Threshold

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  The albino girl leans forward a few inches and squints at the yellowed page through her sunglasses, reaches one hand out and touches the paper with the tip of an index finger. “It’s like a horseshoe crab, isn’t it?” she asks, and Chance shrugs.

  “Well, horseshoe crabs are actually more closely related to spiders than to trilobites, but yeah, I suppose there’s a resemblance. They’re both arthropods.”

  “It’s sure an ugly little bastard,” Sadie says, and Dancy glances at her and then back to the book.

  “Sometimes I used to find horseshoe crabs in the swamps back home,” she says. “They were huge.”

  “This bug here wasn’t more than two or three inches long,” and Chance holds up her right hand, thumb and index finger a couple of inches apart for Dancy to see what she means. “Ugly, I guess, but not very big.”

  “Why’s there a red circle drawn around it?” Dancy asks, focused on nothing now but the four drawings of the grotesque creature. She stares up at Chance, her face expectant, expecting an answer, and Chance can only shake her head and shrug.

  “I’m not sure. I think my grandmother might have been studying these trilobites when she died.”

  “When she killed herself,” Deacon says coldly from his place at the window, doesn’t turn around, and “Yeah,” Chance says, glares over her right shoulder at Deacon. “When she killed herself.”

  “She drew the circle?” Dancy asks, tracing its sloppy, uneven diameter with her finger.

  “As far as I know, but I can’t say for sure.”

  “These are all dead,” and that’s not really a question but it makes Chance less nervous to talk, and so she answers it anyway. “Yeah, they are. Trilobites died out at the end of the Permian Period, about two hundred and fifty million years ago. A lot of things went extinct at the end of the Permian. It’s one of what paleontologists call the ‘Big Five,’ the five major extinction events. The fourth one got the dinosaurs.”

  “You’re lecturing,” Deacon says, takes a step closer to the window, and he lights a cigarette.

  “She wanted to know, Deke. She asked, and I’m telling her. What the hell do you want me to do?”

  “It’s okay,” Dancy says and smiles faintly, looks past Chance to Deacon. “I need to know,” and then she goes back to tracing the red circle with her finger. “Circles hold things inside, circles protect,” she says, and there’s a dry hint of the old woman voice again, just a hint, but enough to give Chance a fresh attack of goose bumps.

  “They keep things in or they keep things out,” Dancy says, almost whispering, almost singsong, and leaning closer to the book now, the weak smile already faded, and she cocks her head to one side like a cat, curious, considering, her eyes far away, and “So, you can find these around here?” she asks Chance.

  “No. Well, not exactly. This species, monstrosus, is from Africa, but I think there’s another kind of Dicranurus from the Devonian of Oklahoma. I don’t know of any from Alabama, but I suppose it’s possible. Africa and Alabama were still connected then, the way the continental plates were arranged—”

  “Monstrosus,” Dancy says softly, interrupting, excited and talking to herself if she’s talking to anyone at all; she stands up, pulling free of Sadie, and the afghan slides off her lap to the floor. Chance doesn’t move, sits with the book open on her knees, no idea what she’s supposed to do next, but she’s pretty sure that Dancy shouldn’t be getting this worked up after the scene in the kitchen.

  “This is where it began,” Dancy whispers, hushed whisper, like revelation or epiphany. “And this is where it ends,” and she’s pointing down at the book, at the drawings on the page and the red circle. “Right here, Chance.”

  “What? This is where what started?” but Dancy is already past Chance and the coffee table and on her way out of the living room, heading for the hallway.

  “Where the fuck’s she going now?” Deacon growls, finally turning away from the window, and “Just how the hell should I know?” Chance growls right back at him, and she closes the book and sets it carefully down on the table beside her.

  “Well, I think maybe we should follow her and find out,” Sadie says. “Unless either of you has a better idea.” Chance doesn’t look at Sadie Jasper, too close to telling her to shut up and go home, too close to telling them all to get the hell out of her house. She runs her fingers through her brown hair and sighs, a loud and weary sigh, and she looks over her shoulder at Deacon again.

