American Elsewhere (21 page)

She sits up, watching the film. The cameraman is following her mother through a dense thicket of people, all of whom are waving to the camera. Mona waits, but she doesn’t see it again, so she has to go through the laborious task of rewinding the film.

She starts it again and sits before the glowing wall, waiting, watching. The cameraman turns a corner and begins wading through the throng, Mona’s mother sometimes stopping to wave him forward. People keep turning to look at the camera and its blinding light as it passes, and then one huge, pale face comes swooping out of the crowd like a wayward moon…

“What the fuck?” breathes Mona.

She rewinds it again, and watches it once more. The empty room seems even bigger than before, and she shivers a bit, feeling cold and vulnerable. For projected on her wall, just very briefly, was the smiling face of none other than Mrs. Benjamin, the very woman who not more than a few days ago claimed she did not remember Mona’s mother at all. She’s standing in the crowd to the side, listening to conversation with a polite smile, and as the camera passes by, her eyes flick over, irritated—
Who brought that damn thing?
—before her polite smile returns and the camera moves on.

“She lied,” says Mona aloud. “Why did she lie?”

But even more concerning, Mrs. Benjamin does not appear thirty years younger in the film. She looks the exact same age as she did the other day, around seventy. Yet this film has to have been taken more than thirty years ago. Right?

There is only so much nothing a man can take, Norris learns, before he has to do something. It’s only been three weeks since Bolan sent them to do that job on the mountain, yet it feels like an eternity, each hour stretched to a day by Norris’s screaming paranoia. But so far nothing has happened, and Norris has made sure to do nothing as well. This, of course, is part of Bolan’s orders: don’t do a damn thing, he told him. Buy groceries. Watch television. Read, cook, whatever. Just don’t talk to me or anyone else, and don’t step a single fucking toe out of line, you hear?

Norris is only too happy to oblige. He’s one of the few Roadhouse employees to actually live in Wink. This is not, of course, coincidence—Bolan decided (or was told) a year ago that he’d need people actually in Wink, rather than on the periphery like the Roadhouse. Zimmerman and Norris got stuck with the job, which only occasionally seems like a bad one—Wink
is
a terribly nice place to live—though the job does come with a lot of rules. Some of which make it a little difficult on a man like Norris.

He tries to be good during this cautious period. He buys groceries, and cooks, and watches television. He cleans his house and mows his yard and just tries to be a generally agreeable neighbor. And everyone just smiles and waves to him, as if there’s nothing wrong.

And there isn’t, Norris says to himself. Nothing is wrong at all. They certainly didn’t kill the town’s eldest, most respected resident up
on the mesa nearly a month ago. Why, it’s just insane to consider. No, it’s just old Norris here, going about his normal, respectable business.

But then it happens: he’s at Mr. Macey’s checking out (his bag contains only tuna, bread, and mustard, for though he attempted cooking as Bolan said, it was an unmitigated disaster) when his eye scans the magazines at the counter. Most of them are the usual forgettable fare (but the magazines in Wink, though all slightly bland, are ones Norris has never seen elsewhere, like
Southern Housekeeper and Gardener, Our Day Today
, and
Southwestern Steppes Outdoorsman
). Yet one, a fitness magazine Norris has never seen before, features a cover that leaps to his eye: a young man in a white T-shirt and acid-washed jeans leans against the hood of a Corvette, staring into the sunset. He is thin and bronzed and his oiled hair features a wandering forelock, an enticing thread of hair that curls across his smooth brow. And there is something about him—the way his hips are thrust forward, maybe, proffered to the viewer, or the way he seems both aware of the beauty of the sunset and totally indifferent to it—that puts a cold fire dancing down Norris’s bones.

He freezes up. Bolan
said
to be good, after all. And the urge that has charged every molecule in Norris’s body is most certainly
not
good. Yet Norris cannot help himself. He swallows, picks up the magazine with trembling hands, and places it in his bag as he checks out.

