Thrall

by Mary SanGiovanni

  “This way.” Jesse motioned toward the stairs leading to the lobby, and they surfed down them so fast that Jesse wasn’t sure his feet touched the ground.

  The thing that had scared Nadia was gone from the lobby. None of them knew or cared whether it had climbed halfway up to the second floor or, giving up on her, had returned outside. They pounded across the tiles and spilled out into the daylight with little else on their minds but escape.

  It wasn’t until they’d caught their breath that they discovered the silhouette of the General and others to the north.

  FIVE

  “Whew! Nothing like being scared shitless to get the heart going, huh?” Tom huffed through a reckless grin.

  Jesse clamped his hands on his knees, breathing hard, his head bowed as he focused on the patchy blades of grass beneath his feet. His calf muscles burned with adrenaline and exertion and his heart pounded silently in his chest. His knees threatened to give out from under him. He concentrated on anything but thoughts of that monstrous mess in the apartment. Hello rock, hello grass, hello ugly, shiny bug-thing crawling there, there on the ground, the steady, real ground....

  “You okay, man?” Tom laughed with relief. “Nadia, you okay?”

  Nadia shivered where she stood as if she’d just come out of the water and into a cold breeze. Her cheeks were wet with tears, her mascara little more than a soft charcoal smudge beneath her bottom lashes. When she spoke, her voice trembled. “I want to go home. I just want to go home and take a shower and no offense, but I just want to forget this whole place and everything in it ever existed.”

  “It’s cool now, really. You’re safe. We’re all okay.” Tom touched her arm, and she looked at him skeptically but stopped shivering. “We’re looking out for you, okay? Nothing’s going down like that on our watch.”

  Nadia dabbed at her cheeks with the back of her sleeve and sniffed softly. “Okay.”

  Tom nodded, his eyes returning to the apartments. “Looks like that trip was a bust, though. I’m not so much worried about ammo. I mean, we can always use more, but I hit the gun store over on Maple Street a couple of days ago, so we should be good for a while. But I would have liked maybe a TV dinner or something....”

  “I got some stuff,” Jesse said, the rhythms of his body finally slowing down. “Didn’t even see the kitchen. Jeez. But I found some batteries, a Swiss-army knife, and little crap like gum and playing cards. I left the sex toys, though.” He managed a smile at Tom’s incredulous face.

  “No way...?”

  “You’ve got some kinky neighbors, man.”

  “Uh, guys? Guys, who’s that?”

  The guys followed Nadia’s gaze past the theaters where silhouetted shapes of three figures stood motionless on the horizon.

  “No one I know,” Tom said, his eyes narrowing.

  “They’re watching us,” Jesse said. “Look, they aren’t moving at all.”

  Tom pumped the shotgun. “Let’s go check it out.”

  “Wait!” Nadia pressed her fingers tightly into Jesse’s arm when he began to follow. “What if there are more of those things? Or even worse things?”

  “Won’t know if we don’t check it out,” Jesse mumbled. It was little more than a passing wonder, how easy it was to slip into Tom’s frame of mind, how being here, he thought practical over fantastical. Looking at Nadia’s expression, he was pretty sure that she didn’t think the same way.

  They moved slowly toward the figures. Nadia clutched Jesse’s arm at the elbow and bicep. He could hear her breathing, feeding into his own excitement. He considered shaking off her arm but thought better of it, focusing instead on the figures ahead.

  The figures stood very still in the middle of the road at the corner of Main Street and Werner Way. No turns of the head, no shifting of weight. They didn’t even seem to breathe. Jesse squinted. “They aren’t real.”

  “Huh?”

  “They’re statues,” Jesse replied, fairly sure now. “Look—they’re just statues.”

  There were three figures in all, two wound together into one statue, while the other larger figure stood alone. At an impressive seven and a half feet tall, head to foot, they were startlingly lifelike but somehow alien in their realism, so much so that all three flesh-and-blood observers shuttered involuntarily where they stood.

