Threshold

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  The sun so high, so bright, all alone up there in the bottomless sky, baking the world from its high and lonely place; Deacon moves through simmering air that smells like pine sap and sand, snakes and magnolia blossoms, pushing his way through the air as thick as the underbrush, as alive, and he walks a long time before he comes to the dirt road that leads down to the cabin. There are footprints on the road, but something wrong about the lazy splay of those toes, the wide and crooked heel, and he tries not to look at them or hear the dry, distrustful whispers from the trees.

  “Aren’t you getting thirsty?” Chance asks him. “Aren’t you getting scared?” And she passes him a bottle of something clear that tastes like pears but burns his throat like whiskey or gasoline, sets his belly on fire, and he gives her the bottle back, not quite that thirsty yet and not quite that scared, either.

  “What do you think you’re gonna find at the end of this road, Deacon?” she asks, and he shakes his head, spits to get the syrupy taste of Chance’s liquor out of his mouth, and he keeps following the tracks like he doesn’t already know where they lead and the answer to her question, like he hasn’t already seen this once before. Holding the severed finger cupped in his hands because it might have been fake, might have meant nothing at all, and “What difference did it make to you?” Chance murmurs.

  “Stop asking me questions,” he says, barks loud like a dog, sun dog following the trail of ugly footprints down the red dirt road, and something moves at the blurry edges of his vision, a shadow’s shadow beneath the summer sky. He doesn’t turn to look because he doesn’t really want to see, because it wouldn’t still be there, anyway.

  “We both know what really happened that night,” Chance says, sounding bitter, sounding hurt. “This doesn’t change a thing.”

  The road ends, and he’s watching the albino girl, or he is the albino girl this time, one or the other or both, Dancy Flammarion alone on the front porch of the cabin. Barely a shack, Deacon thinks, these four pine-log walls and a corrugated tin roof, walls studded with sunbleached antlers, a hundred or a thousand pairs of deer antlers nailed up so it bristles like a giant porcupine against the canebrake and rustling saw grass, against whatever she sees watching her from the woods. Whatever it is that draws her squinting out into the noonday sun with both barrels of the old shotgun loaded and frightens her so much that she doesn’t dare look away.

  “You still think I won’t shoot you?” she shouts at the trees, at all the places where the dusty clearing turns back into trees and tangled blackberry briars, aims the shotgun like she knows what she’s doing, pretending she’s someone who’s lived her whole life behind the Winchester when she hardly even knows how to cock the goddamned thing.

  The hot breeze dies and the trees stand tall and still, waiting for this to end, the sky holding its breath, even though it was all over a long time ago; This has already happened, he thinks, or Dancy thinks it for him, and nothing he sees will change a thing, nothing he tells Chance will ever make her stop hating him.

  “Come on back inside, child,” the old woman says from the cabin door, and that’s what she wants, all she wants, to turn around and go back inside where the sun can’t get at her, where she doesn’t have to look at the way the gray thing at the edge of the swamp is smiling; spikewhite teeth in that mouth stretching wider and wider because it can taste how afraid she is of what comes next.

  “No, Grandmomma,” she says. “Shut the door,” and Deacon turns his head, closes his eyes, and the roar of the shotgun is the sky breaking apart and tumbling down in bloody chunks to bury them all.

  Deacon lies thirsty and sweating on the bed in Chance’s grandfather’s room, Sadie curled up next to him and snoring softly, and he stares at a gun rack on the wall across from them, the shotgun like it’s followed him back from the dream; waiting for his heart to stop racing, until the dream seems enough like a dream and he remembers what he’s doing in Chance’s house, exactly how he got there. And then he tries to get out of bed without waking Sadie, but she stops snoring and blinks at him, half-awake grumble, and “It’s okay,” he tells her. “Go back to sleep. I just gotta take a piss,” and he slips past her, over the side of the bed to the nightcool floorboards. She makes a fretful sound he doesn’t understand, words or something simpler, then curls herself up tighter than before, rumpled, fetal lump of girl, and Deacon stands in the dark room watching her for a moment.

