Interworld. Нил Гейман

turned around. I think I was already sort of subconsciously expecting what I would see. Something in the voice told me who would be standing there at the top of the stairs.

      It was the girl in the picture.

      It wasn’t Jenny. This girl had red-brown hair, freckles, kind of a goofy expression, like she spent too much time inside her own head. She was as old as me, so she couldn’t be my sister. She looked like—and then I admitted to myself what I already knew—she looked like what I would look like if I were a girl.

      We both stared at each other in shock. Faintly, as if from far away, I heard her mother say, “Go back upstairs, Josephine. Hurry.”

      Josephine.

      It was then that I understood, somehow. I don’t know how, but it hit me and I knew it was the truth.

      I didn’t exist anymore. Somehow I’d been edited out of my own life. It hadn’t worked, obviously, since I was still here. But apparently I was the only one who felt I had any right to be here. Somehow reality had changed so that now Mr. and Mrs. Harker’s oldest child was a girl, not a boy. Josephine, not Joseph.

      Mrs. Harker—strange to think of her that way—Mrs. Harker was scrutinizing me. She was wary, but she also seemed curious. Well, sure—she was seeing the family resemblance in my face.

      “Do I—know you?” She frowned, trying to place me. In another minute she’d figure out why I looked so familiar— she’d remember that I’d called her “Mom”—and, like me, her world would fall apart.

      She wasn’t my mother. No matter how much I wanted her to be, no matter how much I needed her to be, this woman wasn’t Mom any more than the woman in the blue coat that day at Macy’s.

      I ran.

      To this day I don’t know if I ran away because it was all too much to handle or because I wanted to spare her what I knew: that reality can splinter like a hammered mirror. That it can happen to anybody, because it had just happened to her—and to me.

      I ran past her, out of the house, down the street, and I kept running. Maybe I was hoping that if I ran fast enough, far enough, I could somehow go back in time, back to before all this insanity happened. I don’t know if it might’ve worked. I never got a chance to find out.

      Suddenly the air in front of me rippled. It shimmered, like heat waves gone all silvery, and then it tore open. It was like reality itself had split apart. I caught a glimpse of a weird psychedelic background inside, all floating geometric shapes and pulsing colors.

      Then through it stepped this—thing.

      Maybe it was a man—I didn’t know. It was wearing a trench coat and hat. I could see the face under the hat brim as it raised its head to look at me.

      It had my face.

      THE STRANGER WAS WEARING a full-face mask of some kind, and the surface of it was mirrored, like mercury. It was the strangest thing, staring into that blank, silvery face and seeing my own face staring back at me, all bent and distorted.

      My face looked goofy and dumb. A liquid map of freckles, a loose mop of reddish-brown hair, big brown eyes and my mouth twisted into a cartoonish mixture of surprise and, frankly, fear.

      The first thing I thought was that the stranger was a robot, one of those liquid metal robots from the movies. Then I thought it was an alien. And then I began to suspect that it was someone I knew wearing some kind of a cool high-tech mask, and it was that thought that grew into a certainty, because when he spoke, it was with a voice I knew. Muffled by the mask enough that I couldn’t place it, but I knew it, all right.

      “Joey?”

      I tried to say “Yeah?” but all I could manage was some kind of noise in my throat.

      He took a step toward me. “Look, this is all happening a bit fast for you, I imagine, but you have to trust me.”

      All happening a bit fast? Understatement of the decade, dude, I wanted to tell him. My house wasn’t my house, my family wasn’t my family, my girlfriend wasn’t my girlfriend—well, she hadn’t been from the start, but this was no time to get finicky. The point was that everything stable and permanent in my life had turned to Jell-O, and I was about this far from losing it completely.

      Then the weirdo in the Halloween mask put his hand on my shoulder, and that closed the gap between losing and lost. I didn’t care if he was someone I knew. I jerked my knee up, hard, just as Mr. Dimas had told us all to do—boys and girls—if we ever thought we were in physical danger from a male adult. (“Don’t aim for the testicles,” said Mr. Dimas that day, just as if he were discussing the weather. “Aim for the center of his stomach, as if you’re planning to get there through the testicles. Then don’t stop to see if he’s okay or not. Just run.”)

      I practically broke my kneecap. He was wearing some kind of armor under the coat.

      I yelped in pain and clutched my right knee. What made it worse was that I knew that behind the mirrored mask, the creep was smiling.

      “You okay?” he asked in that half-familiar voice. He sounded more amused than concerned.

      “You mean apart from not knowing what’s going on, losing my family and breaking my knee?” I would have run, but fleeing for one’s life requires two legs in good operating condition. I took a deep breath, tried to pull it together.

      “Two of those things are your own stupid fault. I was hoping to get to you before you started Walking, but I wasn’t fast enough. Now you’ve set off every alarm in this region by crossing from plane to plane like that.”

      I had no idea what he was talking about; I hadn’t been on a plane since the family saw Aunt Agatha for Easter. I rubbed my leg.

      “Who are you?” I said. “Take off the mask.”

      He didn’t. “You can call me Jay,” he said. Or maybe it was, “You can call me J.” He put out his hand again, as if I were meant to shake it.

      I wonder if I would have shaken it or not—I never got to find out. A sudden flash of green light left me blinded and blinking, and, a moment later, a loud bang momentarily put my ears out of commission, too.

      “Run!” shouted Jay. “No, not that way! Go the way you came. I’ll try to head them off.”

      I didn’t run—I just stood there, staring.

      There were three flying disks, silver and glittering, hovering in the air about ten feet away. Riding each disk, balancing like a surfer riding a wave, was a man wearing a gray one-piece outfit. Each of the men was holding what looked like a weighted net—like something a fisherman might have, it occurred to me, or a gladiator.

      “Joseph Harker,” called one of the gladiators in a flat, almost expressionless voice. “Opposition is nonproductive. Please remain where you are.” He waved his net to emphasize his point.

      The net crackled and sparked tiny blue sparks where the mesh touched. I knew two things when I saw those nets: that they were for me, and that they were going to hurt if they caught me.

      Jay shoved me. “Run!”

      This time, I got it. I turned and took off.

      One of the men on the disks shouted in pain. I looked back momentarily: He was tumbling down to the ground while the disk hovered in the air above him. I suspected that Jay was responsible.

      The other two gladiators were hanging in the air directly above me, keeping pace with me as I ran. I didn’t have to look up. I could see their shadows.

      I felt like a wild beast—a lion or a tiger, maybe— on a wildlife documentary, being hunted by men with tranquilizer darts. You know