Alice Isn’t Dead

When they got to the distribution center, Sylvia clicked off her belt and hid in the back. Keisha didn’t know if that was necessary, but also didn’t know how to explain to her supervisors why she had a runaway child in her truck and so decided that it was probably for the best. Pallets of cereal were unloaded from the truck and replaced with pallets of travel-sized deodorant. When packaged, the two looked much the same. Brown boxes covered in plastic wrap. Only the logos were different. As Keisha waited for them to finish loading, a hand came out of the curtained back with a book. Sylvia was holding up The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S., the second volume from that comic series, which Keisha had just finished reading.

“Is this any good?” she asked.

“Hell yeah, it is.”

“Ok,” she said, considering the cover for a moment before tossing it back by her feet.

Once the new cargo was in place and all the paperwork had been signed off, they were back on the highway and heading west. Sylvia had made no move to leave, and Keisha hadn’t found a way to ask her to. Sylvia hopped back up to the front.

“My mom and I, we used to travel a lot for work,” she said, as though it were part of a conversation they had been having for a while. “And on breaks from school I would come with her. Lot of time spent in cars. We started to see what other people were missing. Between the rest stops and the Taco Bells. There’s danger out there. There’s a crack somewhere, and a terrible force is seeping through.”

Keisha nodded slowly, not sure how to respond.

“Do you know what that terrible force is?” she asked.

“Mm,” Sylvia said. “I need to get to Swansea, South Carolina, and I can’t tell you why. Can you take me there?”

“South Carolina’s the complete opposite direction from where I’m going. I have to get to a supermarket in—”

“You’re the first person I’ve talked to, like really talked to, in, I don’t know, weeks? Months? I need you to take me to Swansea. It has to do with, you know.” Her hand spiraled out to indicate all the things neither of them was willing or able to specify.

Keisha snorted.

“Sylvia, I’m an adult. I’m an adult woman with a job. And that job says I have to deliver deodorant to a supermarket, not drive a teenager hundreds of miles to a town I’ve never heard of for reasons that kid won’t tell me. I’m a responsible goddamn adult.”

8 (#ulink_d81709b2-565a-528c-a70d-a859e34db93b)

Swansea was not a bustling town. Nice, but also empty. Life had left this town. There was less of it than there once was. Sylvia directed them to an E-Z Stop on the highway, across from a farm stand that was closed, and two different car washes, both closed.

Keisha shut off the engine. “So what now?” she asked.

“We wait,” Sylvia said. She picked up The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S. and started reading.

“Alright then, I’m getting some jerky. You want anything?” Sylvia didn’t look up. “Suit yourself.”

As Keisha walked toward the E-Z Stop she kept asking herself what she was doing. A runaway child and a delivery that would be at least a day late. She probably wouldn’t have a job soon, and then how would she look for Alice? And all because someone had spoken to her as a fellow human being for the first time in a long time and she had responded like a stray dog finally fed. She had risked it all so that she could keep this little bit of company going, as fucked up and weird as the company was. Or maybe, though she wanted to deny this, she felt that the kid could lead her to some new revelation or piece of evidence. Maybe she was using this runaway teenager to help her search. Maybe that’s the kind of person she was. Or maybe she had found a teenage runaway and didn’t want to abandon her. Maybe there was some instinct of protection in her that made her want to keep Sylvia close. Most likely some mixed-up combination of them all.

The drive to Swansea was only a few hours, but it had been late and so they had spent the night at a stop east of Atlanta. Keisha had tried to insist on giving Sylvia the cot, but Sylvia curled up in the passenger seat and either fell right asleep or feigned sleep well enough that Keisha gave up and slept in the back, feeling guilty right until she nodded off.

The guy at the E-Z Stop counter was withdrawn. Didn’t comment on the truck, or the jerky. Didn’t comment on anything. Laid-back. Or shell-shocked. Probably surprised to see a customer in a town this dead.

