Scenes from the Secret History

  A number of his lawn-cutting customers lived in Old Town, the original settlement that had spawned the sprawling, thousand-person metropolis of Johnson, NJ. But the succession of rainy days was interfering with his schedule. Yeah, he could cut wet grass, but it always wound up looking crummy, and then he’d have to come back for a fix up.

  He’d swung by after school yesterday to see if the lawns were dry enough to cut. They were, so he’d raced home to get his mower. But as soon as he wheeled it out of the garage, the skies opened up again.

  No mow, no pay. And the longer the grass, the tougher the job, and the longer to get it done. A vicious cycle.

  As the three of them pedaled across the bridge over the lake, Jack glanced at a boxy, two-story, stucco building known around town as “the Lodge.” It belonged to the globe-spanning Ancient Septimus Fraternal Order. A very secretive bunch, tight-lipped about its activities and purposes and membership, and highly selective about who it accepted.

  It had lodges all over the world. Why they’d put one here in Johnson, New Jersey, no one knew. Well, Weezy knew – or thought she did. She said the Lodge was here before the town, that members of the Order had settled here in prehistoric times. But that was part of her Secret History of the World, and the Septimus Order played a big role in it.

  Membership was by invitation only, and this Lodge was rumored to include some of the state’s most influential and powerful people.

  Weezy glared at the building as they passed.

  “You want to find our pyramid, look in there.”

  Jack was ahead of Eddie but could hear an eye roll in his tone as he muttered, “Here we go.”

  “It’s true,” she said.

  Against his better judgment, Jack said, “Things do get lost, Weez. It happens all the time.”

  “Things that are clues to the Secret History don’t get lost, they get hidden away. The Order’s job is to keep the Secret history secret. If we searched that place, we’d find it.”

  “Fat chance,” Eddie said. “What are you gonna do, get invited in for milk and cookies?”

  “I’ll think of something. And you’ll come with me, right, Jack?”

  Jack glanced at the Lodge’s barred windows and figured it was safe to agree – no way they’d ever see the inside of that place.

  “If you’re there, I’m there.”

  They passed the empty and supposedly haunted Klenke house that had been for sale ever since Jack could remember, and then the home of the town’s supposed witch, Mrs. Clevenger. Jack had heard stories about the weird smells and noises in the Klenke place, but he’d never been in there himself, so he couldn’t say if they were true or not. He had, however, come into contact with Mrs. Clevenger on a number of occasions since the summer, and though she was strange and never gave a straight answer, she wasn’t a witch. Who believed in witches and hauntings anyway?

  They approached the place where Quakerton Road ended and the Pine Barrens began. Jack recognized Gus Sooy’s pickup parked by the lightning tree. A lot of folks said Gus’s moonshine – known as applejack – was the best in the Pinelands. Jack also recognized the guy buying from him.

  So did Eddie. “There’s Weird Walt,” he said from behind Jack. “Stocking up.”

  “Hey,” Weezy called as she brought up the rear on her banana-seat Schwinn. “Don’t call him that.”

  She and Walt had a strange bond, and she always took his side.

  “It’s gotta be eighty degrees out and he’s wearing leather gloves and you’re telling me he’s not weird?”

  Jack glanced over to where Walt was watching Gus Sooy fill a quart bottle with water-clear liquor from one of his big brown jugs. Hard to argue against him being weird. Folks said Walter Erskine hadn’t been right since he’d returned from Vietnam. He said weird things and wore gloves day in and day out.

  “He’s a good guy,” Jack said as they turned onto a firebreak trail and followed it into the Pines.

  Weezy moved up beside him. “How would you know?”

  “He comes into the store every now and then and we talk. He–”

  A helicopter, heading southeast, did its wup-wup-wup thing overhead and Weezy stopped for a moment to stare with an anxious expression.

  Jack understood her reaction. A few weeks ago, late one August night, government men – at least Jack assumed they were from the government – had used black helicopters to fly backhoes into the Pines and dig up the mound where he and Weezy had found the pyramid and the corpse. Who had told them about the mound? Who had sent them to tear it apart? These were questions he doubted he’d ever answer.

