He finds his French press has fallen off the top of the stove and shattered on the kitchen floor. He can’t imagine how this could have happened, yet it seems innocent enough. He sighs, relieved, puts the candlestick on the kitchen counter, and stoops to pick up the glass.
It’s as he’s on his hands and knees, brushing shards into a paper towel, that he hears the hiss. And it’s just sheer coincidence that he looks up and sees the severed tube resting against the wall behind his stove. And isn’t the air at the mouth of the severed tube awful shimmery? And what is that smell in the air…
Norris’s eyes shoot wide and he stands up and bolts out of his house, stumbling out the back door to his porch. He jumps his fence and peers back through a crack, watching his house for any sign of movement.
He isn’t sure how they got in, but someone’s broken into this house and cut his gas lines, he’s sure. Just the tiniest spark could have set the whole thing off. But why would someone do that? Is it because of what he was about to do? Was it a message?
A cloud drifts over the moon, and Norris absently glances up at it. He does a double take, and freezes as he realizes he’s just broken another cardinal rule of Wink: he’s outside his property at night.
And he has committed worse crimes than what he was about to do in the linen closet, hasn’t he? Isn’t it possible that what they really wanted to do was flush him out of his house, to the dark, where he’d be vulnerable?
As he realizes this, a soft, twinkling light creeps across the fence and around him. Its source is behind him, and he knows he should not look at it, yet he turns.
Down the hill is the start of the forest, and there are lights in the trees, lights like will-o’-wisps, slowly orbiting a few of the trunks. Some lights are a pale blue, others a soft pink. They are so beautiful and enchanting that Norris cannot help himself: he walks down the hill to them, wishing to touch them and hold them.
Yet somehow they elude him. They always seem a few more feet away, circling the next few trees over rather than the ones he’d thought, and soon he’s deep within the forest, wandering under the dark, whispering pines.
He enters a wide, grassy glade. The will-o’-wisp lights go out, and Norris stands there, confused.
Then someone enters on the opposite side of the glade.
It is difficult to see in this faint light, but he thinks he can see a small, elderly figure in white shirtsleeves and a red bow tie, yet the face is dark. Just as he begins to think the person is familiar, the image flickers like the flame of a candle, and as it does the moon seems to dim too, and the glade grows deeply dark, so dark Norris cannot even see what is in front of him.
“Hello?” he calls, and he walks forward, arms outstretched, trying to find the man on the other side of the glade.
He thinks he is close when he hears breathing. Relieved, he turns toward it, but as he grows near he finds it no longer sounds like normal breathing. The air is passing through too many passageways, he thinks, and some of them seem to rattle, as if they are filled with mucus…
He stops. Something is standing just beside him underneath the tree, and it is not a little old man. He can just see it out of the corner of his eye, and he glimpses something low and broad and chitinous, and what tops it is not a head but a mass that appears somehow nasal to him, a sphenoidal lump riddled with gaping conchae and sinuses, yet clutched under the upper shelf of two of these cavities are two pieces of anatomy he recognizes:
Eyes. Very human, very clear eyes, with pupils and corneas, watching him.
He opens his mouth to scream, but it never gets out. The thing falls on him and he feels hard and rigid limbs grasp his back and pull him to it, and something fleshy and many-headed (like a sea anemone, he thinks, even as he struggles against it) wraps itself around his mouth, pries his lips open, and begins to worm its way into his throat…
Then things go dark.
Norris awakes with the dawn. He groans and rolls over and cracks an eye. He’s lying on his gravel driveway with what feels like most of its pebbles digging into his back. But that isn’t the most painful thing: the worst of it is his skin, for it feels like a million mosquitoes have been feasting on him while he slept. He sits up, scratching and expecting to see many frog-belly-white lumps lining his arms and hands.
He stops. For what is on his skin—or, rather, underneath it—is not mosquito bites at all.
Norris is covered with what looks like some horrific fungal infection, bands of virulent black stretching across his arms and hands and belly. It’s not on his skin but below it, and the skin itself is pebbled and moist.
But this is not the worst thing, nor is it the thing that will send him running down the street, screaming. For though the infection is horrendous, the most unnerving thing is that its many splintered webs and rings are not distributed randomly about his body. Quite the contrary: their arrangement obviously resembles letters. And what those letters spell is the same thing, written over and over again:
GET OUT
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Wink is not perfect. Its residents are well aware of that. But then, they say, no place is perfect. There’s always a few mild irritants you have to put up with, no matter where you go. So Wink is really no different, is it?
No, they say. It really isn’t.
For when night falls and the blue lightning blooms in the sky, things change.
It is something in the very air. Suddenly the Googie architecture and the pleasant white wooden cottages no longer look so spotless. Streetlights seem dimmer, and the neon signs appear to have more dead insects clogging their tubing than they did during the day. People stop waving. In fact, they hunch over and hurry back inside with their eyes downcast.
