The Boys Are Back in Town

by Christopher Golden

  But then, Young Brian was glad to see his elder. Whereas Young Will would have been terrified at the prospect of learning what the next ten years of his life would be like. Even now Will could see it in his eyes and he knew it was the truth. That was what he would have felt. Terror. To know what fate had in store would take away any passion he might have for his life.

  The funny thing was that Will would have loved to tell his younger self how things would turn out with Caitlyn. He had wasted so much time, had borne so much heartache, thanks to her. Now here was an opportunity to prevent that from ever happening, to erase it from his memory, and not only did he know he shouldn't take advantage of it, he knew Young Will wouldn't want to hear it.

  Irony sucked.

  Even if Will said something, there was no way to know how it would affect the future. Back in the day, Stacy Shipman would never have gone out with him. It was only in the future that the two of them would click. Thoughts of her made Will smile. Nope, it was better, all around, for all of them to keep quiet, no matter how much heartache they could have saved their younger selves . . . themselves . . . in the bargain.

  Impatient, Young Will got tired of waiting.

  “So what's the plan?”

  Will glanced at Brian, who nodded. Not that Will expected anything else. They were far too deep into this thing to hold back now. His gaze shifted to Ashleigh, who smiled softly when he looked at her and nodded.

  “I'm shaken up. But I'm all right. Thanks to you guys.” She glanced around. “All of you. If you hadn't come when you did—”

  “That's what we're here for,” Brian the Elder said, his younger counterpart nodding in agreement.

  “It also proves that we can change things,” Will said. They were all watching him, expecting him to take the lead. “That doesn't mean Ashleigh isn't still in danger—”

  “Why don't you let me worry about Ashleigh,” seventeen-year-old Will scowled from the coffee table. “You did such a bang-up job with Lebo.”

  Beside him, his best friend frowned. “Why don't we let Ashleigh worry about Ashleigh? OK, you saved my ass. I said thank you. It doesn't make me the eternal damsel in distress.”

  A chill passed through Will as he stared at his younger self, trying to figure out if the kid was being sarcastic, or if he suspected his elders had had a larger role in Mike's death. Will and Brian had debated telling them, and decided it was best not to mention it. There was no way to take it back now, and it would only weigh them all down with guilt, regret, and resentment. The pain that gnawed at Will's gut, that nibbled at his heart whenever he thought of Saturday night, of the sound of the car striking Mike's body, was something he would not have wished on anyone. But this was different . . . this was selfish.

  He kept the dark truth of that night from Young Will because he wanted to keep it from himself, to save himself the pain of that knowledge in the intervening years.

  “Look, here's our situation,” he said, drawing their attention again, ignoring Young Will's gibe. “Tess O'Brien's in danger. So's Bonnie Winter. Like I said, Ashleigh might not be out of the woods yet. Also, just because Brian and I don't remember anything else happening, that doesn't mean it can't. Our coming back here is changing things. Hopefully for the better, but that could work both ways.”

  On the sofa, Brian spoke up for the first time. He was stroking his goatee in a way that aged him further than his twenty-eight years, and there was a shadow of sadness that dimmed his eyes.

  “Will,” he said, speaking to the younger of the two, an old friend returning, “I've got to tell you something that your mutated self over here took a long time to learn.” Brian hooked a thumb toward the older Will but continued to look at the younger. “You're not always right. You're not always going to do the right thing. Shit, that's a lesson you've already learned, isn't it?”

  Brian glanced at his younger self, then back at Young Will. “We learned it together. But maybe it's going to take a while longer for it to kick in. You guys both want to know what the future holds, don't you? Of course you do. Well, I'll tell you.”

  “Hang on,” Will cautioned him.

  With a hard look, Brian silenced him and continued.

  “You're going to have some shit times. You're going to have some grand ones, too. But life? Life is made up of all the times in between. Magic is pretty amazing. It's like getting high or fucking, only better. It takes you away from the mundane, transports you to another place where you don't just think you're the center of the world, you become the center of the world.

