Threshold

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  And then Chance reached into a front pocket of her jeans and pulled out her big Swiss Army knife, five sharp blades folded up snug in the apple-red plastic casing, a corkscrew, tweezers, and a bottle opener, and she put it in Dancy’s hand. The taxi driver honked, and Dancy stared down at the knife, confused. “My grandfather gave me this for my tenth birthday, Dancy, and I want you to hold onto it for me, just until tomorrow morning. It means more to me than almost anything else I own, and if I wasn’t absolutely sure I’d be seeing you again real soon, there’s no way I’d let you keep it for me.”

  “C’mon. We gotta go,” Deacon said, and Dancy looked up at her, no sign of comfort in her face, no sign she believed a single word that Chance had said, but she nodded once and squeezed the Swiss Army knife tight in her hand. Then Sadie and Deacon led her to the Pontiac, and in a moment the driver was turning right, back towards Five Points, leaving Chance alone in her driveway.

  And now she sits in the kitchen, 2:37 by the clock on the wall above the stove, and she’s holding the chunk of ore and sandstone from the crate, turning it over and over in her hand, examining the trilobites and the odd star-shaped impression on the other side of the rock, glancing occasionally at the dried blood on the window where the crow crashed into the glass that morning, or at the stoppered bottle of alcohol and the dark segmented thing floating inside. Like the pieces of a puzzle, or some of them are the pieces of a puzzle and the real trick is figuring out which ones are and which ones aren’t. Not used to feeling stupid, but that’s the way she feels, and maybe if sensible Alice Sprinkle were here, or her grandfather, maybe they could show her something perfectly obvious, something right in front of her nose to make sense of all this, to tie it all together: the stuff from the crate and the suicidal bird, Dancy Flammarion and the night that she and Deacon and Elise got stoned and decided to break into the old water works tunnel.

  Five more minutes, ten, and she packs the fossils and the dead thing in the jar back into the crate (and there are other things in there, as well, things she hasn’t had the nerve to look too closely at yet), leaves the ledger lying on the table and carries the rest out to her car, sets it carefully on the Impala’s backseat. Saturday afternoon, so maybe nobody will be at the lab, maybe she’ll have it to herself for a few hours, if she’s lucky. Chance goes back up the front porch steps to lock the door, checks it twice, and she’s turning towards the car again when she notices the dead crow lying at the edge of the porch, ebony wings spread wide and the crimsondark cavity in its breast like a bullet hole.

  Chance uses the toe of her boot to scoot the bird off the porch and into the grass, leaves a bloody smear on the wood, but that’ll just have to wait until later. And she tries not to think about Dancy or the crows, tries not to think about anything in particular, as she walks quickly back to the car.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners

  AFTER Deacon has gone to the laundromat, Dancy sits in the kitchen by herself and stares out the window over the stove, watches the bright patch of sky visible between the curtains, sunfaded chintz the color of buttermilk and decorated with smiling baby-blue cats. There’s a can of Coke open and getting warm, going flat on the table in front of her, the can that Sadie opened for her, Coke and some stale Oreos like she was a five-year-old. Chance Matthews’ fancy pocketknife is lying beside the Coke can, and every now and then Dancy looks away from the patch of sky and stares at the knife for a few minutes instead, those two things, the knife and the summer sky, and she listens to Sadie in the bedroom, typing slow at her computer.

  There’s no clock in the kitchen, but she knows it must be almost four by now, a few more hours until dark, only a few more hours until dark, and there’s nothing left for her to say that will make them listen.

  “He doesn’t like the light,” her mother says. “He’ll wait until dark,” and when Dancy turns away from the window, turns towards the corner where she heard her mother’s voice, she almost expects to see her, her sharp blue eyes and chestnut hair, so disappointment when there’s nothing but the peeling wallpaper and a couple of dead roaches. Disappointment, and it makes her mad, makes her glare at the dead bugs like they’re to blame somehow that her mother isn’t there.

  “But it was daytime, wasn’t it, Momma?” she asks the cockroaches, savoring the bitterness, the tiny black flakes of fury hiding somewhere deep down inside her. “It was broad daylight, and he just came on ahead anyway.”

