Threshold. Part 17

And then a sound, hollow, reverberating clang like someone's striking one of the pipes with a hammer, banging on it with a f.u.c.king 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 d.a.m.n 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 "s.h.i.t," 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 f.u.c.king 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 G.o.dd.a.m.n 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, a.s.shole," 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 phosph.o.r.escence 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 wh.o.r.es 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 Sh.o.r.es, 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 gra.s.s, 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 k.n.o.b 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 h.e.l.l 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.

"I didn't think you were coming," Elise says, her voice hoa.r.s.e, hardly as loud as a whisper. "I didn't think that you would ever really come."

Chance grabs one of the thin motel towels hanging from a rack beside the sink, terry cloth that might once have been white, a long time ago. "Give it to me," she says, and when Elise doesn't move, Chance takes the razor blade away from her, drops it into the tub and wraps the towel tightly around her wrist to make a pressure bandage. Then she glances at the amber pill bottle on the tub, the orange-and-white capsules inside, Dreamsicle colors, and "How much of this s.h.i.t have you taken?" she asks.

Elise is sobbing something Chance doesn't understand, an apology or repentance, and Chance shakes her hard, shakes her until she looks more angry than afraid. "How many of them did you take, Elise?" she asks again.

"I don't know, okay? I can't f.u.c.king remember anymore," and Chance doesn't wait for her to try to remember, takes the bottle and runs to the telephone on the table between the beds, punches 911 and reads the label out loud to herself so she'll be ready when the operator comes on the line, Pamelor, seventy-five milligrams each, and "Don't you f.u.c.king move, Elise," she shouts back at the bathroom.

And that's when Chance notices the albino girl watching her from the open motel room door, the girl and a sense of deja vu so strong and sudden that it makes her dizzy, and she has to sit down on the bed to keep from falling.

"I locked that door. How the h.e.l.l did you get in here?"

"This isn't right," the girl says, her pink eyes bright as candy in the garish light of the lamp, and she takes a step towards Chance. "This isn't where it really started."

"I don't know who you are," Chance growls back at the girl, "and I don't know what you're talking about. But I want you to get the h.e.l.l out of this room right this minute." And then she's yelling into the telephone, yelling at the phone, because no one's picked up on the other end, five rings and still no one's answered.

"It was Sadie's idea," the albino girl says. "They're very, very old, Chance, and they know that you can hurt them. They all know now that we can hurt them, if we have to. But we don't have to. I was wrong-"

"Answer the G.o.dd.a.m.n phone!" Chance screams into the receiver, and then there's a splashing sound from the bathroom, and she thinks about the razor lying at the bottom of the tub.

"You can't save Elise from here. It's already too late here. You both already know what's under the mountain. You've already seen it." Then the girl with skin as white as flour, hair like strands of cornsilk, is standing next to her, standing right there in front of her, taking the phone from Chance's hand, prying it from her fingers.

"She's dying in there," Chance says, trying to think of words that will make the girl understand, tries to show her the bottle of Pamelor but she drops it and the capsules spill out and roll away from her across the bedspread.

"Listen to me, Chance. It can't be from here."

Chance reaches for the phone again, and this time the albino girl slaps her, slaps her so hard that she tastes blood, so hard her head snaps back, and the motel room dissolves around her like a bad watercolor painting left out in the rain. . . .

. . . like liquid drops of fire from the sky, if there is a sky here, if there ever was or would ever be a sky here, anything that Chance would call a sky. And she stands someplace, sometime, everywhere and neverwhere, stands as the white stars fall around her.

"It's almost over now," someone whispers. "Don't be afraid," that voice soothing and so close, so familiar, but she knows she's never heard it before, voice from the day after she died or the day before she was born. And she turns her face up to see the lights streaming down on her from the abyss. They are the brightest and most beautiful things she's ever seen, beauty to break her heart because she knows that they're dying, all of them, and beauty to make her want to live again, because such things can be.

And the tall man steps from the black between the sparkling Roman-candle trails, and she does know his face, if she never remembers another she'll know his until the universe forgets itself. "I'm going to have to kill you," she says to him, except she might have done that already, his face erased when she pulled a trigger sometime else, and "Oh, I knew that," the tall man says.

"You were going to hurt someone," and Chance tries to recall who, who the man was going to hurt, why she will have to kill him, and then it doesn't seem to matter anymore.

"Angels and devils," he says and smiles for her, not an unkind smile, but it's terrible, too, a smile like that. "Monsters and ghosts and G.o.ds," and he opens his hand so she can see the symbol burned into his palm. The shape that can't be, not without warping s.p.a.ce, seven perfect sides and seven equal angles, and the darkness around him seems to flare and glimmer.

