by Andrew Smith
It’s really fun.
Wait till you see what I can do with the thing I have in my pocket.
I turn around, start walking back down the narrow hallway through the sleeper car.
Then I hear the first gunshot from inside the baggage car.
Of course. This is what happens.
I freeze, turn back to watch the door.
A second shot.
Then a burst of them.
It is like listening to a bag of popcorn while it cooks inside a microwave.
The last two gunshots come so much later.
Maybe a full minute.
Then it is done.
I don’t need to go inside the car. I know exactly what happens in there. I can draw a picture of the precise spot where some of those boys fall down after they shoot themselves in the head, where Sergeant Ramirez would be right now, at this precise moment. He is seated against the wall, sucking on the barrel of his rifle with its butt tucked down between his knees, his thumb jammed into the trigger guard, and his brains are painting the outline of a tornado up across the rose-patterned wallpaper, all the way onto the ceiling.
Jack has been here before.
Jack is here now.
And Jack never had any idea that the twenty-two kids inside that fucking baggage car blew their brains out because they were so scared of Jack and his little piece of broken glass.
Fun game.
This is Marbury.
I am King.
I take a two-liter bottle of water from the dining car.
That’s all.
And I close up every door on the train when I leave.
twenty-two
The train didn’t want to go away.
I walked for what felt like miles, hours, but every time I’d turn around I could still see it, as if the train were watching me, calling out, Come on, Jack. Come back and play some more.
Eventually, in the whiteout waste of Marbury, I found myself in the middle of a horizonless nothing. No more direction, no features to aim myself toward or away from, and just the slightest difference in shade between the colorless sky and the emptiness of the ground.
This was the center of the universe.
And I had three objects in my universe: a broken piece of glass, a warm bottle of water, and a pair of pants whose knees had ripped when I fell out of that train I’d been trying to get away from.
Nothing else.
I crossed the blasted salt flat of the Marbury desert barefoot, without a shirt.
Alone.
After a while, my eyes began to fail. I supposed it didn’t matter anyway. I walked, counting steps, sometimes with my eyes shut tight. And when I’d open them again, nothing at all looked different.
I began to get tired.
Are you halfway there, Jack?
I thought, If you keep going just halfway to your destination, then halfway again and halfway again, you will spend forever in an infinity of halfways.
All the not-worlds.
I closed my eyes.
Fifty steps this time.
Open your eyes, Jack.
Through the blank ash of the fog, I saw the outline of something big, pale, with a perfect row of blackened circles like eyes that stared back at me. At first, thinking I had walked in a huge circle back to the train, or maybe I’d gone entirely around this world, I squatted down to my knees, keeping myself low, small, as though crouching would be sufficient to make Jack invisible to everything he was afraid of.
I thought the black eyes were moving.
You know how objects, when you stare at them long enough, begin to pulse with some kind of life? Because the thing had to be a sort of structure. It was just so hard to tell what it could be; everything was washed out by ash and fog, and my eyes ached.
I tried pouring water onto my face. It was a mistake. It made my eyes burn so bad I thought I’d go blind. When I was tired of waiting, listening, scoping the thing out, I finally stood up and started moving toward it.
It was a plane.
Not an entire plane; most of a jetliner. Maybe a hundred feet or so of the body. It stuck up at the end where the tail section had broken away, and the nose was either buried in the salt flat, or was perhaps sticking out, unmarked, on some other string, somewhere else entirely.
The way it was tilted, with the circular windows leaning toward me, it was possible that I had been standing—walking on top of—one of its wings.
It was an amazing thing.
I needed to touch it.
It was from the same airline that flew me to England, to St. Atticus Grammar School for Boys. It wasn’t even a question in my mind—I was absolutely certain—this was the same plane. I mean, this was Marbury, after all.
What else could it be?
When I walked toward the buried nose of the plane, the windows dropped down close enough to the ground that I could see inside it. Of course I was drawn to it. I had to look.
Curious Jack.
So I wiped the salt from one of the portholes and cupped my hands around my eyes. I pressed my face against the glass.
At first, all I saw were the gray disks of light—the unobstructed portholes—on the other side of the plane. I waited for my eyes to adjust. As they did, the inside of the plane seemed to liquefy, pulsing like waves on a windblown pond.
Harvesters.
Millions upon millions of them, clustered in endless carpeting gobs over every surface in the plane, a nest of them. Waiting, sniffing, hoping to detect some great field of death out here in this desert.
I felt my stomach convulse. I pushed myself away from the window and walked around the front of the plane.
On the other side, the left wing angled out from the wreckage and rose above the ground. The jet engine was half buried, but the wing itself extended like a massive awning. It didn’t cast any shadow.
There were no such things as shadows in Marbury.
I took a drink, wiped my mouth with the back of my forearm, and kept walking.
Halfway there.
Halfway there.
