Thrall

by Mary SanGiovanni

  Sometimes, when she was with him, he’d get a faraway look, his lips pressed tight, and Nadia would know his thoughts were elsewhere, and he was seeing something he couldn’t quite bring himself to let go of. She’d pat his hand, or rub his back, or even just squeeze his shoulder, and he’d look up and smile at her. And at those times, it seemed that he was about to share those thoughts with her.

  He never quite did, though. And she didn’t push. She traced a dried ink version of a symbol from the tunnel rendered on the metal door.

  It was then that she heard the whispering.

  She hadn’t heard anyone come in, but there it was, coming from the handicapped stall to her left. Feverish syllables tumbled out so fast on top of each other that she couldn’t make out individual words. Nadia suspected from what few bits she could catch that it wasn’t English. The words, whatever they were, whatever they meant, bothered her. Using some tissues in place of toilet paper, she straightened her legs and pulled up her underwear, careful to make no sound. She wasn’t sure why it was so important to be quiet, only that it would be better, maybe, to wait for the person in the stall next to her to finish her business and be gone.

  The whispering snapped off abruptly, as if someone had turned off a radio. No sounds of footsteps, and obviously no flush—there was only silence, stretched thin across several seconds. Nadia waited a few moments longer, then eased open the door and peered around it to the next stall. The door to the large one stood slightly open. She glanced around the empty bathroom and made a half-hearted search for feet under the other door. No one appeared to be in there. She crept up to it and placed a hesitant palm on the cool metal. It squealed in protest but swung open further on its hinges.

  The stall was empty, except for a single quote. It was hastily smeared in crooked lettering on the back wall above the toilet, and looked to Nadia to be of the same substance she had seen splattered on the wall coming in. It simply read: “I am become death, shatterer of worlds.”

  She shivered. Death, shatterer of worlds.

  Nadia backed out of the stall, frowning. Did she imagine the whispering? She didn’t think so. That was the excuse they used in movies and books to justify something they knew damn well that they’d heard. Just the wind, just my imagination. That was bullshit. She’d heard whispering.

  She turned to the sink and on a lark, tried a faucet. She was surprised to see it belch out rusty water that tapered off to a trickle. She washed her hands as best she could, keeping a wary eye all the while on the image of the stall door in the mirror. When she was done, she wiped her hands on her skirt to dry them. Her gaze trailed to the splatter by the exit. What was that stuff, anyway? Couldn’t be blood, could it?

  The loud BANG! of a slamming stall door made her jump. She wheeled around with a tiny squeak to face the row of toilets. The handicap stall’s door swung on its hinge with a nerve-grating squeal, caught in the momentum of whatever force had slammed it.

  A corner of red cloth was just visible in the shadows beyond the doorway, partially obscured by the metal panel that came out to meet the door. Beneath that corner was a strip of denim, splotched with dark stains that spread out until the entire bottom cuff just above the scuffed shoe was dyed black.

  Just above the shoe. For Chrissakes, there was someone in the stall.

  “Hello?” She cleared her throat of the snag that had nearly trapped her word. “Are—are you okay?”

  A hand reached out to open the stall. Nadia noticed the fingernails first—sepia tones beneath the chipped blue polish, they arced far past the muddy tips from which they sprouted. As the fingers drew back, those nails dug into the metal with a screech more horrible than that of the hinges. Nadia’s eyes grew wide as she watched the paint of the door shredded upwards into little curlicues around the long furrows in the metal.

  The door pulled inward, and Nadia screamed.

  She bolted for the doorway without looking back and darted through it into the square of blue dusk, away from the stink of rotted meat and whatever maybe deemed itself the “shatterer of worlds.”

  She was barely around the corner when a figure took her up in its arms, and she screamed again.

  ***

  “My God, what happened? Nadia, are you okay?”

  It was Jesse. He held her tightly, and she realized she’d been squirming against him. She slumped against his chest, allowing him to lead her back to the car. Tears had formed in her eyes, but she kept her gaze averted until both were in the car again.

