The Boys Are Back in Town (22 page)

A collie lunged from the open garage door of 227 Ashtree, claws scraping the pavement as it raced down the driveway trailing a chain behind it. The thing looked like Lassie with mange, and its barking seemed a combination of savagery and panic. Will froze, watching the chain unravel, slinking along the driveway. Finally it snapped tight. The dog let out a yelp and was pulled off its feet, choking.

Will stared at the collie as it stood panting and glaring at him, pulling the chain to its furthest extent. He remembered the dog. Remembered these precise events. The collie had done this to him several times when he had walked the two and a half miles from Caitlyn's to home.

Surreality swallowed him again.

Ashtree took him to the center of town, where it intersected with Winter Street. Will turned left and glanced up at the clock set into the peak of the granite Eastborough Savings Bank building. It was almost half past nine. For several minutes he could only stand on the sidewalk and gaze around, only breathing when he remembered that it was necessary. The windows of the library were dark save for the one just inside the foyer. The librarian, Mrs. Thalberg, always insisted they leave that one light on to discourage vandals.

Will swayed slightly and shook his head. Mrs. Thalberg. He could picture her, a stocky, olive-skinned woman maybe four and a half feet tall whose nylons always made a shushing noise as she patrolled the study carrels making sure the kids were behaving themselves.

He walked slowly along the sidewalk, stepping gingerly as though the entire street might shimmer like heat over summer pavement and simply disappear. The door to Athens Pizza opened and a fortyish woman came out carrying two pizza boxes, followed by twins, a boy and girl of about ten. Will was sure that he recognized them but couldn't remember their names or where they lived. The smell of the pizza was far more familiar. He paused in front of the plateglass window and stared inside. Perry and Arthur, the brothers who ran the place, were behind the counter as always. Perry shouted something at a group of teenagers who sat at a booth, but Will could not make out his words through the glass.

One of the kids at the table was Stacy Shipman.

Will nearly choked on an involuntarily harsh intake of breath. “Stacy,” he whispered. An avalanche of emotion and image went through him, not merely from high school but from the previous two days . . . days that would not come about for eleven more years. In his fear and dread and desperation he had put any thoughts of Stacy out of his head. Now, watching that sly smile, the way she laughed, and the way the spray of freckles across her nose disappeared when she crinkled it up in laughter, he found he missed her. He wanted to find out what was going to happen next.

Next.
What a foreign word it was to him at the moment. Next had to be put on hold for now. But just for now.

The nostalgia that the scene inside Athens instilled in him was powerful. He wanted to go inside right then and order a slice, or a roast beef sub the way Perry made them, toasted with butter. It was with great reluctance that he tore himself away from the window.

This isn't your life now. This is then. It's not for you.

The Comic Book Palace was closed, but through the window he could see Glenn, the guy who owned the shop, tallying up the day's receipts at the counter. Will raised a hand to wave to him but dropped it and glanced away quickly, realizing that Glenn wouldn't have a clue who he was.

When he passed by Herbie's Ice Cream, Will did not even have the heart to look inside. It was possible Nick Acosta would be working, and it had been hard enough for him to see himself and Caitlyn . . . he wasn't ready to see any of the others yet.

On the next block was the strip mall with Annie's Book Stop and The Sampan. But here Will paused and frowned, staring at the front of the store between them. It was a florist—The Flower Cart—with a pretty awning and colorful window displays. The odd part was that he didn't remember it ever having been there. He knew that the shops in that strip had turned over frequently enough; that particular spot had housed a video store, a travel agency, and two separate frame stores. Somewhere in there, he supposed, there must have been The Flower Cart. Obviously it hadn't lasted very long.

A melancholy thought drifted through his mind as he wondered how many other little bits and pieces of his past he had already forgotten, and how much more of it he was likely to lose as the years went by.

Aren't you a ray of fucking sunshine,
he thought, and he laughed softly before continuing on.

