Thrall

by Mary SanGiovanni

  Around the apartments for about a couple blocks to either direction, the pavement looked as if it had been uprooted in sections and dropped heavily onto the ground beneath it. Where Main Street might have ended and Wheeler Road began, though, was difficult to say. The shifted plates of asphalt seemed a rubble-mixed part of the street around them.

  The apartments themselves looked vaguely familiar to Jesse, a periphery-vision landmark of everyday life. Grimy brickwork, blood red in the thick shadow that surrounded them, had worn smooth. The smoothness leant the buildings a kind of surreal fluidity, as if the concrete of the foundations was just an illusion. The chain-link fence separating the property from the sidewalk glinted in some places from the reflected morning light. In others, the metallic silver of the links seemed to run rampant along the structure and drip off at points. It reflected off the stringy clumps of bloated, pale colorless flesh that clung to the metal and gave them a kind of iridescence that made Jesse think of fish.

  A good-sized, flat rock was situated on the meager front lawn of the apartment complex. The sides looked cut by man-made tools, and the overall shape had a kind of deliberate construction to it. Jesse thought the top looked puckered into a bas-relief formation that he couldn’t, from his angle, quite make out. Next to the rock was a badly weather-worn wooden sign, its base gray wood showing beneath the chipped green paint. The words “ARCHAMMER APARTMENTS” were engraved in simple curving script that clung to the flecks of gold and white that once covered them.

  “Apartments have food sometimes,” Tom murmured, almost to himself. “Canned food. We could just go take a look around—”

  “No,” Nadia said with an emphatic wave of her hands. “No way, uh-uh, no how. I am not going into some place with chunks of...of whatever that is on the fence.”

  “I think we should go,” Jesse seconded. “There could be...people in there. Other survivors. We ought to check it out.”

  Nadia pouted. “Fine, whatever. I’ll wait here. I’m not going in there.”

  Jesse shouldered the backpack. “Nadia, I’m really not comfortable with leaving you alone, for obvious reasons.”

  Nadia’s pout broke, her expression faintly hinting at appreciation. “Go, tough guy. I’ll be fine right here.”

  “I really don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  She waved him away. “I’m not going. If you’ve got something to do in there, go do it.” If Mia were in there, this was his one and only chance to see, her look said. “Besides, those things only come out at night, right Tom?”

  “Uh, yeah I guess. Most things only come out at night. But—”

  “Go, if you’re going! I’ll be fine,” Nadia waved them away, and reluctantly, they moved toward the street. “Just...hurry back, okay?”

  ***

  “That’s foul, man,” Jesse said as they neared the fence. Up close, he could see that the gore clung heavily to the entire length of the fence. The silvery shine of the metal had, it seemed to Jesse, rusted out in the time it took them to cross the street. He sucked a breath in through his mouth and held it to avoid breathing in the stench of the fleshy chunks. But its taste, the palpable heaviness of the stink on his tongue, made him cough. Jesse thought he saw human fingernails—human fingertips—embedded in some of the iridescent chunks.

  “Jesus. See a gate anywhere?”

  Tom pointed to the right. “Looks like a latch down there.”

  They followed the length of fence some six feet to the latch. The gate was bent in, its odd posture solidified by the rusted hinges. Using his trench coat sleeve as a barrier between his fingers and the clotted mess that hung from the latch, Tom tried to push open the gate. It wouldn’t budge.

  “Shit. Lemme get a better grip—” Tom pushed at it again, harder.

  “Looks like it’s run into the ground a bit. Gonna be a bitch to move.”

  Tom grimaced in distaste. “Guess we have to shoulder it?”

  Jesse nodded. “That, or hop it.”

  “Count of three?”

  The guys tossed over their backpacks as Tom counted off to three. Then they threw their shoulders at the gate. It swung open so easily under their momentum that they lost balance and fell over into the patchy grass. Jesse dusted off the dirt from his hands and his bruising elbow, where he’d landed with a solid jarring to his arm. He ignored the pins-and-needles tingle and tossed Tom’s things to him, then took up his own. “Well, that was too easy.”

