Secret Histories yrj-1

  Secret Histories

  ( Young Repairman Jack - 1 )

  F. Paul Wilson

  Ever come across a situation that simply wasn’t right—where someone was getting the dirty end of the stick and you wished you could make things right but didn’t know how? Fourteen-year-old Jack knows how. Or rather he’s learning how. He’s discovering that he has a knack for fixing things. Not bikes or toys or appliances—situations….

  It all starts when Jack and his best friends, Weezy and Eddie, discover a rotting corpse—the victim of ritual murder—in the fabled New Jersey Pine Barrens. Beside the body is an ancient artifact carved with strange designs. What is its secret? What is the secret of the corpse? What other mysteries hide in the dark, timeless Pine Barrens? And who doesn’t want them revealed?

  Jack’s town, the surrounding Barrens, his friends, even Jack himself…they all have…Secret Histories.

  F. PAUL WILSON

  JACK: SECRET HISTORIES

  Young Repairman Jack-1

  They discovered the body on a rainy afternoon.

  1

  “Aren’t we there yet?”Eddie said, puffing behind him.

  Jack glanced over his shoulder to where Eddie Connel labored through the sandy

  soil on his bike. His face was red and beaded with perspiration;

  sweat soaked through his red Police T-shirt, darkening Sting’s face. Chunky

  Eddie wasn’t built for speed. He wore his sandy hair shorter than most, which tended to make him look even heavier than he was. Eddie’s idea of exercise was

  a day on the couch playing PolePositionon his new Atari 5200. Jack

  envied that machine. He was stuck with a 2600.

  “Only Weezy knows,” Jack said.

  He wasn’t sweating like Eddie, but he felt clammy al over. With good reason. The

  August heat was stifling here in the Pine Barrens, and the humidity

  made it worse. Whatever breeze existed out there couldn’t penetrate the

  close-packed, spindly trees.

  They were fol owing Eddie’s older sister, Weezy—real y Louise, but no one ever

  cal ed her that. She liked to remind people that she’d been “Weezy”

  long before TheJeffersonsever showed up on the tube.

  She was pedaling her banana-seat Schwinn along one of the firebreak trails that

  crisscrossed the mil ion-plus acres of mostly uninhabited woodland

  known as the Jersey Pine Barrens. A potential y dangerous place if you didn’t

  know what you were doing or where you were going. Every year hunters wandered in, looking for deer, and were never seen again. Locals would wink

  and say the Jersey Devil snagged another one. But Jack knew the JD was just a folktale. Wel , he was pretty sure. Truth was, the missing hunters were

  usual y amateurs who came il equipped and got lost, wandering around in circles until they died of thirst and starvation.

  At least that was what people said. Though that didn’t explain why so few of the

  bodies were ever found.

  But the Barrens didn’t scare Jack and Eddie and Weezy. At least not during the

  day. They’d grown up on the edge of the pinelands and knew this

  section of it like the backs of their hands. Couldn’t know al of it, of course. The

  Barrens hid places no human eye had ever seen.

  Yet as familiar as he was with the area, Jack stil got a creepy sensation when

  riding into the trees and seeing the forty-foot scrub pines get thicker and thicker, crowding the edges of the path, and then leaning over with their

  crooked, scraggly branches seeming to reach for him. He could almost believe they were shuffling off the path ahead of him and then moving back in to close it

  off behind.

  “See that sign?” Eddie said, pointing to a tree they passed. “Maybe we should

  listen.”

  Jack glanced at the orange letters blaring from glossy black tin:

  NO FISHING

  NO HUNTING

  NO TRAPPING

  NO TRESPASSING

  No big deal. The signs dotted just about every other tree on Old Man Foster’s

  land, so common they became part of the scenery.

  “Wel ,” he said, “we’re not doing the first three.”

  “But we’re doing the fourth.”

  “Criminals is what we are!” Jack raised a fist. “Criminals!”

  “Easy with that.” Eddie looked around. “Old Man Foster might hear you.” Jack cal ed to the girl riding twenty feet ahead of them. “Hey, Weez! When do

  we get there?”

  She usual y kept her shoulder-length dark hair down but she’d tied it back in a

  ponytail for the trip. She wore a black-and-white—mostly black

  —Bauhaus T-shirt and black jeans. Jack and Eddie wore jeans too, but theirs

  were faded blue and cut off above the knees. Weezy’s were ful length. Jack couldn’t remember if he’d ever seen her bare legs. Probably white as snow. “Not much farther now,” she cal ed without looking around.

