American Elsewhere

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX




The child screams, and screams, and screams. She looks horrific, a tiny, shriveled person soaked in red with its face contorted and eyes streaming tears. The woman in the panama hat surveys the baby coldly. “Should it be so small?” she asks.

The doctor looks at the baby as if he’s never seen one before. Which, Mona realizes, he probably hasn’t. “It appears to be the acceptable size…”

“Well,” says the woman in the panama hat, “it won’t matter when Mother gets here.”

“Is this as you expected?” asks the doctor. “We need it to be the woman’s progeny, to be Mother’s progeny. Like us, but of this place. Is this Her child?”

The woman in the panama hat shuts her eyes, as if to think. Then her eyes snap open. “Yes,” she says. “It will work. Mother is coming already. I can feel it.” She sighs deeply, as if she has just smelled a particularly alluring fragrance. “It is Her progeny, indirectly. It will work. It is working.”

Mona stares at the bloody child. It’s difficult to really study its features, since it is so slick with blood… but she thinks she sees her brow line, and maybe Dale’s eyes, and could that be her mouth?

This can’t be. I don’t believe it.

The woman in the panama hat holds the child out to the doctor. “Take it. Take it to the highway crossroads just south of town.”

He hesitates. “Do you not wish to do it?”

“No. I have matters to attend to here. She should be there. You must meet Her when She arrives. And when She comes to see me, it will be me… and only me. No”—she glances sideways at Mrs. Benjamin—“distractions.”

“We have not broken any of Mother’s edicts in bringing Her here, have we? We have kept to Her rules?”

The woman in the panama hat gives him a flat stare. “Are you suggesting,” she asks, “that it is possible to defy Mother?”

He bows his head, and takes the child. “Will I need protection?”

“One of the children will assist you.”

“But it’s daylight.”

She rolls her eyes, exasperated. “And why do we need to keep to this town’s rules?”

“You make a fair point.” He and about half of the men and women file out of the room with the screaming child. Mona can still see tiny feet with flexed toes, and struggling arms trying to pull out of his grasp…

“No,” whispers Mona. “No, please…”

One of the men in sweaters—this one a soft brown—turns and looks at her. His gaze is discomfortingly alien. “What do we do with her?” he asks in a quiet monotone.

“Do you know how to use a knife?” asks the woman in the panama hat.

He frowns, nods.

“Do you know how to use one well?”

“I understand the concept.”

“Beside the door is a box. Within it are several knives. Cut her here”—she points to a specific point on her throat—“cut her deep, and make sure she dies.”

“She can die like that?” asks the man, as if this is a foreign concept.

“Oh, yes. Her kind die quite easily. They all do it, eventually.”

“And that’s all it takes?”

“That’s all.”

He nods again, impressed.

“You, and you.” The woman in the panama hat gestures to the remaining men. “Take her”—she points to Mrs. Benjamin—“and come with me. I want to have a discussion with her.”

“Oh, goody,” says Mrs. Benjamin, as the two men grab her by the shoulders. “Am I to get another lecture?”

The woman in the panama hat does not answer as she leads the men dragging Mrs. Benjamin from the room, leaving Mona with the man in the soft brown sweater, who is staring at her with a look of some anticipation, as if about to start a new and exciting experiment.


First he practices the motion: he holds an imaginary knife, and swoops it down in a slash. But he shakes his head, dissatisfied. “Are we too near the wall?” he asks.

Mona is too fatigued by the blood loss to answer, but of course even if she had the strength, she wouldn’t.

“I think we are too near the wall,” says the man thoughtfully, “for the full range of motion.” He pushes her chair over to the center of the room. Mona’s eye registers movement to her right, but it’s only their reflection in the lens. In it, she sees her wrists are bound to the back of the chair by thick ropes. She can also see the doorway out to her left, and beside it there is indeed a small black box. Beside this box, she sees, are her rifle and her Glock.

