vacation retreat for someone with plenty of disposable income. A mantle
of snow was draped over the main roof, another over the porch roof, each
decorated with a fringe of icicles that glittered in the last beams of
cold sunlight. No lights glowed at the windows. No smoke curled up
from any of the three chimneys. The place appeared to be deserted.
“He knows about this,” Frank said, still panicked.
“I bought it under another name, but he found out about it, and he came
here, almost killed me here, and he’s probably keeping tabs on it,
checking in regularly, hoping to catch me again.” Bobby was numbed less
by the subzero cold than by the realization that he had teleported out
of their office and onto this slope in the Sierras or some other
mountains. He finally found his voice and said,
“Frank, what-” Darkness.
Fireflies.
Velocity.
He hit the floor rolling, slammed into a coffee table, and felt Frank
let go of his hand. The table crashed over, spilling a vase and other
decorative-and breakable-items onto a hard floor.
He’d sustained a solid knock to the head. When he pushed himself onto
his knees and tried to stand, he was too dizzy to get up. Frank was
already on his feet, looking around, breathing hard.
“San Diego. This was my apartment once. He found out about it. Had to
get out fast.” When Frank reached down to help Bobby get up, Bobby
unthinkingly accepted his hand, the uninjured one.
“Someone else lives here now,” Frank said.
“Must be working, we’re lucky.” Darkness.
Fireflies.
Velocity.
Bobby found himself standing at a rusted iron gate between two stone
pilasters, looking at a Victorian-style house wit sagging porch roof,
broken balusters, and swaybacked steps. The sidewalk was cracked and
canted, and weeds flourished in an unmown lawn. In the gloaming it
looked like every kids conception of a seriously haunted house, and he
suspected it would look even worse in broad daylight.
Frank gasped.
“Jesus, no, not here!” Darkness.
Fireflies.
Velocity.
Papers fluttered to the floor from a massive mahogany desk as if a wind
had swept through the room, though the air was still now. They were in
a book-lined study with French windows. An old man had risen from a
wing-backed leather chair. He was wearing gray flannel slacks, a white
shirt, a blue cardigan, and a look of surprise.
Frank said, “Doc,” and with his free hand reached toward the startled
elder.
Darkness.
Bobby had figured out that all was lightless and featureless because,
for the moment, he did not exist as a coherent entity; he had no eyes,
no ears, no nerve endings with which to feel. But understanding brought
no diminishment of his fears.
Fireflies.
The millions of tiny, whirling points of light were probably the atomic
particles of which his flesh was constructed, being shepherded along
sheerly by the power of Frank’s mind.
Velocity.
They were teleporting, and the process was probably just about
instantaneous, requiring only microseconds from physical dissolution to
reconstitution, though subjectively it seemed longer.
The decrepit house again. It must be the place in the hills north of
Santa Barbara. They were upslope from the gate, along the Eugenia hedge
that encircled the property.
Frank let out a low cry of terror the instant that he saw where he was.
Bobby was afraid of running into Candy just as much as Frank was, but
also afraid of Frank, and of teleporting.
Darkness.
Fireflies.
Velocity.
This time they didn’t materialize with the balance and stability of
their arrival in the old man’s study or at the peeling house with the
rusted gate, but with the clumsiness of their intrusion into that
apartment in San Diego. Bobby stumbled a few steps up a slope, still in
Frank’s grip as firmly as if they had been handcuffed, and they both
fell to their knees on the plush, well cropped grass.
Frantically Bobby tried to wrench loose of Frank. But Frank held fast
with superhuman strength and pointed to a gravestone only a few feet in
front of them. Bobby looked around and saw that they were alone in a
cemetery, where massive coral trees and palms loomed eerily in the