The Thinny

New York seems like a dream to me now. I don’t necessarily mean that it’s so great that it’s like a dream (c’mon, it’s New York), but I mean that it’s…slightly unreal. I figured it was just that we’d been in Mid-World so long that the other world was starting to feel like home.

Or maybe it was ka. Like we have unfinished business there. Well, if it was ka, we’d found out eventually, no way around it.

Funny that New York should feel like a dream considering the homeward journey from Mid-World. The thinny…the dogan…

I’d run out of blood, though I’d tried to hide it. I knew that it’d be a few weeks yet before I really started to slow down. Until then I could hide the little tremors, and still the shaking. I didn’t even want to entertain the thought of drinking someone’s blood until I absolutely had to.

Carrie tried to force me to it, though. I wasn’t surprised, I should have known better. Carrie used to be a junkie too (ah…used to be…it’s nice to think of it that way), and she could see the signs, even if I was hiding them. Penny might have known too, she has a way of doing that, but I pushed the thought aside. I don’t like thinking that she knows about the blood-drinking, even though I know she does. Like by ignoring it I can pretend it away.

But the cramps in my gut and the tremors in my hands made it real. Carrie asked me step away. I was hoping without much confidence that she just wanted to talk about her struggling attraction to Ashleigh. Or maybe even that she was going to throw herself at me again (a much more pleasant thought than brooding over my starvation).

I wish she had. I had to remember that she was trying to help me but she took a kind of guilt tactic. Maybe not on purpose, but she kept saying that she didn’t want the thinny to get us because I was hungry and weak. She told me that Penny might die if I was too weak to protect her. I guess it really shows how horrified I am at drinking blood that I still refused. Of course, if a thinny was something you could shoot, it might’ve gone differently.

Still, it probably wasn’t a good idea for the ka-tet to be in the dark about my situation. After all, things were bad enough with Carrie on the tail end of withdrawls and Alistair slowly loosing his mind. I let Eden know that we needed to have a talk before we entered the thinn, especially because not everyone had read the books and knew what to expect.

As if that could have prepared us.

It looked about like I expected it to, I’ll give myself that much credit. And I went into it determined. We were mostly worried about Ashleigh, who was still messed up over his fall into the Todash darkness. I don’t know how anyone gets over that.

If the thinny at the Topeka turnpike was a shimmering mass of light and twisted sound, and the one in Eyebolt Canyon was a greenish amoeba of despair, this was something in-between. It crowded the road but allowed us passage. Of course, maybe it was just suckering us in.

The voices started up almost at once. We knew they were coming, we knew that to expect. But when it came, we weren’t ready for it. Of all of us, I’ve seen the most weird shit, I’ve been the most places. I guess you could say I believed the most. And of all of us, only Ashleigh had a harder time with the thinny.

Lex called out to me from the green mist. I knew it wasn’t Lex. I knew it was the thinny playing tricks on me. But that knowledge just sits there up in your brain, it doesn’t reach down into your heart or your guts or your balls where the fear hits you. If it was just a voice making shit up, I could have laughed it off. But it reaches into you and takes something that already there, some fear or doubt, and it hits you with it. So that when you hear it, it’s not fake at all, it’s as real as fear.

It was no secret that I hate being a vampire, or that I’m ashamed of the things I did when I was a Top Hat Cat. Haven’t I learned better? Wasn’t I coming to believe that maybe even a vampire can do some good? But like the voice of the Rose is the voice of yes of it’s alright, the voice of the thinny says nothing will be alright. You will fail again. There’s no hope.

I started walking into the fog, God help me. In a way, it was like the Rose that I longed to see, even though I knew it meant my death. I knew that it would end my existence, end my torment. It was freedom.

I didn’t even realize that I was walking into the mist at first. I heard the shouting, but it didn’t make much sense, I thought it was just more voices in the thinny. I looked down and I could see my toes through my boots. Everything was glowing green like how old x-ray machines at the airports used to look. The green began to creep up my foot, towards my leg and I could see more and more bone.

I took a step back when I realized that’s what was happening. It wasn’t the peace of the Rose. When I was a bit further away I could hear the voices of my friends calling. Telling me that it was wrong, that I was more than a killer. It was like pulling the gun away from my head each night, like trying to separate two very strong magnets.

