Thought Forms

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Paul crouched, eyes burning, like a knife fighter. He straightened up a little and whispered to Abby, “Come on.”

  Nothing looked changed in post-ops…in deflashing. They passed the punch clock. They hung back in the threshold to the main molding room; nothing seemed any more misaligned in there than it had a few minutes ago.

  “I think it was in the machine shop,” Paul whispered, and they proceeded.

  Before them, the machine shop was dimly lit, an ideal playground for mischievous shadow-children. They hid giggling soundlessly behind a work bench here, a pile of unused molds there. The locked office door looked enigmatic—a red security alarm light flashed rhythmically on and off above it like a heart beat.

  They crept past the degreasing tank on their right, Abby craning her neck to cast a quick glance inside it.

  She jumped against Paul, almost knocking him off his feet, and screamed.

  Abby had seen that the chemical had turned an opaque clouded red, and she had glimpsed a bent knee and a bent elbow and a big sneaker poking up out of the murk.

  ««—»»

  Paul snuck up on the cauldron, snapping back at Abby, “Okay, quiet— shut up! ”

  Abby hung back, chanting some kind of Christian supplication:

  “Oh my God, oh my God, Jesus Christ…oh my God…”

  Paul peeked over the tub’s rim and joined in with Abby momentarily despite his belief in the Old Religion: “Jesus Christ! Holy fuck!”

  “Is that blood? ”

  “I don’t know—it looks like it.” With a fluttering heart Paul glanced around and then bounded past Abby to where a broom leaned against a beam.

  “Who is it?” Abby groaned. She half-doubled abruptly and produced a gurgling belch but caught herself, squeezed her eyes shut.

  “I don’t know yet.” The broom shivered in his hands like a dowsing rod. He poked the handle into the red liquid, moved it about gingerly. It found soft resistance. Paul felt his own craw yawn threateningly, as if a bucket of bile inside him were balanced, tottering, on a thin board. He stirred the liquid some more and very nearly jumped out of his body—the sneaker propped against the side of the tank slid down under the surface.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Come on—what if he’s alive?”

  “Why don’t you come over here and do it!” Paul hissed. The pole’s tip caught in some clothing around where the chest should have been and Paul levered the broom on the edge of the tank. Something began to rise up, dripping…something heavy. The broom creaked, bowing, as Paul pushed down on it harder. A face emerged from the red liquid, and now a thrown-back head. Dripping hair. Chemicals with mile-long names mixed into one soup, now tinted red, ran out of the man’s mouth and nostrils and flowed freely across his wide unblinking eyeballs.

  “Oh my God—oh my God—oh Jesus,” Abby hyperventilated, and consummated her litany by vomiting on the toes of her sneakers.

  The quavering broom splintered with a crack and Steve sank back down into the vat.

  ««—»»

  Paul let go of the broom as if he feared that, in sinking, Steve would suddenly seize the end of it and try to yank Paul in with him.

  Paul sprang at Abigail and grabbed her above the elbow. “Come on, back upstairs!” He tugged her after him, causing her to stumble and almost fall. In righting herself she seemed to recover a bit from her shock and Paul knew he could let go of her arm. He pushed her into the stairwell in front of him all the same, then plunged after her while looking over his shoulder into the first floor shop. Abby had already reached the landing between floors when Paul hit the first step.

  Bursting through the door into the shipping department, Abby began screaming out what had happened before Paul could tell the others, as if it were all some juicy gossip she had to be the first to relate.

  “We found Steve dead…he’s dead in the degreaser…somebody killed him and threw him in the degreaser!”

  “What?” Maureen said, rooted.

  “Oh my God, you’re kidding!” Jean’s eyes bulged and flicked to Paul as he dashed through the door. “Did you find St—”

  “He’s dead.” Paul joined the three young women, panting.

  “Dead? How?” whined Maureen. “Somebody killed—”

  ”Somebody killed him,” Abby gasped, and burped her impression of a toilet flushing, coughed in a momentary effort not to vomit again, then vomited again. She clung to the edge of a table and got most of her spurts into a trash bag. Not much came but it sounded like the insides of her throat were being raked with claws. When no more came her face turned red and she gagged as if trying to cough up scrap metal. The others, however, weren’t noticing her much.

