Threshold

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  And another parking lot then, this one as wide as the whole Gulf of Mexico, as wide as a dead sea gone all the colors of coal and blackbirds, but a shimmering glimpse of cool green trees on the other side, trees and grass and a sprinkler spraying endless crystal drops. Dancy sets her duffel down behind a pink garbage Dumpster with a hippopotamus stenciled on it, another stingy pool of shadow here, and she huddles in it, in the soursweet reek of roasting garbage and the buzzing flies trying to ruin this air that’s only stifling.

  “What happened to your hand, Dancy?”

  She looks up, and there’s a tall, thin man standing a few feet away, standing right out there in the sun, sunk up to his ankles in the blacktop but he doesn’t seem to notice or he simply doesn’t care.

  “I know you,” she says, and she does, the jug-eared man from the bus, the man with all those yellow teeth crammed into his wide, wide mouth, and he smiles for her now, showing her all those teeth at once.

  “You’re a long way from Memphis, aren’t you?” the man asks. “A long, long way from Graceland.”

  The man looks up at the sky, narrows his eyes against the day and wipes his forehead with a red-and-white checkered handkerchief.

  “Are you lost, Dancy?” he asks, honey and rattlesnake voice, and “Do you need someone to show you the way? I can do that, you know. I know all the roads—”

  “I don’t want anything from you,” she says, her throat too dry to sound brave, to sound tough, barely enough spit left to make words at all, and she swallows a thick mouthful of nothing but the parking-lot hot air. “So you may as well crawl right back where you came from and leave me alone.”

  The tall man stops smiling and folds his sweatstained handkerchief neatly before he stuffs it back into a front pocket of his gray trousers. The asphalt is all the way up to his knees now, pulling him down into the bubbling goo, and he holds a hand out to Dancy, and for a moment she thinks how wonderful and dark it would be beneath the ground, how cool down there where the sun’s never been.

  “You weren’t made for this world,” the man says. “But there are roads I could show you, night roads that wind forever between milkwhite trees, and the starlight would kiss your skin like ice. There are roads where nothing ever burns, and the sun is only a fairy tale to frighten pale children to bed.”

  Dancy looks down at her duffel bag, and there are things hidden in there that might frighten the tall and toothy man away, that might send him howling and slithering back to all the Others, but the canvas bag seems so far away and his twiglong fingers are so close. All she’d have to do is reach out and take his hand, let those skeletal fingers carry her off to the dark and soothing cold.

  “That’s a girl,” the man says, his breath falling about her like a shroud of spring water and night. “That’s a good, good girl. You know, none of this was ever really about you, Dancy. You shouldn’t have to suffer this way. Your mother should have told you the truth, the whole truth, and none of this would have been necessary.”

  And then Dancy’s fingertips brush the edge of something vast and sharp and raw, something made of lies and flesh sewn from lies, something that’s never been anything but hungry. A devouring hunger that goes on and on until the very end of time, end of the world starvation in that icing touch, and she pulls her injured, dishragswaddled hand back, makes a fist and drives her short nails through the cloth and into the flesh of her palm, squeezes hard until she knows her hand is bleeding again, until the pain is wiping the toothy man’s smile from his face, his voice from her mind. She can hear the buzzing, garbagebloated flies again, can feel the indifferent July heat on her cheeks, only the sun eating away at her now, and there’s no sign the man was ever there. Just the choking smells of tar and trash, car exhaust, and Dancy picks up her duffel bag, which seems at least twice as heavy now, steps out from behind the pink Dumpster. She fixes her eyes on the faraway sprinkler, tiny shower sweeping back and forth across the lush green lawn of what might be a church, great graywhite building of stone and confidence, imagines the water falling against her blistering skin, and Dancy steps out of the shadow and into the parking lot.

