Threshold

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Hammond said you might be able to tell me something about a girl named Dancy Flammarion.”

  Toomey rubs at his eyebrows again and turns away from Deacon, gazes across the courthouse lawn towards a bronze statue of an Indian on a granite pedestal.

  “Right, the albino girl. Fifteen years as a cop and you see some shit, Mr. Silvey, even way out here in the sticks, you do see some shit. But, well, there’s the shit and then there’s the depraved shit. And then there’s things like Miss Flammarion. Jesus.”

  Deacon waits while the detective stares silently at the bronze Indian, wide bronze shoulders streaked with verdigris and pigeon crap, and in a moment the man turns towards him again and smiles a tired, nervous smile like someone with something to hide, someone with secrets.

  “That was my case. Not one of the ones I like to spend too much time thinking about, though. One of the ones I’d just as soon forget, to be perfectly honest. I was there the day Officer Weaver brought the girl in from the swamps. And let me tell you right now, just the time it took him to get her here from Eleanore Road, she’d already done a number on that poor man’s head. Thought for a while he was gonna quit the force after that, and he still won’t talk about it much.”

  “Eleanore Road?” Deacon asks, and Toomey nods, points to the north, past the courthouse.

  “Yeah, that’s where Weaver found her. We’d been having some pretty bad forest fires that summer, what with all the dry weather. A bunch of volunteer firefighters down from Georgia had just spent two days out on Eleanore Road, and Weaver was out there to be sure there weren’t any hot spots left, you know. Well, about sunrise, he comes across Miss Dancy Flammarion walking right down the middle of the road, barefoot and dragging along this big ol’ duffel bag, her clothes scorched to rags, like she walked straight through that fire. But there wasn’t a burn, not so much as a blister, Mr. Silvey, anywhere on her. Or the damned duffel bag, for that matter.

  “Well, sir, Weaver, he pulls over to see what’s up, you know, and she takes one look at him and starts screaming bloody murder. Crazy shit about monsters and angels and lights in the sky. You name it, man. He finally had to hand-cuff the kid just to get her into the patrol car. And then she bit him,” and the detective points to a spot just below his left temple.

  “Took a plug out of the guy’s cheek. Weaver was bleeding like a stuck pig when he brought her into the station.”

  “But you guys already knew who she was?”

  Toomey leans back against the bench, tugs at his yellow tie and his eyebrows arch like excited caterpillars.

  “Oh, yeah. Everyone in town knew about the Flammarions. There aren’t too many bona-fide swamp folks left around these parts. And the Flammarions have been living out there in Shrove Wood since God was in diapers. I understand they gave the Feds a lot of trouble back during Prohibition, shooting at anyone who came near the place, and when alligators went on the endangered species list in the seventies, we almost had a civil war on our hands. Two of the old man’s boys finally wound up in the state pen for poaching gators. Anyway, by the time this happened, this business with the albino girl, they’d all pretty much moved away or died or gone to jail. No one was left out there but the old woman and her daughter, Julia. That was the girl’s mother, you know, Julia Flammarion. She went off to Pensacola at some point and got herself pregnant.”

  “So Dancy’s illegitimate?” Deacon asks, and Detective Toomey shakes his head and barks out a dry, thin laugh.

  “Kind of adds insult to injury, wouldn’t you say? But we’re getting a little off the subject.”

  “Yeah,” Deacon says, and he looks down at his hands, the sweat standing out on his palms. “I guess we probably are. This Officer Weaver, was he the one that drove Dancy back home, the one that found the burned cabin?”

  “Oh, hell no. After she bit him, Al Weaver swore he wasn’t getting anywhere near that child. Said he’d resign before he ever got within spitting distance of her again. We had a doctor look the girl over, make sure she wasn’t injured, and then Ned Morrison and someone from Child Welfare took her back, and they’re the ones found the cabin and the bodies and all.”

  “And then you went out there yourself?”

  “Yep, soon as they brought her back. And I don’t mind telling you, Mr. Silvey, this job doesn’t get much worse than having to deal with bodies that have been through a fire. Except maybe the floaters. You know, someone that’s been in the water a good long while. Either way, the stink gets up your nose, into your sinuses, and it stays there for days.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Deacon says, almost whispering, those smells too easy to remember, all the stink of death and decay that came along with the things he once did for Vincent Hammond, and Detective Toomey stares at him a moment without saying anything at all. No need to say anything out loud because the questions are all there in his eyes.

  “Well, anyhow,” the detective says, and he clears his throat, spits into the grass. “Like I was saying, after they brought the girl back, after Morrison called in the bodies, that’s when this thing landed in my lap.” And he stops, takes half a roll of peppermint Life Savers from his shirt pocket and offers one to Deacon before taking a piece of the candy for himself. “No thanks,” Deacon says, and Toomey shrugs, drops the roll back into his pocket and sucks thoughtfully for a moment on his Life Saver.

  “We had to use dental records to get the official IDs on the two women. We all knew who they were, of course, but not by looking at what was left of them. At first, when I talked to Morrison on the radio, I assumed the forest fire got the cabin and for some reason they weren’t able to get away.”

  “That’s not what happened,” Deacon says, not meaning to sound so certain, only meaning to ask, and he gets another long and wary look from Detective Toomey.

  “You sure you need me to tell you what happened out there, Mr. Silvey?”

  “I’m sorry,” he says, and the detective nods his head, uses his tongue to move the Life Saver from one side of his mouth to the other and back again.

  “That fire never reached the Flammarion place. We found a couple of empty twelve-gallon gas cans at the edge of the woods. And there was plenty of residue from the expedient in the ash and timbers, and on the girl’s hands and clothes. So we were pretty sure how the fire began, even if we didn’t know why. Later on, after she was locked up in that hospital in Tallahassee, when she started talking again, Dancy denied the whole thing. Said it was a lightning strike started the fire.”

  “So she killed them?”

  “Now, that’s not what I said, is it?”

  “But you’re saying she started the fire,” and a fat and stinging drop of sweat runs down Deacon’s forehead, down the bridge of his nose, and into his left eye.

  “The one thing does not necessarily lead straight to the other. Sure, that was the first thought popped into my head, until I actually saw the bodies and the coroner started working on them. Turns out, they both died before the fire even started. The old woman . . . well, we wrote her up as an animal attack. Something out there tried to tear her apart. We never did find one of her arms. The ME said maybe it was a bear or a panther. We still have a few of those around, so maybe that’s all it was.

  “And Dancy’s mother, Julia, she drowned, Mr. Silvey, probably two or three days before the cabin burned. I don’t think I would have believed that one if I hadn’t been there myself when they opened up her chest and seen the water in her lungs. There’s a place where Wampee Creek widens out, where it runs through an old sinkhole, not too far from the cabin. We figure that’s probably where she died.”

  The detective pauses and spits out the half-dissolved Life Saver, makes a face, and “Damn, I hate those things. But I’m trying to quit smoking, you know.”

  “So Dancy was only burning their bodies, like a funeral pyre.”

  The detective turns and glares at Deacon. “Listen, son. I’m about to tell you some stuff, and for the record, you absolutely did not hear any of this shit
from me, and you didn’t hear it from anyone else connected with me, you understand that? The only reason I’m doing this is because someone in the department owed someone in Atlanta a favor. If a single word of this turns up in the press or on the goddamn Internet—”

  “That’s not going to happen,” Deacon says, still rubbing his sweatstung eye, still blinking, and “This is personal. I’m trying to help some friends, that’s all. Some people that got a little too close to Dancy for their own good.”

  “Yeah, well, you just remember what I said.”

  The detective glances towards the bronze Indian statue again, takes out his roll of Life Savers and frowns at them. “Goddamn it, I need a cigarette for this,” he says, and then Deacon listens quietly while he talks about the other things that were found in the ashes, the third body and the footprints in the swamp, and all the stories people tell their children to keep them far, far away from the old Flammarion place.

  North and then west of the city of Milligan, where the meandering Blackwater River wraps itself like a cottonmouth around the cypress swamps and pines, and Deacon hasn’t passed another car since he turned onto Eleanore Road. More potholes than asphalt out here, and there have been stretches where he suspected there was nothing between the car and the sandy earth but a few shovels’ worth of carelessly strewn gravel. The Chevy bounces and rattles as Deacon tries not to think about the flat spare tire in the trunk, watching for the turnoff, and he should have come to it by now, wonders if maybe he’s passed it, too worried about the car to pay attention. Just a dirt road, no name or sign, but Toomey said there was an old mailbox on a post, rusty old mailbox full of holes from kids using it for target practice, but if you look hard enough, he said, you can still read FLAMMARION painted on the side.

  Never mind that he’s managed to spend his whole life without ever once leaving the South, the wooded desolation of this place is almost as alien to Deacon as the surface of the moon, the bottom of an ocean; always more comfortable lost in the brick and steel and glass mazes of cities, straight lines and right angles to keep the world in order, rats and pigeons and if he ever needed anything more exotic, there were always zoos. This wild place only makes him feel more alone, the loneliness that’s followed him all the way from Birmingham and a growing, almost tangible, sense of genuine isolation, this city boy in a borrowed junkheap car wandering around out here alone, chasing ghosts as the day winds down and the sun throws treelong shadows across Eleanore Road.

  After Toomey was finished talking, when Deacon was sure he was done so it didn’t matter anymore whether or not the detective thought he was crazy, he took a deep breath and told him about what had happened in the car, a stretch of road he might have driven twice and the hitchhiker with the tarot cards. Just getting it off his chest, the dim hope that telling someone might effect an exorcism, at least take the edge off the creepiness; when he was finished, Toomey stared at him a while, tugged at his yellow tie one last time, and “If I was you, son, I’d get back in that ugly little car of yours and go home,” he said. “Sometimes what we’re looking for, it don’t want to be found, and sometimes, we don’t really want to find it.” And then he shook Deacon’s hand again, said good-bye and walked back up the marble steps into the courthouse.

  A wide place in the road up ahead, and now he’s almost certain he’s missed the turn somehow, is already slowing down to double back, when he sees the shotgun-peppered mailbox sitting on its post on the left side of the road, almost invisible in a clutching tangle of blackberry vines. And there’s the dirt road, too, hardly even as wide as the Chevy, a weedy, rutted redbrown path leading away into the place that Toomey called Shrove Wood. As if this could be a place of absolution, as if the trees themselves, standing straight and tall and close together, have assembled to hear the paltry sins of man.

  “This is it,” Deacon says. “Last chance, buddy,” but he knows that’s a lie. That his last chance to avoid whatever’s at the end of this dirt road was somewhere else, sometime else entirely—before he and Sadie walked out of the laundromat Saturday night, perhaps, or maybe it’s been inevitable since the moment he first saw Dancy Flammarion. Maybe it was always inevitable, but he knows damn well he isn’t going to turn back now, even after all the things that Toomey said. Stupid or stubborn or just too afraid of what might happen to Chance and Sadie if he does chicken out, so he turns off Eleanore Road and the car bumps over a particularly deep pothole and stalls.

  “It’s more of a driveway than a road,” what Toomey said when Deacon asked him directions to the burned cabin. “Hell, these days it’s probably more like a deer trail.” Sitting in the Chevy, staring down the narrow path winding through the trees and brush, Deacon wonders if even the deer would bother now. The forest is taking it back, has laid waist-high saplings and fallen branches, deep wash-outs he’d never get the car across, so he doesn’t bother cranking the engine again. Through the pines, the sun is huge and red, and Deacon wishes he wore a watch, or that the car’s clock worked, wishes he knew exactly how long he has before sunset. Not long enough, surely, an hour maybe, hour and a half if he’s lucky, before it’s pitch black out here.

  What do you think you’re gonna find at the end of this road, Deacon?

  Aren’t you getting thirsty?

  Aren’t you getting scared?

  Questions that Chance asked him in a dream, the bright and dazzling dream where he wandered through these woods and watched impossible things through Dancy Flammarion’s eyes, and it seems as if everything he’s seen and heard since leaving Birmingham has only raised more questions; if there have been answers, they’re certainly not the ones he came looking for, the ones to explain away, to ravel the mysteries and set the world on course again. Instead, only answers that cast as much shadow as light, answers to leave him jealous of lost ignorance. “Just get out of the car,” he says. “Just get out the car and see whatever the hell there is to see.”

  Aren’t you getting scared?

  Deacon glances over at the glove compartment, a fat silver piece of duct tape to keep it from coming open because the latch is broken, and maybe there’s a flashlight in there, at least. He pulls back the tape, and at first all he sees are two old copies of Hustler magazine crammed into the space, Soda’s porn stash and a big, rubber dinosaur the color of a tangerine; he pulls the magazines out, lets them fall to the floorboard, and the dinosaur lands feet-first on top of one of the glossy covers, hiding the smiling face of a woman with breasts almost as big as small watermelons. No flashlight, though, which figures, but at the very back of the glove compartment is something wrapped in an oily rag, most likely a baggie of marijuana or mushrooms, knowing Soda, and Deacon reaches in and takes it out.

  It’s surprisingly heavy, so probably not dope after all, and he unwraps the oily rag and then sits staring at the gun in his hand.

  “Soda, you dumb-ass son of a bitch,” he says, picturing what might have happened if some cop had pulled him over and found the thing. But they didn’t, and now there’s no denying that the weight of it, the way it glints dull in the late afternoon sunlight, is a comfort; Deacon doesn’t know shit about guns, has never touched anything but a BB rifle, and that was when he was a kid, but he figures even he knows enough to point it and pull the trigger. He finds a small switch on the right side of the revolver, just above the grip, and pushes it; the cylinder swings open, and there are five bullets inside and one empty chamber. He checks the glove compartment for extra ammo and finds nothing else but a map of Arkansas and four moldy Fritos.

  “Just get out of the car,” he says again and opens the door. “Just keep moving.” And he takes a deep breath as he snaps the cylinder closed, locks all the Chevy’s doors before he climbs out. Deacon tucks the gun into the waistband of his jeans, feels stupid doing it, like playing Dirty Harry or Charles Bronson out here in the middle of nowhere, and he wonders if anyone’s ever blown his dick off carrying a gun around like that, if he’ll be the first. In the trees there are crows and mockingbirds, an
d the incessant thrum of insects and frogs from every direction. Deacon wipes sweat from his forehead, looks at the car one more time, and then starts off down the trail.

  Something more than déjà vu, standing in the clearing at the other end of the dirt road. The knowledge that he has stood here once before, and it doesn’t matter if that first time wasn’t real, only a vision, because this is the same place, exactly the same, only the ruin of the cabin and the blackberry and ferns reclaiming the clearing to make it any different at all. Dusk coming down on him instead of a scalding midday sun overhead, and that still doesn’t change a thing. The hulks of rusting cars balanced on concrete-block crutches, bare wheels where there should be tires, and then the charred remains of the cabin. Deacon walks past a rose garden gone wild, two or three heavy canary-yellow blooms among the thorns, a line of rocks whitewashed to mark what was once a path to the porch, something fallen over and shattered in the weeds, and it takes him a moment to realize it used to be a cement birdbath.

  The blackened bones of the cabin like a skeleton that has surrendered and collapsed in upon itself, roof timbers for the charcoal ribs of a defeated giant or dragon, and the tall chimney of soot- and smokestained limestone blocks and mortar rising defiantly above the wreckage. There are ferns and wildflowers growing among the bones, a carpet of new life in death, green and specks of brighter colors on a grave, and Deacon doesn’t have to imagine what that last day was like, has seen enough himself to know.

  Just past the birdbath, and he finds a large rack of antlers still attached to a piece of deer skull, the points scorched and cracked from the heat of the fire, and there’s a big ten-penny nail still sticking out of the skull cap. He looks again, and the antlers are everywhere, scattered across the ground and among the burnt wood, some burned almost beyond recognition, others untouched. Something else from his vision, and the dream of the vision, the antlers, and something else from Dancy’s dog-eared copy of Beowulf, as well: the walls of King Hrothgar’s hall, Hart Hall, Heorot, adorned with antlers, and whether this is coincidence or design, it’s not a pleasant thought, something to send a shiver along Deacon’s spine.