Nadia already had the driver’s door open and was leaning over it, but he shoved her back in and slid into the seat.
“Hey!”
Jesse ignored her indignant cry. Night had taken over for dusk in the short time it took him to sprint back to the car, and that triggered an instinct he thought had deserted him in Ohio. He was glad to find it was still on call.
“We need a place to crash for the night,” he muttered to himself as he slammed the door. Throwing a quick glance back at the lot, Jesse saw a five-fingered silhouette, grossly enlarged, spider-leg its way over the frame. His head snapped forward. “Now.”
He threw the car into Drive and peeled out down the street.
THREE
“Wanna tell me what that was all about?”
Jesse could feel her frown burrowing into his cheekbone, but he kept his eyes on the road ahead of him. “That was where her house was supposed to be.”
“I know. I meant, what was with the running and the shoving? What happened in there?”
“Nothing. Nothing, Nadia. Just freaked myself out, is all.” He forced a smile, and injected his tone with a lightness he didn’t feel. “I think you’re right about her maybe being in a motel. There’s one off Main Street toward the center of town.”
Nadia didn’t answer. He glanced in her direction, but her head was turned away from him.
He made a left onto Wainwright Terrace, squinting to make sense of the road as it unrolled before the car. Many of the streetlights were broken, and little was visible now except whatever the headlights picked up ahead—the occasional dented garbage can or mailbox, the dull glint of a hubcap or car body wasting away by the curb. It wasn’t good, no sir, no how. Night always brought out the worst in Thrall.
As if taking a cue from his thoughts, a small silhouette sprang from the darkness of the sidewalk into the path of the oncoming headlights’ beams. Jesse stomped on the brake, sending both him and Nadia rocking in their seats. Jesse shot a quick look at Nadia, then scanned the street for the figure.
No one was there. He eased off the brake pedal and the car rolled forward.
“Nice driving there, Jesse.”
“I thought I saw someone.”
“Who?”
A doll. The thought sounded crazy before it even came close to his lips, but that’s what Jesse thought he’d seen. He’d braked at the sudden strangeness of a doll sprinting across the street rather than any fear of hitting it with the car. “I dunno. Something small. A doll, I think. Something leapt into the street. I thought I was going to hit it.”
Jesse thought he’d said “a dog.” He hadn’t, though, and didn’t understand the odd look that Nadia gave him afterward.
“A what?”
“A dog.”
Nadia exhaled. “Well, thank God you didn’t hit it. Thrall doesn’t strike me as the kind of place where you’d want to have to get out of the car and scrape road kill off your bumper.” A pause. “Hey. You okay, Jesse?”
Jesse shook his head. “Maybe my eyes are tired. It’s been a long drive.”
Nadia nodded, then changed the subject. “Are we going to get a room at a motel for the night?” A tinge in her voice suggested the question was less casual than she tried to make it sound.
“Yeah, I guess so. I’m sure they’ve got plenty around here. We can probably each get our own.”
Nadia sighed, slumped, then straightened up in her seat suddenly. “What’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“There,” Nadia pointed, “in the street. Is that your near miss?”
Jesse followed her pointing finger to a huddled lump of darkness by the curb. It was limping away from them (on rigid doll-legs, he couldn’t help but think) but when it reached the sidewalk, it collapsed in a shivering mass of shadow.
“God, I didn’t hit anything. I know it. I would have felt it if I hit something that size, right? Oh damn.” He coasted closer to the shadow, and as the white-gold glow of the headlights enveloped it, a face turned up from the dark swathing of clothes to look at them.
Dark blue orbs reflected a dim light of their own from sunken sockets. Cracked porcelain lips parted to tug the porcelain cheeks in a file-toothed sneer.
Nadia gasped just as the car rolled up to the spot where it lay. The hood obscured the creature from view.
Jesse cut the engine, and the two sat in silence for several seconds.
“That wasn’t a dog,” Nadia said at last.
With a faint creak, Jesse opened his door. Nadia followed suit. Both slipped from the car and crept around to the front bumper.
The glare of the headlights cast a sheen across the surface of an oily puddle on the sidewalk. No other evidence of the doll-thing remained.
