Threshold

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Trying not to think about Chance or Sadie, about what he will or won’t find in Milligan, and he glances at the odometer. One of the few things on the dashboard that seems to be working right, working at all, and he sees that he’s driven almost two hundred miles since leaving Birmingham. Two hundred miles and most of it interstate, before he took the exit for Andalusia half an hour ago. It was better on the interstate, the breeze through the windows just the slightest bit cooler when he was driving fast. Now he’s a lot more worried about cops, plenty of places for them to hide, waiting patiently, laying speed traps along the narrow highway, and he’s trying to stay under sixty. But it’s all guesswork anyhow, since the speedometer is one of the things that doesn’t work.

  There’s country music blaring from the radio, nothing but country and gospel stations this far south, and so he’s going with the lesser of two evils, a twangy stream of Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood, but at least it’s something to keep him company. Something besides the sound of the wheels on the road, the unnerving assortment of noises that come from the Chevy’s engine at irregular intervals. And every now and then there’s a Johnny Cash or Patsy Cline song, like water holes in the wasteland, something small but genuine to keep him going.

  A mile past Red Level, someplace that isn’t actually any place at all, a crossroads and a gas station, two rusty house trailers and they both looked deserted, when he spots the hitchhiker standing by a faded Pepsi Cola billboard. A very tall man standing in the sun without a hat, an old green knapsack on one shoulder, and he’s holding up a cardboard and crayon sign with ENTERPRISE printed neatly on it. He sees the Chevy coming and smiles, holds his sign a little higher so there’s no chance that the driver won’t see him. And It might not be so bad, a little company, Deacon thinks, better than the damned radio, and maybe the guy doesn’t look harmless, but then who does? He pulls over, raising a thick cloud of dust and sand, and a second later the hitchhiker leans in through the passenger-side window and smiles one of the widest smiles that Deacon’s ever seen. Wide and nicotine-stained teeth the dingy color of old ivory or bone, and the man reaches inside and shakes Deacon’s hand. He has eyes so brown they seem almost black, oildark eyes and long black hair slicked down close to his scalp.

  “I’m mighty grateful to you,” the hitchhiker says. “Been standing there since dawn this morning, and nobody’s even slowed down to look twice. And old Mr. Sun up there’s a bull-bitch on wheels, if you catch my meaning.”

  “I can only take you as far as Andalusia,” Deacon says, and the man’s still pumping his arm up and down, up and down, like he expects quarters or a gush of cold spring water to come spilling from Deacon’s lips. “I’m turning south there, for Florida.”

  “Yeah? Well, Andalusia will do just fine, then,” the man says and finally releases Deacon’s hand. He opens the car door, letting in more of the dust, and Deacon coughs a dry cough into the palm of his hand and reaches for the half-empty Gatorade bottle tucked into the shadows beneath his seat. The man throws his knapsack into the back, lays the cardboard sign on top of it, and gets in, slams the door so hard it rattles the whole car.

  “You got folks down in Florida?” the hitchhiker asks. “Or is it business?”

  “Just business,” Deacon says and unscrews the cap on the Gatorade bottle, takes a long swallow, washing dust and grit down his throat and trying to pretend it’s an ice cold beer instead. The man keeps talking, watching the dust cloud start to settle on the hood of the car or maybe whatever he can see farther down the highway.

  “Florida ain’t so bad, you know, except for all the goddamned tourists, all those goddamned, pasty-assed Yankee tourists trying to get away from the snow.”

  “Is that right?” Deacon asks, wipes his mouth on the back of his hand and briefly considers finishing off the Gatorade, only an inch or so left in the bottle, anyway.

  “Well, if you ask me, that’s exactly right. But the deep-sea fishing’s still good, Yankees or no Yankees.”

  Deacon wipes his mouth again and decides to save the rest of the baby aspirin-flavored Gatorade until later, much too easy to imagine Soda’s car breaking down before he reaches the next town or convenience store, and he’d rather not think about being stuck out here with nothing at all to drink. He puts the cap back on the bottle and returns it to its place beneath the seat. The transmission makes an ugly, grinding sound when he shifts the stick back into drive, but Deacon ignores it, beginning to get used to the car’s repertoire of complaints, and he pulls back out onto the highway.

