The Marbury Lens (23 page)

They got Griffin Goodrich.

It was my fault.

When we went swimming, we’d left every one of our guns lying on top of the saddlebags, back by the cottonwood trees. It was stupid, and it was my fault. The boys trusted me to make the right decisions, to keep them safe, and I failed.

When I saw the Hunters coming toward us, I grabbed the knife I’d been using to cut the fish.

Both of them carried clubs that had been fashioned into pickaxes by lashing sharpened human femurs to the heavy ends, stained black with dried blood.

Conner and Freddie Horvath.

At first, they quietly moved through the cover of the trees, slowly, stalking, one of them pointing off at an angle to determine a method for reducing the odds that we’d be able to make an effective escape.

Freddie was gruesomely deformed, but I had no doubt it was him that I saw. The spots along his sides were glossy black. They mottled his skin all the way down to the outside of his knees. His hands were twisted claws with obsidian hooks for nails; and gray horns of bone jutted unevenly out from the flesh of his chin, curving outward from his lower jaw. The hair of the scalp he wore to cover his groin had been braided, so it looked like bouncing spider legs that danced from his crotch as he walked. The brand he showed was a fiery diagonal slash that started on his left shoulder and ended on the inside of his right thigh, like it was cutting him in half.

But I watched Conner, my eyes focused on that small fish-shaped cross above his groin; and I wondered if there was any part of him that could make a connection between this world, where we were enemies, and any other that we were part of.

When the Hunters separated, and Freddie Horvath began circling around behind the trees, Griffin made a run for our guns.

Conner sprang into the chase.

“Jack!” Griffin was terrified, unable to match Conner’s speed.

And Freddie was coming toward me and Ben from the opposite side.

I froze. When I realized I was staring directly at Freddie Horvath, everything that had happened to me in that other place flooded my thinking and made me feel weak, captive.

Quit it, Jack.

I held the knife up in front of me.

I screamed, “Conner! Conner Kirk!” And just for a second, maybe, Conner slowed his stride and turned his face so he could look at me. Griffin cut to his right, away from our belongings, deeper into the cover of trees, but Conner was immediately on the boy’s heels again, reaching out, so close he could almost grab Griffin by the hair.

Freddie hesitated, eyeing me and Ben cautiously from a distance of twenty feet.

“Ben, go for the guns,” I whispered.

“Jack!” Griffin screamed from somewhere behind us.

“He got him, Jack! That sonofabitch got Griffin!”

Freddie started coming toward us, deliberately but carefully through the brush. I could hear twigs and branches snapping against his skin as he moved, holding that axe over his head. I glanced back and saw Ben running across the clearing by the riverbank to where we’d left our belongings, could see, through the trees beyond him, Conner sprinting out, deeper into the woods, carrying the scrawny boy, who was slumped helplessly over one shoulder. Griffin’s arms punched and clawed, but Conner just kept running, unfazed. The dog chased after them, helplessly barking his high-pitched yelps.

Griffin kept screaming for me, wailing, “Jack!”

Frantic, I swung around to face Freddie, but he was gone.

Then all I could hear were Griffin’s indistinguishable cries getting farther away from us. And soon, they became incoherent garbles, as though his mouth had been stuffed with something, or they were strangling the boy. Then there was no more sound at all, not even the yapping of the dog.

Silence.

“Fuck!” I kicked the ground and slashed at the air futilely with my knife blade.

Ben was behind me, sitting on his feet in the dirt next to our bags and holding a gun across his knee, pointing the barrel at the ground. His other hand masked his eyes. I could tell by the way his back pumped silent coughing motions that Ben was crying.

I walked over and pulled our wet clothes down from the willow tree, bundled Ben’s into a ball, and threw them at him.

“Straighten up, Ben.”

“Fuck this place.”

“Get your clothes on and let’s get moving. We’re going to get Griffin back,” I said. “We can catch them, even if they got horses, but you need to move. They aren’t going to kill the kid yet.”

Ben knew that, too.

They’d keep the boy until they got tired of messing with him, until he wore out and started looking more dead than alive.

Then they’d eat him.

