27

Pistol at the ready, stepping into the hallway, Jeffy saw the ladder at the farther end from the stairs, a counterweighted folding model attached to a ceiling trapdoor from which dangled a pull cord. Good Boy had leaped and seized the cord and pulled down the ladder. The creature had climbed up where perhaps it had in days past spent time haunting that raftered space in the version of this house that existed on Earth 1.13.

Jeffy had no intention of following the freak into that dark, higher realm. But if he lifted the lowest segment of the ladder and gave it a shove, it would automatically fold upward, and the trap would close behind it. Good Boy could still push it open from above, though that was harder than opening it from below and would take more time. The noise would alert them that the beast was coming.

And maybe the thing didn't want to come down. Maybe it wished to stay up there in the dusty dark, with spiders friendlier than the people it knew, up where it had retreated when dada-mama scolded or punished it. The creature's mental landscape must be black and gray, brightened alternately by the lightning of fear and a feeble foxfire of hope never to be fulfilled, a bleak terrain of endless loneliness and confusion. It was forever an outsider, natural to none of the worlds in the multiverse, belonging not even on Earth 1.13, where arrogant men and cruel science had conjured it into being.

Although Good Boy was fearsome, when Jeffy considered its life as an unloved pet or slave—or whatever its owners considered it—pity stirred in him. As he lifted the lowest segment of the ladder and then watched it fold up automatically, he thought, If a man can't understand a monster's suffering, then he's something of a monster himself.

Which was when, from out of a shadowy room to his left, Good Boy attacked him.