Threshold (32 page)

Deacon is standing in the downstairs hall, has just set the telephone receiver back in its cradle, when he hears the squeal of spinning tires in the driveway. Like someone’s doing fucking doughnuts out there, and he heads for the front door, the door open but the screen closed to keep out bugs because Sadie’s afraid of wasps. Through the screen wire he sees Chance’s redorange Impala barreling towards the porch, cloud of dust and gravel spray and Chance behind the wheel, and he’s wrestling with the latch when the car bounces across the lawn, crashes through the steps and buries its front end deep in one corner of the porch. The impact knocks Deacon off his feet, and he takes the coatrack down with him.

“What the hell was
that
?” Sadie yells from somewhere upstairs, and Deacon pushes the brass coatrack off of him, a wonder one of the hooks didn’t put out an eye or knock his goddamn teeth down his throat, and “I think Chance is home, baby,” he yells back at Sadie.

He stands up and pushes the screen door open, lets it bang shut behind him, and Deacon’s immediately engulfed by a choking, thick fog of driveway grit and radiator steam. He coughs, pulls his T-shirt up to cover his mouth and nose, and crosses the buckled porch boards to the place where the steps used to be. Nothing much there now but some shattered concrete blocks and a few broken slats, the steps sheared completely away; he sits on the edge and drops the five or six feet down to the ground. The Impala’s taillights are flashing, like Chance is signaling that she wants to turns both ways at once, and Deacon walks around the rear of the car to the driver’s side. Not much smoke on this side, and he can see that Chance is slumped forward over the steering wheel.

“Jesus. Is she dead or what?” Sadie calls out from the porch, from someplace behind the settling redgray fog, and he ignores her. Opens the car door, and now he can see that there’s blood on Chance’s face, blood on the hard plastic steering wheel, too; his heart races, and his mouth is as dry as old bones.

“Don’t move her, Deke! You’re not supposed to move people in car wrecks,” Sadie shouts. “I’m gonna call an ambulance!”

“You don’t do
anything
but stay right where you are.” He reaches for Chance’s wrist, presses his finger to the soft spot where blue veins intersect. And Chance jerks her hand away, sits up in the seat and blinks at Deacon. He can see there’s a nasty-looking cut above her eyebrows, probably where most of the blood is coming from, the spot where her head hit the steering wheel, he thinks, and if she’d been going any faster, there’d probably be a big piece of it sticking out of her skull.

“Can you hear me?” he asks, ashamed that he sounds so scared when she’s the one that’s hurt, and Chance nods her head once. “Yeah,” she says, and more blood leaks from between her lips, dribbles down her chin. “Yeah, I can hear.”

“Do you think you can move?”

“Don’t move her, Deacon!” Sadie shouts from the porch. “Her neck might be broken!”

“Sadie, will you shut the hell up or go back inside?”

“My neck isn’t broken,” Chance says, and she sits back, stares at her blood spattered on the inside of the Impala’s busted windshield. “I just couldn’t remember how to make it stop. I just kept going faster.”

“Yeah, well, I’m gonna help you, and we’re gonna get you out of the car and into the house. I can’t have you fucking bleeding to death in your own front yard,” and then there’s a sound from somewhere under the hood of the Impala, popping sound like a champagne cork, and Deacon jumps. “I think maybe we should hurry, Chance.”

She nods again and reaches for something lying in the floorboard at her feet. Deacon sees that it’s the ledger from the crate, and he puts one arm around her shoulders, the other under her legs, and lifts her carefully out of the car. Surprised that she seems so light, not half as heavy as he’d expected, but his back will still probably be giving him hell for this in a few hours. He moves as slowly, as deliberately, as he can, trying not to jostle her or trip or lose his balance, and his heart is pounding from fear and this unaccustomed exertion. He turns his back on the dying car, carries Chance to a shady place a few feet away, cool shadows cast by a shaggy oleander bush, and lays her on the grass. Deacon sits down next to her and looks back at the porch. Sadie’s still standing there, hands on her hips and a scowl on her face, and he waves at her.

“It’s okay,” he says. “It’s gonna be okay now.”

Chance rolls over on her side and spits out a mouthful of blood and saliva, and then she looks up at him. And her eyes are so wide, so afraid, and he tells her again that she’s going to be okay, the Impala’s probably bought the farm, but he’s pretty sure she’s going to be fine. Chance coughs, and he wipes the blood from her mouth with the hem of his T-shirt.

“No,” she says and lies back down in the grass and dandelions, her face turned up to the wide summer sky above the mountain, and “No,” she says again. “I can see them, Deke. I can see monsters.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

T
HE small hours of Monday morning, after the trip to the emergency room, seven stitches in Chance’s forehead and a doctor who said no, she didn’t have a concussion, but don’t let her sleep for six hours and then wake her once every hour during the night. Deacon is sitting in the chair beside her bed, waiting for her to start talking again. Not like she’s made any effort to hold back, more like she can only find the strength to speak for short intervals, five or ten minutes, and then she closes her eyes and presses herself as tight as she can against the bedroom wall. As if there’s only so much of it she can stand at a time, and the powderblue Lortabs probably not helping much either. So Deacon knows
some
of it, what her grandmother wrote in the old ledger, fragments of whatever happened to Chance at the lab, but he suspects she’s hardly scratched the surface, and he can only sit, patient, pretend patience, and wait for her to open her eyes and begin again.

Sadie’s downstairs, alone downstairs because that’s the way she wants it. Angry at Deacon’s playing nursemaid to his ex-lover and probably angrier that they’re still not telling her everything that they might. Hours ago, she brought up a cup of hot chamomile and peppermint tea and a big bowl of Campbell’s chicken noodle, but the look in her eyes made Deacon wonder if he shouldn’t check to see if the food was poisoned; no matter, because Chance only managed a couple of hesitant sips of the tea and ignored the soup altogether.

