Threshold

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  And he knows there’s nothing important left here for him to see, just like Toomey said, everything carted away and buried or locked up tight where it might never be seen again. The bodies of Dancy’s mother and grandmother and the heavy cast-iron disc found nailed to a nearby tree, metal engraved with a pentagram and a seven-sided figure set inside the star. Something that Toomey said gave him the heebies just to look at, that disc, and someone finally sent it away to an archeologist at the university in Gain-seville. Deacon didn’t tell him about the drawings from Esther Matthews’ journal, the man already clearly fucked-up enough by the things he knows, the things he’s seen, and Deacon saw no point in sharing fresher nightmares.

  But the worst of it, the third body found in the ashes, and the police reports wrote that up, wrote it off, as the corpse of a black bear, the bear that must have killed Dancy’s grandmother. Half its face blown off by a shotgun blast, but Toomey leaned close to him, and “If that was a bear, Mr. Silvey, then I’m a goddamn Chinaman,” he said and then flatly refused to say anything else about the beast.

  Deacon bends over, and his fingertips brush a scorched plank, what might once have been a step or part of a windowsill, door frame, and he half-expects the sudden smell of oranges, the pain behind his eyes, but there’s nothing. No visions of the fire, of Dancy pouring gasoline or striking a match to hide whatever really happened here. Only the droning symphony of frogs and insects, the faintly spicy aroma of pine sap and ferns.

  And Chance’s voice again, the memory of the dream of her so strong and clear that he looks over his shoulder; We both know what really happened that night. This doesn’t change a thing. There’s nothing behind him but the watchful trees, the dwindling day, and “No,” he says. “I guess it doesn’t.”

  Deacon turns back to the cabin, the guardian chimney, and on the other side of the clearing, past a pile of scrap iron and rotting, moss-scabbed stumps, he sees the path that leads through the woods and down to Wampee Creek, to the deep pool where Dancy’s mother drowned.

  Or drowned herself, he thinks, remembering the story that Dancy told him about Pensacola, her mother and the ocean and the fishermen who rescued her. No idea whether that was the truth or the truth disguised, Dancy’s way of dealing with how her mother really died, making it more distant and inventing a happy ending.

  He can see from where he’s standing that the path through the woods is overgrown, briars and saw grass up to his knees, up to his ass, and maybe this is as far as he should go. Maybe he’s gone too far already, abandoning Chance and Sadie and driving two hundred and fifty miles just to listen to Toomey tell him spooky stories and poke through a burned-out cabin. He glances down at the butt of the pistol sticking out of his pants, feeling ridiculous and lost and scared, all those things at once.

  The sound of wings overhead, then, mad flutter of a dozen or a hundred wings, and he looks up, stares amazed at the flock of crows rising from the trees around the clearing. A storm of cawing, featherblack bodies to blot out the sky for a moment, frantic, living cloud moving in unison, responding to some signal too subtle for his dull human senses to perceive.

  Psychopomps, that word something lost for years in the dustier corners of his memory and the recollection triggered by the sight of these birds, something he read when he was in college, before he gave up trying to understand the things he saw. Conductors of the souls of the dead, blackbirds and crows and ravens especially, and the bird-shadow is already breaking up, dissipating above the trees.

  “What did you think you’d find?” she says, and he isn’t even surprised to see Dancy standing there by the chimney, standing in the ferns growing up through the charred and broken skeleton of the cabin floor. Her face is dirty, but she isn’t sunburned the way she was that night outside the water works tunnel.

  “The truth,” he says, and she smiles, sad smile that’s more regret than anything else, and kicks at the ferns.

  “Is that how you think this is all going to end, Deacon? Like in a book or a scary movie? You discover the truth and save us all?”

  “I don’t have a clue how this is going to end,” he says, and the crows are already far away, just a distant commotion fading like the sun. “But that would be nice, don’t you think, like an old Scooby Doo episode?” But from the way she looks at him, he can tell she’s never heard of Scooby Doo, no television out here, no Saturday-morning cartoons.

  “Some stories don’t have endings,” she says. “In some stories, there aren’t even answers.”