  “It’s not black,” he said. “And it’s not headed our way. Probably some high rollers headed for AC.”

  Gambling had been legal in Atlantic City for half a dozen years now and was enormously popular.

  Weezy said nothing as she pulled ahead to lead the way. She always rode point when they were in the woods. Made sense. She knew this corner of the Pine Barrens backward, forward, up and down. She never got lost.

  As they rode, the forty-foot scrub pines thickened on either side, stretching their gnarled, green-needled branches overhead as they lined the path like sentinels guarding their woodland domain. Jack checked the overcast sky through the needled canopy. This was the kind of day when people got lost in the Pines and were never seen again. But no worry about that with Weezy along.

  Weezy led them along the dipping, deeply puddled trail onto Old Man Foster’s land. Foster was something of a mystery. Nobody had ever seen him or seemed to know who he was, but he kept his land heavily posted with signs warning against fishing, hunting, trapping, and trespassing. Jack ignored them. He figured obeying the first three out of the four was good enough.

  At least he wasn’t trapping like a certain someone was doing around a spong they’d be passing along the way.

  When they reached the spong they saw Mrs. Clevenger standing with an armload of sticks. She wore her usual long black dress and a black scarf around her neck – which made as much sense in this weather as Walt’s gloves. Her three-legged dog sat to the side, watching their approach. The big, floppy-eared mutt had the thick body of a rottweiler but with lots of other breeds mixed in. Its right front leg was missing as if it had never been – not even a scar.

  Weezy stopped and waved. “Hi, Mrs. Clevenger. Need any help?”

  “No, dear. I’m doing fine.”

  Some Piney had been setting leg-hold traps around the spong – the local term for a wet low spot – trying to catch coons and possums and such when they came for a drink. Mrs. Clevenger had been coming out regularly and springing the traps with sticks. Jack wondered what the trapper would do if he ever caught the old lady at it. Whatever it was, he’d have to get past her nameless dog, and that wouldn’t be easy.

  Eventually they reached a burned-out area deep in the Pines. They knew the place well. Maybe too well. Here was where they’d dug up the little pyramid and the corpse.

  After they'd leaned their bikes against some trees, Jack stood in the shade and pulled out their aerial photo of the area. Judging by the position of the midmorning sun, they’d been following the fire trail eastward. The mound lay to the right of the trail, which meant south. The strange-looking thing he’d spotted on the photo was to the right of the mound, which meant farther south.

  He pointed to the burned-out area. “This way.”

  As they walked a weaving course through the blackened tree trunks, Jack saw green branchlets poking through the charred bark. Hard to kill these pines. Fires were common in the Barrens during the summer and fall, mostly the fault of campers and lightning. With all the recent rain, he doubted they’d see any fires at all this season.

  “Think anything’s left in there?” Jack said, pointing to the ruins of the mound as they passed.

  Weezy shook her head. “Look at it. It’s not even a mound anymore.”

  She had a poi
nt. The government men had left little more than a twisty-turny trench, now filled with stagnant water.

  The pines thickened past the burned-out area, slowing their progress.

  “This better be worth it,” Eddie said.

  Jack had known it was only a matter of time before he’d start complaining. He was kind of surprised he’d held off this long.

  “Shouldn’t be too much farther now. According to the photo, we should hit a clearing any…”

  He stopped and stared as he spotted an open area dead ahead.

  “…minute.”

  The clearing hadn’t surprised him, but what stood in its center stopped him cold.

  Weezy pushed past him, then stopped, saying “Ohmygod!” over and over.

  Jack couldn’t speak. The Pines were full of secrets and surprises, but this… this was over the top. Way over.

  3

  “What is it?” Eddie said from behind.

  “Some sort of…pyramid.”

  At maybe fifteen feet tall, it had nothing height-wise on the ones in Egypt, but this was definitely a pyramid, and unlike any Jack had seen or heard of. He wondered if anyone alive today had ever laid eyes on it.

