“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.

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.