It is very regular to have strange experiences at night in Wink. For example, in Wink it is common to wake up with the powerful feeling that someone is standing in your front or backyard. It is never known to you whether this stranger has come to your house in particular, or if he or she is watching you and your family; the stranger is simply there, shadowy and still. What is most exceptional about this is that all of it is conveyed only in feeling, an irrational conviction like that of a dream. Most people in Wink do not even look out their windows when this occurs, mostly because they know doing so would prove the conviction true—for there is a stranger on your lawn, dark and faceless and still—and moreover, seeing that stranger has its own consequences.
There are houses in Wink where no one ever sees anyone going in or out, yet the lawn is clean and the trees are trimmed and the beds are full and blooming. And sometimes at night, if you were to look—and of course you wouldn’t—you might see pale faces peeping out of the darkened windows.
In the evening in Wink, it is normal for a man to take the trash out to the back alley, and as he places the bag in the trash can he will suddenly hear the sound of someone speaking to him from nearby. He will look and see that the speaker stands behind the tall wooden fence of the house behind his, and he will be unable to discern anything besides the shadow of the speaker’s figure and the light from his neighbor’s windows filtering through the pickets. What the speaker is whispering to him is unknown, for it will be in a language he has never heard before and could never mimic. The man will say nothing back—it is crucial he say nothing back—and he will walk away slowly, return to his home, and not mention it to his wife or family. In the morning, there will be no sign of anyone’s having been behind the fence at all.
In the morning in Wink, people frequently find that someone has gone through their garbage or left footprints all over their lawn. On discovering this they will set everything to rights, replacing the garbage or smoothing over the grass, and they will not complain or discuss it with anyone.
There are very few pets in Wink. The few pets people own are decidedly indoor pets. The outdoor, wandering pets are unpopular, for they have a tendency to never come home in the morning.
On the outskirts of Wink, where the trees end and the canyons begin,
people often hear fluting and cries from down the slopes, and, on very clear nights, one can see flickering lights of a thin, unnerving yellow, and many dark figures standing upright and still on the stones.
They are trying to remember. They are trying to remember their home, where they came from. And they are trying to remind themselves that now, this is home, here in Wink.
The residents of Wink know about all these things, to the extent that they wish to. They tolerate them as one would a rainy season, or some pestering raccoons. Because, after all, no neighborhood is perfect. There will always be a few problems, at least. And besides, people can make arrangements, if they want.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
It is nearly two o’clock in the morning, and Tom Bolan is ass-over-head, military-grade, wearing-more-booze-than-he’s-ingesting drunk. He’s sitting on the floor of his shadowy little corridor with the stock ticker, and for the past two hours his lone companion has been a 750-milliliter bottle of Bushmills (what Bolan thinks of as a “polite-size bottle of booze”), and it’s been a pretty good companion as far as Bolan’s concerned, for he’s said a great deal of controversial things and the bottle hasn’t vocally dissented yet.
He’ll pay for this in the morning, and it won’t just be the hangover: his indigestion will be nothing short of mutinous. But he doesn’t care. It has been a goddamn difficult couple of days.
No man of his—not Dee, Norris, Zimmerman, or any of the few others—can get within a mile of Wink without something going wrong, and not stepped-in-dogshit wrong but nearly-crushed-by-a-falling-piano wrong. Dee’s tires got slashed while he was in a corner store, and someone left an ice pick stabbed in the cushion of the driver’s seat of his car; Zimmerman’s safe house had an electrical fire (while he was out, thank God) and it ate through his apartment and the ones on either side; and Norris… Jesus. Words can’t begin to describe it. It was one thing to have him running in, sobbing and covered in fungal, spindly words, but when they started to crack and ooze…
Bolan knows it’s all a message. In the case of Norris, a bit too literally. Someone knows who the triggermen were, and wants them to skip town. He knows he’s lucky they didn’t just kill anyone or… whatever it is they do to people.
Bolan’s taken this personally. His crew was never supposed to be at risk. Bolan isn’t the world’s greatest boss, that he knows, but he’s not going to sit idly by while his boys get circled by sharks.
But he’s also never confronted the people in Wink on anything, ever. And isn’t it time, he thinks, to stop calling them people? But Bolan doesn’t really have a name for what they are… He thinks of the man in the panama hat not as a person but as an index finger poked up into this place from deeper waters, and perhaps the finger has a smiley face drawn on its pad, and it’s wearing silly little people-clothing, so it looks like a person but really… really it’s connected to a lot more down below, an extremity of something vast.
Which explains all the Dutch courage currently bubbling away in Bolan’s gut.
The stock ticker comes to life at the end of the hallway. Bolan sits up, then lurches to his feet as the bronzed contraption spits out a little tongue of paper:
WHO IS THE GIRL
“The girl?” says Bolan. “You’re seriously asking about the girl? My boys are under fire, and you’re still on about that goddamn girl? We did everything you said, and you told us we’d be protected. We wouldn’t come to any harm. Where’s your goddamn protection now?”
There is a pause. He feels like the stock ticker is a little taken aback by his response. He has never smarted off to them before.
Finally it begins writing again:
DID YOU DELIVER THE NEXT TOTEM
“The skull?” says Bolan. “Yeah, we dropped the thing off earlier tonight.”
It writes:
THEN YOU HAVE NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT
“How do you fucking think?”