  The dual figures were carved thin to the point of emaciation, cloaked in long robes of loose black obsidian. The folds of their frozen clothing blended toward the bottoms and became indistinguishable. Bone-colored marble hands, lightly veined with blue, each clutched the elbow of the other figure. Deflated purple sacs made of such thin stone that they had a kind of transparent shine dangled from the long fingers of their free hands. The gaunt faces of the figures were grotesque theater masks of white marble. The features of one shrieked in silent despair, sagging as if they would melt off the marble skull. Conversely, the mouth and eye sockets of the other were upturned in sinister glee, the corners above the temples pulling up and back over the head like two long cornrows. Long white marble tendrils curled down and away from both skull tops like hair, caught and held motionless mid-breeze.

  The body of the lone other figure was broader, more massive, and clad in dark gray marble reminiscent of a uniform. In its outstretched hand, a snaking mass of gray stone spilled in stony vines off the massive palm. It wore on its head a hat whose shape reminded Jesse of a manta ray, its edges long and sharp. Gray marble, cracked and veined with red, formed the squared-off features of its hardened face and thick neck. Horns of black protruded from the jaw line toward the mouth like twisted tusks. The same material formed the fathomless black spheres that sat in its eye sockets. Within those spheres, gold flecks swirled over a pattern that was almost hypnotizing....

  “What are they?” Nadia cast a sidelong glance at the uniformed one. “Where did they come from?”

  “That’s the General,” came a woman’s voice from behind. The three jumped and spun around.

  She cleared her throat, glancing up at each in turn with an uncomfortable little smile. Her eyes were a pretty shade of pale blue, but set in an otherwise plain face that Nadia would have wanted to “take make-up, tweezers, and a Cosmo article to,” as Jesse had heard her put it in the past. The sides of the woman’s short, thin brown hair were scooped into barrettes above her temples. As she stood there under their scrutiny, she tucked unseen wisps behind her ear with an almost involuntary flick of the wrist. Her shoulders barely looked able to support the heavy sweater she wore, her tiny frame lost beneath the sea of cream cable-knit. Her breasts just crested below its surface as she straightened her back. She didn’t come across as threatening in the slightest, but Tom arched an eyebrow in her direction, gun in hand.

  As if by way of explaining herself, she gestured toward the larger statue, her hand half-obscured by the oversized cuff. “That big one there, that’s the General. And those are the Twins.”

  “I’m sorry, but we didn’t catch your name....” Tom fingered the trigger of his shotgun.

  She glanced at Tom and blushed deeply. “Oh, right, silly me. I guess I’m not much used to seeing people out here on the street, so my manners are somewhat lacking. I’m Carolyn. Carolyn Kerwin. I’m—I mean, I was—the local librarian. You know, back...before, I mean, when people still....” Her train of thought floundered a moment like a fish out of water, then finally lay still as her voice trailed off.

  Tom offered a slow smile, holstering the gun, which sent a fresh blush blooming across her cheeks. “I’ve seen you around. I’m Tom, and that’s Jesse and Nadia.”

  “Pleased to meet you.” She offered a tight wave to each, tucking away those invisible wisps of hair, and let out a shuddery breath.

  “You’ve seen these statues before? What are they supposed to be?” Jesse reached out and touched the marble and was surprised to find it warm, almost...vibrating. He drew his hand away.

  Carolyn looked up at the statues. “A piece of Thrall’s history, tucked away for a long time.
Probably been around longer than anyone who’s ever lived in this town. Funny, though—I’ve heard about them for years, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen one. Uh, other than in the books at the library, that is.”

  She reached an uncertain hand out to touch the General, hesitated, and drew it back. “Supposedly, the people who came here to live in the early 1900s found several statues scattered about town. Town anchors, of a sort. People thought they were ugly to look at—disturbing, even. That’s really kind of an understatement. They downright scared people. So the town council uprooted all of them and moved them off someplace—that old church, I think. The original church. Or maybe it was the museum. But no one would destroy them. No one would dare. No one wanted to get that close to them.” She leaned in and added in a conspiratorial whisper, “They say that nine men died in the three days it took to move them. If you want to get technical, that was really when the first of the weird occurrences happened in Thrall.”

