The Boys Are Back in Town (12 page)

Not that they believed any of it. Not really.

Most of the modern books on magic were filled with self-help bullshit in which they were instructed to commune with nature and to meditate and to perform certain rituals naked under the moon. A large number of the older texts concerned worshipping the devil. Neither of them had any interest in the devil and they were reluctant to run around the woods in the nude, though they had a tacit agreement that if nothing else worked they might try it later when the weather improved a bit.

Aside from Satan and nudity, they had experimented with every formula and chant they could find without result, but that did not dim their enthusiasm. It was all very fascinating.

Yet that night as they walked back to Brian's house on Waverly Street, they spoke of other things. Both boys had other interests. Brian loved science and music, played the guitar, and struggled to overcome a shyness that would not allow him to play in front of an audience outside his closest friends. Will loved movies, books, baseball, and Caitlyn, not necessarily in that order.

As they cut through the little cemetery on Cherry Street, climbing the chain-link fence in the trees at the back and moving along well-worn paths that would lead them in time to the top of Waverly, they talked about school and television and how Boston sports teams had come to suck so completely. They talked about various girls at Eastborough High and which ones they wouldn't mind seeing naked.

“You and Nick both going to work at Herbie's again this summer?” Brian asked as they started down the gentle slope from the dead-end circle at the top of Waverly Street.

Will nodded. Some of the most fun he'd had the previous summer had been behind the counter at Herbie's Ice Cream, and he had gotten to know Nick a lot better since they both worked there. “I need the money,” he explained. “Plus, if you've gotta have a job, it's a good place to be. Cool in July. Lots of girls.”

They were in darkness, only the chilly breeze rustling in the leaves breaking the silence. From far off Will could hear car engines, but they were distant, down on the main road somewhere.

“So, I've been doing all this reading on Houdini,” Will said.

“Houdini was an idiot,” Brian scowled. “Sure, he was a genius on the stage, but he was fucking obsessed with mediums and stuff. Went around debunking people who claimed to do real magic.”

“Yeah,” Will agreed, excitement sparking in him. “But why do you think he did that?”

Brian paused, his sneakers scuffing the pavement as he turned to stare at Will. “What are you saying?”

“If you read about his mother, and his coming from the old country and stuff . . . I think he was so obsessed with debunking the fakes because he was looking for something real. He was like us, Bri. He was looking for proof. Who knows? Maybe he found it.”

“You're high.” Brian rolled his eyes and started walking again.

Will fell in beside him. “Maybe. Or maybe not.”

“Maybe not,” Brian allowed.

When Will glanced sidelong at him, the moonlight revealed the tiniest of smirks on Brian's face.

“What?” Will demanded.

The smirk blossomed into a smile. “You'll see.”

“What?” Will asked again.

Brian ignored him. They had arrived at the Schnells' house. There was no car in the driveway and the light above the front door was lit, which always meant that Brian's parents had gone out. Will was glad. They were nice people, but with no parents around they could raid the kitchen with impunity and watch R-rated movies on HBO.

As Brian unlocked the front door Will stole glances at him, curious as to what his friend was hiding, what that smirk had meant.

Brian pushed the door open and walked in, Will right behind him. It was only dimly lit inside the house. A rustle and thump off to the left drew their attention, and Will and Brian turned together to see Dori scramble up off the sofa wearing nothing but a pair of high-cut panties. It was only a moment before she snatched her shirt up from the sofa and draped it to cover her, but in that moment her perfectly rounded breasts with their small, prominent nipples were illuminated in the blue light of the enormous television in the living room.

Will was breathless. Dori was tall and reasonably pretty, with short black hair that framed her face nicely, but she had always been Brian's bitchy sister to him. In recent months he had come to truly dislike her, for it seemed the closer he and Brian became, the nastier Dori was to him. She was vicious in a way he felt only siblings ever really were. Now, though, Will saw what Nick saw in her . . . in fact, he had seen enough of her to make Nick jealous for eternity.

