American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,223

far too early to be outdoors in Wink.

Mrs. Benjamin is sure she can bear it no more when they come upon a small hole in the side of a cliff. And when they enter the tunnel, she immediately feels that she is being brought to something…

Big.

The walls of the tunnel fall away as they enter a vast space. Mrs. Benjamin can hear noises from the sides and the ceiling, chitterings and chirps, and she looks up and sees…

“The children,” she says softly. “The young ones. They’re all here.”

“Yes,” says the woman.

“You brought them here? Why?”

“For that,” says the woman, and she points ahead.

Something takes form in the darkness—something colossal and primitive, as if the pieces of Stonehenge had been disassembled and piled together into some sort of organic shape…

Like a person, Mrs. Benjamin thinks. Like a huge person lying there in the darkness, each curve and bulge composed in increments of sharp, ninety-degree angles. And as Mrs. Benjamin comes closer, she sees that the massive stones are actually made of small metal blocks of varying sizes, but all in the same proportions as the one she now holds in her arms…

Yet she sees none as big as the one she holds. The rest are all tiny, tiny things…

“It must have taken years,” she murmurs.

“More,” says the woman. “Decades. Once I knew the pieces of Her were here, in Wink, it was just a matter of finding them. It ruined the bodies I used—the hosts. Burned their hands, burned right through their bones. So I had to talk a few of the young ones into helping me—the ones small enough to have come here in their original forms. The pieces did not burn them.

“The young ones gladly helped me. They hate it here as much as I do, did you know that? They hate being told they have to hide in the woods. They aren’t allowed to playact like you and Weringer and Macey and all the rest. So we all labored, in the dark, at the fringes of the town, building the thing you all had given up on so long ago.”

The shapes of the children stream down from the walls and the ceiling. They crawl across the cavern floor to her, and in one mass reach forward with claws and limbs unlike any on Earth, take her monstrous burden, and carry it to the giant lying in the dark. Mrs. Benjamin, relieved of the weight, falls to her knees. She watches as her youngest siblings hoist the huge block of metal up, over the giant’s shoulder, towards its chest.

“I’d been looking for that piece for so long,” says the woman. “I knew it had to be somewhere. I could feel it. But it was hidden from me. By Parson, of course—the reluctant bastard. I don’t know how he found it, and I don’t know how he managed to move it, but he must have known what he’d found. Otherwise, why hide it at all? He must have known it was Mother’s heart. Yet when he ‘died,’ it was an easy thing to find it.”

The children lower the huge block down, and slide it into some shaft in the giant’s chest. There is the hiss of escaping air as the block glides down, and finally a soft thunk as it falls into place. And then things… change.

Just slightly. The giant does not come to life. But it seems to soften, its edges and curves becoming distinctly more organic. It is, Mrs. Benjamin understands, almost whole.

“Now what will you do?” she asks, panting.

“Oh, now you are a willing helper? After all these years?”

Mrs. Benjamin lifts and drops her arms—What else is there for me to do? “Wasn’t it the last piece?”

The woman stares off into the darkness. Her face is hidden in shadow. She says, “No. Second.”

“What?”

“The second-to-last,” she says softly. “It’s looking for the last piece now. Mother is. She’s alive now, blindly seeking Her host. It will just take one more thing.” She walks back toward the entrance to the cave. “Come,” she says. “I will show you.”

Mrs. Benjamin limps after. But now she can feel it. Something is happening. Not here, but

(otherside)

(elsewhere)

(the betweenplace)

(where a single eye)

(great and dark and gleaming)

(slowly opens)

(for the first time after)

(a long sleep)

(and begins roving, whirling)

(spinning blindly)

(feverishly seeking)

(a way in)

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

Time stretches on in the dark. On and on and on.

More than once Mona goes into a fit of rage, kicking at everything in the car, breaking the wiring to the taillights, grinding the