Threshold

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Don’t move her, Deacon!” Sadie shouts from the porch. “Her neck might be broken!”

  “Sadie, will you shut the hell up or go back inside?”

  “My neck isn’t broken,” Chance says, and she sits back, stares at her blood spattered on the inside of the Impala’s busted windshield. “I just couldn’t remember how to make it stop. I just kept going faster.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m gonna help you, and we’re gonna get you out of the car and into the house. I can’t have you fucking bleeding to death in your own front yard,” and then there’s a sound from somewhere under the hood of the Impala, popping sound like a champagne cork, and Deacon jumps. “I think maybe we should hurry, Chance.”

  She nods again and reaches for something lying in the floorboard at her feet. Deacon sees that it’s the ledger from the crate, and he puts one arm around her shoulders, the other under her legs, and lifts her carefully out of the car. Surprised that she seems so light, not half as heavy as he’d expected, but his back will still probably be giving him hell for this in a few hours. He moves as slowly, as deliberately, as he can, trying not to jostle her or trip or lose his balance, and his heart is pounding from fear and this unaccustomed exertion. He turns his back on the dying car, carries Chance to a shady place a few feet away, cool shadows cast by a shaggy oleander bush, and lays her on the grass. Deacon sits down next to her and looks back at the porch. Sadie’s still standing there, hands on her hips and a scowl on her face, and he waves at her.

  “It’s okay,” he says. “It’s gonna be okay now.”

  Chance rolls over on her side and spits out a mouthful of blood and saliva, and then she looks up at him. And her eyes are so wide, so afraid, and he tells her again that she’s going to be okay, the Impala’s probably bought the farm, but he’s pretty sure she’s going to be fine. Chance coughs, and he wipes the blood from her mouth with the hem of his T-shirt.

  “No,” she says and lies back down in the grass and dandelions, her face turned up to the wide summer sky above the mountain, and “No,” she says again. “I can see them, Deke. I can see monsters.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Forked and Shining Path

  THE small hours of Monday morning, after the trip to the emergency room, seven stitches in Chance’s forehead and a doctor who said no, she didn’t have a concussion, but don’t let her sleep for six hours and then wake her once every hour during the night. Deacon is sitting in the chair beside her bed, waiting for her to start talking again. Not like she’s made any effort to hold back, more like she can only find the strength to speak for short intervals, five or ten minutes, and then she closes her eyes and presses herself as tight as she can against the bedroom wall. As if there’s only so much of it she can stand at a time, and the powderblue Lortabs probably not helping much either. So Deacon knows some of it, what her grandmother wrote in the old ledger, fragments of whatever happened to Chance at the lab, but he suspects she’s hardly scratched the surface, and he can only sit, patient, pretend patience, and wait for her to open her eyes and begin again.

  Sadie’s downstairs, alone downstairs because that’s the way she wants it. Angry at Deacon’s playing nursemaid to his ex-lover and probably angrier that they’re still not telling her everything that they might. Hours ago, she brought up a cup of hot chamomile and peppermint tea and a big bowl of Campbell’s chicken noodle, but the look in her eyes made Deacon wonder if he shouldn’t check to see if the food was poisoned; no matter, because Chance only managed a couple of hesitant sips of the tea and ignored the soup altogether.

  Deacon followed Sadie back to the top of the stairs, leaving Chance alone longer than he wanted, but afraid that Sadie was on the verge of walking back to Quinlan Castle by herself, hurt foot or no hurt foot, dog monsters or no dog monsters.

  “Does she know what happened to Dancy?” Sadie asked. “That’s all I want to know,” and she peered resentfully over Deacon’s shoulder towards the open door to Chance’s room.

  “Maybe. But listen, Sadie, I’m having a lot of trouble just trying to figure out how much of this she thinks is real and how much she thinks she imagined. I’m pretty sure Chance believes she’s losing her mind.”

  “Yeah, well. The way she plowed into the porch, I can see why,” and Sadie crossed her arms and glared down at the toes of the hiking boots that Chance let her borrow Saturday night. Huge, silly things on Sadie’s feet, at least two sizes too big for her.

