Thrall Read online

  THRALL

  ONE

  “It just seems extreme, is all.” When he didn’t answer, Nadia huff-sighed, then turned her head to gaze out the car window at the passing blur of trees along the highway.

  Jesse shrugged. “I told you, it’s just a feeling, a very strong feeling, that it’s something I have to do. And I told you why.” He wasn’t sure she quite believed everything he’d told her. It was a lot to ask someone to believe. But she’d agreed to come. Why she’d decided to wait until they were almost (home) all the way to Thrall before questioning his motives, though, was beyond him. “Could you leave anyone you considered a friend in a place like that?”

  “Friends.” There was a flawlessly executed sniff, followed by the timed flip and petulant bounce of her short blond waves around her shoulders.

  “Nadia....”

  She wasn’t Jesse’s taste in beautiful, but he’d always thought she was nice enough to look at. And a more faithful friend one would be hard-pressed to find. He liked her, but she wasn’t really his type. He had tried to explain. She was cute with a nice little body, and obviously he liked being around her. But she was quirky. She had a flare for drama that made mountains out of molehills, and her approach with men in the past was almost painfully childlike:

  ‘Why didn’t he call me, Jesse?’

  He’d ask, ‘Did you sleep with him?’

  The sheepish grin, and then, ‘Yeeeaaahhh...but he said he liked me.’

  “C’mon, Nadia. Cut me a break.”

  She said nothing. The attitude shifts were changes that seemed, at least to him, to have happened out of nowhere. All of a sudden, and for no clear reason that Jesse could see at first, she would get miffed. When he asked her what was wrong, she would say she was fine as if fine meant spasms of hatred were wracking her body. If he told her about a woman that he found attractive, she’d give him the sigh-huff or whatever it was instead of the encouragement she’d doled out in the past. And God forbid he ever told her that he’d call and then forgot. There would be all kinds of hell to pay. It took a while, but then he started to understand. Jesse was no player by any stretch of the imagination, but he wasn’t a block of wood, either. He knew when girls were staking claims. So, he had “the Talk” with her. He thought he’d let her down firmly but gently. She said she understood, and still wanted to be friends.

  Then she tried to jump him. And true to her nature as a good friend, she remembered just about everything he had ever told her that turned him on. He stopped it, of course, before it came to sex, but it came too close for her.

  The silence in the car stretched for what seemed like miles of Route 206 North before she answered.

  “I just think you might be jumping the gun,” she continued. From Jesse’s periphery, he saw her green-eyed stare. He suspected that it was more worry about Mia, and what it meant to what she considered her turf if another woman existed who was important enough to call him back all the way from Ohio. There was another shift, a tide of acquiescence, and then the stare softened—just a little, but some—before she added, “I probably know you better than anybody, right? And I knew this was a part of your life you’ve always kept to yourself, which is fine. I agreed to go with you to support you, because I could tell you were scared. I wanted to be there for you, and I thought you were finally maybe letting me in a little. I wanted to help you with whatever demons you were looking to face there. But running off to rescue an ex-girlfriend you haven’t seen in—how long? That doesn’t smack of whipped desperation to you?”

  A tightness spread over his face, shrinking the features into a grimace that constricted over his skull. “You said you believed me.”

  “What?” She sounded startled, thrown off her game.

  “You said you believed what I told you about Thrall.”

  “Well...yeah, yeah of course.”

  “Then how could you possibly make it sound like I’m driving half-way across the country for a piece of ass?”

  “Jesse, I didn’t mean—”

  “I need to see her, Nadia, to see if she’s okay. I need to know for myself.”

  “And if she is, then what? Say ‘hi, how are you?’ and be on our way?”

  “Well,” Jesse muttered, “something like that.”

  ***

  Jesse didn’t expect Nadia to understand. He didn’t expect anyone to, really. Unless a person had lived in Thrall, he or she couldn’t possibly understand totally. When he’d escaped, he entertained the possibility that in time he could block Thrall out of his mind completely. The nightmares would stop. The uncontrollable night tremors would quiet. He thought he’d never have to set foot in Thrall again.

  He felt a familiar ache, accompanied by memories so vivid that they took over his vision in flashes that hurt behind his eyes.

  (shivering in the dark)

  Stop, he told himself.

  (all that blood)

  Don’t do it to yourself.

  He shook his head and blinked. No good in thinking about it now. He squeezed his eyes shut three quick times, as if he could expel the memories from his head like dishwater from a sponge.

  So much had happened that he couldn’t explain to anyone. For seven years he’d carried clippings of the past in some kind of mental scrapbook, the acid of its thin paper eating away at his perceptions of reality and fantasy. Reality and fantasy. In Thrall, he’d felt like there was never a real, clear-cut boundary between the two—not for him or anyone else.

  A long time after, far away and with a good two and a half years of self-help therapy under his belt (how could he begin to explain Thrall to a shrink without rubber rooms and long white sleeves?), he wondered if he’d just been suffering from some town-wide illness, something that maybe caused a kind of temporary insanity. Some kind of post-traumatic stress that, over time, relinquished some of its grip and let him believe, at least enough to go outside at night, that other towns were not like Thrall. When the realization did finally take hold, he found he couldn’t believe any town could ever have been like Thrall.

  With time and distance, he thought he’d gained a good handle on what was real and what wasn’t now. But those clippings remained, faded in some places and more vivid in others than he wanted to admit. Like the black hole, for instance, that had opened up at the Grocer-Rite! over the dairy aisle, sucking in four shoppers, two cashiers, and a stockroom boy. Or the phenomenon of the bleeding nuns: every single one of them from both churches in Thrall hemorrhaging to death one night in May, as if their menstrual cycles went into overload. And then, there was the night that the blood streamed down Main Street....

  These were not the things a guy told even his closest friends. Even if he had anyone to share those memories with, who would believe him? It was a “you-had-to-be-there” kind of thing. So he let his friends, such as they were, wonder about his past. He didn’t care if they whispered behind his back. They sensed somehow that it was not a subject to broach to his face, and that was fine with him.

  He glanced at Nadia. He had told her, though—at least that much of it, before they’d left. Jesse hadn’t wanted to, had in fact put it off as long as he could. The nagging voice in his head convinced him otherwise. That damn nagging voice, which had so much to say since he’d left Thrall, shutting his mouth before he could say something stupid at parties, keeping him away from anything like a meaningful relationship, bullying him into insecurity in the late hours of night. So he told Nadia as much as he could, as much as he remembered, even about that night on Main Street. He told her it might be a dangerous trip. He even told her the truth behind his reasons for wanting her to come, admitted he was scared, that he didn’t want to be alone. That he wanted his best friend there, to ground him. He needed her there to remind him that there was a world outside of Thral
l, and a life and a home.

  He figured Nadia wouldn’t understand everything about Thrall, but she was the only person in his current life who would be willing to try. She listened to everything he had to say, asked a few questions which struck him as roundabout ways of searching his eyes or voice or body language for signs of delusion or deceit or maybe a big joke in poor taste. She must have seen something in his face, maybe some hauntedness in his eyes or some tremor in his voice, that decided her. She’d agreed—insisted, actually—that she come along.

  The side-scenery of woods, whose early autumn colors bled together in patches of dry reddish-brown and dull green, melded into bland patches of farm land, dotted here and there by a cow or a horse. Half a mile later, they gave way to the steady blur of trees again. This far out, there was nothing but the trees and farms. A mile or so beyond that, he saw the first of the signs for Wexton.

  Almost there.

  The proximity made Jesse shudder. For a quick, panic-stricken moment, he felt compelled to slam on the brakes, to turn the Nissan around mid-road and drive it back home as fast as the power of one hundred and fifteen horses could carry it.

  But the moment passed, and a strange sort of calm settled into his skin, numbing the tips of his fingers and stiffening the joints. He realized he needed to use the bathroom, and stopping in Wexton would also allow him to work off some of the stiffness in his legs and hands.

  When a green sign said “WELCOME TO WEXTON, NEW JERSEY,” he let out a low breath.

  “Are we almost there?” A good deal of the petulance in Nadia’s voice had dissipated.

  He nodded slowly. “Yeah. We’ve got about twenty minutes, tops. But I want to stop here first.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I gotta take a leak, for one,” Jesse answered, his own voice edgy now. “And I don’t think the eating’s all that good in Thrall. Besides, I want to see what’s been going on there before we actually drive into it.”

  “You don’t want to just go straight through and save time?”

  “No.”

  He could see her frown from the corner of his vision, and a small, bitter smile sprung suddenly to his lips. It frightened him—an unwelcome memory of an old time mentality—but that didn’t keep him from snorting and answering her with, “Don’t be so quick to get there, Nadia. No shops, no restaurants, no bars.”

  She didn’t answer. In a new sigh-huff, he figured. And he was glad for it. Jesse didn’t feel much like making conversation anyway.

  ***

  Jesse pulled into the lot of Ricky’s Diner and parked the car.

  “Ready?”

  Nadia grabbed her purse. “Lead the way.”

  A familiar landmark in the area, the exterior of the diner had always struck Jesse as being outdated and neglected, with its stucco-and-wood beam frame and dimly lit sign. Its interior trim, however, went sort of sci-fi nowadays. Glimmery silver metal and mirrors caught the colors of the arcade game cases and the blinking lights of the Guess-Your-Weight and Horoscope machines in the corners. The place was in the perpetual state of progressive upgrade that all New Jersey diners always seemed to be in.

  Nadia passed in front of him and opened the interior doors. Immediately, an olive-skinned woman with large curves beneath tight clothes met them at the door.

  “How many?”

  “Two, please,” Nadia answered.

  Scooping up two menus in passing, the woman motioned for them to follow her toward the back of the diner. She stopped in front of a booth next to two policemen, waved Nadia and Jesse in, then bustled away as they sat down.

  Jesse’s eyes scanned the menu. He wasn’t really feeling hungry, but knew that it might be a while before he would have a chance to eat again. Better to get something down into his stomach than pass out from stress and lack of food. In the diner, where reality and sanity still held sway, Jesse let go of a long breath, and some of his tension smoothed away. He wasn’t alone, at least. For all her quirks, Nadia was there with him, as she always was when he needed her. As he glanced up at her, he felt acutely his need for her presence. He had to have her there, keeping him grounded. Thrall had never been what Jesse would consider safe, but surely by now it would be a shell of what it was, a dried-up skin that even haunting old memories had long abandoned. It would be, he told himself, like the old mining towns up around there, a scarce few folks living on the outskirts. And she wanted to be there for him. It couldn’t be wrong to have her there.

  “Nadia?”

  She looked up from her menu.

  “I’m glad you came with me.” He offered a smile.

  She returned it, a blush reddening her cheeks as her eyes went back to the menu.

  A forty-something waitress with thin black hair rubber-bound at the nape of her neck appeared at the table. She cast a tired glance down at them, pen poised on a pad to take their order. Nadia ordered a chef salad and a diet Pepsi, and Jesse, a hamburger with french fries and a cup of coffee. The waitress noted it all with four quick swipes of the pen, then turned with a barely audible “Okay.”

  Jesse’s bladder shot him an urgent reminder, and he slid from the booth. “I’ll be right back.” Nadia nodded, and Jesse headed off to the men’s room.

  He felt eyes from a nearby booth as he passed, following his movements until he reached the bathroom door. Jesse looked back to the booth and met a wild, concentrated stare. It belonged to a man with a determined expression fixed on a face just beginning to betray the blue eyes and thin mouth with wrinkles. Gray-white hair stuck up from his head in thick shocks and peppered his unshaven face and neck with scruff. His pale blue button-down shirt sported yellowish stains, like sweat, or maybe even urine.

  Jesse grimaced and opened the door. It swung closed behind him, clipping off a single word that floated from the direction of the man.

