by Joseph Fink
“Ok,” Sylvia said. “Ok. Ok. Ok.”
12
She crossed into California north of Lake Havasu. Then into the Inland Empire. Land that would hardly be populated if it weren’t for the tempting light of LA over the San Gabriel Mountains, a daily commute for those who want a house more than they want the hours of their day. Land that would be uninhabitable if it weren’t for the water brought in by canal, portioned out to farmers, who then sell their portions to the thirsty cities, making them nothing but water farmers. Foreclosures and cabbage and Vons supermarkets.
Victorville is a city of about a hundred thousand people, named after a man born in Ohio who died in the Inland Empire working as a manager of the California railroad. If a person is not from Southern California, it is unlikely they’ve ever even heard the name of the city. And somewhere in it was the secret that had destroyed Keisha’s life. Or so she hoped. It was thin evidence, the fact that the name had been underlined while the others were crossed out. Maybe it merely meant it was next on Officer Campbell’s list to investigate. And who even knew where he had gotten his information. What his sources were, and whether they were telling him the truth.
She had left Sylvia at an Extended Stay America in Arkansas. Keisha had paid for a couple weeks in cash. After that, Sylvia would have to figure it out. Most likely she would disappear out onto the roads again. Keisha wasn’t worried about her. She could take care of herself. Ok, Keisha was a little worried about her.
She left the truck outside of town and bought the cheapest used car she could find on Craigslist.
“This barely runs,” the man said, as she picked up the car from his driveway. “Won’t last a year.”
“Who’s thinking that far ahead?” she said and drove off, after a lesson on coaxing it into ignition.
The issue was where to even begin. Victorville is small, but not that small. A slice of suburb too far from the city to be a suburb. Strip malls and industry and agriculture. Keisha started by randomly sampling the city. Trying local businesses. Eating pizza, getting her nails done, buying shoes at Kmart, and everywhere trying to make idle conversation. Gently poking her way through to anything strange that maybe people noticed, or that they forced themselves not to notice. But it was only a city, only a place where people lived and worked and died.
Until the Burger King, where the guy behind the counter saw her copy of the third volume in the comic series she was reading, Perla la Loca, which she had brought in to read with lunch, and said, “Love and Rockets! That’s my shit!” and she explained that it was very much her shit, too, and they started talking about the series. He was getting worked up about a recent story line she hadn’t gotten to yet, and somewhere in that explanation, he referenced “the other town” as though it were a place in Victorville. She let him wind his way down, and when things seemed as friendly as they were going to be, she asked: “What other town?”
He blanched and tried to recover. “Huh? No, no other town. Or, like, Apple Valley, I guess. It’s right there, you know. The other town. So.”
She tried to keep the conversation going by talking about one of her favorite panels in Perla, the one with the dog that was actually the devil, but he muttered down toward the register that he had to get back to work and gave her the order number. After she ate she said good-bye. He only nodded slightly. But now she had a phrase. “The other town.” And with that phrase she returned to the places she had already been to.
At each business, she worked the phrase into conversation. Never as a direct question. But as though it were a piece of knowledge she already had, and she would place it out next to a few innocuous statements and then watch how people reacted.
The man at the hardware store was stoic but excused himself a minute or so after she said it and never returned.
The woman at the nail salon winced. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “They leave us alone. You leave it alone.” She wouldn’t be drawn back to the subject, and she rushed Keisha’s appointment.
The woman at the bike shop got angry. “Don’t even say that in here. You don’t say those words in my store. You’ll bring him in.”
“Who?”
“Get out.”
By the time she was at a party supply store, it was well after dark, and she was the last customer before they closed. The teenager behind the register shuddered. “Jeez, dude. You can’t talk about that.”
“Why not?”
He glanced out the front windows. “Because when you talk about the other town, there’s a tendency for him to show up. You haven’t been going around talking about that, have . . . oh shit,” he said, looking again out the window.
“What?”
“You need to hide right now.”
Given her experiences up to this point, if someone thought she needed to hide, then she hid. She crouched behind a wire bin of cheap inflatable balls. The door chime rang.
“Hey, Mike,” said a voice that was not a voice she knew but had a familiar tone. Like the hollowing of the wind.
“Oh, hey, man, so,” Mike said, in a high-pitched waver.
“Son, no need to be worried like that. Heard that someone might be asking around about the other town.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, seen anyone like that?”
“Not that I remember?”
“Don’t you think you’d remember if they mentioned the other town, son? Wouldn’t that stick out in your memory?”
She shifted slightly so she could see around the edge of the bin. The man was wearing a dirty polo shirt. His fingernails were yellow below the surface. His skin stretched oddly over his face.
Keisha had never seen this man before. It wasn’t the Thistle Man. Or, more accurately, it was a Thistle Man but not the Thistle Man she knew. There were more than one.
13
Her mind was in a race with her heart and both were losing. If there was another Thistle Man, then he was not a monster but a species. How many of these Thistle Men were out there? How many families with a quiet space where once a life had been lived among them? How many people died looking into dull eyes and a gaping yellow mouth, rimmed with sagging flesh? Keisha couldn’t put her jumbled thoughts together. Her heart pumped blood madly through her shivering body.
