The Marbury Lens (6 page)

Midnight.

It was cool, so I shut the window. I left the drapes pulled back, then I undressed and got into bed. I lay there looking around the room that almost glowed in the gray moonlight filtered through the uneven, ancient glass of the window.

And in the night, something moved inside my room.

At first, I heard a rolling sound coming from beneath the bed.

Just like Freddie’s bed.

You better see what’s under there, Jack.

Something wooden and small, round—like maybe an empty spool of thread; maybe a nut. It rolled, and I could measure the distance it covered by the sound it made, across the width of the bed. Roll. Then stop. Then three taps; and it rolled back in the opposite direction.

He did something to my brain.

You better look, Jack.

Roll. Three taps. Right across the floor, an equator through the center of my belly.

Silence.

Roll. Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

Like someone knocking, but I was certain it was right there on the floor beneath my bed.

I pushed back the covers and turned on the lamp next to me. And I know it was compulsive and dumb, but the first thing I did was to look at my foot to see if I was trapped again. I rubbed my hands around my ankle, and then I bent down to look under the bed.

What are you looking for, Jack? Something to get away with?

Don’t fool yourself, Jack. You haven’t gotten away from anything.

I couldn’t see anything, just black. I reached up and tipped the lamp downward. It hung from the edge of the nightstand, swinging slowly. I lowered myself onto my hands and knees, the side of my face pressed to the floor.

Wood floor.

And I heard something, just a hushed whisper that sounded like someone said “shhhh” or maybe a word, like “soft.” But it was real.

Did something to my brain.

There was nothing there.

Don’t fool yourself.

You haven’t gotten away from anything.

I sat on the floor. I was so tired. I got back into bed and switched off the lamp.

Then I went to sleep.

I think I never slept as soundly as I did that first night I spent in London. When I woke, I lay there on my back for a few minutes, pressed down into the softness of the bed by the weight of a heavy feathered comforter that seemed to be holding the pieces of me together, and looked out at the perfection of the day on the other side of the window.

The building must have mice, I thought. It didn’t matter, once I fell to sleep I never heard anything at all. I didn’t even dream.

I got up from bed and opened the window.

And later on, after I ate breakfast downstairs and went out for my run, while I fumbled around with putting on clothes so I could get out of the hotel and begin to explore the city, as I shook out the shorts I’d tossed on the floor the night before to see if my cell phone was still alive, Henry Hewitt’s glasses fell right out onto the folds of the sheets I’d slept in.

I took them up into my hands and sat on the edge of the bed. They were so old and frail, made from such a thin gauge of braided gold wire that had serpentine patterns of black etched into the surface. And the lenses themselves felt so heavy in my hand, like they were polished discs of stone crystal. One of them was chipped on its edge, and unevenly tinted a kind of purple that faded, clear and milky in some spots, and dark as gemstones in others.

T
HE
A
METHYST
H
OUR
.

Quit it, Jack.

I unfolded the glasses and held them up at arm’s length so I could see through them by the light from the window.

And then I heard the rolling sound again, but this time it was louder.

But when I looked through the lenses, something happened that was difficult to understand: I saw a bug—a big one—crawling downward, shiny, wet, black. I lowered the glasses. The rolling noise stopped.

So I thought that the glasses, held at a distance, acted as some sort of telescope. I wanted to find the magnified bug that must have been crawling on my windowpane.

But I’d left the window open.

Still, I thought, there must be a bug there. On the wall, the drapes, maybe.

I got up and went over to the window. I searched everywhere, shook out the drapes, but there was no bug. There had to have been one, I thought, because it was so huge. It couldn’t have just disappeared.

It was there; I saw it.

I sat down again.

I held the glasses up.

I put them on.

You haven’t gotten away from anything, Jack.

I don’t even remember bringing my hands down from my face. Why would I remember it? I wasn’t there anymore.

There was this bug.

The sky domed overhead like a vacant cathedral ceiling, white and hot.

