50

Suavidad Beach had been quaint and picturesque for most of its existence. Official architectural guidelines were enforced with an array of laws and with the cooperation of a determined historical society. Any new construction or reconstruction that occurred in the commercial zone and in those residential neighborhoods within the historic district would, on completion, look as if they had been there since the founding of the town. Tourists greatly preferred to get away to places that soothed them with the promise of calmer and simpler times—as long as the latest amenities were available behind the well-tended facades.

Jeffy and Amity had ventured only a few steps into the first block of Forest Avenue when they were both seized by the suspicion that the depopulation of the town might be incomplete. As in Gaston Leroux's Paris Opera House, maybe there was at all times a phantom in this labyrinth of streets and passages. If such was the case, the flashlight called attention to them that they could not afford, and she switched it off.

In the subsequent blackout, Jeffy was not easily able to see the subtle differences confirming that an advanced technology lay behind the quaint surface. Where once might have been arrays of traffic lights, however, poles were topped with something that resembled the barrel and flared muzzle of a bazooka. A quick probe with Amity's flashlight revealed that this curious instrument was mounted on an armature allowing it to pivot 360 degrees. Although the thing wasn't a weapon, he couldn't be certain of its function. He wondered if motorists here were not guided by red and yellow and green lights, if perhaps at intersections vehicles were controlled and selected to stop or proceed by microwave transmissions from a traffic-command computer.

All the cars parked at an angle to the curb were variations of the sleek and mysterious conveyance they had seen in the Bonners' driveway, as if models conceived by previous technologies had been outlawed. Within four blocks of Forest Avenue, seven vehicles that had been involved in collisions still stood in the street. Two others had plunged across sidewalks and crashed through storefronts.

The fate that befell the people of this town had been sudden and violent, though perhaps the event had been over in short order. Most shops remained undamaged, displays of desirable merchandise still on offer—if dusty and webbed—in the gloom beyond their windows, evidence that neither rioting nor looting had occurred.

The assumption of apocalyptic violence seemed to require at least a few victims of it. But there were no dead bodies either in the wrecked cars or on the street.

The immense ficus trees from which the avenue took its name, faithfully nurtured in the better version of this town that Jeffy knew and loved, were in some cases parched and dead and fractured by bad weather. An equal number were somewhat leafed out and struggling to survive.

About twenty feet before Forest Avenue ended at Pacific Coast Highway, a child's stroller was overturned on the street. As if the moon were in the service of some satanic set designer, it spilled its silver between the trees, pouring a pool of pale light into a gutter otherwise brimming with darkness. In this lunar pin spot lay a miniature Converse sneaker suitable perhaps for a two-year-old. No other sign remained of the child who'd once worn the black-and-white shoe, nor of the parents who had pushed the stroller.

Jeffy was riveted by this mundane footwear, which seemed to radiate an occult power as might have the first apple in Eden. It didn't tempt him toward transgression, but pierced him with the recognition that he had failed his daughter when he had taken the key to everything from the box that Ed Harkenbach had warned him never to open. And again when he had not returned it to the box the moment that Falkirk and his men had left the house after searching it. Curious about the object's purpose, intrigued by what power might have been instilled in it by the expenditure of seventy-six billion dollars' worth of research, he'd put the damn thing on the kitchen table to indulge his ever-active imagination, his taste for fantasy. If he wanted to blame Snowball, he could not. Imagination combined the products of knowledge in new or ideal forms. Fantasy combined them without regard for reason and rationality—imagination in its lower form. Fantasy enlivened life, but it was best confined to the pages of books and the images on a movie screen, and was often dangerous when it served as the basis for action. He knew this. The novels that he loved frequently told him this truth. But for a few minutes in his kitchen, he had forgotten what he knew—or had wished to forget it. Now Amity's life was at risk, and by his own judgment he was damned forever if she died.

A girl of extraordinary sensitivity, his daughter put a hand on his arm. As if Jeffy had criticized and condemned himself aloud, she said, "The key to everything is spooky old Ed's responsibility, and he messed up. Snowball is my mouse, and he's forbidden to be on the kitchen table, but I didn't control him. So you're not first in line to be spanked and sent to bed without dessert. You're third."

For a moment he didn't trust himself to speak. Her love and understanding humbled him. Then he managed to say, "Bullsugar."

She grinned, and the moonlight made an elf of her. "Let's split this dump."

"Not here," he said. "At home, even at this hour, there'll be a few people taking a walk on Forest Avenue. We can't just materialize in front of them. Especially if one happens to be a policeman on patrol."

"Where then?"

With the key to everything in one hand and the pistol in the other, with his daughter remaining close by his side, Jeffy walked twenty feet to the end of Forest Avenue and stepped onto Pacific Coast Highway.

They were in the flat center of town, with the park across the highway, the beach beyond the park, the deep black ocean rumbling as breakers broke upon the pale sand of the shore.

This close to the water, he felt the barest breath of a cool onshore breeze. It smelled fresh and clean—and then he remembered that in the nearby park, on a parallel world, Amity had found the three teeth in a chunk of jawbone.

The lanes of blacktop rose both to the left and right, littered with half a dozen vehicles, devoid of moving traffic, with not one pedestrian in sight.

To the south, about a block uphill, on the far side of the highway, rose Hotel Suavidad, an Art Deco structure built in the 1930s and renovated several times since. It looked much the same as on their own world, though sleeker in ways that he could not quite define. He and Amity had often eaten dinner in one of the hotel's two restaurants, which overlooked the sea.

"The hotel," he said. "I know just where we can hide out in there to make the jump and not risk being seen when we pop up on Earth Prime."

He couldn't help but consider how absurd those words would have seemed a few days ago, and how sane they sounded now. Oz was always right here, if unseen, waiting only for a tornado or a megabillion-dollar device to be made manifest.

Crossing the wide highway, Jeffy became more aware than he'd been on Forest Avenue that the darkness was uniquely disturbing. Its vastness seemed to confirm not merely the death of a town but also the end of civilization. To Newport Beach in the north and beyond, to San Clemente in the south and beyond, no light rose to dim the gleam of stars. If California was gone, so was the United States, and if the nation was finished, so might be the world.

As they reached the entrance to the hotel, something like a foghorn issued a warning in the distance, a haunting voice that halted Jeffy and Amity. After a few seconds of silence, the note throbbed in a steady rhythm, lower and more reverberant, pulsing through the hollows of the town. Then with the sound came waves of soft purple light, washing across the rooftops, racing over the walls of the buildings, rippling along the pavement like the cleansing tides of an antiseptic rinse.

He felt the sound quivering the marrow of his bones, trembling the blood in his veins, and he felt the light purling through him like a laser scanner reading the spirals of his genome. Some entity yet occupied this Suavidad Beach and suspected their presence. The sound and the light were somehow search instruments. Either he and Amity had already been found or shortly would be.

"Run!"he said, and Amity kept pace with him through the last hundred feet, to the front door of the hotel.