“Dori, Jesus Christ.” Brian sighed.

The expression on her face then erased any pleasure Will had taken from seeing her naked. Dori sneered, all her embarrassment coming out as venom.

“What are you looking at?”

There was a jostling behind the sofa and Ian Foster sat up, rubbing the side of his head but wearing a grin. Ian was smooth and always laid-back, the bass player for a band called Deus ex Machina that was supposed to play the spring dance. His sister was in Dori's class, but Ian was a junior.

“Son of a bitch,” Brian whispered.

“Hit my head on the coffee table,” Ian said. “Way you got up like that . . . shit, I thought it was your parents.”

“So did I,” Dori said, still covering herself and glaring.

“Schnell,” Ian said, by way of greeting Brian. “And you're Will something, right?”

“James. Will James.”

A lazy grin spread across his face. Ian, obviously shirtless, gestured toward his lower half, which was obscured by the sofa. “You'll understand if I don't get up to shake hands.”

“Brian, come on!” Dori snapped. “Get the fuck out of here!”

Her brother took a long look at Ian, then turned back to Dori. “We're gonna talk about this later.”

Dori's brows knitted in consternation. “Whatever.”

With a grunt, Brian turned and started for the stairs. Will felt awkwardly left behind and hurried to catch up, although it was really the last thing he wanted. Brian was going to be in a foul mood now. Not that Will blamed him.

There were framed family photographs on both walls going up the stairs, not just of Brian, Dori, and their parents, but aunts and uncles and grandparents, some old enough they were probably great-grandparents. Will glanced at a picture he'd seen a hundred times before, of Mr. and Mrs. Schnell, Brian, and Dori sitting in front of the fireplace in the living room. Dori was about seven in the picture and there was a strange disconnect in Will's mind, the events of moments earlier having short-circuited whatever his natural response to this photograph would have been.
How could that little girl have grown up to be such an absolute twat?

He sighed.
Shit. I should just go home.

“Will.”

Brian was at the top of the steps, a dark look on his face, eyebrows knitted together.

“You coming?”

Will nodded, then took the rest of the stairs two at a time. The farther he could get from Dori and Ian, the happier he would be. Although as he thought about it, in retrospect, Dori had a sweet little body. The image of her bare breasts was seared in his mind and he found himself thinking again of the dark, protruding nubs of her nipples.

Snap out of it!
he told himself, literally shaking his head to try to erase the image from his mind. It didn't matter how good she looked naked. Dori was poison and Will didn't want to think about her like that, never mind how jealous Nick would be if Will told him he'd seen Dori naked.

With a deep breath, he forced the thoughts out of his mind. Brian had gone into his bedroom and now Will followed him down the hall and rapped unnecessarily on the door as he entered. Brian had taken a seat on the edge of his desk and had the window open, inhaling the cold spring air deeply as if he was trying not to throw up.

Will sat down on the end of Brian's bed and kept silent.

At length, Brian turned to look at him, anger and embarrassment and frustration and sadness all warring on his features. But when he met Will's eyes, all of that seemed to evaporate in a short burst of laughter. Brian shook his head in disbelief, a broad, mystified grin on his face.

“Motherfucker,” he whispered. “This is not my life. I cannot believe that just happened.” In a startling snap, the amusement disappeared from his face and he glared at Will. “You won't say anything.”

It wasn't a question, but Will still felt as though he had to respond. “No way, man. Sincerely.”

Though it was clear that neither one of them quite believed that Will would be able to keep the events of the evening in total confidence, Brian seemed satisfied with this response. Once more he shook his head and stared out the window, inhaling the cool air.

“Bri, look—” Will began.

As if stung, Brian jumped up from his perch on the edge of the desk and went to his closet. His blue eyes were stormy with grim purpose, his hair windblown from their walk home. He swung the closet door open and started rifling through the shirts piled on the upper shelf.