The devils were on horseback, had tracked us over the mountains. I cursed myself that I’d made it easier for them to find us when I decided to double back after discovering that nun who killed herself and the old man; just so I could somehow protect Griffin from knowing what had happened.

And now Griffin was gone.

I tried not to think about what they’d do to him, or to guess how long they’d keep him alive.

They appeared to be making no effort to conceal the path they were following. They wanted us to chase after them.

Ben rode alongside me, trailing Griffin’s horse on a line.

“I’m going to ask you something, Ben,” I said.

“Okay.”

“They can’t be too far ahead. Probably not even an hour. When we catch up to them, no matter what’s happened, I’m going to ask you to not kill that young one that carried off Griffin.”

“No matter what?” Ben asked, his voice thick with obvious disbelief.

“Yeah.”

“I can’t promise that, Jack.”

I didn’t say anything.

So Ben said, “You’re going to have to tell me why you want me to listen to you on that promise, before I can say yes to it first. ’Cause it’s not like we’re talking about some lunatic old lost person hiding up in the mountains. We’re talking about Griffin now. And I think that no matter what, I am going to kill that one. Unless you do it first.”

I nudged my horse ahead. I didn’t want to look at Ben, but he was aware of what I was doing, so forced the issue by staying even with me.

“Are you going to tell me how you knew that one’s name, or are you going to lie to me, too, ’cause you think I’m too much of a kid to tell the truth to?”

“Goddamnit, Ben.”

“Well?”

“Mind the gap.” I watched to see Ben’s reaction, and immediately recognized that what I’d said meant something important to him.

“How did you know that?”

There is no gap.

“Henry told me to say that to you and Griffin.”

“Is he okay?” Ben asked.

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand this shit. He told us that if you ever said ‘mind the gap’ that we’d know he was okay, and we’d know that we had to trust you, no matter how crazy you were acting.”

“Okay.”

Ben squinted, kept his eyes trained ahead of us, scanning. We had to be close now. I could almost feel their presence.

“So, that one who carried off Griffin, you know him, too, from that other place? Where Henry is?”

“Yeah.”

“Who is he to you?” Ben asked.

“He’s my best friend.”

Ben glanced at me. “I have to trust you, like Henry said. But I want you to know that here is here, and if it means a chance to save Griffin’s life, I can’t promise what I’ll do.”

“I guess that’s fair.”

“How do you get there, Jack?”

I scratched my head. “I don’t know. I get pulled. Back and forth. Part of me is there, where Henry is, and part of me is here. It feels like it’s going to kill me sometimes, it hurts so bad. It isn’t good, but I can’t stop it.”

“Can you take me and Griffin?”

“If I could, I would.”

“But Henry did it to you.”

“He got lucky, is all.”

“Lucky? How the hell do you figure that?” Ben said. “His head ended up on the same wall where they nailed up pieces of every last one of our crew except the three of us kids. And Henry tricked you into staying back with me and Griffin, because he must have known something about you. Otherwise some trophy of your carcass would have been up there next to Henry’s. And me and Griffin’d probably both be dead.”

I stopped my horse, extended a hand out so Ben would hold up, too.

Ahead of us, on a rise in a fissured pathway winding up the rock face of the mountain, I saw a flash of red.

Freddie Horvath.

We found them.

They were so close.

Then I saw another pale image, not five feet ahead of me. Seth stood there with blank eyes and an expressionless mouth. He was so faint, but as I looked directly through his outline, I could see another light, flashing and intense, growing more vivid, like a strobe coming from somewhere inside him, the epileptic shotgun blast of pictures through the lit windows on a train rushing past me, the flashbulb impressions of people alternating with emptiness.

I felt it pulling me back.

“No. Not yet.”

“What the fuck is that?” Ben said.

He could see it, too.

“Goddamnit, no!” I screamed.

And a whisper, “Seth.”

Fuck you, Jack.

A platform.

The Underground.

Night.

I’m alone.

The train rushes forward out of the yawning blackness beneath a tunnel arch and hisses to a stop. Doors sigh open with the suction of so many hungry mouths.

Welcome home, Jack.

