Threshold

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “No, I haven’t been back. Not yet,” Chance says, and she stares at the half inch of whiskey in her glass, doesn’t look at Deacon or Sadie as she talks. “I finally made myself call Alice about an hour after I got home, and she called the cops. I was on the phone with her again when you guys showed up.”

  Deacon pours himself another drink from the pint bottle on the kitchen table, his third since they sat down and his head is beginning to clear enough that he can think around the thorny edges of the headache. Amber fire to drive away the agony, and that’s no exaggeration; agony the best or only word for the crippling headaches that almost always follow his visions, his episodes, the seizures, whatever the fuck happens when he touches the wrong thing. And alcohol the quickest fix he’s ever found. He takes a large swallow from his glass and watches Chance across the table. The old ledger from the crate is lying in front of her, and she’s resting her right hand on the cover like someone taking an oath.

  “Alice met campus security at the lab, and they did a walk-through with her.”

  “And? What’d they find?” Deacon asks and spits an ice cube back into his glass.

  Chance shrugs her sagging, boybroad shoulders, and “Nothing. They didn’t find anything at all,” she replies. “Except that the crate was missing, and everything we’d taken out of the crate was gone. This is all that’s left.” She taps the cover of the ledger twice with the middle finger of her right hand, smiles a cold and weary smile. “I left it here when I took the crate to the lab this afternoon.”

  “I don’t know why we haven’t called the police,” Sadie says. Her hands are still shaking so badly that Deacon can hear the ice cubes in her glass clinking against each other. She hasn’t taken a single sip of her whiskey, has asked three times if Chance has a cigarette even though Sadie knows that she’s never smoked. “We have to call the police.”

  “What would we tell them, Sadie?” Chance asks her, and Deacon can see how hard she’s trying to say the right thing, say it exactly the right way, Chance’s voice the strained calm of the profoundly uneasy trying to comfort the hysterical. Or maybe the chronically rational facing the undeniably weird, he thinks, and takes another drink of bourbon. And Jesus, none of them has even said anything yet, not really, so maybe that’s the scariest part. What happens when they find the guts to start talking, filling in the gaping holes in their respective stories, and he decides it’s probably best not to think about that until after he’s had at least another glass or two of whiskey.

  “What do you mean? We tell them she’s missing,” and there’s just enough shrillness creeping into Sadie’s voice that it’s starting to get on Deacon’s nerves. “We tell them she might be in trouble.”

  “But we don’t know that,” Chance says. “Right now, we don’t know anything except that she left your apartment without saying good-bye, lost her duffel bag, and dropped my pocketknife in the park.”

  Sadie makes a bewildered, breathless noise in her throat and stares at Chance, confusion and rage competing silently for control of her face and finally settling on a grudging compromise, something that isn’t exactly one or the other, the worst of both. She slams her glass down and most of the ice and bourbon sloshes out onto the sunflow oilcloth. “Christ, you don’t care what happens to her, do you?” and she’s almost shouting now. “Why the hell did we even come back here, anyhow?”

  “She’s right, Sadie,” Deacon says, rubs his eyes and stares at his empty glass. “I mean, you don’t honestly think the cops give a shit if we’ve misplaced some homeless girl? And that’s all she is to them, one more goddamn transient that they’d just as soon not even know about.”

  “She’s just a kid,” Sadie hisses, and Deacon sighs and reaches for the bottle of Jim Beam, but she grabs it, stands up and steps quickly away from the table.

  “Now what the fuck did you do that for?”

  “ ’Cause I’m not gonna sit here and watch you get shit-faced, Deke, and watch her pretend that nothing’s happening.”

  “Then what are you going to do, Sadie?” Chance asks, and now she sounds a lot less interested in coddling Sadie, or anyone else for that matter, a lot less interested in keeping the peace. “Why don’t you stop yelling at us for a minute and tell us what precisely it is you intend to do?”

  But Sadie only shakes her head and stares pitifully down at the mutilated duffel bag dangling from her right hand, sets the whiskey bottle back on the table. There’s an orange and green striped T-shirt poking out through one of the slashes in the canvas, and “She’s just a kid,” she says again.

