49

Because Daddy liked old things—Chiparus sculptures, Clarice Cliff ceramics, Art Deco posters—he was naturally in love with really old cars like Cords and Tuckers and Auburns and Grahams, makes that went out of business decades ago, as well as '36 Fords and '40 Cadillacs and all that. He couldn't afford to own an expensive collectible car, but he had shelves of books about them.

Now and then, his automotive magazines featured articles about car shows where companies revealed concept drawings and even mock-ups of the conveyances of the future, which always looked like you might be able to fly them to the moon. The vehicle in the Bonners' driveway was one of those, but more so: low and sleek, but also curvy in a way cars had never managed to be both before. It appeared seamless, a single piece, not assembled from parts. No visible door handles. No drip molding. No gas-tank door. The windows seemed to be made of the same material as the body; Amity's flashlight couldn't penetrate them, though she assumed that if you were inside, you could see out.

She followed her father around to the front of the car, which had no grille, no vents of any kind. If there were headlights and signal lights, they were flush with the body and appeared to be made of the same material as the rest of the vehicle.

"No license plate," he said.

She said, "No side mirrors."

"There doesn't seem to be a hood to open."

"Maybe it's not a car."

He said, "It's a car, all right."

"It looks like it could levitate."

She had the creepy feeling that someone was inside the vehicle, watching them through the windshield that was opaque from this side.

Not likely. If someone was in there, he was dead; and he'd been dead for a long time, having rotted away or been mummified. The whole neighborhood felt like a graveyard. The darkness to the west, where all the lights should have been, suggested that Suavidad Beach was at best a ghost town, at worst a cemetery full of corpses.

Daddy wiped a hand across the shape of a fender. "No dust. As if somebody washed it just an hour ago."

Amity played the flashlight beam across the driveway. Leaves and litter covered the pavement, and stiff weeds flourished through the cracks. If this car had been driven recently, the weeds would be flattened and the dry leaves crushed—but they weren't.

The overhanging oak tree shed a leaf and then another. They fell onto what should have been the hood of the vehicle. The instant they landed, they were flung away, each in a different direction, as though conflicting currents of a breeze swept them off the car, though the strange night remained as still as it was dark.

"The thing repels stuff. It cleans itself," said Amity.

To test that assertion, her father bent down and scooped up a handful of the small oval leaves and threw them on the hood. They whirled off the smooth, clean surface, exploded past him and Amity like a swarm of winged beetles, and rained down on the yard.

Daddy sounded spooked when he said, "I don't get it. This technology is at least thirty years beyond anything we have today."

"It's totally Bradbury," she agreed, referring to one of her favorite science-fiction authors.

Her father shook his head. "But in Ed's book, he says that when you move from one parallel world to another, it's always exactly the same time, down to the minute, the second. It's impossible to travel into the past or the future, only sideways. He made that clear. He was very convincing."

Daddy knew as well as Amity did that scientists could be wrong. In fact, they were wrong more often than they were right. They were human beings, after all. She knew a lot of things, not just fantasy fiction. She knew her share of history, and some of the things that scientists believed three hundred years ago or a hundred years ago, or even fifty, were weird and sometimes laughable.

Nothing to laugh about now, however. If they had not just crossed from one timeline to another, but had also jumped into the future, maybe they would never be able to get back to their world in the decade—or the century!—in which they had been living.

Although she really and truly tried to be positive, to avoid the negative thinking that led to unhappy endings, she said, "We're screwed."

Looking at the Bonners' house, her father said, "We aren't screwed."

"We're so screwed," she begged to differ.

"I'd prefer if you'd stop using that expression. It's crude."

"You know, some of the alternatives are a lot worse." She was sorry for her tone of voice, wondering if it was fear that made her sound like a sulky teenager before her time.

"And some are better," he said.

For too long, with the creepy night all around and filled with who-knew-what horrors, her father stared at the house as if it were a pyramid half buried in the sands of Egypt, a mystery wrapped in an enigma.

Finally he turned to her again. "Listen, what if we didn't travel forward in time, after all? What if the technology of this world just advanced a lot faster than on Earth Prime? Scientific discoveries could've occurred decades earlier, piled on top of one another, speeding everything along."

She hoped that was true. She didn't want to return to Prime only to discover that Justin Dakota, the boy who might be marriage material, was now ninety years old with a pacemaker and robot knees. "But if they have cars like this, Dad, there would be all kinds of cool tech in the house, stuff we've never seen before."

"Maybe there was. Underneath all the ruin. We got out of there so fast, we didn't take time to look."

That could be true. She didn't want to go back into the house to investigate. It wasn't welcoming like the Bonners' house in her world. This Victorian hulk was freaky and decaying, like a place out of a Poe story, a house that might sink into a tarn or suddenly be full of partygoers wearing costumes and masks, hiding from the Red Death, yet already diseased and bleeding from every orifice.

"Come on," her father said. "Let's get done with this. Let's go into town and find a place where we can jump back to a location in Prime where Falkirk and his thugs won't be waiting for us."

As they proceeded along the lane, the stars glittered as sharp as ice picks, and the cratered eyes of the moon watched them through the screen of trees. When they reached Oak Hollow Road, the four lanes of blacktop were deserted except for a few abandoned vehicles as futuristic as the one in the Bonners' driveway. The oaks fell back from the highway, and the unmasked moon seemed to move through the sky to match their progress—pocked, pale, inscrutable, and indifferent.