American Elsewhere

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 shriek of a terrified child, and Mona leaps out of bed.

She’s halfway up the stairs when she realizes she has her gun in her hand. Old habits die hard, she guesses, but she doesn’t have time to think about that because the person upstairs is screaming again. Mona wheels about when she reaches the second floor and homes in on the source.

She stops. The door to the lightning-struck bathroom is shut, but the light is on inside. She can see it through the cracks around and underneath the door. And someone on the other side is screaming.

She lowers her gun and slowly walks to the door. She places one hand on the knob, and remembers the image of her hollow reflection with carven-pumpkin eyes…

She braces herself, turns the knob, and throws the door open.

At first she can see nothing but smoke, but then a great gust of wind blows through the room and clears it out, and Mona sees there is someone in her tub, a child-size person looking away from her with its head bowed. But it is not a child, not anymore, for its scalp is black and smoking and its fingers are withered and Mona can see bone where its flesh has been burned away from its jaw. It hears Mona open the door and it turns to her and she sees it is a little girl, or it was once, but she sees its eyes have been burned out of its skull, leaving just gaping, blackened sockets, and it opens its mouth (its tongue singed and scarred) and takes a rattling breath and shrieks again, a cry of horrific pain and fear.

Initially Mona is too terrified to see anything more than the girl. But the little cop voice in her brain asks—Where did the wind come from?

And Mona lifts her eyes from the burned thing in the tub, and she sees that the wall is gone.

What is on the other side of the wall is the most awesome and horrifying sight she has ever witnessed.

It is a storm, but a storm like no other. Blue bashes of light erupt in the swirling dark clouds, and fires rage throughout Wink. One storm cloud shudders with lightning, and then the lightning slowly—not quickly, but slowly and gracefully—descends to touch the ground, like a soundless, blue-white finger of pure energy. And where it touches, flames sprout up and a pillar of smoke comes barreling up to join the dark sky.

So many buildings burn. There is so much smoke and so many dark clouds. Yet Mona feels there’s something else wrong, something larger, yet more subtle.

It takes her a bit to realize there’s been a change in the landscape on the horizon: the mesa is wrong. It’s not a mesa at all anymore, but a mountain. It no longer ends in a wide, flat top, but keeps ascending to a towering point. She can see the silhouette of it even from here, through the smoke and the fire and the clouds. It’s as if someone sneaked in and delivered a mountaintop while no one was watching.

The mountaintop trembles. What new catastrophe is this, Mona wonders? Is it an earthquake? Or an avalanche? Yet then the entire top shifts to one side, and while any glancing familiarity with physics would make one think the whole thing should come tumbling down now, it doesn’t. The mountaintop shifts back, swaying slightly, almost like a tree…

Then Mona spots some protrusions on the edge of the mountaintop. They are familiar. From this angle they appear to rise out of the slope and withdraw in an almost organic, reactive motion. And when she sees them, Mona’s mouth falls open.

Her mind staggers to understand it. It can’t be. That can’t have happened. Yet she knows what she saw. There was no mistaking the silhouette that rose up from the mountainside, then fell.

Fingers. Fingers from an enormous hand.

Mona stares at the fires and the mountain, dumbfounded. Then the girl in the tub howls again, jarring her from her fixation. “Jesus Christ,” Mona says, and she turns and bounds back downstairs to the phone, because she knows the limits of her first aid skills and that charred child is well beyond them.

The aquamarine phone is in the corner, as always, and she snatches it up and dials 911 on the rotary. There’s popping on the line, like the phone is trying to find a connection. Then it begins ringing, but no one answers.

“Come on, come on,” says Mona. She glances around fretfully.

Then she stops and lifts her head.

She listens.

There are no more screams, and the wind has died. Everything is silent.

The phone keeps ringing. She hangs up before anyone can answer. Then she walks to the window and looks out.

There are no fires, no blasts of lightning, no pillars of smoke. The night is calm and peaceful.

She stares out the window for a while, stupefied. Then she tilts her head, listening. She hasn’t heard a scream since she picked up the phone.

She walks to the foot of the stairs and looks up. She can see no lights on upstairs.

Her gun is still in her hand. She lifts it and places her finger just above the trigger. Then she begins silently moving upstairs.

The second floor is totally dark. She can hear no noise at all from any of the rooms. She slowly walks over to the bathroom. The door is shut, but didn’t she leave it open when she left? And there is no light on behind the door that she can see.

She puts her hand on the knob and, for the second time, thinks. Then she turns it and slowly pushes the door open.

She can see nothing, for the room is utterly dark. She waits a bit, then reaches out with one hand and turns on the light.

The bathroom is empty, and though the tub is still scorched the wall is whole and there is no smoke. She feels faint at the sight, and she totters forward and feels the wall with one hand. It is solid and firm.

Mona looks at her hand and tries again. The wall is still solid. Then she squats and feels the bottom of the tub. The porcelain is cold: it has not been used in hours at least.

Mona’s squat turns into a sit as she falls backward onto the floor of the bathroom. She sets the gun down on the floor with a clunk. She just sits there, unsure what to do next.

Finally she stands, gun in her hand, and walks downstairs and out the front door. She walks to the middle of the street and stares north. The mesa is there, and it’s definitely a mesa again, ending in a plateau.

She shakes her head. “No, goddamn it,” she says. “No. I am not crazy, no.”

She sprints across the street, flings open the door of the Charger, leaps in, and starts her up. And then Mona, defying every bit of advice everyone in Wink has given her, goes speeding off into the night.