American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,231

he shakes his head, dissatisfied. “Are we too near the wall?” he asks.

Mona is too fatigued by the blood loss to answer, but of course even if she had the strength, she wouldn’t.

“I think we are too near the wall,” says the man thoughtfully, “for the full range of motion.” He pushes her chair over to the center of the room. Mona’s eye registers movement to her right, but it’s only their reflection in the lens. In it, she sees her wrists are bound to the back of the chair by thick ropes. She can also see the doorway out to her left, and beside it there is indeed a small black box. Beside this box, she sees, are her rifle and her Glock.

The man in the soft brown sweater walks to the box, opens it, and says, “Ah.” He scratches his head pensively. Then he takes out three different knives, examines them carefully, and selects the largest one. The other two he places on the ground beside the box.

As he goes through this scrupulous procedure, Mona flexes her fingers. To her surprise, they can move, though she feels very weak. She paws at the seat of the chair, where Mrs. Benjamin wedged the mirrors. She can manage to grasp and retrieve only one, in her right hand; her left remains disturbingly dead, but then it was the one that got tapped.

The man in the soft brown sweater holds up the big knife, and slashes it through the air. “Cut,” he says. “Cut! Or—perhaps like a surgeon?” He makes a small, dainty slice in the air, and says, with great delicacy: “Cut.”

Jesus, thinks Mona. He must be one of the really young ones…

But what is she going to do with just one lens? She’s only done this once before, and then she had to have two lenses to get anything to move…

She realizes she’s staring at her reflection in the big lens.

Oh, she thinks.

“Cut,” says the man in the soft brown sweater. He wheels to look at her. “Cut!” he says, and swipes the blade through the air. “I’ve never killed one of you before. Is it messy?”

Mona ignores him. She tries to concentrate on wriggling her right wrist around to rotate her little lens toward the big one…

“I bet it is,” he says. “You’re all full of… fluid. Matter. Hm.” He looks down at his sweater. He plucks the front and stretches it out. “Hm,” he says again.

Is it pointed in the right direction? She can see part of the face of the hand mirror (or hand lens) in the reflection of the big lens. Two little bubbles of space, floating free and unattached in the air…

She remembers the nursery. The face of the woman who looked so much like her.

Because it was you, she thinks.

Stop. Don’t think about that.

She thinks she has the angles right, so she tries to concentrate. But this time it’s not hard at all: she senses immediately that the big lens is a different animal altogether. Using the hand mirrors in Mrs. Benjamin’s house was like using tweezers to pick up pebbles, but this thing is a fucking bulldozer on and rumbling and ready to go, leaping at the slightest touch of the pedal. The challenge won’t be getting it to work, but controlling it.

The man in the brown sweater is now carefully removing his sweater, but he hasn’t thought to put down the knife, which makes it pretty tough on him.

Mona focuses on one of the little knives next to the black box. For a long time, nothing happens. But then it appears to grow just slightly, slightly transparent…

She opens her left hand wide. I hope I get the right part in my fucking hand, she thinks, otherwise I’m going to cut my palm wide open.

“Ah!” says the man. He’s finally gotten one arm and his head out of his sweater. “There we go!”

Come on, come on.

The knife flickers. Then she feels something hard and cold in her left hand. She begins to close her fingers around it…

… but just as she does, she sees something in the big lens. The lens, she thinks, is a bit like a door, and this one’s been left slightly ajar, opening onto wherever it opened onto last. It’s like looking at something down a long, dark hallway (and Mona isn’t really looking at all, except possibly with the little dark eye inside of her), but she thinks she’s starting to understand.

The lens opened onto a place