American Elsewhere (24 page)

Parson said,
But that’s not so. There was another. Before all of us. Even me and Mr. First. Wasn’t there?

Mr. Macey was confused at first. What jabbering was this? Silly old fruit, the loneliness and isolation has gotten to him.

But then he realized what the old man was getting at, and as the thought trickled into his brain he turned white as a sheet. And Macey said,
No… no, you’ve got to be wrong.

Parson only shrugged.

Macey said,
You have to be wrong. It can’t be here. It just can’t be.

Parson said,
Many things that couldn’t be have happened recently. But if it is here, wouldn’t it have a very good reason to want to hurt us? And I don’t think She would have ever extracted a promise from it. I doubt She even knew it came with us. That is, if I’m right. It is only one possibility.

Yet the idea resonates in some dark, awful corner of Mr. Macey’s heart. It would confirm so many of his worst suspicions that it must be true. What can one do against such a

(woodwose, wayward and wild)

thing? They would be helpless. Such a being is beyond comprehension, even for them, and they comprehend a great deal.

Macey looks up as he walks, and is a bit surprised to see what he has come to.

A sprawling Mid-Century Modern mansion is laid out against the hillside before him. It is done in the style of a Case Study House, with broad, overhanging flat roofs, floor-to-ceiling windows, and a sparkling blue pool dangling over the mountain slope. Though the house is currently dark, he can see white globe lamps hanging from the ribbed steel roofing, and white womb chairs lined up against an elegant Japanese wall screen. It is a house that has absolutely no business being in Wink; it is more suited to Palm Springs or the Palisades than a sleepy little town in northern New Mexico.

And Macey says, with a slight sigh, “Home again, home again, jiggity-jig.”

He pulls a set of keys from his pocket, takes a winding path through the perfectly manicured cypress trees (each paired with its own spotlight), walks up to the front door, unlocks it, and enters his home.

The entry hall is white, white, terribly white. White marble walls, white marble floors, and what few unwhite spots there are (tables, pictures) are simple black. This is because Macey does not care to see color when he comes home; he is unused to the sensation, and it aggravates him so.

Yet there is color, he realizes. There is a splash of color at his feet, screamingly bright. They are the colors called
pink
and
yellow
, and once Macey gets past this irritation he realizes he is staring at a gift-wrapped present sitting in the center of his entry hall. It also features an extremely large pink bow, and attached to this is a white tag. Upon examination, he finds it reads
BE THERE SOON!—M

Macey scratches his head. This, like the sudden intrusion of color, is a new experience for him: he has never received a present before. He wonders what to do with it. Though his familiarity with this process is limited, he knows there is really only one thing you do with a present: open it.

So he does. He lifts off the top, and inside are heaps and heaps of
pink tissue paper. He prods his way through the top layer yet finds no gift inside, so he reaches in, arm up to the elbow in pink paper, and he wonders: why would the present not fit its box? Or (and even he knows this is absurd) does the box contain nothing but pink tissue paper?

Yet then his fingers brush against something small and dry and rough, some item nestled among all the tissue paper. He jerks back, and as he does he cannot help but notice all the lights in the house flickered a bit just now, almost exactly when his fingers touched that hidden little… whatever it is.

Curious, Macey starts pawing through the paper, digging past its layers until he grasps the hard little object. He rips it out, stuck in its own ball of paper, and begins to peel away each pink sheath.

And as he does, the form of the object becomes clear (and the lights flicker more and more and more) until finally the last layer is gone and his disbelief is confirmed:

He holds in his hands a small rabbit skull, its eyes empty and its teeth like little pearls. He turns it over in his hands,

(and does he feel a door opening somewhere in the house, invisible and tiny, a perforation in the skin of the world through which black aether comes rushing?)

examining it and thinking what a bizarre little gift this is, but his examination is interrupted.

There is a clicking sound in his hallway. He looks up, searching for its source, and he tracks it to the little (black, of course) table at the end of the hall. There is a plate of decorative black marble balls on it, and they are all clacking against one another as if someone is shaking the plate.