  “Is this what you meant by ‘no more bullshit’?” she asks, not caring if she sounds sarcastic, if she’s starting to sound angry again.

  “Maybe it’s a start,” he replies, and then the three of them follow Dancy, Sadie first, and Chance last of all.

  This small blue room at the back of the house that has never been anything but a storage place for cardboard boxes and wooden crates, at least not as far back as Chance can remember. Bright and sunlit walls lined with sagging plywood and metal shelves, and some of the boxes are labeled, but more of them aren’t. Tidy and not-so-tidy boxes and crates packed past overflowing with canvas and plastic collection bags; picks and shovels filling in the corners, a hoe with a broken handle, screen-wire sieves for sifting through broken shale and the orangered clay of weathered limestone. Piles of camping equipment and a ragtag assortment of gardening tools, a rusty wheelbarrow, an oil-encrusted lawn mower missing most of its engine, and the dust as thick and fine as a gray, velvet drop cloth over everything.

  This room the perfect, disordered antithesis of the study, and Dancy Flammarion picks her way through the clutter like she’s been here a hundred times before. Chance follows her as far as the lawn mower, halfway to the far side of the room, and stops by a box marked “Moteagle, Tuscumbia, and Bangor Lms.—Summer ’59.” Deacon and Sadie are waiting together at the door, lingering in the doorway like they’re both afraid to cross the threshold.

  “What are you looking for?” Chance asks, and Dancy doesn’t answer her, but she stops abruptly in front of one of the tall, crooked shelves, aluminum utility shelf almost twice as tall as her, and Chance imagines it tumbling over and crushing the girl underneath its load of cardboard and stone. Dancy uses her palm to wipe away the dust from the ends of the boxes, pausing long enough to read the ones that are labeled, peering briefly inside the ones that aren’t.

  “Be careful, Dancy. Some of these shelves aren’t so sturdy anymore.” Chance steps over the box from 1959, and she’s almost close enough to reach out and touch Dancy now, wants to pull her back out into the hall, lock the door to this room because she doesn’t like the urgency on Dancy’s face, the grim determination as if she knows exactly what she’s looking for, as if she’s been looking for it a long, long time.

  “What the hell’s she after, anyway?” Deacon asks, and Chance shakes her head, keeping her eyes on Dancy, who’s standing on her tiptoes now, straining to get a better look at a crate on a shelf above her head. There’s nothing written on the box, nothing Chance can see, just one of the many pine ammo crates that Joe Matthews bought from the army surplus store, and she can see that it’s been nailed shut.

  “That one,” Dancy says, pointing at the crate, and she taps it hard with one finger. The shelf wobbles precariously, lists a little more to the right, and Dancy taps it again like she didn’t notice. “I need to see what’s inside that crate, Chance.”

  “It’s just a bunch of rocks,” Chance tells her, exasperated, and she looks back at Deacon for help, but he’s already stepping over and around the confusion of boxes; Sadie standing alone in the doorway now, and in a moment Deacon’s lifting the ammo crate off the wobbly shelf, all the scrawnytaut muscles standing out in his arms as he sets it on the floor at Dancy’s feet.

  “It’s nailed shut,” he says, stating the obvious, staring down at the pine lid and the heads of a dozen threepenny nails sunk deep into the strawyellow wood. There’s nothing written on the top of the crate, either, and Chance tries hard to pretend that it doesn’t make her nervous,
just one more box that her grandfather or grandmother never got around to unpacking. More junk they picked up in a quarry or a strip mine somewhere, and then she spots a pry bar leaning against the wall a few feet from where Deacon and Dancy are standing.

  “That ought to do the job,” she says, pointing out the pry bar to Deacon, deciding it’s better to get this nonsense over with, and maybe when Dancy sees that there’s nothing in the crate, nothing at all but a bunch of rocks, maybe then she’ll be satisfied, maybe then Chance can get them all out of her house and this will finally be over.

