American Elsewhere

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  She can see the pale shapes of trees and shrubs and hills, but in places the countryside is pockmarked and filled with a bright blue light, as if massive spotlights are hidden in the hills. All of them are pointed straight up, shining directly into the sky, piercing the clouds and rising into the dark heavens.

  Or, she wonders, is something above the clouds shining down onto these spots? And do they coincide with another vision she had? Did she not once see coils of lightning streaming down to brush these very places?

  But as she stares at these glowing spots in the countryside, her eye eventually falls upon the faint form of the town in the valley. She can see through it, past it, underneath it, and when she realizes this she sees that the earth below the town and even under the mesa is not solid…

  There is something underneath the town. Something buried there, sleeping, waiting. It is broken into a million pieces, it feels like. And though it is shattered, she can feel it turn its attention to her, dreaming of her, this lost, broken woman standing on the hillside…

  And it recognizes her.

  She begins screaming, and she writhes and rips her hand back and squeezes it…

  There is a crash, and Mona is released. She realizes she has her eyes shut, and she opens them and sees she is still standing on the road, but the world is no longer gray and misty.

  Then she smells gunpowder, and she realizes she has just fired the Glock again.

  She looks around. The man is kneeling before her, face fixed in a look of complete surprise.

  “Oh,” he says, and he falls back until he is sitting on the road.

  There is blood pouring from his chest. She can see the tiny rent in his shirtfront with blood spurting out of it, and she slowly, stupidly realizes that she has put it there.

  “Oh, fuck,” says Mona.

  The man touches his wound and looks at the blood as if he has never seen such a thing.

  “Oh, oh fuck,” says Mona again.

  He sits in the middle of the road, still staring at his chest in shock. He looks around himself, contemplating his situation, as if he’s just tripped and he’s wondering who saw.

  “Just… just sit there,” says Mona. She sticks the gun back in her pants and cautiously approaches him. “Just don’t move, you’ll make it worse. Lie down, and just…”

  The Indian appears to come to some decision. He reaches into his coat and produces something dark and glimmering. It takes her a moment to see it’s a snub-nosed .38.

  Mona doesn’t even pause to think. She dives to the right, behind the Charger, pulls the Glock back out, and points it at him again. “Don’t!” she says. “Don’t you fucking dare!”

  But the man does not point the gun at her. He examines it, as if trying to remember how such a contraption works, before lifting it and sticking it under his chin.

  “No!” cries Mona.

  She stands up, but it is too late: the gun goes off. Streamers of red come bursting out of the top of the man’s skull like fireworks, and he topples back.

  “Fucking Christ!” screams Mona. She rushes to him, but she can see he’s already far beyond help. His body is totally limp, the asphalt already covered in a spreading sea of blood.

  Mona stops and stares, wondering what to do now. She has never shot someone before now, and though she has seen people die it was never in such a horrific manner.

  But the man’s body is not completely still. His ruptured head is twitching from side to side. And somehow Mona does not think his neck is jerking it back and forth: instead, she thinks the source of the motion is coming from inside his skull, as if something within is beating against its walls.

  There is a squelching sound, and she thinks she can see something sprouting from the gaping wound at the top of his head, tiny gossamer tendrils wriggling out as if trying to taste the air, and as the thing struggles the flow of blood triples…

  “What the fuck,” says Mona softly.

  Then with a tiny, reedy cry, the wriggling stops, and the little tendrils appear to foam up (exactly like baking soda and vinegar) and dissolve. The dead man lies still in the middle of the road, gun still in his hand. Mona stares at him, not sure what to do.

  There is a flash of lightning from out over the town, the bolt rushing down to strike to ground, and a clap of thunder. Mona turns to look. The cloud lightning above the mesa is roiling as always, but that strike was much closer, and unlike the normal lightning it produced a thunderclap…

  She does not need to think about it more. She dashes around to the driver’s side of the Charger, jumps in, and peels out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  When Mona comes rushing into the office at the Ponderosa Acres, Parson looks up from his desk—his expression stuck between amusement and irritation, as always—and asks, “I take it your visit was a success?”

  Mona wonders what to say. Something shudders and curls in her stomach. She runs to his trash can, grabs it, and vomits into it prolifically.

  Parson looks on, mildly perplexed. “Or perhaps not?” he asks.

  “Things got fucked,” gasps Mona.

  “They got what?”

  “Fucked,” she says again, angry. “Things went fucking nuts on the way back here!”

  “In a matter that concerns the key?”

  “No, it does not concern the key. I don’t think. Hell, I don’t know.”

  “Then you have it?”

  She glares at him, streams of spittle still hanging from her lips. She wipes them off with a forearm, rummages around in her backpack, and takes out her glove with the key wrapped inside. She looks at it, then up at Parson. So far, he’s given her very little reason to trust him.

  He seems to sense this. “I am not going to do anything with this key,” he says.

  “That’s not really a comfort, Mr. Parson.”

  “I will not even take it from you. This key is more for you than for me, Miss Bright. I only wish to see it, and verify what it is.”