And in the white vacuum that swirled around me, enclosed me, that surrendered its boundary another few inches with every step I took, I heard music.
An accordion.
I walked toward it. What else could I do?
Halfway there.
* * *
When I saw him, it was like looking at the scene of a shipwreck.
I saw something big, dark, and low to the ground, that had been washed up on this endless beach of desert.
A dead whale, maybe.
I stepped closer, careful, and I could see the man playing music. He was seated in the salt, his legs stretched out in front of him, with his back propped against the carcass of a fallen horse.
I circled around.
He had no way of knowing I watched him. I moved silently, and his music was so loud.
The song he played sounded mournful and plodding; a dirge that repeated after the first bars, over and over, as though he had no intention of ever stopping the tune or breaking his rhythm.
Of course I knew who the man was. I didn’t need to see his face, because I had seen him before, other times, in other places. But not in this Marbury, and not with this Jack’s eyes.
Uncle Teddy.
Preacher.
Maybe he’d been left behind by the Rangers, the same ones who stopped the train. It didn’t make sense that they’d abandon an old man like this, but I couldn’t expect anything the Rangers did to be justly calculated when weighed against such counterbalances as right and wrong.
I could smell blood before I was close enough to see it.
Black-shafted arrows jutted like spiny quills from the horse’s neck and side. They vibrated like tuning forks. The animal was still breathing, and I’m sure that if it wasn’t for the wailing of the accordion, I would have heard the horse’s gurgling death-gasps.
The old man had one arrow completely through his right shoulder. The point of it, pasted over
with clotted blood, stuck out level, aiming directly at me, a stained and accusing finger.
I watched him play.
He couldn’t last.
The harvesters would be here soon.
The music stopped, in mid-beat.
I thought he died, but the man said, “Are you here to kill me?”
“I’m not going to kill you.”
“Then why are you standing in back of me, like that?”
“I came from this way.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m not sure.”
He put his little accordion on his lap. It wheezed. Maybe it was the horse.
“You got a long walk.” He tried to move. He looked as stiff as a statue. “Come around this way, so I can see what you look like, before you kill me.”
I took one step, then stopped. “I told you I’m not here to kill you.”
Preacher coughed. The arrow twitched like the needle on a lie detector.
“No matter which direction you came from, you walked straight through death. And now, here you are, unscathed. Don’t tell me you’re not here to kill me, boy. You are just a boy, right? You sound like one.”
I walked around the horse’s head. I could see its eye, crazed, rolling with a slender crescent of white as it followed me.
I stood in front of the man, my legs apart. The water bottle dangled from my hooked fingers.
He said, “It’s you.”
I held out the bottle. I didn’t say anything.
Preacher raised his hand. I unscrewed the cap, helped him drink.
“I’ve seen you before,” he said.
“A couple times.”
The man swallowed. He grunted when he tried to hand the bottle back to me. “Thank you.”
There were three red dots, like planets, on the bottle. Preacher’s fingerprints in blood.
He kept a gun lying across his groin. It looked like a .45. I could see that the hammer had been pulled back; it was cocked.
“It’s been a good show you put on, boy. Heaven must be amused.”
I sat down with my legs folded. I made sure I was far enough away that he couldn’t reach me. But I wasn’t afraid of him trying to shoot me. Maybe I should have been.
“I’m not anyone you think.”
“You’re him,” he said. “It’s you. The Jumping Man.”
“You’re a crazy old man.”
I turned my head, looked around us.
I don’t know what I was expecting to see. Maybe a sign with an arrow, pointing This way, Jack. But I felt like there was something else, someone else, nearby.
Maybe I was supposed to follow the arrow sticking out of the old man’s back.
Preacher lifted a finger, crusted with blood and ash, pointed up. “What’s the sky look like now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well,” he said, “I’d think a boy would know what the sky looks like.”
“It looks like nothing.”
“And the ground?”
He was fucking with me.
“It looks like endless fields of grass and clover.”
Preacher grimaced, a smile. His teeth were black, and he hadn’t shaved in days. The white stubble of his beard looked like spines on a cactus.
“In another world, we could have a long talk, I think.”
“Do you want me to help pull that arrow out or something?”
He shook his head. “The horse is dead now.”
I looked at the horse’s side. The arrows had stopped twitching.
“I keep coming back to this place. And every time it’s different.”
“This is how the world has always been. It will continue to be this way after we’re gone.” The old man’s voice was a raspy croak. “But I do suspect a new broom sweeps clean.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Maybe.”
“I was in Pope Valley, California, in 1888.”
“You think I don’t recognize you?”
“I knew who you were, old man, the first time I saw you.”
The old man shut his mouth. He swallowed.
I said, “Do you know what this place is?”
“I only know what it isn’t, boy.”
“You could start with that, if you want.”
“It isn’t Pope Valley. It isn’t the tree you and your father were hung from.”
