Threshold

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “I haven’t talked to that son of a bitch in for fuckin’ ever. I thought he was gonna have a heart attack when he heard my voice.”

  “You called him about Dancy,” Chance says, and Deacon nods, keeps his eyes on the floor.

  “I told him everything I thought I could, without him thinking I was totally whacked. It was that finger. Regardless of what she believed it was, regardless of what I felt when I touched it, I figured if she’s really been killing people and hacking them up like that, then maybe somebody was looking for her. Maybe someone out there might know something that would help.”

  “You saw a monster, too, didn’t you?” Chance asks him, and the Lortab is making her slur; her eyes are closed again, and “When you touched it,” she says, “that’s what you saw.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I saw. But I learned a long time ago that some of the stuff I see when I touch these things, some of it can be influenced by other people who touched them before me, by what those people believed. If those beliefs are strong enough, Chance, it’s like they can leave impressions behind, the same way that actual events can.

  “So, when I found that marked-up copy of Beowulf and realized that’s where she was getting all of this stuff, it started me thinking—maybe the things I saw when I touched the finger, and the things I saw at the tunnel, maybe they had as much to do with what Dancy believed was happening as what really has been happening.”

  “Yeah, well, what about the things I saw?” Chance asks him. “What about the things Sadie said she saw?”

  “Like I said, this is complicated. I’m not saying you guys didn’t see anything. At the very least, I know you think you saw something. But neither of you had these experiences until after you met Dancy, and maybe some of the things you saw, maybe you saw them because of what she said to you.”

  “You think we imagined it all.”

  “Chance, have you ever wondered why those folks who claim to have been abducted by space aliens all tell more or less the same story? Why their stories tend to have so much in common? I know you, so I know damned well you don’t think it’s because they’ve all been abducted by extraterrestrials with the same idea of how to go poking around inside people’s butts,” and she laughs, then, a clean, sane laugh, laughing just because she thinks something’s funny. It’s almost enough to lift some of the weight from Deacon’s shoulders, from his mind, the simple sound of her laughing, and he can look at Chance again instead of the floor.

  “The UFO nuts like to say it’s impossible that all these people could have concocted such similar stories, that the similarities between the reports are proof that the stories must be accounts of real abductions. But you know that’s bullshit, because all those people, I don’t care if they’re in fucking Kansas City or Kathmandu, all of them have been contaminated by everything from Close Encounters to supermarket tabloids to the stories they’ve heard other abductees tell on talk shows.”

  “And you think Dancy contaminated me and Sadie,” Chance says. She rubs at her eyes like they’re sore, rubs them like a sleepy child trying to stay awake just a little longer, and then glances back towards the open window. The nightwarm breeze ruffling the curtains smells faintly of kudzu and car exhaust.

  “Maybe. And maybe me, too,” he says. “She was trying, as hard as she could, to convince all three of us that she was telling us the truth. She needed to convince us, to reinforce her own beliefs. Personally, I think Dancy was a hell of a lot more afraid of her own doubt than she ever was of monsters.”

  “So, what did your detective friend have to say, anyway?”

  Deacon sighs and rocks his chair back onto two legs, scuffs at the floor with the heel of one shoe.

  “Some pretty wild shit. More than I expected, that’s for sure. Dancy told me she was from Florida, down near Fort Walton somewhere, so Hammond called this guy he knows who’s Florida State Patrol, and then he talked to the Feds in Tallahassee. And they told him that a sixteen-year-old albino girl named Dancy Flammarion escaped from a state mental hospital a few months ago.”

  He pauses, then, but Chance doesn’t say anything, keeps her head turned towards the open window; she flares her nostrils slightly, once, twice, as if searching the breeze for some particular odor. An animal kind of a thing to do, almost like a dog, and that makes him think of things he’d just as soon not remember, and he starts talking again.