  “Where you coming from?” the hitchhiker asks, and Deacon points out the window, points north, and “Birmingham,” he says. “That’s where I live.”

  “I’ve been lots of worse places,” the man says and takes a deck of cards from the pocket of his shirt. Deacon switches off the radio, and the knob comes away in his hand; he curses and tosses it out the window.

  “Not exactly a goddamned Rolls-Royce, is it?” the man says and chuckles softly to himself, cuts the deck of cards once and shuffles them. “But listen to me, like I got a gold-plated chariot to haul my ass around in.”

  “It isn’t even mine. I borrowed it from a friend.”

  “Well, it’s sure as coon shit better than standing back there getting a sunstroke. Even if it ain’t got an air conditioner, it’s better than that.”

  “Oh, it has one,” Deacon says, “but it only blows warm air,” and the man laughs again, shuffles his deck of cards and turns the top card faceup.

  “Well, look at that,” the hitchhiker says, and he whistles through his teeth. “Not exactly what I had in mind.”

  Deacon glances from the road to the cards and sees that they’re not playing cards, a tattered, dog-eared pack of tarot cards, instead, and the hitchhiker is holding The Tower between his left thumb and index finger. The lightning-struck tower perched on its rocky crag, fire from its windows and two figures plummeting towards the earth. “You see that there?” he asks and taps the card.

  “What?” and so the man taps the card again.

  “These drops of light here, falling down out of the clouds. The Hebrews call those things ‘yods.’ They sort of represent the descent of the life force into the material plane. Light falling out of the sky like rain.”

  “I’ve never picked up a hitchhiker who read the tarot before,” Deacon says, and the man smiles again, showing off his yellowbrown teeth, and he places The Tower back on the top of the deck.

  “I’ve been carrying this old deck of cards around with me since the war. I used to have a book to tell me what they all meant, but it got lost somewhere. I’d already memorized most of it, though.”

  “Which war?” Deacon asks him, and the man shrugs his skinny shoulders and shakes his head.

  “You think one’s any different from the next? I mean, when it comes right down to brass tacks, people killing each other since they figured out how, that’s all. Give them pretty names and numbers, but it’s all the same to the worms. Worms can’t count or read, and what’s more, they got the good sense to stay down in the dark where the light don’t come dripping out of the clouds onto their heads.”

  And Deacon’s starting to think picking the hitchhiker up wasn’t such a great idea after all, that perhaps he should have stuck with the road noise and honky-tonk music; already enough things in his head to give him the willies without this guy pulling out a deck of tarot cards and lecturing him about cabalism and worms.

  “All the upheaval in the world in this card here,” the man says. “The destruction of order and tradition, all your beliefs like a candle flickering in a hurricane. Enlightenment, but at a cost, you see.”

  “You’re starting to sound like a preacher,” Deacon says, and he’s trying to make a joke out of it, but the man nods his head and slips the card back into the deck.

  “Yeah? Well that’s one of the things I’ve been. That’s one of the things I’ll be again someday, I expect,” and he turns over the second card. “The Queen of Pentacles, reve
rsed,” he says. But this time Deacon doesn’t look at the card, keeps his eyes fixed straight ahead of him, the road and the pine trees and the unsheltering sky.

  “Maybe this ain’t where you’re supposed to be today, this long, hot road going down to the sea. Maybe there’s something else you’re supposed to be doing, somewhere else. Neglected duties, and the Queen here, she says you’ve been thinking just that very thing all morning long.”

  “Does she now?” and he’s straining to sound more skeptical than nervous, but his throat so dry it’s almost sore, and if he only had one goddamn beer, one stinking Bud or Sterling or PBR, maybe this fucker wouldn’t be getting under his skin. “What else does she say?”

