American Elsewhere

by Robert Jackson Bennett

Mona uses one of the hand lenses to look around the corner. She sees two men before one of the lab doors, sitting on the concrete floor cross-legged like children. She wonders what to do before remembering the extreme incompetence of her last captor. The bitch in the blue suit, she decides, must have really scraped the bottom of the barrel for help, but that makes sense—the older and smarter ones would have been too dangerous to approach.

  She feels her pockets, and finds a spent round casing from the fight in the canyon the night before. She weighs it carefully, then throws it across the hallway entrance where it tinkles loudly as it rolls away.

  “What was that?” asks one man.

  Mona shrinks up against the wall. She hears footsteps growing louder. The two men emerge from the hallway entrance, and sure enough they turn immediately in the direction of the sound: they don’t even think to check the other end of the hallway.

  So the one on the left is incredibly surprised when Mona stabs him in the back of the leg, just behind his knee, and the other is too stunned to even look at her before she brings the butt of the Glock down, cracking him on the side of his head.

  Both of them collapse. “My leg,” says the stabbed one, with an air of wonderment. “What’s happened to my leg?”

  There were people in those bodies, once, thinks Mona. I wonder where they went…

  Still, she can’t risk these two causing any more trouble, and she doesn’t want either of them hopping into another poor soul’s body. So she stoops down and stabs them in the knees, just next to the kneecaps, severing the iliotibial band.

  “My other leg!” cries the stabbed one. “Oh, my other leg!”

  “Shut up,” says Mona softly. “There are worse ways to incapacitate you. You want me to try one?”

  He doesn’t answer. Mona wonders if he even knows what the word incapacitate means.

  Forget it. She leaves them both behind and heads for the door they were guarding.

  Mona eases the door open just slightly. The room is the typical Coburn lab (excepting the lens chamber, of course): bare, concrete, wreathed in stains and shadows from equipment long gone. Mrs. Benjamin sits in a heap in the corner, and in the center stands the woman in the blue suit. The two seem to be in the middle of a discussion.

  The woman in the panama hat is saying, “—d you know I’ve been farther than you, big sister?”

  “Oh?” says Mrs. Benjamin. She looks quite weak, and not very interested.

  “You were trapped here in Wink like all the others. But I went to its very limits. When I died, I turned to lightning, and rode the curves of the skies above us… and I’ve been to the fringes. I went there all the time. Maybe past them, just a bit. You can’t claim the same, can you?”

  Mrs. Benjamin does not answer.

  “No. I even went to that Roadhouse of theirs. That’s where I met them. The natives who helped me. Everyone here thought it was outside the limits. And no one ever tried, because you were lazy, and afraid. But I did. I went there. Imagine how silly it is: a bunch of men, drunk and drugged and stupid, bringing down our five eldest family members. Do you want to find out how?” She reaches down again, and lifts up something: a small, lacquered box.

  “I wanted to kill First,” says the woman. “But I wasn’t sure what it would take. So on the last trip, I sent them to get two totems. Just in case. So convenient to have a spare on hand now, isn’t it? I had to go back to their Roadhouse just this morning to get it. You’ve caused me a lot of traveling, Sister.”

  “Totems?” asks Mrs. Benjamin, confused.

  “Oh, you don’t know? No, you wouldn’t. Listen—do you remember the stories we used to tell one another about the wildling?”

  Mrs. Benjamin looks up a little, but does not answer.

  “Yes, you do. About the real first, the first child Mother ever had. But it displeased Her, and She abandoned it. But we always used to tell one another that it was following us, following everything we did, trying to catch up.” The woman opens up the box. “Well. It did, Sister. It came with us to Wink.”

  Inside is, as Mona expected, a small white skull. Mrs. Benjamin and the woman stare at it, though one does so with a look of reverence and the other with a look of profound dread.

  “You do remember,” says Mrs. Benjamin, “that I did just help you.”

  “Yes. And I don’t care. Do you feel afraid, Sister?”

  “Yes, I feel afraid.”

  “Do you feel weak?”

