The Boys Are Back in Town

by Christopher Golden

  Of course, if the boys had had a few beers, it wouldn't be hard for Nick to talk Will into leading them all on a covert mission up the tree outside Ashleigh's window. She wasn't a flashy girl like Caitlyn or flirtatious in the way that Pix and Lolly were, but she wasn't above relishing the idea that the boys might want to have a peek at her.

  Not that she would let them.

  Before she turned her bedroom light back on, Ashleigh slipped into a pair of sweatpants. Now she lay on the bed reading Dune, but her mind was not entirely focused on the sand worms of Arrakis. Even as her eyes followed the words on the page, her ears were attuned to sounds outside her window. The breeze rustled the leaves, and though the house was only a few decades old it popped and creaked from time to time, so it was difficult for her to discern what sounds might be coming from outside. Still, she felt certain that after that first round of scuffling and voices, she had heard other, quieter sounds, from farther away.

  A tiny smirk appeared at the corner of her mouth and she reached up to push a stray lock of brown hair away from her face. This was why she wore her hair in a ponytail when she was reading.

  Boys and beer, she thought, are a hilarious combination.

  With a glance at her window, Ashleigh settled further into her bed, the book propped on her chest. Though it was early autumn yet, her parents had already put the heat on in the house and it was nice to have the cool breeze coming in through the window. As she read about intergalactic politics and sand and spice, the words began to blur on the page and her eyelids fluttered. Her chin nodded drowsily, and several times she snapped her eyes open and tried to focus on the page again. When she had read the same paragraph half a dozen times, she surrendered and slipped her marker into the book and set it down on her nightstand.

  “Ashleigh?”

  The voice was like the whisper of the wind. The first time he spoke she was not even certain she had really heard it. Perhaps, she thought, it had been the rustling of the leaves outside the window.

  But then she heard her name called again, ever so softly, and she shivered, a sour twist to her lips. All of the amusement she had felt only a short time earlier left her. It had to be Will, or Eric, or maybe one of the other guys. But that whisper gave her no familiar voice to latch on to, and there was something dark and insinuating about the way he called to her. There was none of the urgency Will or Eric would have had, yet a great sense of caution.

  With some trepidation she clicked off the lamp at her bedside. Though she knew she was wearing her sweatpants she still glanced down self-consciously to reassure herself, the same way her mother always checked that the front door was locked before they left, and then checked once or twice more, as if once wasn't enough.

  Ashleigh went to the window and peered out into the darkness of her backyard. The moon was not full, yet it was bright enough to cast the trees and bushes in ominous silhouettes. Nothing moved in the dark, and her heart drummed a staccato rhythm as a strange dread enveloped her. There was something wrong here. Though it wasn't the sort of thing she shared with her friends, she had always had a sense about such things.

  And yet . . .

  At the edge of the Wheelers' property was a stretch of woods that ran behind all of the homes on this side of the street. As she surveyed the yard, there came the snap of a branch and the rustle of underbrush from those woods. An animal, she was sure, but when she peered into the woods there was a shadow darker than all the others, a silhouette that was not a tree or a bush. It was human.

  She felt it watching her.

  The silhouette moved, darting abruptly behind a pine tree. Ashleigh uttered a small gasp and flinched as the lurker disappeared.

  She heard her name called again, and was startled to realize that it came from directly below the window. Startled and relieved. Her eyes ticked back and forth between the woods on the other side of the yard and the few trees just outside her window. One hand had flown up to cover her mouth when she had glimpsed the silhouette in the woods. Now she lowered it and pressed her forehead against the screen, trying to peer downward to get a glimpse of whoever was down there.

  “Who is it?” she whispered.

  “It's Will.”

  Ashleigh shuddered. “It doesn't sound like Will.”

  There was a pause. “I . . . something's happened, Ash. Something . . . pretty unbelievable. I need your help.”

