Scenes from the Secret History

by F. Paul Wilson

  "How many and when?"

  "One. Ten-thirty." Jack slipped into the last booth and sat with a clear view of the door. The rear exit was two steps away. "Name's Bahkti. Sounds like he's from Paki­stan or someplace around there."

  "A man of color."

  "More color than you, no doubt."

  "Gotcha. Coffee?"

  "Sure."

  Jack thought about seeing Gia later today. A nice thought. They'd meet, they'd touch, and Gia would remember what they'd had, and maybe... just maybe... she'd realize that he wasn't such a bad guy after all. He began whistling through his teeth.

  Julio gave him a strange look as he re­turned with a coffeepot, a cup, and the morning's Daily News.

  "How come you're in such a good mood?"

  "Why not?"

  "You been a grouch for months now, meng."

  Jack hadn't realized it had been so obvious. "Personal."

  Julio shrugged and poured him a cup of coffee. Jack sipped it black while he waited. He never liked first meet­ings with a customer. There was always a chance he wasn't a customer but somebody with a score to settle. He got up and checked the exit door to make sure it was unlocked.

  Two Con Ed workers came in for a coffee break. They took their coffee clear and golden with a foamy cap, poured into pilsner glasses as they watched the TV over the bar. Some guy was interviewing three transvestite grammar­ schoolteachers; everyone on the screen had greenish hair and pumpkin-colored complexions. Julio served the Con Ed men a second round, then came out from behind the bar and took a seat by the door.

  Jack glanced at the paper. "Where Are the Winos?" was the headline. The press was getting lots of mileage out of the rapid and mysterious dwindling of the city's derelict population during the past few months.

  At ten-thirty-two, Mr. Bahkti came in. No doubt it was him. He wore a navy blue Nehru-type tunic. His dark skin seemed to blend into his clothes. For an instant after the door swung shut behind him, all Jack could see was a pair of eyes floating in the air at the other end of the dim tavern.

  Julio approached him immediately. Words were ex­changed and Jack noted the newcomer flinch away as Julio leaned against him. He seemed angry as Julio walked toward Jack with an elaborate shrug.

  "He's clean," he said as he came back to Jack's booth. "Clean but weird."

  "How do you read him?"

  "That's jus' it – I don't read him. He's bottled up real tight. Nothing at all out of that guy. Nothing but creeps."

  "What?"

  "Sonthin 'bout him gimme the creeps, man. Wouldn't want to get on his wrong side. You better be sure you can make him happy before you take him on."

  Jack drummed his fingers on the table. Julio's reaction made him uneasy. The little man was all macho and brag­gadocio. He must have sensed something pretty unsettling about Mr. Bahkti to have even mentioned it.

  "What'd you do to get him riled up?" Jack asked.

  "Nothin’ special. He jus’ got real ticked off when I give him my 'accidental' frisk. Didn't like that one bit. You wanna take off?"

  Jack hesitated, toying with the idea of getting out now. After all, he probably was going to have to turn the man down anyway. But he had agreed to meet him, and the guy had arrived on time.

  "Send him back and let's get this over with."

  Julio waved Bahkti toward the booth and headed back to his place behind the bar.

  Bahkti strolled toward Jack with a smooth, gliding gait that reeked of confidence and self-assurance. He was half­way down the aisle when Jack realized with a start that his left arm was missing at the shoulder. But there was no pinned-up left sleeve – the jacket had been tailored without one. He was a tall man-six-three, Jack guessed, lean but sturdy. Well into his forties, maybe fifty. The nose was long; he wore a sculptured beard, neatly trimmed to a point at the chin. What could be seen of his mouth was wide and thin-lipped. The whites of his deep walnut eyes almost glowed in the darkness of his face, reminding Jack of John Barrymore in Svengali.

  He stopped at the edge of the facing banquette and looked down at Jack, taking his measure just as Jack was taking his.

