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 standing 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 doppelg?nger, a ghostly double of a living person. She and Daddy had once read a story about a doppelg?nger, and things hadn't gone well for the luckless living man whose place in the world the freaking doppelg?nger 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 doppelg?nger 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.

Watching the man with the mower, she shuddered. "This isn't our house. It's his house."

"He's me," her father said with a note of astonishment, but under the circumstances, Amity could forgive him for stating the obvious. Really and truly, she could.

She stepped back from the window, afraid of being seen by the doppelg?nger if he should look up from the lawn. Surveying this transformed space, she said, "My room isn't my room. There's nothing in it that belongs to me. Maybe I've never lived here. Either Mom took me away with her—"

"I'd never have allowed that."

"—or you never married her and I was never born."

When she glanced at her father, she wished she hadn't. His shocked expression, the horror in his eyes, the sudden softness of his mouth and the way it trembled nearly undid her.

Holding out one hand, she said, "Let me see the stupid thing, the key, the whatever."

He showed it to her but didn't give her the device. Three on-screen buttons offered HOME, SELECT, RETURN. In smaller letters, a data bar at the bottom provided information even harder to confidently interpret than the words on the buttons: ELSEWHERE 1.13—CATALOGED.

"You know what I'm thinking?" he whispered, as if the other Jeffy Coltrane mowing the yard might hear.

"Oh, yeah. I know what you're thinking," she assured him.

"Crazy as it sounds, I'm thinking ..."

"Parallel worlds."

"Yeah. Parallel worlds."

"That's what I knew you were thinking."

"It can't be true."

"But maybe it is."

A significant number of big-brain physicists, maybe half, believed there were an infinite number of universes, in fact new ones springing into existence all the time. In this multiverse were other Earths—call our planet Earth Prime—where history had taken different turns from the history of our world. Some Earths would be almost identical to Earth Prime except for small things, like maybe no one ever invented hair spray and everyone looked windblown all the time; however, some were sure to be radically different.

One thing you could bet on: The greater the difference between Earth Prime and another Earth, the more dangerous a place it would be for Amity and her father. They had read a few fantasies set in parallel worlds, and the body count among the cast of characters tended to be higher than in those stories about witches and dragons and trolls who lived under bridges.

Like most people, Amity had now and then stood between two parallel mirrors and had seen infinite receding images of herself. Could there really and truly be an endless series of worlds with countless Amity Coltranes?

Stepping away from the window, Daddy stared at the key to everything. He said, "Shit."

Her father didn't often resort to such language. Amity wasn't yet allowed to use that word; it was reserved for grown-ups, so they could sound more mature than children. But she figured that she'd soon be saying shit frequently, because current dire circumstances were going to require her to grow up fast.

"It seems obvious," Daddy said, "that all we have to do to get back to where we belong is press the button marked HOME."

"In stories," Amity said, "you know what happens when the best thing to do seems obvious and so then the good guys do it."

"They find themselves in even deeper shit."

"Yeah. And the cast grows smaller."

Her father's face had gone ghastly pale under his tan, so that his complexion had turned a disturbing grayish brown. He glanced at the window, at the screen of the device, the window, the screen. "It would help us if we knew more about the guy who invented this damn thing, how he thought, what he might mean by home, select, return."

"Spooky old Edwin Harkenbach. Google him."

"Yeah. Google. We will. But maybe we better get out of here before I ... before the other me finishes mowing the yard and comes inside for a nice glass of iced tea."

The screen of the key to everything went dark.

"We'll walk into town," Daddy said. "We can use the computer at the library to search for Ed."

The thought of going into this alternate version of Suavidad Beach excited Amity as much as it scared her, not solely or even primarily because it might be intriguingly different, an adventure. If Michelle Jamison still lived here, if she had never met and married Jeffy Coltrane in this world, if she hadn't married anyone else, and if her dream of being a successful musician had never been fulfilled, she would be like thirty-three, and maybe ready for a change. Perhaps she could fall in love with Daddy and come with them to Suavidad Prime, where she would have a daughter who missed her and wanted to love her. She wouldn't be the kind of Michelle who would walk out on them. That's what Amity believed. If you believed hard enough, you could shape the future. Sometimes in the real world as in stories, there were happy endings, even improbable ones.

When the mower engine shut off, Daddy said, "Let's go."

Amity tucked Snowball in a pocket of her denim jacket.

In the hallway, he halted at a poster from 1935, a Deco image of the French Line ship Normandie, advertising its transatlantic service from Southampton, England, to New York.

"I sold this years ago," he said.

"Not in this world," Amity said.

Their eyes met, and in each other they saw an awareness of the profound strangeness of their situation, which had the effect of doubling their amazement and anxiety.

He hurried toward the front door, and she stayed at his heels, wondering if another Amity lived with her mother somewhere in town, and what would happen if she came face-to-face with that other self.

The thought induced a sharp if transient pain in her heart, as though some wicked voodooist somewhere had stuck a pin in an Amity doll.

Daddy took a lightweight jacket from the foyer closet and pocketed the key to everything.

Out the front door, across the porch, down the steps, onto Shadow Canyon Lane, left toward Oak Hollow Road and Suavidad Beach.

The heavens low and gray and mottled black. The air still and heavy, oppressed by the weight of the pending storm.

Crows wheeled across the sky, dozens of them in constantly shifting configurations that seemed to mean something, if only she had been a witch who could read the ephemeral script of birds in flight.