Elsewhere Page 6

  As Jeffy and Amity hunted for the books by Edwin Harkenbach, strange currents came and went, disturbing the air between the rows of tall shelves, as if unseen presences were likewise searching the library’s collection, perhaps the restless ghosts of past patrons vainly inquiring after a self-help volume that would counsel them about how to let go of their late, lamented lives.

  The romantic fragrances of yellowing paper and literary dust were pervasive. A faint, disturbing odor of mildew rose repeatedly but always faded. Twice Jeffy caught a vague scent of something burning, and though it was the merest tease of a cataclysmic smell, he looked toward the vaulted ceiling and turned his head this way and that, half expecting to see a thin haze of smoke.

  “Here!” Amity breathed and slid one fingertip along the spines of several volumes.

  Of the many works by Harkenbach, the library possessed only seven. Among those, however, Infinite Worlds waited. A field of stars illustrated the cover, and between the vivid red letters of the title were pale blue letters repeating those two words.

  Although the book was only 312 pages and appeared to be written for curious laymen rather than for physicists, it was too long to be perused while standing in the aisle. And for reasons he could not fully grasp, he didn’t want the patron in black to see him reading.

  He possessed a Suavidad Beach Library card, but intuition told him that something about it would be different from the way such a card looked in this version of the town. The wirehaired, clenched-jaw librarian would reject it and impound the book, and she would most likely do so loud enough to attract the attention of the man in black fatigues, who had already shown an unhealthy interest in Jeffy and Amity.

  Jeffy handed the book to his daughter. He spoke softly. “He’s less likely to suspect you than me. Loosen your belt, tuck this in your jeans, button up your jacket.”

  “We’re stealing it?” she whispered.

  “No, sweetheart. It’s not stealing.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “Informal borrowing. We’ll return it later.”

  “Cool.”

  “It’s not cool. Even though it isn’t stealing, it’s still not cool. It’s a one-time thing.”

  Amity concealed the book as he’d directed.

  “Try not to look guilty,” he said.

  “I don’t look guilty,” she objected.

  “You look something. Okay, we’ll walk directly to the front door. Don’t hurry. Act relaxed. Be casual.”

  “Can I whistle a tune?”

  “Is that a joke?”

  “I thought so.”

  “It’s not a time for jokes.”

  Together they moved toward the end of the aisle.

  They halted when the man in black garb rounded the corner and blocked their way. He had an unfortunate porcine face and eyes that glittered with menace in the shadows of deep sockets. As he boldly regarded them, the nostrils of his fleshy nose flared as if he were on a truffle hunt.

  “You find what you were looking for?” he asked, not in the helpful way of a library employee, but with sharp suspicion.

  “Yes, sir, thank you,” Jeffy said brightly. “My daughter has this school project, she’s got to make a motorized model of the solar system, and we didn’t know which planets might have more than one moon or no moons at all. Now we know.”

  The stranger appeared simultaneously ridiculous and threatening in his faux Ninja outfit. However, his manner and voice suggested that he possessed authority and was accustomed to being treated with respect. “The solar system, is it? Just how old are you, girl?”

  Belatedly, Jeffy realized that building a motorized model of the solar system was too ambitious a project for a sixth grader, but Amity was quick to patch the hole in his story.

  “I’m almost fourteen,” she lied. “So I’m kind of a runt, but I’m not always gonna be. I’m gonna have a growth spurt and be five feet eight, maybe five nine, and no one will tease me anymore, which will sure be, you know, great. Daddy can make the planets and moons rotate and revolve, and that’ll make me seem totally cool.”

  Jeffy was pleased by how quick-witted Amity was, but at the same time, he was unsettled by the alacrity with which she lied and the convincing innocence with which she did it.

  Proving himself a cynic, the guy in black said, “You think it’s cold in here? Why is your jacket buttoned to the neck? It’s not cold in here. You hiding something in your jacket, girl?”