  Get to know Jack better here: The Tomb

  …ends in September

  The Barrens

  The New Jersey Pine Barrens loom large in the Secret History. It was inhabited during the First Age and the Septimus Order built one of its earliest post-cataclysmic lodges there. All sorts of strangeness is still going on there as young Jack discovered in the Teen Trilogy.

  “The Barrens” is my official tribute to H. P. Lovecraft. I purposely avoided rereading any of his fiction before writing it. I wasn't out to do a slavish pastiche; I wanted to capture the Lovecraft gestalt as I remembered it. I chose the Jersey Pine Barrens because it is a truly Lovecraftian setting; all the Piney history and lore in the story are true, every locale except Razorback Hill is real. (In fact, I liked Razorback Hill so much I returned there for the backstory of Freak Show.) The style is mine, but the Cosmic Horror is Lovecraft's.

  It first appeared in Lovecraft’s Legacy and wound up as a finalist for the World Fantasy Award for best novella (it lost). Wildside Press reissued it in a signed, limited hardcover edition in 1991. More recently it was revived for Arkham House's Cthulhu 2000.

  Here’s the opening section. (HPL fans will recognize the opening line as a riff on his “The Thing on the Doorstep.”)

  The Barrens

  (sample)

  1. In Search of a Devil

  I shot my answering machine today. Took out the old twelve gauge my father left me, and blew it to pieces. A silly, futile gesture, I know, but it illustrates my present state of mind, I think.

  And it felt good. If not for an answering machine, my life would be completely different now. I would have missed Jonathan Creighton's call. I'd be less wise but far, far happier. And I'd still have some semblance of order and meaning in my life.

  He left an innocent enough message:

  "'The office of Kathleen McKelston and Associates!' Sounds like Big Business! How's it going, Mac? This is Jon Creighton calling. I'm going to be in the area later this week and I'd like to see you. Lunch or dinner – whatever's better. Give me a buzz." And he left a number with a 212 area code.

  So simple, so forthright, giving no hint of where it would lead.

  You work your way through life day by day, learning how to play the game, carving out your niche, making a place for yourself. You have some good luck, some bad luck, sometimes you make your own luck, and along the way you begin to think that you've figured out some of the answers – not all of them, of course, but enough to make you feel that you've learned something, that you've got a handle on life and just might be able to get a decent ride out of it. You start to think you're in control. Then along comes someone like Jonathan Creighton and he smashes everything. Not just your plans, your hopes, your dreams, but everything, up to and including your sense of what is real and what is not.

  I'd heard nothing from or about him since college, and had thought of him only occasionally until that day in early August when he called my office. Intrigued, I returned his call and set a date for lunch.

  That was my first mistake. If I'd had the slightest inkling of where that simple lunch with an old college lover would lead, I'd have slammed down the phone and fled to Europe, or the Orient, anywhere where Jonathan Creighton wasn't.

  We'd met at a freshmen mixer at Rutgers University. Maybe we each picked up subliminal cues – we called them "vibes" in those days – that told us we shared a rural upbringing. We didn't dress like it, act like it, or feel like it, but we were a couple of Jersey hicks. I came from the Pemberton area, Jon came from another rural zone, but in North Jersey, near a place called Gilead. Despite that link, we were polar opposites in most other ways. I'm still amazed we hit it off. I was career oriented while Jon was...well, he was a flake. He earned the name Crazy Creighton and he lived up to it every day. He never stayed with one t
hing long enough to allow anyone to pin him down. Always on to the Next New Thing before the crowd had tuned into it, always into the exotic and esoteric. Looking for the Truth, he'd say.

  And as so often happens with people who are incompatible in so many ways, we found each other irresistible and fell madly in love.

  Sophomore year we found an apartment off campus and moved in together. It was my first affair, and not at all a tranquil one. I read the strange books he'd find and I kept up with his strange hours, but I put my foot down when it came to the Pickman prints. There was something deeply disturbing about those paintings that went beyond their gruesome subject matter. Jon didn't fight me on it. He just smiled sadly in his condescending way, as if disappointed that I had missed the point, and rolled them up and put them away.