I stood near a wall, watching the bug crawl out of a red-black hole the size of a soft rotten plum, breathing in the thick humid stench, sweet rot, fascinated by the hideous thing. If I grabbed it, the bug would have been bigger than both of my hands together. I’d never seen anything like it, not even in nightmares. I listened to it as it chewed a counterclockwise circle around the meaty rim of the crater it came from, making soft wet clicks. Then two more of the bugs crawled out from the same wet black hole. One of them dropped down next to my foot. I heard it thud onto the ground; and I took a step back.

That’s when I realized the bugs were eating the meat from inside the eye socket on a human head.

Nothing more of the body was there; just the head. And it was nailed to the wall in front of me, held there as though in conversation, just at my eye level, by a thick wooden stake that had been driven into the masonry through the other eyeball.

“Fuck!” I backed up another step, felt vomit rising from my gut.

I tripped on something solid and soft, and fell back, catching myself in the dirt with my open hands. But I couldn’t look away from that thing on the gray wall in front of me. One of the bugs, with its lacquer black, chitinous shell yawning open, began chewing up into a nostril. It made an electric buzzing with lime-colored wings. Blood angled, sprouting treelike outward from the neck where the body had been hewn free, forming pointed and glistening branches in the little creases on the shadowless wall.

Something moved across my hand.

One of those bugs.

I looked down, flailed. What the hell was I wearing? These weren’t my clothes.

I recognized it.

The head on the wall was Henry Hewitt’s.

I sat in gray-white dirt. The rest of Henry’s body was next to me, my left hand, open, propping me upright, braced on his unmoving and hardened chest.

His hands had been hacked off, too. The sleeves of his coat were stained to the shoulders.

“Jack! Jack! We got to get the hell out of here! Now!”

I turned. I recognized the voice. Someone named Miller. Ben. I had to think, wasn’t sure why I knew that name. I couldn’t see where he was calling from.

A hiss, and three arrows with fletching the color of those monstrous bugs, glistening black, spattered into the wall just above me.

“Jack! Here! Jack!”

I turned over onto my hands and knees and crawled away from Hewitt’s body. I looked back one time at that wall. It was covered with impaled heads and other dripping, black-rot body parts: hands, hearts, feet, ears, penises.

Where the fuck was this?

Welcome home, Jack.

You haven’t gotten away from anything.

I scrabbled along the ground. More arrows whizzed over my head. I thought I was moving in the direction of Ben’s voice, but I couldn’t be certain. Everything here blended together: the white sky, the gray ground, no shadows, heat, fog, the smell, that back-and-forth rolling noise from under the bed.

“Here! This way!”

I lifted my head up, looked across the littered ground. There was the carcass of a horse, its belly split open and guts stretched across the pale ground. The lower body of a naked male had been stuffed up inside the rent in the dead horse, the obscene and final revelation of some gruesome vaudeville act.

He had one shoe and sock on his left foot.

Where was the rest of him?

Ben Miller stood in a pale-gray dustcoat that had been splattered with flecks of blood, holding two worn horses with his hand wound tightly through their halters, behind a breech where a landslide of fractured boulders from the dry mountain above had crushed down upon the strewn remnants of corpses and bones; the stones piled shoulder-high against the wall of the settlement.

I knew who he was, had a vague memory of where I was, too.

How did I know him?

I stood, began to run.

The arrow came, silent. It tore through my right side, just beneath my rib cage.

In.

Out.

And it buried its shaft in me up to the foul blackness of its feathers; and I watched my blood spit forward onto the colorless land like it was some kind of joke. But it hurt so bad. The stun gun in Freddie’s prodding hand, magnified a thousand times and more.

You haven’t gotten

I fell to my knees, tried to catch myself on my palms, but my face ended up in the dirt, sideways, watching one of those bugs coming toward me.

“Jack! Jack!”

The boy named Ben Miller was running toward me.

I snapped my hands up, an electric jolt.

And there I was, shirtless, dripping wet, sitting on the edge of my bed and looking out the open window at one of my T-shirts moving, ghostlike on a cool breeze where it hung from the window’s handle. I must have gone running. The shirt was soaked.

It was night.

My hand shook.

