The Mostly True Story of Jack (6 page)

Jack heard the voice first. He froze, turned, and saw a pair of headlights speeding down the hill. But something wasn’t right. The car swerved wildly from right to left to right again. The brakes squealed and the engine roared as the shiny black car fishtailed down the road. Jack stared at it. He couldn’t move.

“Get out of the way!” a voice screamed at him from the side of the road. But he couldn’t. Jack felt his legs turning to lead. The car was closer… it was about to…

Jack reached out his hands toward the oncoming lights. He gasped and closed his eyes.

Anders pounced, grabbed Jack, and pulled him to the side of the road. Jack fell backward into the gully, his palms pressed hard against his eyes.

“Stopthecarstopthecar,” Jack said over and over.

The car made one last squeal as it took a hard turn to the right. Jack screamed at the sound. The car wobbled, whined, and tipped over on its side, leaving a shower of sparks trailing behind. Once it had stopped, Anders left Jack panicking on the ground and ran over to see whether anyone was hurt.

Mr. Avery was inside, his body curled under his arms as a protection from attacking cats. “GET THESE CATS OFF OF ME!” he shouted.

“Don’t worry, sir,” Anders called. “I’ll wake someone up and get help.” He ran to the nearest house, but he left the cats. Even Anders, who got on well with most animals he met, knew better than to cross
those
cats.

Jack lay in the underbrush, his hands still pressed against his eyes, a clammy sweat slicking his skin, his breath ripping in and out in panicked heaves.

That car nearly killed me. Why did my mom leave me in such a dangerous town?
He swallowed, sighed, and tried to get a hold of himself. He dropped his hands to his sides, blinked a few times, and looked upward at the sky.
And someone pulled me out of the way
, he thought. But he hadn’t seen who it was. Who on earth would be just walking around at that time, he wondered. Jack had no idea. The ground beneath him was surprisingly warm, and the leaves, quite damp with the early-morning dew, pressed against his skin. He didn’t push them away.

“I want to go home,” he whispered. “I just want to go home.”

His glasses itched terribly under his nose, but when he tried to adjust them, he realized that he couldn’t move his right arm. Or his left. Tendrils of grass and ivy slithered along his side. They twined around his ankles and wrists and held him tight.

“What’s going on?” Jack squeaked, but a wave of moss covered his chest, and a tangle of roots pulled him into darkness. “Help me!” he yelled. “Somebody
help
me!” And in that last second—when the sky above him was reduced to a spot the size of the head of a pin—only one thought remained:

Home.

J
ACK HAD A DREAM THAT THE HOUSE WAS MADE OF EYES
—heavy lashed and pretty, but eyes nonetheless. Eyes that followed his every move, winked at his jokes, and welled up with tears for no good reason. In his dream, the eyes blinked in sequence, fluttering like waves from one end of the house to the other.

And the eyes sang.

Or maybe the house sang. In either case, it was beautiful, both hopeful and lonely all at once.

He woke with a start and groaned, covering his face
with his hands to block out the glare of morning light blasting into the window.

He was alive.

Thank goodness.

He gave a skeptical glance around the room. Which part, he wondered, was the dream? He brought his hand to his head and felt a hard, painful lump about the size of a walnut. He winced. Also, he was still wearing his muddy shoes, and his bed and body were covered with grass and moss and leaf bits. Strands of vine clung to his arms and legs, their spiraled filaments pressing against his skin, their papery leaves curling inward, like scrolls.

How?
he wondered again and again and again.
How?
His skin had been itching terribly since he arrived in town, but the dirt and mulch made it a million times worse. He tried brushing the debris off of his arms and clothes, but there was too much of it. He covered his face with his hands and groaned. Rubbing his eyes, Jack rolled over, misjudged the distance to the bed’s edge, and fell with a thud on the floor. The floorboards squeaked and sighed. They were warm to the touch.

“Ouch,” he said out loud, rubbing his left elbow. He paused and waited, but no one came running up to check on him. He stood, and the floor whined, as though sorry that he should have to go. “Anyone home?” Jack called. But no one answered.

The shelves in his room, like the rest of the house, were crammed tight with books. Only one book sat alone,
separated from the others by a handful of dried flowers in a glass vase on one side and the wall on the other. Jack slid the book off the shelf and let it fall, fluttering, into his hands. It was, he noticed, the same book that his uncle had given him on his first day at their house—the same book that he left on the couch when he took off the night before. Which meant that Clive and Mabel had read the note.

Jack felt sick.

The floorboards under his feet gave an impatient squeak. Jack sat down on the bed and flipped through the book.

“
The Secret History of Hazelwood
, by Clive Fitzpatrick,” he read out loud. “Oh, sure. Just give me a book that
you
wrote,” he said, the weight of the obligation pressing against his chest like a stone. “I don’t know why he’s making such a big thing about it. It’s not even a
regular
book.” The house shuddered and groaned. The windows rattled.
A storm, I’ll bet
, Jack thought, and started reading.

The pages were thick, gold-edged, and handwritten in an elegant, spidery script. Many pages had things glued on—pictures, old newspaper articles, old letters, maps, and pages from diaries. Clive had arranged the clippings in the center of the pages with a heading on the top and an explanation on the bottom. Sometimes his writing went on for several pages. Practically every page talked about magic. Some of them even read like fairy stories.

