Threshold (12 page)

“Yeah, well fuck you, too,” she says to the smiley face and glances over her shoulder. Jerome’s watching her from his chair behind the counter; he nods his head once, waves good-bye, and she waves back, tucks the twice-wrapped book beneath one arm and crosses Twentieth Street.

 

Back home, the dank and mildewstinking halls of Quinlan Castle, and she pauses on the concrete front steps to shake the rain off Jerome’s happy yellow umbrella, flaps it open and closed, open and closed, making a furious noise like the death throes of a giant bat or a pterodactyl, spraying a thousand droplets across the steps and the sidewalk. The storm has almost passed, just a sickly drizzle now and the thunder fading away, distant, muffled cacophony done with Birmingham and taking its wrath elsewhere.

On the way upstairs, she passes Mrs. Schmidt who lives across the hall, elderly Mrs. Schmidt who hears voices if she forgets to take her medication, who has an ugly little dog of no discernible breed named Tinkle, and once she brought Sadie and Deke a plate of hot oatmeal cookies that tasted faintly of fish. Sadie smiles at her, says hello, and the old woman smiles back, her no-denture smile, healthy pink gums but no teeth, and she lightly touches Sadie’s arm, and “I told her to come back when you or Deacon were at home,” she says.

“Who?” Sadie asks, groaning inside because this is probably just something Mrs. Schmidt got into her head halfway through
General Hospital,
something crazy, and Sadie doesn’t have the patience for it today.

“The albino girl,” Mrs. Schmidt replies, her trembling fingers still resting on Sadie’s forearm, age spots and skin like wrinkled silk, and “Oh, her eyes were so pink, just like a white Easter rabbit’s.”

“There was an albino girl looking for us?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Schmidt says, leaning closer now, and she smells like menthol and violets. “She was sitting in front of your door eating a bag of gumdrops, and when I asked her what she was doing there, she said waiting. Just waiting. And I told her that she should come back when you were home.”

“Did you remember to take your pills this morning, Mrs. Schmidt?” Sadie asks, trying not to sound annoyed or patronizing. “The green ones?” Puzzled squint from the old woman for a second, and then she blinks and smiles again. “Yes, dear,” she says, laughs softly, and “She wasn’t
that
sort of a girl at all.”

“Well, I just wanted to be sure. You know, just in case,” Sadie says, still not certain whether to believe Mrs. Schmidt or not. “It isn’t good for you to miss your pills.”

“Thank you, dear. It’s very nice of you to worry about me. But she said that she would find you,” and then the old woman says good-bye and is toddling unsteadily away towards the row of mailboxes by the front door. Sadie watches her go, and she’s pretty sure she doesn’t believe that there was an albino sitting at their front door eating gumdrops.

She takes the stairs two or three at a time, out of breath and her heart racing when she reaches the third floor and the musty smell is worse up here because the landlords refuse to fix a seeping, rotten patch of ceiling at the far end of the hallway. The plaster like soft and molded cheese down there, a couple of places where it’s fallen away completely and you can see the lath, can look straight up into the attic darkness showing between the timegray wood slats. So, the perpetual stench of rotten ceiling, and if it rains long enough, small, pinkwhite mushrooms sprout from the carpet below the hole. The mushrooms seem to make Deacon nervous, though she’s never asked him why, and he doesn’t ever walk down to that end of the hall alone.

Digging through her purse for the door key, the ring with a toothy rubber vampire bat on it and keys to places she hasn’t lived for years, keys to her parents’ house, keys to a car she wrecked last summer, and of course it’s hiding at the bottom under all the other purse junk. As usual, the lock sticks, and she’s wrestling with it when she notices the mound of black gumdrops on the threshold, neat and sugared pile of discarded candy, and so the troublesome door forgotten for the moment, the rubber bat left dangling from the lock, as she bends down for a closer look. Black gumdrops, eight of them, and Sadie picks one up and looks at it like she’s never seen one before, glances across the hall to Mrs. Schmidt’s door. Certainly not impossible that the old woman put them there herself, like the time she drew big X’s and O’s in blue chalk on every door in the building; Sadie sets the gumdrop back on top of the pile and opens the door, thinking that she’ll just leave them there and let Deke figure out what to do about it, probably best to forget the whole thing anyway, and that’s when she sees the folded sheet of paper that someone’s slid under the door.

The first bad dream about a week after she moved in with Deke, right before she found the computer, and if Sadie told him that he might start talking about synchronicity and meaningful coincidence. But she hasn’t told him. Hasn’t told anyone, admitting the nightmares to nobody but herself and the Mac, confidence kept between her and the squat box of microchips and cybergreen circuit board. The black and waterdripping dreams, wandering someplace beneath the city, and she’s never alone, but never quite sure who’s with her, their voices always indistinct, their faces lost in the darkness. A strangling smell like stagnant water and something dead, something drowned, and the moldy hallway stench magnified a thousandfold. Walking and listening to the voices up ahead, wondering if she should call out, if she’s lost, if they’re all lost and searching for a way out, but she’s never said a word. Hugs herself against the damp and cold, against the deadwetdecay smells, and the rocks beneath her feet are slick with slime and mud, with whatever can grow untouched by the sun.

