American Elsewhere

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE




The evening was cool, dry, and quiet, like all evenings in Wink. Mrs. Benjamin had passed the day as she passed nearly all of them, whiling the hours away in bored tedium at her desk, kept afloat only by the rumors people dropped by, each one spawning hours of gleeful conjecture. For despite her bureaucratic title in the small government town, Mrs. Benjamin’s true role, the only one that mattered, was that of town gossip.

And despite the fact that almost nothing happened in Wink—for the lab on the mountain had made no discoveries, nor had it attracted any worthwhile attention in years—Mrs. Benjamin still ran a thriving trade. Her chief strength was fashion, for she and she alone was the unspoken authority on what was and was not acceptable these days. And these days were quite deplorable, really: she could not bear to see men sport such ridiculous sideburns and gaudy glasses, and it was wise not to even get her started on the women, in their absurd, ragged pants and low-cut tops and untamed hair.

For years Mrs. Benjamin had been doing her damnedest to keep all of that out. It was mainly her efforts that had protected Wink from the encroaching decades: they’d made it to 1983 without showing any sign of having moved past 1969, and she intended to make that last until she was in the ground. Then those children could do as they please, but perhaps—just perhaps—they’d feel a twinge of regret for disobeying Mrs. Benjamin’s silent strictures. Because, after all, Mrs. Benjamin was undeniably right.

As the sky grew darker, she sat on her porch and surveyed the street, sipping her tea and waiting for someone to stroll by so she could plumb them for information. But she was not wholly interested in her duties: she kept glancing toward the mesa, idly wondering if the lightning would be there again.

It had been there every night for the past month or so. No one was quite sure what it was. Was it heat lightning? It made no sound, but still… no one had ever seen heat lightning like that. Perhaps it was something to do with the lab… No one knew.

There was a spark in the skies. Mrs. Benjamin, pleased, sat up and hauled her rocking chair around to face the horizon.

They’d had parties when it first started, picnics on the baseball field as they watched the show in the sky. It was like their own version of the Northern Lights. Though they did not understand it, they were glad to have it.

But this night the lightning was curiously brighter than normal. The sight was so queer Mrs. Benjamin simply stared at it, transfixed. Sometimes it looked like the lightning in the sky backlit something, some form in the clouds. In her more fanciful moments, she imagined there was a giant in the sky, huge and dark, looking out at the town from its vantage point in the sky.

There was another flicker, but this one was different: it was closer. She frowned, and watched as the heart of another cloud burst with lightning, this one closer still.

That was odd. The lightning usually stayed directly over the mesa. But as she watched, the flickers in the sky marched across the clouds as if jumping across links in a chain, bit by bit, until they came almost to hover over the town.

Mrs. Benjamin stood and walked to the center of her yard, looking up. She heard squeaking, and saw young Eddie Jacobs riding his old bicycle down the sidewalk. The squeaking slowed as he came to a stop, looking up, openmouthed. He got off and let his bike fall to the ground. Then, wordlessly, the two of them wandered over to stand next to one another and stare at the sky.

Then the lightning died. The two of them blinked and looked around.

“That was funny,” said Eddie.

“It was, wasn’t it,” said Mrs. Benjamin.

Yet then a soft breeze filled her yard, and she frowned, for she smelled something quite odd…

Was it ozone?

One of the clouds built to a point. Its innards flickering mutinously. Then it blazed bright, and a rope of lightning stabbed down into the rooftops.

She had only a moment to register the sight before the blast hit her. It was like an artillery shell had just gone off, a tremendous eruption that sent her staggering back.

She fell onto the grass. The wind raged around her, pulling at her hair and her dress. Her eyes wheeled about until she saw another bolt of lightning shoot down into Wink, and another, and another, each one followed by the screaming, earth-shattering crashes.

When she regained herself, she heard the wailing of air-raid sirens as some long-dormant disaster system rattled awake. Then she saw a faraway tree lit by dancing red light, and gasped.

“Fire,” she said, though she was almost deaf to her own voice. “Eddie—run home. Get on your bike and run home and get your parents!”

Eddie leaped onto his bike and pedaled away. Mrs. Benjamin managed to stand back up and started to rush off toward the fire, not certain what she would do if she got there. More bolts of lightning came shooting down, decimating houses, shops, trees. A florist’s shop mere yards away burst apart as one of the arcs of lightning brushed it, sending waves of dust dancing across the street. People rushed out of their homes, looking about wildly, holding hands.

