Threshold

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Don’t look at it,” the girl in the window called down to her. “Don’t look at it, Dancy,” so the girl did know she was there after all, and Dancy turned to say that she’d been rude, to pretend not to see her before, and what wasn’t she supposed to look at, anyway. But the girl was gone, nothing there now but an empty attic window, lacewhite curtains to flap and twist in a hot breeze that hadn’t been there a second before.

  And a sound then, like a freight train far away, railroad rumble as the steel begins to hum and the ballast shift, but she knew that it wasn’t really a train, that this sound came from the ground beneath her, railroad or thunder trapped somewhere underground and getting louder. Something she could feel now, tremors through the palms of her hands, the tips of her fingers, and then the girl was standing over her, the brown-haired girl standing over her, and one hand held out, one hand to pull Dancy back to her feet as the earth began to roll and lurch, pitch and yaw like a small boat on a rough sea. “You never should have come here,” the girl said, and Jesus, she looked so sad, not scared that the ground was splitting open like overripe fruit, splitting open to bleed gouts of dusty steam and a smell like something dead too long in the sun, just sad, and then they were running. Running back towards that huge white house, and rocks, boulders, were shaking themselves loose from the mountain and rolling across the yard towards them.

  And she wanted to tell the girl that she’d had to come, because of what had happened to her mother, what had happened to her grandmother, because she had pulled the trigger, what else was she supposed to do but pull the trigger, but then she couldn’t even remember what it was that had happened, nothing but a sick, lost feeling where the memories had been just a second before, and, “None of it matters now,” the girl said. “You did what you had to do, that’s all,” and the earth bellowed underfoot like a bull alligator and rose in a single wave to shatter the mountainside and the pretty white house, wave of soil and broken stone and the squirming, living things caught inside, tumbling towards Dancy and the brown-haired girl helpless in the trough, and they held hands and waited to drown.

  The doors slide open, and Dancy follows Chance out of the elevator, past rows of science and computer magazines, past the children’s section and a huge cardboard cut-out of a happy purple dinosaur, and there’s the crosswalk; third-floor umbilicus of steel and glass to bridge the street below, and Chance pauses, looks back at her. It’s very bright out there, two o’clock sun shining straight through smogtinted glass, and the air-conditioning doesn’t seem to reach beyond the building, hangs back like Dancy, lingering in the shadows. There are three antique wooden benches in the crosswalk, discarded church pews, maybe, yellowbrown wood bolted to the carpet, left to bake beneath the sun, and Chance sits down on the first one and sets the cardboard box between her feet. Now Dancy can see the papers inside, and that’s all they are, just old papers, notebooks, and “You’re following me, aren’t you?” Chance asks.

  No point denying it, so she doesn’t, points at the box, instead. “What did your grandfather write about?” she asks, a question for an answer, and maybe that’ll buy her a few more minutes, stalling as long as she can because if she has to tell Chance anything like the truth she knows she’ll never see her again.

  “Rocks,” Chance says, voice gone suddenly flat, spiritless, like she doesn’t want to talk about this, but one hand into the box and she takes out a manila folder stuffed much too full of pages. “Fossils, mostly. He was a geologist. You know, someone who studies—”

  “I’m not ignorant,” Dancy snaps, interrupting her. “I know what a geologist is,” and already wishing she hadn’t sounded so defensive, knowing Chance wasn’t calling her stupid, but so few years in school and so many people who assumed that being an albino had also made her retarded.

  “I’m sorry,” Chance says, returning the folder to the box. “You might be surprised how many people don’t know.”

  And a few seconds’ worth of silence then, silence wedged tight between them while Chance stares down at the box, at her dead grandfather’s papers, and Dancy squints into the merciless day separating her and the cool, dark doorway leading into the building at the other end of the crosswalk. Maybe a hundred feet across, no more than a hundred feet, surely, and there’s Chance sitting in the sun like she’s never heard of skin cancer, like no one’s ever lectured her about melanoma, Chance and her impossible suntanned face and arms.