  His whispers were rasped and his voice low and grim, but now that he had spoken further she thought it might be Will after all. Ashleigh glanced at the door to her bedroom, careful to keep her voice low so that her parents would not hear her.

  “Are you sick? You don't . . . you don't sound like yourself.”

  Another pause. “I don't look like myself, either.”

  Barely aware she was doing it, Ashleigh slid her hands up her arms and hugged herself, a chill spreading through her body. Something unpleasant fluttered in her stomach. Her gaze ticked toward the woods, but the silhouette still had not returned and she had to wonder if she had seen anything there at all. It might have just been a tree branch swaying in the breeze. The alternative was far too unsettling to consider. If there was a lurker, he was likely still there, spying on her window.

  “What . . . what's that mean, Will? You're scaring me.”

  “I don't mean to.”

  “Why didn't you just climb the tree like you used to?”

  No answer, though she could hear him now, moving around at the base of the tree out there. She pressed her face against the screen again, trying to get a glimpse of him. And then she knew.

  “It's because of what you just said, wasn't it? You look different?”

  “Yes.”

  Fear raced through her then. Fear for him. “Oh, my God, Will. What happened?”

  “I'll be OK. But I do need your help,” he replied, his whispers floating up to her. “Ashleigh, listen. If I . . . if I didn't look like me . . . I know it sounds freaky, but if I didn't look like me, what's the one question you could ask me so I could prove it was me?”

  The question unnerved her but her mind began to work at it immediately. What was it that no one else would know but Will? He had read portions of her diary, but there wasn't much that was secret inside it, really. Will knew so much about her, when she first got her period, when she had first experimented sexually with Eric . . . hell, he knew what she had gotten for her birthday every year for her entire life. An image floated across her mind, a glass Coke bottle spinning on a wooden picnic table behind Connie Laurent's house.

  “Ashleigh?” that strangely familiar voice rasped.

  “Have you ever kissed me?” she asked, peering down into the darkness beneath the trees.

  Seconds passed. During that time she realized it was a stupid question. There was a fifty-fifty chance he would guess the right answer, whether it was Will or not.

  “I don't look like me.”What the hell does that mean?

  “No. Not in the way that you mean. I've kissed you, but just, y'know, as friends.”

  “Did we ever come close?”

  This time there was no hesitation. “Yes. Playing spin the bottle at Connie Laurent's. We went behind the fence, but we didn't kiss. It just would've been too weird.”

  A prickling sensation spread across the back of her neck and Ashleigh found that rather than relief, she felt only more anxious and hesitant. His voice was just wrong. It was Will, but not Will; even whispered, she could tell that.

  “Will . . . I mean, you could have told someone.”

  “I didn't, Ashleigh. Not ever. It wasn't anybody else's business.”

  “I'm . . . I'm afraid, Will. If you are Will. I think I should close the window now.”

  “No!” he called, his voice rising from a whisper though not quite a shout. “Sorry. Shit,” he whispered. “Ashleigh, please, ask me something else.”

  Her eyes closed and she rested her forehead against the window frame. She hugged herself again, and she could feel the gooseflesh on her arms. Will w
as her best friend, even now. What would be so private that—

  “I've got it,” she said.

  “Ask me.”

  Ashleigh opened her eyes. She peered into the darkness below, and through the trees and the leaves for the first time she thought she saw a figure. In the night she could not tell, but he seemed too tall to be Will.

  “I don't look like me.”

  “My ninth birthday. What did you get me?”

  His sigh was audible even on the second floor. “Jesus, Ash, I don't remember. It was a . . . it was a long time ago. But . . . your ninth birthday? I remember you cried that day. You cried a lot.”

  Her throat went dry and though she wanted to, she could not close her eyes. When she swallowed, it hurt her.

  “Do you . . . do you remember why?”

  There was a long pause this time. At length, another whisper carried up to her. “I'm not alone, Ashleigh. I don't know if you'd want me to talk about it.”

  She froze. “Who's there? Who's with you?”

