The Boys Are Back in Town

by Christopher Golden

  That left Will to focus on Brian. At the table, where he was in animated conversation with Danny and Lebo, Brian paused to glance once at Will. His smile was insufferable. Will couldn't help but laugh softly to himself. You son of a bitch, he thought. You really did it. Fucking levitation.

  But Brian wasn't the only one who had been studying.

  There was a small spatter of ice-cream drips on the counter. A baby began to cry. A teenage girl sitting with her friends threw herself back in her chair and let loose a torrent of giddy laughter that caused her to cover her face in embarrassment a moment later. The sun continued to beat down upon the sidewalk outside. Herbie's was like a million other ice cream shops. Perfectly ordinary.

  Will turned so that his back was to Nick and the painters. He kept his hands down below the counter so that none of the customers would see the contortions of his fingers. He closed his eyes and whispered a handful of words in French. Most of them were gibberish to him, but he had the gist of what they meant, what the incantation was intended to accomplish. He held it in his mind, and his eyes fluttered open as he repeated the troublesome French words again and again, carefully forming them with his tongue.

  There were other accoutrements that went along with the incantation. A white candle, a charred bit of birch bark, black thread and, somewhat disturbingly, human saliva. But the writings of Jean-Marc Gaudet had revealed to Will and Brian one of the fundamental truths of magic, something that none of the poseurs had ever touched upon. An incantation, once successfully performed with the appropriate rituals, became far simpler thereafter, requiring only words and focus. It was as though the power to perform that bit of magic had been indelibly inked upon the magician. That was thrilling, and not a little frightening. Every time either of them performed an incantation, they would be changed forever.

  Touched by magic.

  Now, as another oldie pumped out of the sound system and Nick handed the first of the painters his ice cream—a huge pistachio thing in a waffle cone—Will glanced over at the table where Brian sat with Danny and Mike Lebo. Lebo was rolling his eyes and laughing as Danny ranted about something. Brian shoved the blob of vanilla ice cream into his orange soda and took a sip from his straw.

  Will carefully contorted his fingers, replicating the position that had been illustrated in fine, spidery pencil sketches in Gaudet's book. His lips quietly mouthed the difficult French words. He could not help smiling.

  As he watched, the orange soda in Brian's glass began to darken to a deep red. Leaning forward, chuckling good-naturedly at Danny's ire, Brian took a long sip from his orange float, then recoiled, his face etched with disgust. He threw himself back in his chair, its legs scraping the floor, and spat on the table. Then his eyes locked on the glass and he saw.

  “Jesus!” Brian cried, and he batted at the glass as though it might attack him. It tumbled off the table and fell end over end to shatter on the floor, spraying bright, fresh blood across the linoleum.

  A tiny island of vanilla ice cream quickly melted in the puddle of warm blood.

  Everyone in the shop froze. First they stared at Brian. Then they glanced down at what he was staring at, at the streaks and spatters of crimson. Lebo swore in disgust, Danny in amazement.

  Will didn't give them time to adjust. The moment Brian had reacted, even before he had swiped the glass from the table, his fingers had been at work again and his lips silently formed the words to a spell of reversal. In seconds, the blood faded, red becoming orange, and then it was nothing more than sticky soda on the floor.

  Brian's mouth was open in a small O of astonishment as he turned to look across the shop at Will, who shrugged as if to say, Don't look at me. Which they both knew was bullshit. Brian was clearly impressed. Will was glad. So much for levitation, he thought. Try transmutation next time. It was not a contest between them, this investigation into magic. But the boys did derive a certain amount of pleasure from astounding one another. Other kids might have used card tricks and coin vanishes. Will and Brian were only interested in real magic, and now that they had discovered it, they were just getting started.

  There were staccato bursts of conversation around the shop, the loudest coming from the table where his three friends sat, but Will was relieved that within a minute or so, no one seemed certain they had seen what they had seen. A trick of the light, someone suggested. The mother with the crying baby thought it might have something to do with the heat, or with the linoleum itself. The painter with the pistachio ice cream told his partner that he knew one thing for certain, he wouldn't be drinking the orange soda they served in Herbie's.

