The Marbury Lens (22 page)

“Yeah,” he answered. He looked at me, I could see him at the edge of my vision, but I kept my eyes fixed on my hand and the stained coffee cup vibrating on the table beside it. Conner cleared his throat. “The train to Leeds is sitting there. We can get on it now.”

We stood up to leave, and Conner pulled my shoulder back so I would look at him. “Come on, Jack,” his voice was low, like he didn’t really want Nickie to hear what he was going to tell me. She caught on, and took a few steps away from us.

“I’m really sorry,” he said. “Especially about hurting you. Please tell me that we’re still friends.”

He held his hand out to me.

“Yeah,” I said.

I took his hand, but I felt dead.

And I felt even worse when I had to say good-bye to Nickie in the Tube station at King’s Cross. She promised to meet us for lunch on Monday. Then she headed off to Hampstead, while Conner and I took a very quiet and lonely ride to Great Portland Street.

It was late when we got back into our hotel room, but there were nearly two hours to go before I’d have to leave to meet Henry.

Conner threw his pack down on the floor. I kicked off my shoes and sat on the bed.

“It seems like we’ve been gone a long time,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“You want to get something to eat?”

“I’m tired, Con.”

He tried to joke, “After last night, I bet you are.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Well, you want a beer, then?”

I shrugged. “Okay. Sure.”

Conner brought two bottles over from the refrigerator and handed one to me. He took off his shoes, sat on the bed, and leaned his shoulders against the headboard.

“Are we ever going to be friends again, or what?”

I sighed, a long exhaled breath. “Conner, we’re still friends. I just feel sick about this. It’s, like, hurting me. I can’t explain it. Like I’m lost, and I don’t know whether I’m really here or there.”

“That’s why it’s a good thing I got rid of them, Jack. Listen to me. You are really here.”

I looked at the beer in my hand. When I swallowed some, it felt like there were needles inside it.

Something’s wrong with you, Jack.

“Don’t you think that other place really exists?”

“No. You need to forget about it.”

“But there’s something I still needed to do. You shouldn’t have fucking done that, Con. Fuck!”

Jack doesn’t cry.

“I said I was sorry.”

“I’ll get over it. I just feel shitty. Weird.” I emptied my beer. “I’ll get over it. I got no choice. What else can I do, anyway? I’m going to sleep.”

I got into bed and Conner turned out the lights.

Jack watched the clock.

Conner must have been awake the whole time, too, because half an hour later, when I got out of bed and started getting dressed, he asked, “What are you doing?”

“Nothing. I need to go outside for a minute.”

“You want me to come?”

“No.”

And as I was on my way out the door, Conner said, “When are you going to give me a fucking break, Jack?”

“I lost the fucking glasses.”

I said it as soon as I sat down. He was holding a beer to his mouth and had another full pint waiting on the table for me. He jerked like he’d been punched when he heard me say it.

Henry took a drink. “How?”

“My friend, Conner. He threw them into the sea.” I pushed my untouched beer across to him. “I don’t want this, Henry. I feel sick. I feel really bad.”

Henry shook his head.

“Your friend didn’t look through them, then?”

“He did. But I don’t think he really knows what’s going on. I don’t think he really understood about, you know, us. And them. At least, maybe not until this morning; but that’s when he got rid of them.”

“But he threw them away? You saw him do that?”

“Yes.”

“Are you certain?”

I didn’t say anything.

Henry shrugged. “I never thought anyone could do that once you’ve been there. He must be very strong.”

“Is there anything I can do to get back there?”

“I wouldn’t know. No.”

My forearms lay flat on the table. I looked at them. I was shaking so bad, just like I was getting shocked again.

Fuck you, Jack.

“It feels like I left part of me there, like there’s something that’s been ripped out of my guts. I’m scared because it’s getting worse. The hole. I feel like it’s really going to kill me.”

“That’s what it’s like.”

“I need to go back.”

“I can’t help you, Jack. I don’t know what to do.”

“Why did you do this to me?” I slapped the table, sounded pathetic. “They said I was your best friend.”

Freddie Horvath did something to my brain and I need to get help.

“Here,” he said, and he pushed my beer back across the table toward me. “You should have some of this.”

