Passenger (37 page)

Where are those fucking glasses?

I slid my hand under his bed, sweeping my fingers around through the debris, trying not to think about what I might be touching.

Then something tickled the hair in my armpit.

Whatever it was came out through my shirt and began crawling toward my hand.

I jerked my arm back from under the bed.

Stretching nearly the entire span from my elbow to wrist, a green-black harvester clung to my forearm, looking for the source of the blood it smelled, the cut on my hand.

Then the thing bit me, right over my middle knuckle, laying open a smiling, white-lipped gash in my skin. I was horrified and sick.

“Fuck!” I swatted my hand back at nothing, and the bug tumbled away, clicking its shell open and futilely buzzing the cellophane wings that could never support such weight. “It fucking bit me!”

Harvesters don’t eat living things.

The thing sailed past Henry and he moved aside nonchalantly, like he was stepping from the path of an errant tennis ball during a summer match in the park.

I sat up against the bed, squeezing my hand, watching the blood from the bite wound pool and run in a thick scarlet streak that dripped down onto Ander’s T-shirt and jeans, where it left button-sized stains on my crotch.

Henry looked amused, his cigarette dangling loosely. Barefoot, he stepped on the thing. I couldn’t see it, but I could tell by how Henry’s stomps encroached in succession toward the baseboard that it took several attempts for him to kill the harvester.

But by that time, two more had climbed up inside the back of my T-shirt and began eating me. I got up, pulling at my shirt, trying to swipe my arm behind myself and get the things off me. I could feel their jaws, slicing, biting, like tiny carving knives that cut into the skin on my back. I could hear them chewing.

“Henry!” I lifted my shirt and spun around, urgently assuming Henry would help. He hit me. I didn’t care. I wanted those fucking things off my back.

As soon as Henry swatted the second harvester from me—and it was sickening that I could feel how it dug into my skin and didn’t want to let go—a sea of bugs came spilling out from under the bed, washing toward our feet, like an oozing black flood of tar, like the entire apartment was sinking into a roiling ocean of the monsters, and someone had just pulled a drain plug from the floor.

Henry froze. I shoved him back into the living room and slammed the bedroom door shut. But the harvesters had already reached the doorway, and flattening themselves, the first ones began wriggling through the crack above the floor, frantically scratching with their clicking legs, jaws snapping, flexing, open, shut.

I crushed the first ones with the edge of my shoe as soon as they began to squeeze through. It sounded like I was stomping on lightbulbs, and a burbling mass of rust-colored snot erupted all over the floor, up the leg of my jeans, past my ankle, inside my shoes. Behind me, I heard things tipping over, breaking. Henry was pulling up a thick rug and upending the furniture.

Panting, his cigarette still pinched between his lips, Henry jammed the rug down into the crack beneath the door, and wedged it tightly with his fingers until the opening was sealed. But there were so many harvesters on the other side of the door that I could hear the rasping clatter of their shells and legs, the pincers of their jaws against the door in such great numbers that it sounded like we were deluged in a downpour of pea gravel.

My hands shook. I combed fingers through my hair, tried pulling my shirt away from the spots where my blood cemented it to my back.

And my hand kept bleeding.

“You still think this is home?”

Henry looked sick, gray.

He took another drag on his cigarette, then let the butt fall onto the rug. He stamped it out with his bare foot. Henry swallowed. I could tell he struggled with articulating words. “We need to get the fuck out of here.”

The harvesters began pulling the rug through the crack beneath door.

They were going to get out.

Like everything, it was a matter only of time.

twenty-seven

Henry said, “Do something.”

I didn’t know what I could do.

All I knew was that from the moment I first opened my eyes, lying on my back in the doorway to Henry’s toilet, I hunted for signs that this was not the place.

It would never be the place.

I was lost forever; we all were, skipping through layer after broken layer, hell after rearranged hell, not-worlds upon not-worlds, jumping men, every one of us.

It was the Marbury lens.

