Secret Histories yrj-1

by F. Paul Wilson

  Jack wasn’t surprised. Though young enough to be his daughter, Weezy had a thing for Walt. If she met him on the street she’d walk with him;

  sometimes they’d sit on one of the benches down by the lake and talk—about what, Jack had no idea.

  No use trying to stop her, so he fol owed. Couldn’t let her face those two creeps alone. He watched her jump off her bike and quickly set the kickstand

  —Walt or no Walt, she wasn’t going to let that cube fal . Then she ran over, stepped in front of Teddy, and pushed him back. Not that she had much effect.

  Teddy was an ox. But Weezy was fearless.

  “Leave him alone!”

  “Yeah, lay off!” Walt said, raising a gloved hand. He alwayswore gloves.

  Walt had a hippieish look with a gray-streaked beard and long, dark hair. His voice sounded a little slurred. No surprise there. Jack didn’t know of

  anyone who’d ever seen him completely sober.

  Teddy laughed. “Look at this! Weird Weezy and Weird Walt together. How about that?”

  Jack lay his bike on the grass and looked around. Last time Mom had taken him for a checkup he’d been five-five and one-hundred-two pounds. Teddy

  had two years, two inches, and maybe fifty lardy pounds over him. He’d need an equalizer. He looked for a weapon, a rock, maybe, but found nothing.

  Swel .

  He approached the group empty-handed.

  “What do you wantwith him?” Weezy was saying. “He’s not bothering you!”

  “We just think he should share some of his hooch. We ain’t greedy. We don’t want it al , just a little. So get outta the way.”

  Teddy’s friend’s hands moved toward Weezy, as if to shove her aside.

  “Don’t touch her!” Jack shouted.

  Teddy spun, looked surprised, then grinned. Jack saw now that he was wearing a Black Sabbath T-shirt.

  “Wel , look who it is. What is it with you two—you find a dead body and suddenly you’re Guardians of the Universe?”

  “Just let her take him home.”

  Teddy, his expression menacing, took a step closer. “And if I don’t?”

  Jack felt his heart racing, but with more anger than fear. And the anger was growing, quickly overtaking the fear, blotting it out.

  “You lay one finger on her and I wil kil you.”

  The cold way the words came out startled Jack. He sounded like he meant it. And at the moment, he did.

  Teddy stopped and stared, then smiled. Jack wondered at that smile until he felt a pair of arms wrap around him, pinning his arms at his sides.

  “Gotcha, squirt!” said Teddy’s friend.

  Jack had been so intent on Teddy and Weezy he’d forgotten the friend.

  Teddy’s grin widened as he cocked a fist back to his ear. “Let’s see who’s gonna kil who.”

  Jack lowered his head as he struggled wildly to get free. This was going to hurt. He heard Weezy scream, quickly fol owed by a cry of pain from Teddy,

  and another from the guy holding him. Suddenly he was free. He leaped to the side, raising his fist, ready to swing, but stopped.

  Teddy and his friend were cowering and rubbing their heads. Between them stood a heavyset old woman brandishing a silver-headed cane. She wore

  a long black dress that reached the sidewalk and had a black scarf wrapped around her neck. Like Walt’s gloves, she wore that scarf no matter what the

  weather. Beside her stood a three-legged dog.

  Mrs. Elizabeth Clevenger.

  But where had she come from? Jack was sure she hadn’t been in sight when he’d come over here. How—?

  “Damn you!” Teddy shouted.

  He took a step toward her but stopped when the dog bared its teeth and growled. A thick-bodied, big-jawed, floppy-eared mutt—Jack thought he

  detected some Lab and some rottweiler along with miscel aneous other breeds—it seemed al muscle under its short, mud-brown coat. He’d seen it lots

  of times; the missing leg didn’t slow it down at al .

  “That dog bites me my dad’l sue you for every penny you’ve got.”

  “If I let him at you it won’t be for a bite—he’l have you for lunch. Al of you.”

  One look at the dog’s cold eyes and big jaws and Jack believed her. So did Teddy, apparently, because he backed off.

  Jack felt his heartbeat slowing but his hands felt cold, sweaty, shaky. He’d been awful close to getting his face rearranged. Too close.

  “Bitch!” Teddy said.

  “Don’t you dare speak to your mother like that!”

  “You ain’t my mother!”

  “Sadly, I am. But only because I cannot pick and choose my children. Now be gone.” She brandished her cane. “Off before I cast a spel on you!”

  That seemed to do it. Teddy jammed his hands into his jeans pockets and started to move away.

  “C’mon, Joey. Let’s go,” Teddy said to his friend.

  “Wait,” Joey said, his eyes wide with disbelief. “‘Cast a spel on you’? Is she kidding?”

  “Shut up, Joey. You don’t know nothin’.”

