Thrall

by Mary SanGiovanni

  When he’d tried to take the hamburger from Celeste (he wanted to believe then and for a good many years long afterward that it still really was Celeste, sick and scared, but his baby all the same), she’d snarled at him. It was a sound that children’s vocal chords don’t have the capacity to produce, and the surprise more than anything was what caused him to draw back.

  In that second, she was on her feet. In the next, she’d disappeared out the back door into the Raw.

  He went after her. He called her name until his throat cracked and threatened to shut down and the tears on his cheeks made the skin tight. The panic hitched in his chest and his stomach until he thought he’d either have a heart attack or throw up or both, if both were possible. And all the while, his knees and back wailed in agony. He couldn’t see a damn thing, and inhaling the pink, mucousy fuzz of the Raw was giving him a feeling very much like a hangover. But he kept straining to see her shape, kept calling her name, kept feeling out for her in the mists.

  He’d given up some three and a half hours later, and had sat on the edge of his bed until dawn flushed the Raw away. Then he’d gone out again. He’d searched the property, the street, the neighborhood, all the places she loved to go. He’d gone to the police, and after getting the disquieting vibe that Thrall PD was not going to be able to do much more than add a flier to the hundreds of others plastered on their bulletin board, he’d taken the matter to Wexton PD. They essentially told him it was Thrall’s jurisdiction, and that he’d have to be patient. They told him they were sure Thrall PD would do everything within their power to find his little girl.

  It was probably then that he realized that everything was gone. Thrall had finally taken everything from him, everything that mattered.

  He put in for a transfer, sold the house and moved to Wexton, but he went back to Thrall regularly. He watched the people in town fall apart while the town itself grew stronger. He was there in town the night the blood flowed down Main Street, and after that night, he saw the Raw give birth to countless abominations. He saw the most detestable weaknesses and the quietest strengths of human character. Nothing surprised him anymore. He kept coming back, even when he wasn’t sure there would be a town left to come back to.

  He’d believed that Celeste was still in Thrall somewhere, and if he couldn’t find her, at least he didn’t want her to be alone. He wanted to be somewhere close in case one day she did come back.

  In the meantime, though, he had to do something to help that day along. He’d tried to tell the police department in Wexton (and the fire department and municipal personnel as well as priests and rabbis when that failed) what was happening in Thrall. He tried to make them understand how imperative it was that they come and see what was going on for themselves to believe. Thrall was swallowing its people alive, but none of Wexton’s townspeople ever believed it—obstinately refused to believe, as a matter of fact. He even tried to contact the National Guard, but that had been a bust from the first person to answer the phone. She’d laughed, actually laughed, and said that they’d already spoken to Wexton PD and Thrall PD about him, and they’d worked out the situation with them. It had been bullshit, of course. He hadn’t doubted that they’d talked to the police departments. He only wondered who the hell they might have talked to in Thrall.

  Everyone he tried to convince deliberately chose to turn a blind eye, and Carpenter was absolutely sure that had something to do with Thrall’s influence, too. Wexton was in relatively close proximity to Thrall. It wasn’t such a leap that the plague that Thrall infected its own people with might have spread out to Wexton. Maybe it wasn’t as strong there, but it was strong enough to keep them blissfully ignorant and stubbornly blind.

  They whispered about him—at the diner, at the post office, things like breakdown and crazy and loose cannon. He didn’t much care, so long as they let him continue to deliver mail. It was an excuse to haunt the streets of Thrall like a ghost, searching, he supposed, for signs of the real Celeste.

  He never found anything conclusive. Not, he supposed, until he saw that doll’s eye in the sidewalk in front of the car where he now sat. It wasn’t that he’d never understood what had happened to Celeste before then. It was just that until that moment, he’d never been willing to accept it.

  Carpenter knew somewhere deep inside that a mummer, as Murdock called them, had crept in that open window with the Raw that night. It had sucked out Celeste’s insides and shrugged into her skin, but it hadn’t had the wherewithal yet to pretend better than it did. It was still a relatively new creature to Thrall, feral and without the freedom or know-how that the mummers had gained since the night the blood flowed down Main Street.