The man in the soft brown sweater walks to the box, opens it, and says, “Ah.” He scratches his head pensively. Then he takes out three different knives, examines them carefully, and selects the largest one. The other two he places on the ground beside the box.

As he goes through this scrupulous procedure, Mona flexes her fingers. To her surprise, they can move, though she feels very weak. She paws at the seat of the chair, where Mrs. Benjamin wedged the mirrors. She can manage to grasp and retrieve only one, in her right hand; her left remains disturbingly dead, but then it was the one that got tapped.

The man in the soft brown sweater holds up the big knife, and slashes it through the air. “Cut,” he says. “Cut! Or—perhaps like a surgeon?” He makes a small, dainty slice in the air, and says, with great delicacy: “Cut.”

Jesus, thinks Mona. He must be one of the really young ones…

But what is she going to do with just one lens? She’s only done this once before, and then she had to have two lenses to get anything to move…

She realizes she’s staring at her reflection in the big lens.

Oh, she thinks.

“Cut,” says the man in the soft brown sweater. He wheels to look at her. “Cut!” he says, and swipes the blade through the air. “I’ve never killed one of you before. Is it messy?”

Mona ignores him. She tries to concentrate on wriggling her right wrist around to rotate her little lens toward the big one…

“I bet it is,” he says. “You’re all full of… fluid. Matter. Hm.” He looks down at his sweater. He plucks the front and stretches it out. “Hm,” he says again.

Is it pointed in the right direction? She can see part of the face of the hand mirror (or hand lens) in the reflection of the big lens. Two little bubbles of space, floating free and unattached in the air…

She remembers the nursery. The face of the woman who looked so much like her.

Because it was you, she thinks.

Stop. Don’t think about that.

She thinks she has the angles right, so she tries to concentrate. But this time it’s not hard at all: she senses immediately that the big lens is a different animal altogether. Using the hand mirrors in Mrs. Benjamin’s house was like using tweezers to pick up pebbles, but this thing is a f*cking bulldozer on and rumbling and ready to go, leaping at the slightest touch of the pedal. The challenge won’t be getting it to work, but controlling it.

The man in the brown sweater is now carefully removing his sweater, but he hasn’t thought to put down the knife, which makes it pretty tough on him.

Mona focuses on one of the little knives next to the black box. For a long time, nothing happens. But then it appears to grow just slightly, slightly transparent…

She opens her left hand wide. I hope I get the right part in my f*cking hand, she thinks, otherwise I’m going to cut my palm wide open.

“Ah!” says the man. He’s finally gotten one arm and his head out of his sweater. “There we go!”

Come on, come on.

The knife flickers. Then she feels something hard and cold in her left hand. She begins to close her fingers around it…

… but just as she does, she sees something in the big lens. The lens, she thinks, is a bit like a door, and this one’s been left slightly ajar, opening onto wherever it opened onto last. It’s like looking at something down a long, dark hallway (and Mona isn’t really looking at all, except possibly with the little dark eye inside of her), but she thinks she’s starting to understand.

The lens opened onto a place ghostly and distant, something ephemeral and far away… something that didn’t happen, or at least it didn’t happen here.

Was that me I saw? Or another version of me?

She remembers her current situation when she hears a voice say, “Cut.”

She releases the big lens. She’s still sitting in the chair with her wrists bound behind her, the hand lens in her right hand and the knife in her left. She begins sawing at the rope as fast as she can, trying to summon all her remaining strength. Her left hand and arm are so numb that it’s difficult to tell how far she’s getting.

The man, now sweaterless, takes a breath. “All right,” he says softly. “All right.”

He takes a step forward, still staring at her with that detached, blank gaze. Whatever swims in his eyes is wriggling madly.

Mona feels the rope begin to give way. She frees the pinky and ring finger of her right hand and twists the rope, trying to stretch the fibers against the blade.

“Just a cut,” whispers the man.

He takes another step.

The rope frays. Pops.

