Yet then his fingers brush against something small and dry and rough, some item nestled among all the tissue paper. He jerks back, and as he does he cannot help but notice all the lights in the house flickered a bit just now, almost exactly when his fingers touched that hidden little… whatever it is.
Curious, Macey starts pawing through the paper, digging past its layers until he grasps the hard little object. He rips it out, stuck in its own ball of paper, and begins to peel away each pink sheath.
And as he does, the form of the object becomes clear (and the lights flicker more and more and more) until finally the last layer is gone and his disbelief is confirmed:
He holds in his hands a small rabbit skull, its eyes empty and its teeth like little pearls. He turns it over in his hands,
(and does he feel a door opening somewhere in the house, invisible and tiny, a perforation in the skin of the world through which black aether comes rushing?)
examining it and thinking what a bizarre little gift this is, but his examination is interrupted.
There is a clicking sound in his hallway. He looks up, searching for its source, and he tracks it to the little (black, of course) table at the end of the hall. There is a plate of decorative black marble balls on it, and they are all clacking against one another as if someone is shaking the plate.
And then something happens that even Macey finds strange: slowly, one by one, the marble balls lift from the plate and begin floating into the air.
Macey stares at this, astonished, his eyes beginning to hurt from the flickering lights. He turns and looks at the window at the end of the hall. He can see the reflection of the living room there, and he sees that all his belongings in that room are floating, too: the womb chairs dangle in nothing as if hanging from invisible string, the copies of Southwestern Steppes Outdoorsman drift by with pages fluttering.
Then he feels it, a sensation he has not felt in a long, long time.
The world is bending. Something from elsewhere—something from the other side—is making its way through.
Macey rises, and walks to his open front door.
There is a man standing on the front walk.
(you know this man)
His figure is pale and somewhat translucent, as if his image were rendered in the blue flame of a dying candle, but Macey can see two long horns or maybe ears rising up from the sides of his skull…
(Brother Brother do you see me)
Macey stares at him, and whispers, “No, no. It can’t be you, it can’t be.”
Yet the figure remains, watching him impassively. Macey does not wait: he throws the door shut, locks it, and sprints down the hallway.
All around him his possessions are leaving the ground to hang in the air. The floor and walls shake as if the mountain were threatening to cut the house loose and send it sliding down into the valley. And each room begins to flood with an awful smell, a scent of horrific rot and hay and shit…
“No, no!” screams Macey. “Not you, not here! I didn’t do anything to you! Leave me alone, please!”
He hits the stairwell, grabs the post, swings himself around, and leaps down the black marble steps, knees protesting with each bound. The lights in the floor above him are dying out, leaving each room dark, and he feels he can hear something rushing through the house after him, moving with the sound of a thousand dead leaves striking pavement…
The floor below is no different. The filament of each bulb sputters, and everything—chairs, tables, lamps—hangs suspended in the air. Macey dodges these obstacles and throws himself toward a large black door tucked away under the stairs. He opens it, falls through, and slams it behind him.
The other side is dark. Macey, breathing hard, fumbles for the switches on the wall beside him. When his fingers finally find them he slaps them all on, and the room fills with light.
The room is huge, nearly two hundred feet on each side, and the ceiling is lined with bright fluorescent lamps. Ordinarily this room would be the garage, filled with expensive, fancy cars that would suit the taste of the house’s owner. But Mr. Macey’s garage is totally empty, nothing but blank gray surfaces on all sides except the ceiling.
This room has one advantage, however: none of its doors have ever been unlocked or used except the one Mr. Macey has just run through. It is completely barricaded off.
How could it be here, he wonders? Such a thing is impossible. Yet then he thinks of the
(invitation)
skull in the box… and he begins to realize that there are many more machinations operating within Wink than he ever suspected, and he has just stumbled into one.
He puts his ear to the door. He cannot hear anything on the other side, nor can he see any hint of flickering lights through the crack at the bottom. He wonders what this could mean… yet just as he does the lights above flicker, just a little, and he begins to smell a horrible odor pervading the room, the smell of an untended barn, stables and coops of livestock lying dead and rotting in the hay…
“No,” he whispers.
He sits up and looks around. And he sees he is not alone.
There is a man standing in the exact center of the garage. He is very tall, and he stands motionless with his arms stiff at his sides. He wears a filthy blue canvas suit, streaked with mud in a thousand places, and sewn into the surface of this suit are dozens and dozens of tiny wooden rabbit heads, all with huge, staring eyes and long, tapered ears. On his face he wears a wooden helmet—or perhaps it is a tribal mask—whose crude, chiseled features suggest the blank, terrified face of a rabbit, complete with curving, badly carved ears. Where its eyes should be are two long rectangular holes. Somewhere behind these, presumably, are the eyes of the mask’s wearer, yet only darkness can be seen.
Mr. Macey falls to his knees. “No,” he whispers. “No, no.”
The figure does not move, yet when the lights flicker out and come back on he is suddenly closer, just yards away.