I picked up the glass and drank. I could feel the cool slick of the liquid descending into my body. Then it felt like I’d swallowed shards of glass, like I was being ripped apart from the inside.

Fun game.

Henry could see the pain I was in. “I’m very sorry, Jack.”

“Everyone’s saying that to me today. Fuck this place.”

“Will you tell me about Marbury now? Will you tell me what’s happened?”

So I talked about everything I saw there since the first time I fell into Marbury: the boys, how Griffin saved me, Seth, the train, the crucified people, the slaughter on the mountain pass, finding the river in the canyon on the other side. Henry listened, and quietly drank three pints of beer while I told him the story. After that first taste from my glass, I couldn’t take another sip, kept feeling weaker and sicker. And telling him what happened made me want to go back there even more.

I’ve tried to reason it out in my mind countless times, but I never understood what it was, or what combination of things there were, that pulled so hard on me and made me want to go back to that hell. Henry understood, though. But Henry was off the hook, too, because he couldn’t go back. And the more I talked to him about it, the more strongly I became convinced that Jack really was dying here.

I was going to die.

I didn’t say anything to him about seeing Freddie Horvath in Marbury, or how Nickie had looked through the glasses and seen nothing at all. I didn’t want to tell Henry the entire life story of Pathetic Jack. It made me feel somehow guilty, even betrayed, too, that he was supposed to have been my best friend in Marbury, but here, on this side of the lens, I didn’t like him very much at all.

Why did I bother coming to see him? I knew he wasn’t going to be able to help me, but I was desperate. And hopeless.

Henry must have seen that I was fading. Maybe I was only tired, but I had my head down and my eyes were shut. It hurt. He tapped my hand. “You saw the same ghost from Marbury, and he was here? With you?”

“I saw him once. He told me he was scared. But he’s been around here a lot of times. Mostly, he comes before I’m about to go back, he makes noises; and one time he moved stuff around in my room.”

We were the only ones left in The Prince of Wales. The bartender began putting things away, signaling that he wanted to shut down.

Henry said, “There’s a reason for it all, you know? I was there long enough to see that. And every time one of them helps you, a ghost, they get a little weaker, a little harder to see. Have you noticed that at all? But there’s a reason for it.”

I did notice it about Seth, and thought, maybe that was why he wasn’t coming around anymore.

“There’s no reasons for any of this shit. Not here, not there.”

“I believe there are reasons, Jack,” Henry said. “But what do I know?” Then he waved at the bartender, “Can I just have one more, then, please?”

The bartender shrugged, began drawing a pint.

“You know enough to have fucked up my life,” I said.

“I didn’t mean to. There was nothing else I could do, Jack.” Henry sighed. “Look. I didn’t have a choice. There were almost none of us left. You know that, a handful of people and hundreds of times more devils in that entire world. And you weren’t the only one I cared about and trusted. You were quite simply the only one I could find here. When I got captured at the settlement, we had come all that way across the desert. We were trying to find more people—anyone. But everywhere we went, it was only them, devils, chasing us. I knew what they would do to me when they caught me, and then I saw you at Heathrow. You can’t imagine how that made me feel, how it filled me with hope.”

“Hope for what?”

“Balance, maybe. I don’t know,” Henry said. “All things balance out, don’t they? They have to. But Marbury is out of balance. We have to save it, Jack, save those boys. There are things you can take with you, from here to there. There are things about you that can make a difference. I believe that. We have to save what is good.”

“Or else what?”

“Everything tilts first, then everything falls.”

“You know what I believe? I believe you’re full of shit.”

He looked at me, no reaction on his face. “To be honest, it would be a good thing if you were right. But I’ve spent a good part of my life there. You’ll see.”

I put my face in my hands, my elbows resting on the table. “I’ve never felt this bad in my life. Do you think losing the glasses is going to kill me?”

“Mind the gap,” he said.

“What?” I was dizzy, didn’t understand.

“If you do make it back, say that to Ben and Griffin. Mind the gap.”

“Why?”

“I told them you would.”

The gap. I had thought the gap between Marbury and here was disappearing. Now the gap was the only thing that existed, and I was stuck in it.

