She laid it on the ground between them and began to examine it, tilting it a little this way and a little that.
Jack knelt opposite her. “What do you think it is?”
She shook her head, looking as baffled as he felt. “I don’t know. Some kind of stone – onyx, maybe? It’s got no writing on it, but I get this feeling it’s… old.” She looked up at him. “Know what I mean?”
Jack couldn’t say why, but he knew exactly what she meant.
“Yeah. Very old.”
“And where there’s one there’s probably others.” Her eyes were wide with wonder and excitement. “Help me, Jack?”
He laughed. “Try and stop me.”
He wanted one of those cubes for himself.
So they started digging – not easy in the wet sand. But they kept coming up empty. Frustration was beginning to nibble at Jack when his fingertips scraped against a hard surface.
“Got something!”
He dug his fingers down on each side of whatever it was and pulled it up.
And found himself looking into the empty eye sockets of a rotting human head.
He stared in mute, open-mouthed, grossed-out shock. Beside him, Weezy screamed.
You can find the rest here: Jack: Secret Histories
1983
JACK: SECRET CIRCLES
The second volume of the Teen Trilogy – in which Ernst Drexler II and the Septimus Order (and the Barrens, of course) play a central role. Also, Jack gets a look at one of the Seven Infernals. Another Infernal will trigger a harrowing episode in his adult life. And Jack has a near-fatal run-in with a survivor of the First Age.
I never saw myself writing for kids, especially since I already have a fair number of teen readers, mostly sixteen and up. But a motley array of forces converged to goose me into writing novels geared toward the under-fifteen crowd. If I’m going to write a book about Jack as a teen, why not aim it at teens (and maybe hook some new readers in the process).
I was told at that time that I was the first author to do this – take an adult series character and do young adult novels about him. I don’t know if it’s true. I do know George Lucas did it with young Indy, but that was film, not prose. Since I started with Jack, other writers have followed suit.
As luck would have it, I’d already placed Jack’s hometown in Burlington County, which juts into the mysterious and fabled Jersey Pine Barrens. Perfect. I could work all sorts of magic in a million acres of wilderness with places no human eyes have ever seen, where strange lights jump from tree to tree, and the Jersey Devil supposedly roams. I peopled his town with weird characters and places – like an old woman (with a dog) who's supposedly a witch; the town drunk who’s rumored to be able to heal with a touch but always wears gloves (you’ll recognize him if you’ve read “Dat-Tay-Vao”); Ernst Drexler II, son of Ernst from “Aryans and Absinthe” shows up. And then there’s USED, the store that sells old… stuff.
Here’s how it begins…
JACK: SECRET CIRCLES
(sample)
SATURDAY
Little Cody Bockman disappeared on a rainy morning
1
Jack dodged puddles as he pedaled his BMX along Adams Street to the Connell house. Even though the sky was overcast now, the air felt dry. He hoped it would last. He was sick to death of rain. People were saying this could turn out to be the rainiest September on record and –
“Hey!” he shouted as he almost collided with a little kid scooting by on a red bike. “Cody!”
The kid braked and almost fell off his bike.
“Jack! Jack! I can do it!”
“What?”
“Look! No training wheels!”
Cody Bockman was five and lived two doors down from Jack. His long hair was a blond tangle and his blue eyes sparkled with excitement. Cute kid, but a little wild man. Jack liked him except when he attached himself and followed him around like a dog. Somehow he always chose times when Jack felt like being alone.
“That’s cool, Code.” Jack looked around. Not an adult in sight. “Your folks know you’re out here?”
“No, but it’s okay.”
“Yeah? You mean, if I go back and ask your mom and dad if it’s all right for you to be cruising the streets, they’ll say it’s fine with them?”
Cody looked down. “Well…”
Jack put on a stern look. “You gonna go or am I gonna have to take you back?”
“I’m goin’!”
