American Elsewhere

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  It smells the blood in the air and quickly finds the bodies. One of them, it knows, must have the totem—the secret door to that prison-place, that hidden bubble where the monster (as the Ganymede has come to think of it) stews and paces.

  It does not take long to find it. There is a wooden box lying on the rocky ground. It is covered in blood, and the Ganymede is surprised to find it is held closed only by a silver clasp.

  Ignorant wretches. Had it not told them the box must be secure? Had it not warned them of what was inside?

  The Ganymede, trembling slightly, picks up the box. It refuses to admit this, but at this moment it is deeply terrified, even more terrified than when they left home and came here: for within this box is a door to something like the Ganymede and its siblings, even THE FIRST, but also not like them.

  For the thing in that prison place can do the unthinkable: it can defy Mother’s wishes.

  This could, if considered properly, upend much of how the Ganymede sees its existence. For at the center of its world, undeniable and immovable, is Mother, forever Mother, beautiful and terrible and vast. None can withstand Her; none can behold Her. She is all and everything.

  Yet not to this being in the box. This prisoner, who appears to be somewhere on par with THE FIRST in abilities (or even, the Ganymede thinks with a thrill of pleasure and terror, above him), can do as it likes.

  The Ganymede knows it should find this horrifying. To deny Mother is to prove Her fallible, which She cannot be. But it has instead chosen to cherry-pick, and take away one conclusion, and one conclusion only:

  If manipulated correctly, the imprisoned thing can get rid of the siblings that stand in the way.

  The Ganymede begins walking up the slope to the barren canyon above it.

  Maybe, just maybe, it can get rid of another one of them tonight.

  Oh, how wonderful that would be. And I will do it personally.

  I am not troubled. My mind is clear. She is with me. She has always been with me.

  Though I was one of the youngest, one of the weakest, one of the slightest, She made me Her closest servant, Her most trusted confidant, and I was the only one who could make Her happy, I was the only one who could entertain Her, and please Her.

  It was me. I am the favorite one. I, the friend, the councillor, the cupbearer.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  “See, you’re missing the point,” says Bolan, and he pounds the table with a finger, though he is careful to avoid touching any of the blood. This is difficult, because the top of the table is soaked in it. “The point is, I don’t give a fuck about our investments anymore.”

  Dord frowns. “You want to walk away from all this money ’cause Norris got tagged?”

  “No!” shouts Bolan. “Because of what I saw inside that goddamn cave! Haven’t you been fucking listening?”

  “We’ve all seen our own fair share of spooky shit,” Mallory drawls from the corner. She is leaning up against the corner because she’s so soused she can’t figure out how to lean against just one wall. This is nothing new: ever since going to fetch the last rabbit skull, she’s maintained a steady, stumbling drunk. “But what I saw certainly didn’t make me want to stop. I don’t want to go back to them and tell them no.”

  “Yeah,” says Dord. “Me neither.” He shifts uncomfortably in his chair: he has not yet told them about his own experiences up in the mountains, and what he found in that ravine. But then, none of them have really talked about what they’ve seen: all three of them have come to the unspoken agreement that, whatever it is they’ve encountered, it is surely the most horrifying thing to have ever happened in their lives.

  “I’m not saying we tell them anything,” says Bolan. “I personally never intend to meet one of them again in my life.”

  “I bet they can make that hard if they want to,” says Mallory.

  “Well, I can make being found hard too, if I put my mind to it,” says Bolan. “My decision’s final. The Roadhouse is done. Everything’s done. It’s over with. I made my buck and I’m out. As of this moment, I am now unemployed, as are all of you.”

  An uneasy silence fills the room. Mallory and Dord glance at one another.

  “It’s not the unemployment I’m worried about,” mutters Dord.

  Bolan sighs. “Me neither.”

  He wishes Zimmerman were still here. This night has been a nightmare of logistics, never at the right place at the right time. First Bolan had to drive the girl in the white hat up to that canyon below the mesa (and never in his life has he been happier to have someone walk away from him without a glance back), and then on the way down his cell phone lit up.

