understand how the connection was made. But as his hand slid off the sheetrock and into the apparently open doorway, he detected no details of structure, nothing but a coldness – and also the red light crawling more vigorously than ever across his upraised palm.
'No, don't, no!' Jilly warned.
'No, what?'
'No, don't go in there.'
'I'm not going in there.'
'You look like you're going in there.'
'Why would I go in there?'
'After Shep.'
'No way am I going in there.'
'You'd jump off a cliff after Shep.'
'I wouldn't jump off a cliff,' he impatiently assured her.
'You'd jump off a cliff,' she insisted. 'Hope to catch him on the way down, hope to carry him down into a haystack. You'd jump, all right.'
He just wanted to test the reality of the scene before him, to confirm that indeed it had true dimension, that it was a gateway and not just a window, an actual entry point to some otherworldly place rather than merely a view of it. Then he would retreat and think over the situation, try to arrive at a logical course of action with which to approach this monumentally illogical development.
Firmly pressing his right hand against the plane where the wall should have been, he discovered no sheetrock underlying the image of the tunnel, encountered no resistance whatsoever. He reached out of the bathroom, into that forbidding other realm, where the air proved to be icy, and where the baleful light squirmed over and around his fingers not like hundreds of ants any longer but like thousands of hard-shell beetles that might strip the flesh from his bones.
If he'd allowed himself to be guided by instinct, he would have withdrawn his hand at once; but he believed that he needed to explore this incredible situation more fully. He reached farther through the gateway, extending his hand in there to the wrist, and although he winced at the bitter cold, was nearly overwhelmed by revulsion at the hideous crawly sensation, he reached in still farther, all the way to his elbow, and then, of course, as instinct might have warned him if he had been listening, the tunnel took him.
24
Dylan didn't walk the length of the tunnel, didn't run, didn't tumble, didn't fly through it, had no sense of being in transit, but went from the motel bathroom to Shep's side in an instant. He felt his shoes slip off the vinyl tiles and simultaneously bite into soft earth, and when he looked down, he discovered that he was standing in knee-high grass.
His abrupt arrival stirred scores of tiny midges into spiraling flight from the golden-brown grass, which appeared crisp from months of summer heat. A few startled grasshoppers leaped for safety.
Upon touchdown, Dylan explosively spoke his brother's name – 'Shep!' – but Shepherd didn't acknowledge his arrival.
Even as Dylan registered that he stood upon a hilltop, under a blue sky, on a warm day, in a mild breeze, he turned from the vista that fascinated Shepherd and looked back where he expected the tunnel to be. Instead, he found a six-foot-diameter view of Jillian Jackson standing in the motel bathroom, not at the end of the red passageway, but immediately in front of him, as though she were a foot from him, as though he were looking at her through a round window that had no frame.
From the bathroom, Shepherd had appeared to be standing far away, a fragile silhouette against blue light. Viewed from this end, however, Jilly loomed life-size. Yet Dylan knew at once that from where she stood, the woman perceived him as a tiny figure at Shep's side, for she leaned toward the tunnel entrance where he himself had so recently stood, and she squinted worriedly at him, straining to see his distant face.
Her mouth opened, her lips moved. Perhaps she called his name, but though she appeared to be only inches from him, Dylan couldn't hear her, not even faintly.
The view of the bathroom, floating like a huge bubble here on the hilltop, disoriented him. He grew lightheaded. The land seemed to slide under him as though it were a sea, and he felt that he had been shanghaied by a dream.
He wanted to step at once out of the dry grass and back into the motel, for in spite of the fact that he had arrived on this hilltop physically intact, he feared that he must nevertheless have left some vital part of himself back there, some essential thread of mind or spirit, without which he'd soon unravel.
Instead, propelled by curiosity, he moved around the gateway, wondering what side view it presented. He discovered that the portal wasn't in the least similar either to a window or a bubble, but more resembled a giant coin balanced on edge. From the side, it had the narrow profile of a dime, though it lacked the serrations to be found on the milled edges of most coins. The thin silvery line, arcing out of the sun-browned grass and all but vanishing against the backdrop of bright blue sky, might in fact have been narrower than the edge of a dime, hardly more than a filament, as though this gate were but a disc as translucent and thin as the membrane of a fly's wing.
Dylan waded through grass all the way around to the back of the portal, out of sight of his brother.
Viewed from a point 180 degrees opposite his first position, the gateway offered the identical sight as from the front. The shabby motel bathroom. Jilly anxiously leaning forward – squinting, worried.
Not being within sight of Shep made Dylan nervous. He quickly continued around the gate to the point at his brother's side from which he had begun this inspection.
Shep stood as Dylan had left him: arms hanging slackly at his sides, head cocked to the right, gazing west and down upon a familiar vista. His wistful smile expressed both melancholy and pleasure.
Rolling hills mantled in golden grass lay to the north and south, here and there graced by widely separated California live oaks that cast long morning shadows, and this particular hill rolled down to a long meadow. West of the meadow stood a Victorian house with an expansive back porch. Beyond the house: more lush meadows, a gravel driveway leading to a highway that followed the coastline. A quarter of a mile to the west of those blacktop lanes, the Pacific Ocean, a vast mirror, took the color of the sky and condensed it into a deeper and more solemn blue.
