The Secret Keepers

by Trenton Lee Stewart

  Reuben stared morosely at his feet. It seemed impossible that he could have caused such a thing. Worse, he knew that Middleton was only the beginning. Once it became clear that he was nowhere to be found in this neighborhood, the Directions would be sent into other neighborhoods, one by one, terrifying every parent of a boy who looked anything like him, until at last, inevitably, the search would extend to the Lower Downs. It was only a matter of time.

  “And as if you did not find this to be enough trouble,” Mrs. Genevieve was saying, still in her clipped and angry tone, “you ignore my advice and call this number in the paper! Has it occurred to you that this awful man, the one on the telephone, had perhaps heard only a rumor of this search under way in Middleton? That perhaps he believed it was only a rumor? But no, you called him—a boy called him—and now he is convinced of the truth. Now he, too, will be searching for you, whoever he is.”

  Reuben closed his eyes. In her anger, Mrs. Genevieve was clearly trying to make him feel as bad as possible. After all, the man on the phone was probably certain of the truth before Reuben called him. But there was no point in arguing, and anyway, Mrs. Genevieve was right about the most important thing—he would now have this mysterious man looking for him, and Reuben didn’t even know what he looked like.

  “Why have you come back?” Mrs. Genevieve demanded, and Reuben opened his eyes again. It was remarkable to him that she could give such an angry lecture while standing perfectly still, holding her teacup. When his mom got angry, her hands were all over the place—in the air, in her hair, everywhere. Not Mrs. Genevieve. Her anger was all in her eyes and her tone.

  It was remarkable to him that she could give such an angry lecture while standing perfectly still, holding her teacup.

  “Perhaps,” Mrs. Genevieve continued, “you wish now for me to speak with the Directions, to request a reward on your behalf? Surely you must see that I am no longer in a position to do so. They will find it strange that you did not approach me on the day you approached the others, only to do so now. They will suspect that I was not truthful with them. Do you understand?”

  “I wouldn’t ask you to do that!” said Reuben, a little hurt. “I—I really just hoped you could help me understand what’s going on. So that I could—so that I’ll know what to do.”

  The watchmaker furrowed her brow. “What do you mean by this, ‘what to do’? What is there to do but return to one of these other shops and give them the watch? You may try again to sell it if you wish—this I leave to you—but in any case you must leave the watch and go away as quickly as possible. You are only a boy.”

  “It isn’t that simple,” Reuben said. “There’s something—very special about the watch. I figured out what it does. I know its secret.”

  Mrs. Genevieve had been about to take a sip of her tea. She looked sharply at him over the rim of her teacup. “And so? What is this secret?”

  Reuben hesitated. He had been bursting to tell her—it had been his plan all along. Mrs. Genevieve was already in on part of the secret, if not quite the most incredible part. But now that the moment was at hand, he felt strangely reluctant.

  “Well?” Mrs. Genevieve looked exasperated. “Do you intend to share this information?”

  Reuben swallowed hard and forced himself to nod. He had to tell her. “I’m afraid you won’t believe me, though, Mrs. Genevieve.”

  The watchmaker clicked her teeth impatiently.

  “Right. Okay. Here goes.” Reuben took a deep breath. “The watch can make you turn invisible.”

  Mrs. Genevieve stared at him. She seemed to be waiting for him to tell her he was joking, then get on with the real explanation. He could insist for hours and she would never believe him. And why should she? Reuben would have thought it impossible, too.

  “Here, I’ll show you,” he said, and took the watch from his sweatshirt pocket.

  Mrs. Genevieve flinched at the sight of it. “You have it in your pocket? Can you truly be so reckless as this? This rare and beautiful clock watch, and you—”

  Reuben pulled out on the key. The room went black.

  He waited for her cry of surprise. Instead he heard a tinkling sound, as if something had shattered on the carpet—the teacup and saucer, he realized—followed in the next instant by a heavy, tumbling thump that could only be Mrs. Genevieve herself.

  Reuben hurriedly pushed the key back in.