  Amity turned half away from the man and quickly undid only the top two buttons and produced Snowball from an exterior pocket while making it appear that he’d been inside her jacket. “Snowball is a good mouse. He goes everywhere with me, and he’s never a problem, never runs away. He’d never ever poop on a book or anything bad like that. I’m real sorry. I made a mistake bringing him here.”

  The security man—or whatever he was—scowled. “That’s no right kind of pet.” He regarded Jeffy with contempt out of proportion to any perceived offense. “What kind of parent allows his child to keep a filthy rodent like that?”

  In the California from which Jeffy and Amity had come, this kind of dressing-down from a man who looked like a background extra in a cheesy kung fu movie would have elicited a withering response. In this alternate state, however, such a man was a mystery that required caution.

  “Yes, sir. You’re right, of course. I guess I indulge her too much. I’ve been guilty of that ever since her mom . . . since her mom passed away.”

  Although he seemed to assume that he was privileged, although he was officious and rude in the manner of a petty bureaucrat, this costumed Gestapo wannabe still had a spoonful of the milk of human kindness. His expression softened slightly at the mention of a family tragedy. His stare shifted from Jeffy to Amity to Jeffy again. “All right, maybe you don’t need to take a parenting course. But get out of here with that dirty rodent. Buy the girl an approved animal, something that honors the genius of the state.”

  “I will,” Jeffy assured him, though he had no idea what the guy meant. “Thanks for your understanding.”

  Without looking back at their interrogator, he and Amity made their way out of the maze of stacks. As they crossed the receiving area toward the entrance, he saw the librarian with the shock of white hair. She moved briskly, pushing a cart bearing the books she’d earlier been inspecting. As she passed through an archway, out of sight, Jeffy again detected the smell of smoke. Although the odor was faint, he thought it was the scent of paper burning.

  A shiver descended his spine as he opened the front door and as he and Amity stepped outside into a world not theirs.

  16

  Amity hoped maybe the storm wouldn’t spill out into the day. The swollen heavens promised rain, but hour by hour the promise wasn’t kept. In fact, the birds that had gone to shelter in anticipation of the downpour had again taken to the sky. Bright against the soiled clouds, white gulls looped high and then cried down the day. Having returned from their nests in whatever lagoons, brown pelicans glided effortlessly in formation, eternally silent, while shrieking crows darted from tree to tree, repeatedly exploding into flight as if invisible predators swarmed after them.

  Amity and her father couldn’t take Ed Harkenbach’s book home to study it in their house on Shadow Canyon Lane, because in this crazy world, the house belonged to another Coltrane who might not be as kind as the father she loved. She didn’t think that any version of her dad could be outright evil; across even thousands and thousands of worlds, surely no Jeffy Coltrane was a killer like Hannibal Lecter, but maybe a few of them were humongously annoying. Anyway, she and her father didn’t know what, if anything, would happen when two Jeffys came face-to-face in a world that was meant to have only one. Most likely, neither of them would explode or otherwise cease to exist, though such a disaste
r couldn’t be ruled out.

  Daddy wanted to go to a back booth in Harbison’s Diner and study the book over lunch. But in this world, the restaurant was called Steptoe’s Diner, and it didn’t look as clean as Harbison’s. This difference inspired Daddy to wonder if the cash in his wallet would pass for currency in this United States, or if maybe it would be so different from local money that the cashier would reject it and cause a scene.

  Counting on the storm clouds to carry the rain miles farther south before spending it, they went to the seaside park at the center of town and settled on one of the benches on the grassy area that overlooked the white sand beach.

  Taking its color from the sky, the ocean now appeared to be a lifeless swamp of ashes, as though all the cities and towns along its shores—except for this one—had burned down and shed their remains into the water. Low gray surf, like a soup of ruination, washed upon the beach, and with it came the faint iodine smell of rotting seaweed.

