Threshold

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Get away from me, Sadie,” he growled. “Get the hell away from me right this goddamned minute,” and she shook her head no, reached instead for his injured hands and turned her back on the bathtub. Whatever it was he saw in there nothing meant for her, probably nothing meant for anyone anymore. His skin so cold, dead man’s hands, and she rubbed them, friction to bring him back, kicking and screaming if that’s the way it had to be.

  “Was it a dream, Deke? Did you have a dream about Elise or . . .” and pausing then because she knew how dangerous the words would be, how thin the ice beneath them, between them, was becoming.

  “Was it a dream, or is she here?”

  And his face like crystalperfect condemnation for a moment, crazy, burning face like a holy man confronted with some blasphemy too terrible to forgive and there could be only punishment. He’s going to kill me, she thought, no other way she could imagine an end to that expression, release from that rage, and then he closed his eyes and squeezed her hands tight, squeezed so hard it hurt, and he was shaking his head, the fire gone from his face as quickly as it had come. But she knew that he had let nothing go, had only pulled it all back inside himself somehow.

  And before the moment was gone, before he’d smothered the last sparking embers, she asked the question again, the fury on his face all the proof she needed that it had been the right question; a hiss through Deacon’s clenched teeth like steam, then, demon breath to scald, and he slowly opened his eyes, fresh tears escaping and rolling down his stubbled cheeks.

  “You really think there’s any goddamned difference?” he asked. “You really think that matters?”

  “No,” she said, pulling him closer to her, arms around him now, circle of her arms to bind him and keep him safe. “I don’t think there’s really any difference at all.”

  For almost two months, Sadie has been trying to write a novel; not a very good novel, she knows that much, of that much she’s absolutely certain, but something inside her that wants out. No matter that it’s nothing anyone will ever want to read, that when she finally finds the place where the story ends, all the pages will go into a box and the box will go under her bed or onto the top shelf of a closet, because she has no intention of ever letting anyone read it, no delusions of agents or publishers, no fantasies of an audience.

  This makes it her book, and if she’s deluded herself about anything it’s that this fact somehow makes the writing of it more pure, more genuine, unsullied by the things that other people might want to read, or might not want to read.

  Pecking it all out on a temperamental old Macintosh SE II that she found in a Dumpster behind an accounting firm on Morris Avenue, actually found the thing; no mouse in the Dumpster, but it wasn’t that hard to shoplift one. So she sits in the cold whitegray light of the computer screen and pecks with two fingers, left and right index fingers because she never learned to type, and the Mac hums and sometimes it makes angryrude R2D2 noises for no apparent reason. Plugged into an outlet in one corner of Deke’s bedroom, sitting on the floor between the bed and a stack of the science-fiction novels he reads; and that’s where she writes, legs crossed, slouched like a vulture over the keyboard, and Deacon keeps telling her she’s going to wind up with a pinched nerve or carpal tunnel syndrome, some office monkey yuppie shit like that if she doesn’t move the Mac to the kitchen table and sit in a chair while she writes. But Deacon’s kitchen smells too much like his refrigerator, like the ancient gas stove, so she’s content with her nappy patch of carpet.

  No printer, of course, so every single word stored on the hard drive and one blue backup diskette that Deke made her buy at Kinko’s. “Just in case,” he said, because the building’s wiring has seen better days, and how much can you trust a computer you found in the garbage, anyway? She makes herself write at least two whole pages every night, four or five on a really good night, writes while Deke lies on the bed reading Ben Bova or Robert Heinlein, sipping his cheap gin or Thunderbird, and the sound of her two fingers dancing slowly, uncertainly, over the plastic alphabet keys. Making a story from the messy thoughts and half-thoughts in her head, building a world and lives and taking them apart again, fitting the pieces together another way until it feels right, as right as she can make it feel.

  “When you gonna let me read it?” Deacon asks her once a week, the question like clockwork, and sometimes she shrugs and sometimes it makes her angry and she tells him he can read it when there’s an ice rink in Hell. Always the same mock hurt from Deke, the same pretend affront or indignity, and she likes the way he looks when he isn’t really sulking.

