‘Fold us out of here, Shep,’ Dylan said.
In the dining room, the younger Dylan spoke to the younger Shepherd: ‘Hey, buddy, smells like we have cake tonight.’
‘Fold us home, Shep. Our own time.’
In the adjacent room, the other Dylan said, ‘Buddy, are you crying? Hey, what’s wrong?’
Hearing his own tortured wail when he found his mother’s body would be the camel-crippling straw. ‘Shep, get us to hell out of here now, now.’
The dark kitchen folded away. A bright place folded toward them. Crazily, Dylan wondered if Shepherd’s fantastic trick of travel might not be limited merely to journeys through space and time, but if it might extend to dimensions unknown to the living. Perhaps it had been a mistake to say ‘to hell’ just before they left 1992.
36
The kaleidoscope tweaked. Around Jilly the sunlit kitchen folded in through the outgoing night kitchen, and fell into place in every bright detail.
No delicious smell of freshly baked cake. No shimmering black energy underfoot.
The smiling ceramic pig on the wall clasped its front hooves around the clock in its belly, which read 1:20, twenty-four minutes after they had folded out of the besieged motel room in Arizona. The present had progressed equal to the amount of time that they had spent in the past.
No open gateway loomed behind them, giving a view of the dark kitchen in 1992, nor a radiant tunnel. She had the feeling that the tunnel had been a travel technique that Shepherd didn’t need to use anymore, that it was crude compared to his current method, by which he moved them from place to place without maintaining a tether to the location that they had departed.
Impressed by her own aplomb, as though she had just stepped out of a conveyance no more extraordinary than a common elevator, Jilly put the laptop on the kitchen table. ‘You didn’t change the place much, did you? Looks the same.’
Dylan shushed her, cocked his head, listening intently.
A pool of stillness flooded the house until the refrigerator motor kicked on.
‘What’s wrong?’ Jilly asked.
‘I’m going to have to explain this to Vonetta. Our housekeeper. That’s her Harley in front of the garage.’
Looking out the kitchen windows, Jilly saw the garage at the end of the backyard, but no motorcycle. ‘What Harley?’
‘There.’ Dylan turned, pointing through a window to a place where no Harley stood. ‘Huh. She must’ve gone to the store for something. Maybe we can get in and out of here before she’s back.’
Shepherd opened the refrigerator. Perhaps he was looking for a consoling piece of cake.
Still assimilating their journey into the past, unconcerned about the housekeeper, Jilly said, ‘While Proctor’s enemies, whoever they are, were closing in on him, he was tracking down you and Shep.’
‘Last night when he had me strapped in that chair, he said he was so eaten away with remorse that he was empty inside, but it didn’t make sense to me then.’
‘The creep’s always been empty inside,’ Jilly said. ‘From day one, from the cradle, if you ask me.’
‘The remorse is bullshit. He’s got this self-deprecation shtick that makes him feel good about himself. Sorry, Jilly.’
‘That’s okay. After what we’ve been through, you’ve got every right not to say diaper dump.’
She almost got a laugh out of him, but 1992 was still too much in their minds for Dylan to manage more than a smile. ‘No. I mean, I’m sorry you got caught up in this because of me. Me and Shep.’
‘Proctor just had an extra dose of his hell juice, he needed someone to screw over, and there I was, out for a root beer.’
Standing at the open refrigerator, Shepherd said, ‘Cold.’
‘But Proctor wouldn’t have been there,’ Dylan said, ‘if Shep and I hadn’t been there.’
‘Yeah, and I wouldn’t have been there if I hadn’t spent all of my relatively short, so-called adult life trying to be a standup joke jockey, telling myself that performing is not just a meaningful life but the only life. Hell, I don’t have to worry about my ass getting big, ’cause I’m already a big ass. So don’t you start with your own remorse shtick. It happened, we’re here, and even with the nanobots supposedly building the New Jerusalem inside our skulls, being here and alive is – so far, anyway – better than being dead. So what now?’