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  Jeffy grabbed Amity’s hand. They ran along the path through the English garden, across the patio with its white-painted wrought-iron chairs and hanging baskets of flower-laden fuchsia, to the back door of the house. They simply needed to get out of sight, find a haven that would provide fourteen seconds of privacy in which to switch on and use the key to everything.

  They went inside. He slammed the door and twisted the thumb turn on the deadbolt to lock it.

  “Where?” Amity asked breathlessly.

  “Upstairs,” Jeffy said. “They don’t know we can just teleport out of here, or whatever it is the key does to us. They’ll search down here, which will give us all the time we need.”

  “I hope there’s not a mean dog,” she worried as they crossed the kitchen toward a swinging door that no doubt led to the ground-floor hallway.

  “There won’t be a mean dog,” Jeffy promised as he pushed open the door, and in fact there was no dog, though waiting for them was the meanest member of the family.

  22

  At first it had been possible to think that 1.13 was pretty much like the world from which they had come, except that here the economy was limping along, and there was a freaky cult whose members dressed in black with stupid-looking knitted caps. But almost minute by minute, the differences mounted until it became impossible to predict what weirdness might wait around the corner or, in this case, in the downstairs hallway. In his book, spooky Ed Harkenbach said there were an infinite number of parallel universes, worlds side-by-side but invisible to one another, each different from the others in lots of unpredictable ways. Infinite differences meant that if you were using the key to everything, you had better be prepared for some upside-down inside-out ass-backward situations. Amity had lost track of this truth. Daddy, too. Which was understandable when you considered all the crap and crazies they’d had to deal with since the black-clad bozo in the library declared that Snowball did not qualify as an approved pet.

  Following Daddy as he hurried across the kitchen, Amity reached into the right pocket of her denim jacket to reassure her passenger mouse, who had ridden out the recent action with aplomb. He cuddled into her palm appreciatively.

  Grandpa and Grandma Satan hadn’t left any lights on when they had gone outside to work in the garden. The day wasn’t bright enough to chase all shadows from the kitchen. Now sudden sheets of rain battered the windows, and the room darkened further.

  The swinging door creaked, and they went into a hallway even gloomier than the kitchen. They halted when they realized they were not alone.

  The boy stood where the hall met the foyer, an archway to the right of him, stairs to the left. Backlit by watery, gray light that issued from the windows flanking the front door. A silhouette with no detail. His shoulders were slumped, his posture peculiar, somehow menacing for such a small figure.

  Daddy felt the wall to his left, found a switch, and flicked on a pair of frosted ceiling fixtures, providing just enough light to reveal something that chilled Amity to the bone and for a moment left her unable to draw a breath.

  The shoeless individual standing at the end of the hallway wore a uniform like the one young Rudy Starkman had worn, with a breast patch featuring a wolf with radiant yellow eyes. Whatever this thing might be, however, it for sure wasn’t an ordinary boy like snotty, snarky Rudy. It looked more like a chimpanzee, in fact a lot like a chimpanzee, although not entirely. Its brow wasn’t as sloped as that of a chimp, its eyes not as deeply set under a prominent brow bone, the nose not as flat or the jaw as forward thrusting as that of an ape. The creature seemed to be more of a chimp than not, with long arms and short legs and thick black body hair and finger-length toes, but its long-fingered hands were less roughly knuckled and less curled than those of a chimpanzee. Its deeply disturbing facial features were frightening and pathetic at the same time, really and truly, suggesting a human child in chimp makeup. No ape in a zoo cage had ever turned a face with such human qualities toward those who came to be amused by its antics. Amity remembered The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells, where animals with human qualities had prowled the jungle, and she shuddered. Her teeth chattered, they really did, if only briefly.

  This apparition stood about four feet tall and weighed ninety or a hundred pounds. If it was an exotic species of chimpanzee, its costume was bizarre. Some people put sweaters and funny hats on dogs or dressed them six ways crazy for Halloween. Maybe this was that kind of fun, but it felt different, like cruel mockery, as though someone meant to make fun of the Justice Wolves or else of this man-monkey hybrid. The beast seemed to pose with self-conceit, much as snarky Rudy Starkman had taken pride in his silly uniform, as though it believed it was admired and possessed authority.

