The Boys Are Back in Town

by Christopher Golden

  “Will,” someone said again.

  His hands trembled as he turned. The door to the men's room was about ten feet away. Nick Acosta had just come out of it to find him standing there in the foyer, still dressed in the blue jeans and Red Sox jersey he had worn to the game earlier, completely out of place. Nick himself wore a well-tailored brown suit with a crimson tie that swam up in Will's vision so that it looked like a surgeon had cut Nick open and walked away in the midst of the operation. Will could only imagine how red his eyes must be, how dark the bags beneath them.

  “Am I underdressed?” Will asked, hearing the hysteria in his voice but unable to do anything about it. “What do you think, Nicky?”

  The sadness in Nick's gaze was more than Will could take. He turned away. Nick moved to lay a concerned hand upon his shoulder but Will shook him off and started for the main hall. He could hear the manager angrily shouting at Nick and Nick curtly vowing to look after him, to take Will out of Papillon himself if he disrupted anything.

  Then Nick caught up. “Will!” he snapped, and his hand fell on Will's shoulder. Nick was powerful, his fingers digging into Will's flesh as he turned his friend around to stare into his eyes.

  “Talk to me, buddy,” he said, maneuvering Will between the closed door of the main hall and a tall potted plant. Nick's gaze was intense. “What're you on? Talk to me, man. We all find ourselves on roads we shouldn't have to travel alone. Don't do this to yourself. Don't go in there like this. You'll never live it down.”

  Will actually laughed. He had no idea it was coming and then it just bubbled up from his throat, a kind of hideous, hopeless sound. Nick pinched his eyes shut tight and then opened them again, taking a deep breath to try to reason with Will again.

  “That's my wise man. I like that traveling alone bit, that was good,” Will said. “You're still alive, Nick. Nobody's fucked with you yet. But any second now . . .” He couldn't go on. How could he explain? Drugs, Nick thought. If only it were that simple. Will laughed again and reached up to pat Nick's cheek. “Did I ever tell you I saw Dori Schnell naked? Beautiful tits, man. Nipples like brown pencil erasers. I should've told you. Maybe you don't care now, but I think you would've wanted to know back then.”

  “For Christ's sake, Will,” Nick began again.

  With a grunt of effort, Will placed both hands on Nick's chest and shoved him backward. He looked ridiculous, eyes too white set against his olive skin, arms pinwheeling like the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz as his feet flew up from beneath him. Nick swore as he tried to save himself from going down. White lights glinted off the shiny scar that ran through his eyebrow. Then he sprawled on the floor, a great growl growing in his throat as though he was some kind of animal. Only the growl said son of a bitch.

  Will bolted inside the main hall. The music pumped in cardiac rhythm, Boyz II Men playing now, music of the era. There were people on the dance floor, but for the most part his high school class was clustered in small groups with their friends and spouses, waiting in line at one of the bars on either side of the room. Two enormous chandeliers hung from the ceiling above and the lights were dim, but the crystals in the chandeliers cast little slashes of refracted light all over the room. There were more people tonight than there had been the previous night. Perhaps three times as many. They wore suits and dresses; some of the women even wore formal gowns.

  It was the prom all over again.

  Faces swam toward him in the sea of light, on waves of music. Everyone he recognized set off another tangent of echoing, conflicting memories in his mind. Things he might have done or said or seen, and now there were so many cards in the deck, so many images shuffling around in his mind, that he found it impossible to decipher if each belonged with his original memories or with those that had replaced them. The false truth. The altered present.

  People spoke to him. Stared at him in concern. Pretty women he half knew whispered to one another behind their upraised hands, one of them gently rocking her glass so that the ice in her drink made a bright, clinking noise. Will cursed under his breath and stopped himself. He brought his hand up and ran it over his face, fingertips dragging across stubble. The contact was an odd comfort and he took a breath, trying to slow down the adrenaline that was surging through him.

