Threshold

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “And that means what, exactly?” Chance asks, her voice low but seeming very loud in the empty lab. Her head too full of questions, and most of them have nothing at all to do with trilobites. No, that would be simple, she thinks. That would be easy, better than the ghosts dredged up by this box of oddities, better than trying to recall exactly what it was she did and did not hear the stormy night her grandmother hung herself. What she does and does not know about her grandfather, trying to imagine why he would have hidden any of these things, buried Esther Matthews’ last, hard work instead of finishing it himself. Obvious now that they must have been arguing about these fossils the night she died, these fossils and maybe the thing in the jar, as well, but why? The trilobites almost certainly a new and undescribed species, and a Silurian record of the genus Dicranurus would be a small but important addition to the long story of trilobite evolution, evidence that one lineage of the group was far older than previously suspected, but still a common enough sort of discovery, the sort of problem her grandmother spent her life solving.

  Chance slides the drawer full of Haragan fossils back into the gray steel cabinet, closes the door and locks it. Questions for a dead man, and maybe she’s better off not asking them. Perhaps there’s nothing left to do but follow Alice’s advice and pass the things from the crate along to the people best suited to solve whatever mysteries they pose, whatever scientific mysteries, and leave the rest alone. Secrets between her grandparents that she might be happier not knowing, their secrets, their problems, and neither of them burdened with them any longer. So she sits on the stool in front of Cabinet 25, listening to the whir of the fan across the room, and stares blankly down at the fossils embedded in the piece of ore.

  So what about Dancy, and what about Elise? What about Deacon? and she suspects these are only more questions better left unanswered; too many unlikely or impossible connections drawn for the wrong reasons, string art for loss and hurt and insanity, too little that she can hold in her hands, that she can see; Chance turns the rock over, and there’s the star-shaped fossil on the bottom and the smaller polyhedron centered within the stellate impression. She’d completely forgotten about it, and I’ll have to remember to show you to Alice, she thinks. No doubt it’s only some echinoderm she’s never seen before, a poorly preserved crinoid or an eocrinoid, possibly something rarer, a very early true starfish, perhaps, and wouldn’t that make this chunk of rock something special?

  The sunlight through the windows is getting dim, already fading away towards twilight, towards the merciful end of this long, weird day, and Chance squints to get a better view of the fossil. She counts the sides of the polyhedron, and there are seven, not an unusual number for the plates of some pelmatozoans, so it’s probably only a crinoid after all. She tilts the rock a little to one side, and the flat surface of the plate glimmers beneath the stark row of fluorescents overhead, an almost oily sheen off the septahedron.

  Unpleasant light, Chance thinks. An unclean, slippery sort of light, and she scolds herself for letting all the weirdness get to her, letting it freak her out like children telling spooky stories. But then the rock seems to wink at her again, briefest flash of greasy light, and there’s something else, the realization that it’s difficult to look directly at the septahedral plate for very long, that it seems to force her eyes away after only a few seconds.

  She carries the piece of iron ore back across the room to the table with the microscope. There’s a wooden case somewhere in all the clutter, polished wooden case with a pair of digital calipers inside, and that’s what she needs right now, the mundane certainty of measurements to clear her head. She sets the rock aside and begins searching under computer printouts and pages torn from notebooks, Alice’s tray of broken shale, and she doesn’t find the calipers, but there’s a protractor, black lines and numbers printed on translucent green plastic. And that’s even better, really, following the vertical and horizontal axes to find the specific angles of the septahedron, simple and everyday exercise to bring her back down to earth.

  Chance reaches for the rock again, hears something outside, and she pauses, thinks she hears footsteps at the gravel edge of the parking lot; probably Alice finished with her meeting and dropping back by to see if Chance is still working, hoping that she is and wanting to talk, or it’s just someone taking a shortcut. Chance glances towards the lab door standing wide open, the last of the day in sunset reds and oranges bleeding away outside, and then the footsteps stop somewhere near one corner of the building, corner closest to her and closest to the door. And immediately there’s another sound, a snuffling animal sound that makes Chance think of pigs and dogs, and her skin prickles with the sudden urge to shut the door, to run and shut it quickly, but she makes herself stand still and listen.

