Thrall

by Mary SanGiovanni

  “Children’s section.” Carolyn said, the words stretched and tight. “Never liked it down there.”

  Jesse’s flashlight lit little more than the steps in front of them and the faint angular outlines of things waiting in the darkness below. The clanking of their footsteps on the staircase rang out against the narrow walls. Each stayed close to the one in front; a naked feeling of being surrounded by unseen things pressed them close, tightening their grips on the railing as they made their slow descent.

  “Hello?” Jesse called out. A thump from somewhere ahead froze him, and he felt the pressure against his back of the train behind him stopping short.

  “What is it?” Tom asked over the silhouetted heads between them.

  “I thought I heard something.” Jesse’s flashlight beam swept the darkness below.

  “Ms. Steitler!”

  Nadia shushed Carolyn. “We don’t know if that’s Ms. Steitler. If it isn’t, we probably don’t want it to know yet that we’re here.”

  Jesse moved down the stairs again, deeper into the children’s room. He imagined drowning in the inkiness that lapped against the walls, imagined it pouring into his lungs, into his head, and blocking out all sound and light. He fought against panic and forced his breathing to stay slow and steady.

  But he couldn’t shake the cold feeling of dread that they were sinking to their own deaths, and that he was leading them right to the bottom. If there is a bottom, a voice in his head said.

  His flashlight caught a silhouette then, a curve of gold hair and a slim bare shoulder. He jumped, cursing to himself.

  “What now?” Nadia asked. “What’s down there?”

  “I don’t know.” He discovered a far wall of gray brick, as well as an erratically tiled floor. So at least there was a bottom. But there was no sign of the person he’d seen.

  A person? How could he be so sure he’d seen a person? But he had, he knew he had, and he thought he’d recognized that gold curtain of hair, even from behind.

  “Carolyn, what does Ms. Steitler look like?”

  “Oh, about five-four, a hundred pounds. She’s sixty-one, but they say she looked like Janet Leigh when she was young. Her hair is gray now but she still sweeps it up like they did back in the sixties. Why, did you see her? Is she down there?”

  Gray hair. Could it have been gray hair and not blond? He didn’t think so, but he couldn’t be sure. “I don’t think I did.”

  “What did you see?” Tom asked.

  “Not sure. I....”

  At the bottom of the stairs, the figure passed through his beam of light again, and this time, there was no doubt in his mind that the woman was not Ms. Steitler.

  “Mia?” Jesse faltered on the last step.

  “What?” Carolyn leaned in over his shoulder. “Who’s down there, Jesse?”

  “Didn’t you see her?” Jesse made frantic sweeps with the flashlight, but she was nowhere in the main room. He stepped onto the floor. The cold seeped up from the tiles through the soles of his sneakers and made his leg hairs stand on end.

  “See who, Jesse?” Nadia asked.

  Jesse didn’t answer. He glossed over his friends with the flashlight and saw a range of confused expressions.

  “Nobody, I guess. No one’s down here.”

  Five-foot shelves of books shook off the dust of sleep into the flashlight beam. The book covers were still brightly colored, though the plastic slips that protected them were cracked and curling on the edges. The library smell hung heavy there, combined with mildew. It brought him back in time some twenty years to an afternoon he spent with pirates, looking out over the high seas from a crow’s nest tucked snugly between two shelves of Children’s Classics. It was the only time he’d seen the Man with No Mouth.

  Thrall’s young people had their heads chock-full of urban legend, maybe more so than other kids. Jesse’s childhood had been a series of Ghost-in-the-Graveyard games and sessions of “Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board.” They’d tried summoning Bloody Mary to come out of their mirrors and bite their fingers. To test each other’s bravery, they told stories in school or at sleepovers or camp-outs of the Hook Man and the ghosts of Serlings Lake and of what (or who) roamed in the abandoned catacombs of Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital out in Morris County. But none of the dark play had ever stricken Jesse as so awful as the stories about the Man with No Mouth. They said he wore a long black coat of hair. Where his mouth should have been was a plane of smooth white skin; a trick deal with the devil had erased it right off his face. A few of the kids had sworn they’d seen him, and they’d retold their harrowing escapes with eyes wide as golf balls and hands shaking as they illustrated parts of their stories in the air. A ghost, a monster, an alien, and/or a mutation of science gone-wrong, he came from the woods around Thrall to prowl parks and schools and baseball fields for the lone child to take back into the woods to....

