The Secret: A Thriller (30 page)

Magnus frowned a little. There was a line of broken trees, including splinters of one ancient bristlecone pine. Thousands of years, he mused, the tree grew here. And then this boy—but what had the boy done?

He had no tools. No clothes, either. He had seen Magnus, and flinched away, and curled himself further into his hole in the rocks.

“How badly are you hurt?” Magnus asked him. But the boy only gazed at him in abject terror, and shook his head.

Magnus stepped up closer. “I won’t hurt you,” he said. “But I need to see how bad that wound is.”

The boy, shivering, sat up—then spotted Magnus’s bare feet and his eyes shot wide open. Strangely, he seemed to calm down somewhat.

Magnus walked closer, reached out and put a hand on the boy’s arm. The boy, still staring at Magnus’s feet, let him move it.

Magnus pursed his lips. His arthritis barely let him hobble on these trails—he had to switch his cane from his left hand to his right, and back again, depending on how badly they hurt. There was no way he could carry this boy to get help. Worse, Magnus had no cell phone—no reception in these mountains—and the nearest landline was in his own cabin. Two miles away.

“Can you walk?” he asked the boy.

The boy stared blankly, but grasped the hand Magnus held out to him.

Magnus, still strong from his years as a sailor in whatever fleet had offered the most money, whatever ship was going in the direction his whim took him, or sometimes just taking the quickest escape from whatever shenanigan Magnus had embroiled himself into locally, pulled the boy to his feet.

The pain in his hand felt like breaking bones—he’d done that before, when he’d carelessly caught his hand in a line in his youth, and knew the feeling. But the boy stood, leaning on Magnus, and together they contemplated the rocky trail before them.

Magnus shrugged out of his jacket and offered it to the boy. The boy looked at it for a moment, confusion on his face, but then his expression cleared and he slipped it on. The jacket fit Magnus a bit snugly, built as he was with a broad six-and-a-half-foot frame, but it covered the boy well enough.

Of course it would be stained with this child’s blood, but…

Together the boy and the old man limped and slid, injured and frail as they were, up and down the mountain trail.

But no matter what Magnus tried, the boy would not speak to him.

* * *

I
was Jacob Ashton once. Or nearly. All that was a long time ago. And, Gentle Reader, it didn’t happen in your world anyway. Not quite.

Some of us used to wonder how we, or perhaps our bodies, or then again it may have been our unconscious minds, chose the forms we took early on. Generally our shapes and abilities seemed based on some sort of mythology, or on popular stories that may have captured our imaginations. Did it happen as it did because those were the limits of what our minds could grasp? Did we re-create ourselves according to our
exposure to ideas?
And so our dreams and our entertainments came to actively define our capabilities? If so, there may be a useful lesson in that. Dream well, if you can.

Most of the beings in the Summer and Winter Courts still experience sharp boundaries as to their perceptions and their forms. In so many ways they remain very nearly
human
, and mortal, and therefore much less than they might someday become. After all these thousands of years, I still hope their minds will reach for freedom. Someday. Or some night. Whichever.

Our people have undergone great changes in the past. We may well do so again. I will not give up this hope lightly.

But lately I have come to believe the explanation for our initial forms is considerably more dire than we previously suspected. In short: I now know that there is Leakage between worlds. I have seen it happen. And it changes everything—not so much for us in our own form of existence, perhaps. But for you, Gentle but Doomed Reader, it means terrible things are coming.

It was always true, since the early days of the Change, that all it took to convert an entire community of old-style humans was one of Us. The Change may have been initially inspired by some sort of viral or bacterial contagion—but I suspect that it became more a disease (or a capability) of the somewhat-human mind.

Perhaps the old stories did inspire us. But what if the reason for the old stories
themselves
is that some of us, or at least a perception of us, traveled
backward in time?
What if it turns out that time actually flows and bends in
many
strange and wonderful directions? I have been studying this for…well, the duration may be irrelevant, and it would not strike you as reasonable. I have come to believe there are other worlds, some lying very close to our own, and I am convinced we are Leaking into them. Worse, we may soon become capable of traveling to them by our own choice. I have seen signs that it has already begun.