  “But it's all bullshit,” Brian whispered, his voice a rasp filled with hesitant emotion. He dropped his gaze a moment and swallowed hard before raising his chin and glaring around the room. “None of it's real. Magic, drugs, sex . . . no matter how high up you go, you've always got to come back down. And it's what you've got waiting for you when you come down that matters.”

  The shush of a car passing on the street outside whispered through the room; the only other sound was the ticking of the clock in the kitchen. They all stared at Brian for a time, until at length the dough-faced teenager he had once been twisted around on the couch to face him.

  “I get what you're saying. I do. But what's that have to do with this? With what's going on right now?”

  Brian the Elder looked over at Young Will with a gravity he had never been able to summon as a boy. “It means you've got to get over yourself. Knock this shit off. There's no room here for attitude. You, both of you”—he glanced at Will—“we, all of us messed with something we shouldn't have. I can't help thinking, long-term, this is the payback. Magic screws with the natural order of things. It makes ripples. We're feeling them now.”

  “Ripples!” Young Will shot to his feet and shook his head in denial, shuddering as though he were cold. “Mike Lebo is dead, you asshole!”

  Young Brian flinched. “Hey!” he said, and glanced apologetically at his older self.

  “Fuck you, too,” the teenage Will replied. Then he spun to glare at his older self, and the elder Will knew most of this bitterness was aimed at him.

  He understood.

  But he didn't have any more time for this crap.

  Will strode up to the boy he had once been and reached for him. The kid tried to slap his arms away, but Will embraced him nevertheless. His whole body trembled, the smell of his hair was so familiar, and for a moment he felt that odd slippage in his mind as memories reasserted themselves, some sifting lower in the deck and others higher. For a few seconds it was hard to know which body was his and which was his own, because he remembered this moment with utter clarity.

  It was the strangest sensation: he remembered what he was going to say before the words had left his lips, words whose effect he understood completely.

  “I know you don't want to believe in this. I know you don't want to think about magic ever again. But I'm you, Will,” he whispered, gripping the back of the kid's head. “And without me, without you, more of your friends are going to be hurt. Bonnie Winter's going to die. She kissed us once, do you remember? In the eighth grade, in the closet at Doreen Bianchi's house.”

  At first Young Will struggled against him, but then he seemed to sink into Will's arms. When he looked up there was a kind of surrender in his eyes, but a resoluteness there as well.

  His fingers went to his lips as if experiencing a tactile memory of that one kiss from Bonnie Winter.

  “You can't let her die,” Will told him.

  Young Will pushed away from him and went back to the coffee table, where he sat with Ashleigh. She slid her arm around him.

  “So,” Brian said, watching Will, “you were saying?”

  Will nodded. “I was saying we've got to watch them all.”

  “It shouldn't be too hard,” Ashleigh offered. “Tess and Bonnie are both on the cheer squad with me. If Will and Brian hang out at practice this week, no one will think it's weird. Especially not since Caitlyn's on the squad, too.”

  The elder Brian sho
t a mischievous glance at his younger self. “And you'll be able to spend every afternoon ogling cheerleaders and have an excuse.”

  Young Brian pretended to be scandalized. “I admire them for their athleticism and . . . the synchronization. It's a skill.”

  Ashleigh shot him a dark look, but Will wasn't ready for them to lighten up just yet.

  “That works,” he said, “and Brian and I can keep an eye on their houses at night. Will . . . and I can't tell you how weird it is to call you that . . . you'll have to keep in constant contact with Ashleigh when she's not at school or cheer practice.

  “Look, Mike's funeral is Wednesday morning. If things actually do happen the way Brian and I remember them, Tess's attack will be Friday night. We'll get another shot at the invisible man then, for sure. Meanwhile, the two of us will sleep mostly during the day. We're staying at the Red Roof Inn if you need us during that time. For now we'll split up, start keeping watch over Tess and Bonnie. The three of you try to get some rest. You still have school, and us to answer to if you start blowing off homework and tests.”

  The five of them paused to glance around the room at one another.

  “Everyone good with the plan?” Will asked.

