Threshold (33 page)

“Yeah,” Deacon says. “At least that’s the way things used to work.” A sip from the can of Coke then, lukewarm and syrupsweet, but it’s better than nothing at all, better than the dust bowl spreading itself out at the back of his tongue. “There’s more, if you’re up to hearing it.”

“Sure,” she says, doesn’t open her eyes but Chance rolls over onto her left side, rolls towards Deacon and wraps both her arms around her pillow, hugs it tightly, and “I’m listening,” she whispers.

 

Sadie’s staring at the television screen,
The Beginning of the End
showing on AMC, but she isn’t actually
watching
it, just staring at the screen because it’s someplace tangible to focus her eyes and her anger. Something to look at besides the walls and the windows, the night outside, and now if she could only stop thinking about Chance and Deacon upstairs, trading their secrets and keeping her in her place, creepydumb Sadie Jasper who can’t deal with the truth.

I’m not the fucked-up bitch running cars into houses,
she thinks and lights a cigarette, hopes that Chance can smell the smoke all the way upstairs, and her eyes drift from the TV screen to the old ledger lying on the coffee table.

Deacon almost couldn’t get Chance to put the thing down, when he led her into the house after the trip to the hospital, and they had to use the back door and come through the kitchen because the front porch was too much trouble with all the steps gone. Him telling her that she should put the ledger away for a while, that it would be okay, really, no one was going to steal it or anything, after she’d clutched the book the whole time they were waiting to see a doctor, didn’t even turn it loose when they were sewing up the gash in her head.

And no one has told Sadie
not
to touch it, no explicit or implicit instructions that she was to leave the ledger alone. But she thinks it’s probably like reading someone else’s diary, that sort of unspoken understanding, and she should just stare at her movie and mind her own business.

But this
is
my own business, isn’t it?
she thinks.
If that book has anything to do with what happened at the apartment, or whatever’s happened to Dancy, it’s
absolutely
my goddamn business.

And that makes sense on the surface, at least, which is about as much as anything is making sense. She reads the cover again, everything but the date meaningless to her, and she hates that, feeling stupid just because she hasn’t spent her life in college staring at rocks. Sadie sets her cigarette down on the edge of a china saucer, shifts about nervously on the sofa, half turns and glances towards the hallway, towards the staircase. Deacon and Chance’s voices are faint, but she’s sure she can hear them talking. Sharing their greedy confidences, so it’s not very likely either of them will be coming downstairs any time soon.

This is what he’s wanted all along, to be alone with her again. For her to
need
him again, and neither of them gives a rat’s ass what happens to Dancy.

And she takes advantage of a fresh and disorienting surge of jealousy, the bitterhot flush across her cheeks, the cold knot in her belly, and Sadie picks the ledger up off the coffee table. The sort of thing she should have done a long time ago, she thinks, if they’re so determined to keep her in the dark, if she’s the only one who cares about Dancy. She holds the book in both hands and stares at the cover, stalling one last moment longer, because even through the jealousy, she knows that a trust is being violated. Something that she’ll never be able to take back, once it’s done, regardless of her reasons or excuses or how well she plays the clueless innocent. And something else, too; a bright speck of dread somewhere behind her resentment. Maybe she
doesn’t
want to know what’s written in this book, self-doubt to muddle her resolve, and she thinks of Chance upstairs, the madness in her eyes, thinks of poor Dancy, and
Everything,
she thinks.
It could cost me everything.

“Maybe it already has,” Sadie Jasper says, and she opens the ledger. But there’s nothing on the first page that isn’t anticlimax, scribbled cursive that she has to squint to read, and what she can make out means about as much to her as the words written on the cover. Pages and pages about nothing but trilobites: collecting trilobites, the anatomy of trilobites, what trilobites are found where and in which rocks, how old the rocks are, and after she’s scanned forty or fifty pages, the anger and dread is beginning to fade, and she just feels foolish, like the butt of someone’s practical joke, like somebody that
deserves
to feel like a fool.

