The Marbury Lens

by Andrew Smith

  I was embarrassed, I put the phone to my ear.

  “What?”

  “Dude,” he said. “She sounds totally hot.”

  I felt myself going red as I looked at Nickie. She had to have known what he was saying.

  “She is, Con.”

  “What’s wrong with her? Is she missing an eye or something?”

  “You’re a dick. I’ll see you Monday.”

  It was nearly midnight, and I’d walked Nickie to a taxi to take her back to Hampstead.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” I said. I unlocked my arm from hers and stood in front of her before the open cab door.

  I felt so awkward. I wanted to kiss her on the mouth, but I’d never done that before.

  “Good night, Jack,” she said.

  I hugged her, and I watched her as we separated. I think we both looked disappointed. And when the taxi pulled away, I kicked the ground. I hated myself. I should have kissed her good night and now she’d probably never call me tomorrow.

  Twenty-One

  I tried finding an Underground station, but the nearest one had already closed. I began following streets in no particular direction. And then I realized I had no idea where I was. I started walking back toward the statue where we sat earlier, or at least what I thought was the right direction, hoping to find an open Underground station, or maybe a taxi.

  I didn’t care. I finally felt happy. It was like the first time I actually knew relief.

  Even if it wouldn’t last.

  The street I walked on stretched ahead of me, narrow and dark, with closely packed row houses that rose up, straight and gray-faced, behind low iron fences and emaciated trees. I couldn’t see anyone else, and figured I must have turned the wrong way.

  Then I heard a sound.

  Faint, like a small wooden ball rolling across a plank floor.

  I started running, hoping that the desperation of my breaths and the sounds of my footfalls would drown out the nagging Why is this happening to me? So I kept turning toward where I’d see lights, and I finally spilled out into a convergence of busy and crowded streets. A staircase leading down below the sidewalk, the Underground, people, noise.

  You haven’t gotten away from anything, Jack.

  All the way back to my hotel, I kept a hand in my back pocket, fingers wrapped around the sock that contained the purple glasses. I thought about abandoning them in the train car, throwing them in the river, a thousand different ways of separating myself from them but it was already too late for that.

  I needed them.

  I needed them to prove that I wasn’t losing my mind. Or maybe to relieve myself of worrying about what I saw on the other side of the lenses because I really was losing it.

  I asked the clerk at the front desk if I could use his cellophane tape, and he looked at me as though wondering what kinds of drugs required the use of adhesives, but he gave me a roll anyway; and I promised I’d return it in the morning.

  In my room, I shut the window and pulled the drapes across it. I kicked my shoes off and sat at the desk. I put the sock with the glasses in it on the corner of the bed and then took out the hotel stationery pad and began writing notes to myself:

  Jack: Do not leave the room.

  Jack: Remember Nickie is going to call at 3:00.

  Jack Wynn Whitmore

  I taped all of them on the door at eye level.

  The rolling sound again.

  Something was going to happen.

  Roll.

  Tap.

  Tap.

  Tap.

  Under the bed again.

  I looked at the clock on the nightstand. I wrote down the time on another piece of paper:

  12:37

  Roll.

  Tap.

  I got on my hands and knees and looked under the bed.

  I heard a voice. A whisper.

  “Seth.”

  Seth.

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

  Breathing hard, I pulled myself up onto the bed, sitting so my back rested against the headboard, barefoot, wearing jeans, and a T-shirt.

  Then, on another piece of paper, I wrote down a list of the clothes I had on.

  I grabbed the sock and put my fingers down into it. I felt the glasses in there.

  I pulled them out.

  Roll. Tap. Tap. Tap.

  “Nothing’s going to happen,” I said.

  You haven’t gotten away from anything.

  I put them on.

  Twenty-Two

  Pain.

  It hurt so bad; and I was sick, felt the fever boiling inside me.

  I opened my eyes and I was lying inside some sort of cave, wrapped in blankets that stunk and were soaked with my sweat. I could see the flat white sky beyond the jagged sash of the opening above my head, and I couldn’t feel my legs. All I felt was the burning misery.

  I turned my head so I could throw up.

  I saw shadows, two others were in there with me. Kids. I knew who they were.

  How could I know them? Everything about them: Ben and Griffin. Half brothers. Ben’s father was killed at the start of the war, the beginning of the plague. A disease we couldn’t catch. And Griffin was born after everything went dark.

  Ben Miller sat beside me. He leaned forward when I moved. When I vomited, it felt like an animal clawing its way out from my side. I screamed.

  “Hey! Shut him up!” I heard Griffin Goodrich moving toward us from where he was standing at the entrance.

  “Shhh…” Ben wiped a wet cloth across my face. “It’s okay, Jack.”

  And then I heard him say, “He’s waking up.”

  “He’s going to have to, Ben. Or I’m going to leave him here. Both of you. Two days in here is too long. We need to move.”

  “It’ll be okay,” Ben said.

  “Not if they find us. You want to end up like Hewitt and the others, nailed to a fucking wall?”

