Threshold

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Leave me the fuck alone,” she yells at it, but yelling makes her stomach roll again, so she stops.

  Fourth ring and then the answering machine clicks on, Joe Matthews’ voice, and Jesus Christ, she hasn’t even changed the message on the fucking answering machine and her grandfather’s rambling on about leaving your name and number, the date and time, her grandfather talking from the grave. His voice trapped and rattling from the tinny answering-machine speaker, and Chance manages to get to her feet, stands up to walk the ten or fifteen steps to the gossip bench in the hall, when the machine beeps and her stomach feels so bad she sits quickly back down on the edge of the tub. A pause before Deacon Silvey clears his throat, and “Chance?” he asks, like he knows she’s sitting there, like he could know, and “Pick up if you’re listening,” and then a longer pause.

  The very last person in the world she wants to talk to, so maybe this is still the nightmare, maybe if she pinches herself really hard, she’ll wake up.

  “Yeah. Okay,” he says, and the skeptical tone in his voice that says, I know you’re there. I know you just don’t want to speak to me. “Look. There’s something we have to talk about and it’s entirely too goddamn weird to go into over the phone.”

  “Right,” Chance mumbles and looks back at the toilet bowl, the wad of tissue she used to wipe the vomit from her mouth floating around in there, and her stomach cramps at the sight of it.

  “I know you don’t want to talk to me. I wouldn’t have called, but—”

  “You’re an asshole,” Chance mumbles.

  “But there’s this girl, and she says she talked to you at the downtown library a few days ago. She says you’ll remember her, that you gave her twenty bucks. Look, Chance. This is just too strange for me to try and explain over the telephone, so call me back. Call me back tonight, okay?”

  Dull click when he hangs up, and then the phone beeps again, beeps like it’s pissed off, pissed at Chance for sitting there and making Deke leave a message. For making it speak to Deacon with a dead man’s voice; Chance flushes the toilet again and turns off the bathroom light behind her. When she gets to the gossip bench in the hall, she jabs the eject button hard with one finger and the answering machine spits out the miniature cassette tape. She holds it tightly in her palm for a minute, squeezes the plastic, and there’s hardly any weight at all, when something that hurt so much to hear should weigh a ton. Chance thinks about smashing the tape against the wall or hurling it to the floor, stomping it to translucent shards and a tangled mess of black magnetic ribbon. Pretends for a moment she could ever do a thing like that, could ever be that decided, that resolute, the sort of thing that Alice Sprinkle would do, surely, but Chance can only open her palm and stare at it, Memorex and the two tiny spools that seem so innocent, so mute, and she sets it on the edge of the bench next to the telephone book. Which is what Chance Matthews would do, she thinks, exactly what Chance Matthews would do.

  Her shadow in the colorless television glow from the living room, the noise of John Wayne burning down his own house because he’s drunk and alone and he probably wants to burn down a lot of other things, too, but the ranch house will have to do. Chance stares at the phone a few more minutes, and then she picks up the receiver and dials Deacon’s number.

  Over an hour before there’s finally a knock at the front door. Chance is sitting on the sofa in the living room eating Saltine crackers, trying to settle her stomach, has half the lights downstairs burning now and the television turned off. Thinking about the argument with Deacon when he wouldn’t tell her what was going on over the phone, and the second one when he wanted her to come all the way over to his place at one o’clock in the morning to find out. She jumps at the sound of his knuckles against wood, blam blam blam like he wants to break the door down, and she drops a half-eaten Saltine.

  “Just one goddamn minute!” Yelling loud, but he starts knocking again anyway; blam blam blam blam; Chance stoops to retrieve the Saltine, brushes cracker crumbs from her blue jeans to the floor, and “I’m coming!” she yells at the front door. Ten bucks from her back pocket for Deke to pay the taxi, the only way she could talk him into coming to her, promising to pay the carfare so she didn’t have to smell the must and decay of Quinlan Castle, the smell like mold and nests of fat cockroaches, almost enough to get her puking again, just thinking about the place.

