clear night sky, necklaces of stars, and a pendant moon. This sky scape
was the only thing out there where the stairs had been, as though this
door now opened high above the earth’s atmosphere, in interplanetary
space, a long way from the nearest doughnut shop. Or perhaps it opened
into a time when the earth no longer existed. No floor lay beyond the
threshold, nothing but empty space jeweled with more stars, a cold and
infinite drop from the bright corridor in which I stood.
Sharsy.
I closed the door. I gripped the shotgun fiercely in both hands, not
because I expected to use it but because it was real, solid and
unyielding, an anchor in this sea of strangeness.
Sasha was now immediately behind me.
When I turned to face her, I could tell that she had seen the same
celestial panorama that had rocked me. Her gray eyes were as clear as
ever, but they were darker than before.
Doogie hadn’t glimpsed the impossible sight, because he was holding the
Uzi at the ready and watching the three departing men.
Frowning, standing with his fists balled tightly at his sides, Roosevelt
studied the cat.
From his position, Bobby couldn’t have seen through the doorway, either,
but he knew something was wrong. His face was as solemn as that of a
rabbit reading a cookbook recipe for hare soup.
Mungojerrie was the only one of us who didn’t appear to be about to blow
out snarled springs like an overwound cuckoo clock.
Trying not to dwell on what I’d seen beyond the stairwell door, I
wondered how the cat could find Orson and the kids if they were in a
present-time place while we were stuck here in the past. But then I
figured that if we could pass from one time period to another, be caught
up in the time shifts taking place around us, so could my four-footed
brother and the children.
Anyway, from every indication, we hadn’t actually traveled back in time.
Rather, the past and present and perhaps the future were occurring
simultaneously, weirdly pressed together by whatever force or force
field the engines of the egg room had generated. And perhaps it was not
only one night from the past that was bleeding into our present time,
maybe we were experiencing moments from different days and nights when
the egg room had been in operation.
The three men were still walking away from us. Ambling. Taking their
sweet time.
The rhythmic swell and recession of the electronic sound began to have
an odd psychological effect. A mild vertigo overcame me, and the
corridor this entire subterranean floor seemed to be turning like a
carousel.
My grip on the shotgun was too fierce. Unwittingly, I was exerting
dangerous pressure on the trigger. I hooked my finger around the trigger
guard instead.
I had a headache. It wasn’t a result of being knocked around by Father
Tom at the Stanwyk house. I was sustaining a brain bruise from pondering
time paradoxes, from trying to make sense of what was happening. This
required a talent for mathematics and theoretical physics, but although
I can balance my checkbook, I haven’t inherited my mother’s love of math
and science. In the most general sense, I understand the theory of
leverage that explains the function of a bottle opener, why gravity
makes it a bad idea to leap off a high building, and why running
headlong into a brick wall will have little effect on the bricks.
Otherwise, I trust the cosmos to run itself efficiently without my
having to understand it, which is also pretty much my attitude toward
electric razors, wristwatches, bread-baking machines, and other
mechanical devices.
The only way to deal with these events was to treat them as supernatural
occurrences, accept them as you might accept poltergeist
phenomenalevitating chairs, hurtling knickknacks, doors slammed by
invisible presencesor the spectral appearance of a moldering and
semitransparent corpse glimpsed on a midnight stroll in a graveyard.
Thinking too much about time-bending force fields and time paradoxes and
reality shifts, straining to grasp the logic of it, would only make me
crazy, when what I desperately needed to be was cool. Calm.