  The snuffling is getting louder, right up against the wall now, maybe less than five feet between her and whatever’s making the noise, five feet and a brick wall. Chance puts the protractor down again, and she keeps her eyes on the open door.

  It’s just a dog, just a hungry, stray dog sniffing about for something to eat, and she tries to picture the ribsythin mongrel in her head, the skittish kind of stray that always looks as if it expects you to kick it, that flinches if you so much as look at it hard.

  The snuffling stops as abruptly as it began, but another sound to take its place, like a very big dog panting, breathless, wet pant from mottled canine lips, and under that, much softer, hardly as loud as Chance’s heartbeat, a noise no dog could make. A wheezing, satisfied sigh and then a laugh that isn’t anything like a laugh, a thin and labored sound trying to pass itself off for a laugh. And a long shadow falling across the crumbling square of concrete set in front of the door, falling across the threshold and into the lab itself, crooked, laughing shadow like the sun shining past the mockery of a dog made from sticks and baling wire.

  And Chance turns and runs, no more room left inside for explanations, no room for deciding what can and cannot be with that shadow slipping towards her, dragging its maker close behind. She follows the long, dark hall that divides the lab straight down the middle, doesn’t bother fumbling about for the light switch because it can’t be more than fifty yards to the door at the other end, fifty yards of pitch darkness, and the only light is back the way she came. She can hear it behind her now, the uneven click and scrape of claws on the cement floor, the panting noise, and then Chance runs into the door, hits it so hard she almost falls, sees stars or only pinprick holes in the gloom, and there’s a long and terrible moment when she can’t find the doorknob, another when it’s locked and she has to search for the dead bolt. Certain that she isn’t alone in the hallway now, that the snuffling, laughing thing is striding though the darkness on its long stilt legs, broomstick, mophandle legs, and then the dead bolt turns and the door swings open, and Chance tumbles out into daylight. Almost falls again, and she runs at least another hundred feet across the gravel and asphalt before she stops and looks behind her, and there’s nothing back there but the lab door standing open and the taunting blackness coiled inside.

  Dancy knows perfectly well where the entrance to the water works tunnel is, spent enough hours, enough days, at the library studying the maps and diagrams of Red Mountain in a book called Birmingham Bound, finally snuck the book into a restroom and carefully ripped out the relevant pages, has been keeping them folded at the bottom of her duffel bag in case she forgot. But she hasn’t forgotten, doesn’t need to open up the wet duffel and find the maps because she remembers: follow Nineteenth Street South, all the way to the place where it dead ends at Valley View Park. More like the streets have forgotten where they’re supposed to lead, and she keeps turning when she means to go straight, has walked the same circle around Ramsey High School three times now, almost like her ninth birthday when she and her mother took the bus into Milligan to see a carnival. A big, noisy carnival on the edge of town and she got lost in the hall of mirrors. Almost like that, walking three times around the same block, reading lies on street
signs, passing corners that aren’t there until she looks over her shoulder.

  The sun has begun to set, too low now to make her sunburn worse, and the air’s cooler, but there’s precious little comfort there, not when her skin’s already gone the color of a boiled crawfish; fat blisters on the backs of her hands, on her sweatsmooth cheeks, enough aches and chills that she’s sure she’s running a fever, and pretty soon it’ll be dark and They won’t have to bother playing games with street corners anymore.

  Dancy looks up, stops walking and counting the cracks in the sidewalk, counting off her steps, and she sees that she’s standing in front of the high school again. The cut on her hand is bleeding, fresh drops of blood spattering the cement at her feet, and her other arm’s gone numb from carrying the duffel. She lets the heavy bag slide off her shoulder, thump to the ground, and stares up at the high and cloudless sky, knows that it would be so easy to just sit down and wait for this to end, caught in their clever mirrorstreet trap, going round and round until night comes crashing down on top of her, and then the nightwalkers can take their time. Then they can do all the things they’ve always promised they would do, sooner or later, worse things even than what they did to her mother before she finally died.

