“It’ll be okay!” Trix said. Sally glanced at her and smiled, and Trix thought perhaps she’d found that little girl at last.
“I’ll be watching from here,” Sally said, “but you’ll be a world away. I don’t have to stand here and watch.” She tapped her foot on the sidewalk and looked down at the tinkle of broken glass. “Besides, I’ve got plenty to keep me occupied now. So many who need my help.”
They watched her leave.
“So, what’re you waiting for?” Anne asked. She sat on a fire hydrant, arms crossed, head tilted to one side. “Get it done, and get your cute ass back here.”
Holly giggled. Even Jenny managed a soft laugh and said, “That’s not something I ever thought I’d say.”
“Don’t know what you’re missing,” Anne said, and winked at her. The two women, facets of each other, smiled conspiratorially.
“So?” Trix said. She looked from Jim to Jenny to Holly and felt a rush of love.
“So,” Jim said. And as they walked along the street toward Veronica’s house, even Holly was silent, because the unspoken truth hung heavy around them.
If they were successful, today would end with a woman dead by their hands.
“We need to go upstairs to your bedroom,” Trix said, and the man’s expression barely changed. Behind him in the hallway stood another version of him, slightly plumper, longer-haired, but wearing the same shell-shocked expression. As both wives peered from the living room doorway, Trix began to really understand how fundamentally everything here had changed. Her Boston was still safe and sound, ignorant in its single existence of anything so surreal as what she was witnessing right now. But here, everything was different. The earthquake had not only taken lives, it had shattered them as well. The two worlds where these merged Bostons had once been different were forever changed. How would people overcome such a shock? How could they?
But then she saw the two teenaged girls coming giggling down the stairs, and she thought maybe it would be fine after all.
“You two again!” one of the girls said.
“You know these people?” the other girl asked.
“Sure. Well. Not really. But they were in our house, and Dad scared them off.”
“I like your hair,” the other girl said.
“Thanks,” Trix said. “Er…” This was becoming more surreal by the moment, and when the women started berating their daughters, that only increased.
“Really,” Holly said, “we need to do what Auntie Trix says. Otherwise my daddy says it might all happen again, and then there might be three of you. Or maybe there won’t be any.”
“You need to what?” the man said.
“Upstairs,” Jim said over Trix’s shoulder.
“Why?” the other man said.
“There’s…” Trix gave what she hoped was her best smile, unsure how her grubby, bruised face would present it.
“It’s something to do with the ghost, isn’t it?” the man asked. He nodded wisely. “I knew it the first time I saw you. The ghost.”
“What ghost?” Trix asked.
“We’ve never used the room,” he said. He turned to his longer-haired twin. “Have you?”
The man shook his head slowly. “Never liked it. Always felt weird. And smelled.”
“Cotton candy,” Trix said, and everyone facing her-the four adults, the two girls-knew what she was saying.
The man stood back from the doorway, his motion inviting them to enter. Trix went first, then Holly, and Jim and Jenny followed. “What’s happening?” he asked softly as Trix passed. She saw in his eyes the doubt and fear that he had been trying to hide from his family.
“It’s okay to be afraid, Conor. But everything’s going to work out fine.”
They climbed the stairs, reached the landing, and gathered outside the door. There was nothing to indicate that the room beyond was unused, but Trix had the very real sense that it was not part of the house. In my world, this place belongs to an evil woman, she thought, looking around the landing at family pictures showing smiling people and holidays gone by.
“When we go in, hold on to our hands,” Jim said to Holly. “We’re Uniques, and crossing should be easy for us. But Jenny… it might be different for you.”
“Different how?” Jenny asked, drawing Holly close to her.
“I don’t know,” Jim said truthfully.
“You have Sally’s No-Face Man still inside you,” Trix said. “It might provide a buffer.”
“So let’s go,” Jim said. He reached for the handle and opened the door.
Inside, the room was as they had seen it on their arrival in the Irish Boston. Yellow wallpaper, an antiquestyle bed, clothes hanging in the closet. But on their arrival they’d believed the room was lived-in. Now they knew otherwise, and Trix saw the signs they’d missed before. The bedroom was like a movie set rather than a real room, arranged to look genuine yet somehow tainted with falseness.
Beyond the bed was the door that led into McGee’s terrible room.
She led the way and they all went through. The stench of ash and age hit them as they passed into the ruined room, and she wondered what the family that lived here thought of this place. Perhaps they didn’t even know it existed. Maybe this was a ghost room to that family, and that would mean that Trix and the others were now ghosts as well.
She knew that wasn’t true, but still it gave her the shivers.
“What now?” Jenny asked.
“I can see,” Holly said, her little voice filled with wonder.
“What?” Jenny asked.
“Don’t be scared,” Trix said. “Jenny, please don’t be scared.” She held her friend and hugged her tight, and when she breathed in Jenny’s hair it was Anne smiling in her mind’s eye.
“Come here,” Jim said, welcoming them into his embrace. “And you, too, sweetie.”
Holly came, too, hugging their waists, stretching as far as she could to embrace the three adults and giggling as she said, “Group hug!”
“You think we need to do the…?” Trix said, swirling her eyes around to imitate the first time they’d perceived the weirdness of this room. But she already knew the answer to that. The thing she carried inside her was already urging her to cross the room. They stood on undamaged flooring right now, and when they crossed they would also pivot around reality-a pivot around which Thomas McGee had twisted Boston. He had created splinter cities primed with the potential for tragedy, but it had taken Veronica to realize that potential.
Jim stared at her grimly, and she tried to smile back. Sure, she wanted to say, I’m ready to kill. Sure I am. For everything she’s done, and everything else she’d do. But she had no wish to speak those words aloud.
It was Jenny who urged them to walk. As a group they crossed the room, and Jenny cried out as they pierced the skin between worlds.
Trix’s No-Face Man shivered at the change, a disturbingly sexual sensation.
For just an instant, the whole world seemed to flex outward, and a wave of dizziness swept over Trix. Jenny nearly collapsed with the sudden loss of equilibrium, staggering as though drunk, but her family kept her from falling. For several seconds, the four of them only stood and breathed, waiting for the world to right itself again.
When it did, Trix knew that they were through.
The door stood before them, closed where they had left it open. Beyond, in the depths of the house they had just left-a different version of that house, in which families no longer lived-a voice rose up in fury.