Threshold (44 page)

“It can’t be much farther,” she says. “We have to be getting pretty close now,” if her grandmother’s notes are right, only twelve hundred feet or so from the blockhouse door, not far past the point where the Ordovician limestones change over to the redviolet sandstones and shales of the younger Red Mountain Formation.

So why didn’t I notice it before? Why didn’t I see a brick wall in April?
and of course the always-handy answer that she was simply too high to notice, they were all too high. So high they managed to get lost walking in a straight line and wander around in here for hours before Deacon finally found the way out again. She stops to look back at him, looking back for a reassuring glimpse of sunlight, but the tunnel behind them is as perfectly dark as a night without the moon, without so much as city lights to trouble the blackness.

“It’s started,” she says, and Deacon turns and looks back too. “We must have gone around a corner somewhere,” he says, and Chance shakes her head.

“No. It’s a straight line, Deke. All the way from one end to the other.”

“Then the pipes are getting in the way, that’s all.”

“You don’t believe that any more than I do,” she says, wishing that she’d brought a compass along, or some strong nylon cord to tie the two of them together.

“Just keep moving,” he says. “That’s all we can do now,” and he gives her a little push, not hard, but hard enough, so Chance wrestles her feet free of the mud and starts walking again.
Just keep moving,
like he said and all the light she needs is right there in her hand, shining clean and white to show her the way.

“Talk to me, Chance,” Deacon says. “Remind me what the hell it is we’re looking for again,” and she can tell that he’s trying not to sound scared, but she knows him too well to be fooled, too well to fool herself.

“A wall. A brick wall. It’s going to be on our right, I think, on the west side of the tunnel.”

“A wall. A fucking brick wall on the right side of the tunnel,” and he bumps into her, apologizes, and “So tell me about the rocks,” he says. “How old are these rocks?”

Chance plays the beam of her flashlight across the roof of the tunnel again, relieved that he’s changed the subject, because they’re better off if she doesn’t have to start talking about what might be on the other side of that brick wall, the things that Sadie whispered and her grandmother only hinted at, the things the workmen found down here more than a hundred years ago and built that wall against. The smallest part of it trapped inside a jar of alcohol, and so she concentrates instead on the maroon strata above them.

“Well, we’re out of the Chickamauga Limestone now and coming into the Red Mountain. We’re right at the bottom of the Silurian, so these beds are maybe four hundred and thirty million years old. The rocks will keep getting younger as we go, the way they’re tilted.” She has to stop and clear her throat, the meaty, rotten smell grown so strong that she can taste it, and Chance wishes she had a hand free to cover her mouth.

“And after the Silurian, then the rocks are Devonian age, right? You explained that to me once, remember?”

“Yeah,” she says. “But I didn’t think you would.”

“Hey, I’ve still got a few brain cells left. The booze hasn’t pickled them all—”

And then a sound, hollow, reverberating clang like someone’s striking one of the pipes with a hammer, banging on it with a fucking sledgehammer. Noise so vast, so deep it rolls over them like an ocean wave, fills the tunnel from wall to wall, but no way to tell if it came from behind them or from somewhere up ahead.

“Don’t think about it,” Deacon says, but her head is still so full of the sound that he seems to be speaking from somewhere else far, far away. “Just keep talking to me, Chance. What comes next, after the Devonian?”

“The Mississippian. The Mississippian Period comes next, Deke,” and she stops walking, then, stops so suddenly that he runs into her again, almost knocks her off her feet this time.

“The Mississippian,” she says again. “The Maury and Fort Payne Chert formations,” and that’s all she has to say, because they’ve come to the wall, finally, unremarkable brick wall maybe four feet across, and Chance lays the shotgun down on one of the pipes, reaches out and runs the tips of her fingers gently across the damp masonry. Bricks laid here and mortar set in 1888, when her great-grandfathers were still young men and Birmingham was hardly more than a few dirt streets, a rough and coaldust cluster of steel mills and mining camps.

“Jesus, that’s it,” Deacon says, somewhere close behind her.

“Yeah, that’s it,” she replies. Her fingers still pressed against the bricks, and they’re more than wet, more than cold, some sensation she doesn’t have a word for because she’s never even imagined it.
Waxy,
she thinks, trying to fill in the blank anyway, but waxy isn’t even close to the way the wall feels.

“This is where it’s coming from,” she says, and slides the pack off her shoulder, sets it carefully down in the mud at the base of the wall, but doesn’t take her hand away from the bricks.

“They found something down here, didn’t they, Chance? When they were digging this damn tunnel, they woke something up. It’s like the sinkhole by the cabin,” and she doesn’t ask him what sinkhole, what he’s talking about, the time for all these questions come and gone, and if there ever were such easy answers those are past, as well. Swallowed by the years, the decades, the way the tunnel has swallowed the light from the blockhouse gate.

“Can’t you
feel
it?” she asks, and surely he can, surely Deacon Silvey of all people can feel it pouring out through this insubstantial barrier, leaking through the gaps between atoms as if these bricks were no more solid than screen wire.
Time, and what people find when they start looking in time,
Sadie said, and that’s only a beginning, Chance thinks, one baby step towards comprehending what’s hidden behind this wall. A thousand metaphors and she’d never come any closer, a seeping place where two worlds meet, where all worlds and all times meet, black hole, white hole, a
crossroads
and that’s as good a way as any other of looking at it.

They used to bury suicides at crossroads,
and “Shit,” Deacon hisses, and when she looks up he’s holding the shotgun, pointing it at the dark, aiming back the way they came or the way they haven’t gone yet. Impossible for her to be sure which is which, no point of reference anymore, nothing but this wall and two feeble beams of electric light.

“Christ, did you
hear
that?” he asks, and she shakes her head no.