  “What happened in there?” Jesse sounded worried, but not surprised. Hadn’t he said something about calling for him if she needed help?

  “I...I saw someone. In one of the stalls.” She looked up at him. “Whoever it was had long nails. Dirty nails, and brown fingers and—and awful stains on the pants.”

  Jesse watched her grimly. “Are you sure you don’t want me to take you back to Wexton? There’s still time before dark.”

  “There was something wrong. She—I assume it was a she—did this weird thing to the door with her nails. I dunno, I....” Her voice trailed off, and she sighed. From the safety of the car’s interior, away from the stink and the screech of those claws, some logic returned. Maybe the girl was sick or hurt—bleeding, maybe even dying. Maybe muscle spasms from some strange illness or injury had caused her fingers to dig into the metal like that. “Do you think you should go back and check on her?” Nadia asked.

  Jesse turned to face forward, a grim expression cast out over the lake. “No,” he finally answered, and shifted into Reverse. “No, I don’t.”

  “Why?” She frowned again.

  He pulled away from the lake, away from the restrooms, and out onto the road. “Whoever’s in there—I don’t think we want to go back and check on her.”

  ***

  Jesse turned onto Blake Street, circumventing the outreach of the lake that he would have sworn had been part of Phillips Circuit. He turned next onto Endicott Terrace, which crossed perpendicular to Mia’s street. His stomach tightened on the heels of a strange sensation of passing through something, some transparent webbing that tangled up his intestines as he crossed to the far side of it. Something similar had gripped him once before, a long time ago.

  But this was a different time. A lot had changed.

  It had made him sick to his stomach when Mia asked him to come back to Thrall, but a part of him thought it inevitable. He’d known somehow that he would have to go back, that something he couldn’t help or refute would force him to return. The night Mia left her voicemail message, Jesse had come home to a blinking red light on the machine and ignored it. He wasn’t planning on calling anyone back anyway, and likely it was only Nadia, who’d called to complain about something. It wasn’t until he’d showered, shaved, and sunken onto the couch to watch football (Giants vs. Eagles) that he dropped an exhausted finger down onto the play button and heard Mia’s voice.

  At her first words, he fumbled for the remote and shut off the game, leaning in toward the machine in disbelief. Then he played back the message three more times.

  “Jesse, I need you...I need you to come back to Thrall.”

  Mia had given birth to a daughter since he’d left. His daughter. She had named the little girl after the child Mia’s mother miscarried after her. Mia had always been fascinated by what her little sister would have been like, and she’d told him once that she intended to name her first child—their first child, she’d say with a loving smile—after Caitlyn.

  And now he had a daughter who’d be about six years old, or thereabouts, by Jesse’s estimation. A Caitlyn. He had stared at the machine for a long time before getting up and pacing the room.

  She wanted him to come back to Thrall.

  “Jesse, please.” She had sounded so desperate on the voicemail, so close to the verge of tears, that feelings for her throbbed painfully in his chest. “Jesse, I need you...I need you to come back to Thrall. This...this place is a nightmare, a layer of hell. There are things here, Jes
se. Evil, awful things. I want Caitlyn out of here—she’s too perfect, too innocent. This place would tear her apart. Please Jesse, come get her. Take her out of here. Take us out of here. I—I’m ready to go now.” Her voice deteriorated into sobs but she forced coherent speech through them. “But I can’t leave on my own. I’m not strong enough. It won’t let me leave. I’m so afraid, Jesse. So afraid of failing her, hurting her. But you can save her. She’ll love you, Jesse, I know she will. And I know you’ll love her, too, and be great with her. I know you’ll protect her and take care of her even if I’m....”

  She stopped talking, and for a moment, Jesse thought she’d hung up.

  “Please, Jesse, come get her. Hurry! Hurry! Keep her safe.” And at that, she really must have hung up or been cut off, because the machine clicked and the mechanical voice announced “End-of-messages.”