“You can’t be here,” says Macey. He hugs his chest and wilts before the intruder. “You can’t have followed us. You can’t have been here all along…”
The lights flicker again and the figure in the rabbit suit is closer, standing only a few feet in front of Mr. Macey. He stares up into that blank wooden face, and those dark, rectangular eyes, and he sees…
(a cracked plain, red stars, and a huge black pyramid rising from the horizon, and all around it are thousands of broken, ancient columns, a place where a people once worshipped things that departed long ago)
(a scar-pocked hill, at the top of which is a twisted white tree, and from the tree’s branches are many swollen, putrid fruits, un-plucked and untended for centuries)
(endless darkness, stars flickering through the ether, and then empty, sunless cities made of black stone, each leaning, warped structure abandoned eons ago)
(falling, falling through the black, forever)
(a mesa, sharp and hard against the starlit sky, and clouds gather around its tip and lightning begins to leap from cumulus to cumulus, staircases of light waiting to be lowered to the ground)
And though the figure does not speak, Mr. Macey knows what it is trying to say, and he thinks he sees eyes behind the mask now. They are wild and mad, filled with an incomprehensible fury. The figure’s hands, fingers thick and scarred and filthy, are bunched into fists. And slowly, bending at the waist, the figure leans down to him.
Mr. Macey begins screaming. And the last thought that enters his mind is: he was right. Parson was right. The wildling is in Wink. It has been in Wink all along.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Mona is driving so fast she’s about halfway across town before she realizes she has no idea where she’s going. Is she leaving Wink, she wonders? Though that would make sense, the thought never crossed her mind. She jumped in the car with no intention other than just to get away, to get the hell out of the house. And possibly just away from the crawling, nauseating feeling that she’s going as batshit crazy as her mother did. Bec
ause that would make sense, wouldn’t it? She remembers her mother staring out of windows, describing things that weren’t there: old buildings, thousands of caves, cities in the ice… the similarities are so exact it makes Mona feel physically ill.
She needs to talk to someone about what she saw, to articulate it aloud and pick it apart, and let them weigh in on whether or not she’s exactly as nuts as she feels. But she doesn’t have a single friend in this town. She only talked to Carmen for ten minutes, and this seems out of her league. And she certainly doesn’t trust Mrs. Benjamin, because somewhere in Mona’s furious thoughts is the suspicion that that crazy bitch’s mirror trick is the cause of all this: it opened something in her head, or maybe a lot of somethings, and now she feels like she’s seeing double all the time. There is the peaceful little town of Wink, but behind that is something much stranger, like one piece of wallpaper pasted over another, yet she can see both at once.
But evidently there is someone she can go to, for she looks up as if waking from a dream and finds that not only is the car stopped, but it’s parked before the manager’s office of the Ponderosa Acres.
A shadow splits the golden stream of light pouring through the door, and the form of Parson comes shuffling into view.
He looks at her. Her fingers are still clutching the wheel. He scratches his chin and gives a deep, amused “Hm.”
“Help,” says Mona softly.
He looks over his spectacles at her. “I beg your pardon?”
Mona manages to let go of the wheel, open the car door, and hobble out. “You’ve… you’ve got to help me.”
“Help you what?”
Mona wonders how she can possibly phrase this. “I really don’t know. I’m… I think something’s really wrong with me, Mr. Parson.”
“How so?”
She thinks for a long time, feeling ashamed of what she’s about to admit to. “I know it sounds crazy, but I’m… seeing things.”
He raises his eyebrows and waits for more.
“I’m seeing two things at once. Seeing people and places here, and something else. I… I saw the goddamn lightning storm from thirty years ago, through my own wall.”
“Did you?” He does not sound alarmed at all, but quite intrigued. “Well. I am unused to having so many people come to me for advice. But I admit, it is not unpleasant. Please come in,” he says, extending a hand to the door.
She enters, and his office is almost the same as before, though now “Only the Lonely” is playing on the radio. He turns to face his card table—a game of Chinese checkers is again in progress—and says, “Will you please excuse us?”
Mona looks at him, then the table. It is totally empty. She is not sure whom he could be addressing, but he shuts the door as if whoever it was has just left.
He gets her a cup of coffee and gestures to the card table. She sits at one chair, he at the other. Her chair is unpleasantly warm, as if someone was just sitting in it. And of course someone was, she reminds herself: Parson was just sitting here. Wasn’t he?
“Now,” he says, and he takes a long, messy slurp of coffee, “why don’t you tell me what happened?”
And she does. She tells him about the dreams she’s been having, and Mrs. Benjamin’s mirror trick, and the tea closet, and the horrifying glimpse of the lightning storm she’s heard so much about. “I mean, is it possible I imagined it?” she asks. “I got told about the storm so many times, maybe I just thought up what it’d look like and then… hallucinated it.”
“Hm,” Parson says slowly. “No. I doubt that.”
“You do?” she says, relieved. “Then what could it have been? How could I see something like that?”
Parson is still for a long, long time. He looks at Mona, and though she once suspected he was senile she now feels a terrible intelligence in that gaze, like he is trying to silently communicate many things to her. “You know by now that Wink is… different. Correct?”