  “Maybe here is good enough,” her father said, taking the key to everything from his pocket.

  Before Daddy could switch on the device, the chimp-boy took three quick steps toward them and spoke. “Who is it you? Who is it you? Where dada-mama?”

  Any words issuing from this creature would have stiffened the fine hairs on the nape of Amity’s neck, but the inconsistent quality of its voice made what it said even more horrific, as though it must be two spirits in one husk, simultaneously aggressive and fearful, needful and wary. The raw guttural sound rose almost to a thin whine of anxiety on the word you.

  “Get behind me,” her father said, and Amity didn’t hesitate to obey him.

  23

  Flutters of lightning purling down the foyer windows, shudders of thunder vibrating the bones of the house with greater force than before, drumrolls of rain beating across the roof . . . The hallway lights pulsed as if the power might fail.

  The nightmare voice grew more insistent, sharp with suspicion. “Who is it you? Why here? Dada-mama wants you here?”

  Jeffy found the beast grotesque in its uniform, an affront to creation, yet nonetheless terrifying, a hideous product of genetic engineering that revealed the depths and the cruelty to which the science and culture of this timeline descended. In his mind’s ear, he heard again the officious prick in the library: Buy the girl an approved animal, something that honors the genius of the state. And here before them loomed the sinister product of a government in rebellion against everything—against economic sanity, against the righteous limits of authority, against freedom and human dignity, against nature itself and beauty and hope and the very idea of transcendent meaning. What was this pitiful and perhaps pitiless creature to those who owned it? Was it part pet and part guard ape, a kind of ersatz child for a childless couple, but also a slave? What strange desires preoccupied it, and what fears constrained it from acting on those desires? How deeply surrealistic and dark might be the landscape of its twisted mind?

  It ventured closer, within a few feet of Jeffy, peering up at him with lantern eyes, its dark lips peeling back from teeth like the blades of chisels. “Who is it you? Tell now! Tell now who is!”

  Lacking a weapon, scanning the hall for one and seeing nothing suitable, Jeffy said, “A friend. We’re friends of dada-mama. Who are you?”

  Scowling, chewing on its lower lip, the creature considered what it had been told, but it did not reply. Its stare was as hard and shiny and dark as polished obsidian.

  Inevitably, Jeffy thought of news stories from the past decade, incidents involving chimpanzee attacks on people who kept them as pets. The animals were uncannily quick. Far stronger, pound for pound, than any human being. Capable of sudden rages for which their previous benign behavior had not prepared their human companions. One man had been blinded, and his testicles had been torn off. The friend of a woman who kept a hundred-pound chimp had all her fingers bitten off, her eyes gouged out, and her face torn off in less than two minutes of unimaginable terror.

  “Me is name Good Boy. Me loves dada-mama.” It cocked its head at Amity where she sheltered behind Jeffy. “Good Boy think you not
belongs here.” The creature hissed its judgment so venomously that Jeffy steeled himself for an attack.

  At the back of the house, a window shattered.

  Good Boy’s attention at once shifted from Jeffy and Amity to the kitchen. Its nostrils flared and it bared its formidable teeth. With a fierce shriek, the monster flung itself past them, slammed through the swinging door and out of sight.

  Jeffy grabbed his daughter’s hand, and they dashed into the foyer.

  A pane in the front door shattered, clear blades of glass slicing through the air, chips like sleet glittering in arcs. As the sparkling debris splashed on the floor, the rataplan of rain grew louder. A man reached inside to feel for the deadbolt thumb turn.

  Before the police could force entry, Jeffy and Amity raced up the stairs, desperate for a fourteen-second haven.

