“Jesus, that’s it,” Deacon says, somewhere close behind her.
“Yeah, that’s it,” she replies. Her fingers still pressed against the bricks, and they’re more than wet, more than cold, some sensation she doesn’t have a word for because she’s never even imagined it. Waxy, she thinks, trying to fill in the blank anyway, but waxy isn’t even close to the way the wall feels.
“This is where it’s coming from,” she says, and slides the pack off her shoulder, sets it carefully down in the mud at the base of the wall, but doesn’t take her hand away from the bricks.
“They found something down here, didn’t they, Chance? When they were digging this damn tunnel, they woke something up. It’s like the sinkhole by the cabin,” and she doesn’t ask him what sinkhole, what he’s talking about, the time for all these questions come and gone, and if there ever were such easy answers those are past, as well. Swallowed by the years, the decades, the way the tunnel has swallowed the light from the blockhouse gate.
“Can’t you feel it?” she asks, and surely he can, surely Deacon Silvey of all people can feel it pouring out through this insubstantial barrier, leaking through the gaps between atoms as if these bricks were no more solid than screen wire. Time, and what people find when they start looking in time, Sadie said, and that’s only a beginning, Chance thinks, one baby step towards comprehending what’s hidden behind this wall. A thousand metaphors and she’d never come any closer, a seeping place where two worlds meet, where all worlds and all times meet, black hole, white hole, a crossroads and that’s as good a way as any other of looking at it.
They used to bury suicides at crossroads, and “Shit,” Deacon hisses, and when she looks up he’s holding the shotgun, pointing it at the dark, aiming back the way they came or the way they haven’t gone yet. Impossible for her to be sure which is which, no point of reference anymore, nothing but this wall and two feeble beams of electric light.
“Christ, did you hear that?” he asks, and she shakes her head no.
“I didn’t hear anything, Deke.”
She takes a deep, deep breath and pulls her fingers away from the wall, and she’s surprised when it lets her do that, surprised when she isn’t touching it anymore. It didn’t have to let me. It could have held me like that forever, and behind her there’s the sound of Deacon pumping the shotgun.
“If you’re gonna do this, Chance, you better do it right fucking now,” he says. “We’re not alone down here.”
She kneels in the mud and undoes the straps on the backpack, folds open the canvas flap, but she’s moving so slow, like running in a nightmare. All her effort, straining, and even these small movements almost more than she can manage.
“A slow sort of country,” she says, pulling out a stick of dynamite and then another after it. “Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.”
“You had to have heard it that time,” Deacon says, a pause and then, “There, that’s it. There’s something on the goddamn pipes.”
When Chance has taken six sticks of dynamite from the pack, embedded them in the mud like candles on a birthday cake, she reaches into a pocket of her jeans for the roll of green electrical tape. The tape to bind the dynamite together and then she’ll make another bundle from the last six sticks, just like she planned it hours ago, planned all of this out so deliberately, so precisely; the green tape to hold the dynamite together, and then all she has to do is insert one of the brightly colored detonators into each of the bundles, the copper wire connected to the detonators, then, and the wire to the battery . . .
But that will take time, and if there is time here, if there’s time like that here, she’s losing track of it. Chance wraps the electrical tape around and around the first bundle of explosives, wraps it three times, charmed and magic number to keep away the bad things, and “You’re dead, asshole,” Deacon says behind her. “You’re all dead.”
A minute or an hour later, no way to be certain with the seconds beginning to bleed together like this, one moment and the next no different from each other, and she reaches into the pack for the detonators. And the brick wall seems to shudder, gray and punky bits of mortar falling away, and she stops, stares directly at it while Deacon curses the noises she can’t hear, sights that she can’t see.
There’s a trilobite, perfect bristly Dicranurus as big as a silver dollar, crawling slowly up the bricks, unexpected shimmer of phosphorescence at the tips of its long genal and pleural spines, the grotesquely retorted spines rising from the occipital rings like tiny horns, firefly specks of brilliance beneath its eyes; and she reaches out to touch it, reaching back across epochs, all the ages she named for Deacon recited the other way round. But the wall is crumbling now, shaking itself apart, and the trilobite sinks into it like a pebble dropped into a stream.
“Deacon, help me,” she says, catching on too late, too slow or dull to see the strings until the show’s almost over and it doesn’t matter anymore. The wall shudders again and collapses, the disintegrating bricks sucked back into a night that the tunnel can only envy, darkness before there was even the premonition of light, still an hour before the birth of the universe in there, and she screams as eternity rushes out around her, and Deacon pulls the trigger on the shotgun, and the world slips away like a stain.
Already twilight when Chance turns off Fourth Avenue into the parking lot of the Schooner Motel, this place probably a dump thirty years ago and nothing now but a cheap place to take hookers, somewhere for the crack whores and winos to hide out when they have the money to spare for a room. She has no idea why anyone would name a motel on the edge of downtown Birmingham something like that, schooner, more like a name for a motel in Panama City or Gulf Shores, some vacation city by the sea. She parks the Impala between a pickup truck and a long black Monte Carlo with a trash bag for its missing rear windshield, double-checks the number she scribbled on a Post-It note fifteen minutes ago, and then looks to be sure that the other three doors are locked before she gets out of the car.
The end of a stormy April day, tornadoes, and she heard on the radio that seven people were killed in Mississippi. Nothing now but rain, and she forgot her umbrella, left it leaning against the coatrack by the door on her way out of the house. “Don’t you go and forget your umbrella, Chance,” her grandfather said, and “I won’t,” she promised him, but she forgot it anyway, her head too many places at once, too full, and so now she shivers in the cold drizzle and walks quickly across the parking lot towards the yellow cinderblock walls, the drab row of identical black doors. There are more cars and a narrow, stunted patch of dead-brown grass, a few hopeful clumps of clover and dandelions, before she reaches the doors.
“Number Seven,” she says, but this is only number five, the room number painted directly onto the door in front of her, and so she walks down the row to seven and knocks. When no one answers, she knocks again, harder than before.
“Come on, Elise. I’m getting cold out here.”
But no sign that anyone’s even in the room except the lamp shining from the other side of the curtains, and when she tries the knob it isn’t locked, turns easy in her hand, and Chance opens the door and steps inside out of the wind.
Two single beds and the wallpaper stamped with a faded bamboo pattern, gaudy wallpaper the swampy color of pea soup. Elise’s purse is lying on the bed closest to Chance, and she closes the door behind her and locks it.
“Elise? Where the hell are you?” but there’s only the sound of water running in the bathroom for a reply. The bathroom door standing wide open, and anyone could have come waltzing in here, anyone who pleased; Chance sighs and looks at the bed again, the familiar beaded purse lying there with everything spilled out of it, careless scatter of car keys and a pack of chewing gum, old movie ticket stubs and Elise’s address book.
“I came as soon as I could,” she says. “Are you decent in there or what? You didn’t even bother to lock the door,” and Chance walks past the bed to the bathroom w
here Elise Alden is sitting naked on the toilet seat. The little bathtub filled almost to overflowing, steaming water almost all the way to the top, and Elise looks up at Chance with puffy, red-rimmed eyes like she’s been sitting here crying for hours. She opens her mouth to say something but stops, and Chance sees the hesitant cuts on her left wrist, then, the razor blade held between the fingers of her right hand and a dark smear of crimson on the steel. The open and half-empty prescription bottle sitting on the edge of the tub.
“I didn’t think you were coming,” Elise says, her voice hoarse, hardly as loud as a whisper. “I didn’t think that you would ever really come.”
Chance grabs one of the thin motel towels hanging from a rack beside the sink, terry cloth that might once have been white, a long time ago. “Give it to me,” she says, and when Elise doesn’t move, Chance takes the razor blade away from her, drops it into the tub and wraps the towel tightly around her wrist to make a pressure bandage. Then she glances at the amber pill bottle on the tub, the orange-and-white capsules inside, Dreamsicle colors, and “How much of this shit have you taken?” she asks.
