shifting in discomfort…
No, she wants to say. Don’t show me this. Don’t you show me this.
The child in the crib moans. It lifts its head. There is the gleam of a tiny blue eye peering through the crib bars, and a mass of dark, moist hair.
No, no, no.
The child blinks in the sunlight, and wrinkles its nose.
“Is that it?” asks one of the men in sweaters.
“Yes,” snaps the woman in the panama hat. “Keep concentrating!”
A tiny, frowning mouth opens, and allows out a reedy mewl.
Then the child flickers, like an error in a filmstrip—the child is there, then it isn’t.
A voice sings from somewhere: “Coming! Coming!” But it didn’t come from inside the lens chamber. It was in the room in the lens, the nursery on the other side…
And Mona knows that voice. She’s heard it before.
What is this? What is happening?
“Concentrate,” says the woman in the panama hat.
The humming in the room grows louder. The child in the crib briefly grows faint, and when it does…
Did Mona just see movement in the glass tub? Did the lake of blood there twitch?
“Keep going,” whispers the woman in the panama hat. She speaks in the voice of someone on the verge of orgasm.
The child in the crib flickers once more. It begins bawling loudly.
“Coming! Almost done, little one! Just one more second!” shouts the voice in the lens.
The child slips out of the world in the lens… and very briefly, Mona sees a tiny hand in the glass tub, floating up out of the sea of blood to paw at the walls…
Oh, my God, no.
“Almost there,” whispers the woman in the panama hat.
The child in the lens, now crying hysterically, blinks out of existence once more…
Mona remembers what Mr. First said: It could change the very nature of reality, like the finger of a god.
And Coburn’s words: And in that moment, the thing it is examining is shoved—partially—into all those various other realities as well. So it could exist in a variety of states, places, et cetera. Even times, possibly, though of course that is quite hard to quantify…
No, no, thinks Mona.
The surface of the blood begins sloshing back and forth. Something in the tub is struggling, flailing…
It’s like lubricant, thinks Mona. Easing transition from one place to another…
Then someone steps into view in the lens. Though Mona is barely conscious, her eyes spring wide at the sight of this new person. At first she thinks it is her mother, for it looks so much like Laura Alvarez… even though this person is shorter and her skin is so much browner…
This new woman looks in the crib, and sees the child is missing. She freezes.
At the exact same time, the woman in the panama hat darts forward, reaches into the tub of blood, and pulls out something red and dripping and coughing…
A child. A naked human child, which is hacking and coughing horribly.
The woman in the lens turns around. Mona sees her face.
“Is it alive?” asks one of the men.
Mona barely hears them. She is staring into the mirror. Because this new person is not Laura Alvarez. It is her—Mona Bright herself. Slightly fatter, with slightly fewer wrinkles, and slightly longer hair. But it is most certainly Mona Bright, staring around the room, anxious, worried, wondering where her child could be…
The bloody, dripping baby coughs again, then begins shrieking in fear.
“It’s alive,” says the woman in the panama hat. Her hands and sleeves are soaked in blood, but she grins in manic triumph. “It’s alive. It’s a baby girl. It’s alive.”
The humming in the room stops. And the other Mona—the mother Mona, in her nursery, staring about in fear—fades from view, swallowed in a sea of shining silver as the lens reverts to its reflective state.
The woman in the panama hat begins laughing. “It’s here. She’s finally here. She’s coming!”
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
In the south of Wink, just below the skin of the earth under the highway crossroads, many eyes open in the dark.
The dark does not bother them. They were born in the dark. They have lived their whole lives in the dark. They were made for the dark and their hearts will always belong in the dark. So they open their eyes, and see:
Movement. Their creation is hissing. Melting. The blocks of metal (of Her) bubble at all the seams and edges, swirling together like boiling lead.
At first they are concerned: they chirp and tweet and grumble in the darkness, shifting in their roosts and rolling over one another in their