Threshold

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  The changeling only nods her head, not so dull or frightened that she doesn’t understand that the time for words has long since come and gone. The ghoul’s blood is bitter and salty on her tongue and burns her throat going down to her belly. But it warms her, too, pushing back some of the chill that’s worked its way into her soul.

  “Do you know the story of Esmeribetheda and the three gray witches?” Madam Terpsichore asks the changeling, and Sparrow Spooner nods her head again. Of course she knows the story, has known it since she was very young, one of the seventy-four “Parables of Division” recorded in the Red Book of Riyadh and taught to the Children of the Cuckoo before they are even old enough to read the words for themselves.

  “Then you remember the crime of Esmeribetheda, don’t you?” Madam Terpsichore asks Sparrow Spooner.

  “Yes ma’am,” the girl replies and wipes her mouth again. The blood on her face has begun to dry, turning the color of rust.

  “Then, will you tell us, please?” and she motions towards the other students. “Perhaps some of the others have forgotten.” For a moment, the chamber beneath the cemetery comes alive with nervous chatter and tittering laughter at Sparrow’s predicament. But Madam Terpsichore silences them with a glare.

  “She . . . Esmeribetheda became curious, and she wanted—”

  “Stand up, please,” Madam Terpsichore says, interrupting her. “Stand up and face the class, not me. I already know the story.”

  “So do they,” the changeling replies and earns a scowl and another click of the teeth from her mistress. She apologizes for her impudence and gets to her feet, brushing some of the mud from her dress and bare legs, then turns to face the others.

  “Esmeribetheda became curious, and she wanted to know how the children of men and women lived, what it was like to have a mother and father. She wanted to know what she’d lost when the Hounds of Cain had stolen her from her crib.”

  “And what did she do to learn these things?” Madam Terpsichore asks.

  “She was sought out by three human witches, Arabian necromancers determined to locate a route to the world Below that they might learn its secrets and gain greater power in their arts. In the desert, at an altar beneath a dead tree that had once served as a temple to the goddess Han-Uzzai, Al-Uzza, youngest daughter of Allah, she was met by a blue-eyed crow. In truth, though, the crow was one of the witches who had disguised herself, and it promised that Esmeribetheda would be reunited with her parents if she’d show the necromancers a doorway and lead them down to the Hall of—” and Sparrow Spooner stops talking and looks over her shoulder at Madam Terpsichore.

  “What’s wrong, dear?” the ghouls asks her. “Have you forgotten what comes next?”

  “No, ma’am,” the girl replies. “But they know the story. They know all of it.”

  “Yes, but we never, ever suffer from hearing a good tale retold, do we? Especially when it’s a story with so much to teach us, so much we should take pains to remember.”

  Sparrow Spooner licks at her dry lips, tasting the ghoul’s blood again. The warmth it left in her stomach has already begun to fade, replaced with something hard and cold that twists and turns like a winding ball of pink worms, something much colder than the late November night.

  “Continue, please,” Madam Terpsichore says.

  “Well, Esmeribetheda was shown images of the life she might have lived. She saw herself in her mother’s arms. She saw her brothers and sisters. She saw herself growing into a young woman and marrying a handsome man who gave her children of her own, children she could keep. The witches promised her she could have all this back, all that might have been, if she’d show them the road down to the hounds. She agreed that she would, and the crow flew away to tell the other witches.”

  “She agreed to show them the way?” Madam Terpsichore asks. “Even though she knew perfectly well that it was forbidden of her to reveal those paths to mortal men?”

  “Yes,” Sparrow Spooner replies, promising herself that whatever’s going to happen, she won’t cry. She doesn’t want the others to see her cry. “She was a very foolish and ungrateful girl. She’d never been able to accept the life she’d been given. On a moonless night, Esmeribetheda led the witches across the sands to a warren doorway. But the hounds knew, and they were waiting for her.”

  The nameless boy who’d stuck his tongue out at her earlier was now pretending to hang himself, tugging at an imaginary noose before his head lolled to one side in a pantomime of strangulation. The ghoul named Consequence snickered, but Madam Terpsichore seemed not to notice them.

