Threshold

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Ask me what, Alice?”

  Alice lays the pencil down and looks up at Chance; there’s something reluctant in her eyes, something more than hesitant and out of place on her face that’s always so damned sure of itself, always so entirely confident.

  “Yesterday you were pretty adamant about keeping the contents of that crate a secret. So I was wondering, is it possible, after I left, that you had second thoughts. Decided maybe you shouldn’t have shown it to me, that maybe you shouldn’t have brought it down to the lab at all—?”

  “Oh, please,” Chance moans, and she stands up, indignant and angrytired sigh to sum up almost everything she feels, and she reaches for her backpack, just wanting to be anywhere else in the world right now, wanting to get away fast.

  “No, Chance. Wait,” Alice says. “You have to understand, I’m only trying to make some kind of sense out of this.”

  “I did not fucking lie to you. Why the hell do you think it makes sense that I would have lied to you? I’ve never lied to you.”

  “I’m sorry, but it makes more sense than a thief who steals nothing but that one crate. You have to see that, Chance. You have to try to look at this from my position.”

  “Yeah? And how do I know that you didn’t take the crate, Alice? I mean, shit, that makes sense, too, doesn’t it? You were the one that wanted to start showing that stuff all over campus—”

  “Hey, hey, okay,” and now Alice is standing up, too, the paperstrewn bulwark of the desk still safe between them, but the impatience and anger coming off Alice Sprinkle no less immediate for that barrier. “Just calm down, all right? If you say you didn’t take it, then you didn’t take it. Fine. I have no reason in the world not to believe you.”

  Chance’s heart is racing, heart like a scared rabbit, heart like something hunted, something cornered, and she leans against the edge of the desk because her legs feel too weak to support her as the adrenaline drains away, quickly as it came, and leaves her feeling nauseous and dizzy.

  “Then why the hell did you ask me that? I didn’t take it,” she says, her voice as unsteady as her legs. “It was mine already, and if I’d changed my mind, I would have told you and then I would have carried it back home. That’s all. I certainly wouldn’t have needed to concoct this sort of crazy, bullshit story.”

  “Okay,” Alice says and she sits back down. “That’s cool. I believe you, Chance,” and she takes another stick of Juicy Fruit from the pack on her desk.

  Chance slides her arm through one of the canvas straps of the backpack and nods her head. “Yeah. Look, I’ve got to do something. Get some work done, anything to take my mind off this for a while. I’ll be at the lab.”

  “That sounds like a good idea,” and Alice rolls the gum wrapper into a tiny silver ball, tosses it in the general direction of a wastepaper basket and misses. “You see why I didn’t go into basketball.”

  “I’ll be at the lab if you need me,” Chance says, and then she leaves Alice in her messy office with her suspicions and unanswered questions and closes the door behind her.

  Moments of discovery, conspiracies of the unlikely and the inevitable, the dustdim glint of a rock from a quarry wall, a hammer’s careless blow—one instant at the shining end of a billion billion coincidences, and the course of a life is decided.

  It’s been almost three years since the day that Chance found her first tetrapod fossil in the scabby, bulldozer wastes of a Carbon Hill strip mine. Still only an undergraduate then, but she was already teaching the laboratory course and field trips for Introduction to Historical Geology, and one rainy March morning she drove a vanload of freshmen fifty miles to give them a firsthand look at the Walker County coalfields. They listened or pretended to listen while Chance explained the cycle of transgressive and regressive marine sedimentation that had created these rocks, as she guided them through the autumn-colored beds of sandstone and shale, the siltstones and conglomerates of the Pottsville Formation, all the countless earth-tone shades of red and orange and brown, tawny yellows and pale violetgrays, and here and there a preciousthin seam of anthracite coal like pure and crystallized midnight. The miners had scraped away the pine woods and topsoil to reveal the stratified remains of peat bogs and vast river deltas, lowland forests and barrier islands that had long ago lined the shores of a shallow western sea at the edge of a great floodplain. A time when all the world’s land masses were being driven together into the great Pangean supercontinent, almost a hundred million years before the first dinosaurs appeared.