  With a curt nod, a kind of affirmation meant only for himself, he ignored the stares and set off to the right of the dance floor, moving amongst tables and chairs. Several people called his name but he paid no attention. A giddy, girlish laugh carried to him in the midst of the torrent of voices in that hall and Will recognized it. He glanced in that direction and saw Stacy near the bar. She wore a bottle-green dress with spaghetti straps, her hair falling loose over her bare shoulders.

  The sight of her pained him. Will was supposed to save a dance for her tonight. To save all his dances for her. Despite what a fuckup he'd been this weekend, they had made a connection on Friday night—and on a bus a lifetime ago—and she still wanted to find out what the nature of that connection was. She was an island of normalcy to him now, yet when she smiled so brightly, her whole face lit up with merriment, it made him feel like throwing up.

  What if she's next?

  The thought whirled him around; he was unable to look at her even a moment longer. He forged on through the crowd, familiar faces flickering by his focus like streetlights flashing across the hood of a speeding car. But he paid them no mind, for he was looking for one face in particular and one face only. The music thumping from the huge speakers seemed to match tempo with the throbbing in his head as he reached the last of the tables on this side of the dance floor. He turned to head across to the other side of the hall and nearly knocked Lolly over.

  Her brows were knitted together in consternation, her eyes narrowed. In all the time he had known her he did not think he had ever seen her angry, so it gave him pause. Somewhere in the back of his mind a part of him that was merely observing took note of her regal features, her caramel skin, and recognized that anger had made her more beautiful.

  Lolly glanced around, self-conscious about the number of people watching her. When she spoke to him it was a hiss between her teeth. “What the fuck is the matter with you?”

  A sadness welled up from within him, a melancholy that leeched from him the fury and purpose with which he had stormed into Papillon. The urge to let the words spill out, to talk to her, to share the burden on his heart, was nearly overwhelming.

  His mouth opened.

  Then over Lolly's shoulder he saw couples on the dance floor, swaying together, grinning at one another, as far away from him at that moment as if they existed in another universe. A guy in a charcoal suit danced close with his date. Will saw his profile at first, and then he swung his dance partner around so that he was in full view.

  Brian Schnell. And the woman he was dancing with . . . it was Caitlyn. Brian was at the reunion with Will's former fiancée, the Homecoming Queen. She hadn't been the Homecoming Queen, of course. That was one of the truths Will was holding on to, an anchor his mind grasped at. Someone had changed all of that.

  “Son of a bitch,” Will whispered.

  Lolly put her hand, fingers splayed, on his chest to stop him as he started for the dance floor. She spun around, saw Brian and Caitlyn dancing, and Will could see in her eyes that she leaped to the wrong conclusion, thought he was going after Brian out of petty jealousy over a woman who had left him at the altar years before.

  “That's what this is about?” Lolly asked, pity and dismissal in her eyes. “Leave it alone, Will. Don't do anything stupid.”

  But he wasn't listening. Images flickered through his head still, that Zoetrope of shuffling cards, and he pushed past Lolly. His foot caught on the leg of a chair as he slid between two tables and he stumbled, nearly fell down. Will collided with a waiter who carried a huge round tray laden with salads. The tray was upended, bowls and cups of dressing clattering down upon a table, salad showering a woman beside them.

  Will kept going. The waiter sh
outed at him. Lolly called his name.

  A number of couples on the dance floor heard the commotion and stopped. Others spun around them, heels clapping on the floor, oblivious to the freight train rolling toward them. Will James was not a large man, but his shoulders were broad and he had a steely determination as he strode purposefully onto the dance floor.

  Caitlyn saw him first. Her eyes widened with shock and she stopped dancing, pushed back from Brian, and gaped at Will, a quiver of distaste curling her lip.

  “Will?” she said.

  As Brian turned toward him, Will sped up. The guy had time only to muster a look of confusion and then Will lunged for him. With a grunt of exertion he sprang upon Brian, momentum carrying them both down to the ground.

  Brian's head bounced off the floor with a loud crack.

