Thrall

by Mary SanGiovanni

  “Well then, let me give you a crash course in local history.” Tom slid an arm around her and steered her onto the sidewalk, motioning for Jesse to follow as he started toward Main Street. Silent communication passed between them, and it reminded Jesse of old times. Tom taking care of business, smoothing the ruffled feathers of a damsel in distress.

  “When we were kids,” said Tom, “Thrall was an okay place to live. I mean, weird things always happened here, sometimes really weird things. Wrong end of the poodle kinds of things, see? Our statistics for suicide and accidental death were a little above average. All my neighbors complained about strange noises in the night, and vague intruders half-formed in the shadows of the lawns. Sometimes—and this happened, it seemed, most often with old people and teenage girls—people claimed they were being stalked or watched, but never saw anything to prove it. It was something they felt more than saw or heard, ya know? They always said it with that nervous little ‘I know it sounds weird,’ kind of laugh. My dad used to say this place has always been that kind of weird.” He steered them in a wide arc around an old shed, sagging on the corner house’s overgrown back lawn—gutted, its interior bled darkness onto the property around it. A black splatter beneath dripped downwards and hung in stringy shadows, clinging with a gory thickness to the side of the wooden husk. Jesse shivered. They rounded the corner onto North Main Street.

  “Sure,” Tom continued, “the older kids used to complain about Thrall all the time, about the narrow roads and narrow minds, the total lack of anything interesting to do besides smoke pot and drink. But the weirdness itself didn’t seem too weird at first. Thrall is a small, quiet town in the northwest corner of Nowhere, New Jersey, and small towns have a way of distorting and magnifying things that are not part of the day-to-day grind. Nothing too bad about that. But then...it got worse. Thrall stopped being an okay place to live.”

  Tom pulled away from her and crossed to the far side of North Main. The others followed as he bore off to the right, onto Beaumont Street.

  “By the time we got to middle school,” Tom said over his shoulder, “weather was sometimes—not always, but sometimes—more than unpredictable. That was the first bad sign. Snow flurries in May; ninety-degree weather in November; that sort of thing. All of it written off as weather flukes, as ones ‘for the books.’ Then this...fog began rolling in. I guess that’s what it was, but ‘fog’ doesn’t do it justice. I heard someone call it a miasma once, and I always thought that was the best word for it. It’s a kind of pink color that makes you feel sick if you look at it for too long.”

  Jesse remembered—they called it the Raw, something between mist and fog but stringy and heavy and unlike anything, really, he’d ever known. It wasn’t sunset or prom dress pink; it was the color of a blister, of raw skin. A pink like the blood-tinged phlegm of a dying man, flaked with pale yellow sometimes, and black or red swirls at others. A blood-haze.

  “...and when it rolled out again,” Tom was telling her, “you could, after a while, be sure something bad was left in its wake. You could almost always find some teary-eyed little girl posting fliers about a missing pet or something like that. It seeped into everything. Its damp cold was always in your clothes, your hair, clammy on your skin. Everything got this sort of musty smell too, ya know what I mean? It got into...I dunno, the blood work of the town, I guess you could call it. The wires between the telephone poles actually looked coated with this sort of clear, quivering kind of red jelly. It got in if you left the window open too long or the hood of your car up. Rusted shit out something awful. Jesse, remember what it did to Chris’s car that one time? Damn!”

  He bypassed a lump of dirty fur onto which clung a shiny black bulge. From the bulge came a low buzz. It broke apart into a dark cloud of flies when Nadia’s foot accidentally connected with it. She squealed. Jesse rubbed a finger under his nose to chase away the stench and the black bodies that sprang up in his face as he stepped over the carcass.

  “Yeah, that jelly used to vibrate, sort of,” Tom was saying to Nadia, “and give off this low kind of hum that was always in your ears. It interfered with radios, cable, televisions, phones, Internet connections. Reception cut in and out, and then eventually cut out altogether. But something had gotten into the heads of people around here, too. They were in bad shape, too bad to care that we were cut off, or try to fix it. This way.”