  The painters paid Nick and he rang up the sale. When he closed the register drawer he glanced over at Will. There was something odd in his expression, as though there was a question on the tip of his tongue that he was hesitant to put voice to. But Nick never said a word to Will about what had happened that afternoon with Brian's orange float.

  Not ever.

  THE HOUSE WAS QUIET AND DARK. Other than those in Kyle's room, the only light on was the one above the kitchen sink. The entire drive home from that bizarre scene in the parking lot with Will James, Kyle had been buzzing, adrenaline racing through him.

  As soon as he had arrived home Kyle had dropped his jacket over a kitchen chair and gone up to his room. He had been on the phone ever since, first to his girlfriend Amie, and now to his best friend, Ben Klosky.

  “Did you tell Amie all this shit?” Ben asked.

  Kyle had the phone trapped between cheek and shoulder, picking up his room. Now he paused, dirty socks in one hand. “Dude, are you nuts? She'd think I was out of my mind. I mean, I told her I found the book and all, but I didn't mention that first note. I just told her it belonged to the guy, that he used to live here.”

  Ben chuckled. “What'd you say, that you tracked him down on the Web or something?”

  “Exactly.” Kyle tossed the dirty socks into a pile, then grabbed a basket of clean, folded laundry his mother had left in his room and set it on the bed. “So what do you think?”

  As he pulled open a drawer and began to put away the folded clothes, he could almost hear Ben mulling it over, could imagine him squinting his eyes, making them disappear into the baby fat that still rounded out his face.

  “What do I think? I think you're on crack.”

  “Fuck you,” Kyle grunted.

  “No,” Ben replied politely. “Fuck you.”

  “I'm serious, Benjy. I'm not making this crap up.” With a pair of neatly folded blue jeans in his hands, Kyle paused. A shiver went through him as he thought about the crawl space under the stairs, about that book and the dust on it, and how sometimes it felt heavier than it should, and sometimes it felt lighter. And how sometimes . . . sometimes it felt warm. “It's creeping me out.”

  Ben was silent for several seconds. Kyle waited for his voice on the phone as though he could not move until Ben spoke again. He stood with the blue jeans in his hands and listened to the windows rattle in their frames. The wind had kicked up. One of his windows was open just a couple of inches and the chill breeze seemed to whistle through the gap.

  “Hello?” Kyle said, snapping off the word in annoyance that barely covered the tremor in his voice.

  “I'm thinking.” A gravity had crept into Ben's tone and he paused again for several seconds. “You're my amigo, Kyle. I know better than to ask if you were drunk or on something. Obviously something's going on there. But does it have to be something freaky?”

  Kyle let out a tense breath, dropped the blue jeans into the drawer and slid it shut. He sat down on the end of the bed, ignoring the rest of the clean laundry. The wall began to tick, a familiar sound that always came with the heat going on.

  “I'm up for suggestions.”

  “Anything,” Ben said. “You said you first saw the guy on the street outside your house, checking out his old place or whatever. Couldn't it be that he broke in there? Locks can be picked. Professionals know how to do that shit.”
>
  A dry, humorless laugh escaped Kyle's lips. He tried to imagine Will James picking the lock on the storage area under the back porch. The problem was that Ben had not seen the yellowed envelope or the thick layer of dust upon it, or Will James's reaction to reading it when Kyle had given it to him at the football game earlier. And Ben had not seen the book. That damned book.

  “You've seen too many movies,” Kyle said.

  “Man, come on . . . the shit you're talking about—”

  “Happened, Benjy. What are you doing to me? I thought . . . I mean, I figured you were the one person I could tell who wouldn't think I was . . . ah, shit, forget it. I gotta go.”

  “Whoa,” Ben said. “Hold on. I'm not saying I don't believe you. I just think you shouldn't jump to conclusions without looking at all the possibilities. I mean—”

  “These things happened. Impossible things are happening.”

