American Elsewhere

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN




The door is made of dull metal and is striped like a yellow jacket. The neon-yellow bands run diagonally from its top right corner to its bottom left. There are old yellow block letters spray-painted at the top that read WARNING, but what they are supposed to be warning you about is not made clear. On the whole it is not a large door: it is about seven feet tall and three feet wide, and it’s set about a foot into the rock side of the mesa, by means of a construction method with which Mona is not familiar.

(And she thinks—Coburn is in the mesa? Like inside of it? Is the entire mesa hollow? She remembers an article she read about that particle accelerator thing in Europe, CERN or whatever—wasn’t it completely underground? Perhaps Coburn isn’t all that different—underground, yet also raised into the air.)

She is surprised by the size of the door. She expected it to be a loading door, but it’s obviously meant just for people. She wonders why.

But what is most surprising is that the door stands open about an inch or two. It has a huge, clunky doorknob, one of those kinds you usually see in really old public restrooms, but it is not engaged: someone forced the door ajar, probably by kicking at it, judging by the way the metal frame has bent. From the pile of dust built up at the bottom, it seems it’s been this way for some time.

The thing that Mona doesn’t like is the way the door was kicked open. Because, judging from the way the lock and frame are bent, whoever did it was kicking from the inside.

She reaches into her pocket and takes out the key Parson sent her to get. Since the lock is broken, it would appear the key is unnecessary. But then, Parson never explicitly said the key was for this door. She just assumed that was what he meant.

She examines the key and the lock. The lock is pretty basic; the key, however, remains an intimidating four-inch piece of industrial technology with about two dozen teeth.

No. No, this key is meant for something else. Something much more important.

“Shit,” says Mona.

She rubs the back of her neck. She doesn’t like this at all. This is worse than Weringer’s house. Even Parson, who is often so dismissive of the oddities happening around town, holds Coburn in some kind of reverence.

His words echo in her head until she feels she’s about to have a panic attack. She wishes now, more than anything, that she understood him more. She wishes she could grasp the meaning behind his little parable, which seems to have been so crucial that it drove him into a coma. And she is beginning to wish that she’d chosen to just beat it and leave town, leave this little clutch of shifting shadows and veiled words behind and find a new life somewhere else.

But another part of Mona knows that a new life isn’t coming. She’s used up all her wishes, all her fresh starts, and this is the last place to find anything that could remake her. And when she remembers the film she watched back in her mother’s house—the smoke-filled room, the glamorous, cheery woman striding in from the patio—she knows that there are secrets behind this door she simply must understand. Because unless she’s wrong, somewhere behind this surreal, forbidding door is the history of her mother, or at least a part of it. But that’s more than Mona’s ever had in her life.

She remembers Parson gave her one other clue, one she hasn’t had the time to look at yet. She sits down in the shadow of a large rock, reaches into her pocket, and pulls out his note cards.

She looks at the “Cat” card to see if she’s missed any hidden code, but if so a closer look doesn’t help. It appears to just be an innocuous and rather vapid definition of the word, like one a grade-schooler would make for a project.

She looks at the next card. She is not at all surprised to see that it is:

DOG

(noun)

A small domesticated carnivore, Canis familiaris, noted for its loyalty and servitude. Its puppies are a lot of fun!

“What the f*ck,” says Mona, shaking her head. She starts flipping through them. They are all fairly insipid and utterly useless. There is a card for “Octopus” (the mother dies after laying her eggs, which is quite sad), for “Sunshine” (it’s what makes plants green!), and for “Home” (where your family and friends are, and where everything makes sense). She looks at the definition for “Home” for a while. Maybe he’s coding something into the first letter of each word? But when Mona actually takes the time to test this idea the letters spell nothing but gibberish.

Frustrated, she starts flipping through the cards. There must be over thirty of the damn things. But then she comes across a card that is markedly different from all the others:

PANDIMENSIONAL

(adjective)

1. The quality of existing in several different aspects of reality at once, rather than just one

2. The ability to operate or move across the same


Mona stares at the note card, and again says, “What the f*ck?”

