American Elsewhere (27 page)

“Who are you?” she asks.

“I am Mr. Weringer,” he says. Then he smiles, the light glinting off his spectacles. The immediate switch from suspicious to pleasant is unnerving. “Please come in.”

Mona hesitates. “I thought you were dead,” she says. “I saw your funeral.”

The old man does not respond. He just keeps smiling at her from behind his desk. Then he says, again, “Please come in.”

“Who are you?” Mona asks for the second time.

The old man keeps smiling the exact same smile, but he tilts his head from one side to the other, a queerly avian gesture. Again: “Please come in.”

“Why don’t you come here?”

The smile, wide and innocent, does not twitch a bit. The old man tilts his head back the other way and blinks.

Then Mona feels it again: that same feeling she had in
Mrs. Benjamin’s house with the mirrors, and when she saw the storm through the wall in her mother’s house. She sees two things at once: one is the library with the smiling old man behind the desk, and the second is…

A chasm. A deep, endless chasm, enormous and dark, and she is staring directly down into it, as if all dimensions are twisted beyond the threshold of that door and were she to pass through it she would begin falling, not down or up or to the side but just
falling
, falling forever. She realizes she can hear the faint screaming again, and she squints and can just make out a figure lost in the chasm, plummeting through all that empty black. It is a man, she thinks, writhing and tumbling as he falls, and she believes he has been falling for a long, long time.

Then the sight flickers, and she sees Weringer sitting behind his desk again, smiling that idiotic smile of his.

It’s a trap, she realizes: the man behind the desk is just an image, like a projection.

“Please come in,” says the old man kindly again.

Mona swallows. She is sweating very hard, powerfully aware of how close she came to utter annihilation just now. “No,” she says, voice trembling. “No, thanks.”

“Please come i—”

She slams the door shut and steps back, still breathing hard.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” she says, and she almost sits down on the floor.

She was wrong, she realizes. Weringer actually does have some security measures set up in this house. They’re just of a kind she’s never seen before.

Even though Mona has just encountered something totally inexplicable, just as Parson said she would, the calm, cool-eyed part of her brain goes on thinking, and she listens to it, grateful for any morsel of sanity.

He was expecting intruders, it says. He knew someone was going to come for him. In fact, she’s willing to bet the man falling into that chasm was one of them. It just wasn’t enough to save Weringer’s life.

This is all a lot worse and a lot bigger than she realized.

“Let’s get this fucking key and get out of here,” she says quietly, and she steels herself and continues down the hallway.

She ignores the doors on either side. These are just storage and entertainment rooms, she thinks, or probably more traps. She wants to see what’s at the very end of this hallway, if it does have an end.

And getting to the end proves surprisingly difficult. It is impossible to describe, but though the floor appears level and flat, she feels the hallway twisting around her as she moves. Her eyes and inner ear report a standard hallway with an even floor, but some instinctive part of her brain believes she’s walking up a steep hill. At another part she feels as if the hallway is tilting to the side, and she almost has to lean on the doors and walls to move forward, yet everything tells her it’s still totally flat, a normal hallway.

It’s as if some invisible dimension of the hallway, one she’d never normally notice, is twisting more and more the farther she walks into it. It’s like the chasm she saw in that room: the physics are completely fucked, as if space here can be manipulated like clay.

The walls themselves begin to change. They are not white wood anymore: now they are made of dry-stacked stone. Mona isn’t sure if it’s a modern look or a primitive one. The doors, however, remain the same boring white ones with brass doorknobs.

She begins to wonder where the hallway is taking her. She starts thinking it’s going someplace that’s not in Weringer’s house. Maybe someplace that’s not even in Wink.

Eventually the hallway sorts itself out, deciding that it liked it when the floor was down and the walls were on the sides, and it feels like she’s on firm ground again. Panting, she shines her light ahead and sees a golden twinkle: it is the knob of a door standing at the very end of the hallway.

“Finally,” she says, and she walks to it and places her hand on the doorknob. She waits. There is no thrill of fear, no burst of goose bumps. Whatever intuition helped her avoid falling into the trap before, it is silent now.