  “I suppose I do.”

  “That’s how I felt. How I’ve always felt. Weak and scared. It isn’t fair, that I was weak. It wasn’t fair that all I could be was Mother’s Ganymede. I could have been stronger. I could have been better. If you had given me the chance.”

  “Ganymede?” says Mrs. Benjamin. “I don’t understand.”

  “All I got to be was Her servant. I carried Her cup, I brought Her entertainment. Yet She never thanked me. Because all She ever thought about was you. You five, my elders, always off rushing about, doing important things. She never cared about anyone else. And she should have cared. She would have, if She’d had the chance. You all fought for Her, made sure no one else could ever have Her favor! You manipulated Her!”

  “We manipulated Her?” asks Mrs. Benjamin sniffily. “That is a stunning revision of history.”

  “Shut up!” snarls the woman. “Don’t act like you didn’t! I… I know what She would have done if you hadn’t made sure you were the favorites! She would have… She would have loved us. She would have loved me. You don’t know what it’s like, being so forgotten. You don’t know what it’s like, to be cast aside. She never even knew us. Never even cared about us. You don’t know what that’s like. None of you do!

  “But all that will change.” She thumps herself on the chest. “I am the weapon in Mother’s hand! I am the tool of Her mind! I am Her device, Her emissary, Her herald! I am first in Her eyes! And when She comes I will be rewarded, and I shall be loved! She will come back, and She will love me! Do you hear me? Do you hear my words?”

  “I do,” says Mrs. Benjamin warily. “But I wonder if it is really worth it.”

  “It is!” says the woman. “It must be! It has to be!”

  “Are you sure Mother is even coming? You showed me Her body in the cavern, but…”

  “She is! Mother will wake when Her host comes near! That last piece of Her!”

  “A child. A human child.”

  “Not for long. Soon Mother will wake and take Her rightful place at the center of this world.”

  “And then what? You will replace First, replace the rest of us?”

  “Yes!” shouts the woman. She is on the verge of sobbing now. “I found Her! I’m the one bringing Her here! I brought down those who would stand in Her way! I brought the woman here! It was me, me, I did it all, it was me! Not you, never you! You never helped! Never helped me, not once!”

  “We never knew…”

  “You did know! You had to know! Stop… stop saying that!” The woman begins to thrust the open box forward, preparing to send the little skull tumbling onto Mrs. Benjamin…

  … which is when Mona’s hand darts forward, and shuts the box with a snap. Before the woman can react, Mona shoves the barrel of the Glock up against her back, right at the base of her spine, and pulls the trigger.

  Immediately the woman’s legs give out underneath her: the round has just cleanly severed her spine. She flops awkwardly on the floor, rolls over, and stares at her belly, from which the round has rather messily exited; blood is pouring out at a fairly alarming rate.

  Mona stands over her, breathing hard, and looks between her and Mrs. Benjamin. “Right,” she says.

  The woman stares up at Mona, then at the wooden box in her hand. “You, you…”

  “Yeah,” says Mona. “I shot you. But don’t worry, you’re not dying, at least not fast. I’m smart enough to know that shooting you would just shift you around.” She points her gun at the woman’s chest. “I can make you hurt, though. R
eal bad. I’m learning to be pretty good at that. Now I want you to tell me what happened in that room back there.”

  The woman looks at her blankly, then examines her wound again. She does not seem all that pained or concerned by it.

  “Tell me,” says Mona again.

  The woman remains still, unresponsive.

  “I don’t think physical threats will work, dear,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “It’s my understanding that it has died or hurt or maimed itself numerous times before.”

  “It?”

  “The Ganymede. That’s what it calls itself.”

  “Huh. Well.” Mona sticks her Glock in her shorts (the barrel is hot, but she doesn’t care) and opens the wooden box. The pearly little rabbit skull roars at her silently from its pillow of blue satin.

  She looks down at the woman in the panama hat. Her eyes have gone wide. It’s clear she realizes what Mona’s thinking.

