by Andrew Smith
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.
Nineteen
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 th
e 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.
Twenty
This is real.
My feet, inside my shoes.
Sounds of cars on the road.
I slip my hand up inside my T-shirt and feel my side.
This is real.
Henry’s glasses are wrapped inside my sock and I know they’re in my back pocket.
I haven’t gotten away from anything.
Saturday night.
The pub was crowded with kids; and three guys had set up on a stage near the back and were playing folk music with a guitar, mandolin, and drum. I scanned the length of the bar, saw the same bartender who’d served me the night before, and just as I found a path to where he was pouring, I felt a hand on my shoulder.
A soft hand. It stopped me, turned me back.
“I didn’t think you were going to come. I’d almost given up waiting for you.”
I felt myself going white, like all the blood had just drained from my body, and my eyes met squarely with hers.
“It’s Nickie, with an I-E,” she had said, and spelled it out slowly. And now I remembered how I’d entered it into my cell phone, earlier, before it went dead. She was the one who took my picture after we met on the boat. I remembered it now, how she’d brushed my hand lightly while I was taking a picture and asked if I’d like her to take one of me, since I was alone, for my friends back home. Nickie.
Maybe.
What the hell is happening to me?
I exhaled, smiled. “I…I’m sorry. I don’t know where the time went. Jet lag, I guess. I’ll get over it.”
She smiled back at me.
“Well, I’m pleased you’re here now,” she said, and added, “Jack.”
Then she squeezed my hand.
I heard myself gulp. She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever talked to in my life, I think.
She wore those jeans that were so tight around her ankles and a pink sweater that clung to her waist with a wide, open neckline that showed her collarbone, the perfect smoothness of her skin. And she looked at me with the softest blue eyes—the slightest trace of a smile on her lips, and shining black hair that spilled down to her shoulders—like she was waiting for me to say something.
Nickie.
“Do you want to get something to drink? Something to eat?” I stuttered.
“It’s very crowded in here, Jack,” she said. “Can we go for a walk outside?”
I looked back at the bartender. He was watching us.
Everyone’s watching you, Jack.
I took her hand. “Let’s go.”
When we were out on the street, Nickie slipped her arm in mine and I said, “Where to?”
Nickie smiled and said, “Come on. I’ll show you.”
And while we walked toward the Tube, I thought I’d better shut up and let her talk, because I didn’t have any idea how a guy like me could get a girl like Nickie to wait for him anywhere.
Hey, Nickie, did I tell you about how I got kidnapped by this sick guy named Freddie Horvath? And how he shot me up with drugs and shocked me, and I thought I was going to die? And, oh yeah, how he tried to rape me, too?
But I got away from him.
YOU DIDN’T GET AWAY FROM ANYTHING, JACK.
Freddie Horvath did something to my brain.
And then me and my best friend, Conner, killed him. It was an accident, but we fucking killed him, just the same. Did I tell you that, Nickie? Or, did I tell you about how I can’t even remember anything about meeting you today because I hallucinated some crazy shit about people getting hacked into pieces and eaten by bugs? Or how I got shot through my side with an arrow?
Did I tell you about that, Nickie?
Because I do remember that.
I reached around and felt those goddamned glasses there, still in my back pocket.
She took me to Hampstead, the part of the city where her family lived, and we ate Thai food at a café there and then rode on the Underground to Piccadilly.
She caught me staring at her on the subway. I wasn’t really staring, though, I was looking past her at the alternating blur and reflections in the window. I looked at myself, and sometimes I looked scared.
And Nickie said, “There’s something about you, isn’t there, Jack?”
That snapped me out of it.
I said, “I don’t know. What do you think?”
“I think it’s okay,” she said.
She said it like she knew, like she could heal me. Maybe I was only hoping that was true, because I really didn’t know what to believe anymore.
I said, “Thanks for having dinner with me, Nickie. I’m beginning to feel, well, not so alone.”
It was warm, muggy, and we sat on the steps beneath the statue of Eros, looking out at the lights, the traffic. I felt so comfortable with her, but at the same time I felt like I wasn’t completely there, too.
“What made you do it?” I said. “Ask if I wanted you to take that picture, I mean?”
Nickie sat right next to me, our legs touching.
“It was Rachel who dared me,” she said.
I remembered. She had a friend with her. They wore dresses, uniforms, like they’d just come from school.
“Oh. Rachel.”
“It was a lark, anyway.” Nickie smiled. “I mean, we would never take a tour cruise on any other day. But when I saw you in the queue, I needed to follow you.”
“You followed me?”
Everyone’s following you.
“I was taken by you. I don’t know why, but I had to see what you were doing there, all by yourself. We laughed as we watched you attempting to order coffee on the boat,” she said. “When the server asked if you wanted filtered or Americano, you looked so confused and then you said, ‘I’m American.’ It really was, well…”
And her voice trailed off softly, blending in with the sounds of being there in that square, sitting beside her on a perfect evening in summer.
This is real.
Isn’t it?
“Well, either way, it was horrible-tasting stuff,” I remembered.
How can you remember the taste of the coffee, but nothing about Nickie?
Freddie Horvath did something to your brain.
You need help.
“So, I guess you thought I needed help or something.”
“I said I thought you looked interesting,” Nickie said. “And Rachel teased that I wasn’t daring enough to say hello to you.”
“Interesting?”
Nickie laughed. “You know,” she said, “you had that way about you, I suppose. Well. Very handsome. When I finally did say hello, you were so charming and easy to talk to. And anyway, you certainly had no qualms about asking me for my telephone number.”
“I couldn’t help myself.”
She put her hand over mine.
“Tomorrow, you should go buy a new charge cord for your phone, Jack.”
I thought about it. “I don’
t want one. Too much of a connection to the other world back home. And Conner’s bringing mine on Monday.”
“If you’d like, you could call him with mine,” she said. She looked at her watch. “It’s afternoon there now. And I’m getting late.”
She took her phone out and held it to me.
“Can we do something tomorrow?” I asked.
“I’m going to church with my parents in the morning. I could call your hotel in the afternoon.”
“What time?”
I took her phone, flipped it open.
“Three,” Nickie said.
“I’ll make sure to be there.”
“Don’t stand me up again, Jack. Here, let me put in the code.” Nickie’s hand went to mine and she entered the dialing code for America. I looked at her face, and as I entered Conner’s number, she leaned into me and her hair brushed my cheek.
“There,” she said.
I almost forgot Conner’s number.
“Hello?” he said.
“Hey, Con.” I sounded choked, even to me.
“Jack! What happened? Don’t tell me. Your phone’s dead again.”
“Yeah.”
“I tried calling you. Is everything okay?”
“Yeah. Tell Wynn and Stella I’m fine. I’m calling from a friend’s phone.”
“A friend? Who?” Conner asked.
“I met a girl today.”
“Dude,” Conner said. “Did you get laid? Can I finally tell everyone you’re officially not gay? I think Dana will be disappointed.”
“Stop being a dick, Con.” I held the phone away from my ear. “I’m putting you on speakerphone.”
I held the phone in front of Nickie, and she tapped a button.
“Can you hear me?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Conner, this is Nickie.”
“Hello, Conner,” Nickie said. “I think you have a very nice friend.”
“Wow,” was all Conner said. Then, “Jack, take me off speaker.”
