The Mostly True Story of Jack (22 page)

Jack tried to tilt his body upward, just as someone gasped.

“Oh! My!” a woman’s voice said. “Clive, dear. He’s back. And Anders is with him.” Mabel knelt down next to Jack. Her eyes were very red, with dark circles underneath, and her cheeks were pale and streaked with tears. “Thank God,” she said, and threw her arms around his neck so tightly that he choked.

But Jack was only half listening. The voice he heard in the dark was still speaking. It was muffled and quiet,
as though it was coming from behind a very thick wall, but he could hear it all the same.

My darling
, the voice said through the walls.

Be careful
, it said from the floors, from the baseboards, from the ceiling.

Be brave, my brave boy.
The voice thickened and choked.
My brave, brave boy.

Jack laid his hand on the floorboards to prop himself up. They were hot. He touched the wall on his right. It was hot too. He didn’t pull his hand away.

It’s not heat
, Jack thought.
It’s love. This house loves me.

Tentatively, he patted the floorboards with the pads of his fingers. The warm wood shivered at his touch. The books, the paintings, even the figurines on the shelves, all shook and rumbled.

“The house,” Jack said slowly. “Why does it—” He stopped. He couldn’t say it.

“Ah,” Clive said as he came up the stairs. “He’s starting to understand.”

G
OG AND
M
AGOG POSITIONED THEMSELVES AT THE TOP OF
the stairs, facing downward. Sunlight poured from the landing window, casting a long rectangle of light that draped over their hulking shoulders, giving their silvery fur a curious gleam. They sat perfectly still, and if it wasn’t for the occasional lash of the tail, Jack could have sworn they were statues.

“Tea,” Mabel said finally. “I’ll make tea.” She stepped over the cats and went down the stairs.

“Let me help, Mrs. Fitzpatrick,” Anders said quickly,
scrambling to his feet and hurrying after her. The cats didn’t move. Clive had lowered himself down to the floor and leaned his back against the wall. Sitting down like that, without his constant movements, Jack could see just how small the man really was. And how
old
.

“What does Anders know?” Jack said. “About me. And…” He faltered. “All this… weird stuff.”

“Tough to say, really,” Clive said, chuckling. “That boy always knows more than he says. Still. Probably everything. And, though it pains my professional ego to say this, he likely knows more than I. He’d never admit to it, though.”

“Mr. Avery wants to kill me,” Jack said. His voice was deadly calm, after the many hours of fear. Jack felt sure that he must still
feel
fear… somewhere deep inside himself. But after all this time, he could no longer
feel
himself feeling it.

“Indeed he does, Jack,” Clive said, shaking his head. “He’s wanted to kill you from the day you were born. Now, though, his motives are different. Before he wanted power, but now, I’m not convinced he even
wants
power anymore. Not like he used to. All he wants is his son—an understandable urge, of course, and natural, but the cost to the rest of us is terrible indeed. To save his son, he must kill you, or so he believes. If he kills you now, he’ll kill your mother too. Or half of her anyway. The
good
half. Which means that what’s left of the magic underneath our feet will be evil magic forever. No choices. No goodness. No hope. No nothing.”

Jack sat up straight. “I have
no idea
what you’re talking about. My mother is in San Francisco. She’s smart and busy and just a person. There’s nothing magic about her. And—” His voice caught in his throat, sharp as a fishhook. He swallowed. “She doesn’t even know who I am anymore.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, boy. Your mother knows
exactly
who you are. She knew the moment you laid your hand on her door. Indeed, that was the very moment that she began to wake up.”

“This stupid house isn’t
family
. It’s not my
mother
.” Under his feet, he could feel the floorboards hiccuping slightly, as though repressing a sob.

Clive looked at Jack steadily in the face. “Well,” he said, “of course not.” Jack relaxed. “At first glance, you are sitting in something made of wood and plaster and glass. A house has never given birth to a boy, and therefore we can assume that a house has never been anyone’s mother.” Jack stared at the wall. It was made of hand-smeared plaster, painted over many times, and the paint was thick and bubbly. It seemed solid enough. But two bubbles began to swell and green. They grew lashes. They blinked. They were damp with tears. Jack couldn’t move.

