Threshold

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Imperfect, because it’s only a plane figure, right?” talking loud, and it doesn’t matter because there’s no one to hear her, no one to answer or wonder. “The fossil was three-dimensional,” and Chance places the rough tip of the chalk at the lowermost point of the heptagon, and this time she draws curved lines to connect the intersections.

  “Curve the fucking lines,” she says, “then all the sides and angles could be congruent,” just like the thing in the hematite, close enough, maybe, and Chance traces over her seven curved lines again, pressing down so hard that the chalk begins to crumble and bits of it fall to the floor and speckle the tops of her boots.

  She pauses, trying to remember the moment the day before when she placed the protractor against the stone, the moment before she thought she heard something moving around outside the lab.

  But the edges weren’t curved, were they? The edges of the fossil were straight.

  And there’s a noise then from somewhere close behind her, wet and ripping noise like a head of lettuce being torn slowly apart, torn in half, a rending that’s almost as much a feeling as a sound. Chance doesn’t turn to see, doesn’t want to move, but the pain in her head has doubled, trebled, hot tears streaming down her cheeks from the force of it now, and she shuts her eyes again so she won’t have to look at what she’s drawn on the blackboard. As if simply closing her eyes might make the pain and the terrible sound go away, and “I’m not afraid anymore,” she whispers angrily between clenched teeth.

  What could have been a second or an hour, an indefinite interval when the sound behind her might have changed somehow, might have climbed the slightest octave or been joined by yet another voice, another sensation, and Chance smells something that makes her think of dark places that are never dry, that will never see the sun.

  “I will not be afraid,” she says again. “Whatever the hell is happening to me, I won’t be afraid.”

  “No one’s trying to scare you, Chance,” but she screams when it touches her, and the lifeless voice that can’t be Elise Alden’s seems to drip like blood and honey from a wound in the shredding heart of the sound.

  Her head has stopped hurting, but the fetidwet smell grown so strong, sour night and tiny white mushrooms, and it’s almost thick enough to suffocate, thick enough that Chance reaches instinctively to wipe it from her nostrils and mouth. She gags, and wherever she is now, it isn’t the lab. Rough stone at her back, moss-slicked wall of rock and frigid rivulets of water tracing their way crookedly down from somewhere overhead. And she’s blind or there’s no trace of light here, one or the other or both, and when she takes a hesitant step forward her boots squelch loud in the mud.

  “I’m not supposed to show you anything,” Elise says softly from someplace nearby, her voice unmistakable, but changed, too, withered, a blighted garden of a voice, and “I think they’re losing patience with both of us,” she says.

  “Elise? Fuck.” Chance is groping frantically about in the darkness, her fingers for ten surrogate eyes. “Let me see you! If it’s really you, then let me see, goddamn it!”

  “It’s nothing you can ever even imagine, Chance. It’s nothing you can know, and when you’ve opened your eyes down here, it’s nothing you’ll ever be able to doubt again.”

  Chance swings her right arm in a wild and clumsy arc, striking out in the direction she thinks the voice is coming from, the withered voice that can’t be Elise no matter who it sounds like or who wants her to think it is, and she touches something damp and cold, like dangling strips of raw liver, a trembling curtain of flesh, and her hand comes away sticky and chilled.

  “There will be nonsense in it,” the voice whispers, sweet and bittersad whisper before it laughs at her and a wind begins to blow. Lukewarm wind to stir the blackness and the Antarctic cold, and Chance wipes her hand on her jeans, trying to scrub away the stain and the memory of what she’s touched. There are new smells on the wind, the healthy scent of green and growing things, the way a summer day can smell, or a greenhouse, sugarsmooth aroma of budding trees and water flowing free across coarse and sparkling sand. Everything this boundless darkness isn’t, and Chance turns away from the voice, away from the raw and quivering mass that’s stolen Elise’s voice for its own.

