Jack has been here before.
Jack is here now.
And Jack never had any idea that the twenty-two kids inside that fucking baggage car blew their brains out because they were so scared of Jack and his little piece of broken glass.
Fun game.
This is Marbury.
I am King.
I take a two-liter bottle of water from the dining car.
That’s all.
And I close up every door on the train when I leave.
twenty-two
The train didn’t want to go away.
I walked for what felt like miles, hours, but every time I’d turn around I could still see it, as if the train were watching me, calling out, Come on, Jack. Come back and play some more.
Eventually, in the whiteout waste of Marbury, I found myself in the middle of a horizonless nothing. No more direction, no features to aim myself toward or away from, and just the slightest difference in shade between the colorless sky and the emptiness of the ground.
This was the center of the universe.
And I had three objects in my universe: a broken piece of glass, a warm bottle of water, and a pair of pants whose knees had ripped when I fell out of that train I’d been trying to get away from.
Nothing else.
I crossed the blasted salt flat of the Marbury desert barefoot, without a shirt.
Alone.
After a while, my eyes began to fail. I supposed it didn’t matter anyway. I walked, counting steps, sometimes with my eyes shut tight. And when I’d open them again, nothing at all looked different.
I began to get tired.
Are you halfway there, Jack?
I thought, If you keep going just halfway to your destination, then halfway again and halfway again, you will spend forever in an infinity of halfways.
All the not-worlds.
I closed my eyes.
Fifty steps this time.
Open your eyes, Jack.
Through the blank ash of the fog, I saw the outline of something big, pale, with a perfect row of blackened circles like eyes that stared back at me. At first, thinking I had walked in a huge circle back to the train, or maybe I’d gone entirely around this world, I squatted down to my knees, keeping myself low, small, as though crouching would be sufficient to make Jack invisible to everything he was afraid of.
I thought the black eyes were moving.
You know how objects, when you stare at them long enough, begin to pulse with some kind of life? Because the thing had to be a sort of structure. It was just so hard to tell what it could be; everything was washed out by ash and fog, and my eyes ached.
I tried pouring water onto my face. It was a mistake. It made my eyes burn so bad I thought I’d go blind. When I was tired of waiting, listening, scoping the thing out, I finally stood up and started moving toward it.
It was a plane.
Not an entire plane; most of a jetliner. Maybe a hundred feet or so of the body. It stuck up at the end where the tail section had broken away, and the nose was either buried in the salt flat, or was perhaps sticking out, unmarked, on some other string, somewhere else entirely.
The way it was tilted, with the circular windows leaning toward me, it was possible that I had been standing—walking on top of—one of its wings.
It was an amazing thing.
I needed to touch it.
It was from the same airline that flew me to England, to St. Atticus Grammar School for Boys. It wasn’t even a question in my mind—I was absolutely certain—this was the same plane. I mean, this was Marbury, after all.
What else could it be?
When I walked toward the buried nose of the plane, the windows dropped down close enough to the ground that I could see inside it. Of course I was drawn to it. I had to look.
Curious Jack.
So I wiped the salt from one of the portholes and cupped my hands around my eyes. I pressed my face against the glass.
At first, all I saw were the gray disks of light—the unobstructed portholes—on the other side of the plane. I waited for my eyes to adjust. As they did, the inside of the plane seemed to liquefy, pulsing like waves on a windblown pond.
Harvesters.
Millions upon millions of them, clustered in endless carpeting gobs over every surface in the plane, a nest of them. Waiting, sniffing, hoping to detect some great field of death out here in this desert.
I felt my stomach convulse. I pushed myself away from the window and walked around the front of the plane.
On the other side, the left wing angled out from the wreckage and rose above the ground. The jet engine was half buried, but the wing itself extended like a massive awning. It didn’t cast any shadow.
There were no such things as shadows in Marbury.
I took a drink, wiped my mouth with the back of my forearm, and kept walking.
Halfway there.
Halfway there.
And in the white vacuum that swirled around me, enclosed me, that surrendered its boundary another few inches with every step I took, I heard music.
An accordion.
I walked toward it. What else could I do?
Halfway there.
* * *
When I saw him, it was like looking at the scene of a shipwreck.
I saw something big, dark, and low to the ground, that had been washed up on this endless beach of desert.
A dead whale, maybe.
I stepped closer, careful, and I could see the man playing music. He was seated in the salt, his legs stretched out in front of him, with his back propped against the carcass of a fallen horse.
I circled around.
He had no way of knowing I watched him. I moved silently, and his music was so loud.
The song he played sounded mournful and plodding; a dirge that repeated after the first bars, over and over, as though he had no intention of ever stopping the tune or breaking his rhythm.
Of course I knew who the man was. I didn’t need to see his face, because I had seen him before, other times, in other places. But not in this Marbury, and not with this Jack’s eyes.
Uncle Teddy.
Preacher.
Maybe he’d been left behind by the Rangers, the same ones who stopped the train. It didn’t make sense that they’d abandon an old man like this, but I couldn’t expect anything the Rangers did to be justly calculated when weighed against such counterbalances as right and wrong.
I could smell blood before I was close enough to see it.
Black-shafted arrows jutted like spiny quills from the horse’s neck and side. They vibrated like tuning forks. The animal was still breathing, and I’m sure that if it wasn’t for the wailing of the accordion, I would have heard the horse’s gurgling death-gasps.
The old man had one arrow completely through his right shoulder. The point of it, pasted over with clotted blood, stuck out level, aiming directly at me, a stained and accusing finger.
I watched him play.
He couldn’t last.
The harvesters would be here soon.
The music stopped, in mid-beat.
I thought he died, but the man said, “Are you here to kill me?”
“I’m not going to kill you.”
“Then why are you standing in back of me, like that?”
“I came from this way.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m not sure.”
He put his little accordion on his lap. It wheezed. Maybe it was the horse.
“You got a long walk.” He tried to move. He looked as stiff as a statue. “Come around this way, so I can see what you look like, before you kill me.”
I took one step, then stopped. “I told you I’m not here to kill you.”
Preacher coughed. The arrow twitched like the needle on a lie detector.
“No matter which direction you came from, you walked straight through death. And now, here you are, unscathed. Don’t tell me you’re not here to kill me, boy. You are just a boy, right? You sound like one.”
I walked around the horse’s head. I could see its eye, crazed, rolling with a slender crescent of white as it followed me.
I stood in front of the man, my legs apart. The water bottle dangled from my hooked fingers.