Threshold

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Instead of what,” Sadie whispers, frowning at the piece of paper, the sticky, gumdrop fingerprints at the edges, and the handwriting is getting worse as it goes along, so she has to hold the note closer to her face and squint.

  I will tell you why I am and then something that’s been scratched out, violentsudden graphite scratches to obliterate a mistake, three or four words written down and then taken back, thought better of, and I need to talk to you both very soon. You know a girl named Chance who lives in a big house on the mountain and I have already talked to her. I have not told her why, but when I do she will not believe me but I know that you both will. I am sorry I had to leave a note like this. I am not a bad person, and then printed much more legibly below the last line, Dancy Flammarion.

  “Your door is open,” and Sadie looks up from the note and there’s Mrs. Schmidt standing in the doorway, clutching a fat wad of junk mail in her left hand. She’s stepped on the little pile of gumdrops, one of her blue bedroom slippers squashing them flat. “You really shouldn’t leave your door standing open like that, Sadie. It’s not a good neighborhood anymore.”

  “I know,” Sadie says, and then she glances back down at the note, that last line before the signature.

  I am not a bad person.

  “There are all sorts of people wandering about that don’t belong here. Let me close the door for you, Sadie,” and Sadie looks up at the old woman, the deep worry lines on Mrs. Schmidt’s creased face even deeper than usual.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Schmidt,” Sadie says, and when the door is shut and she’s alone again, she reads the note over from the beginning.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Dead and the Moonstruck

  ALICE Sprinkle has hands like a bricklayer, sturdylong fingers and calluses and muscle, all the white and inconsequential scars that come from twenty years spent climbing around in limestone quarries, shale quarries, road cuts. Scars and the damage the sun does to a woman’s skin, the fine wrinkles and her nails thick and nubby, a fresh Band-Aid wrapped around her left index finger; Chance smiles politely at her across the cluttered kitchen table and pours Alice another cup of coffee.

  “I just can’t see any reason for it, Chance,” Alice says and sighs, lifts her grayblue china cup and blows hard on the steaming black liquid inside. Breath to send tiny ripples across the dark surface, and “It’s a goddamned, stupid waste,” she says.

  “You really don’t have to keep saying that,” Chance says quietly, trying to sound confident, trying to sound like she doesn’t know she’s losing this argument again, and she drinks her own coffee, scaldingquick mouthful and a glance out the kitchen window at the summer night filling up the backyard. July night full of crickets and the metronome cicada thrum, a little cooler now because of the thunderstorms this afternoon, and the grass out there will still be wet, the soil underfoot still damp.

  “Maybe I wouldn’t, if you’d listen to reason,” Alice says, setting her cup down too hard, and a few drops of coffee slosh over the brim, run down the side of the cup to stain the tablecloth. “What do you think Joe would say if he knew what you were doing? You think he wouldn’t be telling you the same things I am?”

  “Joe’s dead,” Chance says, looks away from the backyard, back to her cup, and “Yeah, well, and you know what? You’re not,” Alice Sprinkle says, leaning towards Chance now. Not exactly anger on her face, but something more angry than simple concern.

  “I just need some time to get my head together, Alice. That’s not stupid. My grandfather just died, okay? It’s not stupid if I can’t deal with school right now.”

  “But that’s not what you said. You said you didn’t think you’d be coming back. You said you didn’t see the point.”

  Chance closes her eyes for a moment, and that is what she said, more or less, two days since she talked to Alice on the phone, Dr. Alice K. Sprinkle from her thesis committee, and she should’ve known better, should have simply dropped out of sight and let everyone figure it out for themselves. But all the responsible parts of her mind refusing to shut down along with the parts that give a shit about fossils and grade-point averages and where she was going to do her doctoral work, all the parts that drove her through six years of college in less than five. The parts that got her published in the Journal of Paleontology and Palaios when she was still an undergrad. She should have vanished and let them wonder. Instead, she called Alice, I don’t think I’ll be coming back, nothing but cold silence from the other end of the phone as she stuttered out her practiced apologies and suggested someone who might be good to take over her Tuesday/ Thursday freshman ES 102 lab. “I’ll be by in a few days to clean out my office,” she said, and Alice said nothing but, “We’ll talk about this later, Chance.” So now here they are, later, talking about it in her dead grandfather’s kitchen, talking about it since six o’clock this evening, arguing in smaller and smaller circles, and Chance always wrong, always the one who isn’t making sense.

