The Mostly True Story of Jack (11 page)

“Shoo,” the man cried, and Jack noticed that his pants had been torn to strips, as had the skin of his legs, which bled heavily into his socks.

Serves him right
, Jack thought, though he instantly felt guilty for thinking such a thing.

“Bad kitties!” Mr. Perkins yelped.

The skateboard slowed to a stop and Jack jumped off, running to the man.

“Sir,” he said, “I’d like my bag back, please.” One of the cats pounced on the man’s back and hung on tight. He staggered toward the front door of the Exchange.

“I can call them off, you know,” Jack said, though he wasn’t entirely sure it was true. “Toss me the bag and say you’re sorry for stealing.”
Nice
, Jack congratulated himself. That, he felt, was an impressive addition.

“Don’t
you
give me your lectures about
stealing
,” the man said as he reached the door.

Wendy couldn’t stand it anymore. She ran up the stairs and tackled him.
“Give it back, you thieving—”

The doors flew open and two policemen, the same ones Jack had seen earlier, came running out.
Do they work in the Exchange building?
Jack wondered.
Is it really true that Mr. Avery runs everything in town?
The cats reared up and hissed at the approaching men before bounding into the shrubberies on either side of the entrance, vanishing from sight.

“Wendy,” Jack gasped. “Stop it. We’re going to get in so much—”

“Trouble?” one police officer said. “I’d say so.”

One officer grabbed Wendy’s arm while the other grabbed Jack. “We’ll take these two home, Mr. Perkins. Unless you’d like to press charges.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Mr. Perkins said loftily, brushing off his jacket and pants.

“Can I have my bag back?” Jack said, keeping his voice steady and his eyes on Mr. Perkins, who shuddered under the gaze.

Recovering himself, he turned, holding the bag tightly to his chest. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, young man,” he said without looking at Jack. “This bag is mine.”

“
Liar!
” Wendy shouted.

“That’s enough, Schumacher.” And Jack and Wendy, their forearms firmly grasped in the broad fists of the officers, were walked to the squad car.

As the car pulled away, Jack looked back at the stone building. Mr. Perkins stood in the open door with an
unmistakably smug expression on his face. He nodded, turned, and went inside.

However, as the door slowly closed, Jack saw something that Mr. Perkins did not: the shadows of two quicksilver figures darting inside, their tails moving like whips.

B
EFORE THE POLICE DROPPED
W
ENDY AND
J
ACK OFF AT
their respective homes, Wendy leaned close to Jack and whispered in his ear.

“
Tonight, keep your shoes on
,” she said.

“What?” asked Jack.

“No talking,” said the first officer. He pulled into the Schumachers’ driveway while Wendy’s mom—her face set and fuming, and looking ready to ground the next person who spoke, whether kid or adult—marched toward
the squad car. All four occupants in the car braced themselves for impact. Even the officers, Jack noticed with some satisfaction, were terrified of Wendy’s mom.

Jack, on the other hand, was handed over to a grim-faced Uncle Clive. Jack didn’t look at him, but went upstairs and shut the door. He spent the rest of the day at his desk staring at the spot where his notebook should have been. With nothing to draw
on
, he just used his finger and the desktop, drawing picture after imaginary picture—a house made of eyes, a woman uncurling out of the ground, a boy who looked like a tree. Or a tree that looked like a boy. Whichever. Each image floated in his mind’s eye for a moment before wobbling, fading, and disappearing altogether.

Later, after a silent supper, Jack paced in his room. He didn’t have his notebook. He didn’t have the
History
. His nerves jangled and rattled, and the whole world seemed to shiver and shake. When Wendy’s head popped over the windowsill, Jack nearly fainted in terror.

“Oh, for crying out loud,” Wendy said. “Haven’t you ever seen a person climb a trellis before?”

Actually, he
hadn’t
ever seen a person climb a trellis. Jack’s life, he realized with a start, had been very sheltered.

“Can you climb down?” Wendy asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“Then we’ll have to be quiet. Did you tell your uncle?”

Jack shook his head. “No. But I think he knew. He
asked where my bag was, and I told him I had already brought it home.”

“Yeah,” Wendy said, throwing her sun-browned legs over the sill and jumping into the room. “He probably does. Fortunately, Mr. Avery’s out of town. He hasn’t seen the book yet.”

“How do you know?”

“My dad works for the Exchange. Which means I also have these.” She reached into the pocket of her cutoffs and pulled out a set of keys. She jingled them, giving Jack a quick, wide grin. “We’ll only be gone a minute.”

The Exchange was silent and dark, its employees all home with their families. All except Mr. Perkins, who had no family, making his office at the Exchange about as close to a home as he had anymore. He paced his office, sweat slicking his neck and forehead. The book lay on the desk, opened to the middle. Though he was never privy to the broad spectrum of knowledge possessed by his employer, he certainly knew this: Most of the reliable information regarding the person, substance, and power of the sleeping Lady came from the letters a certain Reverend Marcus Weihr had written more than a century earlier to Mr. Avery’s great-grandfather.

