Passenger (32 page)

Uncle Teddy.

Preacher.

Maybe he’d been left behind by the Rangers, the same ones who stopped the train. It didn’t make sense that they’d abandon an old man like this, but I couldn’t expect anything the Rangers did to be justly calculated when weighed against such counterbalances as right and wrong.

I could smell blood before I was close enough to see it.

Black-shafted arrows jutted like spiny quills from the horse’s neck and side. They vibrated like tuning forks. The animal was still breathing, and I’m sure that if it wasn’t for the wailing of the accordion, I would have heard the horse’s gurgling death-gasps.

The old man had one arrow completely through his right shoulder. The point of it, pasted over with clotted blood, stuck out level, aiming directly at me, a stained and accusing finger.

I watched him play.

He couldn’t last.

The harvesters would be here soon.

The music stopped, in mid-beat.

I thought he died, but the man said, “Are you here to kill me?”

“I’m not going to kill you.”

“Then why are you standing in back of me, like that?”

“I came from this way.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m not sure.”

He put his little accordion on his lap. It wheezed. Maybe it was the horse.

“You got a long walk.” He tried to move. He looked as stiff as a statue. “Come around this way, so I can see what you look like, before you kill me.”

I took one step, then stopped. “I told you I’m not here to kill you.”

Preacher coughed. The arrow twitched like the needle on a lie detector.

“No matter which direction you came from, you walked straight through death. And now, here you are, unscathed. Don’t tell me you’re not here to kill me, boy. You are just a boy, right? You sound like one.”

I walked around the horse’s head. I could see its eye, crazed, rolling with a slender crescent of white as it followed me.

I stood in front of the man, my legs apart. The water bottle dangled from my hooked fingers.

He said, “It’s you.”

I held out the bottle. I didn’t say anything.

Preacher raised his hand. I unscrewed the cap, helped him drink.

“I’ve seen you before,” he said.

“A couple times.”

The man swallowed. He grunted when he tried to hand the bottle back to me. “Thank you.”

There were three red dots, like planets, on the bottle. Preacher’s fingerprints in blood.

He kept a gun lying across his groin. It looked like a .45. I could see that the hammer had been pulled back; it was cocked.

“It’s been a good show you put on, boy. Heaven must be amused.”

I sat down with my legs folded. I made sure I was far enough away that he couldn’t reach me. But I wasn’t afraid of him trying to shoot me. Maybe I should have been.

“I’m not anyone you think.”

“You’re him,” he said. “It’s you. The Jumping Man.”

“You’re a crazy old man.”

I turned my head, looked around us.

I don’t know what I was expecting to see. Maybe a sign with an arrow, pointing
This way, Jack.
But I felt like there was something else, someone else, nearby.

Maybe I was supposed to follow the arrow sticking out of the old man’s back.

Preacher lifted a finger, crusted with blood and ash, pointed up. “What’s the sky look like now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well,” he said, “I’d think a boy would know what the sky looks like.”

“It looks like nothing.”

“And the ground?”

He was fucking with me.

“It looks like endless fields of grass and clover.”

Preacher grimaced, a smile. His teeth were black, and he hadn’t shaved in days. The white stubble of his beard looked like spines on a cactus.

“In another world, we could have a long talk, I think.”

“Do you want me to help pull that arrow out or something?”

He shook his head. “The horse is dead now.”

I looked at the horse’s side. The arrows had stopped twitching.

“I keep coming back to this place. And every time it’s different.”

“This is how the world has always been. It will continue to be this way after we’re gone.” The old man’s voice was a raspy croak. “But I do suspect a new broom sweeps clean.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Maybe.”

“I was in Pope Valley, California, in 1888.”

“You think I don’t recognize you?”

“I knew who you were, old man, the first time I saw you.”

The old man shut his mouth. He swallowed.

I said, “Do you know what this place is?”

“I only know what it isn’t, boy.”

“You could start with that, if you want.”

