Passenger (8 page)

It hurt so bad that my nose ran with clear snot and my eyes watered. But I didn’t break my leg. I made it down.

The bundle of food and water I’d slung over my shoulder was awkward and painful to carry, but I could do nothing about it. I dreamed of stumbling across some little kid’s wagon to put it in; I fantasized about finding my truck, still full of gas, sliding in, my skin resting in the cool cradle of leather seats, turning on the stereo, tapping the wheel as I drove somewhere that wasn’t here.

I kept moving. And I remember how my shoulders tensed, hunched up toward my neck on either side when I heard all the shooting start, off behind me somewhere in the direction of Quinn’s palace.

So I justified in my mind that either the Rangers or the Hunters would have ended up with a trophy of Jack if I’d stayed behind. I was convinced that Quinn Cahill, the survivor like no other, would be fine and would slip back into his routine—maybe “following me,” maybe just lying about it, but always winning his game.

And after I’d made it past the schoolhouse and crossed the dead darkness of what had at one time been a highway, I thought,
Please, do not start raining on me now.

Two ghosts ran out in front of me, a boy and a girl, holding hands, barefoot, trailing wisps of luminescent fog like the unexplainable thing in the sky. They vanished in three short steps, and I kept thinking about how bothered Ben used to get over the ghosts in Marbury; how much he hated them.

Jack was going home.

*   *   *

I saw no other living thing that night as I passed through the ruins of the town, making my way toward the vacant miles of bare land that would have been vineyards at some other time.

This was the right place—I knew it—but there were no roads, no markers. Here, it was just drifts of soft ash that had taken over the undulating hills where Wynn and Stella grew grapes.

Occasionally, I’d see “things”—souvenirs of a past here: the lid from a galvanized-steel trash can, a mail delivery truck burned and tipped onto its side, half buried, twists of mangled wrought iron, and the strangest objects—bricks. There were bricks and cinderblocks scattered everywhere, randomly, patternless, as though anything that had been made of them just separated and flew in different directions.

They could have fallen from the sky, too.

But I wondered if maybe they were the remains of the walls that had surrounded Wynn’s property.

And, just when the morning broke, pale and ulcerous, I saw the house.

It wasn’t the house I noticed at first, but the huge oak tree in front of it—the one I used to park my truck under. But it wasn’t a tree anymore. It was nothing more than a hollow, black log that stuck straight up through the white ash, barely taller than I was and wide enough across that I could have laid down inside it.

There was the house.

It was my house, wasn’t it?

I think I stood against the husk of that oak tree for ten minutes just looking at it, trying to decide whether or not Jack had the balls to go inside.

It was coated in dust, the fine, sticky, annoying kind like you get from the inside of a vacuum cleaner bag. At one time Wynn and Stella’s house had been a kind of peach color—all the houses in Glenbrook seemed to be painted that color—but now it had turned the same dull, rotten-meat shade of nothing that covered everything, everywhere.

The windows had all been broken. None of them were boarded. I already had learned enough here to know it meant nobody was alive. Not ever, probably. Sections of the roof had sloughed away.

But it was the same house where Jack was born on the floor in his grandparents’ perfect kitchen.

You can’t shoot an arrow anywhere and not aim at the center of the universe.

The boards were gone from the steps to the porch. I had to launch myself over the frame of the staircase from the bottom. I nearly dropped the satchel of food I was carrying, and I could hear the crotch ripping out of the jeans I wore.

Just great,
I thought. I don’t have any clothes and now my only pair of pants is coming apart, too.

The house was closed up.

Like the old man’s house, all the hardware had been removed from the doors, and the leaded windows were broken out. When I pushed in against the front doors, the milky plumes of dust that rose up from the floor made it look like films you’d see of divers entering a stateroom in some long-sunken liner at the bottom of a cold ocean.

Welcome home, Jack.

I know it was stupid, but I almost choked when I stopped myself from calling my grandparents’ names.

“Hey!”

Maybe there was a breeze raking over the jagged fangs of glass that jabbed out from the window frames upstairs, but I could hear a faint, hushed sigh—like someone was sleeping—breathing, whispering through the house.

“Is anybody in here?”

Down the hallway on the left side of the stairway—that was Wynn’s room, where he would sit and watch television—I could see trails in the dust on the floor.

Things had been dragged.

“Hello?”

A curled brass light fixture, like a finger, a meat hook, dangled against the wall from its wires; the oak wainscoting had been pried away, the ragged splinters piled into a forbidding
X
where they crossed in front of the open doorway.

Shhhhhh …

Something was upstairs.

Maybe I was crazy.

Maybe I just needed sleep, but my heart shot up into my throat and I felt like I couldn’t breathe, like I didn’t want to, because I was afraid I’d make too much noise. And I cursed myself for having shouted my entry calls in the first place.

I was hot and cold at the same time, felt that feverish sickness of sweat on the back of my neck.

Quietly, I placed the bundled things I’d stolen from Quinn down on the floor, next to my feet.

I pushed the front doors shut behind me.

Shhhhhh …

I put my foot on the first stair.

How nice. Jack wants to go back to his old room.

Maybe he’ll find something there to play with.

The stairs compressed under my feet, moaning. I walked along the wall. I was afraid they’d collapse in a rotten heap below me.

I was afraid.

This is stupid
, I thought.
There’s nothing here.

It was my house.

But it wasn’t my house.

At the top of the stairs, I glanced down the hallway. There was the bathroom, two guest rooms. One of them we called “Conner’s room,” because he was the only guest who ever slept in it. The light came in through the open doors from gaping window frames that spilled grayness across the floor of dust around me.

More signs that things—someone, maybe—had been dragged in the hallway, leaving nervous train tracks cleared through the dust on the floor.