"Isn't it a marvelous thing to know?" he asks her. "Even if you forget it again in an instant, wasn't it worth it?"

"I'm half sick of shadows," she says to the man because it's the only thing left in her head, something borrowed from Elise's suicide note, high-school Tennyson and a woman drifting towards her across the water.

"Aren't we all?" he says as the darkness around him flares again, supernova spinning backwards, the night opening its eyes, and she nods her head.

"You know the way, Chance Matthews. h.e.l.l, you are the way," and the man laughs like a dog laughing, and she knows now or she knew or one day she'll know that the light is falling out of him, falling into him.

"Time is your cathedral. You know the present is only a pretty illusion in the minds of men. And I think you know that nothing has ever pa.s.sed away, not entirely."

And the clock ticks, and worlds spin, and silt falls on the muddy floors of seas out of time where trilobites scuttle on jointed feather legs, and she sees the tarot card in his hand, and opens herself . . .

. . . and Chance is lying on her back, then, staring up at the raindrops plunging towards her, kicked out of heaven and plunging helplessly towards the soggy earth where they began.

" 'Down, down, down,' " she says, and, " 'I wonder how many miles I've fallen. . . .' "

"You want to just leave her out here?" Elise asks, but Deacon is already hauling Chance to her feet. She shivers and leans against him, stealing the warmth off him, and kisses his stubbly chin, the arch of his long nose. "C'mon, girlie girl," he says. "Shake a leg," one arm around her tight as they step through the low, square archway leading into the tunnel. "It's time to go forth and explore the Stygian bowels of the world."

Chance laughs, but there was something strange and sad about the rain falling, something it means that she can't quite remember, can't forget either, so she doesn't start giggling again. Stops instead, stands with one hand tight around Deacon's arm, and "No," she says, trying to think through the haze of pot smoke in her head. "I don't want to do this, Deke. I don't want to do this again."

"Jesus, this was your dumb-a.s.s idea," Elise says, taking another step towards the deeper gloom where the tunnel begins, where the two huge water pipes disappear beneath the mountain.

"Well, I think I've changed my mind," she says. "I'm cold, and I think I'm going to be sick."

"Look," Deacon says, points at the iron chain lying on the floor of the blockhouse, rusty pile of chain like a snake coiled there. "We've already gone and committed a crime for you. This s.h.i.t's breaking and entering, you know. And now you want to back out? I think you're just scared."

"Yeah," she says and pulls hard at his arm, pulls him an inch or so back towards the iron gate. "I am, Deacon. I'm scared. I'm just really f.u.c.king scared, all right?"

"Hey, okay, just a minute," and he's looking down at her, rainwater dripping from the end of his nose, his green eyes hidden from her in the shadows.

"Please," she says. "It's not too late. Not yet."

He watches her for a second, watches her with those shadowed eyes, then Deacon Silvey nods his head, puts an arm around her and "Hey, Elise," he yells. "It f.u.c.king stinks in this place. Let's get the h.e.l.l out of here."

Elise grumbles something rude from the darkness, p.i.s.sed-off defiance, but then she's standing there beside them again anyway, marches past Chance and back into the rain. Deacon follows her, so Chance is the last one out of the blockhouse, last one out of that mustystale air that smells like mold and mud and the faintest hint of rot, faintest stink like an animal lying broken and dead on a scorching summer road. She pulls the heavy iron gate shut again, and it clangs loud, the metal against metal sound of it echoing down the tunnel, and she stands there a moment, listening as the clanging noise grows fainter, listening until the only sound is the rain falling softly against the leaves overhead.

EPILOGUE.

July TWO weeks after her grandfather died, and she wouldn't have ever come here alone, not without Deacon. Would never have come here at all, but the dreams have grown finally into something so real, so tangible, that they frighten her, the pale dream girl as real as anyone she has ever known awake. It doesn't matter that she doesn't believe in any of this psychic stuff, any more than the fact that Deacon does. Her therapist the one who finally sent her off to Florida, Dr. Miller, who listens to her strange nightmares and makes notes on the pages of yellow legal pads.

"This isn't about what's factual, Chance," she said. "It's about what's true, what's true to you. You know that there's a difference, don't you?"

So now she's sitting here with Deke in this too-white, fluorescent-drenched room in a Tallaha.s.see mental hospital. The ward where they keep the violent cases, all the patients who are a threat to themselves or someone else. Like something from a prison movie, she thinks, the cramped and shabby cubicles, the thick Plexiglas divider to keep the sane and insane apart, and they can only talk through the big black rotary telephones.

"You're absolutely sure you want to do this?" Deacon asks her, sounding worried and confused. "It isn't too late to back out."

"We've already driven all the way down here," she says.

"That doesn't matter. I wouldn't be angry."