  “I shouldn’t have ever let you come here,” he mutters, like he really thinks he could have stopped her, but he might have tried a little harder, if he hadn’t been so nervous about facing Chance alone. None of this has anything to do with you, and then he wishes he knew for certain whether that’s true or just something he wants to believe.

  Sadie frowns in her sleep, presses her face deep into her pillowcase, and that makes him think of the dream sun hot against his skin, reminds him how dry his throat is, mouth like dust and ashes, and “I’ll be right back,” he says. Deacon walks as quietly as he can to the bedroom door and shuts it softly behind him.

  Down the long and creaky stairs, and he looks in the kitchen first, checks the refrigerator and rummages through all the cabinets, underneath the sink, and his hands have started to shake, the sour beads of drunksweat standing out on his forehead, as if he needs a reminder. He finds half a bottle of Robitussin-DM sitting beside the sink and hangs onto it, just in case, hates the taste of the stuff, but it might have to be better than nothing at all, might have to hold him until morning. He carries it down the hall to the dining room, from the dining room to the living room, because he remembers that Joe Matthews always kept a bottle or two tucked away inside the antique secretary, and that would be fine, that would be wonderful. But what if it’s locked, he thinks. What if Chance keeps it locked, and I can’t find the fucking key, and that’s when he sees Dancy sitting alone in the window seat.

  She turns and looks at him, might have smiled, but it’s hard to tell in the dark.

  “I wasn’t sleepy,” she says, answer before he can think to ask the question, and Deacon glances anxiously towards the old secretary sitting by itself in one corner of the room.

  “Yeah, I know what you mean,” and he sets the bottle of cough syrup down on the coffee table, sits himself down on the sofa in front of it, and Dancy nods and turns back to stare out the window.

  “Someone should stay awake,” she says.

  “Why? Are we expecting company?” Deacon asks her, and he rubs at his cheeks with both hands, wonders how many days it’s been since the last time he shaved, how many days since the last time Sadie bitched about his beard scratching her when they kissed, chased him into the bathroom and handed him his razor.

  “I think you’re making fun of me now,” and Dancy doesn’t turn away from the window to face him, might be speaking to the night or the whole world outside. “I’m used to that,” she says, not sounding very hurt or disappointed, and somehow that only makes it worse. A long second or two for him to remember what he said that she could have possibly taken as an insult, trying to think clearly through his thirst and the all too familiar certainty that he’s said or done exactly the wrong thing without even trying.

  “No, I’m not.” But he knows how much it sounds like a lie, the words hardly out of his mouth, and he doesn’t quite believe them himself; Dancy shrugs and nods her head.

  “I never had to try to make anyone believe me before,” she says. “It hasn’t ever mattered until now. It’s always been a secret.”

  Deacon steals another glance at the secretary, and now it almost seems to be mocking him from its corner, smirking with drawers and cabinet doors, its polished walnut silence, and he looks reluctantly back down at the bottle of Robitussin sitting on the coffee table.

  “You’re asking an awful lot,” he says and picks up the bottle, squints at the label, but there’s not enough light to read the small print. “You know that, don’t you?”

  Nothing for a moment, just Dancy staring out the window like she’s waiting
for something, like she’s sure it’s only a matter of time, and then, “You saw what’s in the jar,” she says. “I showed you.”

  “You showed me a severed finger, Dancy. That’s all. I don’t think we see the same thing when we look into that little jar of yours.”

  “You only see what you want to see,” she whispers from the window seat, and just the faintest trace of anger at the edges of her voice, but enough that he hears it whether she wants him to or not. Anger and something else, something righteous, indignant, a Puritan’s offense at doubt, and Deacon sets the bottle of cough syrup back down with a careless, loud thunk.

  “That’s bullshit and you know it,” and now there’s anger blooming in his voice as well, his turn for indignation, uglyblack flowers opening up between his words, and Deacon doesn’t try to hide it from her. “You wouldn’t even be here tonight if you thought that was true. Jesus, I fucking wish it was. I’d give my left nut to make it true.”

  “Then you saw more than a finger in the jar, and you just won’t admit it. You’re scared to admit it.”