  “Did somebody kill him, Paul?” Maureen was asking.

  “I don’t know—I doubt it. Steve was acting crazy…”

  “He was in the degreaser? ” Jean asked, holding Paul’s forearm.

  “Yeah—I began to fish him out but I couldn’t so I left him, but he’s definitely dead.”

  “Are you sure? ” Maureen looked nauseous herself. Nauseous with horrified disbelief, a swooning sense of unreality.

  “The degreaser was full of blood. I didn’t see any wounds on him but I only saw him for a second.” Paul glanced over his shoulder at the door.

  “So did someone kill him or what? ”

  “I don’t know— I think maybe he killed himself. Why would anyone else kill him?”

  “Why would he kill himself? ” Maureen’s voice teetered like an unsteady tightrope walker. She had stepped onto a low mesa of hysteria.

  “We’ve gotta get the fuck outta here now.”

  “We’re trying to.”

  “Were all the doors and windows covered down there?” asked Jean, who looked intense but more stable. Almost morbidly intrigued.

  “I didn’t get into the back dock area—Abby and me heard a loud crash and came out and then we found Steve in the degreaser.”

  “You heard him fall in? Or thrown in—was that the crash?”

  “I don’t know—we didn’t look into it the first time we went past it.”

  “We’ve gotta go check those doors on the dock,” Maureen said, her eyes with a liquid sheen but too numb with fear to produce real tears.

  “Right?”

  Abby’s cheeks were streaked with tears of fright mixed with strain, her face contorted and eyes squinted as she groaned against her cramps and burning throat, still doubled at the trash bag. At least her dry heaves had stopped. No one thought to give her a soothing pat on the back.

  “I don’t know,” Paul told Maureen. He turned to look at the metal door again; and what did he expect to see—Steve standing behind it looking in at them through the door’s small window, his hair plastered to his head and eyes glassy and chemical drooling out of his gaping mouth? Paul saw this clearly in his mind but Steve wasn’t there. Paul said, “We don’t know if somebody did kill Steve—we don’t know who could be down there.”

  “Look,” Jean said, “I think Steve flipped out on acid or something and he glued all the windows shut—listen to me—he glued them shut and he fell into the degreaser and bonked his head and whatever.”

  “He couldn’t have glued anything,” Maureen snapped, “he was with us! And what did everybody else do, freak out on acid too and go home?”

  She abruptly snapped her head and stared at the door as if she saw what

  Paul had imagined. On her mesa of hysteria, the view was dizzying. With fresh terror she hissed, “That crash you guys heard—couldn’t that have been a gun?”

  “A gun?” Jean echoed.

  “I…doubt it,” Paul said, but he doubted that doubt. He couldn’t play back the crash in his memory. At this point anything was possible.

  Abby tried to straighten up a bit and gingerly unsquinted her eyes.

  Her mind flashbacked the image of Steve’s open-mouthed face rising up from the red soup, the liquid trickling across his eyes and out of his nostrils, and she shuddered violent
ly. Only minutes ago he had been curled on the push-cart staring up at her and the others, weak but alive. This situation was so disorienting—not your daily factory routine. Fighting for a regular breathing pattern, listening to the others nervously argue, she looked around and her eyes settled on the door near Ted’s little shipping office, the door which led into the main offices.

  “Hey guys—Paul,” she said, straightening up fully with inspiration.

  “Why don’t we break down the door into the office? There are phones in there.”

  “Somebody’s fucked up the lines,” Paul said, “it’s gotta be—so they’re not gonna work.”

  “Yeah, but the windows…”

  “Right, the windows. They probably won’t be covered in there. Not only that, but if we can break open the door it’ll set off the alarm system.”

  Paul smiled with sadistic triumph. “The cops will be down here in a minute.”

  “Awright—great—let’s do it!” Maureen enthused.

  “Are we gonna kick it open?” Jean asked.

  Paul scanned the area around them, regarding the possible tools they might use to get the door open. “I wish I had a crowbar or one of those metal pikes the molders use to break up foam buns. I dunno…we’ll try a screwdriver.” The others kept close to him as he moved to the broad, fea-tureless door.