  “Dying,” says Mona. “It’s a weird idea to you all, isn’t it? I’m pretty sure it’s why your buddy in the brown sweater did such a shit job of trying to kill me. But you—you’ve killed before. I think you’ve killed plenty of times. You get it.”

  “I never killed anyone,” says the woman. “It’s against the rules.”

  “Mm, I’m willing to bet you killed plenty of people just by body-hopping. Which is a pretty fucked-up thing to do.” Mona takes a step forward and puts her foot on the wound in the woman’s belly. The woman grunts and tenses up, obviously pained. “You’re not as tough as you think. Now. What the hell happened back there? Whose baby was that?”

  “Yours,” groans the woman.

  “That can’t be. My baby died. We buried it. It was the worst thing that happened to me in my fucking life, and I can’t forget it. So whose was it?”

  “Yours!” says the woman again.

  Mona leans on the wound harder and lowers the box threateningly.

  “It’s yours, I swear it is!” the woman shouts.

  Mona eases up on the wound. “How?”

  She swallows. Her lips are lined with red. “Time… is broken here…”

  “Oh, God, not this speech again. I’ve heard it a million fucking times.”

  “Time is broken here,” says the woman angrily, “so here you can see the alternates.”

  “The alternates to what?” Mona asks.

  “To everything!” shouts the woman.

  Mona eases up more on the wound. She thinks, and asks, “What the hell does that mean?”

  Mrs. Benjamin clears her throat. “I believe I can help with this. Time is not linear, dear—you and your kind experience it as linear, but it isn’t, not really. It branches off, spins into different directions. Some of these offshoots fade and die, some keep going. And, occasionally, these can be accessed.”

  “Yes,” gasps the woman. “If the… the difference is very slight, the alternate can be breached.”

  “And that’s what you did back there? Accessed an alternate… time?”

  The woman nods.

  “It’s not something that would occur to us on our side, since when we’re in our element we do not experience time the same way you do,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “But here it’s… different.”

  Mona realizes her hands are shaking. She flexes them to try to make them stop. “So what we saw was an alternate time. Another way things could have gone.”

  “Yes,” says the woman. She is white and panting now.

  “And what was the difference between where we are here… and what I saw in the lens?”

  “We had to have a piece of Mother that was… willing to cooperate,” says the woman. She coughs, turns her head, and burps up a significant quantity of blood.

  “Yeah?”

  “We had to have a piece of Her that was from both here and the other side. Our side. To anchor Her here, to pull Her in. I had… I had intended this to be you. That’s why I… called you here.”

  “That’s what you tried to do to me on the highway, isn’t it? Make me Her… conduit.”

  “Yes,” says the woman savagely. “But you rejected me, rejected Her. You were too old, too… resistant. So we had to find another way. You had had a child, but… it had died in this time.”

  Mona’s whole body is trembling, and she knows it is not from blood loss. “So you just found a different time,” she says. “You found a time where… where my baby didn’t die. Where I had her, and she was alive.”

  “Yes.”

  She’s alive, Mona thinks. My God. She’s alive, and she’s real.

  She remembers the look on the face of the Mona in the lens: the complete terror and disbelief when she walked into the nursery and saw the crib was empty…

  The woman continues: “We had to have your blood, because… alternates are so difficult to access. The child is a part of you—she is your progeny. We had to… bridge the gap.”

  “Like you’re doing with Mother now? Now that you’ve got her, she’ll bring Mother here?”

  “She already is here!” snarls the woman. “It’s already happening! The breach has occurred, and the wound is only widening! You can’t stop it! She’s coming!”

  She looks to Mrs. Benjamin. “Is this possible?”

  “It seems so,” says Mrs. Benjamin gravely. “I cannot pretend to understand all of it… but it seems so.”

  The woman’s breath is now shallow. “I’ll see Her,” she whispers. “I’ll see Her and She’ll see me and we’ll be happy again… it’ll be like the past… never happened.”

  Mona studies the dying woman. “Think you’re just going to jump ship out of that body?”

  The woman’s face is still, but her eyes twitch to look at Mona.