But then it is too late, because a woman in a white uniform is leading the girl to the chair on the other side of the Plexiglas. The teenage girl dressed in blue jeans and a gaudybright Disney World T-shirt, Mickey Mouse and Pluto as if this wasn't already absurd enough. For a moment Chance can only sit silent and stare speechless at the girl, her hair and skin so white they're almost translucent. Her eyes like white rabbit eyes, shades of pink and scarlet, and she blinks uncertainly back at Chance from behind the protective plastic barrier, blinks her heavy lids that droop a little too much to be completely awake. That's just from the medication, Chance thinks. Whatever they're giving her in here.

Chance reaches for the telephone, but Deacon's already picked up the receiver for her, puts it in her unsteady hand, and the albino girl is watching her now the way a cat that isn't particularly hungry watches a careless bird. Then she lifts the telephone receiver on her side, and "h.e.l.lo," Chance says. "h.e.l.lo there, Dancy. My name is Chance."

"h.e.l.lo, Chance," the albino girl says, and she's slurring a little. "You know my name."

"They told me. The nurses told me," and the girl nods her head once and glances back at the orderly standing guard behind her.

"They think they know everything," she says. "They think G.o.d comes down from Heaven every morning and reads them the newspaper."

Deacon's holding onto Chance's hand now, holding it tight, like he's almost as shaken as she is, and that makes her feel better. Maybe it shouldn't, but it does, Deacon and all the weird things he tells her whenever he gets drunk enough, the stories about Atlanta and the things he's seen, the stories she's never really believed, but even he's unnerved that this girl is alive and breathing and sitting there looking back at them.

"I dream about you," Chance says. "For months now, I've been dreaming about you."

"Are they scary dreams?" the girl asks, and she leans forward suddenly, moves quick, and the orderly takes a cautious step towards her.

"Sometimes," Chance says, trying to think of the things she needs to say, the things she said over and over again on the drive down so that she wouldn't forget. She glances at Deacon, but his eyes are on the girl, staring at her like there's nothing else in the world and she might vanish in an instant.

"Sometimes, in my dreams, you're the one who's afraid, Dancy. And I can't ever make you stop being afraid, no matter how hard I try."

"They give me these pills to make me not be afraid anymore," the albino girl says and looks back at the orderly again. "Sometimes I spit them out. They don't work, either."

"Dancy, I need you to tell me what you're afraid of, why I keep dreaming about you. Please, if you know, I need you to tell me." Chance is crying now, her eyes burning and tears rolling down her cheeks even though she swore to herself that she wouldn't.

" 'There are things of which I may not speak,' " the girl says, and then she rubs her hands together like they're cold. "I have done things, Chance. I have done so many things I can't remember anymore."

"No," Chance says, and she leans forward now, too, places her left palm against the Plexiglas, and this is the way she should have cried when her grandfather was buried, the night her grandmother killed herself, the way that she's never been able to cry her whole life.

"It's all right now, Dancy. I came here to tell you that. You can't seem to hear me in the dreams, so I'm telling you now, because I know we're awake and you can hear me."

"I try to stay awake," the girl says, and now she's started crying, too. "But they give me these pills."

"It's okay to sleep, Dancy. I think that's what I'm supposed to tell you. I think that's why I dream about you. Whatever happened, whatever it is, you don't have to be afraid anymore."

And now there's a snarling, keening sound coming from the girl, like an animal trapped and dying, hurting and no way to know that eventually the pain will stop, and she slams the telephone receiver against the divider so hard that one end of it shatters in a spray of jagged black shards. Chance flinches, but she doesn't move her hand, her fingers that would reach through to the girl if she knew how.

"I am not afraid," the girl growls, hurls the words like stones or sharp knives, and pounds the broken phone against the Plexiglas again. Blood on her knuckles, blood smeared back and forth across the invisible divider to show it's there. "I am fire and metal wings," she says. "I am all the burning swords, and I'm trying to forget you, Chance. I'm trying hard to forget you."

The orderly is on top of her then, dragging the albino girl back, fighting her, and in a moment there's another woman, a woman with a syringe, and Chance wants to look away, wants to turn and run, as the needle p.r.i.c.ks the girl's white skin. Then the nurse that led them in is standing behind Deacon and Chance. "You should both leave now, Miss Matthews," he says, his voice as soft as velveteen.

"I didn't mean for this to happen," Chance says. "You know that, Deke. You know I didn't ever want to hurt her."

Deacon takes her hand away from the Plexiglas, folds it up safe in his own.

"It isn't your fault," he says and puts his arms around her. "This sort of s.h.i.t isn't anyone's fault, Chance," and in another moment the orderlies have taken Dancy Flammarion somewhere else, and the nurse hurries them from the visiting room and down the long and sterile hallway that leads back to the day.