Threshold (25 page)

“Not just yet,” he says firmly. “You’ve done us harm, child, and we expect a little more sport for our trouble,” but when she reaches for the twine it rolls out of his hand and bounces down the steps towards her. Dancy stoops to pick it up, moves slow because she’s very dizzy, and when she looks back at the place the man was sitting he’s gone.

 

This is what they want me to do, isn’t it?
she thinks,
They want me to find the tunnel;
it doesn’t make sense, but she’s pretty sure that doesn’t matter anymore, all of it gone beyond making sense, and Dancy ties one end of the smiling man’s twine around the trunk of a small dogwood tree growing in front of the high school. A strong square knot, and she tugs at it with what’s left of her strength until she’s sure it’s strong enough, sure that it won’t slip loose. Then she crosses the street, leaves a careful, straight line of string on the blacktop, and when she’s on the other side, loops it twice around the post of a bright yellow school-zone sign before turning left and trailing it along the ground behind her half a block to the corner of Thirteenth Avenue and Nineteenth Street.

Another loop around another silver post, and this time she turns right, turns south, and when she looks back the school is already growing small and distant and she knows she’s found her way out of the maze, that he’s
shown
her the way out. Dancy unwinds the twine as she walks, lets it fall to the ground to mark the way she’s come, Hansel and Gretel bread-crumb trick, something she’ll recognize if she starts going around in circles again.

She’s almost all the way to the corner of Fourteenth and Nineteenth before she realizes that she left her duffel bag back at the high school, everything she owns in there: the few small things she saved from the cabin before it burned, photographs of her mother and grandmother and grandfather, her grandmother’s rosary, the big carving knife. But she doesn’t have the strength to walk all the way back and retrieve it, not if she’s going to reach the park, if she’s ever going to reach the tunnel at the end of this road.

Dancy tries not to think about the duffel bag, crosses the street, is busy wrapping the twine tight around one leg of a mailbox when she hears the sound and looks up. Sharp and wooden sound like someone tapping a broomstick hard against the pavement, sound like tapping broomsticks and rustling straw. She’s heard that sound once before, tap-tapping along a midnight alley in Savannah, and she tries to stop shivering for a minute, long enough to listen, tries not to think about how bad she hurts.

But there’s only the scoldingharsh squawk of a mockingbird somewhere close by, and the constant city sound of traffic; Dancy stands up, so dizzy and hot, and she only wants to lie down on the cooling sidewalk. The eastern sky turning indigo and violet while the west burns alive, and there’s a cold crescent moon hanging in between; the heavens like a velvet lullaby for her, an apology for what the sun has done to her skin and what the night gives shelter.
Lie down, Dancy. Lie down and close your eyes,
but the memory of what she saw that night in Savannah enough to get her moving again, unwinding more of this ball of string that isn’t getting any smaller, and she knows she could walk all the way back to Florida and it never would.

 

This unhealing cleft in the side of the mountain, deep furrow between park-tended grass and trees that have already turned the dusk beneath their branches into night; steep red earth on either side and rough gray boulders, and Dancy walks up to the gates of the water works tunnel. Hundreds of miles, a thousand, to bring her finally to this spot, to stand before this grim and mosscrusted façade of limestone blocks and mortar, the entrance with its rusty iron gate and a small window set high on either side. No bars across the windows, but they’re both so small and so high that it doesn’t matter, because no one’s going in or coming out that way.

This is the ravenous stone face that Dancy’s dreamt of so many times, the same yawning, toothless mouth and those vacant, hollow eyes. Face of the thing that killed her mother and the vengeful ebony thing that came to take its body back into the swamp, the face of the smiling man from the Greyhound bus and the black-haired woman in Waycross with stubby, writhing tentacles where her breasts should have been, the pretty boy in Savannah who showed her a corked amber bottle that held three thousand ways to suffer, three thousand ways to hurt, before she killed him. All of them dead because that’s what the angel said, and she’s standing here holding tight to these iron bars so she doesn’t fall, too weak to stand, and the mountain looming above her, because this is where the angel said she had to go.