  The thing that kept us together – at least for the year we were together – was our devotion to personal autonomy. We spent weeks of nights talking about how we had to take complete control of our own lives, and brainstorming how we were going to go about it. It seems so silly now, but that was the Sixties, and we really discussed those sorts of things back then.

  We lasted sophomore year and then we fell apart. It might have gone on longer if Creighton hadn't got in with the druggies. That was the path toward loss of all autonomy as far as I was concerned, but Creighton said you can't be free until you know what's real. And if drugs might reveal the Truth, he had to try them. Which was hippie bullshit as far as I was concerned. After that, we rarely ran into each other. He wound up living alone off campus in his senior year. Somehow he managed to graduate, with a degree in anthropology, and that was the last I'd heard of him.

  But that doesn't mean he hadn't left his mark.

  I suppose I'm what you might call a feminist. I don't belong to NOW and I don't march in the streets, but I don't let anyone leave footprints on my back simply because I'm a woman. I believe in myself and I guess I owe some of that to Jonanthan Creighton. He always treated me as an equal. He never made an issue of it – it was simply implicit in his attitude that I was intelligent, competent, worthy of respect, able to stand on my own. It helped shape me. And I'll always revere him for that.

  Lunch. I chose Rosario's on the Point Pleasant Beach side of the Manasquan Inlet, not so much for its food as for the view. Creighton was late and that didn't terribly surprise me. I didn't mind. I sipped a Chablis spritzer and watched the party boats roll in from their half-day runs of bottom fishing. Then a voice with echoes of familiarity broke through my thoughts.

  "Well, Mac, I see you haven't changed much."

  I turned and was shocked at what I saw. I barely recognized Creighton. He'd always been thin to the point of emaciation. Could the plump, bearded, almost cherubic figure standing before me now be–?

  "Jon? Is that you?"

  "The one and only," he said and spread his arms.

  We embraced briefly, then took our seats in a booth by the window. As he squeezed into the far side of the table, he called the waitress over and pointed to my glass.

  "Two Lites for me and another of those for her."

  At first glance I'd thought that Creighton's extra poundage made him look healthy for the first time in his life. His hair was still thick and dark brown, but despite his round, rosy cheeks, his eyes were sunken and too bright. He seemed jovial but I sensed a grim undertone. I wondered if he was still into drugs.

  "Almost a quarter century since we were together," he said. "Hard to believe it's been that long. The years look as if they've been kind to you."

  As far as looks go, I suppose that's true. I don't dye my hair, so there's a little gray tucked in with the red. But I've always had a young face. I don't wear make-p – with my high coloring and freckles, I don't need it.

  "And you."

  Which wasn't actually true. His open shirt collar was frayed and looked as if this might be the third time he'd worn it since it was last washed. His tweed sport coat was worn at the elbows and a good two sizes too small for him.

  We spent the drinks, appetizers, and most of the entrees catching up on each other's lives. I told him about my small accounting firm, my marriage, my recent divorce.

  "No children?"

  I shook my head. The marriage had gone sour, the divorce had been a nightmare. I wanted off the subject.

  "But enough about me," I said. "What have you been up to?"

  "Would you believe clinical psychology?"

  "No," I said, too shocked to lie. "I wouldn't"

  The Jonathan Creighton I'd known had been so eccentric, so out of step, so self-absorbed, I couldn't imagine him as a psychotherapist. Jonathan Creighton helping other people get their lives together – it was almost laughable.

  He was the one laughing, however – good-naturedly, too.

  "Yeah. It is hard to believe, but I went on to get a masters, and then a Ph.D. Actually went into practice."

  His voice trailed off.

  "You're using the past tense," I said.

  "Right. It didn't work out. The practice never got off the ground. But the problem was really within myself. I was using a form of reality therapy but it never worked as it should. And finally I realized why: I don't know – really know – what reality is. Nobody does."

  This had an all-too-familiar ring to it. I tried to lighten things up before they got too heavy.

  "Didn't someone once say that reality is what trips you up whenever you walk around with your eyes closed?"

  Creighton's smile showed a touch of the old condescension that so infuriated some people.

