373
Outside, the rain raged.
I moved closer.
My shirt still hung open, unbuttoned. I flattened the left side with my palm and looked down at the number stitched there.
373
Maybe everything had the same number here.
Fuck that.
Inmate.
I tore the shirt off. After I knotted it into a ball, I lifted the broken shower door with the toe of one boot and put the shirt on the floor beneath it. Somehow, water had begun pooling in the carpeting there, and I saw something that looked like a long black slug wriggling through the fibers. I could feel the sides of my mouth turning down in disgust and I pressed the door flat beneath my foot.
Now I was nobody.
Welcome back, Jack.
The lightning moved off into the distance but the rain never slackened at all. The sky shifted to the boiled paleness of the Marbury dusk. When I moved closer to the wall, I could make out what had been left as a message.
And there, just below the highest scrawl of the number—my number—my eyes fell upon a drawing of circles inside other circles.
At the midpoint of them all, the word HOME.
The center of the universe.
An arrow from the exact middle. It crossed the shape’s perimeter, pierced the concentric interior of a second, larger circle.
In this one, MARBURY.
I am going to build something big for you.
From there, an arrow shoots into a third.
Trapped inside that circle are the words:
I DON’T KNOW THE NAME OF THIS ONE.
I SAW THE PREACHER THERE.
IT’S ALL MARBURY, BUT IT’S ALL DIFFERENT.
THIS WAS THE HARDEST TO GET OUT OF.
And then, the smears of letters that said:
YOU AND SETH HAVE THE KEYS.
The hardest to get out of.
A third arrow, another world.
The circle encloses the first three.
The final circle, an outer ring that surrounds them all.
I recognize the hand. Of course I recognize the hand.
I DON’T KNOW HOW MANY MORE THERE ARE. IT IS PROBABLY UNCOUNTABLE.
And near the edge of the wall, just at the level of my own heart, floating out there, somewhere—who knows—in Jack’s universe, in deliberate and dark lines, I trace my own fingers around the strokes that had been left behind.
Maybe it’s blood, I thought, the tip of my finger following around a precise drawing of a hammer.
* * *
I know.
It is in Conner’s hand.
* * *
Henry Hewitt had come to Marbury before I did. It was Henry who’d pawned the glasses off on me when I was alone in London. I couldn’t count the number of times I considered getting even with Henry for trapping me, and now I’d done the same thing to my best friends.
It was clear we had all somehow fallen apart, fallen together.
Conner had gotten there before me.
Faintly, somehow, I began to remember. An argument about something, about the next steps. Conner yelling at me about how I fucked it up, saying, Henry said you would bring things here. He didn’t mean the lens. We weren’t supposed to bring the lens here. We fucked up, Jack. We fucked up. And first Conner, then Ben and Griffin, disappearing in the garage; falling, all of us.
That’s why he drew that mark.
Conner got here first.
And one second might be a month through the Marbury lens.
Maybe forever.
I knew that.
We all did.
At the far edge of the wall, opposite Conner’s drawing of my universe—our universe—I saw more writing:
MIND THE GAP.
FENT IS LOOKING FOR YOU.
THE BUGS ARE EVERYWHERE.
STAY OUT OF THE RAINWATER.
And, finally:
JACK—I WILL FIND YOU AGAIN I PROMISE.
WE WILL PUT THINGS BACK.
CONNER KIRK
* * *
I couldn’t stay there. There were dead people in the room. And the rain poured down endlessly.
There was an inch of standing water on the floor. I kept wondering about the warning to stay out of the rain, and who—or what—Fent was.
A hallway led off to the right of the entryway, but it was so dark I couldn’t see to the end of it. I stayed out of it as long as I could, but it was dry, so I eventually gave up being scared of what I couldn’t see there.
At the end of the hall, there were two doors. One of them opened onto a small bathroom. The toilet was missing; there was a black hole in the tile floor where it had been. A slot window above the bathtub let in a steady sheet of rain, but it ran down the wall and into the drain. Here was where the shower door came from.
The other door led to a bedroom. It was dry, but very dark. The window had been boarded over with the broken slate top from a pool table, and the floor was covered with jumbles of dusty cloth: towels, sheets, clothing, drapes, blankets. I could see where people had been sleeping. There was a wide closet set back into one of the walls, but the doors were missing. When I got closer to it, I could tell it was the spot someone had used as a toilet.
There was nothing else I could do.
I shut myself into the room.
I pulled the knife I’d found out of its sheath and held on to it.
I took off my boots and socks and sat down on the matting to wait out the storm.
When I stretched out, I realized I’d laid my head down on a pair of green surgical scrub pants. Dotted with blood on one of the legs.
They were mine, from somewhere else.
Fuck you, Jack.
Henry said you would bring things here. He didn’t mean the lens. We weren’t supposed to bring the lens here.
And in the dark, I took the injured lens from my pocket and held it between my fingers.
Nothing.
Only rain.
I even pressed the lens up to my eyes; one, then the other, pleading with it.
The words from the dictionary swirled, a dizzying cloud in my head.
Marbury: (noun) Third planet in order from the sun. No natural satellites. This planet, as the only in the Solar System which is inhabited by humans.
Fuck this place.
* * *
Just before morning, the Hunters came.
I couldn’t sleep. I lay on my side, curled on top of the blankets, so hungry and thirsty it felt as if I were dissolving, caving in on myself. The rain did not slacken at all; it became this constant white noise, like flying on an airplane that was never going to land.
I got up and walked the hallway, irrationally hoping that maybe it wouldn’t be raining anymore once I got back to the front door. And I thought, It’s only rain; it’s not like you haven’t been in rain before; you need to get the fuck out of here, Jack.
Everything smelled like warm metal. The air was so thick it felt like I was breathing in fibrous stuffing from torn seat cushions, just the way I’d remembered that unsatisfying Marbury air.