This entrance to all the nowhere places where their gods sleep, where they’ve slept since the first day, the first scorching sunrise, and Chance Matthews should be here beside her, Chance and Deacon, and she should have her duffel bag and all the things inside. All this way, and now she knows that this is as far as she goes, that she can only stand and stare between the bars into the blackness beyond this gate sealed with loops of chain like serpent coils and a shiny new padlock, can only glimpse the elbow bends of enormous water pipes, the corroded valves slick with mold.

Dancy’s started shaking so badly that her teeth clack loud as a pocketful of pennies, loud as jumping railroad steel under locomotive wheels, and she shuts her eyes, sits down with her back against the gate, her back to the abyss and its mushroom-damp exhalations. Doesn’t move again until her head has stopped swimming enough that she can tell up from down, right from left, and she reaches into her jeans pocket and takes out Chance’s red knife.

She opens the largest blade and uses it to sever the twine, and then Dancy drops the rest, and the ball of string rolls away into the shadows, rolling all the way back to the smiling man, for all she knows or cares. She ties the free end to one of the iron bars, ties it tight, a knot to match the one around the dogwood’s trunk, and there are sounds coming from the trees now, from the dark beneath the trees, and the spindly things crouched there, broomstick legs and the huffing breath of thirsty dogs.

“What the hell are you waiting for?” she asks the soulless crimson eyes watching her, not wanting to cry, wanting to be brave at the end, and Dancy crosses herself and waits for them to come.

—CHARLES FORT (1919)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

S
ADIE at the window, the fluorescent-bright inside of the laundromat window, and she’s watching the street, the sidewalk streetlight pools and the less certain spaces in between, the big pine trees and oaks at the edge of Rushton Park all blending together in the dark. Deacon’s still on the phone, still trying to find someone willing to drop whatever they’re doing and come in on a Saturday night, someone with nothing better to do, nothing worse, but no luck so far. His reflection is superimposed over her view of Highland Avenue, so Sadie can see him watching her from his stool behind the counter without taking her eyes off the street or the park or the trees. Looking ahead of herself and behind at the same time, and Deacon frowns and shakes his head, because he knows she can see him, eyes in the back of her head, and she nods.

“Look, man, yeah, I
know
it’s Saturday night, all right?” he says, and he’s starting to sound the way her stomach feels. “So why don’t you just say no and get it the hell over with so I can call somebody else?”

A pickup truck full of teenagers cruises slowly past the laundromat, and Sadie can feel the
whump whump whump
of its stereo through the plate glass; shitty rap and a truck-load of drunken white boys all looking for a cop to pull them over, a couple of nights in the Birmingham jail, and maybe that would rub a little bit of the suburbia off their dumb asses. She closes her eyes and doesn’t open them again until she can’t hear the pounding music anymore, until there’s nothing but the night outside, and
That’s right,
she thinks.
Nothing at all but the night.

“Jesus, didn’t I say to just forget about it, Soda,” Deacon growls and hangs up the phone, rubs hard at his eyes, and Sadie turns around, sits down in one of the hard plastic chairs lined up in front of the window.

“Why don’t you call Peggy? Maybe if you tell her it’s an emergency,” but Deacon coughs up a dry scrap of a laugh and squints at the wall clock hanging above the vending machine that sells little boxes of soap powder and fabric softener.

“You know she’s already looking for an excuse to tell me to hit the road. Making her come all the way down here on a Saturday night would probably be the last straw.”

“But if you told her it’s an
emergency,
” Sadie says again. “Deke, she couldn’t fire you if it was an emergency,” trying hard not to sound impatient, but she’s looking at the clock, too, and it’s almost an hour now since she left the apartment, longer than that since she realized that Dancy was gone.

“Is that what this is? An emergency?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” And the quick, accusing edge in her voice unintended, unanticipated, but it feels good regardless; better than sitting here like she isn’t scared, playing calm because she doesn’t want Deacon to see what’s going on inside her head.

“It means maybe we should let her go. She isn’t your responsibility, and she
sure
as hell isn’t mine.”