  “Sounds like Papa Smurf,” Eddie grumbled. “This is stupidacious.” Jack turned back to Eddie. “Want to trade bikes?”

  Jack rode his BMX. He’d let some air out of the tires for better grip in the sand

  and they were doing pretty wel .

  “Nah.” Eddie patted the handlebars of his slim-tired English street bike. “I’m al

  right.”

  “Whoa!” Jack heard Weezy say.

  He looked around and saw she’d stopped. He had to jam on his brakes to keep

  from running into her. Eddie flew past both of them and stopped ahead of his sister.

  “Is this it, Smurfette?” he said.

  Weezy shook her head. “Almost.”

  She had eyes almost as dark as her hair, and a round face, normal y milk pale,

  made paler by the dark eyeliner she wore. But she was flushed now with heat and excitement. The color looked good on her. Made her look almost …

  healthy, a look Weezy did not pursue.

  Jack liked Weezy. She was only four months older, but his January birthday had

  landed him a year behind her in school. Come next month they’d both

  be in Southern Burlington County Regional High, just a couple of miles away. But

  she’d be a soph and he a lowly frosh. Maybe they’d be able to spend

  more time together. And then again, maybe not. Did sophs hang with freshmen?

  Were they al owed?

  She wasn’t pretty by most standards. Skinny, almost boyish, although her hips

  seemed to be flaring a little now. Back in grammar school a lot of the kids had cal ed her “Wednesday Addams” because of her round face and perpetual y

  dark clothes. If she ever decided to wear her hair in pigtails, the

  resemblance would be scary.

  But whatever her looks, Jack thought she was the most interesting girl—no,

  make that most interesting personhe’d ever met. She read things no one else read, and viewed the world in a light different from anyone else. She pointed to their right. “What on Earth’s going on there?”

  Jack saw a smal clearing with a low wet spot known in these parts as a spong.

  But around the rim of the spong stood about a dozen sticks of odd

  shapes and sizes, leaning this way and that.

  “Who cares?” Eddie said. “If this isn’t what you dragged us out here to see, let’s

  keep going.”

  After hopping off her bike, she leaned it against a tree and started for the

  clearing.

  “Just give me a minute.”


  His curiosity piqued, Jack leaned his bike against hers and fol owed. The

  knee-high grass slapped against his sweaty lower legs, making them itch. A glance back showed Eddie sitting on the sand in the shade of a pine. Jack caught

  up to Weezy as they neared the spong.

  “They just look like dead branches someone’s stuck in the sand.” “But why?” Weezy said.

  “For nothing better to do?”

  She looked at him with that tolerant smile—the smile she showed a world that just didn’t get it. At least not in her terms.

  “Everything that happens out here happens for a reason,” she said in the ooh-spookytone she used whenever she talked about the Barrens.

  He knew Weezy loved the Barrens. She studied them, knew everything about them, and had been delighted back in 1979, at the tender age of eleven,

  when the state passed a conservation act to preserve them.

  She gestured at the sticks, not a dozen feet away now. “Can you imagine anyone coming out here just to poke sticks into the ground for no reason at

  al ? I don’t—” She stopped, grabbed Jack’s arm, and pointed. “Look! What’d I tel you?”

  Jack kind of liked the feel of her fingers gripping his forearm, but he fol owed her point. When he saw what she was talking about, he broke free and

  hurried forward.

  “Traps! A whole mess of traps.”

  “Yeah,” Weezy said, coming up behind him. “The nasty leg-hold type. Some dirty, rotten …”

  As her voice trailed off Jack glanced at her and flinched at her enraged expression. She looked a little scary.

  “But they’ve al been sprung.” He started walking around the spong. “Every single one of them.”

  “Whoever did this is my hero,” she said, fol owing close behind. “Didn’t I tel you that everything that happens out here—”

  “—happens for a reason,” Jack said, finishing for her.

  Clear as day that someone had set up a slew of traps around the perimeter of the spong, planning to trap any animals that stopped by to drink from the

  water in its basin.

  And just as clear, someone else had come by with a bunch of dead branches and used them to tap the trigger plates, springing the traps and making

  them harmless. In some cases the steel jaws had snapped right through the dead wood; in others it had only dented it, leaving the branch upright.

  “Got to be at least a couple dozen along here,” Jack said.

  “Not anymore.”

  She bent, grabbed one of the trap chains, and started working its anchor loose from the sand.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Watch.”

