American Elsewhere

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  Gracie does not answer: she is backing away slowly, her attention fixed on Dee’s body.

  “Gracie!” says Mona sharply.

  Gracie jumps a little. “Wh-what?”

  “They were bringing this box here,” says Mona. “They didn’t come here to attack us. Just to bring this. Why would they do that?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  “Has your”—Mona struggles as she wonders how to word this—“ friend heard of it?” She nods toward the canyon.

  “He’s never mentioned it.”

  Mona turns back to the little bloody box hiding in the weeds. “It took me someplace. When I opened it, it took me and… I think this whole clearing someplace. Somewhere not in Wink. I mean, I know a lot of places in Wink aren’t actually in Wink, whatever that means, but… somewhere even farther than that.”

  “Why would they want to do that to you?”

  Mona starts back up the hill to the mouth of the canyon. “I don’t think they wanted to do that to me,” she says. “Come on. Let’s go meet your boyfriend.”

  CHCAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Unlike nearly everyone who works for him at the Roadhouse, Bolan has a vehicle devoid of any overweening masculinity: his chosen chariot is not a neon-colored sports car, or a muscle-y, amped-up truck, but a bland, nondescript Honda Civic whose sole embellishment is satellite radio. Bolan chose to purchase this car the day he drove back to his home in his Camaro with over three-quarters of a million dollars in the trunk, hands jittering all the way as he tried to imagine how he would explain his cargo to any highway patrolman who just happened to pull him over due to a vague dislike for his ride.

  No—Bolan does not plan to go out like that. He’d rather drive a nebbishy, emasculated car than get collared that way.

  But the Civic has trouble getting to the more remote places here. Bolan never considered that, because he never intended to go into the mountains: he has never wished to go to Wink, never wanted to start down its many winding roads, so he did not choose a car that could handle this terrain. Yet here he is, struggling up an insane incline, wincing as he waits for the road to drop away, when he’ll have to start mashing on the brake.

  Finally he comes to the highway crossroads. He has seen this destination only on a map: it is a frequent pickup spot for Zimmerman, and he often comes back with several pounds of incredibly pure heroin. It is a bit surreal to finally see it in real life. He can see the sign welcoming everyone to Wink just a few feet down, and beyond that the crystalline spiderweb of the town.

  Bolan pulls off the road, throwing up tons of dust, and gets out.

  The headlights turn the dust into a swirling khaki-colored mist. It’s almost impenetrable to the eye. Bolan remembers what the message on the machine said—you will have to look down—and dutifully looks down.

  There is just gravel there, of course. But as the dust settles, he sees he’s parked on the edge of a small cliff. He never even noticed it. If he hadn’t stopped, he would have driven over the edge.

  Nervous (for Bolan does not like heights), he walks to the edge of the cliff, and looks down. There’s a long ravine at the bottom, which, after the fog of dust recedes, fills with pink moonlight. Just a few yards below Bolan is a small rent in the cliff wall, and there is something uncomfortably organic about it, as if it is the cliff’s navel, or (Bolan’s mind does not really want to go there but what can you do) some kind of vaginal orifice.

  That’s the place, of course. It has to be.

  Bolan hasn’t worked as a legman in decades, but he was still smart enough to bring a flashlight. He takes it out and walks along the roadside, flashing the rocks and the trees, looking for a way down. He finds one path that is incredibly dangerous, almost a sheer drop down to the bottom of the ravine, but it’s less sheer than the rest of the cliff wall.

  It takes him twenty minutes to climb down. I am going to get this creepy motherfucker, he thinks, to cough up a significant fee for this act.

  But of course Bolan will do no such thing.

  He gets to the bottom of the ravine and puts his hands on his knees and puffs for a while. When he finally gains the strength to lift his head, he sees he is not alone.

  There is someone standing in front of the hole in the cliff wall. The person is not facing him, but the moon: he stands directly underneath the pale pink orb with one arm up, fingers clawed as if desperate to grasp it.