Elise is sobbing something Chance doesn’t understand, an apology or repentance, and Chance shakes her hard, shakes her until she looks more angry than afraid. “How many of them did you take, Elise?” she asks again.
“I don’t know, okay? I can’t fucking remember anymore,” and Chance doesn’t wait for her to try to remember, takes the bottle and runs to the telephone on the table between the beds, punches 911 and reads the label out loud to herself so she’ll be ready when the operator comes on the line, Pamelor, seventy-five milligrams each, and “Don’t you fucking move, Elise,” she shouts back at the bathroom.
And that’s when Chance notices the albino girl watching her from the open motel room door, the girl and a sense of déjà vu so strong and sudden that it makes her dizzy, and she has to sit down on the bed to keep from falling.
“I locked that door. How the hell did you get in here?”
“This isn’t right,” the girl says, her pink eyes bright as candy in the garish light of the lamp, and she takes a step towards Chance. “This isn’t where it really started.”
“I don’t know who you are,” Chance growls back at the girl, “and I don’t know what you’re talking about. But I want you to get the hell out of this room right this minute.” And then she’s yelling into the telephone, yelling at the phone, because no one’s picked up on the other end, five rings and still no one’s answered.
“It was Sadie’s idea,” the albino girl says. “They’re very, very old, Chance, and they know that you can hurt them. They all know now that we can hurt them, if we have to. But we don’t have to. I was wrong—”
“Answer the goddamn phone!” Chance screams into the receiver, and then there’s a splashing sound from the bathroom, and she thinks about the razor lying at the bottom of the tub.
“You can’t save Elise from here. It’s already too late here. You both already know what’s under the mountain. You’ve already seen it.” Then the girl with skin as white as flour, hair like strands of cornsilk, is standing next to her, standing right there in front of her, taking the phone from Chance’s hand, prying it from her fingers.
“She’s dying in there,” Chance says, trying to think of words that will make the girl understand, tries to show her the bottle of Pamelor but she drops it and the capsules spill out and roll away from her across the bedspread.
“Listen to me, Chance. It can’t be from here.”
Chance reaches for the phone again, and this time the albino girl slaps her, slaps her so hard that she tastes blood, so hard her head snaps back, and the motel room dissolves around her like a bad watercolor painting left out in the rain. . . .
. . . like liquid drops of fire from the sky, if there is a sky here, if there ever was or would ever be a sky here, anything that Chance would call a sky. And she stands someplace, sometime, everywhere and neverwhere, stands as the white stars fall around her.
“It’s almost over now,” someone whispers. “Don’t be afraid,” that voice soothing and so close, so familiar, but she knows she’s never heard it before, voice from the day after she died or the day before she was born. And she turns her face up to see the lights streaming down on her from the abyss. They are the brightest and most beautiful things she’s ever seen, beauty to break her heart because she knows that they’re dying, all of them, and beauty to make her want to live again, because such things can be.
And the tall man steps from the black between the sparkling Roman-candle trails, and she does know his face, if she never remembers another she’ll know his until the universe forgets itself. “I’m going to have to kill you,” she says to him, except she might have done that already, his face erased when she pulled a trigger sometime else, and “Oh, I knew that,” the tall man says.
“You were going to hurt someone,” and Chance tries to recall who, who the man was going to hurt, why she will have to kill him, and then it doesn’t seem to matter anymore.
“Angels and devils,” he says and smiles for her, not an unkind smile, but it’s terrible, too, a smile like that. “Monsters and ghosts and gods,” and he opens his hand so she can see the symbol burned into his palm. The shape that can’t be, not without warping space, seven perfect sides and seven equal angles, and the darkness around him seems to flare and glimmer.
“Isn’t it a marvelous thing to know?” he asks her. “Even if you forget it again in an instant, wasn’t it worth it?”
