Jack: Secret Histories

by F. Paul Wilson

  As she’d done all day, Weezy led the way, winding through the blackened trunks until she came to a break in the trees.

  “Here’s where the mound begins.”

  “Mound?” Eddie said. “Where?”

  But Jack saw what she meant. They stood at the tip of where two linear mounds, each a couple of feet high and maybe a yard wide, converged to a point. Both ran off at angles between the blackened trees.

  “Like some giant gopher,” Eddie said.

  Weezy shook her head. “Except look how smooth they are. And how straight. Nobody knows it’s here, and I never would have noticed it if the fire hadn’t cleared all the undergrowth. I haven’t explored the whole thing, so I—”

  “You were out here alone?” Jack said.

  She nodded. “You know me. I like to explore. Who else is going to come along? You?”

  His two part-time jobs didn’t leave Jack much time to explore the Barrens, especially not to the extent Weezy did. She’d spend hours digging for arrowheads or other artifacts. The only reason he was out here today was because Mr. Rosen closed his store on Mondays.

  He smiled and shrugged. “Beautiful teenage girl alone in the woods … might meet a Big Bad Wolf.”

  She grinned and punched him on the shoulder. “Get out! Now you’re making fun of me.”

  “Maybe a little, but you’ve got to be careful, Weez.”

  She sighed. “Yeah, you’re right. But they’ve got to find me first.” She shrugged. “Anyway, I got a little spooked here before I could explore the rest of the mound, so that’s—”

  “You? Spooked?” Eddie laughed. “You are a spook. Nothing spooks you.”

  “Well, this place does.” She pointed along the lengths of the two ridges to where they faded into the trees. “See how nothing grows on the mounds? I mean, isn’t that weird?”

  Jack saw what she meant. Low-lying scrub—most of it scorched and blackened—crowded around the trees and spread across every square inch of sand between them. Everywhere except on the mounds.

  Yeah. Weird, all right. Sand was sand. What made the mounds different?

  Or was it a single mound, angling in different directions?

  “Feel it,” she said, patting the surface. “It’s still sand, but it’s hard. Like it hasn’t been disturbed for so long it’s formed some kind of crust.”

  Jack ran his fingers along the surface, then pressed. The sand wouldn’t yield. But something else … an unpleasant tingle in his fingertips. He pulled them away and looked at them. The tingling stopped. He glanced at Weezy and found her staring at him.

  “So it isn’t just me. You feel it too.”

  “Feel what?” Eddie said, rubbing his hands over the hard surface. “I don’t feel anything.”

  Weezy was still staring at Jack. “Now you know what spooked me.”

  She reached around to a rear pocket and pulled out the small spiral notebook and pencil she never went anywhere without.

  “I’ll bet somebody designed this in a special shape. Let’s see if we can figure it out.”

  “What do you mean, ‘special shape’?”

  “A lot of these mounds are ancient—thousands of years old.”

  “You mean, like, burial mounds?”

  Jack had heard of those. The Lenape Indians used to inhabit the pines.

  Weezy shook her head. “Some of the most mysterious mounds have nothing to do with burials. Take the Serpent Mound in Ohio. It curves back and forth like a snake for over a quarter mile. And get this—nobody knows how old it is. This could be something like that.” Her face brightened as she smiled. “And I discovered it. I’ve got to get this diagrammed.”

  Wondering how she knew all this stuff, Jack watched her draw a few lines on her pad, then move off, weaving through the trees as she followed the mound to the right. Jack and Eddie followed close behind through air heavy with the smell of burned wood. This was Weezy’s show, but Jack was getting into it. Something about these mounds and the way nothing grew on them gave him a funny feeling in his gut, but he had to admit he was fascinated.

  “Oh, look at this,” she said after she’d gone maybe twenty feet. “Another mound crosses here.” She drew some more lines. “This is getting confusing.”

  “Hey,” Eddie said.

  Jack turned and saw him standing atop the mound with his arms spread.

  “Eddie—” Weezy began

  “You want to map these mounds, right? Well, instead of ducking through all those trees, doesn’t it make more sense to follow the mounds themselves? It’ll be a lot less boracious.”