Mona strains her left shoulder. More pops sound from the rope.

“Hm?” says the man. He leans in, confused.

The rope snaps.

Mona clenches her teeth, and swings her left hand around.

There is a soft thud. It is so soft that it is surprising, really. But then, the knife does bite into a very soft place, just behind the esophagus of the man in the brown sweater, piercing God knows how many tendons and muscles and veins.

Blood sprays from the corners of the knife in tiny, furious geysers, like pinholes in a dike. The man stares at Mona, mouth open. She can already see blood welling up in his mouth. Mona, in disbelief, stares back.

Then rage begins to bubble inside her. My f*cking daughter, she thinks.

She drops the hand lens, brings her right hand around, grasps the top of the man’s head with it, and rips the knife forward with her left.

She is totally and utterly showered in a hot wave of blood, which shocks her, but she really should have expected that since she’s just partially decapitated this man. As he tumbles to the ground, all she can think is Man oh man am I happy I kept my mouth closed.

He twitches for a moment, still just spewing blood (this does not surprise Mona—she’s seen a few murder scenes, which is when you realize the shocking amount of blood in the human body), and then he goes still.

There is the soft sound of thunder from somewhere.

“Shit,” she says. She hopes she didn’t just send this stupid bastard into someone else’s body. But that seems highly plausible right now.

She looks at herself in the lens. She’s bloody from head to toe. But she’s alive. And she’s not quite as weak as she thought. Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, since she’s just lost a shitload of blood.

But maybe, she thinks as she stares at herself in the lens, it’s because you’re not completely human.

She looks at the vat of blood before the lens. She almost wishes to touch it. She cannot conceive that a child was just there, and that that child might have been her daughter…

Mona decides she doesn’t understand a goddamn bit of this. But she knows someone who does.


She takes off her shoes before venturing out into the hall, and she moves silently and swiftly over the cracked concrete floor. She has her Glock, but she doesn’t want to use it (because f*ck knows what that bitch in the blue suit would do if she heard her coming), so she’s got two of the knives stuffed into the belt loops of her shorts as backup.

It isn’t very long until she hears voices echoing down the hall.

“—if She’ll be happy to see us,” says a man’s voice.

“Of course She’ll be happy to see us,” says another’s. “We’re Her children.”

“But She’s been gone so long. Will She remember us?”

Silence for a moment. “I had not thought about that. I had not thought that She could forget.”

Mona creeps toward the voices. She comes to a hallway entrance on her left, and listens.

“Do you forget Her?” asks the first voice. “I do, sometimes… it seems awfully hard to remember Her. I remember being happy. I think I remember being happy. But it seems very long ago.”

“We were meant to be happy here. That was what we decided.”

“I know.”

“But I… I will admit that I found it… hard. It was not as easy as I had expected. Maybe Weringer was wrong.”

There is a long pause. “I don’t know. Maybe we were all wrong. Maybe She will know.”

Mona uses one of the hand lenses to look around the corner. She sees two men before one of the lab doors, sitting on the concrete floor cross-legged like children. She wonders what to do before remembering the extreme incompetence of her last captor. The bitch in the blue suit, she decides, must have really scraped the bottom of the barrel for help, but that makes sense—the older and smarter ones would have been too dangerous to approach.

She feels her pockets, and finds a spent round casing from the fight in the canyon the night before. She weighs it carefully, then throws it across the hallway entrance where it tinkles loudly as it rolls away.

“What was that?” asks one man.

Mona shrinks up against the wall. She hears footsteps growing louder. The two men emerge from the hallway entrance, and sure enough they turn immediately in the direction of the sound: they don’t even think to check the other end of the hallway.

So the one on the left is incredibly surprised when Mona stabs him in the back of the leg, just behind his knee, and the other is too stunned to even look at her before she brings the butt of the Glock down, cracking him on the side of his head.

Both of them collapse. “My leg,” says the stabbed one, with an air of wonderment. “What’s happened to my leg?”

