Threshold

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “You don’t even believe in God,” Dancy says. “I don’t know where I’m supposed to start.”

  Chance takes a deep breath, fills her lungs with all the brightness getting in through the window, filling herself with that sane and ordinary air, with what she knows is real, reality to make her brave.

  “Do you even know what a Dicranurus is?” Chance asks her.

  Dancy shakes her head slow, stops chewing her nail, and Chance can see that her cuticle has started bleeding, that there are fresh drops of blood like red berries against her white, white skin.

  “No, but you do, Chance. I know you do, and I need you to tell me what it means.”

  “And what about the water works tunnel, and Elise, all the stuff in those old newspaper clippings?”

  “All those things fit together some way,” Dancy says. “It’s all supposed to fit together in my dreams, but—”

  “So you’re saying that you have dreams about the tunnel and Elise? That you dream about my grandmother?” And Chance is sitting closer to Dancy now, watching the albino girl, keeping tabs on her nervous, apologetic eyes.

  “That’s why I’m here, Chance,” she says. “This time, I can’t see how all the pieces fit together. That’s never happened to me before.”

  Chance gives the coffee cup and saucer back to Dancy, pushes away the tangle of sheets, and climbs out of bed. She stands next to the chair where Dancy is sitting and rubs at her chin, the sore spot just beneath her chin, and there’s probably already a bruise there.

  “You need me to answer your questions so that you can find someone you think is a monster,” she says, and now she isn’t looking at Dancy, hard enough to say these things aloud without having to look at her, too. “So you can find them and kill them. Like the person you took that finger from.”

  “Chance, just tell me what killed Elise and your grandmother,” Dancy asks, and her voice has changed somehow, grown suddenly older, an old woman’s knowing, weary voice from Dancy’s lips. “Tell me what you and Deacon and Elise saw in the tunnel.”

  “They killed themselves,” Chance replies, and Dancy’s standing beside her, takes her hand and somewhere downstairs, Sadie’s started yelling at Deacon again. “That’s all, Dancy. They both killed themselves.”

  “That’s only what it wants you to think,” Dancy says.

  For almost a minute Chance stands staring silently at Dancy Flammarion, almost a minute because now she can read the clock radio on the table by the bed. But there’s nothing left she can think to say, nothing this girl doesn’t have another crazy answer for, so what’s the point. Dancy’s still holding her hand, holding it the way she was holding Sadie’s on the porch, the way a shy child holds its mother’s hand.

  “Well, let’s go downstairs,” Chance says. “I certainly don’t want that bitch killing him in my house.”

  Cold cereal and more coffee, Sadie and Chance sharing the last of a box of stale Cheerios, Dancy eating straight from a box of Nabisco shredded wheat, dipping the fibrous little biscuits into her coffee so they make a soggy sort of crunch when she bites into them; Deacon still too sick to come to the kitchen table, sitting on the floor in the hall bathroom, nursing his fourth or fifth cup of Red Diamond, because puking up coffee is better than dry heaves, he says.

  “You’re absolutely sure you don’t want some milk with those things?” Sadie asks Dancy for the third time, and Dancy shakes her head before her hand disappears back into the box of shredded wheat.

  There are two crows in the backyard pecking at something in the grass, something that Chance can’t quite see from her chair by the window. One of the crows spreads its wings very wide; hops backwards, and for a moment Chance sees or thinks she sees a dark shape writhing in the grass, dark coils, a small snake or a very big worm, stickywet skin or glinting scales the color of licorice, and then both the crows are on top of it again.

  “We owe you an apology,” Sadie says, hesitant, uncertain, and Chance looks away from the window. “You know, about Deacon finding those bottles last night and getting pissed in your house. I know how you feel about that.”

  “Sadie, if Deacon really wants to say he’s sorry, let him do it for himself,” and Chance gets up from the table, walks past Dancy to the sink and pours her Cheerio-stained milk down the drain. She turns on the faucet and rinses her bowl with lukewarm water.

  “Yeah. I know that. But this whole thing has him pretty goddamn freaked out. I mean, Jesus, I swear I haven’t seen him that drunk in a long time,” Sadie says. And Chance sets her bowl down in the sink, starts to tell Sadie Jasper she doesn’t want to hear it, too much of her own life spent making excuses for Deacon, but now Sadie’s rummaging noisily through her purse, her ridiculous silver purse shaped like a fucking casket and a red velvet cross glued on the lid, gaudy silver or chrome flashing in the morning sun; Sadie digs out a bubblegumpink plastic mirror, something plastic from a little girl’s dime-store vanity set, the mirror and a black eyeliner pencil.