  Jack to turned to Weezy. “You know, that’s a great idea.”

  Weezy hesitated, then shrugged. “I guess everybody has a good idea in them,” she muttered. “Even Eddie.”

  Jack bowed and made a flourish toward the mound. “Ladies first.”

  She smiled and faked a curtsy. “Why, thank you, kind sir.”

  As the three of them began walking the mound, the sky darkened. Jack looked up and saw a menacing pile of clouds scudding in from the west, blotting out the sun. Weezy shaded her eyes as she stared skyward.

  “Shoot. We’ve got trouble.”

  “Looks like a thunderhead,” Eddie said.

  She nodded. “Cumulonimbus—piled high. Going to be a bad one.”

  “‘Cumulonimbus’?” Jack had to laugh. Weezy never ceased to amaze him. “How do you know this stuff?”

  She frowned. “I’m not sure.”

  “Do you sit down and memorize everything you read?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t have to. If I read something once, it’s there. I never forget it. Ever. At least not so far.”

  No wonder she got straight A’s. Jack would give anything—anything—for that power.

  Thunder rumbled in the distance.

  “Hurry,” she said. “I want to get this done before the downpour.”

  She started quick-walking along the mound until she came to another intersection. As she stopped to mark in her notebook, Jack looked around for Eddie and spotted him a couple of dozen feet back. He was down on one knee, fiddling with his sneaker lace.

  “Come on, Eddie. Don’t want the Jersey Devil to catch you.”

  He grinned. “You kidding? I have JD sausages for breakfast every morning.”

  He jumped up and started trotting toward them. When he neared he jumped and landed inches in front of Jack.

  “Boo!”

  More thunder then, but another sound too. As Eddie’s feet thumped onto the surface of the mound, they kept on going, breaking through the outer shell with a crunch.

  Jack looked down and saw Eddie’s sneakers sunk ankle deep in the softer sand within.

  “Jeez, man! What’d you do?”

  He heard Weezy hurry up behind him and gasp. “Oh, Eddie! How could you?”

  Eddie’s face reddened—whether with anger or embarrassment, Jack couldn’t tell.

  “Hey, I didn’t—”

  “You are the most unbelievable klutz! This mound’s sat here undisturbed for hundreds, maybe thousands of years, and you’re here, what, ten minutes, and already you’ve desecrated it!”

  “It was a soft spot! How could I know?”

  Lightning flashed, followed quickly by a roar of thunder that rattled Jack’s fillings. He looked up at a sky completely lidded with dark clouds looking ready to burst. Jeez, this storm was coming fast.

  “Time to take cover, guys,” he said.

  He grabbed Weezy’s arm and started pulling her back toward the bikes. He knew if he didn’t she’d probably stay in the open, storm or no storm, drawing her diagram. She didn’t fight him. Eddie followed.

  Just as they reached the bikes, the sky opened like a bursting dam. They huddled in the center of a thick copse of young pines.

  “Under a tree,” Weezy said. “The worst place to be in a storm.”

  Jack knew that, but didn’t see as they had much choice. Even under the trees they were getting soaked.

  �
��In case you haven’t noticed, Weez,” Jack said, “we’re in the middle of the Pine Barrens. If you know of a place without trees, I’m all ears.”

  Weezy said nothing more, just crouched on her haunches, her eyes closed and her fingers in her ears. Eddie too. They both jumped with every thunderclap.

  Jack didn’t get that. He loved thunderstorms—their fury, their unpredictability, their deafening light shows fascinated him. Same with his father. Many a summer night they’d sit together on the front porch and watch a storm approach, peak, and move on. Sometimes Dad would drive him over to Old Town where they’d park within sight of the Lightning Tree. For some reason no one could figure, the long-dead tree took a hit from every storm that passed overhead.

  The thunder grew louder, the lightning flashed brighter, the rain fell harder. The world funneled down to the copse and little else. Nothing was visible beyond their clump of trees. Water cascaded through the branches and swirled around their feet. Might as well have been in the shower—except Jack wished he could have cranked up the hot water handle.

  He felt his Converse All-Stars filling with water.