Even though he pays for the magazine honestly, he feels as if he’s stolen the damn thing. He tucks his bag under his arm and hunches over as he walks out. Yet as he leaves, he sees he is being watched: he looks up to see an old, lined face staring at him from the yellowed office windows near the exit. It is Mr. Macey, the shop’s owner, and though he is often genial and pleasant, now his face is fixed in a look of terrible fury.

Norris runs out the door, and even hides behind a parked truck, watching the store’s door and waiting for Macey to follow. Yet he never comes. Norris slinks away, feeling guilty and jittery and nauseous.

For the rest of the day he goes through his normal routine. He eats his tuna sandwiches and watches
Howdy Doody
on the TV. He plays
darts on his porch and has to turn down an offer from his neighbor to join in. When night falls he returns inside.

Sometimes Norris must remind himself that he is not on friendly territory. Somewhere in the woods there is a border, and what is on one side of the border is not the same as what is on the other. The Roadhouse, he knows, just barely rides that invisible line. Most people can cross the line, if they wish—but most don’t, fearing what would happen if they tried. Yet
They
can’t, at all. Norris knows that, and thanks God for it. But since Norris is in here with Them, on the inside of the border, he has to be mindful about himself.

He turns on all the lights in the house, for to turn them off would look suspicious. He makes sure all his chores are done, all the dishes put away and the laundry neatly folded and sorted, and as he finishes up he picks up a stack of books very nonchalantly—
Just carrying these books around, no problem here
—and begins placing them on random shelves. About halfway through, he comes to the fitness magazine he bought at the store, and he grunts as if to say—
How did this get here?
And he absentmindedly leaves it on a shelf in the linen closet of the bathroom, making sure it appears as though he just set it down on whichever surface was available.

Then he decides to go through the cleaning supplies under his sink. And again, he finds something that should not be there: a bottle of baby oil. He shakes his head,
tsk
ing and bemoaning his poor organizational skills, and again returns to the bathroom. Yet rather than putting the baby oil away, he enters the linen closet with it, and shuts the door behind him.

In Wink, it is always smart to live your life as if you’re being watched. Because so frequently, you are.

Norris blindly reaches out and picks up a waiting flashlight from one of the closet shelves. He turns it on, grabs the magazine, stoops, and crawls below the biggest shelf at the bottom of the closet. There, curled up in the fetal position, his breath trembling and his fingers quivering, he begins to page through the magazine, his eyes devouring every image.

Wink has strict rules, and though one of its rules is never to discuss
what the rules are, there are certain things that just don’t happen. No one gets divorced in Wink, for example. Premarital sex is deeply frowned upon, and pregnancy out of wedlock is beyond scandalous. Yet there are things even worse than these.

Norris is not sure why, but he’s always found it easier to fall in love with men than women. He’s just more comfortable around them. And he knows it is wrong—it
is
wrong—yet he cannot stop himself. He cannot stop the bolt of energy that sometimes comes rushing out of his heart. He has never really acted on it: though sometimes he might desperately wish for physical contact (the brush of knuckles on the back of his hand, perhaps) he cannot allow it. His one moment of perfection, his guilty, trembling moment of joy, occurs once a month in the cramped dark of his linen closet, lit only by a flashlight and perfumed with the puerile aroma of baby oil. It is the only time he feels happy and whole, and each time it is followed by unspeakable self-hate. What a fool he is to follow such passions, and what a coward he is to do so in such a craven way.

He is just about to unbuckle his pants when he hears a crash from his kitchen. He sits up so fast he knocks his head on the shelf above him. A single thought cracks through his mind like a caroming bullet:

He’s been found out. They know what he is.

He sits in the closet for a moment, listening, but he hears no other noise. Then, slowly, he emerges from the closet, making sure to leave the baby oil and the fitness magazine hidden below piles of bedsheets. He looks down his hallway but sees nothing there. He grabs the only weapon he can find—an old brass candlestick—and, feeling like a cartoon out of
Clue
, he stalks down the hall.

He finds his French press has fallen off the top of the stove and shattered on the kitchen floor. He can’t imagine how this could have happened, yet it seems innocent enough. He sighs, relieved, puts the candlestick on the kitchen counter, and stoops to pick up the glass.