“Uh, no,” the kid at the register said, his voice lost in a quaver. “You’re right, no. Definitely no one asked about any other town.”
This new Thistle Man was silent for a long while. From where she crouched, Keisha couldn’t tell what was happening. She could only see the strange crooked posture of the creature, as though gravity for him was slightly up and to the left of the rest of the world. She could only see the deep fear in the teenager’s eyes as it occurred to him, maybe for the first time in his life, that no breath came guaranteed.
But the next breath came, both for the kid and for her.
“Pfft,” the Thistle Man said. “Whaff. Narn.” His wet lips smacked. Then this other Thistle Man turned and ambled crookedly out of the store. Keisha waited until she was sure he was gone and came out.
“Thank you.”
“Just get out of here,” said the kid.
She did, and despite everything both mind and heart were telling her, she followed after this new Thistle Man. He crossed the empty road, desert wind blowing hot down the street divided by a planter of yellow flowers and waxy leaves grown with borrowed water, and the Thistle Man stomped over them. The two of them crossed a massive parking lot, almost completely empty, and entered a Vons.
The swish of the door opening, the swish of the door closing. Quiet warm darkness replaced by blaring light and air-conditioning, and the murmur of music designed to shop to. There was no sign at all of her quarry. Or perhaps she should think of him as her hunter. Cautiously she walked past the aisles. There were no customers, only the lines of logos receding into a vanishing point of dairy refrigerators. Back again along the aisles. Where were the customers? Where, even, was the staff?
She tu
rned a corner in frozen foods and there he was, only a few feet away. Back turned. His shoulders bouncing like he was laughing, but the sound was more like a man drowning, thick, desperate gasps. He shouted, no words, just sound, then back to gasping. A Vons employee, the first other person she had seen, turned the corner on the other end of the aisle, saw the man, and immediately walked away. Keisha retreated a few aisles down, trying to stay out of sight.
Now that she had caught up to him, she realized that she didn’t have any clear idea of what her plan had been. Once again, she had pointed herself in the direction of trouble without thinking through the consequences of finding it.
But the Thistle Man did not turn. He stopped gasping and thrashing and started walking again. Every few feet his right leg would give, like it had no muscle or bone, and his entire body would stoop to the side and then unsteadily lurch its way back up with his next step. She stayed on the opposite ends of the aisles, tracking his movement. He circled the store once and then went back out the exit, never looking around him, although she didn’t know whether that meant that he hadn’t seen her or that he didn’t need to.
Out in the parking lot, he got into a car, a silver Toyota a few years old, relatively clean. As it had happened, she had left her car in this same lot, because it was central to a number of the businesses she had been going to. But the lot was big enough that she still had to sprint at least a quarter of a mile, trying to reach her car in time to follow him. Keisha turned the key and only a faint cough happened and she thought, No, no, no, I’ve come this far and I won’t have the world fail me, and she turned the key again, relieved to hear the unsteady whine of the starting engine.
The Toyota turned left out of the shopping center and she followed. She tried to keep a distance between them, but few cars were out in a town as quiet as Victorville, and so it was hard not to be visible. At first they were surrounded by strip malls, but then the right-hand side of the road fell away to desert, where the darkness was near total. In the distance, some sort of factory, all glow and smoke. Sweating, breathing human beings on a night shift inside that factory, and on every side of them, darkness and sand.
They hit a T intersection and made a left, past the bus station. A bus was pulling out, on late-night departure to who knows where. On the other side of the road was the Route 66 museum. A museum to road tripping, to distance, to how big and spread out America is. As Keisha drove, in order to distract her nervous mind from what she was actually doing, she thought about how her country was a place defined as much by its distance as its culture.
Sand drifts on the road. They were fully outside of town now. Stacks of boxcars. An outpost of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Wires emanating from it, almost invisible against the sky, carrying the lights to Hollywood, the air-conditioning to Malibu. Here there was no glamour, only the machine.
They turned again. A road called Gas Line Road that intersected a block away with Powerline Road.
And finally, a military airport. Barbed wire and hangars. They drove along the fences. The road was completely empty, and so Keisha switched off her headlights and drove only by watching his car and trying to mirror its movements. It felt dangerous, but also somehow restful and quiet, like swimming underwater. In the dark, with the thrum of the engines, she could almost let her natural anxiety fade into an undercurrent that wouldn’t intrude on her thoughts.
The Toyota slowed, put on a blinker (signaling to whom?) then turned through a hole in the fence into the airport. The hole was rough, with wire hanging loose around it, looking innocently accidental, but was also exactly wide enough for a car.
A small plane came in for landing, and as she drove toward the entrance, she watched the entire landing happen. Red lights blinking their way down, and then finally touching earth and she realized she hadn’t been breathing, and then she hit the curb and screamed.
14
Keisha stopped the car on the road, undecided for a moment, but then made the turn. If he noticed her, he noticed her. She had gone too far to be able to make any other decision in that moment. She was always afraid but did what she needed to do.