  “Someone you don’t trust, she says, someone you think ain’t precisely what they been telling you,” and he puts the Queen of Pentacles on the bottom of the deck and turns over another card. “The Eight of Staves. But, then, we already know you’re on a journey. Question is, what’s waiting for you at the end? What’ll be left when you get back home?”

  “Well, I suppose that’s what you’re going to show me next,” Deacon says, glances at the man, and it’s okay that there’s an angry edge to his voice; if he can’t fake disbelief, he can at least make it clear that this whole shtick is beginning to piss him off, and maybe the hitchhiker will take the hint and put the cards back into his shirt pocket.

  “Dead dog,” the man says, points at the windshield, and Deacon looks back at the road just in time to see the sun-bloated corpse sprawled completely across his lane, the thick cloud of green-bottle flies and its body swollen big enough that it might as well be a deer as a dog; he cuts the wheel sharply to the left, but hits it, anyway, plowing headlong through bone and rot and fur. The back tires squeal as the car fishtails, and for a moment Deacon thinks he’s lost control, a few more seconds and he’ll be careening into the trees.

  “Holy shiiiit, that was a ripe tomato,” the hitchhiker cackles from the passenger seat, laughing like a madman, a high and delirious laugh.

  “You just shut the fuck up!” Deacon growls at him. “We almost fuckin’ died back there, for Christ’s sake!” but the car has stopped swerving, is sailing along straight and smooth under the blue summer sky as if maybe it’s decided to contradict him, angry about the radio knob, and so it’s decided to take the hitchhiker’s side.

  “Hey, you’re the one ran over the son of a bitch,” the man says and stops laughing, goes back to shuffling his tarot cards. “Don’t be yelling at me ’cause you weren’t looking at the road.”

  The cloying, sicksweet smell of roadkill so bad that Deacon’s eyes are watering, and he swallows hard, trying not to taste it but tasting it anyway. He steals a quick peek in the rearview mirror, but whatever’s left of the dog is already too far behind them to see.

  “You still got a long, long ways to go, Mr. Silvey, and you ain’t never gonna make it at this rate.”

  Deacon starts to say something, ready to tell the man exactly where he can stick it, ready to pull over and let his smart-ass, spooky brains sizzle in his skull like a skillet full of scrapple and eggs, when he realizes that he hasn’t told the hitchhiker his name. The tall man never asked, and Deacon’s pretty sure he didn’t volunteer the information. He stares through the windshield at a ragged scrap of flesh caught on the hood of the Chevy, something dark and greasy that might be one of the dead dog’s ears.

  The hitchhiker shuffles his cards and sighs.

  “Oh, I can tell you got some of the sight about you, so don’t look too surprised. Just a glimmer, sure, not like that little albino bitch. That girl was a goddamn searchlight. She’d just as soon blind you as give you the time of day.”

  Not another car on the road as far as Deacon can see, not a house or a service station in sight, and it could easily go on like this for miles and miles. He licks his dry lips and puts more pressure on the gas pedal; if he’s lucky, there might be a highway patrolman with a radar gun somewhere up ahead.

  “You been trying to keep your head down all your life, ain’t you, Deke? You never did want any part of this hocuspocus. Am I right or am I wrong?”

  “I didn’t ask for it, if that’s what you mean,” Deacon says. “But that really hasn’t made a whole hell of lot of difference, has it?” The Chevy’s accelerator is halfway to the floorboard now, and the car races over a short bridge, a narrow, nameless creek fringed with bald cypress trees and Spanish moss. Deacon thinks he sees something moving about in the dark water, a shapeless mass gleaming wet in the sun, but then the creek’s behind them and the man’s talking again.

  “No, I don’t suppose it has at that. But sometimes a fellow’s just got bad shit coming to him, whether he deserves it or not.”

  “Did Dancy Flammarion deserve it?” he asks, and the man clicks his tongue twice against the roof of his mouth and turns another tarot card.

  “You better slow this junk heap down a bit, or you’re gonna be spending the night in some cracker’s pissant jail.”

  “That’s sort of what I had in mind.”

