Thrall Read online

  “What about police? Is the station house still open?”

  Something in Pembrey’s eyes when he answered made Jesse feel anxious all over again. “Someone radios in from Thrall PD every so often to let us know the townies are okay, and gives us a report on how things are going over there. We heard from someone a couple of weeks ago, as a matter of fact. And the state troopers drive by once in a while when they have the time and check out things from Baylock Hill.”

  “Baylock Hill?” Nadia asked.

  “The only road into Thrall winds up Baylock Hill,” Jesse explained. “You can see Main Street from the outskirts there, before the tunnel.” Turning to the officer, he asked, “But no one goes into town to check on anyone?”

  “No need to,” the officer said. “There isn’t much to check on. Place is quiet.”

  “And no one reports anything...strange?”

  Pembrey’s eyes seemed to retreat into shaded sockets. He slipped on his jacket. “Why all the interest? What are you getting at, son?”

  Jesse shrugged, unsure what to say. “I don’t know...anything strange. You never have reason to go into Thrall? Ever? Cops never see anything weird out there? I find that hard to believe.” He regretted the last part almost before it was all the way out of his mouth, and he cringed internally at the way his voice sounded acutely desperate in his ears. That thought about the Thrall crazy-sickness seeping into Wexton (and that blood, all that blood) tried to gain purchase in his mind again. He had always wanted to believe otherwise, but maybe they really had all been washed away....

  The officer frowned, heavy folds materializing in the skin around his mouth. He looked tired in that moment, and old. He rose. “I hope you haven’t come all this way just to see your old digs again. I told you, there isn’t anything for you to go home to. And further, there’s no reason for us to waste time in Thrall when there clearly isn’t a need for us to be there.” He glanced impatiently at the other officer, who had paid the check and was making his way back to the table with the tip and the change, before swinging a no-nonsense look back at Jesse and Nadia. “People say a lot of things about Thrall, but none of them are true. I don’t believe them, and neither would anybody else, except maybe your crazy mailman friend. So no, there’s no reason for anyone to go into Thrall. Not me, and certainly not you.” His tone verged on the edge between warning and threat.

  Pembrey’s partner, who had put down the tip and now stood behind him, mumbled, “Ready to go, Pem?”

  Pembrey nodded, then turned back to Jesse. “Some things, son, are better left to fall apart. Your town there, that’s one of them. Let the dust settle there. Don’t stir it up.” Then he turned sharply and the policemen left the diner.

  Nadia watched him, watched his face for thunderclouds, as she put it. But they ate in silence. He didn’t have to tell her he thought Officer Pembrey was lying, or otherwise somehow willfully ignorant. She sensed it about him. It was one of the things he did appreciate about her.

  Suddenly, he wanted to get to Thrall, to just be there already.

  ***

  The old man’s eyes followed the young man and his lady friend as they left the diner. He turned quickly in his seat so that he could watch them cross the parking lot to their car in the late afternoon sun. Used car, silver. Nissan Sentra, 1997 or ’98, from the look of it. His lips moved as he read the Ohio license plate under his breath. As it backed out of its parking space and pulled out into the street, the old man rose. He left a crumpled wad of bills on the table and stalked out of the diner.

  ***

  It took longer to get there than Jesse remembered. A couple of missed turns had set him a little off course. He swore he’d never taken those back roads to get to Thrall before, but it had been a long time and he was tired and more than a little nervous. He blinked a few times to clear his eyes, which felt dry and blurry from the road. It made his head hurt some, trying to keep up with the dotted line. It didn’t lay right; nothing about the road lay right. Still, he managed to make it to the main road leading to Thrall without too much trouble. In a way, he wished he’d stayed lost a little longer.

  Dusk crept by degrees up Baylock Hill as Jesse’s car reached its peak, just before the tunnel. Densely packed trees pressed in from both sides of the road and sheer blackness gathered between them, allowing little more than the suggestion of shapes to materialize from their interior, with one exception. A parting of the trees to the left of the tunnel allowed him a glimpse of empty Main Street, a dark building front, and a rusted-out delivery truck. He remembered how that window on Thrall had been wider once, and from it one night he’d seen everything drowning.

