“Sorry, oh Jesus, sorry,” Jeffy chanted, pulling Amity from the room. The flashlight swooped wildly across dense abstract patterns of the interlocked vertebrae of countless stacked and tangled spines, which seemed like an intricate alien life form that might suddenly twitch and come awake and lurch at them.

In the hall again, he didn’t make a move toward the door of the women’s restroom, for he was sure that it would contain more spines or something worse. Were there trophy rooms containing skeletal arms and hands, others for hips and leg bones, for rib cages? Who flensed the flesh from the murdered bodies? Or was that work done while the victims still lived? Who unhinged the dead into their separate parts? Who boiled thousands of skulls to make them pristine white and presentable for the lobby display?

A clatter arose from the front entrance of the hotel. He was too far away to see the cause. Something was coming.

His heart knocked as if on Heaven’s door.

Holding Amity close against him, he realized they had to get out of sight. No way in hell would they go outside and face whatever forces were gathering there. Assume the ground floor of the building and maybe a few levels above it were boneyards. The hotel was seven stories high. They had to go up.

“The stairs,” he said, and Amity sprinted to the labeled door, with him close behind.

Jeffy had no illusions about the human potential for evil, but this seemed to be insanity far in excess of any human obsession ever recorded. No men or women could sustain so long the fierce intensity of hatred necessary to do all of this. A legion of sociopaths would have been required to slaughter and process so many thousands, maybe millions. The explanation could not be human, and he hoped to escape this place before he was confronted by the answer.

52

They went all the way to the fourth floor. The building was old, constructed in the days when things were built to last, so the stairs were concrete, not metal. As Jeffy and Amity ascended, the most noise they made was their rapid breathing.

The fire doors at each floor stood open, their self-closure mechanisms having been disabled. The main hallway on the fourth floor was narrower than in a more modern hotel, the carpet a pale celadon marked by stains of some kind, although none that looked like blood.

On both sides, the regularly spaced doors stood open, as though a search had once been conducted. The flashlight revealed not one trove of bones, only hotel rooms with beds and chairs and dressers.

“Where?” Amity asked.

Whoever or whatever was coming, they or it would sweep the building from bottom to top. An idea struck Jeffy. Although it might be a useless gambit if the searchers had technology that could read the heat signature of a human being through a wall, he enlisted Amity to help him execute it.

“You take the left, I’ll take the right, close all the doors.”

Perhaps because a window was broken out at the end of the hall, allowing salty sea air to enter, the hinges of the doors were badly corroded. The knuckles of the barrels grated noisily and stubbornly against the pintles, but the hinges worked.

When the task was quickly done, Jeffy led Amity to a room on the east side of the building, halfway along the corridor. He said, “Flashlight off,” and took her inside and closed the door. When searchers arrived on this floor, they were likely to start at one end of the hall and work toward the other.

At the two windows, heavy draperies were sagging and ripe with mold, but they covered all the glass.

When Amity switched on the flashlight, she nevertheless hooded the trembling beam with one hand.

“We’ll be all right,” he said.

“I know.”

“We’re almost out of here.”

“I know.”

The electronic lock on the door could be engaged and disengaged only with a coded magnetic card issued to each guest. Jeffy didn’t have a card. Anyway, the hotel no longer seemed to have electrical service. A traditional knob allowed him to brace the door with a straight-backed chair.

Amity nervously swept the finger-filtered light across the furniture, through the open doorway to the adjoining bathroom, as though reluctant to believe they were alone and even briefly safe.

Jeffy withdrew the key to everything from a coat pocket and pressed the home circle at the bottom of the screen.

Passing the flashlight beam across a wall that was fitted floor to ceiling and corner to corner with a seamless, dark, reflective surface in front of which no furniture stood, the girl said, “What’s this?”

“Maybe TV,” he said as, after a four-second delay, soft gray light appeared on the screen of Harkenbach’s device.

“A whole wall of TV?”

“Might be a screen for some kind of virtual reality system. Something we don’t have on our timeline.” The blue, red, and green buttons appeared on the key. He said, “Grab hold of me.”

She clutched his arm tightly.

When they arrived in this hotel room in their timeline, maybe it wouldn’t be booked for the night. This wasn’t the height of the beach season. Even if guests were in residence, they would most likely be asleep. Jeffy and Amity would be out of the room and running before the sleeper woke and was able to switch on a light.

With a sigh of relief, he pushed HOME, and after a few seconds the buttons disappeared. They were replaced by that universal symbol familiar to every surfer of the internet—a little comet of light turning around and around like a wheel—which meant searching.

A knot of something seemed to rise into Jeffy’s throat, and he wasn’t able to swallow it.

Having seen the symbol, Amity said, “Does that mean . . . ?”

“No, it can’t. I’m not trying to connect with any damn website. I just want to go home. I pressed the button that said HOME.”

“Can the thing have trouble finding home?”

“Ed never said anything about this, he never wrote anything like this in his book, not that I read.”

“It’s a big multiverse,” she said.

Out in the street, something shrieked past the building, an aircraft, nothing big, maybe a drone. Maybe a fleet of drones.

Startled, Amity let go of him and swept her light toward the windows, which was when the little turning wheel stopped turning. Jeffy was enveloped in a blizzard of white light and in an instant flashed back to Prime. Alone.

53

On Prime, the draperies were open, and the ambient light of nighttime Suavidad Beach relieved the darkness enough to reveal a neatly made bed, a hotel room that wasn’t occupied.

Jubilant, Jeffy let out a bark of laughter, but then realized an instant later that Amity wasn’t with him, whereupon celebration pivoted to desperation. Anxiety and anguish contested to disable him. He staggered backward, collided with the straight-backed chair, knocking it into the full-length mirror on the closet door. He cried out as the mirror shattered. He almost fell, dropped his pistol, almost dropped the precious key to everything, the hateful key to everything.

Of course this had to happen. He should have known it had to happen, because it was the stuff of stories, and real life was the biggest craziest story ever told, so big and so crazy that no writer in the history of the world had been able to convey even 1 percent of its bigness and craziness, so they had to shrink it down, squeeze the tiniest essence of it onto the page in the hope of finding some coherent meaning in it. If there was any meaning in an eleven-year-old girl being left alone on a world of death and horror, it escaped Jeffy and pissed him off and made him want to scream. It was nothing but a cruel and stupid and meaningless event, because real life was plotted like Tolkien on methamphetamine, an endless cascade of events events events. Something always had to be happening, and a lot of what happened was tragic, which was what most obsessed writers who wanted to understand life: Why all the loss and suffering and death, what sense could possibly be made of it?

All that and more raced through Jeffy’s mind, manic torrents of frantic thought, as he regained his balance and pressed the home circle on the key to everything and waited four seconds for the damn gray light to appear. “I’m on my way, Amity. I’ll be there, I’ll be there.” After four seconds that seemed like an eternity, the gray light filled the screen, and he was waiting for the three buttons when someone pounded on the room door and said, “Security.”

54