Alice Isn’t Dead

“And I am too,” Sylvia said, in a voice soft as stone, gentle as a knife.

“But you’re not a fool,” Keisha said. “The Thistle Man, the Hungry Man, whoever else is doing all this, they should be terrified of you. Because I think you’re going to be the one who stops it. No, I mean it. I think you haven’t even grown into the force for good you could become. But you won’t stop anything if you get killed poking around some town that may or may not have any answers. That doesn’t have to happen. Because, no matter what, I’m going to go there. Whether you go or stay, it’s too late for me. I need you to be smarter than me. I need you to lie low, and keep trying to hear what you can hear, and I need you to grow and get even smarter and more powerful than you are now. Let me be the fool. You be the one who lives.”

It was only when the drops reached her mouth that she noticed she was crying.

“Whatever needs to be done in that place,” she finished, “I will fucking do it. I really will. And if I fail, then you will be right here, alive and ready.”

Keisha didn’t say please. Didn’t try to touch Sylvia or make any gesture. She sat and she waited. Either Sylvia would agree with her or she wouldn’t. The girl was old enough to know which. Sylvia’s glare faltered at the edge of her eyes. Her arms loosened. And then she pulled Keisha into a fierce hug. She shook through the hug, and so by transposition Keisha shook too. Sylvia’s tears soaked into the shoulder of Keisha’s T-shirt.

“Ok,” Sylvia said. “Ok. Ok. Ok.”

12 (#ulink_70c9cf94-ba14-5976-bdb8-02cf604addf5)

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 (#ulink_f70c88d9-649b-5244-975f-b536a1af4dd2)

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 turned 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.