  Thrall. At least, he thought that was the word. Was almost sure of it, actually.

  Still, it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with Jesse. Maybe the town was the topic of conversation with a waitress, or another patron. Who knew? And yet, that look had been so intent on him....

  The sour smell of the men’s room spurred him to conclude his business quickly at the urinal. He washed his hands, glancing once at the tired, baggy-eyed face in the mirror before leaving.

  Jesse couldn’t help but take a quick look at the old man’s booth, and found the cracked egg was staring at him again. The expression was hostile almost, a glare without the narrow eyes or knitted eyebrows, but aggressive just the same. Maybe the old man wanted to fight, but it was the last thing Jesse wanted to get into so close to Thrall. A nagging theory floated up to the surface of his thoughts (Thrall’s crazy-sickness has spread to Wexton) but he forced it back down. He averted his eyes and made his way back, praying (oh please oh please oh please don’t talk to me) that the old man would get bored and look away.

  A bony hand clamped around Jesse’s forearm as he passed the table, and Jesse panicked. Shit. Shit shit shit.

  Jesse turned slowly to the man. “Can I help—”

  “It’s a world of hurt there, boy.” This close, the man smelled like he’d bathed in rusted copper. The smell reminded Jesse of bloody noses.

  “Huh?” He tried to shrug off the man’s hand, but the grip was strong. The crowd around them had quieted some as people watched the exchange.

  “Do you understand what I’m getting at, boy?” The man seemed suddenly aware of those staring from the nearest booths. “Do I have to spell it out?”

  “Look, if this is about that little staring match back there—”

  The man let go of him and shook his head, turning to his coffee. A low, billowing laugh rose from the depths of him, and he spoke into his coffee cup. “Creeper 7 and the changing of the guards...you’ll see. You’ll see.”

  Jesse frowned, keeping a wary eye on the old man as he went back to his booth. Creeper 7? Changing of the guards? What the hell?

  He found a plate of food waiting for him when h
e returned. It looked heavy and greasy, a lump of artery-hardener. He pushed the plate away as he slid into the booth.

  “You’ll never guess what just happened to me coming out of the bathroom.”

  Nadia looked up from her salad. “What?”

  “Some old guy just threatened me.”

  “Really? Why?” Concerned, she put down her fork.

  Jesse shrugged. “Something about guards or something.” He thought for a minute. “And Thrall, I think.”

  The voice from behind him was low—the kind that would boom if raised, a voice that commanded authority. “Blue eyes, gray hair? Wearing a dirty blue shirt?”

  Jesse turned and found one of the cops, a robust man probably in his late thirties, with a pale, clean-shaven face and a crew cut, gathering up his jacket from the booth. His tag read “Lt. Scott Pembrey.” The other officer, thinner and lighter of hair and skin, passed them on the way to the counter with their bill.

  “Yeah, do you know him? What’s he, like, the local crazy?”

  The officer smiled, a grim, uneven shift of the lips. “That’s Thrall’s mailman. Some do say he’s crazy as a loon, but he hasn’t ever caused me any trouble. He still delivers papers to the stragglers and hermits, but why he bothers is beyond me.”

  Jesse forced a grin he didn’t feel. “Thrall isn’t much to look at anymore, huh?”

  The policeman shook his head. “Ever been to Thrall?”

  “It’s my home town.”

  Pembrey let out a long, low whistle. “Well there isn’t much to go home to, son. Place is practically a ghost town now. People started packing up and moving out long ago—shops closed down, houses were abandoned. They kept the fire department open for a while. I remember there was a rash of bad fires for a summer. Then they closed that up, too. Said if they needed help, they’d call Wexton. Probably just as well they all left. Towns just fall apart sometimes. Politics, or economy, maybe. Pretty much all that’s left in Thrall are a few run-down shacks and an assortment of bums, junkies, and crazies.” The officer’s voice had a flat, strained sort of tone that even his smile and the nonchalant sip from his coffee cup couldn’t hide.