  She throws it to him, and he does not react at all, as if he’s never caught anything before in his life: the glove bounces off his shoulder and lands on his desk. He looks at it, confused.

  “There’s your fucking key,” she says.

  He opens up the glove, looks within, and smiles. “Good. Very good.”

  “No. No good at all,” says Mona.

  “Why not?”

  “Some crazy fuck attacked me on the road,” she says. “And I shot him. Well… I actually shot him a couple of times. But then he took out his own gun and, and…” She mimes holding a gun to her chin and pulling the trigger, and makes a childish pkchoom noise. “Blew his own fucking brains out, right then and there, like it was nothing.”

  “This man… shot himself?”

  “Yes!” says Mona. “Are you not fucking hearing me?”

  “But why did he attack you?”

  “I don’t know! He just did! He was, like… lying in wait for me. He’d set up some tire spikes, I’m almost sure of it, and I blew a tire and had to change it and that’s when he came at me.”

  “He… came at you?”

  “He tried to grab me.” She pauses. “Well. He actually did grab me. And when he did, I saw…”

  Parson is sitting forward. He asks, “You saw something?”

  “I saw underneath the town. There’s something there, something broken and laid out all over and under this valley. And it saw me, and I felt like… like it knew me.”

  Parson is quiet for a long, long time. “And you saw this when this man grabbed you? As if he was showing it to you?”

  “I guess.”

  “What did he look like?”

  Mona describes him, but Parson shakes his head and says, “He does not sound familiar… I have never seen such a man in Wink. This is troubling.”

  “More troubling than him blowing his brains out?” she asks.

  He bobs his head from side to side, as if to say that they are roughly equal in his mind.

  “What’s going to ha
ppen?”

  “To you?” asks Parson. He thinks about it. “Well. If he is dead, he was no one of note.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes. I can tell when someone… important has died. As I did with Weringer, and Macey. And if his body is there, I expect someone will come to collect it in the night. Such things happen frequently with items left out. Even corpses, I assume, though I have never witnessed such a thing.”

  Mona tries to ignore the sea of crazy shit he just said, and focuses on one thing in particular: “What do you mean, if he is dead? The top of his goddamn head was gone!”

  Parson looks at her stony-faced. He shrugs.

  “You can’t tell me, huh?” she says. “It isn’t allowed?”

  Parson does nothing. He is hardly even breathing.

  “And I guess you can’t tell me about the thing that tried to crawl out of his fucking gourd, can you?” says Mona. “The thing that foamed up like a… like a fucking science fair project when it touched asphalt? Or what I saw in that house?”

  Parson clears his throat. “We should discuss what you are going to do with this key.” He pats the glove on the table.

  “No,” says Mona.

  He raises an eyebrow. “No?”

  She coughs, hawks, and spits a lump into the trash can. Then she takes a Kleenex and blows each nostril thoroughly. “No,” she says. “I’m not doing a fucking thing, Mr. Parson. Not until you start telling me what the hell is going on.”

  “I have told you about this,” says Parson calmly. “There are some things I am not allowed to discuss, or do.”

  “I honestly don’t care,” says Mona. “I just endured some serious shit for you. I say we play fair and spread it around. This is a two-way street, Mr. Parson. Get fucking driving.”

  “I do not understand your metaphor,” he says.

  “What I am saying,” says Mona, and she hauls herself up and sits in the chair before his desk, “is you tell me something worth knowing. For starters, why the hell would I care about this key, anyway, let alone why would you?”

  “It is a key to a door.”

  “That’s specific.”

  “I think it is the key to a door.”

  “You don’t even know?”

  “I have never… been there. And I do not know exactly what is inside the door. But I think… I think it is important.”

  “This sounds like the worst setup I could imagine. I’m not just going to go out and open this mystery door of yours because you ask politely.”

  “It is important to me,” Parson says quietly. “And it will be important to you.”

  “Mr. Parson, you might not understand the meaning of this, but whatever you had me do tonight, it involved something apparently worth dying over. Because I’m fairly sure that spook in the hat offed himself to make sure he couldn’t talk. That’s a lot of devotion right there. I was a cop for seven years, and I never saw anyone do that. Usually folks are all about self-preservation. So whatever it is you have me doing, people are willing to die for it, and if they’re willing to die they’re almost certainly willing to kill. Now, don’t try and tell me you don’t know anything about this. And don’t send me out to some fucking mystery door without giving me the details, Mr. Parson. Don’t you even try to tell me to do that. I’m shocked I have to tell you this, but that dog won’t hunt.”

  Parson contemplates this. He looks a little weary, as if this is a task he’s been dreading for a long time. He swallows, takes a breath, and says, “Are you quite sure about this?”

  “After what I’ve seen tonight, I am damn sure, Mr. Parson.”

  He nods and swallows again. “All right, then. I admit, I have thought about how best to do this,” he says. “Here is what is going to happen. Listen carefully. And you must trust me.”

  “Well, I don’t really cotton to the idea of you telling me how to run this sho—”

  “You must trust me.”

  She gives him a glare, but gestures to go on.

  “I am going to tell you more about what you need to do with this key.” He thinks. “And after that, I will do several things that make no sense to you. They might even seem to be quite silly. Is this acceptable?”