  “What are you trying to tell me, Dancy?”

  “I’ve looked into their faces. Their real faces. The holes they have for eyes that go on forever, a longer forever than the stars, Deacon. You can stare at them until time ends and starts itself all over again, and you’ll never know any more than when you began.”

  “Whose faces? What are you talking about?” and Deacon takes a step towards her, and she takes a step back, a cautious, warning flash in her pinkred eyes and then it’s gone, and Deacon stays where he is.

  “ ‘Land-dwellers in the old days named him Grendel.’ ”

  “Grendel? Dancy, do you know what you’ve done to Chance and Sadie?”

  “Yeah,” she says and looks away from him, watches her feet down there somewhere among the fronds and rubble. “I should have stayed away from Sadie. But they would have found Chance, sooner or later. I just made it sooner, that’s all.”

  “Because of what her grandmother knew, is that what you mean? The journal and that box full of rocks?”

  “They are afraid of us, Deacon. They were already old when those rocks were mud and slime, and they are terrible, but they are as afraid of us as we are of dying. Sometimes we come too close—”

  “Just tell me what I’m supposed to do, Dancy. Just tell me, and I’ll fuckin’ do it,” and at first he doesn’t think she’s going to answer him this time, the expression on her face like a teacher who’s growing tired of lecturing a student too stupid to ever comprehend the basics. Her time wasted on him, and then she holds out her left hand and there’s something small and black crawling across her palm. Something alive that glistens wet and iridescent in the twilight, its needle spines and bulging compound eyes, and she looks from the trilobite to Deacon and then back to the trilobite.

  “ ‘You’ll go to see the mere, because you’ve come this far. They’re waiting for you down there, the ones that took my mother. That which has held the flood’s tract a hundred half-years, ravenous for prey, grim and greedy—’ ”

  “You’re just quoting fucking Beowulf,” he says, not wanting to sound angry, but sounding angry anyway. “I know that’s what you’re doing.”

  And she smiles again, but a different smile from before, a wider smile to show that he’s beginning to see at last, a smile to show she’s proud.

  “Yeah, I am,” she says. “Did you ever think there was more than one story? One’s as good as the next. They’re in all our stories, all the ones that matter. The path will lead you to the mere, Deacon. Stay on the path and don’t believe the things they want you to believe, and you might still be the hero in this story. Or, if Chance has to be the hero, you might keep her from falling. But there aren’t any answers, and this will never make sense, not the way you want, so stop trying to force it to.

  “Watch your step, Deacon. There are serpents in these woods, and hounds,” and then she’s gone, if she was ever there. Nothing left but the chimney and the rustling pine needles and all the patient, eternal voices of the forest.

  Deacon pushes aside the last tangled veil of creeper and wild muscadine vines, and he’s standing on a crumbling chalksoft boulder at the edge of the pool. The noise of his shoes against the ground sends dozens of tiny frogs leaping from the rushes and bamboo thickets that line the water’s edge, and they splash and vanish beneath the gently rippling surface of the pool. On his left, there’s a small waterfall, the place where Wampee Creek leaves its bed and tumbles down a low vertical outcrop of the yellowwhite limestone,
the algae- and moss-slicked rocks, and if Chance were here she could tell him how old these rocks are, could put her scientific names to the imprints of ancient snails and clams that cover the stones at his feet.

  The pool is wide, forty or fifty feet across, and the water so clear that he can see all the way to the bottom. The undulating forest of eel grass, flash and dart of silverfish shapes, and this late in the day there are strange shadows down there among the drowned logs and watchful turtle eyes. A sinkhole, Toomey said, and Deacon imagines this was once a small cave in the rock with the creek flowing over it, and one day its roof grew too thin, finally, too thin for the weight of the forest floor, the millennia of fallen leaves and pine straw. There must have been a violent, decisive moment when the earth opened up and the water rushed in to fill the void.

  Deacon kneels on one knee at the edge of the pool, stares across it at the silent trees on the opposite shore, their snarled and crooked roots like lichengray knuckles, thirsty fingers abandoning the soil to gladly decay beneath the cool and crystal waters.

