by Andrew Smith
I looked back along the boys’ house, where I remembered a flagstone trail led through a wrought-iron arbor to a backyard pool. It was the same house, but sections of the roof were missing. The curved red pottery tiles had spilled down in scattered shards and exposed the tarred and buckling plywood and flapping strips of black felt.
There was wind.
Every one of the windows had been broken, and in places, the concrete stucco of the house’s siding had been pounded in as though pummeled by stones or shrapnel. There was no arbor, no flagstones, and when I walked around the corner I saw that the pool had been drained, now filled with broken debris: a realtor’s FOR SALE sign; part of a wire-mesh picnic bench like the ones they had in Steckel Park; a life-sized fiberglass horse—the kind that you’d see on top of a feed store—but this one was headless; and an overturned station wagon that was missing three of its wheels.
And there was no fence, no sidewalks, no street I could see.
Forest Trail Lane.
I could tell where the street was supposed to be. A tilted fire hydrant, the skeletons of things marked a familiar path that was now covered beneath the gray salty ash that was everywhere in Marbury. I thought about my truck, how we’d all squeezed into the cab, sand sticking to our skin, when the four of us drove back to the boys’ house from the beach.
Before I broke the lens.
I couldn’t help myself, and I immediately felt stupid for doing it. I spun around and yelled, “Conner!”
Nothing.
“Conner!”
Wind.
Ash.
I whispered, hoping for anything that might connect here to anywhere I knew, “Seth?”
Seth had always been there before. He was the ghost, a part of me, who linked me between the gaps, Marbury, home, wherever this place was or was not.
But it was empty. Seth wasn’t here, either.
I sat down in front of the house. I knew Ben and Griffin were watching through one of the cracks in their house, ready to fight, to defend themselves.
Against me.
The neighbors’ homes were there—some of them. Most had been broken down to the foundations. The others were empty—I could tell—and not just because I could see right through them. There’s a silent message you get from an abandoned house that lets you know exactly how things are.
A refrigerator lay on its side in the middle of what would have been the street. Its door had fallen open. There was a man’s head inside. I felt the need to go there, make sure it wasn’t someone I knew—someone else Jack dragged along with him into this pit.
They had their own aesthetic sensibilities, I thought. The harvesters, the Hunters. They didn’t eat everything. They didn’t wipe everything clean. They decorated.
I didn’t recognize the face. The eyes were squinted shut like they had been stung with vinegar, and the man had puffy cheeks that stretched his mouth into a narrow smile and showed a row of bloodied teeth that all looked ridiculously small.
Welcome back.
It’s the same old Marbury.
Jack’s hometown.
I started walking.
And I knew where I would go: Conner’s house was closer, and then to see if I could find Wynn and Stella’s.
All the way down Forest Trail Lane it was the same. Houses were burned or abandoned, things were strewn everywhere in chaotic order, and nothing moved except the small things that vibrated on the wind.
My foot struck against something in the ash. I nearly fell, but caught myself with my hand. The salt burned in my cut. It was bad. It should have stitches. I thought about how Griffin had never been afraid to do things like that—stitch us up when we got cut.
Whenever that was.
It was a book. I brushed it off and lifted it from the dust. A dictionary.
The cover warped like a dried orange rind; the pages inside pasted together as though the book had been dragged up from the bottom of a sea.
There was a flash of light and something exploded overhead, louder than any sound I’d ever heard.
I jerked, curled myself down against the ground.
I need to get out of here.
Out of breath, I watched the sky.
It came again. Lightning. But it was bigger, thicker than any lightning I’d ever seen, and the boom of the thunderclap felt like hammers pounding my brain.
Another hammer, I thought. Maybe it will break me in half, too.
And I’d never seen lightning in Marbury before. Not ever.
The burning light was so thick, so bright, it looked almost crystallized, as though, if I had the right timing, I could swing that hammer and shatter razor-sharp icicles of pure energy from the bolts. And every time they flashed, I felt the electric charge stiffen and prickle the hair on the back of my neck.
At the end of Forest Trail Lane, the old highway ran north and south. It was the main road through Glenbrook before they’d constructed the 101.
This isn’t Glenbrook.
On the corner stood the lower half of a two-story. The only thing I could see on the exposed upper floor was a toilet and an overturned bathtub. It still had a ring of dirt around the bottom.
“Prime location for Glenbrook real estate,” I said.
My voice sounded strange, tighter. But I knew I’d need to get under something until the lightning stopped, and the bottom level of the shattered house was the closest thing that looked capable of hiding me, so I carried the dictionary under one arm and ran for the doorway.
Another flash of lightning exploded. It hit the street back where I’d come from, sending up a glowing mushroom cloud of ash that seemed to set the air around it on fire.
This was like no lightning I’d ever seen anywhere.
Where the curb would be, I found a rusted yellow Tonka dump truck and one boy’s tennis shoe with a picture of a ninja on the side. The ninja had red eyes. The boy who wore that shoe at one time couldn’t have been more than five.
Another flash.
I ran.