  And it got him killed, didn’t it? her mother replies, but this time Dancy knows the voice is only in her head, and she stops glaring at the bugs, looks back at the knife. Chance’s pretty red knife. Dancy has a knife of her own, her grandmother’s big carving knife hidden at the bottom of her duffel bag, and maybe it doesn’t fold up all nice and neat, doesn’t have five blades and a screwdriver, but it always gets the job done. She touches the silver cross stamped into the red plastic, silver cross inside a sort of shield, five-sided emblem, and Dancy doesn’t know what it’s supposed to mean, and maybe it doesn’t mean anything.

  You gotta be strong now, Dancy, her mother says. Strong for all of us, and for just a moment it’s that last terrible day in the swamp again, and she can smell the heat and gun-powder smoke, can smell blood, and she closes her eyes, wants to tell her dead mother’s voice to leave her alone, please just leave her alone now because she’s been strong for a long, long time and it hasn’t made any difference at all. So much fear and guilt, all the things she’s done that she’ll never be sure if they were right or wrong, and it might go on this way the rest of her life and it still wouldn’t make any difference.

  It don’t make you crazy just because nobody else can see what’s true, her mother says, but now her voice seems farther away, hushed and far away as the sky, almost, fading like Deacon’s ugly curtains, and Dancy doesn’t want to hear any more, squeezes her eyes shut as tightly as she can and shakes her head. “I’m not strong,” she says. “I’m tired. I’m tired, and I want to stop now.” Almost says, I just want to go home, but she’s the one that built the fire when it was over, watched from the pines and brambles while the cabin burned down around her mother and her grandmother and the smoke turned the Florida twilight sky as dark as midnight.

  Dancy opens her eyes then, sudden, certain impression that she isn’t alone, and there might have been a quick and cindergray blur at the window, something staring into the kitchen with eyes like poisonous black berries, there one instant and gone the next. And then there’s only the bright and empty sky again and her right hand hurts. She looks down at it and sees she’s holding Chance’s knife, the largest blade folded out and a gash in her palm from the base of her thumb all the way to her middle finger; a big pool of her blood collecting in the space between the stale Oreos and the can of Coca-Cola, blood flowing down and around her wrist like a liquid bracelet before it drips to the tabletop.

  I know exactly what’s coming.

  Dancy drops the knife, stares at all that wasted blood for a minute and then she gets up and goes to the sink, careful to keep her eyes away from the window, whatever may or may not be out there, while she runs cold and stinging tap water over the cut. She finds an orange-and-white striped dish towel that looks almost clean and wraps it around her hand, finds another hidden behind half a loaf of moldy bread and a jar of peanut butter, and she uses it to wipe up the pool of blood on the kitchen table. When she’s done, she rinses the bloody towel and hangs it over the faucet to dry, her hand really starting to hurt now, starting to ache all the way to the bone, and she sits back down at the table, cradles her hand to her chest and listens to Sadie still pecking slowly away at her keyboard.

  The Swiss Army knife is lying on the table where she dropped it, her blood already beginning to crust on the shiny stainless steel blade, and Dancy takes a sip of the lukewarm Coke, holds it in her mouth a moment before she swallows.

  And there are no voices now, not her dead mother’s, or her grandmother, or the angel with his eyes lik
e furnace embers and his wings like a bluegray flock of herons before a hurricane. All of them forsaking her, finally, abandoning her, and maybe that’s the price for having admitted that she’s tired, that she’s too scared to go down to the dragon alone.

  “This is where it starts,” she whispers, picking up Chance’s red knife in her left hand, knife red as her blood, and “This is where it ends,” she says.

  Dancy wipes the blade on her jeans, then folds it shut again and slips it into a back pocket. She doesn’t take anything else but her duffel bag, stands at the front door for a moment because there’s something comforting in the clack-clack-clack sound of Sadie Jasper’s fingers moving over the plastic keys, Sadie making words. And then Dancy steps out into the musty hallway and pulls the door very quietly shut behind her.