  But Thrall was getting stronger even then, and its survival dictated that the mummers learn manipulation quickly. So learn it they did. And Carpenter had spent the better part of the last four years learning with them.

  Carpenter took a deep breath and turned the key. For a single second, there was no sound of the engine turning over and Carpenter felt sure that something had gotten inside the car and....

  The car growled to life, prodded out of hibernation. He shifted into Drive and rolled over the curb, then cut the wheel and landed with a small thud onto the road. He turned onto Main Street and leaned on the gas. Why not? He had the street to himself. Aside from the possible doll or two that might run out into the middle of the road, there was nothing to worry about hitting. Nothing, at least, that he wouldn’t take some pleasure in painting the pavement with, anyway.

  Driving felt good, but it was a bittersweet kind of good. He hadn’t done much driving in the last four years, he realized. After Celeste, he couldn’t bear to be in the family car any more than he had to. It reminded him too much of trips to Seaside, and he wasn’t planning any of those in the near future. Besides, he liked the exercise. He used the car if the weather was particularly bad, but otherwise, he walked—to the post office, to the market, to the library. To Thrall, too, although that was for a different reason. Somewhere just below the area of fully recognized thought or articulation, Carpenter thought he’d have the stealth advantage if he left the car home. He thought he could somehow get beneath the town’s radar and move more freely, more deeply into Thrall. He’d always have the advantage of surprise. He couldn’t be sure if it really made any difference, but it felt right, and he’d survived a very difficult four years by learning to trust what felt right and what felt wrong.

  The pain in his knees and back subsided as he got farther from the center of Thrall. He figured he should have left town a long time ago, should have kept driving all the way down to Seaside and never looked back. But in that same vague place of almost unrecognized thoughts and unarticulated ideas, Carpenter knew that wasn’t possible. He may not have been born and bred in Thrall, but the town had gotten its hooks into him just the same.

  The tunnel gaped ahead of him, its interior gloom dense and seemingly endless. It was the tunnel of nightmares, the tunnel of funhouses, where travelers would be perpetually frozen in that second before they see the light at the end. He wondered if he rolled his windows down, whether that darkness would seep inside the car and into his lungs and he’d never make it through.

  He gunned the engine a little, hoping the extra boost would keep him from getting stuck.

  Carpenter kept his hands on the wheel and the gas pedal pressed to the floor, but he moved through the tunnel at the conveyor belt speed of a car wash. His eyes could only make out flashes in the tunnel: muscles beneath an open tear in rubbery flesh, a heavy chattering jaw filled to bursting with ivory blades, unnatural contours, empty eye sockets, shreds of flesh slapping at the windshield. The images shot out of the shadows and shrank away before his brain could fully register everything he was seeing. They shook so violently in his view that they made him sick, so he closed his eyes. He didn’t need to see to drive through the tunnel. He didn’t want to see, either.

  Around him, even though the windows were closed, he could hear disjointed voic
es crying, singing, laughing. They weren’t loud, but they were disturbingly hysterical. Voices driven by broken minds that had seen too much, minds that had been saturated in Thrall’s poison for far too long.

  When the voices snapped off, there was a moment of silence. It was almost as if Carpenter’s hearing had to ascend into working order again. He opened his eyes, and for a moment, his vision had ceased to work, too. By degrees, Baylock Hill sprang up out of the darkness. The shadows shrank into shapes between the foliage. The car rolled to a stop.

  He glanced in his rearview mirror. The tunnel behind him was not nearly so dark now. He could see a few feet into its interior, and as far in as that, the tunnel looked empty.

  Looked empty, maybe, but it wasn’t empty. Oh, no sir-ee. And whatever was in that tunnel was not something he was eager to face again, and sure as hell, not on foot. He cut the engine and got out of the car slowly. He didn’t bother to lock the doors. If the car was in any danger of being stolen at all, it wasn’t by something that locks could keep out, anyway.