When I moved, the explosion of thunder was so loud it felt like it lifted me, pushed me toward the broken door at the front of the house. And, dumbly, I stood there for just a moment and nearly raised my hand to knock.
The door had a slot window in the center of it, but the swirled yellow glass had long since been broken, making a lamprey’s mouth of needle teeth around the edges of the frame. I saw where the knob, the hardware, was vacant, leaving just a hole through the core. The door pushed easily inward and sucked a breath of air over me as if the house were tasting my scent.
I hesitated.
Another flash spit my shadow across the floor, and before the next blast of thunder came I scrambled inside, pressing the door shut with the heel of my boot.
Then the rain came. It smelled like burning aluminum and fell so thick and heavy that I couldn’t even hear the cusswords I yelled.
“Is there anybody in here?”
Flash.
A snapshot image of the house’s interior burned into my eyes.
To my left, a staircase rose into the darkness of the ceiling. Somebody had covered the opening to the upper floor, which was now the roof, with corrugated tin that roared and vibrated under the constant downpour. Water trickled in from the sides, spattering down on the house’s rotten carpeting. I held my hand under the stream; washed my face. It made me smell like a foundry. There had to be something wrong with that water.
Thinking it almost made me laugh. What could possibly be wrong with anything here in Marbury?
The entryway at the foot of the stairs opened onto what was once a living room and kitchen. I put the dictionary down on a jagged pier of bar top that extended out from one wall. There was something about the book, I thought, that was important.
Something.
Even though the windows had been knocked out long ago, there was hardly enough light coming in for me to clearly see what was around me.
I called out, “Is anybody in here?”
Nothing
.
Rain.
“Anyone? I’m alone. I’m lost.”
Flash.
It was like a bomb going off.
One of the walls appeared to buckle inward then snap back, like the house was rubber. My eyes scanned across the floor. Junk was everywhere. Pieces of soggy drywall, a hair dryer with its cord tied into a noose, the gutted frame of a television, clothing, the door from a shower stall. I saw a belt, and thought about picking it up, but there was an entire human pelvis, picked perfectly clean, yellow-white, lying among other bones beneath it.
People had been here recently, too. I could smell them. The place reeked like an underground pisser in summertime, and the stink made me want to pee, too, so I did it, right there against the wall under the staircase.
Fuck this place.
Flash.
I watched the conical stain of my piss slick downward over the wall. It somehow made me feel good, like I was real, alive.
Another explosion.
I looked at my feet, and that’s when I found the knife. Perfect and beautiful, like it had just been purchased at a sporting goods store, and I could almost smell the freshness of its leather sheath. Someone had taken care of it. Someone who didn’t need it anymore. I turned it over in my hands, felt the sharpness of its edge, then unbuckled my belt and threaded the sheath onto my side.
Something crashed into the wall in the kitchen. It sounded like the door on a cupboard. It slammed three more times before I rounded a brick hearth where water splashed down from the shattered chimney somewhere above me on the naked second floor.
A man stood there, kicking his foot against the wood paneling beneath the place where a sink should have been. He was completely naked, deathly pale, but covered with brilliant tattoos all the way from his belly down to the soles of his bony feet; and nothing at all above his waist, just white, hairless skin. He looked like a centaur or something.
He turned and glared at me, his jaw working up and down like he was chewing something, trying to get words out, and my hand fell down onto the handle of the knife before I realized it was only a ghost.
Then he vanished.
“Wait! Wait! Please, let me talk to you.”
He was gone.
“Come back!”
I went over to the place where he’d been standing and kicked the wall as hard as I could. I felt the wood cracking beneath my foot, and when I looked down inside the empty black crib where the sink had been, I saw him again—the man—curled on his side, rotting in death.
Rain came straight down from the vacant square where a window had looked out—on what?—from over the sink, and it made his skin slick, snakes and fish, twisted cables of wire and swords, saints and skeletons that vibrated like cartoons inked on his rotting hide. Something black crawled up inside his nostril. I turned away and threw up beside a twisted heap of metal window blinds that was left crumpled on the kitchen floor.
Flash.
The lightning came less frequently, but the rain was constant, howling against the tin sheeting and bare floor above me. I kicked the metal blinds, turning them over. There were maybe a dozen harvesters that scattered out from underneath the heap.
And I saw the body of a little boy there, too.
He had only one shoe on. Nothing else.
I covered him again.
“Fuck!” I staggered out of the kitchen, around the fireplace, the smell of aluminum; the smell of aluminum and vomit.
I shut my eyes, and leaned my folded arms on the broken piece of countertop where I’d left the dictionary.
Flash.
I have got to get the fuck out of here.
Get a grip, Jack. You’re not going anywhere.
Think.
I had to think.
The dictionary.
I peeled through the pages. Some of them tore. Some would not separate at all.
The rain kept pounding.
Pounding relentlessly against the anvil of this wrecked house.
The hammer.
The water came splattering down on the stairway. The stench was nauseating.
I couldn’t hear the bugs. That was good.
I looked up California.
There was no such word in the dictionary.
