King of Marbury by Andrew Smith
You see one destroyed pier, you’ve seen ’em all.
Just another fucking coincidence.
But it was exact.
It was a snapshot from Marbury.
I didn’t even want to look at the faces in the ancient portrait photographs in the office. I was too scared I’d see people I’d remember from Marbury.
I was almost nervous enough to piss myself.
“Are you going to show me the piece of lens you’ve brought, then?” Cahill said.
I cleared my throat. “It’s not a piece. It’s the whole thing.”
“Well?”
Cahill lit another cigarette. He reached across the top of his desk and picked up a small box about the size of one you’d put a ring in.
I felt myself being drawn into the photograph of the pier. It was nuts. I must have been going crazy, but I swear I could smell the salt of that lukewarm black seawater, and I could almost hear the little yapping dog that used to follow Griffin everywhere.
Cahill glanced over his shoulder toward the wall.
“What is it?” he asked.
I nodded my chin at the picture. “I’ve seen that place before.”
“What? In the photograph?”
“Yes.”
“I found that in Creighton Marbury’s archives,” Cahill said. “He took the photograph in 1908. It’s a pier that burned down near Blackpool, England. I’m quite certain the place no longer looks like the picture.”
“I’m telling you I’ve seen it. We’ve been there,” I said. I felt in my pocket, had my fingers curled around the lens. “Do you have any more of Marbury’s things?”
“A few.”
I shook my head, kind of the way you would if you weren’t completely awake and needed to snap out of a daze or something.
“I can’t look at the lens,” I said. “It will…you know…It will make me go out.”
“Out? Out where?”
I shrugged. “Poof. Who knows? I was hoping you’d be able to show me how to stop doing it.”
“Why would you want to do that?”
And I thought, Are you out of your fucking mind?
I told myself to just get the hell out of there, but I was stuck, feet firmly planted on the creaking planks of some rat-infested house on this crooked old road, while I stared and stared, and could feel the humid chemical mists from the choppy sea that wore away at the foundations of a collapsing pier.
Fucking Marbury.
I pulled my hand up and held my clenched fist in front of Dr. Q. Edward Cahill’s chest. He took a drag from his cigarette.
The ocean rippled.
“Let me see it.”
I opened my hand.
I looked away, Jack. As soon as I moved my fingers, Dr. Cahill’s room lit up with shadows and shapes that seemed to project three-dimensional images into the smoke that hung everywhere.
“What’s it supposed to be?” Dr. Cahill said.
I turned my eyes down and stared at my feet. It felt like I was balancing on a surfboard.
A shark-infested monster break, Jack.
“I don’t know. One of the lenses. Like I said, it’s not the lens that got us there, but I can’t look at it. I don’t know what it is. You’re supposed to know, aren’t you?”
He said, “I don’t see anything in it at all, boy.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
I didn’t understand it. Cahill grabbed the lens out of my hand. As he moved it across the small space between us, everything seemed to twist and smear in the room. I got so dizzy I had to sit down—right on the floor in front of Cahill’s feet.
He ignored me. I heard the chink of the lens as he placed it down on his desktop. I felt sick.
Then Cahill opened the box he’d grabbed. It contained another lens—a dark green one that was much smaller in diameter than the one I’d brought.
He looked down at me as he stood. “Are you all right?”
My ears roared with the terrible howling of a hurricane, the clicking of millions of bugs.
I shook my head. “Just dizzy.”
Cahill turned his attention back to the lenses.
“This was one of Marbury’s eyepieces,” he said, and raised the small emerald-colored disc. “I haven’t been able to determine what it’s supposed to do.”
I couldn’t say whether the lens Cahill was holding had any connection to Marbury. All I knew was that I saw nothing in it. Apparently, Cahill couldn’t see anything in either one of the lenses.
At least, he didn’t see things until he put them together.
From where I sat on the floor, I was unsure what Cahill did with the smaller lens. It sounded as though he placed it down on top of the blue one I’d stolen from Jack’s room.
Tink!
Then he leaned over his desk.
Dr. Q. Edward Cahill stared down into the lens and vaporized.
It was just like that. No noise, no struggle. He turned pale, and a few seconds later I realized I could see through him.
I could say he burned up—became smoke—but that wasn’t exactly the way it happened. It was as if every atom in his body, his clothing, even the cigarette he held between his lips, everything, simply decided to float away. And it wasn’t smoke, but I could smell him. I breathed in tiny fragments of what had once been Dr. Cahill’s body, and I knew it.
Nothing smells like that, breathing in what used to be some other person.
I threw up in Cahill’s trash can.
I must have sat there on the floor with my face down in that garbage for ten minutes.
Everything stunk like puke and cigarettes.
I needed to get out of there, but I was scared I couldn’t make myself stand up. So I shut my eyes and waited.
That was a mistake, too.
Things started happening somewhere behind the door at the back of Cahill’s office.
You know how sick we get sometimes, Jack, when we pop in and out of Marbury? How it’s a different kind of sick, sharper, stinging, sweating like you’re going to die. And then the shakes hit.
You know that.
That’s how it felt when I was down on the floor in Dr. Cahill’s office.
I heard the waves lapping at the posts of the pier.
