American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,159

thing ever need to lock the doors?

She walks in. The dark color of the floor and walls makes the house even darker. It is still every inch an old woman’s house, stuffed with ticking clocks and piles of mail and forgettable trinkets. She hears nothing. It seems the owner is not at home.

Mona stalks through the house, gun drawn, eyes hunting for any movement. She turns left and follows a short hallway to the bedroom. And there she sees him.

He is lying on the bed with his fingers threaded together on his chest, peaceful as the dead. Yet she can see he is not dead, not quite: his chest rises and falls, slowly.

He looks the same, like your average old man. Perhaps a little caustic. Someone who has spent too much of his life indoors.

She sits down in the overstuffed chair beside Parson. She looks into his face and wonders what is behind it. It is not, she thinks, an eccentric old man who’s spent his waning years running a motel. Any more than the owner of this house is a doddering old bureaucrat.

She raises the gun a little, but does not point it at him. The clocks seem to tick louder and louder. She wonders what it would be like to break their ponderous ticking and spill his skull across these yellowed sheets.

Would it be such a bad thing? Would it be wrong? Would it even do anything?

There is a voice from the door: “No. No, it would do nothing.”

Mona very nearly pulls the trigger. She looks up and sees Mrs. Benjamin is standing at the door, and though she watches Mona coolly, indifferently, her dress is muddy, torn, and tattered. Streaks of blood show through the rents in the blotchy purple fabric.

“You stay right there,” says Mona.

“I am,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “I would wish no violence on him.”

They stare at each other for a moment. In the hall the clocks tick and tock endlessly.

“Why wouldn’t it?” asks Mona.

Mrs. Benjamin cocks an eyebrow, uncomprehending.

“Why wouldn’t it hurt him?” she explains.

Mrs. Benjamin is silent.

“You aren’t permitted to say,” says Mona.

“No,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “We are not.”

“We,” says Mona. “How many?”

Mrs. Benjamin still does not answer. The clocks tick on and on.

“Tell me,” says Mona. “Tell me or I’ll pull this trigger and blow his fucking brains out.”

“Did I not just say it would do nothing?”

“Are you telling me the bullet in the chamber of this gun wouldn’t punch through to his brain and turn it to soup? I’ve seen it before. Oh Lord, I’ve seen it before. It makes a mess, Mrs. Benjamin. You’d be doing laundry for days.”

Mrs. Benjamin purses her lips.

“Yeah,” says Mona. “I don’t quite know what you all are, but I know you aren’t bulletproof. How many?”

“If you know so much, why don’t you guess?”

Mona can feel sweat running down her arms. She glances at Parson, then back at Mrs. Benjamin. “Can’t be the whole town. Not everyone. Most of them are people, real people. But you all are… from somewhere else.”

Mrs. Benjamin raises her head and thins her eyes, an inscrutable gesture that neither affirms nor denies it.

“I’ve been up on the mesa,” says Mona.

“Have you,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “He sent you there, didn’t he?”

“Yeah. He wanted me to know. And now I do. I saw the records there. I know your mirror trick now.”

She expected that to get some reaction from her, but Mrs. Benjamin does nothing. Then Mona realizes—how could she have expected such a thing to react in any normal way?

“It makes things soft, doesn’t it?” asks Mona. “Bruised. It makes the boundaries of things… permeable. And when that happens, things can come through. Things like you, and him.”

Mrs. Benjamin is stone-faced, dead-eyed, totally dormant. Mona gets the feeling that certain muscles are going slack in her face that no normal person could relax. The hairs rise up on Mona’s arms as she begins to understand that Mrs. Benjamin’s physical form is but a puppet in a very real way, and she’s no longer bothering to maintain her appearance.

“What are you?” asks Mona softly. “Don’t tell me you can’t say.”

“I cannot,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

“Don’t tell me you’re not fucking permitted.”

“The issue is not so much that,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

“Then what is it?”

“Such things cannot be explained.”

“Why not?”

“How does one tell a fish it swims in an ocean? How would one tell it of currents, of skies, of mountains? How could you make it understand?”

“Tell me anyway. I’m a quick study.”

“I cannot.”

“Do it.”

“I