The Marbury Lens

by Andrew Smith

  “Why did you call me?”

  “I told you. To see how you were getting on. But I wanted to ask you something, Jack.”

  “What?”

  “Who’s left?”

  “Ben and Griffin. Nobody else.”

  “I’m sorry.” I heard him exhale. A sigh, maybe. Or he was smoking a cigarette. “Be good, Jack. Oh…and Jack, I just want to be sure of one thing. Tell me what it looks like there. Marbury.”

  “A white desert.”

  “Okay.”

  “Henry?”

  “Mmmm?”

  “Is it real?”

  “You know as much as I do, Jack. Of course it is. As real as anything. Be good. Maybe I’ll talk to you again. Here, I mean, of course.”

  “Can’t you help me?”

  “It’s why I told you not to look for me, Jack. There’s nothing I can do now. You know that. And I’m afraid there just aren’t very many others you could give them to at this point. I’ve tried finding Griffin and Ben, but I can’t do it. Be good. You know what to do. I’m confident of that.”

  Then he hung up.

  I walked to the bathroom and climbed back into the shower, under the warm water.

  Nickie met me in the lobby. She’d brought a basket of things and we spread out a blanket where we had tea on the grass in the park. It was a perfect day.

  And as much as I’d tried, I couldn’t overcome my awkwardness with her. So after my first series of stumbling attempts at conversation—asking her about church, how she’d slept after our late dinner—she knew something was bothering me.

  “Are you all right, Jack?”

  I lay back on the blanket and looked up at the blueness of the sky, wondering if it really was blue.

  “I like you, Nickie.”

  She touched my shoulder. It felt so nice, like nothing I’d ever felt before. “I like you, too. I mean, for an American and all.” She laughed. “And you’re mysterious. And clever, I think.”

  I sighed. “Really bad things have happened to me.”

  She leaned over me, inches from my face. Her hair fell, and shaded my eyes.

  “What sorts of things?”

  “Someone did something. Terrible. I don’t know if I can tell you yet. But I feel like I need to say something. I think there’s something wrong with me because of it, and I don’t want it to affect you.” I looked away from her, watched her hair. I wished it could cover me entirely. “I hope you can be patient with me.”

  “I can be patient, Jack,” she said, “to a point, that is.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She put her hand on mine and turned so she sat facing out onto the small lake.

  “When you can tell me, I’ll listen.”

  “Okay.”

  She tried to change the subject. I sensed she felt bad for me, maybe sorry.

  “You must be excited to be seeing your friend tomorrow.”

  I thought about it. I felt so guilty for what we’d done, but now I didn’t really know what I would tell Conner about Henry and those glasses. If I’d tell him anything at all.

  I said, “Yes.”

  “You know,” she said, “I’m going to Blackpool on holiday tomorrow with Rachel. I think I shall desperately miss you, Jack, until I come back to London next weekend.”

  “Oh, great,” I said. “Now Conner will probably think I just made the whole thing up about meeting you.”

  “If you get lonely, you and he might come up to Blackpool. It’s quite lovely. We can introduce him to Rachel.”

  “Not if you want to stay friends with her.”

  She laughed again. It sounded like a bird singing.

  I sat up so our shoulders touched, and I wasn’t scared anymore. There was no reason to be. Not after what I’d seen. So I decided to say it.

  “Nickie, I’ve never kissed a girl in my entire life. Do you think there’s something wrong with me?”

  And she said, “I don’t know. Let’s see.”

  And in that moment, I forgot about everything. It was like nowhere else existed except the space between Nickie and me.

  Nickie said, “No. There’s nothing wrong.”

  Twenty-Four

  I didn’t want to say good-bye to her that evening.

  We kissed again before she passed through the gate to the Underground. And we’d stopped an older couple coming in, handed them my camera, and asked if they’d take a picture of us together. I wanted to ride with her, but she told me to stay; and said if I really couldn’t stand it in London without her, then I should give her a call and catch a train north for the coast.

