American Elsewhere

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “Tell me anyway. I’m a quick study.”

  “I cannot.”

  “Do it.”

  “I cannot. It would kill you.”

  There is a rattling gasp in the room. Mona tenses up, but does not take her eyes off Mrs. Benjamin. Then she glances to the side and sees Parson’s eyes fluttering. He frowns, shifts on the bed, and opens his eyes. He does not look at the gun, but stares straight ahead.

  “She is not like the others,” he says in a croaking voice.

  Mrs. Benjamin and Mona do not move. The clocks keep ticking, on and on.

  “That does not mean she can understand,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

  “We can try to show her,” says Parson.

  “What do you mean?” asks Mrs. Benjamin.

  “The hell are you talking about?” asks Mona.

  He does not answer either of them.

  “Do you mean… take her there?” asks Mrs. Benjamin.

  “Yes,” says Parson. “And see what she can see.”

  “Take who where?” asks Mona.

  “It would destroy her. She cannot go to such places mindfully. She is not like us.”

  “Mm. No,” he says. He turns his head to look at Mona, totally ignoring the gun in his face. “She is not bound to this place, like we are. But neither is she truly free. She is drawn here against her will. She is different.”

  “Different enough?” asks Mrs. Benjamin.

  Parson does not answer. He just stares at Mona.

  Mrs. Benjamin sighs. “Do you really want to see, dear?”

  “See what?” asks Mona.

  “What we are. What we are underneath it all.”

  “What we are on the other side,” says Parson.

  “What we were in the beginning,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

  “Do you want to see?”

  “Do you wish us to take you there?”

  “To the halfway spot, not here, not there?”

  “Where we reside?”

  Mona is trembling. They speak so fast it is hard to keep up. “What the hell are you all talking about? If you’re gonna try something, hurry up and do it. But I am handy with a gun.”

  “We have no reason to harm you,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

  “But what I know—”

  “You know what you know,” says Parson, “because I led you to it.”

  Mona sees the truth in this, but she still is not comfortable with what they are suggesting. “I thought it wasn’t permitted,” she says.

  “You know enough,” says Parson. “We would not be showing you something new.”

  “Nothing you do not suspect,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

  Mona pauses, uncertain. But she cannot turn away, not now.

  “All right,” she says.

  Mrs. Benjamin and Parson glance at one another, faces slack and dead, eyes watery and small.

  “Please put down the gun,” says Parson. “Please.”

  Mona hesitates, but lowers it.

  “Good,” says Parson. “Now.”

  For a moment nothing happens, and Mona thinks they have just tricked her. Yet the two do not pounce on her, but stay stock-still.

  The clocks stop ticking in the hallway. Everything in the room is silent: all the background noise, the susurrus of sounds from the forest and streets, has died. Then the walls begin to tremble and shudder, like they are drum skins being fiercely beaten by hammers, and with each blow they become more and more transparent until finally Mona can see out of them, glimpsing red stars and a huge pink moon and a gray, lunar terrain…

  And then she sees

  (no no)

  (please no)

  (endless canyons)

  (glittering flats)

  (and there beside her, swaying)

  (a column, a stalk)

  (tall, tall, infinitely tall)

  (rigid and chitinous and dripping)

  (hollow, honey-chambered)

  (countless sinews and polyps)

  (and in each chamber)

  (a tiny black eye)

  (like a fungus, she thinks, a huge, dripping fungus)

  (roots like the root of a tooth)

  (worming down into the heart of the world)

  (and there beside it she sees)

  (bulky and broad, shoulders spanning miles)

  (thousands of powerful limbs)

  (clutch the ground)

  (a tiny, malformed skull)

  (hundreds of spider eyes)

  (like black marbles, glittering)

  (she feels herself shake)

  (it is too much)

  (too)

  (much)

  Mona awakes gripping the carpet so hard she feels certain she’s broken her left ring finger. She is facedown on the ground. Every muscle in her body is tense to the point of snapping. She can’t even remember how to breathe. Then she gasps and goes limp.