  The nails make an ugly noise that isn’t exactly a squeak or a scrunch, a bit of both at once, something in between, as they bend and twist and pull free of the wood, the flat end of the pry bar forced in between the lid and the upper edge of the crate, and Deacon works it back and forth, up and down, until the lid gives one last squeakyscrunchy protest and pops completely loose. He picks it up, examining the underside of boards studded with nails still as sharp as the day they were driven into the crate, nails like cold steel teeth. Dancy is on her knees, kneeling beside the open crate, digging through cotton and excelsior, and Chance takes another hesitant step towards her.

  “What is it? What’s in there?” Sadie asks from the doorway, but no one answers her.

  “Your grandmother understood about the monsters,” Dancy says. “She knew about the Children of Cain, about the nightwalkers,” and there’s still that excitement in her voice, but an excitement weighted at the corners now by some solemn purpose, by the gravity of whatever she thinks is waiting for them beneath all that packing material. You really are crazy, Chance thinks, crazy as a loon, almost says it aloud, and then Dancy pulls something from the crate, a thick ledger, and she looks at it a moment and passes it to Chance.

  “This was my grandmother’s,” Chance says, hearing the distant flatness in her voice, maybe a shred of surprise, too, as she reads the first page, reads it to herself because it wouldn’t mean anything to Deacon or Dancy or Sadie, anyway. “Notes on Trilobita of the Red Mountain Fm., L. and M. Silurian, Alexandrian-Lockportian, Alabama Valley and Ridge Province,” and a date, March 1991, all scribbled down in her grandmother’s tight and almost indecipherable cursive.

  “This is what she was working on when she died,” Chance says, flipping through the pages, perhaps the first hundred or so filled up with Esther Matthews’ handwriting and a few hurried sketches of various species of trilobites, some familiar and some a mystery, and then the rest devoted to what look like geometry problems. “But what the hell’s it doing hidden away in here?”

  On the floor, Dancy has pulled something else from the crate and holds it up for Chance to see. A large piece of purplered rock, rock the color of dried blood, and Chance knows right away that it’s iron ore, a fist-sized chunk of sandstone and hematite from the mountain. “Dicranurus,” Dancy says, and she’s smiling, some of the solemnity that was there only a moment ago vanished; she looks proud of herself.

  Chance takes the rock from her, and there are indeed five or six trilobites exposed on one side, the largest no more than an inch and a half across, shinydark exoskeletons preserved on the granular sandstone, a concentric ring of scrape marks surrounding the fossils where her grandmother must have used small chisels and picks to clean away the hard matrix. No mistaking the identity of these trilobites, the bizarre ornamentation, the coiling occipital ring spines like slender ram’s horns. “Goddamn,” she whispers, realizing these rocks are too old, this rock tens of millions of years older than any published records of Dicranurus, realizing how important these fossils must have been to her grandmother, a new species at the very least, and “Now, Chance, turn it over,” Dancy says.

  For a moment, Chance can’t take her eyes off the amazing little animals on the maroon chunk of ore, knows that whatever Dancy wants her to see can’t be half this incredible. But “Please,” Dancy says, “it’s important,” so Chance turns the rock over, only expecting to find more of the trilobites.

  “That’s why your grandfather hid these things,” Dancy says. “That’s why your grandmother died.”

  And as far as Chance can tell, it’s just another fossil, not a trilobite but something she’s never seen before, and she holds the rock closer to her face, turns so she isn’t blocking the noonday light through the windows. A perfect star-shaped impression in the stone, no bigger than a quarter, and at its center a sort of polyhedron, upraised polyhedric structure that she thinks has seven sides, but there might be more, and its smooth surface glints iridescent in the light.

  “What are you?” she asks the rock, as if it might answer, and then Dancy is holding up something else, forcing her to look away from the strange fossil; a small bottle, old-fashioned apothecary bottle, Chance thinks, ground glass stopper shoved in tight, and there’s an inch or two of tea-colored liquid inside. Chance sets her grandmother’s journal down on a big cardboard box that originally held cans of Green Giant creamed corn, “Fort Payne Chert, Happy Hollow, ’65” scrawled on one side in her grandfather’s hand, and she takes the bottle from Dancy.

  “This is where it all begins,” the albino girl says. “The teeth of the dragon.”