  “Well, my first guess would have been an amphineuran of some sort,” Alice Sprinkle says, looking away from the black rubber eyepieces of the stereomicroscope. The thing from the jar is lying in a small glass dish, with a little of the tea-colored alcohol to keep it from drying out. “But it’s not a chiton,” she says, leans back in her chair and reaches for her pack of Winstons on the tabletop. “It has the right sort of gills and those look like calcareous spicules there between the plates, but the plates themselves are all wrong. For one thing, chitons only have one overlapping row of dorsal plates. This thing here has a dorsal and a ventral set, almost completely encircling the body with no room for a functional foot. So it isn’t an amphineuran. I don’t think it’s a mollusk at all.”

  Alice takes a cigarette from the pack and lights it, careful to blow the smoke away from Chance who’s sitting next to her, staring at the thing in the dish. “And it’s not a worm,” Chance says vacantly, the idea that it could possibly be a worm discarded half an hour ago.

  “Nope,” Alice says, “it’s not a worm.” She sets her cigarette in an ashtray made from a huge fossil oyster shell and looks through the microscope again.

  “There’s no sign of a cerebral ganglion or any visible sensory organs, unless that’s what all those little hairs along the midline are for. But this bastard’s got a mouth on him, I’ll tell you that much,” and Alice picks up a probe and pokes gently at the front end of the thing, pushes the first set of plates apart, and Chance leans closer, watches over her shoulder. “There’s a radula, attached to the floor of what must be the digestive canal,” Alice says, “almost like a snail, so I’m guessing it’s some sort of a predator. And look at this,” and now Alice is using the probe to point at the rear of the animal.

  “The mantle tissue here’s been torn, and this last set of plates is broken along the back edges, like this thing was bitten in two or cut in half, so whatever it is, we don’t even have a whole specimen. Which just fucking figures,” and she takes her eyes away from the microscope again and rubs at them, pushes her chair back from the table. “Have a look for yourself,” she says.

  Chance leans over the scope, and there’s nothing through the eyepieces but a dusky, drawn-out blur, so she plays with the fine adjustment a moment, rotates the knobs up and down until the blur resolves, solidifies, and she’s looking at the thing from the stoppered jar, magnified ten times, and if it was ugly before, now it’s something from a monster movie.

  “I know you’ve spent the last couple of years fooling around with your little fishies and salamanders and shit,” Alice says, faintest and insincere hint of derision in her voice because she once tried to steer Chance towards studying invertebrate fossils, instead. “So I don’t know if you quite appreciate exactly how utterly full-tilt weird this thing here is.”

  “I think I’m beginning to get an idea,” and Chance rotates the microscope’s nosepiece to the next highest setting, refocuses at 40x, and she’s looking at the armored head, uses a pair of forceps to get a better view of the sharp and horny radula, pinkwhite tongue like a minute rasping file, tongue made for boring through the hard shells of other animals.

  “Then you know that we need to show this to someone over in biology, someone with a little more experience with recent animals,” Alice says, but Chance shakes her head no, and “You already promised,” she says.

  “Yeah,” Alice replies, sullen, defeated, and starting to sound more than a little annoyed with Chance, not someone who’s exactly in the habit of hiding her feelings. “I promised,” she sighs.

  “Now, have a look at this,” Chance says, changing the subject, trying to ignore the disgruntled tone in Alice’s voice, plenty enough time for that later, and she turns away from the microscope, reaches into the crate again, and this time she takes out the chunk of hematite and sandstone. “You’re pretty good with trilobit
es, right?”

  “Well, I’m not your grandmother, if that’s what you mean,” she says, and Chance passes the purplered rock to Alice Sprinkle; a long moment of silence while she examines the cluster of spiny trilobites through her bifocals, and she grins, any sign of irritation melting quickly from her face. “You and that box, girl, you’re getting to be like some kind of goddamn magic act, you know that? ‘Hey Rocky. Watch me pull a rabbit outta my hat,’ ” and then Alice glances at her wristwatch and frowns, hands the rock back to Chance.

  “Jesus, I was supposed to be over at Campbell Hall ten minutes ago.”

  “They’re Dicranurus, aren’t they?” Chance asks while Alice gathers up a stack of files and her pack of Winstons from the confusion on the table. “I know this rock’s a lot older than any record for the genus, but I think that’s what they are, anyway.”