He crossed to the other side of the road and took a right down Market Street, which was short and dead-ended in the parking lot of Kennedy Middle School, a long rectangular box with windows. In addition to the strangeness of it all, as he walked past the school Will felt almost as though he were haunting the place with his memories. Yet moment by moment the surreal quality that had affected all of his senses from the moment he'd come around in the cemetery seemed to be diminishing. The air around him no longer felt electric. The brick structure of the school was just brick. Real and tangible.

It was not this place that was out of the ordinary, it was Will himself.

Despite everything, he could not help but take pleasure in simply being here. As he walked across Robinson Field behind the school, he glanced up at the night sky and marveled at the stars. Then Will picked up his pace and began to jog. On the far side of the field he found the tear in the chain-link fence and slipped through it, then made his way along the winding path through the woods. He was amazed that even in the dark his memory did not fail him and he navigated without error.

Minutes later he emerged from the woods at the top of Parmenter Road, and his smile broadened. A shiver went through him, and he felt almost giddy. He could picture his parents watching TV in the living room . . . his father making pancakes on Sunday morning . . . his mother painting in the little studio she had fixed up for herself in the garage. Al and Diana James had been older than most of the parents of their son's friends, but Will had barely noticed. Now the idea of seeing them then—seeing them here, a decade younger—was fascinating to him.

Will ticked off the names of the families who lived in the houses he passed. Hendron. Panza. Kenney. Carlin. He came around a corner where tall spruce trees blocked his view of the lower half of the street and at last was in sight of his house. He laughed again and shook his head, slowing to a walk once more.

“Son of a bitch,” he said. This was what his house was supposed to look like. The triangular walk in front surrounded shrubs and birdbaths, and there were much larger bushes across the face of the split-level home. After his parents retired to South Carolina, the Brodys would tear all of those bushes out and remove the shutters, painting the thing an austere white. But on this night the green shutters were still in place and the house was painted Chatham Sand, a kind of beige Will would always remember the name of because they had spent a number of summer vacations in Chatham on Cape Cod.

This was home.

His steps slowed even further and he took a deep breath, the smile slipping from his features. Of course he could not speak to his parents, could not simply walk up and knock on the door. If he could get a glimpse of them, that would have to be enough. There would be no way for him to stop the horrors of the days ahead without interfering somewhat with the past, without confiding in someone, but he wanted to take as little risk as possible. Talking with his parents would be an unnecessary risk. Unless he could manage to “accidentally” bump into them at the supermarket or something. But that was for later.

Twenty-four hours from now, Mike Lebo was going to be run down by a hit-and-run driver and killed, his skull shattered on the pavement and his ribs crushed by the impact. Right now that had to be his focus.

Will took a deep breath and stepped off the road, away from the streetlights, into the comparative darkness of the Ginzlers' front yard. As he drew nearer to the house in which he had grown up, he could not stop his gaze from roving to the ash tree in the front yard and to the oak from which he had once fallen, earning him a concussion.

And beyond his house, there was a pale blue one with dark shutters that belonged to Herb and Kathy Wheeler. It was Ashleigh's house. Before she had met Eric DeSantis and he had met Caitlyn Rouge, Will and Ashleigh had been inseparable. Even afterward, she had been his best friend. The cleverest, most imaginative girl he would ever know.

Will cut across his lawn and went along the side of the house, then slipped through the darkness of the backyard, happy that his parents had never bought him the puppy he had always asked for. He didn't need any barking dogs at the moment. It unnerved him to be a prowler on his own property, to know that should his mother spot him out the window of her bedroom she would be alarmed, even afraid.

Cautiously he made his way to the line of hedges that separated his property from the Wheelers'. He poked his head through to the other side and studied the rear of the house, the patio, and the tall trees just outside Ashleigh's corner bedroom window on the second floor.

Something shifted in the darkness at the base of the trees and Will froze, narrowing his eyes. A shadow. A silhouette.

Someone else was already there. The shadow reached out to grab the lowest branch and began to haul himself up into the tree, climbing toward Ashleigh's window.

