American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,79

glimpse of the lightning storm she’s heard so much about. “I mean, is it possible I imagined it?” she asks. “I got told about the storm so many times, maybe I just thought up what it’d look like and then… hallucinated it.”

“Hm,” Parson says slowly. “No. I doubt that.”

“You do?” she says, relieved. “Then what could it have been? How could I see something like that?”

Parson is still for a long, long time. He looks at Mona, and though she once suspected he was senile she now feels a terrible intelligence in that gaze, like he is trying to silently communicate many things to her. “You know by now that Wink is… different. Correct?”

She wonders what that means, but says, “I… think so.”

“There are some things I can discuss about it, Miss Bright, and some things I cannot. I am not permitted to, I should say. But, since you have experienced this firsthand… I do not feel I would be giving you information you are not already privy to.” He takes another contemplative sip of coffee. “You probably will not believe it, I expect.”

“I might.”

“We shall see,” he says, indifferent. “In my time here, I have found that there are places in Wink where things do not precisely work right. Not like pipes or plumbing or electricity. Specifically, time no longer works right.”

“Time?”

“Yes. Please forgive me, I am not familiar with all of the terminology, so… here. Imagine time as a clock, with many gears and wheels—an easy enough metaphor, I imagine—but some gears have some damage or imperfection in them that causes them to sometimes catch, and skip back several notches, and run again. Do you see?”

“I certainly fucking don’t.”

“What I am saying,” he says, “is that what you experienced was not, I feel, a hallucination, or a symptom of some madness within your”—he thinks for a while, searching for the word—“ brain, but rather you were witness to this occasional skipping of the gears. The time where you were was damaged, so you saw something that had happened already. It is common enough, I expect, though understandably you were quite perturbed.”

The wind rises outside the motel. It sounds unusually sharp, and even Parson appears a bit disturbed by it.

“How can time be damaged?” asks Mona. “You can’t hurt time, like it’s some… like it’s a fucking engine or something.”

Parson raises an eyebrow—And you would know this how?

“Wink is goddamn weird, but it can’t be… you can’t have something like that happen. Things like that aren’t real.”

“I said I did not think you would believe it,” he says mildly. “It is always possible for time to be nonlinear. Some perceive time to be in a straight line—others perceive it as having many different branches, like those of a tree, leading to could-have-beens and might-have-beens and should-have-beens and so on. The idea of seeing the past is not an extraordinary one.”

“Are you really saying I saw the past?”

“A few seconds of it. Unfortunately for you, the past in that place was quite troubled. I think if you saw the past of someplace else—say, some park or closet—you would have hardly noticed anything at all. You would have simply experienced some feeling of wrongness, like there was a change in light, before things reverted to normal. The past, for you people, is often not very different from the present, beyond some superficial differences.”

Mona remembers the way the town was lit up with flaming houses, and how the lightning slowly snaked down to brush the earth… “So that was the thunderstorm?”

Parson shrugs. “You saw it. I did not.”

Yet Mona knows she saw something worse than the burning town, and the charred girl in the tub. “Do you know… if, when the storm came, there was something on the mesa? Something standing there, like a person would? But… bigger? Much, much bigger?”

Parson gives her a very closed look and shrugs again.

“You don’t know?”

His face grows grave. “I cannot say.”

“You can’t say, or you don’t know?”

Parson frowns and sips his coffee, but does not look her in the eye.

“So how does something like time get damaged?”

Now Parson looks positively anxious. Outside the wind keeps rising, and there is a burst of static on the radio. “I am not permitted to say,” he says.

“What do you mean? Why not?”

“I am sorry. But it is not… allowed,” he says, and when he sees Mona’s irritated glare, he adds, “I cannot. There are rules.”

“What the hell do you mean? Whose fucking rules?”

He blinks slowly and exhales, as