Threshold

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Now we have to find her. We have to make sure that she’s okay,” and without another word, Sadie leads him around the corner.

  Less than a block from the park, and Sadie steps on a chunk of broken bottle, viciousgreen 7UP shard hiding in the grass and dandelions at the edge of the sidewalk, overgrown edge of someone’s yard, and it leaves an inch-long gash in the heel of her right foot.

  “Jesus, we’re almost there,” she says. “We can’t stop now,” and she’s trying to act like it doesn’t hurt like hell, like she hasn’t noticed all the blood on the concrete. But Deacon makes her sit down anyway, and he squints grimly at the cut by the dim yellow light from a nearby porch.

  “It’s pretty deep,” he says, scowling at the bottom of her foot. “I think you’re gonna need stitches.”

  “Well, I can fucking need stitches later,” and Sadie starts to get up, but he makes her sit back down again.

  “I can’t let you walk on that, baby. I wasn’t kidding when I said it was deep,” and now he’s hastily unlacing one of his sneakers, takes it off and pulls his sock off as well. Sadie hardly even notices what he’s doing, stares anxiously towards the park, her eyes following the row of sodium-arc fireflies and lamplit windows bracketing the street, electric fairy trail that ends in Dancy and the hole in Red Mountain. She can see the edge of the park from where she’s sitting, and there aren’t any lights at all back there. Just the night curled in on itself, pressed black against the earth. “It’s trying to stop me, Deacon,” she says, her voice gone as brittle as a handful of old newspaper clippings, so close to tears now, but she doesn’t care. “It’s trying to keep me from getting to her.”

  “What are you talking about, Sadie? What’s trying to stop you?” Deacon slips the white tube sock on over Sadie’s injured foot and she flinches, grimaces and closes her eyes; she can feel the hot tears leaking down her cheeks, tears that have a lot more to do with anger than any pain, more to do with the bottomless conviction that she’s failed Dancy than her fear of laughing shadows or scrawny, grinning dog monsters.

  “Why won’t you tell me what happened at the apartment? What did you see back there?” and she looks up at him, then, no time or patience for this, every second they sit here talking a second lost, a second wasted, and “Why won’t you tell me about the tunnel, Deke?” she asks him, hoping she sounds every bit as resentful as she feels. “You haven’t told me a goddamn thing since this began. Like it’s all some holy fucking secret between you and Chance, like I’m just too stupid to understand, or it’s none of my business. Like I’m too big a flake to deal with it. Well, fine. Wonderful. It doesn’t matter anymore. Right now all that matters is that you find Dancy before something happens, because there’s no one else to help her.”

  Deacon watches her silently for a moment, the surprised, uncertain expression on his face that says maybe he’s seeing her for the first time, that perhaps he’s never seen more than a pale ghost of this angry, bleeding girl, and “Yeah,” he says finally. “But you’re staying here, Sadie. Promise me you’ll wait right here for me to come back.”

  “Cross my heart,” and she does, draws a big X across her left breast, then glances down at Deacon’s ridiculous white sock stuck on her foot. Cottonwhite sock turning scarlet, and “Be careful,” she says. “I don’t know what I saw, if I even saw anything at all, but . . .” and she pauses, hunting words that aren’t there. “It was something wrong, Deacon.”

  Part of her hoping that he’ll laugh at her, tell her she’s full of shit, but Deacon only rubs at his stubbly cheeks and puts his tennis shoe back on his bare foot. “Everything’s gonna be okay,” he says, and Sadie can tell how much he wants her to believe him, even if he doesn’t believe himself. So she smiles, and Deacon leans forward and kisses her, a quick kiss that leaves her lips tingling, the faint, musky taste of him on her mouth, and she tries to stop crying. He stands up and points at the porch behind her.

  “Stay close to the lights, okay? If you hear anything, I want you to head straight for that house there. Or if I’m not back here in ten minutes. Don’t think about it, Sadie, just do it. Tell them to call the cops.”

  “I love you,” she says, but Deacon has turned away and he doesn’t seem to hear her, too busy staring up the street at the darker place where the park begins.