All the breath went out of Will. Blood rushed to his face. Killing Mike, raping Tess and Ashleigh, all of that had apparently not been enough for Brian Schnell. He had to hurt Ashleigh more. He had come back again. This time, however, he wasn't the only one who knew what the future would hold.

Fury and disgust rippled through Will, and he slipped soundlessly from the hedges and began to rush across the lawn toward the dark figure scrambling up that tree.

This time when he had Brian by the throat, there would be no one to pull him away.

Questions flashed through Will's mind in a confused jumble. The figure in the tree was Brian. One glimpse of his face had been enough to convince Will of that. But from what point in time had Brian returned to this time frame? He had the foolish goatee that Will had seen on him recently, but that proved nothing. Had he already returned to the past and committed the crimes that were to come, and had now made a
second
trip into the past? Or was this his first foray through time? Could Will prevent those crimes by stopping Brian now? Yet as he sprinted across the Wheelers' backyard, those questions were stillborn, buried beneath a torrent of fury and adrenaline. Will breathed in the scent of October, of someone burning leaves and of the chill night air, and he hurtled through the moonlight toward the tree that led up to Ashleigh's bedroom window.

Brian saw him.

“Will?” his old friend whispered. “Oh, shit, Will, hang on.” Frantically, Brian began to climb down. Which was an incredibly stupid thing for him to do.

“Son of a bitch,” Will muttered as he reached the tree.

He reached up and grabbed the back of Brian's shirt, then yanked him from his perch. Brian's fingers stretched out, hands scrabbling for purchase, but it was too late. He fell from the branches and landed hard on his back on the grass with a grunt as the air was expelled from his lungs. Brian groaned and began to shake his head even as Will attacked him.

“Stop,” Brian rasped thinly, trying to catch his breath. He held up both hands. Will slapped them away, dropped to his knees, and hauled on the front of Brian's shirt.

“Stop?” he hissed. “Did that work when you were raping Ashleigh? What about with Tess?”

His vision seemed to tunnel then, the night deepening around him so that he could see only Brian. Will hit him three times in rapid succession, clutching his shirt with his left fist and striking with his right. Blood and spittle sprayed from Brian's mouth and there were strings of it in his thin goatee.

“Jesus, Will, stop,” Brian wheezed. “It wasn't me. I swear to—”

Will wrapped his hands around Brian's throat and began to choke him. The pleading in Brian's eyes only maddened him further, and he slammed the man's head against the ground again and again, feeling thick corded muscles beneath his fingers and digging deeper into his throat.

A hideous little laugh burst from Will's lips. “Wasn't you? How stupid do you think I am?”

But even as he spoke these words, Will moved ever so slightly, so that the full light of the moon could shine upon Brian's bloodied features. There were multiple bruises there, some of them several days old. A single tear slipped out the side of Brian's right eye and slid, glistening in the moonlight, along his temple to drop into the grass. Without even realizing it, Will began to relax his grip on Brian's throat.

Changing his past had changed him. Will knew that. The violence and heartache that had been wrought upon his memories had tainted him.
But how much?
he wondered.
Just how much?

Teeth gritted in confusion and anguish, he bent over Brian and met his gaze with a primal hatred that unnerved him. “Who else could it have been? I was there, Brian. We were in it together, remember? I saw the look in your eyes when we cursed Dori, and when we promised each other we'd never go near magic or that fucking book again. You had a hard-on for it the way you never did for anything or anyone else.”

Brian nodded frantically, licking blood from his lips. When he spoke it was in gasps. “I did. I . . . I liked it, Will. And I lied. I didn't stop.”

“And now you've gone too far,” Will snarled.

“No,” Brian shook his head. “I swear I—”

Will cracked a backhand across his face that sent a satisfying spike of pain through his own knuckles. Brian shook it off, his trepidation being replaced by anger now. He glared up at Will and spat a wad of bloody saliva into his face.

“Listen to me, you dense son of a bitch!” he roared.

On instinct, Will held him down and turned to look up at Ashleigh's window. A figure moved past the glass. She had to have heard, but with the light on she wouldn't be able to see out into the darkness of her backyard.

The room went dark.