  They crossed the street and headed toward what was once the local 7-11, skirting potholes of the tiny parking lot. The trio slipped through the sliver of open doorway. With a grunt, Tom forced the metal and plexiglass door closed behind him, then turned to continue his story.

  “We should be safe in here, for a while. Anyway, like I was saying, things didn’t seem like a big deal at first. And when something bad happened, it never seemed, to the people in charge, like too much for the town to handle on its own. Jesse and I had a cop friend, John Gurban, who constantly backed out of parties and stuff to look into a missing person report filed by a frantic housewife or worried friend. Then he was called on to investigate a few grisly murders and strange suicides that made the county papers when we were in high school. Our cops took care of it. Thrall took a lot of pride in being able to handle its own affairs. So as time wore on, offers for help stopped coming from outside. Then there was the summer we had all the fires. After that, it was sort of understood without ever being said that Thrall was caught in the grip of troubles no one wanted to talk about and that the folks running everything wanted to be left alone about. That made the few towns around us uneasy, I think. Even Wexton’s sporadic contact seemed to drop off. I think maybe they were glad to be rid of us.”

  “We can tell you what Wexton told us,” Jesse said quietly. “Nadia and I talked to a Wexton cop before we came here. He said there isn’t much to check on. The state troopers drive by once in a while during downtime and everything looks quiet from the outskirts. I can’t believe they don’t notice what’s going on here. I don’t think they’re looking hard enough, or else they somehow can’t see Thrall for what it is. Maybe they don’t want to.” He shrugged. “But they also told us that someone radios in from Thrall every so often to let them know the stragglers are okay. Gives them a report on how things are going. They said they talked to somebody about two, two and a half weeks ago.”

  “Bullshit. No way. Nobody’s left here to talk to Wexton, I’m sure of that. Most of the cops became—” Tom stopped abruptly.

  “Became what?” Nadia’s eyes narrowed.

  Tom looked away from her. “Let’s just say that the snake back there isn’t the only thing lurking out in the Raw. Some are good at playing bad cop. Some have acquired weapons. Firearms.” He jerked a thumb at the shotgun on his back. “Now, I have them, too. Jesse, what did they say this...person...is telling them about us?”

  “That over the last few years, people started bailing out. Too many bad memories, what with the deaths and all. Shops were closing up and people were moving away. I guess it didn’t seem to Wexton to be anything strange that Thrall was falling apart. We kinda got the impression that they were glad to see Thrall go, too. Anyway, they told us the only person that ever goes near Thrall anymore is your crazy mailman. Delivering to stragglers and hermits. I met him at the diner in Wexton. Nut-job.”

  Tom grinned, but it was a weird sort of grin, as if he’d tasted something sour. “Yeah, that’s Carpenter. Guy’s a couple croutons short of a salad. I used to see him tossing letters onto abandoned porches. It’s sad. Bills that will never be paid, credit card offers that will never be accepted.” He shook his head. “So, basically, someone claiming to be Thrall PD radios in to Wexton and tells them we’re all just fucking fine?”

  Jesse looked uncertainly at Nadia, and she nodded.

  “Wexton told us Thrall was close to being a ghost town and that someone from Thrall PD reports in from time to time to say the remaining riffraff is okay,” she answered. Then she added more softly, “He said that only ‘bums, junkies, and crazies’ lived he
re, anyway.”

  Tom nodded slowly. “Not far from the truth, I guess.”

  “I’m a little confused,” Nadia said. “Obviously somewhere along the line, things got all Stephen King on you—why didn’t Thrall ask for help then?”

  “Well, it was more Twilight Zone first. Just little bizarre things happening here and there. In Jesse’s defense, the monsters didn’t show up right away—not that we could prove, not that we saw, although we heard things sometimes. If the kinds of things like what I shot outside were here when Jesse was, they sure hid it from us. But our numbers dwindled, and the poison of this place took its toll on folks, and then I guess the monsters didn’t feel so shy anymore.