“Clive—” he whispered.

“And,” Clive continued, as though Jack had not spoken, “on the other hand,
of course she is
. Not the house per se, but inside—the fibers of the floorboards, the
pebbles of plaster, the joists, the doors. Everything. She’s, well, she’s
inside
. And she’s trapped. On some level, Jack, you knew. You’ve always known.”

Jack laid his hand on the wall, and felt the wall press back at him. “I just don’t—”

“Listen Jack, there isn’t much time. Your friend Wendy is in terrible danger. So is Clayton Avery, though he doesn’t know it. And so are you. There’s magic underground. Quite a bit of it, actually. You know this already. I know you’ve been reading. I know you’ve been taking notes. And I know it’s been
difficult
for you to believe, yet you
have
believed all the same. It’s true there was a Guardian of the Magic who protected it from those who might want to manipulate it. But after a terrible lapse in judgment, the Guardian split in two and became the Lady and the Other, wicked and good—that’s all true, Jack.”

“But that’s just—” Jack stopped. He was about to say that it was
just a story
, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He wiped his nose with his free hand, but kept the other pressed against the wall. He could feel the shape and warmth of another hand straining at the wallpaper. “Even if it
is
true, it doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

Clive shook his head impatiently.
“It has everything to do with you.”
He closed his eyes and breathed through his nose until he calmed. “For well over a hundred years, in each generation, the Lady has swapped Her new child with a son of an Avery, and each time both children—
one human and one Magic—were swallowed up in the transfer of power, and lost forever. You’ve
read
this, Jack. Four years ago, Jack, that child was
you
.”

Clive paused. Jack shook his head.
Wendy said I was normal
, he thought wildly.
I
felt
normal.

“I was there, Jack; I
saw
it. The Lady’s Other—the
good
half—tried in previous generations to stop the swap, but as She could not
think
like Her wicked half, She couldn’t make a plan. So She was doomed to fail. Four years ago, She came to me looking for assistance in hiding you. I knew a few spells, you see. Together, we infused magic into the very fibers of the house, created a little magical world sealed away from the Lady’s knowledge or power. We hid you right under Her nose, and you grew. I know you have no memory of this,” Clive waved Jack’s protestations away.

“
Will
I?” Jack asked. “Remember, I mean.”

“If all goes well, your memories will come back in time. Or that’s the theory. My theories haven’t been entirely accurate, I’m afraid.” He shook his head and sighed. “I thought we’d be able to hide you until you were grown. But the Lady learned of our plans. She trapped the Other in this house—an unintended consequence of my earlier spells. Then, she took you and set off to perform the swap, intending to deal with me at a later time. She bound me with vines and forced me to come. She wanted to force me to watch the destruction of
a child that I had come to love.” Clive closed his crinkled eyelids, and big tears slid into the grooves of his cheeks.

The plaster pressed against Jack’s back. He could feel the outline of hands. Jack closed his eyes.

“What the Lady did
not
know was that Horace Avery is a liar. He was not about to swap his only child. He kidnapped young Frankie Schumacher, gave him a sleeping draft, and told the Lady that Frankie was Clayton. The Lady laid you in your acorn cradle at the feet of Mr. Avery. ‘Yours,’ she told him. Mr. Avery set the sleeping Frankie in the Lady’s arms. ‘Yours,’ he said. But Frankie wasn’t his to give. The Magic backfired. The earth shook and flashed. The Lady screamed as a rip opened in the land, pulling both Her and Frankie inside. The vines binding my hands instantly loosed, and I leaped to the rift in the land. I tried to grab him, but I was too late. And you, frightened by the noise, ran away into the fields.”

“I was the kid in the field.” Jack whispered. He felt empty and hollow. A dry husk. “The one Wendy saw. That was
me
.”

“It was you.”

Jack closed his eyes and suddenly remembered a dream. Or the dream of a dream. He could remember a pair of hands guiding his small shoulders through a field of sunflowers. The hands were green, as was the face of the woman who owned the hands. Green hands, green face, green eyes, and a shock of yellow hair that smelled
like the silk from corn. In his dream, the woman told him to run.

