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.
And above it all, the hole in the sky tears and gapes open like a hungry mouth, Jack’s mouth, Jack’s hand, and it is the same hole that Seth had made through the wall of the apartment building, grinding and spitting fragments of stone, brick, the teeth of the universe, opening outward and exposing another gray street that is equally strewn with bodies, floating endlessly over our heads as far as I can see.
And Seth is running away from me down the street.
Henry repeats, “What the fuck—”
“What do you think? What do you think it is?” I ask, disgusted.
I have no time for this.
A brick tumbles past my feet.
One droplet of blood splatters, a perfect circle, in the center of its upturned face.
Rolling dice.
The snake’s eye.
I have to follow Seth.
I know this place.
And I know I will die here if I don’t follow.
Henry knows this place.
It is all too fast. I cannot keep up with the boy, and Henry falls twice. His feet are cut, the skin on his hands, the knees of his trousers tear open like waking eyelids over the orbs of his pale and skeletal kneecaps. I help him up, turn my head to see where Seth has squeezed himself into a narrow walkway between two jittering brownstones.
“We have to follow him.”
Henry wipes spit from his mouth and I continue after Seth.
There is something blocking the confined footpath between the buildings.
I know what it is.
Of course I know.
Perfect, flawless, a comforting shade of blue—it is the color of toys and swimming pools. A fifty-five-gallon plastic barrel.
Seth stops at the end of the alleyway, but he doesn’t look back at me.
Everything is so loud: Henry’s gasping pants, the crumbling stone, clicking. Harvesters coming, following us. And from where I am standing, I can see that there is no top on the barrel.
I know there are dark things inside it, crowded, folded together within the cramped space of the drum.
Seth turns down the street and I can’t see him anymore.
I need to go.
Above me, a window explodes outward from its buckling frame, showering crystals of glass that stick in my hair.
Henry yells, “What are you doing?”
But I won’t answer.
I walk toward the barrel.
Do not look inside, Jack.
How can you keep yourself from looking?
Fuck you, Jack.
I scream it, “Fuck you, Jack! Fuck you!”
I put my hands on the perfect rim of the drum and push my hips around it. I smear my blood across the raised lip of the barrel as it presses, cool and smooth, like naked skin against me. I can feel my balls tightening up inside me.
Don’t look.
I can’t stop it.
And inside the barrel, I see the boys.
Ben and Griffin.
They look so small and pale, naked, like unborn twins. Unconcerned by the confinement of their plastic womb, their arms fold, spiderlike, entwined. One of Ben’s knees presses up between Griffin’s shoulder blades, angular and rigid. Their heads lie so comfortably, slumbering, jaw to jaw, perfectly unmoving, brothers before and after everything.
I turn away.
I make it to the end of the alley.
Henry struggles past the barrel behind me, and as I emerge onto the next street, I see Seth just as he vanishes into the black square doorway to a Tube station.
Green Park.
This is it.
Of course this is it.
Seth waits for me inside.
* * *
The Green Park Underground was dark and empty, its floors strewn with trash: discarded papers, plastic bottles, wax-paper cups. It smelled like an old movie theatre, or maybe a library—musty and ancient in abandonment.
You never see Tube stations deserted like this.
But this was Marbury.
I felt as empty as the hall, lightheaded, floating unconnected like a fog above the rocking and undulating floor.
I dripped blood everywhere, and I was now too weak to hold my arm up. It ached.
On the other side of the turnstiles, I saw Seth vanish down the escalator. They were still moving, up one side, down the other; the place was lit up, but we were the only ones inside.
I had to follow him. I knew if he didn’t get me out of here that I was going to die.
Tickets.
There were two tickets inside my pocket.
Drip.
Drip.
I handed one of the tickets to Henry.
“Come on.” My voice was a garbled slur.
This is real.
I slipped my shirt over my head, and began winding it around my hand. Tight. Tighter. Dumbly, I though
t about laundering it before giving the T-shirt back to Nickie’s brother.
Henry followed me through the electric gates at the turnstile. They opened like mouths when we fed the tickets into the slots.
I staggered toward the top of the long escalator that went down into the belly of the Tube station. Henry shifted his weight from foot to foot, as though he felt like running, but I wasn’t about to do that.