She opens the door and shines her light in. She is both surprised
and a little disappointed by what she finds, for it is a rather plain, boring bedroom, with pink-beige walls and ghastly frilly lamps. But she suspects that this one is the master bedroom, the sleeping place of Weringer himself, and if he cared about this key as much as Parson suggested then it’s likely he kept it somewhere in here.

She walks into the room, shining the flashlight around. It is like the rest of the house outside of this one queer hallway: a little drab and dull, a place for a quiet elderly man to putter around harmlessly. There is the arrhythmic ticking of an ancient clock from the wall. The bedspread is pale blue, the window above it layered in pink, frothy drapes, an odd touch for an old man.

Yet as she approaches the bed, it seems to get farther and farther away. The entire room seems to be getting bigger with each step she takes. The boring, empty walls fall back, and soon the sound of the clock is echoing off huge stone walls…

Stone walls
? thinks Mona.

Then it happens again, and she sees double: she is standing in a small, dull bedroom in one way, but in another, she is standing within a huge cavern of black stone, one with stalagmites like church columns that glitter in the light of her flashlight. There are low, guttering fires burning in the many atria of the cavern, but they seem to cast no light. But there at the center of the cavern she can see a huge, blank stone shelf, one nearly the size of a football field, with many indentations in its surface from friction, as if something very big and very heavy has been laid down here again and again.

This is where he slept
, says a little voice in Mona’s head.

She agrees, though she feels she has to correct it:
Not a
he.
An
it.

She walks toward the stone shelf. The spot from her flashlight is a tiny dot dancing in the gloom. She feels an immense pressure on her thoughts, as if the enormity of this place and what dwelt within it is so great her sanity cannot bear it, and surely she will snap…

Yet she does not. The vision releases her, and the room begins to resolve itself—or perhaps she is
forcing
it to resolve itself—and soon she is inside the boring old master bedroom again, standing just before the bed.

She knows this isn’t quite true. She knows, on some wordless level, that this room exists in two locations, as if one reality is hidden within another like a Russian nesting doll, or perhaps if you advance in one direction then reality itself expands inward (or perhaps outward) in an almost—what is the word—
fractal
manner.

She is not sure how, but she wills herself to stay within the bedroom and avoid the huge stone cavern.
Just like swimming in a pool
, she thinks,
and staying out of the deep end
. She walks to the nightstand and goes through its drawers. There is a copy of
Southern Housekeeper and Gardener
in one drawer, along with a box of Kleenex, but there is no key. Then she kneels and looks under the bed. There is nothing underneath it, but a thought hits her, and she lifts up the bedspread and reaches underneath the mattress and feels around.

Her fingers brush something long and thin and hard. Her heart leaps, and she thrusts her arm in, grabs the object, and pulls it out.

It is a key, just as Parson described. It is nearly six inches long with nearly two dozen impossibly complicated teeth, and its head is fat and striped diagonally in yellow and black. It appears scuffed and very old, yet she can feel the indentations of writing on the key’s head. She holds it up to the flashlight to try to read it.

She can make out a logo of some kind on the key, an atom encased in a smooth ray of light.

A place that has answers for you, and me.

“Goddamn it,” Mona says, and she turns the key over. Written on the other side is
COBURN NATIONAL LABORATORY AND OBSERVATORY
.

It’s Tuesday night, so Mrs. Benjamin starts off on her weekly tour of her backyard, swinging her compost pail, which is redolent of the tea and coffee she consumes by the gallon. She totters out, hits the floodlights, and is about to sprinkle a cupful around the base of her yucca when she notices a figure standing in the corner of her yard, beyond the reach of the light.

Whereas most people in Wink would immediately retreat back inside, eyes averted, Mrs. Benjamin does nothing of the sort. She straightens up, looking directly at the intruder, and crosses her arms.

“Well?” she says. “What are you waiting for? Come into the light at least, and let me have a look at you.”

