The Thread (6 page)

“Ah.” Her smile fades away, leaving only its memory in the countless wrinkles on her face, and then she picks up the round, hot thing and holds it close to her face. She sniffs it. She sticks out her tongue and tastes it. There’s a little spit of sound, the way something hot hisses when you touch it with a wet finger, but she doesn’t pull back. After a moment, she lets the thing drop back into her lap.

“Let’s see then.” With one sudden motion, she jabs her thumb through the glowing skin. The ball splits open, revealing a hollow interior. And I realize she was right after all. The thing is rotten inside. It smells like something dead, like the rat that died inside our kitchen wall one summer.

She nods, as though she’s not surprised. Maybe she says something to me. I think I hear her voice, but I can’t understand her, can’t focus on what she’s saying, because all I can do is look at that tiny putrid cave in the ball’s center. My skin crawls—as though it were trying to pick itself up and creep away from my bones—because there’s something inside that dark hollow. Something that moves. I lean closer, trying to see what it is.

And then I jerk back. Because it’s me. It’s Dad and me.

It’s one of those moments I don’t let myself remember, that I don’t even let myself experience while they’re happening, and yet there it is, all the tiny details as precise as if they were the insides of a broken snow globe. I want to turn away. I want to throw up. I want to grab the cracked-open ball and heave it as far away as I can.

“Little girl,” says Dad’s tiny voice, filled with that horrifying tenderness that makes me hate him, that makes me hate myself more. There I am, the doll-sized me inside the dark cave, opening my legs to him, and he’s on top of me. I am both watching that hideous little scene from my place on the floor beside the old woman’s knees—and I am inside it, experiencing it, feeling it.

My body reacts as though this were pleasure instead of horror.

I hate myself. This is that smallest, darkest, deepest place I go to, the place where I hide, but here it is, exposed and open.

As soon as I think that, the ball’s two broken pieces suck themselves together with a little sizzle. Suddenly I can’t breathe. There’s no room. The broken thing has sealed itself shut again—and I’m on the inside. I’m in that terrible, tiny black space. I thought it was a safe place, the safest place left to me, but I realize now that it’s a trap. And I can’t escape it.

I beat against the dark walls, but my hands are small and weak. This is what the old woman wanted all along. She’s the one who lured me here. “You did this!” I shriek. “I hate you! I hate you!” The words rip my throat like knives.

And something changes. There’s something there now in the blackness, a sliver of light, a hairline crack. Dad’s body is heavy and lifeless, as though he were dead, and I push him off me. “Who shall deliver me from this body of sin?” I hear myself whisper, a Bible verse that suddenly seems like the only words to match this moment.

As soon as I say it, the terror inside me recedes, and I feel more like myself.
You’re dreaming,
I think instantly.
Or you’re tripping. Maybe the old lady gave you drugs.

But I’m still caught in this weird Alice-in-Wonderland hallucination, and I don’t want to stay there in the darkness with Dad’s body. So I start crawling toward that thin silver line in the dark.

I’m too big to fit through, of course. How I can be both so tiny and weak, and at the same time so grotesquely huge? I push just my fingers into the hairline crevice, as though that will do me any good.

But the crack widens around my fingers. At first, I think I’m imagining it. As I press forward, though, hoping that fresh air might reach me through that slender space, I realize the opening has grown enough that I can fit myself inside it. It’s a tight squeeze, and the blackness is hot and sharp, the way I imagine the inside of an ember would feel, but at least I can no longer feel Dad’s flesh against me. I welcome the burning scrape of those dark shards on my skin. My skin peels off my back and the top of my head as I push into what turns into a narrow tunnel, but I don’t care. It’s worth it if I can get away from the cave behind me.

I creep forward, an inch at a time for what seems like hour after hour. I must be scraping my way through miles of burning rock, but I gulp back the claustrophobia that threatens to grip me. I can bear anything if I can just get away from that small, dark place.

And then the walls of ember fall back from me, and a narrow band of light shines down the wider channel that lies ahead. I scramble to my feet—and I run straight into the light. Some small, logical part of me is still certain I’m hallucinating, but all the while, another part of me
knows
I’ve become so tiny that what I had perceived as a thread before looks big by comparison now. The stream of light is the thread’s glowing strand, and I am inside it now, running and running as fast I can to escape the darkness behind me. The thread glows steadily around me, in front of me, a long, looping arc that never breaks or falters as it unspools through the darkness

It leads me into someplace totally different, somewhere I’m sure I’ve never been before. I fall on the floor, exhausted from running so far, so long. Gasping, I look around me.

