American Elsewhere

CHAPTER TWENTY




Okay, so.

Mona knows now, or at least generally feels, that she isn’t insane. She is not hallucinating, nor is she schizophrenic, nor is any of this a result of years of profound and bitter depression, depression she thought she was escaping when she came to Wink. No, she now feels that this madness is being done by Wink itself, as if the little town is toxic or soporific in some way and she’s slowly being drugged or poisoned just by being here. Why this town has such an effect on her, she isn’t sure; but she knows now that it’s not some genetic defect in her brain that may one day send an impulse to her hand telling it to please pick up that loaded Remington in the closet, lift it to her temple, and await the hot kiss of cordite-perfumed lead. Which is a pretty big relief.

But if she’s not crazy, she thinks as she drives the Charger through town with evening rushing on above her, then why is she still here? And, more importantly, why is she suddenly so cavalier about committing very prosecutable breaking and entering on behalf of a semi-lucid old man who runs an empty motel on the outskirts of this town? Because, she reminds herself as she parks her car on the side of the road next to a steep cliff, that’s exactly what she’s about to do.

She gets out and peers down the cliff and sees the home nestled in the pines below. It is a huge, sprawling mansion, and though she cannot see much of it from here she can tell it’s one of those houses in Wink that’s absolutely perfect, a house that should exist only in the backgrounds of fashion magazines and Rockwell paintings.

It’s getting quite dark out by now, and she checks her equipment one last time. She’s wearing her black boots, a pair of dark jeans, and a dark coat she borrowed from Parson. Around one shoulder is a black, compact backpack that contains a set of improvised lockpicks (and Mona, having worked quite a few burglaries in her time as a cop, knows these are frequently all that’s necessary), a small flashlight, a utility knife, and a pair of gloves. Tucked in the back, as usual, is her Glock, but she hopes to Christ she’s not going to need it. Mona has never shot anyone, and she doesn’t want her first time to occur when she’s doing something ridiculously, ridiculously illegal.

“I do not expect for there to be anyone there, or anyone watching,” Parson told her back at the motel. “The death happened weeks ago, and I expect all eyes will be on Macey’s residence, since his passing is so much more recent. So getting in and out of Weringer’s house should be no issue.”

“The way you say that makes me think there’s problems somewhere else,” Mona said.

“You are correct,” Parson said. “It’s what’s inside the house that may be an obstacle for you.”

“I thought you said Weringer was just an old man who lived by himself?”

Parson squirmed uncomfortably, and Mona knew they were skirting one of the many subjects he couldn’t discuss directly. “There are very few ‘justs’ in Wink,” he said. “Let me simply say that what you encounter in the house, even if Weringer no longer lives there, will probably be unlike many things you have ever seen before.”

“I really do not like being sent into anything blind,” she said to him. “If I wind up hurting someone doing this, I will be f*cking mad.”

But it’s what he said just after this that really got to her, Mona thinks as she begins sliding down the slope, grasping rocks and roots to slow her descent. For Parson just smiled, and said, “If it is any consolation, if you find anything within the house I doubt you would be able to hurt it at all.”

She comes to the base of the cliff and squats there, listening. She can hear no one nearby, nor can she see anyone. The fence of Weringer’s backyard starts just ahead. It’s made (of course) of perfect white pickets, but the advantage to this is that they have significant gaps between them, so she can see quite a bit of the house and the yard on the other side. The house is utterly dark and still, the yard totally disorganized but with plenty of cover.

Mona sighs a little, and, mentally kicking herself every step of the way, runs up and hops the fence.

She feels as if she’s just broken some solemn rule when she crests the top of the fence and lands on the ground on the other side. She looks around at the dark, quiet yard. It is overgrown with leafy brush, and an unpruned cottonwood leans drunkenly toward the house as if about to impart an impolite secret. She remembers what Parson said:

“What you are looking for is something that will not belong there at all. It will be a key, but not just any key: it will be a large, technical-looking key, like a key for some rare and extremely dangerous piece of equipment. Which it is, in a way. It will be unusually long and have many, many teeth, and its head will be striped yellow and black. And I expect that, if it is still there, Weringer will have attempted to hide it very, very well.”