I looked at my side, cupped my palm over the skin and rubbed at the spot.

The purple glasses lay on the floor next to my foot. I braced my elbows against my knees and cradled my face. I was covered with sweat. It stung my eyes as I squeezed them shut.

Okay.

What the fuck was that, Jack?

Inventory time: What happened couldn’t possibly have been real. Freddie Horvath did something to my brain.

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

I had to think. Put the pieces together.

I was thirsty for a beer. That was good. Real. I went to the minibar and opened a bottle. Wynn and Stella would find out. Stella would be mad. That was good, too. Wynn and Stella. They were real. I drank. It was hard to swallow.

Calm down, Jack.

I turned on every light in the small room, reaching from one to the next.

Here.

I was here.

This side: I was in England. It was nine o’clock in the evening. The last thing I remembered about being here was sitting down on the bed after breakfast, shaking out the curtains and looking for a bug.

Bugs.

That side: The worst things I’d ever seen in my life. Henry Hewitt’s head staked into a wall. A wall of human butchery. Arrows. A boy named Ben Miller screaming to me, holding two horses behind a pile of rocks and corpses. And then me, getting shot through my side by a long black arrow. I could still feel it, the tickling vibration of the shaft sticking from my back as it quivered with each gasping breath and pulse of my blood, the pain, burning hot, stabbing every nerve in my body.

I ran to the toilet and threw up.

I sat on the edge of the bed. I had nothing on, just my underwear, and I was wet. I shut the window and took another gulp of warm, frothy beer. My hair dripped water on my shoulders and onto the wood floor. I went into the bathroom again, checked. I had taken a shower. A towel, my running shorts and socks, were thrown onto the floor. The clothes were damp and smelled like sweat. I must have gone for another run.

Why can’t I remember?

Freddie Horvath did something to your brain and you better get help, Jack.

I checked the clothes I’d put on after breakfast, emptied the pockets of my jeans onto the bed.

The glasses. On the floor. I thought about the glasses. I didn’t want to look at them, felt around with my palm, closed my hand around their bony frames, and slipped them inside one of my sweaty socks.

I didn’t want to see those bugs again.

I could feel the beer. I wanted another one. I felt guilty about drinking it, but it felt good.

Fuck. Jack feels guilty about everything.

I opened another beer, went back to the bed.

My cell phone was dead. I wondered if I’d spoken to Conner, to anyone who could tell me I was really here today. Passport, money, folded slips of paper; and I found the smeared card Henry Hewitt had left for me in the pub lying on the bed under my digital camera.

I picked up the card and read it again while I took another gulp from the beer bottle. I rubbed my thumb over the black ink. I shook my head.

I must be going insane.

No, I am insane.

There was a yellow index card–size slip of paper tucked into my passport. It was a ticket for a Thames River sightseeing cruise, and it had been stamped earlier that afternoon.

Okay. Crazy Jack went on a boat, I guess.

I flipped my camera over and turned it on. I felt dizzy, like I was going to collapse. I dropped onto my knees, elbows on the bed like I was praying, holding the small screen of the camera up before my eyes. I played through the images: Marylebone Road in front of the park, a blurry image from the platform in a Tube station, boats on the river, the Houses of Parliament. Then there were pictures taken from a glass-canopied boat: the London Bridge, and, finally, a picture of me, smiling, standing in the sunlight, leaning against a red painted rail on the ship’s deck, under a perfect, blue sky.

I think I stared at that picture for half an hour, studying every detail of it.

I looked happy, standing there in loose jeans and a white T-shirt that said
GLENBROOK HIGH SCHOOL CROSS-COUNTRY
, hands tucked into pockets, white baseball cap turned around backwards, hair blown across an eye on one side by a wind I thought I could remember feeling somehow, standing so relaxed. Smiling.

I wondered who took the picture.

I tried turning on my phone again, irrationally hoping the battery may have restored itself.

I pulled my jeans and T-shirt on. Then I tucked Henry’s glasses, wrapped in my sock, into a back pocket and slid my bare feet into my Vans.

And then I went back to The Prince of Wales.