She flips through the remainder of the stack, but finds no other card like it. She is certain that this card was the purpose of Parson’s entire charade. But what it means is beyond her.

Yet then she remembers that moment back in Weringer’s house, when one room felt nested inside another, yet occupied the same place. And when she focused, she could stay in one room, and avoid that huge stone cavern with the enormous fires…

Mona thinks for a moment, then stands and throws the door open.

Behind it is a long set of cement stairs leading up. They are dark and she cannot see where they go. So she takes out her flashlight, flicks it on, and starts up.


The staircase is completely black, and though she can see fluorescent lights hanging at each landing she can find no switch for them. Mona’s been climbing for about an hour, but the stairs seem to go on forever. She looks over the metal railing once and shines her light down and sees an endless blocked spiral of gray yawning below. She can’t even see the bottom anymore.

She remembers that Coburn is supposedly located at the top of the mesa, and she started at the very, very bottom, and she groans. Her legs are already aching and she’s almost out of breath, but she’s willing to bet she’s not a quarter of the way up.

She keeps climbing with nothing but her flashlight to guide her. The railings and the stair corners cast jigsaw-puzzle shadows on the walls. Occasionally she’ll shine it up the stairwell to see if she’s finally getting close to something, but there is always darkness and more stairs above.

The only sounds Mona hears throughout all of this are the stomping of her feet and her labored breath. Her calf muscles feel as if they’re about to snap, like guitar strings stretched too tightly.

Then she hears a third sound.

She stops and listens, and realizes she’s right. But it’s one she never expected here:

Someone is singing.

It’s only because the stairwell is so quiet that Mona can hear it. But it’s definitely there. Someone very far above her, maybe a woman, is singing.

She stares up at the darkness. She can see no lights up there, nor can she hear the sound of anyone moving. Yet as she listens, she hears saxophones and trumpets joining the singer. It’s like there’s a Big Band performance happening up there.

Very, very slowly, Mona takes out the Glock. She points the flashlight down at the ground to lessen the chances that someone above will spot it. Then she starts climbing the stairs again, moving slowly and softly with her eyes trained on the next flight of stairs above her.

The singing gets louder as Mona climbs. Eventually she recognizes the song: to her total confusion, it’s “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.”

Then more sounds join it. There’s the sound of laughter, the mutter of conversation, glasses tinkling. But that shouldn’t be right at all… she thought Coburn was abandoned.

Somewhere above a voice shouts, “Charlie? Charlie! Come on! Get in here!”

It’s a party, she thinks. They’re throwing a f*cking party up there. She can’t even begin to understand it.

After a few more flights of stairs Mona thinks she can discern a very faint light cast on the wall at the top. She stops and turns off her flashlight and waits for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. She isn’t wrong: a very dim blade of light is cast across a wall on one of the topmost landings. She isn’t willing to shine her light up there and give away her position, but she’d bet now that she’s reached the very top of the staircase.

She slows her ascent to a crawl. As she rounds the landing opposite the light, she sees there is a thin, glowing line at the top of the staircase, and it marches around the wall to form a rectangle.

It’s a door. There’s a door at the top of the staircase, and someone is throwing a party just behind it.

Mona stares at it, breathing hard. Every inch of her shirt is sticking to her skin. There are many, many voices now, so whatever party it is, it must be a big one. She starts to approach the door, but she brings the Glock up just a little, just in case.

She hears shouting from the other side again. Someone cries, “Cheers, everyone! Look at me. Hey! F*cking look at me! All right, good. Finally. Now, come on, everyone, to the New Year, am I right?”

“And on Uncle Sam’s dime, too,” says a second voice, a woman.

“F*ck Sam’s dime,” says a third. “The DOD ain’t footing this bill. We paid for this out of our goddamn pockets.”

“Then we better get our money’s worth!” shouts the first voice, and there’s a round of cheers and laughing.

It’s a New Year’s Eve party, thinks Mona, but it’s July, isn’t it? What the hell could be going on?