  “I’m finished,” Dancy says, and then she carefully folds the lid of the cereal box closed and sets it near the center of the table, near the Dresden-blue sugar bowl and a half-gallon carton of Barber’s milk, a pair of souvenir salt and pepper shakers from Niagara Falls. “Thank you,” she says to Chance and wipes her mouth on the back of her hand.

  “You’re welcome,” Chance says, glad for an excuse to think of anything besides Deacon and Sadie and her morbid death-rocker affectations. “Did you eat enough?”

  “Yeah,” Dancy says, and then she’s dusting shredded wheat crumbs off her hand onto the faded sunflower-print oilcloth that covers the tabletop. Sadie pauses, looks towards Dancy and absently taps one end of her eyeliner against her front teeth. “How old are you, anyway?” and Dancy looks back at her; Wary, Chance thinks, catching the apprehension that washes so quick across the albino girl’s face, across her carnation eyes, that it might never have been there at all.

  “Seventeen,” Dancy says. “Well, I’ll be seventeen come September.”

  “Damn,” Sadie says and goes back to her mirror, back to painting her eyes like an oil spill. “You’re not even legal, girl. Are you a runaway or what?”

  That apprehension on Dancy’s face again, and this time Chance is sure that she sees it in the guarded, sidelong glance towards Sadie, and “No,” Dancy says firmly. “I’m not running from anything anymore.”

  “Hey, kiddo, everybody’s running from something. It ain’t nothing to be ashamed of,” and Sadie looks at Chance over the top of her mirror. “Ain’t that right, Chance?”

  “I lived with my mother and my grandmomma. But my mother died,” Dancy says, and she’s speaking in the old woman voice from upstairs again and it gives Chance the creeps, gooseflesh prickling her forearms, too much time locked up in a voice like that for sixteen years. “Then my grandmomma died, and I didn’t want to live there all by myself. There wasn’t anything left for me to run away from.”

  “Christ, I’m sorry,” and at least Sadie sounds like she means it, sounds ashamed, embarrassed, and Chance takes the box of shredded wheat off the table and returns it to one of the cabinets.

  “It’s not your fault,” Dancy says, staring at the brown scatter of crumbs in front of her, and she’s the nervous girl from the library again, sixteen instead of seventy-five. “I don’t think it’s anybody’s fault.”

  Sadie puts the mirror and eyeliner back into her purse, takes out an unopened pack of Camels and a disposable lighter, and she glances up at Chance, who shrugs, annoyed but determined not to let it show. “Thanks,” Sadie says, and she begins to peel the cellophane wrapper from the cigarettes.

  “I just wish I still had my sunglasses,” Dancy says, wincing at the brilliant backyard sunlight through the windows, and Sadie stops, an unlit Camel dangling between her black lips, and she pulls a pair of bug-eyed orchidpurple shades from her purse and hands them to Dancy.

  Dancy looks at Chance, like she’s asking for permission, and “C’mon,” Sadie mu
mbles around the filter of the Camel. “I always carry a spare. Here. Take ’em.”

  “Thanks,” and Dancy smiles a shy and grateful smile and reaches for the purple sunglasses, her alabaster fingers closing around them when the crow crashes into one of the windows and Sadie jumps. The sunglasses slip from Dancy’s hand, clatter to the kitchen floor, and the bird hits the glass again; this time, Chance can see a dull smear of blood and bird shit streaking the window, a few feathers stuck in the mess. The crow is perched on the sill, pecks weakly at the glass once, and “Don’t look at it,” Dancy says urgently, growls at them in the impossible old woman voice, just before the crow folds its broken wings and topples, lifeless, into the holly bushes beneath the window.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Sadie whispers, one hand to her chest like she’s having a heart attack, someone scared halfway to death and back again, and she takes the unlit cigarette from her mouth and lays it on the table. “What the fuck was that?”

  “A crow,” Chance says, “Just a crow,” but she can hear the doubt in her own voice, the adrenaline-hot confusion, and “I think I saw it out in the yard a few minutes ago,” she says.

