American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,164

Mr. Macey, standing perfectly still as if struck by an odd thought.

She struggled to her feet, sure he would collapse at any moment. She could hear herself saying his name. Then she grabbed him by the shoulder and turned him around.

His eyes and his mouth were wide and he was trembling, arms stiff and neck stretched to its limit.

She cried out his name and shook him, telling him to please snap out of it.

Then fire spilled out into the street around them, and bright light filled his face. And she looked into his eyes, and saw.

It was as if his eyes were windows, and there behind them was something squirming, something with many tentacles and a long, flowing, flowery body, and his mouth opened wider and wider and she began to hear an awful, reedy whine…

It was like the sound from that shadow in the street. But it came not from his mouth, but from the base of his skull, near his neck…

And when he looked at her she saw nothing in his eyes that was Eustace Macey, nothing of the small-town shop owner she’d spoken to nearly every day of her life. The lightning had emptied him out, and filled him up with something else.

She turned and began to run down the street, shrieking. Everything was smoke and fire and deafening crashes. She saw neighbors she knew and loved screaming and running through the blazes—there, Mr. Cunningham, his daughter thrown over one shoulder, and there Mrs. Rochester, holding one black, wounded hand in her armpit…

The town was unrecognizable. She ran without knowing where she was going, just running in the hope that somewhere this would end, somewhere the devastation would stop.

Then the cloud of smoke parted before her again, and she saw the mesa once more.

She stopped. Choked. And fell to her knees.

She saw enormous shoulders bathed in lightning. Long, sinewy limbs, a faceless, slumping head wreathed in clouds. And the thing on the mesa pointed, and when it did another bolt of lightning fell shrieking to crash into the earth.

It shifted on the mesa, and pointed again. And she could have sworn it pointed at her.

She looked up. There was a bright, glimmering breach in the clouds above her. The clouds fluttered with light, and the breach glowed furiously bright, and then…

Light. Heat. And fire all around.

She stood totally frozen. There was something warm behind her eyes, something soft that tickled her sinuses.

Then all the world turned white.

Mona waits for Mrs. Benjamin to finish her story, yet nothing comes.

“I don’t get it,” she says. “So… are you saying you died?”

Mrs. Benjamin looks at her, and even though her face is slack Mona thinks she can see scorn in it. “Miss Bright,” she says, “to whom do you really think you are speaking?”

Mona thinks about it for a moment, confused. Then she realizes, and for a moment she stops breathing.

She stares into Mrs. Benjamin’s eyes. There’s a fluttering in her corneas, a squirming as if each of her eyes is the shell of a snail, inside of which is something flexing and undulating, feeling the boundaries of its casing.

She begins to understand. “You’re… you’re not Mrs. Benjamin, are you.”

Mrs. Benjamin smiles a little.

“And you’re not Parson,” says Mona. “But they were both people before, weren’t they? Real people with real lives, and you just… came and took them over.”

“In a way. As we said, we are here in only the slightest sense,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

“What are you… in there?” says Mona, horrified.

“It is not us,” says Parson, gesturing to his head. “You have seen us already.”

“And it very nearly killed you,” says Mrs. Benjamin, who sounds a little pleased by that.

“This thing inside this vessel is more like a device. Like a walkie-talkie, one could say.”

“It is our link to the other side,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “The story I just related to you is, I suppose, the last memory of whoever or whatever occupied this vessel before me.”

“Whoever occupied… so you killed her?” says Mona. “You killed the real Mrs. Benjamin when you… crawled into her skull?” She is horrified and disgusted by the idea, but also by the realization that all the times she has spoken to these people (and who knows who else in Wink) she has really been addressing the frothy, fleshy masses in their skulls that tweak their nerves like the strings of marionettes and report everything they see to those things in that gray, red-starred abyss…

“I did not have a choice,” says Mrs. Benjamin.