The Mostly True Story of Jack (20 page)

“He has been apprehended. If we eliminate him in
sight of Your Other, we can eliminate Her forever. Your powers will increase, and so will mine. No more…
misunderstanding
. I’m only thinking of what is best, my Lady. I am ever Your servant.” He mopped his brow. Despite the cold, he sweated through his clothing—a heavy, drippy sweat, stinking with fear.

“Good,” She said, vanishing sleepily into the wood. “I’ll rest,” She murmured. “But not for long.”

M
RS
. A
VERY STOOD NEXT TO THE CLOSED DOOR, LISTENING
. She was not supposed to listen, of course. But she did. She listened all the time. When Clayton was young, and it was clear that she would not have another child, she listened every day, crying silently into her hands, gathering enough information to propose a plan.

It was not, as it turned out, a particularly
good
plan, and it was a shame what happened to that poor Schumacher boy, of course it was, but a good mother must protect her own. Myrtle Avery never had any ambitions
to become a particularly good
woman
; however, she was and would be a good mother. Her child would be protected. She would see to it.

She laid her fingertips on the polished face of the door to steady herself. She was a small woman, pale skinned, tiny featured, a birdlike body dressed always in brown, with large, round glasses that magnified her large brown eyes and made her look like a surprised owl. She blinked rapidly to beat back tears. Her husband’s voice trembled. She had only heard it tremble twice before: first on their wedding day, and then later, when he transmitted her plan to a woman on the other side of the door. A woman Mrs. Avery had never been allowed to see. A woman whose voice haunted Mrs. Avery’s dreams.

I have been sleeping, Horace
, the woman’s voice said.
I dislike sleeping
.

It wasn’t my fault
, Mrs. Avery thought desperately.
I demanded what any mother would demand.

Where is your son?
The woman on the other side of the door had a voice slick as a ribbon around a throat. It was subtle, muted, dark. Mrs. Avery shivered.

Not available
, she heard her husband say. But his voice was weak, and
oh
, how timid he sounded.

She backed away from the door and crept down the stairs. She tiptoed into the kitchen, breathing hard and fast. She forced herself to remain calm. She forced herself not to scream. Throwing open the junk drawer, she rummaged hastily for her keys and sunglasses. She ran to
the backyard, forgetting her shoes, forgetting her purse, forgetting to care about what she had forgotten.

“Clayton,” she whispered.
“Clayton!”

Clayton Avery stood next to the garage, throwing a softball against the door and catching it with a well-used glove. At the sound of his mother’s voice, he hastily threw both ball and glove into the hydrangea bushes next to the garage. Throwing a ball against—or, for that matter, even standing near—the garage was against the rules.

Mrs. Avery opened the back gate and closed it quietly.

“Oh,” Clayton said, giving his mother what he hoped was a winning smile. “Hi, Mom.” He paused. “Where are your shoes?”

“Get in the car,” she whispered, opening the side door to the garage.

“Why?”

“Shhhh.” She looked over her left shoulder toward the house and shuddered visibly. “No talking. Get in the car.”

Now, the last time his mother told him to get into the car without explaining why, it was because she was tricking him into sitting in the office for a whole hour with some lady doctor who wanted to know all about his
feelings
. After that, Clayton refused to accompany his mother on any driving trip unless she told him exactly where they were going and specified whether there were snacks involved.

But today. Today his mother’s eyes were wild and red.
And she had no purse. And she would never leave the house without shoes unless it was an emergency.

Clayton got in the car.

Mrs. Avery had friends in Des Moines. Fellow librarians she would meet at conferences, and they would have lovely dinners where everyone talked about books and politics and trends in the larger culture. Since her marriage, she saw these friends rarely if at all. Still, she continued to send them Christmas cards every year and received them in turn.

If she showed up at their doorstep, surely they would not refuse her safe harbor. Surely they would not turn her away. One cannot, she reasoned, turn one’s back on a mother with a child.