  “Jesus,” Sadie says again and takes a cautious, slow step towards the gore-smeared windowpane. “So what the hell was it doing?”

  “No,” Dancy growls, “not yet,” the old woman growling with Dancy’s throat, and she makes an abrupt and breathless noise, strangling noise, her mouth open too wide and both hands gripping desperately for the edges of the table as her white-rabbit eyes roll back in her head. “I know you,” she says. “I’ve always known you,” gravel and glass words ground flat between her teeth, and now there’s foam flecking her lips, foam like a mad dog or the edge of the sea.

  “Oh god, Chance, I think she’s choking,” Sadie says, reaching for Dancy, moving too fast, too careless, knocking her purse off the corner of the table and everything spills out of it onto the kitchen floor. A rubber eyeball bounces clear of the jumble of cosmetics and spare change, the broken pink mirror and scraps of paper, bounces towards Chance, who’s still staring at the birdstained window. Not as if she doesn’t know what’s happening at the table, not like she can’t hear Dancy, but something about the crow too familiar, too real . . .

  I’m not supposed to show you anything.

  You don’t have to tell me anything, Elise. I haven’t asked you to tell me anything.

  You wouldn’t even know to ask . . .

  “Don’t you look at it,” Dancy Flammarion snarls, angry old woman or rabid animal snarl that finally makes Chance look away from the window. Sadie is standing directly behind Dancy’s chair now, both her arms tight around the girl’s skinny shoulders, her thumbs pressed together, pressed to the soft place where ribs meet sternum, Heimlich pressure point below the girl’s ribcage; What’s that called? Chance thinks. That little piece of bone right there, orderly classroom game to bring her back to earth again.

  The xiphoid process, she answers herself. That little piece of bone is called the xiphoid process.

  “No, Sadie,” she says, reaching into the sink. “She isn’t choking. She couldn’t talk if she were choking,” and Chance finds what she’s looking for, the spoon hiding beneath her cereal bowl.

  “Then what the fuck’s wrong with her?” Sadie snaps back, not so very far from hysterical now, her wolfblue eyes gazing bright from their twin bruise pools of smudged eyeliner.

  “I think it’s a seizure,” Chance says, pushing Sadie away, not meaning to be rough, but knowing it will seem that way to Sadie later, and Dancy’s body shudders on cue. Violent, living tremor like her muscles want off her bones, and her head jerks back, slams itself hard against the chair’s wooden headrest.

  “Try to hold her still,” Chance says. “She’s going to hurt herself. She’s going to swallow her tongue.”

  And this time Sadie doesn’t argue, holds both sides of Dancy’s pale face while Chance slips the spoon between her lips. Her teeth click castanet loud against the silver handle and her eyelids flutter and dance, tears from her eyes, a dark trickle of blood from one corner of her mouth.

  “Don’t you die,” Sadie whispers, desperateloud whisper that’s almost a hiss. “Don’t you dare fuckin’ die on us,” and Chance realizes that Sadie’s started crying. Behind her, there’s a wild sound at the window, crowblack feathers against the glass, wings battering weakly, wanting in or only wanting Chance to turn around and see. Look, Chance. Look quick, but she keeps her eyes on Dancy, and in another moment or two the sound is gone, if it was ever really there, and Dancy’s body stops shaking, rattles down to sweatsoaked calm, and she opens her pink eyes wide.

  “Jesus,” Sadie says. “Jesus Christ,” but now she sounds more relieved than scared, and Chance slides the spoon slowly from Dancy’s mouth. The metal drips blood and saliva, blood and spit running down Dancy’s chin, and Chance wipes it away with her hand.

  “Can you hear me?” Chance asks, and Dancy nods her head slowly, but her eyes are still far away, focused somewhere beyond the kitchen, beyond the walls of the old house.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, coughs once or twice, swallows, and this time Dancy wipes her own mouth. “It’s too late, isn’t it? I didn’t get here soon enough.”

  “You got here as soon as you could,” Sadie says, crying harder now, brushing colorless strands of hair from Dancy’s face and sobbing the grateful way a mother cries because her child hasn’t drowned after all, because it isn’t lost in the woods anymore. “God, kiddo. You scared the shit out of us, you know that?”

  “I’m sorry,” Dancy says again, and then she turns in her chair and looks towards the kitchen door, towards the hall and the front of the house, blinks and wipes at her watering eyes; Chance looks, too, and Deacon’s standing there, leaning sickly, unsteadily, against the door frame, watching them.