  I wished I could be more like Conner, and immodestly persuade her to come to my bed with me, even if the reason I wanted her with me was that the thought of going back to the room all by myself terrified me.

  Because I knew what I would do.

  I didn’t eat dinner, didn’t want to throw up again.

  As soon as I’d gotten inside my room, I began the routine: taped notes to the door. Conner is coming. Six fifteen. I left the train tickets on the desk next to the phone. I rushed, my hands shook, like I was a junkie scrambling for another dirty fix.

  And I was pissed off at myself, too. I took the glasses out from where I’d hidden them, then I picked up my pack and hurled it, crashing against the door.

  “Fuck!” I screamed. “Fuck this, Jack!”

  I couldn’t stop it, even if I wanted to.

  I kicked my clothes across the floor where they’d spilled out.

  There were zip ties at the bottom of the pack. I remembered putting them there. The ones from Freddie’s car.

  “Fuck yourself, Jack!”

  Shaking in my rage, I kicked the pack.

  “Fuck you, Freddie!”

  Then I tore my clothes off and bound my ankle tightly to the bottom rail of the bed frame.

  It hurt.

  I put the glasses on.

  As far as we knew, we could have been the only living humans in the world. Who was there to argue differently?

  On the morning of the second day, before we rode across the parched and salty flat of the desert, we drank our own piss that we distilled in the heat using a sheet of plastic and Griffin’s empty water bottle, just to keep ourselves alive.

  If we didn’t find water, we knew it would be our last day.

  The horses were failing, too.

  My side oozed snot-colored pus that ran down my skin and glued the waist of my pants against my hip. We cut a hole in one of our blankets, and I wore it over my bare chest like a poncho to slow down my dehydration, but I don’t think it worked.

  We stopped talking to each other.

  Griffin and Ben followed. I pointed our horses in the direction of the black spires of mountain peaks north of us, and I promised them there’d be water in the mountains if we could make it. So they believed me, and I wondered who among us would be the first to drop.

  I hadn’t seen Seth since we left the cave, but I could feel what he was doing for me, and I knew everything about him—how he was a foundling, and he’d killed a man. And I believed I knew why he’d been waiting for me, too. One day, I’d tell Seth’s story to the other boys, just so they’d know he wasn’t a bad kid.

  Just unlucky.

  Like me.

  When we left on the first day, I looked across the flat of the desert and could see a shining black river spilling toward us like a flood. It was the harvesters, seeking out the cave where we’d been hiding; and behind the quivering insect sea rose the updrifts of dust from the mounted riders who were hunting us.

  The Followers. Devils, we called them. Hunters. What else could they be? It would always be this way, and now there were almost none of us left. That’s why we rode, looking for someone. Anyone.

  When we left with Henry, trying to find anyone else, there were twenty of us.

  The boys didn’t remember anything other than this life—the war, and I wondered if my own memories were from here or some other place. But being in Marbur
y was in some ways like being imprisoned by Freddie Horvath: I didn’t have the time or energy to worry about what was real. It made me wonder if anything was: Marbury, London, Conner, Nickie.

  Griffin leaned forward on his horse, arms grabbing the animal’s neck. Every one of the horses was bareback, guided only by crude rope halters. It was agony to ride them like this.

  “Are you okay?” I asked. I moved my horse up beside him, close enough that I could touch him.

  “No.” His voice was a constricted rasp.

  Ben rode in front. He stopped his horse and looked back at us.

  “Do you have any idea what that is, Jack?”

  He pointed forward, and I followed his arm.

  “I don’t know.”

  We saw what looked like a wall of black boxes stretched across the salt ahead of us, maybe a mile distant.

  “Do we keep heading for it?” Ben asked.

  I looked at Griffin.

  He was going to be the first of us to die, I thought.

  I said, “Yeah.”

  “What the fuck is that?” Ben said.

