Threshold

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Maybe it was the landlord . . .” Chance begins, but she stops herself, can see what he wants to believe, what he’s hoping, that Sadie has been back, after all, that she’s the one who locked the door, and Chance is either lying or crazy or both. Full of shit, either way, and the door swings open, then, creaks loud on rustdry hinges, louder because the only other sound is a television blaring from the apartment directly across the hall. Chance remembers the old woman who lives there, the senile old woman and her greasy-looking little dog.

  Deacon stands in the doorway for a moment, staring into the sunlit apartment. “Sadie? Are you here, baby?” When no one answers him, he steps across the threshold and looks over his shoulder at Chance.

  “I had to know,” he says. “I had to know for sure.”

  “I understand,” and she does, but looks down at the floor because she doesn’t want to see the emptiness in his eyes, the pain on his face so eager to fill it in.

  “Well, come on,” he says. “Let’s see what there is to see,” and he draws the revolver from his jeans, the stubby gun and the three bullets he picked up from the foot of the stairs. “We’ve come this far.”

  But there really isn’t anything to see. Just Deacon’s shabby apartment, his paperback books and Sadie’s clothes, the posters for goth and black metal bands that weren’t there before, so those must be Sadie’s, too. But they walk through the whole place twice. And the second time around the bedroom Chance notices the squat gray Macintosh computer sitting on the floor beside the bed. Even more decrepit than the donated LC II in the paleo lab, and it looks like someone’s smashed in the screen with a hammer or the toe of their boot.

  “Was it like that before?” she asks him, pointing at the Mac. Deacon shakes his head, slips the revolver back into his jeans, and steps past her, squats down next to the computer and picks something up off the carpet; a crushed handful of blue plastic, and it takes Chance a moment to realize that it’s what’s left of a diskette.

  “It was her novel,” he says, laughs a hard, humorless laugh and lays the broken disk on top of the computer. “She was trying to write a novel. I made her keep this as a backup.” And then he sits down on the floor, leans back against the bed and stares up at the ceiling.

  “She never let me read it.”

  “Sadie was like that,” Chance says and immediately wishes that she hadn’t, probably not her place to say anything at all, but Deacon nods, turns his face towards her, and “Yeah, I guess she was,” he says.

  “She always thought I hated her, didn’t she?”

  He’s staring at the ceiling again, like there’s something up there that she can’t see. “I think Sadie thought you were evil incarnate,” he says. “She was afraid of you.”

  “I never wanted it to be like that.”

  “Yeah, well, whatever. It sure as hell doesn’t matter now, does it?” and Deacon closes his eyes.

  Chance glances at the clock radio beside the bed, the red digital numbers there to remind her how much of the morning’s slipped past already, how much time she’s lost, and she wants to say We can’t stay here. It’s not safe, but that’s so much like Dancy that it scares her. A little surprised that she can still be frightened, after what she’s seen, what she’s done, the shit in her head that will always be there now, no matter what happens next.

  “Deacon, you said that you’d help me, if we came back here first,” and he picks up the crushed diskette again, holds it a few inches from his face, trying to read Sadie’s handwriting, the purple cursive scrawl on a crumpled Kinko’s label.

  “Yeah,” he says. “I did, didn’t I.”

  “I can’t hold you to that promise. Not if this is as far as you can go.” She pauses, and now he’s watching her, the hot threat of tears in his bloodshot eyes. “Maybe this is something I was always supposed to do on my own. Maybe that’s just the way it has to be.”

  “Not a chance,” he says and almost smiles at the unintended pun, a fleeting quiver at the corners of his mouth, then he looks away, lays the disk gently on top of the computer again and turns his face away, towards the bedroom window. “You’re the only thing I’ve got left now, whether you like it or not.”

  Chance sits down on the floor beside him, and for almost a minute neither of them says anything else, nothing but the babble from the old woman’s television coming through the walls.

  “So what’s next, chief,” he says, and she takes his right hand in her left and holds it tight. Holds it the way she used to, when she loved him and the only monsters in her world came from the bottoms of his empty liquor bottles.