  “Everything’s gonna be okay,” he says again, and then he’s moving away from her, his long strides carrying him quickly off into the gloom, and she’s alone with the ache in her foot and the air that smells like kudzu and her blood drying on the sidewalk.

  Deacon Silvey never saw the park or the entrance to the water works tunnel before he met Chance Matthews. She brought him here the first time, a few weeks after they began seeing each other. Someplace different to get drunk and hang out, someplace to talk, and she showed him the old blockhouse at the entrance to the tunnel, and they shared a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, listened to Nick Cave on Chance’s boombox, while she pointed out fossils in the limestone boulders scattered near the tunnel. Hard rock the dingygray color of lead, weather-rounded clumps of ancient reefs mashed flat by unimaginable pressures and the weight of ages.

  They sat together in the grass while she talked, teaching him how to tell the difference between sponges and algae, bryozoans and corals, that there was a trilobite, Acaste birminghamensis, named after the city, and then telling the story of the men who’d carved the hole through the mountain more than a hundred years before. This tunnel one link in a system designed to bring fresh water all the way from the Cahaba River five miles south of the city, rough shaft dug more than two thousand feet straight through the limestone and chert and iron-ore bones of the mountain, and “My grandmother did some collecting in there sometime back in the early nineties,” she said.

  “So that’s why you’re such a big ol’ geek,” and he grinned and scratched at his chin. “It’s all your grandmomma’s fault.”

  Chance smiled back at him, and “Well, can you think of anything else I could do with my life that could ever possibly be half this splendid, half this important? I’m learning to read, Deke, and not just the handful of things men have been around long enough to write down. The history of the whole damned planet is written in rocks, just lying there waiting for us to learn how to read the words.

  “How to read time,” she said, and he kissed her, then, tasting the bourbon on her tongue and wishing he could share even the smallest part of her passion, loving her for that if nothing else, that she was still alive. That she had not lost herself, had not lost her heart or wonder, and perhaps she was strong enough that she never would.

  But tonight that afternoon seems as far away and unredeemable as a time when the mountain was still silt, still mud, and living, oceanwarm waters blanketed the world, and Deacon pauses where the street dead-ends. Where the blacktop turns abruptly to well-tended park lawn and a winding trail leads between and through the trees to a picnic table near the blockhouse, and he looks back over his shoulder. He can’t see Sadie from here, just the soft glow of porch lights and all the cars lined up neatly along both sides of the narrow, sloping street.

  And he’s suddenly so terribly afraid for her, this last thing keeping him together, tether for his shabby soul, and he wants to run back to Sadie and take her away from here, let Dancy fight her own demons, and he’ll forget about Chance once and for all, forget the rainy night in April when he and Chance and Elise Alden came here with a pair of bolt cutters, and that’s where all this crazy shit started, isn’t it? Everything that’s gone wrong and keeps going wronger, whatever the hell happened here that none of them ever talked about and now Elise is dead. Forget that and forget the ghosts he’s spent his whole life seeing, the horrors he left Atlanta to escape. Walk away right now, and finally he’ll just be plain old Deke; if he can’t get it from Sadie or a good bottle of whiskey then who needs it, anyway. Who needs their whole goddamn life turned into a bad episode of the Twilight Zone, and Deacon takes one step away from the nightshrouded park.

/>   “Don’t you think maybe you’ve come just a little too far for that?” and the steelhard and silk and burning voice is both inside him and hiding somewhere just out of sight, somewhere on the trail leading to the tunnel, and he knows it’s his own voice just as surely as he knows that it’s Elise’s, as surely as it’s Dancy Flammarion’s. All these things at once like all the fraying lines of a wasted, coward’s life that have brought him here and won’t let him walk away, and Deacon turns to face the darkness waiting beneath the trees.

  And that’s when he sees the string looped tight around the trunk of a small dogwood growing beside the trail, white twine like lost kite string leading from the street to the tree and then on to the next tree after that. Deacon reaches out and gently brushes the taut cord with the tips of his fingers, the fingers of his left hand, like he shouldn’t have known better, and all the smells of the muggy July evening are immediately swept aside by the sweetraw stench of putrefying fish and oranges. His knees suddenly gone weak as kittens and he has to hold onto the tree to keep from sinking to the ground, the pain at his temples, migraine throb between and behind his eyes, and “No,” he snarls. “Not now,” as if he has some say in the matter, as if there’s any way to intimidate or bargain with the hole tearing itself wide around him, tattered hole in time or his sanity, and Deacon can only lean against the little tree and watch.

