Thrall

by Mary SanGiovanni

  For several seconds, no one and nothing moved but the faint, unsteady pulse of light in the room.

  Finally, Jesse inched forward. Something inside him screamed against it, warning him that if he touched the cool stone of the figures his hand would shrivel and fall off or some other equally horrible thing would happen. But he moved closer anyway, crossing around to the front of the statues. The others followed.

  The figure in the center was a good two feet taller than the others, which put it, by Jesse’s estimation, at about nine feet tall. It seemed to be made mostly of granite, although the horns that protruded from the forehead and curled away from the eyeless face were a deep red-rock color, like Martian clay. Its snarling mouth bore lines of long, bristling teeth, and the chin hung so low that the bottom jaw looked dislocated, obscuring the chin. Its massive body was split into three guts, which bloated out from either side of its ribs and from under its flat chest. Thick legs held it up. The arms were outstretched, and one of the hands clutched a deflated sac. Veined black-marble thorns wound around the hand, lacing the sac to the palm.

  To the left stood a smaller, hunched figure in a long trench coat of gray marble. The top of its head and back of its neck, as well as the backs of its hands, looked like lava melt that had cooled. Red and orange swirled in the deepest, shiniest black Jesse had ever seen. A mask, lashed to its head by stone straps, covered its face. It reminded Jesse of some type of S&M leather mask. Carved from brownish stone, it showed little indication of a nose and left no more than a slit for the mouth, the latter of which was laced with thin bars of actual metal piercing the face above and below the lips. There were also twin openings for the eyes, which were carved of dark blue marble veined in lighter blue. In its hand, it held a lump of deep reddish-brown stone, glazed to a wet sheen.

  “That one over there,” Murdock said, indicating the larger figure, “is the Giant. This figure with the mask is the Criminal. And this little lady here,” he added, gesturing to the third figure, “is the Round Woman.”

  The third figure seemed more sculpted than carved, her alabaster curves soft and smooth and flowing one into the other. She had none of the jagged angles, the rough, sharp edges, or ugly horns. That she was totally colorless made her more disturbing to Jesse than the other two statues. Her eyes were empty domes of white in her head, and her face was devoid of any real facial cast. Her hair was frozen in a sweep of white behind her, caught in the same billowing wind as her dress. Her limbs were the pale white of dead skin, and were wrapped beneath her sizable belly as if to hold it up. It was in the bulbous belly that Jesse found the most unsettling feature of the figure, a gaping wound that exposed layers of sculpted white muscle and tissue. Nestled within that wound were buildings: houses, churches, schools.

  With reluctance, Tom eased the shotgun back in the holster, his eyes all the while on the statue that Murdock had called the Criminal. Jesse sensed that Tom wasn’t quite sure even now whether he was going to have to blow away one of the contents of the room. “Ugly fuckers, aren’t they?”

  “What are they holding in their hands?” Nadia wrinkled her nose in disgust. “Or maybe I don’t want to know. Looks like raw meat or something.”

  “It is, in a sense,” Murdock answered. His own voice was tinctured by a certain revulsion. “They are organs. The Giant holds a stomach, the Criminal a liver, and within the Round Woman is the womb of the world. There are others. The General carries a brain, and the Twins carry a lung each. I’ve never seen the Sorceress or the Warrior, but as I understand it, the former carries a heart, and the latter the...ahem. The testicles.”

  Jesse frowned. “Why organs? Whose are they supposed to be?”

  A dark look passed over Murdock’s face. “The town founder, you could say.”

  Carpenter sucked in a breath as if he were about to rapid-fire some angry response when a long, low wail, followed by a bass rumble, shook the room.

  They turned to see the Edgicor skeleton straining against its cords, and for a moment, Jesse had the horrible sick feeling that the skeletons were going to break free and charge them.

  But it wasn’t that the skeletons were really moving. It was the floor, Jesse noticed, and the walls, too.

  “Oh...oh shit! It’s going up!” Tom broke into a run toward the door and the others followed.

  “I—wait! I don’t understand,” Murdock panted behind him as he struggled to keep pace. “What’s going up?”

