Before they could move, the gateway came to them. Facing Shep, Dylan was also facing the magical portal behind Shep when the image of Jilly in the motel bathroom abruptly folded as though it were a work of origami in progress, like one of those tablet-paper cootie catchers that kids made in school for the purpose of teasing other kids: folded forward, folded around them, folded them up inside it, and folded away from California.
25
Half crazed with worry, Jilly almost snapped completely when the radiant tunnel in front of her appeared to fracture from the center and then folded upon the fracture lines. Although she thought the red passageway folded inward upon itself, simultaneously she had a sense of it blooming toward her, causing her to step backward in alarm.
In place of the tunnel, she was confronted by shifting geometric patterns in shades of red and black, similar to what might be seen in a kaleidoscope, except that these designs were breathtakingly three-dimensional, continually evolving. She feared falling into them, not down necessarily, but also up and around, feared tumbling like a weightless astronaut into blossoming patterns forever, to eternity.
In fact, the awesome structure that loomed in the wall defied her sense of vision, or perhaps defied her mental capacity to grasp and analyze what her eyes revealed. It seemed markedly more real than anything else in the bathroom, real but so infinitely strange that her terrified gaze ricocheted off one peculiar detail after another, as though her mind fled from the consideration of the true complexity of the construct. Repeatedly she perceived a depth greater than three dimensions, but didn’t possess the ability to lock on that perception and hold it, even though a small and panicky inner voice of intuition counted five, and then seven, and kept counting after she refused to listen to it anymore.
Almost at once, new colors intruded upon the red and black: the blue of a summer sky, the golden shade of certain beaches and of ripe wheat. Among the countless thousands of tiles in this ceaselessly reforming mosaic, the percentage of red and black rapidly declined as the blue and gold increased. She thought she saw, then knew she saw, then tried not to see fragments of human forms distributed widely through the kaleidoscopic patterns: here a staring eye, and there a finger, and there an ear, as if a stained-glass portrait had been shattered and tossed in the air by a cyclone wind. She thought that she also glimpsed a toothy portion of Wile E. Coyote’s grinning visage, then saw the merest scrap of a familiar blue-and-yellow Hawaiian shirt, and another scrap there.
No more than five or six seconds passed from the instant that the tunnel folded upon itself until Dylan and Shepherd unfolded into the bathroom and appeared before Jilly as whole and normal as ever they had been. Behind them, where the tunnel had once churned with red light, there was now only an ordinary wall.
With obvious relief, Dylan exhaled a pent-up breath and said something like, ‘No gooey-bloody.’
Shep declared, ‘Shep is dirty.’
Jilly said, ‘You son of a bitch,’ and punched Dylan in the chest.
She hadn’t pulled the punch. The blow made a satisfying thwack, but Dylan was too big to be rocked off his feet as Jilly had hoped he would be.
‘Hey!’ Dylan protested.
Head bowed, Shep said, ‘Time to shower.’
And Jilly repeated herself, ‘You son of a bitch,’ as she hit Dylan again.
‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘You said you weren’t going in there,’ she angrily reminded him, and punched still harder.
‘Ow! Hey, I didn’t intend to go.’
‘You went,’ she accused, and she swung at him again.
With one of his open hands as big as a catcher’s mitt, he caught her fist and held it, effectively ending her assault. ‘I went, yeah, okay, but I really didn’t intend to go.’
Shepherd remained patient but persistent: ‘Shep is dirty. Time to shower.’
‘You told me you wouldn’t go,’ Jilly said, ‘but you went, and left me here alone.’
She didn’t quite know how Dylan had gotten hold of her by both wrists. Restraining her, he said, ‘I came back, we both came back, everything’s all right.’