There were people in those bodies, once, thinks Mona. I wonder where they went…

Still, she can’t risk these two causing any more trouble, and she doesn’t want either of them hopping into another poor soul’s body. So she stoops down and stabs them in the knees, just next to the kneecaps, severing the iliotibial band.

“My other leg!” cries the stabbed one. “Oh, my other leg!”

“Shut up,” says Mona softly. “There are worse ways to incapacitate you. You want me to try one?”

He doesn’t answer. Mona wonders if he even knows what the word incapacitate means.

Forget it. She leaves them both behind and heads for the door they were guarding.


Mona eases the door open just slightly. The room is the typical Coburn lab (excepting the lens chamber, of course): bare, concrete, wreathed in stains and shadows from equipment long gone. Mrs. Benjamin sits in a heap in the corner, and in the center stands the woman in the blue suit. The two seem to be in the middle of a discussion.

The woman in the panama hat is saying, “—d you know I’ve been farther than you, big sister?”

“Oh?” says Mrs. Benjamin. She looks quite weak, and not very interested.

“You were trapped here in Wink like all the others. But I went to its very limits. When I died, I turned to lightning, and rode the curves of the skies above us… and I’ve been to the fringes. I went there all the time. Maybe past them, just a bit. You can’t claim the same, can you?”

Mrs. Benjamin does not answer.

“No. I even went to that Roadhouse of theirs. That’s where I met them. The natives who helped me. Everyone here thought it was outside the limits. And no one ever tried, because you were lazy, and afraid. But I did. I went there. Imagine how silly it is: a bunch of men, drunk and drugged and stupid, bringing down our five eldest family members. Do you want to find out how?” She reaches down again, and lifts up something: a small, lacquered box.

“I wanted to kill First,” says the woman. “But I wasn’t sure what it would take. So on the last trip, I sent them to get two totems. Just in case. So convenient to have a spare on hand now, isn’t it? I had to go back to their Roadhouse just this morning to get it. You’ve caused me a lot of traveling, Sister.”

“Totems?” asks Mrs. Benjamin, confused.

“Oh, you don’t know? No, you wouldn’t. Listen—do you remember the stories we used to tell one another about the wildling?”

Mrs. Benjamin looks up a little, but does not answer.

“Yes, you do. About the real first, the first child Mother ever had. But it displeased Her, and She abandoned it. But we always used to tell one another that it was following us, following everything we did, trying to catch up.” The woman opens up the box. “Well. It did, Sister. It came with us to Wink.”

Inside is, as Mona expected, a small white skull. Mrs. Benjamin and the woman stare at it, though one does so with a look of reverence and the other with a look of profound dread.

“You do remember,” says Mrs. Benjamin, “that I did just help you.”

“Yes. And I don’t care. Do you feel afraid, Sister?”

“Yes, I feel afraid.”

“Do you feel weak?”

“I suppose I do.”

“That’s how I felt. How I’ve always felt. Weak and scared. It isn’t fair, that I was weak. It wasn’t fair that all I could be was Mother’s Ganymede. I could have been stronger. I could have been better. If you had given me the chance.”

“Ganymede?” says Mrs. Benjamin. “I don’t understand.”

“All I got to be was Her servant. I carried Her cup, I brought Her entertainment. Yet She never thanked me. Because all She ever thought about was you. You five, my elders, always off rushing about, doing important things. She never cared about anyone else. And she should have cared. She would have, if She’d had the chance. You all fought for Her, made sure no one else could ever have Her favor! You manipulated Her!”

“We manipulated Her?” asks Mrs. Benjamin sniffily. “That is a stunning revision of history.”

“Shut up!” snarls the woman. “Don’t act like you didn’t! I… I know what She would have done if you hadn’t made sure you were the favorites! She would have… She would have loved us. She would have loved me. You don’t know what it’s like, being so forgotten. You don’t know what it’s like, to be cast aside. She never even knew us. Never even cared about us. You don’t know what that’s like. None of you do!

