Thrall

by Mary SanGiovanni

  “So,” she asked, more to mask the hollowness of the ghost-steps, “you’ve known Jesse a long time, then, huh?”

  “Yup. Been friends since middle school.” He stepped over a jagged shard of broken glass and led her carefully around it. “Jesse and I go back to comic books and Nintendo.”

  “And Mia? You knew her pretty well, too?”

  Nadia sensed Tom tensing—probably anticipating a conversation that might get him in trouble for having with her. She continued. “Jesse said you introduced them.”

  “Yeah.” The word was drawn-out, hesitant. “Yeah, I did. She was a friend of this girl Patty I knew.”

  “What was Mia like?”

  A pause. “Do you really want to know?”

  “Yes, I do. She was a big part of Jesse’s life. And Jesse doesn’t share much about his life. Makes it kind of tough to get to know him, ya know?”

  “I’m sure it does.” Tom still seemed reluctant to answer.

  “It would make me feel better,” she explained, “to understand her. To understand his feelings for her. To know who it is, exactly, that mattered so much that Jesse was willing to risk this —” she gestured at the gloom around her with her free-hand “—to find her.”

  “Sure,” he answered in a slow exhale. “The need to understand. I can dig that.” Tom led her around the bend in the hallway, and for a moment, in the sickly yellow light of the dirty window, Nadia saw in his face that he did understand. That maybe the need to understand something between men and women had been important to him, too.

  “She was pretty, like you.” Tom’s guard was still up—she could sense that—but he was talking. “Blond, a kind of soft look to her. Delicate, like a doll.”

  Nadia said nothing. She waited for him to continue. They plunged back into a gloom that was not quite as thick; the strange angle of the window diluted it some, but not enough for her eyes to be comfortable.

  “When they say the all-American girl next door, they’re talking about girls like Mia. Good girls, college-bound co-ed types. Mia wanted a career and a family. She liked to help people. Volunteered for soup kitchens and meals on wheels and reading to the elderly—things like that. She was a people-person. And she loved kids.” He laughed. “Used to tell Jesse they were going to have a ‘brood of kids.’ That’s what she called it—a ‘brood.’” He seemed to remember then who he was talking to, and the guard snapped back up. “She was...you know. Nice.”

  “She sounds wonderful for him.” She wasn’t sure she meant it, but it sounded in her own ears at least like she did.

  “It wasn’t easy for him to leave her. I don’t think it was easy for him to leave any of us.”

  “I can’t imagine what he must have felt.” That she had no trouble convincing herself was genuine. “We back in Ohio knew that something here kept him hurting, even though he never said much about home. Well, truth be told, until he told me about this trip, the only thing he’d ever told us about home was that he would never go back. Maybe because he was so adamant about that, I guess...I guess it never really occurred to me that what kept him hurting was something he hadn’t wanted to leave.”

  Tom was quiet for a moment. “I think we found a door.”

  “Good.”

  He paused outside it. “Jesse’s had a tough time of things.”

  “So have you, from the looks of this place. I can’t blame Jesse for leaving Thrall.”

  “Me either,” he said.

  “And I guess I can’t blame him for coming back,” she added.

  “You know,” he said, and she could feel his grin rather than see it, “you ought to tell him that. I think he needs to hear it.”

  Tom pushed the door open, a blacker rectangle on a black canvas of wall. For a moment, she thought she caught sight of mounds about the room as he pulled her inside, but as the door closed, the idea faded, too.

  Tom let go of her hand.

  “Where are we?” Nadia could hear his footsteps on some type of tiles as he moved away from her and the sound of his (please God, let it be his) light breathing off to her left, but she couldn’t see much of anything. “And what is that smell?”

  “Well, I don’t think we’re in the Geology exhibit anymore. Maybe we’re in the dinosaur room now.” There was a smacking sound and a click as he tried to get the flashlight going again, and then a sudden cone of light. Nadia sucked in a breath.

  “Oh, God,” she said.

  “Hey, looks like we found a museum morgue.”

