deep merde, and extraordinary courage would be required of them.

  Her father came to her, and maybe unshed tears were sta
nding in his eyes, so she quickly looked away from him. This was the totally wrong time for either of them to show weakness. Being no less of an avid reader than Amity, her father surely knew what the weirdness of their situation required. If she gave him a moment, he would regain his balance.

  Before Daddy could say the wrong thing, a loud noise drew their attention to a window. The racket of a machine.

  Amity went to the window, and her father joined her, and they looked out at the backyard, where a man was mowing the grass, intent as if determined to finish the task before the storm broke. They didn’t have a gardener. Daddy mowed the lawn himself. And in fact the guy out there pushing the mower back and forth was Daddy. He had to be Daddy, because Daddy didn’t have an identical twin.

  Just when you thought you were getting a grip on your fear, it became as hard to subdue as a crazed cat. Amity had one father and no mother and a big hole in her life, but the emptiness couldn’t be filled in and paved over by having two dads. The guy out there must be a doppelgänger, a ghostly double of a living person. She and Daddy had once read a story about a doppelgänger, and things hadn’t gone well for the luckless living man whose place in the world the freaking doppelgänger wanted for itself. After disposing of the true father, the evil impersonator had schemed to have the two children—one a girl rather like Amity—swallowed whole by a huge mystical crocodile and carried into an infinite swamp, where they would live forever in its bowels, screaming for help that would never come. Fortunately, a bird named Pickitt, who served the crocodile by feeding on scraps of meat stuck between its teeth, took pity on the kids before they could be eaten. Pickitt stole all the reptile’s ivories while it slept, so that it couldn’t devour the children. In the real world, however, if a doppelgänger took her father’s place, there wouldn’t be a mystical crocodile or a bird sympathetic to her plight. The evil double would just strangle her and stuff her in a liquid cremation machine full of concentrated lye water, reduce her to the consistency of soup, and flush her down a toilet. The real world had become weirder than even the darkest fairy tales.