“But all that will change.” She thumps herself on the chest. “I am the weapon in Mother’s hand! I am the tool of Her mind! I am Her device, Her emissary, Her herald! I am first in Her eyes! And when She comes I will be rewarded, and I shall be loved! She will come back, and She will love me! Do you hear me? Do you hear my words?”

“I do,” says Mrs. Benjamin warily. “But I wonder if it is really worth it.”

“It is!” says the woman. “It must be! It has to be!”

“Are you sure Mother is even coming? You showed me Her body in the cavern, but…”

“She is! Mother will wake when Her host comes near! That last piece of Her!”

“A child. A human child.”

“Not for long. Soon Mother will wake and take Her rightful place at the center of this world.”

“And then what? You will replace First, replace the rest of us?”

“Yes!” shouts the woman. She is on the verge of sobbing now. “I found Her! I’m the one bringing Her here! I brought down those who would stand in Her way! I brought the woman here! It was me, me, I did it all, it was me! Not you, never you! You never helped! Never helped me, not once!”

“We never knew…”

“You did know! You had to know! Stop… stop saying that!” The woman begins to thrust the open box forward, preparing to send the little skull tumbling onto Mrs. Benjamin…

… which is when Mona’s hand darts forward, and shuts the box with a snap. Before the woman can react, Mona shoves the barrel of the Glock up against her back, right at the base of her spine, and pulls the trigger.

Immediately the woman’s legs give out underneath her: the round has just cleanly severed her spine. She flops awkwardly on the floor, rolls over, and stares at her belly, from which the round has rather messily exited; blood is pouring out at a fairly alarming rate.

Mona stands over her, breathing hard, and looks between her and Mrs. Benjamin. “Right,” she says.


The woman stares up at Mona, then at the wooden box in her hand. “You, you…”

“Yeah,” says Mona. “I shot you. But don’t worry, you’re not dying, at least not fast. I’m smart enough to know that shooting you would just shift you around.” She points her gun at the woman’s chest. “I can make you hurt, though. Real bad. I’m learning to be pretty good at that. Now I want you to tell me what happened in that room back there.”

The woman looks at her blankly, then examines her wound again. She does not seem all that pained or concerned by it.

“Tell me,” says Mona again.

The woman remains still, unresponsive.

“I don’t think physical threats will work, dear,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “It’s my understanding that it has died or hurt or maimed itself numerous times before.”

“It?”

“The Ganymede. That’s what it calls itself.”

“Huh. Well.” Mona sticks her Glock in her shorts (the barrel is hot, but she doesn’t care) and opens the wooden box. The pearly little rabbit skull roars at her silently from its pillow of blue satin.

She looks down at the woman in the panama hat. Her eyes have gone wide. It’s clear she realizes what Mona’s thinking.

“Dying,” says Mona. “It’s a weird idea to you all, isn’t it? I’m pretty sure it’s why your buddy in the brown sweater did such a shit job of trying to kill me. But you—you’ve killed before. I think you’ve killed plenty of times. You get it.”

“I never killed anyone,” says the woman. “It’s against the rules.”

“Mm, I’m willing to bet you killed plenty of people just by body-hopping. Which is a pretty f*cked-up thing to do.” Mona takes a step forward and puts her foot on the wound in the woman’s belly. The woman grunts and tenses up, obviously pained. “You’re not as tough as you think. Now. What the hell happened back there? Whose baby was that?”

“Yours,” groans the woman.

“That can’t be. My baby died. We buried it. It was the worst thing that happened to me in my f*cking life, and I can’t forget it. So whose was it?”

“Yours!” says the woman again.

Mona leans on the wound harder and lowers the box threateningly.

“It’s yours, I swear it is!” the woman shouts.

Mona eases up on the wound. “How?”

