American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,186

fur still clinging to its tiny bones, and it stared at her accusingly, as if to say: You forgot about me. You wished me hidden and so I hid, but I was never gone.

She had nightmares that night, and for the rest of the week. How she wished she had buried it, respected it, given it the love no one else had—it was as if she had chosen to kill her own child.

It is so strange to find a rabbit skull now, in this bloody red velvet box. Mona almost wonders if they were trying to send a message to her. The mere sight of it fills her with unexpected guilt.

Frowning, she reaches out, and picks it up.

“Where did you come from?” she asks it.

And then the lights go out.

CHAPTER FORTY

There is a certain darkness you can never imagine until you are actually in it. It is a darkness so deep and complete it not only makes you doubt if you have ever seen light, it also makes you doubt if the world is still truly there: If I stretch out my hands, you think, will I feel anything? If I walk in one direction for miles and miles and days and days, will there be only nothing, nothing forever and ever?

But Mona finds herself lost in a darkness even deeper than that. Her feet do not touch the ground; her lungs pull no air; her nerves report neither heat nor coolness. There is only the dark and the nothing.

Then forms begin to appear. Trees. Rocks. Stars. But it is as if she is seeing them through a dark filter—they are there in only the most muted, superficial sense.

She begins to realize she is still in the same place, still in the pine forest below the mesa, but she is also, like so many places in Wink, somewhere else at the same time.

She begins to see.

She is in a stone chamber, like a crypt. There is no light in the chamber, yet she can see. There are no corners: the chamber is round. The floor is flat and filthy, and in the center of the floor is a pile of bones.

Not just bones. Rabbit skulls.

The double vision slowly fades: she is now within this room only.

Mona swallows. This place, though so much of it escapes her senses, feels trapped, hermetic. Unlike much of Wink, it does not bleed into anything else, does not fade imperceptibly into a park or a backyard or someone’s upper room; it is even different from the mirror room at Coburn, which seemed to float in nothing, like a capsule lost below the sea; no, this is a jail cell at the very fringes of existence.

So what is jailed here?

Her eyes struggle to make sense of the space: is this chamber vastly huge, or tiny? When she looks in one direction it feels like a cathedral vault, yet in another it is like a kitchen cupboard.

Maybe it is big to me, she thinks, but tiny to whatever is trapped here.

But still the question remains—what is trapped here? The room appears empty, and there are no doors or windows, no hiding places of any kind. Is she alone? She does not think so: she does not feel alone. Whatever is here is watching her.

Helpless, Mona keeps slowly turning around, yet on each turn her eye wanders back to the pile of rabbit skulls. Finally she stops turning and walks to them.

She picks one up. Looks at it. Then, very quickly, everything begins to vibrate.

Without any warning, she’s suddenly in another part of the rounded chamber, looking in a different direction. It takes her a moment to reorient herself.

She looks in her hand. The rabbit skull is gone.

She returns to the pile and picks up another. For a moment there is nothing, and then everything begins to vibrate again like she’s stuck in a paint shaker, and before she can do more she’s staring into the stone wall of the chamber. Once more she has been transported to a different part of the room. Her fingers clutch nothing, for again the rabbit skull is gone.

In the inexplicable manner of dream logic, she begins to understand:

The skulls are not skulls. They look like skulls, but they aren’t, not really. They’re doors. Little tiny doors that, when activated, take you to this place. But when they’re activated here, they can’t bring you far at all, can they?

Maybe they bring you halfway, thinks Mona, and allow whatever is in here to