  And she’s standing on the sloping, pebblestrewn bank of a broad river, crystal-green waters that slip gently past on their way to the sea, that ripple and eddy beneath the high tropical sun. A river like this to put the Mississippi to shame, a river even the Amazon could only envy, restless depths to divide a forest of strange trees, giant club mosses and the towering evergreen Lepidodendron that stand as tall and straight as redwoods, their ancient branches spread out above a billowing carpet of ferns. No sound here but the river lapping hungry at the edge of the forest, the sigh of the wind in the leaves and the rasping drone of insects. The Paleozoic sunlight falls in cathedral-brilliant shafts across a million shades of green, and Chance knows that she has already walked the broken sedimentary memory of this world, the shale and sandstone ruin of it. Has spent so many years struggling to read its stingy carbonized remains, and here it is laid out before her, made whole again, restored, and suddenly she’s crying, tears as warm as the sun and the wind.

  “My god,” and something else that she’s already forgotten, thoughts silenced on her tongue because there are no words she knows to express what she feels, the utter joy and terror of these sights, this Eden stretching wide beneath the gemblue sky.

  “We did not think you believed in gods.”

  She turns around, and Elise is standing where the ferns end and the beach begins, standing there in the shifting, dappled shadow of the trees, and she squints painfully through the light at Chance. Elise, but not Elise’s eyes, eyes that have been consumed by their own pupils, collapsed into the infinite gravity of their own visions. She’s wet and naked and her wrists are bleeding.

  “I don’t believe any of this,” Chance says, the salt from her tears getting into her mouth. “I can’t.”

  “Neither did your grandmother,” Elise says, and she smiles, flashes perfect and piranha-sharp teeth. “And she knew more than you. She had almost begun to understand.”

  “Is that why she’s dead? Because she’d started to understand? Is that what happened to Dancy, too?”

  “I’m not here to answer questions. I’m not supposed to tell you anything—”

  And before the girl can say another word, Chance rushes forward, strikes her hard across the face, hard enough to send her stumbling backwards into a deadfall tangle of unearthed roots and logs. She grabs for a branch and misses, lands hard on her ass, and glares up at Chance with those brutal eyes. The smile around her razor teeth grown even wider than before; wicked, leering smile so wide that her face doesn’t look quite so much like Elise’s anymore, something about as far from human as possible, a mask stretched too tight over its skull, and the sound coming from its throat isn’t laughter, but Chance knows it means almost the same thing as laughter.

  “Shut up,” she screams, and it nods its head obediently and stops making the not-laughing noise, raises a pale and blood-encrusted hand and points at Chance.

  “I should see the garden far better,” it says, speaking in that purling ice water and acid mockery of Elise’s voice, “if I could get to the top of that hill: and here’s a path that leads straight to it.”

  “I told you to shut up, fucker,” and Chance reaches for a big piece of driftwood, means to bash its head in, smear whatever it has for brains into the loamy soil. But the thing dissolves in a violent burst of purplish light, light like a bruise that swells and swarms fiercely around her, bloated aubergine fireflies, and in less than an instant the forest breaks apart and is gone, swallowed as the light becomes a night as bottomless as a sky without stars. A night that wraps itself tight about Chance, light that could crush her bones to jelly if it wanted.

  “Close your eyes,” and this time the voice isn’t Elise, this time the voice is Dancy Flammarion. “Don’t see what it
wants you to see. Don’t listen—”

  But there’s not even time to shut her eyes before the smothering night releases her, drains away, and Chance is left on her knees, shivering and her clothes soaked through with the water and slime that leaks from the close, rough walls of the tunnel.

  The tunnel. I’m in the water works tunnel.

  She can see by the sickly greenyellow glow of phosphorescent fungi, chartreuse clumps of the stuff sprouting all around her like tumors, can tell that the tunnel ends only a few more yards ahead. Ten or twelve feet and the narrow rock walls open abruptly into some sort of cavern, something that the workmen must have broken through to a hundred years ago, and the great cast-iron pipes turn downwards and disappear from view.