  “I think you know very well what your career meant to Joe,” Alice says and lights a cigarette, even though she knows how much it bothers Chance, that Chance doesn’t like people smoking in the house. She taps a Winston from a half-empty pack and lights it, blows a single ghostperfect smoke ring towards the light above the table, dim bulb in a frosted antique globe.

  “This work you’re doing in the Parkwood and Pottsville with those new fish and tetrapods, and the trackways, Dr. Bierce keeps telling me how important this stuff is. How your work on Middle Carboniferous vertebrates is gonna raise some eyebrows,” and Alice takes another drag off the Winston, doesn’t take her eyes off Chance. “Do you have any idea how proud of you Joe was? He never would’ve pushed you to go into paleo’, but you know how happy he was when that’s what you wanted.”

  “Look, I don’t need this fucking guilt trip,” the words tumbling out of Chance’s mouth in a growl, never mind that she knows this is exactly what Alice Sprinkle wants, trying to provoke, digging for a flintstrike spark of passion and here it is and maybe if she digs just a little deeper she can build a fire.

  Alice still talking, like she didn’t hear the resentment in Chance’s voice, like she doesn’t care, and “So it’s not just what Joe wanted, it’s what you want, Chance. Goddamn, you’re fucking brilliant. You know that. I know you know that. And you love—”

  “Don’t try to tell me what I love, Dr. Sprinkle,” she says, hard and formal words to build a wall between them, titles and last names because she knows the familiarity is only working against her.

  “Call it whatever you want. I don’t care what you call it. But it’s rarer than brains,” and Alice taps her temple hard with her bandaged index finger for emphasis. “I see smarts every goddamn day of the week. Smart is cheap stuff, kiddo. You’re smart, but you do this because you’ll never be whole without it, and you’re so goddamn lucky that your grandparents were there to back you up. You know what my mother did when I told her what I wanted to do with my life? First she asked what the hell a ‘paleontologist’ was, and then, when I told her, she cried. My dad, he just wanted to know if it meant I was a lesbian.”

  “I’m sorry,” Chance says, and her stomach hurts from all the black coffee and no supper, her head from all the talk, and the clock on the wall above the oven says it’s almost nine.

  “Yeah, well, whatever. I did it anyway, didn’t I? But if just once they had encouraged me, had even tried to understand. If just once they had pretended to be proud of me. That’s why I’m in your face like this, Chance. This is what you want, and Joe was so proud of you.”

  “You’re not being fair,” and immediately Chance knows she shouldn’t have said that, a weakness she shouldn’t have shown, and Alice rocks back in her chair and smokes her Winston and watches Chance silently.

  “I just can’t think right now,” Chance says, no growl left in her, almost a whisper; shaky, whispered words, and in another minute or two she’ll be crying again; last thing in the world she wants, to start bawling in front of this
implacable, determined woman. “Can’t you see that? I can’t act like everything’s normal, like nothing’s changed.”

  Not precisely silence then, but no one saying anything else, either; brittlelong moments filled up with all the outside insect noises getting in, and finally Alice exhales, loud, cigarette-smoky exhalation, and she stubs the Winston out in the unused saucer meant for her coffee cup. Chance not looking at her, staring at the yellow sunflowers on the tablecloth, yellow flowers with black eyes, and “I can show myself out,” Alice says. “Thanks for the coffee.”

  “I just need some time, that’s all. Just a little time,” Chance says.

  “Yeah,” Alice Sprinkle replies. “Maybe you do. But I’m taking over your Tuesday/Thursday, just until you get your head together. We’ll talk again next week, Chance.” And the woman leaves her alone in the kitchen with the dirty china cups and the smell of coffee and cigarette smoke.

