The Boys Are Back in Town

by Christopher Golden

  Again.

  He burst out of the trees onto the clearing in the state park land that was used as a beach in the summer. There was a parking lot not far off, but it was empty. Nothing there. Ashleigh came up beside him, moving faster, and together they ran along that barren stretch of land just above the place where the state had dumped sand. There were green trash cans and a couple of rusted hibachi grills; at the midpoint was a tall white lifeguard chair.

  Will stopped and stared at the chair, thoughts clicking through his mind like trying to find the combination on his locker. He'd heard at least a couple of different guys talk about taking girls down here, fooling around up on the lifeguard chair.

  “Ash,” he whispered.

  She glanced at him and Will saw pain in her eyes. God, she meant the world to him. He had no idea what the future held, and the other Will wasn't about to tell him, but he prayed that whatever happened he held on to Ashleigh. She was more than a friend. What was that saying? Home was the place that when you went there, they had to take you in. That was family. And blood relation or no, Ashleigh was family.

  Her fingers gripped his hand and like that they hurried down to the lifeguard chair, coming up on it from behind. They slowed as they reached it, moving with caution, sidling around in front.

  There was nothing there but shadows and moonlight.

  HIS HANDS CARESSED HER BACK and Tess let her head loll back while he kissed her neck. She ran her fingers through his hair and her pulse raced. With his right hand he cupped her breast and gently stroked her nipple through her shirt, sending an electric shock of pleasure jolting through her.

  A soft laugh gurgled up from her throat and she smiled further, knowing how sexy it sounded. She darted her tongue out to moisten her lips and she kissed the side of his face even as he continued to nuzzle her throat. They had planned for him to pick her up at the house, but he had walked down the path to meet her, too impatient to see her. In another guy that would have driven her away, but he was a good-looking bastard, charmingly cocky, and she couldn't deny her attraction.

  His hand slipped up beneath her shirt, expertly lifting her bra and pushing it above her breasts. An excited thrill rippled through her and her eyelids fluttered as he caressed her bare skin, gently rolling her nipples between his fingers. She knew this was crazy. It was their first date. She should make him stop. This wasn't the place or the time.

  “We . . . we have reservations,” she said breathlessly. “Maybe we should—”

  He covered her mouth with his own and they kissed deeply, his tongue dancing with hers, lips brushing against hers. Her arousal burgeoned and she let herself go, kissing him back with a fire that surprised her. He ground against her; she could feel his hardness against her thigh, even through their clothes, and she uttered a tiny sigh of admiration.

  Tess shivered with pleasure and kissed him more deeply, tracing her fingers across his face.

  His hands ran down over her body, and then his fingers tickled her belly as he began to unbutton her jeans. She froze for a moment, then reached down to push his hands away. Tess didn't think she had ever been this aroused in her entire life. She wanted the same thing he wanted; she wasn't going to lie to herself about that. But she knew how things worked, and there was no way that was happening tonight. Though she might curse herself for it later, she forced her heart to slow down, took short breaths to calm herself.

  “Maybe we should actually have a date?” she suggested with a lopsided grin.

  He wasn't smiling.

  Her own grin evaporated. “Hey, come on, don't be like—”

  The blow took her in the side of the face, cracking her cheekbone. He struck her with such force that she spun halfway around and staggered backward.

  “If it makes you feel any better,” he said, “this was always going to end the hard way. If you'd played along, you would've just been postponing the inevitable.”

  Tess had no time to whimper, no time to even begin to right herself, to run away, before he hauled back and kicked her in the stomach. A thin tendril of vomit flew from her lips and she fell backward into an old tree someone had stripped of half its branches to clear the path. Tess hit the tree and one of those jagged, truncated, snapped-off branches punctured her shoulder, tearing flesh and scraping bone.

  Eyes wide, terror and pain nearly stilling her heart, she opened her mouth and began to scream. Her agony echoed out across Gorham Lake.

  But he was just getting started.