  “And what happened next?” she asks Sparrow Spooner.

  “The three witches were killed there on the spot and their corpses carried down into the tunnels. Esmeribetheda was led back through the dunes to the dead tree in the desert, and the ghouls hung her there, and then they set the tree on fire.”

  “Yes,” Madam Terpsichore says, speaking now so softly that only the changeling would hear. “They did. Would you call that justice, child?”

  Sparrow glances over at the rootsy place where Master Shardlace is hiding, as though he might decide to help when she knows damned well that he won’t, that she’s been brought here tonight instead of some other, later night at his insistence.

  “Was it justice?” Madam Terpsichore asks again, and now she rises from her place on the stool, standing up straight so that she looms over the girl and her head almost scrapes against the low roof of the chamber.

  “Esmeribetheda just . . . she only wanted to go home. . . . She only wanted to get back the life that had been taken away from her.”

  “I know the story, child,” the ghoul sighs, almost whispering, and presses her muzzle gently against Sparrow Spooner’s cheek. “I have asked you a question.”

  “She wanted to go home,” the changeling says. “That’s all. She wanted to go home.”

  “Your life will be spared,” Madam Terpsichore says, not unkindly, her wet nose nuzzling the girl’s face, her eyes on the other students. “But there must be a punishment, you understand that?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the changeling girl says, her legs gone suddenly so weak that she’s afraid she might fall. Her mistress’s breath, hot as a summer day, smells of lifeless, broken things that have lain a long time beneath the soil.

  “She should die,” Master Shardlace growls.

  “No, she will live,” Madam Terpsichore tells him, “but she will always remember this night and the folly of her actions. She will learn, tonight, that desire is only another demon that would happily see her strung from the branches of a burning tree.”

  “And what of the witch?” demands Master Shardlace.

  “The witch will die, just as the three died in the story of poor, misguided Esmeribetheda.” And Madame Terpsichore grips Sparrow Spooner by the back of the head and forces the girl down onto her knees. From the shadows, there comes the rough sound of stone grating against stone, stone ground against metal, and then a sudden gust of fresh night air threatens to extinguish the candles. All the changelings and ghoul pups turn to see the open door leading up to the cemetery and the world Above and to behold the face of the one who has led Sparrow astray from the path set for her by the Cuckoo.

  “You be strong, child,” Madame Terpsichore tells Sparrow Spooner, and the girl shuts her eyes.

  The old hearse, a 1948 Caddy slick and long and blacker than the stormy New England night, subtle as a fucking heart attack, rolls unchallenged through the wild Massachusetts night. In the passenger seat, Soldier drifts between her uneasy dreams and the nagging edges of wakefulness, dozing and waking and dozing again to the metronome rhythm of the windshield wipers. The radio’s set to a classic rock station out of Boston, and she’s already told that asshole Sheldon that she’ll break his goddamn fingers if he so much as touches the dial. He can listen to that college shit on his own dime, not when she’s trying to catch a couple hours shut-eye before a job.

  After Providence and their brief meeting
with the Bailiff and one of his boys at the Dunkin’ Donuts on Thayer Street, the hearse left the city and followed I-95 north all the way up to and across the New Hampshire state line, finally doubling back at Hampton Beach, because that’s the way the Bailiff had told them to do it. Just like always, everything worked out ahead of time to the letter and in accordance with the Bailiff’s precise instructions, the plans he’d cobbled together from star charts and newspaper astrologers and the obscure intersections of geometry and geography, nothing Soldier even pretended to understand. She listened when he talked and did what she was told.

  Past the Hamptons, then on to Salisbury and Newburyport, US 1 traded for Route 1A, past sleeping houses and fishing boats tied up secure against the storm, across the bridge spanning the brackish confluence of the Merrimack River and Newburyport Bay. Other bridges over other lesser waters, over railroad tracks, Rowley to Ipswich, and when Sheldon jabs her in the arm and tells her to wake up, Soldier tells him to fuck off. But she opens her eyes, anyway, squinting out at the dark streetlights and the darker windows of the houses along High Street and the raindrops hitting the windshield. Eric and the Animals are coming through the Caddy’s speakers, “White Houses,” and at least that’s one thing about the night that’s all right by her.