  “The museum,” Tom called back. “The bastard’s gonna lift!”

  They sprinted back through the box-and-crate valley and up the steps, stumbling in the obscurity that engulfed them on the way. They felt their way down the corridor and out into the main hallway, crashing into walls and slamming doors in their hurry to get to the entrance.

  A square of afternoon light fell hesitantly across the mouth of a hole where the front doors had been, as if afraid of going too far beyond the threshold. Beyond it, they could see that it was raining dirt and grass. Rocks and stones pelted the driveway outside the museum, and where clumps of dirt splattered the drive, the occasional branch or worm or bird carcass fell nearby.

  Tom skidded to a stop in the doorway. Jesse nearly crashed into his back, and Nadia behind him. Carpenter caught the jagged edge of the wall and grabbed Murdock. The ground beneath their feet shook violently, and a crack opened up in the pavement that zigzagged toward the doorway. There was a squealing and groaning sound like metal being twisted, and wood heavily weighed upon. The crystalline crash of shattering glass added to the symphony, and layered above that was a muffled grind of moving earth.

  The sound of suffocation. Impending burial. Jesse thought he understood then—it wasn’t the museum that was moving this time.

  “Why are we waiting?” Nadia screamed over the noise. “It’ll be like the library and—”

  “No,” Tom shouted back. “Not this time.” He pointed up into the sky and confirmed Jesse’s own suspicions.

  A massive chunk of property hovered just above the tops of the trees. It looked like someone had dug deep into the earth with an impossibly large bulldozer and scooped up ground, trees, sidewalk and all, and hoisted it high above their heads. Crumbling pieces of curb fell to the ground and shattered. They could see tree roots dangling like hairs under the mini-mountain where the dirt was falling away.

  Something churned through the underside; they caught glimpses of glistening scales swimming in and out of the dirt.

  A shower of pebbles fell into the Thrall Community Park and Recreational Area across the street. They made tiny clinking sounds against the long iron fence like wind chimes set off all at once. The gate whined against its post. For just a moment, the grass grew darker and the woodland trails took on the black cast of dried blood smears on the ground. The shadow passed over the park, over the street, and up the curving driveway, distorting as it climbed the hill. From their angle on the ground, they could also see the roof edge of a long beige building with the letters POL visible over the top of a rusted out Crown Victoria.

  “My God, it’s a building up there!” Murdock’s mouth hung open. Dried leaves and twigs clung to his hair.

  “It’s a whole goddamn slice of life up there,” Carpenter said, squinting against the falling dirt.

  “Is it going to land on us?” Nadia wedged herself between Tom and Jesse, locking her arms around theirs. The dirt that powdered her face mixed with the dampness of her sweat.

  As if hearing her, or maybe noticing their little forms far below, the whole thing ceased all movement. The silence was complete—a burial silence of encompassing dirt in the ears, in the cavities of the body, muting all sound. Dead quiet, Jesse thought, and held his breath. They were all hushed, waiting.

  NINE

  Then the earth fell.

  Tom and Jesse dove for the floor, pulling Nadia with them. Carpenter staggered back and Murdock fell to one knee and clutched his chest. The sound was deafening: a roar of rushing earth and growling things beneath it, of gro
aning trees and twisting rock. Jesse glanced back through the cloud of dust.

  The Crown Victoria hit the ground hard. It landed amidst a hailstorm of glass and twisted metal on the museum driveway, just where the pavement started to level out. The impact blew the car up onto two tires, then rolled it like a dirty beached whale over onto the driver’s door with Thrall Police Department and accompanying logo painted on the side. It rocked along the curve of the door and landed on its roof with a groan, not more than fifty feet away from the entrance to the museum. On the passenger’s side, the remains of a ruddy bulb of dead flesh hung upside-down, bent at a terribly wrong angle to the bare shoulder. The bulb had a rubbery and distinctly inhuman shape to it, but it had been trying, by God (if God had actually had any part in it)—it had been trying to form the features of a face. Jesse knew this without really understanding how he knew, and the thought horrified him with a deep down cold in the meat of him.

