American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,58

up ever so slightly. A blade of light pokes through, and he squints to see through it.

His window is on the ground floor, and he can see the edge of the forest just beyond his house. There’s a figure standing just beside the trunk of one tree: a white hand is resting against its bark and is barely caught by the luminescence of the streetlight.

The hand rises and gestures to him, telling him to come out, and his heart nearly stops. He should never have looked through the blinds, he thinks. This was all a huge mistake…

The figure seems to grow frustrated at his lack of response. It gestures again, and Joseph is just about to shut the blinds when the hand’s owner steps out into the light.

It is Gracie. She is dressed in black, except for a checked skirt. Her skin is paler than usual. She looks almost bloodless in the streetlight. She gestures to him again.

This worries Joseph: they shouldn’t be seeing one another after Macey caught them, and it’s definitely not a night to be going out. He glances around at the trees, then pulls his blinds up and opens his window.

“What are you doing?” he hisses as Gracie approaches. “Go back home, Gracie! It’s dangerous out!”

“Not for me, it isn’t,” she says. There is something soft and hollow in her voice. “Come out with me. I need to talk to you.”

“What? Are you insane? I can’t come out in this!”

“You can if I’m with you,” says Gracie. “Come out, Joseph. You won’t be harmed.”

“Mr. Macey caught us, though. We can’t risk it.”

“Mr. Macey’s what I want to talk to you about.”

He looks at the trees bending in the wind. They bend so much he’s sure they’ll break. “They’re angry,” he says softly.

“They aren’t angry,” she says. “They’re scared. Scared and confused. Come out with me.”

Joseph looks into her eyes. There is something new there, something that shouldn’t be. It’s as if there’s a flaw in their color that’s appeared overnight. “All right,” he says.

He puts on some slippers and climbs out the window to her. She holds out a hand for him, then leads him away into the woods.

The woods are cold and strange in the night. The way the wind runs through them makes it sound as if they are filled with voices. Sometimes he and Gracie pass through a glade and it looks like no place on earth: the stones are black and shiny, and boulders with queer angles lean drunkenly against the night sky. Joseph smells the air and realizes it has that electric, ionized scent to it, and he understands she is leading him through No-Go Zones, one after the other. But these are ones he has never seen before, ones no one in town might even know exist. He is almost faint with fear at the idea of it.

“Where are you taking me, Gracie?” he asks.

“To the lake, to talk,” she says. “In quiet. There are too many eyes here in the woods. Too many eyes in town, too, too many ears listening to everything and everyone.”

“And the lake will be safe?”

“Safer. Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because no one wants to be near the lake,” she says simply.

The woods go on and on. Joseph never knew they were so big. But then, he has never really ventured into them before. As a young boy he always wanted to, for what child would turn down an untamed kingdom just beyond his doorstep? But it was drilled into him from the start that his life, like everyone’s in Wink, was to be anchored to the streets and sidewalks and well-lit areas, places of sunlight and fresh breeze. The other places, the places in the forest and those hidden in the canyons, well… those just weren’t theirs to have.

Gracie holds up a hand, and they stop. She places a finger to her lips. Then she looks up and scans the pines above them. Joseph looks with her, but sees nothing. It feels like they’ve been looking forever when they hear a sound coming from the treetops.

It’s an awful sound, one that makes Joseph’s teeth hurt, like someone’s taken a swarm of some particularly vicious cousin of the cicada, tossed them all in a bag, and given the bag a shake, pissing them off. And yet Joseph feels there are words in that buzz. The thing in the trees is calling out a message, like a warning—This territory is mine. Stay off.

Gracie motions to him to stoop down low,