  “She’s alive,” she hears Mrs. Benjamin say, with some amount of surprise.

  “Did I not tell you?” asks Parson.

  “But is she whole?”

  Mona just lies there blinking for a moment, telling her body to remember how to draw air. She feels fluid running down her face and she realizes she is weeping.

  In some sensible part of her malfunctioning brain, she is beginning to understand that all information, from numbers to colors to sensations to words, is really just a means of establishing perspective: we know what green is only because we have blue to compare it to, just as we can understand three because we can match it up with two and see there is one more. The approximate qualities, behavior, and pattern of any witnessable occurrence are determined only by how it is like and unlike its neighbors; we know a thing only to the degree that we know what it is next to.

  And what Mona just experienced for that one awful, endless, titubant moment neighbors nothing at all. She has nothing to compare it to. All of her many frames of reference, which were so carefully, thoughtlessly constructed during all of her life, and which she always assumed to be as solid and undeniable as the very earth, have been proven to be tottering, fragile little popsicle-stick structures, vulnerable to a breeze or a shift in the carpet.

  Her faculties struggle under the weight of this revelation. It is too much. Her mind wishes to throw its hands up and quit.

  But she will not let it: she rallies, coughs, and says, “What… what the fuck?”

  “Apparently so,” says Parson.

  She rolls over and sees the two of them standing over her, their figures indistinct in the dark room. Immediately she shoves herself away and looks for the gun, but it is nowhere to be found. She crawls to the corner and grabs a lamp and threatens to throw it. She’s too shaken to realize how ridiculous she looks.

  “Do you see now?” asks Mrs. Benjamin. “Do you see what we are?”

  “What you are?” asks Mona. “Those… that… that’s what you are?”

  They are silent, two shapeless shadows slouching in the center of the dark room. Slowly, the clocks in the hallway resume their ticking. The two of them shift a little bit, and evening light spills in, lighting a bit of their faces.

  Mona can see their eyes. There is something behind them, something wriggling, squirming.

  “Yes,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

  “We are not from here, Mona Bright,” says Parson.

  “Nor are we here, not entirely,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

  “Just a bit of us is,” says Parson. “As the tip of an iceberg pokes past the ocean’s surface, yet the rest of it lies below.”

  “Hidden.”

  “You cannot grasp it, cannot comprehend its size, its breadth. Just as you—or most of your kind, at least—cannot see us.”

  “Jesus,” says Mona. “What… what are you all? Monsters?”

  “Monsters?” asks Mrs. Benjamin. “We have been thought such before.”

  “And we have also been thought of as gods,” says Parson.

  “In the places we took.”

  “The worlds we conquered.”
<
br />   “In the other place.”

  “Elsewhere from this.”

  “Our family is vast, Mona Bright,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “And we are most esteemed. You cannot imagine what we have conquered, what we have controlled, there in the aspects of reality you and your kind still have not touched.”

  “Imagine a building, tall and narrow, many floors, many stairs,” says Parson. “Many, many tiny rooms, many places stacked on one another. In some spots they overlap, but in most they are whole, contained, hermetic. Walls stiff and unyielding. Most people in the building would only live on one floor, one level. One plane. Yet imagine if someone could live in several at the same time, occupying many places, many floors, rising up through the whole of the building and moving through it all at once, just as sea creatures move through many meters of the sea, vertically, horizontally.”

  “Pandimensional,” Mona says.

  “Yes,” says Parson.

  “We are from a place underneath this one,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

  “Behind it.”

  “Beside it.”

  “Above it, around it.”

  “Everywhere,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

  “Then why the hell are you here?” asks Mona.

  They pause and glance at each other. Their eyes seem to move independently of their slack faces.

  “We were forced to leave,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

  “Yes. And come here,” says Parson.