  The iridescent eyes beneath writhing, seeping trees with fat leaves as soft and white as cheese, the lupine faces roughly woven from straw and hair and feathers, and “They hold to the secret land,” Dancy says. Dancy slumped against the iron gate, the tunnel at her back, and she holds something out in front of her, something small and sharp and silver that catches the faint glint of starlight through the sick and ashen trees.

  “. . . the wolf-slopes . . .”

  And Deacon’s lost his hold on the tree now, the ground as insubstantial beneath his hands and knees as the sky overhead, the jealous sky clotted with angelflesh and deceit, and he claws at the dirt, anything to keep him from sliding any closer to the gaping iron-toothed mouth in the side of the mountain.

  “. . . the paths where the mountain stream goes down under the darkness of the hills, the flood under the earth.”

  He understands that she’s calling them down, calling them out, opens his mouth to tell her to please shut the hell up, and now he can hear the snick snick snick of claws and stolen teeth.

  “Dancy . . .” he croaks, hoarse, pathetic whisper from his lips as dry as sand, but she hears him and looks up, like the shades creeping towards her matter less, or matter hardly at all, and her skin shimmers faintly in the night. Dark and blisterbright shimmer instead of the powdery luster of her alabaster complexion, and She’s sunburned, he thinks. He can’t see her eyes, but he can feel them, everything locked there inside her pink eyes, and in another moment, they’ll be on top of her. “You know this is already over, Deacon,” she says, sounding sad and brave and grateful in a single breath, chiding him and thanking him at the same time.

  “Try to change what hasn’t happened yet,” and Deacon recognizes the knife in her hand, Chance’s Swiss Army knife, before he can’t see her anymore, one of the twiggy scarecrow nightmares closing the space between them.

  And the earth rolls like a broken carnival ride, seasick Tilt-A-Whirl lurch and loll as the sky cracks apart and tumbles down in ebon splinters, and he opens his eyes. Opens his watering corporeal eyes, closing those other, secret eyes, those inward eyes that will take him to pieces one day, and the world falls back in place, the world and the night, and the only smells are dirt and grass. No telling how long since he touched the string wrapped around the dogwood tree.

  Deacon rolls over on his back, breathless, his head like a throbbing, open wound; he blinks up at the low branches, canopy of limbs and leaves between him and infinity, but nothing strong enough to hold if he could let go and fall that one last time.

  “Deacon? Fuck . . .” and then the stars are blotted out by Sadie, her thin, sweaty face hanging somewhere above his own, her cheeks flushed and sweating like she’s been running. “I heard you,” she says. “I heard you scream.”

  And he can’t remember screaming, but he can remember Dancy Flammarion brandishing a pocketknife against the things that slunk out of the parkquiet night, Dancy sitting with her back against the locked and rusty gates of the water works tunnel, her skin shining like blistered pearls.

  He can remember all the things she said.

  “Dancy,” he whispers, and Sadie shakes her head slow, bending close now and she looks scared, looks worried.

  “She’s not here, Deke.”

  “No,” he says. “She was here.” He tries to sit and feels like he’s going to puke, the vise at his temples tightening until it’s surely only a matter of minutes, a matter of seconds, before his eyes pop out of his skull. “She was here,” he says again and lies down and shuts his eyes.

  “Well, she’s not here now,” Sadie says. “There’s no one here now but us,” and that makes him want to laugh, and he thinks that maybe the trees are laughing, maybe the tunnel is cackling through its wrought-iron teeth, because they know better. Deacon opens his eyes again, eyes full of tears, and he sees that he’s only a few yards from the blockhouse.

  “How did I get here, Sadie?” but she only shakes her head again and looks more concerned.

  “Don’t you remember?”