  The choppy waves were too tame for surfers, and the threat of the storm left the strand deserted. The traffic on Pacific Coast Highway, a hundred yards behind them, was markedly less than it would have been in their world, as if people here either chose not to travel much or were somehow discouraged from doing so. Amity wasn’t car crazy, but it seemed to her that there were fewer makes and models than in her Suavidad Beach, and all appeared to be gray or brown or black. In spite of the saturated sky and the rolling ocean, the dismal day felt barren, arid—drained of color and energy.

  Keeping one eye out for birds, she removed Snowball from her jacket pocket and put him on the ground, where he promptly toileted. The mouse then began exploring the territory around her feet, which was when she first noticed the shell casings scattered through the grass, dully gleaming cylinders, as if the park had recently been the scene of a gunfight.

  The concrete bench was hard, but Harkenbach’s book was harder. Although he was supposed to be a genius, old Ed didn’t seem able to compose a short sentence without hundred-dollar words, so he might as well have been writing in Martian. Daddy slowly skimmed through the volume, reading passages aloud, most of which made no sense to Amity; only one seemed as though it might be helpful to them.

  Spooky old, sad old Ed, homeless genius on the run, suggested that if a parallel world—which he also referred to as an “alternate timeline”—could be visited, its location could then be cataloged. So people traveling sideways through the infinite multiverse could return to a specific alternate timeline instead of always being flung across the spectrum of worlds willy-nilly, like tumbling dice.

  According to Daddy, that explained the readout on the data bar at the bottom of the screen on the key to everything: Elsewhere 1.13—Cataloged. “If we think of our world as Earth Prime, then all the other worlds, other timelines, they’re ‘Elsewhere.’ Doesn’t that make sense? I think it makes sense.”

  In spite of their less than ideal situation, he was overcome with a boyish enthusiasm. He liked to learn things. He enjoyed mysteries and puzzles of all kinds, and solving them.

  “So it follows that this world we’re in has been cataloged, the route to it stored in the memory of this device, and its name is Earth 1.13. Which maybe means it’s thirteen worlds away from ours. What do you think?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Amity said, searching the slowly roiling sky as though a dragon might suddenly swoop down from the overcast and snatch her up as effortlessly as a hawk could seize a mouse. This didn’t seem like a world in which there could be dragons. There were no castles to be seen, no knights astride armored steeds, none of the stuff that she associated with dragons. Nevertheless, in really good stories, the unexpected was often more likely to occur than anything easily anticipated. In books, she liked the unexpected, though not so much in real life.

  She rose to her feet. Careful not to step on little Snowball, she plucked the shell casings from the grass. They were cold. She thought: They’re cold with death. Someone was killed right here, maybe more than one person, in a public park. This place is creepy. We’ve got to get the hell out of here.

  She didn’t give voice to her thoughts because some second-rate fantasy novels featured pitiful girls who too easily lost their cool. When they became hysterical, they were saved by princes or by families of sympathetic dwarves or by magical wolves. They never got to do any of the really fun stuff themselves; they enjoyed no role except to be rescued. Amity had no patience for their kind, and for sure she didn’t want to be one of them. In spite of the shiny spent cartridges nestled in the grass, which suggested gross violence, she had no proof that murder had been committed in this park. She wasn’t going to run screaming to Daddy and wind up being the object of an it’s-okay-pumpkin-don’t-worry-your-pretty-head moment.

  After reading further, her dad took the key to everything from his jacket. He pressed the home circle. The screen filled with gray light, and then the three buttons appeared.

  “If I press the button marked Select, I bet nothing drastic will happen.”

  “It might,” she cautioned.

  “I bet what’ll happen is the screen will give me a keypad, so then I can enter the address of whatever parallel world I want to visit. And I’ll probably have to take several more steps in order to be sent there.”

  “We just want to go home,” Amity said, depositing a handful of brass shell casings on the bench. They made a fairy-bell sound as they spilled onto the concrete. “We don’t want to go anywhere else.”