  Chance opens the door and there’s Deacon in a once-black Velvet Underground T-shirt that’s been washed so many times it’s almost gray, black turning the dingy gray of mouse fur or mockingbird feathers, and he’s squinting, blinking at the light from the front porch, from the foyer. He has a big armygreen duffel bag in one hand, and she thinks maybe he isn’t drunk, thinks maybe he’s actually sober, and then she notices Sadie Jasper standing there beside him and the albino girl holding her hand like a weird twin sister, Sadie’s paler shadow, and Chance shoves the ten-dollar bill into Deke’s hand before he can ask for it.

  “Here,” she says. “And hurry.” Deacon blinks at the ten once or twice, and then he’s on his way back down to the driveway, back down to the old Ford station wagon trying to pass for a taxi, one headlight and its motor purring like a huge impatient cat. A cat with really bad sinuses, Chance thinks, and then Sadie smiles her waxyblack smile and tries to look happy to be there, points at the albino girl, and “This is Dancy,” she says. “I think you two have met already.”

  “Yeah,” Chance says, talking to Sadie, but still watching Deacon as he hands the guy in the station wagon the ten and waits for change. “At the library,” she says.

  “Your grandfather was a geologist,” Dancy says, not smiling, but there’s something gentle in her voice, a soothing voice when Chance’s nerves are humming like electric guitar strings, humming like the cicadas in the humidwarm night.

  “Yeah,” Chance says, “he was,” and then Deke is on his way back up to the house, the station wagon turning around behind him, rear wheels flinging a little gravel, and the driver’s probably ticked off because Deacon stiffed him on the tip, Chance thinks, thinks Deke probably pocketed the change and now he’s hoping she won’t think to ask if there was any.

  “Well, come on,” she says to Sadie and the albino girl, and they follow her inside, and Chance leaves the door open for Deacon.

  All of them in Chance’s living room, Chance at one end of the long sofa and Sadie at the other, Deke in a gingham armchair near the silent television, and Dancy Flammarion sitting on a footstool in the middle of the room, facing Chance, the duffel bag Deacon was carrying at her feet now, and “I can see monsters,” she says again.

  Chance stops staring at her and looks across the room at Deacon. He shrugs a small, apprehensive sort of shrug and rubs hard at his eyes like they hurt, like the light’s too bright, covers them with his right hand.

  “Monsters,” Chance says, repeating the word carefully just in case there are secrets hidden somewhere between the two syllables, something that she’s missing, secret code or the punch line to a joke that she isn’t getting. But Dancy only nods her head, the same quiet grace in that movement as in her voice, and an earnest intensity in her pink eyes that makes it hard for Chance to look directly at her for very long.

  “Deacon,” Chance says, his name spoken quiet like a warning, but he still has his hand over his eyes.

  “It’s okay,” Dancy says. “I already know that you can’t see them. I know you don’t believe in monsters.”

  “I’m sorry, Dancy. I don’t think I even understand what you’re trying to say, or why you’re saying it to me,” and Sadie glances at Chance, quick and scowling glance from Sadie Jasper’s iceblue eyes, eyes almost as strange as Dancy’s. Maybe that’s it, Chance thinks. Maybe she sees the monsters too, and she has to bite down hard on the inside of her lower lip to stifle a nervous laugh; everything way too weird and getting weirder, but still not sure if this is a joke, and she suspects it might be rude to laugh.

  “The Children of Cain,” Dancy says earnestly, and Chance
can taste blood in her mouth, only a trace, but salty and warm, real enough to keep her in line. She’s trying to remember the day in the library, all the details, but nothing she can recall that made her doubt the girl’s sanity, and sure, Deke’s a jerk, but this isn’t his style, too bizarre and sure as hell too much trouble for Deacon Silvey to stage anything half this twisted.

  “Slow down,” Sadie says to the albino girl. “You’re going too fast. It’s coming out all wrong.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dancy says, smiles softly, looks almost embarrassed, and she scoots her footstool a few inches closer to Chance. “I’m tired. I didn’t sleep very much last night.”

  “Jesus,” Deacon hisses from his chair. “Just fucking spit it the hell out and let’s get this over with. Please,” and Chance knows from the fraying tone in his voice that this isn’t a joke; now she’s sure it’s not some sick prank to make her look like an ass, whatever else it might be.