  “Well, you can at least tell me what it’s about,” and she tells him that’s even worse than asking if he can read it. An insult, the assumption that what she’s doing can be reduced to a convenient synopsis. “That’s what’s wrong with you,” she says, “you’re a goddamn reductionist.”

  “Whoa, girl. Who’s been teaching you all these big fucking words?” and she flings a copy of Dune or Again, Dangerous Visions at him, something thick with some weight, with some gravity. She rarely ever actually hits him; there’s a jumbled pile of paperbacks on her side of the bed, books that have missed Deke’s head by inches.

  “That’s okay,” he says, or “Whatever,” smiles and takes a sip from his jelly glass of liquor, bottle of wine the color of an eggplant or the color of nothing at all. “It’s probably just some of that trashy Lovecraft shit you read. ‘The Moldering Big Toe of Dagon’ or ‘The Whisperer from Behind the Laundry Hamper,’ something like that,” and so she has to throw another book at him.

  “You haven’t even ever read Lovecraft, dumb-ass,” and he always rolls his eyes and mutters something condescending, “When you were still watching goddamn Sesame Street, kiddo, when you were still into Mr. Rogers and King Friday, Mr. fucking Greenjeans, kiddo.”

  “You know, I always thought Mr. Moose was especially creepy, didn’t you?” and “Now you’re trying to change the subject,” he says. Never exactly like that, but never very different, either. Comfortable little ritual, something almost approaching domestic, as close as they’ll probably ever get to domestic. And maybe she will let him read it one day, when she’s done. When she’s finished the last sentence, transferred the last muddy thought from her head to the screen, and it’s all there to speak for itself.

  Maybe that would prove that she loves him, that it’s not just the sex or a weakness for irredeemable losers, the romance of a life of poverty with an alcoholic of questionable sanity and dubious hygiene. Not just that they saw a ghost together one night a long time ago, saw something in a warehouse once that might have been a ghost, or that they both like Charlie Parker and Joy Division. That would be showing him a part of her soul, a part of her mind, that she’s never risked showing anyone. The raw and squirming part that indifferent high-school counselors were always prying at, the part therapists tried to trick her into showing them for free, the part her parents hated her for. The light and the darkness behind her eyes, the soft places.

  But it would also mean admitting how much of what she’s writing is about him, the patchwork bits and pieces she’s learned about him, about Elise’s suicide and why he can’t ever stop loving Chance Matthews. It would mean confessing her own resentment in words more honest than she’s ever had the nerve to say to his face.

  And then there are her own bad dreams, the dreams about the mountain, the secret places below the mountain, and perhaps that would be the worst of all.

  “It’s starting to rain,” Jerome says, and Sadie glances up from the Yeats, and the old man’s pointing towards the high and shadowy ceiling of the bookshop. “Just thought you might want to know, since I ain’t never seen you carrying an umbrella.”

  “Thanks,” she says, her head still lost in Yeats’ cyclical theories of history, marking her place with the ticket stub and returning the volume to its hiding place behind The Book of Mormon.

  “I got an extra one you can borrow, though, if you want it,” Jerome says, and Sadie
glances at her Sanrio wristwatch, trying to figure out how it got so late so fast.

  “Sure,” she says. “Thanks.”

  She follows him back to the register, pays the twelve fifty, plus tax, for the book of ghost stories, and he’s wrapped it in a second bag, plastic grocery bag from the Piggly Wiggly, so it won’t get wet, hands her the umbrella, and she thanks him again. Big umbrella the color of overripe bananas, the color of a banana Popsicle, but at least it’ll keep her dry. The door jingles shut behind her, and she stands for a moment beneath the raggedy bookshop awning, green-and-white canvas stripes, looking out at the stormslick street, up at the sky gone dark as silt and ashes, and the falling rain makes an incongruous sound, like eggs frying in a skillet. Sadie opens the umbrella and sighs when she sees that there’s a giant smiley face printed on the underside, smirking, happy cartoon face to leer down at her while she splashes through the puddles.

