Now we straddle the gap of nowhere, between this world and the not-world called Marbury. And Marbury is what we need more than anything.
I can’t explain it; that’s just how things are.
Freddie Horvath made me into a monster.
I made monsters of my friends: Conner Kirk, Ben Miller, and Griffin Goodrich.
And before Conner and I could leave Glenbrook, California, for the coming school year in England, the four of us monsters must divide our pathetic kingdom.
Here, in this piss-reeked garage.
one
I was in the garage.
But it wasn’t the garage.
* * *
I rolled over onto my side and watched the gray light coming through the window, now uncovered, an asterisk of jagged fractures in the lower right pane centered in the quadrant of rusting muntin strips like someone had started a game of tic-tac-toe there with a hammer and then gave up.
X.
It all looked so familiar.
But it wasn’t.
I don’t know how long I lay there like that. There was the loose jumble of disjointed things I knew: I was in Mr. Goodrich’s garage—I was certain of it—and it felt like I was about to puke, but I had to hold it back, think about something else, because it was my friends’ house, after all, and I just didn’t want to move yet.
But something was wrong.
I became suddenly aware that I had been drooling. Warm spit ran down my cheek and onto the oilstained concrete floor, and something black scuttled toward my feet.
Griffin’s cat, I thought.
And where was Griffin?
Where were Conner and Ben?
I pushed myself up to a sitting position, my legs spread out like arrows, clockhands on the floor.
“Hey,” I called. “Where’d you guys go?”
My clothes were different. The knees on the dusty jeans I wore had been torn through, and I was filthy. Somehow, I remembered it. The shirt hung open, unbuttoned, striped.
I don’t have any striped shirts.
One sleeve was rolled to my elbow; the other hung limply, unraveled over my arm, like something dead. A number had been stitched across the left shoulder, above a spot where the pocket had been torn away.
373
It didn’t mean anything to me, but I felt that tickle in my head.
I was supposed to remember something.
And I had work boots on.
I wasn’t wearing boots. I never wear things like this.
One of them was untied, half hanging off my foot.
Movement again.
The bugs.
I could hear them eating, chewing, burrowing their way into a pile of stained rags crumpled across the bottom of the wide roll-up garage door. But I knew it wasn’t rags.
Who was it?
“Hey. Con?”
I gasped, pushed myself onto my feet and immediately fell backward, dizzy. I slammed my hip against the workbench where we’d clamped the lens down in Mr. Goodrich’s vice. My foot kicked the hammer; it spun a half circle and pointed to me.
Spin the hammer.
You really fucked up this time.
My eyes darted from the rags, the bugs, to the vice. I saw the lens, broken, dull, like it had been drained of something, and when I grabbed for it, I cut a deep gash across the palm of my hand and watched dumbly as my blood dropped thick and hot onto the floor, splattering the tops of my boots and the smooth wooden handle on the hammer.
The sting felt good.
Get a grip.
I closed my hand, sticky with my own blood, pushed the broken lens down inside my pocket.
Don’t look at it.
No. These were not my clothes.
“Griff?”
I took three slow steps—counted them—toward the heap lying against the door. It jerked, electric, as the bugs tore into their task beneath the canvas clothing that covered what once was a person.
Cleaning.
Always cleaning away everything dead.
One of the harvesters followed the dots of blood I’d left on the concrete. I heard scraping sounds from its jaws as it tried eating the little bits of me I’d scattered there. I pushed my foot down inside the untied boot and then stomped my heel square across the harvester’s shell. It was nearly as big as a cat and it burbled a hiss when it broke in two, spastic legs twitching in slick goo, protesting while cousins came eagerly to pick it apart.
The thing beside the door had been a soldier. His uniform looked the same as those we’d once found on a train, and I couldn’t remember when that had ever happened. Trying to figure out where that image belonged in Jack’s head was impossible.
The soldier had been dead for some time, too. The bugs kept grinding away at the side of his skull, and I saw a jagged piece of what looked like a collarbone being pulled under a lawnmower, five feet away.
I couldn’t see the name on his shirt. It was too stained.
I looked back at the door that led into the house—to the kitchen. I had been here plenty of times, took stock of the things in the garage that I knew would always be there. And I looked out the broken window again, could see the ashen sky.
I was in the garage.
And the garage was in Glenbrook, at Ben and Griffin’s house.
But this was Marbury.
* * *
I thought if I pressed my palms hard enough into my eyes, maybe it would all go away. But the sound of the bugs kept me there, the sting in my hand, and I realized I had smeared my face with my own blood.
A door opened.
The door to the house.
I jerked.
Ben Miller stood in the dark of the hallway holding a rusted spike of rebar and pointing it out past the threshold, aiming the spear at the center of my chest.
“Ben?”
Ben twitched like the sound of his name punched him square in the face.
He didn’t answer. He looked different: thinner maybe. His eyes were sunken and dark and his hair hung down on one side to the edge of his narrowed mouth. It was Ben, but it wasn’t Ben.
And he was terrified. Of me.
“Ben Miller?”
I didn’t move.
“We don’t have any food, kid. I don’t know what the fuck you want here. Go back to where you came from, Odd.”
I felt dizzy again; drunk. Ben Miller was standing in the doorway, shaking, right in front of me. And I could see he had no idea who I was.
“Don’t you know who I am?” I held out my hands. I looked down at myself, at the bloodstained gash across my right palm. I must have looked like a lunatic to him, blood smeared across the side of my face.
I argued like a lawyer in court, “You know me, don’t you?” I needed to hear my voice. I didn’t want to think it could be possible that I was here, that this was Glenbrook, that we were back in Marbury. But things were different.
Griffin hid behind Ben; I could see his eyes glint when they peeked out around the older boy’s tensed arm. He whispered something. Griffin’s hair reached his shoulders. He was shirtless, like always, if always had anything to do with where we were. And both of the boys were covered in smears of dirt.
Somehow, I knew we’d all gone back.
But it wasn’t the same.
I knew it then, standing in that garage while harvesters picked away at the remains of a dead man; and while Ben Miller, this scared kid who didn’t know who I was, held me back with a weapon I was sure he wouldn’t hesitate to use; while Griffin stood in the dark, studying me, defiant and snot nosed, unwavering in his determination to keep me away from their home.
Griffin pulled Ben’s shoulder and whispered to him again. Then he pointed at me, and Ben said, “I know. I saw it, too.”
“Griffin Goodrich,” I said. “Your brother. Well, your half brother’s name is Ben Miller. Don’t you know who I am?”
This time, I heard what Griffin said to his brother: “How does that prisoner know our names?”
Odd. Prisoner. It didn’t make any sense.
“We know who you are,” Ben said. “But we never seen you before in our life.”