“It isn’t Pope Valley. It isn’t the tree you and your father were hung from.”

I spit down into the ash between my legs.

“You were with Anamore Fent’s team, weren’t you?” I said.

Preacher’s chin dropped. I thought he was looking at his legs, or he was falling asleep. I counted my breaths—five of them—before the old man answered.

“Captain Fent is dead.”

I didn’t see any of the others on the train. I might have remembered who they were, if they were the ones from Fent’s team. Probably.

Then Preacher said, “It’s just you and me here, boy.”

Brian Fields would be the only one left.

“There was one of them. A kid named Conner Kirk. Do you know what might have happened to him?”

I looked down. I drew a circle in the white salt. Another circle enclosing it.

Preacher said, “Kirk. I know him. The sergeant. Good-looking boy. He was quiet and mean. Always got what he wanted.”

“Do you know anything about him?”

Preacher started to laugh, but it came out as a cough. He spit blood. His eyes squinted at me, like he was sizing me up, waiting for me to say something. He shook his head. “We went looking for him. Fent made us go after him. He was her boy, you know. Favored, at least. What did you do to him?”

“I didn’t do nothing.”

“After that morning he and Pittman took you out of the station. Kirk took you out. He was going to shoot you. I imagine he failed at that, judging by our current engagement in this conversation. He never came back.”

“He is a friend of mine.”

“We did find Pittman, though. Well. Pieces of him.”

I tracked the tip of my finger in a line through the ash. I drew an arrow that pierced the center of my circles.

The old man said, “Bad magic. That’s what Pittman feared most. He brought it on himself. He was a dark man.”

“You believe that? About bringing things on?”

“What’s in the sky, boy?”

I put my hands flat on the ground, pushed myself up, and stood. My legs ached. If I didn’t start moving, I’d die here, right alongside the old man and his horse. I felt like I could sleep, but I had things that still needed to be done.

“Is that it? Are you going to kill me now, son?”

“No.”

“I believe I’d prefer it if you did.”

Preacher’s hand slid over his lap. He grasped the gun, but it seemed like it was too heavy for the old man to lift. He tried aiming it at me.

I felt something, a warm wind, like a breath, and with it came a sighing sound, a low whisper.

Shhhhhh …

As I turned away from the old man, I saw the ghost of a boy standing ten feet from me, floating up like steam from the burned ground.

Every time I’d seen Seth before, he looked small, frail, like a little kid. But here, this time, he was older. At first, he just stood there watching me with his arms flat to his body, palms pressed against his thighs as though posing for a portrait. He didn’t say anything to me.

I could clearly see the deep marks that coiled around his neck.

The old man coughed, his voice creaking. “Devils.”

When I looked at him, Preacher had the butt of the gun resting on his leg, and his trembling hand held the barrel pointed directly at me.

“I guess all things are not accomplished, old man.”

*   *   *

In the wind, smoke clears behind the preacher.

But the sky is still white, empty.

He is shaking so bad I can see the point of the arrow behind him as it nods up and down, up and down; a seesaw.

That’s how we play in Marbury.

There is a horizon now, formed by the rising light that establishes all the things in front of me: a crooked shell of a plane, a wing, a black centipede miles back that is a train filled with the dead.

This pathetic dying man, serving out his mission.

Against the wind, the gray shadow of Seth floats between us.

Me.

Seth.

The man with the gun.

There is a white explosion around the old man’s hand. It burns my eyes, but I can clearly see it through Seth’s back. A shell ejects, it tumbles in the air, a circle, an eye, opening, closing.

Forever.

The flash hangs around the muzzle of the gun, splashes outward, dances, curls.

Fireworks.

It is a clear yellow-white, brilliant, and I realize I have never seen a color this pure, this beautiful. Through Seth, the blast from Preacher’s gun resembles swaying tentacles, an anemone fanned by the tide.

The light gets bigger.

Until all I can see is just the light.

Nothing else.

I am staring at a sun.

It must be the center of the universe.

twenty-three

A ball of yellow light.