  “Yeah, well fuck you, too,” she says to the smiley face and glances over her shoulder. Jerome’s watching her from his chair behind the counter; he nods his head once, waves good-bye, and she waves back, tucks the twice-wrapped book beneath one arm and crosses Twentieth Street.

  Back home, the dank and mildewstinking halls of Quinlan Castle, and she pauses on the concrete front steps to shake the rain off Jerome’s happy yellow umbrella, flaps it open and closed, open and closed, making a furious noise like the death throes of a giant bat or a pterodactyl, spraying a thousand droplets across the steps and the sidewalk. The storm has almost passed, just a sickly drizzle now and the thunder fading away, distant, muffled cacophony done with Birmingham and taking its wrath elsewhere.

  On the way upstairs, she passes Mrs. Schmidt who lives across the hall, elderly Mrs. Schmidt who hears voices if she forgets to take her medication, who has an ugly little dog of no discernible breed named Tinkle, and once she brought Sadie and Deke a plate of hot oatmeal cookies that tasted faintly of fish. Sadie smiles at her, says hello, and the old woman smiles back, her no-denture smile, healthy pink gums but no teeth, and she lightly touches Sadie’s arm, and “I told her to come back when you or Deacon were at home,” she says.

  “Who?” Sadie asks, groaning inside because this is probably just something Mrs. Schmidt got into her head halfway through General Hospital, something crazy, and Sadie doesn’t have the patience for it today.

  “The albino girl,” Mrs. Schmidt replies, her trembling fingers still resting on Sadie’s forearm, age spots and skin like wrinkled silk, and “Oh, her eyes were so pink, just like a white Easter rabbit’s.”

  “There was an albino girl looking for us?”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Schmidt says, leaning closer now, and she smells like menthol and violets. “She was sitting in front of your door eating a bag of gumdrops, and when I asked her what she was doing there, she said waiting. Just waiting. And I told her that she should come back when you were home.”

  “Did you remember to take your pills this morning, Mrs. Schmidt?” Sadie asks, trying not to sound annoyed or patronizing. “The green ones?” Puzzled squint from the old woman for a second, and then she blinks and smiles again. “Yes, dear,” she says, laughs softly, and “She wasn’t that sort of a girl at all.”

  “Well, I just wanted to be sure. You know, just in case,” Sadie says, still not certain whether to believe Mrs. Schmidt or not. “It isn’t good for you to miss your pills.”

  “Thank you, dear. It’s very nice of you to worry about me. But she said that she would find you,” and then the old woman says good-bye and is toddling unsteadily away towards the row of mailboxes by the front door. Sadie watches her go, and she’s pretty sure she doesn’t believe that there was an albino sitting at their front door eating gumdrops.

  She takes the stairs two or three at a time, out of breath and her heart racing when she reaches the third floor and the musty smell is worse up here because the landlords refuse to fix a seeping, rotten patch of ceiling at the far end of the hallway. The plaster like soft and molded cheese down there, a couple of places where it’s fallen away completely and you can see the lath, can look straight up into the attic darkness showing between the timegray wood slats. So, the perpetual stench of rotten ceiling, and if it rains long enough, small, pinkwhite mushrooms sprout from the carpet below the hole. The mushrooms seem to make Deacon nervous, though she’s never asked him why, and he doesn’t ever walk down to that end of the hall alone.

  Digging through her purse for the door key, the ring with a toothy rubber vampire bat on it and keys to places she hasn’t lived for years, keys to her parents’ house, keys to a car she wrecked last summer, and of course it’s hiding at the bottom under all the other purse junk. As usual, the lock sticks, and she’s wrestling with it when she notices the mound of black gumdrops on the threshold, neat and sugared pile of discarded candy, and so the troublesome door forgotten for the moment, the rubber bat left dangling from the lock, as she bends down for a closer look. Black gumdrops, eight of them, and Sadie picks one up and looks at it like she’s never seen one before, glances across the hall to Mrs. Schmidt’s door. Certainly not impossible that the old woman put them there herself, like the time she drew big X’s and O’s in blue chalk on every door in the building; Sadie sets the gumdrop back on top of the pile and opens the door, thinking that she’ll just leave them there and let Deke figure out what to do about it, probably best to forget the whole thing anyway, and that’s when she sees the folded sheet of paper that someone’s slid under the door.