“Shit,” she hisses, almost slams the book closed, then flips through fifty more pages or so, nothing left to lose now. The deed done whether she’s learned anything or not, so she might as well. And about halfway through the ledger the notes and the drawings of trilobites end and something that seems even more baffling begins: a seven-sided figure and a lot of math, and suddenly she wants to hurl the book across the room, throw it at the television and leave it lying there on the floor for Deacon and Chance to see whenever they get tired of each other’s company and remember she’s sitting down here waiting for them.

But then she notices what’s written underneath the figure, not math and nothing that seems to have anything much to do with fucking trilobites. She holds the book closer to her face, scoots a little closer to the lamp, and reads the words out loud.

And Sadie stops, her heart beginning to beat faster again and her mouth gone dry and sour. Just the mention of the water works tunnel enough to get her attention, and she glances quickly at the stairs, the shadows there, before she turns back to the book and begins to read again.

“ ‘The masonry is still solid. Found several more cf.
Dicranurus
near that spot. Terrible smell too (rotten, like old cabbage) and the man from the city said he thought he heard things behind the wall sometimes. I can’t
sleep
at night anymore. Can’t stop thinking about the thing in the bottle and brick wall and polyhedrons. Our
drinking water
comes through that place’ ”

And that’s all. Nothing after that but more numbers and countless variations on the seven-sided figure, but Sadie reads the paragraph about the tunnel twice more, trying to squeeze more meaning from the words, the empty spaces between the words, and then she sits with the book open in her lap, alone with the implications of what she’s read, and stares at the flickering television screen.

 

“Yeah, I still know someone on the force in Atlanta,” Deacon says. He’d rather be talking about almost anything in the world, because of the promises that he made to himself years and years ago, that he was done with the cops forever. Done with letting them milk him for the bits and pieces of tragedy that he sees from time to time if he tries, and sometimes if he
doesn’t
try. A malignant part of himself he can’t cut out or ignore, but that doesn’t mean he has to talk about it, has to acknowledge what it’s done to him. Except that now that’s
exactly
what it means, because of Chance and Sadie and the things he saw when he touched a piece of twine tied around the trunk of a dogwood tree.

Try to change what
hasn’t
happened yet,
Dancy said that night at the tunnel, only last night, but it already feels like a hundred years ago.

“The detective that I used to work with sometimes,” he says, and Chance opens her eyes halfway, drugheavy lids, and “You don’t have to tell me about this stuff, Deke,” she says.

“Yes I do, Chance. This time I do have to talk about it,” but he doesn’t say anything else for a few seconds, rubs his hands together and keeps his eyes on the floor. Like he’ll lose his nerve if he looks directly at her too long, doing all of this
for
her so it doesn’t make sense; the sight of her should make him stronger, should strengthen his resolve and keep him moving instead of frightening him even worse than he already is.

“I called him while you were at school. Actually, I’d just hung up the phone when you . . . you know,” and he doesn’t want to say
When you plowed your car into the house,
so he just jabs his left thumb over his shoulder at the bedroom window, in the general direction of the front porch.

“Right,” Chance says. “I know.”

“I haven’t talked to that son of a bitch in for fuckin’ ever. I thought he was gonna have a heart attack when he heard my voice.”

“You called him about Dancy,” Chance says, and Deacon nods, keeps his eyes on the floor.

“I told him everything I thought I could, without him thinking I was totally whacked. It was that finger. Regardless of what she believed it was, regardless of what I felt when I touched it, I figured if she’s really been killing people and hacking them up like that, then maybe somebody was looking for her. Maybe someone out there might know something that would help.”

“You saw a monster, too, didn’t you?” Chance asks him, and the Lortab is making her slur; her eyes are closed again, and “When you touched it,” she says, “that’s what you saw.”

“Yeah, that’s what I
saw.
But I learned a long time ago that some of the stuff I see when I touch these things, some of it can be influenced by other people who touched them before me, by what those people believed. If those beliefs are strong enough, Chance, it’s like they can leave impressions behind, the same way that actual events can.