  The two of them walked off, arguing, Teddy looking over his shoulder from time to time.

  Clearly Joey wasn’t from Johnson. Otherwise he’d have known that old Mrs. Clevenger was a witch.

  5

  “Are you al right, Walter?” Mrs. Clevenger said, rubbing her hand along his upper arm.

  He nodded. “Yeah. They just pushed me around some. I’ve been through worse.”

  “I know,” she said. “Much worse.” Then she turned to Weezy. “That was a brave thing you did, child.”

  “Not so brave.” She seemed to have trouble meeting Mrs. Clevenger’s eyes. “I was scared half to death.”

  “The brave are always scared.” She turned to Jack. “I know why she helped Walter—he’s her friend. But why did you?”

  Jack figured the reason was obvious. “Because she’s myfriend.”

  The old woman gave him a long stare, her green eyes boring into his, then nodded. “Friendship … there is nothing better, is there?”

  “Nothing,” Weezy said, beaming at Jack.

  The lady said, “Walter is myfriend. I’m going to walk him home now, but first …” She looked past them to Weezy’s bike. “That box … put it back in the

  ground where you found it.”

  Jack spun and stared at Weezy’s bike. Only a little bit of the towel wrapping the box was visible in the basket, nothing more.

  Weezy’s mouth dropped open. “H-how do you know about that?” Her brow furrowed. “Did Mister Rosen—?”

  Mrs. Clevenger smiled, which added more lines to her already wrinkled face. “I know more than I should and less than I’d like to.” The smile

  disappeared. “But hear me wel . That thing is an il wind that wil blow nobody good. It was hidden from the light of day for good reason. Return it to its

  resting place.” With that she started to turn away. “Besides, you wil never get it open.”

  “But we did,” Weezy said.

  Mrs. Clevenger’s turn came to an abrupt halt, then she swiveled back to fix Weezy with her stare.

  “We?Who is we?”

  Weezy looked flustered. “Wel , not ‘we,’ real y. Just Jack. He’s the only one who can do it.”

  She turned her gaze on him. “Not such a surprise, I suppose. But that does not change anything. Put it back where it belongs.”

  Jack wanted to ask her why that wasn’t a surprise but she’d turned away again. She took Walter’s arm and the two of them began walking, her dog

  close behind. Jack heard bottles clinking in Walter’s paper bag.

  “Now, Walter,” Jack heard her say, “you’re overdoing the drinking. You must learn to pace yourself, otherwise you won’t survive to complete your

  mission.”

  Walter shook his shaggy head. “Not surviving … that doesn’t sound so bad. I hate this …” He glanced back at Jack. “Do you think
he might be the one?”

  “I can understand why you might feel that way. But no, he’s not the one you seek …”

  And then their voices faded.

  What were they talking about? Why was Walt seeking someone, and why could Mrs. Clevenger understand why he might think Jack was the one? Jack

  wanted to trail after them and hear more, then realized that they were both sort of crazy. He couldn’t expect to make sense out of a conversation between

  those two.

  Weezy too was watching them go, but she had her own questions.

  “How could she know about the box?”

  Jack shrugged. “And where did she come from? Did you see?”

  Weezy shook her head. “No. Al of a sudden she was there, swinging her cane.”

  Jack looked at the Old Town bridge that spanned the narrow midsection of the figure-eight-shaped lake. On the far side of that creaky one-lane span lay

  the easternmost end of Johnson, where it backed up to the Pine Barrens. The area included the six square blocks of the original Quakerton settlement,

  cal ed Old Town for as long as anyone could remember. Nobody knew for sure when it had first been settled. Most said before the revolutionary war— long

  before the war.

  Mrs. Clevenger lived in Old Town. She must have come from there.

  Jack reconstructed the chain of events: Johnson didn’t have a liquor store, so Walt must have been stocking up in Old Town. Some of the Pineys had

  stil s, but instead of using corn they made their moonshine from apples. Every Wednesday and Saturday one or two of them would come in from the

  woods; they’d park their pickups at the end of Quakerton Road where it dead-ended at the edge of the Pines and sel their applejack. They transported it

  in big jugs and customers had to bring their own bottle—or in Walt’s case, bottles—to be fil ed.

  Nearly everybody in Johnson had at least one bottle of applejack in the house, and it was an ongoing argument as to who made the best—Gus Sooy or

  Lester Appleton.

  Walt must have gone over to get his bottles fil ed and run into Teddy and Joey on the way back. Mrs. Clevenger must have been close behind him.

  Wel , wherever she came from, Jack was glad she’d arrived when she did.

  He looked back and saw the pair turning the corner onto the block where Walt lived with his sister and brother-in-law.

  “There goes an odd couple,” he said.

  Weezy nodded. “Way odder than Oscar and Felix. She wears that same scarf day in and day out, and he wears gloves no matter how hot it gets.”