  “I saw you cut it off a dead man’s hand with a kitchen knife. A dead man, okay? Not a monster, a man.”

  “That’s not all you saw, Deacon Silvey,” sounding smug, suddenly very, very sure of herself, and the anger already receding, its designing purpose served, and she’s putting it all away until the next time she needs it. You little freak, he thinks, understanding the game too late, seeing the strings after the fact. You messed-up, creepy little fuck, and he wants to cross the room and slap her, wants to shake her until her pink eyes rattle like marbles in her head.

  “Why are you a drunkard?” Dancy asks, finally turning away from the window, swiveling around to face him, “Because you don’t like hearing what the angels say, what they show you?”

  “There are no goddamn angels!”

  “It doesn’t matter what you call them,” she says, so calm, so confident. “My momma said they usually don’t care.”

  And Deacon gets up and walks quickly over to the secretary, yanks hard at the top drawer and it’s unlocked, stuffed full of paper and nothing else as far as he can tell. He slams it shut again and begins searching other drawers, opening the cabinet doors, and there’s nothing but dusty stacks of papers, bundles of envelopes tied together with string, old power and water bills, like no one in this house has ever thrown anything away. A Blue Plate mayonnaise jar half filled with pennies and nickels, an unopened box of lead for a mechanical pencil.

  “Well, that’s what my momma tried to do, too,” Dancy says from somewhere behind him, somewhere closer than her seat at the window. “She ran off to Pensacola when she was fifteen and tried to stay drunk until the angels would shut up and leave her alone.”

  Deacon comes to the last door on the secretary, pulls too hard and the brass handle comes off in his hand, this door locked against him, and he has to start all over again. Praying there’s a key hidden somewhere and he just didn’t see it the first time through, a key missed in the clutter and his sloppy, headlong inspection.

  “It didn’t work, of course,” Dancy Flammarion says, and he tells her to shut up, please shut the fuck up, but if she hears him, she doesn’t care. “So she tried to drown herself in the Gulf of Mexico. Walked right out into the water until her feet didn’t touch bottom anymore, and then she just started swimming.”

  And there it is at last, a tarnished and silvergray key masking-taped to the underside of one of the drawers; it slides smoothly into the keyhole on the cabinet door, perfect fit, slides in, and there’s an audible click when he turns it and the tumblers roll.

  “She swallowed a lot of water, but a fishing boat found her and brought her back. She said she saw bad things in the sea while she was drowning, bad things that were glad she was trying to die.”

  The cabinet door swings open, and there’s another stack of yellowed envelopes and a little strongbox, and in the very back, two unopened bottles of scotch whiskey.

  “When the fishermen were hauling her into their boat, all the bad things in the sea tried to hold onto her soul and keep her from getting away. They promised her she’d never have to hear angels ever again, told her how deep and quiet the sea was.”

  Deacon sits on the floor beside the secretary, leans against the wall, and he breaks the paper seal on one of the dustskinned bottles of Johnnie Walker Black; the bottle to his trembling lips, but Dancy is there, standing over him, watching, no expression on her porcelain face or her expression hidden by the shadows, by the night.

  “I know what you saw when you held the finger, Deacon,” she says. “And I know what it feels like to be afraid of the things that you see. I’m almost always scared.” She walks away, then, walks back to her place at the window seat, keeping watch for angels or monsters or whoever the hell comes looking for crazy albino girls who save rotting fingers in baby-food jars. Deacon raises the bottle of scotch and lets its amber fire fill his mouth and throat, merciful liquid to burn through his guts and his mind, until the warm and whiskeystinking darkness closes hard around him, and the night slips away, forgotten, like a drowning woman’s last view of the sky.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Uroboros

  THE morning sun is hot and bright across Chance’s face, shining straight through her eyelids, and the angry, uneasy dreams finally let her go, reluctantly send her dazed and blinking back to the waking world. July sun through the open window and the sugarsoft smell of dandelions and daisy fleabane from the yard below, the room filled with the smell of summer flowers and rich black coffee, and “You’re awake,” the girl says. Am I? Chance thinks, trying to remember the strange girl’s name. Am I really awake?