  Today Chance isn’t lucky, and when she pulls up outside the lab Alice’s old Toyota pickup’s parked out front under the negligible shade of a crooked sycamore tree and all the louvered windows are cranked open just in case there’s a breeze. Chance curses, glances at the crate in the backseat, and she almost turns around and drives straight home again; not up to Alice and certainly not up to trying to explain to Alice what she doesn’t half understand herself, so almost five whole minutes spent sitting in the hot afternoon sun, sweating and listening to the unhappy rumble of the idling motor and an old Nirvana song playing loud on the radio, before she sighs and pulls the Impala up next to the truck.

  This tiny building, stingy rectangle of autumnred and shitbrown bricks, concrete blocks and peeling white paint, stranded on a neglected island of grass and gravel in the middle of a faculty parking lot on the shabby north edge of campus. Browngreen island in a baking black asphalt sea, and almost fifteen years ago one of Esther Matthews’ students carefully printed PALEONTOLOGY LAB on one of the doors, one heavy metal door at each end of the building. But no other indication that this is anything but an eyesore, maybe someplace to store files or janitorial supplies, and “Welcome to the endlessly rewarding and glamorous limbo of pure science,” Alice Sprinkle says whenever she brings a new student to the lab for the first time.

  The door’s already unlocked, already open, and Chance finds Alice at a big table in the front room, this end of the building mostly set aside for collection storage, so there are dozens of squat steel Lane cabinets, all the same battleship gray, stacked two high along the walls and another double row down the center of the room; but this one table near the door where Alice sits beneath a cloud of cigarette smoke, and she’s staring through the lens of a fluorescent magnifying lamp at a plastic tray of shale fragments, fine shale shards the color of charcoal, and she stirs intently at the bits of rock with a pair of tweezers.

  “Well, hello there, stranger,” she says, not looking up from the tray, from the lamp. “Didn’t expect to see you this afternoon, certainly not after what you said yesterday.”

  Chance sets the heavy crate down on the bare concrete floor before she replies. “Well, I didn’t exactly expect to be here, either,” she says, keeping her eyes on the crate.

  “So what’s in the box?” Alice asks, and Chance shrugs and shakes her head. “That’s a good question,” and then, before Alice can say anything else, “Do you know what my grandmother was working on when she died?” and she raises her head, risks a glimpse at the older woman.

  And now Alice does look up, lays her tweezers on the table and stares thoughtfully at Chance over the dull glare from the lamp. She’s wearing her glasses and the thick bifocal lenses make her eyes look huge and fish-like.

  “That was a pretty long time ago, Chance.”

  “Yeah, but do you remember?” and then she looks back down at the crate.

  “Not offhand. I think she was collecting again. She’d just finished a report for the Geological Survey, so she was probably out in the field. She always liked being in the field more than sitting around this shithole.”

  “Do you know what she was collecting, Alice?” and Chance hates sounding anxious, sounding impatient, wishes that Alice Sprinkle could have been anywhere but here this afternoon, anywhere else and then they wouldn’t even be having this conversation.

  “Well, if I had to bet cash money on it, I’d say trilobites. Esther was usually looking for trilobites. But I’m not telling you anything that you don’t already know, Chance.”

  “No,” Chance says. “You’re not,” and Alice points at the ammo crate, raises both her eyebrows above the wire rims of her glasses so that her eyes look even larger. “I don’t have to be a terribly clever lady to guess this has something to do with whatever’s in that box there.”

  “Some stuff my grandfather must have packed up after she died. I found it this afternoon.”

  Alice lights a cigarette and blows smoke towards the low ceiling. “And? Are you gonna tell me what it is, or is that none of my business?”

  Chance shrugs again but she doesn’t answer, stoops and picks the crate up off the floor instead, carries it over to the table while Alice hastily clears off a space big enough for her to put it down, shoves aside a stack of books, several thick volumes of the Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology and a few old journals.

  “I don’t want you to tell anyone else about this stuff,” Chance says, setting the crate in the small, uncluttered spot Alice has made on the table. “Maybe later, but not now, okay? I want you to promise me that you’ll keep this to yourself.”

