The Marbury Lens (16 page)

We caught the bus to Blackpool outside Victoria Station before eight in the morning. Neither of us slept much after the way we both fucked up the night before. We’d emptied the refrigerator bar of everything that had the least bit of alcohol in it, but it didn’t help. I’m sure we both just lay there all night, wondering what the other saw, what he knew. We hardly spoke at all after Conner picked himself up from the floor in front of the toilet.

It would be a six-hour ride.

I called Nickie once the bus got out of the city. It was almost like I had to hear her voice just to prove that
this
was what was really happening, to know there was such a place called Blackpool, to be able to count on her meeting us there when our bus arrived in the afternoon.

I’d taken a picture of Conner on the bus with my cell phone and sent it to her with the text message:
this is a pic of conner. dont worry, he isnt naked for once in his life. its so rachel can see how ugly he is lol.
He leaned against the window, sleepy-eyed, wearing a black beanie that was pulled back at an angle on his head. His stringy, dishwater blond hair hung down over one eye, and he smiled a closemouthed grin that looked too much like he knew something. But it was a great picture of Conner because it really looked like him. The Conner from here.

Quit it, Jack.

You know you’re not going to leave Griffin and Ben by themselves.

How long do you think you’ll last before you have those goddamned glasses back in your hand?

How long till Conner asks where you’re hiding them?

Conner cleared his throat and shifted in his seat. His knee bumped mine.

“Oh. Sorry,” he said.

Conner would never say that to me.

Fuck this place.

I sighed. “Yeah. Whatever. I’m sorry, too, Con.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Are we just not gonna talk to each other anymore?”

A gray-haired woman sitting in front of us turned around and looked through the gap in the high seat-backs.

“Bullshit,” Conner whispered.

“Yeah. Just like
Gary
in the airport toilet.”

“You knew that guy’s name?”

“He fucking sat next to me in business class,” I said. “He tried hitting on me the whole time, invited me to come clubbing with him in London. Then the flight attendant felt sorry for me and upgraded me to first class after he tried to grab my nuts.”

“Dude, why are you such a fag magnet?” Conner laughed.

“You tell me.”

“So,” he said, “which one of us is going to talk about it first?”

I felt myself going tense. I looked between the seats in front of us. The woman up there seemed to be ignoring us, but I kept my voice low and leaned over to my friend’s side of the armrest. “You. Tell me about it.”

Conner looked around, had a strange and guilty look on his face. It was weird and scary for me. I mean, here was this guy—my best friend, who I’d grown up with—and we both knew every minute detail about one another’s lives. There were no secrets or embarrassed frailties between us. Conner Kirk wouldn’t even bat an eye about me walking in on him having sex with his girlfriend—and then ask me to join them like it was no big deal at all, like I was strolling by and caught him in a pickup game of basketball or something.

But in that moment on the bus to Blackpool, while he began forming the words he’d use to tell me what he saw on the other side of the Marbury lens, my best friend looked frightened, embarrassed, and unsure of himself.

And I’d never seen Conner Kirk that way in my life, before that day.

“I keep thinking I’m nuts or something,” he began. “Like it didn’t happen.”

“I know.”

“How many times have you done it?”

I wasn’t sure. I shrugged and shook my head.

Conner looked down at his knees. His fingers were twisted together, and he was gripping his hands so tightly that his nails turned white. “The longer I was there, I started remembering things about that place, and who I was. It was like filling in all these holes, like I knew this entire story that I never even saw before last night.”

“How long were you there?”

“Two days.”

“It wasn’t even five seconds in the bathroom, Con.”

“I don’t get it, Jack. I was there for two days.” He glanced out the window. “At first, it was like we were in a desert. It was night, but the sky wasn’t completely dark, just a whitish gray. No stars. It was like some kind of foggy ceiling overhead, the way the sky looked. We made a big fire.”

“Was I there?”

“You? No. You weren’t there. But there were people that I knew. I knew their names and everything, but I’d never seen them before in my life.” Conner released the grip on his hands and flattened his palms on his thighs. “It was like I said, like we were cavemen or something. Seemed like there were a hundred of us there, at least. A big wild party or something. Most of us didn’t hardly have anything on at all. The girls were all totally naked, and the guys were, like, running around wearing just cups and nothing else.”

He looked at me apologetically. “They were made out of scalps, Jack. I remembered that. Is that fucking crazy or what? Everyone was eating. We fucking killed a horse with a hammer and threw it on the fire to cook it. And we were eating a goddamned person, too, cooking him, pulling him apart. I ate it. Everyone did.”

I could see he was scared when he told me. “It isn’t here, Conner. It’s something else. Something like hell.”

“And we’re different,” Conner said. “Not really people. Our eyes are all messed up, solid black and white. Some of the guys have spots on their skin, and spikes growing out of their bodies. There’s some fucking disease that’s doing that to us, and everyone’s got it.”

Not everyone, Con.