  Kyle Brody lay frozen on the cold concrete in the darkness of the storage space beneath his back porch, the stench of Ben Klosky's urine in his nose. Half-buried beneath his much larger friend, he could feel Ben quivering, could hear the breath catch in his throat.

  “Kyle,” the voice at the door whispered. “Time for you to learn a lesson about staying out of other people's business.”

  There was an awful glee in that voice that clawed at Kyle's heart. Even now, with Ben's whimpering in his ear and the mutterings of the whisperer beyond the door, his ears still echoed with the sound of his mother's screaming, and the terrible, abrupt silence that had followed. While Ben trembled, Kyle was rapt with attention. His muscles were paralyzed, his lips pressed tightly together, and he held his breath. Only his thunderous heart was in motion as he strained to hear any sound from inside the house, any indication that his parents were still . . . moving.

  Once again there came the sound of something scratching slowly down the door to the storage area.

  There was a filthiness to the air now, a clinging, fetid rot that filmed his exposed skin. He could taste his fear, and yet his panic over the fate of his parents, the echo of his mother's shrieking, hardened him against his own terror. It was the only thing that saved him from the abject fright that had reduced his best friend to near catatonia.

  The latch, he thought. I've gotta get to the latch, try to hold it and . . . This line of thought withered and vanished from his mind, obliterated by a bit of logic that he grasped for in desperation. The magic. The magic is keeping it out.

  “Ben,” he whispered, desperately trying to get free, to extricate himself from beneath that bulk. “Ben, I think if we—”

  “Are you afraid, Kyle? I hope so. That's good. That . . . helps,” came that eerie, drifting voice, much too close in the dark.

  The temperature plummeted in that tiny room and the air felt too close around him, as though the place were shrinking. Kyle shivered and screwed his eyes tightly shut, transported instantly back to childhood memories of quivering beneath his bedspread on nights when every creak and moan made him bury his face in his pillow. The fear crawled upon him, coating him like the filth in the air, like that intimate whisper.

  Ben shook even more uncontrollably. Then, abruptly, he sat up. Kyle felt his weight lift and heard Ben shifting in the darkness, trying to catch his breath. Hands scrabbled along the concrete, searching perhaps for something with which to defend himself.

  Kyle stared in what he believed was the direction of the door. His thoughts of a moment before had been uprooted and now tumbled through his mind, and he tried to snatch at them, to make sense of them again. His pulse beat a staccato rhythm that urged him to act, but they were in a tiny room with no windows and no other door, and he knew without doubt that nothing in this room could protect them from the whisperer.

  The scratching ceased.

  Ben gave a querulous grunt.

  The latch clicked and the door began to swing open, a scythe of moonlight slicing into the room. Ben was slightly in front of Kyle and to his left, and in the wash of moonlight his face was almost feral with terror.

  Kyle's thoughts began connecting again. Shaken from his paralysis, he turned and scrambled back through the storage area. From the floor where he had dropped it he grabbed the book and moaned with the effort. Dark Gifts had never felt heavier. It was like hefting a cinder block, but with both hands he managed to tuck it under one arm. With his other hand he spider-walked his fingers along the cemen
t, its details hidden in the darkness.

  The pressure in the room changed. His ears popped.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

  His fingertips scraped dried blood. A triumphant rush went through him, and, clutching the book tightly to him, Kyle rose to a crouch and stepped inside the gore-painted circle. Even as he turned his gaze toward the door, the room was filled with a kind of roar that seemed to tear from Ben Klosky's throat in an agonized blend of fear, anguish, and aggression, a lunatic growl of escape.

  That square of moonlight grew wider, the door fully open now. A cold certainty clasped Kyle's heart. There was no escape through that door. Ben stooped over and charged through the opening and Kyle shouted his name, tried to warn him, to call him back. Didn't he feel it? This was the terrible truth of the title of that book.

  Dark Gifts.

