The Boys Are Back in Town

by Christopher Golden

  With the added motivation of not wanting to bleed through her jeans to complete the ensemble of stains for the evening, she took a final breath and left the pantry. A trio of guys passed a joint around and the sweet smell of marijuana filled the kitchen. One of them was cooking scrambled eggs and dancing along to Nine Inch Nails or Jane's Addiction or whoever the hell it was on the sound system.

  After her red wine shower, Dori had left Ian in the living room. She figured maybe ten minutes had passed, but he wasn't there.

  “Son of a bitch,” she whispered, glancing around until she spotted Brad Ghilani, a friend of Ian's. Her skin crawled with a paranoid unease, for she was convinced that somehow everyone in the room was tracking her in their peripheral vision, that they could see she was falling apart. A kind of frenzied panic overtook her as she strode up to Brad.

  Normally brazen, Dori glanced around hesitantly and tapped him on the arm. “Brad? Have you seen Ian? I'm . . . I need to . . .” Flustered, she forced herself to stare at him, chin raised. “I need his car keys.”

  Brad was useless. She should have seen the glaze over his eyes before she had even spoken to him, but somehow she had missed it. He took a long swig of beer and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “Nah, sorry,” he said, slurring ever so slightly. Then he pointed toward the stairs. “Think he had to piss, though.”

  As she walked toward the stairs, a gentle wave of relief began to wash over her. Why hadn't she thought of the upstairs bathroom? That had been foolish. Not only might it be possible for her to get a moment alone, but surely Jillian would have tampons. Just chill out, she told herself. Take care of this first, then you can find Ian and decide if you still want to leave.

  There were a few people on the stairs, but the second floor was quiet. The door to the hall bathroom was ajar and the light was on inside, the fan whirring. Dori raised a hand to rap on it. From inside, she heard a soft moan. She rolled her eyes in frustration. Snorting coke in the downstairs bathroom and now this upstairs? Couldn't people pick someplace else to fuck around? She lowered her hand, trying to decide whether to interrupt or just to wait.

  Then a male voice reached her from inside the bathroom, a raspy, hitching whisper. “Hey . . . oh, shit, the door. What if . . . what if someone comes?”

  Dori's lips parted and she swayed forward, just slightly, her knees weakening. Her facial muscles were slack and her fingers felt numb. She reached out, watching her hand move as though it belonged to someone else entirely, and slowly pressed the door open.

  “Mmm,” said a girl on the other side of that door, and the sound was followed by another, a moist sound, that Dori had heard before. That Dori had made before. “Oh, don't worry,” the girl said. “Someone's definitely going to come.”

  Dori's fingers kept pushing. The door swung open just in time for her to see Jillian lower her head and slide her lips onto Ian's cock. He moaned again, eyes closing, and he pushed his fingers through her hair and then held her head, fucking her mouth. Jillian stroked him with her right hand and sucked noisily, greedily.

  Ian shuddered. He opened his eyes and gazed dreamily down at her bobbing head, entranced. Then he must have sensed that the door was open, that someone had come in. Or perhaps he had seen Dori in his peripheral vision, for he glanced up, shock warring with the pleasure etched upon his face.

  His eyes went wide when he saw who it was.

  “Dori,” Ian whispered, trying to pull back from Jillian, though the sink was behind him and there was nowhere for him to go. His hands flailed in the air as he began to panic, and he tried weakly to push Jillian's head away.

  The girl continued to slide her hand and her mouth over him, but she glanced upward as she did. Jillian saw that his gaze was elsewhere and she looked to her right. Her eyes met Dori's.

  She kept sucking.

  Dori took a step back, then another. Her fingers touched the door frame and the nerve endings came alive. Just touching the wooden frame seemed to burn her. Her face felt cold, but hot tears striped her cheeks and she tasted salt on her lips.

  That was what broke her. The taste of her own tears.