It’s as he’s on his hands and knees, brushing shards into a paper towel, that he hears the hiss. And it’s just sheer coincidence that he looks up and sees the severed tube resting against the wall behind his
stove. And isn’t the air at the mouth of the severed tube awful shimmery? And what is that smell in the air…

Norris’s eyes shoot wide and he stands up and bolts out of his house, stumbling out the back door to his porch. He jumps his fence and peers back through a crack, watching his house for any sign of movement.

He isn’t sure how they got in, but someone’s broken into this house and cut his gas lines, he’s sure. Just the tiniest spark could have set the whole thing off. But why would someone do that? Is it because of what he was about to do? Was it a message?

A cloud drifts over the moon, and Norris absently glances up at it. He does a double take, and freezes as he realizes he’s just broken another cardinal rule of Wink: he’s outside his property at night.

And he has committed worse crimes than what he was about to do in the linen closet, hasn’t he? Isn’t it possible that what they really wanted to do was flush him out of his house, to the dark, where he’d be vulnerable?

As he realizes this, a soft, twinkling light creeps across the fence and around him. Its source is behind him, and he
knows
he should not look at it, yet he turns.

Down the hill is the start of the forest, and there are lights in the trees, lights like will-o’-wisps, slowly orbiting a few of the trunks. Some lights are a pale blue, others a soft pink. They are so beautiful and enchanting that Norris cannot help himself: he walks down the hill to them, wishing to touch them and hold them.

Yet somehow they elude him. They always seem a few more feet away, circling the next few trees over rather than the ones he’d thought, and soon he’s deep within the forest, wandering under the dark, whispering pines.

He enters a wide, grassy glade. The will-o’-wisp lights go out, and Norris stands there, confused.

Then someone enters on the opposite side of the glade.

It is difficult to see in this faint light, but he thinks he can see a small, elderly figure in white shirtsleeves and a red bow tie, yet the face is dark. Just as he begins to think the person is familiar, the image
flickers like the flame of a candle, and as it does the moon seems to dim too, and the glade grows deeply dark, so dark Norris cannot even see what is in front of him.

“Hello?” he calls, and he walks forward, arms outstretched, trying to find the man on the other side of the glade.

He thinks he is close when he hears breathing. Relieved, he turns toward it, but as he grows near he finds it no longer sounds like normal breathing. The air is passing through too many passageways, he thinks, and some of them seem to rattle, as if they are filled with mucus…

He stops. Something is standing just beside him underneath the tree, and it is not a little old man. He can just see it out of the corner of his eye, and he glimpses something low and broad and chitinous, and what tops it is not a head but a mass that appears somehow nasal to him, a sphenoidal lump riddled with gaping conchae and sinuses, yet clutched under the upper shelf of two of these cavities are two pieces of anatomy he recognizes:

Eyes. Very human, very clear eyes, with pupils and corneas, watching him.

He opens his mouth to scream, but it never gets out. The thing falls on him and he feels hard and rigid limbs grasp his back and pull him to it, and something fleshy and many-headed (like a sea anemone, he thinks, even as he struggles against it) wraps itself around his mouth, pries his lips open, and begins to worm its way into his throat…

Then things go dark.

Norris awakes with the dawn. He groans and rolls over and cracks an eye. He’s lying on his gravel driveway with what feels like most of its pebbles digging into his back. But that isn’t the most painful thing: the worst of it is his skin, for it feels like a million mosquitoes have been feasting on him while he slept. He sits up, scratching and expecting to see many frog-belly-white lumps lining his arms and hands.

He stops. For what is on his skin—or, rather,
underneath
it—is not mosquito bites at all.

Norris is covered with what looks like some horrific fungal infection, bands of virulent black stretching across his arms and hands and belly. It’s not on his skin but
below
it, and the skin itself is pebbled and moist.

But this is not the worst thing, nor is it the thing that will send him running down the street, screaming. For though the infection is horrendous, the most unnerving thing is that its many splintered webs and rings are not distributed randomly about his body. Quite the contrary: their arrangement obviously resembles
letters
. And what those letters spell is the same thing, written over and over again: