If you enjoyed
THE TROUPE,
look out for
Robert Jackson Bennett’s next novel
Ex–police detective Mona Bright has inherited a house. Her mother’s, apparently. And jobless, homeless, and aimless, Mona decides to return to a home she never knew.
The house is in Wink, New Mexico, a town no one has ever heard of. Trapped in the nuclear-age optimism of the 1960s, Wink seems like a town that time has left behind.
Except behind its sunny façade there are dark secrets and darker motives. Mona is the key that will set off a chain of events that no one could have predicted. Strange horrors lie in wait for her, and her homecoming may be her undoing.
Wink is not perfect. Its residents are well aware of that. But then, they say, no place is perfect. There’s always a few mild irritants you have to put up with, no matter where you go. So Wink is really no different, is it? No, they say. It really isn’t.
For when night falls and the blue lightning blooms in the sky, things change.
It is something in the very air. Suddenly the Googie architecture and the pleasant, white wood cottages no longer look so spotless. Streetlights seem dimmer, and the neon signs appear to have more dead insects clogging their tubing than they did during the day. People stop waving. In fact, they hunch over and hurry back inside with their eyes downcast.
It is very regular to have strange experiences at night in Wink. For example, in Wink it is common to wake up with the powerful feeling that someone is standing in your front or backyard. It is never known to you whether or not this stranger has come to your house in particular, or if they’re watching you and your family; they are simply there, shadowy and still. What is most exceptional about this is that all of it is conveyed only in feeling, an irrational conviction like that of a dream. Most people in Wink do not even look out their windows when this occurs, mostly because they know doing so would prove the conviction true—for there is a stranger on your lawn, dark and faceless and still—and, moreover, seeing them has its own consequences.
There are houses in Wink where no one ever sees anyone going in or out, yet the lawn is clean and the trees are trimmed and the beds are full and blooming. And sometimes at night, if you were to look—and of course you wouldn’t—you might see pale faces peeping out of the darkened windows.
In the evening in Wink, it is normal for a man to take the trash out to the back alley, and as he places the bag in the trash can he will suddenly hear the sound of someone speaking to him from nearby. He will look and see that the speaker stands behind the tall wooden fence of the house behind his, and he will be unable to discern anything besides the shadow of the speaker’s figure and the light from his neighbor’s windows filtering through the pickets. What the speaker is whispering to him is unknown, for it will be in a language he has never heard before and could never mimic. The man will say nothing back—it is crucial he say nothing back—and he will walk away slowly, return to his home, and he will not mention it to his wife or family. In the morning, there will be no sign of anyone having been behind the fence at all.
In the morning in Wink, people frequently find that someone has gone through their garbage or left footprints all over their lawn. On discovering this they will set everything to right, either by replacing the garbage or smoothing over the grass, and they will not complain or discuss it with anyone.
There are very few pets in Wink. Almost all of them are decidedly house-trained. Outdoors, wandering pets are unpopular, for they have a tendency to never return home in the morning.
On the outskirts of Wink, where the trees end and the canyons begin, people often hear fluting and cries from down the slopes, and, on very clear nights, one can see flickering lights of a thin, unnerving yellow, and many dark figures standing upright and still on the stones.
And sometimes, maybe only once a year, the people who live near the park at the center of town will glance out their window at night and see a small crowd has silently assembled on the grass. They all stand motionless with their heads craned up, watching the night sky. What they are looking at would be difficult to determine from any angle, but most residents understand that they are looking at one black corner of the sky. It is unusual, naturally, for anyone who has such a beautiful night sky before them to focus on the one part that has no star at all. Yet this starless part is all that they care to stare at. Or, perhaps, it has no star anymore.
The residents of Wink know about all these things, in a peripheral fashion. They tolerate them as one would a rainy season, or some pestering raccoons. Because, after all, no neighborhood is perfect. There’ll always be a few problems, at least. And besides, everyone can make an arrangement, if they want.
Comes he walking windy-ways, wandering under spruces and through canyons and across shadowy glens, hands in his pockets and head bowed as if all the weight of the world lies teetering on his slumped shoulders. Which it is, in a way, and this is a change of pace for Mr. Macy, he who is so often the delight of Cockler Street, always there sweeping off his store’s front steps and waiting to favor passersby with a wink or a smile or a piece of bawdy flattery. The very idea of merry old Macy ever falling into a gloomy spell is preposterous, inconceivable, for Macy is indomitable, unchanging. Were the town ever washed away in a freak flood Macy would remain, still ready with a snippet of gossip or an idle joke. Yet here he is, making a lonely crossing through the desolate countryside, the pink moon lazily swimming through the purple skies above him, and though Macy may tell himself his midnight perambulations serve some deeper, more secret purpose, he cannot deny that partially they serve to relieve his mind of its many burdens.
As he winds around a staggered cliffside he glimpses a flash of lightning over his shoulder. He stops and watches the blue luminescence bloom in the clouds above the mesa, its eldritch light strobing the mountains, the pines, the red rocky flats beyond that seem
queerly threatening recently. The lightning is soundless, but his ears imagine quiet thunder rolling across the countryside. It will gather around the tip of the mesa (it always gathers at the tip of the mesa) and disperse, trailing north and east to fade to nothing.