  “Brian.”

  Her brow furrowed in confusion and she tried to get a better look out the window. She traced her fingers along the base of the screen, tempted to remove it, to thrust her head out and try to see them.

  “Brian?”

  Another voice, then. Not at all familiar. “Hello, Ashleigh.”

  “Has . . . has something happened to you, too?”

  “Yes. Yeah, I guess that's one way to put it.”

  She was more than a little freaked out. Forget about closing the window; her mind had now moved on to the possibility of calling the police. But then it occurred to her that the question she had asked . . . that was one only Will would ever know. He would never have told anyone that story. No way.

  “Brian. Can I trust you to cover your ears?” she asked. It was insane. It didn't even sound like Brian. How could she trust him? But the alternative—completely panicking—would be a bad idea if it turned out that something awful really had happened to Will.

  “Yeah. I'll cover them. Got 'em covered now.”

  “Answer the question, Will,” Ashleigh said. She bit her lip gently and her chest hurt. She did not want to talk about this, didn't want to remember.

  “It was . . .” Will began hesitantly, “it was the last time your father ever took a drink. He forgot your birthday. He ate part of your cake. And he . . . he hit your mother. Your mom, she canceled the party, but you begged her to let me come over. I was the only one there with you, and . . .”

  Ashleigh felt the edges of her eyes burn with unshed tears. “And you held me while I cried.” She covered her mouth again and then reached to begin removing the screen. “Will, what is it? What's happened to you? Come up. I'll help. Of course I'll help.”

  He hesitated only a moment, and then he began to climb. Ashleigh saw the dark figure clutching branches, hauling himself up. Too broad in the shoulder to be Will. But different as it was, the voice was his. And only Will would have known . . . only Will had held her when her heart was broken.

  A snapping of branches across the yard drew her gaze and she spotted it, that same dark silhouette, moving amongst the woods. The figure quickly darted deeper into the woods and then was gone.

  “What the hell . . .” she began slowly, speaking mostly to herself.

  From beneath her, climbing nearer the window, Will spoke. “Happened to me? You asked that already. The answer's simple, but hard to take.”

  Ashleigh looked down and she saw him, his face illuminated by the glow from her bedroom. It was Will's face, no doubt about it. But different. Older. More rugged. This was not a boy, but a man.

  “What happened is, I grew up.”

  All the breath went out of Ashleigh's lungs. A spasm passed through her and dizziness made her stumble backward. Ashleigh believed that people only fainted in the movies, and so she did not faint. Instead, she said a silent, barely formed prayer as all the feeling went out of her legs and she collapsed, eyes wide with horror. She scrambled backward, sliding across the wood floor, and she began to hyperventilate.

  Ashleigh pulled her legs up beneath her and hugged them to her, turning to face the wall, her back to the window.

  But she did not wake up.

  The nightmare did not go away.

  “Ashleigh,” whispered this man . . . Will James. “Please.”

  Her heart trip-hammered in her chest, but she could not deny what she had seen. That face. And what she had heard. His voice and his words and the truth that he had known.

  He spoke to her.

  And Ashleigh listened.

  “You've got to be kidding me.”

  Kyle stared at the place where Will James had been, a weird, manic grin spreading across his features and a mad little laugh bubbling up from his throat. His body went slack and he just sat there, smiling, running one hand through his hair.

  “No way. No. Way.”

  But his denials were only perfunctory. There was no doubt in his mind as to what he had just seen. Magic. As impressive as the flame-in-hand Will had brandished earlier had been, this was the big time. Serious mojo. Kyle was almost numb with amazement. Holy shit, he thought. Unbelievable.

  So much of his connection to Will James—the note and the book and all of that stuff—had been so creepy, even frightening, that this giddiness that swept over him now was a relief. He shook his head and gazed in admiration at the circle and symbols, all painted in Will's blood. The memory of Will slicing open his own hand was fresh in Kyle's mind, and he had to hand it to the guy, that move had taken more than a little faith and slightly less than all his marbles.