  Going through the motions, everyday chores to keep both her feet on the ground, dustdry eyes, and Chance cleans the kitchen, empties Alice’s cigarette ash from the china saucer, rinses the old percolator, rearranges the clutter on the table so it’s the same mess disorganized another way. She carries out half a bag of trash and leaves it on the curb for the rumbling green garbage truck to haul off in the middle of the night. Brief and meaningless things that take away some of the time and require no thought, as little thought as possible. And then her stomach growls, emptysick feeling now to remind Chance that she hasn’t eaten since breakfast, her belly as hollow as everything else, so she opens some Chef Boyardee ravioli and eats it cold from the can, sits on the floor in front of the television, flipping channels and not tasting the tomato sauce and whatever it is that’s supposed to be meat. A documentary on the Learning Channel about coral reefs off the coast of Australia, but that only makes her think about school, her unfinished thesis, so she keeps flipping, finally settles on a Humphrey Bogart film she can’t remember the name of, Humphrey Bogart as a Devil’s Island convict, and she turns the volume up loud enough that she doesn’t have to listen to the summer night sounds outside the living-room windows.

  Running alone through the water works tunnel, through the dimly lit hallways of the apartment building where Elise lived, where she lives because she isn’t dead yet, because this time Chance isn’t at home, isn’t sitting in her room with her head stuck in her work while Elise is dying behind one of these doors. Doors painted the color of dried blood and vomit, and there are no numbers on them, nothing to distinguish one from another and no doorknobs, gaping rustrimmed holes where the doorknobs should be, corrosion the same flaking color as blood, and white light spills from the rooms through the holes.

  “How the fuck are people supposed to know where anyone lives,” Deacon says, Deacon somewhere close behind her, and she tells him to shut up. She doesn’t want him here, all his fault anyway, and he knows it. Selfish, but not that stupid, Elise dying because of him, and Chance follows the spiraldown halls that tilt and lead them around and around, dizzying whorl inside a snail’s cast-off shell, floors warped and walls buckled.

  No, not apartments, Chance thinks. Elise didn’t die at home, did she? and then Deacon’s ahead of her, no memory of him passing her, but there he is anyway, standing in front of one of the doors. The painwhite light from the doorknob hole eating at the legs of his jeans, his raggedy black tennis shoes, and he puts his fingers through the hole, slides them into the light, into the room behind the door, and there’s an ugly, tearing sound like raw meat and waxed paper, and Chance looks away. Coward, she thinks, but the light suddenly so bright, bright past blinding, and she can feel it scorching her bare skin, searing Hiroshima flash to swallow her whole, and that means that Deacon’s opened the door, that means he’s found her.

  And a hot wind is filling the motel hallway then, and he’s shouting but the wind steals all the words, nothing left but the familiar shell of his voice. Chance is on her knees, screaming his name, and she can feel the light getting inside her, getting into her bones.

  “You learn things over here,” Elise says, and now Chance is sitting on the toilet in a bathroom with dirtywhite ceramic tile on the walls while Elise Alden bleeds to death in the tub. “Oh, not as much as you might think, but more than is really necessary, I suspect. More than I wanted to know.”

  “Deacon opened the door,” Chance says, trying not to look at the bathwater like cherry Kool-Aid.

  “That’s one of the things he does.”

  No idea what Elise means, and Chance can’t remember what it is that she’s supposed to be doing, something urgent that doesn’t seem to matter anymore. Hard to think because the room smells like blood, and “Aren’t you cold?” she asks the dead girl.

  “They tell me things,” Elise says, like an answer.

  “I don’t understand,” Chance replies. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” because she doesn’t, and Elise smiles, not a pretty smile, a crooked smile to hide something worse, and “You’re not supposed to,” she says. “Not yet. But I think you will.”

  Elise bends forward a little, pulls a chain to let the water out of the bathtub.

  “Deacon opened the door,” she says. “That’s one of the things he can do.”