Then he cocks his head. His eyes go searching, curious, tracing over every line of dark on the mountain. He saw something, he’s sure of it, not the brilliantine blue of lightning, no, but a flat box of dull white light, like a window. But what could lie yonder on the mesa save the remains of the lab, with its twisted tunnels and blackened antennae (all sticking up from the ground like barbecue spits)? And he is sure there is nothing else there,
(except the door)
nothing at all, for they would know about it, wouldn’t they?
He looks. Waits. Sees nothing. Then continues home.
His manner of walking is counterclockwise and peripheral, approaching the town always from the side, crossing empty playgrounds and parks and isolated intersections. It is good to move through the forbidden places, the halfway patches. He’s spent too much time in the havens at the center of Wink, far too much time puttering around his store and among his neighbors. Here at the edges, in the cracks and at the crossroads, stepping from shadow to shadow in the river of darkness that runs through the heart of Wink, he feels much more at home.
As he walks under one tree a harsh buzz sounds out from above. He stops, peers up. Though the tree is dark he can see the form of a man standing at the top, balanced perfectly on a single branch. The buzz increases, wheedling and reedy, like it is telling him to clear off. It is not a sound any human could ever make.
Macy watches for a moment, but soon grows impatient. He has no time for such mannered gestures. “Oh, shut up,” he snaps.
The thing in the tree falls silent. Mr. Macy glares at it a moment longer, then continues on.
Mr. Macy can go anywhere he likes in Wink, anytime,
(except beyond it)
and no one knows more about the town than he does. Except, perhaps, for Mr. Werthing. But Mr. Werthing is dead, dead as a doornail, dead as dead can be. Whatever that means.
And what does it mean? he wonders as he walks. What could it ever mean? Macy does not know. What a foreign concept it is: to die, to cough up what you are as if it were no more than mucus pooled at the back of your throat and perish. Where is his friend now? What has happened to him? Where has he gone? Still he wonders.
It is this death—and the answers about it he so desperately desires—that has sent Macy on these midnight errands, visiting the hidden residents of Wink and telling him his news and thoughts: have you heard and what did you do, who knew before you and how, and why, why? Why did they know, why did they not know, what has happened, what is happening? Do you know? Does anyone know?
No. They do not. They, like Macy, like the town, are alone now.
He misses Werthing like one would miss a limb. Werthing was always the stabilizing force in town, the rudder steering their little ship across dark, unsteady seas. It was his idea to use the names of the town’s residents. “And are we not residents of the town?” he said to them. “Are we not these people now? I feel that we are. We are part of a community. And so we should be named accordingly.”
Part of a community… Macy badly wishes this were the case.
For now the unthinkable has happened: one of them has died. No, more than that—he has been murdered. How can such a thing occur? Do the seas sometimes float away into the sky? Do the planets crash into one another in their orbit? Can one hold the stars in the palm of their hand?
No, no. And so they cannot die.
But Macy has a few ideas about how this happened. He knows those men at the truck stop had something to do with it, such weaselly little things with small eyes and cautious movements. He can smell it on them, a heady, reeking perfume of guilt and malice. It’s as if they went rolling in it, like dogs. Macy’s started scaring them out of town ever since, and oh, how he’s enjoyed doing that, especially the last one. He’s never toyed with the natives like some of the others do, but how fun it was to rouse one of the slumbering ones to join him in his little jest. And that was all he wanted
(kill them)
to do, really. Just a joke. After all, he is forbidden to do more.
Yet how often had he said that they should remove the roadhouse entirely? It was a threat, a taint to their peaceful way of life. Especially after they started bringing in that drug, the heroin. But it was Werthing who always talked him out of it. “Let them be,” he would say. “They’re little people making little fortunes off of little vices. They’re no concern of ours. And were we to do anything about them, I’m certain it would attract attention, and that we do not need.” How ironic that those he defended should be the very ones who took his life.
And that is the crux of it, the howling, snarling, silly old crux of it. How could men—and poor, stupid, foolish ones at that—ever manage to kill one of them? Hadn’t it been said from the start, even decreed, that they were not to die? That they should never harm another or perish
(oh, mother, where are you)
so long as they waited here?
Of course, the answer came from the very last person Macy wanted it to. Nearly all the hidden residents of Wink reacted the same way to the news: they trembled, quaked, asked many questions themselves, before finally admitting they knew nothing, and begging Macy to please let them know once an answer was found.
(yet how troubling were those he visited that did not answer his call, those caves and canyons and old dry wells he came to and spoke into, and though he expected them to emerge [with the sound of rustling scales, or the burbling of deep waters underground] and turn their attentions on his being and join him in parley, they did not? he now wonders—were they gone? had they fled? or were they too terrified by what had happened to even poke their heads out of their makeshift domiciles?)
And Macy expected old Parson to do the same, or perhaps he wanted him to, for Macy has never liked old Parson, so contemptuous of everything they try to accomplish in Wink. But to his chagrin, Parson did none of those things. Instead he went still, thought, and said: It’s true that none of us are allowed to kill any other. Or, rather, we promised so before we came here. But did we all make that promise, Macy?
