By the light of the moon

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.
    Staring at his hands, the older Shep said, 'Shep is brave,' in a
voice that shook with fear. 'Shep is brave.' He seemed not to be
speaking admiringly of ten-year-old Shepherd O'Conner, but to be
encouraging himself to face the horror that he knew lay ahead.
    'Fold us out of here,' Dylan persisted.
    Shepherd made eye contact, and even though he was eye to eye
with his brother, not with a stranger, this intimacy always cost
him. Tonight, in these circumstances, the cost was especially high.
His gaze revealed a terrible vulnerability, a sensitivity for which
he didn't possess the usual compensating human armor: ego,
self-esteem, an instinct for psychological self-preservation.
'Come. Come see.'
    'No.'
    'Come see. You have to see.'
    The younger Shepherd stepped out of the dining room, into the
living room.
    Breaking eye contact with Dylan, the older Shepherd insisted,
'Shep is brave, brave,' and trailed after himself, man-child in the
wake of child, out of the dining room, the inky puddles under his
feet moving with him as he shuffled off the Persian carpet onto the
blond maple tongue-and-groove floor.
    Dylan followed, Jilly followed, into the living room as it had
been on February 12,1992.
    Younger Shepherd stopped two steps past the doorway, but older
Shepherd walked around him and deeper into the momentous scene.
    The sight of his mother, Blair, not yet dead and therefore
seeming to be once more alive, rocked Dylan worse even than he