  Weezy finally stopped saying, “Ohmygod!” and the three of them approached the pyramid. The closer they got, the odder it became.

  As Jack neared he noticed it wasn’t solid. Huge, elongated triangular stones stood in a circle, their bases buried in the sandy soil with their pointed ends jutting skyward and leaning toward each other.

  “Looks like Godzilla pizza slices,” Eddie said.

  A typical Eddie comment. If he wasn’t thinking about videogames, he was thinking about food. But his comment hit the mark: the structure did resemble half a dozen giant petrified pizza slices, crusts down and arranged in a circle.

  A three-foot high wall of headstonelike rectangular slabs ringed the whole thing.

  They marched around it in silence. One of the triangular megaliths was broken halfway up, but the undamaged points of the remaining five met and leaned against each other at the pyramid’s apex.

  “Notice, Weez? Six sides… just like our little pyramid.”

  The gleaming black artifact they’d found in the mound back there would have fit inside a softball. It too had six sides – seven if you counted the base.

  Weezy nodded but said nothing. She seemed in a daze, incapable of speech, or even taking her eyes off the pyramid. Jack thought he knew how she felt: She’d lost a little piece of the Secret History, but found something much bigger. He felt it too. The strangeness, the ancient, alien feel to the structure.

  They came to a broken fence stone. Without a word, Weezy stepped over it and entered the circle. Jack followed but Eddie hung back.

  Jack turned to look at him. “Coming?”

  Eddie looked uncomfortable. “This whole place is majorly creepacious.”

  Jack agreed, but he put on a smile. “Don’t worry. Weezy will protect you.”

  Eddie rolled his eyes and stepped over the broken slab. “I should know better by now to go anywhere with you guys. You find dead bodies, you get me locked up in a police car and chased by the cops, but do I learn? Nooooo.”

  “Look, Jack.”

  Weezy was standing by one of the leaning megaliths, rubbing her hand over the surface. Her expression was triumphant, beaming vindication. He imagined this was what Percival looked like when he glimpsed the Holy Grail.

  “What have you got?” he said, approaching.

  “Look familiar?”

  With a trembling finger she traced a circle around a faint indentation in the weather-smoothed surface of the stone. Jack squinted until he could make out the full outline, then he gasped. Recognition was like a punch in the chest.

  “That’s…that was on our pyramid!”

  She nodded and jumped to the next where she again ran her hands over the surface. She seemed about to explode.

  “So was this one.”

  Then to the next stone.

  Her voice shook. “This one too.”

  They were connected. No question.

  “So…” he managed, swallowing hard as he stepped back for a longer look. “Is this based on our little pyramid, or was ours based on this?”

  She shrugged. “Who can say? No way they’re not connected. I mean, they’re too much alike. But our pyramid wasn’t made of stone.”

  Right. They’d given it to Professor Nakamura who’d had it analyzed at the University of Pennsylvania. No one there could say what it was made of, but it sure hadn’t been stone. All they’d been able to say was that it was many thousands of years old – and then it had disappeared.

  Jack stepped up to one of the megaliths and felt its surface. “Granite?”

  Weezy moved up next to him. “That’s what it feels like to me. Except…”

  “Except what?”

  “There’s no granite in the Barrens, or anywhere near here.”

  Jack never understood where Weezy got all her information, but he’d learned to believe her. She wasn’t a bull slinger.

  Eddie joined them, saying, “So that means somebody cut these pizza slices somewhere else, drove them all the way out here, and made a teepee out of them. What for?”

  Jack was thinking that “teepee” was a pretty good description when Weezy said, “‘Drove’? I don’t think so. Can’t you see how old these are? I’ll bet they were dragged here on rollers.”

  Jack looked at the stones and tried to imagine their weight, and the work it must have taken to carve each from a block of granite and then transport it here from wherever. He remembered Eddie’s last question.

  “But why?”

  “And look,” Eddie said. “It’s not even put together right. They left spaces between the rocks.”