Jesse directed a meaningful glance at Nadia, and she nodded. Wordlessly, they got back in the car.
Several long seconds stretched out into the darkness beyond the scope of the headlights. “Jesse, what the hell just happened?”
He shook his head. “The kind of stupid freaky shit that used to happen here all the time. C’mon, let’s just get to the motel.” He turned the key in the ignition. The car grunted back, but refused to give life to the engine. Jesse tried again, and again, the engine sank into sulking silence. The headlights faded.
“Shit.” He slammed his hands down on the steering wheel, and Nadia flinched. “Shit, shit, shit.” Then, softer: “Guess we gotta walk, Nadia.”
“But...but what about the suitcases?”
“Leave em. We’ll get them tomorrow.”
“Won’t somebody take our stuff? You yourself said that this place—”
“They’ll be fine. Nobody’ll bother ’em. We need to get off the streets for the night. We can worry about the bags tomorrow, okay?” Jesse tried to sound more confident than he felt. Truth was, he didn’t even know if the car would still be there by morning, let alone their bags. He pocketed the keys, grabbed a flashlight from the glove compartment, and switched it on. Then he opened the door. Nadia reluctantly followed suit.
Their footsteps echoed between the buildings, giving the almost unshakable impression that someone was following them. The moon did little more than catch highlights of things, as the headlights had. Periodically, he fanned the beam of light in a small arc in front of them. What little he could see of the residential apartment buildings and homes looked abandoned and forgotten. Jesse wondered if maybe he and Nadia really were alone in the town. Somehow, he didn’t think so, and the thought unsettled rather than relieved him. He resisted the urge to look back in the direction of the car, into the dark that swallowed everything behind them.
Nadia shivered. “This place is creepy,” she said in a low voice, as if afraid someone might hear.
Jesse snorted. “You got that right, sister.”
“Was it always like this around here?” Nadia’s eyes made pendulum sweeps of the blackness around them.
“Not as bad. This place was kind of okay once.”
“What the hell happened to it?”
“It’s hard to explain.”
“It’s a little frustrating to try to be supportive of blow-offs and answers like ‘it’s hard to explain.’”
She’d crossed a foot over the no-question boundary, and he knew she was aware of it by the little retraction-gasp she uttered after.
“I’m sorry, Jesse. You have to understand, though—”
“I do, Nadia. Look, let’s just drop it. At least until we’re at the motel, okay?”
“Fine.” She sounded miffed, but moved closer to him in the darkness—closer to the beam of light, he supposed. He couldn’t blame her for being uneasy or for being frustrated. Thrall made him feel both as well. But he didn’t know quite how to tell her why yet.
It was then that the echo of movement grew louder behind them—not quite footsteps, but rhythmic, and faster in pace than their own.
“What’s that?” Nadia’s words fought the current of a sharply inhaled breath, sounding whispery and dis
jointed, close to his ear.
“I don’t know.” He could feel his heart, its silent pulse pounding in his head, as he grabbed at her sleeve and pulled her onto the sidewalk.
It was drawing closer, whatever it was. They could hear an atavistic growling, whose low-tones sank periodically into a silence punctuated every so often by a wet snort. A heavy scent carried to them on some otherwise unfelt breeze that reminded Jesse of sweat-socks and the sour stink of long-unwashed laundry.
Jesse switched off the flashlight.
“Oh God, Jesse, what is that?” Nadia’s fingers dug into his shoulder. He could feel her breath on his neck.
“I don’t know, Nadia. I don’t think I want to, either.”
“Well then what—”
Her sentence dropped off. Weak moonlight stroked a hunched silhouette as it pulled itself toward them. For just a moment, they saw mottled scaly skin and twin points of fiery orange light before the thing slipped back into shadow.
“Oh my God,” Nadia whispered. “Please tell me that’s just a dog. Or a raccoon.”
Jesse squinted. “Wait here,” he said, then took a cautious step toward the place where the thing had disappeared. She uttered a small cry of protest.
It came into the moonlight again, and Jesse could see spirals of glinting white barbs funneling toward a center point of dull red. A fetid stink, almost painfully hot, blasted his face. He took an instinctive leap back, turning his head and squeezing his eyes shut against the anticipated pain. A loud roar thundered through the darkness between the buildings. Nadia screamed behind him.