  It was Zimmerman again. He’d returned with Norris to the Roadhouse, but Norris was in quite a state: the entire conversation was overlaid with his screams in the background, plus Mallory and Dord’s panicked bickering.

  “The kid’s bad,” said Zimmerman.

  “How bad?” Bolan asked.

  “The sort of bad we can’t take care of,” Zimmerman said. Then, lower: “If we don’t get him to a hospital, I’m gonna have to send Dord out to start digging a hole somewhere now.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah,” said Zimmerman. “Yeah.”

  And for the first time Bolan heard something in Zimmerman’s voice that he’d been hearing in his own for the past week or so: he was tired. Not just sleep-deprived, but tired of living this way, tired of the paranoia, tired of the dead drops, of the secret messages and invisible warfare and byzantine hierarchies. You can only stay terrified and confused for so long. After a while, it unfolds and flowers into despair.

  Bolan bit his lip. Fuck it.

  “Then take him to a hospital,” he said.

  A long pause. “You sure?” Bolan was not surprised to hear Zimmerman’s doubt: since beginning their contract with the man in the panama hat, whoever and whatever he was, none of them had gone more than a hundred miles from the Roadhouse, usually only to towns not much bigger than Wink, and definitely never for anything beyond business. Their agreements bound them to this place.

  “Yeah,” said Bolan. He thought for a moment. I guess if I’m going to start having regrets, he thought, I’d prefer to have all of them at once. “And while you’re gone, stay gone.”

  Silence, save for Norris’s groaning.

  “Do you understand?” Bolan asked. “Go and keep going. Don’t come back.”

  Again: “You sure?”

  Bolan turned a corner. The headlights slashed over tree trunks, stones, and then, without warning, a five-year-old boy and an old man, digging a hole by the side of the road with their hands. Though both of them were dressed quite nicely, they were covered in filth, as if they’d been sleeping in a landfill. When his headlights hit them they looked up and stared like raccoons interrupted while rooting through the garbage. The boy even bared his teeth, hissing.

  He drove right by them. He didn’t wonder what they were doing. He was hardly even fazed by it.

  This town starts out strange, then becomes normal, then becomes unbearable, he thought.

  “Yeah,” says Bolan. “Go on. Get him out of here. You’ve both done enough.”

  Zimmerman hung up. And that was it. Bolan’s most dependable man, and his longest-lasting business relationship, over with in just a handful of words. Zimmerman was long gone by the time Bolan returned.

  He misses Zimmerman now. Here Bolan is, standing before their improvised operating table like a preacher at a lectern, trying to get his last two remaining employees (or at least the ones who aren’t just whores) to come over to his side. He cannot believe the two of them are not disturbed enough by what they’ve seen to do something.

  “So you’re saying we just run?” says Dord.

  Mallory brushes a sheet of ginger hair aside to look at Bolan.

  He hesitates for a long, long time. Somewhere in Bolan’s heart, which has so far sat hidden deep within his chest, scarred, ignored, forgotten, he begins to feel a sinking sensation that
he is about to suggest they do something that could be considered selfless.

  Because Bolan is not stupid. And he does not think of himself as evil. He is definitely not willing to be complicit in whatever the hell the People from Wink are doing, not anymore.

  Crime and sin are one thing, but this… he’d be a damn fool to do what they tell him to, having seen what he’s seen.

  Why is it now, he sighs mentally, that I feel like being a fucking hero?

  “No,” says Bolan. “We’re not going to run. Something is about to happen here. Something… something way, way worse than transporting a little H.”

  “Or a fuckin’ lot of H,” says Dord.

  “Shut up, Dord,” Bolan says absently. “I should have never helped them. I should have never said yes. And I don’t think we can stop them. Not now. Not us. But maybe we can make it a little harder for them.”

  “What the hell are you saying?” Mallory asks.