“So we've been through it all, right? Fulcanelli. Fucking Rasputin. Every accused witch in every book we could find,” Brian said. He shot Will a glance, pushed a hand through his hair, just noticing that it was wild. A thin smile stretched his mouth into a grimace. “Gotta confess, buddy, I started to think it really was all bullshit. The hobby was getting boring.”

Brian shoved his hand in amongst his sweaters and fished around. Will saw the moment that he found what he was looking for. A small grunt of satisfaction escaped Brian's lips. When he pulled his prize from the closet, sweaters tumbled out and spilled into a pile on the floor. Brian ignored them.

So did Will. His focus was on the thing Brian had retrieved from its hiding place. It was a thick book covered in faded burgundy leather, the edges of its pages yellowed and uneven, suggesting age. Brian dropped the heavy tome into his lap and Will caught it. Later he would deny it to himself but there was a kind of spark that went through his fingers then, traveling all the way up his arms. His scalp tingled and his eyes grew momentarily moist.

He felt as though his heart had fallen silent, just for a moment.

There was no title on the weathered face of the book, so he opened it and began to turn pages, the paper rough beneath his fingers. The third page at last revealed the title and author.
Dark Gifts: On the Nature of Magick and Its Uses,
by Jean-Marc Gaudet.

For several seemingly eternal seconds, Will stared at the book's subtitle.
On the Nature of Magick and Its Uses
. Though it was little more than leather and paper and ink, the text had a surreal weight in his hands, as though he held a block of concrete instead of a book.

Static filled his mind, his thoughts all a jumble. He had seen dozens of similar books in the past six months. But there was something . . . Will looked up at Brian.

“Well?”

“Gaudet was an acolyte of Crowley's. Or maybe it was the other way around. Nobody knows much about him except that a year before anyone had ever heard of Crowley, Gaudet published this. There were three hundred copies bound. Word is there's less than thirty left. Most of them were burned.”

Will was breathless. “Where'd you get it?”

That thin smile returned. “It was in a private collection at the Archdiocese of Boston.”

For a couple of beats, Will tried to make sense of this response. Then it dawned on him what Brian was saying and his eyebrows went up. “You stole it?”

“Yes, I fucking stole it!” Brian replied, throwing his hands up with an exasperated laugh. “You don't think they loaned it to me.”

A picture formed in Will's mind of Brian breaking a window and creeping through the offices of the archdiocese in the middle of the night. But that didn't make any sense. Brian couldn't drive, and no one was going to take him to Boston in the middle of the night. Will almost asked him, then remembered something he had forgotten. Brian's aunt worked at the archdiocese as a secretary or something, and Will remembered that Brian had spent the weekend with his aunt and uncle only a couple of weeks earlier. It was difficult to imagine the machinations necessary for Brian to end up sneaking around the building and pilfering a book of this size without getting caught, yet the proof was right in Will's hands.

“Jesus,” he whispered.

Brian smirked. “Yeah.”

Will stood up abruptly, dropping the book on Brian's bed. He stood back and stared at it, then glanced at the bedroom door. He ran his hands through his hair and paced back and forth across the room several times. At length he stopped and stared at the book again.

“So . . . spells?”

“Lots of spells,” Brian replied.

Will nodded. His mouth felt dry. “So when are we going to try one?”

Off to his right came the sound of Brian clearing his throat, almost as though he were going to cough up a clot of phlegm. “I already did.” Brian lifted up a small dish with a candle set upon it, held in place by dried wax. He made that hideous sound in his throat again, and then he spat at the top of the candle.

The saliva and phlegm that shot from between his lips touched the candlewick and ignited, a tiny wisp of red smoke rising before the candle began to burn clean fire that flickered and danced in the breeze from the open window.

Will could barely whisper. “Oh, shit.”

Papillon
is the French word for butterfly. It was also the name of the gleaming banquet hall where the main reunion event was being held. The place was in Westborough, just off of Route 9, in an enormous building that had been built as a nightclub, only to fail and end up being used mostly for weddings and proms and reunions. The interior was a cascade of white lights that decorated the walls as if a particularly ambitious spider-electrician had strung them about. There were butterflies as well, of course, none of them real.