  A shrill, inhuman cry arose from the back of the house, Good Boy in a bestial rage. No men cried out in response and no shots were fired, because the objects of the miscreation’s fury were not the authorities but instead the two intruders who, in its excitement and bad judgment, it had allowed farther into dada-mama’s house.

  When they reached the landing and started up the second flight of stairs, Jeffy heard the creature slam through the swinging door between the kitchen and the hall, and then the slap of its feet on the wood floor. By the time they crossed the topmost step, he could tell by sound alone that Good Boy was gaining on them, keening as it came, and he dared not look back.

  Just past the head of the stairs were a door to the left and another to the right. He pushed Amity into the room on the right, followed her. A bedroom. No lock, just the simple latch bolt that a twist of the knob would open. He braced his back against the closed door, which wasn’t flimsy Masonite but a solid-core construct, so it might withstand assault.

  An instant later, Good Boy crashed into the far side, yattering incoherently, rattling the knob, pounding hard, now squealing like a soulless thing that fed on the souls of others. A sudden silence. It hadn’t retreated, merely backed off. Abruptly it challenged the barrier again, threw itself across the hall with tremendous force, the door quaking-cracking as if with the impact of three hundred pounds instead of at most a hundred. Heedless of injury to itself, the fiend cried out not in pain but in fury at the failure of the attempt, and then it tried again.

  The door bucked, and Jeffy was jolted harder than before, an inch-wide gap opening along the jamb. Good Boy’s shrieks were louder and more ferocious, but Jeffy pushed back with everything he had, closing the gap. And here came Amity with a straight-backed chair taken from the vanity. She knew what needed to be done, and she had the courage to do it. She was no coward, never had been. She tilted the chair, jammed the headrail under the knob, bracing the door, a kid with the right stuff.

  As Jeffy stepped away from the fortified barrier, men shouted to one another, and footsteps boomed on the stairs. Police and their black-clad overseers were coming fast. In spite of the chair, they would break down the door because they were trained how to do it, break it down or shoot their way into the room. They wouldn’t care if he and Amity were wounded. This wasn’t the America where law enforcement had rules of engagement and answered to police-review boards, where the vast majority of those who became cops did so to serve and protect; this was an America where fascists didn’t pretend to be antifascists, didn’t conceal their faces behind black masks, operated openly and boldly; this was an America ruled by brute intimidation, harassment, and violence.

  Trembling, his emotional compass just one degree south of panic, mentally cursing himself for having consented to Amity’s request to see her mother—who was not in fact her mother, but a stranger, a Michelle from a different Earth, another planet—Jeffy fumbled in the wrong jacket pocket for the key to everything.

  Agitated voices in the hallway. The doorknob rattled.

  He found the right pocket, the fearsome device.

  Amity stayed at his side, her left hand on his arm.

  Someone kicked hard, and the chair clattered against the knob, but the door held.

  Jeffy pressed the home circle on the device.

  The screen remained black. Maybe four seconds. That’s what it had previously taken to activate. Just four seconds.

  Good Boy shrieking.

  Amity cried out, “Dad!”

  Beyond the rain-streaked window, the creature bounced up and down on the porch roof, his shadow leaping with him as lightning flared, capering like the freakish jester in the court of a mad monarch in a tale about an evil kingdom.

  Impatiently, Jeffy pressed the home circle again before he realized that the screen had filled with soft gray light. It went black. He had turned it off.

  “Shit!”

  As someone kicked the door harder and some part of the bracing chair cracked, Jeffy pressed the home circle.

  Another four-second wait.

  The window glass exploded into the room, and Good Boy clambered across the sill, eyes wild and teeth bared, dripping rain, oblivious of the shards of glass still bristling in the frame.

  “Daddy!”

  The hideous mascot of the Justice Wolves had smashed the window with a fireplace poker perhaps taken from another bedroom. Now the hateful thing sprang at Jeffy, holding the pointed brass poker in both hands, like a spear with which it intended to stab through his gut and shatter his spine.

  Once more, the screen turned gray, but there were no buttons yet.

