Threshold

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “What the hell are you waiting for?” she asks the soulless crimson eyes watching her, not wanting to cry, wanting to be brave at the end, and Dancy crosses herself and waits for them to come.

  PART II

  The Dragon

  “Chaos and muck and filth—the indeterminable and the unrecordable and the unknowable—and all men are liars—and yet—”

  —CHARLES FORT (1919)

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Other Word for Catchfly

  SADIE at the window, the fluorescent-bright inside of the laundromat window, and she’s watching the street, the sidewalk streetlight pools and the less certain spaces in between, the big pine trees and oaks at the edge of Rushton Park all blending together in the dark. Deacon’s still on the phone, still trying to find someone willing to drop whatever they’re doing and come in on a Saturday night, someone with nothing better to do, nothing worse, but no luck so far. His reflection is superimposed over her view of Highland Avenue, so Sadie can see him watching her from his stool behind the counter without taking her eyes off the street or the park or the trees. Looking ahead of herself and behind at the same time, and Deacon frowns and shakes his head, because he knows she can see him, eyes in the back of her head, and she nods.

  “Look, man, yeah, I know it’s Saturday night, all right?” he says, and he’s starting to sound the way her stomach feels. “So why don’t you just say no and get it the hell over with so I can call somebody else?”

  A pickup truck full of teenagers cruises slowly past the laundromat, and Sadie can feel the whump whump whump of its stereo through the plate glass; shitty rap and a truck-load of drunken white boys all looking for a cop to pull them over, a couple of nights in the Birmingham jail, and maybe that would rub a little bit of the suburbia off their dumb asses. She closes her eyes and doesn’t open them again until she can’t hear the pounding music anymore, until there’s nothing but the night outside, and That’s right, she thinks. Nothing at all but the night.

  “Jesus, didn’t I say to just forget about it, Soda,” Deacon growls and hangs up the phone, rubs hard at his eyes, and Sadie turns around, sits down in one of the hard plastic chairs lined up in front of the window.

  “Why don’t you call Peggy? Maybe if you tell her it’s an emergency,” but Deacon coughs up a dry scrap of a laugh and squints at the wall clock hanging above the vending machine that sells little boxes of soap powder and fabric softener.

  “You know she’s already looking for an excuse to tell me to hit the road. Making her come all the way down here on a Saturday night would probably be the last straw.”

  “But if you told her it’s an emergency,” Sadie says again. “Deke, she couldn’t fire you if it was an emergency,” trying hard not to sound impatient, but she’s looking at the clock, too, and it’s almost an hour now since she left the apartment, longer than that since she realized that Dancy was gone.

  “Is that what this is? An emergency?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” And the quick, accusing edge in her voice unintended, unanticipated, but it feels good regardless; better than sitting here like she isn’t scared, playing calm because she doesn’t want Deacon to see what’s going on inside her head.

  “It means maybe we should let her go. She isn’t your responsibility, and she sure as hell isn’t mine.”

  Deacon licks at his thin, dry lips, and Sadie can tell how badly he wants a drink, probably the only thing in the world he wants more than for her to shut up and leave him alone, a beer and a shot of cheap bar-brand whiskey, maybe a dark corner where he can get drunk in peace.

  “We can’t save her, Sadie,” he says, and she glances down at the dirty linoleum floor, her bare feet against the scuffed red and dirtywhite squares like a chessboard; Your move now, babycakes, small and mocking whisper wedged in somewhere behind her eyes, wedged beneath her skin, voice to speak from the weary part of herself that wishes Dancy Flammarion had picked someone else’s life to screw around with. But it’s only a very small voice, and in a moment she looks back up at Deacon.

  “You know, it’s one thing to be a drunk. I’ve never judged you for being a drunk. But it’s something else to be a coward.”