I spit down into the ash between my legs.
“You were with Anamore Fent’s team, weren’t you?” I said.
Preacher’s chin dropped. I thought he was looking at his legs, or he was falling asleep. I counted my breaths—five of them—before the old man answered.
“Captain Fent is dead.”
I didn’t see any of the others on the train. I might have remembered who they were, if they were the ones from Fent’s team. Probably.
Then Preacher said, “It’s just you and me here, boy.”
Brian Fields would be the only one left.
“There was one of them. A kid named Conner Kirk. Do you know what might have happened to him?”
I looked down. I drew a circle in the white salt. Another circle enclosing it.
Preacher said, “Kirk. I know him. The sergeant. Good-looking boy. He was quiet and mean. Always got what he wanted.”
“Do you know anything about him?”
Preacher started to laugh, but it came out as a cough. He spit blood. His eyes squinted at me, like he was sizing me up, waiting for me to say something. He shook his head. “We went looking for him. Fent made us go after him. He was her boy, you know. Favored, at least. What did you do to him?”
“I didn’t do nothing.”
“After that morning he and Pittman took you out of the station. Kirk took you out. He was going to shoot you. I imagine he failed at that, judging by our current engagement in this conversation. He never came back.”
“He is a friend of mine.”
“We did find Pittman, though. Well. Pieces of him.”
I tracked the tip of my finger in a line through the ash. I drew an arrow that pierced the center of my circles.
The old man said, “Bad magic. That’s what Pittman feared most. He brought it on himself. He was a dark man.”
“You believe that? About bringing things on?”
“What’s in the sky, boy?”
I put my hands flat on the ground, pushed myself up, and stood. My legs ached. If I didn’t start moving, I’d die here, right alongside the old man and his horse. I felt like I could sleep, but I had things that still needed to be done.
“Is that it? Are you going to kill me now, son?”
“No.”
“I believe I’d prefer it if you did.”
Preacher’s hand slid over his lap. He grasped the gun, but it seemed like it was too heavy for the old man to lift. He tried aiming it at me.
I felt something, a warm wind, like a breath, and with it came a sighing sound, a low whisper.
Shhhhhh …
As I turned away from the old man, I saw the ghost of a boy standing ten feet from me, floating up like steam from the burned ground.
Every time I’d seen Seth before, he looked small, frail, like a little kid. But here, this time, he was older. At first, he just stood there watching me with his arms flat to his body, palms pressed against his thighs as though posing for a portrait. He didn’t say anything to me.
I could clearly see the deep marks that coiled around his neck.
The old man coughed, his voice creaking. “Devils.”
When I looked at him, Preacher had the butt of the gun resting on his leg, and his trembling hand held the barrel pointed directly at me.
“I guess all things are not accomplished, old man.”
* * *
In the wind, smoke clears behind the preacher.
But the sky is still white, empty.
He is shaking so bad I can see the point of the arrow behind him as it nods up and down, up and down; a seesaw.
There is a horizon now, formed by the rising light that establishes all the things in front of me: a crooked shell of a plane, a wing, a black centipede miles back that is a train filled with the dead.
This pathetic dying man, serving out his mission.
Against the wind, the gray shadow of Seth floats between us.
Me.
Seth.
The man with the gun.
There is a white explosion around the old man’s hand. It burns my eyes, but I can clearly see it through Seth’s back. A shell ejects, it tumbles in the air, a circle, an eye, opening, closing.
Forever.
The flash hangs around the muzzle of the gun, splashes outward, dances, curls.
Fireworks.
It is a clear yellow-white, brilliant, and I realize I have never seen a color this pure, this beautiful. Through Seth, the blast from Preacher’s gun resembles swaying tentacles, an anemone fanned by the tide.
The light gets bigger.
Until all I can see is just the light.
Nothing else.
I am staring at a sun.
It must be the center of the universe.
twenty-three
A ball of yellow light.
That was all.
I thought the old man shot me.
When my eyes focused, I realized I was lying on my side.
My mouth was open and I could feel the clay grit, taste the dirt that gathered in pasty clumps on the inside of my lips and stuck to my tongue.
But I could see only a blob of yellow light.
The old man must have shot me.
I moved my arm. I ran my hand over my face, felt down along my neck, my chest. I rubbed across my belly, the waist of my pants, my legs. I could feel the straps of a backpack looped over my shoulders.
Think, Jack.
I was wet, cold.
Maybe I pissed myself or something when the old man shot me.
But there was no blood.
I closed my mouth. It was awful. And I could smell river water.
I was staring into a flashlight.
I lay on my belly, in the dirt at the edge of the river. I could hear the rush of the water.
The Under.
I fumbled for the light. My hand didn’t work right. It took me a couple attempts before I could pick it up, pivot the beam away from my face.
I remembered.