And then something happens that even Macey finds strange: slowly, one by one, the marble balls lift from the plate and begin floating into the air.

Macey stares at this, astonished, his eyes beginning to hurt from the flickering lights. He turns and looks at the window at the end of the hall. He can see the reflection of the living room there, and he sees
that all his belongings in that room are floating, too: the womb chairs dangle in nothing as if hanging from invisible string, the copies of
Southwestern Steppes Outdoorsman
drift by with pages fluttering.

Then he feels it, a sensation he has not felt in a long, long time.

The world is bending. Something from elsewhere—something from the other side—is making its way through.

Macey rises, and walks to his open front door.

There is a man standing on the front walk.

(you know this man)

His figure is pale and somewhat translucent, as if his image were rendered in the blue flame of a dying candle, but Macey can see two long horns or maybe ears rising up from the sides of his skull…

(Brother Brother do you see me)

Macey stares at him, and whispers, “No, no. It can’t be you, it
can’t
be.”

Yet the figure remains, watching him impassively. Macey does not wait: he throws the door shut, locks it, and sprints down the hallway.

All around him his possessions are leaving the ground to hang in the air. The floor and walls shake as if the mountain were threatening to cut the house loose and send it sliding down into the valley. And each room begins to flood with an awful smell, a scent of horrific rot and hay and shit…

“No, no!” screams Macey. “Not you, not here! I didn’t do anything to you! Leave me alone, please!”

He hits the stairwell, grabs the post, swings himself around, and leaps down the black marble steps, knees protesting with each bound. The lights in the floor above him are dying out, leaving each room dark, and he feels he can hear something rushing through the house after him, moving with the sound of a thousand dead leaves striking pavement…

The floor below is no different. The filament of each bulb sputters,
and everything—chairs, tables, lamps—hangs suspended in the air. Macey dodges these obstacles and throws himself toward a large black door tucked away under the stairs. He opens it, falls through, and slams it behind him.

The other side is dark. Macey, breathing hard, fumbles for the switches on the wall beside him. When his fingers finally find them he slaps them all on, and the room fills with light.

The room is huge, nearly two hundred feet on each side, and the ceiling is lined with bright fluorescent lamps. Ordinarily this room would be the garage, filled with expensive, fancy cars that would suit the taste of the house’s owner. But Mr. Macey’s garage is totally empty, nothing but blank gray surfaces on all sides except the ceiling.

This room has one advantage, however: none of its doors have ever been unlocked or used except the one Mr. Macey has just run through. It is completely barricaded off.

How could it be here, he wonders? Such a thing is impossible. Yet then he thinks of the

(invitation)

skull in the box… and he begins to realize that there are many more machinations operating within Wink than he ever suspected, and he has just stumbled into one.

He puts his ear to the door. He cannot hear anything on the other side, nor can he see any hint of flickering lights through the crack at the bottom. He wonders what this could mean… yet just as he does the lights above flicker, just a little, and he begins to smell a horrible odor pervading the room, the smell of an untended barn, stables and coops of livestock lying dead and rotting in the hay…

“No,” he whispers.

He sits up and looks around. And he sees he is not alone.

There is a man standing in the exact center of the garage. He is very tall, and he stands motionless with his arms stiff at his sides. He wears a filthy blue canvas suit, streaked with mud in a thousand
places, and sewn into the surface of this suit are dozens and dozens of tiny wooden rabbit heads, all with huge, staring eyes and long, tapered ears. On his face he wears a wooden helmet—or perhaps it is a tribal mask—whose crude, chiseled features suggest the blank, terrified face of a rabbit, complete with curving, badly carved ears. Where its eyes should be are two long rectangular holes. Somewhere behind these, presumably, are the eyes of the mask’s wearer, yet only darkness can be seen.

Mr. Macey falls to his knees. “No,” he whispers. “No, no.”

