The big pistol starts going off again. The rounds hammer the slope above her. Some of them are rather close: little shards of rocks rain down on her shoulders and hair. But Mona does not move.
“She’s dead, ain’t she?” says Dee. “She’s dead already. I got you, didn’t I! I got you!”
The branches move a little more.
“We got you! We shot your fucking ass!”
And then Dee’s head, swollen like a rotting pumpkin, pops up into view. His cheek is clearly defined by the moonlight; she can see exactly where he is and what he’s doing.
Right now, he is screaming at her. Mona is so far inside herself that she cannot hear his words. She does not put the crosshairs in the middle of his face, but just above his right eyebrow, at the very edge of his skull; she does this thoughtlessly, as a well-oiled machine would.
She can feel the impulse running down her arm to her finger, telling it to fire.
As it does, she thinks, You know, I haven’t really killed anyone yet.
But this is followed by, Well. He’s a good one to start with.
She is so in the moment she does not even register the sound of the gun; she feels it kick, sees the scope spin, and brings it back just in time to see a curious halo swarm up to surround Dee’s head, which is not snapping back but is staying perfectly still; the halo dissolves; Dee appears to look down and to the side, as if he sees something in the grass; then he falls from view.
He does not shout again.
Mona starts moving, rolling farther down the hillside. She goes about thirty yards, then finds a new roost.
She expects another salvo. None comes. There is just silence, and sometimes a whimper.
So, just like when she hunted, she waits.
And waits.
And waits.
Which is most of any action, really. Be it hunting or fighting, the most important part is the waiting.
The minutes stretch on.
Killing, thinks Mona, is such a goddamn boring job.
Then there’s a shout: “Hey, lady!”
Mona’s rifle swivels to the north as she tries to guess where it came from.
“Hey, listen, lady.” It is the second voice, Zimmerman. “I know now might not be, uh, the best time to try to appeal to your better nature, what with us having shot at you and all, but… this kid here is really hurt, and he’s had a bad string of luck for a while and I think it’d be a shame for him to have to die up here. You agree?”
Mona does not answer.
“Okay… well. I am going to come right out and say what my plans are. I plan to pick this kid up and carry him back down the hill to my truck. Then I will drive him out of this fucking town to a hospital, where he will be treated. Please observe that absolutely none of that—none of it—includes me taking more shots at you. Okay?”
Mona is silent.
“Okay. Because there might be a lot of reasons worth dying for, but I just don’t think this is one of them, and I really just want to go home. So I’m going to pick this kid up, and stand up, and leave my gun behind, and… well. I guess you can shoot me down if you want. I don’t have a lot of say in that. But… that’s what I’m gonna try and do. I don’t think you’ll shoot me, because I’m pretty sure I’ve talked enough for you to draw a bead on me”—which is true, Mona notes—“but, well… I don’t know. Whatever you gotta do, I guess. Okay?”
Mona says nothing. She hardly moves.
“Yeah,” says the man. “Yeah. Okay.”
There’s a grunt. Then she sees a bulky figure rise up and begin hobbling down to the road.
She follows him with the scope every step of the way. She can see limbs lifelessly swaying in his arms. She feels kind of bad about that. But she just keeps following him. She follows him until she can’t anymore.
She waits. Then a horn honks twice from somewhere way down the slope. There’s the sound of wheels spinning—He’s spinning them because he wants me to hear him leaving—and then only silence.
She waits. Again. And she keeps waiting.
She waits for over forty minutes, not moving, hardly breathing.
There might be others he’s left behind—any ones who are waiting on her, in turn, to move or speak and tell them where she is. Yet with each blaze of lightning she peers through the dark forest, and she sees nothing.
Finally she begins to crawl down the slope to where they hid.
She sees bent branches, spent rounds twinkling in the grass. She sees footprints and disturbed stones and, eventually, blotches of blood.
Not much else.
That is, until she finds Dee. His ostrich-skin boots, which have been so impeccably shined, gleam brightly from underneath a bush. Mona goes to investigate.
She peers around the bush, and grunts.
She hit him in the mouth. Square in the roof of the mouth.
Jesus.
She looks at him for a long time. She has seen dead bodies many times before but the causality of it—I did this, I made this happen—escapes her. She cannot link that desperate, cold moment at the bottom of the hill, when her whole world was reduced to the dark spotlight of her scope, to this dead man lying on the forest floor.
She wonders who told him to be here. Did they come to kill her and Parson? From the way the second one, Zimmerman, acted, he was surprised to find her. Hence why they shot Parson first, and why Zimmerman was so willing to abandon it after she wounded Norris and killed Dee. They must have been here for some other reason.
She sees there is something silver below Dee’s body.
She squats to see. It looks ornamental, a clasp to a box—and the rest of the box is underneath him, as if he fell on it.
Wincing, she reaches forward and pulls it out. It is covered in the man’s blood, but she can see it is a very nice wooden box with a silver clasp; yet evidently the owner didn’t think this was enough security, for it’s also fastened with string and tape of all kinds.
She holds it up to one ear: she hears no ticking.
She shakes it: it sounds hollow, but something is rattling around in there. It’s not a bomb, then.
She looks back up at the canyon. Were they simply bringing this box here? Why?
Mona unties the string, which is now quite sticky from the blood. Then she flips up the clasp.
She wedges her finger into the crack, and slowly eases it open, certain she is about to be ripped apart by an explosion.
It never comes: the interior of the box is simple red velvet, and resting in its corner is a very strange item that is certainly not a bomb.
It is a skull. A little rabbit skull.
Mona stares, and shivers. Because she is uncomfortably familiar with rabbit skulls, and the mere sight of this one sends old, gray memories howling up the hallways of her mind.
When she was in junior high, Mona, like a lot of kids in her country-ass school, participated in 4-H. While most kids preferred the larger animals, the ones they’d learned about since kindergarten—pigs, cows, etc.—Mona instead opted to raise meat rabbits for a judging competition, mostly because she’d assumed it’d be easier, because what were rabbits besides slightly larger, cuter guinea pigs?
She only did it the one time, for she found the whole process to be one of the most awful experiences of her young life: not only did many of her rabbits die—an experience she was unprepared for, and she is still quite angry at her father for not warning her about—but the first of them was intentionally killed by its mother. There had been something wrong with it—something twisted in its neck and front leg—and in the evening its mother had pushed it out of the nest and allowed it to starve.
Mona knew she should remove it from the rabbits’ pen. But when she first found the baby rabbit, with lines of ants marching to it across the barn floor in a gruesome little pilgrimage, and its tiny, rotting eyes swarming with blackflies, she was so horrified she could only bear to kick it into the corner. And she forgot about it until many days and many dead rabbits later, when the
whole horrible thing was over and she removed the straw from the pen, scraping it up with a pitchfork, and with one scrape a desiccated, eyeless little rabbit body popped up from the straw, scraps of fur still clinging to its tiny bones, and it stared at her accusingly, as if to say: You forgot about me. You wished me hidden and so I hid, but I was never gone.
She had nightmares that night, and for the rest of the week. How she wished she had buried it, respected it, given it the love no one else had—it was as if she had chosen to kill her own child.
It is so strange to find a rabbit skull now, in this bloody red velvet box. Mona almost wonders if they were trying to send a message to her. The mere sight of it fills her with unexpected guilt.
Frowning, she reaches out, and picks it up.
“Where did you come from?” she asks it.
And then the lights go out.
CHAPTER FORTY
There is a certain darkness you can never imagine until you are actually in it. It is a darkness so deep and complete it not only makes you doubt if you have ever seen light, it also makes you doubt if the world is still truly there: If I stretch out my hands, you think, will I feel anything? If I walk in one direction for miles and miles and days and days, will there be only nothing, nothing forever and ever?
But Mona finds herself lost in a darkness even deeper than that. Her feet do not touch the ground; her lungs pull no air; her nerves report neither heat nor coolness. There is only the dark and the nothing.
Then forms begin to appear. Trees. Rocks. Stars. But it is as if she is seeing them through a dark filter—they are there in only the most muted, superficial sense.
She begins to realize she is still in the same place, still in the pine forest below the mesa, but she is also, like so many places in Wink, somewhere else at the same time.
She begins to see.
She is in a stone chamber, like a crypt. There is no light in the chamber, yet she can see. There are no corners: the chamber is round. The floor is flat and filthy, and in the center of the floor is a pile of bones.
Not just bones. Rabbit skulls.
The double vision slowly fades: she is now within this room only.
Mona swallows. This place, though so much of it escapes her senses, feels trapped, hermetic. Unlike much of Wink, it does not bleed into anything else, does not fade imperceptibly into a park or a backyard or someone’s upper room; it is even different from the mirror room at Coburn, which seemed to float in nothing, like a capsule lost below the sea; no, this is a jail cell at the very fringes of existence.
So what is jailed here?
Her eyes struggle to make sense of the space: is this chamber vastly huge, or tiny? When she looks in one direction it feels like a cathedral vault, yet in another it is like a kitchen cupboard.
Maybe it is big to me, she thinks, but tiny to whatever is trapped here.
But still the question remains—what is trapped here? The room appears empty, and there are no doors or windows, no hiding places of any kind. Is she alone? She does not think so: she does not feel alone. Whatever is here is watching her.
Helpless, Mona keeps slowly turning around, yet on each turn her eye wanders back to the pile of rabbit skulls. Finally she stops turning and walks to them.
She picks one up. Looks at it. Then, very quickly, everything begins to vibrate.
Without any warning, she’s suddenly in another part of the rounded chamber, looking in a different direction. It takes her a moment to reorient herself.
She looks in her hand. The rabbit skull is gone.
She returns to the pile and picks up another. For a moment there is nothing, and then everything begins to vibrate again like she’s stuck in a paint shaker, and before she can do more she’s staring into the stone wall of the chamber. Once more she has been transported to a different part of the room. Her fingers clutch nothing, for again the rabbit skull is gone.
In the inexplicable manner of dream logic, she begins to understand:
The skulls are not skulls. They look like skulls, but they aren’t, not really. They’re doors. Little tiny doors that, when activated, take you to this place. But when they’re activated here, they can’t bring you far at all, can they?
Maybe they bring you halfway, thinks Mona, and allow whatever is in here to venture out halfway as well, and meet you.
Then she sees it: something is moving over her shoulder, like a portion of the rounded stone wall is rippling liquid. She does not want to look, she does not, but she cannot help but see a form begin to emerge, tall and thin, and when she sees what appears to be a face (a face carved of wood?) then everything begins to…
Change.
She first sees a man, standing quite still and wearing a curious blue canvas suit that is covered in tiny wooden rabbit heads. On his face he wears a primitive wooden mask, suggesting the face of a rabbit, but its features are spare and simple, giving it a blank, furious look.
But this is only an image. Behind it, in a deeper way, is something else.
She does not want to look. But she cannot help it.
She sees
(a figure, tall and ropy)
(an arched back and bony shoulders)
(covered in hair)
(arms like needles, stretching for miles)
(how does it stand)
(on such thin legs)
(and its face)
(so, so long)
(and its eyes)
(so terribly)
(huge)
(don’t look)
(don’t)
Just as with Parson and Mrs. Benjamin, this vision threatens to overwhelm her. But Mona has been figuring out a few things since she’s been here in Wink. In Weringer’s bedroom she was able to avoid the deep places, the places on the other side. Why couldn’t she do the same here?
So she focuses, and breathes, and relaxes… and with a simple push, she picks up this horrible image and packages it away, pushing it in one direction and her own mind in another, until all she can see is the man in the filthy rabbit costume…
Yet as she does so, she understands that whatever this man is—whatever he really is—is much, much more powerful than Parson or Mrs. Benjamin. The man in the blue rabbit suit is not a simple vessel, like those used by so many “people” in Wink. Rather, whatever is in this jail cell with her just chooses to manifest as this odd sight, a filthy man in a filthy rabbit suit. She supposes it could manifest as whatever it wished: in this place, the difference between it and a god is too small to matter.
She breathes deeply, and focuses. “Who are you?” she asks.
The man stares at her. She cannot see any eyes through the holes in his mask.
“Am I meant to be here?” asks Mona. “Did I come here by accident?”
The man cocks his head, like a curious dog. Mona finds the sight repulsive. Then the man raises an arm and reaches out to her, but stops, fingers trembling. It is an oddly sentimental gesture, as if he wishes to touch her face and yet adores her too much to bring himself to do so.
Mona withdraws a little. “What do you want?” she asks.
The man slowly drops his arm. He cocks his head one way, then the other. Then he appears to come to some decision, and reaches up to take off his mask.
Mona wonders if she should turn away. The horrors that reside in this town seem to possess many secrets too large for her mind, and whatever lies behind that mask should surely be one of them. But as he removes the wooden mask, she sees something she never expected.
“Oh, my God,” she says, surprised.
At first she thinks it is her own face—because those are most certainly her eyes, deep and rounded and charcoal-brown, and her lips, so dark and thin—but it is a male face, with sharp, hard cheekbones, and many lines, as if this face has been exposed to brutal conditions day in and day out for decades. The man looks at her in a manner both wary and full of longing, as if he wishes for her to accept him, even come to love him, but cannot bring himself to believe she ever w
ould.
He looks so much like me, thinks Mona. He could even be my brother.
“What is this?” she asks him.
The man slumps forward a little. He looks away as if her response has deeply disappointed him.
“What do you mean by this?” Mona asks him.
He shakes his head. He suddenly looks terribly distraught. He buries his face in his hands.
“Wait,” says Mona, “are you trying to say that—”
But then things begin to swim around her, and she hears someone saying her name.
“—ight? Miss Bright?”
It’s dark again. Mona realizes she has her eyes shut. She opens them, and sees the lights of Wink just below her. She is back in the forest: in one hand she holds a bloody, empty box, and in the other a rabbit skull. She hears someone crashing through the undergrowth. Then Gracie emerges from the trees at the edge of the clearing.
“What happened?” Mona asks.
Gracie says, “There you are. Are you all right?”
Mona inspects herself. “I think so.”
“Where were you? Were you here this whole time?”
The question is simple enough, but Mona is not sure how to answer.
“I’ve been looking for you for over half an hour!” says Gracie. “I walked by here calling your name, but I swear I didn’t see this place. I don’t remember it being here at all. So—” She freezes, eye drawn to the two cowboy boots poking out from underneath the brush. “Wh… what’s that? Is that—is that man… dead?”
“What?” says Mona absently. “Oh. Yeah.”
“Did you kill him?” asks Gracie.
“Yes.”
“Oh.” She stares at the body, not daring to ask more.
Mona’s still thinking about what Gracie just said—so this whole clearing just went missing when she picked up the skull? She turns it over in her fingers, wondering if it could still pose a threat. She thinks not: perhaps its batteries have been drained, so to speak. A one-shot ticket.
She replaces the little skull in the bloody box, kneels, and hides the box in the weeds. She is not sure what it did to her, but she does not want to carry it any farther. “They were bringing this here,” she says.
American Elsewhere Page 45
