American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,71

scalped finding it out. Is there anything you want us to do about it?”

There is another pause, this one the longest yet. He can tell they’re thinking very hard, wherever they are. He feels a little satisfied by that. It’s nice to see them confused.

Then it begins ticking again:

DO NOTHING

“That’s it?” says Bolan. “You want me to just sit tight? You can’t even tell me what’ll go down tomorrow?”

The response from the ticker is almost as short and sweet as the last one. It reads:

ABSOLUTE CHAOS

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

That night, Mona sleeps. It is, again, good sleep, hard and black and solid. And just as before, Mona dreams.

She dreams she is standing on the front walk to her mother’s house. It is night, and the trees dance in the wind. She can see there is a light on in the front window, and under the light is a mattress, and someone, a black-haired girl (a black just like her own hair), is sleeping there on her side with her face turned away from the window.

Mona walks up to the front door and places her hand on the knob. Then she looks back.

There are people in the street. They are watching her as if they expect something from her. They look a little like some people she’s seen around Wink, just acquaintances she’s met—there is Franklin the cook from Chloe’s, and Mrs. O’Cleary, who works part-time as the mail lady, and so on—yet their faces are obviously masks, masks made of papier-mâché with hard, ragged angles. Their eyes are dark and empty, their mouths twisted into queer frowns. Behind them, beyond the light of the streetlamp, are other figures watching her, but though she cannot see much of them in the darkness they do not look much like people. Some are low and many-armed. Others are tall and spindly as if they are made of glass. And somewhere behind them all is a fluting sound, like a broken pipe organ.

Mona turns back, and opens the door.

It does not open onto the foyer. Rather, it opens onto a single long, dark hallway. Shaded lamps on the wall cast little pools of yellow light. Mona can see there is something at the end of the hallway, maybe a light, but she can’t tell what it is.

She glances back at the paper-faced people. They stare back at her, expressionless. She turns away again and walks down the hallway.

The hall seems to go on forever. At some point the floors and ceiling begin shuddering, as if there is an earthquake nearby. Puffs of dust twirl down from the ceiling, and somewhere there is a low rumble.

At the other end of the hallway is a mirror. Not just a mirror—a bathroom. She sees the drooping, Daliesque faucets and realizes it’s the upstairs bathroom, the one that got struck by lightning. Mona can see herself approaching in the mirror… yet is it her? As she walks by one lamp it looks almost like her mother, smiling at her…

She comes before the mirror and gazes into it. The rumbling increases, and the walls shimmer. Then her reflection smiles at her, raises a hand, and waves.

Mona looks at it for a moment, then waves back.

Her reflection raises a finger—Watch. Then it reaches up to the light in the ceiling and plucks at it. The light goes out in the mirror, and suddenly there’s a tiny pearl of luminescence in her reflection’s hand, like she’s stolen the light out of the bulb.

Mona glances up at the lightbulb on her side of the mirror. The light is still on, un-stolen.

Her reflection holds up the pearl of light, showing it to Mona. Then she opens her mouth wide, and she lifts the pearl up and places it far back in her throat, past her tongue, and when she does her eyes and nose light up and Mona sees that her reflection is utterly hollow, and where she once had eyes she has ribbed, cavernous sockets, like those of a jack-o’-lantern. Her reflection keeps shoving the light down her throat, farther and farther, and then she tilts her head forward and stares at Mona with those empty eye sockets, a hollow puppet-person with barely any skin…

Then Mona hears the screaming, and she wakes up.

She’s in her bedroom, on her mattress. The wind is whipping about the house, and every window is filled with rustling trees, and at first Mona thinks she imagined the screams. But then a fresh peal rings out from upstairs, the high-pitched