Threshold

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “They only want us not to think about them,” she says, and then a pause, and she rubs at her left temple, rubs like she has a headache or is trying hard to remember something very important that she’s almost forgotten. “Our thoughts make spirals in their world,” she says.

  “You’re not Sadie Jasper,” and Chance pumps the shotgun again, aiming at Sadie now instead of the door or the window. “I know they want me to think you’re Sadie, but you’re not her.”

  Sadie rubs at her head again, pain or a frantic concentration in that gesture, that maroonslick mask passing itself off as her face, grotesque parody of Sadie trying to remember something that’s right there on the tip of her tongue. Something she must have known for certain only a second ago, and she gazes at the floor for a moment and then looks back to Chance.

  “I told them that I wouldn’t be Sadie like this. Not like this. But they didn’t give me a choice. Please, Chance. They won’t let me go. They won’t let any of us go, until no one knows about them anymore.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Chance says, knows that she’s lying, but right now a lie that even she doesn’t believe is better than the alternative, so she says it again. “I don’t believe you’re Sadie.”

  Sadie looks towards the ceiling and smiles, more blood spilling from her mouth, and she raises her arms as if she would worship the sky hidden beyond paint and plaster and shingles, her ghostblue eyes like someone who’s waited a thousand years to be even this close to the sun again.

  “Don’t make me do this, Sadie,” Chance says, realizes that she’s crying now, hot tears streaking her face, salt to sting her eyes, and she slips her trembling index finger through the trigger guard. “Go back and tell them not to make me do this to you.”

  Sadie closes her eyes, and her head droops to one side, but her face still turned towards the unseen morning sky. When she speaks, it’s the deliberate speech of someone reciting a poem or a pledge, something memorized and care taken with each and every word.

  “Where great things go on unceasingly . . . yet wholly different in kind . . . where immense and terrible personalities hurry by, intent on vast purposes . . . vast purposes, Chance.”

  And Chance is getting to her feet, back braced against the wall and the sudden swell and surge of anger to give her strength, despite the exhaustion and the fear, the ache in her shoulder.

  “Are you really that afraid of me?” she screams at the barricaded door, screams through her tears, and something on the stairs begins to mutter excitedly to itself or to something else. “You cowardly fuckers, you cowardly, fucking shits. You are afraid, aren’t you? You can’t do this yourself. You’re too goddamn scared of dying to even try.”

  Sadie opens her eyes, raises her head, and she watches Chance. Like someone watching the world slipping away from them, and slowly she lowers her arms.

  “You’re dead, Sadie,” Chance whispers, whispers like someone pleading with a drunk who wants to drive, a sleepy child who refuses to go to bed. And Sadie smiles again, smiles and shows teeth, but not her teeth, crooked needle teeth like a blind abyssal fish, row upon row stained crimson and gums as black as coal.

  “The division,” she says and hugs herself, arms tight around her own shoulders like she’s freezing, speaking from some white and polar place. “The division here is so thin that it leaks through somehow. Their sound . . . the humming of their region . . . It’s in the willows. It’s the willows themselves humming, because here the willows have been made symbols of the forces that are against us.”

  Chance raises the shotgun and aims it at Sadie’s face, and the dead girl glares stubbornly back at her.

  “Not the willows. I didn’t mean to say that. It’s the trilobites, Chance. The trilobites your grandmother found, and the thing in the bottle—”

  “Please god, Sadie,” Chance says, “I can’t handle any more of this. I fucking swear I can’t,” and she takes a step towards Sadie, closing the distance between them because she knows she’ll never be able to pull the trigger again if she misses the first time.

  “You’re not listening to me, Chance. Do you know how much this fucking hurts, and you’re not even listening,” and now Sadie has changed, Sadie or the fabrication that only wants her to believe it’s Sadie, if that makes any difference. Those blue eyes bright and furious, and it moves so quickly that Chance doesn’t have time to shoot, seems to slide across the bedroom floor like butter across a hot skillet, a thousand times smoother than that even: motion without the slightest effort, without the burden of time or distance. And Sadie has grown, no more of her than before, but what there is stretched somehow, and now the shotgun’s clutched in the twiggy fingers of her left hand, Chance’s chin held painfully in her right.

