American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,115

metal and is striped like a yellow jacket. The neon-yellow bands run diagonally from its top right corner to its bottom left. There are old yellow block letters spray-painted at the top that read WARNING, but what they are supposed to be warning you about is not made clear. On the whole it is not a large door: it is about seven feet tall and three feet wide, and it’s set about a foot into the rock side of the mesa, by means of a construction method with which Mona is not familiar.

(And she thinks—Coburn is in the mesa? Like inside of it? Is the entire mesa hollow? She remembers an article she read about that particle accelerator thing in Europe, CERN or whatever—wasn’t it completely underground? Perhaps Coburn isn’t all that different—underground, yet also raised into the air.)

She is surprised by the size of the door. She expected it to be a loading door, but it’s obviously meant just for people. She wonders why.

But what is most surprising is that the door stands open about an inch or two. It has a huge, clunky doorknob, one of those kinds you usually see in really old public restrooms, but it is not engaged: someone forced the door ajar, probably by kicking at it, judging by the way the metal frame has bent. From the pile of dust built up at the bottom, it seems it’s been this way for some time.

The thing that Mona doesn’t like is the way the door was kicked open. Because, judging from the way the lock and frame are bent, whoever did it was kicking from the inside.

She reaches into her pocket and takes out the key Parson sent her to get. Since the lock is broken, it would appear the key is unnecessary. But then, Parson never explicitly said the key was for this door. She just assumed that was what he meant.

She examines the key and the lock. The lock is pretty basic; the key, however, remains an intimidating four-inch piece of industrial technology with about two dozen teeth.

No. No, this key is meant for something else. Something much more important.

“Shit,” says Mona.

She rubs the back of her neck. She doesn’t like this at all. This is worse than Weringer’s house. Even Parson, who is often so dismissive of the oddities happening around town, holds Coburn in some kind of reverence.

His words echo in her head until she feels she’s about to have a panic attack. She wishes now, more than anything, that she understood him more. She wishes she could grasp the meaning behind his little parable, which seems to have been so crucial that it drove him into a coma. And she is beginning to wish that she’d chosen to just beat it and leave town, leave this little clutch of shifting shadows and veiled words behind and find a new life somewhere else.

But another part of Mona knows that a new life isn’t coming. She’s used up all her wishes, all her fresh starts, and this is the last place to find anything that could remake her. And when she remembers the film she watched back in her mother’s house—the smoke-filled room, the glamorous, cheery woman striding in from the patio—she knows that there are secrets behind this door she simply must understand. Because unless she’s wrong, somewhere behind this surreal, forbidding door is the history of her mother, or at least a part of it. But that’s more than Mona’s ever had in her life.

She remembers Parson gave her one other clue, one she hasn’t had the time to look at yet. She sits down in the shadow of a large rock, reaches into her pocket, and pulls out his note cards.

She looks at the “Cat” card to see if she’s missed any hidden code, but if so a closer look doesn’t help. It appears to just be an innocuous and rather vapid definition of the word, like one a grade-schooler would make for a project.

She looks at the next card. She is not at all surprised to see that it is:

DOG

(noun)

A small domesticated carnivore, Canis familiaris, noted for its loyalty and servitude. Its puppies are a lot of fun!

“What the fuck,” says Mona, shaking her head. She starts flipping through them. They are all fairly insipid and utterly useless. There is a card for “Octopus” (the mother dies after laying her eggs, which is quite sad), for “Sunshine” (it’s what makes plants green!), and for “Home” (where your