  The watchmaker had fainted dead away.

  It was fortunate that Mrs. Genevieve had collapsed forward rather than backward. Her head struck the sofa cushion on its way to the floor, breaking her fall and sparing her a nasty bump. She regained consciousness almost immediately, sat up very slowly with Reuben’s help, and though she told him she felt as if she’d been hit by a train, she appeared to be more or less intact. After a few sips of brandy that Reuben, per her instructions, fetched from a cabinet and poured into a small glass, she rose unsteadily to the sofa, where she sat gazing into her drink as Reuben (also per her instructions) cleaned up the mess on her floor.

  “But how can this be?” she said, not for the first time. “How am I to believe this?”

  “It does take some getting used to,” Reuben said, wiping his brow. He was having trouble with the broom and dustpan. “You don’t have a vacuum cleaner, do you? It’s kind of tough to sweep a carpet.”

  Mrs. Genevieve seemed not to hear his question. “But how can it work?” She looked up from her glass. “What happens to you when you disappear? What do you feel?”

  Reuben shrugged. “I feel normal. Well, I go blind, but I feel normal.”

  “You go blind,” Mrs. Genevieve repeated, mumbling the words. “You go blind.”

  “It was scary the first few times,” said Reuben. “But nothing bad seems to happen. I mean, my eyes seem to be okay. Whatever’s happening—the magic or whatever—it doesn’t hurt me. I think it’s just the price you have to pay.”

  Emerging from her dazed-seeming ruminations, the watchmaker set her glass on the little side table. She clasped her fingers over one knee and regarded Reuben thoughtfully. “You use the word magic,” she said slowly, “but I believe this seems like magic only because we do not understand it. So let us try to understand, yes?”

  Reuben nodded and sat down in an upholstered chair across from her. It hadn’t occurred to him that he might actually learn how the watch worked. He had been much too absorbed in what it could do.

  “The secret must lie in the metal,” Mrs. Genevieve mused after a pause. “This brilliant watchmaker was no doubt an alchemist as well. In his time, most men of genius were. Do you know this word, alchemy? The attempt to transform common metals into gold? Perhaps the watchmaker created this unusual metal by accident, and in the course of his experiment he discovered its incredible power.”

  “It seems crazy that a metal could have special powers, though,” Reuben said.

  “Crazy?” Mrs. Genevieve frowned. “But a great many metals have ‘special powers,’ Reuben. Some are toxic, some radioactive. For heaven’s sake, think of magnets!” She fell silent a moment, pursing her lips. “Yet how does one control this power? This is a wonder to me.”

  “Do you want me to show you again?” Reuben asked, taking the watch from his pocket.

  “Yes, please do,” said Mrs. Genevieve, reaching for her glasses. She squinted at him with focused attention. “And explain to me everything as you do so. First you wind it.…”

  Reuben pointed out that there was no need to wind the watch again, as he had allowed it to unwind for only a few seconds. “So you can spread the fifteen minutes out—a minute here, another minute there, if you see what I mean.” Mrs. Genevieve nodded. “And then you just back the key up out of the winding position like this.”

  Reuben disappeared, and Mrs. Genevieve gasped. He reappeared to find her gaping and half-risen from her seat. She blinked and slowly settled back onto the sofa cushion. “As you say, this will take some getting used to,” she said in a thin voice. “Please give me a moment.”
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br />   After a few more demonstrations, Mrs. Genevieve had begun to get used to it. She had stopped gasping each time, at any rate. And she had begun to develop a theory. “You say that it makes you very tired?”

  “Supertired,” Reuben said. “Something about being invisible just takes it right out of you.”

  Mrs. Genevieve shook her head. “But why should it be so exhausting? Unless…” Her hands flew to her mouth. “Of course! We have been thinking of the watch spring as the source of power. Naturally, this is the case with normal watches. But this device, to do its work, requires far more energy than such a spring can produce. It is you, Reuben. You power the watch! It takes energy from you!”

  Reuben screwed up his face. “What?”