  Not now, though. The trees had grown thicker. They nearly surrounded the town, creating an ominous barricade between the outside world and the aberrations of Thrall. No scenic trails there, or aimless wanderings through sun-speckled cover. The place was a gooz-fuck waiting to happen. He could almost hear the trees breathing, heaving their polluted darkness onto the Hill.

  Jesse didn’t realize that he’d slowed the car to a stop until Nadia nudged him gently. “Are we going in?”

  ‘They were everywhere.’ A voice, childlike, hollow, terrified....

  “Sure, sure. In a minute.” His eyes scanned the woods as Gavin Hardley’s voice echoed, then faded from his thoughts. Gavin Hardley—there was a name from the past. A friend from grade school.

  It had happened back when strange things in Thrall were not as common, back when the kids could still play alone after the sun went down, without any real threat to their safety. But even then, when Jesse thought back—even then, there must have been a sense of instinct for crises in the townspeople.

  When Jerry Hardley’s youngest son disappeared, no one was really surprised, even though little Gavin was a good kid, and not prone in the slightest to wandering off. He was a little slow (something neurological) and not as savvy as the other boys his age, so he spent a lot of time alone, playing quiet games of his own private creation in the back yard. So when Mr. Hardley couldn’t find him out back or out front or anywhere in the house, the town had pulled together immediately to sweep the woods, setting up hotlines and tip lines and managing the collection and distribution of food and relief items to the searchers. Everyone was involved in some part of the search effort. Even Jesse and his friends had been allowed to go out to the woods to dole out water bottles, provided they all stayed together and remained close to an adult at all times. For nine hours the town combed the woods for little Gavin Hardley until darkness intruded, halting their efforts with a firm hand. The town was about to start looking for a body rather than a breathing boy when a small figure stumbled from between two elms, glancing several times over his shoulder.

  Jesse’s friend Tom Wyatt had seen Gavin first, and pointed him out to Jesse and the others. Gavin’s round face had been so pale, his eyes so wide, that Jesse thought they would fall out of his head. Blood had crusted on his temple and lay in splatters on his shirt, and the leg of his pants was shredded to ribbons and dipped in a rusty brown. The boys had shouted to each other and at their classmate, but Gavin just stared at them seemingly without seeing them, and without speaking.

  He stumbled to a stop a couple of yards from the boys. Then he’d reached a shaky hand up to touch the blood-crusted scab on the side of his head. The hysterical screams that followed drew the crowd of grown-ups.

  It had taken a long time to quiet the boy, and when he met Jesse’s gaze, it was like someone had flipped a switch. He clutched the blanket they’d wrapped around his shoulders and drew it tighter around him like a cocoon, his pink tongue smoothing down the chapping of his lips.

  “They were everywhere,” he whispered to Jesse. Then he started to shake uncontrollably, crying into the corner of the blanket. “They’re everywhere now, everywhere everywhere everywhichwhere now....”

  And Jesse was sure, although he couldn’t have said how, that this boy he’d known since kindergarten, this “The Little Bus” boy two grades be
hind him in school, suddenly knew everything—everything that a fifth grader or even a seventh grader had no business knowing. And whatever he’d learned in those woods had torn up most of his simple sanity.

  Gavin’s family had moved away from Thrall three months later. The boy had uncontrollable night tremors and a crippling fear of the outside. Grown-ups had called it something that at the time Jesse thought sounded like Angora sweaters.

  “Jesse?” Nadia’s voice broke through his thoughts, and Gavin’s terrified, tear-stained face faded.

  Before them loomed the old railroad tunnel, through which the only road into Thrall passed. The dusk gathered thick inside it, making it hard to see through to the other side. He’d always thought of that tunnel as a point of no return.

  Jesse opened the car door and slid out. Nadia followed, taking tiny, hesitant steps to catch up.

  He stood just inside the tunnel, his gaze fixed on a series of crude symbols that crowded the stone walls. There were more of them than he remembered. He fingered them like hieroglyphics, feeling their meaning through the paint.