  “Fuck him,” and Chance is getting nauseous from the commingled smell of Elise’s blood and bathroom cleansers, disinfectant and the crimson water swirling down the drain. Tired of sitting in a dirty motel bathroom, talking about Deacon Silvey, smelling blood and Lysol. “He put you here. He doesn’t give a shit about anyone in the world but himself.”

  “I’m supposed to show you something, Chance.”

  And there’s an impatient flutter from the other side of the tiny window above the bathtub, abrupt flutter like a flock of starlings all taking off at once, flutter like a hundred frantic, feathered wings, and Chance didn’t even notice the window before. Perfect rectangle of smudgy glass, and there’s a bright light shining in.

  “No, I’m not supposed to tell you anything,” Elise says, and she sounds frightened, sounds confused.

  “You don’t have to tell me anything, Elise. I haven’t asked you to tell me anything.”

  “You wouldn’t even know to ask,” the dead girl says. “You never ask anyone anything,” and that fluttering again, closer this time, twice as loud, and the light outside the window seems to swell and pulse like a toothache.

  “I won’t let it hurt you again,” Chance says, watching the window, and now there are spiderweb cracks in the glass, the shadow of something outside, something big moving around between the light and the window.

  “Is that what you think?” Elise asks. “Is that how you think this works?”

  A sucking, squelching sound from the tub, then, the last of the water and Elise down the drain, but barely audible over the noise from the window. The pane pops loud and cracks all the way across, shudders in its rotten wooden frame. And Chance remembers the hallway and Deacon’s fingers through the hole where there wasn’t a doorknob, remembers why she’s here, that Elise isn’t dead, dying, but she isn’t dead yet, and if there’s a telephone in the room she can still call an ambulance and maybe this time everything will be different. This time it will end in a hospital room and Elise crying because she knows she didn’t really want to die, Chance telling her not to cry. Or cry if she needs to, but everything will be right again anyway, wait and see, everything will be just fine.

  Chance gets up off the toilet seat, and now the condensation on the bathroom window is rising in wispy tendrils of steam, steam like little tentacles, and she can feel the heat from the light on her face.

  “I’m not supposed to show you anything,” Elise whispers, small and scared childwhisper, and Chance looks away from the light, the devouring light and the restless feather shadows, and she sees what’s lying in the empty bathtub.

  Waking up on the floor, waking up on the floor a lot these days, dreamsweat chill and the gooey aftertaste of Chef Boyardee in her mouth, and for a little while Chanc
e just lies there staring at the television screen. Familiar images to drive away the bad things in her head, John Wayne and Henry Fonda, black-and-white phosphor security blanket when there’s no one alive she can call out to, no one to turn on a light and tell her it was only a nightmare and it’s over now, no one to hold her or mumble something irrelevant and reassuring. Her left arm’s gone to sleep, jabbing pins and needles when she rolls over onto her back to stare at the ceiling, the light and dark watercolor patterns the TV screen makes on the high ceiling.

  Gunfire and startled shouts from the television, and Chance realizes that she’s going to throw up, tries a trick that Deacon taught her, counting backwards from one hundred—ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven—but it’s too late for that, and at least she manages to reach the downstairs bathroom before she pukes up all the half-digested ravioli. Heaving into the toilet bowl until her stomach’s empty again, wondering if it’s food poisoning, if maybe she caught a bug, and then she flushes and leans back against the tub, the tile floor cool against her skin. Chance wipes at her mouth with a wad of toilet paper, tosses it away and closes her eyes, heart beating slower now, and she feels better already, the sickness fading almost as quickly as it came.

  Not thinking about the bathroom because it would only remind her of the dream, trying not to think about anything but The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence playing loud in the living room. John Wayne hiding in the alleyway so that Jimmy Stewart thinks he’s the one that killed Lee Marvin, that he’s the hero and so he’ll get the girl in the end. One of her grandfather’s favorite movies, almost anything with John Wayne one of his favorites, and there are hot tears running down her face before she can think of something else. No thought safe anymore, no memory or thought that hasn’t been ruined for her, that isn’t waiting to cut, waiting to bite, and then the phone starts ringing.