I handed Griffin the flashlight I’d taken from his brother.
He was about to say something, too. And I knew what it was. I could tell. He was about to call Quinn a cocksucker or a faggot or whatever boys Griffin’s age call other boys when they get into fights, but I didn’t want to hear it.
I held up my hand. “Don’t start any more shit, Griff. The fight’s over. Let’s get your brother out of there.”
Griffin sniffed and wiped at his bloody nose. He looked like hell. I looked worse. Griffin said as much. “You look like you crawled through a shithole, Jack.”
He grabbed the rope behind me and we pulled together, slowly.
Griffin sniffed again. “And you smell like piss.”
My stomach turned. “Fuck.” I shook my head.
With each pull, I could hear Ben grunting, “Unh. Unh.”
Then Quinn got hold of the rope behind Griffin, and we kept tugging until Ben was clear of the mold. I lifted up his shoulders.
The three of us dragged him all the way back to the junction just before the main tunnel.
* * *
Griffin leaned over his brother. He wiped his hand across Ben’s face and hair while I poured water on him.
We tried to get him to drink, but Ben choked and gagged, spitting the water all over both of us.
“He’s a fucking mess,” Griffin said. He patted Ben’s cheek. “Ben? Hey? Can you hear me?”
Quinn hadn’t said a word since I came back out of the mold, he just hovered over us, watching, pouting, sniffling. And Ben stared at us while we tried washing him, but we could tell he wasn’t actually seeing us. He’d just murmur things that didn’t make any sense.
“Wow. It’s okay. It’s moving. It’s opening up. I can see forever. Jack. It’s you and Griffin. Jack. The hole in the sky is the way through for everyone. I know who you are. Jumping Man. I can see you. I love you, Griff.”
Griffin chewed at his lip, and kept his hand in Ben’s hair.
He was scared and I could see it.
“Ben never says shit like that.”
“He got bit, Griff,” I said. “One of those things got on his back and bit him. It was like the hand you found, only it was some kind of spider.”
“Where’d he bite him?” Quinn’s voice, cracked and strained from the fight with Griffin, from crying, surprised us.
“On his back,” I said.
I turned Ben onto his side and Quinn cautiously stepped toward us to look. Ben’s arm flopped limply across his chest; slick drool ran down the side of his cheek.
“Did it unfold its legs?” Quinn asked. “Did it have really long legs that were folded up, and then he was maybe bigger across than the kid?”
I looked at Quinn and nodded. “What is that thing?”
“A whip spider.”
Just the way he said it—the tone in his voice—told me it was something bad, and Quinn knew what it was, too.
Griffin leaned in and put his face right up to the marks on Ben’s back. They seemed bigger now, and there was a spreading red mass that seemed to be growing across Ben’s skin. It looked like it was snaking in both directions along the boy’s spine.
Griffin put his hands flat on either side of the bite. “It feels like he’s on fire.”
I shined my light on Quinn’s face. His cheeks were streaked with mud. “How bad is this thing?”
Quinn didn’t flinch. He frowned and shook his head.
I put my hand on the side of Ben’s head and then looked at Griffin. He knew what Quinn meant.
I dropped the flashlight and stood up. I got right up against Quinn, so our chests touched. He felt soft and small, afraid. “What the fuck, Quinn? What the fuck?”
Quinn started backing away. He was scared, and I’ll admit a big part of me wanted to punch him again, but I felt sorry for him, too. And I was so tired of the kid at the same time. But I couldn’t help thinking about Ben Miller’s bones inside a fucking trash barrel with Griffin’s, secreted away in Freddie Horvath’s garage, and how that fucked-up version of the world couldn’t be real; and now here we were and this redheaded fucker was telling us how Ben was going to lie down in a fucking sewer and die right in front of us while we watched him go.
And this couldn’t be real, either.
But we couldn’t escape.
I couldn’t get Ben and Griffin home.
And it was my fault.
I put my hands on Quinn’s shoulders, not hard, not threatening, just like I wanted to hold the kid down, to make things okay. It took all the will in the world to keep my voice restrained, to not claw my fingers into his pasty white flesh, to not shake the living shit out of him.
Deep breath, Jack.
“I’m not going to hit you, Quinn.”
I could feel the kid begin to relax, loosen up, under my touch.
“What do you know about those spiders?”
He shook his head, tried to look away from me. “He ain’t gonna make it, Billy.”
nineteen
“What do you mean?” I said. I shook the kid angrily. “What the fuck do you mean?”
But I knew what he meant.
Quinn didn’t have to say it.
I probably would have hit him if he did. He stood there sniffling, looking like he was getting ready to cry again.
“You’re full of shit,” Griffin said. “You’ve always been full of shit, you fucking prick. I should have said yes. I should have told Ben we needed to kill you.”
Griffin poured water across Ben’s chest, washing his brother, wiping his skin with a shaking hand.
The muscles in Ben’s neck had tightened, so his head tilted back, and his mouth stretched open even wider now. Except for the movement of his ribs when he inhaled, he already looked dead.
“I don’t know what to do, Griff.” I sounded pathetic, like every fucked-up thing I’d ever done to them had all clotted in my mouth and was choking me.
Griffin wouldn’t look at me. I knew what he was thinking.
He kept trying to clean Ben’s skin.
I slipped the noose on the speargun away from my neck, let the weapon rest on the floor beside my wet and black-stained boots. I dropped the pack next to it.
Then I began unwrapping the bandage from around my hand. But even as I did it, I had an understanding that nothing would happen—I needed to be outside, under the hole in the sky. And if we were outside, what could I expect? To drive everyone to madness? To send Quinn running off in terror, looking for a hook where he might hang himself? Or maybe I’d deliver Ben and Griffin back to the cramped prison of a plastic waste barrel inside a killer’s garage in a Glenbrook that is not Glenbrook?
Bad magic.
Everything came through Jack.
I was the arrow through every fucked-up layer in this universe, and when I broke the lens, the shaft of the arrow splintered everything. That’s what I did. Ben knew it, too. The hole in the sky was the fracture of the lens was the cut in my hand was the doorway to every not-world I never wanted to see.
Griffin put his face down on his brother’s chest. I couldn’t tell whether he was resting, giving up, or trying to hear if Ben was still alive.
I looked at my hand.
My skin was white and puffy with moisture. I stunk. The black salt had soaked through the bandage. Was there any spot on my body not covered in some kind of filth?
The mark was a deeper color of pink now, zigzagged in the identical pattern to the thing we’d all seen in the sky. If I laid the Marbury lens in my palm, it would match like a puzzle piece. If I had Conner’s part of it, too, maybe we could put things back.
I shined my light on Griffin, and kneeled down on the opposite side of Ben’s chest.
That was exactly the moment Ben Miller stopped breathing.
“Stop fucking around!” Griffin yelled at his brother. He pushed his hands down against Ben’s unmoving sternum and pushed. “Don’t fucking do this to me!”
Griffin put his mouth over his brother’s and began blowing gasps of air into Ben’s lungs. And when I put the flat of my palm over Ben’s heart, I could immediately feel how cold and stiff the boy was.
I grabbed his hand, squeezed it.