American Elsewhere

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  Mona looks at the flow of blood, which is extreme. She shakes her head. “I doubt it.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Damn,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “I… I quite liked being an old woman. No one asked you… to do much. Left you alone.”

  “You can… come back, right? As someone else?”

  She shrugs. “Though that does mean… killing another person in Wink, and taking their place. But I suppose… that’s the way things are.”

  “Will I see you again?” Mona asks.

  “Oh, probably,” she says wearily. “I expect everyone… will be seeing… quite a lot of you, dear.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Mrs. Benjamin coughs and sits forward a little. One hand plays with the string of pearls around her neck, smearing them with red. She says, “Oh… how I wish it were… night.”

  “Night?”

  “Yes. Liked the look… of the stars.”

  She sits forward a little more, then a little more.

  “Oh,” she says. “Oh, goodness.”

  The flow of blood trickles away, and she is still. And somewhere in the distance, there is thunder.

  “Is she dead?” asks Gracie, emerging from behind the Charger.

  “Yeah,” says Mona. “As dead as her kind can get, I guess.” My kind, she thinks. I wonder if I’ll be loaded into someone’s body if I snuff it… probably not. “You okay, Gracie?”

  “I think so.”

  “Didn’t hit your head or anything? You can move your arms and legs okay?”

  “Yes, I—”

  She stops. There is a sound over the buzzing: a tiny, croaky sound, like someone working the rusted hinges of a door.

  Crying. A baby, crying.

  “Oh my God,” says Mona. She stands and runs to the Lincoln.

  She can see there is something in the center of the backseat, wrapped in sheets and twitching.

  She dives in and pulls the sheets aside. She expects it to be wounded, because Mona’s never done these things right and it can’t have gone right can it, it just can’t have, but then…

  The little girl pulls the sheets aside herself. She is not, Mona sees with some surprise, a newborn. She looks about six or seven months old. And when she sees Mona she reacts with obvious relief, and throws her arms out to her and cries.

  Mona slides her fingers underneath the baby (and Jesus Christ she is small) and picks her up. The baby is not at all weak or limp, and she sits forward in Mona’s grasp and haltingly puts her arms around Mona’s neck for (Mona cannot believe this) an embrace.

  She is hugging her. Her baby is hugging her.

  She thinks I’m her mom.

  I am her mom.

  Mona tells the voices in her head to shut up, but she cannot stop laughing and crying at the same time.

  Gracie tentatively approaches the car. “What’s that?” she asks in a hushed voice.

  “It’s my baby,” says Mona. And as she says it, it finally seems to become real. “It’s my little girl. My own little girl.”

  “How?” asks Gracie, positively flummoxed.

  And Mona can hardly answer.

  “Is she hurt?” asks Gracie.

  “No, I think she’s just scared. It’s not her blood.”

  Gracie looks at the whimpering baby, concerned. “I thought you said you lost your baby, or… something like that.”

  “I did.”

  “Then how can she be your baby?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know how to explain it. She just… is.”

  The baby warily peers around Mona’s head at Gracie. “She definitely seems to think you’re her mom,” says Gracie. “Listen, I don’t think this is the issue right now. Those… those things are getting closer.”

  Mona peers out the car door: the rivers of those horrors are about halfway down the mountain now. She has no idea what they plan to do when they get to Wink, but she does not want to be here for it.

  “We got to go,” says Mona. “That’s what we have to do.”

  “Leave Wink?”

  “Yep.”

  “But we can’t! No one ever gets out of Wink!”

  “I did, once. When I went to Coburn through the back way. I had to walk out of town, then back into it.” She leverages herself up and out of the car, clutching the baby to her chest. “Get back in the Charger. We’ll just head to—”

  A new sound joins the buzzing reverberating through Wink. It is incredibly, incredibly loud, so loud it feels like it reaches past her eardrums and vibrates her brain directly. It sounds like someone is slapping a bass string miles long, or maybe as if some vast engine is trying to turn over, gears guttering and cranking…

  It sounds, Mona thinks, a little like the buzzing coming from the necks of all the people in Wink, only much, much larger.

  “What is that?” asks Gracie.

  “I don’t know.”

  Then Mona sees something in the landscape. It is so vague it is hard to pinpoint it, but she finds herself looking to the south, where she first entered the valley and passed the sign with the antenna on the mesa. She stares at one of the mountaintops there, and then she sees it.

  No way, she thinks.

  “What?” asks Gracie.

  “Shh,” says Mona. She raises a hand.

  Gracie comes to stand beside her. “What?” she asks, more softly.

  The river of children is thinning out. Mona guesses that must be all of them. But did she see…

  It happens again. Gracie sees it too, and gasps.

  “Did that just… did the mountain just move?” she asks.

  “Yes,” says Mona slowly. “Yes, it did.”

  The movement is so large it dupes the eye into thinking it impossible, but it is really happening: they watch as the entire top half of the mountain rises just a little bit, then falls back down again. The motion is uneven, lopsided: the left side of the mountaintop teeters and slides away more than the right. Trees are uprooted and go tumbling down the mountain like sticks. Huge clouds of dust go roiling up, filling the sky.