She’s right next to the door now. Barging in on a party with a gun drawn really isn’t her style, to say the least. But whatever her style is, it’s been woefully inadequate the last couple of days. She supposes it’s time to adapt.

She decides she’s going to take a peek. She grasps the knob, and slowly applies pressure. It is not locked. She swallows and keeps turning the knob, tensing with each twitch of the bolt.

Finally it will turn no farther. She positions herself at the opening and begins to ease the door open.

“Say,” says a voice on the other side, and it sounds mere feet away, “what kind of gin is this, anyways?”

The door is almost open a crack. Mona puts her eye to it, tries to steady her hand, and keeps easing the door open.

Then, abruptly, the light on the other side of the door dies, and the music and voices cease entirely. The stairway fills with total, impenetrable darkness.

Mona is so shocked she almost falls over. She stands in the dark, wondering what happened. Did the people on the other side know she was about to peep in on them? But surely they couldn’t have reacted that quickly? There is no light of any kind anymore, and no sound. It’s as if they simply stopped existing.

She pushes the door open all the way, and though she can’t see it, she’s very aware that she might be standing in front of a hallway with a bunch of people staring right at her. She tries to remind herself that the people in the hallway can’t see her either… or at least they shouldn’t be able to.

She raises her gun to point directly ahead. Then she lifts the flashlight, places it over the wrist holding the gun, and turns it on.

What is before her is indeed a hallway, but it looks as if it hasn’t seen people in years. The ceiling panels have fallen in and the Pergo paneling is blooming with corrosion. She can see several doors to what look like offices—because this does not look like a lab hallway to her, but an ordinary office hallway—but they are all open and she can see no movement within them.

She fights the urge to call, “Hello?” and begins to stalk down the hallway, gun wheeling to cover each angle of approach. It is an awkward and clumsy dance in this decrepit, musky hallway. Each office is littered with rotting yellow paper. Yet nothing appears to have been disturbed. No one has been here in decades.

The place looks like it was built in the sixties and never updated: all the desks are streamlined, Mid-Century Modern affairs, and they’re surrounded by chairs resembling tulips and eggs. The lamps are skeletal, geometric contraptions, like things pried off Sputnik and plugged into the wall, yet the lamps in the ceiling are rounded, organic sculptures of glass and chrome (now rusted) that look inspired by undersea life. The sheer silence of the place is intimidating. This is not a place where a party was being thrown not more than five minutes ago.

Finally Mona gives in to her worst instincts: “Anyone home?” she asks aloud, softly.

There is no answer. She continues on with quiet footsteps.


So this was where her mother worked, she thinks as she wanders the halls, even though no one in Wink can remember it. Again, it feels impossible to reconcile what she’s found here with the woman she knew. This was once a sleek, stylish place to work, even if it was out in the desert. It would have been a haven for thinkers and researchers, a magnet for the most ambitious professors and scientists and graduate students out there. People with beards and glasses and chalk—shit, Mona doesn’t know. This isn’t her scene, no matter what decade.

She tries to imagine what it was like when it was first built—hell, when Wink was first built. She imagines it bustling with intellectuals, each one trying to think up a way to make the nation stronger, to push the very limits of what humanity could do. It must have seemed like such a tremendous hope to everyone. For the first time, she can understand the compulsion of the men and women who first built the town in the valley. They thought they were making something. Maybe something like a utopia.

Yet what did they do here? What did the occupants of all these modish offices work to accomplish? And what did Laura Bright, née Alvarez, once do in this place? If she was ever here at all, that is.

The woman who worked here, thinks Mona, would have been such a wonderful mother. Smart, cultured… what happened to her? Why was she not the inspiring figure Mona now imagines her to have been?

And somewhere inside Mona is a tiny voice that says, Maybe one of us is always supposed to die, the mother or the daughter… maybe that’s just the way we’re made. We’re weak, breakable. Maybe it was right that I never had the chance…

“Shut up,” whispers Mona. “Shut up.”

The voice quiets, and she continues on.


Mona comes to the reception area. Somehow it remains untouched by the decay. The walls are rounded and white, the front desk shaped like a teardrop, done in pale wood paneling. On one of the flatter spots of the wall there’s a huge starburst clock that, to her concern, is still ticking.

It has been maintained, obviously, so someone’s been here. Someone might still be here. But she still isn’t sure what happened to the party she heard.

There’s a bright, happy mural painted on the wall behind the desk, depicting a mountain landscape. It does not take Mona long to recognize the splinter of piney green running through the feet of the striking red peaks. She can even see the pink balloon of Wink’s water tower situated on the far side of the valley. She eventually sees that Mesa Abertura—the mesa she’s currently inside of—is also shown in the mural. Yet she sees that its top is bedecked with immense white orbs and cups, like sculpted white icing on a red cake. They’re telescopes and satellite dishes, she realizes, but she sure as hell hasn’t seen any of those on the mesa in her time here. They must have been totally removed. But that would have taken a lot of work, even more than getting the damn things up here.

For a fleeting second, she remembers glimpsing something huge and dark perched on the mesa, swaying back and forth against a black sky bursting with lightning…

She shudders and moves on. She walks around the receptionist’s desk and starts down the main hall, which is where things start to look a little more like a lab.

The carpet turns to cement. Then the doors turn into huge slabs of metal with tiny, thick windows set in the exact centers, and they feature some fearfully complicated locks.

She takes out Weringer’s key again, and thinks. Then she tries fitting it into one of the locks.

The key fits, but she can’t turn it. So it’s not the key for this lock. But at least she’s in the right neighborhood now. This key must fit one of the lab doors.

She moves on.

She comes across one door that doesn’t lead to a lab at all, but to some kind of electrical closet. Circuits and panels crawl across the wall in a rusty tangle. Against one wall is a box of dictionaries. Yet up against the circuit wall is a huge electric generator that doesn’t look as if it had been made more than two years ago. It’s a new addition for sure.

Someone has definitely been in here. But somehow she doesn’t think they had anything to do with the party. Whoever was drinking and carousing didn’t sound like the generator-toting sort.

She squats and examines the generator. She pops the cap to the fuel tank and shines her light in. It’s full. Then she looks at all the cables running to the circuits in the wall, and, though her electrical knowledge is rudimentary at best, everything seems hooked up to the right place in order to run a fair amount of the building. Probably not whatever the hell is behind those metal doors, but maybe the lights.

She considers her choices. Again, if she turns on the generator, she could be alerting people that she’s here. Yet at the same time, Mona really, really doesn’t want to be stumbling around in the dark in this place, with so many dark corners occupied by who the f*ck knows what, so she shrugs, shuts the cap, grabs the rip cord, and starts her up.

It takes minimal effort to get the thing going. The lights outside flicker, then fully come on. She walks back out and looks around.

With the lights on the place is not quite so intimidating. It is antiseptic and cold, yes, but it’s not the dour cenotaph she was trawling through before.

She keeps walking down the hall, trying her key in all the locks. None of them gives. One door’s little glass window is broken, and she stands on her tiptoes and peers inside. It’s like an airlock from the sci-fi movies in there. She starts to wonder if she needs to be wearing a lead shield over her torso as she walks around in here, because though Mona has absolutely no desire for children anymore, she still doesn’t fancy the idea of her uterus bubbling away like a teapot.

Some of the laboratories have windows that allow her to see in. There are huge old electrical conduits on the walls and floors, and she can see places around them where enormous pieces of equipment once stood. It’s like her mother’s house, with the ghostly inverse shadows on the walls and floors telling her of belongings long gone.

She absently glances in each window as she walks from door to door, trying her key. It’s the same thing, as far as she can see: a dimly lit, empty room with severed electrical cords dangling from the ceiling or snaking out of the walls. They must have had a hell of a power bill at this place. But this was a government-funded lab, so they must—

She freezes where she stands. “What the hell?” she says aloud. She turns back and peers in one lab window.

This lab is empty like all the others. But for a moment she could have sworn that it was different. It’s like it changed when she turned away, just for an instant.

She thought she saw the lights were on, glowing much cleaner and whiter than the fluorescent ones out in the hall. But there was also something new in the room: a huge, cone-like device sitting in the middle of the floor with an unbelievable amount of wiring leading to it. And though her brain refuses to consider this suggestion, she is sure she caught a fleeting glimpse of two men standing around the cone-like device, dressed in gray suits and skinny black ties and horn-rimmed glasses, discussing something that seemed to be slightly irritating to them, as if it were just a casual workday.

But now the room is empty, just like the others: the lights are gray and weak, and there are no people inside. There are no men inside, and no cone-like device sitting on the floor, either, but she can definitely see where one was: there is a circular indentation in the blank concrete, like the device was sitting there for years and years, years and years ago.

Is it possible, she wonders, to see the imprint that lives have left on a place, just like how she sees the shapes of departed machines on the floors and walls of each tiny room?

As she wonders for the hundredth time what happened in this place, her toe catches something on the ground and it almost sends her sprawling. She curses, mentally thanks God her finger was nowhere near the Glock’s trigger, and looks back at what tripped her.

There is an enormous crack in the paved floor. It stretches across the hallway and crawls up the walls and even across the ceiling. The hallway beyond the crack is askew, in fact: the floor ahead is one to three inches higher on the left side and correspondingly lower on the right. It’s like a miniature tectonic rift. The crack she tripped on isn’t the only one, either: it appears to be the papa crack, with many baby spiderweb cracks radiating outward down the hallway, but only in one direction, away from her.

The sight gives Mona vertigo. Whatever caused this (and whatever it was, it must have been huge) has also screwed with the electrical systems, because the fluorescent lights in the ceiling tend to flutter more the farther away they are from the crack. She gets that same queer unease as when she first found the lightning-struck bathroom in her mother’s house: it is as if some horrible accident has warped this place, like it no longer belongs in the building at all.

Wary, she continues down the hallway, staggering a little due to the uneven floor. She studies the cracks in the wall, worried that this whole place might cave in. As she does, she sees that there are immense cables running along the ceiling, some of them so heavy they have to be bolted directly into the concrete. Most of them branch off into the various lab rooms, but one of them, the biggest, goes straight ahead before passing through the wall above the largest, darkest door in the entire hallway.

Mona looks at the door, then down at the key in her hand. She’s about to try it when she hears footsteps coming down the hallway behind her.

She turns and points the gun toward the mouth of the hall. The footsteps, like those of the Native American in the panama hat, suggest wooden-soled shoes. She moves up against the wall and steadies her aim.

He followed me here, she thinks. I don’t know how he survived, but he followed me here.

Yet though the footsteps keep getting louder, no one comes. She can see no movement below the fluttering fluorescent lights at all. The footsteps get loud enough for her to think that the walker is only a dozen feet in front of her, but she sees nothing. Then she hears a few other sounds—the shuffling of papers, and a grunt—and the footsteps come to a stop.

Mona doesn’t move. Her ears are telling her that this person is just fifteen feet or fewer in front of her. But she can’t see a damn thing. Just feet and feet of blank gray concrete, lit by the strobing neon lights.

She hears more papers turning. Then a quiet “Hmm,” and the sound of a match being struck.

Mona feels sweat trickling down her temples. She can see no flame, nor any change in light, nor can she smell or see any smoke. Yet she can hear the faint crackling of a tiny fire in the hallway.

What the f*ck is going on? she wonders.

She hears a series of throaty clicks—like someone puffing at a pipe?—and then the footsteps resume, though they’re much slower, and they sound like they’re walking to the side of the hall rather than down it.

Then, though she sees absolutely no doors move at all, she hears one open, the lock clanking and the hinges making a slow screech. Her eyes jump from door to door, confirming that they are all still shut.

A voice rings out: “Paul, have you seen these numbers? They’re ridiculous!” Then the sound of a door slamming, and silence.

She stares at the empty hallway. It was always empty, of course—or at least it looked that way—but now her ears are also telling her it’s deserted. Still, she doesn’t dare move for the next five minutes. Her legs start to tremble, since they’re already exhausted from the climb up here, but she forces them to stay taut, keeping the Glock trained on the center of the hallway.

Nothing happens. The invisible mystery man must have found Paul, whoever he is, and must now be discussing his ridiculous numbers.

First the party, then the men standing around that machine in the lab, now this.

Is this place—her brain almost refuses to process such a ridiculous idea—haunted? Or maybe she’s just going insane again…

Then she remembers the last time she thought she was going insane, and seeing things that weren’t there. She hears Parson’s voice in her head: The time where you were was damaged, so you saw something that had happened already.

Is this the same thing? she wonders. Is time broken here, and she’s catching stray seconds from long, long ago?

She lowers the gun. It would make sense, wouldn’t it? Perhaps a man did once actually walk down this hall, light his pipe, and enter a room and ask a question. Maybe they did throw a New Year’s Eve party here, decades and decades ago; and at some point two engineers probably stood in one of the laboratories scratching their heads, teasing out the problem before them.

And perhaps, if time is indeed broken here, those events could echo down through the years to be witnessed by Mona herself. Maybe she is seeing ghosts, but they’re ghosts of moments and seconds rather than people. The past is still happening here in some unseen way. Her path just happens to convene with those taken by the people who worked here long, long ago.

She is not comforted by the idea, but she feels it’s the right one. The things she’s glimpsed and heard have not responded to her or acknowledged her in any way. They’re just doing what they did decades ago, over and over again. She finds the thought a little horrifying.

Something cold calcifies in her belly. What if one of the little moments that gets replayed before her happens to feature none other than Laura Alvarez herself? What if she catches some ghostly imprint of her mother, going about her daily duties? Mona is both disturbed by and attracted to this thought: it would be practically the same as seeing her on film, but it would feel a little more real, wouldn’t it? And she could finally see what she was like, here at work, before marrying Earl…

She returns to the door. It is substantially thicker than the others, and its metal is a bit darker. She wonders if it’s made of lead; the others appeared to be steel. She is not eager to walk into a room that’s still hot, and it would be, wouldn’t it, because doesn’t radioactivity take centuries to die out? That was what they taught her in school. They have to stick radioactive waste in some giant round canister, like a poisoned, malicious Easter Egg, and drop it down a mine shaft out in the desert. It suddenly feels as if all of America’s nasty secrets could be found out here among the rock and sand, buried in the wilderness, forgotten.

She grips Weringer’s key a little tighter. The dozens of little teeth bite into her fingers. She braces herself and slides the key in the lock.

The lock gives with the slightest amount of force, and the door, though it must weigh hundreds of pounds, silently falls open, smoothly gliding through the air.

Mona walks to the threshold, and looks in.

It is a wide, low room with a ceiling, walls, and floor all made of the same metal as the door. The room is rounded, with no distinguishable corners. It is completely bare except for the large apparatus hanging in the center, lit by the beams from tiny spotlights in the ceiling.

It is a mirror. But it is a mirror unlike any Mona has ever seen before.

The mirror portion is a wide, gleaming, silvery circle with a diameter of about ten feet. It hangs from the ceiling by a long, triple-jointed arm that looks like it would allow for rotation in many directions. The mirror is mounted on a thick copperish-looking plate, which is fed by dozens of thick wires that wind down the arm. A variety of machinery and equipment hangs off the arm as well: wires and tubing and chambers and pressure plates. Surrounding the apparatus are numerous steel frames stacked with old analog devices (to Mona they look like VCRs), but she does not get the impression that they are part of it: they sport microphones, lenses, electronic readouts. No, these devices, whatever they are, were meant to monitor the mirror and record it.

And if you record things, Mona thinks, then you have to keep your recordings somewhere…

She hesitates, again worrying that the room is radioactive. She holds a flat palm out, which she knows is stupid because you can’t feel radiation on your bare skin. As she expected, she feels nothing. Still, she is reluctant.

She notices that the mirror apparatus is not whole. A second arm branches off the main one, and it looks as if it held a mirror once, yet the mirror is gone, as if it’s been unscrewed or ripped off. She wonders where it went

(Would you like to see a magic trick?)

and who has it. From the look of things, the door to this room hadn’t been opened in a while.