  “I’m not supposed to tell you anything, bitch,” Sadie says, hisses angry past all those barbed and crooked teeth. “But you learn, over here.”

  Outside, something has started slamming itself repeatedly against the bedroom door, something hitting the door like a battering ram, blam, blam, blam, and already the wood has begun to warp and crack. Another minute, and it’ll be in the room with them.

  “It’s what the trilobites mean,” Sadie says, Wonderland nightmare after the drink-me bottle, and so now she has to crouch down low to look Chance in the eyes. “Time, and what people find when they start looking in time. The willows, if they look in the tunnel. If they look behind the wall.”

  Sadie leans very close then, her lips pressed to Chance’s ear, whispering, and her lips are cold, but her voice is colder, the freezing words pouring out of her, and “I don’t give a shit about you,” she says. “But Dancy’s in here, and I won’t have them getting Deacon, too.”

  And the other things she says, instructions before the door comes apart like it was made of paper and match-sticks, her flimsy barricade pushed aside easy as dollhouse furniture. Sadie dissolves, melts away to nothing as the long-legged thing pauses in the doorway, and it turns its wire and bleached-bone muzzle towards Chance and howls. An eternity of cheated, vengeful rage in that howl, in its hateful scarlet eyes, and Chance doesn’t stop to wonder how the shotgun got back into her hands before she pulls the trigger.

  The gouges in the hardwood floorboards lead Deacon from the foyer down the hall to the staircase, and he stands staring up into the shadows and half-light waiting for him on the landing. Each of the steps as scarred as the porch, as the hallway, burnished and shoesmoothed pine damaged beyond repair, and there are wide parallel grooves dug into the wall, too, the blue wallpaper torn and hanging down in ragged strips so he can see the plaster underneath. He glances back towards the front door, sunlight and the way back to the world, and calls Sadie’s name again.

  “I’m afraid Miss Jasper is occupied at the moment,” and the hitchhiker steps out of the gloom at the top of the stairs. His dark eyes and oilslick hair, narrow hatchet face and high stubbled cheekbones, and he scowls down at Deacon.

  “She’s attending to a few loose ends for us, just now.”

  And Deacon doesn’t wait for him to say anything else, fires the revolver and hits the hitchhiker in the right shoulder near his collarbone. There’s a dark spray of blood as the man stumbles backwards, grabs the banister to keep from falling, and now he’s grinning the way he did back at the pool, that ear-to-ear Cheshire grin, those teeth like antique piano keys.

  “Damn, Deke. That’s some fancy goddamn shootin’,” he says and steadies himself, lets go of the banister and gently touches the hole in his shoulder with two fingers, stares at the blood on his hand and shakes his head. “But how many bullets does that leave you now? Three?”

  Deacon pulls back the hammer again, and this time he aims more carefully, aims at the hitchhiker’s face, the furrowed spot between his eyes, but Deacon’s hands are shaking like an old man’s. Palsied old man’s tremble, drunkard’s unsteady aim, and “How long has it been since you had a drink, Mr. Silvey?” the hitchhiker asks. “ ’Cause, personally, I’m thinking you’re looking pretty dry.
Couple of belts of something stiff and you might even have a chance. A little Jack, say, or maybe—”

  Deacon squeezes the trigger again, but this time the hammer clicks hollow and useless on an empty chamber.

  “Hey. Now, I honestly can’t say I saw that one coming,” and the grinning hitchhiker is swaggering down the stairs towards him. “You gotta watch out for stuff like that, boy. Make sure all your ducks are in a row, if you get my meaning.”

  “You just keep right on coming, you smiling bastard,” Deacon says, cocking the gun again, but then something is blocking the sunlight from the front door, eclipse at the edge of his vision to draw his attention away from the man on the stairs. Something like a dog that Deacon knows isn’t really anything like a dog, familiar and monstrous silhouette, and “See there? That’s just exactly the sort of shit I’m talking about,” the hitchhiker says.