  “What time is it?” Chance asks, straining to read the clock beside the bed, but still too groggy to make out its blocky, digital numbers, red numbers that all look like eights or zeros, and Dancy, she remembers, the girl from the library, the albino girl, and then Chance also remembers the finger in the jar, the newspaper clippings, and worse things, and she closes her eyes again.

  “Ten thirty-four,” the albino girl says.

  “I fainted,” murky glimmer of surprise or wonder in her sleepy voice, nothing she ever expected to hear herself say. I fainted.

  “I brought you some coffee, if you want it.”

  “You didn’t have to do that,” and Chance has started thinking about the flowery smell instead of the night before, better to worry about the grass that will need cutting soon, pulling up weeds, setting traps for moles, anything but what it means that Dancy Flammarion wasn’t only a part of the dreams.

  “I don’t mind,” Dancy says. “I had to make some for Deacon anyway. He’s sick,” and Chance rubs at her eyes and sits up in bed, sees that she’s still wearing her clothes from the day before, the same pair of blue jeans and T-shirt, same socks, and she puts the pillows between her back and the headboard. Dancy hands her the coffee cup—the cup and the matching saucer, her grandmother’s good china—not the cups she uses for breakfast, but Dancy couldn’t have known that. The cup is trimmed in gold and there are primroses painted on it, pink primroses on the saucer, too.

  “Sick? What’s wrong with him?” and Dancy looks out the window like she’s said too much already; Chance takes a sip of the steaming black coffee. “You mean Deacon has a hangover,” she says, and Dancy nods her head once.

  “He’s an alcoholic,” Chance says, and she takes another sip of the strong coffee, bitter and so hot that she has to be careful not to scald the roof of her mouth, her throat; she usually takes lots of milk, milk or half-and-half, but Dancy wouldn’t have known that, either. “Deacon has hangovers the way most people have toast and jelly. It’s what he does in the morning.”

  “I think this one is worse,” Dancy says and frowns. “And besides, Sadie keeps yelling at him.”

  “Yeah, well, they deserve each other. Fuck, my tongue hurts,” and she sticks out her tongue and carefully touches the tip end of it with an index finger.

  “Deacon sai
d you bit it pretty hard when you fell,” Dancy says, and yeah, she remembers that, too, salty mouthful of blood like seawater and old pennies, then Deke wiping at her face with a wet washcloth, Deke cleaning her face and putting her to bed in her clothes.

  Chance puts her tongue back in her mouth and looks at her finger like she expects to see more blood, but there’s only a drop of coffee-stained spittle. And for a little while neither of them says anything else. Chance drinks her black coffee and tries not to think about anything but the hopeful way the morning smells, and Dancy watches the window, the ivory curtains stirring in the light breeze, the leafygreen branches of the oaks and pecan trees in the front yard. Maybe if this could just go on forever, Chance thinks, or just for a while longer, because it isn’t so bad, really, isn’t even so strange if she doesn’t think about what it means, what it all signifies—this rumpled albino girl bringing her coffee, the morning half over and Chance still in bed, Deacon puking downstairs, Deacon in her house again.

  But then the gold and primrose cup is empty, and she’s staring at the grounds stranded at the bottom, and Chance sighs, probably a louder sigh than she intended, and Dancy turns towards her. “Does your tongue still hurt?” she asks, and Chance shrugs. “Yeah, but I think the coffee helped a little bit,” and that makes Dancy smile.

  “We have to talk, don’t we?” Chance asks her, and Dancy nods again, her pink eyes like the secret insides of conch shells, like the hearts of roses, and they don’t make Chance uneasy, they actually frighten her.

  “I thought so.”

  “I didn’t mean to upset you last night,” Dancy says very softly, apology that’s almost a whisper, regretful, nervous whisper, and “I knew I shouldn’t say that . . . that word, but I had to say something that would make you believe me.”

  “I haven’t said that I believe you, Dancy. I’m not even sure what it is you want me to believe,” and that makes Dancy look away again, makes her frown again, and she chews fretfully at one of her stubby fingernails.