  There was a scuffle in the bathroom as Ian pushed Jillian away. He called her name, but Dori could barely hear him. She was already moving, running down the corridor. Chris LeBlanc tried to stop her on the stairs, to ask what was wrong, but she pushed past him and nearly fell as she hurried down the steps. Conversations stopped all around. People turned to stare. Dori didn't care. The pain in her heart had shut down everything else inside her. She ran to the front door and threw it open, rushing out into the night, into the rain, not bothering to close it behind her.

  On the Mansurs' front lawn, she hugged herself and let loose the shriek that had been building inside her, turning her face up to the sky. The rain drowned her tears, ruined the suede jacket she was wearing. Dori barely noticed.

  From inside the house, she heard Ian calling her name. She glanced quickly back. The door was still open but he had not come outside yet. Abruptly her pain was replaced by a venomous hatred unlike anything she had ever felt in her life. Fucking bastard, she thought. Scum. Violent images filled her mind, but despite her desire to do him harm, all she really wanted was to go, to be away from here. From him.

  Despite the rain, Dori started away from the Mansurs' house, cutting across the lawn, shoes squelching in the sodden earth. Already part of her was hesitant. On a clear night she could have walked home without difficulty. It was a few miles, but not a problem. Tonight, though . . .

  She paused, felt the rain streaming down her face.

  Back at the front of the house, blocked from her view by trees, Ian called out into the rain. Any second now he might actually come out into the storm, might come looking, wanting to try to explain. And the hell of it was, she thought she might listen.

  Asshole, she thought. But no amount of profanity could truly express what she felt about Ian just then.

  “No,” she said, denying the urge to go back. “No way.”

  She shook herself and started toward the road again, first walking, then lightly jogging on the slippery, muddy lawn. It felt good to move, and she ignored the rain that plastered her hair to her face. Dori started to run, her breath coming more quickly, her heart pounding. She reached the pavement but she kept running, wanting only to put distance between herself and the party. Questions had begun to rise in her mind and she wondered how she would deal with all of this at school . . . Everyone would know. What was she supposed to do when she saw Ian or Jillian in the halls?

  The rain was cold as it sluiced down the back of her neck, and Dori pulled her soaking-wet jacket up over her head like a cloak. She kept up her pace, hurrying along the road, wondering if she should risk trying to hitchhike. Grove Street was a lazy, winding road lined with trees. It was going to be a long, wet walk.

  “Dori!”

  She spun, still holding her jacket over her head. Back along the road at the edge of the Mansurs' property she could make out a dark figure, silhouetted against the night. Ian had come after her. Bitterness rose like bile in the back of her throat. Did he actually think he was going to be able to explain what she had seen?

  “Fuck you!” she screamed.

  Ian started to follow her. He called her name again. The pain in her heart returned now, worse than before, and fresh tears burned her cheeks. She started to run across Grove Street.

  “Dori!”

  She spun around, there on the wet road, and bellowed so loudly that the strength of it bent her over. “FUCK! YOU!”

  The pickup truck's headlights washed over her, and as she turned she was blinded by them. Instinct took over. She heard tires screaming on the pavement as the driver tried to stop. Dori threw herself to the left.

  One of the headlights shattered as the truck hit her.

  THE TICKING OF THE CLOCK seemed impossibly loud. Will James sat in a chair in his kitchen . . . only it hadn't been his kitchen for years. Everything about it was strangely unfam
iliar, and yet it still felt like home, as though there was a thin veneer of falsehood covering the truth of this place, and if he only scratched the surface he might find beneath it the kitchen he remembered from his childhood.

  There was a bittersweet quality to each minute he spent here. It felt good and right, and it also made him feel far too much like the adult he had become when his attention was elsewhere.

  The clock ticked.

  The refrigerator hummed.

  Kyle stared at him, eyebrows knitted, and actually flinched back an inch or two. “You're not serious,” the kid said.

  Will did not turn away. He was fighting the emotional and mental turmoil that threatened to overwhelm him, trying to hold on to memories that his mind kept trying to bury, and he didn't have time for pretense or courtesy.

  “I'm completely serious.”