Deacon licks at his thin, dry lips, and Sadie can tell how badly he wants a drink, probably the only thing in the world he wants more than for her to shut up and leave him alone, a beer and a shot of cheap bar-brand whiskey, maybe a dark corner where he can get drunk in peace.

“We can’t save her, Sadie,” he says, and she glances down at the dirty linoleum floor, her bare feet against the scuffed red and dirtywhite squares like a chessboard;
Your move now, babycakes,
small and mocking whisper wedged in somewhere behind her eyes, wedged beneath her skin, voice to speak from the weary part of herself that wishes Dancy Flammarion had picked someone else’s life to screw around with. But it’s only a very small voice, and in a moment she looks back up at Deacon.

“You know, it’s one thing to be a drunk. I’ve never judged you for being a drunk. But it’s something else to be a coward.”

“I never figured there was a whole hell of a lot of difference,” he says, and then there’s a long and leadheavy silence between them, nothing to mark the time but the monotonous slosh and throb from one of the washing machines. Silence to let Sadie’s anger get almost as big as her fear, time enough that she knows he’s seen it in her eyes. And she doesn’t pretend that she can’t see the contempt in his, as well, that she doesn’t know just how far she’s pushed him, and any moment now he’ll tell her to go fuck herself. Fuck herself
and
all the creepy, little albino lunatics she can find, while she’s at it, and then Deacon sighs loud and looks down at the telephone and his list of names and numbers; after he starts dialing again, Sadie turns back to the window and the wide night full of shadows still waiting for her.

 

The long nub end of the afternoon spent at her keyboard, her hands moving so much slower than her racing mind. The frustrating lag between her thoughts and the hunt and peck; a hot flood of ideas where there had been months of trickling, uncertain sentences, and Sadie trying to keep up with herself, wishing she’d taken typing in high school, scared that this inspiration would soon grow restless, impatient with her, and slink back to whatever hole it crawled out of. Listening to the same Brian Eno album over and over on her headphones and smoking too much, as if that would help. Finishing a stale pack of Lucky Strikes left from the last time Deacon quit instead of her Djarum cloves, and it was dark by the time she finally began to run out of steam.

Ten new pages on the Mac’s hard drive, ten and half, really, when she’d never done better than seven before; she fished the last of the Luckys from the pack and lit it with a wooden kitchen match, squinted through smoke at the softly glowing screen. Her words, her jumbled, mad thoughts tamed or simply broken, made language, and she took another drag off the Lucky, exhaled, and read the last sentence aloud.

“ ‘I can’t get it off,’ Val said, and she held out her red hands for Wendy to see.”

This scene, and the girls named Wendy and Val were hiding in the rusted shell of an old caboose, a wide and desolate place just across the tracks from Morris Avenue where dozens of box cars and engines lay abandoned, and, in the story, something like meat started falling from the cloudless sky. A hailstorm of blood and marbled flakes of something that
wanted
to be meat, and the girls huddled together in the dark, listening to the sticky, spattering sounds the stuff made as it struck the steel roof of the caboose. Red smears down the one window that wasn’t broken, Val afraid to even look outside, and then Sadie knew that it was time to stop for the day, because the words were coming
too
easily, too fast, and that usually meant that she was getting tired and wasn’t thinking hard enough anymore. She saved the file to her back-up diskette, switched off the computer, and leaned back against the edge of the bed to finish her cigarette.

And that’s when she remembered Dancy. A glance at the alarm clock beside the bed, 8:07 PM, so almost five whole hours sitting here on the floor, hunched over the keyboard, and it was no wonder her typing fingers were numb and her back ached, no wonder she needed to piss, and Dancy was probably asleep out on the couch. Was probably exhausted after the weird shit at Chance Matthews’ house and grateful for a quiet place to rest for a while. Sadie stubbed out the butt of the Lucky Strike in the saucer she was using for an ashtray, looked at the dark computer screen one more time, some part of her reluctant to walk away, uncomfortable with the thought of leaving Val and Wendy trapped inside the caboose while the sky hemorrhaged above them.