  “I never figured there was a whole hell of a lot of difference,” he says, and then there’s a long and leadheavy silence between them, nothing to mark the time but the monotonous slosh and throb from one of the washing machines. Silence to let Sadie’s anger get almost as big as her fear, time enough that she knows he’s seen it in her eyes. And she doesn’t pretend that she can’t see the contempt in his, as well, that she doesn’t know just how far she’s pushed him, and any moment now he’ll tell her to go fuck herself. Fuck herself and all the creepy, little albino lunatics she can find, while she’s at it, and then Deacon sighs loud and looks down at the telephone and his list of names and numbers; after he starts dialing again, Sadie turns back to the window and the wide night full of shadows still waiting for her.

  The long nub end of the afternoon spent at her keyboard, her hands moving so much slower than her racing mind. The frustrating lag between her thoughts and the hunt and peck; a hot flood of ideas where there had been months of trickling, uncertain sentences, and Sadie trying to keep up with herself, wishing she’d taken typing in high school, scared that this inspiration would soon grow restless, impatient with her, and slink back to whatever hole it crawled out of. Listening to the same Brian Eno album over and over on her headphones and smoking too much, as if that would help. Finishing a stale pack of Lucky Strikes left from the last time Deacon quit instead of her Djarum cloves, and it was dark by the time she finally began to run out of steam.

  Ten new pages on the Mac’s hard drive, ten and half, really, when she’d never done better than seven before; she fished the last of the Luckys from the pack and lit it with a wooden kitchen match, squinted through smoke at the softly glowing screen. Her words, her jumbled, mad thoughts tamed or simply broken, made language, and she took another drag off the Lucky, exhaled, and read the last sentence aloud.

  “ ‘I can’t get it off,’ Val said, and she held out her red hands for Wendy to see.”

  This scene, and the girls named Wendy and Val were hiding in the rusted shell of an old caboose, a wide and desolate place just across the tracks from Morris Avenue where dozens of box cars and engines lay abandoned, and, in the story, something like meat started falling from the cloudless sky. A hailstorm of blood and marbled flakes of something that wanted to be meat, and the girls huddled together in the dark, listening to the sticky, spattering sounds the stuff made as it struck the steel roof of the caboose. Red smears down the one window that wasn’t broken, Val afraid to even look outside, and then Sadie knew that it was time to stop for the day, because the words were coming too easily, too fast, and that usually meant that she was getting tired and wasn’t thinking hard enough anymore. She saved the file to her back-up diskette, switched off the computer, and leaned back against the edge of the bed to finish her cigarette.

  And that’s when she remembered Dancy. A glance at the alarm clock beside the bed, 8:07 PM, so almost five whole hours sitting here on the floor, hunched over the keyboard, and it was no wonder her typing fingers were numb and her back ached, no wonder she needed to piss, and Dancy was probably asleep out on the couch. Was probably exhausted after the weird shit at Chance Matthews’ house and grateful for a quiet place to rest for a while. Sadie stubbed out the butt of the Lucky Strike in the saucer she was using for an ashtray, looked at the dark computer screen one more time, some part of her reluctant to walk away, uncomfortable with the thought of leaving Val and Wendy trapped inside the caboose while the sky hemorrhaged above them.

  She walked quietly from the bed, her bare feet almost silent on the carpet, and stood for a moment in the doorway staring at the ratty sofa where Dancy wasn’t sleeping. Only the final, unreliable dregs of dusk to illuminate the room, murky sunset light the color of raisins, and a gauzy haze of cigarette smoke drifting a few feet a
bove the floor. No sign of Dancy anywhere, here or in the kitchen, so Sadie called her name once, “Dancy?” but no one answered, and she didn’t like the way her voice sounded in the empty apartment, the way it bounced back at her from the gray walls and grayer corners. Not quite an echo, but still the impression that someone was taunting her, throwing her words in her face and smiling at her unease.

  Sadie kept both eyes on the room as she fumbled for the switch plate on the wall, and in another moment the darkness was gone, washed away by warmsafe incandescent bulbs, and she could see that Dancy was gone, as well. An empty spot where her duffel bag had been, no one left in the apartment but Sadie, and she looked at the front door, half expecting to find it standing open, but it wasn’t. She walked across the room to the kitchen, and there were the Coke and the uneaten Oreos waiting for her on the table.