He turned his bike around and pedaled a wobbly path back toward Jefferson. Jack watched him a little, then continued on to the Connells’.
Weezy’s brother Eddie had asked him over to play, Berzerk, the new game his father had bought him for his Atari 5200. The game was simple and so fun when you could trick the robots into walking into walls or shooting each other, but so nerve racking when that deadly smiley face came bouncing through.
But no videogames today. He’d played enough during the rains. This morning he was going to drag Eddie off the couch and into the sunlight. No easy task, considering Eddie’s weight and resistance to any activity that involved moving more than his thumbs.
As Jack glided past the unlidded garbage cans at the curb – Wednesday and Saturday were garbage days in Johnson – he noticed a couple of familiar items from Weezy’s room in the nearer container. He stopped for a closer look and saw copies of Fortean Times and Fate. Weezy treasured those weird paranormal magazines. Why was she throwing them out?
Maybe she was in a cleaning mood. She had all sorts of moods lately. Spin the dial and see who appeared.
Or maybe she didn’t even know. Her parents were always on her case for not being like other teenage girls. Had they simply gone in and started tossing stuff? That wasn’t right.
He spotted a half-folded photo, an aerial shot of the Pinelands, the million acres of woods beyond the town’s eastern edge. He recognized the scene: an excavation of the mound where just last month he and Weezy had found a corpse and a mysterious little pyramid.
The sight of it released a flood of memories… most of them bad. He’d blocked them out, but now they were back. The dead man was not simply dead, he'd been murdered – ritually murdered – and his discovery had triggered other deaths, all seemingly of natural causes, but all weirdly connected. Then Jack had learned the cause, and it hadn’t been natural at all. But he couldn’t talk about it because he had no proof and everyone – even Weezy – would think he was crazy.
And the pyramid…shiny, black, embossed with strange glyphs… Weezy had fallen in love with it, memorizing every detail of the symbols on its sides and the weird grid inside the box that had held it. It had turned out to be older that it seemed – much older than anything man-made should be.
Then it had disappeared.
And Weezy hadn’t been quite the same since. Jack had felt the loss too – such a neat artifact – but not like Weezy. She’d taken it like the loss of her best friend. But more than that, she was convinced it had been stolen and was sure she knew the culprit… all without a shred of proof.
So he couldn’t believe she’d throw away this photo.
He snagged it from the can and stuck it in his back pocket as he hopped up the front steps and knocked on the door.
“Door’s open,” he heard a man’s voice call from inside.
As Jack stepped in, Mr. Connell poked his crewcut head around a corner and grinned. “Eddie said you’d be coming. He’s in the family room.”
“Is Weezy here?”
“Yeah. Hey, Weez!”
“What?” Her voice floated from upstairs.
“Jack’s here!”
Weezy appeared at the top of the stairway in her customary black jeans and a black T-shirt. She had dark eyes and pale skin. She’d gone a little heavier than usual on the eyeliner today. She held a book in her right hand, her index finger poked between two pages. She’d been letting her dark hair grow
and today she’d parted it in the middle and braided it into a pair of pigtails.
“Hey, Jack. Come on up.”
“Going for the Wednesday Addams look?” he said as he took the steps two at a time.
“Well, it’s the weekend and I’m full of woe.”
He followed her into her room, christened the “Bat Cave” by her brother. With all the shades drawn, a dark purple bedspread, gargoyles peering down from her bookshelves, and a creepy Bauhaus poster on the wall, it lived up to the name.
“About anything in particular?”
“The usual – everything.” She belly flopped onto the bed and opened her book.
“What’s so interesting?”
“Just got it from the library. All about pre-Sumerian civilizations. What’s up?”
Jack pulled the photo from his pocket and held it up. “I found this in your garbage can.”
She glanced up with a smile. “Are you Dumpster diving now?” Then her gaze fixed on the wrinkled photo. “Isn’t that…?”
“Yeah. Never thought you’d toss it out.”