  Swell.

  3

  After a couple of forevers, the storm tapered off. When the rain finally stopped they stepped out of the copse and shook themselves off.

  Jack took off his T-shirt and wrung the water out of it. Eddie followed suit. Weezy didn’t have that luxury. Her Bauhaus shirt was plastered to her; she pulled it free of her skin as best she could. Her soaked hair looked almost black, her bangs were plastered to her forehead, and her ponytail had become a rattail.

  “Look at us,” she said. “Three drowned mice.”

  “At least we didn’t get hit by lightning,” Eddie said. “Let’s get home. I need to dry off.”

  “But I haven’t mapped the mound yet.”

  Eddie rolled his eyes. “You’ve gotta be kidding! You can come back any time—”

  “Just give me a few minutes.”

  “Come on, Eddie,” Jack said, nudging him with an elbow. “What difference is a few more minutes going to make?”

  “Okay, okay. I’ll stay with the bikes.”

  She pulled out her notepad and regarded it with dismay. “Soaked!”

  But that didn’t stop her. She hurried ahead, hopped on the mound, and began retracing her steps. The sun popped out as Jack followed. Now he welcomed it.

  Weezy stopped where Eddie had broken through the crust and pointed to the edges.

  “See this? I was so mad at him I didn’t notice before, but it’s really weird.”

  Jack saw what she meant. Eddie had shattered a four-or five-foot length of the crust into about a zillion irregular pieces, but the edges of the broken area—the near, the far, and both sides near ground level—were perfectly straight. Could have been cut by an electric saw.

  The rain had done a number on the soft sand within the mound, washing it out and fanning it around the break like a cloud. Jack didn’t know what kind of cloud it resembled, but he was sure Weezy could tell him.

  He kicked over a random shard of crust and spotted something shiny and black beneath it. Before he could react, Weezy was on her knees and all over it.

  “What’s this?”

  She started scooping away the surrounding wet sand, gradually revealing a black cube the size of a softball. Gently, cautiously, she wriggled her fingers beneath it.

  “Why don’t you just pick it up?” Jack said.

  “Because it may be attached to something.” Her fingers must have met on its underside because suddenly she lifted it free and held it up. “Heavy!”

  She laid it on the ground between them and began to examine it, tilting it a little this way and a little that.

  Jack knelt opposite her. “What do you think it is?”

  She shook her head, looking as baffled as he felt. “I don’t know. Some kind of stone—onyx, maybe? It’s got no writing on it, but I get this feeling it’s … old.” She looked up at him. “Know what I mean?”

  Jack couldn’t say why, but he knew exactly what she meant.

  “Yeah. Very old.”

  “And where there’s one there’s probably others.” Her eyes were wide with wonder and excitement. “Help me, Jack?”

  He laughed. “Try and stop me.”

  He wanted one of those cubes for himself.

  So they started digging—not easy in the wet sand. But they kept coming up empty. Frustration was beginning to nibble at Jack when his fingertips scraped against a hard surface.

  “Got something!”

  He dug his fingers down on each side of whatever it was and pulled it up.

  And found himself looking into the empty eye sockets of a rotting human head.

  He stared in mute, openmouthed, grossed-out shock. Beside him, Weezy screamed.

  4

  Jack spotted a sheriff’s patrol car rolling down Quakerton Road, Johnson’s main drag, just as he, Weezy, and Eddie raced into town. Johnson—often confused with Johnson Place, fifteen miles northeast of here—wasn’t big enough to rate its own police force, so the Burlington County Sheriff’s Department patrolled the streets.

  Trouble was, the cruiser was moving away.

  Jack threw extra muscle behind the pedals and started waving an arm and yelling as he chased it. Whoever was behind the wheel must have spotted him because the cruiser pulled over and waited.

  He skidded to a halt beside the driver’s window and saw Deputy Tim Davis behind the wheel. Jack knew him from when Davis used to date his sister, Kate, back in their high school days. He looked up at Jack through super-dark aviator sunglasses.

  “Hey, Jack. How’s that beautiful sister of yours?”

