He would have preferred to direct the flashlight himself. But until he understood why this place warranted a skull and crossbones, he would keep the pistol in a two-handed grip. Amity did well enough, first sweeping the space to get an overall sense of it, then probing odd shapes and suspicious corners with quick efficiency.

In the hallway, the ceiling plasterboard swagged, and the stained wallpaper scrolled off the walls in places, evidence of water damage caused by a roof leak or the failure of the plumbing. Veins of dark mold branched in varicose patterns on the baseboard.

At the head of the stairs, they stood listening. Although Jeffy expected that such a decrepit house should be alive with settling noises as it ever so slowly crumbled toward ruin, the silence was complete until they started down the warped treads of the staircase, which groaned and creaked under them.

Downstairs, the front door lay on the foyer floor, wrenched from its mountings with such violence that the frame leafs of the hinges had been torn out of the jamb, buckled as if they were made of tinfoil. Someone had been determined to get inside.

Someone or something.

That thought would have seemed ludicrous a mere two days ago. Monsters were for spooky movies and novels, not part of real life—until Good Boy. And whatever might be responsible for this world being declared a hostile timeline, it must be something far worse than that pathetic ape-human hybrid.

With the light, Amity broomed the living room beyond the archway and then the ground-floor hallway behind them, where the ruin and decay matched that on the second floor.

They stepped past the fallen door, out of the house, onto the porch. At the head of the four steps to the front walk, they stood listening, watchful.

In this world, as in their own, Shadow Canyon Lane lacked streetlamps. At such a dead hour of the night, Jeffy would not have expected to see signs of life in any of his neighbors’ houses unless someone suffered from a case of the whim-whams, which modern life so often inspired, and was unable to sleep. Therefore, the absence of light in all those windows didn’t disturb him.

Fresh apprehension arose instead from a sense, at first intuitive, that the night was darker than ever before. As always, the diamond-bright stars offered no significant illumination. The downbound moon was still afloat, but screened by higher branches of the oaks, which concealed its roundness and revealed only fragments of its glow. Although the houses along the lane were usually pale-gray shapes at this hour, they were less visible now, as if the very darkness had condensed on their walls as surely as dew formed a film on other nights. The gloom was such that he thought, but couldn’t confirm, that all the structures, including their bungalow across the street, were in disrepair, perhaps abandoned.

As they descended the steps, observation confirmed intuition when he looked to the west—southwest, due west, northwest—and realized that the electric incandescence of the citied coast was gone, as though the many hundreds of thousands who lived from San Clemente in the south to Huntington Beach in the north had turned off all the lights and gone away.

On both sides of the front walkway, what once had been a well-tended lawn had become a tangled weed patch.

Amity said, “What happened to all the people?”

He had no answer. As his perplexity darkened into foreboding, he halted and took the key to everything from his pocket and touched the home circle at the bottom of the screen.

The device filled with soft gray light, and Amity said, “What are you doing?”

He didn’t want to go farther into this world. If Shadow Canyon Lane, their bungalow, their safe corner of the world now was—and for some time had been—uninhabited and crumbling into ruins, if Suavidad Beach was a ghost town, whatever had depopulated it might still be active—whether a disease, a death cult of deranged people, or some strange beast no other world had known.

Without need of an explanation, Amity understood what he meant to do. “No, Dad, no, we don’t dare jump back to Prime from here. You said there were at least like a dozen of those freaking bad guys back there. And now they know for sure we have the key, so they’ll lock down Shadow Canyon Lane. If we go back, we’re like totally screwed.”

“So then we have to jump to another world,” he said, tapping the SELECT button, “any world that doesn’t come with a skull and crossbones.”

But he hesitated when the keyboard appeared. Earth 1.13 hadn’t rated a hostile-timeline warning, and yet the world of Good Boy had been as rife with danger as any he could have conceived before the damn key to everything had been entrusted to him. No matter where he and Amity went next, they would be flying blind. They might jump into the middle of a firefight or worse.

She extracted something from a pocket of her jeans, displaying it on the palm of her hand, focusing the flashlight on it. “I found this yesterday.”

For a moment, he didn’t understand what she was showing him. Then he realized she held three teeth in a fragment of jawbone.

She said, “They were in the grass. The park by the beach. You were on a bench, reading Harkenbach’s book. There were a lot of brass cartridges in the grass. I think maybe people were executed there. These teeth must’ve belonged to someone who was executed.”

Looking from the grisly relic to his daughter’s face, Jeffy realized that she had depths until now unknown to him. “Why didn’t you show me then?”

“I wanted to go to that house on Bastoncherry and meet my mother. I knew if you saw these, you’d take us straight back to Prime. I did wrong, I guess.”

“You guess, huh?”

“Yeah, well, I never want to go back to that world.” She flung the teeth away into the weeds. “But if we jump now to someplace new, just to get out of here, maybe it’ll be even worse than that crazy sewer of a world with its Good Boys and Justice Wolves.”

“Maybe right here is worse. It sure seems worse to me.”

Amity slowly turned her head, surveying the night as though she were equipped with bad-guy radar. “Whatever happened here was a major crap storm, but it’s done. It’s over.”

“We don’t know that it’s over,” he disagreed.

“With this much quiet, it had to be over long ago.”

“Quiet is always a lure, and then the trap springs.”

“Not in every scene of every story. ‘He who fears to take a risk will never know reward.’”

“We’re not going to stand here quoting our favorite heroes at each other.”

“Good,” she said. “Let’s go into town and find a place that’ll be safe when we jump back to Prime.”

His soft laughter was genuine, if bleak. He would protect her at any cost. He only wished he knew when the bill would come due.

“Okay, you win. But sometimes I worry that unwittingly I’m raising a lawyer.” He pressed CANCEL on the screen, and the keypad vanished, and the device went dark, and he pocketed it.

“Before we go,” Amity said, “do you see that weird car in the driveway?”

He’d been peripherally aware of the vehicle, off to the right, but in the blanketing dark, he’d not discerned anything especially strange about it.

Stepping off the brick walk, making her way through the tall grass and weeds, Amity played the beam of her flashlight over the sedan.

Following her, Jeffy felt a frisson of fear quiver across his scalp and down his spine, not because anything about the car was overtly ominous, but because it was as anachronistic as would have been Alexander Graham Bell making the first telephone call with an Apple iPhone. The car revealed something about this timeline that was as important as it was at first impossible for him to compute.

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.”