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.

51

The stainless-steel revolving door, with its four compartments, required no power other than human effort. It spun them smoothly off the sidewalk into a large vestibule, where the flashlight revealed a dead palm tree in a center planter. An upscale women’s dress shop lay to the left, a men’s store to the right, display windows peopled by mannequins wearing once-stylish clothes that moths and rot had converted into rags.

At the end of the vestibule, they pushed through another door into what Jeffy knew would be the lobby with its marble floor and columns. The generous space was indeed pretty much as it had been in his world, but here it served also as a repository for human skulls.

Shock and horror brought him and Amity up short. On both sides of a pathway that had been left open, fleshless skulls were piled in ascending mounds, brain box on brain box, sans brains, sloping up to the left and right. Thousands of lipless and eternal grins. Hollow sockets blind to the atrocity of which they were a testament. The registration counter, the bellhops’ station, the concierge’s desk were buried under drifts of white bone, the discarded craniums of adults and children, gender and race and age stripped away with the flesh, yet in such numbers that were the definition of holocaust.

“Oh, shit,” Amity said.

“Don’t look,” he said.

But the grim collection was so encompassing, so compelling, that nothing else could command attention, nor was this a place where they would dare to close their eyes.

He pivoted back the way they had come and looked through the nearer doors, through the vestibule, through the outer doors. Soft purple light no longer washed the night, and he couldn’t hear the throbbing foghorn sound.

That didn’t mean they could venture outside again. Something was coming. A sound like screaming aircraft. Like jets inbound with their payloads.

Still holding the pistol but pocketing the key to everything, he grabbed his daughter’s hand. “It’s like Halloween at Knott’s, at Disneyland, think of it that way, plastic skulls and nothing real.”

She couldn’t deceive herself any more than he could, and God knew what damage this was doing to her psyche, to her soul, but he could think of nothing else to say.

They hurried along the path between the skulls, to a hallway off the lobby, to the elevators. Beyond the elevators were spacious public restrooms, from one of which he intended to make the jump out of this timeline to the one where they belonged. At 3:20 a.m., there would be no restaurant customers or arriving hotel guests who might be using those facilities when he and Amity materialized on Earth Prime.

He yanked open the men’s-room door and urged the girl in after him. Across the threshold, the flashlight revealed that whatever the nature of those who had done this, they were violent in the extreme and mad beyond the power of analysis. Here, the trophies were not skulls but human spines, curved configurations of barren vertebrae stacked everywhere, filling the toilet stalls. The chamber of skulls had contained no foul odor of which he’d been aware; but a stench filled this room. The meninges membranes as well as the gray and white matter of the spinal cords had dissolved, leaked through the vertebrae, and puddled the floor, providing a breeding ground for a foul black mold that thrived in lumpish colonies from end to end of the lavatory.