“I didn’t hear anything, Deke.”

She takes a deep, deep breath and pulls her fingers away from the wall, and she’s surprised when it lets her do that, surprised when she isn’t touching it anymore.
It didn’t have to let me. It could have held me like that forever,
and behind her there’s the sound of Deacon pumping the shotgun.

“If you’re gonna do this, Chance, you better do it right fucking
now,
” he says. “We’re not alone down here.”

She kneels in the mud and undoes the straps on the backpack, folds open the canvas flap, but she’s moving so slow, like running in a nightmare. All her effort, straining, and even these small movements almost more than she can manage.

“A slow sort of country,” she says, pulling out a stick of dynamite and then another after it. “
Here,
you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.”

“You
had
to have heard it that time,” Deacon says, a pause and then, “
There,
that’s it. There’s something on the goddamn pipes.”

When Chance has taken six sticks of dynamite from the pack, embedded them in the mud like candles on a birthday cake, she reaches into a pocket of her jeans for the roll of green electrical tape. The tape to bind the dynamite together and then she’ll make another bundle from the last six sticks, just like she planned it hours ago, planned all of this out so deliberately, so precisely; the green tape to hold the dynamite together, and then all she has to do is insert one of the brightly colored detonators into each of the bundles, the copper wire connected to the detonators, then, and the wire to the battery . . .

But that will take time, and if there is time here, if there’s time like
that
here, she’s losing track of it. Chance wraps the electrical tape around and around the first bundle of explosives, wraps it three times, charmed and magic number to keep away the bad things, and “You’re
dead,
asshole,” Deacon says behind her. “You’re
all
dead.”

A minute or an hour later, no way to be certain with the seconds beginning to bleed together like this, one moment and the next no different from each other, and she reaches into the pack for the detonators. And the brick wall seems to shudder, gray and punky bits of mortar falling away, and she stops, stares directly at it while Deacon curses the noises she can’t hear, sights that she can’t see.

There’s a trilobite, perfect bristly
Dicranurus
as big as a silver dollar, crawling slowly up the bricks, unexpected shimmer of phosphorescence at the tips of its long genal and pleural spines, the grotesquely retorted spines rising from the occipital rings like tiny horns, firefly specks of brilliance beneath its eyes; and she reaches out to touch it, reaching back across epochs, all the ages she named for Deacon recited the other way round. But the wall is crumbling now, shaking itself apart, and the trilobite sinks into it like a pebble dropped into a stream.

“Deacon, help me,” she says, catching on too late, too slow or dull to see the strings until the show’s almost over and it doesn’t matter anymore. The wall shudders again and collapses, the disintegrating bricks sucked back into a night that the tunnel can only envy, darkness before there was even the premonition of light, still an hour before the birth of the universe in there, and she screams as eternity rushes out around her, and Deacon pulls the trigger on the shotgun, and the world slips away like a stain.

Already twilight when Chance turns off Fourth Avenue into the parking lot of the Schooner Motel, this place probably a dump thirty years ago and nothing now but a cheap place to take hookers, somewhere for the crack whores and winos to hide out when they have the money to spare for a room. She has no idea why anyone would name a motel on the edge of downtown Birmingham something like that,
schooner,
more like a name for a motel in Panama City or Gulf Shores, some vacation city by the sea. She parks the Impala between a pickup truck and a long black Monte Carlo with a trash bag for its missing rear windshield, double-checks the number she scribbled on a Post-It note fifteen minutes ago, and then looks to be sure that the other three doors are locked before she gets out of the car.

The end of a stormy April day, tornadoes, and she heard on the radio that seven people were killed in Mississippi. Nothing now but rain, and she forgot her umbrella, left it leaning against the coatrack by the door on her way out of the house. “Don’t you go and forget your umbrella, Chance,” her grandfather said, and “I won’t,” she promised him, but she forgot it anyway, her head too many places at once, too full, and so now she shivers in the cold drizzle and walks quickly across the parking lot towards the yellow cinderblock walls, the drab row of identical black doors. There are more cars and a narrow, stunted patch of dead-brown grass, a few hopeful clumps of clover and dandelions, before she reaches the doors.

“Number Seven,” she says, but this is only number five, the room number painted directly onto the door in front of her, and so she walks down the row to seven and knocks. When no one answers, she knocks again, harder than before.

“Come
on,
Elise. I’m getting
cold
out here.”

But no sign that anyone’s even in the room except the lamp shining from the other side of the curtains, and when she tries the knob it isn’t locked, turns easy in her hand, and Chance opens the door and steps inside out of the wind.

Two single beds and the wallpaper stamped with a faded bamboo pattern, gaudy wallpaper the swampy color of pea soup. Elise’s purse is lying on the bed closest to Chance, and she closes the door behind her and locks it.

“Elise? Where the hell are you?” but there’s only the sound of water running in the bathroom for a reply. The bathroom door standing wide open, and anyone could have come waltzing in here, anyone who pleased; Chance sighs and looks at the bed again, the familiar beaded purse lying there with everything spilled out of it, careless scatter of car keys and a pack of chewing gum, old movie ticket stubs and Elise’s address book.

“I came as soon as I could,” she says. “Are you decent in there or what? You didn’t even bother to lock the door,” and Chance walks past the bed to the bathroom where Elise Alden is sitting naked on the toilet seat. The little bathtub filled almost to overflowing, steaming water almost all the way to the top, and Elise looks up at Chance with puffy, red-rimmed eyes like she’s been sitting here crying for hours. She opens her mouth to say something but stops, and Chance sees the hesitant cuts on her left wrist, then, the razor blade held between the fingers of her right hand and a dark smear of crimson on the steel. The open and half-empty prescription bottle sitting on the edge of the tub.