  Jeffy dodged, and the goblin drove the poker into the footboard of the bed, splitting a handsome inlaid panel of oak burl, but also colliding hard with his intended target. Jeffy stumbled and fell. The key to everything slipped from his hand and tumbled across the carpet, as he and Amity simultaneously said, “Shit!”

  24

  Good Boy was a total demonic whack job, like some orc straight out of the bowels of Mordor, not only physically horrific, but also a mental mess, neither as smart as a boy nor as intuitive as an ape. In that moment when Daddy fell and the fabulous key flipped across the floor to the nightstand, the freak could have attacked them, strong as it was, could have bitten them and gouged out their eyes and torn off their ears in a murderous frenzy, but it was fixated on the fireplace poker, which it had driven clean through the footboard of the bed and now struggled to extract. You might have thought this rain-soaked hairy mutant must be familiar with the legend of good King Arthur and imagined that the poker stuck in the wood was its version of the magic sword Excalibur locked in stone, with a throne as the reward for anyone who was able to pull it free. Good Boy worked the poker up and down, back and forth, spitting, hissing, shrieking like a wild animal, but also cursing like a boy who had fallen in with the wrong crowd and given himself to all kinds of vices that would have shocked dada-mama.

  Such noise, cacophony. The hard rush of rain and the crack of thunder, the boot kicking and kicking the defiant door, someone shouting “Police,” the transspecies laboratory-born thing snarling and shrieking . . .

  In the grip of a terror that motivated rather than paralyzed her, heart knocking so hard that her vision pulsed, Amity went after the key and plucked it off the carpet and turned to her father. Daddy got to his feet as the bracing chair cracked and came apart.

  The door flew open, knocking the remains of the chair aside, and the big uniformed man at the threshold, who had done all the kicking, froze for a moment, as if surprised by his own success. A smaller guy pushed past the kicker, one of the thugs who dressed in soft, black fatigues. He had the face of a weasel, the eyes of a snake, and a pistol in hand.

  The three buttons glowed on the screen, the entire multiverse awaiting her, infinite worlds with infinite dangers.

  “Blue,” Daddy said, which was labeled Home, and though the goon in black surely didn’t know what the key to everything could do,
he said, “Drop it,” and aimed his pistol at her.

  Daddy reached out and put a hand on her shoulder as her finger descended toward blue. The sudden collapse of the chair and the door crashing open had broken the ape-boy’s obsession with the poker stuck in the footboard. Screeching, it flung itself at Amity and her father. The thing clutched Daddy’s arm to pull him down, and Amity pressed the button.

  They had thought perhaps skin needed to be touching skin—or mouse fur—in order for a passenger to accompany the holder of the key. However, Daddy’s hand was on her jacket, and Good Boy’s hand clutched Daddy’s sleeve, and Snowball remained in Amity’s pocket when the bedroom vanished, leaving all of them seeming almost to float in a white void, a snowy nothingness, glimmering flakes passing through them, like radiation that they could see.

  Being penetrated by snow scared the bejesus out of the freak, and though it held fast to Daddy with one hand, it covered its eyes with its other hand and curled its lip over its lower teeth and issued a miserable wail of terror.

  As before, with a whoosh, the veil of light blew away. They were in the bedroom again. Not exactly the same bedroom. No police, no thug in black, no ruined chair, no shattered window. No storm darkened the sky. The furniture was placed pretty much as before, but the pieces were more harmonious and the fabrics subtler than those in the bedroom from which they had just come. Whoever lived here in Earth Prime had much better taste than dada-mama, whose decor had favored a carnival of chintz and plaids and damask to match the riotous colors of their English garden.

  In the sudden silence, Good Boy lowered its hand from its face and opened its eyes. However limited its intelligence and therefore its imagination might be, the freak knew at once that something big had happened, that it was in the same room yet not the same, that it was in a different reality. Baffled, it glanced at the door, where no chair lay broken, where no cop or guy in black loomed menacingly. It looked at the window, which hadn’t been shattered, beyond which no rain fell and no lightning flashed, and slowly its expression of astonishment soured.