46

An all-encompassing whiteness. A blizzard of light. Bright particles passing through them by the millions.

While in transit, maybe they were outside of time, outside of space-time where God resided. Or maybe they were speeding through a black hole, a wormhole, some kind of space-time tunnel that served as a shortcut between universes. Jeffy didn't want to think about that because it scared the shit out of him; it was a lot scarier than just stepping through the back of a wardrobe into Narnia or being sucked into the virtual reality of a Jumanji video game or riding a mystery train to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

He felt something this time that he hadn't felt during their previous two jaunts, which had been to and from Earth 1.13. He felt that he and Amity had been dissolved into a soup of atoms and were about to be reassembled at their destination, that while en route, they were not flesh-and-blood people, but only data streams, a set of plans for replicating Jeffy and Amity Coltrane in their daunting complexity. Well, he didn't truly feel this. He wasn't aware of disintegrating; he experienced no pain. He suspected this might be happening, and if indeed it was, he was adamantly opposed to it, not to the reassembly, no, but to the disintegration in the first place, not that he could do anything about it.

With a soft whoosh, the blizzard of light blew away, as before. They were in the walk-in closet of the master bedroom of the Bonner house, across the street from their cozy bungalow, seemingly where they had begun, but in fact seventy-seven universes away.

The only light issued from the key to everything. The keypad had disappeared, but the word WARNING and the skull-and-crossbones remained on the screen for a moment before being replaced by the admonition HOSTILE TIMELINE: ADVISE RETREAT. Under those ominous words, the only button offered was blue and labeled HOME.

"We can't retreat," Amity said. "On our world, the bad guys are in the closet, they have us trapped. If we go back there, we're done for sure, we're caught, we're toast."

Here, the closet door stood open, but no one loomed at the threshold. The dark bedroom lay beyond.

Jeffy said, "Maybe we just stay right where we are, wait a couple hours, then go home."

He knew the problem with that plan even as he proposed it, and Amity knew it, too. "Dad, no, that freaking thug opened the closet door and saw us kneeling together. He said, ‘They're here!' They know for sure we have the key to everything. They aren't going to leave our house or the Bonners' place for days, if they ever leave, waiting for us to return."

When he didn't respond to the advisory to retreat, the screen blinked off.

In the pitch-black consequence, Jeffy realized that the closet smelled different from the closet in their world. Less wholesome. Musty. And a faint scent of something more offensive than mold but not quite identifiable.

Scrabbling in her tote for the flashlight, Amity said, "Do you hear something, I don't hear anything, there's no one in the house, it's super quiet," but the anxiety in her voice and the nervous rush of words suggested either that she thought she had heard a noise or expected to hear something that would unsettle her.

She switched on the flashlight, revealing what the soft glow of the screen had not been bright enough to illuminate. On their world, the Bonners' master bedroom closet contained neatly pressed clothes on hangers and sweaters precisely folded on shelves, polished shoes and belts and ties and colorful scarves and hats all organized and ready for use. But here, the shoes on the lower, slanted shelves were mottled with mold. Garments hung askew, and some were moth-eaten. A layer of dust had settled on everything. In the highest corners, fat spiders crawled their trembling webs, silken structures so elaborate that the current tenants and generations before them must have ruled this space for years, with never a concern of being swept away in a housecleaning.

"What happened to Mr. and Mrs. Bonner?" Amity asked. "They're not just on vacation in this world."

"They're all right. They've gone somewhere safe," Jeffy said, but his reassurances sounded so insincere that he decided to make no more of them, to stick to the truth, or to what little he knew of it. "Doesn't look good, but we can't know for sure."

"Safe from what?" she asked, while the beam of her flashlight tracked the plumpest of the spiders across a gossamer bridge to a larder hung with silk-bound moths and silverfish, provisions against those days when nothing fresh and wriggling ventured into the sticky trap that had been spun for it. "Safe from what?"

"I don't know. What I do know is we've got to leave this place and go somewhere else in town, somewhere that Falkirk and his thugs, back in our world, won't be waiting for us when we return to that timeline."

From the tote, Amity retrieved the pistol and handed it to him.

As they got to their feet, he pocketed the key to everything. "We stay close at all times. Never leave my side."

She nodded, trying to appear brave and collected, and maybe she was both those things, but she was also small, a child, and so very vulnerable.

Jeffy hugged her tightly. "You're the best."

"You, too."

What might wait beyond this closet, seventy-seven worlds away from home, wasn't what most frightened him. His greater fear was that when they returned to Earth Prime, to a part of Suavidad Beach where Falkirk would not be looking for them, they would be fugitives from the law, from whatever deep-state secret police Falkirk had at his disposal. And they would have no vehicle, little money, no one to whom they dared turn for help.