  To collect mouths, they said. To kill the child and peel off the lips and pull out the teeth and tongue and add them to his gory wall collection of other children’s mouths.

  As Jesse had sat that one afternoon, sandwiched between two shelves with his back to that cold gray brick wall in the Children’s section of Thrall Public Library, a shadow had fallen over his page. He looked up, fully expecting someone to be right in front of him.

  The man stood instead at the far end of the aisle, beyond shadowing distance. Long black coat, not quite fur, but coarser and dirty and wiry, like Chris Robertson and Lisa Cannon, his classmates, had described. His head was bent so that Jesse couldn’t see his face, but he knew, with that sick-chill kind of certainty that children have about the supernatural. When the man looked up, that confirmed it. No mouth.

  The man pointed at him, nodded, and walked away. When Jesse managed to thaw his limbs into moving again he got up, pirates forgotten on the high seas. He crept to the end of the shelf and peered around the children’s section, but the man was gone. No one else, it seemed, had seen the Man with No Mouth.

  Jesse had bolted from the library and hadn’t been back since. He’d kept his mouth and didn’t want to push his luck.

  “Hey man, you okay?” Tom’s voice pulled him back into the present.

  “Yeah, yeah, sure. Just...yeah, I’m fine. Just been a long time since I’ve been back here, ya know?” He illuminated some of the books on the top shelf as he wandered down the aisle, reading the titles off to himself. Swiss Family Robinson, Legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, The Jungle Book, Lord of the Flies, Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer—

  —and a yellow-covered book whose binding read Where to Find Mia. He blinked, drawing the book off the shelf. The front cover had the title displayed in a kind of hokey horror font dripping with blood. Beneath it was an illustrated picture of a pretty girl with shining blond hair, broken over a large rock in the woods. Blood dribbled from her mouth down the side of her chin. More blood spilled out over the rock from beneath the girl’s back. Her eyes were closed, and bending over her like some Dracula-villain from the Lugosi days was the Man with No Mouth. And even without a mouth, or maybe because of it, the drawn face was sinister and suggestive.

  Jesse nearly dropped the book.

  “Jesse, what’s wrong?”

  He glanced up at them. Tom and Carolyn were feeling around amidst the shelves but Nadia stood with a fixed expression of worry on him.

  He forced a smile. “Nothing. Just...reliving the past, I guess. I used to come here all the time when I was little.” Nadia nodded doubtfully and turned to help Carolyn.

  He opened the book again and the smile faded. All the pages were blank. He flipped back to the beginning and noticed something he hadn’t before.

  The checkout card was stamped the same day Jesse had left Thrall. Tucked inside the pocket behind it was half of a photograph. Of him. Next to him stood Mia, and even after all those years, he sucked in a breath at the sight of her. In the photo, her cheek was pressed close to his as she waved at the camera. Her hair looke
d as gold and bright as the sunshine above them, and her smile as warm. Mia’s eyes laughed beneath the soft curtain of her hair. Between them she held a tiny child’s sand shovel. A rip down the photo’s center tore her body in half, cutting out most of the scenery beyond them. But the picture sparked something against the flint of his memory. Something about a career day for high school kids, about a visit with his girl to the museum, because Mia had so wanted to be a curator some day.

  That was it then—a clue maybe, as to where to find her. But had she left it, and if so, why, and when? He turned the picture over. Her handwriting was scrawled across the back: “Jesse and M-,” and beneath it, what might have been a partial date, but it was too smudged for Jesse to be sure. He shoved the picture into his pocket and closed the book. The cover had changed. Now it read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, reiterated on the spine. Jesse replaced the book.

  “Can we go now?” Nadia whined from the center of the room. “Clearly, this Ms. Steitler isn’t here. Maybe she’s in that room upstairs.”

  “Only one way to find out, right?” Tom’s grin came out of the gloom and appeared alongside her, and she jumped. “Shall we? Ladies first.”

  “Gladly.” Nadia snatched the flashlight from Jesse’s hands. “The sooner, the better.” She started for the stairs with Tom, Carolyn, and finally, Jesse in tow.