“I’m half sick of shadows,” she says to the man because it’s the only thing left in her head, something borrowed from Elise’s suicide note, high-school Tennyson and a woman drifting towards her across the water.
“Aren’t we all?” he says as the darkness around him flares again, supernova spinning backwards, the night opening its eyes, and she nods her head.
“You know the way, Chance Matthews. Hell, you are the way,” and the man laughs like a dog laughing, and she knows now or she knew or one day she’ll know that the light is falling out of him, falling into him.
“Time is your cathedral. You know the present is only a pretty illusion in the minds of men. And I think you know that nothing has ever passed away, not entirely.”
And the clock ticks, and worlds spin, and silt falls on the muddy floors of seas out of time where trilobites scuttle on jointed feather legs, and she sees the tarot card in his hand, and opens herself . . .
. . . and Chance is lying on her back, then, staring up at the raindrops plunging towards her, kicked out of heaven and plunging helplessly towards the soggy earth where they began.
“ ‘Down, down, down,’ ” she says, and, “ ‘I wonder how many miles I’ve fallen. . . .’ ”
“You want to just leave her out here?” Elise asks, but Deacon is already hauling Chance to her feet. She shivers and leans against him, stealing the warmth off him, and kisses his stubbly chin, the arch of his long nose. “C’mon, girlie girl,” he says. “Shake a leg,” one arm around her tight as they step through the low, square archway leading into the tunnel. “It’s time to go forth and explore the Stygian bowels of the world.”
Chance laughs, but there was something strange and sad about the rain falling, something it means that she can’t quite remember, can’t forget either, so she doesn’t start giggling again. Stops instead, stands with one hand tight around Deacon’s arm, and “No,” she says, trying to think through the haze of pot smoke in her head. “I don’t want to do this, Deke. I don’t want to do this again.”
“Jesus, this was your dumb-ass idea,” Elise says, taking another step towards the deeper gloom where the tunnel begins, where the two huge water pipes disappear beneath the mountain.
“Well, I think I’ve changed my mind,” she says. “I’m cold, and I think I’m going to be sick.”
“Look,” Deacon says, points at the iron chain lying on the floor of the blockhouse, rusty pile of chain like a snake coiled there. “We’ve already g
one and committed a crime for you. This shit’s breaking and entering, you know. And now you want to back out? I think you’re just scared.”
“Yeah,” she says and pulls hard at his arm, pulls him an inch or so back towards the iron gate. “I am, Deacon. I’m scared. I’m just really fucking scared, all right?”
“Hey, okay, just a minute,” and he’s looking down at her, rainwater dripping from the end of his nose, his green eyes hidden from her in the shadows.
“Please,” she says. “It’s not too late. Not yet.”
He watches her for a second, watches her with those shadowed eyes, then Deacon Silvey nods his head, puts an arm around her and “Hey, Elise,” he yells. “It fucking stinks in this place. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Elise grumbles something rude from the darkness, pissed-off defiance, but then she’s standing there beside them again anyway, marches past Chance and back into the rain. Deacon follows her, so Chance is the last one out of the blockhouse, last one out of that mustystale air that smells like mold and mud and the faintest hint of rot, faintest stink like an animal lying broken and dead on a scorching summer road. She pulls the heavy iron gate shut again, and it clangs loud, the metal against metal sound of it echoing down the tunnel, and she stands there a moment, listening as the clanging noise grows fainter, listening until the only sound is the rain falling softly against the leaves overhead.
EPILOGUE
July
TWO weeks after her grandfather died, and she wouldn’t have ever come here alone, not without Deacon. Would never have come here at all, but the dreams have grown finally into something so real, so tangible, that they frighten her, the pale dream girl as real as anyone she has ever known awake. It doesn’t matter that she doesn’t believe in any of this psychic stuff, any more than the fact that Deacon does. Her therapist the one who finally sent her off to Florida, Dr. Miller, who listens to her strange nightmares and makes notes on the pages of yellow legal pads.
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