Threshold

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Shouldn’t you at least get some sleep?” she asks him, and Deacon nods, but doesn’t stop watching the television.

  After what Chance said to her upstairs, what she said about the things that happened when she drew the design on the blackboard, the things that might have happened, Sadie’s having trouble sitting still, trouble waiting. Hours to go before she’ll be able to leave the house, before Deacon is on his way and no one will try to stop her. She realizes that she’s tapping her fingers impatiently on the arm of the sofa, impatient tap tap tap tappity tap, and she makes herself stop.

  “You know, maybe I should go home in the morning,” she says, “just to make sure everything’s okay. I didn’t even shut the door when I left last night,” because it’s too damn quiet in the house, even with the television on, and she has to say something, too anxious to just sit there watching Deacon watch television, watching the tacky old clock tick off the seconds, trying not to think about Dancy and the tunnel.

  “No, baby. I’ll have Soda go by and have a look. Anyway, Mrs. Schmidt probably shut the door. You know how she gets about doors. Don’t worry about it.”

  “But my computer’s in there, Deke. My book’s in there.”

  Deacon turns his head towards her, and the shifting, salt-and-pepper TV light makes him look older than he is, his eyes so tired, the stubble on his chin and cheeks, but he looks sober and she wonders how long since he’s had a drink; for a second, he’s more important than Dancy, more important than being brave or strong, than anything else ever could be, and even the thought of losing him is almost more than she can bear.

  “I need you to stay here with Chance,” he says. “Just in case she needs help. And I think maybe you’re safer here. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  “Right,” she says. “Whatever you say,” and there’s just a hint of sullen in her voice, a realistic touch that isn’t that hard if she thinks about how Deacon’s probably a lot more worried about Chance than he is about her, how in case she needs help came before you’re safer here. A sharp little jab of reality to restore her perspective. Deacon turns away from her again, looks back at the television screen, and in a few minutes he closes his eyes and falls asleep sitting up on the sofa. Sadie waits until he begins to snore his ragged-loud Deacon snore, until she’s certain that he’s deep enough asleep that she isn’t likely to wake him, and then she takes the piece of paper from the shirt pocket, the page she tore out of the ledger after Chance finally stopped talking, stopped crying, and dozed off.

  She lays the folded, slightly crumpled piece of paper on her knee and smooths it flat with one hand, stares at the thing that Chance’s grandmother drew there when Sadie Jasper was only twelve years old, sixth-grade Sadie still afraid of the branches scratching the window at night and the things that hid beneath her bed waiting for the light to go out, and “There’s no such things as monsters, dear,” her mother would say. “Even if there are, God would never let them eat little girls,” and maybe her mother even believed those things. Her mother believed a lot of things, comforting, light-of-day things, but now Sadie knows better; the panting, gaunt apparition outside Quinlan Castle that wasn’t a stray dog, that stopped her from helping Dancy, that and this piece of paper are all the testament she needs.

  “When I shut my eyes,” Chance said upstairs, “every time I shut my eyes, I see it again. I’ll never be able to stop seeing it,” and Sadie held her hand and said reassuring words she didn’t mean.

  “All of this, it’s all about what we know,” Chance said. “They don’t want to be known, Sadie.”

  Sadie stares at the design while Deacon snores and the television talks to itself in too many voices to be sane. Later, when she begins to feel sleepy, she folds the paper carefully and puts it back into her pocket. She lies down on the sofa, her head in his bony lap, first dishwater light outside, watergray light leaking through the drapes, and Sadie tries to pretend that nothing has changed, and nothing ever will, until she falls asleep.

  And when she opens her eyes he’s gone and the sun is very bright outside. Bright morning sun, and at first she can’t remember where she is, only that Deacon was here a moment ago and now he’s gone. Dreams she can’t quite recall, dim and subterranean dreams, dripping water, and Sadie squints at the ugly clock until her eyes focus and she can see that it’s almost noon.

  She sits up, and Chance’s house, she reminds herself. I’m in Chance’s house, and I should have been up hours ago. Too soon to let herself think about the tunnel, so she only thinks about how badly she needs to piss, how she’s thirsty and needs to piss and wants a cigarette.