  His intention was to wedge the screwdriver’s blade between the door and frame, hammer it in as deep as possible and then try to bust the bolt with leverage—but Paul instantly saw that this would be impossible. The girls saw, too, and exclaimed appropriately. Their unseen challenger had foreseen their plan: a little resin, hard as rock, could be seen squeezed out around the four borders of the door. Undetectable at a distance…how long had it been there?

  “Okay,” Paul hissed, “we’ll go right through the door itself.” He strode across the room to a locked tool cabinet, jammed the screwdriver behind the padlock and jerked on the screwdriver violently with both hands. The screws of the lock mechanism were torn out on the left door of the double doors, and Paul swung them open. Inside he found a hammer, which he handed to Abby, two drills, little boxes of interchange-able drill bits, and a glue gun. He held it up and scrutinized it. It didn’t look capable of what had been done, and the glue residue didn’t resemble the resinous stuff they had encountered. Paul tossed the gun back amongst the tools. He dug out an extension cord for the drills.

  The drill was plugged in. Paul found a real, thick drill bit in the midst of too many tapping bits. He depressed the trigger and the drill whirred anxiously. “Okay,” he passed it to Abby, “start drilling a circle of holes in the middle of the door. Wait a sec.” He snatched up a magic marker and drew a dotted outline of a circle on the door. “When you got that finished we’ll smash it in and crawl through—understand?”

  “What are you gonna be doing?” Maureen asked before the other two could.

  “Checking the windows in the cardboard room—we haven’t looked.”

  Maureen gazed past him across the room, at the heavy canvas curtain that blocked the brief corridor leading into the cardboard storage room.

  Through the thick plastic widow in the curtain she could only see ill-illu-mined murk, which suggested a vast and dangerous void lay beyond, as if the curtain divided this dimension from one both alien and hostile.

  “No way, Paul, don’t be crazy—you can’t go back there alone.”

  “You said we should all stick together, so you stick with us,” Abby said. “We can get out this way.”

  “Yeah, well what if we can’t?”

  “At least the alarm will go off, won’t it?”

  “We need you here to protect us,” Maureen said. “Everybody’s safer if we stay together, so you’re not goin’ anywhere.”

  The intercom came on with a loud crackle that rippled the hair on Paul’s nape and arms, one of which Maureen snatched in both hands.

  They could hear a radio down there, the volume apparently very high, playing Badlands by Bruce Springsteen. The song had just then begun, as if whoever were broadcasting it over the intercom had known in advance that it was going to come on.

  “Someone is in the building!” Maureen whispered, almost in tears, crushing Paul’s arm. “What if they come up here?”

  “Start drilling, come on,” Paul ordered. Fumbling, he fitted another drill bit into the second drill, glancing up at the window in the metal door.

  Behind him, Abby’s drill buzzed and whined shrilly as she applied the bit to the wood.

  Paul cursed at the key used to tighten the bit into the drill as it repeatedly slipped out of place. Abby reversed her drill and pulled it out. One hole through. She started on the next.

  Jean and Maureen stood by helplessly and watched while Paul began drilling beside Abby, who had three holes through now and was starting a fourth. Badlands, the Boss kept chanting as the song came to its end, Badlands. The song ended.

  The intercom went off.

  Abby and Paul paused from their drilling and the four of them exchanged very similar looks.

  “Real clever, real cute,” Paul sneered.

  “Shit, look out!” Abby yelled. “Owww—oh my God!”

  A resin-colored liquid was squirting through the four holes Abby had drilled and the one Paul had drilled, squirting and running down the surface of the door, and one spurt had splashed Abby on the top of her left hand.Maureen screamed and jumped to one side, Jean following suit. Paul yanked Abby to the opposite side at the same time he noticed the toe of his right shoe had gotten splashed with the stuff.

  “It burns, get if off me!” Abby cried, breaking out of Paul’s grip and bolting for the cafeteria. Paul bolted after her. He was going to order the other two to follow him but he didn’t have to.