  “Get out of my way or I'll fucking kill—”

  Ben had his right fist cocked back as he lunged through the door. His hair was the first thing to catch fire. With a blast of superheated air and a crackling of burning flesh, his entire body was engulfed in flame. An instant later Ben Klosky collapsed into a pile of blazing orange embers that swirled across the patio and blew away like the ash tapped from the tip of a cigarette.

  Where he had been was a shadow figure, blacker than black, silhouetted by the moonlight. It did not so much move as flow into the tiny room under the porch. One hand snaked out and a long finger pointed at Kyle.

  “That,” it whispered, pointing at the book he clutched, “does not belong to you.”

  His mother's death cries—for he was certain now that was what he had heard—still rang in his ears. His eyelids seemed to be icing shut with the chill in the air and he shuddered, his breath coming in ragged gasps as he stared at that perfect, human darkness.

  “F-fuck you,” he said, his teeth chattering.

  The shadow laughed. “Who are you saving it for?” Its night-swaddled head inclined toward the blood circle on the concrete. “He's not coming back.”

  Kyle squeezed his eyes closed, trying to see if he could sense the magic of the symbols scrawled below him. “You can't have the book. And I'm not going to let you destroy the circle.”

  This time there came no reply, not in words nor in laughter. He began to cringe, his fear gnawing at him deep as bone, worsening in that dreadful silence.

  He shook with the force of the blow to his chest. It took a fragment of a second for the sound of cracking bone to register upon his ears. The book fell from his hands and there was the wet slap of something splashing the concrete. Kyle Brody opened his eyes and glanced down. In the moonlight he could see that the arcane circle Will had drawn had been obscured by a cascade of fresh blood.

  The whisperer was gone. The book was gone.

  Kyle fell to the ground, unconscious, the left side of his face resting amid a growing pool of his own blood.

  October, Senior Year . . .

  Three quarters of the way around to the other side of the lake, Brian and his teenage counterpart emerged from a dense stretch of woods where there was barely a path onto a flat clearing, where a series of large rocks formed an outcropping that jutted up from the lake. His chest burned from the rush through the trees and his arms and face bore light scratches. He smelled pine sap, and his scalp itched with the paranoia that there might be insects crawling there.

  “Damn,” Brian whispered as he paused in that clearing, one foot on a large rock as he drew deep breaths.

  A short, awkward laugh drew his gaze up, and in the light from the stars and moon he stared into his own face . . . the face that had looked back at him from the mirror over a decade before. The younger Brian was chuckling at him.

  “What's funny?”

  The kid was also breathing heavy, but not hard, not gasping for air. “I'm just thinking when I get older, I'm gonna have to spend some more time in the gym. You look like you're in good shape, but—” He threw his hands up and shrugged.

  Brian tried to shoot him a withering glare but couldn't hold it and ended up laughing instead. “Say shit like that and you might not get any older.”

  “We run any more and I damn well know I'm not getting any older than you are now,” the kid retorted with a taunting grin.

  A wail of absolute despair tore out over the lake, echoing off the trees and sending something scuttling through the branches above them. Brian looked at his younger self, bearing full knowledge of all of the wrongs he had committed at that age, the sins that had weighed down his conscience, but when he saw the flash of panic and concern in those eyes he felt that weight lifted from him.

  Together, the two of them sprinted through the clearing and crashed through the trees on the other side. Those lost, desperate screams continued to tear across the sky. Brian pushed branches out of the way and vaulted a felled birch, drawn on by the sorrow of that voice.

  “Tess!” he shouted as he darted through some trees to the shoreline of the lake, where the footing was treacherous in the dark but there were fewer obstacles.

  “What are you doing?” his younger self demanded in a harsh whisper, stumbling as he followed. “If you scare him off we'll never catch him!”

  “I don't care! I just want him to stop!”

  Before he had even gotten the words out, the screaming ceased. The last of it rolled across the surface of the lake, and then the only echo was in Brian's head. He did not want to even begin to think about what had caused Tess to fall silent. For long seconds they hustled along in a wordless chorus of grunts. Then the kid swore.