Deacon followed Sadie back to the top of the stairs, leaving Chance alone longer than he wanted, but afraid that Sadie was on the verge of walking back to Quinlan Castle by herself, hurt foot or no hurt foot, dog monsters or no dog monsters.

“Does she know what happened to Dancy?” Sadie asked. “That’s all I want to know,” and she peered resentfully over Deacon’s shoulder towards the open door to Chance’s room.

“Maybe. But listen, Sadie, I’m having a lot of trouble just trying to figure out how much of this
she
thinks is real and how much she thinks she imagined. I’m pretty sure Chance believes she’s losing her mind.”

“Yeah, well. The way she plowed into the porch, I can see why,” and Sadie crossed her arms and glared down at the toes of the hiking boots that Chance let her borrow Saturday night. Huge, silly things on Sadie’s feet, at least two sizes too big for her.

“I understand it runs in the family.”

Deacon wanted to hit her, one of those brittle moments when he knew that he needed to get as far away from her as fast as he could, and this time he didn’t have the luxury.

“I’m going to
try
to pretend you didn’t say that, because I know you’re not one-half the bitch you like to
think
you are,” almost whispering so Chance wouldn’t hear, trying to find words to defuse the bomb ticking behind his bloodshot eyes. “If Chance knows what’s happened to Dancy, she’ll tell us. If not, well, I’m really fucking sorry about that.”

“
Fine.
Whatever,” and she clomped away back downstairs, limping in Chance’s boots, and in a few minutes, he could hear a movie blaring from the television set in the living room.

“I should have listened to her, Deke,” Chance says, and Deacon sees that she’s opened her eyes, is staring out the raised window into the dark.

“You mean Dancy?” he asks, and she nods her head, doesn’t take her eyes off the window.

“Yeah,” she says. “I thought I knew so much. I
always
thought I knew so much.”

“Maybe we ought to talk about Dancy,” and he looks down at one of the books he found inside the shredded remains of the duffel bag. A waterstained paperback copy of
Beowulf,
dog-eared pages, and someone’s underlined passages with a red ballpoint pen. There are notes written in the margins as well, and pictures drawn on the two or three blank pages at the back.

“I treated her the same way I treated you, Deacon, the same way I’ve always treated everyone. Either measure up to my rationalist bullshit or fuck off.”

Deacon picks the book up off the floor, holds it so that Chance can see the tattered cover, a cartoon-gaudy painting of the monster Grendel, the Geat warrior clutched in its scaly fist. “I assume you’ve read this,” he says. “Even you scientific types have to read books, right?”

“Yes, Deacon. I’ve read
Beowulf,
” and Chance touches her bruised and swollen face with the fingers of her right hand and winces. “I read
Beowulf
when I was in seventh grade.”

“Well, good for you. You’ve got a bump on your head, but at least you ain’t ignorant,” and Deacon forces a weak smile and opens the book, starts flipping through the pages.

“What has this got to do with anything?” Chance asks, and he sees that she’s staring at the dark window again, flecks of fear and longing in her green eyes, and Deacon thinks about closing it, no idea if that would make things better or worse. He decides it’s best to leave the window open, and he goes back to flipping through
Beowulf.

“I found this in Dancy’s duffel bag, which I thought was pretty interesting in and of itself. It’s not the sort of thing I’d have expected to find a homeless girl carrying around with her.”

“Dancy wasn’t
just
a homeless girl,” Chance says, a hint of annoyance in her voice.
That’s good,
he thinks, better than the shellshock monotone and blank stares she’s given him since he pulled her out of the wrecked Impala.

“No,” Deacon says. “No, she wasn’t.”

“She tried to tell me. She
showed
me.”

“Chance, just listen for a minute,” and he opens the book, and Chance watches the bedroom window silently and waits.

“Last night, you asked me what I saw when I was at the tunnel. Well, one of the things that I saw was Dancy, and she said something that stuck in my head. I
knew
I’d heard it somewhere before, and when I found this in her duffel bag I realized where. She’s underlined passages all through here.”

He coughs, his throat dry, and there’s half a can of Coke sitting on the dresser beside him; he looks at it for a moment, wishing it was a shot of Jack Daniel’s or Wild Turkey, and then he turns back to the book, coughs again, and begins to read.

“ ‘The other wretched shape trod the tracks of exile in the form of a man, except that he was bigger than any other man. Land-dwellers in the old days named him Grendel. They know of no father, whether in earlier times any was begotten for them among the dark spirits,’ ” and he pauses for a moment, and now Chance is watching him instead of the window.

“ ‘They hold to the secret land, the wolf-slopes, the windy headlands, the dangerous fen-paths where the mountain stream goes down under the darkness of the hills, the flood under the earth.’ ”

For a moment, neither of them says anything, and then Deacon closes the book, lays it on the dresser beside the can of Coca-Cola.

“You saw a vision of Dancy reciting
Beowulf
?” and he can tell that Chance is trying not to sound incredulous, not to sound skeptical, and maybe she could have managed it without the painkillers.

“Not just then, Chance. The night she showed us the finger, all that talk about the Children of Cain. Grendel and his mother are described as the kin of Cain. And that stuff about the dragon—”

“So you think she made all this up?”

“Not exactly. It’s got to be a lot more complicated than that. But I think
whatever’s
happening, Dancy was using
Beowulf
to try and make sense of things. The same way some people use the Bible—”

“Or science,” Chance says, interrupting him, and she laughs a weary, ironic laugh and shuts her eyes.

“Well, yeah. Now that you mention it. It was part of her belief system. Her paradigm.”

“Jesus, Deke, this is so completely fucked up. I’m Scully and
you’re
Mulder, remember?”