American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,84

in the bedroom but often in the bathroom, which Mona began to think of as a genuine death trap for the elderly after she found her third limp, starving octogenarian curled around the toilet with a broken leg or hip or skull. Having toured the homes of the elderly in the worst, most bizarre way possible, she doesn’t find anything all that extraordinary about this one, beyond its size: the old photos, trophies, stuffed fish and animal heads, and Tiffany crystal lamps are all de rigueur, in Mona’s experience.

But that doesn’t mean finding this key is easy. She checks all the places she’d expect it to be—desks, mattresses, sofas, drawers, wall safes (of which there are none, but she pushes aside each hanging picture to make sure)—but she doesn’t find a damn thing. As far as she can tell, there are no deceptive security measures in this old man’s house. Unless he’s got a hollowed-out book somewhere, but being as he owned tons of musty old tomes Mona wants to eliminate all other possibilities first before she starts flipping through his collection.

She checks, then rechecks, then re-rechecks all the rooms, starting with the first floor and moving to the second, and it’s on what has to be the fourth round that she notices something she missed. She’s walking from the library to the bedroom, and she glances to the side and sees that the hallway she previously thought led to the bathroom does not: now it appears to keep going, and never arrives at a bathroom at all, and whereas before it was only about ten feet long now it is nearly a hundred, and dark and lined with many doors.

She isn’t disturbed by this, initially. Mona’s very observant, but she knows she’s capable of making mistakes, even big ones like missing a whole hallway. Yet as she starts to explore this hallway she realizes two things:

1) She can remember exactly where the bathroom door was, yet now there’s no sign of any bathroom at all, and 2) She can’t shake the feeling that this hallway is actually quite a bit longer than the whole house.

She goes to one door and opens it and shines her flashlight in. Inside is yet another library, except it is much, much bigger than the last one, and one whole wall is an enormous crystal window. The room is lit with pink-white moonlight traced with intricate designs from the glass, and there is a brass telescope set before the window, pointing off at one dark corner of the sky. An observatory, she thinks, though she notices there’s some artwork in here, too: sculptures made of black stone sit on top of the bookcases. Initially she thinks they’re just abstract art, a collection designed around a single theme (amoebic or microcellular life, she thinks), but she cannot help but feel that the sculptor was not sculpting from sheer inspiration: there is a familiarity and intelligence to the sculptures, as if the artist worked with subjects, which is bizarre, as Mona cannot imagine any organism with so many unnecessary tails or fins. Either way, she doesn’t think anyone would hide a key in here.

She continues on down the hallway and opens the next door. The room within is dark, and she shines her flashlight in and sees it is a large storage room with many rolls of fancy fabric stacked along the walls. She unrolls one partially and sees that it’s a tapestry, like the medieval kind, but she doesn’t think there was ever a medieval tapestry like this: it is done in what appears to be different shades of black, if such a thing could even be possible. It’s sort of like a Magic Eye poster, because when she stares at it long enough she begins to see the hints of an image. After a moment she realizes it’s a large city laid out under a black sky. The structures are strange, however: there is almost something aquatic to their design, resembling a mass of growth from a coral reef more than any city Mona’s seen before. She checks out a few more tapestries (the one of the tree with the unsightly white fruit is especially disturbing to her) before continuing to the next room.

This room appears to be devoted to beer-brewing, or at least something-brewing, and if she’s right then Weringer must’ve been thinking about opening his own goddamn brewery, as this is no small-time operation: there are kegs and barrels and coils of