  The smell of puke in my face made me want to throw up again, but I held it back. My stomach convulsed, tearing my insides. I traced my hand down my chest toward my hip. It was wet and sticky and I remembered that black arrow, but now it was gone. My fingertip tracked across the bumps of haphazard knots where someone had sewn my body shut with what felt like a shoelace.

  “What happened?”

  “How you feeling, Jack?” Ben said.

  I tried to sit up, couldn’t. I answered with, “Uh.”

  Ben wiped my mouth off and slid his hands beneath my armpits. He looked at Griffin.

  “I’m gonna try and move you away from that puke there, Jack. Try not to do that again if you can help it, bud.”

  He slid me around so my head was closer to the light coming in from the cave’s entrance.

  Griffin held a clear plastic bottle over my face.

  “This is all we have left,” he said.

  He opened the bottle and poured a mouthful of cloudy warm water past my lips.

  I swallowed.

  “Thanks, Griff.” I remembered how everyone—at least, what was left of everyone—called the boy Griff. He was only twelve. Ben was fourteen. As far as any of us knew, that was all that was left. Just kids. And none of us had seen a girl in years. At least, not a live one. Or a human.

  I knew where I was.

  Marbury.

  Griffin recapped the bottle and walked back to the cave’s opening.

  I struggled to prop myself onto my elbows.

  “Let me see how bad it is, Ben.”

  Ben Miller stepped over me and squatted down at my side.

  “It’s not too bad,” he said. He pulled the blanket down from my chest. “Just through where you could grab your fat, if you had any. But don’t get mad at me. Griff’s the one who sewed you up. You know I couldn’t even look at it, Jack, I was so scared you were gonna die.”

  The wound puckered out like pouting lips, swollen and stitched shut with a winding of tawny thread. My skin was bruised black around it, the same on the
back side as well.

  “We had to take your shirt apart to get that thread. It was ruined, anyhow.”

  I fanned the blanket away from me. All I had on were pants, loose and torn open with vertical slashes on both legs. Nothing else, just pants. I could see a big straight-bladed knife lying on the ground beside my hip. I knew it was my knife.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “You don’t remember?”

  “I’m having a hard time remembering anything,” I said. I shut my eyes, tried to picture Conner, Nickie, London.

  Conner and Dana on that bed the night of the party.

  Freddie Horvath.

  What the fuck was happening to me?

  You haven’t gotten away from anything, Jack.

  “It was two days ago, outside the Bass-Hove Settlement. We found it. But they were waiting for us, knew we were coming. They got just about everyone.” Then he lowered his voice to a whisper. “We’re all that’s left. Just us three.”

  Ben looked toward where Griffin was standing. “What are we going to do now, Jack? I’m scared. We don’t have no place else to go.”

  “Fuck!” Griffin shouted. Then I heard the jarring sound of a heavy rock pounding against another.

  Ben stood up quickly.

  “The harvesters are coming,” Griffin said. “I knew it. There’s something dead in the cave back there. We should have looked better. They fucking know we’re here now.”

  He lifted the rock he’d used and smashed it down again, crushing the large black bug that had crawled into our hiding place.

  I knew that soon the bugs would come by the thousands. Millions. And I knew what would be following after them, too.

  Ben said, “You’re gonna have to ride, Jack. Get the horses, Griff.”

  Griffin slipped out from where he stood and disappeared into the white.

  “Help me stand up.”

  I held my hand out for Ben.

  “Stay there. Let me get your shoes, first.”

  They were work boots, splitting and mismatched; and Ben slipped them onto my bare feet and held each one straight between his knees while he laced them tight.

  “Are you gonna be okay, Jack? I don’t know what we’d do without you.”

  I propped myself into a sitting position.

  It hurt.

  “I think so.”

  Roll. Tap. Tap. Tap.

  That sound.

  Ben still had my foot wedged between his legs, but he turned around when he heard it, too.

  Then I saw, standing at the back of the cave on the other side of Ben Miller, a pale and barefoot boy with sunken, dark eyes who looked like he couldn’t have been any older than me.

  And Ben said, “Goddamned ghost. That’s all we need. No wonder that harvester found us so easy.”

  The boy sat down and hugged his knees in toward his chest. He looked scared.

  I thought he might have been crying, but he sat there watching me; and I understood that he knew me, too, had been following me, waiting for something.

  I could see right through him, the cracks in the stone wall behind him. Then he got lighter and just spilled out into a kind of fog that blanketed over the ground where he’d been sitting.

  Ben looked at me. “I never did this before. I heard it works. Hewitt told us how he’d done it, remember?”

  “No.”

  I couldn’t remember things very well anymore.

  And Ben turned his face to the back of the cave where that grayish fog sat low upon the hot ground and said, “Well if you can help him, then do it, boy. I figure you’re the one what got us into this by being here in the first place, so it’s the least you could do. The harvesters are gonna get you anyway if you don’t.”

  The fog rolled up, like a blanket, and the boy was there again, now standing.

  Roll. Tap.

  He was barefoot and skinny, starved even, with neither shirt nor hat, wearing tattered pants held up onto his pale, naked waist with a fraying rope of some sort. He looked dirty and uncared for. His jagged and light-colored hair hung down past his eyebrows.