  “Why are there two buildings, anyway?” Dancy asks, and that seems to bring Chance back a little, back from wherever her head’s gone, and she glances from one side of the street to the other and then back to Dancy.

  “The one we were just in is the new library. They opened it about ’83. And that one over there,” and she motions with her head towards the far side of the crosswalk, “that’s the old library.”

  “How old?” Dancy asks, and, “1925, I think,” Chance says. “It was built after a fire destroyed the original.”

  “Oh,” Dancy says and steps out into the sun, cautious venture just far enough that she can see both the buildings now, the razorsharpened, polished angles of the new library, squat and featureless façade of glass and anonymous gray stone like ugly Lego blocks, the kind of building that can seem cold even under the summer sun. And across the street, something more like a Greek temple cut from limestone, tall columns to support the upper stories, and the names of great artists and scientists, playwrights and poets, carved into a frieze around the top. “It’s kind of like a time machine, you know,” Chance says. “Cross the street and you cross seventy-five years, three-quarters of a century in just a few footsteps. On one side of the street, you have Prohibition and it’s still years till World War II, and on the other side, you’ve got Ronald Reagan and AIDS.”

  Dancy looks down at her, then, and Chance is staring towards the old building; “Come over here,” she says, “I want you to see something.” She gets up, box of papers hefted off the floor, and Dancy follows her across the street, cars honking and zipping by underneath them, the sun pricking at her skin, but she’s trying not to notice. “Right down there,” Chance says. “Down by the sidewalk, in the tall grass there.” At first Dancy doesn’t see anything special, just the gray strip of sidewalk, the unmown grass at the edge of the old building, until Chance points and there’s something the color of charcoal rising out of the grass, something that looks like a tree stump cast in dull smoke-colored stone.

  “Is it a statue?” she asks, and no, Chance says, shakes her head no, and Dancy stoops down for a better look.

  “My grandfather found that in a coal mine up in Warrior back in the forties. It’s a fossil tree stump,” and now Dancy can make out roots like stone tentacles branching off the thing, snaking away into the grass. “He gave it to the library, and they set it in concrete. So nobody could steal it, I guess. There used to be a little wooden sign next to it. Anyway, these days I think people just think it’s a rock no one’s ever bothered to move.”

  “Wow,” Dancy whispers, glad they have something real to talk about. “How old is it?”

  “About two hundred and ten, maybe two hundred and twenty million years or so. They’re really not that hard to find out in the coalfields,” and Chance looks back down at the soup box then, like she’s forgotten it for a moment, just remembering, and “You want to see the old library?” she asks.

  Dancy nods, “Yeah, thank you. That would be nice,” but all the time she’s thinking how 1925 isn’t old at all, how 1925 is just last week compared to that lump of gray rock sitting down there by the sidewalk.

  “Well, come on then,” Chance Matthews says. “This box isn’t getting any lighter,” and she leads Dancy out of the hateful sun and into kindly shadows, and Maybe this will be okay, she thinks. Maybe she will listen, when it’s time to tell, and the limestone blocks stacked and mortared one to the other since her grandmother was her age close protectively around them.

  An hour later, and Chance has left her box of papers in the library base
ment, handed them all over to a jowly, pink-faced woman who smiled and gave her a yellow receipt that she stuffed thoughtlessly into a front pocket of her blue jeans. And then she led Dancy back up to the first floor, and this time the elevator is wood paneled and its gears and cables clank, shudder like an old man trying to wake up and wanting to go back to sleep. But hauling them up anyway, slow, to the huge ground-floor gallery for Southern History, all the books arranged alphabetically by state and two whole wings set aside for the Civil War and genealogy.

  But the most amazing thing, a mural wrapped around three of the four high walls, figures drawn from history and myth, literature and legend, and painted there, oil-paint parade of heroes and heroines, and Chance and Dancy sit together at a long reading table, brass lamps with glassgreen shades and the sunlight filtered through the tall windows in the fourth wall instead of the antiseptic, stark fluorescence from the newer building across the street. This library the opposite of almost everything across the street, and how has she spent two weeks over there, not even suspecting this existed?