  “We are… emigrants.”

  “Refugees, you could say.”

  “And this place is our haven.”

  “To an extent,” corrects Parson, sounding suddenly bitter.

  “Christ,” says Mona. “This is what you were trying to tell me with your little fable, wasn’t it… your story about the birds in the trees.”

  Parson nods.

  She laughs madly. “But you don’t look like any fucking birds I know. Not how you really are, I mean. In that… that place.” She stops laughing as she remembers a line from Parson’s story: Then one evening a terrible storm broke open in the skies…

  And it all begins to make sense.

  “And you didn’t just fly here, did you,” she says. “You didn’t crawl out of the mirror, or the lab. And you didn’t just pop into existence.”

  “No,” says Parson.

  “The change happened to the whole town,” says Mona. “To everyone. Everything. You came here in the storm. That was what it was. But it wasn’t really a storm, or just a storm.”

  “No,” says Parson.

  “It was bruising,” says Mona. “Bruising miles wide. It was just a bunch of doors opening everywhere, all at once. Wasn’t it?”

  “In a way,” says Mrs. Benjamin. She stares at the ceiling. “The whole sky opened up,” she says. “And then we came.”

  And she begins to speak.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  The evening was cool, dry, and quiet, like all evenings in Wink. Mrs. Benjamin had passed the day as she passed nearly all of them, whiling the hours away in bored tedium at her desk, kept afloat only by the rumors people dropped by, each one spawning hours of gleeful conjecture. For despite her bureaucratic title in the small government town, Mrs. Benjamin’s true role, the only one that mattered, was that of town gossip.

  And despite the fact that almost nothing happened in Wink—for the lab on the mountain had made no discoveries, nor had it attracted any worthwhile attention in years—Mrs. Benjamin still ran a thriving trade. Her chief strength was fashion, for she and she alone was the unspoken authority on what was and was not acceptable these days. And these days were quite deplorable, really: she could not bear to see men sport such ridiculous sideburns and gaudy glasses, and it was wise not to even get her started on the women, in their absurd, ragged pants and low-cut tops and untamed hair.

  For years Mrs. Benjamin had been doing her damnedest to keep all of that out. It was mainly her efforts that had protected Wink from the encroaching decades: they’d made it to 1983 without showing any sign of having moved past 1969, and she intended to make that last until she was in the ground. Then those children could do as they please, but perhaps—just perhaps—they’d feel a twinge of regret for disobeying Mrs. Benjamin’s silent strictures. Because, after all, Mrs. Benjamin was undeniably right.

  As the sky grew darker, she sat on her porch and surveyed the street, sipping her tea and waiting for someone to stroll by so she could plumb them for information. But she was not wholly interested in her duties: she kept glancing toward the mesa, idly wondering if the lightning would be there again.

  It had been there every night for the past month or so. No one was quite sure what it was. Was it heat lightning? It made no sound, but still… no one had ever seen heat lightning like that. Perhaps it was something to do with the lab… No one knew.

  There was a spark in the skies. Mrs. Benjamin, pleased, sat up and hauled her rocking chair around to face the horizon.

  They’d had parties when it first started, picnics on the baseball field as they watched the show in the sky. It was like their own version of the Northern Lights. Though they did not understand it, they were glad to have it.

  But this night the lightning was curiously brighter than normal. The sight was so queer Mrs. Benjamin simply stared at it, transfixed. Sometimes it looked like the lightning in the sky backlit something, some form in the clouds. In her more fanciful moments, she imagined there was a giant in the sky, huge and dark, looking out at the town from its vantage point in the sky.

  There was another flicker, but this one was different: it was closer. She frowned, and watched as the heart of another cloud burst with lightning, this one closer still.

  That was odd. The lightning usually stayed directly over the mesa. But as she watched, the flickers in the sky marched across the clouds as if jumping across links in a chain, bit by bit, until they came almost to hover over the town.

