Thrall

by Mary SanGiovanni

  Caitlyn nodded, then after a moment’s pause, said, “What about Mommy?”

  “Do you know which way she went to find food?” Murdock asked.

  Caitlyn shook her head. “When we lived at the apartments, I sometimes went with her to get the food. But she said not this time. She said she had to go someplace not safe. She made me promise to stay here until she got back. I promised, Dr. Murdock. I promised not to leave until she got back.”

  “Caitlyn, honey, I think Mommy’d be okay with you going with us,” Tom said. “I mean, we’ve got your Daddy here and all. You’d be safe.”

  Caitlyn shook her head stubbornly. “I can’t. Mommy won’t know where to find me. I don’t want to go until she comes back.”

  “There’s a wrinkle in the plan for you.” Murdock gave a small sigh.

  “She has a point,” Jesse said thoughtfully.

  “Well,” Nadia replied, throwing her hands up, “we can’t leave her here alone. Someone needs to stay with her.”

  “I will. And Nadia, too, right, Nadia?” Jesse looked pleadingly at her.

  Nadia shook her head, pulling him out from around the desk and outside the room. Out of earshot from the others, she said, “Oh no, Jesse. She seems like a sweet little girl, but she’s your little girl. You stay with her.”

  “Nadia, please.”

  “I’m not good with kids, Jesse.”

  “Neither am I!”

  “But I’m not the one who has a new reason to learn,” Nadia replied pointedly.

  Jesse sighed. “I’m not asking you to babysit her, Nadia. Just stay with me. Help me break the ice.”

  She glanced once over the desk to the others. When she spoke again, her voice was softer. “Look, Jesse. You know I’d do almost anything for you. I think my being here at all is evidence of that. But...if she came back, what would I say to her, Jesse? Honestly, what would I say to her? Or should I just roll out on my squeaky third wheel so you two can become reacquainted?”

  Jesse let out a long, slow breath. Maybe she was right. He supposed he could imagine how uncomfortable Nadia would be around Mia, and it made him feel a little guilty for being so annoyed at her reactions. It wasn’t fair to ask her to put herself in such an awkward position.

  He’d hoped for the chance to see Mia again since he left Ohio. Really, if he looked deep enough, he’d hoped for it longer than that, and suddenly here it was. Being alone, more or less, with Mia for that first moment when he saw her and spoke to her, that just seemed right. In fact, the more he thought about it, it seemed the only way the reunion should go.

  “Okay. You’ve got a point. I’ll stay with Caitlyn. You go with Tom and Murdock to meet up with Carpenter. We’ll meet you there no later than morning, like Carpenter said.”

  Nadia turned to go, paused, and turned back. “If morning comes and she’s not back, Jesse—”

  “I’ll meet you by morning, no matter what.” That irritation flared up again. He couldn’t help it.

  If Nadia heard it in his voice, she pretended not to. “Okay, Jesse. See you there.”

  TWELVE

  The pain didn’t start until Carpenter was midway through the tunnel. The sharp throb in his back and twin aches in the knees came on so suddenly that he spasmed and almost tripped. He stopped, trying to attune some sense to possible danger. He couldn’t see a damned thing, nor could he hear anything echoing in the tunnel, but he found he could smell something. Not a fleshy reptilian smell, like the tricoils, but something ether-sweet, and over that, something that made him think of rubbing alcohol.

  Ahead of him, bluish-purple sparks lit up the tunnel for a couple of seconds, illuminating fleshy geometries that made him cringe before the impenetrable black engulfed them again.

  Carpenter had a feeling it was going to be a real biter of a situation, all right. A real biter.

  The sparks went off again, and this time, he caught a glimpse of long limbs like broken legs, dangling from the dark ceiling in savagely twisted angles of bone. The skin over these was pulled so tight that it was white, like knuckles on a steering wheel, and it was pockmarked by random pits of flesh in which little rotating razor arcs rose and sank. Sea legs, he thought with a grim smile. They reminded him very much of the antique navigation instruments he’d seen once in a nautical museum—sextants and quadrants and something called an equinoctial ring dial. He noticed that the razors moved very fast, their dizzying rhythms overlapping so that at nearly all moments, a sharp end faced out somewhere and sliced the air. It would be one hell of a gauntlet dodging those things. A king fish of all biters.