Another smaller roar exploded in the wake of the first, and there was a loud thump. When the heat-stench had dissipated and cool air touched his cheeks again, Jesse opened his eyes and switched on the flashlight. The thing lay at his feet. Jesse shuddered and looked away quickly.
“Nadia, you okay?” He came up alongside her and touched her arm, but her gaze was fixed on the top of the garage. Jesse swallowed the dry lump in his throat, forcing his breaths to slow down. He shoved his shaky hands into his pockets and followed her gaze.
Someone was up there.
“Uh, hello?” Jesse took a step closer to get a better look.
Nadia grasped his arm. “Jesse, wait.”
A figure in a long black trench coat and blue jeans stood in the shadows of the low-hanging garage roof. With a sharp crack, he pumped the shotgun he held. Then he lowered the gun slowly, took a few steps to the roof’s edge, and peered down.
“Hey. You okay?” The voice from the roof was familiar to Jesse. It stirred up memories like a pot smoke haze, soundtracked by Zeppelin and CCR and the Rolling Stones. He thought he recognized the face, too, though now well into twenty-something and sporting a fine shadow of dark blond scruff. The build—the chest, the abs, the broader shoulders—was more muscular than he remembered, but the black T-shirt he filled out was unmistakable. A white stick figure with an oversized jack-o-lantern of a smiley-face stood above the caption, “Got head?”
“Tom? Tom Wyatt?”
The figure slid the gun into the holster strapped to his back, leapt to the roof of the front porch, then slid off, catching the ledge with both hands and swinging a moment before dropping to the ground. As he turned and stood, the hardened expression melted into surprised recognition, then suspicion.
The gun was out of the holster again and pointing at him. “You look like Jesse.”
Jesse eyed the gun. “Whoa. I am Jesse, man.”
The barrel wavered. So did the hard look in the eyes behind it. “It’s been a long time.”
“Too long.”
“Is it you?”
“Yeah, man. Yeah, it’s me.”
The voice shook a little. “I don’t want to shoot you.”
“Then don’t.” Jesse felt sweat break out under his arms, but he kept his voice even. He tried to smile. “That would be a real gooz-fuck for sure.”
Tom seemed to consider that for a moment, then lowered the shotgun. “Jesse Coaglan—holy shit. Never thought I’d see the day you’d come back to this hellhole.” He embraced Jesse in a quick, awkward kind of hug that only males who know each other well would even attempt, then clapped him on the shoulder as they pulled apart. He smelled like pine and burnt leaves and faintly, like deodorant. “Wow. Jesse Coaglan.”
“Fucking gooses, man,” Jesse said, and Tom smiled. It was one of the dozens of inside jokes they’d collected in the years they’d been friends. This one referred to a time when they’d gotten stoned on the south shore of Serlings Lake. A loudly honking goose had startled Tom into dropping the last of the joint in the sand between his tented knees. He’d looked down and muttered “Fucking gooses. Think they can blow their shit right off there.” Then he’d picked up the joint and put its sandy end between his lips. What he’d said and the look on his face had sent Jesse into a fit of stoned laughter that brought tears to his eyes. Over time, the phrase had morphed into “gooz-fuck,” a term they used to mean anything that went bad suddenly.
“No shit, man. Talk about a real gooz-fuck—you stepped into one coming back here.” With a genuine look of affection, though, he added, “It’s good to see you, man. Real good to see you.”
Nadia stared in unabashed amazement, but Jesse was used to that, with Tom. Not that he was inclined to look at his friend that way, but he knew Tom was considered a really good-looking guy. The thick, sandy blond hair had grown to the nape of his neck and was bound there with a rubber band, but locks escaped their bonds and flicked across his blue-green eyes. He had a way of studying a girl with those eyes and offering a genuine kind of smile that got her all giggly.
Feeling, it seemed, the intensity of Nadia’s gaze, Tom smiled at her. “And who’s this lovely lady, Jesse?”
She blushed, offering an uncharacteristically shy smile. “I’m Nadia.”
“She’s a friend,” Jesse added. “From home.”
Tom turned to him. “Where’s home?”
“Been a little bit of everywhere. Right now it’s Amherst, Ohio.”
