American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,86

does have some security measures set up in this house. They’re just of a kind she’s never seen before.

Even though Mona has just encountered something totally inexplicable, just as Parson said she would, the calm, cool-eyed part of her brain goes on thinking, and she listens to it, grateful for any morsel of sanity.

He was expecting intruders, it says. He knew someone was going to come for him. In fact, she’s willing to bet the man falling into that chasm was one of them. It just wasn’t enough to save Weringer’s life.

This is all a lot worse and a lot bigger than she realized.

“Let’s get this fucking key and get out of here,” she says quietly, and she steels herself and continues down the hallway.

She ignores the doors on either side. These are just storage and entertainment rooms, she thinks, or probably more traps. She wants to see what’s at the very end of this hallway, if it does have an end.

And getting to the end proves surprisingly difficult. It is impossible to describe, but though the floor appears level and flat, she feels the hallway twisting around her as she moves. Her eyes and inner ear report a standard hallway with an even floor, but some instinctive part of her brain believes she’s walking up a steep hill. At another part she feels as if the hallway is tilting to the side, and she almost has to lean on the doors and walls to move forward, yet everything tells her it’s still totally flat, a normal hallway.

It’s as if some invisible dimension of the hallway, one she’d never normally notice, is twisting more and more the farther she walks into it. It’s like the chasm she saw in that room: the physics are completely fucked, as if space here can be manipulated like clay.

The walls themselves begin to change. They are not white wood anymore: now they are made of dry-stacked stone. Mona isn’t sure if it’s a modern look or a primitive one. The doors, however, remain the same boring white ones with brass doorknobs.

She begins to wonder where the hallway is taking her. She starts thinking it’s going someplace that’s not in Weringer’s house. Maybe someplace that’s not even in Wink.

Eventually the hallway sorts itself out, deciding that it liked it when the floor was down and the walls were on the sides, and it feels like she’s on firm ground again. Panting, she shines her light ahead and sees a golden twinkle: it is the knob of a door standing at the very end of the hallway.

“Finally,” she says, and she walks to it and places her hand on the doorknob. She waits. There is no thrill of fear, no burst of goose bumps. Whatever intuition helped her avoid falling into the trap before, it is silent now.

She opens the door and shines her light in. She is both surprised and a little disappointed by what she finds, for it is a rather plain, boring bedroom, with pink-beige walls and ghastly frilly lamps. But she suspects that this one is the master bedroom, the sleeping place of Weringer himself, and if he cared about this key as much as Parson suggested then it’s likely he kept it somewhere in here.

She walks into the room, shining the flashlight around. It is like the rest of the house outside of this one queer hallway: a little drab and dull, a place for a quiet elderly man to putter around harmlessly. There is the arrhythmic ticking of an ancient clock from the wall. The bedspread is pale blue, the window above it layered in pink, frothy drapes, an odd touch for an old man.

Yet as she approaches the bed, it seems to get farther and farther away. The entire room seems to be getting bigger with each step she takes. The boring, empty walls fall back, and soon the sound of the clock is echoing off huge stone walls…

Stone walls? thinks Mona.

Then it happens again, and she sees double: she is standing in a small, dull bedroom in one way, but in another, she is standing within a huge cavern of black stone, one with stalagmites like church columns that glitter in the light of her flashlight. There are low, guttering fires burning in the many atria of the cavern, but they seem to cast no light. But there at the center of the cavern she can see a huge, blank stone shelf, one nearly the size of a