While Mr. Avery had the writings and studies done by
his great-grandfather (also a Mr. Avery—a scholar by trade, and later the most powerful man that the county had ever seen), as well as
many
of the good Reverend’s letters, he did not have the diary. He had looked for it, as had his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, but to no avail. The diary was believed to be lost.

Until now.

Certainly Mr. Perkins knew that Clive Fitzpatrick was a formidable adversary with far more magic at his disposal than he ever let on, but this was better than magic. This was
smart
. Mr. Perkins carefully leafed through the pages—it wouldn’t do to damage the book—and marveled at the simplicity of Clive’s solution: Detach the pages, change the order, intersperse them with other writings, other artifacts, and, most crucially, encase them in a paper-thin, flexible resin. Cut, paste, and bind into a new book—and it
becomes
a new book. Which meant that in each generation of powerful and magically inclined Averys, every location spell and retrieval spell and any other spell they could think of was useless. They had been unable to locate the first half of the diary because it
didn’t exist anymore
. It had become Clive Fitzpatrick’s book. It was brilliant, really.

Mr. Perkins had no doubt that his boss would praise him—even reward him—for finding so valuable an object, but would he ever know what Mr. Avery knew? Or would he be forever in the dark?

When Mr. Perkins was a child, his grandmother had warned him about the wicked Lady who lived underground—a creature of power so great and so hungry as to remove a person’s soul. She told him that not everyone could feel the Magic that hummed through the land and through each living thing. She said that such things ran in families—like big feet or curly hair. She told him that the Lady had Magic Children—one every half century—and that these children were marked for death, and that it was a shame, but there was nothing that anyone could do about it.

Besides, who
knew
what would happen to those children if they grew up, or what they would become? They weren’t like
us
, his grandmother told him, so what did it matter? Still, it was a worry. What
if
one of the Lady’s children survived? Would it be like Her? Would it steal souls too? Would it ever be satisfied?

Mr. Perkins carried rawhide every day because of his grandmother. A man’s soul, after all, is no mere trifle. And he chose to work for Mr. Avery. Best to stand in the shadow of the man in charge, he thought. It’s
safer
.

Still, Reginald Perkins was a curious man. How does, Perkins wondered, a man become as powerful as his employer’s great-grandfather? And how does that power extend from one generation to the next?
What have the Averys been doing all these years?
He didn’t know, but he had a feeling it wasn’t anything
good
. And he was fairly certain that the book might give him some answers.

Mr. Perkins pulled out his sketch pad and laid it out on the desk. The copy machine was out of the question, of course. Who knew what it would do to the ancient inks, and the last thing Mr. Perkins wanted was to damage even a single page. Best do it by hand. He couldn’t copy out the entire book. That would be madness. But a page or two. Maybe ten. Or even twenty. What could it hurt?

Mr. Perkins wrote quickly, with a sure, clean hand. He wanted it to be accurate. There was no reason why he shouldn’t be allowed to know just a little bit. After all, he
deserved
it.

Atop the bookshelf, two pairs of glowing yellow eyes blinked through the gloom. Sharpened claws extended and retracted and extended again. The cats were ready.

Wendy and Jack kept to the shadows. She took him to the side door that the low-level employees were required to use. The front doors were for important people. The side door was next to the Dumpsters and the recycling center. It smelled like old lunches and waterlogged paper. Jack wrinkled his nose.

“Do you even know where his office is?”

“Of course I do,” Wendy said. “He’s Avery’s assistant. You go through Perkins’s office if you want to see Mr. Avery. But no one does that unless they have to. This way.”

They turned from the cracked plaster and peeling paint of the maintenance staff’s rooms into a pretty hallway with limestone walls and dimly lit green lamps stationed every twenty feet.

“Why are the lights on?” Jack asked nervously.

“Probably for the security guard.”

“
There’s a security guard?
” Jack hissed.

“Yeah, but we don’t have to worry about him. My dad knows him. Nice, but slow. Plus, he drinks.” Jack couldn’t help but notice the lack of assurance in her voice. “And anyway, here we are.”

They peered through the glass door. Mr. Perkins’s office was dark except for a single desk lamp shining down onto an open book.

“There it is,” Jack whispered. “And my backpack’s on the floor.”

They opened the door—
Why isn’t
this
one locked?
Jack wondered—and ran to the desk. Wendy grabbed the book and tucked it under her arm. Jack noticed a stack of writing paper lying facedown on the desk. He was just about to flip them over when he heard the unmistakable sound of a toilet flushing, a faucet running, and a bathroom door opening. Mr. Perkins appeared in the doorway, drying his hands. He dropped the paper towel onto the ground.

“
You
,” he said, pointing.

“Run for it,” Wendy yelled.

Mr. Perkins rushed forward but stopped in his tracks as two alarmingly large cats leaped from the top of the bookshelf and stood in front of him, their muscled shoulders flexed and ready, their hind legs curled under their bodies, ready to pounce. He rested his hand on the desk to steady himself, curling his fingers under the edge of the small stack of papers. He picked them up and held them close to his chest as though they were a shield.