  “We’re there?” she croaks, her mouth dry as ashes, and reaches for the pint bottle she stashed beneath the seat before leaving Rhode Island. “Why the fuck is it so dark?”

  “Not quite, but close enough,” Sheldon replies. “Time to rise and shine, Sleeping Beauty.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Babe, if I thought there was time—”

  “Why is it so dark?” she asks him again. “What’s up with the streetlights?”

  “Power’s out. The storm, I expect.”

  “Jesus, I need a goddamn drink,” Soldier says, interrupting the driver, and her hand only has to grope about for a moment before it closes around the neck of the pint of George Dickel.

  “The Bailiff wants you sober for this one,” Sheldon says and glances anxiously at Soldier as she unscrews the cap.

  “The Bailiff doesn’t pull the fucking trigger, now does he? Why don’t you shut up and watch the road?”

  Old Hill Burying Ground rises up on their left, countless listing rows of slate and granite markers lined up like a dutiful army of stone soldiers gathered together beneath the swaying boughs of oaks and hemlocks, an army of the dead standing guard since sometime in 1634. And Soldier remembers this place, the delivery they made there a year or so back, one of her first rides with Sheldon, and they left a heavy leather satchel sitting outside one of the vine-covered mausoleums. She never found out what was inside the satchel, never asked because she never wanted to know. It isn’t her job to know.

  She takes a drink of the whiskey, and if it doesn’t quite drive away the fog in her head, it’s a halfway decent start.

  “What time is it?” she asks, and Sheldon shrugs his broad shoulders.

  “You got a watch, lady,” he says. “You tell me.”

  Instead, she takes another swallow of George Dickel, rubs at her eyes, and watches the night slipping by outside the hearse.

  “It’s almost three thirty,” Sheldon sighs, checking his wristwatch when it’s clear Soldier isn’t going to check for herself. “We made pretty good time, all things considered.”

  “Yeah? All things considered, looks to me like we’re cutting this pretty goddamned close,” she replies, tightening the cap on the whiskey bottle. “If we miss Bittern—”

  ”—then I suppose we’re fucked, good and harsh. But we’re not gonna miss him. Ain’t no way that card game’s gonna break up until dawn, right? No way, lady, especially not with this blow. Hell, by now, he’s probably into Jameson for ten or twelve Gs, easy. Ain’t no way he’s gonna walk with that many franklins on the line.”

  “Look, man, all I’m saying is we’re cutting it close. It would have been nice if we’d had a little more notice, and that’s all I’m saying.”

  Sheldon Vale slows for a traffic light that isn’t working, then steers the hearse off High Street onto North Main. On the radio, Eric Burden’s been replaced by the Beatles’ “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill,” and he reaches for the knob.

  “Don’t touch it,” Soldier says.

  “Oh, come on. I’ve been listening to this crap since Providence, and I fucking hate the Beatles.”

  “Why don’t you just worry about getting us to Bittern and forget about what’s on the radio,” Soldier tells him and returns the bottle to its spot beneath the seat.

  “I should have let you sleep.”

  “Yeah,” she says, “you should have let me sleep.”

  “He gives us as much notice as he can,” Sheldon says, and it takes Soldier a second or two to figure out what he means, to remember what she said about the Bailiff.

  “You think so? You think that’s how it is?”

  “Where’s the percentage in doing any different?”

  “You really think it’s all that simple?”

  Sheldon snorts and turns left onto State 133 and crosses the swollen, muddy Ipswich River.

  “What I think is I was driving this route, running for the Bailiff, when you were still shitting your diapers, and maybe old Terpsichore and Danas got their plans all laid out for you, all right, but you don’t know even half as much about operations as you like to let on.”

  Soldier laughs, then goes back to staring out the window. “That was a mouthful, Sheldon. Were you rehearsing that little speech all the way up from Providence?”

  Sheldon frowns and wipes condensation off the inside of the windshield with his bare hand.

  “You know that’s gonna streak,” she says. “And you know how the Bailiff feels about hand prints and streaky windshields.”

