Sam looked good and annoyed now. “I underestimated him. He heard I was asking around. I still thought I could walk up to the punk’s house and haul his ass down to juvie.”

But Billy was waiting for Sam when he arrived at the Fullers’ ranch-style nightmare house. Sam walked right into a trap.

“When I looked down, I was standing in the middle of a magic circle he’d made out of the ground bones of the dead,” Sam’s head said, flushing with anger. “I was trapped, I couldn’t move. Then the little brat shifted the dimensions between my head and my body. He separated me in two. Each part still alive without the other.”

I shook my head.

“That is some fucked up shit,” I laughed.

I knew the concept. Each second of time that passes is a separate moment in which everything exists. To put it in simple terms; if five seconds pass for a cow, then there are five different cows that can be tapped by dipping into the pool of time. What Billy had done was take Sam’s head and place it in a slightly different time than his body, tearing them apart, but not killing them.

Smart kid. Evil as all hell, but smart.

“So, where’s your body?” I asked.

“Somewhere in Southern California would be my guess.”

I shook my head. “So how’d you . . . your head get all the way here?”

“The fucking punk dumped me off at Dawson’s place. After old Teddy came to, I talked him into taking me to you.”

I glanced at the box on the floor, at the postmark. Sam knew what I was going to ask before I asked it.

“Teddy chickened out. He mailed me.”

I started laughing again.

“That’s right, laugh it up!”

“I’m sorry,” I choked, “I really am, but you gotta see the humor in it all.”

Sam stared me down. “All I see is a bunch of dead kids and a crazed teen geek wielding power that can kill a bunch more. You gotta stop this Billy and get my fucking body back!”

Sam paused for a second, then screamed, “That’s all I see . . . you fuck!”

He always made me feel all warm inside.

With all the over-the-top shit I’ve seen in my day, I’m still not one for signs, but even I had to step back and look at this fucked up situation. I wake up, narrowly escape being killed, get evicted, and get a package with Sam’s head and a desperate plea to go to California. The way I figured it, I’d been in the D.C. area my whole life. It was time for a change of scenery.