  “All this crazy shit, and now you’re just gonna give up?” and Dancy turns to see who said that, already knows, but turning anyway, and the smiling, rawboned man from the bus is sitting near the bottom of the stairs that lead up to the whitewashed front doors of the high school. The man from the parking lot, and his face has grown almost as long and hairy as a wolf’s, no need for masks with twilight so close.

  “Hell, you might as well have stayed on the bus, girl, done like you said and rode it all the way to Graceland.”

  A rustyblue Volkswagen bug rattles by, and the man on the steps smiles and waves to the driver and the driver smiles and waves back. Dancy wonders exactly what the woman in the car saw, and then the chills are back and she’s shivering too hard to care. Her head feels light, head like a rubber helium balloon, and she puts her bleeding hand around her throat to keep it from floating away.

  “Ain’t you never even heard of umbrellas?”

  “I’m sick,” she says to the man, and he blinks his eyes like swollen red-wasp stings, eyes like blind things inside his skull wanting out, and “No,” he says. “You’re dying. I think you’ve been dying all along.”

  Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to let go, Dancy thinks. Maybe it would be good, and she can see her head rising up and up above the trees and the rooftops, sailing away into the summer sky, and then she wouldn’t have to listen to men with wolf faces and running-sore eyes.

  “Frankly, I’m a little disappointed. I thought you’d put up more of a fight,” the man says. “We were all impressed, the way you handled things back there in Florida. I thought, ‘Look at this one here. This one’s gonna teach us all a thing or two.’ ”

  “He killed my mother,” Dancy whispers, and she’s disappointed, too, has turned loose of her throat, but her head’s still on her shoulders, just a sticky smear at her throat from her bleeding hand, sticky handprint smear on the collar of her T-shirt. “He killed my mother, and then he killed my grandmother.”

  “That’s right,” the man says and runs a long pinkred tongue around his muzzle, maybe the sight of her blood making him hungry, and he leans towards her and sniffs at the air. “He did. But you fixed his little red wagon, didn’t you? You even waited around until his momma came looking for him, and you put some holes in her, too, didn’t you? Damn, you were gonna send us all to Hell. Isn’t that what you said?”

  “No. That’s what the angel said,” and Dancy doesn’t think she can stand up much longer, wants to sit down on the sidewalk beside her duffel bag if the smiling man intends to talk her to death.

  “There ain’t no angels, girl. I thought you would’ve figured that out by now.”

  “Can I sit down, please? I think this will all make more sense if I sit down,” but the smiling man laughs and shakes his head. He holds out a hand to Dancy, opens his long fingers and there’s a fat silkwhite roll of twine lying in his hairy palm.

  “Not just yet,” he says firmly. “You’ve done us harm, child, and we expect a little more sport for our trouble,” but when she reaches for the twine it rolls out of his hand and bounces down the steps towards her. Dancy stoops to pick it up, moves slow because she’s very dizzy, and when she looks back at the place the man was sitting he’s gone.

  This is what they want me to do, isn’t it? she thinks, They want me to find the tunnel; it doesn’t make sense, but she’s pretty sure that doesn’t matter anymore, all of it gone beyond making sense, and Dancy ties one end of the smiling man’s twine around the trunk of a small dogwood tree growing in front of the high school. A strong square knot, and she tugs at it with what’s left of her strength until she’s sure it’s strong enough, sure that it won’t slip loose. Then she crosses the street, leaves a careful, straight line of string on the blacktop, and when she’s on the other side, loops it twice around the post of a bright yellow school-zone sign before turning left and trailing it along the ground behind her half a block to the corner of Thirteenth Avenue and Nineteenth Street.

  Another loop around another silver post, and this time she turns right, turns south, and when she looks back the school is already growing small and distant and she knows she’s found her way out of the maze, that he’s shown her the way out. Dancy unwinds the twine as she walks, lets it fall to the ground to mark the way she’s come, Hansel and Gretel bread-crumb trick, something she’ll recognize if she starts going around in circles again.