  "Yes, I suppose someone would say something like that. Anyway, I decided to go off and see if I could find out what reality really was. Did a lot of traveling. Wound up in a place called Miskatonic University. Ever heard of it?"

  "In Massachusetts, isn't it?"

  "That's the one. In a small town called Arkham. I hooked up with the anthropology department there – that was my undergraduate major, after all. But now I've left academe to write a book."

  "A book?"

  This was beginning to sound like a pretty disjointed life. But that shouldn't have surprised me.

  "What a deal!" he said, his eyes sparkling. "I've got grants from Rutgers, Princeton, the American Folklore Society, the New Jersey Historical Society, and half a dozen others, just to write a book!"

  "What's it about?"

  "The origins of folk tales. I'm going to select a few and trace them back to their roots. That's where you come in."

  "Oh?"

  "I'm going to devote a significant chapter to the Jersey Devil."

  "There've been whole books written about the Jersey Devil. Why don't you–"

  "I want real sources for this, Mac. Primary all the way. Nothing second-hand. This is going to be definitive."

  "What can I do for you?"

  "You're a Piney, aren't you?"

  Resentment flashed through me. Even though people nowadays described themselves as "Piney" with a certain amount of pride, and I'd even seen bumper stickers touting "Piney Power," some of us still couldn't help bristling when an outsider said it. When I was a kid it was always used as a pejorative. Like "clamdigger" here on the coast. Fighting words. Officially it referred to the multigenerational natives of the great Pine Barrens that ran south from Route 70 all the way down to the lower end of the state. I've always hated the term. To me it was the equivalent of calling someone a redneck.

  Which, to be honest, wasn't so far from the truth. The true Pineys are poor rural folk, often working truck farms and doing menial labor in the berry fields and cranberry bogs – a lot of them do indeed have red necks. Many are uneducated, or at best undereducated. Those who can afford wheels drive the prototypical battered pick-up with the gun rack in the rear window. They even speak with an accent that sounds southern. They're Jersey hillbillies. Country bumpkins in the very heart of the industrial Northeast. Anachronisms.

  P
ineys.

  "Who told you that?" I said as levelly as I could.

  "You did. Back in school."

  "Did I?"

  It shook me to see how far I'd traveled from my roots. As a scared, naive, self-deprecating frosh at Rutgers I probably had indeed referred to myself as a Piney. Now I never mentioned the word, not in reference to myself or anyone else. I was a college educated woman; I was a respected professional who spoke with a colorless northeast accent. No one in his right mind would consider me a Piney.

  "Well, that was just a gag," I said. "My family roots are back in the Pine Barrens, but I am by no stretch of the imagination a Piney. So I doubt I can help you."

  "Oh, but you can! The McKelston name is big in the Barrens. Everybody knows it. You've got plenty of relatives there."

  "Really? How do you know?"

  Suddenly he looked sheepish.

  "Because I've been into the Barrens a few times now. No one will open up to me. I'm an outsider. They don't trust me. Instead of answering my questions, they play games with me. They say they don't know what I'm talking about but they know someone who might, then they send me driving in circles. I was lost out there for two solid days last month. And believe me, I was getting scared. I thought I'd never find my way out."

  "You wouldn't be the first. Plenty of people, many of them experienced hunters, have gone into the Barrens and never been seen again. You'd better stay out."

  His hand darted across the table and clutched mine.

  "You've got to help me, Kathy. My whole future hinges on this."

  I was shocked. He'd always called me "Mac." Even in bed back in our college days he'd never called me "Kathy." Gently, I pulled my hand free, saying.

  "Come on, Jon–"

  He leaned back and stared out the window at the circling gulls.

  "If I do this right, do something really definitive, it may get me back into Miskatonic where I can finish my doctoral thesis."

  I was immediately suspicious.

  "I thought you said you 'left' Miskatonic, Jon. Why can't you get back in without it?"

  "'Irregularities,'" he said, still not looking at me. "The old farts in the antiquities department didn't like where my research was leading me."