“I remembered something about that,” I said.

“And everyone’s got these fiery designs from it, like tattoos or something, but they glow. I don’t know what else to call them.”

“Yours is right here.” I pointed to the spot on my body where I’d seen Conner’s mark. “Shaped kind of like this.”

I drew the outline.

“You saw me?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“You can’t remember?”

Conner just stared straight ahead. He shook his head.

“Where’s yours at?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m not going to lie, Jack,” Conner said. “But I keep checking myself for that mark. I keep looking to see if it’s there because that shit seemed so real.”

“I got shot by an arrow,” I said. “Right here.”

I lifted up my T-shirt and pointed with my finger to the place on my skin where the arrow had gone through.

I twisted around. “In here, and out here. I almost died. I can’t tell you how many times I keep looking at myself to see if that wound is there.”

He leaned over and looked at my side, like he was trying to see some trace that I may have missed.

Conner shifted in his seat, his hands fidgeting. “And then that night, after we ate, there was this completely insane orgy, Jack. Everyone was just, like, having sex with everyone all over the place. It was wild. It went on all night, until we all just passed out in the dirt and slept like that. And I remembered thinking how fucking cool it was to live like this, and how I never wanted to come back because being there was so wild and fun. But I thought about you, and I remembered about being in London, too, but being there was so intense, and I wanted to stay there, like that, and make it last forever.”

I remembered how Henry Hewitt asked what Marbury looked like to me. And I thought that for as long as Henry had owned the glasses, he’d probably had doubts about his own sanity, too. But I can’t say, even now, if hearing Conner’s description of Marbury made me feel any better about things, even if I was certain that we had both been in the same place, at the same time.

Conner rubbed his eyes. “It’s like there’s a war going on or something, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

“In the morning, everything was white,” Conner said. “Like being snow-blind, but it’s a desert, and it was so fucking hot there. We were all following a group of our soldiers who had taken off ahead of us, but we were way behind because most of us were walking, and we had pregnant girls and little kids with us, too. But we were following them up into the mountains, these black, jagged mountains. And I was, like, one of the guys in charge. I remember that. I was important. After a few hours, we came to this place where there were all these bodies that had been nailed up to posts, and they were upside down. Most of them didn’t have heads, or they’d been scalped, and the guys had their dicks and their balls cut out. And there were all these huge fucking black bugs eating the bodies. I could hear them chewing.”

“Harvesters,” I said.

Conner looked at me, his eyes wide. “Yeah. That’s what we called them. You seen that shit, too, Jack?”

“Same shit, Con.”

“We kept on going into the mountains. Just before the second night, we found the soldiers we’d been following. Every one of them had been killed, torn apart in some kind of attack. Forty-two of them, just massacred. There was blood and guts everywhere, and those bugs so thick on them we couldn’t hardly tell what was left of any of them. Their horses, too. It was the worst thing I think I’ve ever seen, only I’m not sure that I really saw it. Then, next thing I knew, I was in the bathroom with my head under the sink and you were standing there trying to talk to me. And it was, like, two fucking days, but the last thing I remember was being in bed, and how we kind of had a fight, and then…”

“That’s how it’s been for me, too,” I said. “Just like that.”

“What about you? What did you see?”

I didn’t know what to tell him.

Oh yeah, Con. We’re, like, trying to kill each other, dude. You bit me, tried to chew a hole into my chest. And, by the way, I was one of the guys who slaughtered your buddies on the mountain. Yeah, Con. Same shit as you.

Oh. And that disease you have? Bad news about that, Con.

Fun game, isn’t it?

So I lied. Again. How could I tell my only real friend the truth? “Same place. But there are only two other guys with me. Kids, basically. One’s twelve and one’s fourteen. Everyone else was killed.”

“I don’t want to see it again,” Conner said.

That’s what Jack said, too.

“You won’t.” I looked at his face. I knew he’d been telling me the truth—whatever that is. “And you don’t remember seeing me at all when you were there?”

Conner shook his head. “What’d you do with those glasses?”

“Nothing.”

“We should destroy them.”

I can’t.

I didn’t answer him.

“You want me to tell you something, Con?”

“What?”

“There are ghosts there, too. One of them’s been following me around. His name is Seth, and he’s just a kid. But he’s even been in our room at the hotel a couple times, so I know that place is real. And you heard him, too. I know it. He makes a kind of tapping noise on the floor when he comes.”

Conner swallowed. I watched his Adam’s apple jerk and relax. “Seems like I knew something about ghosts from there, but I can’t remember.”

“It’s hard to remember things sometimes,” I said. “But I know a lot about this boy.”

“Like what?”

“I’ll tell you something.”

SETH’S STORY [2]

Blake Mansfield found me sleeping in the ditch at the side of the road when I was seven years old. Well, we guessed I was seven. That May morning, he was hauling some calves and a pig he’d sold into Necker’s Mill when he noticed me there and thought I’d been killed, so he stopped.