  NUMBER 76 PARMENTER ROAD was dark save for a single light that burned in Kyle Brody's bedroom. His parents were out for the night, celebrating the birthday of Vernon Basque, a creepy little weasel who was one of his father's business partners. Kyle was glad they were gone. He paced in his room with the window all the way open and took a long drag on a cigarette he had stolen from the pack on his dad's dresser. He knew smoking could fuck you up, but it wasn't like his parents could give him shit with a straight face, not when both of them still smoked.

  Kyle strolled from one end of the room to the other like an animal investigating new surroundings. He paused at the center of the room and stared at the blazing orange tip of the cigarette. A plume of smoke puffed from his lips and he scowled at the butt in his hand. Gotta be an idiot to smoke, he thought.

  But he took one last drag on the cigarette before dropping it, still lit, into the Pepsi can on his bureau. It hissed as it struck whatever soda was left, and smoke swirled up out of the can.

  “Jesus,” Kyle whispered. He massaged his temple with the palm of his hand, feeling a headache coming on.

  How the hell did I get pulled into this . . . whatever it is? he thought. What am I supposed to do? Two questions, the first of which was vital, the second of which was just stupid. He had instructions regarding what he was supposed to do now.

  There was nothing funny about it, but the thought made him laugh.

  A chilly breeze blew into his bedroom and Kyle shivered, but it occurred to him that there might be more to it than the chill. He stood beside the bureau now, regretting having put the cigarette out. Across the room, half a dozen magazines were spread out on his bed. Hustler. Penthouse. A couple of Playboys, but he only ever got the ones with famous girls in them. He had inherited the others from his friend Devon, who had too many of the things, all passed on to him from his older brother. Truth was, Kyle thought the Hustlers were sort of nasty. The others were pretty good, though.

  But there was something else on the bed.

  Kyle kept the magazines in a brown legal expandable folder he had taken from his father's study. When he wasn't looking at them, he stashed the folder deep in the closet under the stairs, where there was an opening into a crawl space.

  He had been thinking about that crawl space all day, since even before he had left for the football game. A dreadful tickle had been dancing up and down his spine, drawing his mind back to it again and again. He had brought the note to freaky Will James at the Homecoming game, trying to avoid thinking about the damn thing, about how yellow and dusty it was, about how it had gotten into the hole in the storage area in the first place. But he couldn't avoid it forever, couldn't not think about it. And when he did, that train of thought had led him back to the other place he stashed things in his house.

  Would he find something there as well, with the Playboys and Penthouses?

  After the game he had come right home, telling his friends he didn't feel well and just needed to get some sleep. His mother had made a sausage pasta dish for dinner that Kyle loved, but he barely tasted it as he ate, just waiting for them to leave, silently willing them to go. And simultaneously wishing they would stay home, so he wouldn't have to check the hiding place in the closet under the stairs.

  But they went.

  And he looked.

  Now, in his room, he stared at the thing that he had found under the stairs, wondering what would happen if he ignored it. The dread that filled him then was far worse and something twisted in his stomach.

  Just leave me alone, he thought, hating the infantile whining in his own head. I don't want any part of this, whatever it is.

  But he understood the truth, that he didn't have a choice. He had been singled out.

  And it frightened him.

  CAITLYN SCREAMED. There were shouts and curses, and a number of hands tried to reach for Will, tried to tear him off Brian.

  “You fucking lunatic!” Will roared, spittle flying from his mouth as he squeezed his hands around Brian's throat and slammed his head against the floor a second time, then a third. “Why? Why are you doing this?”

  Brian's face reddened and his eyes began to bulge. Will hauled back his right fist and struck him, knuckles shattering Brian's nose. Blood spurted from his nostrils and Will hit him again and again, pain shooting up his arm with every blow. Will knew he was still shouting, but if words were coming from his mouth even he did not understand them.

  Tears burned his eyes. Tess had been raped. And Ashleigh . . . He squeezed his eyes tightly closed and punched Brian again, blindly, feeling swollen, pulpy flesh beneath his fist. He could not even think about the changes in Ashleigh.