  He joked, but Nadia had thought the same thing, too, at first. They had stumbled into some type of storeroom, or prep room for exhibits. Gurney-type tables stood haphazardly around the room. On each one, a heavy white sheet was draped across the contents. Nadia assumed they were meant to keep the dust off already old artifacts. Some shapes beneath the cloth had the rounded contours of bowls and vases, or the varying heights of pottery and ostensibly other housewares piled next to each other. Others were oblong in shape, creating erections somehow terrible in their implication beneath the sheets. Two or three of the more irregular shapes laid out closest to them gave Nadia the distinct impression of religious idols. She imagined the figures were meant to represent death gods (the shatterers of worlds) whose human shapes housed something far more terrible. Her gaze traced diminutive heads and torsos whose proportions made her think of mummified children (or dolls, a voice inside her suggested) and she shivered.

  She noticed two tables at the far end of the room. Sheets lay draped over an assortment of odd scythe-like angles. Beneath the edge of one sheet, Nadia could see a long, bony spike protruding from a fleshy bulb ringed in tiny ivory teeth. She shuddered. No artifacts there, no sir. Those two were the real deal.

  Forty or fifty more assorted ancient bowls, cups, jewelry, clothing, religious items, and tablets of various writings sat on the shelves along the side and back walls. Nadia found it much easier to focus on them.

  Tom eyed the shroud at his hip, nudging at it with the flashlight. “At least nothing here’s about to get up and say hello. Not without turning to dust.”

  “Oh, Tom, don’t even joke. This is so creepy. Please, can we move on?”

  Tom hesitated. “Yeah, but...I know it’s morbid, but, well, three or four of these are shaped like people, and—do you think we should check? I mean, so he knows for sure whether or not she’s, uh, here?”

  “You want to look underneath those sheets? Be my guest. But I’m not touching them, no way in hell.”

  “I’ll look.” Tom took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and muttered, “Okay. Okay, no problem. I’ll look.”

  He reached a tentative hand out toward the sheet, and a dark flower sprouted and bloomed up from its center. Tom’s hand snapped back. “Oh shit!”

  They watched as the stain spread out rapidly in all directions, climbing across the swell of the chest and up and over the shelf of the chin. Nadia gagged, choking on the scream wedged in her throat. It was happening everywhere—almost all the tables with sheets were picking up flecks and spatters from whatever lay beneath, little spots that grew and melded with others to become large, irregular stains, wet and heavy, clinging close to the forms and painting them the color of thick clots. Distinct skeletal features emerged as the blood washed over the heads of the child-shapes on some tables. On others though—she thought that strangely enough, this might have been worse—the bloody sheets hung over pottery or weapons or figurines. Things that didn’t—couldn’t bleed.

  Within seconds the sheets were saturated, and the blood spilled out in a burgundy waterfall over the sides of the tables. Tom yanked the shotgun from the holster and gestured for Nadia to get behind him. As she backed toward the door, she caught glimpses of color spreading across the floor. With a frantic turn of her head, she saw the pottery, the weapons, all the artifacts on the shelves were splattered with blood, too. It dripped from the ceramic handles, the carved arcs of wood, pooled in the cloth and then spilled over the ledges. It dribbled out of spouts and down
the length of metal blades. But the tables, their sheets a solid crimson range of irregular hills and puddled valleys, lay silent and soaked through.

  All except the two in the back.

  Those two spasmed beneath the nebulous white that covered them, their irregular movements jerking them around on the tables. Occasionally, one of the long spikes hit the tile floor with a glassy chime.

  It’s like they smell the blood. Like they’re frenzied, Nadia thought.

  Tom noticed them, too, and leveled his shotgun at one of the forms as it rose up, a specter beneath a sheet. He blasted it, and the whole amorphous form fell, tangled in its cotton shroud, with a heavy thud to the floor. Tom aimed at the second and fired. It dropped like a lead weight onto the floor next to the first with a dull, meaty thump. Black sludge spread out beneath both, eating away at the floor in a widening circle of darkness. For just a moment, Nadia thought she saw an endless expanse of stars in that sludge, as if the blood of those things was eating a hole in the floor straight through to deep space. But she blinked hard, and when she opened them, the sludge was liquid again, the toxic blood of a monster.

