Michael Flynn - House of Dreams

It was a three-bullet clip. The rifle joined the crossbows and Betsy snatched the pistol from where it lay ready on the dresser top. She spared one bullet for a leaper still moving on the floor; then fired methodically into the pack.

Those leapers might not be intelligent, but they weren’t stupid. A second tear opened up. Through it, Ted glimpsed a third version of the bedroom: a shambles, smashed, decayed by rain and weather, a patchwork of light and shadow showing that portions of the roof were gone. How long had H. leonis been prowling about in that universe?

Two leapers came through, one from each hole. Ted cried out, chose one and blinded it.

And the other got her.

It was fast. Those creatures could move in a blur when they were motivated. It landed square on Sweet Betsy and bore her down—claws and fangs, one-two-three—then everything was still.

Several more hunters squeezed into the room. They pranced around the prone body in small impatient leaps. Their mouths opened and closed in mewls that Ted could not hear. What were they waiting for? For the one that made the kill to share it? Were there pack-hunter rules? Carnivore Miss Manners? Finally, one grew impatient, reached forward and nudged the victor with its foot.

And the victor rolled off Sweet Betsy with a great, honking knife in its heart.

People, Ted laughed! He wanted to dance, to savor her last victory. But he turned the ghostlight off once and for all. Nothing he could do now could help Sweet Betsy, and he absolutely could not abide watching the feast.

Besides, the leapers had started to squint in his direction.

Sure, if he tried the light again, he would probably see Betsy, alive and well, in some earlier time. Maybe playing with her children. Maybe making love to her man. Maybe, if he somehow aimed the light far down the corridor of time, a dim glimpse of a world to which the leapers had not yet found their way. But he didn’t. He couldn’t. He took the ghostlight downstairs, to the cellar stairs, and hung it on the hook where he’d first found it. Then he closed the door and locked it and walked away forever.

Sharon refused to move into the house, of course. The realtor and the owner’s estate argued that it was a done deal and she had no choice. They were sorry, but a contract was a contract. The media saw things differently and drummed the story for all it was worth; and, people, it was worth plenty! Even the police officers went on television and said as how they would never move into a house where their spouse had been brutally murdered; especially not if they had found the body themselves! Sharon was in treatment, trying to work through her grief, and the seller’s obstinacy was only making things worse for her and for her son. In the end, the estate caved and ate the contract. They never did sell the place.

Stories about the murder circulated for a long time after. It was in the tabloids, and people chattered nervously in checkout lanes and around gas pumps. The self-righteous prattled—about moral decay or social injustice, depending. There was a brisk sale of locks and security systems, and a vigilante gang beat up some folks who, if not precisely innocent, had nothing to do with what had happened to Ted. Some said it was a drug gang that had been using the empty house as a crack den. Some said it was bikers on a sado-maso kick. Others said it was Satanists, because there were these rumors that the body had been mutilated and partly eaten. What Sharon saw when she walked into the house, she never told. So no one really knows what went down.

Oh, Ted knew. People, he knew when he turned that light into those feral faces that it could end the way it did. So, when you turn a glass over for Betsy, or whatever her real name was, turn another one over for Ted, or whatever his real name was, because he didn’t have to lift a damn finger.

Sometimes, when the light is right, or the angle, you can see the shades of other worlds. It may be only some trick of the light, a peculiar form of polarization. It may be the quantum resonance of worldlines abutting. Perhaps paraphotons leak over from the world next door.

It is not clear what these glimpses mean, or why we sometimes see them. In the end, we each sit in the center of our own universe and watch others dimly through the screening walls. Are those walls real, or are they only built of our own blindness? If we reach out far enough, we could touch, if only briefly. Ted did. He found a way.

Too bad that, in finding it, he showed the leapers the direction to the next universe. They’re in your world now, a few of them—and more will follow. You won’t like it.