  The thing coming down the hallway towards Deacon makes a parched and barren sound in its scarecrow throat, a thirsty sound, and now Deacon can see that there’s another one of them right behind it. The whole house full of them, maybe, and he glances back at the hitchhiker, the tall man and his long slicked-back hair, his wolf-friendly manners.

  “The devil and the deep blue sea, Mr. Silvey,” he says. “That ol’ Scylla and Charybdis dilemma. A rock and a hard goddamn place. But now it’s your move, you and that little pop gun of yours. Or ain’t you bothered to think that far ahead?”

  Deacon looks at the things in the hall again, deadgray meat for tongues dangling dry and hungry from their jaws, and the man is standing only three or four steps above him now.

  “Call those motherfuckers off,” he says. “Get the hell out of my way, or I’m going to put the next bullet through your ugly fucking face.”

  The man takes one more step towards him and stops; he isn’t smiling anymore, something on his face that’s so much worse; whatever comes after the most exquisite extremes of spite, after the most studied malevolence. His slashthin lips like a wound, an unhealing, unhealable violation of flesh, and Deacon’s heart is racing, trying to fight its way out of his chest. This man’s face to steal away the last flimsy pretense of courage, and “Where the hell do you get this crap, Deke? Jesus, you know what you sound like? You sound like a goddamn nigger pimp, talkin’ shit like that.”

  “Get out of my way,” Deacon says again, each syllable punched out as slow and calm and hard as he can manage, but his voice quavering all the same. He’s pointing the revolver at the hitchhiker’s left eye, and there’s no way he could ever miss now, not even the way his hands are shaking.

  But the man on the stairs shrugs his wide shoulders, and “Checkmate,” he says, opens his right hand, and there are three shiny .38 cartridges in his palm. Fine blond hair on his palm and those three bullets, and Deacon squeezes the trigger anyway, but there’s only the dull click of the hammer falling on an empty chamber.

  The hitchhiker’s eyes glint, silver as new ball bearings, and he lets the bullets roll out of his hand and bounce down the stairs to lie at Deacon’s feet.

  “Neat trick, huh? Wanna see another one?”

  “Get out of the way, Deke,” Chance says, and Deacon sees her at the top of the stairs, sees the big shotgun in her arms, and then the hitchhiker turns around, and he sees her, too.

  “You tell them I’m coming,” she says to the tall man, and Deacon falls to his knees as the shotgun tears the silent morning apart.

  Chance behind the wheel of the old Chevy, driving too fast, ignoring stop signs, and Deacon’s in the passenger seat with a damp washcloth pressed to his forehead and a full bottle of whiskey clamped between his knees. Still a steady trickle of blood down his forehead from where the buckshot grazed his scalp, his left ear, too, and it’s a wonder she didn’t blow his goddamn head off. His face is smeared with the hitchhiker’s dark blood, his clothes soaked through with it, blood the color of India ink, and it smells like soured milk and ammonia.

  “You’re gonna kill us if you don’t slow the fuck down,” he says, twists the cap off the whiskey with one hand, and Chance misses the rear bumper of a parked SUV by only an inch or two, maybe less. “Jesus, it’s over, okay? All we have to do is find Sadie and—”

  “She’s dead,” Chance says. “Sadie’s dead, Deke,” and she doesn’t even take her eyes off the road, her face still as utterly unreadable as the moment he first saw her at the top of the stairs, that expression so intense and emotionless, both at once, and he looks away from her, stares at the plastic cap in his right hand.

  The Chevy bounces violently over a speed bump, illegal shortcut across a convenience store parking lot. “I think she went to the tunnel after you left,” Chance says. “There’s a page missing from the ledger. I think she tried to get inside.”

  Deacon raises the bottle slowly to his lips and a few precious drops slosh out onto his hand; the bourbon smells almost like solace, like mercy. “How do you know she’s dead?” he says.

  “She told me,” Chance replies, says it almost the same way someone might mention the weather or the time of day. Deacon takes a swig from the bottle, long and scorching swallow, burning swallow but nothing that can burn him deeply enough, burn the knot from his soul; he screws the cap back on the whiskey and stares out the window at Southside rushing by outside the car.

  “I don’t think I believe you,” he says very quietly.

  “I’m sorry,” and Chance turns left. The tires screech like birds, and she runs a red light.