Will burst through the double doors of Papillon just a few minutes after eight o'clock. One of the doors struck the wall with such ferocity that the inset glass cracked. Will barely noticed and certainly did not acknowledge it. If anyone else had noticed it, they did not bring it to his attention.

His mind was in turmoil. His fingers tingled with tactile doubt as though his every nerve ending knew that whatever he might reach out and touch at this moment could be gone the very next, or if not gone then changed. Altered.

Just as his life was being altered. His world. His friends and his past.

He felt weak and his legs trembled beneath him as he stormed through the foyer of the hall. His eyes burned from weeping and from staring for far too long at the remnants of his history, at the Eastborough High yearbook and his own address book, at photographs he had in albums and others in frames and still more that he unearthed from boxes along with other artifacts from his high school days.

A waitress heading for the main banquet hall stopped and stared at him nervously as he froze and brought up his fist, punching himself in the skull three times in rapid succession. His eyes were closed. He had stopped walking without even realizing it, teeth gritted together in frustration.

Will shook himself, his whole body shuddering.

Sifting. Cards shuffling. Suicide King. Jack of Hearts. Ace of fucking Spades.

Mike Lebo's funeral. Caitlyn as Homecoming Queen. Ashleigh changing, just changing right in front of him, all the spark extinguished in her eyes and her children erased from the goddamned universe and how the fuck does that happen? Only he
knew
how it happened. The only way it could have happened.

There were anchors in his mind, things he simply would not allow his consciousness to let go of. He had received an e-mail from Mike Lebo a week ago. He had held Ashleigh and Eric's twin girls in his arms. The thoughts sifted in his brain the way a drunk might lose track of a story, the way a perfectly ordinary word might seem gibberish if he stared at it for too long. The past tried to swallow these anchors, the terrible, churning ocean of his memories tried to suck them down to be lost forever, but he would not allow it.

Shuffling cards. But Will spiked an anchor right through the deck. He had spent the afternoon and early evening doing just that, tracing back through his mind all of the memories that had a double track. The old memories, the original ones, were fading, but they were still there. If he focused he could still visualize them . . . at least partially. Snippets here and there.

He knew he had to do something about those memories before they faded completely.

Other things he remembered perfectly well. In his mind's eye he could still see Dori Schnell's dark, jutting nipples and the weathered burgundy leather cover of the Gaudet book,
Dark Gifts
. That fucking book, that candle, and all that came after with Brian and with Dori and with magic, all of these were memories he had locked up in his mind, the dark secret laden with even blacker emotions that he had forced himself to forget. One little spell. It had seemed so simple.

But now that spell had been shattered. He remembered it all. Someone was altering the past, twisting his mind and memories, and whoever it was had also broken the spell he had cast on himself.

Magic
. He gritted his teeth, anchoring himself to the here and now. One hand flashed out and he leaned for a moment upon the wall, the white lights like fireflies around him.

Will grunted in something remotely resembling amusement, but more like disgust. It was almost funny what he had done to himself. Forcing his conscious mind to forget fragments of his past had made him overly sensitive to the subject of magic. He was like goddamned Houdini. Working for the
Tribune,
debunking anything remotely resembling magic, from psychic mediums to stage tricks, decorating his cubicle and his apartment with images of good old Harry, the master debunker. There was no such thing as magic.

But, of course, there was.

“Will?”

His body wavered, his mind fighting for those anchors. His eyes opened and the world swam back into focus. He was inside Papillon. The music from the disc jockey in the main hall flooded out to him, some J. Lo song or other. They all sounded the same to him. Butterflies and white lights surrounded him. A waitress stood with a man in a suit coat who was probably a manager or something. Her eyes were a little scared, but also concerned. His were very clearly disapproving, and he was on the verge of calling the police, Will guessed.

“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.