She swallows. Her lips are lined with red. “Time… is broken here…”

“Oh, God, not this speech again. I’ve heard it a million f*cking times.”

“Time is broken here,” says the woman angrily, “so here you can see the alternates.”

“The alternates to what?” Mona asks.

“To everything!” shouts the woman.

Mona eases up more on the wound. She thinks, and asks, “What the hell does that mean?”

Mrs. Benjamin clears her throat. “I believe I can help with this. Time is not linear, dear—you and your kind experience it as linear, but it isn’t, not really. It branches off, spins into different directions. Some of these offshoots fade and die, some keep going. And, occasionally, these can be accessed.”

“Yes,” gasps the woman. “If the… the difference is very slight, the alternate can be breached.”

“And that’s what you did back there? Accessed an alternate… time?”

The woman nods.

“It’s not something that would occur to us on our side, since when we’re in our element we do not experience time the same way you do,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “But here it’s… different.”

Mona realizes her hands are shaking. She flexes them to try to make them stop. “So what we saw was an alternate time. Another way things could have gone.”

“Yes,” says the woman. She is white and panting now.

“And what was the difference between where we are here… and what I saw in the lens?”

“We had to have a piece of Mother that was… willing to cooperate,” says the woman. She coughs, turns her head, and burps up a significant quantity of blood.

“Yeah?”

“We had to have a piece of Her that was from both here and the other side. Our side. To anchor Her here, to pull Her in. I had… I had intended this to be you. That’s why I… called you here.”

“That’s what you tried to do to me on the highway, isn’t it? Make me Her… conduit.”

“Yes,” says the woman savagely. “But you rejected me, rejected Her. You were too old, too… resistant. So we had to find another way. You had had a child, but… it had died in this time.”

Mona’s whole body is trembling, and she knows it is not from blood loss. “So you just found a different time,” she says. “You found a time where… where my baby didn’t die. Where I had her, and she was alive.”

“Yes.”

She’s alive, Mona thinks. My God. She’s alive, and she’s real.

She remembers the look on the face of the Mona in the lens: the complete terror and disbelief when she walked into the nursery and saw the crib was empty…

The woman continues: “We had to have your blood, because… alternates are so difficult to access. The child is a part of you—she is your progeny. We had to… bridge the gap.”

“Like you’re doing with Mother now? Now that you’ve got her, she’ll bring Mother here?”

“She already is here!” snarls the woman. “It’s already happening! The breach has occurred, and the wound is only widening! You can’t stop it! She’s coming!”

She looks to Mrs. Benjamin. “Is this possible?”

“It seems so,” says Mrs. Benjamin gravely. “I cannot pretend to understand all of it… but it seems so.”

The woman’s breath is now shallow. “I’ll see Her,” she whispers. “I’ll see Her and She’ll see me and we’ll be happy again… it’ll be like the past… never happened.”

Mona studies the dying woman. “Think you’re just going to jump ship out of that body?”

The woman’s face is still, but her eyes twitch to look at Mona.

“If you’d just killed a few of your kin, I wouldn’t have cared,” says Mona. “I don’t give a shit about your family squabbles. But you had to drag me into this. Me and my—my dead little girl…”

The woman tries to mouth something. It looks like she’s saying, Mother’s wishes.

“I don’t give a shit what Mother wanted. You’re pathetic. You’re all… you’re all so goddamn pathetic.”

And she turns the box over.

The pale little skull falls through the air.

The woman’s eyes go wide and track it.

And the second it touches her chest…

All three of them become aware of a fourth person in the room with them, who has apparently appeared without any of them knowing it: it is as if this person, who strikes such a strange figure in his ragged, mud-smeared blue canvas suit, and his wooden rabbit mask, has been here all along, and someone has merely turned on a light behind him, outlining his figure and alerting them to his presence.

The room is now two rooms. First the light changes, very subtly: it turns a faint yellow, the color of old parchment. And if she really looks, Mona thinks she can see old, worn stone in the shadows, and somewhere above them is a high, vaulted ceiling…

The woman mouths, No! No!

