By the light of the moon

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,