“And what is this key to?” Mona asked.

“A place,” said Parson. “A place that has answers for you, and me.”

Answers for you and me, Mona thinks as she makes her way to the back door. She kneels and produces her lockpicks, and grasps the knob as she examines the lock. It’s as she reaches for the right pick that she twists the knob a little bit, and is surprised to find it gives.

She twists the knob all the way and gives the door a little push. It falls open.

Well, she thinks, that makes things a lot easier.

She slips inside and shuts the door behind her. She turns on her flashlight and sees she’s in the kitchen, and it’s done in that nauseating sort of faux French country that requires lots of rustic chicken decorations. A genuine Kit-Cat Klock hangs on one wall, tail at an angle, eyes suspiciously at one side. Mona’s about to start forward when she hears something: there’s a song being played somewhere in the house.

She calms herself, and prowls forward through the rooms, all of which are a little shabby but quaint. The song is coming from an ancient-looking record player, which, defying all logic, is playing twenty seconds of “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” over and over again. Mona flashes the room with her light, sees no one, and approaches.

Immediately she spots the signs of a struggle. She can see where the couch has been moved, its clawed feet out of place with the years-old indentations in the green shag carpet. She’s guessing someone bumped it, and bumped the record player in the process, which is why it’s stuck on repeat. It must have been playing this section of song for weeks, over and over again. Mona debates turning it off, but if there is someone else here (and there won’t be, she tells herself, but if there is) then whoever it is, they’ll definitely know they’re not alone if the music stops. So as much as it sets her teeth on edge, she lets it keep playing.

She begins searching for this key of Weringer’s. She’s not sure why Parson talked up the interior of this house so much, because to Mona it’s just another old-man house, and she’s been in plenty of those, mostly when the neighbors called the police because they hadn’t seen Mr. So-and-So in a while and could they please send someone out to check on him. And often she did find him, sometimes 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 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 f*cking Christ,” she says, and she almost sits down on the floor.

She was wrong, she realizes. Weringer actually 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 f*cking 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 f*cked, 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 football field, with many indentations in its surface from friction, as if something very big and very heavy has been laid down here again and again.

This is where he slept, says a little voice in Mona’s head.

She agrees, though she feels she has to correct it: Not a he. An it.

She walks toward the stone shelf. The spot from her flashlight is a tiny dot dancing in the gloom. She feels an immense pressure on her thoughts, as if the enormity of this place and what dwelt within it is so great her sanity cannot bear it, and surely she will snap…

Yet she does not. The vision releases her, and the room begins to resolve itself—or perhaps she is forcing it to resolve itself—and soon she is inside the boring old master bedroom again, standing just before the bed.

She knows this isn’t quite true. She knows, on some wordless level, that this room exists in two locations, as if one reality is hidden within another like a Russian nesting doll, or perhaps if you advance in one direction then reality itself expands inward (or perhaps outward) in an almost—what is the word—fractal manner.

She is not sure how, but she wills herself to stay within the bedroom and avoid the huge stone cavern. Just like swimming in a pool, she thinks, and staying out of the deep end. She walks to the nightstand and goes through its drawers. There is a copy of Southern Housekeeper and Gardener in one drawer, along with a box of Kleenex, but there is no key. Then she kneels and looks under the bed. There is nothing underneath it, but a thought hits her, and she lifts up the bedspread and reaches underneath the mattress and feels around.

Her fingers brush something long and thin and hard. Her heart leaps, and she thrusts her arm in, grabs the object, and pulls it out.

It is a key, just as Parson described. It is nearly six inches long with nearly two dozen impossibly complicated teeth, and its head is fat and striped diagonally in yellow and black. It appears scuffed and very old, yet she can feel the indentations of writing on the key’s head. She holds it up to the flashlight to try to read it.

She can make out a logo of some kind on the key, an atom encased in a smooth ray of light.

A place that has answers for you, and me.

“Goddamn it,” Mona says, and she turns the key over. Written on the other side is COBURN NATIONAL LABORATORY AND OBSERVATORY.