  “No, I don’t,” and then he sees the twine lying on the ground, and he reaches for it, never mind the hurt, the hurt will be there anyway, until it gets bored with him and goes looking for someone else to torment. “What is it, Deke?” Sadie asks, whispers, but he doesn’t answer her because he doesn’t know, doesn’t know anything more than she can see for herself. A white piece of twine, and he tugs at it and the string goes tight in his hand.

  “It’s tied to the gate,” Sadie says, and she gets up, leaves him lying in the dirt and follows the line to the place where it’s knotted around one of the bars.

  “She was here, Deke,” she says, and Deacon props himself up on one elbow, blinks and squints through the pain and nausea, forcing his blurry vision into focus, a sloppy surrogate for focus, until he can make out the dim form of Sadie crouched at the tunnel entrance. Sadie reaches down and picks something up, holds it out for Deacon to see. The blade of the Swiss Army knife twinkles dull and cold, hardly any light left here for steel to catch and shine back, so little light that isn’t swallowed by the hungry tunnel.

  “What’s happened to her?” Sadie asks him. “Where the hell is she, Deke?” And he doesn’t answer her, because he doesn’t know, lies down and shuts his eyes, and Deacon listens to the crickets and Sadie crying while he waits for the pain to end.

  Sometime later, an hour, two hours, and Deacon and Sadie are standing on Chance’s big front porch again. Deacon’s knocked three times already and no one’s come to the door, not a sound from inside even though Chance’s car is parked in the driveway and it seems like every light in the house is on.

  Sadie’s sitting alone in the porch swing, rocking slowly back and forth, the remains of Dancy’s duffel bag draped across her lap. All they found after Deacon could walk and they followed the wandering trail of twine for three blocks, Sadie limping along as it led them from tree to telephone pole to sign post, dot to dot to dot, all the way from the tunnel to the marble steps of Ramsey High School. The duffel was lying beneath some oleander bushes near the sidewalk, two or three long slashes through the olivegreen canvas like somebody had been at it with a straight razor, and Dancy’s ragged belongings were scattered up and down Thirteenth Street. Deacon said to leave them, just leave it all, Sadie, and come on, but she gathered up what she could find, a few dirty T-shirts and a pair of dirtier underwear, some books and an old Folger’s coffee can with a plastic lid, and stuffed the things back into the bag.

  Deacon knocks again, knocks harder than before, and this time he hears footsteps; “Just a minute,” Chance calls out, and a second later, “Who is
it?” Her voice seems nervous and faraway, muffled, muted by the door.

  “It’s me,” Deacon says, talking loud, and he puts his mouth near the wood so she can hear him on the other side. “Just me and Sadie.”

  The metal-against-metal sound of locks being turned, rolling tumblers and dullsharp dead-bolt click, the hesitant rattle of a safety chain, and when Chance finally opens the door, the glare from the hallway leaves Deacon half-blind after so much night, drives two fresh and searing spikes straight through his pupils and all the way to the back of his skull. Chance doesn’t say a word, stares at him, and Deacon covers his eyes with one hand and squints back at her, strains to see through the light and the pain.

  “Yeah, I know I should have called first,” he says, but then he catches the furious swirl of emotions trapped inside her green eyes, the wild and emerald storm brewing there, something he’s interrupted, and he forgets whatever he was going to say next.

  “What do you want, Deacon?”

  “Sadie’s hurt. She cut her foot,” and Chance takes an impatient breath, glances past him towards the porch swing. “And I think that Dancy might be dead,” he says.

  “You don’t know that,” Sadie snarls. “You don’t know that at all. There wasn’t a body. There wasn’t even any blood, so don’t fucking act like you know that, Deacon.”

  Chance looks back to Deacon, and there’s something else in her eyes now, something new moving through the storm behind her eyes, and “What the hell are the two of you talking about?” she asks him.

  “Dancy went to the tunnel alone,” and there’s nothing else he can think of to say that will make sense of this, certainly no way he can tell her what he really saw in the park, not yet, anyway. So he reaches into the front pocket of his jeans, instead, takes out Chance’s Swiss Army knife and holds it out to her. She stares at it, handful of time and no sound but the still, cicadawhisper night and the rhythmic porch-swing creak. And then she takes the knife from Deacon, and “You’d both better come inside,” she says.