It was the worst mistake he could have made, against a belted knight. Matt ducked under the blow and came up with a left jab into the belly, as hard as if he were driving in a dagger. Choy folded over sudden intense pain, gagging and dropping the stick.
Matt caught it and broke it over his knee. He stood a moment, panting, then reached out and shoved on Choy’s shoulder, hard. The thug staggered to the side, tripped on Luco’s legs, and fell.
Matt stood staring down at them, feeling the thrill of victory coursing through him. Victory over his childhood tormentors! He could scarcely believe it.
Then he fingered his own biceps, flexing the arm. The muscles Sayeesa the lust-witch had given him by her magic were still there. Sir Guy had taught him swordplay and quarterstaff play, and the knowledge he had gained in Merovence’s universe was still in his mind and neurons! Magic might not work here, but the fencing Sir Guy had taught him and the martial arts Saul had made him practice stayed in his brain and nerves. He grinned down at his old enemies, letting the excitement crest and begin to slacken.
Then, working hard to scoff, not gloat, he said, “Too much booze, guys… and you’d better quit smoking. Oh, and you might want to give up tobacco.”
Choy glared up at him, still struggling for breath.
“Don’t be here when I get back,” Matt advised, and turned to stroll away down the block, looking about him and reveling in the softness of the air, the scents of home… acrid though they might have become… and the vividness of the sky. It certainly was a fine day.
But something nagged at the back of his mind… magic. It shouldn’t work at all in this universe, but it had worked a little. He had called for Luco to trip, then be punched out, or at least down… and he had stumbled, then flinched as if somebody had slapped him.
Coincidence. Matt put it out of his mind and went back to enjoying the day. He looked around him at the neighborhood… and found he was standing in front of his own house. His parents’ house, he amended; he didn’t live here anymore. But it was the house he had grown up in, and Merovence began to recede, to seem awfully far away, just a fairy tale…
Until he noticed the two-foot-wide spiderweb between the porch roof and a pillar.
Matt smiled, feeling oddly reassured. He didn’t remember seeing webs like that very often around this neighborhood. The Spider King had a strand in every universe, a magical connection of some sort.
Matt’s magic might not work here, but somebody’s did.
Of course, it might be a perfectly normal spider, completely natural.
Sure.
He smiled, feeling very nostalgic as he gazed at the house. It was three windows wide on the second story, a door and two windows wide on the ground floor. Plain wooden steps ran up to the porch, with latticework between the brick pillars that held it up. Inside, there was a narrow entry hall that turned into an even narrower stairway about four feet from the door, narrower so that an eighteen-inch-wide passageway could lead back to the kitchen… about ten feet wide and twelve feet long. To the left of the entry hall was the doorway into the living room, which opened onto the dining room with its windows at the back and side of the house. Upstairs there were two decent-sized bedrooms, a small bedroom, and a bathroom just long enough to hold a short bathtub and just wide enough for everything else. It was old, it needed a coat of paint, the front-yard garden was down to two rosebushes… and it was wonderful.
Boyhood memories swirled around it, nostalgia tugged him toward the door…
Then it opened, and a dainty woman in a housedress, with her black hair in a knot, came out with a broom, straight toward the spiderweb.
“No, Mama!” Matt cried in panic.
The woman looked up in surprise, and in the split second that she stared at him, Matt was shocked to see a few gray hairs in the thick, luxuriant mass. Then she dropped the broom and ran down the steps to throw her arms around his neck with a glad cry.
Chapter Two
“Mateo!” Mama cried in Spanish. “I was so frightened when your friend called to ask if you were home!
It is so great a relief to see you!” She pushed Matt away, holding him at arm’s length, her face radiant.
Matt looked back at the trim, petite woman with the large eyes and full lips, carefully made-up even at home, and was stricken with the sudden realization that his mother was a beautiful woman. He managed to set the thought aside and say, “Yeah, I really should have told Saul I was leaving town.”
“Now I see why… you were only coming home to visit! Still, I think you worried him, muchacho.” Then Mama frowned, mood changing to concern on the instant. “But why have you come home before the end of the semester, eh? Are you in trouble?”
“Oh, no! Everything’s fine, just fine!” Matt said quickly. “But, uh, I have some news that I thought I needed to tell you and Papa face-to-face. Can he come home for lunch?”
“Yes, at one o’clock he will lock the store.” Mama turned to lead the way into the house. “The security gate is still enough.”
Matt felt a cold chill. He knew she was just talking in general terms… but if folding steel gates hadn’t been enough to keep burglars from breaking into other stores, how long would it be before they weren’t enough here? He remembered how the owner at the Laundromat had covered up his plate-glass windows with stucco, after the third time somebody had lobbed a brick through one. He’d only been ten at the time and hadn’t understood why Mr. Pikovsky had wanted to keep out the sunlight.
They came indoors, and Matt looked around at the little living room that had seemed so big to him when he’d been a boy, savoring its neatness and the tastefulness of the decoration, how well the wallpaper went with the furniture, enjoying the feeling of warmth that seemed to radiate from the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. “This isn’t a bad neighborhood, Mama,” he said, as if to reassure himself.
“No, of course not! It was a fine neighborhood to bring up a boy,” Mama said staunchly.
Well, it had been that. The older couples had been friendly and kind, and the young families’ children hadn’t been all that rough. But that had started changing when Matt hit junior high. “How are the Archers?”
“They moved, I don’t know, to the Poconos, I think. You sit. I will make coffee.” Mama bustled out to the kitchen, moving quickly to escape the memory of the Archers, the swaggering divorcee, her taunting, insulting children, and the friend she had invited in to live with them, another divorcee with three boys… eight people in a house built to hold five at the most. The mothers had gone out to dinner together and left the kids home to fend for themselves, or spent the evening sitting on a neighbor’s porch drinking beer and leaving the kids to do as they pleased. After all, if they got bored, they could always torment
Matt. The boys had made his life even more miserable than the girls had. Papa had started taking the bus to work at the college, so Mama could drive Matt to school and pick him up.
That left only Liam, Choy, Luco, and the would-be thugs who had gathered around them. They’d been no threat to the grownups even when Matt had gone off to college, but he hadn’t looked forward to his trips home. Matt had hoped his parents would move when he went away to grad school and had been sure they would when Papa was laid off at the college, though they didn’t call it that with professors… just that he’d failed to get tenure again. But a man purporting to be from a government bureau had talked
Papa into going into business for himself, using all his savings and taking out a government loan to buy the old corner grocery store. Admittedly, Papa hadn’t needed much persuading… at forty-eight, he’d become rather fed up with insolent students and overbearing college administrators. Besides, running a corner store looked as if it would pay better… and it had, for a while.