Scenes from the Secret History (The Secret History of the World) (44 page)

I could have set it anywhere, but I chose Monroe because I was simultaneously working on
Reborn
, which is set in Monroe.  Why were all these strange things happening in Monroe?  Why had the
Dat-tay-vao
been drawn to Monroe in
The Touch
?  Was it all random, or was there a reason?  I realized
Reborn
contained that reason.  So if the old guy in "Tenants" has some strange boarders, maybe they too wound up in Monroe for a reason.  The locale had no direct effect on the novelette itself, but it gave me a little extra kick to know I was connecting it to the cycle.

George has a cameo in
All the Rage
, and he and his tenants play a crucial role in the Secret History, as you’ll see in
Nightworld
.

Tenants

(sample)

The mail truck was coming.

Gilroy Connors, shoes full of water and shirt still wet from the morning's heavy dew, crouched in the tall grass and punk-topped reeds.  He ached all over; his thighs particularly were cramped from holding his present position.  But he didn't dare move for fear of giving his presence away.

So he stayed hunkered down across the road from the battered old shack that looked deserted but wasn't – there had been lights on in the place last night.  With its single pitched roof and rotting cedar shake siding, it looked more like an overgrown outhouse that a home.  A peeling propane tank squatted on the north side; a crumbling brick chimney supported a canted TV antenna.  Beyond the shack, glittering in the morning sunlight, lay the northeast end of Monroe Harbor and the Long Island Sound. The place gave new meaning to the word
isolated
.  As if a few lifetimes ago someone had brought a couple of tandems of fill out to the end of the hard-packed dirt road, dumped them, and built a shack.  Except for a rickety old dock with a sodden rowboat tethered to it, there was not another structure in sight in either direction.  Only a slender umbilical cord of insulated wire connected it to the rest of the world via a long column of utility poles marching out from town.  All around was empty marsh.

Yeah.  Isolated as all hell.

It was perfect.

As Gil watched, the shack's front door opened and a grizzled old man stumbled out, a cigarette in his mouth and a fistful of envelopes in his hand.  Tall and lanky with an unruly shock of gray hair standing off his head, he scratched his slightly protruding belly as he squinted in the morning sunlight.  He wore a torn undershirt that had probably been white once and a pair of faded green work pants held up by suspenders, He looked as rundown as his home, and as much in need of a shave and a bath as Gil felt.  With timing so perfect that it could only be the result of daily practice, the old guy reached the mailbox at exactly the same time as the white jeep-like mail truck.

Must have been watching from the window
.

Not an encouraging thought.  Had the old guy seen Gil out here?  If he had, he gave no sign.  Which meant Gil was still safe.

He fingered the handle of the knife inside his shirt.

Lucky for him
.

While the old guy and the mailman jawed, Gil studied the shack again.  The place was a sign that his recent run of good luck hadn't deserted him yet.  He had come out to the marshes to hide until things cooled down in and around
Monroe and had been expecting to spend a few real uncomfortable nights out here.  The shack would make things a lot easier.

Not much of a place.  At most it looked big enough for two rooms and no more.  Barely enough space for an ancient couple who didn't move around much
– who ate, slept, crapped, watched TV and nothing more.  Hopefully, it wasn't a couple.  Just the old guy.  That would make it simple.  A wife, even a real sickly one, could complicate matters.

Gil wanted to know how many were living there before he invited himself in.  Not that it would matter much.  Either way, he was going in and staying for a while.  He just liked to know what he was getting into before he made his move.

One thing was sure:  He wasn't going to find any money in there.  The old guy had to be next to destitute.  But even ten bucks would have made him richer than Gil.  He looked at the rusting blue late-sixties Ford Torino with the peeling vinyl roof and hoped it would run.  But of course it ran.  The old guy had to get into town to cash his Social Security check and buy groceries, didn't he?

Damn well better run
.

It had been a long and sloppy trek into these marshes.  He intended to drive out.

Finally the mail truck clinked into gear, did a U-turn, and headed back the way it had come.  The old guy shoved a couple of envelopes into his back pocket, picked up a rake that had been leaning against the Ford, and began scratching at the dirt on the south side of the house.

Gil decided it was now or never.  He straightened up and walked toward the shack.  As his feet crunched on the gravel of the yard, the old man wheeled and stared at him with wide, startled eyes.

"Didn't mean to scare you," Gil said in his friendliest voice.

"Well, you sure as hell did, poppin' outta nowhere like that!" the old man said in a deep, gravelly voice.  The cigarette between his lips bobbed up and down like a conductor's baton.  "We don't exactly get much drop-in company out here.  What happen?  Boat run outta gas?"

Gil noticed the
we
with annoyance but played along.  A stalled boat was as good an excuse as any for being out here in the middle of nowhere.

"Yeah.  Had to paddle it into shore way back over there," he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder.

"Well, I ain't got no phone for you to call anybody–”

No phone!
It was all Gil could do to keep from cheering.

“–
but I can drive you down to the marina and back so you can get some gas."

No hurry."  He moved closer and leaned against the old
Torino's fender.  "You live out here all by yourself?"

The old man squinted at him, as if trying to recognize him.  "I don't believe we've been introduced, son."

"Oh, right."  Gil stuck out his hand.  "Rick...Rick Summers."

"And I'm George Haskins," he said, giving Gil's hand a firm shake.

"What're you growing there?"

"Carrots.  I hear fresh carrots are good for your eyes.  Mine are so bad I try to eat as many as I can."

Half blind and no phone
.  This was sounding better every minute.  Now, if he could just find out who the rest of the
we
was, he'd be golden.

He glanced around.  Even though he was out in the middle of nowhere at the end of a dirt road that no one but the mailman and this old fart knew existed, he felt exposed.  Naked, even.  He wanted to get inside.