  He found Abby at sink in the ladies’ room, her hand under cold water to ease the fire. She was sobbing hysterically and rubbing at her hand with a ball of soaked paper towels. Paul switched the water from cold to hot. “Not cold, that’ll make it harden quicker!” he snapped.

  “It’s too hot!”

  Paul adjusted the water to make it bearable. His heart was doing a speeded-up corybantic dance. Maureen and Jean crowded in.

  “Is it coming off?”

  “Yes,” Abby moaned, “yeah, it is, thank God. Oh my God…”

  “The fuckin’ asshole’s in the office,” Maureen said. “Hey, wait—how’d he do the intercom downstairs, then?”

  “It must’ve been the office intercom,” Paul said, staring into the sink.

  “Great,” Jean said disgustedly.

  “Whoever it is,” Paul went on, “must have a key to the office. That’s how they snuck upstairs while we were out on the dock. That’s how they get back and forth—there’s the other way into the main offices downstairs, in the machine shop.”

  “Would it be Dave? Who else has a key?”

  “Why would Dave do this?”

  “Why would anyone do this?”

  After squirting some liquid soap on her hand Abby scrubbed it under the faucet again with fresh paper towels. “My hand feels burned. The skin is tight.”

  “What if it had hardened?” said Jean.

  “ I know.”

  Maureen said, “Do you think the person was just trying to block up our holes, or squirt us with that shit, or what?”

  “Both, probably,” Abby said. She shut off the water, dried her hand and presented it for them all to examine. The skin was mottled a vivid pink. She flexed it. “The skin is real tight.”

  “Is it sore?”

  “Not too bad—like a sunburn. I was lucky.”

  Looking down at the hardened resin on the toe of his shoe, Paul said,

  “Yeah.”

  They all just stood there in a protective knot for a few moments in the stark fluorescent light, apparently feeling safe in the small enclosed bathroom, apparently hesitant about stepping out of it. When they shifted their weight, glass would crackle and scrape under their shoes.

  “I
don’t know what to do,” Paul told his crew softly, in case their nemesis lurked out there in the grimy, ill-kept cafeteria. “Whoever it is keeps heading us off. I guess we can try the cardboard room, and then if that’s no good we can all go down the back way to the back docks. If those are sealed, I don’t know what. Except—a truck is supposed to come at ten.” His voice brightened a bit. “Remember? Westman Freight is supposed to pick up two skids at ten o’clock. If they can’t get in they’ll call their company, and then their company will make calls.

  Somebody will come looking, Ted or somebody. Even then, if we aren’t out of here at midnight people will come looking for us. We just gotta hang on.”

  “So where’s Donna and everyone?” Maureen asked once more.

  “Murdered like Steve?”

  “Nobody said Steve was definitely murdered.”

  “Paul, somebody really sick is playing a game with us. They’ve purposely trapped us in here. Anybody that crazy could have murdered Steve and be trying to murder us! ” Maureen’s voice had almost broken at the end.“Yeah, well, we’d better assume that’s what’s happening, even if it isn’t—that way we’ll be ready for anything.” Paul unfolded his nasty-looking Buck knife with a nasty, reverberant clack. . He pulled in a long breath.

  Something odd—weird—occurred to Paul then. Weirdly fascinating.

  Paul was frightened by all this…quite scared. On one level. But on another, apparently higher level, he felt cool and tough, strong.

  Competent. On this level he felt their present situation to be an intense challenge. He felt like a young, green soldier, an Audie Murphy, who is thrust into battle and finds he makes a good, clear-headed killer. But Paul realized that it was the three girls who were giving him most of this strength. He was the stereotypical man in charge, he was the boss and he was responsible for them. Having a crew, an army, he could snap orders to boost his sense of control. How would he be right now if he were alone? Cowering under some table with shit in his pants, he wondered?

  At any rate, with the three girls he felt it was their dilemma, not just his, and he was worried about them, not just him, and he would strive to protect their lives, not just his. He was rather surprised to find this was his attitude—he hadn’t expected to encounter such an unselfish attitude in a human, even in himself. He felt pleased about his uncovered capacity for strength and unselfish concern. Proud.