American Elsewhere (61 page)

There is a certain darkness you can never imagine until you are actually in it. It is a darkness so deep and complete it not only makes you doubt if you have ever seen light, it also makes you doubt if the world is still truly there:
If I stretch out my hands
, you think,
will I feel anything? If I walk in one direction for miles and miles and days and days, will there be only nothing, nothing forever and ever?

But Mona finds herself lost in a darkness even deeper than that. Her feet do not touch the ground; her lungs pull no air; her nerves report neither heat nor coolness. There is only the dark and the nothing.

Then forms begin to appear. Trees. Rocks. Stars. But it is as if she is seeing them through a dark filter—they are there in only the most muted, superficial sense.

She begins to realize she is still in the same place, still in the pine forest below the mesa, but she is also, like so many places in Wink, somewhere else at the same time.

She begins to see.

She is in a stone chamber, like a crypt. There is no light in the chamber, yet she can see. There are no corners: the chamber is round. The floor is flat and filthy, and in the center of the floor is a pile of bones.

Not just bones. Rabbit skulls.

The double vision slowly fades: she is now within this room only.

Mona swallows. This place, though so much of it escapes her senses, feels trapped, hermetic. Unlike much of Wink, it does not bleed into anything else, does not fade imperceptibly into a park or a backyard or someone’s upper room; it is even different from the mirror room at Coburn, which seemed to float in nothing, like a capsule lost below the sea; no, this is a jail cell at the very fringes of existence.

So what is jailed here?

Her eyes struggle to make sense of the space: is this chamber vastly huge, or tiny? When she looks in one direction it feels like a cathedral vault, yet in another it is like a kitchen cupboard.

Maybe it is big to me
, she thinks,
but tiny to whatever is trapped here
.

But still the question remains—what is trapped here? The room appears empty, and there are no doors or windows, no hiding places of any kind. Is she alone? She does not think so: she does not
feel
alone. Whatever is here is watching her.

Helpless, Mona keeps slowly turning around, yet on each turn her eye wanders back to the pile of rabbit skulls. Finally she stops turning and walks to them.

She picks one up. Looks at it. Then, very quickly, everything begins to vibrate.

Without any warning, she’s suddenly in another part of the rounded chamber, looking in a different direction. It takes her a moment to reorient herself.

She looks in her hand. The rabbit skull is gone.

She returns to the pile and picks up another. For a moment there is nothing, and then everything begins to vibrate again like she’s stuck in a paint shaker, and before she can do more she’s staring into the stone wall of the chamber. Once more she has been transported to a different part of the room. Her fingers clutch nothing, for again the rabbit skull is gone.

In the inexplicable manner of dream logic, she begins to understand:

The skulls are not skulls. They look like skulls, but they aren’t, not really. They’re doors. Little tiny doors that, when activated, take you to this place. But when they’re activated here, they can’t bring you far at all, can they?

Maybe they bring you halfway
, thinks Mona,
and allow whatever is in here to venture out halfway as well, and meet you
.

Then she sees it: something is moving over her shoulder, like a portion of the rounded stone wall is rippling liquid. She does not want to look, she does
not
, but she cannot help but see a form begin to emerge, tall and thin, and when she sees what appears to be a face (a face carved of wood?) then everything begins to…

Change.

She first sees a man, standing quite still and wearing a curious blue canvas suit that is covered in tiny wooden rabbit heads. On his face he wears a primitive wooden mask, suggesting the face of a rabbit, but its features are spare and simple, giving it a blank, furious look.

But this is only an image. Behind it, in a deeper way, is something else.

She does not want to look. But she cannot help it.

She sees

(a figure, tall and ropy)

(an arched back and bony shoulders)

(covered in hair)

(arms like needles, stretching for miles)

(how does it stand)

(on such thin legs)

(and its face)

(so, so long)

(and its eyes)

(so terribly)

(huge)

(don’t look)

(don’t)

Just as with Parson and Mrs. Benjamin, this vision threatens to overwhelm her. But Mona has been figuring out a few things since she’s been here in Wink. In Weringer’s bedroom she was able to avoid the deep places, the places on the other side. Why couldn’t she do the same here?