I was inside the broken lens, and it was inside me. I would never go home again. And maybe it was just one of those stupid and optimistic things that teenagers tell themselves—no matter how fucked up their lives are—but I could still imagine putting things right, waking up inside Ben and Griffin’s sweaty garage, maybe in my own bed the morning of Conner’s end-of-school party, or perhaps I’d be on top of a bare mattress again, inside an empty room at Freddie Horvath’s house, my foot bound, aching, and I’d be scared, watching the light along the crack at the bottom of a doorway, telling myself
This is real, this is real
and living through the succession of days nervously watching everything so closely, observing it all with a microscope’s unfailing attention to tiny details, each moment holding my breath, wondering when I’d detect the telltale clue that signified another broken string, as familiar as the sound of a doorbell that welcomes Jack home to another not-here.

But I had the lens.

It was inside my pocket.

The lens would set us free.

When I slipped my hand down inside the pocket of Ander’s jeans, I watched the rug, pulling, jerking, as though it had come to life and was trying to crawl away from me and Henry. I could hear it ripping into shreds beneath the door, getting smaller, a cheap magic trick.

Look, no hands.

I felt it.

Something was wrong.

Something is always wrong.

I grabbed, pulled my hand up.

I was bleeding. Bad now.

Henry said, “You’re bleeding.”

No shit, Henry.

Drip.

Drip.

“What are you going to do?”

Like I could actually decide the outcome.

I opened my hand.

And I was holding on to a black knot, a tangled mass.

A thick nylon zip tie, the kind Freddie Horvath used to bind me down to a bed.

No lens.

It was a fucking zip tie in my pocket.

The rug twitched. It was nearly gone now.

This was it.

Jack was home for good.

“Fuck!” I dropped the black knot like it was burning a hole through my hand. I punched the door. The rug was nearly all the way inside the bedroom, disappearing beneath the crack at the bottom of the door.

“What’s wrong?”

Henry was scared.

Something was wrong.

The lens had to be here.

I dug through my pockets again, frantic. All I had was my cell phone, a pair of yellow tickets for the Tube, and a ten-pound note.

“We need to get the fuck out of here.”

The harvesters were coming for us.

I spun around. This was Marbury. Always something trying to kill you here.

In the tight corner of the main room, in Henry’s kitchen, I began pulling out drawers, dumping them.

Henry caught on quick. He knew the game, too. After all, he’d been stuck in Marbury for most of my life. I grabbed a butcher knife. Henry picked up a stubby knife with a thick blade; it would be hard to break. But I didn’t have time to shop for survival gear.

At least I had shoes.

Henry was barefoot.

Oh well, there would be corpses. There were always corpses, and shoes had half-lifes like goddamned uranium in Marbury.

The rug finally disappeared into the slit beneath the bedroom door. I found an ice pick on the kitchen floor, jammed it down into my back pocket, and we ran out to the hallway, slamming the front door to Henry’s apartment shut behind us.

I don’t know why, but as soon as we were out of Henry’s flat, I thought,
This is Marbury with electricity
.

Lightbulbs burned in yellowed tulip sconces all the way down the hall, Henry’s phone was ringing when I woke up, and the beers we drank had been cold.

Electricity.

And harvesters that eat people alive.

And no way out.

We ran toward the stairs. Henry’s flat was three floors above the street, and although neither of us had any idea where we might be going, we both knew we had to move, to get out of there.

Henry followed, one step behind me as we made our way down to the first landing. And he nearly knocked me over when I stopped suddenly at the bottom step.

Standing directly in front of us, in the center of the worn carpet where the banister wrapped around and descended to the next floor, was Seth Mansfield.

And Seth was different now, too.

Again.

When I saw him in the desert, where the old man sat propped against his dead horse, I saw an older Seth, with rope burns that wrapped in red slashes around his neck. Now, here he was, this unmarked boy who just stood there watching me. He looked angry, too.

It was almost as if I could hear Seth telling me,
You fucked up, Jack. You need to put it back together before everything falls apart.

His mouth was pressed tight, a straight line across his face. He was more clear to me now than I had ever seen him; almost solid, real.

This was real.

Seeing the ghost startled Henry. I felt him grab my shoulder, tightly, and I got the impression that he was using me as some sort of barrier between him and Seth.