  Bolan can see that the person is wearing a pale blue suit and a white panama hat. He waits for the man to acknowledge him, but he never does: the man just stands there, frozen, reaching for the moon. Bolan gives up and begins to approach, though warily.

  When he’s about twenty yards away he notices the man in the panama hat is a lot shorter than he remembered. But then, what can he remember about this man? He remembers the briefcase full of heroin, the appearances at the edges of the Roadhouse’s parking lot, but not much else. But whatever he remembers, he does not remember this.

  Because the person in front of the cave is not a man, but a young girl of about sixteen. She has dirty-blond hair that hangs down from the back of the white panama hat in a crooked sheet—obviously, she does not know how to make long hair work with such a hat.

  Bolan stops. He scratches his nose, feeling terribly awkward. Finally the girl drops her arm, stares at her hand for a while, and turns to face Bolan.

  Her eyes are wide and mad, but the rest of her face is vacant of any expression at all. Finally she smiles dreamily. “You look surprised.”

  “That’s because I am,” he says. “Where’s your boss?”

  “Boss?”

  “Yeah. The man who messaged me.”

  “I messaged you,” she says.

  Bolan frowns at her.

  “Do you not recognize me?” she asks.

  He looks at her for a while. Something flutters in her eyes, far at the back. He says, uncertainly, “No.”

  She laughs a laugh that’s mostly clicks from somewhere in her throat. “That’s because I’ve changed. But it is still me, in here.”

  There’s a sound from the cave entrance, an oddly wet sound like someone emptying a bucket of water. Bolan glances at the cave: it is a surprisingly dark hole in the cliff wall, and he can see no end, so it must continue back for several feet. Or more.

  “Okay?” says Bolan.

  “You’re not comforted.”

  “No. The guy said he might die tonight. So I have to assume he did.”

  “Oh, yes. That’s right. I forgot I told you that.” She smiles wider. “Well. I didn’t die. Let’s say I wanted to test what my adversaries knew. And I found they don’t know much. I feared they might know a way to kill me—after all, they are my elders, and usually know much more—but they didn’t. Perhaps they’ve been trapped here for so long they’ve forgotten how we fight.”

  “Okay,” says Bolan, who is feeling more uncomfortable with every passing second.

  She gazes at him solemnly for a long time. Bolan awkwardly stares at the ground and waits. He has never held such a long in-person conversation with his superior—who might or might not be a teenage girl, he isn’t sure. It’s like talking to someone from a mental ward, or a prison, like she’s been in isolation for so long she’s forgotten how to talk with normal people.

  “The totem is on its way to the canyon, correct?” she asks.

  “Yeah. I sent them up there with the box this evening.”

  “And you have no reason to expect any issues?”

  “No. Should I?”

  She stares at him again, that wild, mad gaze of a cultist or a street preacher.

  Bolan’s impatience eventually outweighs his fear. “So… why am I here, again?”

  “You’re here because I wanted to show you something.” She gestures to the cave. “This way.” With stiff, awkward steps, she walks to the cave entrance, and strolls in without looking back.

  “Shit,” says Bolan, and fumbles with the flashlight as he catches up
.

  The cave is quite spacious, tall enough to admit him without his having to duck. It is also curiously even, as if it was drilled or carved into the rock. But its sides gleam a little, as if moist, and when he reaches out to touch them the girl in the panama hat says, “I wouldn’t,” and Bolan does not argue.

  “Where are we?” he asks.

  “You have your headquarters,” says the girl. “I have mine. This is where we’ve been gathering.”

  Bolan thinks—We? He begins looking backward, trying to see if he can spot any figures following them into the tunnel.

  “Have you ever been an outcast, Mr. Bolan?” asks the girl.

  “Uh, an outcast?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not really, I guess.”

  “It is not a pleasant experience. We all wish to belong. We all have our families, our communities, our hierarchies. And we all wish to be thought well of in the eyes of those above us. But to be denied that—to have it withheld, and to be forgotten, when you are so deserving of attention—can you imagine anything worse?”