  “Yeah,” Deacon whispers, wishing he knew anything at all to say that might help, and then he notices the blood seeping out of the tube sock he put on Sadie’s right foot, a crimsonwide pool spreading across the floor of Chance’s kitchen.

  “Jesus, baby, you’re bleeding again,” and she looks down at the mess and starts crying, apologizes to Chance and sits back down, hugs the duffel bag to her chest, hides her face in the folds of ruined fabric.

  “No, it’s okay, Sadie. There’s hydrogen peroxide and gauze in the medicine cabinet. I’ll be right back,” and Chance gets up from the table, takes the ledger with her, and “Thank you,” Sadie sobs as Deacon screws the cap off the bottle of Jim Beam and pours himself another shot.

  The headache has dwindled to an almost bearable pang lost somewhere between his ears, and the whiskey tastes sweet and hot and more forgiving than the night outside the kitchen windows. Something that Dancy said at the tunnel, something familiar, and he mumbles it out loud. “The paths where the mountain stream goes down under the darkness of the hills,” he says, and Sadie looks up from the duffel bag, and she blinks at him through a runny mask of smeared mascara.

  “What? What did you say?” she asks, and “Nothing,” he replies. “No, it’s probably nothing at all.”

  After Chance has finished doctoring Sadie’s foot, has carefully washed the cut and wrapped it in clean white gauze up to the ankle, and after Sadie has hobbled silently back out onto the porch alone, Chance and Deacon sit on opposite ends of the sofa. The front door is open, and Deacon can hear Sadie in the noisy, old swing, back and forth lament of rusted chains and weathertired boards and the occasional thump or thud of Sadie’s good foot against the porch as she kicks off again, keeping the swing in motion, keeping herself moving without ever going anywhere at all.

  “She needs stitches,” Chance says, and Deacon nods his head once.

  “Try telling her that,” he replies. “Try telling her anything at all.”

  And then nothing else for a minute or two, just the porch-swing pendulum squeak and groan and the mute house and the murmuring summer night outside. Sounds that aren’t sounds or only things that Deacon imagines he hears because there’s too much quiet. He sighs and leans forward, his shadow stretching out across the coffee table and the floor, and rests his forearms on his legs.

  “What’s happening, Deke?” and it’s a very quick and urgent whisper as if she’s afraid, or maybe she just doesn’t want Sadie to hear her. “I mean, I can still tell when you know more than you’re saying. I remember that look you get.”

  Deacon picks up his drink from the table and finishes the whiskey, fills the glass to the rim again. He’s drunk enough now that the headache is almost inconsequential, drunk enough that he smiles at Chance instead of getting angry.

  “And what look would that be, exactly?” he asks, the thinnest, wry edge to his voice, the softest slur, and he sips at his drink. She’s rubbing her hands together now like they’re cold, like she needs to pee. Her grandmother’s ledger is lying in her lap, and he’s pretty sure she’s afraid to let it out of her sight.

  “I need you to give me a break, please,” and she turns towards him, raises her voice just enough that there’s no danger that she’ll have to repeat herself. “I’m in the dark here, okay? I don’t think I’ve ever been this kind of scared before.”

  “Well, then. By all means, welcome to the club,” and he smiles a
gain and raises his glass in her direction, gestures in a mock toast and takes a long drink.

  “Please, Deacon. I mean it.”

  “I’m sorry. That was just a little too goddamned ironic, you know?”

  “But I’m right, aren’t I? You saw something at the water works tunnel that you’re not telling Sadie. You know what happened to Dancy.”

  Deacon leans slowly forward again and sets his glass back down on the coffee table, stares at the condensation on the dark wood, the overlapping rings of water to leave pale scars on the wax.

  “Isn’t it a little late to start believing in shit like this, Chance? I mean, you’ve made it this far just fine without the Easter Bunny or Jesus or fucking Santa Claus. Are you absolutely sure you want to blow it now and succumb to the irrational after all these years of faithful disbelief? Hell, what would Joe think?”