Seth Mansfield wore shoes and a collared shirt, tucked in neatly beneath a pair of deep blue suspenders. His hair was combed. He looked like he could have been dressed for church, as clean as he was.

I thought about the harvesters in Henry’s apartment, wondered if they were making their way through his front door, and what could possibly be waiting for us down on the street outside.

I asked Seth, “What do we do?”

Seth didn’t answer me. He stood perfectly still, a color-washed portrait of the kid he used to be.

After a moment, I pleaded, “I don’t have any way out of here, Seth. Can you help us get out?”

Seth spun around, his hand spread open, waving, as though clearing smoke from the air in front of him, and when he touched the plaster wall, the entire building started to shake and creak. It was almost like a bomb had gone off. Bits of dust, splinters from a ceiling somewhere above our heads, fell like noisy snow around my feet.

The wall crumbled. I watched as a hole tore open where Seth’s hand passed inside the plaster. The masonry lay exposed, and when Seth pushed his body closer into the wall, I saw—counted—three, four, five bricks tumbling outward, away from him. They spun and scattered down onto the street below.

Everything was falling apart.

The stairwell rolled and shook.

Henry seemed to drain empty behind me. I felt him weaken, wavering as though he might fall down where he stood. He sat on the staircase.

Seth disappeared through the wall, out into the street and the gray fog of the London morning.

Not-London.

I looked back at Henry. “Get up. We need to get out of here.”

Henry stood, weakly, his jaw slack as he stared at the opening Seth had left in the wall.

He’d been in Marbury for ten years. It wasn’t like Henry had never seen a ghost before.

But this was different.

The building began to tilt, leaning out toward the street, following Seth, collapsing, as the entire world tipped, spilling, pouring its contents down into another empty hole.

And behind Henry, I could hear the clicking, grinding, chewing.

Harvesters were coming.

I took off, running down the stairs.

I didn’t care if Henry followed or not. But he did.

At the bottom of the stairwell, a windowless door rattled on its hinges. It was the way out to the building’s lobby.

And in the center of that door, pinned in place with a single black-shafted arrow, there was a small painted wooden horse, a spinning thread spool between its hind legs.

Spinning and spinning.

I couldn’t help but stop on the landing and stare at the small thing.

Blood had been wiped all over the door behind the horse, smeared in clear and menacing handprints, like some frantic madman left a signature to mark a murder.

I was aware of throbbing pain in my hand. I held it up, saw that the tissue I’d wrapped around my palm had completely soaked through and was dissolving. I was bleeding everywhere.

Up the stairs behind us, thick, dark knots of blood marked the path we’d taken down.

And I knew the handprints on the door were mine.

I tried choking off my wrist with my left hand, but the flow of blood never lessened.

You’re dying, Jack.

Henry nudged my arm as he pushed past me, stumbling into the lobby.

I looked away from the horse, its wheel still spinning, rolling. I followed Henry out of the creaking building and onto the cold and damp street.

*   *   *

What waits for us outside freezes us in our tracks.

Henry stands in front of me. I can’t see his face.

He says, “What the fuck is this?”

Marbury.

What the fuck do you think it is?

The rolling and creaking goes on, endless and anguished, from every building. Even the lightposts along the street seem restless, itchy. They emit static snaps and pops. I can feel the individual fractures of the pavement stones beneath my feet grinding like nervous teeth.

I hold my hand up, arm bent at the elbow, and the bleeding paints a black pudding skin of blood in rounded streaks down my forearm.

Drip.

Drip.

I marvel at how white my body has become.

All down the street, infinite in every direction, the rows of buildings stack tightly one after another, each of them twisting, sighing as though inhaling, exhaling. Sleeping. And they are all decorated, adorned with spattered corpses: men, women, children, every one of them unclothed, bloodstained, pinned into the walls, the frame boards, gutters and eave joists, anywhere—some of them missing pieces, carefully restructured, headless or neutered, drawn, some of them remarkably unscarred like a frieze of angels, but all of them skewered through with the black arrows and the sharpened-bone pikes of Hunters. Some of them are still barely alive; they blink like random lightbulbs, faulty on burned-out strings, moving arms and hands slowly, gracefully, the way you’d wave in a parade.