She wonders what that means, but says, “I… think so.”
“There are some things I can discuss about it, Miss Bright, and some things I cannot. I am not permitted to, I should say. But, since you have experienced this firsthand… I do not feel I would be giving you information you are not already privy to.” He takes another contemplative sip of coffee. “You probably will not believe it, I expect.”
“I might.”
“We shall see,” he says, indifferent. “In my time here, I have found that there are places in Wink where things do not precisely work right. Not like pipes or plumbing or electricity. Specifically, time no longer works right.”
“Time?”
“Yes. Please forgive me, I am not familiar with all of the terminology, so… here. Imagine time as a clock, with many gears and wheels—an easy enough metaphor, I imagine—but some gears have some damage or imperfection in them that causes them to sometimes catch, and skip back several notches, and run again. Do you see?”
“I certainly fucking don’t.”
“What I am saying,” he says, “is that what you experienced was not, I feel, a hallucination, or a symptom of some madness within your”—he thinks for a while, searching for the word—“ brain, but rather you were witness to this occasional skipping of the gears. The time where you were was damaged, so you saw something that had happened already. It is common enough, I expect, though understandably you were quite perturbed.”
The wind rises outside the motel. It sounds unusually sharp, and even Parson appears a bit disturbed by it.
“How can time be damaged?” asks Mona. “You can’t hurt time, like it’s some… like it’s a fucking engine or something.”
Parson raises an eyebrow—And you would know this how?
“Wink is goddamn weird, but it can’t be… you can’t have something like that happen. Things like that aren’t real.”
“I said I did not think you would believe it,” he says mildly. “It is always possible for time to be nonlinear. Some perceive time to be in a straight line—others perceive it as having many different branches, like those of a tree, leading to could-have-beens and might-have-beens and should-have-beens and so on. The idea of seeing the past is not an extraordinary one.”
“Are you really saying I saw the past?”
“A few seconds of it. Unfortunately for you, the past in that place was quite troubled. I think if you saw the past of someplace else—say, some park or closet—you would have hardly noticed anything at all. You would have simply experienced some feeling of wrongness, like there was a change in light, before things reverted to normal. The past, for you people, is often not very different from the present, beyond some superficial differences.”
Mona remembers the way the town was lit up with flaming houses, and how the lightning slowly snaked down to brush the earth… “So that was the thunderstorm?”
Parson shrugs. “You saw it. I did not.”
Yet Mona knows she saw something worse than the burning town, and the charred girl in the tub. “Do you know… if, when the storm came, there was something on the mesa? Something standing there, like a person would? But… bigger? Much, much bigger?”
Parson gives her a very closed look and shrugs again.
“You don’t know?”
His face grows grave. “I cannot say.”
“You can’t say, or you don’t know?”
Parson frowns and sips his coffee, but does not look her in the eye.
“So how does something like time get damaged?”
Now Parson looks positively anxious. Outside the wind keeps rising, and there is a burst of static on the radio. “I am not permitted to say,” he says.
“What do you mean? Why not?”
“I am sorry. But it is not… allowed,” he says, and when he sees Mona’s irritated glare, he adds, “I cannot. There are rules.”
“What the hell do you mean? Whose fucking rules?”
He blinks slowly and exhales, as if he is suffering from a tremendous migraine. Mona notices sweat beginning t
o shine on his forehead. “I am sorry, Miss Bright. But I am not permitted to say much more than what I have. It would be indecent for me to say more upon this matter.”
He gives her a pained look, and Mona begins to wonder if discussing this subject is physically hurting him, like every word he says wounds him in some hidden manner. Just telling her that he can’t tell her appears to be making him sick.
“Can you tell me about Benjamin’s mirror trick?” she asks. “Is that what did this to me?”
Parson looks relieved to have changed the subject. “Ah. Well. I doubt it,” he says. “The mirror trick was precisely that—a trick, or a small and largely meaningless show.”
“But it changed something in me.”
“It did not change anything, I believe. It simply made you aware of something that was already there.”
“And what is it that’s there?”
“You have spent several weeks here. Long enough to know that this place is not normal, by your standards. But do you ever feel, Miss Bright, a sense of kinship with this town? A sense of familiarity, like you have walked these streets before? Or, rather, have you felt throughout your life a quiet type of pain, a nostalgia for a place to which you’ve never been? I think I see such a thing in you. Am I wrong?”
Mona feels a warmth in her palm, and realizes she is trembling and has spilled coffee on her hand. She places the coffee cup on the card table. “Yes.”
“Yes. I feared it was that way when you first came. We do not have new arrivals in Wink, Miss Bright. Unless, that is, they are supposed to be here. And how you came to this place is extraordinarily troubling to me.”
“Why?”
Parson opens his mouth to answer, but then the motel is absolutely blasted by wind. Tree branches and whirling leaves strike the sides of the building, and the windows flex and quiver in their frames. There is another burst of static on the radio, long and loud, and it might be Mona’s imagination but it almost sounds like there is a voice trying to speak through all the white noise.
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