  SIX

  When they reemerged from the basement, the Fiction section seemed somehow brighter and less stale. Jesse glanced at the picture of Mr. Withers as they passed by it on their way toward the stairs. He glared at them from his gloomy alcove between the shelves.

  “Only two rooms up here to check, right, Carolyn?” Tom took the flashlight from Nadia and led the way up.

  “And a closet,” Carolyn added with an invisible-hair tuck. Jesse noticed her eyes following the length of balcony, as if she were waiting for something to strike from the shadows tucked into the corners and molding. As if she knows something’s there, Jesse thought. He wondered briefly what she did, in fact, know about the library, and about what nested in those corners.

  “Be careful, Tom.” Jesse eyed the balcony, too, searching for signs of movement.

  Tom nodded from the front of the line and gestured toward his shotgun. “I’m okay. No worries.”

  At the top of the stairs, they were in a better position to examine the mural. The artwork drew goosebumps on his skin. Robin Hood poised an angry arrow at a death-fete of fairy-tale princesses congregated at the head of the stairs, each with their own downfalls. Snow White cradled a rosy apple in her palm while Sleeping Beauty fingered a spindle. Other cowering beauties shrank beneath the hook-clawed advance of ugly old witches. Further down the balcony, Treasure Island was about to be invaded, not by Pirates, but by beasts that slithered and crept out of the Jungle Book, or hunted in human silhouette from the Lord of the Flies island. Further still, the Witch of the West towered over a forested part of Oz, dwarfing Dorothy. The woods extended toward a headless cloaked figure who held the reigns of a rearing, red-eyed black steed in one hand and a long sword in the other. Next to the Horseman, a wild-eyed Queen of Hearts had been caught mid-downswing as she sought to take off Alice’s head. Above her shoulder, a cheshire smile wreathed in hookah smoke hung like an ominous moon. Scrooge’s ghosts drew their painted mist to him in the cobbled streets of London on a wall partition beyond that. As he and his friends approached the doorway, Jesse saw a guillotine that he guessed was from another Dickens story, and a gabled house that could only be something of Hawthorne’s or Poe’s.

  Through the doorway, faint light slanted down from the windows. Vague rectangular shapes within were crested with an outline of dull white.

  “Ms. Steitler?” Jesse called softly. “Are you in there?” Jesse gestured for the others to follow him, and passed through the doorway into the Non-Fiction room. He didn’t get more than four or five feet into the room when a cold ring of metal pressed against his temple.

  Oh God, oh God, he thought, a gun, it’s the barrel of a gun....

  “Oh shit,” Tom muttered from somewhere behind him.

  “If you so much as exhale a breath, you freak, your head will be chips-and-dip all over the tile floor here.”

  The voice was vaguely familiar, but more so, Jesse recognized the bloody-nose smell, the coppery mineral smell from the diner. He didn’t move. He didn’t breathe.

  Tom’s voice came in shaky breaths around a light laugh. “Uh, Carpenter? Come on, man, cut us a break. We’re the good guys.”

  “If any of you move, I’ll kill you one by one.” With the gun pressed firmly against Jesse’s head, the crazy postman inched into Jesse’s line of view, a suspicious glare further pinching the wrinkles of his face.

  “Look, Carpenter, I know what you think, but we aren’t like that, I swear. We aren’t—”

  “Don’t tell me what you aren’t!” Carpenter shouted at Tom. “I know perfectly well what you aren’t. I’ve made it my business, see, to know every type of creeping, crawling, leaping, flying, swimming, lurching, squelching thing in this whole damn place, so I know exactly what you aren’t. And I know exactly what you look like. But I do not know, however, what you are.”

  “But—”

  “Even if you are real people, how do I know you ain’t one of the crazies? People don’t come to Thrall for fun. How do I know you ain’t gonna kill me?”

  “Because,” Tom replied quietly, “I’ve got a shotgun pointed at your head now and if I wanted to kill you, believe me, asshole, I would have done it already.”