  Griffin lifted his head. His eyes were black gashes.

  I knew what it was. Remembered.

  Stretching across our path ahead, buried in salt up to the bottoms of its doors, was a passenger train: seven cars and a locomotive. It looked like some kind of perfectly placed decoration that had been dropped there in the middle of nowhere, for there were no tracks visible in either direction.

  I nudged my horse forward. He twitched and shook his head. I thought he could smell water.

  “It’s a train,” I said. “Come on.”

  “Is it good?” Griffin said. He’d gone back to resting his head against the horse’s neck. “Is it a good thing, Jack?”

  “It’s good,” I said. “I promise.”

  We led the horses down one side of the train, around the locomotive, and behind it, where the dry wind was blocked by the height of the cars. Even on horseback, the windows were too high to see inside.

  I got down first, then Ben and I helped Griffin from his horse.

  I pulled my pants out from where they’d stuck to my hip.

  Ben said, “Is that okay?”

  “I’m holding up.”

  I unsheathed my knife.

  Ben had a spear he’d made from sharpened rebar. That’s all we had; all we ever had. It’s why we decided to ride along with Henry Hewitt to the settlement in the first place, thinking we’d find something better than we’d been left with.

  Barefoot, Griffin Goodrich didn’t have anything. Just his hands and his meanness, Ben said of him. The younger boy had never known anything but the war, couldn’t remember his parents. It was only riding and running, fighting and watching people die since Ben had begged Henry Hewitt to take them along with his riders. They’d both have been food for the Hunters years before if Henry didn’t tell them yes.

  Most of the time Griffin refused wearing clothes at all, saying there was no use for them that he could see. I took my poncho off and threw it over my horse’s back. Then I put my hand on Griffin’s shoulder and said, “We’re going to find a way inside this thing. But we have to be careful. And we have to stay together. So you gotta try, okay, Griff? I’ll find you some water.”

  “Okay.”

  Ben said, “Jack, if we open this thing up and there’s something dead in there. Well. You know.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “They’re following us, anyway.”

  “Maybe,” Ben argued.

  The boys followed me to the back of the last car. There was a rectangular sliding door with a window so people could stand there and watch what they were leaving behind, I thought.

  And the door was surrounded by a thick black gasket, rubber that had gone scaly and gray. I stuck the blade of my knife into the gasket, testing its resistance.

  Then I pushed it all the way through and levered the door until it slid open enough for Ben and me to wedge our fingers through the gap so we could push.

  It was easy.

  We went inside, and then I closed the door behind us.

  Twenty-Five

  The only sign that there had ever been people in that last car were the suitcases. More than a dozen of them had been left behind, carefully lined along shelves above the rows of windows on either side of the compartment. At the very least, I knew that the boys and I would be able to get some new clothes for us to die in, and maybe some shoes for Griffin.

  I led the way. Ben and Griffin followed as we walked slowly down the dim aisle. Sometimes, the boys would stop just to run their hands over the cool smoothness of the leather seats and Formica tabletops in the car. One of the tables had crumbs of something on it.

  “You think there’s food in any of them bags, Jack?” Ben asked.

  “We’ll find something, that’s for sure,” I said. “We’ll be better off if we walk the whole thing before we take stock of what we can get.”

  Ben said, “Okay, then.”

  I pushed open the door that connected us to the next car.

  There was a whoosh of dry air, as if the car inhaled when the door swung open.

  We smelled the death right away.

  It wasn’t the horrid, gagging smell of rotten death, but we all knew instantly that there would be dead passengers inside the car; and I could tell by the dryness of the odor they’d been there for years, at the least.

  Six of them.

  Mummified.

  A man and woman sat, tilted against the window like they’d fallen to sleep a thousand years ago and were still dreaming. Their skin had vacuumed in, brown, like overdone piecrusts against the sunken contours of their skulls. He was nicely dressed: new jeans with a leather belt and a striped blue shirt that still had pressed creases down the sleeves.