  Carpenter took a deep breath and let it leak out of him. His back didn’t hurt. Neither did his knees. He took a few steps closer, pocketing Jesse’s keys, drew the gun from the waistband of his pants, and clicked off the safety. For several long moments, he waited, breathing shallowly. He heard no other sound but his own breaths and heartbeats. He crept forward again. Still no pain in his knees or back.

  Maybe whatever was in that tunnel was gone.

  “Okay,” he said, pointing his gun at the darkness and wiping his free hand on the seat of his pants. “Okay. Here we go.”

  The gun sank into the tunnel’s gloom like a knife in butter, and Carpenter plunged in behind it.

  ***

  Jesse followed Tom back into the main station room and through the left door of the two on the wall by the filing cabinet. There was no ooze in this hallway, just as there had been no ooze in the office, and he wasn’t sure if that made him feel better or worse. His mood hung gray and stormy over his head, and no one spoke to him. But even through the haze of his mood, he could see Tom’s excitement in his step, and Murdock’s anxiousness in the furtive darting of his eyes between Jesse and a doorway ahead of them marked EVIDENCE.

  “You ready for this, man?” Tom said, and pulled open the door.

  The room was little more than a large walk-in closet, a clutter of dipping lights and swooping shadows caused by a swaying bulb. The lockers against the back wall each had a label encased in plastic that displayed a case number and the contents.

  In front of the lockers and off to the left was a narrow desk with a sign-in ledger and assorted stationary implements: a pad of paper, a few pens in a white coffee mug with the Thrall PD insignia printed on it, a stapler, and a tape dispenser.

  “What am I looking at?”

  Tom nodded at something down behind the desk and murmured “It’s okay.” To Jesse, he said, “She won’t come out. That’s why I brought you to her.”

  Jesse’s stomach flip-flopped. He tried to move forward but found his legs heavy and rigid. “Who won’t come out?”

  Tom’s eyes twinkled, and he smiled. “Go see.”

  It took a moment of concentrated effort to work out the heaviness in his legs and get them moving again. He managed to skirt around the desk and looked down. He sucked in a silent breath and held it until his chest hurt.

  The little girl hiding under the desk was beautiful. Her long blond hair was loosely braided behind her and tied with a pink ribbon. She wore a pink T-shirt with a ’60’s style hippie daisy on it in shades of pink and red, blue jeans with pink flowers patch-worked on the knees, and sneakers. Her big blue eyes stared up at him and her tiny freckled nose and freckled cheeks crinkled as she smiled. She had the tiniest red cut, already starting to crust into a scab, over her right eyebrow.

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  For just a moment, the world paused and the edges of his vision swirled out of focus. He was alone with her, framed in the frozen smears of light and shadow. My God, he thought. My God, she’s beautiful. She looks exactly like Mia. He felt a hand on his arm—Nadia’s, because he could feel her fingernails—and then the world revved up again and grew clear. My God. That’s my daughter, for chrissakes. “Caitlyn? Are you Caitlyn Dalianis?”

  The little girl nodded. “And you’re Daddy. I know, ’cause I have a picture.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a crinkled photo of Jesse and Mia. “Mommy gave it to me. She told me you were coming to find us.”

  Jesse swallowed the dry lump sticking in his throat. The whole experience was very surreal. He’d once been kicked in the groin—not hard, he supposed, but every man knows that no kick to the groin is ever a walk in the park—and the world had swum out of focus, and his body felt like it was dissolving into a million tiny stars. This feeling was like that without the nauseating pain. On the contrary, there was no pain at all. There was feeling, alright, but it wasn’t pain.

  “Yes. I came to find you.” He chuckled, but it was a weak sound, devoid of breath. Finding Caitlyn certainly supported the theory that Mia really had called from right here in town. But how? He supposed it was possible that the police station maybe had some alternate source of back-up power. The lights were on, after all, so why couldn’t the phones be, too?

  More likely, he realized, Thrall had let Mia call because it had wanted him to come back.

  “Caitlyn, sweetie, where’s Mommy?” he asked.