  The kid stared at the thick book on the kitchen table for a moment, then jerked back abruptly and stood up, crossing to the kitchen sink and turning toward Will as though he had been cornered. Kyle looked frightened, sad, and somehow disappointed. When he shook his head now there was horror in his voice.

  “You cursed her.”

  He nodded. “Yeah. We did. I can't be sure all of the shit that happened to her that night was our fault, but neither one of us was enough of an asshole to try to pretend otherwise. It wasn't until a few days later that Dori told Brian most of the story, but the second we found out, that night, we knew we were responsible.”

  Kyle's chin snapped up and he shot Will a hard look. “You mean she lived?”

  Will stared at him blankly. “What? Yeah! Jesus, yes, she lived. You mean you thought—” He let out a puff of breath, shoulders sagging, and felt far older than he was. “The curse didn't kill her. But it could have. If Dori hadn't tried to get out of the way, if the driver hadn't noticed her and hit the brakes . . . she'd have died. Just like—”

  His eyes went wide. He'd been about to say Mike Lebo. His memories had been so badly muddled that he had been about to compare what had happened to Dori to what had happened to Mike, but in his heart he held on to the truth, the memory of what the past had been like before someone had started changing it.

  “Just like what?” Kyle asked.

  Will shook his head. “Doesn't matter. The point is, we cursed Dori. That truck hitting her broke both her legs. Took her months to recover.”

  The lighting in the kitchen made Kyle even paler than he was naturally. He stared at Will as though he were some kind of apparition that had appeared with a warning, like one of Dickens's Christmas spirits, and transformed familiar surroundings into something that simply shouldn't be. Will was uncomfortable beneath the kid's scrutiny, but he was not about to be deterred. He figured he had one chance at this. Kyle might not be the only person who could help him get it done, but Will wasn't going to risk it.

  “So what happened after?” the kid asked.

  Will could not prevent the queasy smile that forced its way onto his face.

  “We removed the curse. What do you think happened?” He shook his head. “We promised each other that we were done with magic, that we weren't going near it, weren't even going to talk about it. Not ever again.” Once more his shoulders sagged and now he dropped his gaze, letting his mind drift back to those days. They seemed so long ago. His eyes itched with the threat of tears. “That wasn't enough for me, though. I did one last bit of magic. Went through that book and found a spell that would make me forget. Forget it was real. Forget what we did. But I guess the universe doesn't allow that kind of cheating. Whoever's doing this now . . . it made me remember. But . . . Son of a bitch,” he whispered hoarsely. “We promised.”

  “Jesus,” Kyle muttered. He paced the kitchen. “So . . . all this stuff that's been happening to you. You think it's this Brian guy?”

  One image rose up in Will's mind then, from that night when they had found out what had happened to Dori. Will had been terrified and wracked with self-loathing. He had seen his own guilt and disgust reflected in Brian's eyes, and the two of them had pledged to keep their crime, their sin, a secret. Who would believe them anyway? But they had made a number of promises to one another that night. And hadn't there been a kind of excited glint in Brian's eyes?

  He thought there had been.

  “When I told him that I was going to do the spell to forget, he swore that afterward he would get rid of the book. That he was gonna burn it. Obviously, he didn't do that.”

  Kyle paused in his pacing and stared at him. “But I found it under the stairs here. This was your house.”

  Will frowned. “What's your point? You think I left it there?”

  Impossible things had been happening for days, so it should not have surprised Will at all when something happened that was merely strange. Yet it did surprise him. The shattering of the spell he had put upon himself, and the realization of what was going on, had pushed him into a kind of madness earlier in the day that had been with him ever since. It made his hands tremble and his skin prickle with pinpoints of heat and his head ache with the conflict of memories and desires and fears. It was a passionate lunacy that had driven him to beat Brian bloody at Papillon and to appear in the dark on the steps of his childhood home to plead with a teenage boy for help.