  “She’d been there about a year, ever since she was picked up last summer wandering along the highway near a place called Milligan. Turns out she was living somewhere back in the swamps with her mother and grandmother. The cops that found her knew who she was, but they couldn’t get her to talk, so they just assumed she’d run away from home. But when they tried to take her back, turns out the cabin her family was living in had burned down to the ground. Her mother and her grandmother were both dead, and, as far as anyone in Milligan knew, she didn’t have any other family. So Dancy became a ward of the state—”

  “Since when do they put you in the nuthouse for that?”

  “They don’t. Hammond said he wasn’t precisely clear on why she was committed, though she evidently gave the Milligan PD a hell of a lot of trouble before they shipped her off to Tallahassee.

  “Anyway, when Dancy finally started talking, whatever she had to say to those shrinks must have sounded an awful lot like the sort of stuff she was telling us, because no one intended to let her out anytime soon. About a month before she escaped, she attacked another patient and an orderly and wound up in isolation, on some sort of high-security suicide watch.”

  “Jesus,” Chance murmurs, and Deacon leans forward and the front legs of his chair bump gently back down to earth again.

  “No one seems to know exactly how she escaped, or if they do they wouldn’t tell Hammond, or he wouldn’t tell me, but in the process she assaulted another orderly. Some poor fucker that must have been trying to stop her, and she bit off his finger, Chance, bit it off and took it with her. Since then, the police in Florida and Georgia have kinda been looking for her, but no one had seen hide nor hair, not until the day you saw her at the library.”

  “What does this mean, Deacon?” and she sits up slow, braces one hand against the headboard to steady herself. “Even if we know where the finger came from, it doesn’t explain how she knew about my grandmother, or the water works tunnel, or Elise, or the trilobites—”

  “There’s a whole hell of a lot it doesn’t explain, Chance. I know that. But it’s a start. It’s someplace to begin. And we have to start somewhere. We have to do something. Right now, I got you and Sadie both goin’ fucking loony toons on me, and I don’t think I’m far behind you myself. This is the only thing that makes sense to me, figuring out what the hell was up with Dancy, because that’s where this began, that day you met her at the library,” and Deacon stops then, because he can hear the way he’s starting to sound, scared and angry, desperate, everything that he doesn’t want Chance to know he’s feeling, everything that can only make it worse. He takes a deep breath, and “I never said I had all the answers,” he says and stands up.

  “That’s not where this began, Deacon,” she says, “You know that’s not where this began,” looking up at him, and her eyes are wet and bright, her green eyes, and he’d almost forgotten how deep those eyes are, how there was a time when he could lose all the ugly parts of himself in them.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The night we broke into the tunnel. Whatever happened to us that night, whatever happened to you and to me and Elise. That’s where this started. Elise knew. She tried to get me to talk, to remember, and I wouldn’t because I was too scared, and then it killed her. And it killed my grandmother, and Dancy, too. And all we do is talk and try to think of ways not to accept what’s going on. I think maybe that’s what it wants.”

  And then she’s crying too hard to say anything else, and Deacon turns away, stares at a bookshelf on the other side of the room. Whatever miserly scrap of courage he has is no match
for her breaking down like this, and he wants to tell her to stop it, stop it right now, wants to grab her and shake her until she shuts up. There are still too many things he has to do, too many questions left to answer if they’re going to come out of this sane.

  “I have to go to Florida, Chance,” he says. “I’ve got to try to find out more about Dancy. Maybe then, maybe if I can understand how she fits into what’s going on, I can make you see this isn’t about monsters and it doesn’t have anything to do with Elise’s death—”

  “Deacon, no, please, just once talk to me about that night. Sit down and tell me what you think happened to us in there.”

  But Deacon doesn’t sit down, keeps his eyes fixed on Chance’s bookshelf, the incongruous mix of children’s picture books and natural history, On Beyond Zebra and Stephen Jay Gould. Neat and sensible rows of books to keep him from following Chance wherever she’s gone, the black and devouring places he’s spent his life running from, the places that his visions would have dragged him off to a long time ago if he’d let them.

  “I’ve asked Soda to loan me his car for a day or two. I won’t be gone any longer than that, I promise.”

  “Please,” she says, “if you ever gave a shit about me,” and he shakes his head, only shakes his head no, because he can’t do more, can’t tell her that he’s never given much of a shit about anything else but her.

