Thrall

by Mary SanGiovanni

  “So you’re saying the town built itself?” Nadia glanced around warily, her eyes coming to rest on the spray-painted wall across the street.

  “I’m saying that in my humble opinion—and it seems, the humble opinion of this paper’s author, Dr. Murdock—something landed here whole. An entity so big and with a physical make-up so alien to anything on our planet, that the first people to encounter it saw it through the closest frame of reference they had. They thought it was a town. And who knows? Maybe it adapted itself to their perception to protect itself while it rested, and birthed atrocities, and collected enough humans for those atrocities to feed on, to sustain itself for as long as this hunting ground could.”

  “Well, why is this...this alignment...happening now?”

  The old man shrugged. “Papers don’t say. Maybe it couldn’t, before; maybe the alignment part takes years to accomplish. Could even be that it has to change every so many years to renew itself, like a phoenix. Different shape, different world. My personal theory is that it couldn’t shift because it wasn’t ready—not until now.”

  “We suspected it sustained some tissue damage in the fall,” Murdock muttered in agreement, nodding. “It was badly hurt, and needed time to heal.” He sighed. “Our theory was that it came from someplace far out in deep space. And it swallowed echoes of home and carried them with it. Some of those echoes had markings which took Dr. Lieberman a good twenty-five years to scratch the surface of deciphering. Those markings suggest—at least, according to Dr. Lieberman—the basis for that paper. I wrote it with the intention of revealing it to the authorities, quietly. But after Main Street and all those deaths, we decided...well, we couldn’t fathom what people would do with the idea that they were trapped inside a living, changing entity. They’d fed on food grown from it, breathed its air, drank water from its reservoirs, bathed in it, swam in it, lived and made love and worked and played and buried their dead in it. It was inside them. It owned them. How do you condemn a town full of doomed men, women, and children to that knowledge and that fate?”

  No one had an answer for him.

  “Oh my God,” Nadia said after a while. “I think I know what ‘Creeper 7’ means.” Her gaze was still fixed on the scrawl near the door. He could almost hear the click of ideas falling into place behind her eyes. Her lips moved, though barely, around the word and the number.

  Her gaze dropped to the stone. Jesse hadn’t noticed it the first time but he saw it now, on the slightly tilted top surface of the stone: a blobbish shape beneath the entwined barbed wire. It reminded him of the statue in that impossible basement room.

  Nadia spoke his thoughts out loud. “Look at the carving on that stone. It looks like what that statue in the basement had in its hand, with the wire around it and everything. It’s the statues, the Creeper 7. It’s what they’re holding—the Brain, the Heart, the Lungs, the Stomach, the Liver, the Womb, and the Testicles, right, Murdock?” He nodded as she counted them off on her fingers. “Carolyn had told us they were all housed once in either an old church or the museum, remember? She wasn’t sure which. But they aren’t all there now, are they? We’ve seen a few, and I don’t think there’s anyone left here with nothing better to do than move them like chess pieces.”

  She tore her gaze away and looked each of them in turn in the eye. “The statues are shifting, too. The town is moving them. It’s rearranging its organs.”

  “The changing of the guards,” Carpenter breathed. “Hot damn, I think you’re right. And those big rocks, they aren’t marking doorways. They’re marking placement of the organs—the seats of life.”

  “The Raw, the blood on Main Street, the black hole—maybe they’re all bodily functions. Digestion, menstruation, excretion. The town’s got to be alive. Alive and—” Nadia started, as if seized by a horrible thought. “—alive and...oh. Oh Lord, it’s able to reproduce.”

  “That can’t be good.” Tom hugged his shotgun to his chest. “Not good at all.”

  Jesse took a tentative step out of the museum and gazed at the mid-afternoon clouds. They floated lazily by, unaffected by the picking up and dropping of whole chunks of landscape that was going on below them. For a moment, he wished he was up there, too, out of the pit of death and decay and escaping on a breeze that would carry him far from Thrall. “What if...what will happen when those last pieces slide into place?”

  “I dare say,” Carpenter replied with a heavy sigh, “something this world was never meant to see.”