  “Wow,” Kyle whispered.

  The giddy sensation began to subside, and his smile disappeared as he thought about what Will had told him, about the purpose of this bit of sorcery. Silently, he wished the man luck. In all his life, nothing like this had ever happened to Kyle. And it wasn't just the magic. He played it cool because that was how a pale, lanky kid with orange hair had to play it to avoid being completely tortured by his classmates. But he had always had this sense that his life was going to be boring.

  Ordinary.

  There was nothing ordinary about this.

  Despite the unsettling truths about the world he had learned in recent hours, for the first time Kyle Brody thought that perhaps his life was not going to be quite so boring after all. Perhaps it was this factor that caused him to approach his obligation to Will James with a gravity and maturity he had never exhibited toward anything else. Whatever it took, he would safeguard this place until Will returned, and not a word to his parents. This guy's life . . . and the lives of some of his friends . . . might be depending on Kyle. It had happened almost too fast for him to understand the weight of that burden, but now that he did, he could only accept it.

  As he began to come down from the high of seeing magic performed, seeing a man slip through time, other concerns began to assert themselves. He was staring at the bloody circle, at those symbols, and it really sank into him what his parents would think if they happened to come into this cold, stooped little room and discovered Will's occult scrawl.

  Minutes went by. Kyle stared at the spot where Will had disappeared, but it quickly became obvious to him that unlike in time travel stories he'd read, Will James was not going to pop right back up only moments after he'd left. Soon he grew anxious and started to bounce his heel on the concrete, his leg rising and falling incessantly. It was a nervous habit that drove his mother crazy, particularly when it signified his desire to leave the dinner table.

  The complications of all of this began to present themselves. Will hadn't had a clue what to expect after he'd performed the spell. He'd left it all for Kyle to figure out, and the clock was ticking. His parents could come home any time now. They'd been out to Ken's for dinner with friends; if they lingered, or if they decided on another bottle of wine, they might be there for another hour yet. But if they didn't, they might pull into the driveway at any moment.

  “Shit,”
Kyle snapped, and he got up and hustled, hunched over, to the door. Leaving the light on he slipped onto the patio, ears attuned for the sound of his parents' car arriving.

  As fast as he was able he slipped up the back porch steps and into the house. His heart had picked up a strange rhythm, a combination of fear and excitement and guilt. In the living room he paused to glance out the picture window at the darkened street. No sign of any cars. Kyle took several breaths, steadying himself, and then as if at the sound of a starter gun he sprinted down the short corridor and into his parents' bedroom. His mother had a long, squat dresser—what they called a lowboy—with a mirror on it. His father's was a tallboy. On top of the bureau were a nice steel-banded watch, a bunch of loose change, and some receipts his father had unceremoniously dumped from his pockets.

  No keys.

  His dad didn't keep the key to the storage area on the ring with his house and car keys but instead on a separate, flimsy metal ring that also had a key to the garage, which they never locked, and to the snowblower. Kyle could feel his pulse in his throat and the tips of his fingers as he rifled through the top drawer of his father's tallboy, where his dad kept rings and batteries and keepsakes, matches and—in a container that could have passed for a harmonica box—a small vibrator.

  Kyle shuddered at the memory of his first discovering the vibrator. It was just too much damn information. But as his fingers brushed the box aside, the keys scraped the bottom of the drawer. He snatched up the small ring and quickly worked the key to the storage area off of it, then hid the ring behind a pack of playing cards and reorganized a few other things to keep the ring from sight. If his father was going through the drawer, he wouldn't notice right off that a key was missing if he didn't notice the ring itself.

  A phone began to ring, but it was not the house phone. It was the trill of his mobile, which was still stashed in his backpack because he had not used it since coming home from school the previous day. He darted across the hall to his own bedroom, grabbed the backpack, and fished through it for the phone. He missed the call, but that wasn't really his priority at the moment.