  “So the bad stuff started when the statues were moved?” Jesse asked.

  “Well, no, not exactly.” Carolyn shivered, hugging her arms to her chest. “I mean, there were the nine men that died, and a few unusual accidents here and there afterward. But things have never been quite right around here.”

  “No argument there,” Tom interjected.

  Carolyn blushed again. Her gaze wandered over to him before she continued. “Right. Our theory over at the library was that moving the statues didn’t start the weird things happening. At best, maybe it staved things off. Mrs. Hinckle—she was a senior librarian—said she’d seen the Giant and the Warrior once about three years ago, and again a year or so ago. Our associate librarian, Ms. Steitler, said she’d seen the Criminal about two months ago, and now these....” She looked around, startled, as if remembering they were there. “Kind of a chicken-or-the-egg thing. Did the statues being moved back into public view start the weird stuff happening, or did the weird stuff happening bring the statues back into public view?”

  “Who moved them back?” Nadia asked. “Where did they come from?”

  “No one’s really sure. They were here with the town when the people settled here. Marked the original buildings, I believe, the ones the settlers found here. There were a few of them, buildings that already existed, their architectural founding lost to time. As for who moved them—the, uh, statues, I mean, not the buildings—we had theories on that, too.”

  Before she could elaborate, a thin high scream pierced the air from the next block over.

  “Oh no,” Carolyn cried, flushing red and looking panicked. “I left Ms. Steitler alone! I knew it was stupid to go out here alone.” She looked at each in turn, wringing her hands. “I just wanted some air. Oh God! What if something got in? If that came from the library....”

  “Let’s go,” Jesse said, leading the running pack up the street and around the corner.

  The library towered over Finch Drive, a mammoth of pale red brick and gray stone, and they slowed, whether in amazement or by instinct, as they came up to it. Jesse was by no means an expert on architecture, but townspeople had always argued the mix of styles. Gothic tracery windows, interior arches and buttresses, Greco-Roman curled-leaf brackets and columns—the overall effect awed and impressed but left Jesse with a vague feeling of disquiet that maybe explained why no one ever looked at the library long enough to know its design. The substance of the place, like so many of the other original buildings of Thrall, seemed almost liquid, as if at any time it could spill onto the ground like blood or reshape its properties entirely and become a new building. Angles as well as curves had minds of their own, jack-knifing and winding and spiraling in ways buildings should never move. It almost hurt the eyes to study for too long.

  The four massive front pillars stood like sentinels guarding against intruders. Just inside the two outermost pillars, the dark glass of the upper floor windows reflected little light. The two interiors held up the heavy outcropping above the entrance into which “THRALL PUBLIC LIBRARY” was engraved in big round letters. Recessed farther into the building face above the outcropping, a frieze ran the length of the building. It was carved with vaguely disturbing figures engaged in blurred acts that suggested horrible things without really showing anything. Stone gargoyles clutched the top of the frieze, glaring down at them with fixed hatred from either side of the clock tower. The substance of the building climbed upward into the sky above the mural, wrapping around the face of a clock to form a narrow spired tower.

  The stature of the library intimidated, and no one made an immediate move to climb the stone steps. After a few minutes of awkward staring, another scream leaked out from between the heavy wooden double doors and set them in motion again. The hinges moaned as Jesse and Tom pulled on the door handles, as if the act caused the building pain. But they opened anyway and the four rushed inside.

  “Ms. Steitler? Ms. Steitler! Are you okay? Where are you?” Carolyn’s voice was frantic, probing the dark corners of the library’s checkout area. Nadia pulled Jesse’s flashlight from his backpack and flicked it around the room. A long, partitioned desk stood in front of them, its dust smudged by the occasional hand or sleeve. The few computers and lone printer stationed on the desk were dead quiet, their screens long dark. Behind the desk stood a filing cabinet with a series of alphabetically lettered drawers that Jesse assumed was the card catalog for when and if the computers went down. Beyond the desk and off to the left, pale light spilled from a doorway. A small plaque affixed above it read “Main Library.” Jesse remembered the bulk of that room was the Fiction section. The Non-Fiction and Miscellaneous Topics rooms were spread out across the upstairs. Tucked away in the basement, there were vaguely remembered bad things....