  “Yeah, well, I think you’re probably right,” Alice says, talking fast now and another glance at her watch, another frown. “We’ve got some stuff from the Haragan Formation of Oklahoma around here somewhere. It should be in the computer, and I’m pretty sure there are a few Dicranurus. Oh, and have a look at Ceratonurus while you’re at it, just to be sure.”

  “Yeah,” Chance says. “Well, thanks,” and Alice rushes past her towards the open door, trailing a cloud of cigarette smoke and agitation; she stops in the doorway, framed in the fading late afternoon sunlight. “So, does this mean that you’re back among the living?” she asks. Chance shrugs, and “We’ll see,” she says. “Let’s take this one thing at a time.”

  “Call me tonight,” Alice says, smiling again, and then she’s gone, and Chance is standing alone, looking down at the trilobites and thinking about Dancy Flammarion and magic tricks.

  In her dream, this is the day after the night that something crawled out of the woods and took her mother away, and Dancy’s sitting on her bed pretending to read, sitting on the threadbare quilt her mother made before she was born, crazy quilt of leftover reds and browns and daisy yellows, and her grandmomma is still watching the cabin door. Sits at the table with the double-barreled Winchester across her lap, and she doesn’t take her eyes off the door or the big broken window next to it. The Bible and a box of shotgun shells on the table, a glass of water and the bloodstone onyx and silver rosary that Dancy’s grandfather brought back with him from Germany; every now and then, she picks up the rosary and fingers the vivid green beads specked with red, red and green like drops of blood on moss, whispers her prayers, and sometimes Dancy whispers along with her, matching word for word, breath for breath, and other times she stares at the pages of her book of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, one of her mother’s books from when she went off to Pensacola, and the pages are turning like autumn leaves.

  There are things of which I may not speak, all these poems she knows by heart, all these words, knows them with her eyes shut. She only has six books, besides her grandmother’s Bible, and she stares at the yellowbrittle pages, but she’s listening to the cicadas in the trees, every noise from the scalding day beyond the cabin’s walls, and if a twig snaps or a single blade of grass bends, she’ll hear it. The day a hushed tangle of sound, the droning rise and fall of insect voices and an alligator bellowing off towards Wampee Creek, and Dancy looks back down at her book of poems.

  There are dreams that cannot die . . .

  Flutter of wings then, like the day she surprised a flock of vultures picking at the carcass of a wild pig, and they all took off at once, loud and unexpected rustle of carrion feathers against air, but that sound trapped within the close pine walls of the cabin now. Her grandmother hasn’t heard, hasn’t moved, but the angel is standing on the other side of the room, watching Dancy with its flaming holocaust eyes. “You let her die,” Dancy says. “You let them both die,” because she remembers that in a few minutes she’ll look up, past the table and through the shattered window and he’ll be standing right there at the edge of the trees, watching them like he wasn’t afraid of the sun or shotguns or angels or anything. Smiling at them, all ripping teeth and skin the color of soot and blacksnakes, and Julia Flammarion’s blood still drying in his matted hair.

  There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak . . .

  “They have seen two such huge walkers in the wasteland,” the angel says, angeltongue to make the sun seem cold, to make the sun a cinder, and “I won’t listen anymore,” Dancy whispers, resentful, everything she’s lost and everything she’ll lose wrapped up like Christmas for the angel to hear. “I’m not your fucking butcher anymore.”

  Fire drips from the angel’s lips to scorch the floor, drip, drip, drip like molten lead, and now Dancy can hear rain beginning to fall on the tar-paper roof of the cabin. Fat summer raindrops, and it’s the sweetest sound, almost, sweet as the end of a fever, as ripe red apples.

  “They know of no father,” the angel roars and murmurs and wails, all those things at once, because it hasn’t noticed the rain or it just doesn’t care, “whether in earlier times any was begotten for them among the dark spirits.”

  The cool rain against the roof, and Dancy closes her eyes, so good to finally close her eyes and hear nothing now but the rain, falling harder and harder, and she doesn’t care that the angel won’t shut up or that this isn’t the way it happened. This is the way it’s happening this time, and that’s good enough for her.