  “What part of your crazy fucking head thinks that’s a fair shake?”

  He takes another breath. “The things I will be doing will be done for no reason,” he says forcefully. “They will make no sense whatsoever. Neither to you, or to me. They have no bearing on what we are discussing at all. Do you understand?”

  Mona looks him over. She worked with criminal informants only a couple of times as a cop, but in those times she became quite aware that double-talk and insinuation are the natural grammar of C.I.’s. Now, listening to Parson describe his plans, she perceives that he is using those same techniques, albeit in the most ridiculous way possible: he cannot even admit that what he is saying could be important, so he must claim that it is wholly unrelated. It’s as if he’s trying to trick himself into talking.

  “Okay,” she says.

  “All right,” he says again. He looks a little relieved, but he’s sweating prolifically, like his feet are being held over a flame. “You know about Coburn. You know that it is situated on top of the mesa.”

  “I also know it’s gone.”

  “Nothing is ever truly gone in Wink,” he says. “Everything tends to come back, even if it does not wish to. In the case of the lab, it is still there, though it is empty… but if you should visit it and look at it the right way, I think it might prove otherwise. If not, I am sure there are records within that might help you. But the main door to Coburn is gone.”

  “What do you mean, gone?” she asks.

  “I mean it is buried under several feet of caved-in rock.”

  “How the hell did that happen?”

  “Please do not interrupt,” he says. “You need to listen, not speak.”

  “Jesus.”

  “That door is gone, but there are many other doors that lead to Coburn. There is one door in particular we can consider.”

  “And where can I find this door?”

  He shuts his eyes, as if envisioning it. Sweat is pooling in the wrinkles around his cheeks. “There is a road that leads out of Wink,” he says hoarsely. “It climbs high, high up, up to the mesa. It is the only road that does so. Take this road, but as you travel you must look at the fencing alongside it. There will be a stretch that is black and mangled as if it has been burned. At one point there will be a break in the fencing. It will look like there is nothing exceptional beyond this gap—more rocks, more scrub, more wilderness—but it is lying to you. It is the start of another road. Follow it, carefully. It winds around the mesa, through rocks and trees and gullies, and… and some things I cannot describe. Keep going. Eventually, you should find a door where none belongs. That is the door to Coburn. The back door.”

  “And am I going to find the same things in Coburn as I did in Weringer’s house?” asks Mona.

  “I have never been to Coburn, so I cannot say,” Parson tells her. “I honestly have no idea what is waiting for you there. But if any place holds answers, it lies atop that mesa.”

  “Why haven’t you looked yourself?”

  He smiles sourly at her.

  “Ah,” she says. “It’s not permitted, is it. It seems you’re not allowed to do much, Mr. Parson. I bet you chafe something awful.”

  He shrugs. Mona looks at him for a long time. His speech appears to have horribly strained him. “It sounds to me,” says Mona, “like this is mighty dangerous.”

  His brow declines in the slightest of nods.

  “And you seem to know a lot about it,” she says. “So why don’t you come with me, so I don’t get my dumb ass killed?”

  Parson is still as a stone.

  “Why not, Mr. Parson? Why don’t you and I hop in the car and take a road trip?”

  “I cannot,” he whispers.

  “I know you’re not permitted and all, but I’m the one who’s
going to have my goddamned life at stake, so the least you can do is come with me. You’re trying to help in your own way, but to be frank it don’t seem like much help to me right now, and I really, really don’t care to be your errand girl, Mr. Parson.”

  “I have already done too much…,” he says. It’s like his stomach is paining him horribly. “I cannot tell one of you what is there. I cannot help you. I cannot”—he grunts a little, as if something in his gut has just turned over—“directly help you to know what you do not know.”

  “What’s happening to you? What’s wrong?”

  He looks at her pleadingly. “Please… please, stop.”

  Mona goes quiet. She definitely does not like how he called her “one of you,” as if she were a foreigner. “What did they do up there, Mr. Parson?” she asks softly. “What happened on that mountain?”

  Parson, panting, takes a sip of coffee and turns up his handheld radio. The Sons of the Pioneers are playing now, crooning “Blue Shadows on the Trail.” When he turns back around Mona sees his eyes are brimming with tears, though his expression is not sad or anguished in any way. He wipes the tears away, sits down, and takes another breath.

  “I’ve made a gift for you,” he says.

  “Oh?”

  “Yes,” he says. He takes out a small stack of note cards. “I have written down some of my favorite words and their definitions.” He holds them out to her, and his hands are trembling. “Please look at them. Later.”

  Bewildered, Mona takes them and glances at the top card. It reads:

  CAT

  (noun)

  A small domesticated carnivore, Felis domestica or

  F. catus, bred in a number of fun, fuzzy varieties.

  “The fuck?” she says.

  “Please keep them somewhere safe,” he says. “They are very important to me. Allow no one to see them. And I mean no one.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Very.”

  “All right… I guess I’ll do that.” She puts them in her pocket.

  “Thank you.” He sits back, head cocked as he listens to the radio. “Would you like to hear a story?”