I stagger back and fall against the dingy tile wall. The surface is damply warm, feels like every hot breath in the city adheres to it, makes me nauseous. I collapse onto a bench, head between my knees, eyes open. Try to concentrate: shoes (
white Puma tennis shoes. I don’t own a pair of Puma tennis shoes
), concrete, I’m not wearing socks (
I don’t go out without socks. Why did I do that?
), jeans (
ripped at the knee, they’re dark and wet on the hems—it must be raining outside
), my hands hang down. They look gray, like there is nothing living inside me at all.

Jack’s been dying a slow death ever since he got into that car with Freddie, and I’m sick of it.

Hold it, Jack.

Hold it.

I push myself up onto my feet and everything swirls around, floating, like I’m inside the biggest toilet imaginable.

Fuck this place.

I make it to a trash bin and empty myself into it.

I’m vaguely aware of the people trying to ignore me, pretending the sick bastard puking his guts out isn’t even here, whooshing past me like particles in a wind tunnel.

Green Park Station.

What the fuck am I doing here?

When the train left, the cavern of the station became suddenly quiet and empty. I sat back down on the bench and tried to think. I felt so vacant, hollow, like I’d puked myself inside out, and hadn’t eaten in days.

Days. I had no idea what time it was, or how long ago it was that I’d left Henry at The Prince of Wales.

I put my hands on my chest. I felt smaller, almost weightless. I couldn’t account for how I was dressed, either. My hair was wet, and I was wearing a faded black T-shirt that didn’t belong to me, that had a dime-sized hole on the belly and said T
HE
R
AMONES
, with a rain-mottled tan canvas jacket that I’d never seen before. No socks, no underwear on, just the jeans—they weren’t mine, either—without a belt. Definitely not the way Jack ever dressed when he was normal.

And how long ago was that, anyway?

I went through my pockets, nothing missing, checked my cell phone.

I opened it.

I didn’t believe what it said.

I squeezed my eyes shut, closed the phone, flipped it on again.

It was Wednesday.

Conner and I were supposed to be flying back home on Friday, in just two days.

Four days had gone by since Seth brought the Marbury lens into our hotel room, on the night we came back from Blackpool and Conner and I had gotten into a fight.

All that shit was Jack’s fault, too, and I suddenly felt so guilty about how I’d treated my best friend.

Four days, and I didn’t have the slightest idea what had happened in that time, or how I’d ended up in clothes that weren’t mine at the Green Park Station on a Tube line that came from nowhere I could imagine being, and headed in no direction I really wanted to go.

And I must have had fifty missed calls showing on my phone: Nickie, Stella, the last one from Conner just twenty minutes ago; voice mails and text messages I didn’t have the guts to look at.

You fucked up, Jack.

Scared, I pulled up Nickie’s number and called it. When I heard the connection ringing, I thought I would chicken out and hang up before she answered. I listened.

“Jack?”

“Hey.”

“Where are you?” She sounded worried. Maybe disappointed. I knew from her tone that Jack really did fuck up again.

“Um. Green Park Underground.”

“Is everything all right?” she said. I thought, maybe, she’d been crying.

“No.”

Jack doesn’t cry.

I swallowed. “Nickie. I really need to see you. I need to talk to you.”

“I’ve been calling since you left.”

She was obviously crying now.

“I know. Something’s messed up. Bad.”

“I checked for you at your hotel. Conner’s been calling me, too, trying to contact you. Where’ve you been? He’s worried, Jack. You should call him.”

“Okay. But can I see you?”

“Oh, Jack.” There was no hiding the hurt in her voice. “Yesterday afternoon before you ran off, you told me that you didn’t want to see me again.”

“What?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, but then I thought,
Why the fuck wouldn’t I believe it?

“I…I don’t know what’s going on with me, Nickie. I need to find something. I don’t know.” I began feeling sick again, and images of the last four days began flickering dimly in my head, just like those flashing windows on the train passing by. Something about her brother, Ander. These clothes were his. I’d stayed at their home in Hampstead on Monday night, in a strange room. I thought about the lens, knew exactly where I’d put it—in the left pocket of these jeans. My hand absently rubbed the shape of it there.

“Please,” I said. “Please can I see you one more time?”

Nickie waited. I could hear her strained breathing, and I knew she was trying not to let me hear that she’d been crying.

She said, “No, Jack.”

“Nickie.” I sounded sick. Pathetic.

