behavior, and pattern of any witnessable occurrence are determined only by how it is like and unlike its neighbors; we know a thing only to the degree that we know what it is next to.
And what Mona just experienced for that one awful, endless, titubant moment neighbors nothing at all. She has nothing to compare it to. All of her many frames of reference, which were so carefully, thoughtlessly constructed during all of her life, and which she always assumed to be as solid and undeniable as the very earth, have been proven to be tottering, fragile little popsicle-stick structures, vulnerable to a breeze or a shift in the carpet.
Her faculties struggle under the weight of this revelation. It is too much. Her mind wishes to throw its hands up and quit.
But she will not let it: she rallies, coughs, and says, “What… what the fuck?”
“Apparently so,” says Parson.
She rolls over and sees the two of them standing over her, their figures indistinct in the dark room. Immediately she shoves herself away and looks for the gun, but it is nowhere to be found. She crawls to the corner and grabs a lamp and threatens to throw it. She’s too shaken to realize how ridiculous she looks.
“Do you see now?” asks Mrs. Benjamin. “Do you see what we are?”
“What you are?” asks Mona. “Those… that… that’s what you are?”
They are silent, two shapeless shadows slouching in the center of the dark room. Slowly, the clocks in the hallway resume their ticking. The two of them shift a little bit, and evening light spills in, lighting a bit of their faces.
Mona can see their eyes. There is something behind them, something wriggling, squirming.
“Yes,” says Mrs. Benjamin.
“We are not from here, Mona Bright,” says Parson.
“Nor are we here, not entirely,” says Mrs. Benjamin.
“Just a bit of us is,” says Parson. “As the tip of an iceberg pokes past the ocean’s surface, yet the rest of it lies below.”
“Hidden.”
“You cannot grasp it, cannot comprehend its size, its breadth. Just as you—or most of your kind, at least—cannot see us.”
“Jesus,” says Mona. “What… what are you all? Monsters?”
“Monsters?” asks Mrs. Benjamin. “We have been thought such before.”
“And we have also been thought of as gods,” says Parson.
“In the places we took.”
“The worlds we conquered.”
“In the other place.”
“Elsewhere from this.”
“Our family is vast, Mona Bright,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “And we are most esteemed. You cannot imagine what we have conquered, what we have controlled, there in the aspects of reality you and your kind still have not touched.”
“Imagine a building, tall and narrow, many floors, many stairs,” says Parson. “Many, many tiny rooms, many places stacked on one another. In some spots they overlap, but in most they are whole, contained, hermetic. Walls stiff and unyielding. Most people in the building would only live on one floor, one level. One plane. Yet imagine if someone could live in several at the same time, occupying many places, many floors, rising up through the whole of the building and moving through it all at once, just as sea creatures move through many meters of the sea, vertically, horizontally.”
“Pandimensional,” Mona says.
“Yes,” says Parson.
“We are from a place underneath this one,” says Mrs. Benjamin.
“Behind it.”
“Beside it.”
“Above it, around it.”
“Everywhere,” says Mrs. Benjamin.
“Then why the hell are you here?” asks Mona.
They pause and glance at each other. Their eyes seem to move independently of their slack faces.
“We were forced to leave,” says Mrs. Benjamin.
“Yes. And come here,” says Parson.
“We are… emigrants.”
“Refugees, you could say.”
“And this place is our haven.”
“To an extent,” corrects Parson, sounding suddenly bitter.
“Christ,” says Mona. “This is what you were trying to tell me with your little fable, wasn’t it… your story about the birds in the trees.”
Parson nods.
She laughs madly. “But you don’t look like any fucking birds I know. Not how you really are, I mean. In that… that place.” She stops laughing as she remembers a line from Parson’s story: Then one evening a terrible storm broke open in the skies…
And it all begins to make sense.
“And you didn’t just fly here, did you,” she says. “You didn’t crawl out of the mirror, or the lab. And you didn’t just pop into existence.”
“No,” says Parson.
“The change happened to the whole town,” says Mona. “To everyone. Everything. You came here in the storm. That was what it was. But it wasn’t really a storm, or just a storm.”
“No,” says Parson.
“It was bruising,” says Mona. “Bruising miles wide. It was just a bunch of doors opening