  They moved as a whole through the door into the Fiction area. The library smell originated there, in the rows of shelves—that old book scent of long-dry ink and yellowing paper thumbed through in different homes by different people. The room had a high ceiling with a chandelier hanging from its center. The one long window let in feeble daylight, which played off the crystals and cast weird shapes on the floor. Offices lined the wall behind them. Another door stood between them.

  Above the eight-foot shelves, painted scenes from classic novels coated the walls climbing upward. Jesse noticed that the weak window light manipulated the painted figures and scenes and gave them a sinister sense of life and movement. A balcony, accessible by a great carpeted staircase to the right, wrapped around three sides of the library, fencing in the scenes. Tables and chairs for reading were sprinkled along the length of it. On the far side of the balcony was the doorway to the Non-Fiction and Miscellaneous Topics rooms.

  “Ms. Steitler?” Carolyn’s echo weaved through the shelves and found nothing.

  Nadia shined the flashlight beam in between the shelves, where the feeble bit of natural light didn’t reach. Nothing there between the first two, or the next two, no one there between the two after that—then suddenly a glint of eyes caught the light. They all jumped.

  “Just a painting,” Carolyn assured them, tucking at her hair. “That’s Mr. Jackson B. Withers. He was the TPL’s first Director of Library Services.”

  “Did he found this place?” Nadia trained the light on the face in the painting. It was old. The paint strokes did little to soften the desiccated state his name suggested. The eyes, small and hard, focused an expression of sheer undeniable will at some point slightly above their heads. The mouth was turned up in an almost imperceptible smile.

  “No, not him. The library is one of the original buildings here. Mr. Withers simply took it over.” Carolyn glanced around as if afraid someone might hear her. “Although some people say it took over him. He...jumped. From up there.” She pointed to the balcony. “Broke his neck against one of the bookshelf corners. No one’s sure why he did it.”

  Jesse shivered, glancing once at those flinty eyes. In the angle of the flashlight beam, they seemed to be looking more at him now than above him.

 
“We—that is, Ms. Steitler and I—have been living here for years now. There was food in the offices’ mini-fridges for a long time, and canned goods in case of emergencies that Mrs. Hinckle had been stockpiling in the storage closet upstairs since the Cold War. Anyway, when that ran out, we went out in pairs to look for food. After Mrs. Hinckle...well, Ms. Steitler and I had gone out together, you see. It was safer that way. But when we came home and found Mrs. Hinckle pretty much like they’d found Mr. Withers all those years ago.” She looked pale, worried. “It’s been Ms. Steitler and I ever since. I’d hate to think of anything happening to her now.”

  Tom touched her arm. “I’m sure she’s okay. Probably scared herself.”

  “She must have scared herself silly,” Jesse said, “if we heard her all the way from where we were.” Seeing her expression and the visible trembling in her shoulders, though, he immediately felt bad, and added, “Not that it means she’s hurt or anything. I didn’t mean anything like that. Anyone would be edgy in this place here.... I mean, if it was even her at all.”

  “I hope you’re both right,” Carolyn answered quickly. “I hope it’s nothing.”

  “I’m sure it is.” Nadia smiled at her. “Why don’t we start looking for her? Where do you think she’d be?”

  A muffled cry, clipped off at the end, came from the door between the offices.

  “That way,” Carolyn whispered, pointing. “Behind that door.”

  They moved as one, their gazes fixed on the knob to note the moment it started to turn. It didn’t.

  “Should we open it?” Jesse asked no one in particular.

  “Yes,” Carolyn said. “Oh my, yes. I need to see if she’s okay.”

  Jesse opened the door, grunting against its weight. Beyond it was a low ceiling sloping downward. A wrought-iron staircase wound down into a pool of shadow, its bottom lost to the dark depths. Jesse frowned, taking his flashlight from Nadia.

  “Looks cold down there,” Nadia murmured. “A basement?”