  So cold now that her hands are numb and her bones ache, her teeth ache, but Chance gets to her feet, leans against the slippery walls of the tunnel until her head stops spinning. There should be ice, all this water and cold, there should be frost and icicles and the mud under her feet should crunch like broken glass. Unless the cold is inside her, and that’s why her breath doesn’t fog, why the little streams fed by the walls of the tunnel wind and flow unhindered towards the place where the cavern begins. Chance hugs herself tight and follows them, shambles forward on numb feet like one of Victor Frankenstein’s resurrected creations.

  When she reaches the end of the tunnel, stands shaking and teethchattering on a narrow, crumbling jut of rock, the last few feet of the tunnel’s floor reaching out into the cavern beyond, she gazes across a fissure or chasm so vast, so deep, that she can’t begin to see the other side. The other side might be miles and miles away, if the cavern doesn’t go on forever, if there is another side to it, a place where the water works tunnel resumes and this abscess in the mountain ends. She looks up, looks up before she dares to look down, and instead of stalactites there seem to be stars, sapphire and diamond pinpricks in a moonless sky, and the weight of that sky on her shoulders presses down like the news of a death, the death of her own heart, like the loss of everything she’s ever loved. Chance realizes that she’s on her knees again, no memory of falling, but there she is on her hands and knees in the unfreezing mud, her tears dripping down to join the water gurgling over the edge of the precipice.

  It’s nothing you can know, and when you’ve opened your eyes down here, it’s nothing you’ll ever be able to doubt again.

  The iron water pipes loom huge on her right before plunging towards the floor of the fissure, and Chance lets her eyes follow them over the ledge, almost vertical descent along the steep wall of the cavern, fifty or sixty feet of rust and bolts before they disappear in a dense patch of the glowing fungi. Corpulent living lanterns to illuminate the trunks and strangling vines of a forest that stretches away from the rock face, plants the unsightly color of custard and semen that seem to strain towards the stars, their branches and leaves waving like the blind stalks and antennae of deep-sea animals. And farther away, over the pale, quivering canopy, she can see what might be a river, but what flows thick between its banks isn’t water.

  All these things in the instant before she sees what has come out of the forest and begun to drag itself along the pipes towards her, a thousand midnight and steelcable tendrils to haul itself slowly forward. And before Chance finally covers her eyes and backs away from the edge, she catches the dim hint of recognition in its faceted, seven-sided irises, knows that it knows her, and she also sees the shriveled things caught in its quivering body like shreds of meat in the teeth of a dog; the bodies of Dancy and Elise, her grandmother and a dozen other faces she doesn’t know, the decayed and hurting faces of corpses that can never die, that will never be permitted to fade into painless nothing-ness. Elise’s eyes turn towards her, wide and pleading, and this is Elise, not some rough counterfeit or sleight of hand.

  “Forget this, Chance,” she whispers. “Forget this and don’t look back,” and then one of the tendrils slides quickly over her mouth and she’s silent.

  The constellations of subterranean stars begin to seep from the sky and fall in hot and icing streaks, and at the end, the only thing that Chance can hear is the way that they scream as they spiral down, one by one, to the blister-swollen surface of the distant river.

  Chance’s eyes open, and not those alien stars, but the world crashing down on her, crashing back into place around her, and she’s squeezed herself tight into a corner behind her desk; crouched behind two old produce crates full of fossil oysters, and her teeth are still chattering, her skin still numb and cold. Her chest heaves, drawing greedy, urgent mouthfuls of the musty air, gasping like a woman drowned and coming suddenly, violently, back to life, hauled somehow back up through the same hole in a frozen river; the afternoon sun spills through the lab windows, gold across her face, welcomed fire across her skin, but her eyes burn and water like eyes that have never seen the day before this moment, eyes of a prisoner locked away from the sun half her life, and she blinks and wipes involuntary tears from her cheeks.

