Jack_ Secret Vengeance - F. Paul Wilson [52]
Mr. Drexler seemed to be enjoying this. Jack wished he could feel the same. He readied his big question, inspired by Kate.
“What if you refuse to be either?”
Mr. Drexler gave a full-fledged grin this time, showing teeth as white as his shirt.
“Surely you’re not thinking of autonomy! That’s pure fiction. Everything is determined.”
Jack refused to buy that.
“I don’t have to play. I can step off the chessboard and refuse to be a Mover or be Moved.”
“So you can. But free will is an illusion.” He leaned closer and lowered his voice. “I’ll let you in on a secret, Jack, a truth that a few people have suspected and even fewer have accepted: Even the Movers are being moved.”
He straightened and paused, as if to let that sink in.
“Should you manage to escape the board and onto the table—not at all an easy feat, I assure you—you need to realize that the table itself is being moved; and if you jump down to the floor, that the floor is being moved. Ultimately it all works back to the Prime Movers.”
“Prime Movers? What are they?”
“No one knows. No one will ever know. But they’re there. And we’re their property. No one moves the Primes. Sometimes you can have a say in which of those Primes moves you, but you are moved nonetheless. One way or another, we are all ultimately among the Moved.”
Jack stared at him. He’d never heard this view of the world before, and didn’t like it. He couldn’t, wouldn’t buy into it.
“How do you sleep at night, Mister Drexler?”
“Very well. Extremely well. Because, through the Septimus Order, I have become privy to what your girlfriend calls ‘the Secret History of the World.’”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” Jack said, but Mr. Drexler ignored him.
“I have seen how existence works, I know where the battle lines are drawn, and I am comfortable with the side with which I am aligned. So yes, I sleep well at night.” He leaned closer, his eyes bright. “But what of you? How will you sleep knowing what you now know?”
“Just fine. Because I don’t know anything more than before. This is all just talk, just opinion.”
“Ah, but opinion based on secret truths, truths to which you may become privy in the future. The easy way is through the Order. The other way is through experience, and that can be most painful.”
He gave a quick, two-finger salute, then turned and strolled away, swinging his cane as he walked.
Jack tried to concentrate on the weeds, but he kept picturing a chessboard, and himself as a pawn someone was moving around.
He hated the picture, and knew he’d be seeing it again as he tried to get off to sleep tonight.
3
With the Bagleys’ lawn done, Jack had some time to himself before he had to show up at USED. He scarfed down the leftover chicken, then grabbed the lock-pick set and bounded upstairs to his folks’ bedroom. After Jack’s birth back in 1969, the house had needed another bedroom. So his folks had finished off the attic, turning it into a master bedroom suite, and leaving a first-floor bedroom to each of the three kids.
He found his father’s metal lockbox in its usual place on the top shelf of his closet. He reached up and dragged it out, but this time a few papers it had been sitting on slid out with it. He took a quick glance at them—some kind of old bills—and set them on the bed. Then he sat cross-legged on the floor and opened the pick set. He was inspecting the selection of tension rods when he heard a car in the driveway.
Kate? She was supposed to be out with her friend.
He rose, padded to the window, and peeked out.
What? Oh, crap! His folks were home, and already halfway to the door!
He leaped to the lockbox and fumbled it back onto the shelf just as the back door slammed. He heard their voices as they came through the kitchen. They were hurrying, and now they were coming up the stairs!
Jack couldn’t get caught up here with a lock-picking kit. But he had nowhere to go except the bathroom, and that was out of the question. The only safe hiding