Miles north of Santa Barbara, California, on a lightly populated stretch of coast, half a mile from the nearest neighbor, this was the house in which Dylan had grown up. In this place, their mother had died more than ten years ago, and to this place, Dylan and Shep still returned between their long road trips to arts festival after arts festival across the West and Southwest.
'This is nuts!' His frustration burst from him in those three words much the way This sucks! might have erupted from him if he'd learned that his lottery ticket had missed the hundred-million-dollar prize by one digit, and as Ouch! or something more rude might have passed his lips if he'd hit his thumb with a hammer. He was confused. he was scared, and because his head might have exploded if he'd stood here as silent as Shep, he said again, 'This is nuts!'
Miles farther north, in the deserted parking lot of a state beach, their father had committed suicide fifteen years ago. From this hill, unaware that their lives were soon to change, Dylan and Shep had watched the spectacular December sunset that their dad had viewed through a haze of Nembutal and carbon-monoxide poisoning as he had settled into an everlasting sleep.
They were hundreds of miles from Holbrook, Arizona, where they had gone to bed.
'Nuts, this is nuts,' he expanded, 'totally, fully nuts with a nut filling and more nuts on top.'
Warm sunshine, fresh air faintly scented by the sea, crickets singing in the dry grass: As much as it might feel like a dream, all of it was real.
Ordinarily, Dylan would not have turned to his brother for the answer to any mystery. Shepherd O'Conner wasn't a source of answers, not a wellhead of clarifying insights. Shep was instead a bubbling font of confusion, a gushing fountain of enigmas, a veritable geyser of mysteries.
In this instance, however, if he didn't turn to Shepherd, he might as well seek answers from the crickets in the grass, from the fairy midges that swooned through the day on lazy currents of sun-w
armed air.
'Shep, are you listening to me?'
Shep smiled a half-sorrowful smile at the house below them.
'Shep, I need you to be with me now. Talk to me now. Shep, I need you to tell me how you got here.'
'Almond,' Shep said, 'filbert, peanut, walnut—'
'Don't do this, Shep.'
'—black walnut, beechnut, butternut—'
'This isn't acceptable, Shep.'
'—cashew, Brazil nut—'
Dylan stepped in front of his brother, seized him firmly by the shoulders, shook him to get his attention. 'Shep, look at me, see me, be with me. How did you get here?'
'—coconut, hickory nut—'
Shaking his brother harder, violently enough to make the litany of nuts stutter out of the boy, Dylan said, 'That's it, enough, no more of this shit, no more!'
'—chestnut, kola nut—'
Dylan let go of Shep's shoulders, clasped his hands around his brother's face, holding his head in a ten-finger vice. 'Don't you hide from me, don't you pull your usual crap, not with this going on, Shep, not now.'
'—pistachio, pine nut.'
Although Shepherd strove mightily to keep his chin down, Dylan relentlessly forced his brother's head up. 'Listen to me, talk to me, look at me!'
Muscled into a confrontation, Shepherd closed his eyes. 'Acorn, betel nut—'
Ten years of frustration, ten years of patience and sacrifice, ten years of vigilance to prevent Shep from unintentionally hurting himself, thousands of days of shaping food into neat rectangular and square morsels, uncounted hours of worrying about what would happen to Shepherd if fate conspired to have him outlive his brother: All of these things and so many more had pressed on Dylan, each a great psychological stone, had piled one atop another, atop another, dear God, until he felt crushed by the cumulative weight, until he could no longer say with any sincerity, He ain't heavy, he's my brother, because Shepherd was heavy, all right, a burden immeasurable, heavier than the boulder that Sisyphus had been condemned forever to roll up a long dark hill in Hades, heavier than the world on the back of Atlas.
'—pecan, litchi nut—'
Pressed between Dylan's big hands, Shepherd's features were scrunched together, puckered and pouted like those of a baby about to burst into tears, and his speech was distorted.
'—almond, cashew, walnut—'
'You're repeating yourself now,' Dylan said angrily. 'Always repeating yourself. Day after day, week after week, the maddening routine, year after year, always the same clothes, the narrow little list of crap you'll eat, always washing your hands twice, always nine minutes under the shower, never eight, never ten, always precisely nine, and all your life with your head bowed, staring at your shoes, always the same stupid fears, the same maddening tics and twitches, deedle-doodle-deedle, always the endless repetition, the endless stupid repetition!'
'—filbert, coconut, peanut—'
With the index finger of his right hand, Dylan attempted to lift the lid of his brother's left eye, tried to pry it open. 'Look at me, Shep, look at me, look, look.'
'—chestnut, hickory nut—'
Although standing with his arms slack at his sides and offering no other resistance, Shep squeezed his eyes shut, foiling Dylan's insistent finger.
'—butternut, Brazil nut—'
'Look at me, you little shit!'
'—kola nut, pistachio—'
'LOOK AT ME!'
