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.