  “Dancy can see monsters,” Sadie says, and the way she says it, as if she might actually believe it was true, makes the fine hairs on the back of Chance’s neck prickle, goose bumps on her arms. “And she has been sent by an angel to kill them. Show her what you showed us, Dancy.”

  “But she doesn’t believe me,” Dancy whispers, and she’s still watching Chance, but her smile’s gone, a sad and wary sort of face, instead, all the calm drained from her voice. “She isn’t ever going to believe me.”

  “Yes, she will,” Sadie says, coaxing patience like a teacher with a difficult student, a mother with a frightened child. “You just got ahead of yourself, that’s all. Show her, Dancy.”

  Dancy bends over then, opens the duffel bag and begins digging around inside it, burrowing through the grimy-looking tangle of shirts and jeans; a sock that might have been white a long time ago tumbles out, and Chance tries to pretend she hasn’t noticed it. When Dancy sits back up she’s holding a handful of yellowed newspaper clippings and a small jar, baby-food jar, Chance thinks, Gerber’s strained peas or carrots or something like that, but the label’s missing.

  “I kept this from the first one. My grandmomma told me to keep it, so I wouldn’t forget,” and the lid on the jar makes a sharp metallic pop when she unscrews it. Dancy shakes the jar once and hands it to Chance.

  “Don’t freak out, okay,” Sadie says and Deacon makes a noise that isn’t a cough and isn’t a laugh, an anxious, weary noise, and Chance accepts the jar from the albino girl.

  “She was afraid I would forget,” Dancy says, and Chance is staring at the bruisedark finger curled like a fat, rotten grub in the bottom of the baby-food jar—not a whole finger, just the second joint down to a short, cracked nail the unhealthy color of an infection, the color of pus. Chance’s stomach lurches, ready to be sick all over again whether there’s a toilet handy or not, whether or not there’s anything left in her to puke up; she gives the jar back to Dancy, swallows hard and almost gags on the acid-sour bile taste rising hot from the back of her mouth.

  “They all have claws,” Dancy says. “At least the ones I’ve seen so far.”

  Chance looks across the room at Deacon, looking for any sort of explanation on his face, anything to make sense of this, but he’s watching the floor between his feet, rubbing his big hands together, grinding his teeth.

  “I’ve never had to ask anyone to help me before,” Dancy says and she sounds ashamed, sounds like she’s admitting to something a whole lot worse than carrying a severed human finger around in her duffel bag.

  “I don’t want to hear any more of this,” Chance says, and she stands up, wipes her hands back and forth on the legs of her jeans, trying to wipe away the memory of the thing in the jar. Sadie reaches to pull her back down onto the sofa, but Chance is already too far away, stepping quickly past Dancy, and “I want her out of my house, Deke,” she says. “I want you to get her out of my house right this minute.”

  “Not yet,” Deacon says, and now he does look at her, turns his head slow, and there’s nothing like sense in his green eyes, nothing like explanation. The same sadness as the day she told him it was over between them, and “I’m sorry, Chance,” he says.

  “Here,” and the albino girl is gently shoving the brittle wad of newspaper clippings into Chance’s hands, some of them crumbling at the edges, dry and butterscotch flakes falling to the floor at her feet, ancient newsprint and cracker crumbs littering the floor between Chance and Dancy Flammarion.

  “I didn’t want to ask,” Dancy whispers, and she still sounds ashamed. “I swear, I didn’t ever want to ask you or anybody else to help me.”

  Chance glances down at the headlines clutched reluctantly in her hands—“Water Works Marks 80th Anniversary” and “Wilfred Gillette McConnel, builder of water works, dies”—bold and blocky words almost half a century old. “Where did you even get these?” Chance asks, and Dancy shakes her head.

  “I know I shouldn’t have taken them out of the library,” she says, speaking so low that Chance can barely hear her. “I know that’s stealing. But I had to. I didn’t have any money, and they wanted ten cents a page for the copier.”