  “Is it an earthquake?” asks Gracie.

  “No,” says Mona. “No, I don’t think so.”

  It happens again, harder. Mona is reminded of someone kicking blindly at a door, trying to break through any way they can, and then…

  The mountain does not burst, as Mona expects: there is no eruption, no explosion. At one point the mountain lifts up again, but it just keeps lifting; or actually it pivots, like the peak is the top to a hinged box that is slowly being opened; yet as it pivots more and more, the entire mountain is sloughed away, tons and tons of rock and earth sliding off. Dust fills the air, rushes down to the town in a tidal wave. It is as if all the topography was resting on a carpet someone has just started ripping up.

  No. No, that’s not right—it’s not ripped up. It’s being pushed up. There’s something underneath the mountain, as if the whole of it is resting on something’s back…

  Mona can see it now, just barely: a dark, bent form lost in the mushroom cloud of dust. It is not just big: the mere glimpse of it forces her to redefine all her preconceptions about the concept of “big.”

  It stands. There is so much of it, it seems to take forever. And the buzzing sounds around them increase, as if an audience applauding.

  “Oh, my God,” says Gracie.

  It takes up the whole sky, the whole horizon. It keeps standing until it blocks out the sun, its shadow stabbing forward to swallow the entire town, and then it lifts its arms from the cloud of dust and stretches them out, buzzing horribly, a deep, abysmal voice that makes the very skies shake as it glories in its newfound freedom…

  “Yeah,” says Mona.

  Mona has seen this thing only once before, in a vision of the mesa north of Wink, long ago. On that occasion she did not get a very good look at it, but now she has a chance to review.

  It looks somewhat like a person: it has legs and arms and a torso, but it is far too huge, fa
r too bulky, a massive, cyclopean person easily over six hundred feet tall. Its skin is dark and pockmarked like that of a humpback whale, something used to lightless submersion. It is covered in veins and black, sinewy muscle. Its shoulders and arms and deltoids are huge and swollen, its thigh muscles are mammoth, rippled tumors. Its belly sags down over its groin in a spill of collops and rolls that quiver with each motion.

  And its head… the head is tiny in comparison to the body. It is a grayish, gleaming little pearl atop the vast mountain of shoulders and biceps and belly. It has no mouth: just a section at its neck where it becomes a dripping patch of baleen and pinkish flesh.

  But its eyes are the worst part. They are so huge and round, and they glow like lighthouses, the golden light blooming through the dust…

  But though Mona registers this form as an abomination, a total violation of every concept of beauty and symmetry and biology she possesses, it also registers with her, somehow. This image, this form is imprinted in her, as if etched into the space right between her eyes. This thing has been with Mona her entire life, casting its immense shadow over every second, every moment of her consciousness.

  She knows it. She knows it as well as she knows herself.

  “Hello, Momma,” she says softly.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  The natives of Wink—the real, human natives—have up until this point stayed inside their houses, eyes obediently averted from all windows. Because when Things Happen in Wink, you stay indoors, and you stay quiet. That’s the way it’s always been, and if they keep to this, they think, then they’ll be fine, just like always—though some do mutter that really, this is ridiculous, don’t they have their time at night for these sorts of goings-on?

  But then the natives feel the earth shake, and the air turns beige with the crush of dust, and when they look out the window they notice the queerly pale red skies, and the thin shadows…

  This is different. This is not supposed to be happening. This is not normal.

  And then, one by one, they begin to See.

  It starts happening at the southern end of Wink first. They, of course, are closest to the Arrival: they cannot avoid seeing the form rising up from the mountaintop, arms extended as if seeking to embrace the valley. Mark Huey of 124 Littleridge Lane is given the inauspicious honor of being first: he runs a fairly decent lawn mower repair shop, and when the earth begins to shake he looks up from his work. His wife bursts in and frantically asks what is going on, and Mark, being the man and all, takes the responsibility of peeping out his blinds.

  And he Sees.

  He looks for ten seconds. Then, without a word, without answering a single question from his wife, he walks to his workbench, opens a drawer, takes out a lawn mower blade he’s been working on, and jams it into his throat.

  He dies almost instantly: all the blood in his skull simply falls out in a rush. His wife, shrieking in terror, runs out of the shop. When she hits the street, she looks back. And she Sees.

  She stops screaming. Instead she walks back to the shop, rummages in its front flower bed, finds a good-sized rock, and begins to pound it against her temple with a very singular concentration. This proves less efficient than her husband’s method: it takes nearly a minute before her right eye socket caves in, followed by the coronal suture of her skull, which causes her brain to begin madly swelling. She drops to the ground, shivering and dying, but thankfully blind.

  Slightly more effective is Angela Clurry’s approach: she walks out to her back patio to try to see the source of the dust; and when she does, she walks back in, goes to her sink, turns on the Dispose-All, and, with calm, Buddhist-like focus, slowly inserts one arm all the way up to the elbow, and then the other.

  It takes her a little over three minutes to bleed out. But this, of course, is better than Seeing.