Once again, I’m in a cave, but this one is lit by firelight. The floor beneath my feet is bare earth, and the air holds a scent that reminds me of field trips when I was in elementary school . . . a farm? I squint, trying to make sense of the dark shapes that move back and forth against the light.

A bearded man comes into focus.

A sleepy chicken roosting with its head beneath its wing.

A cow chewing hay, looking calm and gentle.

A woman sitting cross-legged on a pile of straw, smiling down at something in her lap.

A baby.

And now I recognize the scene. It’s Grandma’s crèche. Except somehow it’s alive.

“Welcome.” The woman turns her gentle smile to me. “There is no reason for shame here.”

But despite her words, I can’t meet her eyes, so I look at the baby instead. I find myself imagining, in that funny, half-real way of dreams, that I’m telling it everything that happened over the last three years. It doesn’t look like Aunt Mickey’s wooden Jesus, though, with round painted cheeks. Instead, it looks like any newborn baby I’ve ever seen, wizened and wobbly and a little wrinkly, like a tiny old person. My cousin Jackie’s baby looked the same, the same dark eyes filled with something unknowable, the same impossibly soft skin and wisps of downy hair. I see the beat of the baby’s pulse in the soft spot on his skull, and I remember how terrified I felt when I held Jackie’s baby, how scared by how small and vulnerable she was.

The baby opens his mouth and gives a thin wail that sounds too weak to be heard by anyone except his mother as she bends closer to him.

And me. I heard him.

My skin’s doing something funny again, but this time it doesn’t feel as though it’s trying to slink off my bones. Instead, it’s like every skin cell is standing on tiptoe, as though each one has forgotten everything except the reality of this ordinary-looking baby.

I drag my eyes away from him, and glance around, expecting to see shepherds and angels and fluffy lambs. But the cave is too small for them. There’s no room for anyone but the man and the woman, the cow and the chicken. And me.

In fact, the walls are so close that claustrophobia creeps inside me again. This cave has hard, stony walls, I realize, as tight and dark as the one I thought I’d left behind me. The firelight fades away then, and I can no longer smell the cow. Instead, there’s that same sweet deadly odor, the smell of rotting flesh, the stench of dead rats.

I’m right back where I started. All that crawling through the darkness, my skin scraping off my back and head, all that running and running until I’m exhausted—and I’ve gotten nowhere at all.

But no. I can still see the baby. He’s still there with me in the darkness. A faint light gleams from him, the same golden light I saw when I peered through the window from the fire escape.

The baby’s no longer crying, though. Maybe that’s a good thing? Maybe he’s sleeping?

But he lies so still and pale on his mother’s lap.

“What’s wrong?” I ask the woman.

Her tears drip on her baby’s face, but he never moves.

“He can’t be dead!” My scream splits through the cave, cleaves it into two pieces that fall free from each other—

I’m back in the room with the old woman, still kneeling on the floor beside her. The round thing is in her lap, its two halves lying jagged and open, like some hideous geode. In the dark hollow within one half, I can still see the baby, as tiny and quiet now as Aunt Mickey’s wooden Baby Jesus.

I look up at the old woman. “You can’t let him die,” I whisper.

She shakes her head, and tears are running down the dark creases in her face. “It’s up to you to change this story, child.”

“Why?” I feel weak and small and empty, but a flicker of my old rage comes back to me. “Why can’t you do it? What good are you if you don’t?”

“I must stay here and spin the thread.”

“Forget the stupid thread! He’s a baby. He’s
real
.”

She smiles, but it’s a sad smile this time. “Yes. He’s real.”

“He’s going to die!”

She nods. “Yes.”

“How can you let that happen?”

With her free hand she gathers up the broken pieces in her lap. “Here, child. I said I would give this back to you.”

I lean back, away from her hand. “I don’t want it.”

“But this is where my Beloved is. And only you can save him.”

I look down at the tiny, quiet child lying inside that dark smelly hollow. The baby is a girl, I realize now, and she’s wearing a pair of yellow pajamas, the fuzzy kind with plastic feet. I used to have a pair of pajamas just like those when I was small. I remember how safe and cozy I felt zipped up inside them, tucked into my crib.

I blink away my tears. “What do I have to do?”

She nods at the thread that’s still unwinding in golden swirls from the spinning wheel. “What you did before. Follow the thread.”

“But what about—” I glance down again at the round thing in my lap, but it’s not there anymore. “Where did it go?”