I leaned against the black rubber handrail and put my head down on the back of my forearm. Nothing I did slowed the flow of blood from the wound on my hand. The escalator shook, the hallway creaked and rumbled, and below us, I heard the whoosh of an arriving train.
Even the trains are running.
Everything was falling apart around us. A glass-framed advertisement shattered and dropped from the wall as the porcelain tiles behind it gave away and scattered like bones down onto the moving steps of the escalator.
Going down.
Then the phone inside my pocket buzzed.
My old Glenbrook ringtone, a song that I didn’t think was especially cool, but had been too lazy to change. The escalator seemed to take forever to go all the way down to the dimness of the lower platform tunnels.
Victoria Line.
Piccadilly Line.
Not-lines.
I reached across my waist with my left hand. My phone vibrated like an insect trapped inside my pocket.
Someone is calling me.
I didn’t look. My thumb smeared a swath of blood across the screen. I pushed a button and held the phone to my ear.
“Billy?”
“Huh?”
I felt sick; I nearly dropped the phone.
He said it again. “Billy?”
Quinn Cahill.
Of course.
“What?”
“It’s me. Quinn.”
“Where are you?”
“Turn around, Billy. I’m right behind you.”
I looked back at Henry. He seemed to be watching the ceiling, as though the force of his stare was sufficient to keep everything from collapsing around us. And standing near the top of the escalator, following us down, all grins and red hair, was Quinn Cahill. He waved a cell phone in the air like we were long-lost cousins meeting for a reunion.
Quinn’s laugh echoed off the tiles of the cavernous escalator flight. Then he shut his phone and tucked it into his back pocket.
My cell phone dropped from my hand. It slid the rest of the way down to the bottom, along the cool slide of stainless steel between the rubber handrail and the wall, smearing a trail of blood.
“Ha-ha! I got something for you, Billy!”
Quinn started down the stairs toward us.
Henry looked confused, scared.
We were nearly at the bottom.
Quinn said, “You maybe looking for these, Billy?”
And from his back pocket, he pulled out my green-and-blue glasses and let them dangle in front of his face. They were dead, lightless. The smaller green lens was flipped out, and Quinn held them between us, swinging back and forth, like a hypnotist’s bauble, between my eyes and his stupid grin.
I nearly fell down trying to gauge my step at the landing of the escalator.
Once I had straightened myself from leaning on the rail, my knees buckled and I would have collapsed if Quinn didn’t push past Henry and shove his hand up into my armpit to catch me.
Henry stood there. He watched us dumbly, his eyes darting from me to Quinn to the glasses. He looked hungry. He looked like he wanted out, too.
Quinn pushed me along toward the arched entryway of a platform. I was too dazed to read the signs, the direction.
“You don’t look so good, Billy.”
Drip.
Drip.
My head hung down. Quinn tugged and pinched at my armpit to keep me on my feet.
I felt him put his face up against my shoulder. I heard him sniff. “And you don’t smell so good, neither.” Then he whispered, “Who’s the barefoot old man?”
“Heh—” I couldn’t even say Henry’s name.
“You can get us out of here,” Henry said. “I’ve seen it work. Turn the lens down. Do it.”
Quinn kept walking, push-dragging me along.
“We need to get on the train, Billy. Then we’ll talk about getting out of here. If you make it that far. Heh-heh!”
“You’re dead,” I said.
“You’re deader than me, Odd. Deader than me.” Quinn wasn’t smiling.
Odds.
I heard a train leave—whoosh!—the air sucked out into the platform with it.
Quinn pulled me over toward the opposite line.
“This way, Billy.”
“There’s Odds here in this world?” I said.
Quinn laughed. “Heh. This world? This world? Everything is everywhere, Billy. Always has been.”
Then he grabbed at my bleeding hand, swiped his fingers in the oozing warmth of my blood and held them up in front of my face.
He pressed his bloody thumb and first finger together and said, “And it all fits here. In this tiny space, Odd. Ain’t you figured that out yet? And you did it, Billy. It all opened up from that nasty cut on your palm. You know how I know? You know how I know?”
Quinn jerked me, like he was scolding me, trying to keep me awake. “Ask me how I know, Billy.”
