American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,48

voice. “I would like to believe so, I must say. Then we could rest easy.”

“Something this important… I cannot help but think otherwise.”

“Why do you think her arrival is important?”

“She comes right after a death. A new face, after an old one is lost. It is too soon for me to feel comfortable about it.”

“Ah,” says the old woman’s voice. “So you think…”

“Exactly. She is not here by accident. She was brought here. This is someone’s doing, but I am not yet sure whose.”

Mona has no idea what they’re talking about, but she’s slowly becoming aware that the air on the back of her neck is nothing like that of the air-conditioning in the house. It is far too cold and dry. It feels like a wind out of a barren desert, one that has never known moisture in all its life. And she feels she has heard those voices before…

She begins to lift her head a little. She is not going to look, she is certain of that, because this is still just a dream. She’s just going to crack her eyes a little, and maybe something will just trickle in.

She cracks her eyelids. And something does indeed trickle in.

Mona is on her mattress, but she is not in her house: the mattress lies on a field of black stone, like volcanic basalt, its surface cracked into nearly perfect little hexagons. There is a red light shining down on the black stone field, and Mona keeps lifting her head until she spies a familiar sight: the red-pink moon, as fat as a happy tick, and just below it is the blue flicker of cloud lightning.

This is some dream, she thinks.

“Do you believe she has any involvement?” asks the voice of the old woman.

“I do not think she knows a thing,” says the man’s voice. “She is mostly confused, and sad. She is a broken thing.”

“So she poses no threat.”

“I did not say that. With so much recent madness, how are we to be sure what is a threat and what is not?”

“Hm. I believe I may wish to confirm for myself,” says the woman’s voice.

“I do not think it’d be wise to attempt anything dangerous now.”

“Oh, it wouldn’t be dangerous. At least, not for us…”

Mona is now sure these voices are familiar. Did she not once hear one of them offer her breakfast, and the other one offer her tea? Confused, she lifts her head higher and begins to roll over.

She sees there are two statues, one standing directly on either side of her, enormous ones done in odd shapes: one looks like a single queerly organic column, the other resembles a mammoth, headless bull with many limbs. They seem taller than the Statue of Liberty and the Sphinx, respectively, and appear to be made of the same black stone as the sunless wasteland. Both statues tower just above her, as if they were strolling by (if such things could stroll) and found her lying here and are investigating together. Yet the moon is just behind them, so she cannot see more of them as they look down on her…

“Wait,” says the man’s voice. “Is she looking at us?”

“Can she see us?”

“How can she—”

Then there is a flicker of movement, lightning-fast. It takes Mona’s brain a few moments to translate what it just saw, and though she cannot believe it her brain keeps on insisting it was real.

The statue that looked like a bull waved a limb. Which statues should not be able to do, she says to herself. If it really did wave a limb, then it could not be a statue at all, but…

Suddenly Mona is falling, plummeting away from the black wasteland and into darkness. She falls until she strikes her mattress—which is odd, because she is certain she was just lying on it—and she jerks awake with a gasp and looks around.

She is lying in the corner of the master bedroom of her new house. Though she could have sworn that just now she was not alone, she looks at all the dark corners and sees no one at all. The room, though spacious, is empty.

Then the braying, shrill peal of a bell splits the silence. Mona’s whole musculature flexes in surprise, causing a stab of pain in her belly and arm. Then the bell rings again, and she realizes it’s the aquamarine phone sitting in the dusty corner of her living room.

She goes to it and watches it ring four more times. Whoever it