The Marbury Lens (8 page)

My hand jerked to my side, rubbed.

No stitches.

The glasses lay open on the pillow beside me; the bed drenched in my sweat.

I needed to throw up, struggled to get my legs off the bed and onto the floor. I stumbled, saw the notes I’d taped to the door.

What the fuck is happening to me?

Gagging, I made it to the toilet just in time.

When I finished, I washed my face with cold water and went back to the bed.

I looked at the clock.

12:37

Not even one minute had passed since I put the glasses on.

This couldn’t be real.

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

Okay, Jack, this is it. Get rid of those goddamned things.

Now.

I folded the glasses, put them back inside my sock, and stuffed the wad down into the bottom of my backpack. I needed time to think. I needed air. I opened the window and looked out at the lights passing below on the street.

Who was I fooling? There was no way I’d be able to give them up.

The panes of glass made smears of the lights over the park.

Smearing the light.

That had to be it, I thought. Maybe the glasses were some kind of filter that cut away everything we see here, that stripped off the surface, like opening one of those dolls, and showed what was going on in that other place.

Inside.

Marbury.

That had to be it.

The center of the universe.

You’re out of your fucking mind.

And I wanted to look through them again, but stopped myself before I got my hand back on them.

I had to stop it.

This is fucking crazy, Jack.

I rushed back to the toilet and vomited again. I kneeled on the floor, cold and shaking in my sweat-soaked clothes. Resting my forehead on my crossed arms, I spit into the clouded water as I hung my face in the bowl.

Something rolled across the floor behind me. I heard it, and it passed so close I could feel its vibration tickling my bare feet.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

I pushed myself up. There was nothing.

If I looked worse to Conner that night when I came back from Freddie Horvath’s than I did at that moment, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, wet, pale, stinking of puke, it would be hard to imagine. I was exhausted. I stared into my own eyes—I don’t know for how long—and I said, “Seth?”

Something slammed angrily against the wall in the bedroom.

I whispered, “Are you here?”

I stepped through the doorway.

Click. Click.

Every light in the room turned off. Then my backpack fell over below the open window and something rolled out of it, across the floor, and stopped in front of my feet.

A wad of paper, crumpled tightly.

I opened the paper. It was the note I’d taped to the door—the one with my name on it. But scrawled on the page below my name, in nervously penciled, childish capital letters, were the words
I AM SETH
.

I waited. Everything became so still and quiet.

I smoothed the paper flat and laid it on the nightstand. Then I crawled under the bedcovers, shivering with all my clothes on, and waited through the silence until, exhausted, I finally fell to sleep.

The day stretched, an endless succession of doubt upon doubt, until it neared the time when Nickie was supposed to call me. Somewhere during my morning run, I’d decided I needed to get help, even if I had no idea how to go about asking for it.

Hey, Nickie, do you know any good psychiatrists? Because, I just thought I’d let you know that Jack has completely lost his mind and could possibly be a danger to you.

Just so you know.

Freddie Horvath did something, and I’m never going to get away from it.

Quit it, Jack.

I tried to force myself to stay away from my hotel room, afraid that I didn’t have the backbone to keep my hands off those glasses. So I walked as far as I could, went to the Underground to buy tickets for the Express to Heathrow so I could meet Conner in the morning.

I wandered.

I tried to think about anything other than Marbury or Freddie Horvath, but I couldn’t do it for more than a few seconds at most.

Finally, I went back to the hotel to take a shower. It was early in the afternoon, and the phone began ringing as soon as I stepped under the water.

I ran to grab it, padding wet tracks along the way and dripping all over the desk where I’d picked up the receiver. I tried to sound like I wasn’t out of breath. I left the shower running. It sounded like rain.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Jack.”

It wasn’t Nickie.

“It’s me. Henry.”

I pulled the chair out and sat down. I looked at the water where it made twin puddles under my feet on the wood floor, dripping from my body.

Like being born.

“What?” I said.

“I was wondering. How are you getting on?” Henry said.

“Fucked.”

I think he chuckled.

“I have something of yours. I think I need to give it back,” I said.

“They wouldn’t serve me any purpose now. You know that. Or haven’t you been yet?”

“I’ve been there.” I listened to the water, looked over at the gray steam fogging out from the open bathroom door. “I’m not going back.”

“I can’t tell you how many times I swore the same thing, Jack. But you’ll have to.”

“Why did you call me?”

“I told you. To see how you were getting on. But I wanted to ask you something, Jack.”

“What?”

“Who’s left?”

“Ben and Griffin. Nobody else.”

“I’m sorry.” I heard him exhale. A sigh, maybe. Or he was smoking a cigarette. “Be good, Jack. Oh…and Jack, I just want to be sure of one thing. Tell me what it looks like there. Marbury.”

“A white desert.”