His friend nodded. “Kind of a haul from here, ain’t it?”
“Sure is. A good eight hours, it took us.”
“Well, it’s great to have you back, Jesse.”
“Wish I could say it’s great to be back, bro. Hey, we were headed for the motel, over at the end of Maynard—is it still there? Anyone staying there?”
“No one that I know of, but I guess you could say that the place is still standing. Isn’t the kind of place you want to spend a night in though, believe me. That motel is barely more than a strip of rotting wood and scraps of tacky ’70s wallpaper. I’ve got a place for you to crash instead.”
“Where are people staying, if they’re living here?”
Tom seemed at a loss for words, but was about to make an attempt at an answer when Nadia broke in. “Excuse me, don’t mean to change the subject, but could you please tell me what the hell that thing was that you shot?”
Three pairs of eyes trailed to the hunk of steaming meat lying in the street. The orange glow had faded from the empty pits of the eye sockets. Its hairless skin, scaly somehow only in movement, seemed to catch the little bit of silver moonlight and absorb it so that nothing reflected off its surface. Jesse thought briefly back to a story he’d read in English Lit about the Hydra, only this was all wrong. Three long tails trailed back into the darkness, knotted together at the neck. From the joint, long barbed spears of bone reached up to pierce the air. The massive reptile head was a good three feet long, and within the gaping mouth they could see several concentric circles of serrated teeth as long as steak knives, dripping with a foul-smelling clearish liquid. The teeth and their poisons disappeared into the recesses of its throat.
Tom cursed under his breath and spit on it, then gave it a good kick in one set of ribs. Black blood spread outwards in a fan beneath the carcass, teeming with worm-like things that offered miniature screams into the night as the pool spread itself too shallow for them to sw
im. They burst with tiny pops when the little writhing bodies touched the air.
Jesse swallowed the lump of sour fear lodged in his throat. “I should have made you wait in Wexton.”
Nadia’s head snapped up in surprise. “You mean you...wait a minute. You’ve seen these things before?”
“No. But I have seen weird things. I tried to explain it to you. Before I even saw the edge of town, I had a bad feeling maybe things weren’t any better. Then we got here, and I thought maybe things were worse. I didn’t want you to have to be exposed to this place, but—”
“Exposed to the town?” Her voice shot up an octave in panic. “Jesse, what do you mean?” She looked back and forth from him to Tom.
Jesse looked to his friend for help, but Tom avoided his eyes, so Jesse met Nadia’s expectant gaze head-on. “You asked me why I have nightmares about Thrall.” He gestured at the thing. “This place, it’s bad. Cursed, maybe. Possessed. Poisoned. I don’t know. I didn’t know then, and I sure as hell don’t know now. All I know is that when I dream of this place, it’s bad. We used to tell each other stories about monsters in Thrall, but...I just had no idea.” He turned to Tom. “I guess I’m not really surprised that it’s possible, though. These...things, whatever they are—when did they happen?”
Tom nodded. “Two years, I’d say, since they slithered into town. Good thing is, tricoils only come out at night.”
Nadia frowned, her eyes misty and fixed on the motionless beast at her feet. “No...no no no. It was a snake, is all. Just a big, skin-shedding snake.”
“Look at it, Nadia!” Frustration ratcheted Jesse’s voice up in volume. Sometimes she could be so stubborn. “It’s not a friggin snake! Look at its blood. Look at its mouth. I don’t know what kind of freaky zoos you went to as a kid, but I’ve never seen a snake like that!”
“Nadia,” Tom broke in gently. “I’m not sure how much Jesse has told you—”
“Not this!” Tears formed in her eyes, her fists pounding her thighs. “I mean, I guess he tried, I....” She took a deep breath, shuddered, and spoke again. “He told me this place had been okay once, and then, it wasn’t. He told me weird things happened here—you know, like Unsolved Mysteries kinds of things. People disappearing, unexplained sightings. But I guess...when he said it was dangerous, I was thinking gangs and drug dealers, not—” She made a retching, disgusted sound in her throat and threw an arm in the direction of the beast. “Not snakes that aren’t snakes. And freaks in bathrooms. I don’t understand how this is even possible.”
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