Dean Koontz - By the Light of the Moon

Relieved, Dylan would have followed them anyway, but when he heard Proctor's footsteps thundering as hard as knocking hooves on the stairs, he stepped after his brother more quickly, pulling Jilly with him, out of the living room.

Ten-year-old Shep rounded the table and returned to his chair. He sat and stared at his puzzle.

The golden-retriever puppies in the basket revealed a moment of peace and charm that couldn't possibly exist in this violent fallen world, that must instead represent a glimpse into a burrow in the Wild Wood.

Shepherd stood across the table from his younger self, flanked by Jilly and Dylan, watching.

In the living room, Proctor began to overturn furniture, tear paintings from the walls, and smash bibelots, further developing the scenario that would lead the police away from any consideration that the intruder might have been other than a common drug-pumped thug.

Younger Shep selected a piece of the jigsaw from the puzzle box. He scanned the incomplete picture. He tried the fragment in a wrong hole, another wrong hole, but inserted it correctly on his third try. The next piece he placed at once. And the next, faster.

After the loudest of the crashes, the living room grew quiet.

Dylan tried to focus on the gracefulness with which ten-year-old Shep turned chaos into puppies and a basket. He hoped to block from his mind images of the final bit of scene-setting in which Proctor must be now engaged.

Inevitably, he failed.

To suggest that the initial intentions of the murderous intruder had included rape as well as robbery, Proctor would tear open Blair O'Conner's blouse, popping the buttons from throat to belt line. To suggest that the victim had fought back before she could be sexually assaulted, and that she'd been shot accidentally during a struggle or on purpose by a man enraged when rejected, Proctor would tear at her bra, snapping one shoulder strap, jerking the cups below her breasts.

With these indignities committed, he came into the dining room, flushed from his exertions.

If ever Dylan had been capable of murder, this was the moment. He had the will, but he did not have the way. His fists were less than smoke to Proctor here. Even if he'd come with a revolver from his own time, the bullet would drill Proctor without shredding one filament of flesh.

Stopping just inside the doorway, the killer watched ten-year-old Shep at the table, oblivious of his audience. He blotted his brow with a handkerchief. 'Boy, do you smell my sweat?'

Fingers plucked, hands darted, unfinished puppies were made whole, but Shepherd did not answer the question.

'I stink of worse than sweat, don't I? Treachery. I've stunk of that for five years, and I always will.'

The man's self-dramatization and self-flagellation infuriated Dylan, for just as in the motel room the previous night, it wasn't a fraction as sincere as Proctor might believe it was, but allowed the creep to indulge in self-pity while calling it courageous self-analysis.

'And now I stink of this .' He watched as the young puzzler puzzled, and then said, 'What a wretched little life. One day, I'll be your redemption, boy, and maybe you'll be mine.'

Proctor stepped from the room, left the house, went out into the night of February 12, 1992, beginning his journey toward his so-called redemption and his fiery death in Arizona more than ten years later.

The puzzle-working Shepherd's face had acquired a glaze of tears as silently as dew forms from the air.

'Let's get out of here,' Jilly said.

'Shep?' Dylan asked.

The older puzzler, who shook with emotion but did not cry, stood watching his younger self. He didn't immediately reply, but after his brother spoke to him twice more, he said, 'Wait. No gooey-bloody Mr. David Cronenberg movie. Wait.'

Although they supposedly weren't engaging in teleportation, per se, and although the mechanism of their travel still mystified him, Dylan could imagine lots of errors in transport almost as unpleasant as those portrayed in The Fly . Accidentally folding onto a highway, in the path of a hurtling Peterbilt, could be a quashing experience.

To Jilly, he said, 'Let's wait till Shep's confident of doing it right.'

Here a bit of golden fur, there the tip of a black snout, and here a quizzical eye: Although time seemed to crawl, the boy's hands flew rapidly toward a full solution.

After a few minutes, older Shepherd said, 'Okay.'

'Okay – we can go?' Dylan asked.

'Okay. We can go, but we can't leave.'

Baffled, Dylan said, 'We can go, but we can't leave?'

'Something,' Shep added.

Interestingly, Jilly was the first to understand. 'We can go, but we can't leave something. If we don't have everything we brought, he's not able to fold us out of the past. I left my purse and the laptop in the kitchen.'

They retreated from the dining room, leaving younger Shep to his tears and to the final pieces of his puzzle.

Although he could have felt the light switch if he'd touched it, Dylan knew he couldn't turn on the fluorescents any more than he had been able to stop a bullet. In the kitchen gloom, he couldn't see if the purse and the laptop, which Jilly had put on the table, rested in the inky blots that traveled under their feet and that spread between them and everything they touched here in the past, but he assumed the black puddles were there.

Slinging the purse over her shoulder, grabbing the laptop, Jilly said, 'Got 'em. Let's go.'

The back door opened, and she whirled toward it as if certain that the door-busting, window-bashing, steroid-chugging crowd from Holbrook, Arizona, had folded themselves back to this California yesteryear in hot pursuit.

Dylan was not surprised to see a younger version of himself step through the door.

On February 12, 1992, he had been attending an evening class at the University of California Santa Barbara. He'd ridden to and from class with a friend who had dropped him off at the end of the long driveway less than two minutes ago.

What did surprise Dylan was how soon after the murder he had arrived home. He checked his watch, then looked at the pig-belly clock. That February night, if he had arrived home five minutes sooner, he would have encountered Lincoln Proctor as the killer left the house. If he'd arrived all of sixteen minutes earlier, he might have been shot dead – but he might have prevented his mother's murder.

Sixteen minutes.

He refused to think about what might have been. Dared not.

Nineteen-year-old Dylan O'Conner closed the door behind him, without bothering to switch on the lights, walked through a startled Jilly Jackson. He put a couple books on the kitchen table and headed toward the dining room.

'Fold us out of here, Shep,' Dylan said.

In the dining room, the younger Dylan spoke to the younger Shepherd: 'Hey, buddy, smells like we have cake tonight.'

'Fold us home, Shep. Our own time.'

In the adjacent room, the other Dylan said, 'Buddy, are you crying? Hey, what's wrong?'

Hearing his own tortured wail when he found his mother's body would be the camel-crippling straw. 'Shep, get us to hell out of here now, now .'

The dark kitchen folded away. A bright place folded toward them. Crazily, Dylan wondered if Shepherd's fantastic trick of travel might not be limited merely to journeys through space and time, but if it might extend to dimensions unknown to the living. Perhaps it had been a mistake to say 'to hell' just before they left 1992.

The kaleidoscope tweaked. Around Jilly the sunlit kitchen folded in through the outgoing night kitchen, and fell into place in every bright detail.

No delicious smell of freshly baked cake. No shimmering black energy underfoot.

The smiling ceramic pig on the wall clasped its front hooves around the clock in its belly, which read 1:20, twenty-four minutes after they had folded out of the besieged motel room in Arizona. The present had progressed equal to the amount of time that they had spent in the past.