  The light faded and then flashed again, and he saw that a disproportionately small set of hips connected some of the random sharp jutting legs. Atop these hips sat dual pie-wedges of waxy flesh. Their open ends pointed out toward where ears should have been. They look like opposing twins, Carpenter thought, of that little yellow fella in that video game Ryan used to love to play. This thought was followed by the insane idea that tattered cartoon sheet-ghosts and floating fruit, rotten and ether-sweet, hung in the thick darkness around them.

  Another slow fade and then flash of sparks let Carpenter see that there were more than one of the wedge-headed things—at least three, maybe more.

  These glimpses weren’t enough to get any really decent information he could use to his advantage. He had no idea whether the things ahead of him were blocking the whole tunnel or if they could move just quickly enough to keep him from passing through. Aside from those sea legs and the dead-pale pie-wedge mouths, he didn’t know what else to expect from them—their M.O., their feeding patterns, whatever. And although some part of him balked at the idea, he really did want to know. Had to know, actually.

  He remained very still, afraid to move or breathe. If the things ahead of him could see in the dark (he hadn’t noticed eyes, but he had no reason to believe that was a handicap to them), then movement might spur them to action.

  Seconds ticked by and drew out into minutes without any flashes of light. If they were inches ahead of his gun or miles out of sight, he couldn’t tell. He sensed they were still there, though. The ether smell hadn’t grown any stronger or fainter, and the ache in his back and knees had settled into a dull rhythm. But he hadn’t moved and they hadn’t attacked him.

  So if they could see him, why didn’t they come after him right now? The last he’d seen, they were maybe ten feet ahead of him, hardly a challenge by Thrall parasite standards. What were they waiting for, an engraved invitation?

  Unless maybe they needed movement to find him. Maybe they caught a sense of him on those mysterious breezes that passed selectively through town. Or perhaps they were toying with him, giving him time to think about his own impending death.

  Still, they didn’t show any signs of advancing, nor of giving up and going away, and he couldn’t just stand there forever. Eventually exhaustion would overtake him or the nerves in his back and knees would really catch fire and he’d flinch or spasm anyway.

  Maybe he’d just back up slowly out of the tunnel and wait for the coast to be clear. Or if worse came to worse, he could navigate the woods. Not the safest passage into town, but a 50-50 chance was probably better than a sure problem in the tunnel. He slid a foot back slowly, keeping as quiet as he could. He took a deep, silent breath and let it go. So far so good. He took another step back, taking care not to drag his foot and kick any loose pebbles. Yeah, that’s it. Nice and slow, easy does it, put some inches between me and those fu—

  A metallic clink behind him made him jump. This was immediately followed by a clipped scream and a heavy wet plop. He didn’t turn around, but he could hear something dripping off the walls to one side of him, and felt a hot wetness that quickly turned cold between his shoulder blades. He counted off several seconds, but no pain came—at least, no pain in addition to the throb in his lower back. He wasn’t hurt. If that was blood that had splattered his shirt, it wasn’t his.

  But clearly, he was surrounded. A new problem, for sur
e. Things weren’t just hanging out in front him. They were closing in around him. Suddenly, the darkness felt far more tangible and far more crowded than it had a minute ago.

  He’d have to move. Question was, which direction was the lesser of the two evils? He took a deep breath. The gun scouted ahead unflinchingly as he took a step and a faint pulse of purple brought the far end of the tunnel into view. An uneven shape of lighter gray-on-gray delineated the patchy pavement beyond the tunnel.

  So they weren’t blocking the entire way through. That was potentially a good sign.

  He moved forward again, baby step by baby step. All the while, his mind repeated They won’t let you out. They won’t let you out. They won’t let you out, like a mantra in his head.

  Bluish light blazed into being, and those wedges chomped like hungry mouths. They could rotate somewhat on the platform of the grotesque squatting hips, but it was their legs, those broken shards and knobs of bone which drew upwards into the cavernous ceiling above, that moved them with spider-like speed and grace. They sidestepped and weaved around each other and drew closer to him just as the blue light faded again.