  Ben sighed. “Kyle. Have you looked up the word in the dictionary? Impossible, I mean.”

  From time to time Kyle fondly recalled the way his mother's kiss had brightened his spirit as a child, and how he had believed with all his heart when she told him her kiss would make it all better. And so it did. Now, though, there were spiders of fear in his gut and unwelcome thoughts burrowing in his mind. He closed his eyes and dragged a hand across his face as though he might erase the dread. But Kyle Brody was not a child anymore. He had long since given up believing there was a way to make anything all better.

  Ben seemed to sense he had overstepped. “Sorry,” he said. “But it's just . . . it's kinda hard to get my head around it. Maybe if I saw the book . . .”

  Through the gap of the open window, the whistling wind carried another sound. A car engine, purring low, slowing, and the squeak of brakes. Tires rolling on pavement.

  The engine died.

  A door opened and then clicked shut.

  “Kyle?”

  “Hang on.”

  Kyle rose from the bed and went quickly to his window, but with the lights on the glass was almost opaque. Phone still in hand, he went to the bedside table and clicked off that lamp, casting half the room in shadow. Kyle put his face to the window, nose cold on the glass.

  A car was parked on the road in front of his house. The streetlights threw haloes of light upon the pavement up and down Parmenter Road, but the Brodys' house was in the middle of a long unlit stretch, so the streetlights in either direction were only enough to shine the promise of illumination their way.

  In front of the car was the dark silhouette of a man. Though little more than a shadow, it was clear he was looking up at the house. The only lights visible from outside would be the ones from Kyle's room. The shadow-man would be staring at this window. At him.

  “Oh, shit,” Kyle whispered.

  “What's wrong?” Ben demanded, concern in his voice.

  The figure began to stride across the lawn. As it passed the oak tree the man slowed, one shadow-arm reaching out through the darkness so that his fingers brushed the lower branches of the oak, almost a caress. Then he continued on, toward the door.

  The light from the moon and the stars was just enough so that as the man neared the front steps, Kyle saw the object he carried in his right hand. It was a book.

  He jumped when he heard the knock. His mouth was dry, heart surging in his chest like a stone skipping across the surface of a pond. Though in his mind he was certain he knew who it was down there, knocking on his door, still he could not eliminate the image of that shadow-man from his mind.

  “Kyle, come on, you're killing me.”

  His knuckles hurt from holding the phone so tightly. Kyle glanced at it. He had momentarily forgotten about Ben, forgotten even that he had been on the phone in the first place.

  The knocking began again.

  “Benjy. I gotta go.”

  “Hey. You all right?”

  Kyle had no answer for that. “I'll call you tomorrow.”

  His thumb clicked the phone off and he dropped it on the bed. As if he were entranced he made his way down the hall and paused at the top of the stairs. The light from the kitchen behind him barely reached the landing in front of the door.

  Making his decision, Kyle hurried down the stairs. He clicked on the outside lights, unlocked the door, and pulled it open.

  Will James stood on the stoop. He looked pale and sick in that wan light, as though he might throw up at any moment. Behind him, the night still seemed alive with menace in a way that it never had before. In his hand was that leather book, and though Kyle felt his gaze drawn to it, he refused to look at it for more than a second or two.

  “What is it with you?” he said, staring at Will, trying to ignore the desperation in his own voice, and the book, and the memory of the yellowed, dusty envelope. “So you used to live here. So what? What the fuck do you want from me?”

  There was something innocent and boyish about the man's face, about his short blond hair and the way he carried himself. But his eyes were ancient.

  “You wanted the truth before, kid. I'm here to give it to you.” Will held up the book, the scuffed burgundy leather cover somehow darker than before, even with the outside lights on. “I hope you still want it, because in exchange for the truth, I'm going to need your help.”

  All Kyle's earlier bravado had disappeared now. “I . . . I don't think I want to know.”

  “Maybe you need to.” Will took a step nearer, clutching the book against his chest now. His eyes were hollow and lost. “Someone's tearing my world apart, Kyle. Destroying lives. I have to stop it and I can't do it alone.”