*   *   *

At the opposite end of the hall, behind me, is Jack’s room.

The door is shut.

A dim line, a crack of light.

I wait, listen.

A creak in the floor; I feel the vibration in the soles of my feet like I’m standing on an anthill. There is someone in my room; I am certain of it.

I think about the lens.

Jack always thinks about the lens.

I take it from my pocket and hold it just so it catches the little thing that squirms beneath the door.

Jack’s door.

And for a moment, there is something in the lens, and it is gone again.

We have come to the right place.

Aching, I wrestle the knife from its sheath, pass it over to my left hand.

Nobody’s allowed in my room when I’m not here.

It isn’t my room.

And here I am.

I push the door open and stand back.

Welcome home, Jack.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

*   *   *

“Seth?” I whispered.

Nothing.

I was afraid to step foot inside my own room.

It’s not your room.

The wind made a
hoosh
through the window.

I put one foot inside.

The door slammed open by itself. It crashed into the wall and made an angry dent in the boards. I didn’t touch it. I could hear the screws in the hinges ripping at the wood.

Hoosh.

I held the fragment of the Marbury lens in front of me, like it was some kind of shield, and I swung it across my path, trying to see if it would pick up anything there in my room.

“Seth?” My voice was barely a breath.

I went inside.

“Can you help me?”

The door slammed shut.

Outside, rain began to fall.

As ridiculous as it all was, my room was still my room.

There was my bed. The sheets were missing, and one of the legs from the frame had collapsed, so the corner sagged down into the inch-thick dust on the floor. And there was dried blood at the foot end of the mattress.

Jack’s blood.

From your ankle.

Remember that, Jack? How Freddie Horvath pinned your ankle to the bed frame using those sharp nylon bands?

The mirror had been shattered. There was one triangular piece jutting up from the bottom, and I could see my hand in it.

My hand was bleeding again, shaking, holding the lens.

Rain.

Sweat.

Lightning, and an explosion of thunder that nearly knocked me backwards.

I sat on the bed—my bed—and looked into the piece of mirror.

I put the lens back into my pocket; slid the knife into its sheath.

I watched the sheets of rain outside that waved their slate fibers like torn theatre scrims.

*   *   *

This is real.

In the mirror, I can only see my hands and knees. The gap between my legs. There would be something there, at least in Jack’s world. Between the mattress and foundation of the bed, right in that corner.

It is the spot where Jack hid the lenses. I know where they are.

The last time we’d seen Seth, as he vanished, blue lenses fell on the spot beneath his faint image. Conner knows about them, even if I’ve been hiding them from him and the others.

I watch the mirror. I can see my unbandaged hand slip into the crack.

Something drags on the floor, cutting through the dust.

A finger, maybe.

It makes a drawing of an arrow that points to me, points away in the mirror.

I find it, Jack’s stupid old sock, and, inside, there is something and it feels alive.

I can tell you, at that moment, when my hand found that wound-up sock hidden in my bed, I felt jangly and giddy—like the first time I touched Nickie’s bare skin—I didn’t know whether I was going to laugh or throw up, or whether my heart was going to explode.

I couldn’t catch my breath. I unwound the sock and slipped my fingers inside.

I felt something, but it was not the same lenses Jack had left there. For a moment, my mind flashed on the image of a harvester twisted up inside the sock, waiting for a meal, or maybe one of those black slugs.

Crash.

The lightning came again.

I pulled my hand out.

There were eyeglasses. But these things were like nothing I’d ever seen before. They were beautiful and terrifying to look at; kind of like Henry’s glasses were the first time I’d touched them when I sat alone at a table in The Prince of Wales, so long ago.

And these were different.

They were like goggles: loose, with a leather strap rather than stiff metal arms, and the eyepieces were cupped and vented. And each one of the lenses had been inlaid with dark blue glass the color of lapis, with round metal stems coming out from the top and bottom, like they were cooling tubes or pipes that carried some element into and out of the eyepiece.

They were made from the same pieces of glass, the lenses Seth had left for us in Marbury or, at least, they looked the same.

I guess we would never know for certain.

Attached to the left lens was a second, smaller, green monocle that was screwed into a double-action hinge system, so it could swivel up and down or pivot outward like a door.

I can’t lie about it. It was exciting, and I didn’t care if it killed me.

I needed it.

Maybe it was a way home.

My hands shook and my belly knotted.

And when I held the lenses up, there was nothing remarkable I saw through either side.

Nothing.

Just blue glass.

So I put them on. Then I flipped the outer lens into place and opened my eyes.

And Jack was gone.

*   *   *

I could tell you that I knew it was going to happen, and I would be lying.

But you would believe me.

Part Two

BAD MAGIC

six

How many crows are there?

They croak their crow-words and I can picture ink-black heads bobbing.

Cocking.

When it is hot and still, and you’re covered with the damp stickiness of insomnia, crows make a sound, a twisting grappling hook in your gut.

I am on the floor.

I feel every individual fiber-end of the rough carpet that comes halfway out from beneath my bed, pricking into the skin on my back. Acrylic nettles. And somehow, my feet, my legs, are resting above me on the mattress.

Sometimes, in summers, when I can’t sleep—this is how Jack doesn’t sleep: faceup, feet on the bed, irritated by things like crows and his bare skin on carpeting.

“Fuck.”

I swipe a palm across my swollen eyes, and I see that there is no cut, no bandage.

No Quinn Cahill.

No Marbury.

This is my room.

This is my room.

And then, for a moment, I am suddenly pissed off at Wynn and Stella because our house isn’t like Conner’s. I don’t have
my
bathroom attached to
my
bedroom. Why should I have to get up and stumble down the hall?

Because I need to puke again.

What time is it?

The thought almost makes me laugh as my stomach clenches in rhythm with the cawing of the crows.