  The hitchhiker clicks his tongue again, something cold and insectile in that sound, cold despite the heat of the day, and “This card,” he says, “well, never you mind this card. You know you got a choice. You’ve always had a choice. All you have to do is forget about the albino and all the rest of this crazy shit, go back to that smart girl of yours in her great big ol’ house and pretend like none of this ever happened. See that she does the same.”

  “Just like that,” Deacon says, and the Chevy has to be doing almost ninety by now, at least ninety, the way its front end has started to rattle and shimmy like it’s ready to fly apart, and the steering wheel is beginning to shake in his hands. “Look the other way and I’m off the hook. It’s that easy.”

  “I never said nothing about easy. Hell no, forgetting the messy truth of things ain’t never been easy, but you and Chance might live a lot longer. It’s your call, Deke. Your choice. You just don’t look much like hero material to me. Let sleeping dogs lie, if you get my drift.”

  The man smiles, flashes all those sharp yellow teeth, and then Deacon’s coughing again, the air inside the Chevy suddenly so full of red dust that he can hardly see. He takes his foot off the gas and hits the brakes hard and realizes that the car is already sitting perfectly, impossibly still as the engine sputters and stalls and is silent. The stereo’s still blaring, the stereo and the rise and fall of the cicadas screaming in the trees, and he peers through the choking dust, through the windshield at the faded Pepsi billboard, and he doesn’t have to look twice to know that it’s the same billboard, that he’s no more than a mile past Red Level. There’s nobody else in the car but him and no knapsack or homemade cardboard sign in the back, either. But there’s a single tarot card on the seat beside him—the Tower—and Deacon sits and stares at it while the dust settles and the sun melts its way slowly towards the west. If there’s no other mercy in the day ahead, at least the card has nothing more to show him than the gaudy mystic’s colors of its face.

  Twenty long minutes waiting for the man that Vincent Hammond’s sent him all the way to Florida to see, twenty minutes sitting on a bench in the lobby of the Milligan Courthouse, footstep echoes on the marble floors and occasional, suspicious stares from the people coming and going. The men and women dressed like they belong here, gray suits to remind him that he doesn’t, and Deacon nods at each of them politely and smiles, spends the rest of the time reading a gold-framed reproduction of the Bill of Rights hanging on the wall. He’s still reading it when someone calls his name, and he looks up to see a pudgy black man with a gray mustache and an ugly yellow tie walking quickly towards him.

  “Mr. Silvey?”

  “Yes sir. That’s me,” and Deacon stands up, holds out a hand, and the man shakes it.

  “I’m Detective Toomey. You know, you’re not exactly what I was expecting,” the man says and tugs anxiously at his yellow tie. “The way Lieutenant Hammond talked, I thought you’d be a lot younger.”


  Deacon shrugs, uncertain what he should or shouldn’t say to that, and then Detective Toomey rubs at his eyebrows like someone with a headache, eyebrows as gray as his mustache, and “Well, that’s really neither here nor there, now is it? Why don’t we step outside?” He motions towards the courthouse doors.

  “Sure,” Deacon says, “that sounds good to me,” and he follows the policeman back out into the afternoon sun. There’s another bench not far from the courthouse steps, and they sit down there.

  “Bet you it don’t get this damn hot way up there in Birmingham,” Detective Toomey says, and Deacon glances up at the sun; it seems much closer than when he left Chance’s house this morning, a spiteful white thing sagging dangerously close to the ground.

  “No sir. Not very often.”

  “When I retire, I’m gonna pick up and move all the way to Canada. I’m not gonna stop until there’s snow so deep you need a bulldozer just to get from the front door to the mailbox,” and Toomey wipes his face with a white handkerchief from a pants pocket.

  “Right about now, that’d be fine by me,” Deacon says, just wanting to get past the chitchat, get to the point, because he’s never been any good at small talk, especially small talk with cops.

  “Yeah. Snow and icicles long as my arm,” and the detective stuffs the sweatstained handkerchief back into his pants. “So, tell me, Mr. Silvey, how can I help you today?”