  “I’m not leaving until daylight, and I won’t be gone long,” he says and starts to turn around, takes his eyes away from the sanctuary of the bookshelf, and there’s Sadie standing in the doorway, watching them and holding the ledger.

  A few awkward minutes, and then Deacon went downstairs, left Sadie and Chance alone in the attic, and now Sadie’s standing in the door, staring down the darkened stairs after him. She might still call him back, she thinks, if she tried, might even be able to talk him out of driving away to Florida on some bullshit wild-goose chase. But she doesn’t. And she wonders if it’s because of Chance or because she knows that he would try to stop her from going back to the tunnel to find Dancy.

  “I’m sorry,” Chance says, trying to stop crying, sounding more asleep than awake, and Sadie turns and looks at her.

  “Why? What do you mean?”

  “I’m sorry for getting you into this. I’m sorry for getting both of you into this mess. I know she only went to you to get to me,” and that’s just one more thing to make Sadie want to tell Chance how full of shit she is. But it’s exactly the sort of thing she should have expected, too; that arrogance, the whole wide world spinning around Chance Matthews, the whole universe, and Sadie’s only some dim, inconsequential satellite unfortunate enough to get caught up in her gravity.

  “It’s not your fault,” Sadie says. “Really. None of this is your fault.” And she walks over, sits down in the chair beside the bed, the chair still warm from Deacon sitting there before her.

  “I wish I could believe that,” Chance says. “Just for a little while,” and she wipes at her eyes. Sadie looks around for a box of Kleenex, but there isn’t any to be seen. She considers going downstairs and getting Chance some toilet paper, a little extra effort to seem more sincere, but Chance has already started talking again.

  “I told him not to go, Sadie. He won’t listen to me. Maybe if you asked him, maybe he’d listen to you.”

  “Maybe, but you know Deke. When he gets something in his head, there’s not much anyone can do.”

  Chance leans back against the wall. “I’m so tired,” she whispers and starts crying again. “I’m so goddamn tired.”

  “You need to lie down and try to get some rest. You’ve been through an awful lot today,” and that’s when Chance notices that Sadie’s holding the ledger, and she points at it.

  “Oh yeah, you left it downstairs. I thought you might want it up here with you,” and she lays it on the bed near Chance. “I know it’s important to you.”

  Chance picks up the book and glares at it, kaleidoscope tumble of emotions across her teardamp eyes, anger and regret and confusion, something that Sadie thinks might be fear, and then Chance lays it down again and wipes her snotty nose with the palm of her right hand.

  “I don’t . . . I don’t know what’s important to me anymore. I should throw this goddamned thing out the window.”

  Sadie opens her mouth and quickly closes it again. Tell me what it means, she wants to say. Tell me what’s wrong with the tunnel, the words almost out of her mouth, and then she thinks it might be too soon, that Chance could get suspicious and she might not ever get a second opportunity.

  “I don’t know,” Sadie says. “Usually, whenever I throw something away I wind up wishing that I hadn’t later on.”

  And Chance looks up at her, a sudden, furious expression like Sadie has just told her to go to straight to hell, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars, and Sadie instinctively scoots a couple of inches farther away from the edge of the bed.

  “What was that supposed to mean?” Chance asks her, and Sadie shakes her head.

  “Nothing. It didn’t mean nothing at all. Just that I think you shouldn’t throw that book away, because it belonged to your grandmother and tomorrow you might wish you hadn’t.”

  “You don’t know about this book, Sadie,” and now Chance is almost snarling, brandishes the ledger like a Baptist minister brandishing a Bible at a tent revival, something in her hands full of damnation and secrets, and she can make a weapon of it if she wants. “You don’t know what it means, this book, the things in here,” and now Chance is stabbing at the cover with an index finger, stabbing the book as she speaks, and a few drops of saliva and the tears that have run down her face to her mouth fly from her lips and speckle the front of Sadie’s T-shirt.

  “So tell me, Chance,” and There, she thinks. It’s out. Whether this was the right time or not, it’s out. “I’m right here, and you can talk to me. It’s not like I haven’t been going through all this right along with you. It’s not like I’m not going to believe whatever you say.”