“Shit,” Will snapped. He glared down at Brian, then grabbed him by the arm and hauled him to his feet. “Come on.”

The last thing he needed was for Ashleigh to have him arrested.

Will hustled Brian across the Wheelers' backyard toward the line of tall bushes that separated it from his own, back the way he had come. Brian did not fight him. If anything, he moved faster than Will. They slipped through the bushes and Will spun him around.

“Not a sound,” he whispered in the dark.

They stood still, Will listening to the ragged breathing of this man, this guy who had once been his friend, who had lied to him, who had killed and raped and violated every natural law.

Yet there in the darkness, with the scents of October and evergreen in his nostrils, all he could think about were the times they had thrown snowballs or crabapples at passing cars and had to run to hide in bushes or behind houses. How many times had they stood, partially hunched just as they were now, breathing heavily but grinning widely, barely able to catch their breath enough to laugh, waiting in silence for the danger of discovery to pass?

“Hello?”

Ashleigh's voice, a stage whisper, was carrying across the backyards. Will had often used the tree in the back to climb up and see her. They would talk quietly, him hanging in the branches and Ashleigh sitting comfortably in her window seat. He had learned more of her secrets and her hopes and her fears there in that intimate darkness than anywhere else. Later, Eric had visited her up that tree as well, sometimes slipping into her room, and other times Ashleigh had slipped out. But that wasn't the same. Though he had never been able to say exactly why, Eric's visits had spoiled it for Will, and he had for the most part stopped climbing that tree. He could always talk to Ashleigh on the phone or just ring the doorbell.

It just wasn't the same.

Now, as she called out into the darkness, Will was struck by her voice. Sometimes he dreamed they were all kids again, but in his dreams none of the details was ever right. The truth was, though it saddened him, many of the details were lost to him. He had forgotten what Ashleigh's voice had sounded like at seventeen. For a moment, when she spoke, he couldn't breathe. The world went off kilter and his equilibrium shifted; conflicting memories flickered through his mind, colliding with the truth of his presence here.

“Shit.” He sighed.
Enough of that. There's no going back now.

“Is anyone out there?” Ashleigh whispered.

Will did not dare try to catch a glimpse of her. His grip on Brian's shirt had loosened, and his fingers were wet with Brian's blood. As his heartbeat slowed and the adrenaline rush subsided, he glanced at his old friend's bruised and bloodied face. Brian stared at him intently, despair etched upon his features.

“Listen,” Brian whispered.

Will's nostrils flared and he tightened his grip, shaking Brian. “Quiet.”

Brian's lips peeled back in a distorted grin, his goatee giving him a devilish air. “Asshole,” he murmured. His right hand came up quickly, fingers curled, contorted. He spoke another word, one Will did not understand.

Will lifted off the grass, pitched forward, but did not hit the ground. Reflexively he let go of Brian and found himself levitating three feet in the air. A shout of alarm and anger came to his lips but he held it back, mindful of Ashleigh, wondering if her window was still open. Wide-eyed, he stared at Brian as doubt seeped into his mind.

“You could've done this anytime?” he asked.

Brian ran a hand through his dark hair, gingerly touched his split lip and winced, pulled his fingers back, and looked at his own blood glistening in the moonlight.

“Not anytime,” he said. “It isn't easy. It makes me tired. And I have to be able to concentrate. You didn't give me much of a chance.”

They spoke in the smallest of whispers and Will's doubts grew. Brian had been willing to take off instead of being discovered by Ashleigh. He had cooperated in remaining quiet. Will stared at him.

“I'm listening.”

A dark, unpleasant chuckle came from Brian's throat. “You don't have a choice.”

With that, he waved his hand through the air and Will collapsed upon the ground with a grunt. Brian poked his head through the bushes and then withdrew, crouching by Will's side.

“She's got her light back on,” he said, wincing from the pain in his face, tracing a finger from his jaw to his left ear, perhaps an aching jaw muscle. Then he let out a short breath and focused on Will again. “I felt it, too. I mean, I'm assuming that's what happened to you. Memories changing. The past . . . changing. It's like someone's overwriting the disk of this week in my . . . in our lives.”