“Okay.”

“Henry?”

“Mmmm?”

“Is it real?”

“You know as much as I do, Jack. Of course it is. As real as anything. Be good. Maybe I’ll talk to you again. Here, I mean, of course.”

“Can’t you help me?”

“It’s why I told you not to look for me, Jack. There’s nothing I can do now. You know that. And I’m afraid there just aren’t very many others you could give them to at this point. I’ve tried finding Griffin and Ben, but I can’t do it. Be good. You know what to do. I’m confident of that.”

Then he hung up.

I walked to the bathroom and climbed back into the shower, under the warm water.

Nickie met me in the lobby. She’d brought a basket of things and we spread out a blanket where we had tea on the grass in the park. It was a perfect day.

And as much as I’d tried, I couldn’t overcome my awkwardness with her. So after my first series of stumbling attempts at conversation—asking her about church, how she’d slept after our late dinner—she knew something was bothering me.

“Are you all right, Jack?”

I lay back on the blanket and looked up at the blueness of the sky, wondering if it really was blue.

“I like you, Nickie.”

She touched my shoulder. It felt so nice, like nothing I’d ever felt before. “I like you, too. I mean, for an American and all.” She laughed. “And you’re mysterious. And clever, I think.”

I sighed. “Really bad things have happened to me.”

She leaned over me, inches from my face. Her hair fell, and shaded my eyes.

“What sorts of things?”

“Someone did something. Terrible. I don’t know if I can tell you yet. But I feel like I need to say something. I think there’s something wrong with me because of it, and I don’t want it to affect you.” I looked away from her, watched her hair. I wished it could cover me entirely. “I hope you can be patient with me.”

“I can be patient, Jack,” she said, “to a point, that is.”

“I’m sorry.”

She put her hand on mine and turned so she sat facing out onto the small lake.

“When you can tell me, I’ll listen.”

“Okay.”

She tried to change the subject. I sensed she felt bad for me, maybe sorry.

“You must be excited to be seeing your friend tomorrow.”

I thought about it. I felt so guilty for what we’d done, but now I didn’t really know what I would tell Conner about Henry and those glasses. If I’d tell him anything at all.

I said, “Yes.”

“You know,” she said, “I’m going to Blackpool on holiday tomorrow with Rachel. I think I shall desperately miss you, Jack, until I come back to London next weekend.”

“Oh, great,” I said. “Now Conner will probably think I just made the whole thing up about meeting you.”

“If you get lonely, you and he might come up to Blackpool. It’s quite lovely. We can introduce him to Rachel.”

“Not if you want to stay friends with her.”

She laughed again. It sounded like a bird singing.

I sat up so our shoulders touched, and I wasn’t scared anymore. There was no reason to be. Not after what I’d seen. So I decided to say it.

“Nickie, I’ve never kissed a girl in my entire life. Do you think there’s something wrong with me?”

And she said, “I don’t know. Let’s see.”

And in that moment, I forgot about everything. It was like nowhere else existed except the space between Nickie and me.

Nickie said, “No. There’s nothing wrong.”

I didn’t want to say good-bye to her that evening.

We kissed again before she passed through the gate to the Underground. And we’d stopped an older couple coming in, handed them my camera, and asked if they’d take a picture of us together. I wanted to ride with her, but she told me to stay; and said if I really couldn’t stand it in London without her, then I should give her a call and catch a train north for the coast.

I wished I could be more like Conner, and immodestly persuade her to come to my bed with me, even if the reason I wanted her with me was that the thought of going back to the room all by myself terrified me.

Because I knew what I would do.

I didn’t eat dinner, didn’t want to throw up again.

As soon as I’d gotten inside my room, I began the routine: taped notes to the door. Conner is coming. Six fifteen. I left the train tickets on the desk next to the phone. I rushed, my hands shook, like I was a junkie scrambling for another dirty fix.

And I was pissed off at myself, too. I took the glasses out from where I’d hidden them, then I picked up my pack and hurled it, crashing against the door.

“Fuck!” I screamed. “Fuck this,
Jack
!”

I couldn’t stop it, even if I wanted to.

I kicked my clothes across the floor where they’d spilled out.

There were zip ties at the bottom of the pack. I remembered putting them there. The ones from Freddie’s car.

“Fuck yourself, Jack!”

Shaking in my rage, I kicked the pack.

“Fuck you, Freddie!”

Then I tore my clothes off and bound my ankle tightly to the bottom rail of the bed frame.

It hurt.

I put the glasses on.

As far as we knew, we could have been the only living humans in the world. Who was there to argue differently?

On the morning of the second day, before we rode across the parched and salty flat of the desert, we drank our own piss that we distilled in the heat using a sheet of plastic and Griffin’s empty water bottle, just to keep ourselves alive.