  The cold ring fell away from his temple. Jesse let go of the breath threatening to burn a hole through his chest. He turned, as did Carpenter, to Tom, who had managed to ease his shotgun out of the holster without drawing attention and now had it trained on Carpenter’s head. Tom took the older man’s gun and tossed it to Jesse. Catching it gingerly, Jesse zipped it up in his backpack.

  Carpenter held their gaze a moment, but his glare shriveled with the passing seconds. Then suddenly he grinned, his paranoid notions seeming to dissolve. “Well, boy, guess I can’t argue there. Even if you’ve got some sinister purpose for keeping me alive, I can’t say as I can dispute with a gun pointed at my head. Besides,” he added, sticking out his hand, “it’s nice to have some company for a change. James Carpenter. And you are?”

  Tom regarded his hand for a moment, glancing from it to the wizened face before him, then slowly lowered the gun. With a cautious shake of the old man’s hand, he replied, “Tom Wyatt. Chips-n-dip over there is Jesse Coaglan, and she’s Nadia, a friend of Jesse’s. And this lady here is Carolyn Kerwin, the librarian here.”

  Carpenter took Nadia’s hand and, ignoring her evident disgust, bowed deeply and kissed her hand. “Charmed, Miss Nadia.” To Jesse, he nodded. “Better safe than sorry. No hard feelings?”

  “Uh, no. No, I guess not.”

  “Good.”

  He kissed Carolyn’s hand as well, and her cheeks colored a deep red.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Carpenter,” Nadia said, “but who are the crazies you’re talking about?”

  Carpenter sniffed. “People that worship this town like it’s a shrine. Or a god. The people too scared of this town to leave here. And the people too screwed in the head, pardon my language, to know the difference.”

  “That could just about describe anybody left here,” Tom said, his narrowed eyes locked onto the old man’s.

  “Made it a point to stay away from three kinds a’ people,” Carpenter answered. “Anyone who eats raw meat, because that ain’t too far off, in my humble opinion, from chewing on my arm next. Anyone who’s spent any good amount of time at any of the original buildings in Thrall, ’cause they make a person’s head funny. And anyone who goes sneakin’ around abandoned buildings without a clue about what’s inside ’em, because they’re a liability. Not too many other people left in town fall into any other category.”

  He regarded them a moment when no one spoke, then added, “But I guess you seem li
ke nice, reasonable folks. Didn’t mean to scare ya. Of course, you can’t be too careful around this place anymore. Just isn’t safe for man or beast out there.” He laughed. “Well, maybe the beasts. Seem to be enough of them, eh?”

  “What are they?” Nadia asked.

  Carpenter regarded her with the kind of smile a parent might give an inquisitive child. “They’re every biological perversion and abnormality you can think of, that’s what. Every freakish nightmare you ever thought was lurking in the dark behind you. Every beast you thought a merciful God would never allow to exist. Thrall’s pets, my dear. Thrall’s pets. And then there are the type that can pretend to be anything they want. Anything at all.” The last seemed full of meaning that no one else but him understood.

  “So what did you think we were, monsters?” Jesse raised an eyebrow.

  Carpenter’s smile melted to no more than a grim upward twist of his thin lips. “Who’s to say? This place is a stage with many strange actors, and every actor has no face.” His short burst of laughter had a dry-warp kind of crackle that made Jesse flinch. “Or maybe this place is the actor, with many masks. Deep and philosophical, whichever light you turn it in.”

  Nadia narrowed her eyes. “I don’t get it.”

  He grinned and winked at her.

  “Excuse me, Mr., uh, Mr. Carpenter,” Carolyn asked with a diminutive tap on his shoulder. “Have you seen a petite older woman with gray upswept hair? She may or may not have been wearing little spectacles? Named Ms. Steitler?”

  Carpenter’s face grew grim. “Uh-huh, I think I did. But I don’t think you’re going to want to.” Seeing Carolyn’s evident distress, he added quickly, “I’m sorry, ma’am, really and truly. For what it’s worth, I...I believe she went quick.”

  For a moment, Carolyn looked as if she might cry—or laugh. Jesse couldn’t tell which. Then, all expression drained with the color from her face. “Can you show me the body? I want to see her. I want to bury her.”

  Carpenter considered it a moment, then nodded his consent. “Sure, ma’am. But I daresay maybe Miss Nadia ought to wait here.”