  For every excuse Jesse made in his head not to return to Thrall, a little voice somewhere deep in his brain stem shot it down. Mia needed him. She wanted out. And he wanted her out—he always had.

  Now, as Jesse turned onto her street, he instinctively slowed down. He could hear her voice in his head the way it had sounded in the message. An achingly familiar voice, but at the same time strange to him. A voice that had undergone some major change. He had chalked up the hollowness and barely audible reverberation to the filtering of telephone wires and recording of voicemail. He reasoned, too, that it had been a long time since he’d last heard her voice. She wasn’t a girl anymore, but a grown woman. The urgency of her message, her distressed state of mind—all these things could have made her sound different to him.

  What nagged at him was that, in spite of these things, she had sounded just plain alien to him—more like the way the townspeople had started to sound when he’d left, and there was no way that could be good. He didn’t want to accept that something had gotten to her, too. He wouldn’t. But it lingered in a corner of his mind just the same.

  A tumult of conflicting feelings tossed that stomach knot around until he thought it would fly out of his mouth. Old, familiar love for Mia resurfaced with a heavy dose of doubt, and both scared him in their intensity. He was terrified of finding Mia in whatever state she might be in, and he was just as terrified of not finding her. It crossed his mind more than once as he rolled toward the end of her street that he could simply turn around. He could get as far away as possible from Thrall, far away from what he remembered of the past and what he could potentially learn about the future. He was afraid of the awesome responsibility Mia wanted to place on his shoulders.

  But afraid, too, of what kind of person it would make him if he didn’t accept it.

  God, how he missed her. And try as he might to deny it, he had to agree with her suggestion. He thought he knew what Thrall was capable of. He couldn’t let it ruin the lives of any more people he cared about if he could do something to save them. Jesse had no idea if he could support Caitlyn once he got her out of town, but he was well aware of how important it was that he try.

  He realized by an old, familiar internal chronometer that he was just about in front of the house and rolled to a stop.

  “Uh, Jesse, what are you doing?”

  Jesse turned his head in her direction to gaze out the passenger window. Nadia frowned, then went slightly out of focus as he took in an empty lot behind her through the window. Its charred lawn was littered with splintering wooden beams and crumbled cement foundation. A melted lump of metal on a pole—he recognized the mailbox by its warped little red flag—hung sadly at head-level with Nadia.

  “Wha...?” Jesse’s voice trailed off, his eyes surveying the properties of Mason Road around them. Several lots stood empty, sprinkled liberally with debris. He hadn’t really expected to find her there, but even so, the level of damage was unbelievable. What had happened to Mia’s house? To her neighborhood?

  “Looks like fires, Jesse.” Nadia’s voice was quiet, even-toned, her words carefully laid out in the silence as if in response to his thoughts. “I’m sorry.”

  “Where did she call me from?” He wasn’t sure he’d spoken aloud. Nadia patted his hand.

  “Hey, you okay?”

  Jesse nodded, only half-hearing the question.

  “Maybe she moved to a different house. Or maybe she moved out of town. Are...are you sure she called from Thrall, Jesse?”

  That broke through the haze. He turned to look at her. “I’m sure. I’m sure she did. She didn’t leave. She...couldn’t. I know that.”

  Nadia tried for an encouraging smile. “Then she’s still here in town. Is there a hotel around here? Motel, maybe?”

  Jesse let off the brake pedal and K-turned so that his side was closest to the lot. Then he put the car in Park. “Yeah, but hold on. Lemme look around here first.”

  Easing open the door, he slid out onto numb legs. They felt cold beneath his pants, and stiff as they carried him across the sidewalk and onto the burnt lawn. The grass crunched beneath his sneakers. All else was silent except for the running motor of the Nissan.

  He made his way over to the foundation and peered down into the shadowed depths of what used to be her basement. Chips of blackened wood, curled ash, and powdery stone had overtaken the places where he’d had dinner with her family, where he’d helped her study for Algebra, where he’d first kissed her and first made love to her. A torn piece of her bedroom curtain lay tattered over one of the rocks. From that window they’d just barely been able to see Serlings Lake through the treetops, and they’d imagined their lives far beyond it.

