Ground Zero

“It’s not quite so simple as that,” Drexler said. “There’s a condition . . .”

10

“There?” Weezy said as they approached the canopied entrance to the apartment building on Central Park West. “He lives there?”

Jack checked the address on the napkin: 34 CPW.

“That’s what he gave me.”

She stopped in her tracks. “I can’t go in there like this. I mean, look at me.”

She wore the same T-shirt and sweatpants as last night. No surprise. They were all she had left.

“You look fine.”

She shook her head, looking around. “I’ve got to go buy something else. Of course, I’ve got no money.”

Jack could front her whatever it cost, but that wasn’t the point.

“You’ve got no time, either. He said one o’clock, and it’s that now.” He took her arm and pulled her forward. “He’s not going to mind.”

“You said you met him only a few months ago, and you never even knew where he lived until now, so how can you say he won’t mind?”

Jack took a breath. He knew he’d have to be breaking the truth to her soon. Might as well be now.

“Because he’s from the First Age.”

She laughed. “So he’s got no fashion sense, right? If that’s supposed to make me feel better . . .” She looked at him, studying his expression. “Wait, you are kidding, right? You don’t expect me to . . . ?”

“Not kidding.”

“But the First Age was supposed to be twelve, fifteen thousand years ago.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So you’re telling me we’re going to visit an immortal.”

“Former immortal. He started aging about the time World War Two started.”

She stopped and stared at him. “You’re serious, aren’t you.”

He pointed to the backpack slung over his right shoulder. “Completely. I even brought the Compendium of Srem along.”

He watched her lips try to smile but they never quite made it.

“This isn’t fu

He took her arm and guided her toward the door. “I’d never be mean to you, Weezy. You’ve got to believe that.”

“Strangely enough, I do. But you’re telling—”

“That the Secret History is real and I’m taking you to a guy who’s lived it—the whole thing.”

She said nothing as they stepped up to the liveried doorman.

“Mister Veilleur?”

He smiled and touched the brim of his cap. “Who shall I say is calling?”

“Jack and Louise.”

He turned and held the door for them. “He’s expecting you. Top floor.”

“Which apartment?” Jack said.

The doorman smiled. “There’s only one.”

“Only one?” Weezy whispered as they approached the elevator. “He has the whole floor?”

“I imagine he’s made a few good investments over the last few thousand years.”

Once in the elevator and on their way up, Jack pulled the Compendium from the backpack. Its covers and spine were made of some sort of metal stamped with letters and symbols.

“Careful,” he said as he handed it to her. “It’s heavy.”

She took it with both hands and stared at the cover. Jack remembered the first time he’d seen it, and knew what she was experiencing: The cover at first would seem decorated with two lines of meaningless squiggles, then they’d blur and morph into English. Two words. Compendium ran across the upper half in large serif letters; below it, half size, was Srem.

She gazed a moment then looked up at him with an awed expression.

“Then it’s true . . . it’s true what they said about the text.”

Jack nodded. “Yeah. It changes into the reader’s native language.” He smiled. “And it’s got capitalizitosis—big into uppercasing first letters. The Infernals and the One and the Adversary and the Ally . . . you’ll see.”

She opened it to a random page. “Ohmygod, Jack. Ohmygod! You weren’t joking. This is it, really it!” Her eyes widened. “But then that must mean that Mister Veilleur is really . . .”

“From the First Age. Yeah.”

He loved the look on her face, a desperate desire to believe battling a fear to commit to that belief, because here was proof of everything she had studied and pieced together and intuited since her teens.

The elevator doors slid open then and the man himself stood there smiling.

“Welcome,” he said, extending his hand to her. “Louise Co

Weezy stood frozen, clutching the Compendium against her chest as she stared at him.

“Weez, you okay?” Jack said as the moment lengthened.

“Mister Foster?” She looked at Jack. “You didn’t say he was Mister Foster!”

What the hell was she talking about?

And then he saw it. How had he missed it? He’d met this man once in his boyhood, but he’d been known then as the reclusive Old Man Foster who owned a piece of the Pinelands near Jack’s hometown.

“Are you?” he said. “I had no idea.”

Veilleur nodded, his blue eyes twinkling. “It’s been decades, and I’ve aged since then.”

Still clutching the Compendium, Weezy managed to shake hands with him.

“Come in, come in,” he said. “I have someone else waiting to see you. It’s going to be like old home week, I fear.”

He was a big man, and his bulk had blocked their view of most of the rest of the apartment. But when he stepped aside they saw an elderly woman in a long black dress. She carried a cane and wore a black scarf around her neck. Beside her sat a three-legged dog.

Jack and Weezy spoke in unison.

“Mrs. Clevenger!”

Unlike Mr. Foster—Veilleur—she hadn’t aged a day. She and her dog had been something of a fixture around their hometown of Johnson when they were kids. She’d kept pretty much to herself and had been rumored by some to be a witch. By the time they finished high school she’d moved away.

But of course she wasn’t a witch, she was . . .

“The Lady!” Jack said. “That was you all along?”

She nodded.

I’m an idiot, he thought.

All these women with dogs traipsing in and out of his life and he never co

Weezy was staring at Mrs. C. “How can this be?” She turned to Jack. “You obviously know more about this than I do.”

“Not as much as you think.” He looked at the Lady. “I have a feeling today’s the day you’re going to bring me into the loop. Am I right?”

She nodded. “It is time, I think.”

Way past time as far as Jack was concerned.

11

Weezy’s mind whirled. Or maybe reeled was more like it.

They sat in the apartment’s great room, its huge windows overlooking Central Park’s Sheep Meadow. She didn’t know much about décor, but knew this place was way out of date. Guys from Interior Design would fight over the chance to do an extreme makeover. But she kind of liked it the way it was, with its dark paneling and strange curios and odd melange of mismatched paintings from all over and, perhaps, all time. A tray of sandwiches—homemade from the look of them—sat in the middle of a table set with crystal and china.

All very nice, except she was seated across from Mrs. Clevenger, a woman who had been elderly when Weezy was a kid, and should have passed on by now, but who looked not a day older than when she’d last seen her. Jack seemed to know her as someone else. He’d called her “the Lady.”

And Mrs. Clevenger was seated next to the man she’d recognized as Old Man Foster, who had aged, but was going by the name of Veilleur. She wondered how Jack hadn’t recognized him. Older, sure, but still a big man like Foster, and the blue eyes and high cheekbones were the same; even the beard was the same shape, though fully gray now.

Mr. Veilleur had a