“So, when I found that marked-up copy of
Beowulf
and realized that’s where she was getting all of this stuff, it started me thinking—maybe the things I saw when I touched the finger, and the things I saw at the tunnel, maybe they had as much to do with what Dancy
believed
was happening as what really has been happening.”

“Yeah, well, what about the things
I
saw?” Chance asks him. “What about the things Sadie said
she
saw?”

“Like I said, this is complicated. I’m not saying you guys didn’t see anything. At the very least, I know you
think
you saw something. But neither of you had these experiences until
after
you met Dancy, and maybe some of the things you saw, maybe you saw them because of what she said to you.”

“You think we imagined it all.”

“Chance, have you ever wondered why those folks who claim to have been abducted by space aliens all tell more or less the same story? Why their stories tend to have so much in common? I know you, so I know damned well you don’t think it’s because they’ve all been abducted by extraterrestrials with the same idea of how to go poking around inside people’s butts,” and she laughs, then, a clean, sane laugh, laughing just because she thinks something’s funny. It’s almost enough to lift some of the weight from Deacon’s shoulders, from his mind, the simple sound of her laughing, and he can look at Chance again instead of the floor.

“The UFO nuts like to say it’s impossible that
all
these people could have concocted such similar stories, that the similarities between the reports are proof that the stories must be accounts of real abductions. But you know that’s bullshit, because all those people, I don’t care if they’re in fucking Kansas City or Kathmandu,
all
of them have been contaminated by everything from
Close Encounters
to supermarket tabloids to the stories they’ve heard other abductees tell on talk shows.”

“And you think Dancy contaminated me and Sadie,” Chance says. She rubs at her eyes like they’re sore, rubs them like a sleepy child trying to stay awake just a little longer, and then glances back towards the open window. The nightwarm breeze ruffling the curtains smells faintly of kudzu and car exhaust.

“Maybe. And maybe me, too,” he says. “She was trying, as hard as she could, to convince all three of us that she was telling us the truth. She
needed
to convince us, to reinforce her own beliefs. Personally, I think Dancy was a hell of a lot more afraid of her own doubt than she ever was of monsters.”

“So, what did your detective friend have to say, anyway?”

Deacon sighs and rocks his chair back onto two legs, scuffs at the floor with the heel of one shoe.

“Some pretty wild shit. More than I expected, that’s for sure. Dancy told me she was from Florida, down near Fort Walton somewhere, so Hammond called this guy he knows who’s Florida State Patrol, and then he talked to the Feds in Tallahassee. And they told him that a sixteen-year-old albino girl named Dancy Flammarion escaped from a state mental hospital a few months ago.”

He pauses, then, but Chance doesn’t say anything, keeps her head turned towards the open window; she flares her nostrils slightly, once, twice, as if searching the breeze for some particular odor. An animal kind of a thing to do, almost like a dog, and that makes him think of things he’d just as soon not remember, and he starts talking again.

“She’d been there about a year, ever since she was picked up last summer wandering along the highway near a place called Milligan. Turns out she was living somewhere back in the swamps with her mother and grandmother. The cops that found her knew who she was, but they couldn’t get her to talk, so they just assumed she’d run away from home. But when they tried to take her back, turns out the cabin her family was living in had burned down to the ground. Her mother and her grandmother were both dead, and, as far as anyone in Milligan knew, she didn’t have any other family. So Dancy became a ward of the state—”

“Since when do they put you in the nuthouse for that?”

“They don’t. Hammond said he wasn’t precisely clear on why she was committed, though she evidently gave the Milligan PD a hell of a lot of trouble before they shipped her off to Tallahassee.

“Anyway, when Dancy finally started talking, whatever she had to say to those shrinks must have sounded an awful lot like the sort of stuff she was telling us, because no one intended to let her out anytime soon. About a month before she escaped, she attacked another patient and an orderly and wound up in isolation, on some sort of high-security suicide watch.”