  Deacon thinks that he can feel her glare, if looks could kill glare, and “Next time you’re lying awake,” she says, “trying to figure out why I left you, why I couldn’t take any more, try to remember what you just said to me, Deacon.”

  “Touché,” and he turns to face her, then, wipes his wet lips with the back of one hand. And Chance isn’t even looking at him, glassy, nowhere stare of a junky or a taxidermied deer instead of what he expected, eyes fixed on nothing and no one in the world. An expression so lost, so turned back upon itself, that it makes the little hairs on the back of his neck prickle and stand up, and he reaches for his whiskey.

  “You’re a son of a bitch,” she says and runs her fingers over the cover of the ledger, not seeing it now instead of not seeing him.

  “Yeah, right,” Deacon says. He swallows a soothing mouthful of Jim Beam and rubs at his face, trying to rub away the familiar regret, that he can’t take back words that are already history, that have found their mark and already done their damage.

  “What did you see at the tunnel, Deke?” she asks again. “What happened to her?”

  “I don’t know what happened to her, all right? And if I told you what I saw out there, I don’t care what sort of revelation or epiphany you’ve had, Chance, you wouldn’t fucking believe me. Right now, I don’t think I believe me.”

  “It has something to do with Elise,” Chance says, and she’s chewing at her lower lip so hard that Deacon thinks it’s going to start bleeding. “It has something to do with why Elise died, and that night we broke into the tunnel. And it has something to do with why my grandmother killed herself.”

  “Maybe,” Deacon says quietly, staring intently at the lumps of bourbonstained ice melting in his glass because he doesn’t want to see that ugly, nowhere look on Chance’s face anymore. “I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.”

  “That would be—” and she pauses, searching for just the right word, and Deacon keeps his eyes on his glass. “That would be elegant, wouldn’t it? No, that would be sublime.”

  “Or schizophrenic,” Deacon grumbles, and now he turns to pour himself another drink.

  “If all these things, all these awful things, if they’re all connected somehow—”

  “Yeah, that would be very convenient, wouldn’t it?”

  Out on the porch, Sadie has stopped swinging, and for a moment there’s only the wet sounds of whiskey being poured, the tinkle of ice against glass.

  “I’m not joking,” she says and begins rubbing at the cover of the ledger again.

  “And I’m not making fun of you, Chance. But I don’t want you to go getting paranoid on me and start seeing connections that aren’t there. I don’t want you to start believing in shit just because you need to believe in something. Not now.”

  “Do you think I’m going crazy?” and she looks up from the book in her lap, looks directly at Deacon this time instead of through him or past him, and at least some of the emptiness is gone from her eyes. She wants me to say yes, he thinks. That would be the kindest thing I could say to her, the most comforting thing.

  “You know that isn’t what I meant, Chance.”

  “Then do you think that was really a dog at the lab today?” she asks. “And whatever it was Sadie saw tonight, do you think that was a dog, too?”

  Deacon licks his lips, his mouth suddenly dry as dust and old bones, but he sets the fresh whiskey back on the coffee table untouched. “No,” he says. “No, I don’t.” And she nods and reaches out and takes his hand, so long since he’s felt that touch that he can’t even fucking remember the last time, and now she’s squeezing his hand so hard it hurts.

  “I want you and Sadie to stay here with me tonight,” Chance says. “I’ll drive you over to your place if there’s anything you need, but I think we should stick together.”

  “Sure, okay,” Deacon says, feeling drunk and stupid, and Chance sighs a long and ragged sigh, relieved rush of air across her teeth, and she lets go of his hand and turns back to the ledger. And that’s almost as bad as anything he saw or only thought he saw at the tunnel, the sudden absence of her touch after that brief, unexpected contact almost as terrible as the scarecrow things that weren’t dogs and the sorrow and resolve in Dancy Flammarion’s pink eyes.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Life Before Man

  LATE Sunday morning, and Chance cooked breakfast for Deacon and Sadie before she left the house—bacon and runny scrambled eggs, steaming black coffee, toast and Bama apple jelly—and no one said anything during the meal. Not a word about Dancy or the water works, menacing phantom dogs or what they should do next, and when they were finished she drove away to school alone, to the unavoidable meeting with Alice. Because the crate was still missing, everything in the crate and everything that came out of the crate still missing, as well—the chunk of hematite, the trilobites, the ugly pickled thing and the old jar of alcohol that had held it for more than a century, all the specimens that Chance hadn’t even unpacked yet—all of it simply gone.