In response, the ticker spits out one word:
TERRIFIED
Bolan eyes the slip of paper blearily. “You think that’ll frighten them off?”
The stock ticker does not answer, as if to say—Clearly. Bolan isn’t sure how an inanimate object can appear snooty, but somehow the stock ticker pulls it off.
When it begins printing again, it’s a familiar question:
WHO IS THE GIRL
He sighs. “Her name’s Mona Bright. Word is she inherited a house in Wink. How the fuck something like that happened is beyond me. She hasn’t done much more than move into the place, which I don’t know anything about. No one’s lived there for, like, thirty fucking years or some such. She’s asking questions, but none of them are dangerous. Mostly she asks about her mother, who apparently worked at Coburn when the place was still ticking, but no one’s heard of her. She must’ve left Wink before”—he pauses, aware that he’s touching on a very sensitive subject—“everything happened.”
He expects a quick response, but none comes.
He glances around the hallway awkwardly. “Hello?” he asks.
He wonders if he’s offended them. They definitely don’t like that he knows where they came from, or at least when they came. But then the stock ticker begins typing again:
HER MOTHER
Bolan stares at it drunkenly. “What?”
It writes:
YOU ARE SURE SHE SAID HER MOTHER
He remembers that the damn thing can’t punctuate. It must’ve meant: “Her mother?” “Yeah,” he says. “She’s talked to a couple of people in town about it. That broad at the courthouse, the one you hate, for one. I don’t know if she’s found anything.”
Another long, long pause. Then:
YOU ARE POSITIVE
Bolan isn’t sure if he feels more confused or irritated. They’ve never asked so many questions before. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, I’m sure. I’ve had four people verify it. Though my boys almost got scalped finding it out. Is there anything you want us to do about it?”
There is another pause, this one the longest yet. He can tell they’re thinking very hard, wherever they are. He feels a little satisfied by that. It’s nice to see them confused.
Then it begins ticking again:
DO NOTHING
“That’s it?” says Bolan. “You want me to just sit tight? You can’t even tell me what’ll go down tomorrow?”
The response from the ticker is almost as short and sweet as the last one. It reads:
ABSOLUTE CHAOS
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
That night, Mona sleeps. It is, again, good sleep, hard and black and solid. And just as before, Mona dreams.
She dreams she is standing on the front walk to her mother’s house. It is night, and the trees dance in the wind. She can see there is a light on in the front window, and under the light is a mattress, and someone, a black-haired girl (a black just like her own hair), is sleeping there on her side with her face turned away from the window.
Mona walks up to the front door and places her hand on the knob. Then she looks back.
There are people in the street. They are watching her as if they expect something from her. They look a little like some people she’s seen around Wink, just acquaintances she’s met—there is Franklin the cook from Chloe’s, and Mrs. O’Cleary, who works part-time as the mail lady, and so on—yet their faces are obviously masks, masks made of papier-mâché with hard, ragged angles. Their eyes are dark and empty, their mouths twisted into queer frowns. Behind them, beyond the light of the streetlamp, are other figures watching her, but though she cannot see much of them in the darkness they do not look much like people. Some are low and many-armed. Others are tall and spindly as if they are made of glass. And somewhere behind them all is a fluting sound, like a broken pipe organ.
Mona turns back, and opens the door.
It does not open onto the foyer. Rather, it opens onto a single long, dark hallway. Shaded lamps on the wall cast little pools of yellow light. Mona can see there is something at the end of the hallway, ma
ybe a light, but she can’t tell what it is.
She glances back at the paper-faced people. They stare back at her, expressionless. She turns away again and walks down the hallway.
The hall seems to go on forever. At some point the floors and ceiling begin shuddering, as if there is an earthquake nearby. Puffs of dust twirl down from the ceiling, and somewhere there is a low rumble.
At the other end of the hallway is a mirror. Not just a mirror—a bathroom. She sees the drooping, Daliesque faucets and realizes it’s the upstairs bathroom, the one that got struck by lightning. Mona can see herself approaching in the mirror… yet is it her? As she walks by one lamp it looks almost like her mother, smiling at her…
She comes before the mirror and gazes into it. The rumbling increases, and the walls shimmer. Then her reflection smiles at her, raises a hand, and waves.
Mona looks at it for a moment, then waves back.
Her reflection raises a finger—Watch. Then it reaches up to the light in the ceiling and plucks at it. The light goes out in the mirror, and suddenly there’s a tiny pearl of luminescence in her reflection’s hand, like she’s stolen the light out of the bulb.
Mona glances up at the lightbulb on her side of the mirror. The light is still on, un-stolen.
Her reflection holds up the pearl of light, showing it to Mona. Then she opens her mouth wide, and she lifts the pearl up and places it far back in her throat, past her tongue, and when she does her eyes and nose light up and Mona sees that her reflection is utterly hollow, and where she once had eyes she has ribbed, cavernous sockets, like those of a jack-o’-lantern. Her reflection keeps shoving the light down her throat, farther and farther, and then she tilts her head forward and stares at Mona with those empty eye sockets, a hollow puppet-person with barely any skin…
American Elsewhere Page 17