She could hear screams. Some sounded like women and men. Others, children.

“My God!” cried Mrs. Benjamin. “My God, my God!”

She was near a corner when one of the bolts of lightning struck the middle of the street just around the bend. It almost knocked her over again, and she had to hold on to a lamppost to stay up. When she recovered, she saw red-and-orange light flickering on the houses across the road. The middle of the street just around the corner must have been on fire.

Yet there was a shadow projected onto the houses by the flames. She was not sure if she was imagining things, but if the shadow was right, something huge and many-limbed was standing in the street, just out of view around the corner. She stared at the shadow, watching its arms heave as whatever it was took huge, gasping breaths, like some kind of enraged animal, and though the whole town was roaring with thunder and fire she thought she could hear deep, rattling gasps…

She walked closer to the corner, wondering if she really wanted to look down that street, and see… but then she heard an awful noise from just around the corner, like a thousand cicadas beginning to whine, and she knew she had to run, run as fast as she could.

Because there’d been something inside that lightning bolt. Something had come down from the sky with it. And Mrs. Benjamin did not know what it was, but she did not want to see it, or for it to see her.

She saw Mr. Macey running in her direction. “Myrtle!” he shouted. “Myrtle, for Christ’s sake, don’t go that way! Everything’s on fire back there!”

“But you can’t go that way, either!” she said, pointing at the corner. “There’s… something there!”

“What?” he cried. “What’s there? What do you mean?”

“I don’t know! But there’s something in the lightning bolts! Something’s coming down with them!”

“Have you lost your f*cking mind?” he screamed. This made her pause, for never in her life had she ever heard Eustace Macey use such a word. “We’ve got to move!”

“But Eustace, please! You can’t—”

She stopped. Though the air was thick with smoke and brilliant light, she saw through it, just briefly, and glimpsed the mesa just a few miles out of town.

The top of the mesa was on fire. All the dishes and satellites and telescopes there were in ruins. But the fire on the mesa lit something above it… something massive and dark, swaying back and forth… and she thought she saw eyes, yellow and luminous like huge lamps…

“There’s something on the mesa!” she screamed, and she pointed.

“What?” said Macey, and he turned to look.

But as he did, Mrs. Benjamin smelled that awful ozone smell again. And then the whole world went bright.

She was aware of a wave of heat, followed by a blast of pressure that lifted her up off the ground and sent her tumbling back. When she came to a stop she thought she had her eyes closed and fought to open them, only to find she was actually blind. Everything around her was dark, and all she could see were bubbles of green and blue swelling and fading.

Then she began to see light. Images calcified around her. Everything nearby was on fire. There was a huge circle of absolute black on the sidewalk, scorched from the lightning. And there, in the center, was Mr. Macey, standing perfectly still as if struck by an odd thought.

She struggled to her feet, sure he would collapse at any moment. She could hear herself saying his name. Then she grabbed him by the shoulder and turned him around.

His eyes and his mouth were wide and he was trembling, arms stiff and neck stretched to its limit.

She cried out his name and shook him, telling him to please snap out of it.

Then fire spilled out into the street around them, and bright light filled his face. And she looked into his eyes, and saw.

It was as if his eyes were windows, and there behind them was something squirming, something with many tentacles and a long, flowing, flowery body, and his mouth opened wider and wider and she began to hear an awful, reedy whine…

It was like the sound from that shadow in the street. But it came not from his mouth, but from the base of his skull, near his neck…

And when he looked at her she saw nothing in his eyes that was Eustace Macey, nothing of the small-town shop owner she’d spoken to nearly every day of her life. The lightning had emptied him out, and filled him up with something else.

She turned and began to run down the street, shrieking. Everything was smoke and fire and deafening crashes. She saw neighbors she knew and loved screaming and running through the blazes—there, Mr. Cunningham, his daughter thrown over one shoulder, and there Mrs. Rochester, holding one black, wounded hand in her armpit…

The town was unrecognizable. She ran without knowing where she was going, just running in the hope that somewhere this would end, somewhere the devastation would stop.

Then the cloud of smoke parted before her again, and she saw the mesa once more.

She stopped. Choked. And fell to her knees.

She saw enormous shoulders bathed in lightning. Long, sinewy limbs, a faceless, slumping head wreathed in clouds. And the thing on the mesa pointed, and when it did another bolt of lightning fell shrieking to crash into the earth.

It shifted on the mesa, and pointed again. And she could have sworn it pointed at her.

She looked up. There was a bright, glimmering breach in the clouds above her. The clouds fluttered with light, and the breach glowed furiously bright, and then…

Light. Heat. And fire all around.

She stood totally frozen. There was something warm behind her eyes, something soft that tickled her sinuses.

Then all the world turned white.


Mona waits for Mrs. Benjamin to finish her story, yet nothing comes.

“I don’t get it,” she says. “So… are you saying you died?”

Mrs. Benjamin looks at her, and even though her face is slack Mona thinks she can see scorn in it. “Miss Bright,” she says, “to whom do you really think you are speaking?”

Mona thinks about it for a moment, confused. Then she realizes, and for a moment she stops breathing.

She stares into Mrs. Benjamin’s eyes. There’s a fluttering in her corneas, a squirming as if each of her eyes is the shell of a snail, inside of which is something flexing and undulating, feeling the boundaries of its casing.

She begins to understand. “You’re… you’re not Mrs. Benjamin, are you.”

Mrs. Benjamin smiles a little.

“And you’re not Parson,” says Mona. “But they were both people before, weren’t they? Real people with real lives, and you just… came and took them over.”

“In a way. As we said, we are here in only the slightest sense,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

“What are you… in there?” says Mona, horrified.

“It is not us,” says Parson, gesturing to his head. “You have seen us already.”

“And it very nearly killed you,” says Mrs. Benjamin, who sounds a little pleased by that.

“This thing inside this vessel is more like a device. Like a walkie-talkie, one could say.”

“It is our link to the other side,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “The story I just related to you is, I suppose, the last memory of whoever or whatever occupied this vessel before me.”

“Whoever occupied… so you killed her?” says Mona. “You killed the real Mrs. Benjamin when you… crawled into her skull?” She is horrified and disgusted by the idea, but also by the realization that all the times she has spoken to these people (and who knows who else in Wink) she has really been addressing the frothy, fleshy masses in their skulls that tweak their nerves like the strings of marionettes and report everything they see to those things in that gray, red-starred abyss…

“I did not have a choice,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “I agreed to come to this place. I chose to accept safety. I did not know what I was coming to, or how.”

“None of us did,” says Parson. “We did not come here. We were brought here.”

“Brought by who?” asks Mona.

The two of them do not speak, but turn to look at one another. Then there’s a series of sounds in the air a bit like someone blowing a dog whistle: while her ears cannot detect the noises, they can tell something is going on. And from the way Parson and Mrs. Benjamin are staring into each other’s eyes, Mona thinks that those things in their heads are choosing to discuss something at a frequency she can’t hear. It is a disturbing thought: has the air in Wink been full of silent, invisible communication this whole time, and she was simply unable to perceive it?

Parson clears his throat. “What we are about to tell you,” he says, “is the most dangerous secret we know.”

“It is the only secret, really,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “It is the secret of us. Of everything.”

“Were anyone to find out that we told you—”

“Any of our kin.”

“Yes,” says Parson, “then the consequences would be… unimaginable.”

Mona asks, “You won’t go into a coma this time?”

“No,” says Parson. “On that occasion, I broke a rule. But there is no rule made for this, because that which made the rules never believed we would ever do what we are about to do.”

“Which is what?”

“Tell you who brought us here.”

Parson blinks slowly. He looks back at Mrs. Benjamin, and she nods, urging him on.

“We were brought here, Miss Bright”—he shuts his eyes sadly—“by Mother.”


Mona stares at them. “Are you serious?” she says after a while. “By your mother? Then that part of your bird story was true?”

The two of them do not respond; they just stare at the ground, shocked, as if they have just committed an abominable betrayal.

Mona shakes her head. It is hard to believe that such things (she remembers the fungal stalk, and the bulky, heaving thing from before, and shivers) could even have a mother. Then she remembers her own vision of the storm, and how she glimpsed that huge, dark figure on the mesa top…

“She actually came here, didn’t she,” says Mona. “Your mother… your mother actually came here, and pulled you through. That was… her on the mountain.”

The two of them do not answer.

“Jesus… that thing was your mother?” asks Mona.

“Yes,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “She pulled us through, scattered us across the valley like seeds. And how we have grown…”

Parson says, “But when Mother brought us here, it was on Her terms. We were confined by Her rules. Rules about what we can and cannot do, what we can and cannot say. Some of us—the eldest, particularly—were too large to come here in whole, and were forced to live through devices housed within the people of this town, and thus be safe and hidden. Others, either because they were too young, or—in the case of one—too old, manifested fully.”

“These, naturally, stay concealed through their own designs,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

“Mother was powerful,” says Parson. “She made us. She was the architect of our lives. She wished us to be perfect. And we tried so hard to be…” A slightly angry note creeps into his voice. “It was through Her designs that we came here. She dwarfed us in all ways. She was vast, vast, incredibly vast… even we do not know Her reaches.”

“Then what happened to her?” asks Mona.

“The effort of bringing us here, of saving us, destroyed Her,” Mrs. Benjamin says. “She was here for one moment… and then She was gone.”

“But Mother is never truly gone,” says Parson. “She cannot die. Death cannot touch Her. Age cannot wound Her. She cannot die. She may sleep, or wait, but never die.”

“Then what happened to Her?” asks Mona.

“We do not know,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “We were told to wait here, and each should obey their elders, and we should never, ever harm one another… and that She would come back.”

“And we have been waiting ever since,” says Parson. “Waiting for Mother to come back.”

“It has been a long time,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “So long. It wears more on some than others. They get restless.”

“What would happen if that… that thing came back?” asks Mona.

Parson and Mrs. Benjamin are silent. Then they slowly turn to look at each other, and back.

“Then we would be brought through entirely,” says Parson.

“The lines between your world and ours,” says Mrs. Benjamin, “blur to almost nothing in this place. Wink is neither here nor there. Some parts are more your world—and others are more ours. It is in these parts that we are hidden. Our true beings, our true selves, are sealed up in little inaccessible pockets, floating on the borders of our world. We stay anchored,” she says, and brushes the side of her head, “through these, the sleepers in our skulls. We are safe, but we are trapped. We are trapped in this physical location, and we are trapped in these bodies, which we are forced to use to preserve us, just as sea turtles hide their eggs in the sand.”

“But if Mother returns, then we would no longer be stuck halfway,” says Parson. “And we would no longer be confined to this place.”

“Our world would be pulled through to yours,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “The very skies would change. We would be free.”

Mona’s head begins swimming as she realizes what they mean. (And how, she thinks stupidly, do they know about sea turtles?) She still does not really understand what she saw on the other side, with those red stars and glittering, volcanic fields, but to imagine such things coming through to here, able to do as they please…

“Why are you telling me this?” asks Mona.

They do not answer.

“You wanted me to understand,” says Mona. “You sent me up to the lab so I’d understand enough for you to tell me the rest, to get around your Mother’s rules. You want me to do something about this. But why? Isn’t that what you want to happen? Don’t you want to be freed?”

“Us?” says Parson. “No. No, we do not wish for that to happen.”

“Why, though?” asks Mona.

Mrs. Benjamin asks, “How well did you love your parents, Miss Bright?”

“I only had the one,” says Mona. “And I wasn’t too fond of him.”

“So why should we be any different?”

Mona stares at her as she realizes what she means. Of all the things she’s heard, somehow this is the most bewildering. “So… this is all some kind of… f*cking teenage rebellion?”

“You make it sound so trite,” says Parson. “You went past the borders of this place to get to Coburn. So you must have seen the barrier.”

Mona thinks, and recalls. “I saw white columns that didn’t want to let me pass…”

“Yes. She put them there. We cannot pass them. We are trapped here, at Her choosing. We live by Her rules, and Her rules alone.”

“We did not know another way of living,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “Until we came here. But part of growing up is being forced to be on your own.”

“And we have been on our own these past thirty years,” says Mr. Parson. “And some of us have grown up.”

“What do you mean?” asks Mona.

The two of them hesitate. There is genuine insecurity in their faces (which Mona realizes is remarkable—do the things in their heads actually feel?), like they are about to divulge an embarrassing secret.

“When we came here to this place, and took on these lives… something happened that Mother did not expect, or intend,” says Parson. “We were not sure what to do with the people living here. We did not even know where we were. But then some of us began to examine our surroundings. And… adapt.”

“They watched your television,” said Mrs. Benjamin. “And read your books. They lived in your houses, looked at your pictures. They learned to talk like you. To look like you. To act like you. And they began to think that here they could have something they had never possessed before. They could find something here they’d never even dreamed of. In this small, quiet place, filled with so many small, quiet people, they could be something they had never been.”

“What?” says Mona.

Parson’s face contorts into one of utter disgust. He turns to Mona, and when he speaks his contempt is almost overwhelming: “They believed they could be happy.”