  “No more bullshit, Chance,” he says hoarsely and glances down at the floor, at his big bare feet.

  “I don’t know what you’re—” but he holds one hand out like a traffic cop, cutting her off. “Okay,” Chance says, wanting to take back the words before they’re even out of her mouth. “No more bullshit,” and Deacon turns around and walks slowly away into the shadowy heart of her house.

  Almost half an hour later, almost noon, and Dancy is resting quietly on the living-room sofa. Chance wanted to call an ambulance, had even picked up the telephone, but “She hasn’t got any money,” Sadie said. “She hasn’t got any money, and she sure as hell hasn’t got any insurance.” Then when Chance offered to pay the bills herself, Dancy frowned and shook her head. “No. I’ll be all right now,” she said, and then Sadie covered her up snug with a caramel-colored afghan that Chance’s Aunt Josie gave her grandfather last Christmas. So no one has said anything else about ambulances or doctors or hospitals; Dancy lies on the big sofa with her eyes half opened or half closed behind her new purple sunglasses, and Sadie sits on the floor beside her, holding her hand, keeping watch.

  She isn’t your daughter, Chance wants to say. She isn’t your little sister, but she doesn’t, because maybe Sadie has never had anyone to care for, to watch over, and maybe that’s what Dancy needs more than anything else right now.

  “No more bullshit,” Dancy says and turns her head towards Deacon, who’s standing alone on the other side of the room, staring out a window at the sunwashed gravel driveway like he’s waiting for someone.

  “So where do we start?” he asks, asks no one in particular, and he doesn’t look away from the window.

  “What’s a Dicranurus?” Dancy replies, turning away from Deacon, and now she’s looking up at Chance through her bug-eyed purple sunglasses. “I know it means something. I know you know what it means, Chance.”

  “It’s just a trilobite,” she says. “A kind of Devonian trilobite, that’s all,” and Dancy and Sadie are looking at her like she’s suddenly started speaking in tongues.

  “Hold on a minute. It’s probably easier if I show you,” and so she leaves them in the living room,
glad for an excuse to get away from Dancy’s questions and Deacon’s sullen, hungover resignation, even if it’s only for a few minutes; she follows the hall to the door of her grandparents’ study, door she hasn’t opened since the day after Joe Matthews’ funeral, day that seems years and years ago already when it’s hardly been two weeks. She closes it behind her, and nothing has changed in here, only a little more dust and the faintest beginnings of that shuttered, shut-away room smell. Chance pulls a brass cord on one of the Tiffany lamps, releases gentle stained-glass light to chase away the shadows. It doesn’t take her long to find what she’s looking for, eight years since she closed the heavy German monograph and slid it back into its assigned place on the crowded shelves, but she remembers. Chance takes it down and pauses for a moment before she pulls the lamp cord again, before she gives the room back to the shadows and cobwebs and dust, thinking about what Alice Sprinkle said the night before and how weird things have gotten, how fast they’ve gotten that way.

  “Well, so what the hell would you do, Alice?” she says, and the sound of the lamp switching off seems very loud in the small, still room.

  Back in the living room, she finds Dancy sitting up, the cushions arranged neatly behind her back and Aunt Josie’s caramel afghan still covering her legs. Sadie’s sitting on the sofa next to her now, one arm around Dancy’s shoulders, and Deacon hasn’t moved from his spot at the window. Stands there like his head isn’t killing him and his stomach doesn’t feel like shit, like he doesn’t need a drink when she knows perfectly well he’s hurting. But she’s glad he’s trying not to let it show, and At least that’s something, Chance thinks.

  “Okay. Dicranurus,” she says, sitting down on the edge of the coffee table in front of Dancy and Sadie as she opens the book, turns the old pages carefully until she finds the right one. She’s trying not to think about the last time she looked at this book, the fact that she never bothered to ask her grandfather about it because she forgot or she really didn’t want to know, trying not to notice the chill bumps prickling her arms, her legs underneath her jeans. And here it is, four views of Dicranurus monstrosus: dorsal, anterior, left lateral view, and a meticulously drafted close-up of the thorny head, the cephalon, and the sloppy pencil-red circle enclosing all four illustrations. She turns the book around so that Dancy can see the pictures.