American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,131

things are eclipsed.

It hates her coming here. It hates everything in the world. And it hates that it cannot hurt her.

Bonnie is weeping, tears running down her cheeks, but she keeps walking. It follows her like a hornet, dodging, buzzing, swooping through the corner of her vision.

She can make it. She’s done this twice before.

You can’t touch me. I’m not really here. I’m actually back at home, aren’t I, sleeping cause I just cooked up, and…

And.

And.

Bonnie stops. Because the room just changed a little. And that’s never happened before.

She notices a couple of things then. First is that she doesn’t really feel that high anymore, which she can’t understand. She dosed herself up goddamn good not more than an hour before Mal picked her up. And yet, and yet…

She remembers thinking when she dosed up that this shit was not all that good. It was, in fact, quite watery, just good old-fashioned aitch-two-fucking-oh, and she remembers thinking oh well goddamn it I got screwed now didn’t I, I should have known better than to buy through anyone but Bolan.

Yet then she did get high. Maybe it was just gonna be for a little while.

But not long enough.

Because Bonnie is becoming aware that she is becoming aware. Usually when she’s here she cannot see or understand anything. And that’s good. You don’t want to understand these things. You can’t look at them. It’s like looking at the sun.

But now she’s coming down.

The room is changing. She is seeing it. It is showing itself to her. It is

(an immense black plain)

(stars red and white)

(surrounded by)

(so many)

(are they mountains)

(and then)

(a dead tree with rotting fruit)

(a city in the dark)

(and in the city is a lone wanderer)

(been waiting for so long)

(waiting)

(for me)

And then Bonnie sees it again, out of the corner of her eye.

Before—when the room looked like a room, and not (this place)—the thing that is jailed here looked like a man in a blue canvas suit with a strange head or skull or helmet. Yet now she understands she was seeing only a part of it. It is like a diamond with many facets, and she was seeing only one.

Yet now she sees more. Maybe all of them. All at once.

She feels it behind her, just over her shoulder. And she thinks she sees something incredibly tall and incredibly thin, with long, thin ears, covered in coarse brown fur, standing under the red moonlight, and it is

Oh oh

Oh my god, my god, she thinks.

It has eyes, eyes like people

It can see me

Mallory never waits for Bonnie at the ravine because, quite frankly, the ravine creeps the ever-living shit out of her. She tried once, tried waiting on that poor girl all night, but she got the weird sensation that the tunnel at the end of that concrete river was an eye, and it was looking straight at her, and it gave her the heebie-jeebies. So instead she always pulls away and parks the ’Burban up the slope on an old gravel parking lot, where she sips from a hip flask and watches the stars and sometimes feels a little romantic, despite herself.

So it takes her a minute to hear the screaming. On account of her being so far away and all.

She sits up, listens for a moment.

“Bonnie,” she says. “Aw, shit.”

She doesn’t bother to start the Suburban up. She just jumps out and starts running across the parking lot, and she kicks off her heels before she starts down the ravine.

It’s stupid, because she knows Bonnie’s pathetic, and she knows she’s essentially been sent to kill her, or maybe just to let her die, though Mal can’t really see the difference. But she still doesn’t want Bonnie to die. Or she doesn’t want her to be in pain, at least. And she sounds like she’s in terrible pain.

To her relief, Mal sees that Bonnie is alive and whole, standing next to the entrance to the tunnel with her back to Mal. Beside her is the lantern and the little wooden box. Bonnie seems to be bowing over and over, like the way Orthodox Jews pray, just bowing quick little ducks forward while she screams her head off, though now that Mal’s closer she notices she can hear a little thuk thuk each time Bonnie bows.

It isn’t until she’s about a dozen feet away that Mal sees the dark stain spreading on the edge of the tunnel.

Bonnie is howling hysterically. Her hands grip the corner of the tunnel and she is ripping herself