King of Marbury by Andrew Smith

Author:Andrew Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2012-07-26T16:00:00+00:00

As creepy as the outside of the place was, things got even weirder inside the professor’s office.

Cahill smoked constantly. As soon as he’d finish one cigarette, he’d snap down on his soft pack of Marlboros and light up another. The place stunk, and the ceiling showed galactic nebulas of sticky brown swirls above the desk chair where the guy obviously spent the majority of his time.

And Jack, I stumbled through my idiotic explanation of why I’d come to see Dr. Cahill. I was so nervous I hardly remembered what I needed to tell him, but the guy stared at me with crazy eyes through all the smoke, and I could see he was interested, and listening, too.

But how do you begin a story like ours, anyway?

“I came to talk to you about Marbury, and his lens, and how me and some of my friends have been going through it…”

I know you’re going to think I’m insane—that’s what it does to us, right?—but every so often as I was talking, I’d glance around the room at the clutter and all the framed images on messy shelves or hanging from the walls, and I saw things.

I saw something from Marbury.

I almost choked when I noticed an old sepia-stained photograph hanging on the wall beside a door at the back of Cahill’s office. It was the image of a broken-down pier—posts and crooked chunks of surface tarmac jutting up above choppy dark waters.

And it was exactly the same pier as the one we rode past—Ben, Griffin, Jack, and me—in that other world of Marbury, the day we made it to the safety of the walled city called Grove. But I thought, well, it couldn’t be—right?

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.

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