“It is where it has always been,” she says. “Inside you. I promised you I would not take it from you. But now you will know that my Child is there with you.”

“But you said—” I look up at her, feeling slow and stupid.

“Follow the thread, Callie.” Her voice is urgent now, a call that pulls at me, filling me with sudden energy. I push myself to my feet.

This is a dream, just a dream.

I reach out and grasp the thread again inside my fist. It tugs me away from the old woman, out into the shadows. Without saying goodbye, I walk away from her. The thread slides through my fingers, leading me into the dark, one step after another, across the room until I must be out in the corridor again. I sense the long hallway ahead of me, but my eyes are still too accustomed to the light to see anything but darkness.

Earlier tonight, it would have frightened me, that darkness. Now, after the weird vision or whatever it was I just experienced, the shadows of the thirteenth floor seem ordinary. No light, but no putrid smell, no sense of claustrophobia and horror. I can’t see where I’m going, though, so I have to rely on the whisper of sensation inside my fingers, leading me forward.

And then the shadows ahead of me move. A light flares in my face, blinding me, and a voice comes out of the darkness.

“What are
you
doing here?”

9

Kirin

Callie Broadstreet squinted into the beam of Kirin’s flashlight. “What are
you
doing here?” she echoed.

He stared at her, trying to understand why she would be up on the thirteenth floor in the middle of the night. She belonged to his school world, to the world of daylight.

But of course she must have heard the child crying, just as he had. The thought made him feel better. If someone else could hear the crying, then he wasn’t crazy after all.

She put her hand over her eyes, shielding herself from the flashlight’s glare. “Could you get that out of my eyes?”

“Sorry.” He lowered the flashlight so that its beam wavered down the hallway, a long white finger poking through the shadows. “I keep hearing a little kid crying,” he says. “A baby. You hear it too?”

She hesitated for a second, then shook her head. “No. I don’t hear anything.”

He looked down the hall, listening. The child’s cries were definitely louder up here. They had to be real.

But when he flicked the flashlight’s beam back at Callie’s face, she was staring at him, and she didn’t look as though she were hearing anything out of the ordinary. “So what
are
you doing up here then?” he asked her.

“I—” Her voice sounded funny. He swung the light toward her again and saw that her hand hovered in the air in front of her, as though she were holding onto something he couldn’t see. Her face was pale and the hollows around her eyes were dark; she looked like a ghost.

“I was following this.” She thrust her fist toward him, as though she were handing him something.

“What?” He groped through the shadows. “I don’t see anything.”

“No,” she answered. “Feel.” She hesitated again, then grabbed his free hand and guided it. “Here. Can you feel that?”

He frowned. “There’s like a tiny current of air . . .” He moved his hand back and forth. “Right there. Is that what you mean?”

“You don’t feel it? A thread?”

“A thread?” He let his hand drop back to his side. “What do you mean?”

“A—a thread. So—so slender that I can’t see it most of the time. But I can feel it with my fingers. It woke me up. I . . . I followed it up here.”

He reached out again and waved his hand back and forth through the air. “All I feel is that little breeze. Right here. Maybe there’s a door open somewhere.” He beamed his flashlight straight ahead, and for an instant, he thought he saw something glint in its light, a slender strand of silver.

Callie pointed. “There. It’s shining in the flashlight. Can you see it now?”

But whatever he’d seen was gone now. He squinted, trying to catch a glimpse of it again, trying to see what she saw. If he could hear a child crying that she couldn’t hear, she might as well be seeing some sort of thread that he couldn’t see. The night felt crazy, and he found himself wondering if maybe he was actually still lying in his bed, asleep and dreaming.

“Sorry.” He shook his head. “So can you follow it now? Maybe it’s connected to that little kid I hear.”

Callie swung toward him, as though he’d startled her. “Why would you think that?”

He shrugged. “Why not? Whatever’s going on here is . . . weird. So if there are two weird things—you feeling an invisible thread, me hearing a little kid crying—stands to reason they’re connected.” He nudged her with his elbow. “Come on. Show me where this thread of yours leads next.”

Callie hesitated again, but then he saw her teeth gleam for an instant as she gave him a shaky grin. “Okay. This way.”

She took a step into the darkness, then another, with Kirin close behind her. They walked the length of the hall, and then Callie paused at the corner where it connected with another long corridor. Kirin stepped around her and shone the flashlight through the darkness. “Have you ever been up here before?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“Me either. But my grandmother has a storage room up here where she keeps things she brought from India, things she doesn’t have room for in her apartment.” He pushed away the memory of the dream where he had seen Poppy in one of the storage rooms. “She says it’s a monkey’s nest up here, lots of little rooms and intersecting corridors.”