  Ashley and David Crompton, married for three years, happen to See together. Without any discussion they walk upstairs, wake their children from their naps, and usher them into the garage. The two parents buckle them into their seat belts, give them their preferred comfort toys (for Michael, a blanket; for Dana, a bear), turn on both cars, and patiently sit back and wait for the fumes to do their work.

  It takes a lot less time for the children, small as they are. But this is so much better than allowing their children to See.

  Seven-year-old Megan Twohey is quite fortunate: she has chosen to stay hidden down in Lady Fish’s home. She does not want to come out—she never wants to come out, ever again—but when she hears the rumbling and feels the earth shaking around her, she tries to burrow ever deeper (for Lady Fish’s home is quite extensive). Though she does not know it, her father has drunk a pint of bleach upon Seeing, and collapsed on the kitchen floor in spasms; and her mother does not See at all, having drunk herself to death in the night.

  As the Arrival becomes harder and harder to ignore, the natives of Wink all take the same action: some choose blades, others poisons, the calmer ones choose automobiles, and those who have access to firearms use them both clinically and carefully: if you could listen over the buzz, you would hear a series of little pops all throughout town, as if someone’s wine cellar were overheating. Of course, there is the odd boom of a shotgun: for example, Julie Hutchins uses her shotgun on her husband, who has not yet Seen, but she finds him in an odd state: he is standing in the garage, but the floor and walls are black and smoking, as if the garage has just been struck by lightning. Her husband is staring at his hands with a very confused look on his face, and when she enters he looks up and says, “Who are you? Ah. I know… I seem to be a man this time. Tell me, where is the center of town from—Is that a gun? Wait, no!”

  The shot catches him in the belly. He falls to the floor with a disappointed look on his face, and just before Julie puts the gun against her jaw, she hears him say, “Oh, bother.”

  Joseph Gradling, hopeful paramour to Gracie Zuela, is called into the living room by his father. Joseph expects his father to explain what’s happening—his father always understands these things—but as he enters the living room his father, who is standing just beside the entryway, lifts his .22 revolver and shoots his son twice in the head. Joseph dies immediately, which is actually quite good, for he never quite sees the sight waiting for him: his mother and baby sister lying on the couch with pillows stuffed over their faces, each pillow smoking and bloody from muffled gunfire.

  Unhappy Margaret Baugh is one of the few who manages to resist for some time (her husband, on the other hand, did not: he lies dead on their porch with a nail gun in his hand and a clutch of nails in his right temple), and she staggers out the front door and over to the neighbors’ house, seeking Helena. When she enters the house, it is silent and seemingly empty. She stalks through the rooms, wondering if (and maybe hoping) they have left; but then she sees Helena’s husband, Frank, or at least what’s left of him, sitting on the floor and propped up against the pump-action shotgun.

  Margaret sees the back door is open. She slowly, slowly walks out.

  Helena is there, as if she was waiting for her. She lies facedown in the grass, her body pointing in the direction of the fence. Her back and neck are perforated with buckshot—and Margaret wonders if Frank thought he was putting her out of her misery, or if desperation drove Helena to reveal her relationship with Margaret, and he retaliated…

  It doesn’t matter. It’s over now. And Margaret knows where Helena—her Helena—was going.

  She sits down beside the body in the grass, and picks her up so her head is in her lap. She strokes Helena’s hand, and carefully coils her index finger around Helena’s. Then she looks up at the hole in the fence before them, and remembers what they had, which was always enough.

  “It’s okay,” Margaret says. “I’m here. I’m here with you. We’ll see it together.”

  And they do.

  One by one, all the natives of the town, who have bartered so carefully for their little piece of property, who have agreed to willfully ignore what is outs
ide their doorsteps so they can live in peace and harmony, begin to wink out like candle flames in the wind, starting at the southernmost tip and moving northward in a wave.

  Because it is possible for something to enter your world that is so vast, so terrible, so foreign, that you cannot coexist with it: you must, in some way or another, vacate the premises, give up your seat. Merely knowing that this thing exists pulls the supports out from everything you know and trust: the established world falls around you like a circus tent whose center pole is cut.

  And you must go with it. You must get out. You have to get out.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  Mona and Gracie stare at the giant standing on the mountain. Mona is still struggling under the realization that this—this thing was what looked at her from behind her mother’s eyes all her life. This thing orchestrated the conception of this entire town, and Mona’s return to it; this abomination constructed and planned her entire life, from her inception to her childhood to now; and it was all for this moment, all for this chance for complete and total breach…

  They watch as the yellow eyes swing back and forth, flashing through the dust clouds.

  The baby coughs in Mona’s arms. Then she realizes—It’s looking for her. It’s looking for my daughter.

  The giant pulls one mammoth foot free of the pile of earth that the mountain has become, swinging its leg out and forward, and finds purchase on the slope down. It is so huge that watching this small step is like seeing a cruise liner dock, and it completely outpaces the rivers of children rushing down to the town.

  “It’s coming,” says Mona. “Jesus Christ, it’s coming for her!”

  “For the baby?” asks Gracie, incredulous.

  Mona doesn’t stop to explain. She runs for the Charger, intending to jump in and… hell, she doesn’t know. Go somewhere. Anywhere.