I didn’t raise my head, but I noticed the light as it changed inside the room, flooding outward from the spot where Creighton Marbury’s lenses lay on Dr. Cahill’s desk. And things began moving around me—shadows.
A television came on in the back room. It must have been a television. Jack, you remember, don’t you? I swear to God it was playing one of those Home Shopping Channel programs.
They were selling amethyst jewelry.
The Amethyst Hour.
The same thing that was on the television the night Freddie Horvath kidnapped Jack Whitmore.
You remember.
Then I heard voices coming from the room, arguing, angry. And there were footsteps and the sound of the door opening.
And I heard this: the same twanging, velvet lilt of Dr. Cahill, only it was a boy’s voice, and he said, “I’ll put your head on a fucking hook, Jack Whitmore. I am King of Marbury.”
I looked up.
You know the light, the bland, boiled-pork color of everything in Marbury. It was Marbury inside that room, Jack, and it went on forever, horizonless and gray.
The Double-Slit Paradox—you can be in two places at once.
He’d explained it like that: You can be and not be, and nothing at all exists until you observe it.
Through that back doorway, I was looking out at the street in front of Cahill’s guesthouse, like it was a mirror’s reflection of the same redbrick staircase I’d climbed moments earlier when I arrived. It was the same, but it was Marbury.
How does the passenger come to arrive at his point of embarkation?
I spun around to be sure I was still inside Dr. Cahill’s office. The front door—the door I’d come through—it was still there. Waves lapped at the broken o
It was all real.
I had to get to those lenses, to wrap them up the way Jack always did. But I felt myself slipping, being pulled into Marbury—or wherever the next place was—just like Cahill had been.
And I needed to stop Marbury from spilling out of those lenses, Jack.
Dropping in on a big wave.
I pushed myself to my feet and blindly pawed for the professor’s desk. My fingers swept across its surface.
Framed through the open back doorway, a small boy—maybe ten years old—sat on the brick steps beside the house—this house—with his bony, bare knees tucked up in front of his chin. The kid looked starved, a living skeleton who wore nothing but a filthy rag for shorts.
He sat there pulling apart the dead rat I’d seen earlier.
The boy was eating it.
Fucking Marbury.
Just as my fingertip brushed across the two lenses on the desktop, I saw my best friend, Jack Whitmore, looking up at me from the bottom of the stairway.
He was dressed in soldier’s clothing, and he carried a small rifle—just as he’d looked all those other times in Marbury.
“Jack?”
He turned and ran away, disappearing in the haze fogging the street.
I wanted to go after him so bad. I can’t exactly say why I didn’t follow Jack.
The little kid sat there, chewing. His teeth and lips smacked wetly into the meat of the dead thing he held in his hands.
I said, “Dumb fucking kid.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, and knocked the lenses down from the desk and onto the floor.
Tink!
I can say that it stopped, but it didn’t, Jack. Not really.
Dr. Cahill and I let Marbury out.
The waves in the photograph stilled.
I went back down to my knees and felt around the floor for the lenses, but I could only find the larger one—the one I’d stolen from Jack. As soon as I jammed it down inside my pocket, the stale Marbury light faded inside the office and I found myself able to breathe again.
It was the door at the rear of the office, though, that still remained open. And on the other side of the doorway, the boy on the stairsteps gnawed at his meal under the steaming gray sky of the place I knew as Marbury.
He glanced back at me, his face smeared with goo. The kid could have been Cahill in reverse—redheaded, pale as cottage cheese.
He spit something small and dark and said, “Tell your friend to keep out. I’m king here.”
Then he turned back to his meal.
I could take a step inside, right?
Just a quick look around, you know, to see the sights.
But I didn’t do it, Jack. I knew I would never come back if I did that.
So I waited for a moment at the front door, trying to work up the nerve to leave. I couldn’t stand the smell of the place—vomit and cigarette smoke. And every time I’d glance at the doorway to the back room, it was still the same. It wouldn’t go away.
I felt like a little kid hiding my face under a pillow at night because the dark shadows inside my room all turned to monsters until the light of dawn made them vanish. But whenever I’d look, the show hadn’t ended; Marbury was there beyond the threshold of that back door.
But I thought, what if there’s something even worse outside the front—the way I’d come in? There never were any sure bets after Jack and I started popping back and forth.
I wanted to go home, though, to be home.
I opened the door and left Dr. Cahill’s office.
I flipped the blue lens around in my sweating fingers as I walked down the uneven brick staircase. The rat was gone. No little kid. And there was a parking ticket tucked beneath the windshield wiper on my truck.
Fucking Berkeley.
I couldn’t tell Jack what I’d done.
On the drive back to Glenbrook, I’d nearly convinced myself that none of it happened anyway.
When I got home the first thing I did was hide the lens I’d stolen from Jack in a place where he’d be able to find it if he ever needed to look. And before going to bed, I called my friend.
“Hey Jack, what do you think about going out to Cayucos tomorrow to catch some waves?”
“Sounds good. I can be over at, like, seven.”
“There’s supposed to be a monster swell coming in.”
“I heard.”
“Maybe a few hungry sharks, too.”
Jack laughed. “You’re insane, Con.”
“Dude. I know.”
“See you in the morning.”
Copyright (C) 2012 by Andrew Smith
Art copyright (C) 2012 by Scott Fischer
Andrew Smith, King of Marbury