  “This way.” Tom motioned toward paint-chipped double outer doors on a porch just about center of the buildings. The overhang on the stoop seemed fit to cave in at any moment, as did the stairs leading to the outer doors. They crept with an instinctive caution onto the creaking wood.

  From the porch, Jesse could see the top of the curved rock he’d noticed from the street. The stone face had been carved away to form a kind of symbol that weather had smoothed and blurred over time. The basic shape remained, though—a vertical bar with horizontal loops extending in oval pairs down the length of it. The top two loops were fairly large, their span taking up most of the stone’s width. Below them, the loops drew in smaller and closer to the base. Overall, it reminded Jesse of a ribcage.

  Tom followed his gaze. “Those things are all over the town—one each in front of the original buildings of Thrall. And each one’s got a weird carving on it.”

  “What are they?” Jesse asked. “They look like pedestals or something.”

  Tom shrugged. “Could be, I guess. This place has got some strange sculpture. I always thought they were, like, some kind of markers.” He laughed, but it was dry and humorless. “Marking where the real world ends and Thrall begins. Hell, I don’t know.” Jesse didn’t know what to say to that.

  Tom pushed open the door, and it groaned against him and opened inward.

  “Ready?”

  Jesse nodded. “Let’s get in and get out.”

  The cracked inner door stood partially open, as if expecting them. They stepped through. The gloom of the foyer wrapped an arm around them and ushered them out of view.

  ***

  Nadia glanced around the empty street and shivered. With the guys gone, the place was too quiet, too still. No cars on the street, no people running errands, no children playing. Even in the early morning, nothing in town took hold of any sunshine. Nothing reflected any real light or heat. It was as if the town stood in the shadow of some perpetual dusk. The overall effect struck Nadia as being cold the way deep space must be cold, and equally as silent and mystifying.

  I can’t believe I’m here. Somehow, somewhere, things had gotten far beyond her scope of experience. She was stranded in some bizarre outland of freaks and God-only-knew what else. It was all just a little too surreal. Things like this don’t happen in real life, her inside-voice argued. But the snake-thing and that whatever-it-was in the bathroom, those things had happened. Clearly, things like that had been happening around Thrall for a long time.

  She was scared in a dull, throbbing way beneath her skin that never quite went away. She was also mad as hell. But her anger was eclipsed mostly by the curiosity of seeing what had shaped Jesse as a boy. That in itself was enough to distract her even from the fear. This was Jesse’s past. This was an open, vulnerable part of him so unlike the sullen, quiet guy she knew. He’d never allowed anyone a glimpse into his private world of bad memories. But he’d taken her by the hand, so to speak, and invited her right in. He trusted her. Nadia knew Jesse wasn’t into a relationship, but she mattered to him because he trusted her, because he needed her there, and for now, that would do. She knew she mattered, because he’d taken her with him, back to a place that even their closest friends in Ohio didn’t dare ask him about. They all had their theories, but no one knew, not like she knew now. Sean thought he’d killed someone, and was “on the lam,” as he put it. Diana thought that maybe he was hiding out from the mob, or drug dealers, in some kind of witness protection program. Tim and Steve guessed it was something more mundane, that he was just
trying to come off as mysterious and brooding when he’d probably been run out of town or had left to avoid getting his ass kicked. Stacy and Miranda, of course, had defended Jesse’s right to privacy. Anything to get into his pants. She knew what they wanted. But they hadn’t gotten any farther than she had, with their cooing at him and coddling him and promising to make it all better. He hadn’t brought those tramps back to Thrall with him. He’d taken her.

  A giggle—really more a nervous titter—escaped her and seemed snatched and swallowed up by the air above her head. The suddenness of the returning silence brought her out of her thoughts and made her aware again of how alone she was at the moment.

  “Most things only come out at night. But—” Tom’s voice echoed in her thoughts. She looked around uneasily. What if she wasn’t as alone as she thought?