  “We need to get out of here,” Nadia said. “We need to get in the car and drive to Wexton and get help, and if they won’t help us—”

  “They won’t,” Carpenter interjected. “At least, they never did any time I tried. Always struck me as eerie, how very much unwilling they were to help.”

  “Then if they won’t,” Nadia continued, “screw them. We’ll drive as far away from here as the gas tank will allow.”

  “You have a car?” Murdock cast her a sidelong glance that seemed as much suspicion as curiosity.

  “Yes, we have a car. It’s over on—what was that, Jesse, Main Street?”

  “Wainwright Terrace,” Jesse answered absently. His mind was still on Nadia’s theory about the Creeper 7 and the idea of Thrall offspring spreading across New Jersey. “Off Main Street.”

  “A car can be a very valuable thing,” Murdock said. “A working one, that is. Does it work?”

  “It got us here,” Jesse answered. “But I cut the ignition to—” (see if I’d killed a doll, his mind finished for him, but it was too disturbing a notion to repeat out loud) “—to check on something, and when I went to start the car again, it died.”

  “We had another theory at the museum,” Murdock said slowly. From the look in his eyes, Jesse got the impression he was unsure whether to speak out loud. “About locals—people born here, I mean—and people who moved here from someplace else. There was some evidence to support the idea that the town got inside people who were born here and grew up here, people whose parents and grandparents grew up here. It got its hooks in and held them back while it let others escape. Thrall keeps its own. But if we had a car....”

  “What good would a car do if we can’t leave?” Tom shook his head.

  “You can’t leave, maybe, but I daresay Nadia and Mr. Carpenter here could. Some of the staff at the museum could have.” This last he said with a strange flat tone, accompanied by a grimace that leeched the color from his face.

  “And,” he continued after a beat, “if the town died, then the locals could probably leave, too. Either way, it would be a shame to leave this car out where the Raw will just eat it away. I don’t suppose you put it in a garage, did you? Well no, I don’t suppose you did.” Murdock seemed increasingly lost in thought, unaware that he was even voicing his ideas out loud. “Wouldn’t matter anyway. The garage could very well pick up and fly across town and when it crashed, your car would be no more useful to us than that Crown Victoria.”

  “What are you getting at, Murdock?” Carpenter asked, leaning against the doorway.

  “Well, let’s just say the town was dying. Any way out we may be able to find could very likely involve a lot of running and ducking, and we probably wouldn’t be alone. If all hell broke loose, it would be far better to have a get-away car waiting for us just outside of town, to get us out of harm’s way as quickly as possible. And if the townies, as they call them in novels, really can’t make it out....” He sighed. “No sense in all of us dying, right? No sense in that at all.”

  Nadia looked at each in turn, lingering as she looked into Jesse’s eyes. Her gaze finally came to rest on Murdock. “I’m not leaving Jesse behind.”

  This was followed by a silence that stretched almost to the point of discomfort. Jesse finally broke it with, “This ‘any way out’ that we might find—was there a theory on that, too?” The thought was in his head—always had been, if he owned up to it—that he might not ever be able to leave. And if he couldn’t leave, neither could Mia or Cai
tlyn. He’d been lucky enough to escape once, whether by cosmic oversight or because his parents, both town locals and resting in its poisoned earth since he was twenty, had adopted him. His birth parents may have been passing through, but he was, in fact, born in Thrall and had grown up there. His whole life, his whole world had been set against the backdrop of that town. He’d been lucky once, but luck had a funny way of running out.

  “A theory on taking down the whole town? No.” He smiled. “We had wishful thinking and fantasies. Bombs, cataclysms, natural catastrophes.”

  Jesse nodded solemnly.

  “That doesn’t mean,” Carpenter said, “that there isn’t a way. We know what we’re up against now. If this town is a living thing, it’s got to have a weakness. We just need to find the weakness.”