  “Shit.” Jesse turned away, the first real pangs of guilt breaking through the haze that had clouded his reason for the whole trip. What was he doing? How could he be so selfish? ” Look, Nadia, I think I made a mistake, bringing you out here. Maybe we should get you back to Wexton for the night. I don’t know if it’s safe.”

  She waved the idea away. “I said I’d come with you, didn’t I?” She approached the tunnel wall. Her fingertips traced the patterns, grazing the strokes of yellow and red almost reverently. “Awful lot of graffiti, huh?”

  “They’re symbols,” Jesse replied, uneasy. “Hobo symbols. And runes.”

  Nadia frowned. “What do they mean?”

  “They’re warning signs.” He came up close to her. “Someone trying to warn people, to keep them out of Thrall. And we never saw it. Even when we lived here, we never saw any of these.”

  “Warnings?”

  Jesse snorted, but it sounded dry, brittle even to him. “It’s a marked town. Abandoned like a leper. I looked up all these symbols online after I left Thrall. I had to. Every time I closed my eyes, they flashed behind my eyelids, like they were made of light.”

  With his index finger he stabbed at a circle with a dot in the middle and Nadia flinched. “‘Here live bad tempered people.’ That’s what this means.” Then he smacked a rectangle with an overextended “w” inside it. “‘People here are malevolent and evil.’ Dangerous.” He looked up at her, grinning humorlessly. “And that one over there,” he pointed to a circle with a swirl inside, “means ‘human sacrifice.’ Human sacrifice, Nadia. All those other signs mean death, disease, dying. That rune there means ‘secret’ or ‘mystery.’ That’s Saturn, that’s Death, that one’s the Grim Reaper, the moon god Nannan, the night. The Destroyer of Souls.” He smacked each one in turn with a good, fleshy thwap! that punctuated the hostile staccato of his speech.

  “Jesse?” Nadia’s voice was soft—scared—and it made him stop. He’d almost forgotten she was there. “Jesse, you okay?”

  Jesse paused a moment, looked around him and nodded slowly. “Sorry, Nadia. I...I don’t—”

  “Let’s just go, okay? Let’s just get back in the car and continue into town.”

  He watched her as he followed her back. “You’re sure you want to go with me? Last chance to bail, Nadia.”

  “I’m sure. Let’s go.”

  TWO

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” Nadia stated as the Nissan passed from what seemed like endless darkness in the tunnel into the approaching dusk.

  Jesse frowned. “Are you kidding me? Why didn’t you go back in Wexton, when we were at the diner?”

  With an indignant glance, she answered, “I didn’t have to go then. I have to go now.”

  “Nadia, I’m not really comfortable with the idea of you going anyplace around here without me....”

  “Uh, Jesse, I think I can handle going to the bathroom by myself, ghost town or not. Just pull over at a gas station or something, will you?”

  Jesse knew better than to argue. When a girl had to go, she had to go. Jesse turned left onto Holger Street and followed it north toward Serlings Lake, where he knew a public restroom building stood. The directions started to come back to him like the familiar lyrics of an old song; he turned left again onto Reynolds Road and made a right onto Misselva Boulevard, which snaked toward Serlings Avenue. The houses there stood sagging, wilted, and Jesse was reminded of Jawbreakers when all the color and flavor had been sucked out. The life of these streets had leached away.

  Nadia made small sounds in her throat all the while, which Jesse assumed were meant to illustrate her impatience.

  The public restroom building stood on the outer curve of Phillips Circuit, a left off of Serlings Avenue. Squat and stained across its once-white surfaces with rusty splotches that had been worked, with time and weathering, into the stucco surface, it hardly looked like a place where Nadia would agree to set her dainty ass down on anything, but it would have to do. On the lakeshore alongside the restrooms was a small parking lot. Jesse pulled into the space closest to the building and shifted into Park.

  “I’ll wait here.”

  She nodded, and opened the door to get out of the car, but paused when Jesse grabbed her arm.

  “Nadia,” he said, looking her in the eye, “if you come across anything—I mean anything at all—that seems wrong, you call for me, okay? I’ll be right here.”