  “We have to go to the apartment,” Deacon says, taking the cap off the bottle of whiskey again. “She might be waiting for me there.”

  “She’s dead, Deacon. Just like Dancy’s dead. Just like Elise.”

  “No,” he says, the violence coiled inside him close enough to the surface now that it shows, that he can hear it, and Chance slows down a little.

  “There isn’t time for this,” she says. “It might be too late already.”

  “Too late for what, Chance? It is over. You shot the bastard,” and Deacon points at the Winchester in the backseat. “You killed him and all the rest of them. They’re lying back there in your house, dead, and I’m asking you to turn this goddamn car around and take me home. Now.”

  Chance shakes her head, and “It’s not over,” she says. “We’re still alive, so it can’t be over yet. It can’t be over until there’s no one left who knows what we found in that crate or what’s written in the ledger or—”

  “Chance, I’m not going to ask you again.”

  “ ‘Our thoughts make spirals in their world.’ That’s what she said, but I don’t know what it means.”

  “Chance, you sound like a psycho, like a deranged lunatic, do you know that? Like you’ve lost your fucking mind,” and she smiles, then, the way that crazy people in the movies smile sometimes. Secret, certain smile that scares him almost as bad as the hitchhiker and the dog things scared him.

  “Sadie said you wouldn’t believe me. She said I should ask you about the yods, and about meeting Dancy in the woods. That you might believe me then.”

  “The yods,” he whispers, tiredsoft whisper, end of his rope whisper, and Deacon reaches for the door handle, the big bottle of Jim Beam tumbling to the floorboard between his feet, spilling across the tops of his shoes as he opens the car door. And he stares down at all that asphalt and concrete flying by, rough and unforgiving as time, as every moment of his life, leans out towards it, this stretch of road as good a place as any other to get it over with. Enough already, running on empty for years now, anyway, running on fumes, just the whiskey and beer to make it bearable.

  Question is, what’s waiting for you at the end?

  What’ll be left when you get back home?

  But someone’s hauling him back, Chance cursing, and she’s hauling him back into the car by his hair, one hand off the steering wheel, and the Chevy swerves suddenly towards a telephone pole. “Oh no. Not yet you don’t,” she says. “I can’t do this alone,” and the door smacks into creosote-staine
d pine a second later, slams shut again, and the window shatters in a crystalbright shower of glass.

  “Not both of you,” Chance says, pulling over to the curb, the brakes squealing as the Chevy rolls to a stop. “It doesn’t get you and Elise, not unless it gets me, too.”

  Deacon stares at the glass in his lap, the crumpled door that’ll probably never open again, at least not without a crowbar, and then he reaches down and picks up the whiskey bottle. Still a few good swallows left in there, three or four if he’s lucky, and he wipes the mouth of the bottle clean with his palm.

  “Just take me home first, Chance,” he says, and all the anger’s gone now, nothing left to his voice but resignation and the thinnest rind of sadness around the edges. “Please. That’s all. I just need to see that she isn’t there, then we’ll do whatever the hell you want.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Chance says, sounding skeptical, breathless, and the fingers of her right hand still tangled in his hair, both her green eyes fixed on him. “If that’s what it takes,” and after a huge pumpkinyellow school bus rumbles past, she turns the car around and heads east, towards Quinlan Castle, driving into the morning sun.

  The first time she’s been in the castle since they split up, three months or more but everything exactly the same, the same squalid hallways, the same cloying stink of mildew and fried food, and she follows Deacon upstairs to the red door of his apartment.

  First he knocks and they wait, and then he knocks again, but no one comes to the door. He tries the knob, turns antique brass painted the same unsightly shade of red as the door, but it’s locked. “Do you even have your keys? Maybe Sadie had them,” Chance says impatiently, as he digs about in the pockets of his pants; his keys are there, his one key, the one that opens this door hanging from a rubber Bull-winkle key ring. Something that she gave him for his birthday two years ago, because he likes those old cartoons, or at least he liked them then.

  “Sadie said she left the door open. When she left Saturday night,” he says. “She said she didn’t even shut it,” and he turns the key in the lock.