  “I understand it runs in the family.”

  Deacon wanted to hit her, one of those brittle moments when he knew that he needed to get as far away from her as fast as he could, and this time he didn’t have the luxury.

  “I’m going to try to pretend you didn’t say that, because I know you’re not one-half the bitch you like to think you are,” almost whispering so Chance wouldn’t hear, trying to find words to defuse the bomb ticking behind his bloodshot eyes. “If Chance knows what’s happened to Dancy, she’ll tell us. If not, well, I’m really fucking sorry about that.”

  “Fine. Whatever,” and she clomped away back downstairs, limping in Chance’s boots, and in a few minutes, he could hear a movie blaring from the television set in the living room.

  “I should have listened to her, Deke,” Chance says, and Deacon sees that she’s opened her eyes, is staring out the raised window into the dark.

  “You mean Dancy?” he asks, and she nods her head, doesn’t take her eyes off the window.

  “Yeah,” she says. “I thought I knew so much. I always thought I knew so much.”

  “Maybe we ought to talk about Dancy,” and he looks down at one of the books he found inside the shredded remains of the duffel bag. A waterstained paperback copy of Beowulf, dog-eared pages, and someone’s underlined passages with a red ballpoint pen. There are notes written in the margins as well, and pictures drawn on the two or three blank pages at the back.

  “I treated her the same way I treated you, Deacon, the same way I’ve always treated everyone. Either measure up to my rationalist bullshit or fuck off.”

  Deacon picks the book up off the floor, holds it so that Chance can see the tattered cover, a cartoon-gaudy painting of the monster Grendel, the Geat warrior clutched in its scaly fist. “I assume you’ve read this,” he says. “Even you scientific types have to read books, right?”

  “Yes, Deacon. I’ve read Beowulf,” and Chance touches her bruised and swollen face with the fingers of her right hand and winces. “I read Beowulf when I was in seventh grade.”

  “Well, good for you. You’ve got a bump on your head, but at least you ain’t ignorant,” and Deacon forces a weak smile and opens the book, starts flipping through the pages.

  “What has this got to do with anything?” Chance asks, and he sees that she’s staring at the dark window again, flecks of fear and longing in her green eyes, and Deacon thinks about closing it, no idea if that would make things better or worse. He decides it’s best to leave the window open, and he goes back to flipping through Beowulf.

  “I found this in Dancy’s duffel bag, which I thought was pretty interesting in and of itself. It’s not the sort of thing I’d have expected to find a homeless girl carrying around with her.”

  “Dancy wasn’t just a homeless girl,” Chance says, a hint of annoyance in her voice. That’s good, he thinks, better than the shellshock monotone and blank stares she’s given him since he pulled her out of the wrecked Impala.

  “No,” Deacon says. “No, she wasn’t.”

  “She tried to tell me. She showed me.”

  “Chance, just listen for a minute,” and he opens the book, and Chance watches the bedroom window silently and waits.

  “Last night, you asked me what I saw when I was at the tunnel. Well, one of the things that I saw was Dancy, and she said something that stuck in my head. I knew I’d heard it somewhere before, and when I found this in her duffel bag I realized where. She’s underlined passages all through here.”

  He coughs, his throat dry, and th
ere’s half a can of Coke sitting on the dresser beside him; he looks at it for a moment, wishing it was a shot of Jack Daniel’s or Wild Turkey, and then he turns back to the book, coughs again, and begins to read.

  “ ‘The other wretched shape trod the tracks of exile in the form of a man, except that he was bigger than any other man. Land-dwellers in the old days named him Grendel. They know of no father, whether in earlier times any was begotten for them among the dark spirits,’ ” and he pauses for a moment, and now Chance is watching him instead of the window.

  “ ‘They hold to the secret land, the wolf-slopes, the windy headlands, the dangerous fen-paths where the mountain stream goes down under the darkness of the hills, the flood under the earth.’ ”

  For a moment, neither of them says anything, and then Deacon closes the book, lays it on the dresser beside the can of Coca-Cola.