  As the coiled anchor came free, Weezy grabbed it and the trap itself, then hurled the whole assembly into the spong. The two ends swung around on

  their chain like a boomerang before splashing into the shal ow water and disappearing beneath the surface.

  She turned to him, brushing the sand from her hands.

  “Come on, Jack. We’ve got work to do.”

  He stared at her, surprised by the wild look in her eyes …

  “But—”

  “These rats don’t check their traps for three or four days at a time.”

  “How do you know al this?”

  “I read, Jack.”

  “So do I.”

  “Yeah, but you read fifty-year-old magazines. I read about what’s real y going on in the world.” She pointed to a trap. “Three days in one of those. Think

  about it.”

  He did, imagining himself a fox or possum or raccoon with a broken leg caught in the steel jaws, hungry and thirsty, with water just a couple of dozen

  feet away but unable to get to it. It made his gut crawl.

  Without a word, he bent and worked an anchor free of the ground, then fol owed Weezy’s example and tossed the trap into the water.

  “Two down. How many more to go?”

  He found her staring at him with a strange light in her eyes.

  “About thirty.”

  “Then we’re gonna need help.” He turned and waved to Eddie. “Over here! You gotta see this!”

  As Eddie made his way toward them, Jack and Weezy bent again to the task of ripping out the traps and hurling them into the drink.

  Eddie arrived and gawked at what they were doing. “Are you guys crazy?You can’t do that!”

  Jack held up a trap. “Real y? Watch.”

  He tossed it into the water.

  Eddie slapped his hands against the side of his head. “What if Old Man Foster comes along and catches us?”

  Weezy said, “Wel , his signs do say, ‘No Trapping.’ We’re just helping him out.”

  “That means no trapping by anybody else.We could be in hel acious big trouble.”

  Jack doubted that. Old Man Foster was just a name. No one had ever seen the guy. Everyone knew he owned this big piece of the Barrens and that

  was about it. Though nobody saw them go up, fresh NoTrespassingsigns appeared every year. Sometimes poachers would take them down, but before

  you knew it they’d be back up again.

  Another mystery of the Pine Barrens. A very minor one.

  As for Eddie, Jack wasn’t sure if he was acting as the voice of good sense, or trying to duck the work of pul ing out the traps. He hated anything more

  strenuous than working a joystick.

  “Look,” Jack told him. “The sooner we get this done and get on our way, the less chance we’l have of being caught. So come on. Get to it.”

  Eddie obeyed, but not without his trademark grumbling.

  “Okay, okay. But I don’t have to ask whose idea this was. It’s got my crazy sister written al over it.”

  In a flash Weezy was in his face. “What did you say?”

  Eddie gave her a sheepish look. “Nothing.”

  “You did! I heard you! Hasn’t this been talked about a mil ion times?” Eddie nodded without looking at her. “Right,” she said. “So you keep your mouth

  shut or someone’s going to hear about this.”

  Eddie sighed, saying, “Okay, okay,” and returned to working on a trap.

  Baffled, Jack caught Weezy’s eye as she turned from her brother. “What—?”

  “Family matter, Jack.” She turned away. “Don’t worry about it.”

  Jack wasn’t worried. But he couldn’t help but wonder. He’d known these two al his life. What was this al about?

  2

  “Okay,” Weezy said, stopping her bike. “Here we are.”

  After sinking al the traps, they’d pedaled like mad away from the spong. Along the way, Jack had wished for a few clouds to hide the sun and cool the

  air, but the sky ignored him. At least now they’d arrived at their original destination.

  Jack fol owed her gaze. “It’s just some burned-out patch.”

  Fires were common in the Barrens during the summer. Tourists and nature lovers came to camp and sometimes got careless with their campfires or

  Coleman stoves or cigarettes. Same with poachers. And many times Nature herself took the blame, setting a tree ablaze with a bolt of lightning.

  Usual y a ranger in a fire tower, like the one on Apple Pie Hil , would spot the smoke and send out an alarm. Then the local and county volunteer fire

  companies would go racing to the scene along the fire trails. But the smal er fires started during a storm often would burn only an acre or two before being

  doused by the rain.

  “Not just any burned-out patch.” She motioned Jack and Eddie to fol ow. “Come on. I’m going to show you something no one else—except for me—has

  seen in a long, long time.”

  Eddie said, “Aw, come on, Smurfette—”

  She stopped and turned to him. “And you can cut the Smurfette bit. Unless you like ‘Pugsley.’”