  Dark dirt (it made Jesse think of chocolate cake crumbs) tumbled down the side of the hill, carrying pieces of concrete sidewalk with it. What had been the police department’s parking lot was little more than gray rubble streaked with the broken white and blue lines that had once designated parking spaces. What had been something of a front lawn was shredded. But the building itself was, amazingly enough, intact. It shouldn’t have surprised Jesse, not at that point, but it did. Aside from a crack in the brickwork that was laid along the bottom half, the beige stucco building was unmarred. THRALL POLICE DEPARTMENT hung rigid beneath the roof in round silver letters. The panes of plexiglass in the door had more or less shattered, but the black frame held on its hinges.

  Like the apartments, Jesse thought. Like the library. What is holding this shit together?

  The dust settled. It took Jesse (and the others, guessing by their gasps) a moment to notice that the whole building leaned backward toward the street at a gravity-defying angle on the downslope of the hill. And it hung there, Jesse saw, as if leaning like the Tower of Pisa was the most natural, comfortable position for a building to take.

  In front of the door was another large rock embossed with barbed wire carvings that crisscrossed around it. Above it, spray-painted on the wall next to the door, was CREEPER 7.

  “Damn,” Tom muttered to himself.

  “Original building,” Carpenter said quietly, as if that explained everything.

  Jesse sat up. Tom stood and offered Jesse a hand, but winced as Jesse pulled himself to his feet.

  “Same shoulder you banged up at the library?” Jesse rubbed his own elbow, which tingled where it had connected with the floor.

  Tom nodded, a halfhearted grin hanging uncertain on his mouth. “Hurts like a bitch now.” His shotgun lay on the floor, and he swooped and picked it up. “You okay?” he asked Carpenter.

  The old man nodded. “You kids okay?”

  “I’m fine, too,” Murdock said, still clutching his chest as he rose.

  “Well, I’m not. God,” Nadia blurted through tears. She shrugged off the guys’ offer to help her up but mewled when she put her weight on her knee to stand. “What the hell is wrong with this place?”

  “Why don’t you ask Dr. Murdock?” Carpenter glared in his direction.

  Jesse looked between the men, confused. “What do you mean?”

  Carpenter nodded at the anthropologist. “He knew. This whole time, he knew what we were up against, and never said a word. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I found some old papers in one of the admin offices. They explain a lot of things. Raise a lot of questions, too.”

  Murdock looked away. When he spoke, he sounded tired—a lot, Jesse thought, like he’d sounded when Jesse first found him. “It doesn’t do any good to know what those papers say. Knowing only ever made it worse. For me, for the others. What you’re up against is almost beyond human comprehension.”

  Jesse stepped up to him. “You mean, you knew what was going on even way back in the day, and you didn’t tell people back when they had a fighting chance?”

  “They wouldn’t have listened, even if we had tried. They never had a fighting chance, not really.” He frowned at their expressions, and with a petulant shrug, added, “By the time we knew—by the time we were really sure—it was too late. No one could leave, so why make it worse? And the rest I’ve met here are too crazy to care.”

  “We’re not the ones to worry about,” Carpenter said, glancing meaningfully down at the gun at the anthropologist’s side. It was Carpenter’s gun. Murdock glanced at his own gun, still tucked in the band of his pants, and handed the old man’s back to him.

  Tom’s eyes narrowed. “So what do the papers say?”

  Carpenter pulled the crumpled sheets out of his pocket. “Looks like Dr. Murdock did some research. Learned that Thrall’s got a mind of its own.”

  “I don’t understand,” Nadia said.

  “Well, if these papers are to be believed,” Carpenter said, skimming over the documents, “it’s not that the place went bad, like rotten fruit, or that something seeped up outta the ground, like some supernatural sewage or something. No, the town’s more like...like a Rubix cube, or one of those cheap goodie-bag games with the little squares—you know what I mean? The kind where the squares slide up and down, left or right to make a picture. Things in Thrall keep shifting and reshifting, literally. Each time, we get closer and closer to seeing the true picture of what Thrall really is. And whatever it is, kids, that picture isn’t going to be pretty.”