So she focuses, and breathes, and relaxes… and with a simple push, she picks up this horrible image and packages it away, pushing it in one direction and her own mind in another, until all she can see is the man in the filthy rabbit costume…

Yet as she does so, she understands that whatever this man is—whatever he
really
is—is much, much more powerful than Parson or Mrs. Benjamin. The man in the blue rabbit suit is not a simple vessel, like those used by so many “people” in Wink. Rather, whatever is in this jail cell with her just chooses to manifest as this odd sight, a filthy man in a filthy rabbit suit. She supposes it could manifest as whatever it wished: in this place, the difference between it and a god is too small to matter.

She breathes deeply, and focuses. “Who are you?” she asks.

The man stares at her. She cannot see any eyes through the holes in his mask.

“Am I meant to be here?” asks Mona. “Did I come here by accident?”

The man cocks his head, like a curious dog. Mona finds the sight repulsive. Then the man raises an arm and reaches out to her, but stops, fingers trembling. It is an oddly sentimental gesture, as if he wishes to touch her face and yet adores her too much to bring himself to do so.

Mona withdraws a little. “What do you want?” she asks.

The man slowly drops his arm. He cocks his head one way, then the other. Then he appears to come to some decision, and reaches up to take off his mask.

Mona wonders if she should turn away. The horrors that reside in this town seem to possess many secrets too large for her mind, and whatever lies behind that mask should surely be one of them. But as he removes the wooden mask, she sees something she never expected.

“Oh, my God,” she says, surprised.

At first she thinks it is her own face—because those are most certainly her eyes, deep and rounded and charcoal-brown, and her lips, so dark and thin—but it is a male face, with sharp, hard cheekbones, and many lines, as if this face has been exposed to brutal conditions day in and day out for decades. The man looks at her in a manner both wary and full of longing, as if he wishes for her to accept him, even come to love him, but cannot bring himself to believe she ever would.

He looks so much like me
, thinks Mona.
He could even be my brother.

“What is this?” she asks him.

The man slumps forward a little. He looks away as if her response has deeply disappointed him.

“What do you mean by this?” Mona asks him.

He shakes his head. He suddenly looks terribly distraught. He buries his face in his hands.

“Wait,” says Mona, “are you trying to say that—”

But then things begin to swim around her, and she hears someone saying her name.

“—ight? Miss Bright?”

It’s dark again. Mona realizes she has her eyes shut. She opens them, and sees the lights of Wink just below her. She is back in the forest: in one hand she holds a bloody, empty box, and in the other a rabbit skull. She hears someone crashing through the undergrowth. Then Gracie emerges from the trees at the edge of the clearing.

“What happened?” Mona asks.

Gracie says, “There you are. Are you all right?”

Mona inspects herself. “I think so.”

“Where were you? Were you here this whole time?”

The question is simple enough, but Mona is not sure how to answer.

“I’ve been looking for you for over half an hour!” says Gracie. “I walked by here calling your name, but I swear I didn’t see this place. I don’t remember it being here at all. So—” She freezes, eye drawn to
the two cowboy boots poking out from underneath the brush. “Wh… what’s that? Is that—is that man… dead?”

“What?” says Mona absently. “Oh. Yeah.”

“Did you kill him?” asks Gracie.

“Yes.”

“Oh.” She stares at the body, not daring to ask more.

Mona’s still thinking about what Gracie just said—so this whole clearing just went missing when she picked up the skull? She turns it over in her fingers, wondering if it could still pose a threat. She thinks not: perhaps its batteries have been drained, so to speak. A one-shot ticket.

She replaces the little skull in the bloody box, kneels, and hides the box in the weeds. She is not sure what it did to her, but she does not want to carry it any farther. “They were bringing this here,” she says.

Gracie does not answer: she is backing away slowly, her attention fixed on Dee’s body.

“Gracie!” says Mona sharply.