  It was late afternoon when she finally finished with her lecture and turned the students loose to clamber over the towering spoil piles in search of fossil seed ferns, sandstone casts of Calamites trunks and the garskin bark of extinct scale trees. Earlier in the day, Chance had found a thick layer of shale studded with rustbrown siderite concretions, and she retraced her steps to that spot, picked out a reasonably comfortable place in the rubble to sit, and began breaking the hard nodules open with her crack hammer. If she were lucky, she might find the imprint of an insect inside one of them, or perhaps a jellyfish or a primitive shrimp-like crustacean, something uncommon and delicate from the steamy Carboniferous rivers and brackish lagoons. Most of the concretions were empty, of course, but still more interesting than ferns, and she had almost an hour to kill before it was time to load up the van and head back to Birmingham.

  Chance had split sixty or seventy of the rounded, oblong concretions, and nothing to show for her trouble but a couple of pyritized snails and a few tonguebroad leaves of Neuropteris and Asterotheca, that and the heap of broken stone scattered about her feet. Bored and discouraged, she looked at her watch, was thinking of calling everyone in fifteen minutes early, and then she noticed a nodule the size of a softball embedded firmly in the quarry wall. She popped it free with a chisel, and the stone split cleanly in two on the very first blow, cleaved easily along the bedding plane created by the dead thing inside, and Chance stared amazed at the extraordinary fan-shaped fossil she’d exposed.

  Something that was no longer a fish’s fin, but not yet precisely a foot either, eight tiny “fingers” formed from the arrangement of hourglass carpals and metacarpals, and each petrified bone in perfect articulation with the next; a less tidy confusion of wrist bones towards the center of the rock, the upper end of the “fingers,” before the stocky radius and ulna, and finally the short, squarish humerus, and she realized that she was holding the forelimb of an animal that had never been found in that part of the country, much less the state, some new species from the wide gray territory between fish and amphibian. Half an hour later, Chance was still sitting on the ground, still gawking at the fossil, when one of her students finally wandered over and asked if they shouldn’t be heading back to town soon.

  After that, two months of field work at the strip mine and a nearby railroad cut turned up seven more specimens, mostly limb material and a few vertebrae, but Chance also discovered a toothy lower jaw and a few bits of a broad froglike skull in another concretion. And that October she attended the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Field Museum in Chicago where she presented a preliminary report on the Carbon Hill tetrapod, and the following summer a formal description of the fossils was published in the Journal of Paleontology—“A new temnospondyl amphibian from Alabama”—in which she christened the creature Walkerpeton carbonhillensis.

  Her grandfather had always wanted Chance to begin her graduate work somewhere besides Birmingham, someplace with a vertebrate paleo program or at least a geology department with money for research and an interest in science beyond the purely pragmatic economic aspects. And though he did manage to talk her into applying to a few southeastern schools, North Carolina State and the University of Florida, Duke and Louisiana State, and even though she was eagerly accepted by every one of them, Chance didn’t want to leave him alone. One heart attack already, and he was all the family she had left in the world, so she stayed at UAB and took her place among the teaching
assistants, mostly practical-minded microfossil geeks headed for high-paying jobs with oil companies and private consulting firms.

  Content with her decision, or at least resigned to it, Chance continued to prowl the mines and quarries, patiently uncovering new remains of Walkerpeton, and by the time her thesis topic was approved, she’d attracted the attention and respect of researchers from as far away as London and Munich. This girl from an undistinguished college in the boonies, and she’d also discovered another new tetrapod and at least four new species of actinistian and rhipidistian fish, and her days were filled with the mysteries and revelations of their ancient, alien skeletons. But never mysteries whose understandings lay any farther away from her than the familiar confines of the rational, the empirical, and never revelations that left her with anything other than a deeper respect for the methods of science and a deeper faith in the constant, foreseeable patterns of nature.

