Another flash.
I ran.
When I moved, the explosion of thunder was so loud it felt like it lifted me, pushed me toward the broken door at the front of the house. And, dumbly, I stood there for just a moment and nearly raised my hand to knock.
The door had a slot window in the center of it, but the swirled yellow glass had long since been broken, making a lamprey’s mouth of needle teeth around the edges of the frame. I saw where the knob, the hardware, was vacant, leaving just a hole through the core. The door pushed easily inward and sucked a breath of air over me as if the house were tasting my scent.
I hesitated.
Another flash spit my shadow across the floor, and before the next blast of thunder came I scrambled inside, pressing the door shut with the heel of my boot.
Then the rain came. It smelled like burning aluminum and fell so thick and heavy that I couldn’t even hear the cusswords I yelled.
“Is there anybody in here?”
Flash.
A snapshot image of the house’s interior burned into my eyes.
To my left, a staircase rose into the darkness of the ceiling. Somebody had covered the opening to the upper floor, which was now the roof, with corrugated tin that roared and vibrated under the constant downpour. Water trickled in from the sides, spattering down on the house’s rotten carpeting. I held my hand under the stream; washed my face. It made me smell like a foundry. There had to be something wrong with that water.
Thinking it almost made me laugh. What could possibly be wrong with anything here in Marbury?
The entryway at the foot of the stairs opened onto what was once a living room and kitchen. I put the dictionary down on a jagged pier of bar top that extended out from one wall. There was something about the book, I thought, that was important.
Something.
Even though the windows had been knocked out long ago, there was hardly enough light coming in for me to clearly see what was around me.
I called out, “Is anybody in here?”
Nothing.
Rain.
“Anyone? I’m alone. I’m lost.”
Flash.
It was like a bomb going off.
One of the walls appeared to buckle inward then snap back, like the house was rubber. My eyes scanned across the floor. Junk was everywhere. Pieces of soggy drywall, a hair dryer with its cord tied into a noose, the gutted frame of a television, clothing, the door from a shower stall. I saw a belt, and thought about picking it up, but there was an entire human pelvis, picked perfectly clean, yellow-white, lying among other bones beneath it.
People had been here recently, too. I could smell them. The place reeked like an underground pisser in summertime, and the stink made me want to pee, too, so I did it, right there against the wall under the staircase.
Fuck this place.
Flash.
I watched the conical stain of my piss slick downward over the wall. It somehow made me feel good, like I was real, alive.
Another explosion.
I looked at my feet, and that’s when I found the knife. Perfect and beautiful, like it had just been purchased at a sporting goods store, and I could almost smell the freshness of its leather sheath. Someone had taken care of it. Someone who didn’t need it anymore. I turned it over in my hands, felt the sharpness of its edge, then unbuckled my belt and threaded the sheath onto my side.
Something crashed into the wall in the kitchen. It sounded like the door on a cupboard. It slammed three more times before I rounded a brick hearth where water splashed down from the shattered chimney somewhere above me on the naked second floor.
A man stood there, kicking his foot against the wood paneling beneath the place where a sink should have been. He was completely naked, deathly pale, but covered with brilliant tattoos all the way from his belly down to the soles of his bony feet; and nothing at all above his waist, just white, hairless skin. He looked like a centaur or something.
He turned and glared at me, his jaw working up and down like he was chewing something, trying to get words out, and my hand fell down onto the handle of the knife before I realized it was only a ghost.
Then he vanished.
“Wait! Wait! Please, let me talk to you.”
He was gone.
“Come back!”
I went over to the place where he’d been standing and kicked the wall as hard as I could. I felt the wood cracking beneath my foot, and when I looked down inside the empty black crib where the sink had been, I saw him again—the man—curled on his side, rotting in death.
Rain came straight down from the vacant square where a window had looked out—on what?—from over the sink, and it made his skin slick, snakes and fish, twisted cables of wire and swords, saints and skeletons that vibrated like cartoons inked on his rotting hide. Something black crawled up inside his nostril. I turned away and threw up beside a twisted heap of metal window blinds that was left crumpled on the kitchen floor.
Flash.
The lightning came less frequently, but the rain was constant, howling against the tin sheeting and bare floor above me. I kicked the metal blinds, turning them over. There were maybe a dozen harvesters that scattered out from underneath the heap.
And I saw the body of a little boy there, too.
He had only one shoe on. Nothing else.
I covered him again.
“Fuck!” I staggered out of the kitchen, around the fireplace, the smell of aluminum; the smell of aluminum and vomit.
I shut my eyes, and leaned my folded arms on the broken piece of countertop where I’d left the dictionary.
Flash.
I have got to get the fuck out of here.
Get a grip, Jack. You’re not going anywhere.
Think.
I had to think.
The dictionary.
I peeled through the pages. Some of them tore. Some would not separate at all.
The rain kept pounding.
Pounding relentlessly against the anvil of this wrecked house.
The hammer.
The water came splattering down on the stairway. The stench was nauseating.
I couldn’t hear the bugs. That was good.
I looked up California.
There was no such word in the dictionary.
There were no entries for Washington, America, or England.
Okay, asshole. Maybe this dictionary doesn’t list the names of places.
So I looked up earth. Earth had to be in there, right? It wasn’t just a name.
And it wasn’t in the book, either.
Bet you don’t have the balls to look up Marbury, do you Jack?
I looked up Marbury.
I found it.
Of course I found it.
* * *
Fuck you, Jack.
two
Flash.
* * *
So I threw the book against the wall, and it splattered like a crushed wasp and fell, fluttering dying paper wings onto the heap of the other dead things cluttered on the floor.
And when it slammed against the wall, I noticed the writing there.
At the top, near the ceiling:
373
The number had been written four times at different places on the wall.
373
Maybe the person writing it wanted to be sure someone would see it.
Maybe he knew I was coming.
373
Painted with two fingers; I could see how they pressed together, tracking the strokes of the numbers, smearing the curves and lines—a first and middle finger—dip and stroke, dip and stroke, with something dark, some foul concoction, because Marbury wouldn’t easily give up anything pure.