“Twisty tails,” Callie muttered. “Like Curious George.”

“What?”

“Monkeys.” She shook her head. “Nothing. Sorry.”

They stood side-by-side a moment longer, looking down the hallway. He felt Callie shudder beside him.

“You okay?”

“Sure.” But she moved closer to him, and he felt her hand brush against his. “You could hear a baby crying up here?” she asked. “All the way down in your apartment on the fifth floor?”

“Yeah.” But he could no longer hear it now. He strained his ears, listening, but all he heard was the quick in-and-out of Callie’s breath beside him. “I didn’t know it was coming from up here, though,” he told her. “But I kept hearing it. Every night. I couldn’t sleep. Tonight I couldn’t take it anymore. So I got up and went out into the hallway . . .”

His voice trailed off, as he realized how lame his story must sound.

“Yeah?” she prompted.

He shrugged. “I thought at first it was coming from one of the apartments on our floor. But it was louder in the stairwell, like it was coming from higher in the building. So then I thought it must be coming from the sixth floor. It didn’t make sense that I’d be hearing it through my ceiling otherwise. But when I went up to the sixth-floor landing, I could still it hear it coming from above me. So I kept going. When I got to the thirteenth floor, I saw something moving and—” He turned toward her. “You scared me stiff. And here we are. What about you?”

She didn’t answer, and her head cocked to one side, as though she were listening to something. Could she hear something now that he couldn’t? Or was she feeling the invisible thread pulling her?

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s see if we can find her.”

“Her?”

Before she could answer, he heard something faint and faraway, something that sounded like a sigh or a whimper. “Did you hear that?”

“This way!”

“Wait,” he whispered. Something cold and icy seemed to be dragging him backward, and he no longer wanted to discover the source of the cries. Maybe there was no child, maybe this was only more of the same nightmare he had had before. He didn’t want to find what he had seen then. He wanted to turn around and go back downstairs, back to his own apartment on the fifth floor, back to his warm bed, where he would pull the covers over his head and hide.

Callie had already run ahead of him. Another whimper, like an exhausted sigh, fluttered through the darkness. Kirin forced himself to run too, the flashlight’s beam making crazy leaping lines along the dark floor.

Side-by-side again, running, they came to another corner. They both stumbled and slid, and then they were running again. The baby’s voice seemed both softer and louder, as though it were nearer but more exhausted, as though it were close to giving up.

He and Callie were panting now, loud enough he could no longer hear anything but the rasp of their breath. He knew they weren’t breathing so hard because they were running, but because they were terrified. He couldn’t stop now, though, no matter how scared he was. It was too late to turn around, too late to go back to his bed.

“Here!” Callie grabbed his shoulder, and Kirin skidded to a stop.

He shone the flashlight on a closed door. A white doorknob gleamed in the light. “It’s coming from in there.”

“I don’t hear anything now.” Callie’s hand on his shoulder jerked him back.

But Kirin could hear the cries plainly. He reached for the doorknob.

“No!” Callie shoved him away from the doorway.

He shrugged her off and pushed on the door.

“No!” she screamed.

He turned the light toward her face. “What’s wrong with you? Can’t you hear him? We’ve got to get him help.” His hand closed over the doorknob again, but it didn’t yield when he turned it. “It’s locked.”

“It’s not a boy,” she whispered. “It’s a girl.”

She sounded sad and tired, but Kirin couldn’t take time now to understand her. He slammed the flashlight against the doorknob, again and again, until the knob shattered, shards of white china flying through the darkness. The door swung inward, darkness opening into more darkness.

Kirin sucked in a deep breath and stepped forward. The flashlight’s beam showed a small body spread like an X on a filthy mattress. Fuzzy yellow pajamas were stained with something dark, and a yellow barrette hung from tangled curls.

“Oh baby!” Callie was already next to the mattress, down on her knees on the floor.

Kirin followed, his feet dragging with dread and horror. Clothesline was wrapped around the baby’s wrists and legs, tying the small body to the mattress. He could smell urine and shit. The baby’s eyes were closed, her brown skin so pale it was gray, as though all the blood in her had nearly stopped flowing.

“Is she alive?”

Callie fumbled with the cords around the baby’s hands, and he reached to help her. The knots finally fell free, but the baby didn’t move. It—she—lay limp, her arms flung wide. Callie touched her cheek. “Baby?”