  “They’ve probably shifted over the ages,” Weezy said.

  Jack wasn’t so sure about that. He’d noticed the spaces, but they seemed pretty uniform. Wouldn’t shifting and settling over time have resulted in uneven gaps? These all looked to be an even ten or twelve inches apart at their bases, tapering as they went up. That couldn’t have happened by chance.

  He peered through one of the gaps. The empty space within was lit by strips of daylight streaming between the stones. Its floor lay about three feet below ground level under a couple of inches of rainwater. Jack could make out a layer of sandy soil beneath the surface. A stone column, maybe a foot in diameter and four feet high, stood in the exact center of the space.

  Weezy and Eddie had moved up to gaps of their own on either side of him.

  “It is a teepee!” Eddie cried. “Just like I said: a stone teepee!”

  Weezy’s voice dripped scorn. “A teepee is a place to live, so it needs a doorway – you know, one of those handy openings you use to get in and out? Plus, it’s supposed to protect you from the weather. This flunks on both.”

  “All right, Miss Know-It-All, what is it then?”

  Weezy hesitated, then, “I don’t know. But maybe if I look at it from another angle…”

  To Jack’s surprise, she turned sideways, squeezed through the gap, and jumped down to the inner floor. She landed with a splash. He noticed she was wearing old sneakers. He looked down at his own battered Converse All-Stars. They’d been soaked before, no reason they couldn’t get soaked again.

  Jack squeezed through his gap – a tight fit but he made it – and eased himself to the floor to avoid splashing Weezy. Cool water filled his sneakers as he looked up and saw Eddie watching from outside. He made no move to join them. Jack was about to coax him in when he realized that even if Eddie wanted to join them, he couldn’t. No way he’d fit through the narrow opening. Or worse, if he forced himself in, he might not be able to get out.

  Jack turned in a slow circle, uncomfortable with the trapped feeling that stole over him. He saw a triangle of cloudy sky above the damaged megalith. The broken-off apex rested at an
angle against its base.

  What had happened? A weakness in the stone? A lightning strike? He’d never know.

  “Look,” Weezy said, pointing to the perimeter of the sunken area.

  Jack saw how the sides sloped away at an angle, following the inner surfaces of the megaliths.

  “How deep do you think the stones are buried?” she asked.

  Jack shrugged. He had no idea, but the megaliths were even bigger than they appeared from the outside.

  He heard splashing and turned to see Weezy making her way toward the short column in the center. Her speed increased until she all but leaped the last few feet.

  “Jack! Look at this!”

  When he joined her he found her running her hands over the top of the column.

  “Look! It’s the same shape, the exact same size!”

  Jack immediately saw what she meant – a six-sided indentation in the top of the column, a perfect fit for their lost little pyramid. No doubt about it now – the two pyramids were connected.

  “What do you think it did here?”

  “I don’t know but…” Anger washed across her features, leaving steely determination.

  “But what?”

  “Somehow, some way, I’m going to get our pyramid back and find out.”

  Jack shared her desire but couldn’t see any way to make that happen, so he looked for a way to change the subject. He turned and pointed to the megaliths.

  “Why go to all the trouble to drag these things here and set them up like this?”

  Weezy shook her head. “Stonehenge was set up as a sort of solar calendar. Maybe this is something like that. Maybe the sun shines through one of these cracks and – ohmygod!”

  “What?”

  “Our pyramid. I’ll bet they placed it right here in the center so that at certain times of the year a shaft of sunlight hit it and…”

  “And what?”

  She looked at him with a lost expression. “I don’t know. But I’ve got to know. And I will know.”

  But Jack was thinking about something else. He did a slow turn, taking in the placement of the megaliths, the spaces between, the way they were tilted inward, making them virtually impossible to climb…

  He felt a little squeeze in his chest as it all came together.

  “I don’t know about sunbeams and that sort of stuff, but look around. Imagine you’re a tiger or a lion… those openings are wide enough to toss food inside but too narrow for something big to squeeze through. I think this is some sort of cage.”