  She seemed confused, but nodded and smiled nonetheless. “I’ll be okay.” She gave a playful shrug, and he drew his hand away.

  As he watched her disappear around the side of the building, Jesse slumped against the driver’s seat and listened to the hum of the engine. He was acutely aware of being alone in Thrall for the first time in years, and he didn’t like it.

  He glanced down the street and frowned. He would have sworn that the road they were on once branched off and continued around the lake, looping around to Mason Road. God, it had been a long time since he’d been there. He’d forgotten some of the lay of the land.

  Jesse’s gaze wandered out over the lake and the thick blanket of low-hanging mist that drifted over its dark surface, nearly obscuring the trees on the far side. His thoughts drifted again to Mia. Where could she be in the town? It would be too simple, he knew, to find her crouched in some corner of her old bi-level house a few blocks away. But it would be his first stop anyway, just in case.

  He wasn’t sure he was ready to see her. He’d counted, calculated, counted again, and reviewed every instance where he’d been intimate with her. It was not beyond the realm of possibility, what she’d told him on his answering machine. They’d spent a lot of time together, especially in the two months or so before he left. Jesse remembered how distracted she’d been those last couple of days, preoccupied with thoughts she’d waved away with a manicured hand and a smile every time he asked her about them. He’d supposed she was really no more distracted than anyone else in the town was, with all the weird goings-on at the time. But that...that she’d been pregnant...well that had never even crossed his mind then.

  Now, it all but consumed his thoughts as he waited, blocking out all else from his senses until he heard the scream.

  ***

  When Nadia rounded the corner, the first thing she noticed through the open doorway was the blood splatter across the tiles of the inner wall. She recoiled.

  At least, it looked like blood. It had that same dark red hue, that same syrupy-looking consistency. But it couldn’t be blood, her rational mind reminded her. Blood dried to an ugly brown. If what that cop back in Wexton said was true, it was highly unlikely that anyone or anything had been hanging around recently that could have made a fresh splatter like that. She locked down on that belief as she inched past the wall into the gloomy interior.

  The floor and walls were tiled with small squares, probably once teal-colored but now a faded, scuffed turquoise. Darknes
s gathered thick in the corners of the room as dusk crammed through the small rectangular window high above on the back wall. There were three stalls, two regular-sized and one larger one in the corner for handicap-accessibility, with beige metal doors. Across from them were three chipped porcelain sinks, each with a mirror overhead. The farthest had a crack. It reminded her of that old saying about cracked mirrors and bad luck.

  By degrees, she became aware of a low dull roar, like wind passing over a small opening, or a vent. Outer doors of antechambers between the outside and say, the mall or an office lobby sometimes made that sound when opened. Nadia wrinkled her nose. She supposed the sound was an indication of some kind of ventilation system, but if so, it wasn’t working. A smell like rotting meat—steakish, when the blood sat out for too long—hung heavy in the room, emanating from the dirty grout between the tiles.

  Nadia pushed open the first stall, but there was no toilet paper. A search of each yielded the same result, so she just chose the middle stall. She set her purse down gingerly on the back of the toilet bowl and took out a packet of tissues. Then Nadia hooked her thumbs up beneath her skirt to pull down her underwear. She let them hang at her knees; the thought of them touching the grimy floor was unacceptable to her. As she hovered over the bowl, she read the graffiti on the back of the door. It was dark in there with the stall door closed, but she could make out a good bit of the writing. “Jen loves Mark 9/21/92” and “Amy + John = Luv 4-Ever” were scrawled in black marker, and underneath that, “R.C. is a whore” and “Robyn wuz here” were scratched into the metal, probably by pocketknife reinforced by ballpoint pen. There were other cryptic statements (“TRHS rules!” and “Creeper7”) and testimonials like “Christine sux cox” and “Mandy-n-John ’til the end” that caught Nadia’s eye from the top of the stall door. Random scribbles and doodles she couldn’t quite make out spread out to the walls around her. She wondered briefly what had happened to the names on the door, if any of them were left in the town, if they had nightmares about it like Jesse did, if they were safe in some other state but tormented by whatever had happened here.