  The mere . . . The stream down under the darkness of the hills, the flood under the earth.

  There’s a big snake over there, a copperhead, he thinks, stretched out to catch the last warmth of the day, and it’s keeping a mindful eye on him. Autumn-colored snake, viperchain of dusky browns and reds and golden scales, and Deacon nods at it respectfully, silently promising to keep his distance if the snake will exchange the favor.

  “Don’t you sweat it, Mr. Snake,” he says. “I’ll be out of here before you even know it,” silly words to keep himself company because this is the loneliest place he’s ever been, a loneliness that seems to rise out of the ground and drip down like syrup from the branches overhead. Not so much a bad place, a place where the things that people have done have left a stain or a bruise; he’s seen more than his share of bad places, working for Hammond and just being the unlucky fuck that he is, the houses and alleys and vacant lots that some people might call haunted. But this is different. This is worse, whether he could ever explain exactly why or not, and Deacon dips his fingers into the pool, breaking the surface, the transparent membrane between two worlds, and the water is as cold as ice.

  And the pain carves its way through his head like a knife, bullets through his eyes and the back of his skull splattered across the ground. The acrid, bitter stink of dead fish and rotting oranges, and Deacon pulls his fingers back, pulls his hand away from the water, as if he doesn’t know it’s too late for that. His eyes squeezed shut tight, but that doesn’t stop him from seeing, never has before and won’t this time, either. The pool still right there in front of him, but the sun swallowed whole by a starveling night sky, midnight come to Shrove Wood in a single, timeless instant.

  Somewhere very close he can hear a woman crying, close but this night so dark, just the faintest glimmers off the water, the dim forms of the trees and not much else. No moon, so no light but the glow from the distant star-specked sky. And sometimes she’s only screaming, not words, just the sound of being that afraid turned loose and pouring out of her, wild and inconsolable, and other times she’s calling for her mother, Momma, please, Momma make it stop now, or she’s calling Dancy, or she’s praying. There’s another voice, breathless, animal grunt past the impatient twigsnapping, vinetearing noises, something vast and heavy driving headlong through the dense underbrush, crushing anything that gets in its way.

  Off towards the cabin, back the way he’s come, Deacon can hear two more voices, Dancy and the old woman, both of them shouting frantically; “Julia, Julia where are you, child?” and “Momma! We’re coming,” and Deacon opens his eyes wide, the pain pressing at the backs of them like thumbs so it’s a wonder they don’t pop out and go rolling down his cheeks. He stares and stares into the dark, searching the velvet folds of the night for her.

  “Julia Flammarion,” he says, reaching for the revolver tucked into his jeans. “I can’t see you. I can’t see fucking shit,” and there’s a loud splash, then, somewhere off to his right, and struggling from the pool. The woman has stopped screaming, nothing from her now but a choking sputter, all the futile, strangling sounds that a drowning person makes.

  “No, Grandmomma!” Dancy screams. “You might hit her, instead,” and Deacon turns away from the pool. Back there where the trail from the cabin makes one last turn and begins its gentle slope down to the water, there’s a bobbing yellow will-o’-the-wisp, a kerosene lantern gripped in Dancy’s hands to light her face, and the old woman’s aiming the twin barrels of a shotgun straight at him.

  “It’s too late, Grandmomma! They’re in the lake now,” Dancy says. “It’s too late,” and Deacon slowly takes his hand off the butt of the pistol, turns towards the pool again. And now he can see something moving through the water, nothing he could ever put a name to, nothing he would ever want to try to name, those taut ebony muscles and skin that glistens like oil, eyes that shine bluegreen fire, and the woman in its arms, still fighting as it drags her under.

  And then the old woman squeezes the trigger and the big gun rips the Florida night apart, belching fire and gun-powder thunder, its killing load of buckshot, and Deacon braces himself for the blast. No way it can possibly miss him, except the night is dissolving, melting rapidly away in greasy strips to show the twilight that was waiting all along on the other side of his vision, this day that’s ending instead of a night that was over a year and a half ago.