  “Tess!” he shouted. Then his voice dropped to a rasp. “Shit. Oh, shit.”

  Brian focused on the dark line of the lake rim, and moments later they came to a place where the woods thinned considerably and a wide path weaved through the trees, worn down over the years. The lights from houses could be seen ahead, and Brian knew one of them must belong to Tess's family.

  But Tess had never made it home.

  She lay curled on her side on the ground. The moonlight turned her blond hair a pale silver and her long, bare legs were those of some apparition, haunting both in the glimmer of the moon and in their horrid implications.

  Brian felt all the air go out of him and he gritted his teeth, glancing around for any sign of her attacker. He saw nothing, but that was meaningless when dealing with a man who could merge with the night itself.

  “Oh, Tess, Jesus,” the younger Brian said behind him.

  The kid hurried past him and Brian did not try to stop him. Tess lay on the dirt and roots and leaves, crying softly. His was an unfamiliar face; at least she would recognize his younger self. Even as the kid went to kneel at the girl's side—and she flinched when she heard his voice—Brian was trying to put it together in his mind. His gaze darted back the way they'd come and then farther along the path ahead. If Tess had been caught here, she must have walked the same way he and the kid had. The path to her neighborhood was still a ways ahead—the way that Ashleigh and Young Will would be coming. If the shadow man was on foot, if he hadn't just disappeared, he might well run right into them.

  He looked down at the tragic spectacle of this young man—the too-serious, almost goofy kid he had been—comforting the would-be Homecoming Queen, and his heart ached as it never had before. He remembered Tess as a sweet girl, not nearly as stuck-up as she should have been given her looks and her popularity. Now she was half naked, her face darkly bruised in the moonlight, her pale flesh shimmering as though she were some crumpled, fallen angel, and something inside of her had been broken forever.

  Something inside of him shifted in that moment. Brian felt it happen. Now that this had come to pass, he could remember it, from the perspective of the kid who knelt beside Tess even now. He had wanted all of this to end because it was unsettling, it was wrong, and he felt a vague sense of guilt about the whole thing, as if his own experimentation with magic had tainted them all, tainted this entire time in all of their lives.

  Now, Brian Schnell hurt in
side. Part of him had been broken as well. Mike Lebo's death had caused him to grieve, to feel wounded. But seeing Tess's face like this . . . it churned him up inside, birthing a rage he had never felt before.

  “Stay with her,” Brian told the kid.

  Then he took off after the son of a bitch, praying that either he or Young Will would catch him before he got to the street, wondering where Will was with the goddamned car now.

  In his mind, new memories were being forged, and they slipped into his head like phantoms of the past. As the kid whispered to Tess, one hand laid gently upon her shoulder, it was almost as though Brian could hear the words being spoken.

  He's gone, Tess. He's gone, and I swear to God he's never going to touch you again.

  Brian only wished that he could be certain of that, but his memories did not include the outcome of this night. That was yet to be seen.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of heavy footfalls up ahead and to his left. The moonlight did not filter too deeply into the woods that separated the lake from the neighborhood, but he had to assume the shadow man had reached the path and started toward the street.

  Jaw set, an ember of fury blazing in his gut, Brian pushed into the trees, forsaking the path to cut diagonally through the woods. The footfalls sped up—the bastard heard him coming—and Brian found himself lunging through whipping branches. He peered through the dark woods, and in a moment he realized that he could see that dark figure hurrying along the path that led to Tess's neighborhood. This time, though, there was no mask covering his face. Maybe he had magic at his disposal, but he was a man.

  In the dark, the moonlight was not enough for Brian to make out his face, but as the shadow man glanced toward him, the darkness seemed to bleed upward from his clothing. In the glimpses Brian got of him between trees, the two men racing toward the point where they would intersect, he saw the shadow crawl over the man's face and become the mask he had worn the last time they had come into contact.