  “You say your skin must be in contact with the metal, yes? Please consider, you are not magically transformed, are you? No, instead a field is generated—a field of invisibility that emanates from this watch. A human being possesses enormous energy, Reuben. This watch uses you like a battery!”

  Mrs. Genevieve was clearly pleased with her idea, but Reuben wasn’t at all. It felt like being told he had a parasite—a tapeworm or a leech. With a disgusted feeling, he set the watch down on the carpet and wiped his hands on his sweatshirt. Evidently, he had more to get used to than he’d realized.

  Mrs. Genevieve was tapping her teeth with the tips of her well-manicured fingernails, thinking. “The winding is for your own protection,” she said presently. “Yes.”

  “Protection?” Reuben grimaced. The watchmaker was troubling him more and more with every word she uttered.

  “This is what I think,” she said. “If the spring is wound, and if the key is in the proper position, and if you touch the metal with your skin, then a sort of circuit is completed, and the watch is energized. It does its job. But when the spring is unwound, the circuit is broken, and the watch no longer receives energy. Yes, I think it very likely that I am right. The power is mystifying, but the concept is simple.” Mrs. Genevieve contemplated the watch on the carpet, considering her idea. She went back to tapping at her teeth.

  “You didn’t say why it’s for my own protection,” Reuben pointed out. “The winding.”

  Mrs. Genevieve lifted her gaze toward him. “Surely you can see for yourself, Reuben, what would happen if this watch continued to take energy from you indefinitely. If, say, you grew weak and lay down and fell asleep but continued to hold this watch in your hands? It would continue to do its job. You would continue to be its battery.”

  Reuben’s mind flashed to the batteries in his toy camera. An icy shiver ran through him. “You mean, it would drain me completely, until I was…?”

  Mrs. Genevieve looked at him steadily. “Yes, child. Until you were dead.”

  Reuben crossed his arms tightly over his chest. He drew his feet up under the chair, away from the watch. Such a dark possibility had never occurred to him. After a long silence, during which both he and the watchmaker gazed soberly at the watch, he asked, “Why do you think it makes me blind when I use it? Do you think it’s hurting me, and I just don’t know it?”

  “Perhaps,” Mrs. Genevieve said slowly, “but I think not. This blindness I do not believe does you harm. It can be explained simply enough. When the metal of the watch is energized, it generates a field that bends light around it. If you are within this field—in this place where light cannot reach your eyes—then naturally you cannot see, for vision requires light. Simple, yes?”

  “I suppose so,” Reuben said uncertainly. Mrs. Genevieve made it all sound like science, but he didn’t wholly understand it. Still, having even this general sense of how the watch worked helped him get over his revulsion. It was not a creepy, evil thing; it was just an extremely clever device—and a beautiful one at that. Carefully he picked it up and returned it to his sweatshirt pocket.

  Mrs. Genevieve took another sip of brandy. She cradled the glass in her lap and gazed without focus in the direction of the shop, as if she could see through the walls and out into the city, where all the trouble was. Reuben felt a stirring of hope. Perhaps she was about to solve his dilemma as readily as she had explained the workings of the watch.

  “Of course,” Mrs. Genevieve said presently, “I see now why it is not so simple to hand over this watch. You fear that others are aware of its secret. And that they wouldn’t wish anyone else to know it. Perhaps because of this you fear that they will do you harm.”

  Reuben nodded.

  “You are not foolish to wonder this. However, I believe you could proceed in such a way as to avoid problems. First you set the clock watch to a different time, and then you give it up to one of these shop owners. You admit that you found it—perhaps you even tell the truth about where you found it—and that this nonsense about your uncle was a lie. Then you go home, Reuben, and forget about all of this. It is doubtful anyone will suspect that you discovered the clock watch’s secret, which, as we know, is not so easy to do. I will point out again: you are only a boy. You will not be considered a threat. The Directions will stop trying to find you. They will leave you alone.”

  Reuben thought about this awhile. Mrs. Genevieve was probably right, he knew.

  And yet.

  He looked at the watchmaker doubtfully. “So I should just hand it over to The Smoke. That’s what you really think I should do?”