  The next five minutes spent walking through the apartment again, turning on all the lights as she went; maybe just a game, Dancy Flammarion’s idea of hide-and-go-seek, but there were only so many places to hide in Deacon’s apartment: the bathtub, underneath the bed, behind the sofa, and five minutes was more than time enough to check them all twice. So Sadie searched the hallway, too, one end to the other, from the damp spot where the ceiling leaked to the top of the stairs, walked downstairs to the front door, and then back up to the apartment. And finally, when there was no more denying that Dancy was gone, Sadie sat down on the sofa and stared at the floor between her feet, the carpet the color of vomit, her black toenails; half an hour before, and her head had been so full, reeling from all the things that Deacon and Chance wouldn’t explain to her, the stranger things that Dancy had only ever hinted at, the unexpected outpouring of words. And now she felt as tired, as empty, as the moment before she found the pile of black gumdrops on the threshold. Maybe just some crazy girl, after all, and gullible Sadie wanting to believe as badly as Deacon and Chance wanted to deny, needing the same way they needed, and in the end the crazy girl had gotten bored with them all or moved on to the next delusion, had walked out on her, and in a few weeks Deacon would tell her how silly they’d all been and there must be a hundred rational explanations.

  Or . . .

  We haven’t even talked about the tunnel, and Sadie looked up quickly, knew that she was still alone and only remembering something Dancy said while they waited for the taxi to take them away from Chance’s house. Something else exciting and nonsensical, but Sadie stared at the closed door, the doorknob and her heart beating too fast.

  We have to talk about the tunnel, and we have to go there, today, while there’s still time.

  The urgency in Dancy’s voice more immediate than mere memory could ever be, and there was a noise from the bedroom or the bathroom, a bumping, clumsy sort of a noise, and Sadie stood up very slowly. Watching the doorway to the bedroom, swallowing the tin-foil adrenaline taste at the back of her throat, and “Dancy!” she called out, shouting loud enough that everyone on the third floor probably got an earful. “This isn’t funny anymore, goddamnit!”

  But it wasn’t Dancy that answered her, not really an answer at all, a laugh, maybe. A dry and perfectly humorless sound that was meant to be a laugh. A sound to make Sadie think of dead leaves and cold wind, of dark streets and the forsaken places where men left the skeletons of trains to decay beneath impossible rains of meat and blood.

  It’s not safe, and whatever was making the sound that wasn’t laughter must have been remembering all the things that Dancy said, too, because it snorted once and there was the shattering sound of the bathroom mirror breaking, shards of glass falling into the sink, bouncing off the porcelain and smashing against the tile floor.

  “Run, Sadie. Now,” and it didn’t matter if it was her voice she was hearing, or Dancy’s she was remembering, and Sadie didn’t stop and look back until she was outside Quinlan Castle and standing in the dark on the other side of Twenty-first Street.

  And if she’d been braver, she might have gone to the entrance to the tunnel in Valley View Park instead of going to Deacon. If she’d been half the person she’d always hoped she could be, because that’s what Dancy had said, wasn’t it? “We have to talk about the tunnel, and we have to go there, today,” and so she knew that was where Dancy had gone. And Sadie also knew that she’d gone there alone, that it hadn’t mattered if Chance believed her or Deacon believed her, not in the end, because Dancy believed, and finally there had been no other option.

  Sadie stood beneath a street lamp and stared up at the castle silhouetted against the last fiery rind of the day, absurd edifice of rough sandstone blocks and corner towers lost in a wilderness of office buildings, watched the windows of her and Deacon’s apartment; all the lights burning and she couldn’t even remember if she’d shut the door behind her. There she was standing on the street, barefoot and afraid of something she might have heard or something she might only have imagined after five hours alone with her own bizarre thoughts.