  Yet now, as Kyle studied him again, the kid's eyes briefly ticking toward the wine-red leather cover of Dark Gifts, there was a connection between the two of them that Will could not deny. It had been there before. Maybe there was something cosmic about it, maybe not. He didn't really care. All he knew was that in that moment he saw in Kyle Brody's eyes that the kid had recognized this bizarre kinship between them—a man who had once been a child here, and a boy whose life was flowing along a similar path, right down to sleeping in the same bedroom.

  Kyle believed him.

  Will closed his eyes and whispered a silent prayer of thanks. Until that moment he had not realized how little hope he had been holding on to.

  “So this Brian?” Kyle said, clearing his throat and standing a bit straighter as he tried to pretend this was just an ordinary conversation. “You said a lot of things about him hurting people, about him changing . . . your life? Your world? Whatever. How's he doing that, exactly?”

  There it was. The biggest question of all. The kid watched him expectantly and for a second Will had to search for the right words. He did not have them, but he was not going to let that stop him now.

  “We had found a spell. We never tried it; or at least I didn't. Looking back, I couldn't tell you if Brian did or not.” In his mind, the deck shuffled again. Mike Lebo's funeral. Ashleigh's bruises and tears the morning after her rape. “This one spell . . . According to the book, it was supposed to . . .” Will took a deep breath and locked eyes with Kyle. “It was supposed to take you back in time.”

  Slowly, Kyle began to lean backward, looking for something to lean on. He nearly fell over before catching himself on the counter. “You're telling me this guy's done it? Gone back? And he's messing with things then and . . . and changing them?”

  Will nodded, not releasing Kyle from his stare. “And there's only one way to undo it. I have to do the spell myself. I have to go back and stop him from hurting people. I could use help with the spell, Kyle, but there's more to it than that. This place, this house, this was everything to me back then. My home. I know you understand that.”

  Kyle nodded.

  “Just being here in this kitchen, I feel like all I'd have to do is reach out and I could just peel away the time that's passed, wipe it away like a layer of dust has settled in over the years. I'm closer to the past now. More connected. I need to do the spell here. And you need to watch over the spot, so I can find my way back. It's . . .” He gestured toward the table. “It's all in the book.”

  “But, my parents,” Kyle said, shaking his head. Then he laughed. “I . . . I want to help. This is completely fucked up, but I do believe you. I've felt that book. . . . I'd never be able to explain it to anyone, but I know there
's something powerful in it, something not right. And those notes. And there's something else, too. It feels true. It's just . . . what about my parents?”

  Will had already considered this. “We won't do it here. We'll do it in the storage room. Under the porch.”

  For long moments Will held his breath. Every tick of the clock made it harder for him to hold on to the memories that were slipping away, every second putting more and more distance between him and the past he was determined to alter. All the dangers, all the potential consequences, were on his mind. He knew that he could end up only making things worse. Magic was a tool, and only as subtle as the magician who wielded it.

  But he had to try.

  So he held his breath until Kyle gave a single, curt nod.

  “OK.”

  “Don't we need candles and stuff?”

  Will was halfway down the stairs that led from the back porch to the concrete patio with Dark Gifts in one hand and a kitchen carving knife in the other. The bushes that had formed a barrier between the patio and the backyard had been torn down and replaced with a low masonry wall that was attractive but completely unnecessary. It was just as sterile and ugly as the front of the house. Kyle's parents apparently had a bizarre hatred for shrubbery.

  He paused on the steps, staring at the patio.

  “Will?” Kyle prodded.

  “Hmm?” He turned around and saw the kid gazing at him expectantly. Had he asked a question? Oh, right, he thought. Candles.

  “I can't say for certain, and it's been a long time,” Will explained, “but I think that crap is mostly for show. I'm not sure if it's for the benefit of the magician or for whatever powers out there in the universe we're supposed to be appeasing. It could also be for focus. I mean, red yarn? Apples? Anyway, we don't need any of that stuff here. I think there are really only a few elements to real magic anyway.”

  He said this last as he continued down the stairs, and he paused at the bottom to glance back up, waiting on Kyle. The kid had not moved from the top of the stairs. He had a large, heavy flashlight and now he trained the beam on Will, studying him closely, paying particular attention to the knife.