  “If you’d just killed a few of your kin, I wouldn’t have cared,” says Mona. “I don’t give a shit about your family squabbles. But you had to drag me into this. Me and my—my dead little girl…”

  The woman tries to mouth something. It looks like she’s saying, Mother’s wishes.

  “I don’t give a shit what Mother wanted. You’re pathetic. You’re all… you’re all so goddamn pathetic.”

  And she turns the box over.

  The pale little skull falls through the air.

  The woman’s eyes go wide and track it.

  And the second it touches her chest…

  All three of them become aware of a fourth person in the room with them, who has apparently appeared without any of them knowing it: it is as if this person, who strikes such a strange figure in his ragged, mud-smeared blue canvas suit, and his wooden rabbit mask, has been here all along, and someone has merely turned on a light behind him, outlining his figure and alerting them to his presence.

  The room is now two rooms. First the light changes, very subtly: it turns a faint yellow, the color of old parchment. And if she really looks, Mona thinks she can see old, worn stone in the shadows, and somewhere above them is a high, vaulted ceiling…

  The woman mouths, No! No!

  And then things go

  dark

  The other side.

  Mona opens her eyes, and looks.

  A tiny blue-and-white form stands on a black plain.

  It is a measly little gangrel, a capering little clown.

  It cowers and covers its head, whimpering.

  The pink moon hangs above it, fat and swollen.

  Yet something dark and spindly rises up, crossing the face of the moon…

  Something is standing on the horizon.

  Mona can see a long, thin skull, a skull like a needle, and two long ears.

  It is huge. The size of skyscrapers. Miles of brambly, dark hide.

  And its eyes… so huge and yellow, yet so human, and so angry.

  The tiny blue-and-white figure waves its arms. There is a tinny scream:

  “No! No! Please, no! Momma! Momma, please!”

  The immense, dark thing cocks its head. Its yellow eyes roll.

  Hands appear in the darkness, thin and clawed.

  “Momma,” whimpers
the little figure.

  The hands clench. Quiver with rage.

  The huge thing dives forward.

  A spray of gore, a shriek. Something dark pools on the rocky field.

  Whimpers in the dark.

  Then…

  There is a gasping sound. The air shudders. They are back in the little room at Coburn.

  Mona and Mrs. Benjamin look down. The skull is still on the woman’s chest, but she is utterly still. The man in the rabbit mask is gone.

  “I’ve never seen any of my family members die before…” says Mrs. Benjamin. “That was…”

  “Fast. Real fast. Are you all right?”

  “I have been stabbed several times, so—no.”

  Mona starts to help her up. “Why the hell did you help me?”

  Mrs. Benjamin appears to pout just slightly. “Well. Perhaps I’ve assumed the role of a cranky old woman a little too thoroughly. Sabotage comes to me very naturally, it seems. Or perhaps I don’t like to see people causing havoc.”

  “Whatever the reason, I’m grateful. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  They return to the lens chamber to grab Mona’s rifle and some rounds. Then they make their way out. Mrs. Benjamin has to lean on her as they move. “So what happens now?” asks Mona.

  “Well… if that Ganymede person was correct, it is possible for Mother to manifest here in some form, but She would be bound to this place, to Wink. Because Wink is not quite here and not quite there. She would need to meld or merge with some element of this side. Only then can she make the full transition.”

  “Meld or merge with my—my daughter.” She says these words, though she cannot believe them.

  “That is correct,” says Mrs. Benjamin dourly. “The child is young, and weak—Mother can force Her entry.”

  “If that were to work, would she… what would happen to the baby?”

  Mrs. Benjamin’s eyebrows rise as she considers it. “Well, for one thing, I would not imagine she would look much like a baby at all, after that.”

  Getting up the ladder to the roof of the mesa proves quite hard: Mrs. Benjamin has to use Mona’s head or shoulders as a stepping-stone, until finally the blazing, merciless New Mexico sun greets them in a triumphant blast.

  “What sort of car was that fucking doctor driving?” Mona asks in a rasp.