  Young Will wouldn't look him in the eye.

  “What?”

  The kid smiled. “I don't want anyone thinking I've got attitude, but isn't there something you guys forgot?”

  Will glanced at Brian, but they were all looking at the kid.

  “You don't want to tell us about the future, but between what Ashleigh told us and what you were saying in the car, I get the basic idea. Someone left you this note, and this book, and that's how you figured you weren't losing your mind, that someone was really screwing with your head. If Brian's the only one who knows where the Gaudet book is stashed, then don't you think we'd better put the thing under the stairs—and that note in the storage area under the porch—just to be on the safe side? We have to, don't we? Otherwise none of this would ever have happened.”

  “That doesn't make sense,” Ashleigh said, brows knitting. “How can that be? If it took them coming back to cause the note to be written and the book to be left under there, but it took the note and the book to cause them to come back, that doesn't make any sense.”

  But Will was not so troubled. “Maybe once the slippage started, once Brian and I kept both sets of memories and started to figure out what was happening, maybe that part, at least, was inevitable. That we would come back, that we would be here, that we would be able to get those messages into the future.”

  Will noticed a dark look exchanged between the two Brians, and he felt a strange uneasiness enter his heart. They seemed relaxed, those two, but looking at them now he wondered if that was not so much relaxation as resignation.

  “What was that?” he asked. “That look?”

  Ashleigh and Young Will both glanced at them as well.

  The expression on the face of Brian the Elder underwent a change that revealed the fear he had been keeping hidden as best he could. In that moment he looked far younger.

  “I've thought about this a lot over the years. Sometimes I think . . .” He paused and glanced out the window at the night. Then he offered a sheepish chuckle that drained from his face instantly. “Sometimes I think magic has a kind of intelligence all its own. Or if not intelligence, at least ambition. It has twists and folds in it . . . and shadows. This isn't H. G. Wells. It's Jean-Marc Gaudet's fucking Dark Gifts.”

  Young Brian sniffed and shook his head, eyes downcast. “Yeah, right. Magic is never a gift. It always comes with a price.”

  The sky was ice blue that Wednesday morning when they buried Michael Paul Lebo. Without any warning from the meteorologists the temperature had tumbled precipitously overnight. If it got any colder, Will knew, he would be able to see his breath. Halloween was less than two weeks away, autumn in full swing, and there was frost on the jack-o'-lanterns in the mornings, but this was still unseasonably cold.

  Will remembered this day, but he had forgotten how cold it was, and he shivered in the thick sweater he wore. It wasn't below freezing, but when the wind eddied the leaves in an autumnal dance across the cemetery, it felt like midwinter.

  At the graveside stood Father Charles, an austere thirty-something priest who was a friend to the Lebo family. Will knew him, but only in the dimmest sense. In that other set of memories, the set that was fading like old photographs in his mind, Father Charles had attended Mike's graduation party. But there wasn't going to be a party now.

  The strangest sensation of all was the visceral, nearly debilitating déjà vu that threatened to overwhelm him at any moment. He wasn't sure if it could really be called déjà vu, however, since he actually had had this experience before. Every time he glanced around, his mind tried to match what he was seeing with his memory of these events. It was an immediate echo, but always from a different angle, a different perspective. This hadn't been as much of a problem on Monday night, speaking with Young Will, because his memories of their conversation hadn't existed until they'd had it. He was making new memories.

  This, though . . . the images from this funeral were etched upon his mind. Several times he had to squeeze his eyes shut from the disorientation caused by his dual perspective. Young Will and Young Brian were near the inner circle of mourners, close to the grave and to Mike's family. Others gathered in grief-stricken concentric rows around the center, including Principal Chadbourne and several teachers. Mr. Sandoval from American history and Mrs. Hidalgo from biology stood on either side of Mr. Murphy, who had grown up in Framingham but knew the area well, and whom all the students really connected with. Mr. Murphy was leaning slightly on Mrs. Hidalgo, and when he glanced at her, Will could see his grim, tear-streaked expression.