Shep stopped resisting, and his left eye flew open, with the lid pressed almost to his eyebrow under the tip of Dylan's finger. Shep's one-eyed stare, as direct a moment of contact as ever he'd made with his brother, was an image suitable for any horror-movie poster: the essence of terror, the look of the victim just before the alien from another world rips his throat open, just before the zombie tears his heart out, just before the lunatic psychiatrist trepans his skull and devours his brain with a good Cabernet.
LOOK AT ME... LOOK AT ME... Look at me...
Dylan heard those three words echoing back from the surrounding hills, decreasing in volume with each repetition, and though he knew that he was listening to his own furious shout, the voice sounded like that of a stranger, hard and sharp with a steely anger of which Dylan would have thought himself incapable, but also cracking with a fear that he recognized too well.
One eye tight shut, the other popped to the max, Shepherd said, 'Shep is scared.'
They were looking at each other now, just like Dylan had wanted, eye to eye, a direct and uncompromising connection. He felt pierced by his brother's panicked stare, as breathless as if his lungs had been punctured, and his heart clenched in pain as though skewered by a needle.
'Shep is s-s-scared.'
The kid was scared, sure enough, flat-out terrified, no denying that, perhaps more frightened than he'd ever been in twenty years of frequent bouts of fright. And while but a moment ago he might have been afraid of the radiant tunnel by which he had traveled in a blink from the eastern Arizona desert to the California coast, his alarm now arose from another cause: his brother, who in an instant had become a stranger to him, a shouting and abusive stranger, as though the sun had played a moon trick, transforming Dylan from a man into a vicious wolf.
'Sh-shep is scared.'
Horrified by the expression of dread with which his brother regarded him, Dylan withdrew his pinning finger from Shep's arched eyelid, let go of the kid's head, and stepped back, shaking with self-disgust, remorse.
'Shep is scared,' the kid said, both eyes open wide.
'I'm sorry, Shep.'
'Shep is scared.'
'I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to scare you, buddy. I didn't mean what I said, not any of it, forget all that.'
Shepherd's shocked-wide eyelids lowered. He let his shoulders slump, too, and bowed his head and cocked it to one side, assuming the meek demeanor and the awkward posture with which he announced to the world that he was harmless, the humble pose that he hoped would allow him to shuffle through life without calling attention to himself, without inviting any notice from dangerous people.
The kid hadn't forgotten the confrontation this quickly. He was still plenty scared. He hadn't gotten over his hurt feelings, either, not in a wink; he might never get over them. Shepherd's sole defense in every situation, however, was to mimic a turtle: quickly pull all the vulnerable parts under the shell, hunker down, hide in the armor of indifference.
'I'm sorry, bro. I don't know what got into me. No. No, that isn't true. I know exactly what got into me. The old jimjams, the whimwhams, the old boogeyman bitin' on my bones. I got scared, Shep. Hell, I am scared, so scared I can't think straight. And I don't like being scared, don't like it one bit. It's not something I'm used to, and so I took my frustration out on you, and I never should've done that.'
Shepherd shifted his weight from left foot to right, right foot to left. The expression with which he stared at his Rockports wasn't difficult to read. He didn't appear to be terrified anymore – anxious, yes, but at least not electrified with fright. Instead he seemed to be startled, as though surprised that anything could scare his big brother.
Dylan peered past Shepherd to the magical round gateway, at the motel bathroom for which he would never have imagined that he could feel a nostalgic yearning as intense as what swelled in his heart at this moment.
One hand visored over her eyes, squinting the length of the red tunnel, clearer to Dylan than he must be to her, Jilly looked terrified. He hoped that she remained more frightened of reaching into the tunnel than of being left behind and alone, because her arrival here on the hilltop could only complicate matters.
He poured out further effusive apologies to Shepherd, until he realized that too many mea culpas could be worse than none at all. He was salving his own conscience at the cost of making his brother nervous, essentially poking at Shep in his shell. The kid shifted more agitatedly from one foot to the other.
'Anyway,' Dylan said, 'the stupid thing is, I shouted at you because I wanted you to
tell me how you got here – but I already knew somehow you must have done it yourself, some new wild talent of your own. I don't understand the mechanics of what you've done. Even you probably don't grasp the mechanics of it any more than I understand how I feel a psychic trace on a door handle, how I read the spoor. But I knew the rest of what must've happened before I asked.'
With an effort, Dylan silenced himself. The surest way to calm Shepherd was to stop jabbering at him, stop overloading him with sensory input, grant him a little quiet.
In the barest breath of ocean-scented breeze, the grass stirred as languidly as seaweed in deep watery gardens. Gnats nearly as tiny as dust motes circled lazily through the air.
High in the summer sky, a hawk glided on thermal currents, in search of field mice three hundred feet below.
At a distance, traffic on the coast highway raised a susurration so faint that even the feeble breeze sometimes erased the sound. When the growl of a single engine rose out of the background murmur, Dylan shifted his attention from the hunting hawk to the graveled driveway and saw a motorcycle approaching his house.
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.