That was all.

I thought the old man shot me.

When my eyes focused, I realized I was lying on my side.

My mouth was open and I could feel the clay grit, taste the dirt that gathered in pasty clumps on the inside of my lips and stuck to my tongue.

But I could see only a blob of yellow light.

The old man must have shot me.

I moved my arm. I ran my hand over my face, felt down along my neck, my chest. I rubbed across my belly, the waist of my pants, my legs. I could feel the straps of a backpack looped over my shoulders.

Think, Jack.

I was wet, cold.

Maybe I pissed myself or something when the old man shot me.

But there was no blood.

I closed my mouth. It was awful. And I could smell river water.

I was staring into a flashlight.

I lay on my belly, in the dirt at the edge of the river. I could hear the rush of the water.

The Under.

I fumbled for the light. My hand didn’t work right. It took me a couple attempts before I could pick it up, pivot the beam away from my face.

I remembered.

My knife lay pressed to the ground beneath the back of my forearm.

Quinn Cahill.

Quinn found the glasses. I remembered how he was holding them in his hands. It was the last thing I saw.

Before Conner and Nickie.

I sat up in the dirt. I immediately vomited all over myself, down my chest, onto my lap. It was mostly just water. Hot, burning with bile. I remembered drinking the river water. I smelled like algae and puke.

I threw up again.

This was Marbury.

Jack’s fun back-and-forth games.

A seesaw, an arrow.

I am King.

“Quinn?”

I spit.

How long had I been lying here? It couldn’t have been long.

It could have been a lifetime.

I had to get up. I had to get back to Griffin and Ben.

“Hey! Quinn!”

My voice echoed in the black void of the Under.

I got to my feet. I was so dizzy, I had to concentrate on not falling. In one hand I held the light; in the other, my knife. I put them carefully in front of myself, ready to break my fall if I collapsed.

I swept the light around me, everywhere.

Quinn was lying on his back with his face turned away from me.

I had to kill the kid.

He was sick.

He was dangerous.

I was going to kill the kid.

Where do you stick the knife?

Where do you stick the knife so the kid will not fight and scream too much?

“Quinn?” I whispered his name.

The kid was not moving. I knew what it was like. Who knew what world or not-world he was in? Maybe he was whole. Maybe he was decent. Maybe he was lying at the side of a pool in another Glenbrook, talking shit with me and the boys.

I was going to kill the kid.

I moved.

I had to be sure.

“Quinn?”

Nothing.

My stomach twisted and retched. I unfastened Quinn’s pants, pulled them down past his knees so I could see the burning red crook of the mark that snaked through the kid’s pubic hair and curled across the top of his thigh.

He was a monster.

I was a monster, too.

He was not heavy. He did not struggle.

I was the king of all the monsters.

I dragged Quinn Cahill to the edge of the river, rolled him into the water, watched as the soft whiteness of his naked body fluttered toward consciousness and was sucked between the teeth of the churning spill gate.

I vomited again.

I pressed my face down into the dirt and cried.

*   *   *

At the edge of the river, I drank. It made me feel alive. I slid out of the backpack and lowered myself over the side. I had to get the smell of puke off my skin, out of my pants.

I had to wash my trespassing hands.

Better.

When I climbed out, sloshing, I picked up the pack and turned around, scanning the ground with the flashlight.

Quinn’s solitary boot sat in the dirt, about fifteen feet from where I stood. I walked over to it. When I kicked it, I uncovered the glasses.

Instantly, the dark cavern filled with moving light.

Look away, Jack.

A flash of that cop, Avery Scott, fanning out photographs on a table in a small room with no windows.

Look away.

I shut my eyes, turned my chin back into my shoulder, the way you’d snap your face away from a burning fire. I groped around blindly in the dirt until I had the glasses twisted up inside the sock in my backpack. I felt the wad with my hand, made sure the outer lens was flipped out of place. Then I zipped the pack shut. Hidden again.