If we didn’t find water, we knew it would be our last day.

The horses were failing, too.

My side oozed snot-colored pus that ran down my skin and glued the waist of my pants against my hip. We cut a hole in one of our blankets, and I wore it over my bare chest like a poncho to slow down my dehydration, but I don’t think it worked.

We stopped talking to each other.

Griffin and Ben followed. I pointed our horses in the direction of the black spires of mountain peaks north of us, and I promised them there’d be water in the mountains if we could make it. So they believed me, and I wondered who among us would be the first to drop.

I hadn’t seen Seth since we left the cave, but I could feel what he was doing for me, and I knew everything about him—how he was a foundling, and he’d killed a man. And I believed I knew why he’d been waiting for me, too. One day, I’d tell Seth’s story to the other boys, just so they’d know he wasn’t a bad kid.

Just unlucky.

Like me.

When we left on the first day, I looked across the flat of the desert and could see a shining black river spilling toward us like a flood. It was the harvesters, seeking out the cave where we’d been hiding; and behind the quivering insect sea rose the updrifts of dust from the mounted riders who were hunting us.

The Followers. Devils, we called them. Hunters. What else could they be? It would always be this way, and now there were almost none of us left. That’s why we rode, looking for someone. Anyone.

When we left with Henry, trying to find anyone else, there were twenty of us.

The boys didn’t remember anything other than this life—the war, and I wondered if my own memories were from here or some other place. But being in Marbury was in some ways like being imprisoned by Freddie Horvath: I didn’t have the time or energy to worry about what was real. It made me wonder if anything was: Marbury, London, Conner, Nickie.

Griffin leaned forward on his horse, arms grabbing the animal’s neck. Every one of the horses was bareback, guided only by crude rope halters. It was agony to ride them like this.

“Are you okay?” I asked. I moved my horse up beside him, close enough that I could touch him.

“No.” His voice was a constricted rasp.

Ben rode in front. He stopped his horse and looked back at us.

“Do you have any idea what that is, Jack?”

He pointed forward, and I followed his arm.

“I don’t know.”

We saw what looked like a wall of black boxes stretched across the salt ahead of us, maybe a mile distant.

“Do we keep heading for it?” Ben asked.

I looked at Griffin.

He was going to be the first of us to die, I thought.

I said, “Yeah.”

“What the fuck is that?” Ben said.

Griffin lifted his head. His eyes were black gashes.

I knew what it was. Remembered.

Stretching across our path ahead, buried in salt up to the bottoms of its doors, was a passenger train: seven cars and a locomotive. It looked like some kind of perfectly placed decoration that had been dropped there in the middle of nowhere, for there were no tracks visible in either direction.

I nudged my horse forward. He twitched and shook his head. I thought he could smell water.

“It’s a train,” I said. “Come on.”

“Is it good?” Griffin said. He’d gone back to resting his head against the horse’s neck. “Is it a good thing, Jack?”

“It’s good,” I said. “I promise.”

We led the horses down one side of the train, around the locomotive, and behind it, where the dry wind was blocked by the height of the cars. Even on horseback, the windows were too high to see inside.

I got down first, then Ben and I helped Griffin from his horse.

I pulled my pants out from where they’d stuck to my hip.

Ben said, “Is that okay?”

“I’m holding up.”

I unsheathed my knife.

Ben had a spear he’d made from sharpened rebar. That’s all we had; all we ever had. It’s why we decided to ride along with Henry Hewitt to the settlement in the first place, thinking we’d find something better than we’d been left with.

Barefoot, Griffin Goodrich didn’t have anything. Just his hands and his meanness, Ben said of him. The younger boy had never known anything but the war, couldn’t remember his parents. It was only riding and running, fighting and watching people die since Ben had begged Henry Hewitt to take them along with his riders. They’d both have been food for the Hunters years before if Henry didn’t tell them yes.

Most of the time Griffin refused wearing clothes at all, saying there was no use for them that he could see. I took my poncho off and threw it over my horse’s back. Then I put my hand on Griffin’s shoulder and said, “We’re going to find a way inside this thing. But we have to be careful. And we have to stay together. So you gotta try, okay, Griff? I’ll find you some water.”

“Okay.”

Ben said, “Jack, if we open this thing up and there’s something dead in there. Well. You know.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “They’re following us, anyway.”

“Maybe,” Ben argued.

The boys followed me to the back of the last car. There was a rectangular sliding door with a window so people could stand there and watch what they were leaving behind, I thought.

And the door was surrounded by a thick black gasket, rubber that had gone scaly and gray. I stuck the blade of my knife into the gasket, testing its resistance.

Then I pushed it all the way through and levered the door until it slid open enough for Ben and me to wedge our fingers through the gap so we could push.

It was easy.

We went inside, and then I closed the door behind us.