“
Once there was a man who learned magic
,” Jack read
out loud.
“After five years of study, he learned how to make one coin into two, how to make a thousand into two thousand. This wealth he did not share, and he became very rich and reasonably happy. The Magic did not notice.”

“What
is
this?” Jack asked.

“After thirty years of study, the man learned how the Magic moved from water to root, from earth to animal, and from the center of the earth to the stars. He learned how to locate Magic’s eruption points on the earth’s surface. He learned how to crack the Magic open like a melon and split it apart—separating the good from the bad. There is, the man learned, unlimited power in the spaces between
good
and
bad;
between
yes
and
no.
This, the Magic noticed—which is to say, the Lady who guarded the Magic noticed. The man approached the Lady and offered a swap:
My son for Your son.
And then things started going very wrong.”

“Why does Uncle Clive want me to read fairy tales?” Jack asked himself. His hands were shaking and his temples were starting to sweat.

Some of the pages were covered with an odd filmy layer that had a bit of a golden sheen to it.
From the diary of the Reverend Marcus Weihr
was scrawled at the top in faded black ink, and
Do not remove the film
was written in red in a different hand.
Why
? Jack wondered. But the book didn’t explain. In any case, it was the same man who wrote the letter he’d found, though the dates in the diary were later than the letter to the professor.

Jack sighed loudly and turned the page. More fairy
tales. He flipped the pages even faster, glancing at photographs with half-faded people, the landscape behind them visible through their torsos or faces. Jack leaned in closely and squinted. He assumed it must be a double-exposed photograph, but the fading didn’t affect
everyone
. Just some people in the group. And in some photographs, there were shadows on the ground of a person who was not there.
Trick photography?
Jack wondered. He saw birth certificates and baptism certificates and school transcripts with missing names, missing dates, as though the people had been erased.

And then. On the last page. Jack stared for a long moment at the photograph. It was recent—the edges crisp and the colors bright—and mounted on the page with gold edging. It showed a little boy with straight black hair and pasty skin that seemed to cling oddly to his small body. He had glasses and a pug nose and wide eyes—livid and frightened and sad all at once.

Jack swallowed.

“It’s me,” he whispered, and he knew it was true: a picture of
himself—
sitting in Clive and Mabel’s living room—as a little boy. The only picture of him, as far as he knew, in existence.

Underneath, the same spidery handwriting scratched out an inscription, which read:
For Jack: A Beginning, an End, and all that’s In Between. From the people who love you most.

J
ACK RAN DOWN THE STAIRS, TRIPPING ON THE BOTTOM LAND
ing and falling in a heap on the floor. His breath came in hot, tight gasps. Jack’s home back in San Francisco was covered with pictures of Baxter—as a baby, as a toddler, smiling with his soccer team or basketball team or Scout troop. There were no pictures of Jack. Not on the wall. Not in an album. Not on a screen saver on the computer. Nowhere. He never questioned it, and though he told himself it didn’t bother him, he had, on occasion, cut out figures
of himself and taped them into the pictures. He never mentioned it to his parents, and they never commented.

He burst into the kitchen, grabbed the phone, and dialed his father’s cell phone in a panic, panting as it rang. The voice-mail greeting—featuring, as always, his father using what Jack called his “captain of industry” voice—nearly sent Jack into hysterics. At the beep, he took a deep breath before he spoke.

“Dad,” he said, “you’ve got to get me out of here. You’re right. They’re kooks and I can’t stay another—” There was a beep, and a digital version of a concerned woman cut over his voice.

“I’m so sorry,” the digital woman said. “I didn’t get that. If you’d like to leave a message, please press one.”

Jack pressed one on the keypad and waited for the second beep. “Dad,” he said, “it’s Jack. I think Uncle Clive is crazy. He’s got this book and it has—”

“I’m so sorry,” repeated the digital woman. Jack pressed the button again.

“Dad, your stupid voice mail won’t—”

“I’m so sorry,” she said again. Jack pressed one.

“He’s got this book and it’s dedicated to me. Why would he dedicate—”

“I’m so sorry,” the digital woman said. “I didn’t get that.” Jack pressed one.

“Dad,
please
pick up. I’ve
got
to get
out
of here. And why does he have a picture of me? You don’t even have a picture of me. How can—”

The digital woman was sorry once again, and Jack hung up. He scooped the book in his left hand and hurled it across the kitchen, where it hit the screen and sent Lancelot flying with an enraged squawk. That he’d managed to annoy the bird was of little consolation. The book had fallen onto the counter, its open pages facing down.

“He wasn’t talking about me,” Jack said out loud. “That kid looks nothing like me. Too pale.” He waited expectantly, as though the house might answer.

But the floor was suddenly still, and cold as any stone.

Later that evening, Mabel had just set Jack’s supper on a tray when he entered the kitchen. He folded his arms.

“Jack,” Mabel said with a start. “Did you want to join us for supper?”

He didn’t answer, but sat down anyway. Mabel busied herself arranging the table settings while Clive grinned broadly. “Marvelous, marvelous,” he said, patting Jack on the shoulders. Jack didn’t smile back. He wasn’t even sure he’d eat anything. He just wanted answers. Clive and Mabel dished out the salad and meat loaf, poured water, and set in on making nervous small talk mostly, Jack noticed, about the weather. After a bit, the conversation fell away, and the three ate in silence.