By the time Keisha got back to the truck, she had rediscovered some semblance of adult composure. Sylvia didn’t acknowledge her, and so Keisha ate her jerky and waited. The sky changed shade, and then color. Sylvia fidgeted in her seat.

“He was supposed to be here already,” she said.

“Who was?”

Sylvia rocked back and forth, and she seemed the youngest she had been since Keisha first saw her, slight and childlike, rising from the shoulder of the highway. Sylvia ran her hands through her hair, shook her head, and then reluctantly said, “You know about the Hungry Man?”

This violated their tacit agreement of not specifying their fears and experiences, and Keisha wasn’t sure what to do with it. Finally, she nodded.

“The Hungry Man killed my mother,” said Sylvia. “At a gas station a couple hours north of New York.”

Sylvia and her mom saw the Thistle Man. Or, as she knew him, the Hungry Man. They saw him commit a horrible act. Sylvia wouldn’t elaborate what it was, but Keisha could guess. And her mother did what Keisha could not. She tried to intervene.

After that, Sylvia didn’t have a mother. She went back to Georgia, was moved from home to home. No one would believe her story. Or no one would admit that they believed her.

There was one policeman, Officer Campbell, who took a special interest in her. Something close to kindness. He warned her that she needed to stop describing what had really happened, needed to stop trying to get people to believe her. That it would be easier if she let that go.

But letting go wasn’t an option for her. Keisha could understand that. If Keisha knew how to let go, she would have been thousands of miles away, living her life, pretending that she had never seen her dead wife on the television.

Sylvia ran away from the last of those foster homes, two days after moving in, and went looking for what scared her most.

“You want to find the Thistle … the Hungry Man?” Keisha could feel the arm against her throat, the must of his breath. “He’s dangerous.”

“Oh, is he? I must not know that. I must be stupid.”

“Not what I meant.”

“Yeah, it was.”

Arm against throat. The policeman’s glance of comradeship at the monster. The smirk on peeling, sagging lips.

“It’s not what I meant,” Keisha said with finality.

Sylvia snorted.

A few months before, Sylvia was sleeping in a city library. There was a window that didn’t lock in one of the reading rooms, and she would slip in after closing, and, thanks to her inability to reach deep sleep since the death of her mother, slip out as the front doors were being unlocked. She checked her in-box on one of the public computers to find an email from Officer Campbell. He said that since she clearly was never going to let this go, he wanted to help her. But it had to be secret. No one could ever know. He told her to meet him, at this date and time, in the parking lot of the E-Z Stop in Swansea. And he would give her the information he had been able to find, all of it.

“I think he hoped that somehow I could put a stop to it, or at least tell the world. I don’t think he knew what he had signed up for when he signed up for it.”

“Ok,” Keisha said. “Maybe the guy inside saw him.”

They went in and asked the guy behind the counter if he had seen a cop car in his parking lot recently. A cop car from Georgia. The guy’s eyes widened, but he shook his head. Keisha revised her impression of him. He wasn’t laid-back. He had seen something. Something of the terror that she and Sylvia had seen. And he wanted desperately to forget.

She leaned in, gentled her voice.

“Man, hey, now look at me, I’m gonna need you to look me in the eyes. I know what you’ve seen tonight. I’ve seen terrible things too; so has this girl, and as long as we’re all quiet, nothing’s going to change. Those terrible things are going to keep on happening.”

The guy didn’t meet her eyes, tapped his hand on the counter.

“Do you want to live in a world where what you saw is possible, or do you want to let us try to change that?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. Sylvia pulled at Keisha’s arm, wanting to leave. Keisha’s anxiety was a vibration in her limbs and chest.

“Ok, how about this,” Keisha said, leaning forward and letting him see on her face every mile she had driven in search of the person she loved. “Whatever scared you, my man, know that I can be so, so much scarier than that.”

His mouth twitched downward and his fingers fidgeted. “I’m sorry. I’d like to help but I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He pointed, past the back wall of the store, to the thick trees behind it.