  “And as for asking for help? Well, the other thing is, people do weird things when they’re scared. Some refused to accept what was happening. And a lot of it happened so fast.... People won’t always admit that what they don’t want to believe could be real, especially when it strikes out of nowhere and leaves with no explanation. Some hid from it, and others hid it from the world. You have to understand, Nadia. People grew up here. Their parents and even grandparents grew up here. Everyone’s family, everyone’s job, everyone’s everything was here. So people rationalized, to protect it. Everyone had this sense that Thrall was our town, and that whatever happened, no matter how strange, our people could handle it. So even when things got weird, like Stephen King weird—Jesse, you tell her about the Grocer-Rite!?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The nuns?”

  “Yeah, what I could remember. A lot of it is sort of hazy.”

  Tom stared at his friend a minute as if he were going to say something, then seemed to decide against it. Jesse thought he knew what Tom was going to say, anyway. He probably thought Nadia was Jesse’s girl—Jesse had gotten her into something bad, and he ought to be the one to make her understand exactly what she was up against. Jesse nodded slowly in resignation, sighed, and dragged numb fingertips through his hair.

  “This isn’t easy for me to talk about, Nadia. I’m sure you know that.”

  Her expectant green eyes studied his face with a mix of confusion and sympathy and a healthy dose of trepidation. Nadia wrapped her arms around her ribcage as if she were caught in a chilly breeze.

  Tom swooped to pick up a badly trampled, warped issue of Muscle Car Review Magazine and leaned against the magazine rack, angling it in the moonlight and thumbing through it with mild interest as Jesse continued.

  “Tom and I had a friend named Lori Rimbauer.”

  Tom glanced up from the magazine at the mention. “Been a long time since I heard that name. Wow.”

  Jesse nodded. “Yeah. This...this thing that happened to Lori—this was the first time I thought maybe it would be a good idea to leave Thrall. See, we were all at this party one Saturday night. At about 11:30, she told us she was going to leave. She had to get up early the next morning—SATs, maybe. I don’t remember why. Anyway, she made a final sweep of the room, shaking hands with the people she’d just met and hugging the rest of us good-bye. I remember she was sober when she left, and in a good mood and all that. Nothing would’ve made us think we shouldn’t have let her drive.”

  Nadia’s eyes narrowed as he spoke, not in suspicion of Jesse’s story, he thought, so much as anticipation of something unpleasant, like she was squinting to keep the bulk of the badness from any lasting place in her memory.

  “She didn’t know the kid who threw the party too well. She didn’t want to make me or Mia or Tom leave early, and she’d taken her own car. Tom, remember that piece of crap Volvo she drove?”

  Tom grinned. “Those brakes squeaked like a squirrel getting screwed up the tailpipe by an elephant.”

  Jesse laughed. “What a hunk of scrap metal.” His smile faded. “Maybe that should have made us keep her from driving.” No one agreed or disagreed with him, so he continued.

  “She used to get lost all the time. We teased her about it. ‘You know me,’ she’d say. ‘I get lost going down the street.’ And that’s exactly what she did.”

  Nadia shivered, her eyes on Jesse all the while as he hopped up on the counter near the register, his sneakers dangling above some dark bluish-black stain.

  “Yup, all smiles and waves, she got into her little blue Volvo with the squirrel-screwing brakes, drove off into the dark Pepto-Bismol Raw down the street, and disappeared. She didn’t come home all the next day, and so, of course, by the next night her parents were freaking out. They called all of us, and when we told them she left at about 11:30 Saturday night, they called the police. The police asked us all kinds of questions about her. Was she a party girl? Did she do drugs? Drink? Have casual relationships with strange men? She didn’t do any of those things, and she’d left alone. If she was going to be even fifteen minutes late, she always made sure that she called. She wasn’t a party girl by any stretch of the imagination. Not a wild bone in her body.”

  “Except for Dave Brewer’s....” A mischievous grin spread across Tom’s face. “That guy was a nutcase before the Raw set in. Don’t know what she ever saw in him.”

  Nadia shot him a look, and he shut up with an undaunted shrug. Jesse stifled a smirk and continued.