“I can’t help you. I can’t do anything for you if you’re determined to let these things happen.”

She hung up.

I dropped my phone, heard it clatter down from the bench to the concrete beside my foot.

Maybe this is how it’s supposed to be, I thought. Jack falls apart here, and everything falls apart in Marbury. No, not Jack falling apart: I was willfully disassembling Jack here. Like Nickie said. Maybe that was why Seth made me come back again. I thought about taking the lens out of my pocket, but I was too disgusted with myself.

I picked up my phone and went across to the other side of the platform, waited for a train toward Oxford Circus so I could get back to the hotel.

I walked from the Tube stop in the rain. It felt good, warm and thick, like blood. By the time I got inside the hotel, I was completely wet.

The room was a mess. My clothes, the entire contents of my pack, had been scattered everywhere—on the floor, the furniture. Conner was gone. I remembered something about him telling us he was going up to York to be with Rachel. I ached, wished he was here so he could maybe help keep Jack from slipping away entirely.

I lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling. I still had her brother’s wet shoes and clothes on, didn’t care. And, for the second time in the past few weeks, I seriously thought I wanted to die, to actually kill myself. I couldn’t see any way out of the hole I was in, believed that nothing was going to get better or fix itself. Probably the only reason I didn’t have the guts to off myself at that moment was that I was concerned about it being too much of a burden for Conner, Stella, and Wynn to deal with: my being over here, alone in London, and all.

How thoughtful of you, Jack.

But Jack doesn’t cry.

So I drank a beer.

Let me tell you what Jack believes about Marbury and the Marbury lens.

I keep going back to this idea of Stella’s nesting dolls: that there are things inside of things that, in turn, are contained within still bigger things. I can’t guess how many times. I think there’s something called
M Theory
, in theoretical physics, that says eleven. Dimensions, or whatever you want to call them. I could go with that number, but I don’t really care, either.

And I see Jack as a kind of an arrow shaft that shoots through every layer, simultaneously, the point directly piercing the exact center. I think everyone’s an arrow like that, too, aiming into their own centers.

So the Marbury lens is a kind of prism, an elevator car maybe, that separates the layers and lets me see the Jack who’s in the next hole made by the arrow.

And that hole is Marbury.

The one sure thing about Marbury is that it’s a horrible place. But so is right here, too. And there’s a certain benefit in the obviousness of its brutality, because in Marbury there’s no doubt about the nature of things: good and evil, or guilt and innocence, for example. Not like here, where you could be sitting in the park next to a doctor or someone and not have any idea what a sick and dangerous sonofabitch he really is. Because we always expect things to be so nice and proper, even if we haven’t learned our fucking lesson that it just doesn’t work out like that all the time.

Henry believed that Marbury was a world out of balance.

He needs to take a closer look at this one.

I opened another beer and sat back against the headboard on the bed. When I moved my pillow, I saw the note Conner had left for me the other night when I’d gone out to meet Henry. I turned it over in my hands, not really wanting to unfold and read it. It would be just like all those missed calls, I thought, just one in a series of messages about how Jack was fucking up his life and needed to get his shit together.

The phone vibrated in my pocket. I let it go for a while, and then, somehow, I got brave enough to fish it out.

Brave and considerate Jack.

I didn’t look at the number.

“Hello?”

“Where are you now?”

It was Nickie.

“I’m at the hotel.”

“Stay there.”

“Okay.”

“I can’t stand this. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

So the new, braver Jack decided to open Conner’s note, too. But then again, I realized that it’s fairly easy to be brave once you give up caring about how bad things can really be.

He’s lying to you, Jack.

He followed you.

Conner’s turning into your enemy here, too.

Fuck you, Jack.

How did he not see Henry sitting with me? We were there until the place closed.

This is real.

But Conner had seen Henry before. He’d pointed him out to me in that picture of Nickie and me in the Underground.

My camera.

I dug through the stuff that was scattered all around the floor. I found my camera, turned it on, and hit the preview button.

This is real.

It said, “Camera contains no images.”

I need help.

This can’t be happening. Maybe none of this has been happening, and maybe Jack is still tied down, drugged out of his mind, rotting on some creep’s bed in California.