  Walking as quietly as she can, the clumsy, too-big boots heavy against the squeaky, old hardwood floor, down the hall to the bathroom, and she stops on the way, pauses to peer up the stairs towards Chance’s attic bedroom. No sign that she’s awake yet, or at least that’s what Sadie hopes. Pretty sure that Chance isn’t in any shape to try and stop her from leaving, but, all the same, she’d rather not have to find out.

  The bathroom smells like Ivory Soap and Pine-Sol, a whiff of something more exotic, lavender or roses, maybe. Sadie flushes the toilet, watches the pee-colored water swirling away and “Our drinking water comes through that place,” she says out loud. The words from the journal and not much point in trying not to remember, now that she’s up and moving, now that she can’t simply close her eyes and let the world slip mercifully away from her again.

  She looks back at herself from the mirrored medicine cabinet door hanging over the sink; a few streaks of eyeliner smudged all the way down to her cheekbones, hardly any left on her eyelids at all, her black lipstick wiped away, and the cold frostblue eyes that she’s always been so proud of, a part of her she didn’t have to make strange because they came that way, and if they truly are the windows to her soul then nothing could be more seemly, more appropriate. Like Dancy Flammarion’s rabbitpink irises, Sadie’s blue eyes faded almost white to mark her for life, I’m not like the rest of them. See? Inside, I’m not like you at all, and Sadie starts to wash her hands, remembers the words from the ledger again, and so she settles for wiping them with a dry hand towel.

  On her way out of the bathroom and headed for the kitchen when she thinks to check her shirt pocket, just to be sure. And it’s still there, the page she tore from the ledger still folded up safe until she needs it. The page she stole so she could get the design exactly right, and now she wonders if she could possibly ever forget it; a hundred years, and she would probably still remember. But always better to be safe than sorry, Deke would say. Better too much than not enough, every goddamn time.

  Sadie finds a mostly empty pack of Marlboros on the kitchen counter, doesn’t remember leaving them there so maybe Deacon did. There are still two cigarettes in the pack, and she lights one off the stove, sits down and takes a deep drag, letting the nicotine fill her lungs and work its way into her bloodstream, waking her the rest of the way while she watches the smoke float lazily towards the ceiling. A cup of coffee would be nice, strong black coffee with lots of sugar, but she doesn’t know how to use Chance’s old-fashioned percolator, so the Marlboro will have to do.

  “What are you doing, Sadie?” Dancy says, her voice as clear as the angry blue jay squawking somewhere in the backyard, clearer even because Dancy’s voice is coming from right behind her. Sadie turns around quickly, but there’s only the oven, the refrigerator, and the fog of her own cigarette smoke.

  “Dancy?” she whispers. “Was that you?” and Sadie’s heart is beating like she’s just run a marathon, sweat on her palms and upper lip, a sick feeling deep inside her belly; she waits a moment and calls Dancy again, speaking as quietly as her shaky, adrenaline-dabbed voice will allow because she’s still afraid of waking Chance.

  “Can you hear me?”

  But no one answers, nothing but the traffic and the jay-bird, the mechanical purr of the fridge, the distant sound of the living room clock ticking off the day. Sadie turns back around, takes another drag
off her cigarette and stares across the kitchen table at the window; a dark stain on the glass, maroondark smear, and then she remembers the crow from Saturday morning. Her and Chance and Dancy having breakfast while Deacon finished being sick in the bathroom, and the crow crashed into the window. Bashed its fucking brains out on the windowpane, and it scared her so badly she actually screamed. Probably the first time in her life that she ever screamed, and it was over some idiot bird. She exhales, smoke spilling slow from her nostrils, and she sees that it’s not just blood on the glass, but a couple of small black feathers stuck there, too, and something white that it takes her a second to realize is a smear of bird shit.

  “Don’t look at it,” Dancy says, and this time Sadie doesn’t turn around, keeps her eyes on the window, ignores the prickling pins-and-needles sensation at the nape of her neck.

  “Don’t look at what, Dancy?” she asks.

  “It’s nothing like what you think,” and this time Sadie notices a hollow, throaty ring in Dancy’s voice, still perfectly clear, still right behind her, but Dancy sounds like someone speaking from the bottom of a well. Or someone talking through pipes, Sadie thinks, water pipes, and then those words again from the ledger, from the piece of paper hidden away in her pocket.