She was up in a flash grabbing it from him.
“I didn’t.” Her expression turned furious. “They have no right!”
As she started for her door Jack blocked her way. She had a wild look in her eyes. Jack had seen that look a few times before when she’d lost it, and she seemed ready to lose it now.
“Easy, Weezy. Could you maybe wait on this? You’re going to put me smack dab in the middle of the fight.”
For a second he thought she might hit him. He didn’t know what he’d do if she tried. He was relieved when the look faded.
“Because you found it?”
He nodded. He didn’t want to become a player in the ongoing tug of war between Weezy and her parents – mostly her father – who wanted her to be what they called a “normal girl” and what she called a “bow head.”
“You know,” she said, her voice thickening as she stalked about her room, “if they’re so unhappy with me, why don’t they just send me off to boarding school or something so they don’t have to look at me?”
Jack didn’t like that idea one bit. Who would he hang with? He tried to lighten the moment by clutching his hands over his heart and giving her his best approximation of a lost-puppy look.
“But-but-but wouldn’t you miss meeee?”
It didn’t work. She was off to the races. She’d always been hard to stop once she got rolling, but almost impossible since the disappearance of the pyramid. She’d gotten a little scary lately.
“I’m going to be fifteen next week! I’ve got a brain, why don’t they want me to use it? They have no right to throw out my stuff!” She stopped her pacing. “Maybe I should pull a Marcie Kurek! That’d show ’em!”
Marcie Kurek was a runaway who’d been a soph at the high school last year. She lived in Shamong. One night she said she was going out to visit a friend and never showed up. No one had seen her since.
Weezy turned and threw the photo on the floor.
Jack knew she tended to leave her stuff all over the house, a perfect invitation for her folks to dump the things they didn’t approve of, especially anything that referred to what she called the Secret History of the World.
The Secret History was her passion – her conviction that accepted history was a collection of lies carefully constructed and arranged to hide what was really going on in the world, and conceal the hidden agenda and identities of those pulling the strings. Ancient secret societies manipulating events throughout the ages…
People – especially her family – tended to roll their eyes once she got started on it. Jack too, though not as quickly as he used to. He’d seen and heard things last month that he couldn’t explain… he didn’t know if they fit into Weezy’s Secret History, didn’t know if they fit anywhere, or if they were even real.
Weezy was convinced that the pyramid they’d found was connected to the Secret History. And maybe it was… this was a picture of the mound where they’d found the body and the artifact, or rather what was left after those strange government men had dug it up in the night.
He glanced at it now on the floor and was once again struck by the mound’s strange outline. As he looked he noticed something to the right of the mound…
He picked it up for a closer look… a dark object or structure in a small clearing. He’d never noticed it before. But then again, the photo had been in Weezy’s possession all this time, so he’d never had much chance to study it.
“Hey, Weez. Where’s your magnifying glass? Or did your folks throw that away too?”
“Not funny.”
She plucked a magnifier with a two-inch lens from a shelf above her desk and handed it to him. Jack poised it over the area in question and felt a tingle of excitement across his neck as it grew larger and came into focus.
“Oh, man, you’ve got to see this.” He passed the lens and photo to her, then tapped the spot. “Right there.”
He watched her brow furrow as she moved the lens up and down and around.
“Hmmph. Never noticed.” She glanced up. “Could be just a big rock.”
“Yeah? Take another look. Count the sides.”
He watched her eyes narrow to a squint as she complied, then widen. She wore an entirely different expression when she looked up this time.
“Six.”
“Yeah. Just like our pyramid.”
A light sparked in her eyes. “Actually it had seven if you count the base. But this is bigger. Much bigger.” She frowned. “Too big for them to steal.”
Jack knew who “them” were but didn’t want her to get started on that now.
“You got that right. Want to take a look?”
“You kidding? Of course I–”
“There you are!”