  Then all the bleeding stopped. Nadia was aware of a kind of silence returning that she hadn’t realized had left. Her heart pounded to fill it. Her eyes slipped closed and she counted to three before opening them, forcing herself to look at the figure on the table near Tom. Blood pooled in the empty sockets of the eyes, but it was kept in check. The sheet had molded to the dried lump of nose and even the basic shape of teeth. The blood all over the room had dried to an ugly rust-colored crust. She clutched, without thinking, at the unsettled feeling in her stomach.

  “What the hell just happened?” Her voice squeaked, weakened by terror. “Why did they bleed like that?”

  Tom looked at her, and she couldn’t tell if he was frightened, sad, or angry, or some mix of all three. He shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. I don’t know.” Turning back to the table himself, he nosed the end of the shotgun beneath the sheet and yanked it off onto the floor.

  There was nothing underneath. No child mummy, no doll, no idol to a dark god—nothing to collect the blood or even serve as mold for the stiffened sheets. Nothing at all.

  Nadia glanced at the floor. The sheet was as white as when they’d entered. She scanned the room, and found all the sheets had deflated and returned to their previous spotless condition. There was nothing on any of the tables—no blood now at all, no artifacts or weapons or pottery, no statues beneath the sheets. Just the tables, and pure white covers laying flat across their surfaces.

  For a moment, she thought she might faint, but it passed. “Can we go now?”

  Tom offered a smile, but it was shaky. “Yeah. I think it’s safe to say Mia isn’t in here.”

  With a final glance back at the sheets, they headed off to the History of Thrall exhibit.

  EIGHT

  “Carpenter?” Jesse glanced around the display room. He couldn’t really see much in the gloom, but it didn’t stop him from trying to piece together recognizable shapes from the patches of darkness. “Carpenter, you in here?”

  Murdock cleared his throat. “I don’t think he’s here.”

  Jesse moved forward in the darkness. Little was visible but outlines and occasional glinting shapes. “I don’t suppose you have a flashlight?”

  “There’s one in the office. I’ll go get it.”

  Jesse watched his silhouette walk back to the door. He traced the sound of receding footsteps. A gut feeling told him that Murdock wasn’t coming back. He shook his head and looked back once to the doorway before turning his attention to the contents of the room.

  The center of the floor was dominated by the model train display on a large table. Along the side of the table wires ran to and from a switch plate to a battery. More out of habit than any real thought that it would work, he flicked the switch and flinched when tiny dots of light winked on all across the display. Most came from miniature streetlamps and storefronts, providing enough pinpoints of light for him to make out some of the detail.

  A miniature town in 1/144 scale spread out irregularly over the table, a reproduction of Thrall down to the toothpick-sized telephone poles and chain-link fences. A smattering of broccoli-sized trees ringed the display. Within, a glassy lake lay off to the left, and a ribbon of road ran down the town’s center to a small tunnel. Squinting, Jesse could make out replicas of the library, the municipal building and its historical society and hall of records sub-buildings, the Archammer Apartments (where they were originally located), the old movie theater, the bank, the police station, even the old Hand of the Black Stars Church. It amazed Jesse that someone had actually had the patience to glue and paint and build the thumbnail-sized houses that dotted the “western” and “southeastern” side of the display, with their tiny cars parked on the side streets and driveways. Jesse spotted a fuzzy green patch he assumed was the park. Even the cemetery had been miniaturized, down to the curling wrought-iron gate and tiny tombstones.