  “Oh,” he whispers as the last of the darkness leaks from the air. “Oh, god,” and Deacon’s on his hands and knees, vomiting all over the limestone boulder; there’s nothing in his stomach to speak of, and after the first hot rush of bile, he’s only dry heaving, cramping and his eyes full of tears, the pain in his head swelling. And maybe this time it’ll just fucking kill him, he thinks. Maybe this is the last time and nobody’s ever going to find his body, his bones gnawed clean and white, bleached by the sun until they crumble into dust, and the merciful rain will wash him bit by bit into the welcoming, forgetful pool.

  “Is that all you want, Mr. Silvey? A little trip down the Lethe,” and Deacon looks up, blinking, and the hitchhiker is standing on the other side of the pool. He smiles his too-wide smile and squats down on the bank among the roots, slips his long fingers below the surface. “You should’ve just said somethin’ before. Hell, I got all kinds of connections, you know.”

  Above him, the copperhead is draped across a low limb, dead snake bleeding from its crushed skull, venom and drops of blood, stickywet drops of life and death wasted on the water which is neither alive nor dead. The man stirs the pool with his hand and shakes his head.

  “She told you there ain’t no answers here, didn’t she? I swear, that little whore has a mouth on her. Worse than her goddamn momma. Of course, that ain’t nothing I hadn’t already tried to tell you, if you’d half a mind to listen.”

  “You . . .” Deacon croaks, his throat raw, and he gags again before he can say anything else. “You’re the one, aren’t you? The one that killed her mother.”

  The hitchhiker scratches thoughtfully at his chin, takes his other hand from the pool and holds it a few inches above the water, watches the crystal beads forming at the tips of his fingers and falling, one by one, back into the lake.

  “No sir,” he says. “That wasn’t me. There are no answers here, Deke. No answers anywhere. That’s what she said, and she was right. No motherfucking answers.”

  Deacon’s drawn the pistol and is pointing it at the man, but his hands are shaky and his eyes still watering so it’s hard to see. He pulls the hammer back, and “Maybe I’m losing interest in answers,” he says.

  “If I was you, I wouldn’t go waving that thing at people unless you mean to go all the way,” and the man stands and wipes his wet hand on his pants. “You’re just not a killer. Not unless you count your own hopes and dreams, and maybe a pint bottle of Kentucky bourbon here and there.”

  Deacon stares down the pistol’s stubby barrel and blinks, trying to clear
his eyes, his mouth sour with the taste of vomit.

  “Now, if it was the albino girl, if it was her pointing that thing at me, I might be worried. Say what you want about her, toys in the attic and all, but that little girl had the courage of her convictions. And you wanna know what else?”

  “Shut up, fucker,” Deacon says, because the tall man’s voice is worse than his headache, full of edges sharp as steel and broken glass, twisting wormjawed voice digging its way into him, and All I have to do is pull the trigger, he thinks. All I have to do is pull the goddamn trigger.

  “You better use those five bullets you got wisely, Mr. Silvey, ’cause right now, out here, I ain’t the only thing in these woods you got to worry about.”

  And then Deacon sees them, all the spindle legs and crimson eyes creeping out of the trees behind the man, separating themselves from the shadows, bones and twigs bundled together with barbed wire and string.

  Serpents in these woods, and hounds.

  “We like a little sport, now and again,” the man says, smiles, and this time his smile is as wide as the Cheshire Cat’s, unreal, ear-to-ear grin, and his teeth are huge and glint black like obsidian arrowheads.

  “You start running now, Deacon Silvey, and we’ll be along directly.”

  And Deacon lowers the pistol slow, because he doesn’t need someone to tell him he’s not a hero, and does exactly what the hitchhiker says, turns and runs back through the woods, down the path towards the cabin. The briars grab at his face and arms, thorns to scratch, to draw blood and stinging welts across his skin, and he makes it almost as far as the clearing before he hears them coming. The clumsy sounds they make moving through the trees, the dry rustle of leaves and thump, thump, thump of hard paws against the earth.