  He sucked in a gulp of air that pressed painfully against his chest. Almost without thinking, he hopped down on top of the remnants, ignoring Nadia’s cry.

  So much, he thought, so much had changed, and he had no idea where to begin catching up. Where would he find her now?

  He stumbled into a knee-high pile of rubble, causing a tiny avalanche and sending a puff of gray dust into the air. A dull silver glint caught the waning strands of sunlight, and he swooped down to pick up the object. Jesse dusted it off, and that painful gulp of air pushed harder against him, stopping his breath for a moment.

  Her locket. The one he’d given her for her nineteenth birthday. Good God, he hoped that the fire wasn’t recent, that it hadn’t taken her and Caitlyn away from him just days before he got there.

  But it had to be an old fire, reason argued. She’d called late afternoon on Friday. It was Saturday evening. A fire of the magnitude that could take down a whole house would leave smoldering embers and hot rocks days later, and possibly a smoke cloud still clinging to the sky. These rocks were cold, almost frigid.

  Jesse frowned. Too cold for early fall.

  The sound of rocks falling away behind him sent him wheeling around. A glove protruded from beneath a pile peppered with what Jesse was sure was the kitchen’s old wallpaper. A glove, but not quite right. He squinted, trying to bring it into sharper focus in the twilight.

  “Jesse?” Nadia’s voice came from the car. She sounded afraid.

  “Give me a minute,” he called back, then crept closer to the glove.

  When he was almost upon it, he saw the fingernails—long, brown, extending from overly long fingers held together by a thin, flesh colored membrane. Not a glove, but a hand.

  “Oh God.”

  Gingerly, he kicked away the stones around the wrist, and the hand fell over palm-down onto the pile, the jagged shard of bone from the severed wrist poking through cauterized flesh. Jesse’s heart pounded as he studied the flat, bony palm and the segmented fingers with their bone protrusions at the knuckles. He let out a long, low whistle. It wasn’t a child’s hand, or Mia’s, either—he saw that right away. He offered silent thanks to the cosmos that it wasn’t either one.

  But it did little to slow his heart or his breathing, because he knew that hand didn’t belong to any kind of family member that had lived in that house. He was pretty sure that hand didn’t belong to any member of the human race.

  A grinding sou
nd from his right made him flinch. It occurred to him at that moment that the pile on which he stood might not be stable enough to hold his weight. He turned with slow deliberation, careful not to upset the rubble beneath him. A false move could send him into a bone-breaking free-fall to the bottom of the basement, with plenty of sharp wood and heavy chunks of wall and ceiling to follow him in. He backed slowly toward the wall, his hand outstretched behind him to feel for the top and the grass beyond.

  He thought the rubble moved in the gloom about four feet in front of him, accompanied by a slow grinding sound from beneath. His fingers grazed the splintered wood of the basement frame, a sliver sticking him in the thumb. A few more pieces of wood bobsledded down the concrete rock pile. That time, he was sure he’d seen movement, as if something was underneath and wanted out. His gaze trailed to the hand by his sneaker, then back to the pile. Good God, he thought. Something’s under there. Something’s under all this shit.

  He turned as the debris tumbled away, aware of a low, ragged breathing, as if whatever was under the mess fought to take more than dust into its lungs. The breathing grew louder, closer to his back as he hoisted himself up on his arms. Chunks of sheet rock pelted against his leg and then something gripped his ankle. It sent icy bands of painful pressure through the denim of his pants and the cotton of his sock. Jesse bit his lip, a scream filling up his mouth. He couldn’t bring himself to look down. Whatever had grabbed him pulled down sharply and Jesse lost his balance, slamming one elbow hard against the wood frame. He cried out as a burning prickle raced up his arm. He kicked out in panic once, twice. The third time, his sneaker connected with something that yielded, then split like an overripe fruit under his foot. The moment the pressure let off of his ankle, he heaved himself up onto the frame and took off for the car.