  The lab almost exactly the way she left it the day before, exactly the same except for the missing crate, and Chance stands just inside the front doorsill, staring at the vacant place on the table where the crate should be. The place where she left it, and standing there in the solitude while Sunday morning turns quickly into Sunday afternoon, surrounded by silent specimen cabinets and whitewashed walls, it’s a lot more difficult to discount the things she thought she saw and heard, to pretend she wasn’t and isn’t still afraid. So maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. Maybe she’d be better off spending the day at home, and she thinks about grabbing a handful of files and a couple of fossils from her desk; not entirely comfortable leaving Deacon and Sadie alone anyway, and if she tells them not to bother her, just leave me alone for a few hours, a couple of hours, please, then her bedroom or her grandparents’ study is as good a place to work as the lab, a better place, really.

  Exactly who the hell are you trying to kid this time? as if she’d ever actually intended to work on her thesis today, as if she could possibly think about cladograms and morphometrics, anything half so sane and comprehensible, with the riddles of her grandmother’s journal still unanswered. And Chance glances back over her shoulder, the heat and brilliant midday slant of sunlight through the open door, the wide asphalt desolation of the parking lot beyond, and she feels a little dizzy, the subtlest disorientation as if the world outside were moving slowly away from her.

  It’s not safe, she thinks, one of the last things that Dancy said to her. You won’t be safe here all by yourself, not when they come, and remembering the lost look on her face when she said that, the urgent and emphatic cast of her eyes, sends a sudden rash of chill bumps up and down Chance’s arms despite the stuffy warmth of the lab.

  “C’mon. Get a goddamned grip,” she whispers, aloud and to herself, even though she hasn’t felt like she’s had a grip on much of anything since Friday night, not since Dancy called out the name of a trilobite from the foot of the staircase, not since the newspaper clippings and the rotting finger in the old baby-food jar. These small and impossible things to take her mind apart, incremental drift from sanity towards this moment when anything seems as probable, as reasonable, as anything else.

  Chance swallows hard and pulls the lab door slowly closed behind her; it clicks shut, metal-loud click in the quiet, and she takes a deep breath, exhales, and walks past the table where she left the vanished crate and its contents, slips her pack off her shoulder and follows the dark and narrow hallway back to the office that she shares with two other geology grad students.

  But an office only in the loosest possible sense of the word, three graffiti-scarred, wooden school desks that were probably antiques when her mother and father were children, a reversible chalkboard and a few nubs of colored chalk. One squeaky, rusted file cabinet that might have been painted industrial gray a long time ago rubbing shoulders with a pressboard bookshelf crammed way beyond capacity and all its shelves have started to sag. There’s an untidy assortment of field gear on the walls—screens and bundles of nylon rope, shovels and Marsh picks hung on nails and hooks—because the “office” serves double duty as a toolshed. One of the other students, a short and excitable guy named Winston, has taped a poster up above the file cabinet, color photograph of a rugged, misty seashore, Oregon or northern California, maybe, and THINGS TAKE TIME printed in bold white letters across the bottom.

  Chance’s desk is neater than the others, but that’s not saying much, and she sets her pack on a fat bundle of last week’s pop quizzes that she hasn’t yet gotten around to grading. Sits down in the swivel chair she bought for five dollars and fifty cents at a Salvation Army thrift store a year ago, torn leatherette the muddy color of red clay, and there’s a spring broken in the base so she always has to be careful not to lean too far back or the chair flips over and dumps her on the hard concrete floor. She undoes the frayed canvas straps and opens the backpack, pulls out her grandmother’s ledger and stares at the cover; there’s nothing she’s ever felt before to match the incongruous mix of dread and excitement she feels every time she looks at the book, the jangling, bitter alloy of fear and something almost pleasurable, a sickening sort of thrill, and she thinks that maybe this is the way that people who like to ride roller coasters must feel. Chance begins reading the words written on the cover aloud, the unremarkable words written in Esther Matthews’ unremarkable hand.