  “Our drinking water comes through that place,” Dancy says. “Whatever you’re thinking, Sadie, it’s nothing like that at all. It’s nothing you can imagine—”

  “Then what is it, Dancy? What the hell is it?”

  “There are still giants in the earth,” Dancy replies, and now Sadie does turn to see, hard to pull her eyes away from the scabby windowpane, but she turns towards the voice anyway. “Stop talking in goddamn riddles. Just answer the question,” almost shouting, and she doesn’t care anymore if she wakes Chance or anyone else.

  And she’s still alone in the kitchen.

  “I have to try to find you,” she whispers. “I’ll never be able to live with myself if I don’t try.” Sadie waits for an answer, anything that could pass for an answer, sits very still in her chair until the cigarette burns down to sear her fingers. She curses and drops it on the floor, not much left but the smoking filter, and she crushes that out with the toe of Chance’s boot, touches the tip of her tongue to blistered skin and closes her eyes, looking inside for whatever has brought her this far and still has to carry her the rest of the way to the water works tunnel.

  Sadie finds all the things she’ll need in the storage room at the back of Chance’s house, the musty room where Dancy found the wooden crate. A small can of black enamel paint and a brush that smells faintly of turpentine, a flashlight that works, and what she thinks is a pair of lopping shears. Not the heavy-duty bolt cutters she hoped to find when she started searching through the tools, working from high-school memories of the janitors forcing open lockers suspected of harboring dope or liquor or stolen property. Nothing that formidable, but these two long aluminum handles that end in a stout tempered-steel beak, a robotic parrot’s jaws, and she thinks they should do the trick just fine.

  All these things and the page torn from the ledger, and Sadie follows the crooked, rootbuckled sidewalk down the mountain towards the park, walking beneath the scorching midday sun, blazing sun in a sky gone the palest blue to match her eyes. She’s carrying the shears over her left shoulder like a rifle, and the paint, the brush, and the flashlight are all inside a brown paper bag she found under the kitchen sink. It isn’t a long walk, three short blocks before the lawns and driveways end, and now there’s shade below the sweet gums and water oaks, welcomed refuge from sunstroke and the indifferent gaze of the distant, cloudless sky. Not far, but far enough that her bandaged foot is getting stiff again and it’s begun throbbing inside the borrowed boot.

  Sadie crosses the road, and there are weathered pineboard steps leading down from Sixteenth to the park, a steep and winding walkway to make a shortcut to Nineteenth Street, and it ends at a dingy little gazebo with a single picnic table. The park’s deserted, but there’s an old Taco Bell bag and a couple of Diet Pepsi cans that someone’s left sitting on the table, someone too lazy to toss them at the green trash barrel with HELP KEEP BIRMINGHAM CLEAN—PUT LITTER IN ITS PLACE stenciled on the side in large, blocky letters. She sets her grocery bag and the lopping shears on the table, sits herself down on the picnic bench, and turns to face the entrance to the tunnel; the blockhouse is only twenty or thirty yards to her right now, back among the trees at the end of a trench in the mountainside. Red dirt and limestone rubble furrow leading right up to the opening, and she can see the rusty chain looped through the iron bars, the silver glint of a big padlock to make sure the chain stays put and the gate stays closed.

  It isn’t much cooler under the gazebo, and Sadie wipes the sweat from her face with the palm of her hand.

  “Where are you now, Deke?” she says out loud, the first thing she’s said since the kitchen, since Dancy talked to her, and she pictures Deacon behind the wheel of Soda’s old Chevy Nova, a small and homely car that looks like something that took a wrong turn and ended up in the middle of a demolition derby. No air conditioner and one headlight, the crumpled hood and fenders like a fucking dinosaur stepped on it because he got stoned and drove under a guardrail a year or two ago. “Jesus, Soda, it looks like Godzilla stepped on the damned thing,” Deacon said, and she wishes he was here with her. Probably all the way to Florida by now, but it doesn’t hurt to wish.

