Threshold (30 page)

Content with her decision, or at least resigned to it, Chance continued to prowl the mines and quarries, patiently uncovering new remains of
Walkerpeton,
and by the time her thesis topic was approved, she’d attracted the attention and respect of researchers from as far away as London and Munich. This girl from an undistinguished college in the boonies, and she’d also discovered another new tetrapod and at least four new species of actinistian and rhipidistian fish, and her days were filled with the mysteries and revelations of their ancient, alien skeletons. But never mysteries whose understandings lay any farther away from her than the familiar confines of the rational, the empirical, and never revelations that left her with anything other than a deeper respect for the methods of science and a deeper faith in the constant, foreseeable patterns of nature.

The lab almost exactly the way she left it the day before, exactly the same except for the missing crate, and Chance stands just inside the front doorsill, staring at the vacant place on the table where the crate
should
be. The place where she left it, and standing there in the solitude while Sunday morning turns quickly into Sunday afternoon, surrounded by silent specimen cabinets and whitewashed walls, it’s a lot more difficult to discount the things she thought she saw and heard, to pretend she wasn’t and isn’t still afraid. So maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. Maybe she’d be better off spending the day at home, and she thinks about grabbing a handful of files and a couple of fossils from her desk; not entirely comfortable leaving Deacon and Sadie alone anyway, and if she tells them not to bother her, just leave me alone for a few hours, a couple of hours, please, then her bedroom or her grandparents’ study is as good a place to work as the lab, a better place, really.

Exactly who the hell are you trying to kid this time?
as if she’d ever actually intended to work on her thesis today, as if she could possibly think about cladograms and morphometrics, anything half so sane and comprehensible, with the riddles of her grandmother’s journal still unanswered. And Chance glances back over her shoulder, the heat and brilliant midday slant of sunlight through the open door, the wide asphalt desolation of the parking lot beyond, and she feels a little dizzy, the subtlest disorientation as if the world outside were moving slowly away from her.

It’s not safe,
she thinks, one of the last things that Dancy said to her.
You won’t be safe here all by yourself, not when they come,
and remembering the lost look on her face when she said that, the urgent and emphatic cast of her eyes, sends a sudden rash of chill bumps up and down Chance’s arms despite the stuffy warmth of the lab.

“C’mon. Get a goddamned grip,” she whispers, aloud and to herself, even though she hasn’t felt like she’s had a grip on much of anything since Friday night, not since Dancy called out the name of a trilobite from the foot of the staircase, not since the newspaper clippings and the rotting finger in the old baby-food jar. These small and impossible things to take her mind apart, incremental drift from sanity towards this moment when anything seems as probable, as reasonable, as anything else.

Chance swallows hard and pulls the lab door slowly closed behind her; it clicks shut, metal-loud click in the quiet, and she takes a deep breath, exhales, and walks past the table where she left the vanished crate and its contents, slips her pack off her shoulder and follows the dark and narrow hallway back to the office that she shares with two other geology grad students.

But an office only in the loosest possible sense of the word, three graffiti-scarred, wooden school desks that were probably antiques when her mother and father were children, a reversible chalkboard and a few nubs of colored chalk. One squeaky, rusted file cabinet that might have been painted industrial gray a long time ago rubbing shoulders with a pressboard bookshelf crammed way beyond capacity and all its shelves have started to sag. There’s an untidy assortment of field gear on the walls—screens and bundles of nylon rope, shovels and Marsh picks hung on nails and hooks—because the “office” serves double duty as a toolshed. One of the other students, a short and excitable guy named Winston, has taped a poster up above the file cabinet, color photograph of a rugged, misty seashore, Oregon or northern California, maybe, and THINGS TAKE TIME printed in bold white letters across the bottom.

Chance’s desk is neater than the others, but that’s not saying much, and she sets her pack on a fat bundle of last week’s pop quizzes that she hasn’t yet gotten around to grading. Sits down in the swivel chair she bought for five dollars and fifty cents at a Salvation Army thrift store a year ago, torn leatherette the muddy color of red clay, and there’s a spring broken in the base so she always has to be careful not to lean too far back or the chair flips over and dumps her on the hard concrete floor. She undoes the frayed canvas straps and opens the backpack, pulls out her grandmother’s ledger and stares at the cover; there’s nothing she’s ever felt before to match the incongruous mix of dread and excitement she feels every time she looks at the book, the jangling, bitter alloy of fear and something almost pleasurable, a sickening sort of thrill, and she thinks that maybe this is the way that people who like to ride roller coasters must feel. Chance begins reading the words written on the cover aloud, the unremarkable words written in Esther Matthews’ unremarkable hand.

“Notes on Trilobita of the Red Mountain Formation, Lower and Middle Silurian . . .” and she trails off, then, knows it all by heart now anyway, the long title and the date scribbled underneath. She opens the book to the place she’s marked with a Hershey bar wrapper, the page where her grandmother’s notes on trilobites and bio-stratigraphy end and the obsessive attempt to solve an elusive geometry problem begins.
#134
stamped in navy-blue ink at the upper-left-hand corner, and under that the last lines of an entry from July 28th, 1991, a comparison of the compound eyes of two closely related trilobites,
Cryp tolithus
and
Onnia,
and a hopeful comment that she might have access to a scanning electron microscope soon; a few lines left blank and then, halfway down the page, there’s a seven-sided polygon drawn neatly in pencil.