The thinny called for the guns with the voice of my old Dinh. I didn’t deserve the carry them, I was staining their long and noble history with my touch… Maybe I was no harrier…but I was still a vampire, a blood drinker… I picked up the guns, wrapped in their own gun belts, those ancient killers that had so recently hung from Cuthbert Allgood’s hips. I couldn’t believe later that after all that had happened, that I was just going to toss them into the fog. That I had rescued them from Jericho Hill only to through them into the mouth of madness.

But the voices calling for me to stop, that said I had earned these guns weren’t fake either. Their love was as real as my doubt. I let go of the guns and they fell back into my open backpack and the spell seemed broken. Lex’s voice faded away and the thinny gave up. …but only to move on to a different target.

Not surprisingly it almost got Ashleigh. The look on his face scared the hell out of me. But we grabbed onto him until he got it under control. Or as much under control as he could. I know that Eden has been working with him to get through some of what’s been done to him. I hope she can help.

We thought it had almost got him, but we were wrong. It did get him.

But before all of that, we had to get through the thinny. Alistair and Eden made it through pretty well, thank God. I wasn’t sure about Alistair at first, in his weakened mental state, but his new pet and his love for collecting gave him something to cling to.

I was very proud of Penny too. I’d barely heard her parents voices, just a broken off sentence before Lex hypnotized them, but I recognized them as they blamed Penny for their deaths. I told her that we were her family now, we all did. But I wasn’t quite brave enough to tell her that she’s like a daughter to me. That I wish I was her real dad because if she’d been in my life, I never would have gone wrong. But her wide, dark eyes turned away from the thinny back to us and my heart stopped breaking.

We were almost out, the thinny didn’t seem to be bothering Arthur. I’m sure that if he wandered into it, that it’d reach for him and devour the little furball, but it didn’t seem to have any power of his mind. Or maybe the bumbler’s simple little mind had no weaknesses to exploit.

But Carrie did. I knew that she pretty much thought she was just a walking ball of weaknesses, and the thinny used our voices to tell her that. Of all the tricks and low blows, it pissed me off the most to hear my voice telling Carrie that she was worthless.

Eden and I got in front of her to stop her from walking into the fog, each one of us putting a hand on a slender shoulder. It surprised me how much weight she’s put on since she ran out of her junk. Her collar bone was still a slim line under my palm, but there was more than pale skin stretched over it. Her body was jealously hanging on to whatever sustenance it could get before the heroin could take it away again.

She didn’t seem to be able to hear us, she kept pushing against our hands weakly, trying to get to the thinny. She had just about the same look on her face as she did when I hypnotized her. Eden threw her arms around Carries neck and hugged her.

I looked at her, annoyed and I had to stop and think, why would I be annoyed that Eden would hug Carrie and save her? I eased back off the balls of my feet and realized that I’d been planning on doing that. And more…I think I was going to kiss her.

When Ashleigh kissed her as we left the thinny behind us, I definitely felt a little thrill of jealousy. Well…I suppose that as she leaves her addiction behind and doesn’t need someone to care for her, she won’t let her fear of dependence stop her and Ashleigh from being together. Good for them.

That night, whatever compulsion or essence the thinny had left inside Ashleigh woke up and made its move. He took out his knife and stabbed Eden. I kept trying to shoot the blades out of his hand, but at close range it’s even harder to hit a small moving target. He hurt Eden, he cut Penny… and I couldn’t stop him. I tried to graze him, just knock him down or throw him off balance, but he was moving so fast and Carrie was trying to knock him down her all her ninety pounds. My hands shook…he was hurting them…trying to kill them… But I didn’t want to kill one of my own. I kept thinking of how I shot Lex, and I couldn’t do it.

Thankfully for all of us, especially Ashleigh, Eden wasn’t limited to gunplay.

Alistair led us on, until the Turtle took us home.

New York again. I promised myself to get laid here – I was tired of being alone every night – but there were things to do first. The whole ka-tet stayed to give Alic our debriefing and I was proud. Even Ashleigh stayed, despite what he’d been through. We ordered pizza and chuckled while Alistair fed Arthur one pepperoni at a time.

…And I asked to meet with the Carvers… Marian and Moses came in, one tall and smooth, the other bent and wrinkled, but both infused with a vitality…a presence. I offered them the guns. While the voice of the thinny hurt me, almost lulled me to my death, it didn’t make me believe that I hadn’t changed. But that didn’t mean that these guns that I picked up belonged to me.

The old man handled them gravely, his easy grin gone from his face. His hands traced the scrollwork on the barrels thoughtfully. And he gave them back to me. …Alright. If I’m going to carry these guns, I’ll try to be worthy of them.