  She’s almost all the way to the corner of Fourteenth and Nineteenth before she realizes that she left her duffel bag back at the high school, everything she owns in there: the few small things she saved from the cabin before it burned, photographs of her mother and grandmother and grandfather, her grandmother’s rosary, the big carving knife. But she doesn’t have the strength to walk all the way back and retrieve it, not if she’s going to reach the park, if she’s ever going to reach the tunnel at the end of this road.

  Dancy tries not to think about the duffel bag, crosses the street, is busy wrapping the twine tight around one leg of a mailbox when she hears the sound and looks up. Sharp and wooden sound like someone tapping a broomstick hard against the pavement, sound like tapping broomsticks and rustling straw. She’s heard that sound once before, tap-tapping along a midnight alley in Savannah, and she tries to stop shivering for a minute, long enough to listen, tries not to think about how bad she hurts.

  But there’s only the scoldingharsh squawk of a mockingbird somewhere close by, and the constant city sound of traffic; Dancy stands up, so dizzy and hot, and she only wants to lie down on the cooling sidewalk. The eastern sky turning indigo and violet while the west burns alive, and there’s a cold crescent moon hanging in between; the heavens like a velvet lullaby for her, an apology for what the sun has done to her skin and what the night gives shelter. Lie down, Dancy. Lie down and close your eyes, but the memory of what she saw that night in Savannah enough to get her moving again, unwinding more of this ball of string that isn’t getting any smaller, and she knows she could walk all the way back to Florida and it never would.

  This unhealing cleft in the side of the mountain, deep furrow between park-tended grass and trees that have already turned the dusk beneath their branches into night; steep red earth on either side and rough gray boulders, and Dancy walks up to the gates of the water works tunnel. Hundreds of miles, a thousand, to bring her finally to this spot, to stand before this grim and mosscrusted façade of limestone blocks and mortar, the entrance with its rusty iron gate and a small window set high on either side. No bars across the windows, but they’re both so small and so high that it doesn’t matter, because no one’s going in or coming out that way.

  This is the ravenous stone face that Dancy’s dreamt of so many times, the same yawning, toothless mouth and those vacant, hollow eyes. Face
of the thing that killed her mother and the vengeful ebony thing that came to take its body back into the swamp, the face of the smiling man from the Greyhound bus and the black-haired woman in Waycross with stubby, writhing tentacles where her breasts should have been, the pretty boy in Savannah who showed her a corked amber bottle that held three thousand ways to suffer, three thousand ways to hurt, before she killed him. All of them dead because that’s what the angel said, and she’s standing here holding tight to these iron bars so she doesn’t fall, too weak to stand, and the mountain looming above her, because this is where the angel said she had to go.

  This entrance to all the nowhere places where their gods sleep, where they’ve slept since the first day, the first scorching sunrise, and Chance Matthews should be here beside her, Chance and Deacon, and she should have her duffel bag and all the things inside. All this way, and now she knows that this is as far as she goes, that she can only stand and stare between the bars into the blackness beyond this gate sealed with loops of chain like serpent coils and a shiny new padlock, can only glimpse the elbow bends of enormous water pipes, the corroded valves slick with mold.

  Dancy’s started shaking so badly that her teeth clack loud as a pocketful of pennies, loud as jumping railroad steel under locomotive wheels, and she shuts her eyes, sits down with her back against the gate, her back to the abyss and its mushroom-damp exhalations. Doesn’t move again until her head has stopped swimming enough that she can tell up from down, right from left, and she reaches into her jeans pocket and takes out Chance’s red knife.

  She opens the largest blade and uses it to sever the twine, and then Dancy drops the rest, and the ball of string rolls away into the shadows, rolling all the way back to the smiling man, for all she knows or cares. She ties the free end to one of the iron bars, ties it tight, a knot to match the one around the dogwood’s trunk, and there are sounds coming from the trees now, from the dark beneath the trees, and the spindly things crouched there, broomstick legs and the huffing breath of thirsty dogs.