  The first bad dream about a week after she moved in with Deke, right before she found the computer, and if Sadie told him that he might start talking about synchronicity and meaningful coincidence. But she hasn’t told him. Hasn’t told anyone, admitting the nightmares to nobody but herself and the Mac, confidence kept between her and the squat box of microchips and cybergreen circuit board. The black and waterdripping dreams, wandering someplace beneath the city, and she’s never alone, but never quite sure who’s with her, their voices always indistinct, their faces lost in the darkness. A strangling smell like stagnant water and something dead, something drowned, and the moldy hallway stench magnified a thousandfold. Walking and listening to the voices up ahead, wondering if she should call out, if she’s lost, if they’re all lost and searching for a way out, but she’s never said a word. Hugs herself against the damp and cold, against the deadwetdecay smells, and the rocks beneath her feet are slick with slime and mud, with whatever can grow untouched by the sun.

  And at first these strange dreams like déjà vu, maddeningly familiar but a fleeting, intangible sort of familiarity, always fading with her first cup of coffee, her first cigarette of the morning. Then one night she was bored and channel-surfing on Deke’s crappy Salvation Army television and she flipped past a PBS documentary, Nova or Nature, something about bats or caves, and suddenly the pieces fit together, dot-to-dot revelation, and Sadie remembered when she was ten years old and she had other dreams of being lost underground, nightmares that lasted for a whole month after her parents took her to Kentucky to see Mammoth Cave.

  The trip a present for her tenth birthday, and the three of them following a guide who explained about stalagmites and stalactites as he led them deeper and deeper underground, farther from the light, farther from the day. Travertine flowstone formations like monsters hulking in the shadows, waiting until no one was looking so they could reach out and drag her screaming into the forever night of the caverns. They passed bottomless reflecting pools where pale, eyeless salamanders and crayfish lived, lingered before fantastic gardens of calcite and quartz. And at some point all the lights were turned out, sixty blindperfect seconds so that everyone would know how dark the cave really was, how absolute and complete that blackness, and she held desperately onto her mother, feeling dank and insubstantial teeth sink straight through her skin, all the way to her bones.

  And these new nightmares stitching now to then, these dreams to those, and sometimes the two bleed together and she’s ten again, lost under Bi
rmingham and trying to find her parents or the way back to the world above, trying to catch up with the mumbling voices ahead of her. So close she should be able to reach out and touch whoever it is that’s talking, but if she holds her hands out, there’s only the chilly underground air and the dark between her fingertips. Except for once, and most of the time she’d rather pretend that isn’t actually part of the dreams; a figment of her imagination’s daystarved imagination, a dream’s insane dream, and in that subterranean place she did not reach out with urgent, imploring fingers and brush the shoulder of a dead girl. Did not feel that skin like ice, but Sadie Jasper’s never been a very good liar, even when she’s only lying to herself, and in that one dream the lights finally did come back on, and she saw that the grand cathedral theater of Mammoth Cave had become a narrow tunnel, purposeful mine shaft sort of tunnel, so maybe she’d wandered away from her parents, away from the guide. Maybe all she had to do was stop and retrace her steps. But the dead girl turned around, instead, and Sadie knew that face, even though the hungry worms and beetles had been at it for days and days, even though she never met Elise Alden, no eyes left, but she knew that face, and she saw the blackred gashes that ran from the girl’s wrists to the bends of her elbows. And the girl smiled for her like a polar night sky where every star has died.

  A single white sheet of paper, folded twice, and her name and Deacon’s scribbled across the front in pencil, scribbled like someone in a hurry or maybe just someone with shitty handwriting, ugly cursive, and Sadie carries the note to the couch and sits down. The door left wide open, and she sets her purse, the book and the yellow umbrella down on the floor at her feet. Unfolds the sheet of paper, and there’s more of the same tight scrawl, all the words tilting sharply to the left, and You do not know me yet, it says at the very top. You do not know me yet, but there is not much time left. I waited all day long and now the woman with the dog says I should go and I am afraid she’ll call the police so I am writing you this note instead.