There were no entries for Washington, America, or England.
Okay, asshole. Maybe this dictionary doesn’t list the names of places.
So I looked up earth. Earth had to be in there, right? It wasn’t just a name.
And it wasn’t in the book, either.
Bet you don’t have the balls to look up Marbury, do you Jack?
I looked up Marbury.
I found it.
Of course I found it.
* * *
Fuck you, Jack.
two
Flash.
* * *
So I threw the book against the wall, and it splattered like a crushed wasp and fell, fluttering dying paper wings onto the heap of the other dead things cluttered on the floor.
And when it slammed against the wall, I noticed the writing there.
At the top, near the ceiling:
373
The number had been written four times at different places on the wall.
373
Maybe the person writing it wanted to be sure someone would see it.
Maybe he knew I was coming.
373
Painted with two fingers; I could see how they pressed together, tracking the strokes of the numbers, smearing the curves and lines—a first and middle finger—dip and stroke, dip and stroke, with something dark, some foul concoction, because Marbury wouldn’t easily give up anything pure.
373
Outside, the rain raged.
I moved closer.
My shirt still hung open, unbuttoned. I flattened the left side with my palm and looked down at the number stitched there.
373
Maybe everything had the same number here.
Fuck that.
Inmate.
I tore the shirt off. After I knotted it into a ball, I lifted the broken shower door with the toe of one boot and put the shirt on the floor beneath it. Somehow, water had begun pooling in the carpeting there, and I saw something that looked like a long black slug wriggling through the fibers. I could feel the sides of my mouth turning down in disgust and I pressed the door flat beneath my foot.
Now I was nobody.
Welcome back, Jack.
The lightning moved off into the distance but the rain never slackened at all. The sky shifted to the boiled paleness of the Marbury dusk. When I moved closer to the wall, I could make out what had been left as a message.
And there, just below the highest scrawl of the number—my number—my eyes fell upon a drawing of circles inside other circles.
At the midpoint of them all, the word HOME.
The center of the universe.
An arrow from the exact middle. It crossed the shape’s perimeter, pierced the concentric interior of a second, larger circle.
In this one, MARBURY.
I am going to build something big for you.
From there, an arrow shoots into a third.
Trapped inside that circle are the words:
I DON’T KNOW THE NAME OF THIS ONE.
I SAW THE PREACHER THERE.
IT’S ALL MARBURY, BUT IT’S ALL DIFFERENT.
THIS WAS THE HARDEST TO GET OUT OF.
And then, the smears of letters that said:
YOU AND SETH HAVE THE KEYS.
The hardest to get out of.
A third arrow, another world.
The circle encloses the first three.
The final circle, an outer ring that surrounds them all.
I recognize the hand. Of course I recognize the hand.
I DON’T KNOW HOW MANY MORE THERE ARE. IT IS PROBABLY UNCOUNTABLE.
And near the edge of the wall, just at the level of my own heart, floating out there, somewhere—who knows—in Jack’s universe, in deliberate
and dark lines, I trace my own fingers around the strokes that had been left behind.
Maybe it’s blood, I thought, the tip of my finger following around a precise drawing of a hammer.
* * *
I know.
It is in Conner’s hand.
* * *
Henry Hewitt had come to Marbury before I did. It was Henry who’d pawned the glasses off on me when I was alone in London. I couldn’t count the number of times I considered getting even with Henry for trapping me, and now I’d done the same thing to my best friends.
It was clear we had all somehow fallen apart, fallen together.
Conner had gotten there before me.
Faintly, somehow, I began to remember. An argument about something, about the next steps. Conner yelling at me about how I fucked it up, saying, Henry said you would bring things here. He didn’t mean the lens. We weren’t supposed to bring the lens here. We fucked up, Jack. We fucked up. And first Conner, then Ben and Griffin, disappearing in the garage; falling, all of us.
That’s why he drew that mark.
Conner got here first.
And one second might be a month through the Marbury lens.
Maybe forever.
I knew that.
We all did.
At the far edge of the wall, opposite Conner’s drawing of my universe—our universe—I saw more writing:
MIND THE GAP.
FENT IS LOOKING FOR YOU.
THE BUGS ARE EVERYWHERE.
STAY OUT OF THE RAINWATER.
And, finally:
JACK—I WILL FIND YOU AGAIN I PROMISE.
WE WILL PUT THINGS BACK.
CONNER KIRK
* * *
I couldn’t stay there. There were dead people in the room. And the rain poured down endlessly.
There was an inch of standing water on the floor. I kept wondering about the warning to stay out of the rain, and who—or what—Fent was.
A hallway led off to the right of the entryway, but it was so dark I couldn’t see to the end of it. I stayed out of it as long as I could, but it was dry, so I eventually gave up being scared of what I couldn’t see there.
At the end of the hall, there were two doors. One of them opened onto a small bathroom. The toilet was missing; there was a black hole in the tile floor where it had been. A slot window above the bathtub let in a steady sheet of rain, but it ran down the wall and into the drain. Here was where the shower door came from.