And at first these strange dreams like déjà vu, maddeningly familiar but a fleeting, intangible sort of familiarity, always fading with her first cup of coffee, her first cigarette of the morning. Then one night she was bored and channel-surfing on Deke’s crappy Salvation Army television and she flipped past a PBS documentary,
Nova
or
Nature,
something about bats or caves, and suddenly the pieces fit together, dot-to-dot revelation, and Sadie remembered when she was ten years old and she had other dreams of being lost underground, nightmares that lasted for a whole month after her parents took her to Kentucky to see Mammoth Cave.

The trip a present for her tenth birthday, and the three of them following a guide who explained about stalagmites and stalactites as he led them deeper and deeper underground, farther from the light, farther from the day. Travertine flowstone formations like monsters hulking in the shadows, waiting until no one was looking so they could reach out and drag her screaming into the forever night of the caverns. They passed bottomless reflecting pools where pale, eyeless salamanders and crayfish lived, lingered before fantastic gardens of calcite and quartz. And at some point all the lights were turned out, sixty blindperfect seconds so that everyone would know how dark the cave
really
was, how absolute and complete that blackness, and she held desperately onto her mother, feeling dank and insubstantial teeth sink straight through her skin, all the way to her bones.

And these new nightmares stitching now to then, these dreams to those, and sometimes the two bleed together and she’s ten again, lost under Birmingham and trying to find her parents or the way back to the world above, trying to catch up with the mumbling voices ahead of her. So close she should be able to reach out and touch whoever it is that’s talking, but if she holds her hands out, there’s only the chilly underground air and the dark between her fingertips. Except for once, and most of the time she’d rather pretend that isn’t actually part of the dreams; a figment of her imagination’s daystarved imagination, a dream’s insane dream, and in that subterranean place she did
not
reach out with urgent, imploring fingers and brush the shoulder of a dead girl. Did not feel that skin like ice, but Sadie Jasper’s never been a very good liar, even when she’s only lying to herself, and in that one dream the lights finally did come back on, and she saw that the grand cathedral theater of Mammoth Cave had become a narrow tunnel, purposeful mine shaft sort of tunnel, so maybe she’d wandered away from her parents, away from the guide. Maybe all she had to do was stop and retrace her steps. But the dead girl turned around, instead, and Sadie knew that face, even though the hungry worms and beetles had been at it for days and days, even though she never met Elise Alden, no eyes left, but she knew
that
face, and she saw the blackred gashes that ran from the girl’s wrists to the bends of her elbows. And the girl smiled for her like a polar night sky where every star has died.

A single white sheet of paper, folded twice, and her name and Deacon’s scribbled across the front in pencil, scribbled like someone in a hurry or maybe just someone with shitty handwriting, ugly cursive, and Sadie carries the note to the couch and sits down. The door left wide open, and she sets her purse, the book and the yellow umbrella down on the floor at her feet. Unfolds the sheet of paper, and there’s more of the same tight scrawl, all the words tilting sharply to the left, and
You do not know me yet,
it says at the very top.
You do not know me yet, but there is not much time left. I waited all day long and now the woman with the dog says I should go and I am afraid she’ll call the police so I am writing you this note instead.

“Instead of
what,
” Sadie whispers, frowning at the piece of paper, the sticky, gumdrop fingerprints at the edges, and the handwriting is getting worse as it goes along, so she has to hold the note closer to her face and squint.

I will tell you why I am
and then something that’s been scratched out, violentsudden graphite scratches to obliterate a mistake, three or four words written down and then taken back, thought better of, and
I need to talk to you both very soon. You know a girl named Chance who lives in a big house on the mountain and I have already talked to her. I have not told her why, but when I do she will not believe me but I know that you both will. I am sorry I had to leave a note like this. I am not a bad person,
and then printed much more legibly below the last line,
Dancy Flammarion.

“Your door is open,” and Sadie looks up from the note and there’s Mrs. Schmidt standing in the doorway, clutching a fat wad of junk mail in her left hand. She’s stepped on the little pile of gumdrops, one of her blue bedroom slippers squashing them flat. “You really shouldn’t leave your door standing open like that, Sadie. It’s not a good neighborhood anymore.”

“I know,” Sadie says, and then she glances back down at the note, that last line before the signature.

“There are all sorts of people wandering about that don’t belong here. Let me close the door for you, Sadie,” and Sadie looks up at the old woman, the deep worry lines on Mrs. Schmidt’s creased face even deeper than usual.

“Thank you, Mrs. Schmidt,” Sadie says, and when the door is shut and she’s alone again, she reads the note over from the beginning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A
LICE Sprinkle has hands like a bricklayer, sturdylong fingers and calluses and muscle, all the white and inconsequential scars that come from twenty years spent climbing around in limestone quarries, shale quarries, road cuts. Scars and the damage the sun does to a woman’s skin, the fine wrinkles and her nails thick and nubby, a fresh Band-Aid wrapped around her left index finger; Chance smiles politely at her across the cluttered kitchen table and pours Alice another cup of coffee.

“I just can’t see any reason for it, Chance,” Alice says and sighs, lifts her grayblue china cup and blows hard on the steaming black liquid inside. Breath to send tiny ripples across the dark surface, and “It’s a goddamned, stupid waste,” she says.