  For a moment, the little girl looked worried; he’d seen the expression before on Mia’s face. “I don’t know. She went out to get us some food and she isn’t back yet. I heard noises and yelling, and I got scared, so I hid in here. Like Mommy told me.”

  “How long has she been gone?”

  Caitlyn shrugged. “I don’t know, Daddy.” Daddy.

  “How long have you been here in the station?” Murdock asked her. A cool comfort in his tone suggested to Jesse that he had experience talking with kids. “Have you been here a long time with Mommy?”

  Caitlyn shook her head. “Only since Wednesday. We used to live in the apartments but there’s bad things in there that hurt people like wild animals if they ever got out of their cages at the zoo, you know? Like how they’d eat people? Mommy said the things in the apartments are like that, so we moved here. Mommy says if you ever need help, you go to the police.”

  “You’ve got a smart mommy,” Jesse said softly.

  Caitlyn nodded. “She went out to get food, but after she left the building shaked and made my head and tummy hurt.” Her eyes welled up with tears. “I was very scared without her. I was in the jails in the basement playing explorer. Mommy lets me play down there while she goes to get food because the bars can keep out monsters and she told me to close myself up in there if monsters tried to come in and eat me. So the building shaked again and I thought monsters were coming so I hid in the jails and I held on like a rollercoaster when we went up in the air and when we fell, the bars broke, but I didn’t get hurt too much. Just a little bit hurt on my knee and on my hand, but I didn’t cry.”

  The thought that she’d actually been in the building when it was hovering above the museum hill had never occurred to Jesse. It was amazing that she was even alive. Maybe the force that defied gravity in the station room and held the furniture in check had somehow worked to protect her. He was glad, though, whatever the reason. He felt the sudden urge to sweep her up and hug her. She giggled when he lifted her off the ground, the tears forgotten on her cheeks.

  “You’re a brave little girl,” Tom told her. “And smart, like your mommy. That was some ride you must’ve gone on.”

  “So, aren’t you going to introduce us, Jesse?” Nadia’s voice and smile were pleasant enough, but there was a touch of cold to both all the same.

  “Right, sorry.” Jesse held her and pointed to each of them in turn and said, “These are my friends, Nadia, Dr. Murdock, and Tom.”

  “I met Tom.” Caitlyn giggled up at him. “And Dr. Murdock, too.”
Then she turned to Nadia and said, “Are you Daddy’s girlfriend?”

  Nadia blushed deeply, her eyes sweeping the Evidence room as if she might find an open locker to crawl into. “No, sweetie, your daddy and I are just friends.” Her eyes found Jesse’s over the girl’s head. “Good friends.”

  Caitlyn nodded, utterly accepting of the explanation. “Mommy said Daddy might have a girlfriend now. But I thought mommies and daddies were supposed to be each other’s boyfriend and girlfriend. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to go, Daddy?”

  Jesse nodded slowly, avoiding Nadia’s eyes. “Usually, yeah. It usually works that way.” He put her down gently.

  Caitlyn searched his face. “Are you going to take us out of here? To the place with no monsters?”

  Over her head, the others nodded encouragement. “Yeah, baby,” Jesse said. “I’m going to try my hardest.”

  “Of course he is. And your Uncle Tom’s gonna help, and so is Dr. Murdock and Nadia. We’re going to get all of us out of here.” Tom ruffled her hair. She giggled and squirmed under his hand.

  “Should we get moving on to the park?” The veneer of cheeriness in Nadia’s voice was thin, almost papery. Jesse didn’t doubt the whole thing was awkward, but it reminded him with no small amount of annoyance that Nadia had maybe never really believed he’d find Caitlyn or Mia. And worse, that maybe she was okay with him never finding them. It was an ugly thing to think about Nadia, but that turn of her head every time he looked at her, just enough so that he couldn’t see the expression under her expression, suggested it was true.

  “If we go, we’ve got to haul a—uh, I mean, we’d have to move quickly,” Tom said. “Sometimes night comes on real fast in Thrall and we’d stand a much better chance of making it to the guard’s station if we got there before dark.” To Caitlyn he said, “The guard station’s kind of like a police station. We’ll be safe there.”