Clayton sat in the passenger’s seat. He had, she noticed, very quietly unbuckled his seat belt, and slouched comfortably. He had shoved two pieces of a foul-smelling purple gum into his mouth and now chewed it greedily, blowing fat bubbles and letting them pop with a dull, wet smack.

“There’s a trash bag right there. Let’s get rid of the gum.”

“No,” Clayton said, turning toward the window. He had gum in his hair. As a librarian, Mrs. Avery was fundamentally opposed to gum and wouldn’t mind it if it was simply banned from the town, or even the nation.

She turned to her son. Her beloved little boy. “
Now!
” she screamed.

“Okay, okay.
Jeez, Mom
.” The gum fell out of his
mouth. He missed the trash bag and it fell on the floor. Mrs. Avery breathed in slowly through her nose. She would not notice, she decided. There were other things at stake.

“Mom,” Clayton asked, “why are we back at the house?”

“Clayton, sweetheart, we’re on our way to Des—” She couldn’t finish.

Inexplicably, she pulled the car back over to the house and put it in park.

“How bizarre,” she said, shaking her head. “Here I am on automatic pilot. At a time like this.” She put the car back in drive and sped away.

Five minutes later they were back at the house.

“Mom, why are we—” Clayton said with his mouth, once again, full of gum.

“No talking,” Mrs. Avery said. She raked her fingers through her hair and grabbed a handful at the nape of her neck, holding on tight. “Just drive,” she said to herself, “just keep driving.”

She decided to head north. She didn’t know anyone to the north, but she could get on the freeway and that ran away from town and not toward it. They could stay in a motel, maybe. Or sleep under the stars in a field. She gunned the engine and gripped the wheel with her free hand. The freeway was wide and fast, but after about a minute, she noticed that it started to curve—imperceptibly at first, but with a shrinking radius, until it was all she
could do to stay in her lane. When they passed the sign that said W
ELCOME TO
H
AZELWOOD
, it was all she could do to keep from crying. The road snaked up the rise and emptied into the town’s streets. She drove slowly to the top of the hill, the tangled wood of Henderson’s Gully stretching silently to their right.

“All right,” she said, more brightly than she had ever said anything in her life. “Not a problem. No problems here. We’ll just take Old Twenty. That meets up with—”

“Mom,” Clayton said. “What’s that on our house?”

“Clayton, what did I say about talking? There’s nothing on our—Oh. My God,
what is that
?”

It was a cloud. Or, more accurately, it was clearly meant to look like a cloud. It was large and puffy, like a dish of ice cream, like the clouds in cartoons or storybooks. And it was floating right over their house. Mrs. Avery stopped the car in the middle of the street. Their house was in shadow. She could see that four windows were broken and the gutters on the northern side looked as though they had been ripped off by a strong wind. As they watched, the house seemed to be aging quickly. The paint—only six months old—peeled and flaked to the ground like snow. The boards warped. The porch sagged. Another window broke. And another.

The cloud above the house darkened, rumbled, and rained. Lightning hit the yard surrounding the house.

“Mom?”

But Mrs. Avery didn’t answer. This had happened once before—the day she said that the woman on the other side of the door couldn’t have her son. The day she made her husband alter his agreement. The cloud began circling around the roof, and then spiraling outward. She looked back toward the shadowed forest at the side of the road. There were stories about the gully, but those were just
stories
. No one knew about the woman whispering in the Avery house. The woman who wanted her son. If Clayton couldn’t escape, at least he could
hide
.

Mrs. Avery felt a sob threatening to explode out of her chest. She gasped, and turned to her son, cupping his face in her hands.

“Run. Run
now
. Go into Henderson’s Gully and get down low. Find branches and cover yourself, and don’t move until I come calling for you.”

Clayton’s face went from white to red. He began to cry. Snot flowed from his pudgy nose, and Mrs. Avery wiped it away with the back of her hand. “But—”

“I’ll keep driving. Hopefully, that thing will think you’re still in the car and will follow me.” She kissed the top of his head. “Run.
Don’t let anyone see you
.”