  Her gaze swept up and down Main Street, with its overlapping portion of someone else’s street. The bowling alley stood next door to the right, and beyond it a Chinese fast food store. To her left was a florist, a cleaners, and across from them, just shy of the rubble and barely out of its range, a sofa and bedding place. Far down along Main Street, she could just make out a post office and a movie theater whose sign P TRIOT—XM N—GL D A OR—SCAR MOV —WH T ES BEN TH was big enough to read. The glassy letters were gray and lightless against the grimy once-white marquee. The sagging, crumbling buildings with their chipped paint and filmy cast of shadow made her feel suddenly on display for unseen eyes. It was the silent, waiting darkness, so thick and so deep inside the doors and windows, she thought. Anything could be hiding in that kind of darkness. Anything could be watching, waiting, planning the right moment to move out.

  Jesse knew every bump and curve of the roads and every familiar landmark’s shape and character. He knew things, she was sure, that he wasn’t telling her. Things that he was maybe afraid of, but things that didn’t surprise him. Even the weird stuff was, to an extent, familiar ground. But all these places were foreign to her. Had Jesse been to that movie theater as a boy? Had he eaten Chinese food in that restaurant? Had this town really once been the kind of place where you could do everyday things like grabbing fast food or catching a movie?

  It seemed alien to her. And truth be told, glimpsing into this childhood of his made him seem even more alien to her, too.

  God, if he did end up finding that girl in this place...what then? What would she do then?

  ***

  The foyer smelled musty, an air of mold clinging with cool dampness to their skin and clothes. After a moment, the darkness shrank away under their gaze, and Jesse and Tom could see around them. Old wallpaper, a nondescript beige, peeled away from the walls and formed powdered piles along the baseboard of the floor. To the left was an old-fashioned elevator with a lattice gate, and against the wall, a door that probably led to the landlord’s office or apartment. Two more doors stood to the right. Straight ahead, an old mahogany banister trailed a wooden staircase leading up, both of which had seen better days. The steps had been worn smooth over time and foot traffic, but the railing bore deep gouges along the length of the wood. Those same gouges ran along the opposite wall, curving parallel to the railing. A recollection of that hand in the debris of Mia’s house made Jesse shiver.

  “Tom, do you think this is a good idea?”

  “Think the elevator works?” On the panel to the left of the elevator, Tom pushed a button, paused, tapped it a few more times. Nothing happened. He cursed under his breath. “Guess we take the stairs.”

  Up close, Jesse noticed the furrows in the wall of the stairwell were about half an inch wide, creating plaster trenches stained a rusty brown. Along the railing, the wood had splintered up in mini-phalanxes around the marks. Tiny black chunks of something he didn’t want to identify were speared along the length of them. Jesse kept dead center as he followed Tom up the stairs. What the hell had happened to this place?

  The hallway on the second floor stretched out to the left and the right, lined with numbered doors. Heavy dark stains splattered the ceiling and had soaked deep into the gray-green carpet. Much like the wallpaper of the foyer, long strips of the hallway floral had peeled away from the walls and now flopped down like palm leaves toward the floor. Jesse peered through the shadow.

  For just a moment, he thought he saw exposed lungs beneath the paper scraps, breathing, expanding against the floral pattern, a membranous purple whose cilia forwarded a phlegm-pale stain down over the wall. He sucked in a breath and was about to say something to Tom when the gloom of the hallway shifted. Jesse squinted. Nothing but raw wood beams and jagged holes in the sheet rock.

  Jesse let out a long, shuddery breath. “In and out, right? Let’s make this fast.”

  Tom moved toward an apartment door marked 102. “Wanna take one side and I’ll take the other?”

  Jesse nodded, turning to 101. “Full-on looting job here?”

  “Damn straight, man. Don’t bother with the money. If the place has knives, guns, bullets, clothes, batteries—shit like that—take it. And slugs, that’s what I load the shotgun with. If you can find a flashlight, grab that. I busted mine the other day over the head of one of those tricoils. We can use matches, too, or maybe cigarette lighters, if there aren’t any flashlights. Oh, and soap, if you can find any. Lake is cold, but it beats stinking like ox ass on a hot day.”

  They grinned at each other. Only Tom comes up with shit like that, Jesse thought. There had been some real classics, like Tom’s nickname for their friend, Joe Bounty (The Fucker-Quick-n-Dumper), “the wrong end of the poodle,” which was something that was just wrong but not as serious as a gooz-fuck, and the “someone-else-is-in-the-house kind of knife” that Sean McCormack had gotten for his sixteenth birthday, and which Tom had parodied a horror movie with one night at a party when he was drunk. Jesse had missed that classic turn-of-the-phrase humor Tom was famous for, and was glad to see it still came so easily.