  “Police combed the woods around here, the lake, even went over to Wexton to see if she’d up and left town. And all the while, the Raw slowed them down. It’s hard enough to find a missing person, but in a mist so thick you lose the searcher two and a half feet in front of you, it’s damn near impossible. They lost valuable hours, days even. The townspeople started whispering—I think that’s when it first started, what they said about the Raw, that there were things in it. Things living or maybe living dead, inhuman beast-things that swam through it as easily as fish in water. Horrible things that brushed against you in the thickness of it. Even then, though, they said it half-joking. They said it the way you might talk about a raccoon that keeps getting into your garbage cans. This place had gotten in their heads. But it got to me. I mean, for the occasional woman-chasing husband or troubled teen or recluse to go missing was one thing. Almost understandable, by Thrall standards. But it wasn’t for someone like Lori. Girls like her don’t disappear unless someone or something makes them disappear.” Jesse shook his head. “They never found a body, but they did find the car, when the Raw receded. They found it slumped street-side on Decker Street, its right front and rear wheels rolled up on the curb. It was one block from the house where the party had been held. Only one block. The gas gauge pointed to ‘E.’ She’d driven around and around in that stuff until the car ran out of gas. And then, something took her.”

  “Took her?” Nadia looked from Jesse to Tom. “What do you mean? Took her how?”

  “Tough to say what it was, exactly. During the investigation into Lori’s disappearance, we were hanging out with these brothers, John and Danny Gurban, at their house drinking beers one night. John was a cop. It was right around the time when John was relieved from his shift.” Jesse hopped off the counter and wandered over to the potato chip aisle. “We’d had two or three each when John walked through the door, all pale and serious, and made a beeline for the cooler where the beer was. John’s first big case was Lori’s. He didn’t know her as well as we did—he was a good seven or eight years older than us—but he knew her from her brothers, who’d been in the same high school classes he was.

  “Now, John was huge. Bigger than any guy I knew. He didn’t scare easily, and he didn’t have a weak stomach. But his hands were shaking so bad that he barely got the can of beer to his mouth.” Jesse remembered how scared Gurban had looked, his eyes shining, his tongue sticking a little to his lips as it passed between them. He hadn’t noticed that under-aged kids, his brother included, were drinking beers in his living room. It was as if he hadn’t even seen them. No one had dared ask how the search had gone. They knew by his face that the police had found something. When John finally spoke to them, through the foam that had welled up around the rim of the can, he’d only managed six words.

&
nbsp; “He said, ‘I just wanted to go home.’ We waited for the rest, but it didn’t come, not that night.” Jesse looked Nadia square in the eye. “He finished his beer, crushed the can, and left the room without another word. We heard about what they found through the usual grapevines, but it took a few months before I got up the guts to ask John himself. When I did, he told me that he and Doug Phelps found the car. I remember, he’d been eating when he told me, and when he got to that part he’d pushed away what was left of the sandwich like it made him sick. ‘Powdered bone,’ he told me. ‘Calcium chips. Nearly nothing left. Except for the seat. That interior, Jesse, that interior soaks up stains like you wouldn’t believe. Reddish little lumps of something on the steering wheel, the headrest....’”

  Nadia gagged, a hand fluttering to her mouth.

  “And the stuff about the black hole at the Grocer-Rite! and the nuns, that all happened during the week before I left. People were scared, too scared to think things out logically, because something they couldn’t explain was going on. They pretended those things didn’t happen. No town meeting, no police investigation, nothing. Not one damn inch of newspaper ink. It was then that I realized there was something seriously wrong with the people of Thrall. They were battered, and were just going to keep their heads down, cringe away from it, and rationalize that it was all normal and natural and all-American as fireworks and apple pie. They filed their reports and all that, but for most, it was easier to pretend nothing had happened. Like Tom said, people around here just ignored what they didn’t want to believe was real. But I couldn’t. So I left that night, alone. I was twenty, almost twenty-one. I had no money, no job, no idea where to go....”