  Scowling at the book, Daddy said, “If the Select button works the way I think it does, then the button marked Home is exactly what it says. It takes us back home to Earth Prime, where we came from.”

  “Don’t push it yet,” Amity said.

  “But I wonder what the Return button does.”

  “Don’t push it, either,” Amity said.

  He put the device down beside him and slowly turned through a few pages of the book, his brow pleated with puzzlement, muttering lines of the text, while she gathered more shell casings and deposited them on the bench.

  Having ventured farther from Amity than was his habit, Snowball had found a discarded candy wrapper with a morsel left in it. The torn plastic rattled with the mouse’s ecstasy.

  Amity moved close to Snowball, watching over him while she collected more pieces of mortal brass. Which was when she found the three teeth. No-doubt-about-it human teeth. Front teeth, incisors. One was cracked, and all three were held together by a bloodstained fragment of a jawbone, as though someone’s face had come apart in a barrage of gunfire.

  17

  The teeth felt colder than the shell casings. They were icy. Amity understood that they weren’t in fact as cold as ice, that the iciness was perceived rather than real, a psychological reaction. If she’d been a tedious rescue-me kind of girl, she would have screamed as if her hair were on fire and would have run to Daddy, but she restrained herself for two reasons.

  First, she wasn’t that kind of girl. She would kick her own ass from here to Cucamunga if she ever found herself acting like such a dullard. Second, if she showed the teeth to him, Daddy would flash Amity and himself home to Earth Prime as fast as he could push a button, and they would never pay a visit to the Jamison house on Bastoncherry Lane in this world, where maybe her mother waited.

  After tossing aside the additional shell casings that she’d found, she put the teeth in a pocket of her jeans and looked up at the storm-cloaked sky. She didn’t expect a dragon. If something plunged out of the clouds, it would be far worse than a dragon with foot-long claws and bloody eyes and breath aflame. She didn’t know what it might be, only that it would be worse.

  Wiping the palm of her hand on her jeans, she looked out to sea. It was hard to tell where the sky met the water. Gray surf broke in a lace of dirty foam. She half expected dead bodies to start washing onto the shore.

&
nbsp; She wasn’t a pessimist and certainly not a depressive. Being raised without a mother sucked, and sometimes it was sad, but she was mostly happy, really and truly. Life was good—better than good, great—and every day she saw something beautiful that she had never seen before, and amazing things happened when she least expected them. She was too smart to be anything but an optimist. Until Earth 1.13. Now she wouldn’t be surprised if the sea spewed out rotting corpses. The problem wasn’t her; it was this weird place. Or maybe it was partly her. Although 1.13 was a sick and twisted world, maybe it wasn’t half as bad as she thought. Some people just weren’t good travelers. For them, no place could ever be as fine and right as home. Not Paris. Not London. Not Rio. Daddy was a homebody and a not-good traveler, and perhaps she shared his love of the familiar, of libraries where you felt welcome and parks where you didn’t find biological debris maybe left over from a public mass execution.

  She plucked the torn candy wrapper off the grass and peeled Snowball out of it. He clutched what might have been a chunk of nougat. She let him keep it and tucked him into a jacket pocket.

  With a composure that made her proud, she returned to the bench and quietly gathered up the shell casings that she had placed there, for they would alarm her father almost as much as the teeth.

  Enthralled by the book and oblivious of the little pile of brass, Daddy said, “Put your hand on my neck.”

  Quietly placing the shiny evidence of violence on the grass behind the bench, she said, “Why on your neck?”

  “Just in case.”

  “In case what?”

  “I’m going to push the Select button to see if I’m right about it. In case I’m wrong and we go flashing away somewhere, I think we have to be touching if we’re to go together. Like we were touching, our hands clutching Snowball, in the kitchen when the little ratfink jumped onto this thing and set it off.”