  There were more than a hundred students there, from the look of it. Will crossed his arms, covering his mouth with one hand as he gathered his composure. They were all there. Caitlyn and Ashleigh, Lolly and Pix, Bonnie Winter and Brian's sister Dori; Will smiled to think how much Mike would've loved to know that half the cheerleading squad had shown up to cry over him.

  Danny and Nick were behind the girls, along with Eric, who had come home the previous day. So far Ashleigh hadn't mentioned what had happened to her, but Will thought she would eventually, that she should. That was not the sort of thing you kept from someone you loved. Joe Rosenthal, Tim Friel, and Kelly Meserve were there. He spotted Martina Dienst, her arm linked with Delia Young. Todd Vasquez. Nyla. Chuck. Kelso. Mia Skopis.

  He was surprised to see Stacy Shipman there, and found himself staring at her. There was something extraordinarily magnetic about the girl, and he wondered if he was the only one upon whom she had that effect. Her head was tilted to one side, resting on Todd Vasquez's shoulder. Even amongst those who had not known Mike well enough to grieve for him, there was a shroud of melancholy that was to be expected. This sort of thing wasn't supposed to happen.

  Will took a long breath and let it out slowly. Intellectually, he knew that Mike's death was not his fault, that he had been used as a murder weapon. But he had been having nightmares about the steering wheel in his hand, the sound of cracking glass and the impact of flesh and bone upon metal. They never kept him from going back to sleep, strangely enough. Perhaps because he felt such night terrors were only a fraction of the torment he deserved.

  From his sadness he seemed to come awake, standing there in the cemetery, mind still muddled with the combination of this experience and the memory of having been through it before. As his eyes focused on the mourners ahead of him once more, he saw that Stacy Shipman was looking his way. She wore a curious expression that seemed to say that she felt she should recognize him but couldn't quite place his face.

  Will offered her a sad smile, and Stacy returned it. Then the priest gave his final blessing and the mourners began to move forward, forming a line around the grave, shuffling past that hole in the ground where what remained of Mike Lebo now lay. Some of them carried
flowers that they dropped into the grave. Beside him, Brian started forward to get in line but Will did not join him. Brian shot him a curious glance, but Will only shrugged. He had been through that line before and did not want to experience it again.

  As the mourners paid their respects, Will turned his back upon the spectacle. His heart hurt too much to watch it again. He thought of Mike rummaging through the stacks at the Comic Book Palace or doing his terrible Hannibal Lecter impression during school assemblies to get a laugh.

  Will closed his eyes again, wiping them. I'm sorry, Lebo.

  “Let's go,” Brian said, voice low. “I don't want to be here anymore.”

  “I'm with you,” Will replied, though he had a difficult time tearing his attention away from the line of black-clad mourners. When he did glance at Brian, he saw that his old friend was staring at him. The bruises on Brian's face had faded to yellow, and though they were both completely out of place in dark pants and sweaters they could barely afford, he managed to look appropriately somber and clean-cut. On the other hand, Will felt like a mess and hoped he didn't look in quite as much disarray as he felt.

  “What's that look?” Brian asked.

  “You turned out okay,” Will said, surprising himself with the sentiment.

  “Know what? I know your thinking is pretty muddy right now, but believe it or not, you turned out all right yourself.” Brian took a step closer and leaned in so they were practically nose to nose. “We've still got work to do, Will. Don't fall apart on me now.”

  Will took a long breath and nodded once, then turned and started across the cemetery lawn. A long line of cars was parked on the long narrow drive that snaked through the graveyard. The two yellow school buses that had carried the students from Eastborough High looked hideously out of place, like clown cars in the presidential motorcade.

  By the time they reached their five-hundred-dollar Buick near the back of the line, the funeral had officially ended, and while many of the mourners gathered in small clusters to speak softly about the dead, others had begun to drift amongst the gravestones and tombs, returning to their own vehicles. Will paused as he opened the Buick's door and took one last long look at the grave, at Father Charles speaking to the Lebos, at his younger self standing with his friends, not wanting to leave . . . not wanting to leave Mike behind forever.