As she passed through the fence, a shape loomed down at her from the dark. She swerved instinctually, fishtailing for a moment. The shape was huge, with a snub-nosed face and weird shadows crisscrossing from light passing through the fence. She squinted as she drove around it and saw a broad wing, like an arm reaching out for help, and she understood. A passenger jet, a double-decker giant, designed for international flight. Company name painted over. The plane was silent and earthbound.
Her eyes adjusted, and she saw there were more of them. Line after line of retired jetliners. No sign of any other car. She drove slowly past the skeletons of flight. At this point, with her engine coughing loudly in this silent graveyard, she had given up any hope for the stealthy approach. Now it was likely he was stalking her. It would be so easy for him to circle around behind. Perhaps that was his intent on leading her to this place. Perhaps she had driven willingly into a Thistle murder site. She passed under a wing, and its elongated shadow lingered over her car.
Under the belly of one of the planes, she thought she saw movement, and she turned the car toward it. The machines around her had avoided disaster again and again only to end up here, in this desolate place, grounded forever. The omen was not lost on her. All luck runs out eventually. Otherwise it wouldn’t be luck.
Keisha opened her window so she could hear the night. The night sounded only like her car and like the wind. Some of the small port windows on the airplanes had been knocked out. She thought about what the inside of these dead airplanes must look like. All fixtures gone, only hollow metal filled with moonlight and rattling in the wind.
When the brake lights came on, her mind didn’t have time to react but her body was already slamming her foot down. The belt went tight as her car gritted to a stop on the gravel. The Thistle Man’s car was a hundred feet or so in front of her. It was idling. Waiting for something. She switched off the engine, got out, and left the beater behind, running across the hardpacked dirt. The night beyond his Toyota shifted, and she realized that what she had thought was sky was a high wall, and a gate was opening in it. She couldn’t see what was on the other side. The Toyota pulled through, the gate slid closed behind him, and the wall became invisible again against the hills.
The wall was featureless, except for a small sign by the gate. It was understated, even elegant, more like a sign for a fancy restaurant than US military property. The sign said thistle. She put her hand on the fence, and it was cool, even in the hot night. She tasted sour acid in her mouth and took her hand away. There was something terrible behind this wall, and despite herself she needed to know what it was. She circled around it, but the wall was unbroken, well maintained, and clean. A lot of money and time had gone into keeping whatever was inside this wall hidden. Giving up instantly on the idea of scaling the smooth expanse, Keisha looked around for another option and saw a nearby hillside that appeared to rise above the wall. She had to crawl under the fence to get to it, and the wounds from the skylight in the police station opened up again. Her shirt went wet with blood, and this mixed with the dust into a red paste that covered her as she scrambled her way up the hill. The brush was thick and thorny, but she picked her way through until, panting and bleeding, she turned to see if she was high enough. She was.
Inside the wall was a little town. The other town. Houses. A market. A gas station. Even at this hour, the town’s population was out in force. Every one of them was a Thistle Man. A town of nightmare creatures. Loose skin, boneless legs, jittering movements. None of them talked to one another, although sometimes one would laugh, long and loud, and then return to monastic silence. And there was him, the original him, the Thistle Man, the Hungry Man. He was leaning on one of the pumps at the gas station, reading a newspaper.
An entire city of them. Creatures so dangerous, so powerful, that a single one of them had almost destroyed her. A
nd here there were hundreds. Were all of them serial killers, uncaught, living together, hidden in this airplane boneyard on a US military air base?
A US air base. She could have fooled herself that there were some corrupt cops involved with whatever the horrors of Thistle were up to. But this was beyond a few cops. This was a system of violence and laws that protected Thistle from the likes of her, five foot three, a gash down her chest, and a constant fear that she wouldn’t recognize a heart attack if it came because it would feel like her panic attacks. The imbalance of power wasn’t merely unfair. It was monumental in a literal sense of the term. It was a monolith of disparity and she could almost laugh at the sheer lopsided span of injustice she was contemplating now from that shrubby hillside.
Not that long before, on a highway in Georgia, a wife she hadn’t seen in over two years had left a billboard with some advice, and now she was going to listen to it. Who was she to fight a war this lopsided? Her wife had perhaps decided to fight it, and her wife had disappeared. She wasn’t as strong as Alice. She wasn’t willing to disappear. She was sorry to have failed Alice, although this was what Alice had wanted. She was even sorrier to have failed Sylvia, although she knew that Sylvia would be fine on her own. But this was beyond Keisha.
She got back in her car, left behind the secret town of serial killers on a US air base, drove to her truck in a lot outside of Victorville, then straight through the night to a house that had stood empty since she’d left it, and she stepped through the door into the stale air that smelled like a different part of her life, and she was home for the first time in over a year.
15
When a person leaves their home for a long time and then returns, the furniture, books, and appliances are all exactly how they had left them. This doesn’t sound weird, but it is. There was, after all, once a person who left those things in those places, and then months of life change that person, and this changed person returns to all the same stuff, still there. A person lives always in the remnants of the life they’ve led up until the present, making do with whatever they’ve left behind for themself.