The Boys Are Back in Town (31 page)

“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.

He grieved still.

On the far side of the cemetery, up the grave-studded slope, something shifted. His gaze ticked upward and there, in the shadow of a marble tomb, he saw the shadow man.

Despite the sun and the blue sky and all of the people around him, Will felt a cloak of darkness enfold him that was far colder than the October air, and he inhaled sharply. In the sunlight the shadow man rippled like the wind across the surface of a pond.

A larger ripple passed through that night-black figure, and then it disappeared.

W
ILL AND
B
RIAN WERE SILENT
as they drove back from the cemetery. For the second day in a row they had stayed awake all night, standing vigilant outside the homes of Tess O'Brien and Bonnie Winter. On Tuesday they had slept most of the day in their room at the Red Roof Inn in Westborough, not far from Papillon. That night they had met up with Ashleigh, Young Will, and Young Brian for perhaps twenty minutes.

Young Brian had
Dark Gifts
in his backpack and had seemed to be struggling with the weight of it. None of them commented on this oddity. By now even Ashleigh knew that the Gaudet book had properties that were unsettling. The seventeen-year-old Brian had already scrawled a message inside the book, a fact that alarmed Will at first. At least, it alarmed him until he read the inscription and recognized that handwriting. It was the same as it had been the first time he had seen this message. The instructions to Kyle were identical. It seemed his theory had been correct; the moment Will had begun to realize that someone was altering the past, this particular event had become inevitable. Every possible unfolding of circumstances included Young Brian writing those words and the book ending up in Kyle Brody's hands and delivering it to Will eleven years hence in the parking lot of Papillon.

Kyle.
Will had barely thought of him at all and he wondered how long—by Kyle's reckoning—he had been gone. He hoped that the kid was all right, that his parents hadn't found that bloodstained circle under the porch . . . and, most of all, that no one had damaged the circle.

Young Brian had also written the words
Don't forget
on a scrap of paper and slipped it into an envelope, upon which he had scrawled more instructions for Kyle. It was Ashleigh who had pointed out to all of them what should have been obvious. If the note and the book were just stashed in their respective hiding places, they would surely be discovered too soon. They had worried at this problem for a while, comforted by the knowledge that it was a problem they were destined to solve.

At length Brian recalled a spell he thought might help. It took him several minutes to locate it in Gaudet's text, and then the book and the envelope were transferred to Young Will's backpack, and the rest was left up to him. He would get them where they needed to be, and perform the spell that would make them invisible and intangible until the very day they were needed. Will knew just shunting them forward in time wouldn't be enough. When Kyle had found them, they had been yellowed and covered in dust. And they would be again. It was the one thing they could be certain of.

Will replayed all of this on that somber drive back from burying Mike Lebo. His eyes were bleary from staying up all night playing watchdog. It was chilly enough for them to need the heat in the car, but for five hundred dollars, they had gotten what they had paid for: the heat didn't work at all. And the radio only played AM stations.

Classical music hissed with static through the speakers in the back and they said not a word to one another. Until they stopped the guy Will had started to think of as the shadow man and set things right, there was very little for them to talk about. A cloud seemed to follow them as the Buick rolled through downtown. Before returning to the Red Roof they both needed something to eat, but there would be no stop at Athens Pizza, no visit to The Sampan. Nothing familiar. Will had longed to drift through the Comic Book Palace and Annie's Book Stop, to do the pop-culture archaeology he had always loved as a kid. Now he felt that such an excursion would be morbid, that if he set foot inside Athens Pizza or that comics shop, he would become violently ill.

“He was there,” Will said, voice gravelly from disuse.

Brian turned in the passenger seat and stared at him, waiting for more.

“The shadow man. I saw him at the cemetery, watching the funeral.”

“Huh. I guess I didn't think he could come out during the day.” Brian shook his head. “How stupid is that? Like he's a vampire or something.”

“It's not stupid. That's magic. It always seems more possible at night.”

“You've gotta wonder, though,” Brian replied.

Will kept his eyes on the road, driving a little faster now, happy to leave Eastborough behind. “Wonder what?”

“Was he watching the funeral? Or was he watching us?”

A
SHLEIGH SPENT THE BALANCE
of the week so much on edge that the creak of a floorboard would startle her and an unexpected tap on the shoulder would make her jump and cry out. The latter could be terribly embarrassing when it occurred in biology lab. But a small dose of humiliation was not enough to soothe her nerves. Never in her life had she been so aware of each intake of breath, of the rhythm of her heart, of the faces she passed in the halls and on the street.

Yet days went by that were dreadfully uneventful, such that now, with Friday night upon her, she was perversely relieved. Tonight was the night Will's “shadow man” was supposed to attack Tess. No more waiting.

But she was still holding her breath.

It was the night before the Homecoming game, and the committee was preparing the float in the parking lot behind the high school. Ashleigh had been Tess's shadow all afternoon, from cheerleading practice to pizza at Papa Gino's and now back to school to finish up the float. There were two or three dozen kids in the lot all being herded by Mr. Murphy, the committee's faculty advisor. Every year the Cougars made a float that was a cougar. This year's committee insisted upon doing something a little different, so they designed a float that was a giant football . . . with the image of a cougar on the side of the ball. Ashleigh thought it was silly, but everyone else loved it, so she kept quiet.