The Mostly True Story of Jack (5 page)

How?
Jack wondered.
Letters can’t just erase themselves.

The next day he tried again. By the time he reached the bottom of the stairs, the letter was blank.

Jack tried writing to his parents eight more times over the next four days. Each time, both envelope and paper stayed in the mailbox, perfectly clean and unblemished by any writing. By the fifth day, he had given up. It wasn’t just that the disappearing letters were odd—obviously they were odd. But they were
wrong
. And the
wrongness
of that wobbling house with its indignant cats and possibly murderous parrot and its casual mentions of magic was more than anyone could stand, as far as Jack was concerned. And he, for one, had had just about enough.

Jack started packing.

T
HERE WAS NO MOON, AND THE STARS CUT THROUGH THE
inky black sky like glinting shards of glass. Jack squinted. Having grown up in a foggy city, he had seen stars appear only rarely, and when they were visible, they were just dull hints of light. But here they flashed, hailed, and beamed. Jack crept down the stairs, his teeth clenched tight, his footfalls light as cotton on the treads. The last thing he needed was to wake the bird. Or the cats. Or even, Jack shuddered to think of it, his aunt and uncle.

There wasn’t time to pack much—and anyway, it
wasn’t like he was attached to most of the things his mother had packed for him. Half the clothes in the bag he’d never seen before. It was as though his parents had walked into the boys’ section of the department store and thrown the first things they found into the suitcase. So Jack only took his notebook, pencils, and a change of clothes and shoved them into his backpack.

He didn’t have any money, but he hoped that wouldn’t be a problem. After all, he had never needed to pay for bus fare or a train ticket in his life. He’d simply climbed aboard and sat down. No one ever noticed.

He laid a note on the couch, and held it in place with the book that Clive had given him. He wasn’t going to need it. There was
nothing
he wanted to know about Hazelwood, Iowa, secret or not.

Don’t worry
, the note said.
I’ll be fine.
He hoped the words would stick. The words in his notebook stuck, after all. And if they didn’t, well, it couldn’t be helped. Eventually, his aunt and uncle would notice Jack was gone, and they’d figure it out.

The floorboards moaned and sighed under his feet. The door felt hot and reproachful. Jack shook his hand at his side and slipped into the night.

He wasn’t afraid of the dark. Not usually anyway. In fact, for as long as he could remember, he had been sneaking out of his family’s apartment—not running away exactly, but just
walking
. He liked the way the evening
mist would gather in great tufts around the shoulders of the buildings and drift slowly to the street. Sometimes, the mist and fog fell so thick and fast that it erased the buildings, then the cars, then the other people walking by, then his own feet, then hands, as though there was nothing left but a cool, white space.

Iowa, though, was different. Here the night had voices.

In Iowa, the grasses breathed and murmured and sang. Crickets whispered in shadowed shrubs; mosquitoes hummed in clouds. Somewhere a cat tipped open its jaws and let loose a loud, feral howl. Jack checked his watch.
Three fifty-two
, he thought, hiking his backpack higher on his shoulders.
The faster I move, the farther I’ll get.

He quickened his pace.

Under the porch, four yellow eyes glowed softly in the dark. Once the boy reached the end of the block, Gog and Magog crept out of their hiding place. They paused briefly, their heads tilted upward, their tails straight and tall like spears, before leaping forward and sprinting down the street.

Anders was out of bed too.

Though the night had been dreamless so far, he woke
up agitated and worried, with a strong urge to stretch his legs. He slipped out of bed, pulled on his jeans, and tiptoed downstairs.
Three fifty-two
, the clock on the microwave read.

But something wasn’t right. It didn’t
feel
right. Very quietly, Anders lifted the back door’s latch and slipped outside.

Mr. Avery should have been in bed hours ago, but he couldn’t sleep.

He paced the perimeter of his Retiring Room, pausing every so often to page through the ancient diaries that he normally kept on his polished shelves but that now lay open on his desk. The first Mr. Avery, his great-grandfather, despite his vast researches into some of the universe’s deeper mysteries, had nothing to say on the subject of
this
sort of difficulty. It was possible that the Reverend Weihr
did
have something to say on the matter, but Mr. Avery didn’t have the good Reverend’s diary. It had been secreted away two generations earlier by the Reverend himself, though now it was, Mr. Avery was
sure
, in the possession of a certain Professor Clive Fitzpatrick. He had no proof, but the self-satisfied smirk on the ancient professor’s face was evidence enough, Mr. Avery felt. Unfortunately, the old man, if he indeed possessed it, had hidden it cleverly—despite Mr. Avery’s gift in
finding things and getting things, he had never been able to lay his hands on the book or access its information.

What he needed, he knew, was an
opportunity
. But what he
felt
was panic. One cannot make good decisions while panicking, but he couldn’t help it. He paced and fidgeted, and, like a little child, felt himself on the verge of tears.

He stopped at the window, leaned on the sash, and gazed outside. At the far end of the road, a figure walked into the lamplight. It was small, the size of a child, its shoulders hunched under the weight of the heavy pack slung over his back. Its eyeglasses flashed in the dark. The figure stopped, turned around as though checking to see whether it was being followed, then shrugged and kept walking.

“You!” Mr. Avery cried.
And alone
, he added silently as the beginnings of a plan—desperate, yes, and not without consequences, but a bold plan all the same—spread from his mind to his face and uncurled into a smile. He grabbed his keys from his desk and hurried out to the car.
Just get him out of town
, he thought.
If I send him away before She wakes up, then perhaps things can stay as they’ve been. It should be simple enough.

From the shadow of the thicket of trees in Henderson’s Gully, Anders watched Jack approach. There was
something about that kid. Something
important
. Though
what
it was
exactly
, Anders did not know. He had a few guesses, but that was it.

Jack came closer. Anders withdrew farther into the trees. As Jack approached, the wind increased. The branches creaked and moaned, and their leaves whispered incessantly. Anders was about to get up, persuade the new kid that it was way too dangerous to try to make it anywhere on his own, particularly at this hour, when a car appeared at the top of the hill. Anders watched it inch up the hill and pause for a moment. Just before it took off down the hill, he saw something remarkable: two small figures on opposite sides of the car leaped into the open rear windows. They were sleek and muscular and, though it was dark and they were far away, they looked remarkably like cats.

But before he could wonder at it, the car started moving, and it was heading directly toward Jack.

She can’t know yet, I’m sure She can’t know
, Mr. Avery thought as he drove down the road, his hands gripping the steering wheel.
She’s not awake yet. Just waking. There’s a difference.
His eyes slid from side to side, checking fearfully for evidence of… he shook his head.
Best not to think about it
, he told himself.
Just get the boy out of town, and everything can go back to the way it was. She can stay asleep
forever, for all I care.
He picked up speed. He might have even attempted a lighthearted chuckle if he’d had the chance.

Instead, he screamed in pain.

A set of long, sharp claws dug into the sides of his face while another set of claws, belonging to an identical cat, attached themselves to his thigh and started scratching his pants to shreds. Mr. Avery took one hand off the steering wheel and pulled at one cat, but the other bit and scratched even harder.

“Get off me,” he attempted to roar, but the upper cat shoved its rump into his mouth, and his voice was muffled in the fur.

And at this moment, a thought popped—unbidden—into his head:
And this is why I have always, always hated cats.