  Bolan decides now is a great time to be diplomatic. “I can’t.” He is keeping the flashlight trained on the floor, watching the gleaming heels of the girl’s two-tone shoes as they pace over the tunnel floor. But at one point the walls recede from his vision, and he realizes they have just entered what must be an immense cavern.

  Then the girl isn’t there anymore. It’s just him and his flashlight, standing at the entrance to this huge cavern. Bolan hears noises in the cavern: that wet, sloshing noise, and what he can only think of as a sloughing sound. Something in this chamber is moving, he realizes. Probably because he’s just walked in, which makes it—whatever it is—nervous.

  A hand snaps out of the dark and snatches the wrist holding the flashlight. He yelps a little, and squirms to see it’s the girl in the panama hat.

  “I would keep your flashlight trained on me,” she says softly, “and what I wish you to view, and nothing else.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there are things in the dark here, Mr. Bolan. Things I do not think you wish to see.”

  The noises in the cave increase. His ears become hysterical half-wits, telling him he is hearing pits of snakes, octopuses in underground pools, alligators turning over in the churning mud. He stares into the wide, mad eyes of the girl, who is breathing hard, with flushed cheeks. Bolan is uncomfortably reminded of his high school girlfriend, whose cheeks pinkened that exact same way when she was horny, as if she were almost to the point of overheating and had to strip from fear of death.

  “Do you know why I engaged your services?” the girl asks.

  Bolan thinks of several answers, and knows all of them are wrong. “Not really.”

  “I contacted you,” she says, “because I wished to stage a reunion.”

  “All right?”

  “And some people were very difficult about that. Some people did not wish to reunite with anyone. They claimed they were happy where they were. But no one,” she says slowly, with a touch of fear in her eyes, “is ever really happy where they are—are they?”

  “I guess you’re onto something there.”

  “No. No, they’re not.” She looks away into the darkness, as if she can see right into it. She thinks, then looks back at Bolan with a knowing gleam in her eyes. “Look,” she says. She forcefully turns his hand over—she’s as strong as a goddamn ox, somehow—and shines his light on something lying on the ground at the cave wall.

  There is a glistening white deposit of some mineral there, nearly four feet tall and about six feet in diameter. It looks like the ceiling has been dripping down onto this spot for millennia, leaving traces of… whatever that is on the cave floor. The girl drags him over to it, and reaches out and touches the deposit, which crumbles apart like flour.

  She holds her fingers up to Bolan’s face with the traces of powder still on their tips. “Does that look familiar?”

  Bolan looks at it. He slowly begins to understand what the girl is suggesting. “Is that… no. No way.”

  She smiles. “They’re making it now. Can you not hear them?” She cocks her head, and points to the ceiling. Bolan looks up, but can see nothing but darkness above them. Then there’s a wet sucking sound, and a soft moan, and a huge dollop of something white plummets out of the darkness to smack into the top of the white pile.

  Bolan almost falls back, but the girl holds him up. “It takes a while for it to dry,” she says calmly. “And it took us a while to get the formula right. But with the resources I’ve gathered here, there really isn’t much I can’t make.”

  He has never been more repulsed and terrified in his life. Did something up there really excrete or shit out a whole fucking kilo of what this girl is suggesting is heroin?

  She is clearly enjoying his confusion. “You look surprised.”

  “Please take me out of here,” says Bolan. He cannot stop staring into the shadows, wondering what stands just beyond the penumbra of his flashlight, staring back at him.

  “Are you afraid?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Because I don’t think… I don’t think we’re alone in here.”

  “You’ve never been alone. We’ve always been there at the edges of things, watching. You see us when we wish you to.”

  “Please. Please get me out of here.”

  “Not yet,” she says. “I have one more thing to show you.” She turns the flashlight to the left, where there’s something else down along the cave wall.

  It’s a stack of metal blocks of varying sizes: some are the size of shoeboxes, others the size of nickels. The proportions remain the same, however, each time an absolutely perfect cube, save for the odd notches and scuffs in their edges.