  “I don’t even believe me,” Chance says, and she drops the ledger. It lands loudly on the floor, and Sadie stares at it a moment, trying to find the words she can trust, the correct words, that can’t be taken the wrong way or brushed aside.

  “Chance, do you think Dancy is dead?”

  “Why don’t you go ask Deacon? These days he seems to be doing a better job of coming up with answers than me,” and then Chance lies down, head towards the foot of the bed, and she curls herself into a fetaltight ball, a smaller target for whatever Sadie’s going to say next; she sniffles and buries her face in the patchwork squares of the quilt.

  “Because,” Sadie says and bends over, retrieves the ledger from the floor, “we both already know what Deacon thinks about Dancy, that she’s some kind of psycho. That she’s dead, or she’s run off somewhere. But he doesn’t think that she’s in trouble.”

  “My head hurts, Sadie. Leave me alone now. My head hurts, and I just want to go to sleep.”

  But Sadie has opened the ledger, flips through it until she finds the first page with the drawing of the star and the seven-sided figure inside the star, and she turns the book towards Chance.

  “Just answer one question for me, Chance. Just this one little question, and then I’ll go away and I won’t bother you again. I fucking promise.”

  Chance is watching her or the book with one bloodshot, weary eye, just her right eye because the left is still buried in the quilt. The side of her face that struck the steering wheel, and that eye is turning the purpleblackred of a ripe plum.

  “Tell me what this is. This design that your grandmother drew over and over again. Tell me what it means, and what it has to do with the water works tunnel.”

  “I don’t know,” Chance says so softly that Sadie can barely hear her. “I don’t know what it is.”

  “Dancy isn’t dead, Chance. I swear to god I know she isn’t dead, and I can find her, but someone has to help me. You have to help me, because Deacon
won’t.”

  Chance’s bruised eyelid flutters and slips closed as slowly as a theater curtain coming down after a show. But she opens her mouth, her lips parting just far enough that Sadie can glimpse white teeth and her pink tongue, and the corner of her mouth stretches back into what that might be a smile, or something else entirely.

  “Please, Chance. Just this one thing,” Sadie whispers, and downstairs Deacon’s calling her, shouting her name from the kitchen or the living room, and she shuts the ledger and leans closer to Chance. Leaning close so there’s no danger that Chance won’t hear her.

  “I know he still loves you. Help me, and I’ll leave you both alone, if that’s what you want. But I can’t let her die down there, not if there’s any way to save her.”

  “What makes you think I want the bastard anymore,” Chance says, flimsy ghost of her voice filtered through pain pills and half her mouth covered by the quilt. “Don’t be so presumptuous, Sadie.”

  And Sadie is already getting up from the chair, ready to tell Chance to go screw herself, and if she has to do this alone that’s fine. She’s spent most of her life figuring things out for herself, but Chance moves, then, reaches out and touches the back of Sadie’s hand with her fingertips, and “Wait,” she says.

  “Why? You don’t know anything, remember? I’m wasting my time talking to you.”

  But now Chance is watching her with both eyes open, more alert than she’s seemed since Deacon pulled her from the car, and Sadie sits down again.

  “Soda’s car is a piece of shit,” Sadie says, and Deacon shrugs his shoulders and stares at the television.

  “Beggars can’t be choosers.”

  “I can just see you broken down in the boonies,” but that’s the last shred of anything like resistance or disapproval that she’s willing to risk; just enough to make it all seem real, enough like herself so that he doesn’t get curious and start asking questions. She glances across the room at the clock hanging on the wall, cheesy sunburst clock from the 1950s or ’60s, and it’s almost four in the morning. She fiddles nervously with the pocket of the button-down shirt that Chance gave her to wear before she came back downstairs, a big crusty bloodstain on her T-shirt, blood from the cut on her foot; the shirt’s the color of lime sherbet, and Sadie thinks that it looks like something an old man would wear. First the clompy boots and now this shirt, and maybe it’s like being assimilated by pod people, becoming Chance one piece at a time.