  “Yeah, well, I can’t fucking see.”

  Soldier shrugs and folds down the passenger-side sun visor. There’s a little mirror mounted there, and she stares for a moment at her reflection, stares at the disheveled woman staring back at her—the puffy, dark half circles beneath her bloodshot eyes, half circles that may as well be bruises, her unkempt, mouse-colored hair that needed a good cutting two or three months ago. There’s an angry red welt bisecting the bridge of her nose that’ll probably leave a scar, but that’s what she gets for picking a fight with one of the ghouls. She sticks her tongue out at herself, then folds the visor up again.

  “You look like shit,” Sheldon Vale says, “in case you need a second opinion.”

  “You’re a damned helpful cunt, Shelly.”

  “Shit,” he hisses, glancing at the rearview. “I think I missed the turnoff.”

  “Yep,” Soldier says, pointing at a green street sign. “That’s the fucking Argilla right there. You missed it. Guess that’ll teach you to keep your eyes on where you’re going, instead of letting yourself get distracted by my pretty face.”

  Sheldon curses himself and Jesus and a few of the nameless gods, slows down and turns around in a church parking lot, slinging mud and gravel, and then the hearse’s wheels are back on blacktop, rolling along with the rubber-against-wet-asphalt sound that’s always reminded Soldier of frying meat. Soon they’re on the other side of the river again, retracing the way they’ve just come, left turns become rights, and there’s the cemetery once more.

  “What’s on your mind, old man?” Soldier asks, because he might be an asshole, and he might have shitty taste in music, but Sheldon Vale can usually be counted on to get you where you’re going without a lot of jiggery-pokery and switchbacks.

  “You think they’re gonna kill that kid?” he asks her and turns off the highway onto a road leading away towards the salt-marshes and the sea.

  “Don’t you think she’s kind of got it coming?” Soldier asks him back, and then she has to stop herself from reaching for the bottle again. “I mean, she knew the fucking rules. This isn’t some first-year squeaker. She’s one moon away from confirmation. She should have known better.”r />
  “She’s a kid,” Sheldon says, as if maybe Soldier hasn’t quite entirely understood that part, and he slows down to check a road sign by the glow of the headlights. “Town Farm Road,” he says, reading it aloud. “Man, just once I wish someone else would pull this route.”

  “Kids screw up,” Soldier says. “Kids screw up all the time, just like the rest of us. Kids screw up, and it gets them killed, just exactly like the rest of us.”

  “So you think they’re gonna do her?”

  “No, I didn’t say that. But this is some pretty serious shit, Shelly. If we’re real damn lucky, it’s not so serious that we can’t put it to rest by visiting Mr. Ass-for-brains Joey Bittern and—”

  “She’s just a kid,” Sheldon says again.

  “Some rules, nobody gets to break.” Soldier says, watching the half-glimpsed houses and marshy fields and the trees that seem to appear out of nowhere, rush past the hearse, and vanish in the night behind them. “Some rules you don’t even bend. I ain’t telling you anything you don’t already know.”

  The Beatles make way for Jefferson Airplane, and Sheldon looks at the radio in disgust, but makes no move to reach for the knob.

  “Grace Slick is a fat cow,” he says.

  “Not in 1967, she wasn’t.”

  Sheldon mutters something under his breath and stares straight ahead at the rain-slick road, the yellow dividing line, the stingy bits of the night revealed in the headlights. And Soldier’s starting to wish she’d asked for another driver, beginning to wonder if Sheldon’s up to this run.

  “Someone does something like this,” she says, “I don’t care if its just some kid or one of us, Madam Terpsichore or the goddamn Bailiff himself—”

  “You’ve made your point,” Sheldon says, interrupting her, and then he turns the wheel as the road carries them deeper into the marshes leading away to the Eagle Hill River and the Atlantic.

  “You just don’t mess around with shit like that,” Soldier says, knowing it’s time to shut the fuck up about the kid and let him drive, time to start thinking about the shotgun in the back and exactly what she’s going to say to Joey Bittern when they reach the old honky-tonk at the end of Town Farm Road.