  The difference, however, between the miniature version of Thrall and the real thing was that Thrall in full scale didn’t have a railroad system. Where in reality the museum stood, the modeler had erected a station. Larger than the other buildings on display, it seemed a center showpiece that captured the most realistic feeling of Thrall. Its weathered beams and supports stood empty and abandoned, its forsaken little benches marking the ghostly passage of time in a place that no one ever entered and no one ever left. A dark bullet of a train sagged in front of it. From the station, the model divided the park from the woods with wire tracks and cut a nice pathway around the lake. In real life, that pathway was obscured by sand now, and the overgrown lawns of Thrall Community Park and Recreational Area tangled with the haunted trees of the woods. One thing Jesse did notice that was true to life in Thrall, especially now, was the lack of people. No tiny figures could be found anywhere in the display at all. In essence, the model showed Thrall the way it really was—a shell devoid of human life, pretending at reality. An empty stage, as Carpenter would say.

  Jesse noticed too, that on the street corners were tiny signs with hand-painted buses. But the real Thrall didn’t have those, either. He knew because he’d had to hitch a ride to Wexton to catch public transportation there. His car had broken down the week before—another victim of the Raw’s rage against the machine, he’d thought—and he was desperate to get out before he lost his nerve. Jesse shook his head slowly in the darkness. It still amazed him how many strange things about Thrall had slipped under the radar of its inhabitants. That there was no public transportation to or from Thrall had never struck him as odd before, but it did now. It was another wrong link in a whole chain of things that had never been right.

  He turned to the various dollhouse displays in glass cases around the walls. He couldn’t see much of the boxes’ shadowed interiors beyond the streaks of dust, but he figured he knew what was in there: mannequins playing out still-lives in replicas of normal settings. The display room was more suited to Thrall than any other place in the whole town, Jesse thought with a certain degree of disgust. Empty stages and dead-eyed dolls with slack faces. He wondered if those shadow boxes contained Thrall’s horrors in miniature, too—the black hole, the bleeding nuns, what really happened to Gavin Hardley in those woods.

  Maybe what, if anything, had happened to Mia and Caitlyn.

  A sudden thump behind him made him jump. He turned, fumbling for the gun in his backpack as he did so.

  “Just me,” Murdock called out lightly. “Don’t shoot.” He clicked on a flashlight. “Took me a while to find it in the mess I call my desk, but here it is. The batteries still work. Can you believe it?”

  Jesse chuckled, relieved. “Glad to see you made it back here. I had my doubts.”

  Murdock waved his words away. “I had doubts of my own, but, well....” His sentence trailed off and he shrugged. “In a way, you did me a favor. Good to see a human face again.”

  “Yeah, I can
understand that.”

  Murdock trained the beam of light on the nearest shadow box as he walked up to Jesse. “I take it you didn’t find your friend?”

  “Nope. He isn’t here. At least, he isn’t answering.” Jesse wiped the dust off the boxes with his fingers to peer inside—to see for himself, he guessed, what those boxes really did contain. As if sensing Jesse’s purpose, Murdock shined the beam of light on each box in turn before sweeping the room.

  The scenes didn’t necessarily depict Thrall. The first box showed a Victorian living room with furniture from the 1800s, and the second held a richly-textured display of some imperial palace in Germany. The third was a scene of children playing outside. A little boy doll was poised to catch a ball while the other dolls looked on and smiled. Two little girl dolls soared feet-first toward the sky on swings, while a handful of dolls were positioned all over the slide and jungle gym. One even dangled from little monkey bars. Something about that display made him uneasy. He was not so much bothered by the idea that the children-dolls made him think of Caitlyn, but rather, of Caitlyn unattended. There were no grown-up dolls anywhere in the display, except for a single tall figure looming over the tiny chain-link fence.

  Oh my God. Jesse uttered something in the back of his throat that barely reached his lips, something that would have been That’s exactly how I saw him. The figure in the shadowed back corner of the display had been crafted without a mouth.

  Murdock pulled the light away from it, though, and continued an arc around the room. When the light reached the cemetery display, it stopped again.

  Without the restrictions of a shadow box, the last display spread out the length of the rest of the wall. Like the train display, the modeler had captured the curling black iron of the gates and the landscape of hills on which the cemetery was built. The bigger display, however, included far more detail and much more realistic monuments, including three mausoleums.