Ten-year-old Shepherd, wrapped in the insulation of autism and focused intently on a puzzle, might not have reacted to their voices even if he had heard them. He would have flinched or at least blinked in surprise, however, at the sight of a man sweeping an arm across the table, attempting to undo his work. He reacted not at all.
‘We’re essentially invisible here,’ Dylan said. ‘We can see but not be seen. We can hear sounds, but we can’t be heard. We can smell the cake. We can feel the warm air coming out of the heating vent and breathe it, feel the surfaces of objects, but we can’t have an effect on anything.’
‘Are you saying that’s how Shepherd wants it?’
Shepherd continued to watch his younger self give feet to lame puppies and eyes to those that had been blind.
‘Considering what night this is,’ Dylan said, ‘that’s the last thing Shepherd would want. He doesn’t set the rules. This must be how Nature wants it, just how it is.’
Apparently Shepherd could fold them into the past, but only to walk through it as they would walk through a museum.
‘The past is the past. It can’t be undone,’ Dylan said, but he ardently wished that this were not true.
‘Last night,’ Jilly reminded him, ‘Shepherd suddenly began to reel off all those synonyms for feces – but he did it long after I’d told you to clean up your language ’cause you sounded like my old man.’
‘You didn’t say I sounded like your old man.’
‘Well, that’s why trash talk bothers me. He was a garbage mouth. Anyway, you said Shep’s sense of time isn’t like yours and mine.’
‘His sense of just about anything isn’t like ours.’
‘You said the past and present and future aren’t as clearly separated for him as for us.’
‘And here we are. February, 1992, more than ten years ago, before everything went to hell.’
From the adjacent living room, through an open door, came voices, argumentative but not loud.
Dylan and Jilly looked toward that door, beyond which glowed more and brighter lights than the single pharmacy lamp in the dining room. Younger Shep continued filling the holes in the puppies while older Shep watched him with an anxious expression.
On the battlefields of mind and heart, an imperative curiosity warred with Dylan’s dread. If so much horror wouldn’t have attended the satisfaction of his curiosity, then curiosity might have won. Or if he could have affected the outcome of this long-ago night, he would at once have been able to overcome his all but paralyzing anticipation of evil. But if he could make no difference – and he could not – then he didn’t want to be a useless witness to what he had not seen ten years ago.
The voices in the living room grew louder, angrier.
‘Buddy,’ he urged the older Shepherd, ‘fold us out of here. Fold us home, but to our own time. Do you understand me, Shep? Fold us out of the past now.’
The younger Shep was deaf to Dylan, to Jilly, and to his older self. Although the older Shep heard every word his brother spoke, he reacted as though he, too, were of this earlier time and were stone deaf to the voices of those who weren’t. Clearly, judging by the intensity with which he watched his younger self, he didn’t want to fold anywhere just yet, and he couldn’t be forced to work his magic.
When the angry exchange in the living room escalated, ten-year-old Shep’s fleet hands dropped to the table, each with an unplaced piece of the puzzle. He looked toward the open door.
‘Oh,’ Dylan said, as a chilling realization came to him. ‘Oh, buddy, no, no.’
‘What?’ Jilly asked. ‘What’s wrong?’
At the table, younger Shep put down the puzzle pieces and got up from his chair.
‘The poor damn kid. He saw,’ Dylan said miserably. ‘We never knew he saw.’
‘Saw what?’
Here on the evening of February 12, 1992, ten-year-old Shepherd O’Conner rounded the dining-room table, shuffling toward the door to the living room.
Twenty-year-old Shepherd stepped forward, reached out, tried to stop his younger self from going farther. His hands passed through that Shepherd of a far February as if through a spirit, without the slightest hindering effect.