By the light of the moon

didn't close
his eyes.
    'I was mean,' Dylan continued, 'and you don't understand that,
because you're never mean. You don't know how to be mean. But I'm
not as good as you, kiddo, I'm not as gentle.'
    Shepherd appeared to boggle at the grass around his bedroom
slippers, as though he had seen an otherworldly creature creeping
through those bristling blades, but he must instead be reacting to
the astonishing idea that, in spite of all his quirks and
limitations, he might in some ways be superior to his brother.
    At the end of the mown yard, Vonetta rode the Harley straight
into the meadow. Tall golden grass parted before the motorcycle,
like a lake cleaving under the prow of a boat.
    Returning his full attention to Shepherd, Dylan said, 'We have
to get out of here, Shep, and right away. We have to get back to
the motel, to Jilly, but not if we're going to end up like the
scientist and the fly.'
    'Gooey-bloody,' said Shep.
    'Exactly. We don't want to end up gooey-bloody.'
    'Gooey-bloody is bad.'
    'Gooey-bloody is very bad, yes.'
    Brow furrowed, Shep said solemnly, 'This isn't a Mr. David
Cronenberg film.'
    'No, it isn't,' Dylan agreed, heartened that Shep seemed to be
as tuned in to a conversation as he ever could be. 'But what does
that mean, Shep? Does that mean it's safe to go back to the motel
together?'
    'Herethere,' Shep said, compressing the two words into one, as
he had done before.
    Vonetta Beesley had traveled half the meadow.
    'Herethere,' Shep repeated. 'Here is there, there is here, and
everywhere is the same place if you know how to fold.'
    'Fold? Fold what?'
    'Fold here to there, one place to another place, herethere.'
    'We're not talking teleportation, are we?'
    'This is not a Mr. David Cronenberg film,' Shep said, which
Dylan took to be a confirmation that teleportation – and
therefore the catastrophic commingling of atomic particles –
was not an issue.
    Rising off his knee to full height, Dylan put his hands on
Shepherd's shoulders. He intended to plunge with his brother into
the gateway.
    Before they could move, the gateway came to them. Facing Shep,
Dylan was also facing the magical portal behind Shep when the image
of Jilly in the motel bathroom abruptly folded as though it
were a work of origami in progress, like one of those tablet-paper
cootie catchers that kids made in school for the purpose of teasing
other kids: folded forward, folded around them, folded them up
inside it, and folded away from California.

25
    Half crazed with worry, Jilly almost snapped
completely when the radiant tunnel in front of her appeared to
fracture from the center and then folded upon the fracture
lines. Although she thought the red passageway folded inward upon
itself, simultaneously she had a sense of it blooming toward her,
causing her to step backward in alarm.
    In place of the tunnel, she was confronted by shifting geometric
patterns in shades of red and black, similar to what might be seen
in a kaleidoscope, except that these designs were breathtakingly
three-dimensional, continually evolving. She feared falling into
them, not down necessarily, but also up and around, feared tumbling
like a weightless astronaut into blossoming patterns forever, to
eternity.
    In fact, the awesome structure that loomed in the wall defied
her sense of vision, or perhaps defied her mental capacity to grasp
and analyze what her eyes revealed. It seemed markedly more real
than anything else in the bathroom, real but so infinitely strange
that her terrified gaze ricocheted off one peculiar detail after
another, as though her mind fled from the consideration of the true
complexity of the construct. Repeatedly she perceived a depth
greater than three dimensions, but didn't possess the ability to
lock on that perception and hold it, even though a small and
panicky inner voice of intuition counted five , and then seven , and kept counting after she refused to listen to it
anymore.
    Almost at once, new colors intruded upon the red and black: the
blue of a summer sky, the golden shade of certain beaches and of
ripe wheat. Among the countless thousands of tiles in this
ceaselessly reforming mosaic, the percentage of red and black
rapidly declined as the blue and gold increased. She thought she
saw, then knew she saw, then tried not to see
fragments of human forms distributed widely through the
kaleidoscopic patterns: here a staring eye, and there a finger, and
there an ear, as if a stained-glass portrait had been shattered and
tossed in