And then things go

dark

The other side.

Mona opens her eyes, and looks.

A tiny blue-and-white form stands on a black plain.

It is a measly little gangrel, a capering little clown.

It cowers and covers its head, whimpering.

The pink moon hangs above it, fat and swollen.

Yet something dark and spindly rises up, crossing the face of the moon…

Something is standing on the horizon.

Mona can see a long, thin skull, a skull like a needle, and two long ears.

It is huge. The size of skyscrapers. Miles of brambly, dark hide.

And its eyes… so huge and yellow, yet so human, and so angry.

The tiny blue-and-white figure waves its arms. There is a tinny scream:

“No! No! Please, no! Momma! Momma, please!”

The immense, dark thing cocks its head. Its yellow eyes roll.

Hands appear in the darkness, thin and clawed.

“Momma,” whimpers the little figure.

The hands clench. Quiver with rage.

The huge thing dives forward.

A spray of gore, a shriek. Something dark pools on the rocky field.

Whimpers in the dark.

Then…

There is a gasping sound. The air shudders. They are back in the little room at Coburn.

Mona and Mrs. Benjamin look down. The skull is still on the woman’s chest, but she is utterly still. The man in the rabbit mask is gone.

“I’ve never seen any of my family members die before…” says Mrs. Benjamin. “That was…”

“Fast. Real fast. Are you all right?”

“I have been stabbed several times, so—no.”

Mona starts to help her up. “Why the hell did you help me?”

Mrs. Benjamin appears to pout just slightly. “Well. Perhaps I’ve assumed the role of a cranky old woman a little too thoroughly. Sabotage comes to me very naturally, it seems. Or perhaps I don’t like to see people causing havoc.”

“Whatever the reason, I’m grateful. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

They return to the lens chamber to grab Mona’s rifle and some rounds. Then they make their way out. Mrs. Benjamin has to lean on her as they move. “So what happens now?” asks Mona.

“Well… if that Ganymede person was correct, it is possible for Mother to manifest here in some form, but She would be bound to this place, to Wink. Because Wink is not quite here and not quite there. She would need to meld or merge with some element of this side. Only then can she make the full transition.”

“Meld or merge with my—my daughter.” She says these words, though she cannot believe them.

“That is correct,” says Mrs. Benjamin dourly. “The child is young, and weak—Mother can force Her entry.”

“If that were to work, would she… what would happen to the baby?”

Mrs. Benjamin’s eyebrows rise as she considers it. “Well, for one thing, I would not imagine she would look much like a baby at all, after that.”

Getting up the ladder to the roof of the mesa proves quite hard: Mrs. Benjamin has to use Mona’s head or shoulders as a stepping-stone, until finally the blazing, merciless New Mexico sun greets them in a triumphant blast.

“What sort of car was that f*cking doctor driving?” Mona asks in a rasp.

“Erm,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “A black Lincoln, I think?”

“Good,” says Mona. She stands. “The way down is over here.”

“Do you intend to catch up with them?”

“Yeah.”

“I am not an expert in automotive matters, but I believe you’d need a car of your own to do so.”

“I know.”

A grunt as Mrs. Benjamin extends one wobbling, swollen foot toward a rocky purchase. “Do you have a car of your own?”

“No. We’ll just have to… I don’t know, figure it out.”

“I can’t imagine that there is anything nearby. You will have to do some very good figuring.”

Mona stops. “No, I won’t.”

“Why not?”

She points. “I just have to ask her.”

Waiting at the start of the road, just before the broken, locked doors of Coburn, is Mona’s 1969 cherry-red Dodge Charger. A skinny teenage girl is standing beside the passenger door, looking very awkward, which, after all, is a very easy thing for a skinny teenage girl to do.

Gracie clears her throat and waves to them. “Hello,” she says.