  “Notes on Trilobita of the Red Mountain Formation, Lower and Middle Silurian . . .” and she trails off, then, knows it all by heart now anyway, the long title and the date scribbled underneath. She opens the book to the place she’s marked with a Hershey bar wrapper, the page where her grandmother’s notes on trilobites and bio-stratigraphy end and the obsessive attempt to solve an elusive geometry problem begins. #134 stamped in navy-blue ink at the upper-left-hand corner, and under that the last lines of an entry from July 28th, 1991, a comparison of the compound eyes of two closely related trilobites, Cryp tolithus and Onnia, and a hopeful comment that she might have access to a scanning electron microscope soon; a few lines left blank and then, halfway down the page, there’s a seven-sided polygon drawn neatly in pencil.

  The angle of each intersection and the length of each side noted in handwriting almost too small to read, but each side longer or shorter than the one before and after, each angle a little more or less obtuse. Chance has never been a whiz at math, but she knows the impossibility of ever constructing a regular heptagon, a polygon with seven sides of equal length and equal angles. One of those nasty quirks of the universe, like pi or Schrödinger’s cat, a seemingly simple and ultimately insoluble equation or paradox. She flips past page #134, past dozens more heptagons drawn as carefully as the first, all the sums of their sides and angles duly noted, scrawled proofs and endless streams of numbers that mean about as much to Chance as Sanskrit or Japanese. But it’s easy enough to see what her grandmother was trying to do, plain as day, page after page after page of figures and she was merely wrestling with the impossible, merely attempting to construct the unconstructable.

  No, Chance thinks, That’s not it at all. She was trying to reproduce the impossible. Trying to draw something on paper that she’d seen, or something that she was looking at even as she measured and calculated, even as she filled these pages with her drawings and numbers.

  Alone in her room the night before, the last hour or two before dawn, Deacon and Sadie asleep downstairs, and that’s when Chance first made the connection between these futile calculations and the strange fossil on the chunk of iron ore from the crate. One side dotted with the perfect Dicranurus exuviae and the other marked only by a single, enigmatic impression, the odd fossil she thought might be a starfish, or some other echinoderm. And the seven-sided polyhedron inside that star, the thing that caught the late afternoon sunlight through the lab windows and flashed it back some way that made her uneasy, that made it difficult to keep her eyes focused on the stone.

  Directly below the first heptagon her grandmother has written the closest thing to an explanation that Chance has found any
where in the ledger, and she reads it again, strains and frets at the words like a madwoman trying to force reality back into focus one last time. Knows already that it won’t make any difference, that it can’t, that these words are more damning than all the rest of it combined— the night in the tunnel, Elise’s suicide, the things that Deacon sees, Dancy and her fairy-tale cosmos of angels and monsters—but she reads it anyway, because it’s all she has, because she doesn’t have the strength or will to close the book and put it away forever.

  Ink that dried ten long years ago, and when she’s finished reading, Chance gets up and walks the short distance to the chalkboard, the ledger still open in her left hand, and she takes a stubby green piece of Crayola chalk from a plastic bowl on top of the file cabinet. Chalk the sweetsoft color of mint candy, and she searches impatiently through the pages until she finds the detailed diagram Esther Matthews made of the thing on the rock, all that’s left of it now. Chance copies the star-shaped outer structure first, draws each line as straight as she can manage without a ruler or a yardstick, and then she adds the upraised, inner heptahedron, and stares at what she’s drawn there. But there’s nothing startling or strange in this geometry, no answer to anything in the convergence of these green lines against black paint, and Chance rubs at her forehead with her right hand. The first, faint twinges of a headache kicking in somewhere towards the front of her skull, even though she hardly ever gets headaches, and she closes her eyes. It was only a fossil, she thinks. It was only a fossil, and my grandmother was only a crazy old lady. I don’t understand because there’s nothing here to understand.

  And then a sudden realization so obvious it seems almost silly, something she should have seen at the start, something that her grandmother had to have seen at some point, and Chance opens her eyes again, and the imperfect polyhedron is still waiting for her, snug inside its star.