American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,85

tubing arranged across many shelves, and there’s a dripping sound coming from every direction. She considers looking through this room, but the stench from the barrels is so noxious she can’t bring herself to get past the threshold, and she happily shuts the door.

She goes to the next room and places her hand on the door, but freezes. The flashlight almost falls from her hand, and she stops breathing.

For some reason all the hair on her head and arms has just stood up, and she’s broken out in goose bumps. Her hand is clutching the knob so tightly it is beginning to hurt. She can see the white forms of her knucklebones poking through her skin. Though she does not know how, she is sure that there is something very wrong on the other side of this door.

Breathing hard, she stares at the knob in her hand, which is plain and unexceptional, just like the door. She leans forward and puts one ear to the door and listens.

She can hear something, very faintly, and it does not take her long to realize what it is.

Screaming, tinny and faint, like through an old radio. There is someone screaming on the other side of the door.

Mona takes a deep breath and opens it.

Immediately the screaming halts. The room is dark, and she takes out her flashlight and shines it about. It reveals a room almost exactly like the observatory from before, with the notable exception that there is a very large desk in the center, and when her flashlight beam crawls over the top she sees there is someone sitting behind it.

She jumps, and the person looks up. It is an old man, his face white and luminous in the beam of the flashlight. He stares at her, startled, and says, “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

Mona nearly falls over from shock. She gasps for a moment and says, “I’m sorry, I… I thought there was no one home.”

The old man looks at her keenly. He has a messy mop of gray hair, and his cheeks are red and happy. Yet there is something insubstantial about this man—and, indeed, about the entire room—that makes Mona feel like her flashlight is shining through him.

“Who are you?” she asks.

“I am Mr. Weringer,” he says. Then he smiles, the light glinting off his spectacles. The immediate switch from suspicious to pleasant is unnerving. “Please come in.”

Mona hesitates. “I thought you were dead,” she says. “I saw your funeral.”

The old man does not respond. He just keeps smiling at her from behind his desk. Then he says, again, “Please come in.”

“Who are you?” Mona asks for the second time.

The old man keeps smiling the exact same smile, but he tilts his head from one side to the other, a queerly avian gesture. Again: “Please come in.”

“Why don’t you come here?”

The smile, wide and innocent, does not twitch a bit. The old man tilts his head back the other way and blinks.

Then Mona feels it again: that same feeling she had in Mrs. Benjamin’s house with the mirrors, and when she saw the storm through the wall in her mother’s house. She sees two things at once: one is the library with the smiling old man behind the desk, and the second is…

A chasm. A deep, endless chasm, enormous and dark, and she is staring directly down into it, as if all dimensions are twisted beyond the threshold of that door and were she to pass through it she would begin falling, not down or up or to the side but just falling, falling forever. She realizes she can hear the faint screaming again, and she squints and can just make out a figure lost in the chasm, plummeting through all that empty black. It is a man, she thinks, writhing and tumbling as he falls, and she believes he has been falling for a long, long time.

Then the sight flickers, and she sees Weringer sitting behind his desk again, smiling that idiotic smile of his.

It’s a trap, she realizes: the man behind the desk is just an image, like a projection.

“Please come in,” says the old man kindly again.

Mona swallows. She is sweating very hard, powerfully aware of how close she came to utter annihilation just now. “No,” she says, voice trembling. “No, thanks.”

“Please come i—”

She slams the door shut and steps back, still breathing hard.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” she says, and she almost sits down on the floor.

She was wrong, she realizes. Weringer actually