“Like shuffling cards,” Will suggested, putting voice to the image that had been with him all along. “Taking the familiar ones and replacing them with a new hand.”

But still his eyes were narrowed with suspicion.

Brian nodded. “I wanted to talk to you at the football game, but there were too many people around. Plus I . . . well, I figured it was you. I mean, who else could it be? So I had to assume it was you, right up until you came into Papillon and fucking attacked me.” He touched the old bruises high on his right cheek. “That was quite a spectacle. I was too confused to try any magic, not that I would've done anything in front of everyone anyway. And I understood why you were doing it.”

An unpleasant smile flickered across his features. “But that's a conversation for later.” Brian sat cross-legged on the grass. The autumn wind carried his whispered words so that it seemed he was speaking directly into Will's ear. “You didn't show up at brunch the day after the debacle at Papillon. Obviously everyone was worried about you. Caitlyn talked to Ashleigh. Danny had been over to your apartment. None of your neighbors had seen you. On Monday, Ashleigh called Caitlyn back and told her you hadn't shown up at work.”

Will's stomach did a queasy flip. “So I don't get back?”

Brian shrugged. “You wouldn't necessarily get back at the same time you left. On the other hand, it's possible you came back here and blew it completely.” He ran his tongue over his swollen, bloody lips. “I knew what was happening. No way to explain it to anyone else, of course. But one look at your face Saturday night, the things you'd said, and then you go missing? I knew you had to have done it. And since you hadn't come back, I thought you might need some help.”

He gestured toward his battered face. “In exchange, I get a tune-up.”

Will couldn't help smiling. “A tune-up? You've been watching too many cop shows.”

“That's what you always say.”

The humor drained out of Will. It was too strange, too awkward to be Brian's friend right now. “I used to. 'Cause it was true.” They sat there in the darkness, hidden from the Wheelers' house by the bushes but in full sight of the Jameses' back porch. The house was quiet, though there was the blue flicker from his parents' television in their bedroom window. Will wondered what time it was.

“I'd done the spell before. Just once,” Brian said, unable to meet Will's eyes. “I wanted to see my grandfather again.”

Will nodded. “That's how you could do the spell without having the book.”

“Once you've done it—”

“It marks you,” Will finished. He glanced down at himself as though he might see the invisible traces left on him by the magic he and Brian had performed years before. It had left scars beneath the skin.

“The spell left me right on my front steps,” Brian said, brow furrowed in contemplation. “I guess it matches you up with the location of your . . . earlier self. Good thing it didn't plunk me down on the couch next to my old self. Not sure I could've dealt with that.”

Will said nothing. He didn't want to think about himself and Caitlyn in the cemetery. There were things he was just going to have to deal with, but he wanted to take them one at a time.

“So you came over here thinking you could get Ashleigh's help. You figured you needed transportation, maybe money, a change of clothes.”

Brian nodded.

“Why Ashleigh?” Will asked. “You guys weren't that tight.”

“I knew you'd come back already. I didn't know what day, but I figured we'd both try to get here before all the terrible shit started happening,” Brian said. “I knew if you needed help, you'd come to Ashleigh. The young me or the young you, we'd have a hell of a time convincing them. We were arrogant little shits. But Ashleigh . . . she had more imagination than she ever let on. And she loved you more than anything. You could convince her. And if you hadn't shown up yet, I figured I could convince her, and if I couldn't, I could tell her you needed her help and at least she'd listen to me before calling the cops.”

They stared at one another. Will lifted his chin and regarded Brian carefully. “You know this doesn't make any sense. This isn't random. We had that damned book. Me and you. Now someone's using the magic in
Dark Gifts
to tear our lives apart . . . to hurt people from our
past . . .” He glanced around. “From here and now. It's got to be connected to us, or connected to that book, or both. Your memories are shifting, but unless you're the guy responsible, you don't know the whole story. You know somebody killed Mike Lebo. But Tess was raped.”