And the contagion, the Change itself, is very likely still with us. Perhaps it is even much stronger, by now.

I have built this message for you, and I have found thin…places…from whence its energy may flow into minds incredibly distant from any I can reach directly. I believe some form or other of this working will reach very far indeed.

Here is my warning:
Beware
of apparently beneficial and innocuous changes in your own world. Are your sick rising from their beds? Is your world’s average lifespan increasing? Are athletic performances improving with no obvious explanation? These are the early signs. There are others too, that will be far more obvious. But they may come very quickly once they begin.

I
do not have
a solution to offer you, though I might if I could. There is no single magical talisman that carries the taint of evil. There is no fire hot enough, no force strong enough, to destroy it if there were…and in fact there is no final destination of any sort in this life. There is only the journey, of which all beings may experience only their own. There shall be no safe haven for
any
of you. No guarantees of any sort.

This only I can offer to you: becoming aware, as far as you are capable, of yourself and your surroundings is your best hope of survival. If you are reading this, all or nearly all of the people you know will very likely soon perish. Probably you will too. But for as long as you can, pay attention to
what
you are becoming and
how
your world changes around you.

Consider, my early self reminds me, even measures as simple as taking off your shoes. As you begin your great journeys into the futures you will inhabit, open up your perceptions however you can.
Accept
what you find the universe around you to
be
. It will surprise you. But although often cruel and cold, it bears you no personal malice.

I wish you well. And I hope this warning, in whatever form it reaches you, is helpful. In return I ask only one thing. But it is important to me, and it is not impossible that we will someday meet. I may know it, if you choose to disregard my request. Do not, I caution you, allow this to occur.

So.

Watch out for my son, will you? I still hope our paths will cross again, though I suspect he may have gone so far by now, and in such strange directions, that I will never be able to reach him again.

Still. The boy has always possessed a good heart. And I miss him terribly.

Be kind, if you can.

M
agnus, sprawled in his well-worn recliner, set down the bit of scrimshaw he was carving and scowled at a too-heavy knock on his cabin door. Glancing at the battery-powered clock on his wall, he saw that the social worker was twenty minutes late for her appointment. Better for her to have skipped it entirely, he thought. But of course she wouldn’t. That would be too easy.

The boy, too, looked up from his sketchpad and grimaced. But stood, and went to greet their visitor.

Outside stood the social worker. Angela, Magnus dimly recalled. Smith? Simpson? Something like that.

“Hello, Roger!” she said in a too-pleased voice. “May I come in and speak with you?”

Magnus shook his head slightly. The boy’s memories of the time before Magnus found him on the mountain were spotty, at best. He rarely spoke, and then in an accent Magnus could not place, but Magnus was sure that Roger was
not
the boy’s name. It was just what he had agreed to use in order to please the social worker. Magnus himself stuck with “boy” for now. There were only two of them in the cabin, after all. Usually.

But then Magnus took another look at the social worker. “You’re wet,” he observed. “Didn’t hear your car coming. Did it break down?”

She laughed. “I guess you
would
hear that kind of thing up here in the mountains, wouldn’t you? Anyway, yes. The engine died and I hit the brakes, then slid into a ditch. And since there’s no cell signal up here, I thought maybe I could borrow…?”

“Sure,” Magnus said. She—yes, Angela, that was right—was actually pretty, now that her face was flushed and he could see her doing something other than sitting in a sterile and stifling cubicle. “On the table.”

The boy went back to his sketchpad, picked it up, then considered their visitor and set it back down again with a little sigh. Magnus grinned at him in commiseration, then glanced back at Angela. “You look cold. Care for some coffee? It’s moderately warm.”

“Thank you,” she told him, and then set Magnus’s phone down with a small frown. “No dial tone. Is it plugged in properly?”

Magnus shrugged. “That happens up here a lot. Ah…my truck’s transmission is sitting next to it in the shed right now, or I’d offer to drive you back down the mountain. It’ll only take a couple of hours to put the beast back together, but our power is out up here too and it’s getting dark outside.”