"Say, I sure could use a cup of coffee, Mr. Haskins.  You think you might spare me some?"

George lets him in, much to his regret.  But Gil regrets it more after he meets George’s tenants.  Available in…
The Barrens and Others

P
elts

Pa Jameson, in case you don’t see it, is the same Piney trapper from the Teen Trilogy.  Some people never learn.

Possibly the only politically correct story I've ever written.  I realized "Pelts" was based on a trendy idea, but I wrote it anyway.  It springs from the same values that fueled the very
in
correct "Buckets" (in
Soft & Others
).

"Where do you get your ideas?"  It's a question we're all asked.  I can tell you the instant this story began.  It was the day I opened a copy of
Rolling Stone
and saw an ad placed by one of the animal rights groups.  It featured an animal (a fox, I think) caught in a leg restraint trap.  In a series of photos it showed a man approach the animal and crush its throat with his heel.  The casual brutality of the act sickened and appalled me.  I had to say something.  And since I speak through my fiction, I began to write.

“Pelts” connects to the Secret History through those fabled Jersey Pine Barrens.  It’s been reprinted often (including a Best of the Year anthology) and was adapted for
Masters of Horror
on Showtime, directed by Dario Argento.  (My goriest story ever, and he made it gorier.)

It starts out on Old Man Foster’s land in the Barrens.  You remember Old Man Foster, don’t you?

Pelts

"I'm scared, Pa,"
Gary said. 

"Shush!" Pa said, tossing the word over his shoulder as he walked ahead.

Gary shivered in the frozen predawn dimness and scanned the surrounding pines and brush for the thousandth time.  He was heading for twenty years old and knew he shouldn't be getting the willies like this but he couldn't help it.  He didn't like this place. 

"What if we get caught?"

"Only way we'll get caught is if you keep yappin', boy," Pa said.  "We're almost there.  Wouldna brought you along cept I can't do all the carryin' myself!  Now hesh up!"

Their feet crunched though the half-inch shroud of frozen snow that layered the sandy ground. 
Gary pressed his lips tightly together, kept an extra tight grip on the Louisville Slugger, and followed Pa through the brush.  But he didn't like this one bit.  Not that he didn't favor hunting and trapping.  He liked them fine.  Loved them, in fact.  But he and Pa were on Zeb Foster's land today.  And everybody knew that was bad news. 

Old Foster owned thousands of acres in the Jersey Pine Barrens and didn't allow nobody to hunt them.  Had "Posted" signs all around the perimeter.  Always been that way with the Fosters.  Pa said old Foster's granpa had started the no-trespassing foolishness and that the family was likely to hold to the damn stupid tradition till Judgment Day.  Pa didn't think he should be fenced out of any part of the Barrens. 
Gary could go along with that most anywheres except old Foster's property.

There were stories...tales of the Jersey Devil roaming the woods here, of people poaching Foster's land and never being seen again.  Those who disappeared weren't fools from
Newark or Trenton who regularly got lost in the Pines and wandered in circles till they died.  These were experienced trackers and hunters, Pineys just like Pa... and Gary.

Never seen again.

"Pa, what if we don't come out of here?"  He hated the whiny sound in his voice and tried to change it.  "What if somethin' gets us?"

"Ain't nothin gonna get us!  Didn't I come in here yesterday and set the traps?  And didn't I come out okay?"

"Yeah, but–"

"Yeah, but
nothin'
!  The Fosters done a good job of spreadin' stories for generations to scare folk off.  But they don't scare me.  I know bullshit when I hear it."

"Is it much farther?"

"No.  Right yonder over the next rise.  A whole area crawlin' with coon tracks."

Gary
noticed they were passing through a thick line of calf-high vegetation, dead now; looked as if it'd been dark and ferny before winterkill had turned it brittle.  It ran off straight as a hunting arrow into the scrub pines on either side of them.

"Looky this,
Pa.  Look how straight this stuff runs.  Almost like it was planted."

Pa snorted.  "That wasn't planted.  That's spleenwort – ebony spleenwort.  Only place it grows around here is where somebody's used lime to set footings for a foundation.  Soil's too acid for it otherwise.  Find it growin' over all the vanished towns."

Gary knew there were lots of vanished towns in the Barrens, but this must have been one hell of a foundation.  It was close to six feet wide and ran as far as he could see in either direction."

"What you think used to stand here, Pa?"

"Who knows, who cares?  People was buildin' in the Barrens afore the Revolutionary War.  And I hear tell there was crumblin' ruins already here when the Indians arrived.  There's some real old stuff around these parts but we ain't about to dig it up.  We're here for coon.  Now hesh up till we get to the traps!"

*

Gary couldn't believe their luck.  Every damn leg-hold trap had a coon in it!  Big fat ones with thick, silky coats the likes of which he'd never seen.  A few were already dead, but most of them were still alive, lying on their sides, their black eyes wide with fear and pain; panting, bloody, exhausted from trying to pull loose from the teeth of the traps, still tugging weakly at the chains that linked the trap to its stake. 

He and Pa took care of the tuckered-out ones first by crushing their throats. 
Gary flipped them onto their backs and watched their stripped tails come up protectively over their bellies.  I ain't after your belly, Mr. Coon.  He put his heel right over the windpipe, and kicked down hard.  If he was in the right spot he heard a satisfying crunch as the cartilage collapsed.  The coons wheezed and thrashed and flopped around awhile in the traps trying to draw some air past the crushed spot but soon enough they choked to death.  Gary had had some trouble doing the throat crush when he started at it years ago, but he was used to it by now.  It was just the way it was done.  All the trappers did it.