  Kyle had to clear his throat to speak. His stomach hurt. “Did you really used to live here?”

  For the first time, a weak smile flickered across Will's face. “Yeah. I did.”

  Kyle closed his eyes. He felt frozen now, and it had nothing to do with the chill in the air. Before he even knew what he was going to do, before he could think about anything else, he pushed his hands through his hair and stepped back from the door so that Will James could enter.

  The rest of the world seemed impossibly far away. As he sat at his kitchen table and listened to Will James talk of magic and blood and levitation, Kyle felt as though his house had receded from everything he understood of reality. Out there was the yard he had played football in, the driveway he helped his dad shovel in the winter, the lamppost whose glass he had shattered with a Frisbee. The neighbors walked their dogs on Parmenter Road, kids rode their bikes, and in the summer a battered ice-cream truck went by, driven by a twentyish girl whose smile was far more interesting to the neighborhood boys than ice cream.

  Yet across the table from him, face too pale in the unforgiving kitchen lights, Will James gave up his ugly secrets, staring at a spot in the middle of the kitchen as though he could see the past unfolding with every word. And despite how detached Kyle felt, how Will's stories made him itch as though tiny insects were crawling upon his skin, he reminded himself time and again that—once upon a time—Will himself had played football in that yard and helped his father shovel the driveway, had ridden his bike on Parmenter Road and probably looked forward to visits from the ice-cream truck, though for an entirely different reason.

  So Kyle sat and he listened to stories about Will James and Brian Schnell, and Brian's little sister Dori's naked breasts, about orange floats and cafeteria fights and about that book. That damnable book. It looked so harmless there on the kitchen table, battered cover dull in the overhead lights, its deep red leather now anemic, drained of much of its color, as pale in its way as Will himself.

  But Kyle did not want to touch it again. With every word Will spoke the book's presence there in the kitchen grew more ominous. He wished he had never seen it, never touched it, and though he knew deep down he would later pretend not to have considered it, the thought crossed his mind that he could feel a malignance emanating from those pages.

  Dark Gifts. It was aptly titled, that much was certain.

  “. . . got wo
rse after that,” Will went on. A sour expression pinched his face and he glanced up at Kyle, almost as if Will had forgotten he was in the room, as if he had lost track of precisely who his confessor was. “It was a big game. I mean, try to imagine it. Just for a moment, try to imagine that you were the one with the unhealthy little obsession that had finally borne fruit.” He chuckled humorlessly. “Rotten, bitter fruit.”

  Through the open windows Kyle could hear a car engine growl as it went up the street. He hesitated, hoping he would not hear it slow, hoping that his parents had not decided to come home early. But the car went on, the engine noise fading, leaving only the sound of the floral-patterned clock ticking in the kitchen, and their breathing.

  “Why you?” he asked doubtfully. “Okay, the book's rare. You and your friend were my age when you found this thing. It's just hard to think something that hadn't worked for other people would—”

  “How do you know?” Will interrupted, voice soft.

  Brows knitted, Kyle studied him, this guy in his jeans and his Red Sox jersey, and thought he could see in the man's face the teenager he had once been. “How do I know what?”

  “That it didn't work for other people? As far as we know, there may have been hundreds or thousands of genuine magicians just in the past couple of hundred years. What makes you think the world would know? Scientific discovery is a thing of exultation, of celebration. That's what you don't understand, Kyle. Magic isn't like that. Once you've had a taste of it . . . it's secret. Something to be savored, to be held close and cherished, but not shared. Magic is dark and selfish.”

  His eyes were so very far away that Kyle was almost afraid to speak then, to interrupt the connection that Will had in those moments with the dark days of his past.

  “After that day in Herbie's—that was the ice-cream shop—Brian and I had a bond that wasn't like anything I'd ever experienced before. Or since, really.” Will grunted. “How fucking sad is that? Anyway, even though we had this secret, this thing that was so much ours, all this time we spent learning spells and stuff was just as much about one-upping each other as it was about the magic.”