Angela’s eyes were glazing at Magnus’s explanation. He tried to the point more quickly. “We’ll need better light to fix the truck. My old eyes don’t do so well with shadows anymore.” Also, he didn’t want to spend half the night working just to make the woman marginally more comfortable. He shrugged again. “Maybe the phone service will come back. Worst case, you can have my bed for tonight and we’ll get you back to town somehow in the morning.”

She was frowning deeply, obviously flustered. “Oh, I hope…I mean I don’t want…” But then she caught herself, considered the situation, and smiled at Magnus. “I may have to take you up on that. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be so much trouble.”

Magnus waved it away, watching as she took off her coat—dumping snow on the cabin floor to melt, but maybe she didn’t know any better—and hung it on a hook inside the door.

“Roger?” she asked. “Since I’m here, maybe we can talk about how things are going for you in school?”

The boy shrugged and made an abortive little grab for his sketchpad.

She smiled at him, then sat next to him at the table. “Are you still drawing? May I see?”

He shrugged and pushed the pad toward her. She took it and looked inside, her mouth opening in surprise. “These are really good!”

The boy shrugged again.

“That’s giants,” Magnus told her. “Frost and fire, both. And of course the wolf. It’s from a book I was showing him. Legends and stories from where I grew up, back in Norway. A scene from Ragnarok, the final battle before the end of the world.”

“This is fascinating,” Angela said. “Roger, you’ve obviously had some training in art. Do you remember anything about it?”

“It’s actually Rob—oh, never mind.” Again, the boy aimed a shrug in her direction. He picked up a pencil, realized he had nothing in particular he could do with it just then, and set it back on the table with a frustrated little shake of his head.

“His teachers tell me he’s doing well, academically,” Angela told Magnus.

Magnus, back in his recliner, nodded. He wasn’t surprised—the boy had been with him for only a few weeks, but he was already reading some of Magnus’s favorite books. Which were in several languages. The particular book he’d mentioned to the social worker was written in Norwegian, which he was fairly sure the boy had never encountered until recently. It didn’t seem to slow him down very much.

“I’m a little concerned about his social skills,” she went on. “Out here you’re the only person he talks to. And he’s apparently a bit of a loner at the school.”

The boy rolled his eyes at this. Angela saw it, and a smile quirked her lips upward. “Well, maybe you’ll figure that out when you’re ready,” she told him, and Magnus found himself liking her a bit more than he’d expected to.

She turned to him. “Was that carving you were doing? Are your hands feeling better?”

He smiled. Of course his hands were better. Hadn’t she heard him talk about replacing his truck’s transmission in the morning? “I think it’s the new arthritis medication I’ve been taking,” he told her. “My doctor got me into some kind of trial.”

Actually the trial had been discontinued last week—Dr. Martin had told him it was something about how too many patients were improving, and they suspected a mixup with the placebos the control group had been supposed to receive. But whatever; for now Magnus’s hands felt better than they had in decades and he was taking full advantage for however long it lasted.

“Listen to that wind!” Angela said. “I’ve never heard it howl like that.”

The boy frowned slightly, and opened his mouth. But then the cabin began to shake, and they heard a loud crashing sound not far away.

“Earthquake,” Magnus said. “And an avalanche. Ah, if that was where I think it was, we may have a little extra trouble getting down the road in the morning.”

His guest stood and drew a window shade partway up, revealing a full moon in an apparently cloudless sky. “Maybe it’s Roger’s giants out there,” she said playfully.

Meanwhile the boy flinched from the moonlight, and Magnus stared at his hands as he quickly hid them beneath the table. They seemed misshapen…was that
hair?

But then the cabin’s battery-powered overhead light went out, and Magnus laughed. “Time for a lantern!” he announced. He used the moonlight to help him get one lit, and took a quick look at the boy’s hands as the boy reached up and drew the shade closed again. They were normal, of course. Must’ve been the light flickering before the power went out. Old eyes saw strange things, in shadows. Especially lately.