All I could do was watch her neck as it still trembled slightly—faint proof of life. All I could do was lie to her.
“Meghan you’re going to be okay,” I said. “The ambulance is on its way. The hospital is only a few blocks away. You’re going to be fine. Just a few scratches.”
It was all I could do.
No.
That wasn’t all I could do.
I reached into my pocket. I still had one half of a pill from last night—when I was parked outside the Adams Institute and tried to wake up Billy Derace.
I swallowed it, closed my eyes, feeling the burn in my blood.
Billy was playing with a G.I. Joe doll when I kicked in his front door. I held a steak knife with the three fingers of my good hand. All I had to do was stick it in his chest to the hilt and hold it there with my left hand until he stopped moving. Then I would leave. I wouldn’t have to worry about wiping the blade clean, or removing fingerprints from the handle. No forensics team was going to track me down. I wouldn’t have to burn my clothes.
I would just have to kill Billy.
Kill little Billy Derace, and life resets itself.
Meghan lives.
It was daylight, but I was being smart about it—wearing Grandpop’s overcoat, shoes and gloves. I also pulled a wool ski cap over my face. It was hard to breathe, and it partially blinded me, but I could still see through the loose gaps in the weave. I put the fedora on my head for extra protection. I didn’t care if the sun found me and nuked me to pieces. I just needed to kill Billy first.
Billy knew it, too.
“Mom!”
He screamed, and I couldn’t blame him. I would be terrified out of my mind, too, if a ghost wearing a face mask and a fedora kicked in my front door. But I didn’t give a shit. I whipped my three-fingered fist across his face. His little head snapped back, banging against the doors of a small hutch. Is this what it felt like to hit a kid, Erna? Was it a thrill to know that you were older, stronger and more vicious, and no matter what, this little boy had to take it?
The hutch doors popped loose from their magnetic locks and swung open slightly. Billy recovered quickly, though—kids often do—and scrambled across the dirty carpet, heading for the apartment door.
But I was older. Smarter. And I had the advantage of not being terrified. I made three quick leaps across the room and beat him there, kicking the door shut with my knee. The slam was like a rifle shot echoing throughout the stairwell.
“Mom!” he screamed again.
I placed my foot against his small chest and pushed hard. Not hard enough to break ribs, but enough to knock the air out of him. It’s funny, you calling for your mother now, little Billy. Think she’s going to come and save you, or join in? Maybe I’m doing her a favor. Maybe you did ruin her life.
You’ve ruined mine.
Now I had him where I wanted him. All I had to do was stick the knife in his chest to the hilt and hold it there until he stopped moving.
I had the knife out now, my three good fingers grasping the black plastic handle. Then I straddled Billy, my legs on either side of his chest. He was crying and screaming, hot fat tears running down the sides of his face. His skin was bright red.
“You didn’t give me a choice,” I said.
But he wasn’t listening. He was too insane with fear, not knowing where to turn or how to protect himself or call for help. Because now he’d realized that help was not coming. He shook his head back and forth as if he could shake himself out of this nightmare.
The knifepoint was just a few inches above his heaving chest.
All I had to do was stick in the knife and hold it there until he stopped moving.
Think about it as a dream, I told myself.
A nightmare.
A nightmare you can wake from.
It was as if Billy could read my mind; he knew what I was planning. This was not a normal beating. There would be no wiping the blood away, putting a Band-Aid over the wound. There would be no bruises that slowly fade until you’re no longer embarrassed to wear shorts outside. This would be the ultimate hurt, the final punishment for being a bad boy.
So he started slamming me with his small fists, desperately pounding at my chest and stomach. His body squirmed beneath my legs. I was focused on the knife in my hand and tried to will myself to plunge it down. Billy got lucky. He reached up and grabbed a fistful of my ski mask and yanked down, exposing my face.
“YOU!”
He saw me. He recognized me.
“I KNEW IT WAS YOU! WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME?”
Why was I doing this to him?
And then I finally put the last piece together.
Billy Derace didn’t have a grudge against my father. They hadn’t met one day in 1972. Billy Derace grew up wanting to kill my father because of what I was doing right now, right this very instant. He’d been scared to death as a twelve-year-old by a man wearing a mask and he’d ripped away the mask and grew up terrified of that face and then later, after years of abuse and drugs and time-traveling pills, he’d gone looking for the face that terrified him.
My face.
But in 1980, the closest thing he could find was my father.
I was my father’s killer.
I let Billy go. I dropped the knife. I climbed to my feet. I left through the front door. I climbed the stairs. I heard a door slam down on the ground floor. Billy cried out for his mother. His mother cried back, an awful shriek that echoed through the stairwell. There was the urgent clacking of high heels up the stairs but I didn’t care. I just wanted to go back into the office and collapse and close my eyes.
The daylight in the hallway scorched the skin on my face. It felt like the worst sunburn I’ve ever had.
I kicked in the door, just like I’d kicked in all the others in this building. There was a complete set now.
I collapsed to the ground, then got up on all fours. The half pill I’d swallowed was already wearing off. I felt dizzy.
Then Erna stepped through the open doorway, holding the gun.
“You hateful son of a bitch,” she said, then squeezed the trigger.
The slug sliced through my astral body and buried itself in the floor beneath me. I felt a searing pain in my abdomen, even though there was no entry wound, no blood.
I didn’t say anything.
She fired again, twice, and both shots were like hot needles in my chest, each stabbing me through my pectoral muscles. The pain made my eyes water. I dropped to my knees and lifted my left hand—the one with only three fingers.
“I’m going to kill you.”
I shook my head.
“It’s no use. You can’t, because I’m not actually here.”
“You’re not making any sense.”
Erna squatted next to me and lifted me up by the lapels of my borrowed overcoat. Her knuckles were raw, fingers bony. I’d never noticed how thin her hands were. It must hurt to be slapped by those hands.
I looked up at her.
“You think I’m dead but I’m not. I’m alive in the future. I just visit the past. So believe me when I tell you that unless you help your son, he’s going to grow up to hurt a lot of people. A lot of innocent people. He’s going to be a killer, Erna, unless you pull your head out of your ass and be a mother to him.”
“You’re from the devil! You’re here to torment me and my boy!”