  Mrs. Genevieve attempted another sip of brandy, only to find her glass empty. An irritated expression passed over her face, and she set the glass onto the side table again. It occurred to Reuben that she was stalling, searching for the right answer. Her eyes were deeply troubled. At length she said, “It is true that much evil might be done with this watch.”

  “That’s what I was thinking, too,” Reuben muttered. Even if he hadn’t wanted to keep the watch, hadn’t needed it to help his mom, could he ever live with himself if he let it fall into the hands of The Smoke? The Smoke, of all people!

  Mrs. Genevieve sighed. “I wish, as I have so often wished, that one might call upon the police.”

  “Yeah,” Reuben said, and that was the end of their discussion about New Umbra’s police. They knew perfectly well that the police couldn’t help them. Indeed, speaking with the police would only bring this dilemma to a swift and unpleasant conclusion. Everyone knew that both the police commissioner and the mayor took regular meetings with the Counselor. They kept the city running, but they were not in charge, and neither of them wanted to cross the one who was. Nobody did.

  “Do you have a family, child?” Mrs. Genevieve asked, studying him.

  From the moment he met her, Reuben had been wondering when she would ask that question. He had planned not to answer it, to give out as little information about himself as possible, but he found now that he wanted to tell her the truth. “My mom,” he said simply. “It’s just my mom and me.”

  Mrs. Genevieve nodded, looking more and more unhappy. Still anxious, still worried, but also strangely sad. “I think perhaps the best thing for this beautiful but terrible clock watch,” she murmured, “would be to fling it into the ocean.”

  Reuben leaped to his feet. “But how could I do that?” he cried, his voice rising. “As long as they think I still have the watch, I’m in trouble! Even if I did throw it in the ocean, they wouldn’t believe me!”

  They regarded each other, Mrs. Genevieve sitting still as a statue, Reuben’s chest heaving as if he’d been running for his life. Neither one said what they both were thinking, which was that it might well be worse for Reuben if The Smoke did believe such a thing. For if The Smoke suspected that Reuben had purposely gotten rid of the watch to keep it out of his hands—this elusive prize he’d sought for so many years—then there would surely be a retribution.

  This is what happens to boys who cross The Smoke. And this is what happens to their families.

  Reuben looked away from Mrs. Genevieve. He didn’t like seeing his own fears reflected in her eyes. It made them worse somehow. He turned and went to the shop door.

  “Where are
you going?” Mrs. Genevieve asked, startled.

  “I have to go home,” Reuben said. His hand was on the doorknob. He felt afraid to go out, yet he couldn’t stay.

  “Reuben!” Mrs. Genevieve said sharply.

  He flinched and looked back. Her blue eyes glistened with tears.

  “You must be careful,” she said, looking quite stern as she tried to keep her face composed. “More careful than you have been. These Directions—they are all over the neighborhood. Four here, four there, always looking. So many eyes, Reuben, and all of them looking for a boy like you.”

  For a moment Reuben made no reply. She’d said nothing he didn’t already know. And yet he still felt grateful to her, in ways he couldn’t properly express. At last he said, “Thanks for your help, Mrs. Genevieve. And thanks—um, thanks for caring, I guess. Yeah.” He nodded. That felt right. “Thanks for caring.” For only now was he realizing how much it meant to him that the number of people who worried about him—the number of people in all the world—had expanded from one to two. Somehow it felt like more than that.

  The watchmaker had risen from the sofa but only stood there, regarding him with a look of helplessness. She looked as though she needed comforting herself.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Reuben said. And with that, he flung open the door and ran out.

  Locking the apartment door behind him, Reuben stumbled to his room and dropped the watch onto his bed. He was exhausted, sweating, faint with hunger. He’d used the watch too much with too little rest, the result of feeling pursued. From now on he needed to plan ahead better, for that feeling wasn’t going to go away, he knew. He struggled out of his sweatshirt as if from a straitjacket and let it fall to the floor. He stood there a moment, panting from the effort.