  Both her hands are smudged with the dusty colors of the chalk from the bowl on top of the file cabinet, a pastel spectrum rubbed deep into her skin, and she glances past the crate, past her desk to the chalkboard. Crazy things scrawled there, Elise’s name over and over again, the star and the heptagon obscured or almost wiped away entirely. And when the board was full, she must have begun writing on the walls, the white walls covered now with chalky pinks and blues, greens and yellows, handprints and a frantic scurry of numbers and geometry, and she’s written Dicranurus a thousand times if she wrote it once. Some of the letters three feet tall and others so small she can hardly make them out from her refuge in the corner, and she lets her watering eyes wander up the walls to the low ceiling, and there’s the thing from the hematite again. Wiped off the chalkboard but restored up there, as wide as the room, and she has no memory of standing on the desks to do that, but she knows that’s how it got there, doesn’t need to see her boot prints on books and stacks of paper and daily planners to be certain that’s exactly how it got there.

  Something hot trickles from her nose, across her lips, and when Chance touches her face her fingertips come back dabbed red, crimsonwet stain to ruin the childish colors on her skin, or only another element in the painting, something intended all along.

  If I start screaming now, I’ll never, ever stop again, she thinks, imagines Alice Sprinkle finding her like this, the expression on Alice’s face, and that’s enough to get her up and moving. She wonders if she could find a bucket and a sponge, thinks there might be some cleaning stuff under the sink in the prep room, and then Chance remembers what she saw dragging itself up the water pipes towards her, remembers Elise’s face, and she glances at the thing drawn so carefully above her head. A more perfect likeness of the fossil than she would have thought possible, the fossil and the eye of a nightmare, and Chance forgets about the mess and how pissed off Alice will be, and she grabs her grandmother’s ledger and runs.

  Deacon is standing in the downstairs hall, has just set the telephone receiver back in its cradle, when he hears the squeal of spinning tires in the driveway. Like someone’s doing fucking doughnuts out there, and he heads for the front door, the door open but the screen closed to keep out bugs because Sadie’s afraid of wasps. Through the screen wire he sees Chance’s redorange Impala barreling towards the porch, cloud of dust and gravel spray and Chance behind the wheel, and he’s wrestling with the latch when the car bounces across the lawn, crashes through the steps and buries its front end deep in one corner of the porch. The impact knocks Deacon off his feet, and he takes the coatrack down with him.

  “What the hell was that?” Sadie yells from somewhere upstairs, and Deacon pushes the brass coatrack off of him, a wonder one of the hooks didn’t put out an eye or knock his goddamn teeth down his throat, and “I think Chance is home, baby,” he yells back at Sadie.

  He stands up and pushes the screen door open, lets it bang shut behind him, and Deacon’s immediately engulfed by a choking, thick fog
of driveway grit and radiator steam. He coughs, pulls his T-shirt up to cover his mouth and nose, and crosses the buckled porch boards to the place where the steps used to be. Nothing much there now but some shattered concrete blocks and a few broken slats, the steps sheared completely away; he sits on the edge and drops the five or six feet down to the ground. The Impala’s taillights are flashing, like Chance is signaling that she wants to turns both ways at once, and Deacon walks around the rear of the car to the driver’s side. Not much smoke on this side, and he can see that Chance is slumped forward over the steering wheel.

  “Jesus. Is she dead or what?” Sadie calls out from the porch, from someplace behind the settling redgray fog, and he ignores her. Opens the car door, and now he can see that there’s blood on Chance’s face, blood on the hard plastic steering wheel, too; his heart races, and his mouth is as dry as old bones.

  “Don’t move her, Deke! You’re not supposed to move people in car wrecks,” Sadie shouts. “I’m gonna call an ambulance!”

  “You don’t do anything but stay right where you are.” He reaches for Chance’s wrist, presses his finger to the soft spot where blue veins intersect. And Chance jerks her hand away, sits up in the seat and blinks at Deacon. He can see there’s a nasty-looking cut above her eyebrows, probably where most of the blood is coming from, the spot where her head hit the steering wheel, he thinks, and if she’d been going any faster, there’d probably be a big piece of it sticking out of her skull.

  “Can you hear me?” he asks, ashamed that he sounds so scared when she’s the one that’s hurt, and Chance nods her head once. “Yeah,” she says, and more blood leaks from between her lips, dribbles down her chin. “Yeah, I can hear.”

  “Do you think you can move?”