  I hoped I wouldn’t have to undress him just so we could have something better to wear. I caught Ben looking at him, too, sizing him up; and I knew he was thinking the same thing.

  All three of us bent forward to look under the table so we could see his shoes. They were new. White tennis shoes.

  Between his hip and the armrest beneath the window sat a liter-size clear bottle, capped, and three-fourths full of water. I pulled it out, opened, smelled. It was good, but I didn’t drink it.

  I handed it to Griffin.

  The three of us took turns, carefully sharing, until the bottle was empty. I put it on the table in front of the dead couple.

  In the next row of seats, three children had stretched out across the benches, lying on their sides, hands folded beneath their heads like pillows. Two girls and a boy, and not one of them could have been more than eight years old. They were hard to look at, even if the three of us had seen something enough like it plenty of times before.

  “Looks like they were sleeping,” I said. “Looks like they all just went to sleep.”

  I glanced at Griffin. I could tell he was bothered by it.

  “It can’t be a bad way to go,” I said.

  We found the old man at the end of the car. He had some kind of uniform on, with an oval brass name tag pinned to the chest of his navy-blue jacket, and he was sitting underneath a table with his knees bent up. His mouth and eyes were open.

  Blackened scabs.

  I decided I wasn’t going to touch that one, no matter what.

  The next car was the dining car. We trembled as we walked through it. None of us had to say it; we knew we’d find something to eat and drink there. The tables were all set: white tablecloths, place settings and silverware that still shined, folded cloth napkins, triangular crystal vases with orbital rings around their bases—the dried peppering from the ashes of flowers they once contained.

  Three more bodies there, seated on the floor against the far door. Men. The workers at the last supper.

  “If you want, you two can stay in here and see what you can find while I check out the rest of the cars up ahead,” I said.

  I held my knife out in front of me.

 
; Ben looked at Griffin. His eyes were clear now, just from that small bit of water we’d shared. “We’re staying together, Jack,” he said.

  There was not even a hint of resistance on Griffin’s gaunt face.

  “We need to move these three out of the way, then,” I said.

  Ben pulled at one of the corpse’s legs, and fell back into us when it came detached inside the man’s uniform trousers.

  “Pull them by the clothes,” I said.

  None of them weighed more than a few pounds, and after Ben’s grisly mistake, we easily pushed the three bodies behind the last table. I took the white tablecloth from it and blanketed it over their heads. I felt sorry for them, for our having to move them as we did.

  Then, more cars of the same. Parched and desiccated bodies, suitcases, conductors, and none of them looked as though anything even remotely out of the ordinary had happened. Just another ride on a train.

  The next-to-last car was a sleeper, with a narrow paneled hallway alongside the only row of windows.

  Ben slid open the first compartment’s curtained door and poked his head inside.

  He threw himself back, collapsing against Griffin and me, screaming, “Fuck! Fuck!”

  The three of us fell down in a heap on the dry carpet. I dropped my knife.

  Something moved inside. I saw a flash, a shadow across the doorway, and then an old woman stepped out into the hallway and looked down at us, shaking her head. She raised her hand as though to touch Ben’s face, and as he launched himself back to his feet, the woman spun around and faded down the corridor.

  Ben sailed after the image, swinging his metal spear back and forth, hammering, pounding it into doors and glass, shouting, “Fuck you, ghost! I fucking hate ghosts!”

  “Ben! Ben!” I stood, pulling Griffin up next to me, but Ben wouldn’t listen. He ran the length of the car, smashing everything he could, cursing until the woman faded and vanished through the jagged cracks of one of the windows he’d shattered.

  Ben dropped his weapon and fell to his knees, panting at the opposite end of the hallway.

  “It’s okay,” I said. I put my hand on the back of Ben’s neck. He just stared at the carpet between his knees, and I said, again, “It’s okay, Ben.”