  “There’s some stuff I need from the lab, if I can still get in. And then we go back to the tunnel.”

  “The tunnel,” he says, the tone in his voice to show there was never any doubt, only ever one possible answer to his question, and Chance doesn’t have to see his face to know that he’s started crying. “And what exactly do we do when we get there?”

  “We’re going to blow the fucker up,” she says, and Deacon laughs. “What good’s that going to do?”

  “I guess we’ll see,” Chance whispers, and they sit together on the floor for a few more minutes, listening to the traffic.

  Most of the morning behind them by the time Chance and Deacon make it back up the mountain to the tunnel. The sun beating down on them like it knows exactly what they’re up to and maybe it doesn’t approve, reproachful sunshine to bake the little park at the end of Nineteenth Street, but a few low grayblue clouds gathering in the sky, too. Chance stops in the shade of a magnolia tree and gets out of the Chevy, and then Deacon climbs out after her, has to climb over the driver’s seat because his door won’t open, and he gazes up at that sun, that sky, the scattered clouds like bruised and wayward sheep. It could rain later on, late afternoon thunderstorms, lightning and a drenching downpour, and that wouldn’t be so bad, he thinks. That wouldn’t be so bad at all.

  Chance has the trunk open, is already busy pulling everything out and setting it down on the white cement pavement at their feet. No trouble getting into the lab after all, and no one around to start asking questions, either; Chance’s keys still good despite her concern.

  “Maintenance is so damn slow it’ll likely be at least another week before the locks are changed,” she told him. “If Alice actually meant what she said.”

  He didn’t bother asking what it was Alice had said, much more interested in why there were two cases of dynamite stored in the university’s paleontology lab, so she explained quickly, while they gathered all the things on the list in her head. These two cases left over from a seismic survey project a year ago, and “Just like sonar signals,” she said. “Only we’re looking through solid rock instead of water.”

  “And you know how to use this stuff?”

  She nodded. “I picked up a few bucks that summer working on the survey. There’s nothing to it, really,” as she handed him a box of electric detonators. “It’s almost as easy as jump-starting a car.”

  The very last thing out of the trunk is a slightly tattered olivedrab canvas backpack, USMC stenciled across the flap, and it’s stuffed with a dozen or so of the brown sticks of dynamite. Chance slips a strap over one shoulder and closes the trunk.

  “Wear this. I mean it,” she says, handing him one of the two neon-orange hard hats. He puts it on his head, feels like he’s in fifth grade again, and all he needs now is a bright orange flag and vest to stop traffic so the younger kids can cross the street. “You actually think there’s some possibility we’re gonna live through this?” he says, and she shrugs, puts on her own hard hat, adjusts the chin strap.

  “Force of habit,” and she frowns and glances back down the street, no way to be sure if anyone’s watching them, far too many porches and windows, and “Don’t forget the shotgun,” she says. “And put some of those shells in your pockets.”

  When Chance is sure they have everything, that nothing has been forgotten, not the guns or the hacksaw or the flashlights, the bundle of
copper wire and the big twelve-volt Eveready battery, her grandmother’s ledger, they follow the winding path through the dogwoods towards the water works tunnel. Most of the twine that Dancy tied to the trees is still there, and Deacon wishes someone had come along and torn it down.

  “I shouldn’t have gone,” he says; Chance looks at him as if she doesn’t know what he’s talking about when he knows damn well she does.

  “I should have stayed here with you and Sadie.”

  “I don’t think it would have made much difference,” she says. “They would have come for us anyway, sooner or later.”

  “But Sadie might still be alive if I’d stayed, if I’d done like you asked.”

  Chance sighs, a sound that’s more weary than exasperated, and “Yeah,” she says. “Sure, and if I’d listened to Dancy in the first place, if we’d all stayed together on Saturday afternoon, maybe everything would be different. We can play this game all day long, Deke. It’s not going to change anything.”

  “No, but I should have talked when you asked me to. Hell, I should have done it a long time ago.”