Mona realizes she is breathing quite hard. She stuffs the Glock in the back of her pants (she no longer trusts her shaking hands), shuts her eyes, and steps into the room.


Though her eyes are shut, Mona is sure she can feel things change. It is the same as in Weringer’s house: though she cannot say why, she is positive that, though this room may appear to be connected to the rest of Coburn via that long, cracked hallway, she is now somewhere else. She is no longer on the mesa, she feels: she is no longer in New Mexico, no longer in America. Perhaps she is no longer on Earth.

She opens her eyes.

The room looks the same. And when she looks behind, she can still see the long, cracked hallway with the quaking lights. And yet she is sure this room is separate from everything, floating freely in… what? Nothing? Is it floating in nothing, like a space capsule?

She looks at the mirror. It seems far larger now that she is near it. She slowly walks around to get a better look. The arm is bent so the mirror’s face is pointed slightly upward, facing the ceiling, which Mona finds a bit curious for a mirror to be doing. But it is a beautiful thing, really. There is something about the way the light glances off its surface, as if when the spotlights’ rays touch it they turn to silver liquid and go skating around it in a shimmering orbit before sliding off the side.

She walks until she can see herself in the bottom half of the mirror. It does not distort her at all, but reflects her as any mirror would do. What was this thing meant for, she wonders? Is it really a mirror, or is its reflective surface just a byproduct of whatever alloy the plate is coated in? She leans in until her nose is almost touching its surface.

She stares into her eyes. For some reason she is suddenly sure that the woman in the mirror is staring back at her, not as a reflection but as a thing with its own agency. She keeps staring at herself, wondering if perhaps she is seeing a Mona that never was…

And then things click.

It happens purely in her head. And, just as when she first entered this room, she feels things change, almost imperceptibly. She looks around, but she sees no visible shift. The hallway is still outside, the lights are still fluttering, and the mirror…

She gasps and jumps back. Her own reflection does the same, of course. But for a moment, Mona was sure that her reflection was not there. What she saw was not the ceiling of this lead room, or any little spotlights, but a wide, endless black sky with many red and white stars.

And the woman standing in front of the mirror was not Mona. But she recognized her. Mona’s seen her only once before, projected onto an old white wall in fuzzy ochre tones, laughing as everyone at her party clapped for her.

Then she hears the footsteps again.

Mona looks out at the hallway. Unlike the last time, she can see movement at the end. She quietly steps to the side, hiding behind the huge door, and takes out the Glock.

The footsteps come closer, heading directly for the room. They slow a little bit, and she hears the walker stop just at the threshold of the door.

“Hello?” says a man’s voice. But it is a very curious voice, Mona thinks. Not only is it not very threatening, it is also faint and crackly, like it is coming out of an old radio catching a signal from a broadcast far, far away.

The person walks forward, toward the mirror. And when he clears the door, Mona sees it is not a man at all.

It looks like a man, just a little, but it is like a black-and-white image of a man from an old, broken television, one overlaid with fuzzy lines and bursts of static, and in some places he is even transparent. He is wearing a ragged tweed coat and a stained pair of slacks, and his shoes are scuffed and beaten and his collar is torn. His salt-and-pepper hair is curly and thick. Though she can see him only from behind, he looks very much like an absentminded professor who has been lost in the wilderness for a long, long time.

He looks around, staring at the room. Finally he glances over his shoulder and sees Mona standing behind the door with a gun pointed at his head. “Oh, my goodness,” he says in that odd, crackly voice. “Laura? My God, Laura, is that you?”

Mona’s mouth drops open and she lowers the gun. Not just because this black-and-white static-man seems to know her mother, and has mistaken Mona for her: but also because, unbelievably, she recognizes him. She saw him once before, in an old book in a library, where she read an interview of his about his idealistic plans for his laboratory and the town it was going to have built around it.

“Laura, my dear, my dear, what happened to you?” asks Dr. Coburn. “Where have you been? What are you doing here?”