I didn’t care if Henry followed or not. But he did.
At the bottom of the stairwell, a windowless door rattled on its hinges. It was the way out to the building’s lobby.
And in the center of that door, pinned in place with a single black-shafted arrow, there was a small painted wooden horse, a spinning thread spool between its hind legs.
Spinning and spinning.
I couldn’t help but stop on the landing and stare at the small thing.
Blood had been wiped all over the door behind the horse, smeared in clear and menacing handprints, like some frantic madman left a signature to mark a murder.
I was aware of throbbing pain in my hand. I held it up, saw that the tissue I’d wrapped around my palm had completely soaked through and was dissolving. I was bleeding everywhere.
Up the stairs behind us, thick, dark knots of blood marked the path we’d taken down.
And I knew the handprints on the door were mine.
I tried choking off my wrist with my left hand, but the flow of blood never lessened.
You’re dying, Jack.
Henry nudged my arm as he pushed past me, stumbling into the lobby.
I looked away from the horse, its wheel still spinning, rolling. I followed Henry out of the creaking building and onto the cold and damp street.
* * *
What waits for us outside freezes us in our tracks.
Henry stands in front of me. I can’t see his face.
He says, “What the fuck is this?”
Marbury.
What the fuck do you think it is?
The rolling and creaking goes on, endless and anguished, from every building. Even the lightposts along the street seem restless, itchy. They emit static snaps and pops. I can feel the individual fractures of the pavement stones beneath my feet grinding like nervous teeth.
I hold my hand up, arm bent at the elbow, and the bleeding paints a black pudding skin of blood in rounded streaks down my forearm.
Drip.
Drip.
I marvel at how white my body has become.
All down the street, infinite in every direction, the rows of buildings stack tightly one after another, each of them twisting, sighing as though inhaling, exhaling. Sleeping. And they are all decorated, adorned with spattered corpses: men, women, children, every one of them unclothed, bloodstained, pinned into the walls, the frame boards, gutters and eave joists, anywhere—some of them missing pieces, carefully restructured, headless or neutered, drawn, some of them remarkably unscarred like a frieze of angels, but all of them skewered through with the black arrows and the sharpened-bone pikes of Hunters. Some of them are still barely alive; they blink like random lightbulbs, faulty on burned-out strings, moving arms and hands slowly, gracefully, the way you’d wave in a parade.
And above it all, the hole in the sky tears and gapes open like a hungry mouth, Jack’s mouth, Jack’s hand, and it is the same hole that Seth had made through the wall of the apartment building, grinding and spitting fragments of stone, brick, the teeth of the universe, opening outward and exposing another gray street that is equally strewn with bodies, floating endlessly over our heads as far as I can see.
And Seth is running away from me down the street.
Henry repeats, “What the fuck—”
“What do you think? What do you think it is?” I ask, disgusted.
I have no time for this.
A brick tumbles past my feet.
One droplet of blood splatters, a perfect circle, in the center of its upturned face.
Rolling dice.
The snake’s eye.
I have to follow Seth.
I know this place.
And I know I will die here if I don’t follow.
Henry knows this place.
It is all too fast. I cannot keep up with the boy, and Henry falls twice. His feet are cut, the skin on his hands, the knees of his trousers tear open like waking eyelids over the orbs of his pale and skeletal kneecaps. I help him up, turn my head to see where Seth has squeezed himself into a narrow walkway between two jittering brownstones.
“We have to follow him.”
Henry wipes spit from his mouth and I continue after Seth.
There is something blocking the confined footpath between the buildings.
I know what it is.
Of course I know.
Perfect, flawless, a comforting shade of blue—it is the color of toys and swimming pools. A fifty-five-gallon plastic barrel.
Seth stops at the end of the alleyway, but he doesn’t look back at me.
Everything is so loud: Henry’s gasping pants, the crumbling stone, clicking. Harvesters coming, following us. And from where I am standing, I can see that there is no top on the barrel.
I know there are dark things inside it, crowded, folded together within the cramped space of the drum.
Seth turns down the street and I can’t see him anymore.
I need to go.
Above me, a window explodes outward from its buckling frame, showering crystals of glass that stick in my hair.
Henry yells, “What are you doing?”
But I won’t answer.
I walk toward the barrel.
Do not look inside, Jack.
How can you keep yourself from looking?
Fuck you, Jack.
I scream it, “Fuck you, Jack! Fuck you!”
I put my hands on the perfect rim of the drum and push my hips around it. I smear my blood across the raised lip of the barrel as it presses, cool and smooth, like naked skin against me. I can feel my balls tightening up inside me.
Don’t look.
I can’t stop it.
And inside the barrel, I see the boys.
Ben and Griffin.
They look so small and pale, naked, like unborn twins. Unconcerned by the confinement of their plastic womb, their arms fold, spiderlike, entwined. One of Ben’s knees presses up between Griffin’s shoulder blades, angular and rigid. Their heads lie so comfortably, slumbering, jaw to jaw, perfectly unmoving, brothers before and after everything.
I turn away.
I make it to the end of the alley.
Henry struggles past the barrel behind me, and as I emerge onto the next street, I see Seth just as he vanishes into the black square doorway to a Tube station.
Green Park.
This is it.
Of course this is it.
Seth waits for me inside.
* * *
The Green Park Underground was dark and empty, its floors strewn with trash: discarded papers, plastic bottles, wax-paper cups. It smelled like an old movie theatre, or maybe a library—musty and ancient in abandonment.
You never see Tube stations deserted like this.
But this was Marbury.
I felt as empty as the hall, lightheaded, floating unconnected like a fog above the rocking and undulating floor.
I dripped blood everywhere, and I was now too weak to hold my arm up. It ached.
On the other side of the turnstiles, I saw Seth vanish down the escalator. They were still moving, up one side, down the other; the place was lit up, but we were the only ones inside.
I had to follow him. I knew if he didn’t get me out of here that I was going to die.
Tickets.
There were two tickets inside my pocket.
Drip.
Drip.
I handed one of the tickets to Henry.
“Come on.” My voice was a garbled slur.
This is real.
I slipped my shirt over my head, and began winding it around my hand. Tight. Tighter. Dumbly, I thought about laundering it before giving the T-shirt back to Nickie’s brother.
Henry followed me through the electric gates at the turnstile. They opened like mouths when we fed the tickets into the slots.
I staggered toward the top of the long escalator that went down into the belly of the Tube station. Henry shifted his weight from foot to foot, as though he felt like running, but I wasn’t about to do that.
I leaned against the black rubber handrail and put my head down on the back of my forearm. Nothing I did slowed the flow of blood from the wound on my hand. The escalator shook, the hallway creaked and rumbled, and below us, I heard the whoosh of an arriving train.