I winced, a knife in my guts. “When did you get the glasses?”

Henry smiled. “I was as old as you are. Ten years ago, when I was just a boy. Things were vastly different there at that time. It was just another place, simple and pleasant.”

He leaned forward, trying to get me to look at his face. “I killed a man, Jack.”

“What do you mean?” I bit my lip. Maybe he did know about me. Maybe he was some kind of fucked-up cop, like Conner said he was.

“I was a kid. I was stupid. It was an accident, but I still couldn’t get over it. And nobody ever knew. No one ever found out,” Henry said.

“What happened?”

Henry shrugged and shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me,” I said.

“It was just that he…we’d had a fight. I didn’t even know him before that night.”

“What do you know about me?”

He shrugged, shook his head.

“I was sick about it,” he said. “Perhaps a week passed. I remember it was raining. I had been on my way to school, and I’d missed the coach that all my friends had taken. While I waited, there was a woman who’d come up. She wore these glasses, and I was quite transfixed by them. She smiled and took them away from her eyes, and said, ‘You’re Henry Hewitt. You’re there, too.’ Of course, I had no idea what she was talking about, but she placed them in my hands and I stared and stared at them. I looked up, and she was gone. Just like that. At first, it was easy: going back and forth. But then the war, the disease, and everything came to a terrible stop there. What do I know about you? I’ve known you since you were a very young child. We were among the few who’d survived initially. And I knew who your mother and father were, while they were alive.”

“Fuck them.”

He shrugged. “You’ve seen how some people are different on one side. You’re not, I think. That’s why I had to get my glasses into your hands before I couldn’t go back any longer.”

“Even if what you say is true, it doesn’t matter now, anyway,” I said. “There’s nothing I can do. Griffin, Ben, me, we’re all probably dead already.”

“If you were, you wouldn’t be sick like you are right now.”

“Did you get sick, too?”

Henry finished his beer. “Every time I came back. Except for the last time.”

Darkness.

Conner was asleep when I got back.

I hurt so bad I couldn’t stand up straight, couldn’t take a full breath.

I got out of my clothes.

In the red glow of the nightstand clock, I saw that he’d left a note for me on my pillow.

Folded, on the top it said J
ACK
.

I couldn’t read it. I pushed it under the pillow and got into bed, curled on my side.

I knew I was dying.

Maybe it wasn’t real. Maybe it was all just the shit Freddie Horvath shot into my veins.

Freddie Horvath did something.

Jack doesn’t cry.

But fuck you anyway, Jack.

You deserve this.

I kept my hand on Conner’s note, like it was holding me there, somehow making the pain a little more tolerable. I fucked up, I knew it. Everything was Jack’s fault. Everything—from the moment I walked out of that party at Conner’s to how I ended up in Freddie Horvath’s house. And now I was a prisoner again—half in one world and half in another. Stuck in the gap. I hoped Conner would be okay. He didn’t know what he was doing.

My chest heaved, but I don’t cry.

Roll.

I knew I’d heard it, so faint.

Roll.

Longer now. Where?

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Conner stirred.

Tap.

Under the bed.

Tap.

Then the vibrating, winding sound that a spinning coin makes when it comes to rest.

Tap.

My muscles cramped, locked tight. I managed to get my knees over the side of the bed, and lowered myself onto the floor. Everything was soaked with my sweat. It smelled like the sea.

And when I looked beneath the bed, I saw the familiar white light shining upward onto the underside of the mattress through the oval of a single lens.

It looked like the eye of God.

And it was the same lens that had come out of the frames when Conner and I fought at Blackpool beach that morning.

I gasped, wondered if Jack was hallucinating.

My sweating hand snaked along the floor, fingers clutching the familiar glassy curve.

“Seth.”

The Marbury Lens.

My hand closed around the lens, smothering the light, hiding the shapes I saw moving in that small window.

Think, Jack.

I grab one of my discarded socks from the floor at the bedside.

I need to be sure Conner doesn’t find it again.

In the bed, he straightens his legs, turns onto his side.

Don’t wake up, Con.

I crawl into the bathroom, whisper, “Seth. Thank you.”

“Seth.”

“Seth. Help me.”