forward and smashing her face into the corner, over and over again, each time making a wet little thuk, each time little fragments and flecks of something whirling off her face.
“It’s everything!” screams Bonnie. “It’s everything! It’s everything in there!”
Mal watches, terrified. Gouts of blood are dripping off Bonnie’s face. There are spatters trailing down the white cement. Mal gags and steps away.
And Bonnie hears her. She freezes, and whirls around drunkenly.
Her entire face has been split open. Her right eye socket is almost entirely gone, and Mal can see the whole of the orb, white and luminous against the little pool of red around it. Her nose is missing and there is a crack in its bridge that is incredibly black, so black you wouldn’t believe it.
“It’s everything, Mal!” shrieks Bonnie through ravaged lips and cracked teeth. “Everything in the world! In his eyes is everything in the world! I didn’t want to see! I didn’t want to see!” She howls again, clawing at her face, then turns around and grabs the corner of the tunnel again.
Before she knows it, Mallory is sprinting away. Somehow she has that fucking little wooden box in her hand, but she isn’t sure why.
But she can still hear it, somewhere behind her.
Thuk thuk
Thuk thuk
CHAPTER THIRTY
Now, there are many odd situations that life has prepared Mona for. But she has no idea how to approach her current predicament, in which a man who seems to have stepped out of an old photo, or maybe an old filmstrip, is standing before her, addressing her as her mother. This is, to say the least, unexpected.
So all she can manage to say is, “What?”
The grainy, gray, washed-out image of Coburn cocks his head. “What?” he says.
Mona keeps staring at him. She manages, “Uhh…”
He grows a little frustrated, leaning forward eagerly. “Did you say something?”
Mona just looks back at him, confused, helpless.
“What are you doing here?” asks Coburn. “How did you get here? Were you caught in the storm as well?”
She sits up a little at that. “No,” says Mona. “I wasn’t in the storm… I actually think you have me confused with someone else, uh—sir.”
Coburn frowns and peers at her. His image flickers like it’s being received by mangled bunny ears on an old television, and Coburn shrinks, sputters, expands, before returning to his original state. Though the act is silent, Mona mentally accompanies it with the sound of hissing static.
“Jesus Christ,” says Mona.
“This is quite odd,” he says. “Your mouth is moving but… but no sound is coming out.”
“Uh, I am afraid you’re wrong there, too, sir. I think I’m even making an ech—”
“No, no,” says Coburn. “No, nothing at all. And you do seem to be talking.” He studies her. “Can you hear me, Laura?”
“Well, yes,” says Mona. She is still too confused to broach the Laura topic.
He sighs, exasperated, rubs his forehead. “I just said I cannot hear you, so if you just said yes—and it looks like you did—I didn’t hear it. Please nod or shake your head.”
Mona, irritated, nods her head in an exaggerated fashion.
“So you can hear me, but I cannot hear you,” says Coburn. “Interesting… I wonder why this is.”
“Maybe you’re deaf.”
“I could be deaf, of course,” he says, tapping his chin and looking away, “but I can still hear the wind… God, how I wish I could stop hearing the wind. I wish we had a pen and paper, but obviously there would be none in place like this.”
He looks around, face baleful. She wonders if he’s crazy. It’s an odd thing for him to say (if this pale shadow of a person is a him, that is), because if he is really Dr. Richard Coburn, then he founded this laboratory, so he must have worked in it, and so he must know that there’s plenty of paper back in the hall there. And she can’t hear a damn bit of wind.
“You want paper?” asks Mona. “I can get you paper. Wouldn’t be a minute.”
But Coburn is not paying attention. He is grimly staring straight into the wall. “I wonder where you came from… everything is impassable, except the way I came. Perhaps through there?” He points at the wall. “Or perhaps up from that gully there?” He points down at the floor, where there is certainly no gully. He seems more and more like a maddened transient, albeit one rendered in flickering monochrome. “I doubt if you did,” he says, “because that way is quite treacherous, unless you