Threshold (45 page)

“I didn’t think you were coming,” Elise says, her voice hoarse, 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 shit 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 fucking 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 fucking
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 déjà 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 hell 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 hell 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 goddamn 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 gods,” and he opens his hand so she can see the symbol burned into his palm. The shape that can’t be, not without warping space, 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. Hell, 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 passed 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-ass 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 shit’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 fucking 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 fucking stinks in this place. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Elise grumbles something rude from the darkness, pissed-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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

T
WO 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 Tallahassee 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 “Hello,” Chance says. “Hello there, Dancy. My name is Chance.”

“Hello, 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 God 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.