I was so small, he told me, he didn’t even think I was a boy at all until he got down from the wagon and touched me. But for a pair of torn britches, I was naked and probably dirtier than the pig he was selling.

And I don’t remember at all where I came from or how I got there on the side of the road that morning. It was too long ago, and I was too little. Ma used to make jokes about it; and said I was a monkey who fell out of the tree after my tail got plucked off by an owl, but Pa—that’s what I came to call Mr. Mansfield—said I was too dirty to come from a tree, that I must have got dug up from the ground by a coyote, and it was only my luck, he said, that the coyote wouldn’t eat me on account of how bad I smelled.

No matter, because Pa just took me up in that wagon and drove me in to Necker’s Mill with him that day and introduced me as his son; and gave me the only name I ever knew, Seth.

So that was that.

I guess you could say that he saved my life, maybe, but I also know that I was cursed from that moment on, too. It doesn’t matter. It was all worth it, in the long run. There’s nothing that ever was better in my life, because I never loved anyone in this world before or after I fell in love with Blake’s daughter, Hannah.

She was a year older than me, and her brother, Davey, was eleven when they took me in. And neither one of them ever so much as questioned or complained one time about my right to be a part of the family. That’s just how the Mansfields were.

So whether I dropped out of a tree or got dug up from the mouth of hell itself, all I can remember of my life was that it started one perfectly blue day in spring, in the year 1878, on a farm in a place called Pope Valley, California.

The first thing Ma did when she saw me that day was hug me and kiss my dirty head like I was her own son who’d been away for some time. Then, with all of them standing by and asking questions, which I didn’t answer because it took me some months before I even started talking at all, she took me out to the well house, stripped me naked, and threw my tattered pants to the dirt, saying they smelled so bad she didn’t think fire would hold on to them. Then she gave me a bath in the coldest water I’d ever touched. Hannah and Davey laughed at that, but Ma scolded them that they’d be next in the tub if they didn’t act respectable and kind around their new brother.

That hushed them both up, but Ma left me there, sitting naked in a leaky steel basin that I could tell was more of a horse trough than a bathtub, and went off into the farmhouse to fetch some of Davey’s clothes for me to wear. But before she left me in their care, she warned Davey that if he teased me about anything and made me cry, she was fixing to give me the only britches he had, and he could get used to wearing a dress till she could make him some new ones.

That’s how she was, always teasing us and making us laugh and worry at the same time, because being as tall as he was, and growing a foot a week, according to Pa, Davey had plenty of clothes that he’d managed to grow his way out of.

“Don’t mind her, Seth,” Davey said. “She never tells us nothing what ain’t twisted around to keep us thinking and fretting.”

I sat there shivering, not understanding at all what he was talking about.

“Poor boy. He’s so cold, Davey,” Hannah said. And then she came right over to me and started rubbing my back with her hands, up and down, from right between my shoulder blades up my neck and into my hair. At first, I was terrified of her, but the touch of that girl’s hands on my bare skin soon made me feel so good I thought I’d never want to get out of that spot and put on clothes ever again.

At least, not until I saw the things Ma brought out of the house for me. Because after she dressed me from head to foot, and even with drawers and a pair of shoes that I promptly took off not more than five minutes later, I felt like I was a prince in a palace.

Pa rolled a cigarette and lit it while he judged my appearance.

“He looks like a regular Mansfield now,” he said.

“Seth Mansfield. I guess that’s a decent name,” Davey confirmed.

Hannah helped me roll one of the cuffs on my new shirt. “He don’t say nothing, Ma. Do you think he’s a Russian?”

Ma waved her hand at Hannah. “He’s just shy, I reckon. I’m sure he’s got plenty of thoughts going on inside that little head of his.”

Then she looked at Davey and said, “Why don’t you take Seth out to the river and see if he ain’t good at fishing, Davey?”

“Fishing or being the bait?” He laughed.

Then she gave me another kiss on the top of my head and a swat on my butt and shooed me along to follow the boy off. I glanced back at Hannah, and she kind of looked hurt and said, “Ma, I want to go, too.”

“Let the boys be, Hannah.”

Then Davey took off, running into the woods as fast as he could, and I was right behind, chasing him.

“How do you know all that stuff about him?”

“I don’t know. I just do. But the weird thing about it was Wynn told me how the Whitmores came from Pope Valley, too. So when we get back to California, I’m going to look up and see if there ever was a family living there in 1878 named Mansfield.”

I didn’t tell Conner about how Seth could disappear inside me, and I could feel it when he did, how that had helped me heal when I’d been hurt in Marbury. And I didn’t tell him that I was worried that Seth would be going away, too, and that I might not see him again. I knew that what he was doing for me was making him weaker, fainter, like he’d disappear.

“But I know a lot more stuff about him,” I said. “Sometimes, I think he doesn’t want me to tell it all. But sometimes, I feel like I have to.”