The figure steps forward slowly, feet rustling in the grass. When it enters the light she sees it is a tall, thin, waxy-skinned young man in a brown suit two sizes too big for him. His eyes are large and eager, and he stands with his hands clasped at his waist and watches Mrs. Benjamin with a faint smile.

“Hm,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “I assume you’re here for a reason?”

“Meeting,” says the young man softly. His eyes gleam wetly, as if he is so pleased to have delivered his message that he is on the verge of tears.

“What’s that?” she says. “Meeting?”

He nods.

“Oh, I can already tell you’re one of the young ones,” she says. “You can’t just walk into someone’s yard in the dead of night and say
meeting
and assume they know what you mean. What meeting? What are you talking about?”

“Mr. Macey’s,” says the young man. “It’s tonight. They would like you to come.”

“Mr. Macey is dead, dear thing. Did you not know?”

He nods, still smiling, eyes still shining.

“Then what do I care about his meeting?”

“You’re the next eldest, after Macey,” explains the young man.

Her mouth drops open as she realizes his meaning. “Oh, no,” she says. “You want
me
to lead his meeting?”

He nods.

“I couldn’t possibly… I’ve always said I supported you all, whatever it is you chose to do, but I did
not
want to get involved. Why don’t you go and get Parson? He’s older than me.”

“Parson does not want to get involved, like you,” says the young man. “But he also does not support us. That he has made clear.”

She groans and sets the compost tin down on the windowsill. “He always has been adept at making his most unpopular opinions clear, yes. I suppose I would be very rude to turn you all down, wouldn’t I?”

The young man does not respond.

“Fine,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “I can get some better shoes, at least, can’t I? You’re not about to make an old woman go running off in the night in some wicker sandals, are you?”

The young man shrugs, his face still placid and eager.

“Thank you,” says Mrs. Benjamin acidly. “You’re a corker for conversation, by the way.”

Once she’s changed footwear the young man offers her an elbow and leads her out into the streets of Wink, waiting as she slowly and uncertainly mounts each curb. “I can’t imagine what they’re going to say,” she says. “I mean, I doubt if they know anything more now than they did before. If Mr. Weringer didn’t see it coming—whatever it was—and Mr. Macey didn’t either, then what chance do they have? I expect it’s all a formality, really. We have to do
something
, so we might as well get together and admit we don’t know what to do.”

If this means anything to the young man, he does not show it. He simply guides Mrs. Benjamin through the shadowy streets with a serenity usually seen only in lobotomy patients.

She peers at him. “I don’t recognize you,” she says. “What’s your name, child?”

“Murphy,” he says.

“Would that be a first or last name?”

For the first time his expression changes, his smile fading and his brow creasing in puzzlement.

“You don’t know, do you?” asks Mrs. Benjamin. “I suppose it doesn’t matter. What’s your
real
name, child?”

“Murphy,” he says again, confused.

“No. Your
old
name.”

He stops. She turns to look at him, expectant. He stares at her, eyes huge, and then from somewhere on his person—perhaps at the neck, near the base of his skull—there comes a reedy, whining, buzzing noise, filled with many harsh clicks. Though his mouth does not move at all, the sound rises to a painful crescendo, then abruptly halts.

“Ah,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “Well, I’m sorry, I don’t know you. But we do have such a large and illustrious family, don’t we.”

They continue down the street to Macey’s store on the corner. The young man opens the door and leads her through the maze of coatracks and shelves. The store is mostly dark, but some track lighting is on along the wall, catching the silhouettes of many mannequins that stand on display like dancers frozen in mid-step.

“How is this done, exactly?” asks Mrs. Benjamin.

The young man crooks a finger but says nothing, and with an irritated sigh she follows on.

He takes her to one of the dressing rooms, pulls aside the red velvet curtain, and gestures in. A pendant light is on at the top, bathing the tiny room in dim light. Frowning, she steps into the dressing room. He closes the curtain behind her and waits on the other side.

There is a chair placed before the angled mirrors. “Ah,” she says. “I see we still stick to the same tools.”