  He sucked in a breath, sharper this time. His tiny whuuuzt of air spurred the sound of movement, but it was impossible to tell from which direction it was coming. Every fiber of his being told him to run, knees and back be damned, just lineback the sons of bitches and plow through to the other side. But that was just panic talking. He’d been around Thrall’s nightlife long enough to know that sudden movements often meant sudden death. Few if any of the beasts that held court over Thrall’s vacant streets had good sight or smell or even hearing (hell, few if any even had eyes or noses or ears), but many had deadly senses of movement anyway. It was as if they’d been granted a whole set of senses or means of detecting senses that went above and beyond the mere five that anything on Earth had.

  Behind him, green sparks went off and held for several moments, perhaps even minutes. They gave off a high-pitched whine that reminded him a little of the sound fireworks make when they are shot into the air. There was no boom, though, and no brightening of the steady green. There was only movement from the corner of his eye, something purple but graying at the edges, and he turned his head slowly in that direction.

  About ten feet in front of him, Carpenter saw a diamond-shaped head with a separate child face on each of the facets. He blinked, and the facets rearranged themselves like pieces of a puzzle, and the faces that had been behind the head were now in front. The diamond head sat atop a loosely flowing black robe. At least, Carpenter’s impression in the dying green light was that it was meant to be a robe; it clung to some bulk beneath the diamond head, but silky tendrils trailed out behind it and trailed into obscurity. Long handless arms reached down and out from beneath the folds of (what, cloth? Smoke?) the robe and then curved out again in scythe-like arcs of bone, the blades half obscured by the swirling black of the lower body.

  The light faded, then flashed again. The faces glared at him, their pairs of big eyes narrowed and their blackened lips drawn back to bear rows of clear, icicle-like teeth. Two more creatures of the same type moved up behind the first, and Carpenter could see that the length of one long blade was splattered with a red so dark that it was almost purple.

  It occurred to him then with a certainty he couldn’t explain that the reason they hadn’t attacked him outright was because he hadn’t been their original target. The things in the tunnel had meant to kill each other—natural enemies, perhaps, in Thrall’s parasitic world. And he had gotten himself stuck smack-dab in the middle of their little turf war.

  Of course, now that they knew he was there, he doubted that they’d let him continue on his way. He figured that he and every other living human being in the town were the cause of these parasite clashes, and the prize for the winner to claim. Both ideals seemed equally appalling.

  His thoughts returned again to the flashlight he wished he had. Keeping one hand on his gun, he felt around his pants pocket with the other, looking for extra bullets and anything else he might have picked up that could be used as a means of defense.

  What he found was his lighter, a Zippo kind, with a raised etching of his initials on it. It was the one he’d used to light up the last cigar he’d brought from Wexton and the cigarette for Tom. Carpenter wasn’t a heavy smoker; in fact, he’d managed through the years to relegate cigar and cigarette smoking to that category of occasional entertainment reserved for beer and candy and the occasional joint. He’d grabbed that last almost-empty pack of cigarettes he’d kept meaning to just throw out almost as an after-thought, as something to do, maybe, while he was roaming around town. But the cigar he’d tossed in for a reason. Something had told him this trip out to Wexton would be different. Monumental, even. A day of endings or beginnings or maybe both. He’d intended to save the cigar but the twinge in his knees now made him reconsider. The pain was different, deeper inside somehow, and that seemed significant to him.

  When they’d found the shell of that poor little librarian lady, something in his head had turned over. Some mental click on the lockbox of his deeper thoughts spring-released the notion that it was now or never. Smoke ’em if you got ’em, folks, because it’s going to turn out to be a real biter.

  He probably could have smoked the rest of the cigar during their lunch on the steps of the library, or during the revelations that Murdock fella had shed some light on for them about the true nature of the town, or even for his long trek out to the kids’ car and the discovery of the doll’s eye. It hadn’t felt right any of those times, though. Each of those instances had been an important nature lesson in his study of the beast, but all the discoveries had been external to his peace of mind. Those things, like the death of that little old lady, reinforced his acceptance of the cold way in which Thrall worked. But the pain in his knees, that newer, deeper kind of throbbing—that was internal. It was the trigger that made him think—no, made him believe wholeheartedly—that this was his last trip to Thrall. That internal peace of mind was acceptance that whatever happened to make that true would be okay. And he would recognize well enough the signs of things to come to know when to smoke that cigar.