The figure does not move, yet when the lights flicker out and come back on he is suddenly closer, just yards away.

“You can’t be here,” says Macey. He hugs his chest and wilts before the intruder. “You can’t have followed us. You can’t have been here all along…”

The lights flicker again and the figure in the rabbit suit is closer, standing only a few feet in front of Mr. Macey. He stares up into that blank wooden face, and those dark, rectangular eyes, and he sees…

(a cracked plain, red stars, and a huge black pyramid rising from the horizon, and all around it are thousands of broken, ancient columns, a place where a people once worshipped things that departed long ago)

(a scar-pocked hill, at the top of which is a twisted white tree, and from the tree’s branches are many swollen, putrid fruits, un-plucked and untended for centuries)

(endless darkness, stars flickering through the ether, and then empty, sunless cities made of black stone, each leaning, warped structure abandoned eons ago)

(falling, falling through the black, forever)

(a mesa, sharp and hard against the starlit sky, and clouds gather around its tip and lightning begins to leap from cumulus to cumulus, staircases of light waiting to be lowered to the ground)

And though the figure does not speak, Mr. Macey knows what it is trying to say, and he thinks he sees eyes behind the mask now. They are wild and mad, filled with an incomprehensible fury. The figure’s hands, fingers thick and scarred and filthy, are bunched into fists. And slowly, bending at the waist, the figure leans down to him.

Mr. Macey begins screaming. And the last thought that enters his mind is: he was right. Parson was right. The wildling is in Wink. It has been in Wink all along.

Mona is driving so fast she’s about halfway across town before she realizes she has no idea where she’s going. Is she leaving Wink, she wonders? Though that would make sense, the thought never crossed her mind. She jumped in the car with no intention other than just to get
away
, to get the hell out of the house. And possibly just away from the crawling, nauseating feeling that she’s going as batshit crazy as her mother did. Because that would make sense, wouldn’t it? She remembers her mother staring out of windows, describing things that weren’t there: old buildings, thousands of caves, cities in the ice… the similarities are so exact it makes Mona feel physically ill.

She needs to talk to someone about what she saw, to articulate it aloud and pick it apart, and let them weigh in on whether or not she’s exactly as nuts as she feels. But she doesn’t have a single friend in this town. She only talked to Carmen for ten minutes, and this seems out of her league. And she certainly doesn’t trust Mrs. Benjamin, because somewhere in Mona’s furious thoughts is the suspicion that that crazy bitch’s mirror trick is the cause of all this: it
opened
something in her head, or maybe a lot of somethings, and now she feels like she’s seeing double all the time. There is the peaceful little town of Wink, but behind that is something much stranger, like one piece of wallpaper pasted over another, yet she can see both at once.

But evidently there
is
someone she can go to, for she looks up as if
waking from a dream and finds that not only is the car stopped, but it’s parked before the manager’s office of the Ponderosa Acres.

A shadow splits the golden stream of light pouring through the door, and the form of Parson comes shuffling into view.

He looks at her. Her fingers are still clutching the wheel. He scratches his chin and gives a deep, amused “Hm.”

“Help,” says Mona softly.

He looks over his spectacles at her. “I beg your pardon?”

Mona manages to let go of the wheel, open the car door, and hobble out. “You’ve… you’ve got to help me.”

“Help you what?”

Mona wonders how she can possibly phrase this. “I really don’t know. I’m… I think something’s really wrong with me, Mr. Parson.”

“How so?”

She thinks for a long time, feeling ashamed of what she’s about to admit to. “I know it sounds crazy, but I’m… seeing things.”

He raises his eyebrows and waits for more.

“I’m seeing two things at once. Seeing people and places here, and something
else
. I… I saw the goddamn lightning storm from thirty years ago, through my own wall.”

“Did you?” He does not sound alarmed at all, but quite intrigued. “Well. I am unused to having so many people come to me for advice. But I admit, it is not unpleasant. Please come in,” he says, extending a hand to the door.