  He thinks back to the last few communications he’s had with the man in the panama hat. So often they were about just one curious topic—the newcomer, the girl in the red car Bolan hasn’t even had the chance to see yet, the one who is apparently quite proficient with firearms, the one person who seems to occupy so much of the attention of whatever is residing in Wink.

  She’s important. And, yes, she shot one of his men. Yet still: the spook in the hat wants her.

  “We are going to run,” he says finally. “But we’re going to go get someone first.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Gene Kelly leans his head back, staring up into the stage lights (Are there stage lights there? Where is there, anyway, Mona thinks?), and sighs. The gesture is meant to be contemplative, Mona thinks, but to her it is alienating: his face is bathed in such bright, cream-white illumination that it appears craggy, carven, a lump of calcite with two twinkling black eyes at the top. “Before we begin,” he says, “I think it’d be wise to know what you know, so I don’t repeat myself. Time’s short. So. You… know where we came from, don’t you, Mona?”

  “I guess as much as anyone can,” says Mona, though she thinks—Why is time short?

  “Yes. You’ve seen it, after all. You’ve been there, and you lived. Very impressive.”

  “People keep saying that.”

  Kelly laughs. “That’s not quite correct, is it? It’s not people who keep saying that, but my… closer siblings. You’ve met all four of them, haven’t you? All except one.”

  “Weringer. Yeah. He died before I got here.”

  “Just before you got here,” corrects Kelly. “Very odd, that.”

  “Why?”

  “Never mind. It’s just so curious that you’ve come to know my family so well, and so rapidly, within just several weeks. Though you haven’t met everyone.” He looks at her, and for the first time this picture of a person looks frightened. In fact, it looks more authentically frightened than Gene Kelly himself ever actually did, because then Kelly was acting frightened; yet this thing, this contrived image, is genuinely, seriously frightened.

  He says, “You know about Mother. Don’t you?”

  “Yes,” says Mona. She realizes this Mother of theirs came into the world only a few hundred feet away, on top of the mesa beside this canyon. It is a little creepy to realize Mona herself stood there just today. And if Parson and Mrs. Benjamin were telling the truth, Mother never got any farther than that.

  “Yes… She kept us quite organized, on the other side. Segregated, you could even say. There were the five eldest, of which I was the… well. You get the idea. We were the favored ones, the cream of the crop. Then below us were the middle children, who were, let’s say, competent but not extraordinary. Limited. Middling. Nothing to talk about. And then below them were the babies, the wee ones who were little more than teeth, gullets, and however many appendages they chose to have. Formidable, sure, but not clever. Now. I bet you wonder why She chose to split us up like that.”

  His eyes are shining strangely, and there is a bitter edge to his voice.

  “To keep a tight hand on the wheel, I’d say,” says Mona.

  “You are correct, sister,” says Kelly acidly. “It’s so much easier to control everyone when you have them all divided. A lesson Weringer—to use his colloquial name—learned well, and used in the making of Wink. You have to have everyone reined in if you want to keep what’s yours. And on the other side, Mona… we owned everything.”

  It’s as he says this that Mona realizes something is bothering her about the screen. Well, not the screen itself, but something around the screen: there are the red curtains on the sides, sure, but behind the curtains, in the shadows, there should be just brick wall, right? And there was brick wall, just a minute ago. Yet now it looks like there’s a gap there: behind the curtains is some kind of backstage area, and something is moving in there, undulating slowly and smoothly, but she can’t really see it…

  “The other side isn’t a where, really,” says Kelly. “Nor is it a when. If a world is a machine, with many wheels and belts, ours on that side had millions, even billions more than yours. Compare a pocket watch to a cathedral clock, and you’d be close. It might not have looked like it when you saw it, little sister, but that place was once”—he thins his eyes, and his whole face trembles with passion—“ marvelous. There was no and is no beauty like it, like the places over there. A dark and savage and monstrously wonderful place.” He pauses. “Or at least, I think it was. I think it was wonderful. Now that I am away from it, it seems far better than when I was actually there. It is so curious.” He shrugs, shakes his head. “But never mind. The most important thing about that place, of all the wonderful sights and lands over there, is that they were ours.