She reached across his body, briefly laid her thin hand on the curve of his cheek, and inhaled deeply at the very smell of him. Then she opened the door and shoved him out of the car. She pulled the door closed and drove away, leaving Clayton standing in the road, weeping and terrified. She did not let herself look back.

W
ENDY WAS IN THE DARK
. T
HE SKY WAS GONE, THE GRASS
was gone. The chair and the red-nailed hand and the welcome sign and the beautiful schoolhouse were all gone, gone, gone. She coughed and spat. Dirt in her mouth; dirt in her nose.

A voice whispered in the dark—a dry, quiet, papery kind of voice, like an autumn leaf right before it crumbles away to nothing.

Is she… could she be…

“Hello?” Wendy attempted to say, but she choked
instead. Gravel between her teeth. Clay on her tongue. She spat again.

Is she like us? Is she?

No, child. That one’s alive.

Like the boy? Is she like that boy?

He was a real boy.

I once was a real boy.

You, never!

I was! I know I was!

Hush! Don’t frighten her.
That last voice seemed older than the rest, and male, and slightly pompous, like a substitute teacher. The rest sounded like children.

“Where am I?” Wendy managed. She spat a few more times and began feeling around in the dark. She was leaning against a curved wall made of packed earth—though it wasn’t packed very well. As she ran her fingers along the sides, she could feel a fine powder crumbling away in her hands.

It should be rather obvious where you are, girl.

Oooooh! She’s a girl! I was a girl, I think.

You weren’t neither.

You don’t believe
anyone.

I want to touch her.

Get back, all of you! She’ll go away, and then you’ll be sorry!

“Stop talking,” Wendy said to the darkness. “Let me think.” She shut her eyes as tightly as she could and
opened them slowly. Nothing. Darkness. She tried it again. This time she could see pale glimmers of light—so faint that it was as likely as not that she was imagining them. Still, as it was better than nothing, she got onto her hands and knees and crawled slowly toward the limpid fragments glowing in the dark.

Come back here at once, young lady.

“I’m not convinced that you’re real,” Wendy said to the darkness. “I might be dreaming or I might be awake. In the end, they’re kind of the same. No matter what, you only ever know about half of what’s going on. And even then you only
mostly
know. I’ll just talk to my
self
, thank you.”

There’s no difference, she told herself, between talking to your
self
and talking to imaginary voices. Either way it means you’ve gone crazy. She’d find a way out, she decided, crazy or not.

I do wish you’d stop and listen, child. I have questions.

“
You
have questions,” Wendy snorted, bending close to examine the shards of light on the ground. They were made of glass. She picked two up and held them in her hands, though she gripped too tightly and cut the top of her left palm.

“Ouch!” she said.

Oh! Children!
The older voice drew closer. He sounded breathless and excited. In the darkness, Wendy rolled her eyes. His voice sounded exactly like one of those
overly pompous substitute teachers who made someone like Wendy want to throw something.
Observe how she can hold the Lady’s mirror in her hands. Locomotion is one of the traits of those with both bodies
and
souls. See how delicate human skin is—one slice and it tears like a leaf and she bleeds.

The childlike voices gasped. They gave a collective
ohhhhhh
.

Was ours like that? Did we bleed too?
Another child’s voice. Hushed and horrified. Wendy found it intensely annoying.

“It’s not a big deal to bleed. Everyone does it.”

We don’t
, several voices said sadly.

Wendy ignored this and examined the glass shards in her hands. If it was a mirror, it was unlike any that she’d ever seen. First, it created its own light. Wendy had heard of plants and animals having bioluminescence: strange, shy creatures that lived in the dark, making light on their skin like they were magic. But she had never heard of a bioluminescent mirror before. Second, the mirror appeared to have two reflective surfaces, not one. And third, the mirror wasn’t reflecting anything in front of it. Instead, other images appeared in the glowing surfaces, and the images flickered and changed. She saw a brightly colored bird gliding over an empty street, its black eye scanning up, down, and sideways. She saw a purple house with ivy growing in and out of the windows, its tendrils
fanning across the roof as though looking for something. And she saw two boys standing in front of a patch of green as a police car fishtailed to a stop right in front of them.