  And towards the bottom of the pile there are two smaller clippings, one of them gone only the faintest yellow and the other could be new, could have been cut from the morning paper, the morning obituary column. The name on the first is Chance’s grandmother’s, and the name on the second is Elise Alden.

  “What in the hell were you thinking?” Chance asks Deke, and he doesn’t answer, turns away from her for a moment, instead, back towards the living room where Sadie and Dancy are sitting together on the sofa, watching television. “Do you actually think I need this sort of crazy horseshit, that my life isn’t fucked-up enough already? Or maybe you think I need to be reminded what an asshole you are.”

  Chance is sitting halfway up the staircase leading to the second story of the house, her back pressed to the wall and both feet braced against the banisters, chewing at a thumbnail and not looking at Deacon. He’s standing two steps below her, slouching in the shadows like a scarecrow that’s lost the poles or planks that hold it upright and at any moment he might tumble over.

  “The girl is not well,” Chance says. “And Jesus, where the hell do you think she got that finger?”

  “She says she cut it off the first monster that she killed,” Deacon replies, talking quiet, either more concerned than Chance about Dancy overhearing them or he just doesn’t feel like speaking up, feels like mumbling so she has to strain to hear, has to pay more attention to him.

  “It’s a human finger, Deke,” and Chance stops chewing her thumb long enough to wiggle her right index finger up and down at him.

  “Yeah,” he mumbles. “I kinda noticed that myself.”

  “Well, that’s because you’re such a goddamn brainy son of a bitch, Deacon. Now, why don’t you cut the crap and take your girlfriend and her creepy little playmate and get out of my house.”

  Deacon sighs through his teeth, disappointed or impatient sigh, as if he expected more from Chance, as if this is exactly what he expected, and it makes her want to get up and slap him.

  “How’d she know about Elise?” he asks her, the temerity to ask her a question like that, and she looks away from him again. “Answer me that one, Chance, and I’ll go and take her with me.”

  “Fuck you,” she mutters around her thumb.

  “No, I’m serious. Come on. You’re good at explaining away whatever you don’t feel like dealing with, whatever’s too illogical or inconvenient. You’re a pro.”

  “And you’re an asshole.”

  Deacon leans closer, lowers his voice even more, and now he’s almost whispering, urgent whisper like he’s afraid, desperate for her to understand and maybe this will be his last chance to get the point across.

  “Perhaps you should’ve listened to her story, Chance. Just stop and think about it a second. The clippings about the water works and Elise’s obit. She knows about the night in the tunnel.”

  And those last five words,
that last word alone, enough to get her up and moving again, climbing the few steps to the top in two long strides, and she stops then, turns around and glares furiously down at him from the landing, knows she would glare holes through his shabby soul if she could. So much fury so fast that she’s dizzy with it, and he isn’t even looking at her, is gazing off towards the living room again.

  “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? This whole thing, it’s some bogus tale you’ve cobbled together to try and get me to believe that you didn’t have anything to do with what happened to her. That you’re not responsible. Christ, I honestly didn’t think you had it in you, Deke.”

  “You’re wrong,” he whispers, but her head buzzing with hate and adrenaline, a head full of wasps and hornets, and “That’s the only way she could know,” she says. “If you told her about the tunnel. How much are you paying Dancy to say this shit?”

  “I didn’t tell her a goddamn thing,” and Deacon’s raising his voice now, punching out the words, takes one step towards her, and Chance takes a step back from the edge of the stairs; actual displays of anger as foreign to Deacon Silvey as sobriety, and she’s not so pissed off that it doesn’t frighten her.

  “This girl, she shows up at my apartment, and starts telling me and Sadie some bullshit story about a monster under the mountain,” and Deacon points down, points at his feet, the stairs, at the ground beneath the house. “Then she tells us she’s spent the last two months riding around on a Greyhound bus killing off monsters because an angel told her to, and just in case we don’t happen to believe her, she pulls out that goddamn finger to prove it.”

  Deacon takes another step forward, and she can see his eyes, those two bottomless siltgreen pools always so indifferent, always so flat and still, and now they’re as jagged as the edge in his voice.