Kirin didn’t know much about little kids, but he thought she looked like she was the same age Amir was when he had sat in that swing so many years ago. Her face had the same round shape his brother’s had, and her arms were short and chubby. The barrette was the shape of a duck, he noticed, and then he recognized her, despite how different she looked from the photographs they’d been showing on television. “She’s the little girl who went missing.”

Callie leaned closer to the baby. “Ayana?”

The baby’s eyes fluttered open. Kirin shone his light on Callie’s face, so the baby could see her.

“Mama?” The baby’s eyes fell shut again, and she sighed. “Mama.”

Kirin sucked in another breath. “We gotta get her help.” He shoved his hand into his jeans pocket and pulled out his phone. “I’m calling 911.”

• • •

They sat silently on the dirty mattress, close to the baby so she could feel their warmth, while they waited for the police and the ambulance. The flashlight lay across Kirin’s knees, shining up on his and Callie’s faces. Now and then, he shifted the light a little, picking out objects here and there around the room—a pile of dirty diapers, a few jars of baby food, a baby’s bottle that looked like it was full of cottage cheese, a ragged towel that was stiff and caked with what looked like vomit, three pink bottles of liquid Benadryl—but he always brought the light back to their faces. If the baby woke up again, he wanted her to be able to see them. He wanted her know she wasn’t alone anymore.

“Who did this?” he whispered. “Who could have done something so terrible?”

Callie was silent.

He turned the light for a moment so that it pointed toward the stains on the mattress and on the yellow pajamas. “Has she been here like this all this time?” He heard his voice wobble. “Why would anyone do this? Why would they put her here?”

But Callie just shook here head. “Oh baby.” She touched the hand that lay curled like a limp little starfish on the mattress. “I’m so sorry.”

The baby’s breath sounded ragged now, as though something was catching it inside her chest, something that wanted to hold it inside her forever and never let it out again. Callie leaned closer to her. “No!” she said. “Don’t you let him win! Ayana, do you hear me? Ayana? Ayana!”

The baby’s lids lifted a crack, and Kirin saw the gleam of her eyes.

Callie put her lips against the baby’s ear. “We’re here. We won’t leave you, and we won’t let anyone hurt you again. We’ve sent for help. Your mama will be here soon. I promise, Ayana. Don’t give up.” The tiny fingers curled around Callie’s thumb. “We’re not giving up, Ayana,” Callie whispered. “We’re never giving up.”

Kirin turned the light toward Callie’s face, trying to decipher the pain and anger he heard in her voice. A siren screamed outside in the street then, and Callie met his eyes.

“They’re here.”

Heavy footsteps pounded through the building, and then there were voices coming nearer and nearer.

Kirin and Callie didn’t move. They just sat there, silent, beside the baby.

• • •

The police called Ayana’s parents, and then they called Kirin’s and Callie’s parents too. Except of course it was just Mum, because Poppy was still at the private school.

Mum and Callie’s parents looked startled and a little silly when they arrived, as though none of them were quite awake yet. Callie’s father had one bare foot and one with a sock, and her mother had curlers in her hair, the old-
fashioned pink foam ones. Mum didn’t look much better. She was wearing Poppy’s old, stained bathrobe, as though she had grabbed the first thing her hand had fallen on. Her eyes were fixed on Ayana, and they were wide and dark with something that looked like terror. She stretched her hand toward the little girl. “No!” The word seemed to nearly strangle her, and she clutched her throat.

Mrs. Broadstreet reached down to the baby, but a policewoman blocked her with her arm. “Stay back please, ma’am.”

“Come on, Pam.” Mr. Broadstreet looked dazed, but he pulled on his wife’s shoulders now. “Let’s get Callie out of this.” He coughed, coughed again, his face very white. “Callie shouldn’t be seeing this.”

“I’m afraid we’re going to need to talk to your daughter at the station,” the policewoman said.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Callie said. “Not until Ayana’s mother gets here.” She sounded angry, and Kirin took a step closer to her, pulled by something he heard in her voice. She glanced at him, and the anger in her face faded; then she turned back to Ayana.

Paramedics were crouched over the little girl, taking away her filthy diaper, cleaning her, connecting her to tubes. Their quick hands were comforting, Kirin thought, as though they knew exactly what to do to put things right.

And then the little girls’ parents were there, a woman with shiny black hair with a thick-shouldered man, both their faces filled with an awful mixture of horror and hope.

“Will she be okay?” the woman whispered, her arms stretched out to the little girl. “Oh Ayana.” She looked up at the paramedics. “Can I touch her?”