  “Yeah. If wishes were horses,” she says and wipes her sweaty face again, stares back at the blockhouse with its two tiny window frames like vacant eyes set too far apart. It’ll be plenty cool in there, I bet, imagining shadows that never grow any longer or any shorter, all the places the withering Alabama summer sun will never touch. Sadie shuts her eyes, so hot and tired after the walk from Chance’s house, and these thoughts to soothe her, to remind her that there’s someplace to escape the heat, a hundred in the shade, a hundred and ten, and if she has to stay out here much longer her brains will start to bake.

  “It’s lying to you,” Dancy says, her wellbottom voice even more hollow than before. “There’s no comfort here. Everything burns down here.”

  Sadie doesn’t open her eyes, has learned her lesson, and maybe whatever’s left of Dancy isn’t something anyone can see, or she’s speaking from somewhere much too far away.

  “Oh, Dancy. I should have tried harder to make them listen—”

  “Go home, Sadie. Please. There’s still time. I’m not your responsibility. I never was—” and then a sound that’s almost like radio static, not a sound from outside but coming from inside her head, radio static, white noise, and it does burn. Like ice crystals growing beneath her skin, blooming glass flowers to tear her apart, cell from frozen cell, and she gasps and opens her eyes. An instant when she’d swear that she’s seeing her breath in the stifling air, less than an instant, before the static in her head fades away to the softest crackle and then to nothing at all.

  And on the other side of the furrow, standing small in the useless shade of the trees, Dancy Flammarion bows her head and raises her left hand, sad and forgiving gesture like a plaster saint, and Sadie calls out to her. Screams her name, but suddenly there’s a breeze blowing across the park, a wind that stinks of mold and stagnant water and it rustles the leaves of the trees, ruffles Dancy’s clothes and hair, and she dissolves as completely as a tear swallowed by an ocean.

  The lopping shears left only a few futile dents and scratches on the steel hasp of the padlock, its blades either too dull or Sadie too weak or both, and by the time she finishes painting the design onto the front of the blockhouse, blood and small pieces of flesh have been falling from the cloudless July sky for almost fifteen minutes. There’s laughter coming from someplace just inside the tunnel, a low, guttural chuckle from something hiding behind the pipes. The laugh and the stickysick plop plop plop of blood and meat hitting the ground, and both these things only prove she’s right, Sadie knows that. Cheap horror movie tricks to scare her away so she must be right.<
br />
  She wipes the blood from her eyes and takes a couple of steps back from the blockhouse, slides in the mud and almost falls; the ground has turned the deepest red beneath her feet, a red that’s almost black, and the mud is speckled with restless white bodies, hungry maggots and grubs, and she lets the paintbrush fall from her slippery fingers. It lands in a small puddle, splashes her ankles with stringy clots and gristle, and Sadie stares up at the bold black lines she’s traced on the stones. The wall almost as bloody as the mud, but the lines still plain enough to see, the star, the inner heptagon, and Sadie stands beneath the bleeding sky, the same wounded sky she invented two days before, and stares past the iron bars into the mouth of the water works tunnel.

  Run, Sadie, run fast. It’s not too late to run away, but that’s not Dancy, clumsy lost girl impersonation, and it only wants her to run because she be might be fun to chase.

  “Come on out, motherfucker. I’m getting tired of waiting for you,” and the darkness crouched inside the tunnel laughs at her again, but she doesn’t have to wait for very long.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Trollholm

  BARELY half past noon and already the heat is a demon stretching itself wide across the monotonous South Alabama landscape, a greedy, suffocating heat to lick at the pine sap and sandyred soil, at Deacon trapped inside the shitty little Chevy. Sweat drips from his hair, trickles down his skin into his eyes, and he squints painfully through the bugspattered windshield at the burning day and licorice-black strip of Highway 55, the watershimmer mirage rising off the blacktop to make him that much thirstier. He’s been swigging lukewarm Gatorade for hours, but the orange liquid tastes vaguely like baby aspirin and, besides, it doesn’t seem to do anything much for the thirst. The wind whipping through the open windows is hot and smells like melting asphalt and the dense forests crowding at the edges of the road, and it’s easy for Deacon to imagine that the trees and brambles are pressing closer and closer on each side, taking back the highway, and the vanishing point up ahead is merely proof that they’re succeeding.