  “Well. Mother’s, really. Everything was Mother’s. We were Mother’s. She made us. We belonged to Her. We were Her kin, Her spawn, Her children. With Her, we took these places, conquered them, made them our own. We installed ourselves as gods… and we were gods to them, of course we were, because what is a god besides a higher intelligence, and was there any intelligence higher than us? No.

  “But we weren’t… unstoppable.” The camera pulls back, and Kelly takes a seat on an empty chair—a chair that was occupied by that older woman just a little while ago. Mona wonders where she went. “It started with no warning, totally and completely out of the blue. Everything just began to… fall apart.”

  “How do you mean?” asks Mona.

  “Well, you saw what it’s like over there, now. Was it particularly pretty to you?”

  “I don’t know what you all find pretty.”

  “Touché,” says Kelly. “But no, that is not pretty to me, to us. Yet let me assure you, what you saw is surely the prettiest part of our world, now.”

  “What happened? Like… a war?”

  He purses his lips, and his eyes search offscreen. “You know… I don’t know.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No. I admit it. I really don’t. Mother was the only one who knew. She foresaw it. She was the only one who really understood its nature. She told me—and only me, because, well, Miss Mona, I am the favorite son, a bit—that it was because of how huge we were, how powerful, that the mere presence of our family was doing something destructive to the fabric of our world…” He sniffs. “Not very specific, is it?”

  “I guess not.” Mona wishes he’d stop talking like she knows what the fuck he means.

  “No. But I, being the dutiful First, told the rest of the family. And we watched helplessly as, one by one, the worlds and places we had conquered… faded. Burned. And were lost. No. No, gods we were not.” He looks at her, his gaze sharp. “What I will tell you now, Miss Mona, is part of some very private conversations I had with Mother. No one, I do really mean no one, including—what does he call himself now—oh that’s right, Parson, knows anything about them.”

  “If you think I’m going to tell anyone, don’t worry,” says Mona. “I’m not on friendly terms with much of your family.”


  “Are you not, now,” says Kelly softly.

  Mona sees another hint of movement in the backstage space behind the curtains. She tries not to let Kelly see her looking (Is Kelly even the way First looks at things? It’s not like his eyes on the screen really work, right?), but Mona finally catches a glimpse of what’s back there before it retreats into the dark.

  She tenses up. The hairs along Mona’s arms slowly stand at attention. She tries very hard not to show that she noticed.

  It looked like… tentacles. As if the wall behind the screen, and perhaps the wall on either side of the theater, and maybe even the ceiling and floor and every crawl space in this building, is packed with endless, endless tentacles, some the size of tree trunks, some like the finest, softest hair, all of them writhing and twisting in the dark…

  That’s you, isn’t it? she thinks. The real you. What you really are, behind this illusion…

  “Mother came to me,” continues Kelly, apparently unaware of any problem at all, “and told me She’d found something. Noticed something, rather. She said She’d discovered a place in our world… where everything was thin. Not just thin—bruised.” Kelly smiles, but it’s utterly humorless. “I don’t suppose I need to tell you that this occurred just before our own world began to fall apart.”

  Mona thinks, Oh, shit.

  Kelly flashes that mirthless smile again. “What Mother had concluded, after examining these bruised portions, was that there were other worlds than our own. Realities we never knew about. And here She did not speak in a spatial sense—not merely civilizations on other—what do you call them here—planets, but contained, functioning worlds existing within dimensions lower and more rudimentary than our own. There was life there, intelligence, and that intelligence was pushing at the boundaries of its own little world into our own. And Mother thought, just maybe, we could push back. And go through.

  “It was revolutionary to me. And also ludicrous. Why would we ever want to abandon what we had? I mean, at the time we were totally safe. And were we not happy here? I asked Her. What more could anyone want? But Mother was silent. I could tell She was troubled. Which, naturally, troubled me.