  “Scout’s honor and hope to die,” Alice says, “etcetera, etcetera,” and then she crosses her heart, takes another drag off her cigarette, and “Shit, we can take a blood oath if you think it’s necessary.”

  Chance reaches down through the top layer of excelsior and pulls out the stoppered bottle. She hands it to Alice, who puts her cigarette between her lips so both hands are free, holds the bottle a few inches from her face, and stares through her bifocals at the dark thing floating inside, no particular expression now, only silent contemplation, maybe the faintest flicker of surprise. She slowly tilts the bottle on its side and shakes it gently, causing the thing inside to bob and roll over.

  “Well, it beats the hell out of me,” she says, mumbling around the filter of her cigarette. “I’ve never seen anything like it. But whatever it is, I don’t think Esther found it. Not originally, anyway.” She taps hard at the yellowed label about the size of a large postage stamp that’s pasted onto one side of the bottle. “Did you happen to notice this?”

  “Yeah,” Chance says, “I did,” and Alice holds the bottle a little closer to her face, squints to make out the spidery sepia-colored handwriting on the label, antique ink faded to an almost illegible scrawl. “Birmingham Water Works tunnel, Red Mountain, Alabama,” and she pauses for a moment, squints harder to read the second line. “October 1888. Or 1886. I’m not sure which.”

  “ ’88,” Chance says. “They didn’t dig the tunnel until ’88, so it can’t be ’86.”

  “Damn, this is one peculiar bug. Do you have any idea what Esther was doing with it?”

  Chance glances at the crate again. “There’s a letter in there from someone at the Survey. Apparently she wrote to them about the tunnel, asking if they had anything important from the site, I guess. They sent her this.”

  “I doubt it’s what she had in mind,” Alice says and turns the bottle for a different view of the thing inside. “What was it doing at the Survey?”

  “The letter says that a foreman at the water works excavation sent it to them that October. He wanted to know what it was. I assume he found it when they were digging the tunnel.”

  Alice smiles, small, approving smile for Chance, and “As usual, our girl’s done her homework,” she says. “I think we should have a closer look at this little bastard, don’t you?”

  “There’s more,” Chance says, “a lot more,” and she’s reaching back into the crate, already has her hand around the chunk of iron ore, but “No,” Alice says firmly. “Let’s take this one thing at a time.”

  Dancy knows where the tunnel is, reme
mbers everything important from all the stolen newspaper clippings and a library book on the industrial history of Birmingham, and after she leaves the castle, after she takes a deep breath and steps from mildewcool shadows into the firestorm brilliance of the summer afternoon, she heads southwest towards the mountain. As straight a line as possible with so many buildings and chain-link fences in her way, razor wire and concrete obstructions, and it doesn’t matter that the sun has begun its painful, slow descent, westward slide from a bluewhite and blindscorched Heaven, but still hours until dark and the air sizzles against her white skin, light to sear its way through the purple sunglasses that Sadie gave her and set her brain on fire. Who needs a dragon when the whole sky’s ablaze, when every breath fills her lungs with gasoline and smoke and the smell of streets that have begun to melt and flow like sticky coalblack, brimstone rivers?

  The day on Their side, and if the night ever comes, They own that as well, own that twice as much, both light and darkness set against her, and Dancy tries not to think about that, lugs her heavy duffel across Twentieth Street while the asphalt sucks wetly at the soles of her shoes; wanting to suck her all the way down to the grindstone belly of the World—and then she’s on the sidewalk again, concrete-narrow sanctuary, but she can hear the sniggering - laughter leaking from beneath the street, taunting, gravelthroated laughter for this crazy girl who thinks she’s going to do anything but die. Anything but burn forever between gnashing teeth like red-hot pokers, and she wipes at her forehead, wipes away the sweatsalt that stings her eyes and blurs her vision. Dancy turns her back on the laughing things below the street, and here’s an alley in front of her, a mean rind of halfshadow clinging to one side of the alley, and she squeezes herself into this niggardly shade, presses herself scrapbook rosepetal flat against the old bricks and mortar as far as the wall runs.