Dean Koontz - By the Light of the Moon

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.

Dylan was reluctant to take Shepherd's hand and plunge together into the gateway. If they had come to California by teleportation – and what else but teleportation could explain this? – if each of them had been instantaneously deconstructed into megatrillions of fellow-traveling atomic particles upon falling out of the motel bathroom and had then been perfectly reconstructed upon emerging onto this hilltop, they might find it necessary or at least wise to make such a journey one at a time, to avoid… commingling their assets. Dylan had seen the old movie The Fly , in which a teleporting scientist had undertaken a short trip from one end of his laboratory to the other, hardly farther than Shepherd's toilet-to-toilet experiment, unaware that a lowly housefly accompanied him, resulting in disaster on a scale usually achieved only by politicians. Dylan didn't want to wind up back at the motel wearing Shepherd's nose on his forehead or with Shepherd's thumb bristling from one of his eye sockets.

'Here, there. There, here,' Shep repeated.

Behind the house, Vonetta put down the kickstand. She climbed off the Harley.

'No here. No there. Herethere,' Shep said, making a single noun from two. 'Herethere.'

They were actually conducting a conversation. Dylan had only the dimmest understanding of what Shepherd might be trying to tell him; however, for once he felt certain that his brother was listening to him and that what Shep said was in direct response to the questions that were asked.

With this in mind, Dylan sprang to the most important question pending: 'Shep, do you remember the movie The Fly ?'

Head still lowered, Shep nodded. ' The Fly . Released to theaters in 1958. Running time – ninety-four minutes.'

'That's not important, Shep. Trivia isn't what I'm after. What I want to know is do you remember what happened to the scientist?'

Far below them, standing beside the motorcycle, Vonetta Beesley took off her crash helmet.

'The cast included Mr. David Hedison as the scientist. Miss Patricia Owens, Mr. Vincent Price-'

'Shep, don't do this.'

'-and Mr. Herbert Marshall. Directed by Mr. Kurt Neumann who also directed Tarzan and the Leopard Woman -'

Here was the kind of conversation that Dylan called Shepspeak . If you were willing to participate, involving yourself in patient give-and-take, you could spend an entertaining half-hour together before you reached data overload. Shep had memorized prodigious quantities of arcane information about subjects that were of particular interest to him, and sometimes he enjoyed sharing it.

'- Son of Ali Baba, Return of the Vampire -'

Vonetta hung her helmet from the handlebars of the bike, peered up at the hawk that circled to the east of her, and then spotted Shep and Dylan high on the hill.

'- It Happened in New Orleans, Mohawk , and Rocketship X-M among others.'

'Shep, listen, let's get back to the scientist. You remember the scientist got into a teleportation booth-'

' The Fly was remade as The Fly in 1986.'

'-and there was a fly in the booth too-'

'Running time of this remade version-'

'-but the scientist didn't know-'

'-is one hundred minutes.'

'-it was there with him.'

'Directed by Mr. David Cronenberg,' said Shepherd. 'Starring Mr. Jeff Goldblum-'

Standing down there beside her big motorcycle, Vonetta waved at them.

'-Miss Geena Davis, and Mr. John Getz.'

Dylan didn't know whether or not he should wave at Vonetta. From this distance, she couldn't possibly know who he and Shep were, but if he gave her too much to work with, she might recognize him by his body language.

'Other films directed by Mr. David Cronenberg include The Dead Zone , which was good, a scary but good movie, Shep liked The Dead Zone -'

Vonetta might be able to see the suggestion of a third person on the hilltop – Jilly – but she wouldn't be able to discern enough of the gateway to understand the full strangeness of the situation up here.

'- The Brood and They Came from Within . Shep didn't like those cause they were too bloody, they were full of sloppy stuff. Shep doesn't ever want to see those again. None of that stuff anymore. Not again. None of that stuff.'

Deciding that to wave at the woman might be to encourage her to come up the hill for a visit, Dylan pretended not to see her. 'Nobody is going to make you watch another Cronenberg movie,' he assured his brother. 'I just want you to think about how the scientist and the fly got all mixed up.'

'Teleportation.'

Apparently suspicious, Vonetta put on her helmet.

'Teleportation!' Dylan agreed. 'Yes, that's exactly right. The fly and the scientist teleported together, and they got mixed up.'

Still addressing the ground at his feet, Shepherd said, 'The 1986 remake was too icky,'