  Scaring myself half to fucking death, that’s what I’m doing, she thought. That’s all I’m doing, and the noises she heard had probably come from the apartment next door, if they’d come from anywhere at all. The guys next door and their PlayStation, all hours of the day and night, fighting zombies and wrecking cars, the volume cranked up so loud the windows rattled. Either video games or one of the kung-fu movies they were always watching over there, and Sadie stepped off the curb, first uncertain step back towards the castle, when a shadow moved slow across the bedroom curtains. A flowing, liquid shadow that almost seemed a thing unto itself, shadow of nothing but itself, and she stopped, one foot in the street, and watched as it moved across the window. As indistinct and undeniable as the edges of an eclipse, and in another moment it was gone and she was standing on the curb again.

  “C’mon, baby,” she whispered to herself, trying to salvage the meanest scrap of calm, to sound the way that Deacon would sound—scared, because anyone sane would be scared, but together. Much too easy to let the fear shut her down, and so she turned her eyes away from the third-floor bedroom window and towards the north flank of the light-speckled mountain, the darker ridge raised against the indigo sky and the dim form of Vulcan outlined against the coming night, the great iron statue standing like the city’s pagan, patron saint of steel and fire, rusting guardian towering high above Southside.

  That’s where she is, isn’t it? Sadie thought. Right up there, and she pictured Dancy standing alone outside the pad-locked gate to the water works tunnel, peering between the corroded bars into the damp black core of the mountain. If Dancy looked up through the trees she would be able see the statue, too, looming huge from his pedestal a few hundred feet farther up the slope from her and almost directly above the park.

  Sadie crossed the street, careful not to look at the castle as she passed by it, trying hard not to think about anything but Dancy alone in the darkness at Vulcan’s feet, alone because they were all three too busy or frightened or stubborn to go with her. If I don’t have the courage, maybe shame will do. Maybe shame is enough to keep me moving, and she followed the asphalt and chain-link margin of a parking lot towards the welcoming noise and traffic of Twentieth Street. Later, secure in the whitestark light of the laundry, she would tell herself the thing that hobbled out of a row of bushes ahead of her was only a dog, a big, hungry stray with legs long and thin as rails, its ribs and spine showing straight through its mangy fur. She would tell herself that, and she wouldn’t let herself think too much about the sounds it was making, or where she’d heard them before.

  Sadie stood very still, not believing and knowing that her belief was irrelevant, while it sniffed at the concrete a moment before raising its wobbly head and turning towards her. It moved as slowly as the shadow she’d seen at the bedroom window; slow, but this movement as jerky as a marionette, wooden blocks dangling on puppet strings and eyes like hateful buttons of bluegreen fire. And when it sat back on its narrow haunches, turned its head to one side, and stretched its black lips back in a wide, wide
smile, she forgot about courage and shame and she ran.

  “No, Pooh, I swear, you’re a goddamn lifesaver,” Deacon says, and the girl with the chemistry textbook, whose real name is Winnie, pretends to smile. He gives her a twenty, and she stares at it a moment like the bribe might be counterfeit before she folds it once and stuffs the bill into the bib pocket of her overalls.

  “Yeah, thanks,” Sadie says and Pooh shrugs and glances down at Sadie’s dirty feet.

  “Jesus, Deke. You really ought to buy your girlfriend some shoes,” and she turns away, drops her textbook loudly onto the mint-green Formica countertop; Sadie starts to tell her to fuck off, never fucking mind, they can find somebody else, but Deacon jabs her hard with his elbow, and then he’s talking again before Sadie can even open her mouth.

  “Well, like I said, I’m gonna try and make it back by midnight, but I can’t promise anything. I don’t really know how this will turn out.”

  “Yeah,” Pooh says. “Whatever. I’m here now. I might as well work,” and she opens her book, flips aimlessly through the glossy pages, and Deacon takes Sadie’s arm and leads her out of the laundromat into the warm summer night.

  “They ought to call her Eeyore,” Sadie grumbles, and Deacon nods his head, keeps a firm grip on her right arm like he’s afraid she’s going to turn around, go right back inside the Wash-N-Fold and pick a fight with Pooh. But that’s just fine with Sadie. It’s good to have him close, good to feel him there beside her. “So, what now, Miss Jasper?” he asks, and Sadie points southwest, in the direction of the little park and the tunnel entrance. A mile or more between here and there, and it’ll take them at least another twenty or twenty-five minutes to walk that far.