By the light of the moon

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