  “Got it. We meet back here.”

  Tom paused, the door half-open. “You got your gun, right?”

  “Yeah,” Jesse answered, patting the backpack. “Any problems and you better bet your stinking oxen ass I’ll come running out here like a bat outta hell.”

  Tom laughed as he pulled out the shotgun. “Okay then.” He slipped through the door.

  Jesse’s smile faded. His fingers brushed over the handle of the gun in the backpack. Taking a deep breath, he turned the knob of 101 and pushed the door open.

  ***

  Nadia shifted impatiently and crossed her arms beneath her breasts. A chilly breeze had picked up in the trees. When it shouldered past her, she shivered as much from a sense of infringement as from the cold. It seemed to reach for her warmest places, lifting the folds of her skirt and brushing across her chest. It whistled low and soft, but erratically, and Nadia couldn’t help but think it sounded like laughter. The feeling that she was being watched grew almost to a certainty.

  The guys were taking a long time in there. She quelled the brief flicker of worry in her gut. Sure, they were big boys. They could take care of themselves. After all, they had the guns. She was the one alone and weaponless.

  Her gaze swung to the right, scanning the street. Nothing but stagnant shadows from Thrall Lanes and Golden Dragon Chinese Eat In/Take Out. Beyond them, she noticed with no small degree of surprise a psychic’s shop, complete with dark neon eye sign and chipped tube lettering beneath. A slow breath escaped her and mingled with the cooling air. She hadn’t noticed that shop before, nor had she noticed Thrall Diner beyond it. Neither seemed to be occupied.

  At that moment, Nadia had the crazy feeling that all those places were mere building fronts, like she’d seen in old westerns and comedies—fake wooden fronts meant to represent real buildings. As if they were meant to represent real, normal life.

  She turned her head, disgusted. Nothing about this place was normal, and as for what was real...well, that was another can of worms altogether.

  Along the other side of the street, dead
flowers, unstirred by the breeze, still dressed the florist shop window. All was quiet at the post office and the cleaners. In fact, aside from the dark stains on the bedding shop’s storefront mattress displays, the south side of Main Street looked almost normal.

  She didn’t see the figure float out of the movie theater, nor did she see it catch a crosscurrent to the left and surge forward toward her. But eventually, its erratic movement caught her eye. She wasn’t scared at first; surprise flashed through her, followed by an instinctive unease that rippled across her stomach. What was that?

  From a distance, it looked to Nadia like a jellyfish—a thin greenish membrane of amorphous shape with long, dangling fingers of darker green. As it drew closer, however, she saw the thin skin of the body rise and fall in an ugly erratic way that hurt her eyes. The skin parted in random places to reveal a black space with specks and novas of light within before closing and opening up somewhere else. The creature glowed internally with that cosmic kind of light, like a grotesque Chinese lantern that had swallowed a miniature universe. That idea, maybe more so than the thing itself, terrified her. She knew somehow that if that thing were to reach her, to swallow her up, she’d spin cold and alone through that endless universe inside it, past grotesque planets of unspeakable horrors, lost forever.

  It wiggled its fingers (Nadia now saw the talons that tipped each) and they scraped the sidewalk with a metallic squeal. In its wake, the blackness that dripped from those talons smoked against the cement of the sidewalk. Panic-thoughts tumbled upward toward her conscious mind: Oh God, oh God, oh God....

  It condensed and expanded like a balloon, spurting forward with shuddery movements, the membrane working in unsmooth waves. As it did so, a new shade of sickly gray-green mottled the misshapen bulb of the body. It seemed obscene to her, the way the colors dripped across it, sinking and settling into the undulating extremities. Nadia couldn’t make out anything even remotely resembling eyes or a nose anywhere. But at intervals, amidst the unbearable exposure of its internal space, the long slash now running diagonally across the membrane worked open and closed as if it were trying to speak. Muted sounds that reminded Nadia of those whale-watching Discovery Channel documentaries punctuated the movements of that mouth. She saw the jagged flaps of the openings ripple across comets and shards of floating debris.