  “You can’t sleep here,” her grandmother says, old woman with her rosary beads and shotgun bending close, old woman that smells like dust and wintergreen candy.

  “Now once again is the cure in you,” the angel says, and the angel smells like nothing real.

  “Wake up. You can’t sleep here, miss,” and Dancy doesn’t want to wake up ever again, wants the rain to melt her like sugar and sand, wash her away bit by bit until there’s nothing left but a sticky place on the bed, but the old woman is shaking her, and when she opens her eyes, it isn’t her grandmother, some other old woman getting wet from the sprinkler, shaking Dancy awake on the lawn of the church.

  “You can’t sleep here,” the old woman says again indignantly, and Dancy stares up at her, the wet, consoling grass pressed into her cheek, her clothes soaked straight through, and now that she’s awake the old woman retreats to the sidewalk where the sprinkler can’t reach her. “Please don’t make me call the police, miss,” she says. “I don’t want to have to call the police.”

  Dancy sits up and wipes sprinkler water from her eyes; her skin has turned the hot color of pink carnations, no telling how long she’s been lying in front of the church, the sun burning her skin, and never mind the heat, she’s shivering, and her mother told her all the things that can happen if she ever gets a bad sunburn. Dancy reaches for her duffel bag lying a few feet away from her on the lawn, and she almost remembers how she got here, dim recollections of the long and stumbling walk across the parking lot, sinking to her knees in the wet grass.

  “We can’t have people sleeping on the grass,” the old woman says, and now she sounds as bewildered as she sounds indignant. “This is a house of God. We can’t have people sleeping on the grass.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dancy says, and the sprinkler sweeps back over her, a few seconds of rain, and then it’s gone again. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”

  “Well, okay,” the old woman mumbles. “Okay, I guess, but you understand that we can’t have people sleeping here,” so Dancy gets to her feet, picks up the duffel bag, every inch of exposed skin like she’s fallen into a bed of fire ants, but she keeps moving anyway, doesn’t even wait for the traffic light to turn green, walks across the street and she stands for a moment in the shade of an elm tree growing in front of a post office. The old woman’s still watching her like she’s afraid Dancy will come sneaking back the moment she turns away; Dancy smiles at her, but the old woman only glares suspiciously from her dry spot on the sidewalk.

  Dancy notices that the dishrag bandage has come off her hand, lies bloody and discarded on the lawn in front of the church. The cut has gone an
angry, violated red at the edges, stiff and starting to swell, and it hurts too much to make a fist. She takes a deep breath of air so hot that her hair and clothes have already begun to dry, and looks over her shoulder at the steep road that leads past the post office and a health-food store, steep road leading up the mountain and towards the water works tunnel; I know exactly what’s coming, she thinks, because she does, and Dancy starts walking again.

  After Alice left, Chance switched on the antique electric fan sitting on top of one of the cabinets, something to stir the stagnant, smoky air, a token gesture against the heat. A quick search of the lab’s computer catalog turned up one whole drawer of fossils collected from the Haragan Formation of Coal County, Oklahoma, all of them tucked away in Cabinet 25, Drawer 4; ancient shells and calcite exoskeletons exposed on marly limestone or weathered completely free of the rock, stored in cardboard trays and glass vials, hand-printed labels for hundreds of brachiopods and net-like bryozoans, horn corals and trilobites, and each one filled out in her grandmother’s handwriting. Exquisitely preserved trilobites with poetic and tongue-twisting names like Leonaspis williamsi and Huntonia lingulifer, and towards the back of the metal drawer, one small Ceratonurus and several large examples of the subspecies Dicranurus hamatus elegans.

  Chance pulls a stool over to the cabinet, retrieves the chunk of Red Mountain iron ore, and spends almost half an hour comparing it to the Oklahoma fossils. Invertebrates not her strong point, more used to puzzling over crushed scraps of fish and tetrapod skulls, but she can see that the trilobites from the crate are virtually identical to the specimens of Dicranurus from the Haragan, the Oklahoma fossils perhaps fifty million years younger and not so well preserved, but the same genus, if not the same species.