  “You saw a vision of Dancy reciting Beowulf?” and he can tell that Chance is trying not to sound incredulous, not to sound skeptical, and maybe she could have managed it without the painkillers.

  “Not just then, Chance. The night she showed us the finger, all that talk about the Children of Cain. Grendel and his mother are described as the kin of Cain. And that stuff about the dragon—”

  “So you think she made all this up?”

  “Not exactly. It’s got to be a lot more complicated than that. But I think whatever’s happening, Dancy was using Beowulf to try and make sense of things. The same way some people use the Bible—”

  “Or science,” Chance says, interrupting him, and she laughs a weary, ironic laugh and shuts her eyes.

  “Well, yeah. Now that you mention it. It was part of her belief system. Her paradigm.”

  “Jesus, Deke, this is so completely fucked up. I’m Scully and you’re Mulder, remember?”

  “Yeah,” Deacon says. “At least that’s the way things used to work.” A sip from the can of Coke then, lukewarm and syrupsweet, but it’s better than nothing at all, better than the dust bowl spreading itself out at the back of his tongue. “There’s more, if you’re up to hearing it.”

  “Sure,” she says, doesn’t open her eyes but Chance rolls over onto her left side, rolls towards Deacon and wraps both her arms around her pillow, hugs it tightly, and “I’m listening,” she whispers.

  Sadie’s staring at the television screen, The Beginning of the End showing on AMC, but she isn’t actually watching it, just staring at the screen because it’s someplace tangible to focus her eyes and her anger. Something to look at besides the walls and the windows, the night outside, and now if she could only stop thinking about Chance and Deacon upstairs, trading their secrets and keeping her in her place, creepydumb Sadie Jasper who can’t deal with the truth.

  I’m not the fucked-up bitch running cars into houses, she thinks and lights a cigarette, hopes that Chance can smell the smoke all the way upstairs, and her eyes drift from the TV screen to the old ledger lying on the coffee table.

  Deacon almost couldn’t get Chance to put the thing down, when he led her into the house after the trip to the hospital, and they had to use the back door and come through the kitchen because the front porch was too much trouble with all the steps gone. Him telling her that she should put the ledger away for a while, that it would be okay, really, no one was going to steal it or anything, after she’d clutched the book the whole time they were waiting to see a doctor, didn’t even turn it loose when they were sewing up the gash in her head.

  And no one has told Sadie not to touch it, no explicit or implicit instructions that she was to leave the ledger alone. But she thinks it’s probably like reading someone else’s diary, that sort of unspoken understanding, and she should just stare at her movie and mind her own business.

  But this is my own business, isn’t it? she thinks. If that book has anything to do with what happened at the apartment, or whatever’s happened to Dancy, it’s absolutely my goddamn business.

  And that makes sense on the surface, at least, which is about as much as anything is making sense. She reads the cover again, everything but the date meaningless to her, and she hates that, feeling stupid just because she hasn’t spent her life in college staring at rocks. Sadie sets her cigarette down on the edge of a china saucer, shifts about nervously on the sofa, half turns and glances towards the hallway, towards the staircase. Deacon and Chance’s voices are faint, but she’s sure she can hear them talking. Sharing their greedy confidences, so it’s not very likely either of them will be coming downstairs any time soon.

  This is what he’s wanted all along, to be alone with her again. For her to need him again, and neither of them gives a rat’s ass what happens to Dancy.

  And she takes advantage of a fresh and disorienting surge of jealousy, the bitterhot flush across her cheeks, the cold knot in her belly, and Sadie picks the ledger up off the coffee table. The sort of thing she should have done a long time ago, she thinks, if they’re so determined to keep her in the dark, if she’s the only one who cares about Dancy. She holds the book in both hands and stares at the cover, stalling one last moment longer, because even through the jealousy, she knows that a trust is being violated. Something that she’ll never be able to take back, once it’s done, regardless of her reasons or excuses or how well she plays the clueless innocent. And something else, too; a bright speck of dread somewhere behind her resentment. Maybe she doesn’t want to know what’s written in this book, self-doubt to muddle her resolve, and she thinks of Chance upstairs, the madness in her eyes, thinks of poor Dancy, and Everything, she thinks. It could cost me everything.