  Chance points to a figure labeled SIGURD, eighteen feet tall above the books, Sigurd and beautiful Brynhild watching him from her seat on a bench carved with the image of a fanged and slinking dragon.

  “Isn’t that cool?” Chance asks, and Dancy nods her head. “It was painted in the twenties, by an artist named Ezra Winter. He did it in his studio in New York City, and it was shipped all the way down here and hung on the bare walls with white lead.

  “I loved this place when I was a kid. I still love it, but when I was a kid I’d take the bus down here and spend all day long reading in this room.”

  And she stops, maybe something she didn’t really mean to say, not to Dancy or anyone else, and Dancy points quickly to another towering figure on the wall, another dragon and white blossoms on a tree, Confucius, and she smiles for Chance, smiles against whatever melancholy lies coiled like a canebrake rattler inside this girl. And that was one of her grandmother’s words, melancholy instead of just plain old sad, and suddenly Dancy feels homesick for the first time in weeks.

  Then Chance is looking at her wristwatch, and, “Damn,” she whispers, librarywhisper, but urgent, and “I have to go,” she says. And Dancy almost says no, please stay just a little longer, Chance noticing the time like a demon called up by her homesickness, something to make it worse. But that’s not the way it goes, she reminds herself, not yet, too afraid of pushing and ruining everything after she’s come this far. So, “I’m sorry,” and that will have to do instead of the things she really feels, really wants to say to Chance.

  “I have some errands,” Chance says. “Stupid shit, but it has to be done,” standing up, pushing her chair back from the table. And then she’s looking down at Dancy, expression like she’s just noticed her all over again. But this time Dancy knows it’s not her white skin and pink-red eyes, this time it’s her shabby clothes, her filthy hair, and “You have someplace to go, right? I mean, a place to stay?”

  “I’ve got some friends,” she says, simple enough answer to forestall anything else Chance might ask, ashamed of the way she looks, the way she smells; Chance takes a twenty-dollar bill from her back pocket and Dancy shakes her head, doesn’t want to accept the money, more embarrassed now, but god it’s twenty dollars, and part of her hopes Chance won’t change her mind. Which she doesn’t, shakes her head, too, and, “Call it a loan,” she says, “If that’s what you want it to be. I needed someone to talk to today, really.”

  So Dancy crumples the bill in one palm and shakes Chance’s hand again, less awkward shake this time, and she doesn’t squeeze quite so hard.

  “Thanks,” she says, and then almost, Will I see you again? but that might be too much, something she could take the wrong way, and no matter how nice she’s been, it’s never too late to scare someone away, never too late to make a bad impression. Chance looks at her watch again. “I really gotta run,” she says. “But it was good to meet you, Dancy Flammarion,” and she smiles, the first real smile she’s seen from her, and the tall girl wears it well.

  And then she’s gone, dashing back towards the elevator, and Dancy watches her go, watches until the doors slide closed, and she opens her palm and examines the twenty. Lays it on the table in front of her and smooths it out flat, tries to iron out the paperwrinkles, the creases, and then she slips the money inside her duffel bag.

  “See you soon, Chance Matthews,” she whispers, knows that it’s true, one way or another, and then Dancy looks back up at the mute and colorful pantheon watching over her.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Deacon

  LATE afternoon and one impertinent shaft of sunlight slipping between the drapes of the bar, drapes drawn against the summer heat and shine, respect for the aching eyes of daytime customers, and the sunlight stabbing its cruel or thoughtless way through drifting cigarette smoke and dust and the thick and sour smell of old beer. THE PLAZA, except someone hung the sign upside down so it reads, but that was a long time ago, a long story everyone’s tired of repeating, or a short story simply not worth repeating again. The Plaza and Deacon sitting alone at the bar, lanky, stoop-shouldered Deacon Silvey nursing his third PBR of the day and dreading seven o’clock and the beginning of his Friday night shift at the Highland Wash-N-Fold, five immeasurable hours of rumbling dryers and washing machines like the strangling lungs of drowning men. If he didn’t still have a hangover from the night before, that would be enough to give him one, just thinking about all those goddamn washers and dryers chugging half the night.