  Jesse didn’t answer. His gaze trailed off down the street to the overturned pumps at the Sunoco, and beyond it, the Fluff-fer-Nuttin Laundromat (Fluff cycle free with wash and dry!). Its oversized happy-go-lucky fabric softener sheet danced by a washing machine and dryer set on the sign, oblivious to the decay around it. There was more road beyond the laundromat. At times and from certain angles, the town could look like it went on forever, churning and changing and carrying everything he knew farther and farther out of reach. If Mia and Caitlyn were still in town somewhere and they brought the town and everything in it crashing down, what then? Would he stay with them, or would he leave again, if he could? He didn’t know if he had the guts to stay behind with them even now. He wanted to believe he was doing what was right and what was best, but best for who? Not for Tom and Carpenter and Murdock, who he’d dragged into what was likely a wild gooz-fuck of a chase. And certainly not for Nadia.

  All that damn near certainty of failure, but he couldn’t get (This place would tear her apart. Please Jesse, come get her. Take her out of here. Take us out of here) Mia’s voice out of his head.

  “I’m so afraid, Jesse. So afraid of failing her, hurting her.”

  Me too, baby, he thought. Me too.

  “Jesse,” Tom broke gently into his thoughts.

  Jesse looked back to find them all staring at him. He let out a long, slow, shuddery breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. “Maybe she’s...maybe they’re both—”

  “We haven’t finished looking, bro.” Tom holstered the shotgun. “Murdock said something went down at the museum, right?” He gestured across the street with a cocked thumb. “If police were involved, I’ll betcha they have records of it.”

  “You all go check the police station. I’ll move the car,” Carpenter said.

  Jesse shot Carpenter a surprised look, and the old man laughed. “Boy, it’s the logical thing to do. I don’t much care about leaving without knowing you all are coming with me. And I don’t want to end my days here, so I have to get you out. You aren’t willing to leave without getting your girl and your little one. And you can’t get them out without sacking Thrall. Just a series of necessary steps, the way I see it. So we’ve just got to find your loved ones, burn Carthage here, and then get the hell out of Dodge. And when all the beasties come screeching and biting at our heels, I want to have a car waiting. Hell, I don’t run as fast as I used to.”

  Jesse smiled. “Okay. Sounds like a plan to me.”

  ***

  Carpenter walked them across the street. They picked their way carefully over the outward spray of dirt and pulverized rock, giving the Crown Vic wide berth. The bulb of flesh in the car twitched once and a shot, deafening in Jesse’s ears, made them all jump.

  “I’m...sorry. Sorry,” Murdock mumbled sheepishly, lowering his gun. “Gut reaction.”

  Tom nodded to him. “You’re a quick shot.” He offered a wavering smile. “Good to know.”

  Murdock looked grateful. “Thanks.”

  Carpenter climbed over a streetlight that had fallen across a hill of overturned lawn before the door, then turned to offer Nadia a hand. She worked her way up to the top but cried out as the leg with the injured knee slipped out from under her. Carpenter caught her and pulled her over to his side. Tom and Jesse hiked over the hill as well, with Murdock huffing behind them.

  The door slanted up and away from them. Inside, they could see the front desk and a waiting area with a bench along each side wall—could see it all surprisingly well, in fact. Fluorescent lights on the ceiling hummed into the empty room, washing it in white light. A long smear of blood ran along the left wall toward a door beyond the front desk.

  Tom chuckled softly, humorlessly, stroking the shotgun in his hands. His eyes were fixed on the smear of blood. “What we’ve got is another episode of As the Thrall Turns. Batten down for the gooz-fuck, kids. Looks like they blew their shit off left and right in there.” Jesse wasn’t sure if it was the look in Tom’s eyes or the tone in his voice that suggested wild abandon, but something inside Tom swayed, just for a moment, on the edge of reason. As if, Jesse thought, some broken little part of him is enjoying this. Jesse put a hand on Tom’s shoulder, and that wild something seemed to fall to the safe side of sanity. Tom shook his head. Thrall had taken its toll on him, too. No one could escape its crazy-sickness, not completely. Not even me, Jesse thought. I never escaped it myself, not really.

  Tom broke away from the door, and a look passed between them as he moved to let Jesse lead the way into the police station. The look seemed to say It’s cool, man, it’s cool. Let’s pull the gooz-fucks inside our heads together and get this done.

  Jesse turned to Carpenter. “Look, man, you be careful, okay? Stay safe.”