  Jack had pedaled so hard on his way back from the mound that it took him a second or two to catch enough breath to reply.

  “Greatwefoundadeadbodyinthepines!”

  He laughed. “Did you say ‘dead body’? What? As opposed to a live one?”

  “I’m not kidding, Tim.” He might be “Deputy” to everybody else, but he’d been “Tim” to eight-year-old Jack back when he’d gone out with Kate and so he’d always be “Tim” in Jack’s mind.

  “It’s true!” Weezy puffed as she pulled up beside him. “I saw it too!”

  Tim’s smile vanished as he stared at Jack. “This had better not be one of your practical jokes.”

  Jack gave him a wounded look. “Who, me?”

  He’d pulled a couple of pranks on Tim and Kate when they were dating—innocent little tricks like resetting Tim’s watch and his car clock ahead so they’d get home an hour early. Truth was, even though he’d liked Tim, he hadn’t wanted Kate dating anyone.

  “Look at us.” Jack pointed to his face, then Weezy’s. “Do we look like we’re joking?”

  People were discovering bodies all the time in the mystery-thriller-adventure stories Jack devoured. He’d always thought he’d be pretty cool if ever in that situation.

  Uh-uh.

  He could still feel the dry, rotted flesh against his fingers, see those empty eye sockets, the grinning teeth, the matted hair. Ugh. It made him queasy to think about it. He tried to push it from his mind but it kept slithering back.

  He wasn’t sure but he thought he might have screamed right along with Weezy. If so, he hoped she hadn’t heard him. That would be majorly embarrassing.

  Tim got on his radio. “This is A-seventeen requesting backup. I have a report of a corpse in the Pines near Johnson.”

  A burst of static followed, choking a voice saying “Roger that” or “Ten-four” or whatever.

  Tim opened his door, unfolding a map as he stepped out. He spread it on the hood of his car.

  “Where exactly did you find this body?”

  Jack looked at the angled lines of the fire lanes and the winding old Piney roads and didn’t know where to begin. He’d been following Weezy’s lead and hadn’t been paying attention.

  Weezy stepped forward and jabbed her finger onto the map. “Right about here.”


  Tim looked at her. “That’s Zeb Foster’s land.”

  Weezy went all wide-eyed and innocent. “Is it? Oh, my goodness. We had no idea. We were just following this fire trail, then we took the right fork here, and the left fork here …”

  Jack spotted Eddie standing by the rear bumper, leaning on his bike and looking annoyed. Jack wheeled over to him.

  “You guys weren’t kidding, were you,” he said. “All the way home I half thought you were putting me on. Wouldn’t be the first time you sucked me in.”

  “But we wouldn’t be putting on the sheriff’s department, right?”

  He shook his head. “I guess not. So if it was real, why didn’t you let me see?”

  “Nobody stopped you. You could’ve gone over.”

  “Yeah, but I thought you were kidding and you’d laugh at me.”

  “We’re a little old for ‘made-you-look’ stuff, don’t you think?”

  Jack hadn’t pulled anything on Eddie since this past winter when he’d pulled the ancient trick of rubbing some black grease around the edges of the eyepieces of a pair of old binoculars. After Eddie had taken a look, he’d wandered around his house for hours with two black eyes. Hadn’t a clue until Weezy came home and cracked up at the sight of him.

  Eddie pounded a fist on his handlebar. “Man, some people have all the luck.”

  “Trust me, if you’d seen it, you’d be thinking ‘yuck’ instead of luck.”

  Eddie’s eyes took on a faraway look. “Yeah, but a dead body. Awesomacious.”

  Jack turned back to Tim and Weezy.

  He heard her saying, “You follow those trails and look for a burned-out area on your right. That’ll be the place.”

  Tim was nodding. “Sounds easy enough. Anything else you can tell me?”

  Jack caught Weezy’s eye and nodded to the black box in the bike basket. She returned a frantic No-please-don’t! look. So he said nothing.

  Tim looked at Jack. “We’ll probably need a statement from you three sometime tomorrow.”

  Another sheriff’s car pulled up then. Tim and the newcomer talked for a minute, then the two of them roared off toward the Pines.