  A long scraping sound behind him jerked him from his thoughts. It was too dark now to make out more than the occasional faint shimmering outlines of green or blue, but he could see them in his mind’s eye, see the things behind him dragging those long scythe hands along the rock of the tunnel wall. He could see their eyes, all glassy orchid pupil, watching and ready to strike whichever species moved first.

  A brief glow lit a small area behind him, and Carpenter could feel their eyes on him, could feel the hate radiating off their multi-faces like a relentless heat. The ones behind him whistled like the finale of a fireworks show. The whistles became little shrieks that cut through the muffling darkness of the tunnel as easily as their hands had cut through the wedge-heads. He was quite sure that’s what that wet plop had been, the first wedge-head casualty of the evening. Carpenter supposed it should have scared the shit out of him. But he didn’t feel much more than a receding ache in his knees and back and a cold kind of calm in his chest. And a burning, unexplainable urge to smoke that cigar.

  Carpenter plucked the cigar out of his shirt pocket, clamped his teeth around it, and lit it. Suddenly, now seemed very much like the right time.

  He chomped on the end of it a little and breathed in deeply, inhaling its taste. It was good; not Cuban, but good nonetheless—a five-inch Arturo Fuente with a ring gauge of 55. They had been a present from Ryan and Melody, and proved to be the best cigars he’d ever had the pleasure of smoking.

  He turned slowly and backed up until he could feel the rock wall against his shoulder blades. The monsters now flanked him to either side. Carpenter exhaled a long stream of smoke between them. He was surprised to find the whistling-shrieking of the diamond-heads increased to clearly agitated levels. The blades of their “hands” clanked against the stones.

  Carpenter rais
ed his arm slowly (no sudden movements) and fired off a single shot at the closest diamond-head. It swept its arm up and deflected the bullet with a metallic ping. It didn’t advance. He lowered his arm. So it wasn’t the gun they were afraid of, but maybe the fire. They recognized the natural danger and were keeping their distance. Evidently, they, too, knew that sudden moves could mean sudden death.

  He took another puff on the cigar and this time forcibly blew the smoke toward the diamond-heads. One that had slipped dangerously close to him caught the full brunt of his exhale. The four pairs of eyes narrowed, the lipless mouths working over needle-teeth in some mock-semblance of a cough. On a hunch, Carpenter used the distraction to dart a hand through the remaining filaments of smoke and touch the lighter flame to the taut skin of the diamond face. The fire caught and spread with a dull whuff, flashing its own bright orange light, and the mouths immediately shrieked in unison. The sound was terrible—too loud, too tinny, too empty and echoish. There was too much smoke, too. The fire dripped and flowed down to the inky garments and the smell made Carpenter cough. An arc of bone lanced out and he deftly sidestepped it, then drew closer to wave the smoking cigar at them. He felt a little like Collin Clive in the old Universal Frankenstein movie, armed with nothing but a torch in the face of the monster. They recognized the cigar tip for what it was, and stayed back, whistling low. In fact, the drawing of steely bone across the tunnel wall in the darkness beyond the cigar tip glow signaled what Carpenter suspected might be the beginnings of a retreat.

  The diamond-head’s wailing protest fell off for just a moment, and in that moment, he heard a light scuttling to his right. He turned and saw that the wedge-heads were skittering across the ceiling toward him. One had beaten out its cave-mates and hung five, maybe six feet away from him. The outer ends of each of the wedges opened and closed in a vexed rapid chatter of tiny clicks and vague moans. He flinched and coughed the cigar smoke in sharp bursts right into the thing’s face, if it could have been said to have a face. The wedges seemed unable to stop or slow, and Carpenter was pretty sure they gobbled more than a mouthful of the smoke each. The distressed chattering grew louder and more angry, but the smoke didn’t seem to evoke any of the fear it had with the diamond-heads.