  It made sense, then, why Jesse’s sense of direction was off, and why things seemed at the same time both familiar and out of place. Change was in the very nature of Thrall, and it affected every part of it. Jesse remembered that the people, too, had started changing, even early on. Personality shifts grew so drastic at times that whole perceptions were skewed. Some people got worse than others, but it took hold of them all. Jesse still felt it at times in his own body—sourceless and almost uncontrollable anger, or sometimes, an anxiety like a damp-weather ache in an injury that never quite healed.

  “So what is Thrall, exactly?” Tom asked.

  The old man shrugged. “Something alien’s my guess. But the whole town’s alive, I believe that. Some kind of creature just waking up and healing up, trying to realign itself so that it can regain strength and move on. And these things—” he sniffed in the direction of the carcass in the police car “—these things are some kind of parasites, maybe, or...or...some kind of symbiotes. Something that spawned in the dark corners of Thrall.”

  “Well,” Murdock cleared his throat. “If you all really want to know...Mr. Carpenter is pretty dead-on, at least by our estimations. We believed Thrall was a physical alien entity. And we had this monsters-within-monsters theory at the museum to explain the others. We figured the monsters feed off the people the town traps inside for them, and then the town feeds off the monsters. A good system for a hundred years or—until all the people run out.

  “Dr. Lieberman, a linguist in our anthropology department, had a slightly different twist on it. The man was fascinated with the idea that we had an additional species of monster on our hands. Tricky little sons of bitches, as Mr. Carpenter here might say. He thought these mummers lured people where the other monsters could get them. A more intelligent kind of animal than your basic tricoil or hall-swimmer. Whether they served as liaisons or ate the prey themselves, Lieberman was right about one thing. The mummers stand apart from the others. They are still prey for the town, though. In the end, everything is.”

  “What’s a mummer?” Jesse asked.

  Murdock made a half-hearted attempt at a smile. “Mimics. They kill organisms by sucking out the insides and leaving just a shell of skin and hair. Then they assume the original’s characteristics, voice, speech patterns, even memories. They lure human beings out into the Raw. In fact, I’ve even seen them imitate other monsters and lure them out into the Raw. When times were tough, I suppose, and human meat was hard to come by.” He pinched the bridge of his nose and seeme
d, for a moment, to be massaging away a headache before he continued. “From a scientific standpoint it’s fascinating, and of course more than a little frightening, how good they are at what they do. They’re efficient killers on a whole new level—an intellectual level. They prey on what you want to believe, and what you need to have absolved. Doctors Lieberman and Gribauer were Victorian lit fans, and just took to calling them mummers. It’s an old-fashioned word. Means ‘one who wears masks.’ An actor.”

  “Perfect,” Carpenter nodded. “Actors without faces on a living, writhing, shifting actor pretending to be a stage.”

  “Wait, I’m still confused. What about the people?” Nadia asked. “How can the town be alive? They don’t just spring up. People build them.”

  “Ahhh, most towns,” Carpenter corrected her. “But people are opportunistic, and all across northern New Jersey—hell, all across America—towns get abandoned and forgotten, or discovered and revived. History books seem to indicate that Thrall’s settlers had happened upon the supposed good fortune of a place that already existed, a place they could build on and grow. See, all local historical evidence shows that Thrall came into existence probably around the turn of the century. Maybe that’s when it landed, or was born. Who knows? Anyway, there’s no evidence that I’ve ever found that indicated any person had a hand in creating the original buildings in this place. Sure, there are names on the newer storefronts and in the county records, and a few instances of people building new houses or raising barns in the last thirty years. But there’s no mention of Thrall’s original architects. It’s as if people never really owned Thrall, only laid claim to it. No original cost reports, no historical architectural plans or land development. Nothing. I had a bitch of a time, pardon my English, finding any planning commission paper trails at all. What little there is looks like it was burned in a fireplace at the old historic society.” That last he added with a sideways glance at Murdock.