Jack turned and saw Weezy’s portly brother standing in the doorway, twisting a Rubik’s Cube. He had short, sandy hair and a pudgy body, and his striped rugby shirt gave him a definite Pugsley look. Jack was tempted to remark on the Addams Family theme here in the Connell house, but held his tongue. Eddie wouldn’t take kindly to the Pugsley comparison.
But if Cousin Itt showed up…
“Hey Eddie. I was just–”
“No Berzerk today, man,” Eddie said, looking miffed. “My dad’s booting me out of the house. Wants me to ‘enjoy the outdoors.’ Can you believe it?” He shook his head sadly. “Boracious.”
Eddie was not a fan of the outdoors, unless it meant sitting in the shade with a copy of Uncanny X-Men.
Jack pointed to the Rubik’s Cube that had become Eddie’s latest obsession. “Hey, anytime you want me to straighten that out for you, let me know.”
He gave a wry grin. “Yeah, right. Like you could.”
Jack shrugged. “Just trying to help the helpless.”
Eddie glanced at his sister stretched on the bed and his grin turned evil. “You too, cave girl. He wants us both out in the”–he grabbed his throat and made a strangled sound–”fresh air.”
“We were just leaving,” Jack said.
“Where to?”
“The Pines.”
Eddie shook his head. “No way. Last time I was in there with you two we found a dead guy, and pretty soon a whole bunch of guys were dead.”
Jack shrugged. “Look at it this way: How many times can that happen? Chances of finding another dead guy are almost zilch.”
“You guarantee that?”
“Let’s go,” was all Jack said.
He knew nothing was guaranteed in the Pines.
2
They finally convinced him to come along. Jack was leading the way off Adams onto North Franklin when he spotted a familiar blond-haired kid on a bike.
“Hey, Cody!” Jack called. “I thought you were going back home!”
“I am! I am!”
“Did you stop off in Canada along the way?”
The
kid laughed. “No!”
Jack pointed toward Jefferson Street. “Better get back before your folks find out and sell you to the circus.”
He grinned as he pedaled away. “That’d be soooo cool!”
Jack watched him turn the corner onto Jefferson and disappear from view, then signaled Weezy and Eddie back into motion.
“You handled that like a pro,” Weezy said as they rode.
“Yeah, well, I’m positive his parents don’t know he’s out here. My mother knows his folks and she says he wears them out. Never stops moving.”
She slapped Eddie on the arm. “That’s where all your energy went. Cody Bockman stole it.”
“I’m gonna sue,” Eddie said. “No, wait. If I get it back I’ll have to run around all the time. Forget it!”
Jack said, “Check it out,” as he pointed to a colorful poster on one of the telephone poles.
It announced the arrival of the Taber & Sons circus. The show parked itself near Johnson for a few days every fall. Not a real full-blown circus like Ringling Brothers, just some rides, a few animals, a tent show, and a midway. The local dates had been inked in.
“Hey, it opens tomorrow,” Weezy said. “Maybe later we can go watch them set up.”
Eddie grinned. “Count me out. Watching people work wears me out.”
“Look!” Weezy cried as they approached Quaker Lake. “I’ve never seen it so high.”
Neither had Jack. The lake was overflowing its banks and puddling near Quakerton Road. Mark Mulliner’s canoes sat upside down at the water’s edge. Jack doubted anyone had rented one in a while.
Mr. Rosen had been talking all week about how the ground was saturated and couldn’t hold any more water. Whatever came down had to run off somewhere, and much of it was flowing into the lake.
“It’s all the rain,” Jack said.
Eddie, switching to the world’s worst Chinese accent, bucked his teeth and said, “Yaw obvious-fu velly stlong.”
Jack had to smile. Yeah, pretty dumb thing to say. In defense, he puffed up his chest.
“That’s ‘Supreme Master of the Obvious’ to you.”
The level was higher than just yesterday when he’d crossed the bridge on his way to Old Town. Water was pooled around some of the lakeside benches and willows.