Mabel arrived with a tray of milky tea and handed mugs to Jack and Clive. Jack took a sip but couldn’t take any more. The thought of eating or drinking made him sick.

Mabel knelt close to Jack and cupped his face in her hands. He flinched, but she did not move. Her hands were warm and soft on his skin and her face was kind and sad at the same time.

“We wanted to keep you with us, you know,” she said, and Jack noticed that her large gray eyes were wet with tears. “We made you appear as a boy, only a bit younger than your brother, Baxter. We thought it would be simple enough to stitch you into the fabric of an existing family. We gave you memories and a life. You looked like a boy; you thought like a boy; but you weren’t.” She swallowed hard. “We didn’t know how alone you’d be, Jack. Honestly, we didn’t. Clair—well, she’s my sister and I love her, but she is”—she paused—“
complicated
. And your dad, bless him, is a bit of an idiot. Neither had any capacity to prepare you for this. For what you’d have to do.”

And I was
so
alone
, Jack wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t come.

Clive cleared his throat. “I’ve been studying this problem longer than anyone, but there are parts that even I don’t entirely understand. I was pretty certain that both halves would stay asleep as long as you were far
away from here. We thought, son,” Clive said, “you would be safe until you were old enough to set things right. You are not old enough, of course, but your family unraveled, which meant that my spell binding you to
them
unraveled too. I’m not as clever as I used to be, it seems. Or, perhaps I was never that clever to begin with. Still, it doesn’t change the fact that the only person who can release Wendy is
you
, and if you do not act quickly, all hope for her will be lost.”

“But what can
I
do?” Jack asked, finding his voice, but neither could answer because someone was yelling downstairs.

“Mrs. Fitzpatrick,” Anders thundered from down below.
“Mrs. Fitzpatrick!”

And Jack realized that the thunder wasn’t just from Anders’s voice.

The ground underneath and the air above rumbled with the sound of wheels and hinges and steel. Diesel smoke poured in through the windows, making Jack choke. He peeked past the curtain and saw trucks approaching. And bulldozers. And a wrecking ball.

And under Jack’s feet, the floorboards shivered in fear.

“W
HAT IS THIS PLACE
?” W
ENDY ASKED
.

Nowhere
, a dozen voices answered.

Everywhere
, a dozen more countered, the two groups of voices twisting into one.

“That’s not very helpful,” Wendy muttered. She sat on the dirt in front of a scattering of glass shards, each one casting a weak light into the utter darkness. Each one showing a quick flash of… something. People and places that Wendy thought she should know, but the world outside of this dark, tight space seemed farther and farther
away from her with each breath. As though her memory was pulling away, unwinding like a spool of thread as it rolls across the ground. Hang on, she told herself. Hang on for dear life.

As the oldest resident here
,
the pompous, substitute teacher voice said,
I do remember that the Lady of the realm had a name for it. She called it the World-Under-the-World. I don’t know what She calls it now. And anyway, it didn’t used to look like this.
He sighed.
It’s not much of a world anymore, I’m afraid.

“What did it used to look like?” She could hear the dry, breezy breathing of… whatever those voices were, coming closer in the darkness. She hunched her shoulders and her skin crawled. Surely they weren’t anything to be afraid of. Still, their
otherness
disturbed her.

It was as big as the world
,
one voice whispered

Bigger
,
said the pompous voice.
And twice as beautiful. Magic flowed through the Under-the-World and sprung outward. It blessed the land, you see, and everyone was happy.

A handful of voices fell to weeping.
He doesn’t remember
,
one voice declared. A boy, Wendy thought, about her age.
He’s just making it up. None of us can remember a thing. We don’t even remember our own names.

A sound like crumpling paper stopped the voices cold.

I remember
,
the pompous voice said.
I do. I probably remember more than the Lady Herself does. I… knew of Her. I… don’t exactly remember the capacity, you understand. Or—
I mean to say—that I don’t know why I sought to know. Only that I did. I had a diary, and I thought it terribly important to write my findings down. It was all before, well, before—
he searched for the word.
It was before this
…
His voice trailed away.