like if that happened to a human eye.
No. No, thanks.
She keeps walking. Just keep walking. Keep the lantern high and your eyes on the prize.
What lives down here, underneath Wink? What lives in Wink, above it, around it? Where is Wink, anyways? Where have we all gone? Which sky hangs over this town?
She is at the chamber. She stops at the doorway, small and round like that of a crypt, and looks in.
The chamber is big. It is bigger than big. So big she almost cannot conceive of it. God does not live in a place this big. Its gray, blank floor stretches for miles, oceans, hemispheres, and its black vaults stretch up and up and up and up until she thinks she can see
(a pink moon)
(many stars)
(a thousand twisting peaks)
She needs to stop.
Bonnie takes a breath. And focuses.
Or, she does not focus, because if she did she’d go fucking insane. To look at this place, to look upon it and perceive it, would be to destroy yourself. Bonnie secretly believes (and though she doesn’t know it, she’s absolutely right) that the heroin is her shield, that it inoculates her against the madness waiting here, puts an impenetrable film on her mind like a tarp protecting a boat against the rain. You cannot make someone mad if there is no mind there to make mad. So maybe Bonnie is one of the only people in Wink who can go here, and only then when she’s absolutely fucking jazzing on H.
But while she is utterly dosed up when she comes here, she has come to understand two things about this place:
It is secretly a jail cell. (And Bonnie knows what is being jailed here.)
Though it is a jail cell, its occupant can be allowed out, though only briefly, and its exit (or invitation) must be arranged in a special way.
A very special way.
In the center of the vast gray floor is a pile of something. From this distance (though distance does not exist, not here) it looks like a pile of small stones, but Bonnie knows it is not.
She looks around, searching the edges of the room, at least what she can see of it.
It is empty. Or it appears that way. Bonnie knows better. And she knows she won’t see it unless it lets her.
She begins the walk across the chamber. It takes a long, long time.
(Am I still here, she wonders? Is some part of me forever trapped in this place? When I go back to my room, and I am followed by the night, by the man in the corner? Or am I still here, torn in half, split down the middle, stuck in this room and wandering Wink all at once? Do I live up above while still trapped in here with it, him, the night?)
The pile gets closer. The closer it gets, the more she can make out the tiny, pebble-like teeth, and the long, desiccated snouts, and the gaping eye sockets…
They are not skulls, not really. They are a part of it, the thing that is jailed here. And if you take a piece of it out, and get someone to touch it…
(you must not touch it)
Gloves. Must remember gloves.
She sets the lantern down. She opens the wooden box. Then she carefully, carefully bends down, scoops up two tiny little skulls in a gloved hand, and lays them in the wooden box. She shuts it, clasps it, and sighs.
Done. Done, done. She grabs the lantern and begins to walk out.
It’s always as she’s leaving that it comes to her. She is not sure why. And she never really sees it. Like right now, she smells it first, an awful scent, decay and rot unknown, as if it is a noxious thunderhead bubbling down out of the sky.
And then it’s there.
It looks like a man. A man in a blue canvas suit, standing off to the side of her, always in the corner of her vision no matter how she tries to directly look at it. But she cannot see much of it, or him, or whatever it is. Words fail to describe it. In this place it is always trembling, always quaking, a blue-gray ghost of a man standing in the shadows of this enormous room. There is no edge or line or section of its form that is not blurred. Yet she thinks she can see tall, thin ears on its head, and fists balled in rage.
It is the night, because before it all