  “Maybe it already has,” Sadie Jasper says, and she opens the ledger. But there’s nothing on the first page that isn’t anticlimax, scribbled cursive that she has to squint to read, and what she can make out means about as much to her as the words written on the cover. Pages and pages about nothing but trilobites: collecting trilobites, the anatomy of trilobites, what trilobites are found where and in which rocks, how old the rocks are, and after she’s scanned forty or fifty pages, the anger and dread is beginning to fade, and she just feels foolish, like the butt of someone’s practical joke, like somebody that deserves to feel like a fool.

  “Shit,” she hisses, almost slams the book closed, then flips through fifty more pages or so, nothing left to lose now. The deed done whether she’s learned anything or not, so she might as well. And about halfway through the ledger the notes and the drawings of trilobites end and something that seems even more baffling begins: a seven-sided figure and a lot of math, and suddenly she wants to hurl the book across the room, throw it at the television and leave it lying there on the floor for Deacon and Chance to see whenever they get tired of each other’s company and remember she’s sitting down here waiting for them.

  But then she notices what’s written underneath the figure, not math and nothing that seems to have anything much to do with fucking trilobites. She holds the book closer to her face, scoots a little closer to the lamp, and reads the words out loud.

  “ ‘I’ve been back to the water works tunnel, this last week with a man from the city. Looked more closely at the bricked-up section at about three hundred fifty m. near base of Srm.’ ”

  And Sadie stops, her heart beginning to beat faster again and her mouth gone dry and sour. Just the mention of the water works tunnel enough to get her attention, and she glances quickly at the stairs, the shadows there, before she turns back to the book and begins to read again.

  “ ‘The masonry is still solid. Found several more cf. Dicranurus near that spot. Terrible smell too (rotten, like old cabbage) and the man from the city said he thought he heard things behind the wall sometimes. I can’t sleep at night anymore. Can’t stop thinking about the thing in the bottle and brick wall and polyhedrons. Our drinking water comes through that place’ ”

  And that’s all. Nothing after that but more numbers and countless variations on the seven-sided figure, but Sadie reads the paragraph about the tunnel twice more, trying to squeeze more
meaning from the words, the empty spaces between the words, and then she sits with the book open in her lap, alone with the implications of what she’s read, and stares at the flickering television screen.

  “Yeah, I still know someone on the force in Atlanta,” Deacon says. He’d rather be talking about almost anything in the world, because of the promises that he made to himself years and years ago, that he was done with the cops forever. Done with letting them milk him for the bits and pieces of tragedy that he sees from time to time if he tries, and sometimes if he doesn’t try. A malignant part of himself he can’t cut out or ignore, but that doesn’t mean he has to talk about it, has to acknowledge what it’s done to him. Except that now that’s exactly what it means, because of Chance and Sadie and the things he saw when he touched a piece of twine tied around the trunk of a dogwood tree.

  Try to change what hasn’t happened yet, Dancy said that night at the tunnel, only last night, but it already feels like a hundred years ago.

  “The detective that I used to work with sometimes,” he says, and Chance opens her eyes halfway, drugheavy lids, and “You don’t have to tell me about this stuff, Deke,” she says.

  “Yes I do, Chance. This time I do have to talk about it,” but he doesn’t say anything else for a few seconds, rubs his hands together and keeps his eyes on the floor. Like he’ll lose his nerve if he looks directly at her too long, doing all of this for her so it doesn’t make sense; the sight of her should make him stronger, should strengthen his resolve and keep him moving instead of frightening him even worse than he already is.

  “I called him while you were at school. Actually, I’d just hung up the phone when you . . . you know,” and he doesn’t want to say When you plowed your car into the house, so he just jabs his left thumb over his shoulder at the bedroom window, in the general direction of the front porch.

  “Right,” Chance says. “I know.”