  “What should you have talked about, Deacon?”

  “About what happened that night we all broke into the tunnel, me and you and Elise,” and now she stops and stares at him, shifts the heavy backpack from one shoulder to the other. Another one of those unfathomable expressions on her face, nothing he wants to see, and he turns away.

  “No, you’re right, Chance. It doesn’t matter now, but I just wanted you to know I was wrong and I’m sorry. You were always the smart one,” and he starts walking again, then, watching the dingy toes of his shoes, and it’s a moment before he hears her footsteps following behind him.

  Around the last bend in the trail, past the last row of dogwood trees, and Chance whispers something, a curse or exclamation muttered under her breath, a word Deacon doesn’t quite catch, but the tone of her voice enough that he looks up, and there’s the blockhouse waiting for them, and the design Chance showed him from the ledger; the heptagon inside the star, sloppy black paint on the weathered stone wall and the gated entryway into the tunnel set right at its center.

  “Sadie must have done that,” Chance says.

  “Why? What the fuck did she think she was doing?” and his eyes trace the crooked, intersecting lines, all the sides and angles and the whole that they add up to in the end. There are other things, as well, a brush and a small can of black paint tipped over on its side, a flashlight and a pair of long-handled shears, a crumpled paper bag, and Deacon leans down and picks up the flashlight. He flips the switch and the tiny bulb shines dimly in the sunlight.

  “She was trying to get in,” Chance says. “Trying to find Dancy. Jesus, she was calling them. I think this is my fault, Deacon.”

  “Why is this your fault? Did you tell her to do this?”

  “No, I didn’t, but she asked me about the design—”

  “Bullshit,” Deacon says and switches the flashlight off again, tosses it away, into a patch of poison ivy and honey-suckle growing near the blockhouse. “Sadie was a big girl, Chance. Whatever she did here, there’s no one to blame but her. Let’s just get this over with.”

  “Yeah,” Chance says. “Sounds like a plan,” but she doesn’t take her eyes off the thing painted on the wall while Deacon takes the hacksaw to the padlock.

  Past the entrance to the water works tunnel, the wider anteroom half-light of the blockhouse where the enormous elbow bends of the two pipes turn downwards to burrow like giant and cast-iron worms into the moldering earth. The pipes so wide there’s hardly enough space left to walk single file, Chance in the lead, Chance with her loaded shotgun and the dynamite and Deacon right behind her, the revolver in one hand and a flashlight in the other. Beneath their feet, the tunnel floor alternates between slick stone and ankle-deep mud, and Chance has almost fallen twice already.

  “I don’t remember it smelling this bad,” Deacon says, and his voice seems very big in the tunnel.

  Chance shines her own flashlight up at the ceiling, ceiling so low that Deacon has to walk stooped over. There are small stalactites growing down from the limestone, uneven flowstone teeth glistening with groundwater. Below them are patches of travertine on the pipes themselves, calcite leached drop by drop from the rocks overhead and redeposited there.

  “You were pretty baked,” she says. “We all were,” and hasn’t that always been the explanation for whatever happened to them that night, Chance thinks. The times that Elise tried to get them to talk about it, and “We were stoned,” Deke would say, or Chance would say it for him.

  “I wasn’t that stoned,” Deacon says. “It smells like something died in here.”

  “It’s just mold and bat guano, all this stagnant water,” saying those things like she might actually believe they’re the reason the tunnel stinks like rotting meat, charnel house reek that’s making her eyes water, making her nauseous.

  “I don’t see any fucking bats in here,” Deacon says.

  “Trust me, Deke. They’re around here somewhere. Probably hundreds of them,” but she hasn’t seen them either, the ubiquitous small brown bats that use almost all the mountain’s abandoned mine shafts and natural caves for their colonies. But perhaps it’s just that they’re all a little farther in, not so close to the entrance, the noise from the street and the park to drive them back deeper than usual.

  Chance’s left arm brushes against one of the water pipes, brushes iron that feels dusty and dank at the same time, and she flinches, pulls back, something unwholesome in that juxtaposition of wet and dry.

