Scenes from the Secret History (The Secret History of the World) (8 page)

…and found a thin little ridge of flesh.

But no opening.

He raised his head – he hadn’t been able to do that before – and looked down at his belly. His shirt and pants were a bloody mess, but he couldn’t see any guts sticking out. And he couldn’t see any wound, either. Just a dark wet mound of flesh.

If he wasn’t so goddamn fat he could see down there! He rolled onto his side – God, he was stronger! – and pushed himself up to his knees to where he could slump his butt onto his heels, all the time keeping at least one hand tight over his belly. But nothing came out, or even pushed against his hand. He pulled his shirt open.

The wound was closed, replaced by a thin, purplish vertical line.

Patsy felt woozy again. What’s going on here?

He was in a coma – that had to be it. He was dreaming this.

But everything was so
real
– the rough ground beneath his knees, the congealing red wetness of the blood on his shirt, the sounds from the street, even the smell of the garbage around him. All so real…

Bracing himself against the wall, he inched his way up to his feet. His knees were wobbly and for a moment he thought they’d give out on him. But they held and now he was stand
ing.

He was afraid to look down, afraid he’d see himself still on the ground. Finally, he took a quick glance. Nothing there but two clotted puddles of blood, one on each side of where he’d been lying.

He tore off the rest of the ruined shirt and began walking – very carefully at first – toward the street. Any moment now he would wake up or die, and this craziness would stop. No doubt ’bout that. But until then he was going to play out this little fantasy to the end.

“Dat-Tay-Vao” is available in the collection
Soft & Others
or in the 2009 reissue of
The Touch

1983

JACK: SECR
ET HISTORIES

The child who would become
Repairman Jack was conceived shortly after Rasalom’s reincarnation.  His genetic makeup leaves him uniquely suited to be the Heir.  Neither he nor his parents are aware that he has been designated.

He makes his first appearance in the Secret History of the World with the first of his Teen Trilogy.  He spends much of his time in the fabled Jersey Pinelands, rich in Secret History lore and relics of the First Age.

Back in 2006 my grandson, a precocious reader, wanted to read my Repairman Jack novels.  But they weren’t for him – the language and situations weren’t appropriate for a seven-year old. Still, I wanted to share Jack with him. The only solution I could see was to tell a few young adult Jack stories to hold him over until he was old enough for the adult books. 

So I decided to go back to 1983 when Jack is fourteen years old. It’s a magical time in his life, the last summer before high school when he’s discovering his fixing talent. I’ve set it on the edge of the mysterious and legendary New Jersey Pine Barrens where strange lights jump from tree to tree and the Jersey Devil supposedly roams. I peopled it with weird characters and places and pitched the idea to Tor.  They hooked me up with one of their teen editors and gave me a contract for 3 so-called Young-Adult novels.

I say "so-called" because the writing process wasn't much different from my adult work and the style is virtually identical.  I've striven over the years for a clean, lean style, tailored to the pace of the thrillers I write. To my delight I found it fits a younger audience equally well. At least that's what a focus group showed: Kids who often took up to a month to finish a book were polishing off
Jack: Secret Histories
over a weekend and looking for more.

Jack: Secret Histories
made a number of recommended lists for middle-grade readers.

Here’s how the first book opens…

Jack: Secret Histories

(sample)

MONDAY

They discovered the body on a rainy afternoon

1

“Aren’t we there
yet
?” Eddie said, puffing behind him.

Jack glanced over his shoulder to where Eddie Connell labored through the sandy soil on his bike.  His face was red and beaded with perspiration, sweat soaked through his red Police T-shirt, darkening Sting’s face.  Chunky Eddie wasn’t built for speed.  He wore his sandy hair shorter than most, which tended to make him look even heavier than he was.  Eddie’s idea of exercise was a day on the couch playing
Pole Position
on his… new Atari 5200.  Jack envied that machine.  He was stuck with a 2600.

“Only Weezy knows,” Jack said.

He wasn’t sweating like Eddie, but he felt clammy all over. With good reason.  The August heat was stifling here in the Pine Barrens, and the humidity made it worse.  Whatever breeze existed out there couldn’t penetrate the close-packed, spindly trees.

They were following Eddie’s older sister Weezy – really Louise, but no one ever called her that.  She liked to remind people that she’d been “Weezy” long before
The Jeffersons
ever showed up on the tube. 

She was pedaling her banana-seat Schwinn along one of the firebreak trails that crisscrossed the million-plus acres of mostly uninhabited woodland known as the Jersey Pine Barrens.  A potentially dangerous place if you didn’t know what you were doing or where you were going.  Every year hunters wandered in, looking for deer, and were never seen again.  Locals would wink and say the Jersey Devil snagged another one.  But Jack knew the JD was just a folk tale.  Well, he was pretty sure.  Truth was, the missing hunters were usually amateurs who came ill equipped and got lost, wandering around in circles until they died of thirst and starvation.

At least that was what people said.  Though that didn’t explain why so few of the bodies were ever found.

But the Barrens didn’t scare Jack and Eddie and Weezy.  At least not during the day.  They’d grown up on the edge of the Pinelands and knew this section of it like the backs of their hands.  Couldn’t know all of it, of course.  The Barrens hid places no human eye had ever seen.

