The Harley belonged to Vonetta Beesley, the housekeeper who came once a week, whether Dylan and Shep were in residence or not. During inclement weather, she drove a supercharged Ford pickup perched high on fifty-four-inch-diameter tires and painted like a crimson dragon.
Vonetta was a fortyish woman with the winning personality and the recreational interests of many a Southern good old boy. A superb housekeeper and a first-rate cook, she had the strength and the guts – and would most likely be delighted – to serve as a bodyguard in a pinch.
The hilltop lay so far behind and above the house that Vonetta would not be able to identify Dylan and Shep at this distance. If she noticed them, however, and if she found them to be suspicious, she might take the Harley off-trail and come up here for a closer look. Concern for her own safety would not be an issue, and she would be motivated both by a sense of duty and a taste for adventure.
Maybe Dylan could concoct a half-assed story to explain what he and his brother were doing here when they were supposed to be on the road in New Mexico, but he didn’t have the talent for deception or the time to craft a story to explain the gateway, the motel bathroom here on the hill, and Jilly peering cluelessly out at them as though she were Alice unsuccessfully attempting to scope the nature of the enchanted realm on the far side of the looking glass.
He turned to his little brother, prepared to risk agitating the kid anew by suggesting that the time had come to return to Holbrook, Arizona.
Before Dylan could speak, Shepherd said, ‘Here, there.’
Dylan was reminded of the men’s restroom at the restaurant in Safford, the previous evening. Here had referred to stall number one. There had referred to stall number four. Shep’s first jaunt had been short, toilet to toilet.
Dylan recalled no eerie red radiance on that occasion. Perhaps because Shep had closed the gateway behind him as soon as he’d passed through it.
‘Here, there,’ Shep repeated.
Head lowered, Shep looked up from under his brow, not at Dylan but at the house below the hill, beyond the meadow, and at Vonetta on the Harley.
‘What’re you trying to say, Shep?’
‘Here, there.’
‘Where is there?’
‘Here,’ said Shep, scuffing the grass with his right foot.
‘And where is here?’
‘There,’ said Shep, tucking his head down farther and turning it to the right, peering back past his shoulder toward Jilly.
‘Can we go back where we started,’ Dylan urged.
On her motorcycle, Vonetta Beesley followed the driveway around the house to the detached garage.
‘Here, there,’ Shep said.
‘How do we get back to the motel safely?’ Dylan asked. ‘Just reach in from this end, just step into the gateway?’
He worried that if he went through the portal first and found himself back in the motel, Shep wouldn’t follow him.
‘Here, there. There, here,’ said Shep.
On the other hand, if Shep made the return trip first, the gate might immediately close up after him, stranding Dylan in California until he could get back to Holbrook, Arizona, by conventional means, thus requiring Jilly to fend for herself and the kid in the meantime.
Common sense insisted that everything strange happening to them came out of Frankenstein’s syringes. Therefore, Shepherd must have been injected and must have acquired the power to open the gate. He found it, activated it. Or more likely he created it. Consequently, in a sense, the gate operated according to Shep’s rules, which were unknown and unknowable, which meant that traveling by means of the gate was like playing poker with the devil using an unconventional deck of cards with three additional suits and a whole new court of royals between jack and queen.
Vonetta brought the Harley to a stop near the garage. The engine swallowed its growl.
Dylan was reluctant to take Shepherd’s hand and plunge together into the gateway. If they had come to California by teleportation – and what else but teleportation could explain this? – if each of them had been instantaneously deconstructed into megatrillions of fellow-traveling atomic particles upon falling out of the motel bathroom and had then been perfectly reconstructed upon emerging onto this hilltop, they might find it necessary or at least wise to make such a journey one at a time, to avoid… commingling their assets. Dylan had seen the old movie The Fly, in which a teleporting scientist had undertaken a short trip from one end of his laboratory to the other, hardly farther than Shepherd’s toilet-to-toilet experiment, unaware that a lowly housefly accompanied him, resulting in disaster on a scale usually achieved only by politicians. Dylan didn’t want to wind up back at the motel wearing Shepherd’s nose on his forehead or with Shepherd’s thumb bristling from one of his eye sockets.