Gracie jumps a little. “Wh-what?”

“They were bringing this box here,” says Mona. “They didn’t come here to attack us. Just to bring this. Why would they do that?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

“Has your”—Mona struggles as she wonders how to word this—“
friend
heard of it?” She nods toward the canyon.

“He’s never mentioned it.”

Mona turns back to the little bloody box hiding in the weeds. “It took me someplace. When I opened it, it took me and… I think this whole clearing someplace. Somewhere not in Wink. I mean, I know a lot of places in Wink aren’t actually
in Wink
, whatever that means, but… somewhere even farther than that.”

“Why would they want to do that to you?”

Mona starts back up the hill to the mouth of the canyon. “I don’t think they wanted to do that to
me
,” she says. “Come on. Let’s go meet your boyfriend.”

Unlike nearly everyone who works for him at the Roadhouse, Bolan has a vehicle devoid of any overweening masculinity: his chosen chariot is not a neon-colored sports car, or a muscle-y, amped-up truck, but a bland, nondescript Honda Civic whose sole embellishment is satellite radio. Bolan chose to purchase this car the day he drove back to his home in his Camaro with over three-quarters of a million dollars in the trunk, hands jittering all the way as he tried to imagine how he would explain his cargo to any highway patrolman who just happened to pull him over due to a vague dislike for his ride.

No—Bolan does not plan to go out like that. He’d rather drive a nebbishy, emasculated car than get collared that way.

But the Civic has trouble getting to the more remote places here. Bolan never considered that, because he never intended to go into the mountains: he has never wished to go to Wink, never wanted to start down its many winding roads, so he did not choose a car that could handle this terrain. Yet here he is, struggling up an insane incline, wincing as he waits for the road to drop away, when he’ll have to start mashing on the brake.

Finally he comes to the highway crossroads. He has seen this destination only on a map: it is a frequent pickup spot for Zimmerman, and he often comes back with several pounds of incredibly pure heroin. It is a bit surreal to finally see it in real life. He can see the sign
welcoming everyone to Wink just a few feet down, and beyond that the crystalline spiderweb of the town.

Bolan pulls off the road, throwing up tons of dust, and gets out.

The headlights turn the dust into a swirling khaki-colored mist. It’s almost impenetrable to the eye. Bolan remembers what the message on the machine said—
you will have to look down
—and dutifully looks down.

There is just gravel there, of course. But as the dust settles, he sees he’s parked on the edge of a small cliff. He never even noticed it. If he hadn’t stopped, he would have driven over the edge.

Nervous (for Bolan does not like heights), he walks to the edge of the cliff, and looks down. There’s a long ravine at the bottom, which, after the fog of dust recedes, fills with pink moonlight. Just a few yards below Bolan is a small rent in the cliff wall, and there is something uncomfortably organic about it, as if it is the cliff’s navel, or (Bolan’s mind does not really want to go there but what can you do) some kind of vaginal orifice.

That’s the place, of course. It has to be.

Bolan hasn’t worked as a legman in decades, but he was still smart enough to bring a flashlight. He takes it out and walks along the roadside, flashing the rocks and the trees, looking for a way down. He finds one path that is incredibly dangerous, almost a sheer drop down to the bottom of the ravine, but it’s less sheer than the rest of the cliff wall.

It takes him twenty minutes to climb down.
I am going to get this creepy motherfucker
, he thinks,
to cough up a significant fee for this act
.

But of course Bolan will do no such thing.

He gets to the bottom of the ravine and puts his hands on his knees and puffs for a while. When he finally gains the strength to lift his head, he sees he is not alone.

There is someone standing in front of the hole in the cliff wall. The person is not facing him, but the moon: he stands directly underneath the pale pink orb with one arm up, fingers clawed as if desperate to grasp it.

Bolan can see that the person is wearing a pale blue suit and a white panama hat. He waits for the man to acknowledge him, but he never does: the man just stands there, frozen, reaching for the moon. Bolan gives up and begins to approach, though warily.