  Chance ignores her, stares into the small bottle, the murky liquid inside, and there’s something else, something like a fat slug, curled up dead and floating on its side. And then she sees the segments, the armored segments of its wormlike body, and the fine and bristling hairs growing between the plates.

  “The dragon has a hundred thousand children,” Dancy says, “And it was old when the angels fell from Heaven.”

  “What is it, Chance?” Deacon asks. “What the hell’s she talking about?” and Chance turns towards him, turns slow and holds the bottle out for him to see.

  “You tell me, Deke,” and Chance sits down on the floor beside Dancy to see what else has been waiting out the last eight years inside the ammo crate.

  Midafternoon before Chance is finally alone in the big house, sits alone in the kitchen and stares at the wooden crate where Deacon left it sitting on the table, where she asked him to put it before she apologized and herded all three of them towards the front door. “I have to have some time to myself,” she said. “To think.”

  And an expression on Dancy’s face then that was almost panic, the joy or relief at her discovery replaced abruptly by alarm, and “No, Chance. There isn’t time,” she said and grabbed hold of Chance’s shirtsleeve. “They’ll know that you found it, that you’ve begun to see what’s going on. It’s not safe to be alone.”

  Chance glanced at Deacon and Sadie, beseeching glance, and “We’ll come back tomorrow,” Sadie said, reassuring words and a hand on Dancy’s shoulder, something meant to comfort her, but no room for comfort in that face, those pink eyes tinted magenta by the purple sunglasses.

  “Tomorrow will be too late,” she said, and then to Chance, “We haven’t even talked about the tunnel. We have to talk about the tunnel, and we have to go there, today, while there’s still time.”

  “That tunnel’s been there for more than a hundred years, Dancy. It’ll still be there in the morning,” and Chance very gently pried Dancy’s fingers from the sleeve of her T-shirt. “I have to read the things my grandmother wrote in this ledger,” she said. “There’s a lot I have to think about.”

  “It’s not safe,” and Dancy was getting hysterical, close to tears, close to something Chance didn’t want to hear or see, maybe another of the seizures or she was about to start talking in the creepy old woman voice again. And “You won’t be safe here all by yourself, not when they come,” Dancy pleaded. “None of us will be safe when they find out what we know.” She brushed Sadie’s hand off her shoulder then, wiped it roughly, quickly, away like a dangerous insect or the uninvited touch of an unclean person, a beggar or a leper, but her eyes still fixed on Chance.

  “Goddamn it, there isn’t anything left to understand, and you don’t need to understand. That’s what they want you to do, to try to make sense of what’s been ha
ppening, to try and understand what there’s no way to understand. They want you to think about it, because then you’ll start doubting everything, and that buys them time.”

  “Dancy,” Chance said, trying hard to sound calm, hiding the anger blooming hot and violent inside her.

  “I’ve seen all of this before,” Dancy said, and there were tears leaking from behind her sunglasses, tears starting to roll down her pale cheeks. “I know exactly what’s coming.”

  “Chance, maybe we should listen to her,” Sadie said. “She knew about the box, didn’t she, so how can you be so sure . . .” But the look on Chance’s face enough to cut her short, the look that showed her anger and the brittle end of her patience even if she didn’t say it out loud.

  “Tomorrow, Sadie,” she said, firm, no room left for debate.

  “Yeah,” Deacon replied, careful to keep his eyes down so that Chance couldn’t see them, so he couldn’t see her, either. “Tomorrow. I gotta be at work in a few hours, anyway, or old lady Taylor’s gonna bust a gut. I’ve already been late twice this month.”

  And Chance called a taxi and followed them to the door, Deacon hauling Dancy’s duffel bag, severed finger and all, and Dancy crying harder, begging Chance to let them stay. Sadie was trying to console her, promising her that everything would be fine, that Chance could take care of herself and nothing was going to happen to any of them.

  Five more minutes before the taxi pulled up out front, a bright green Pontiac sedan this time instead of a station wagon. “You’ll see,” Dancy said, hard to make out what she was saying through the tears and the snot, the breathless, hitching sobs. “I can’t protect you if I’m not here.”