  “Well?” Ben said with an edge of impatience. “Why the fuck were you following us to begin with if you’re not going to help?”

  The boy faded again, fogged over the ground once more. The cloud snaked along toward me, and the next thing I knew, it was slipping through the stitches in my side like wire-thin fingers, and getting inside me.

  It was warm, and I could feel him like he was crawling into every part of my body. I knew who he was.

  And I heard him say his name again.

  “Seth.”

  Twenty-Three

  My hand jerked to my side, rubbed.

  No stitches.

  The glasses lay open on the pillow beside me; the bed drenched in my sweat.

  I needed to throw up, struggled to get my legs off the bed and onto the floor. I stumbled, saw the notes I’d taped to the door.

  What the fuck is happening to me?

  Gagging, I made it to the toilet just in time.

  When I finished, I washed my face with cold water and went back to the bed.

  I looked at the clock.

  12:37

  Not even one minute had passed since I put the glasses on.

  This couldn’t be real.

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

  Okay, Jack, this is it. Get rid of those goddamned things.

  Now.

  I folded the glasses, put them back inside my sock, and stuffed the wad down into the bottom of my backpack. I needed time to think. I needed air. I opened the window and looked out at the lights passing below on the street.

  Who was I fooling? There was no way I’d be able to give them up.

  The panes of glass made smears of the lights over the park.

  Smearing the light.

  That had to be it, I thought. Maybe the glasses were some kind of filter that cut away everything we see here, that stripped off the surface, like opening one of those dolls, and showed what was going on in that other place.

  Inside.

  Marbury.

  That had to be it.

  The center of the universe.

  You’re out of your fucking mind.

  And I wanted to look through them again, but stopped myself before I got my hand back on them.

  I had to stop it.

  This is fucking crazy, Jack.

  I rushed back to the toilet and vomited again. I kneeled on the floor, cold and shaking in my sweat-soaked clothes. Resting my forehead on my crossed arms, I spit into the clouded water as I hung my face in the bowl.

  Something rolled across the floor behind me. I heard it, and it passed so close I could feel its vibration tickling my bare feet.

  Tap. Tap. Tap.

  I pushed myself up. There was nothing.

  If I looked worse to Conner that night when I came back from Freddie Horvath’s than I did at that moment, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, wet, pale, stinking of puke, it would be hard to imagine. I was exhausted. I stared into my own eyes—I don’t know for how long—and I said, “Seth?”

  Something slammed angrily against the wall in the bedroom.

  I whispered, “Are you here?”

  I stepped through the doorway.

  Click. Click.

  Every light in the room turned off. Then my backpack fell over below the open window and something rolled out of it, across the floor, and stopped in front of my feet.

  A wad of paper, crumpled tightly.

  I opened the paper. It was the note I’d taped to the door—the one with my name on it. But scrawled on the page below my name, in nervously penciled, childish capital letters, were the words I AM SETH.

  I waited. Everything became so still and quiet.

  I smoothed the paper flat and laid it on the nightstand. Then I crawled under the bedcovers, shivering with all my clothes on, and waited through the silence until, exhausted, I finally fell to sleep. />
  The day stretched, an endless succession of doubt upon doubt, until it neared the time when Nickie was supposed to call me. Somewhere during my morning run, I’d decided I needed to get help, even if I had no idea how to go about asking for it.

  Hey, Nickie, do you know any good psychiatrists? Because, I just thought I’d let you know that Jack has completely lost his mind and could possibly be a danger to you.

  Just so you know.

  Freddie Horvath did something, and I’m never going to get away from it.

  Quit it, Jack.

  I tried to force myself to stay away from my hotel room, afraid that I didn’t have the backbone to keep my hands off those glasses. So I walked as far as I could, went to the Underground to buy tickets for the Express to Heathrow so I could meet Conner in the morning.

  I wandered.

  I tried to think about anything other than Marbury or Freddie Horvath, but I couldn’t do it for more than a few seconds at most.

  Finally, I went back to the hotel to take a shower. It was early in the afternoon, and the phone began ringing as soon as I stepped under the water.

  I ran to grab it, padding wet tracks along the way and dripping all over the desk where I’d picked up the receiver. I tried to sound like I wasn’t out of breath. I left the shower running. It sounded like rain.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Jack.”

  It wasn’t Nickie.

  “It’s me. Henry.”

  I pulled the chair out and sat down. I looked at the water where it made twin puddles under my feet on the wood floor, dripping from my body.

  Like being born.

  “What?” I said.

  “I was wondering. How are you getting on?” Henry said.

  “Fucked.”

  I think he chuckled.

  “I have something of yours. I think I need to give it back,” I said.

  “They wouldn’t serve me any purpose now. You know that. Or haven’t you been yet?”

  “I’ve been there.” I listened to the water, looked over at the gray steam fogging out from the open bathroom door. “I’m not going back.”

  “I can’t tell you how many times I swore the same thing, Jack. But you’ll have to.”