  Mrs. Benjamin stood and walked to the center of her yard, looking up. She heard squeaking, and saw young Eddie Jacobs riding his old bicycle down the sidewalk. The squeaking slowed as he came to a stop, looking up, openmouthed. He got off and let his bike fall to the ground. Then, wordlessly, the two of them wandered over to stand next to one another and stare at the sky.

  Then the lightning died. The two of them blinked and looked around.

  “That was funny,” said Eddie.

  “It was, wasn’t it,” said Mrs. Benjamin.

  Yet then a soft breeze filled her yard, and she frowned, for she smelled something quite odd…

  Was it ozone?

  One of the clouds built to a point. Its innards flickering mutinously. Then it blazed bright, and a rope of lightning stabbed down into the rooftops.

  She had only a moment to register the sight before the blast hit her. It was like an artillery shell had just gone off, a tremendous eruption that sent her staggering back.

  She fell onto the grass. The wind raged around her, pulling at her hair and her dress. Her eyes wheeled about until she saw another bolt of lightning shoot down into Wink, and another, and another, each one followed by the screaming, earth-shattering crashes.

  When she regained herself, she heard the wailing of air-raid sirens as some long-dormant disaster system rattled awake. Then she saw a faraway tree lit by dancing red light, and gasped.

  “Fire,” she said, though she was almost deaf to her own voice. “Eddie—run home. Get on your bike and run home and get your parents!”

  Eddie leaped onto his bike and pedaled away. Mrs. Benjamin managed to stand back up and started to rush off toward the fire, not certain what she would do if she got there. More bolts of lightning came shooting down, decimating houses, shops, trees. A florist’s shop mere yards away burst apart as one of the arcs of lightning brushed it, sending waves of dust dancing across the street. People rushed out of their homes, looking about wildly, holding hands.

  She could hear screams. Some sounded like women and men. Others, children.

  “My God!” crie
d Mrs. Benjamin. “My God, my God!”

  She was near a corner when one of the bolts of lightning struck the middle of the street just around the bend. It almost knocked her over again, and she had to hold on to a lamppost to stay up. When she recovered, she saw red-and-orange light flickering on the houses across the road. The middle of the street just around the corner must have been on fire.

  Yet there was a shadow projected onto the houses by the flames. She was not sure if she was imagining things, but if the shadow was right, something huge and many-limbed was standing in the street, just out of view around the corner. She stared at the shadow, watching its arms heave as whatever it was took huge, gasping breaths, like some kind of enraged animal, and though the whole town was roaring with thunder and fire she thought she could hear deep, rattling gasps…

  She walked closer to the corner, wondering if she really wanted to look down that street, and see… but then she heard an awful noise from just around the corner, like a thousand cicadas beginning to whine, and she knew she had to run, run as fast as she could.

  Because there’d been something inside that lightning bolt. Something had come down from the sky with it. And Mrs. Benjamin did not know what it was, but she did not want to see it, or for it to see her.

  She saw Mr. Macey running in her direction. “Myrtle!” he shouted. “Myrtle, for Christ’s sake, don’t go that way! Everything’s on fire back there!”

  “But you can’t go that way, either!” she said, pointing at the corner. “There’s… something there!”

  “What?” he cried. “What’s there? What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know! But there’s something in the lightning bolts! Something’s coming down with them!”

  “Have you lost your fucking mind?” he screamed. This made her pause, for never in her life had she ever heard Eustace Macey use such a word. “We’ve got to move!”

  “But Eustace, please! You can’t—”

  She stopped. Though the air was thick with smoke and brilliant light, she saw through it, just briefly, and glimpsed the mesa just a few miles out of town.

  The top of the mesa was on fire. All the dishes and satellites and telescopes there were in ruins. But the fire on the mesa lit something above it… something massive and dark, swaying back and forth… and she thought she saw eyes, yellow and luminous like huge lamps…