  Though the blocks appear rather unremarkable—just bland gray, and six square sides—there is something about them that pulls Bolan’s eye to them. He can’t stop looking at them—in fact, now that he knows that they’re here, he feels that his thoughts will be drawn back to them long after he leaves this place. There is something intensely heavy about them: they make his teeth hurt, like the cubes are slowly but inexorably pulling the fillings out of his skull.

  He realizes that these are the blocks of metal he’s been sending Dee out to get for the past months. He’s never actually seen one in person. Now he knows what Dee is always bitching about: it’s as if merely seeing them has left an imprint on his bones.

  “What are they?” he asks.

  The girl is silent for a long time. He glances sideways at her and sees that tears are streaming down her face. This sight awakens some long-dormant paternal instinct in Bolan, and he briefly experiences the desire to give this crying girl a hug before remembering that the thing holding his hand is probably not a girl of any kind.

  “Have you ever in your life, Mr. Bolan,” asks the girl, “looked on your parents’ remains?”

  “No,” says Bolan, who never knew his father, and whose mother died in prison.

  “Then I cannot describe it to you. It hurts to look at them. But it hurts even more to hold them.” She releases him, and walks to the stack of blocks. She reaches out to one, stoops, and picks it up.

  Immediately her fingers begin smoking. The skin on her palm turns glossy black, like volcanic glass, then crumples and cracks to reveal brilliant red flesh.

  “Jesus Christ!” cries Bolan.

  The girl stares at her withering hand impassively. “Your kind can’t touch Her,” she says reverently. “She is too much for you. Only we can touch Her, in our real forms. But people tend to take notice of our real forms when we move out in the open.”

  She looks at Bolan as if she’s just remembered he’s there. Then she walks to him, smoking, crinkling hand outstretched. He turns his head away, but does not dare step back, for what could be waiting in those shadows?

  “Do you see what this does to me?” she says. “Do you see?”

  “I see! I fucking see!�
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  “What I hold in my hand now is more important than your drug, than your money, than the lives of your men. What I hold in my hand is more important than my own life, and the lives of everyone else who’s come to gather and work in this cavern with me. I would murder this entire town for what I hold in my hand. Do you understand me?”

  “I got you!” Bolan casts an eye back over his shoulder, wondering if he should try running for it.

  “Soon I will need you to find the last pieces. I believe I know where one is, one I’ve asked you about so many times—the largest piece yet. You will find it for me. You must find it for me.”

  The black has spread to the back of the girl’s hand, where the skin is splitting like a shirt several sizes too small. Bolan can see tendons encased in pink tissue, then it all sloughs off and curls away as if the hand is molting.

  “I will! Jesus Christ, I will!”

  The girl nods. “Good,” she says, and—her one hand still sputtering like a dying torch—calmly walks to the stack and replaces the block on the top. She stands there, staring reverently at the block as one would at a gravestone, and nods and walks back to Bolan. “I will take you out now.”

  She walks to the cavern entrance. Bolan turns to follow her, but as he does his flashlight beam happens to shoot out across the cavern.

  And when it does, he sees something.

  For one thing, the cave is enormous—bigger than a football field. But though the cavern is vast, almost all of it is occupied: there is something heaped in the center, and the heap is so huge it almost touches the walls on all sides.

  As the image fades, he realizes it is not a heap: it is a series of stacks, stacks of blocks like the one he just saw, but there must be thousands—no, millions of them. They have been put together almost like a jigsaw, with tiny ones sandwiched between larger ones, and though they are all quite angular, as he considers the sight he realizes they make a shape much like a giant body lying on the cavern floor.

  And as he stumbles down the tunnel, he realizes he saw something else.

  There were things crawling across the stacks of blocks. Dark, shapeless things, dozens of them, hundreds of them, with many arms and legs (or tentacles?), headless, spineless creatures, like enormous jellyfish, all crawling across the sides and roof of the cave…