  Carpenter waved his gun. “Will do, Jesse. You kids be careful, too.”

  “Do you know how to get back to Wainwright Terrace?”

  Carpenter nodded. “I know these streets like I know my own body. Don’t you worry about me.” He leaned closer to Jesse and added in a quieter voice, “Good luck finding information about your girl and your little one.”

  “Thanks.” He fished the car keys out of his pocket and handed them to Carpenter. “And thanks for this. It’s a Nissan Sentra. Silver.”

  Carpenter jingled the keys. “Yup, I’ve seen it. I’ll meet you at the park. If you have to leave for any reason, just head for the park. A ways back along the nature trail, there’s a security guards’ station that doubles as an information booth. A wooden shack of a thing with maps and what-have-you. There’s something there that I think we might be able to use. Meet me there.” He turned to go, then remembered something else. “Give me until the morning. If the Raw rolls in and I don’t meet you by sunrise at the park, then go on without me. Especially if the Raw rolls in—then you shoot anything or anyone you don’t trust.” He turned again, paused, and added over his shoulder, “And speaking of Raw, don’t eat raw hamburger.”

  Jesse nodded, unsure how much of what Carpenter was saying was meant to be funny. “Got it.”

  Carpenter gave a satisfied nod, then headed off toward the street.

  TEN

  “Ready?” Jesse asked the others after Carpenter had moved just out of sight.

  “No time like the present,” Murdock replied, shouldering forward. “Let me help you with the door.”

  Tom silently counted off to three on his fingers. Then he, Jesse, and Murdock leaned into the door. It gave slightly with a groan, scraping against the floor tiles.

  “I think it may be stuck,” Murdock said, panting.

  Tom shook his head. “No way. This is one of the original buildings. It’s just fucking with us.” He handed his shotgun to Nadia, set down his backpack and threw his good shoulder into the door. It gave a bit more, this time without so heavy a groan. “Jesse, help me out here.”

  Jesse and Tom leaned against the door again, budging it another three inches. They exchanged a frustrated glance and pushed harder, but it stuck fast. Jesse peered through the paneless door. A jagged stalagmite of broken tiles rose about four feet beyond the door, but nothing immediately discernable held it closed.

  Tom sighed and leaned his back against the door, his hea
d thumping lightly against it. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered under his breath.

  “May I?” Nadia’s expression was dreamy, her eyes fixed on the door. Jesse moved to let her by. “Maybe if we just—” She knocked twice on the door and gave it a soft push, and it suddenly swung open. Without the door to support him, Tom tumbled backwards and fell in. He landed heavily on his back and slid a few feet along the slanted floor. One of the jagged tiles grazed his cheek, drawing a white-red scratch just above his jaw line.

  “Oh, Tom, I’m sorry!” Nadia snatched up his backpack and reached out to him, taking a few tentative steps through the door. Gravity threatened to tug her off balance as she clung to the frame. “I swear, I didn’t think it would work. It was just a crazy idea that popped into my head for some reason.”

  Tom waved away her concern. “Ah, don’t worry about it.” He rolled away from the broken tiles and tried to stand, stumbled on the incline, then gained his footing. He offered her a grin. “Hell, at least we’re in the door, right?”

  The door hung inward and Jesse held onto the knob as he inched his way along the floor. “How the hell are we supposed to move around in this place?” He laughed—a quick, full-bellied thing that sounded crazy in his own ears. Tom’s sense of humor, he thought, and that made him laugh again. “Can this place be any more of a Grade A, Class 1, 100% Purebred Royal Purple gooz-fuck?”

  Tom laughed, too, and Nadia joined in. Murdock smiled uncertainly, his eyebrows furrowed in confusion like he believed the others had finally cracked. But Jesse didn’t care how it sounded. The laughing felt good. That much, at least, sounded fine to him.

  “Hell, yes. We’ve got ourselves a live one, folks.” Tom extended a hand to Nadia, and with a few steps that threatened to snowball into a run, she bridged the gap between them. She giggled as Tom caught her, then reeled from the impact of her momentum. She handed him back both the shotgun and the backpack.