  His eyes snapped open. Baring his teeth with a ferocity he could not contain, he grabbed Brian by the hair and bent over to shout in his face. “Lebo. You fucking killed Lebo! What did he do? What did he ever do to you?”

  The last word was choked off by an arm that wrapped around his neck from behind. Will was pulled off of Brian and he struggled, swinging, lashing out with fists and feet and elbows, trying to get back to the evil bastard responsible for the savage mutilation of reality that had gone on over the past few days.

  “Will! Will, just stop it!” Nick snarled in his ear.

  It was Nick who was holding him, Nick who had him from behind. But he wasn't the only one. Eric was there as well, and the two of them swung Will around so he was abruptly face to face with the rest of them. Lolly and Pix were both there. Caitlyn. Danny and Keisha. And Ashleigh, hollow eyes filled with a despair that broke his heart again, and he knew that part of that despair had been his fault.

  “Will, what are you doing?” Ashleigh asked.

  The manager he had seen on his way in appeared now at the edge of Will's field of vision. The man looked smug, nostrils flaring as he announced that he had called the police and they were on the way. Caitlyn whimpered at this but she would not look at Will again. She went down on her knees beside Brian. Several other people were there on the dance floor beside him; one of them loudly announced that he was unconscious.

  “You don't know,” Will whispered, gazing into Ashleigh's eyes, barely able to speak for the pain in his heart. “You don't know what he's done.”

  “You're gone, Will. You're fucked in the head,” Nick growled.

  “Will, talk to me,” Eric said, his voice level, the calmest of all of them. “Please, man. Did you take something?”

  All along Danny had gazed at him sadly, shaking his head. Now he squeezed his wife's hand and stepped forward. He tapped Nick's arm and in response first Nick, then Eric, let go of Will.

  “You don't understand,” Will whispered, looking into Danny's eyes.

  Danny's eyes were a bright, guileless blue. There was only compassion in them now. “I do, Will. I do. I'm sorry I got pissed at you last night.”

  For a moment hope surged up within Will. Could it be he wasn't the only one who had felt it, felt this slippage, this shuffling of the deck? But then Danny put his forehead against Will's and there was something odd in his expression, a kind of dark void, a hopelessness that Will had never seen in him before.

  “You need help, bud. I just didn't get it, last night. Didn't se
e it. You need to get a handle on things. Something's going on in your head. You've been acting freaky all weekend. We're scared for you, Will.”

  Hands were placed on his back and arms and Will's heart sank. They were all there for him. He had just ruined the night, eviscerated whatever pleasant thoughts any of these people had ever had about him, and yet his friends were there for him. But they simply did not understand.

  Danny pulled back and looked at him. “You're not right in the head at the moment, bud. We gotta get to the bottom of it.” He glanced at Keisha. “I'm sorry, baby. You stay. Eric and Ashleigh will take you home.”

  Keisha was a kind, understanding woman. “It's all right. We'll be OK. You go.”

  Most of the crowd was back to busily minding their own business. The music was still playing. The refracted lights from the chandelier cast unearthly slivers of light around the hall. With a groan, Brian Schnell woke up. Will started toward him.

  Danny flat-handed Will's chest, stopping him cold. His eyes were hard and unrelenting. “Don't even think about it. We're going. Now. Before the cops get here.”

  Will drew his hand across his mouth, the copper tang of Brian's blood on his lips, the ache in his knuckles deep and sharp. What an idiot he had been, to think that what had to be done could be done here. Brian had to be stopped, prevented from hurting anyone else, but there was no way Will was going to be able to accomplish that with Danny Plumer playing nursemaid.

  Will blinked and took a few short breaths before meeting Danny's steady gaze. “I'm going. You stay.” When Danny began to argue, Will held up a hand. “No, shut up, listen. I've fucked up this night enough. I'm not taking you away from your wife. I drove myself here, I can get myself home. I'm not high. I'm not on anything. You want to talk to me, call me in the morning or just come by.”