Macy said: Of course we did. We wouldn’t have been allowed to come if we didn’t. We would have been left behind. So every one of us did, naturally.
And Parson said: But what if there was someone in Wink who… what is the word… stowed away with us when we came? Someone who’s been living here in secret, or who’s unable to get out of wherever it is they are?
Macy said: That can’t be. There’s no one else besides us. There’s always been us, only us, and no one else.
Parson said: But that’s not so. There was another. Before all of us. Even me and Mr. First. Wasn’t there?
Mr. Macy was confused at first. What jabbering was this? Silly old fruit, the loneliness and isolation has gotten to him. But then he realized what the old man was getting at, and as the thought trickled into his brain he turned white as a sheet. And Macy said: No… No, you’ve got to be wrong.
Parson only shrugged.
Macy said: You have to be wrong. It can’t be here. It just can’t be.
Parson said: Many things that couldn’t be have happened recently. But if it was here, wouldn’t it have a very good reason to want to hurt us? And I don’t think She would have ever extracted a promise from it. I doubt She even knew it came with us. That is, if I’m right. It is only one possibility.
Yet the idea resonates in some dark, awful corner of Mr. Macy’s heart. It would confirm so many of his worst suspicions that it must be true. What can one do against such a
(woodwose, wayward and wild)
thing? They would be helpless. Such a being is beyond comprehension, even for them, and they comprehend a great deal.
Macy looks up as he walks, and is a bit surprised to see what he has come to.
A sprawling modernist mansion is laid out against the hillside before him. It is done in the style of a Case Study House, with long, flat levels and glass walls, and a sparkling blue pool dangling over the mountain slope. Its steel posts are lit up by track lighting running along the base of the house. Though the house is currently dark, one can see white globe lamps hanging from the ribbed steel roofing, and white womb chairs are lined up against an elegant Japanese wall screen. It is a house that has absolutely no business belonging in Wink; it is more suited to Palm Springs and the Palisades than a sleepy little town in northern New Mexico.
And Macy says with a slight sigh: “Home again, home again, jiggity-jig.”
He pulls a set of keys from his pocket, takes a winding path through the perfectly manicured cypress trees (each paired with its own spotlight), walks up to the front door, unlocks it, and enters his home.
The entry hall is white, white, terribly white. White marble walls, white marble floors, and what few unwhite spots there are (tables, pictures) are simple black. This is because Macy does not care to see color when he comes home; he is unused to the sensation, and it aggravates him so.
Yet there is color, he realizes. There is a splash of color at his feet, screamingly bright. It is the colors called pink and yellow, and once Macy gets past this irritation he realizes he is staring at a gift-wrapped present sitting in the center of his entry hall. It also features an extremely large pink bow, and attached to this is a white tag. Upon examination, it reads:
BE THERE SOON!
M
Macy scratches his head. This, like the sudden intrusion of color, is a new experience for him: he has never received a present before. He wonders what to do with it. Though his familiarity with this process is limited, he knows there is really only one thing one does with a present: open it.
So he does. He lifts the top off, and inside is heaps and heaps of pink tissue paper. He prods his way through the top layer yet finds no gift inside, so he reaches in, arm up to the elbow in pink paper, and he wonders: why would the present not fit its box? Or (and even he knows this is absurd) does the box contain nothing but pink tissue paper?
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 that all the lights in the house flickered a bit just now, coinciding almost exactly when his fingers touched that hidden little… whatever it is.
Curious, Macy 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 something comes rushing?)
examining it and wondering 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 like someone is shaking the plate.
And then something happens that even Macy finds strange: slowly, one by one, the marble balls lift off from the plate and begin floating into the air.
Macy stares at this, astonished, his eyes beginning to hurt from the flashing 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 National Geographic 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.
Macy 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 is rendered in the blue flame of a dying candle, but Macy can see two long horns, or maybe ears, rising up from the side of his skull…
(brother, brother, do you see me)
Macy stares at him, and whispers, “No, no. It can’t be you, it can’t be.”
Yet the figure remains, watching him impassively. Macy 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 like the mountain is 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 Macy. “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 from 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. Macy dodges through 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. Macy, 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 bright, piercing light.
The room is huge, nearly two hundred feet on each side, and the ceiling is lined with bright fluorescent lamps. Were this a normal house—and if it had a normal owner—this room would be the garage, and it would be filled with expensive, fancy cars that would suit the taste of the house’s owner. But few people have cars in Wink, and those who do certainly don’t need more than one, so Mr. Macy’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. Macy 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
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. It is 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 still he appears to be made of a faint, flickering blue light), and he stands motionless with his arms stiff at either side. 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, square-shaped holes. Somewhere behind these, presumably, are the eyes of the mask’s wearer, yet only darkness can be seen.
Mr. Macy falls to his knees, mouth open. “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 Macy. 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. Macy. He stares up into that blank wooden face, and those dark, square-shaped 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 fruit, unplucked 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. Macy 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. Macy 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.