American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,212

that, perhaps, has left some vestige of itself behind.

The boy turns and marches away, across the street and down the sidewalk and into darkness.

Some places in Wink are more than one place. Some places take you places you never expected. Rooms within rooms, doors within doors, worlds hidden within a thimble or a teacup.

You just have to know where to look.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

Mona looks at the screen, but she does not see it: she looks through it, beyond it, ears ringing with the amplified words she’s just heard.

She hears herself say: “What?”

Kelly looks back at her, face kindly and anxious. “Oh, my dear. Don’t say what like that. It can’t be that much of a surprise to you. You knew. You felt it in your bones when you came here. Something resonated inside of you—something woke up, poked its head out of its dark hole, and recognized what it saw. You knew you’d come home. Didn’t you?”

“What are you… What are you saying that I…”

“Oh, I’m sure you passed all your physicals,” says Kelly. “Blood pressure, check. Cholesterol, check. Proper reflexes. Good eyesight. You are, no doubt, a person. Or at least you register as a person here, in this little place, and don’t set off any alarms. And I’m sure that, if someone were to take your blood, you’d register as Laura Alvarez’s progeny with absolutely no doubt.

“But Laura Alvarez wasn’t your real mother, Mona. She wasn’t what bore you, shaped you, made you. And you aren’t just a person. There’s more to you. Parts you didn’t know were there, and never used. But they’ve always been there, Mona.”

“You’re crazy,” says Mona. “That’s fucking crazy.”

“Please think, Miss Bright,” says Kelly. “When you came to Wink, you sometimes looked at a thing and saw two things, two different objects or places somehow occupying the same physical space. Did you not?”

“That’s because of that fucking mirror trick Mrs. Benjamin showed me.”

“No. If anything, that mirror trick activated something in you. How did you think you were able to do the trick itself? You made something in her house suddenly appear in two places at once, didn’t you? Isn’t that, well… quite an unusual talent?”

“That was her. She did that to me!”

“No,” says Kelly calmly. “It was a test. She realized there was something different about you. And she was right.

“The things that make us us, Mona—the characteristics that make my family so esteemed, so privileged—they don’t show up on any CAT scan, or any blood test. They have nothing to do with this shoddy, muddy, physical world. They transcend them. You transcend them. Less than most of my family—much less than me, of course—but it’s there. What’s that word Parson tried so hard to tell you? Ah, I remember it now—pandimensional.” He says it with relish, like an exotic, foreign term. “Miss Mona, you are, to a very slight degree, pandimensional. Not all of you is here. Some of you, some functioning part of your being, is elsewhere. Because you are Mother’s. Because you are my sister, my kin. And isn’t it so good, to finally find a place where you belong?”

Mona feels nothing—there is nothing she can feel, not anymore, especially at this insane suggestion. Is this thing really suggesting she is like the vague, shadowy monsters lurking in the mountains of this town? That she is connected to those horrific, fleshy, wheedling beasts occupying the skulls of Parson, and Mrs. Benjamin, and whoever else besides? Or, worse, the things that operate them, those beings and shapes she glimpsed in that place with the red stars and the barren earth?

It’s impossible. That can’t be right. It can’t. She’s just an unemployed drifter, for Christ’s sakes. She’s not a… a…

Then Mona remembers the dream she had the last night in her mother’s house: walking down the hallway and seeing the mirror-version of herself pluck the light from the bulb in the ceiling and shove it down her throat, its radiance filtering through all her tissues and membranes in a soft pink glow…

And she understands now: that dream made sense. It was a sense Mona could not articulate, could not even name, but the dream acknowledged a deep, sad feeling that has, over time, pervaded every part of her life:

She is empty. And that emptiness makes her monstrous.

She thought she felt this way because of her lost daughter, all the promise and hope of a new life and new love wiped away in a burst of chrome and glass. But perhaps not. Perhaps