He tugged me toward the tracks, empty, black.
Seth was there, waiting at the edge of the platform.
Quinn nodded at the ghost and said, “He showed me that, Billy. That one there. I been following him ever since you sent me for a swim in the Under. Remember that? How you rolled me into the water? I fucking want to kill you right now, Billy.”
A train was coming.
Everything shook.
I looked from Seth to Quinn.
“I saw you fucking go down the spill gate.”
Quinn grabbed me harder, shook me. It hurt.
“You saw what you saw, I guess. You wouldn’t know what I seen, where I been. Now I can’t go back. Can’t get my stuff. My house. ’Cause of you, is why. I can’t go home ’cause of you.”
Whoosh.
A train vomited in from the black mouth of the tunnel. It was so loud.
Henry was trying to say something. He’d grabbed Quinn’s shoulder, obviously wanting to get the kid to listen to him, but I couldn’t tell what he said.
The train stopped.
The doors hissed open.
I heard an accordion.
Everything is everywhere.
I said, “Seth.”
But I couldn’t see him on the platform. He had already gotten onto the train.
Henry tried to snatch the glasses out of Quinn’s hand, but the kid was not an easy target. He never had been the kind for surprises. Quinn twisted away from Henry and shoved me through the open doors of the empty car.
I fell onto the dirty floor with my face landing against a chrome support pole.
Seth watched me from the end of the car, standing motionless near the doorway to the next compartment. Outside on the platform, Quinn and Henry fought over the glasses, but Henry was no match for the kid.
As the doors began closing, Henry collapsed to the concrete floor of the platform and Quinn spun around, just in time to jam an arm between the gaskets and squeeze his way into the train with me.
Good-bye, Henry.
The doors hissed shut.
The train shuddered and rocked. I couldn’t tell if we were moving or if the whole world was simply falling apart on top of us.
Quinn stood over me, panting, holding the chrome rail that my forehead pressed against. “Get up, Billy. You ain’t dead yet.”
He raked his fingers into my hair and pulled my head from the floor.
The train picked up speed.
My eyes fixed on the glasses in Quinn’s left hand.
I tried to steady myself on my knees in front of him; my bare chest leaned into the pole, and my face lolled with the motion of the accelerating train
, coming to rest against the kid’s thigh.
Quinn kept trying to pull me up by my hair.
“Stop it.”
I turned my head to see Seth, but the ghost faded and slipped ahead of us into the forward compartment.
“Get up. You ain’t dead.”
I put my hands down onto the floor, attempted to scoot my feet under me so I could stand, so I could relieve the pulling on my fucking hair.
It felt like we were flying, and outside the windows there was nothing but thick velvet black.
“Get off me, Quinn.”
I was dying.
I knew I was dying.
“You ready to take a jump again, Billy?”
I got one foot under me.
A light, just a solitary bulb, smeared past the windows, the length of the train, as fast as if we were falling, a burning eye. Like the flashlight in the Under.
“What the fuck are you trying to do?”
I didn’t think I could stand, but the kid kept pulling on me.
Another light.
“Look at me,” he said. “This time, we’re staying together. This time, you’re taking me back home. Or I’ll fucking kill you, Billy.”
His words smeared like the trailing flashes of light.
Faster and faster.
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“Fuck you, Billy. Look at me.”
And Quinn held the lenses in front of my face.
I made it up to my feet. And I looked at the kid, thinking, I’m taller than you. I should fuck you up, you little prick.
But I nearly fell down.
And Quinn said, “Give me your hand, Billy.”
He swiped the glasses across my belly, flipping the green lens across the eyepiece as it dragged against my skin.
I saw things there.
Everything.
And Quinn said, “Give me your fucking hand.”
Then he yanked the bloody shirt away from my hand and slid his fingers between mine.
I heard an accordion playing.
Wind in trees.
The sound of a small wooden toy horse; rolling, tapping.
twenty-eight
I was Seth Mansfield.
* * *
I remember so clearly being him, that sometimes, lying in my own bed at home in Glenbrook, I could recall the smell of the bedding in the house where Seth slept as a boy, the particular coldness of the plank floors beneath his bare feet in the morning; the feel, awkward and scratchy, of Davey’s hand-me-down clothes against his skin.