  And now Chance is sitting in an uncomfortable molded plastic chair in Alice Sprinkle’s office, modular chair the color of yellow Play-Doh in the middle of this cramped and disorderly broom-closet excuse for an office. She tries to sit still, rubs at her eyes and tries hard to look like she isn’t thinking about a dozen things that seem more important than what Alice is saying to her.

  “Girl, I promise if it was anybody else, I’d be asking for your keys right now,” and Alice glares at Chance from the safe, other side of her papercluttered desk, other side of her thick bifocals, and Chance knows she’s telling the truth. Knows that Alice is so protective of the shoddy little building and the treasures inside that she’d probably have done a lot worse than take back a set of keys if it had been someone else who ran off and left both doors standing wide open for two hours. Part of Chance wants to feel grateful, and part of her still suspects she should be ashamed of herself, jumping at shadows like a child, like a silly girl, letting her imagination take the place of common sense, but after the last two days she isn’t much of either.

  “I’m sorry,” she says again, whether she actually means it or not; she’s already lost track of how many times she’s apologized in the twenty minutes since she walked into the office.

  “Yeah, that’s what you keep saying,” and Alice takes another stick of Juicy Fruit from the pack lying in front of her, slowly peels the silver foil away from the chewing gum without ever taking her eyes off Chance. “But I still haven’t heard you sound like you actually mean it.”

  “Of course I mean it,” Chance says. “That was my grandmother’s work, and it was important. I don’t know what else you expect from me, Alice. I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  Alice stares at her silently for a moment, the cold, familiar scrutiny in her eyes like Chance is just another one of her fossilized bugs beneath a microscope, something to be classified and cataloged, something to be labeled and filed sensibly away, and “Maybe if you tried a little bit harder to help me understand,” she says finally.

  “How? I’ve told you what happened. I’ve told you three times what happened.”


  “Right. A stray dog came into the lab and it chased you,” Alice says, making no attempt to hide the skepticism in her voice. “It scared you so badly, you went home and didn’t even think to call anyone about it for nearly two hours. That’s what you said.”

  Chance sighs and glances anxiously down at her backpack sitting on the floor between her boots. Her grandmother’s ledger is in there, and she was up half the night reading the damned thing, understanding less and less with every page she turned. Meticulous notes that eventually disintegrated into undated, rambling speculation and strings of numbers, lengthy linear and quadratic equations and geometrical diagrams. The book frightens her, but right now it’s better than facing the doubt on Alice Sprinkle’s face, the doubt that might as well be an accusation, and she wishes Alice would tell her that she imagined the whole thing or that she’s lying and be done with it.

  “It just doesn’t make any goddamn sense,” Alice mutters, almost whispering now, talking to herself, and she inspects the puttygray stick of Juicy Fruit before she folds it double and puts it in her mouth. “Why would someone want the stuff from that crate and, in fact, only the stuff from that crate? As far as I can tell, they didn’t so much as touch the computers or the scopes or any of the cabinets, all the things they might have been able to sell . . .” and she trails off, chews her gum and stares intently down at the confusion of reprints and ungraded papers littering her desk, picks up a pencil and begins tapping the eraser end against the coffee-stained cover of a stratigraphy textbook.

  “What I’m about to ask you next,” Alice says, and she leans a little ways towards Chance, but she’s still looking at the desktop, still tapping the pencil against the textbook. “I wouldn’t even ask you something like this, except I figure that the cops are probably gonna do it, and I’d rather you heard it from me first.”