“We have to stop at the library,” her father said.

“What?” The suggestion alarmed her. “Why? That’s where the creep said Snowball wasn’t an appropriate animal.”

“That wasn’t in this world, remember. That was . . . elsewhere.”

“Oh. Yeah. That’s right, huh?” She still felt uneasy.

“We need to check out Ed Harkenbach’s book, Infinite Worlds.”

“You had it already. What happened to it?”

“I dropped it somewhere, maybe scrambling up a garden wall or running from Good Boy. It’s been a pretty physical day, in case you hadn’t noticed. They’ll probably have a copy in this library, too.”

The woman with the Mrs. Frankenstein hair wasn’t at the front desk. The librarian on duty, Mrs. Rockwell, was the wife of Vince Rockwell, who taught history and coached the high school football team.

No faintest scent of burning paper tainted the air. The aisles between the stacks were better lighted than those in the Library of the Weird. A copy of Infinite Worlds: Parallel Universes and Quantum Reality waited where she and her father had found it before.

This time they didn’t informally borrow the book. They took it to the checkout desk, and Daddy presented his library card, and Mrs. Rockwell processed everything properly while chatting about the weather and the latest foolishness in Sacramento. She liked unique earrings, and today she wore a dangly pair of brightly colored enamel parrots.

Mrs. Rockwell seemed totally normal. Amity loved how normal the librarian seemed.

On this beautiful sunny afternoon, the twelfth of April, they had found again the world as it was supposed to be. They were home. They were safe.

THE VISITOR IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT

In more than one world, he has done a great wrong. When he’d been a boy, his mother had taught him always to do the right thing, but he had done the wrong thing with the best of intentions. The wrong is so enormous that he can’t rectify it in all the worlds where it has happened, but he hopes to do a small good here and there to honor the memory of his mother.

Now, in the early morning hours of the eleventh day of April, the same night that he also visits libraries in search of what he needs to know about the Coltranes, he journeys to the oak woods past the end of Shadow Canyon Lane. An hour before dawn, he travels across worlds from the trees around a clearing to the same trees around the same clearing elsewhere, in that specific elsewhere in which Jeffrey Coltrane legally dissolved his marriage to Michelle because she vanished seven years earlier. The existence of this inflatable tent, which he watches from the cover of the oaks, is evidence that there is an Edwin Harkenbach hiding out from the forces of evil in this Suavidad Beach, just as in certain others.

Further evidence is the aroma of strong coffee in the absence of a campfire. The declining moon gives off a smoky light like a sorcerer’s brew steaming from a hot chalice, and the visitor’s eyes take time to adapt to the witchy light before he is able to discern a jerry-rigged battery-powered hot plate in front of the tent. In more than one world, various Harkenbachs have invented this clever appliance to provide a favorite beverage without risking a fire in such dry land.

From within the tent comes whistling that only Edwin Harkenbach would attempt: a signature passage from a Mozart concerto, K. 453. Mozart had once purchased a starling that could whistle K. 453. But in none of the worlds that Harkenbach inhabits is he as talented as the bird.

The visitor doesn’t know if this version of the scientist has interacted with Jeffrey Coltrane, but the possibility is real. Everywhere that he is known to exist, Harkenbach is a sociable man, though in some cases more distressed about his situation than in others. If he and Coltrane are acquainted here, the ground might already have been laid for the success of the visitor’s plan.

The visitor, who is Ed Harkenbach from a parallel world, could approach this version of himself and collude with him to ensure the success of his mission here, but he has no intention of doing that. In some worlds, sad to say, there are versions of himself who have come unglued because of what he’s done and because of being hunted by agents of the shadow state. It’s too distressing—and potentially dangerous—for this Ed to come face-to-face with one of those Eds.

Before the Harkenbach on this world might throw back the tent flap and step into sight, the visiting Ed makes his way through the woods, which are familiar to him, and proceeds downslope to Shadow Canyon Lane. This neighborhood lacks streetlamps, and the last hour of night suits him well as he walks past the widely separated, dark houses.

The Coltranes, father and daughter and mouse, are early risers. Their bungalow is the only residence with light in some windows.

The visitor quietly makes his way around the side of the house to one of the kitchen windows. Together, father and daughter are making breakfast.

Jeffrey is dressed for the day, but Amity still wears Rocket Raccoon pajamas. He is cracking eggs into a bowl, evidently with the intention of scrambling them. The girl is preparing bread for the toaster, trimming the crusts off the slices for herself but leaving those for her father in their natural condition.

The visitor is thrilled to think how profoundly Jeffrey’s and Amity’s lives will be changed within the next few days. The key to everything has shown him horrific worlds of blood and terror and catastrophe. Now he looks forward to what he can bring into the lives of these two innocents.

Dawn will soon brighten the horizon on this eleventh day of April.

31

The sight of the little stone house with the slate roof, in the shadows of the breeze-stirred palms, filled Amity with nothing less than joy, really and truly. Her heart seemed to swell, and she felt impossibly light, like a helium-filled balloon, as if her feet were barely touching the ground, as if instead she were gliding up the flagstone walkway.

There wasn’t a Daddy Doppelg?nger mowing the lawn. Birds sat on the fence, singing as if to welcome her, and a cute little lizard skittered up the walkway, leading her home.

Inside, she rushed to her room. It wasn’t empty, as it had been on Earth 1.13. Her furniture stood where it belonged. Anime posters. Yellow walls and white ceiling, instead of everything dreary beige. In this world, she had been born and lived, and a snotty boy named Rudy Starkman—in a uniform for wannabe fascists or communists or whatever—had never existed.

She extracted Snowball from her pocket and took him to his enormous cage. Safe within that wire fortress, he scampered to his water dish, took a drink, pooped in a corner where he usually left his little pellets, and then went to his exercise wheel. He ran like a maniac, his face squinched up strangely, more intense than usual, as if he might be stressed out and trying to find his bliss again.

Of course Snowball’s brain was too tiny for him to have a clue that he had been to another world and back. Nevertheless, he might be somewhat psychic and aware of the extreme emotional chaos that Amity had endured. Animals often seemed to have a sixth sense, or maybe it was just instinct.

“I won’t put you through that again,” she promised the furry white marathoner. “But just remember, you’re the one who activated the key to everything and parked your bottom on the RETURN button.”

As she stepped out of her room, she was skewered by a needle of paranoia, suddenly certain that Good Boy waited in the hallway for her. She didn’t have hackles, not like dogs did, but the nape of her neck prickled; and if she’d been equipped with hackles, they would have been standing up straight and stiff.

She knew Good Boy was dead. Daddy had said so. Evidently, she was suffering post-traumatic stress. She would probably be looking for bogeymen under the bed for weeks and weeks.

Not that she would let her father know she was still spooked. Mother—Michelle—had been afraid of losing her identity, destiny, dreams, or something, and she had run out on her husband and child. Amity was never going to run from anything, unless it had big teeth and there was murder in its eyes. She didn’t want her father to entertain the slightest doubt about her.

She heard him in the kitchen and went to see what he might be doing. He was sitting at the breakfast table with Ed Harkenbach’s book and a bottle of beer.

The key to everything lay on the table.

Indicating her father’s Heineken, Amity said, “I’ll have one, too.”

“Yeah, okay, as long as the word Coke is on the label.”

She retrieved a can of the parent-approved beverage from the refrigerator and sat at the table. “Why’re you reading that?”

“To find answers to some questions, if there are any answers.”

“Like what questions?”

“The key doesn’t have a charging port. There must be a battery, but there’s nothing that opens so you can replace it. What happens if you’re on some other world and this gismo goes dead?”