  And this asshole parked on the stool next to him, talking, talking like he’s just invented The Mouth and it needs a test drive; Deacon turns and stares at him, stares hard at the very fat man with greasylong hair and a black T-shirt that reads KILL ALL THE MOTHERFUCKERS, happy clown face and KILL ALL THE MOTHERFUCKERS in drippy red letters. The fat man has a zit at the left corner of his mouth as big as a peanut and skin the cheesewhite color of something washed up on a beach. The fat man slurps at his beer and is talking again before he’s even swallowed.

  “Now, don’t think they’re gonna stop with the faggots and niggers,” the fat man says. “All this AIDS shit, that’s just a smoke screen, you know, what you might call a red herring to get us all lookin’ off the other way while they get the big guns in place, while they get FEMA and the fuckin’ EPA and the fuckin’ FBI all workin’ together. . . .”

  And every single word from the man’s mouth like a threepenny nail hammered between Deacon’s eyeballs, and he glances over to Sheryl, railthin girl mopping lazily at the bar with a gray rag, and she’s not even pretending to listen to the fat man anymore, so you’d think the asshole would get a clue and shut the hell up.

  “Oh man, you don’t even want to get me started on AIDS,” the fat man says, and the happy clown face jiggles like cottonblack Jell-O. “You get me started on AIDS and I’ll be here until Gabriel blows his horn, I fuckin’ swear. You wanna know how much money, how much of our tax dollars, goes into so-called AIDS research? You wanna hear how we’ve had the goddamn vaccine since 1975?”

  Deacon lifts his mug, pisscheap beer gone lukewarm, but he has to pace himself, better to spend the whole afternoon sipping flat, lukewarm beer than run out of cash with half the day left to go. He swallows, wipes the scabbed knuckles of one hand across his chin, stubble there like sandpaper to remind him he’s forgotten to shave again.

  “Are you as tired of listening to this guy as I am?” he asks Sheryl. She stops mopping the bar and glances at Deacon, cautious glance that says Maybe it’s better just to listen until the asshole gets tired and goes away, better because she knows Deacon, and Jesus, her shift’s over in another thirty minutes and she’d rather make it until three without a fight. All that in her tired green eyes like dusty emeralds, and Deacon nods, sets his mug down; Sheryl sighs, loud, resigned sigh, and goes back to her gray bar rag and the countertop like maybe nothing will happen if she isn’t watching. Deacon turns to the fat man, jabs one th
umb towards Sheryl.

  “The lady’s getting tired of listening to you, buddy,” he says, and immediately, “I did not say that, Deke, you son of a bitch,” Sheryl sounding more annoyed than worried, and Deacon Silvey’s glad it’s the fat man he’s telling to shut up instead of the bartender.

  But the fat man has stopped talking, stares wide-eyed at Deacon like he’s some exotic species of fungus sprouting from the bar stool. “What d’you say to me?” he says, and his tongue flicks past chapped lips, licks nervously at the huge zit.

  “Of course, she’s way too polite to tell you to shut the fuck up. But that’s what she’s thinking. Ordinarily, I’d just sit here, drink my beer, and mind my own goddamn business. Figure, hey, you know, if the girl’s gonna work in a dive like this, she has to expect to listen to creeps like you. Am I right?”

  Not a peep from the fat man now, just his doughy face changing color, turning the shade of funeral-parlor carnations, and Sheryl tosses her rag somewhere beneath the edge of the bar, snakehiss between her teeth that might have been a word or only anger looking for a way out.

  “I swear to God, Deke, you start a fight with this guy on my shift and I’m gonna call the cops,” sounding like she means it, already reaching for the telephone beside the register, and the fat man still hasn’t said anything else.

  “So we’re cool then?” and Deacon almost manages half a grimace, his head hurting way too much to smile, but one eyebrow cocked like a pistol. “You’re gonna save the rest of your cut-rate, anti-Semite, conspiracy-theory bullshit for somebody that cares, okay?”

  “You’re some kinda faggot, ain’t you,” the fat man says, not asking, telling, and now his face is almost the exact color of strawberry preserves.