Yet as familiar as he was with the area, Jack still got a creepy sensation when riding into the trees and seeing the forty-foot scrub pines get thicker and thicker, crowding the edges of the path, and then leaning over with their crooked, scraggly branches seeming to reach for him.  He could almost believe they were shuffling off the path ahead of him and then moving back in to close it off behind.

“See that sign?” Eddie said, pointing to a passing tree. “Maybe we should listen.”

Jack glanced at the orange letters blaring from glossy black tin:

NO FISHING

NO HUNTING

NO TRAPPING

NO TRESPASSING

No big deal.  The signs dotted just about every other tree on Old Man Foster’s land, so common they became part of the scenery.

“Well,” he said, “we’re not doing the first three.”

“But we’re doing the fourth.”

“Criminals is what we are!” Jack raised a fist.  “Criminals!”

“Easy with that.” Eddie looked around.  “Old Man Foster might hear you.”

Jack called to the girl riding twenty feet ahead of them.  “Hey, Weez!  When do we get there?”

She usually kept her shoulder-length dark hair down but she’d tied it back in a ponytail for the trip.  She wore a black-and-white – mostly black – Bauhaus T-shirt and black jeans.  Jack and Eddie wore jeans too, but theirs were faded blue and cut off above the knees.  Weezy’s were full length.  Jack couldn’t remember if he’d ever seen her bare legs.  Probably white as snow.

“Not much farther now,” she called without looking around.

“Sounds like Papa Smurf,” Eddie grumbled.  “This is stupidacious.”

Jack turned back to Eddie.  “Want to trade bikes?”

Jack rode his BMX.  He’d let some air out of the tires for better grip in the sand and they were doing pretty well.

“Nah.” Eddie patted the handlebars of his slim-tired English street bike.  “I’m all right.”

“Whoa!” Jack heard Weezy say.

He looked around and saw she’d stopped.  He had to jam on his brakes to keep from running into her.  Eddie flew past both of them and stopped ahead of his sister.

“Is this it, Smurfette?” he said.

Weezy shook her head.  “Almost.” 

She had eyes almost as dark as her hair, and a round face, normally milk pale, made paler by the dark eyeliner she wore.  But she was flushed now with heat and excitement.  The color looked good on her.  Made her look almost… healthy, a look Weezy did not pursue. 

Jack liked Weezy.  She was only four months older, but his January birthday had landed him a year behind her in school.  Come next month they’d both be in Southern Burlington County Regional High, just a couple of miles away.  But she’d be a soph and he a lowly frosh.  Maybe they’d be able to spend more time together.  And then again, maybe not.  Did sophs hang with freshmen?  Were they allowed?

She wasn’t pretty by most standards. Skinny, almost boyish, although her hips seemed to be flaring a little now.  Back in grammar school a lot of the kids had called her “Wednesday Addams” because of her round face and perpetually dark clothes.  If she ever decided to wear her hair in pigtails, the resemblance would be scary. 

But whatever her looks, Jack thought she was the most interesting girl – no, make that most interesting
person
he’d ever met.  She read things no one else read, and viewed the world in a light different from anyone else.

She pointed to their right.  “What on Earth’s going on there?”

Jack saw a small clearing with a low wet spot known in these parts as a spong.  But around the rim of the spong stood about a dozen sticks of odd shapes and sizes, leaning this way and that.  

“Who cares?” Eddie said.  “If this isn’t what you dragged us out here to see, let’s keep going.”

After hopping off her bike, she leaned it against a tree and started for the clearing.

“Just give me a minute.”

His curiosity piqued, Jack leaned his bike against hers and followed.  The knee-high grass slapped against his sweaty lower legs, making them itch. A glance back showed Eddie sitting on the sand in the shade of a pine. Jack caught up to Weezy as they neared the spong. 

“They just look like dead branches someone’s stuck in the sand.”

“But why?” Weezy said. 

“For nothing better to do?”

She looked at him with that tolerant smile – the smile she showed a world that just didn’t get it.  At least not in her terms.

“Everything that happens out here happens for a reason,” she said in the
ooh-spooky
tone she used whenever she talked about the Barrens. 

He knew Weezy loved the Barrens.  She studied them, knew everything about them, and had been delighted back in 1979, at the tender age of eleven, when the state passed a conservation act to preserve them.

She gestured at the sticks, not a dozen feet away now.  “Can you imagine anyone coming out here just to poke sticks into the ground for no reason at all?  I don’t–”  She stopped, grabbed Jack’s arm, and pointed.  “Look!  What’d I tell you?”

Jack kind of liked the feel of her fingers gripping his forearm, but he followed her point.  When he saw what she was talking about, he broke free and hurried forward.

“Traps!  A whole mess of traps.”

“Yeah,” Weezy said, coming up behind him.  “The nasty leg-hold type.  Some dirty, rotten…”

As her voice trailed off Jack glanced at her and flinched at her enraged expression.  She looked a little scary.

“But they’ve all been sprung.”  He started walking around the spong.  “Every single one of them.”

“Whoever did this is my hero,” she said, following close behind.  “Didn’t I tell you that everything that happens out here–”