  “It can’t be much farther,” she says. “We have to be getting pretty close now,” if her grandmother’s notes are right, only twelve hundred feet or so from the blockhouse door, not far past the point where the Ordovician limestones change over to the redviolet sandstones and shales of the younger Red Mountain Formation.

  So why didn’t I notice it before? Why didn’t I see a brick wall in April? and of course the always-handy answer that she was simply too high to notice, they were all too high. So high they managed to get lost walking in a straight line and wander around in here for hours before Deacon finally found the way out again. She stops to look back at him, looking back for a reassuring glimpse of sunlight, but the tunnel behind them is as perfectly dark as a night without the moon, without so much as city lights to trouble the blackness.

  “It’s started,” she says, and Deacon turns and looks back too. “We must have gone around a corner somewhere,” he says, and Chance shakes her head.

  “No. It’s a straight line, Deke. All the way from one end to the other.”

  “Then the pipes are getting in the way, that’s all.”

  “You don’t believe that any more than I do,” she says, wishing that she’d brought a compass along, or some strong nylon cord to tie the two of them together.

  “Just keep moving,” he says. “That’s all we can do now,” and he gives her a little push, not hard, but hard enough, so Chance wrestles her feet free of the mud and starts walking again. Just keep moving, like he said and all the light she needs is right there in her hand, shining clean and white to show her the way.

  “Talk to me, Chance,” Deacon says. “Remind me what the hell it is we’re looking for again,” and she can tell that he’s trying not to sound scared, but she knows him too well to be fooled, too well to fool herself.

  “A wall. A brick wall. It’s going to be on our right, I think, on the west side of the tunnel.”

  “A wall. A fucking brick wall on the right side of the tunnel,” and he bumps into her, apologizes, and “So tell me about the rocks,” he says. “How old are these rocks?”

  Chance plays the beam of her flashlight across the roof of the tunnel again, relieved that he’s changed the subject, because they’re better off if she doesn’t have to start talking about what might be on the other side of that brick wall, the things that Sadie whispered and her grandmother only hinted at, the things the workmen found down
here more than a hundred years ago and built that wall against. The smallest part of it trapped inside a jar of alcohol, and so she concentrates instead on the maroon strata above them.

  “Well, we’re out of the Chickamauga Limestone now and coming into the Red Mountain. We’re right at the bottom of the Silurian, so these beds are maybe four hundred and thirty million years old. The rocks will keep getting younger as we go, the way they’re tilted.” She has to stop and clear her throat, the meaty, rotten smell grown so strong that she can taste it, and Chance wishes she had a hand free to cover her mouth.

  “And after the Silurian, then the rocks are Devonian age, right? You explained that to me once, remember?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “But I didn’t think you would.”

  “Hey, I’ve still got a few brain cells left. The booze hasn’t pickled them all—”

  And then a sound, hollow, reverberating clang like someone’s striking one of the pipes with a hammer, banging on it with a fucking sledgehammer. Noise so vast, so deep it rolls over them like an ocean wave, fills the tunnel from wall to wall, but no way to tell if it came from behind them or from somewhere up ahead.

  “Don’t think about it,” Deacon says, but her head is still so full of the sound that he seems to be speaking from somewhere else far, far away. “Just keep talking to me, Chance. What comes next, after the Devonian?”

  “The Mississippian. The Mississippian Period comes next, Deke,” and she stops walking, then, stops so suddenly that he runs into her again, almost knocks her off her feet this time.

  “The Mississippian,” she says again. “The Maury and Fort Payne Chert formations,” and that’s all she has to say, because they’ve come to the wall, finally, unremarkable brick wall maybe four feet across, and Chance lays the shotgun down on one of the pipes, reaches out and runs the tips of her fingers gently across the damp masonry. Bricks laid here and mortar set in 1888, when her great-grandfathers were still young men and Birmingham was hardly more than a few dirt streets, a rough and coaldust cluster of steel mills and mining camps.