The angle of each intersection and the length of each side noted in handwriting almost too small to read, but each side longer or shorter than the one before and after, each angle a little more or less obtuse. Chance has never been a whiz at math, but she knows the impossibility of ever constructing a regular heptagon, a polygon with seven sides of equal length and equal angles. One of those nasty quirks of the universe, like pi or Schrödinger’s cat, a seemingly simple and ultimately insoluble equation or paradox. She flips past page #134, past dozens more heptagons drawn as carefully as the first, all the sums of their sides and angles duly noted, scrawled proofs and endless streams of numbers that mean about as much to Chance as Sanskrit or Japanese. But it’s easy enough to see what her grandmother was trying to do, plain as day, page after page after page of figures and she was merely wrestling with the impossible, merely attempting to construct the unconstructable.

No,
Chance thinks,
That’s not it at all. She was trying to
reproduce
the impossible.
Trying to draw something on paper that she’d seen, or something that she was looking at even as she measured and calculated, even as she filled these pages with her drawings and numbers.

Alone in her room the night before, the last hour or two before dawn, Deacon and Sadie asleep downstairs, and that’s when Chance first made the connection between these futile calculations and the strange fossil on the chunk of iron ore from the crate. One side dotted with the perfect
Dicranurus
exuviae and the other marked only by a single, enigmatic impression, the odd fossil she thought might be a starfish, or some other echinoderm. And the seven-sided polyhedron inside that star, the thing that caught the late afternoon sunlight through the lab windows and flashed it back some way that made her uneasy, that made it difficult to keep her eyes focused on the stone.

Directly below the first heptagon her grandmother has written the closest thing to an explanation that Chance has found anywhere in the ledger, and she reads it again, strains and frets at the words like a madwoman trying to force reality back into focus one last time. Knows already that it won’t make any difference, that it can’t, that these words are more damning than all the rest of it combined— the night in the tunnel, Elise’s suicide, the things that Deacon sees, Dancy and her fairy-tale cosmos of angels and monsters—but she reads it anyway, because it’s all she has, because she doesn’t have the strength or will to close the book and put it away forever.

Ink that dried ten long years ago, and when she’s finished reading, Chance gets up and walks the short distance to the chalkboard, the ledger still open in her left hand, and she takes a stubby green piece of Crayola chalk from a plastic bowl on top of the file cabinet. Chalk the sweetsoft color of mint candy, and she searches impatiently through the pages until she finds the detailed diagram Esther Matthews made of the thing on the rock, all that’s left of it now. Chance copies the star-shaped outer structure first, draws each line as straight as she can manage without a ruler or a yardstick, and then she adds the upraised, inner heptahedron, and stares at what she’s drawn there. But there’s nothing startling or strange in this geometry, no answer to anything in the convergence of these green lines against black paint, and Chance rubs at her forehead with her right hand. The first, faint twinges of a headache kicking in somewhere towards the front of her skull, even though she hardly ever gets headaches, and she closes her eyes.
It was only a fossil,
she thinks.
It was only a fossil, and my grandmother was only a crazy old lady. I don’t understand because there’s nothing here to understand.

And then a sudden realization so obvious it seems almost silly, something she should have seen at the start, something that her grandmother had to have seen at some point, and Chance opens her eyes again, and the imperfect polyhedron is still waiting for her, snug inside its star.

“Imperfect, because it’s only a plane figure, right?” talking loud, and it doesn’t matter because there’s no one to hear her, no one to answer or wonder. “The fossil was
three
-dimensional,” and Chance places the rough tip of the chalk at the lowermost point of the heptagon, and this time she draws curved lines to connect the intersections.

“Curve the fucking lines,” she says, “
then
all the sides and angles could be congruent,” just like the thing in the hematite, close enough, maybe, and Chance traces over her seven curved lines again, pressing down so hard that the chalk begins to crumble and bits of it fall to the floor and speckle the tops of her boots.

She pauses, trying to remember the moment the day before when she placed the protractor against the stone, the moment before she thought she heard something moving around outside the lab.

But the edges
weren’t
curved, were they? The edges of the fossil were straight.

And there’s a noise then from somewhere close behind her, wet and ripping noise like a head of lettuce being torn slowly apart, torn in half, a rending that’s almost as much a feeling as a sound. Chance doesn’t turn to see, doesn’t want to move, but the pain in her head has doubled, trebled, hot tears streaming down her cheeks from the force of it now, and she shuts her eyes again so she won’t have to look at what she’s drawn on the blackboard. As if simply closing her eyes might make the pain and the terrible sound go away, and “I’m not afraid anymore,” she whispers angrily between clenched teeth.

What could have been a second or an hour, an indefinite interval when the sound behind her might have changed somehow, might have climbed the slightest octave or been joined by yet another voice, another sensation, and Chance smells something that makes her think of dark places that are never dry, that will never see the sun.

“I will not be afraid,” she says again. “Whatever the hell is happening to me, I
won’t
be afraid.”

“No one’s trying to scare you, Chance,” but she screams when it touches her, and the lifeless voice that can’t be Elise Alden’s seems to drip like blood and honey from a wound in the shredding heart of the sound.