  “You believe she’s a witch?” Jack said as they headed back to their bikes, and immediately realized Weezy was probably the wrong person to ask.

  “Could be. She’s hard to explain. I mean, how did she know about the box?”

  Remembering that caused a trickle of uneasiness to go down Jack’s spine.

  “I don’t know, but should we fol ow her advice?”

  Weezy looked at him as if he’d suddenly grown a second nose and a third eye. “Are you kidding me? Go back and bury it? No way! Even if she isa

  witch.”

  Obviously he’d struck a nerve. No surprise, though.

  “Wel , I don’t believe in witches, but did you hear her threaten Teddy with a spel ?”

  “So? I can threaten youwith a spel , Jack. Doesn’t mean I can cast one.”

  “Yeah, wel , maybe she just pretends to be a witch. She’s already got the Clevenger name. Maybe letting the more superstitious folks around here think

  she’s the Witch of the Pines come back from the dead works for her somehow.”

  She and her dog had moved into Old Town a dozen or so years ago. Her mysterious ways—disappearing for months at a time and then suddenly

  around every day, wandering through the Pines at night—had started some folks whispering that she was real y Peggy Clevenger, the famous Witch of the

  Pines. But how could that be? Everybody knew how the real Peggy Clevenger’s decapitated body had been found in her burned-out cabin back in the

  1800s.

  Weezy shrugged. “Could be.” She gave Jack a sidelong look. “You know they say Peggy’s body wanders the Barrens at night looking for her head. But

  I’m just wondering …”

  “Wondering what?”

  “What if she found it and put it back on?”

  Jack laughed. “Come on! Even you don’t believe that.”

  “Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. But how do you explain Mrs. Clevenger’s

  ever-present scarf? Why would she wear it on a hot day like this?” Weezy dropped into her ooh-spookyvoice. “Unless she’s hiding the seam where she

  reattached her head.”

  Jack picked up his bike and waited for Weezy to knock back her kickstand. “You gotta be kidding me.”

  She looked at him with those big, dark, black-rimmed eyes. “Okay, fine. Your

  turn then: Give me another explanation for the scarf.”

  Jack couldn’t come up with one. Not for lack of trying. He real y wanted another

  explanation. Because he didn’t like Weezy’s one bit.

  6

  Jack spent the afternoon at USED.

  The best thing about the job was he hardly ever did the same thing two days in

  a row. One day he’d spend dusting al the antiques and just plain junk; the next he’d supply a third or fourth hand to help Mr. Rosen fix an old clock;

  another he’d wind al the clocks and watches—not too far—and make sure they were set to the right time. Today he was helping Mr. Rosen pretty up some

  antique oak furniture he’d just bought—a rol top desk and a round table with cool lion paws at the ends of its legs.

  The old man’s fingers weren’t as steady as he’d have liked, so he oversaw Jack

  as he used a stain-soaked Q-tip to darken scratches in the old wood.

  After the stain dried, Jack would polish the surface.

  For his time and effort he was paid $3.50 an hour—not a princely sum, but

  fifteen cents above minimum wage. Mr. Rosen had offered him the extra if Jack would save him al the government paperwork by taking cash. Fine with

  Jack, because that in turn saved him the trouble of finding his birth certificate and applying for a Social Security number.

  He supplemented the USED money by mowing lawns, but that was always

  subject to the whims of weather—not enough rain and the grass didn’t grow, which meant no mowing; too much rain and the wet grass clogged the mower.

  He liked the reliability of the weekly cash from USED.

  Not that he had much in the way of expenses. He’d go to the movies—he

  planned on seeing ReturnoftheJedifor a fourth time this weekend—or rent sci-fi or horror films on videocassette. He liked to keep up with certain comics

  like Cerebusand Roninand SwampThing,but he’d lost interest in most of the titles he used to love—especial y ones with characters in tights. Occasional y

  he’d buy a record album if he liked it enough. His latest had been

  Prince’s 1999;he’d probably buy Synchronicityby the Police next. Dad had insisted he find a part-time job that would, in his words, “al ow you

  enough time to enjoy the summer but help you learn the value of a dol ar.” Wel , fine. But Jack would have found one anyway because he wasn’t

  comfortable with an al owance —givenmoney didn’t feel like it was real y his. But the money he earned—that belonged to him and him alone.

  The phone rang and Jack hustled over to pick it up.

  “USED.”

  “Yes, hel o,” said an accented voice. “This is Professor Nakamura. May I speak to

  Mister Rosen, please?”

  He handed over the phone and listened while Mr. Rosen talked about Carnival

  Glass, then moved the conversation to the “artifact” he and Weezy had found.

&
nbsp; “You say you’l be around tomorrow morning?” he said into the phone, then