Threshold (22 page)

“So what’s in the box?” Alice asks, and Chance shrugs and shakes her head. “That’s a good question,” and then, before Alice can say anything else, “Do you know what my grandmother was working on when she died?” and she raises her head, risks a glimpse at the older woman.

And now Alice does look up, lays her tweezers on the table and stares thoughtfully at Chance over the dull glare from the lamp. She’s wearing her glasses and the thick bifocal lenses make her eyes look huge and fish-like.

“That was a pretty long time ago, Chance.”

“Yeah, but do you remember?” and then she looks back down at the crate.

“Not offhand. I think she was collecting again. She’d just finished a report for the Geological Survey, so she was probably out in the field. She always liked being in the field more than sitting around this shithole.”

“Do you know
what
she was collecting, Alice?” and Chance hates sounding anxious, sounding impatient, wishes that Alice Sprinkle could have been anywhere but here this afternoon, anywhere else and then they wouldn’t even be having this conversation.

“Well, if I had to bet cash money on it, I’d say trilobites. Esther was usually looking for trilobites. But I’m not telling you anything that you don’t already know, Chance.”

“No,” Chance says. “You’re not,” and Alice points at the ammo crate, raises both her eyebrows above the wire rims of her glasses so that her eyes look even larger. “I don’t have to be a terribly clever lady to guess this has something to do with whatever’s in that box there.”

“Some stuff my grandfather must have packed up after she died. I found it this afternoon.”

Alice lights a cigarette and blows smoke towards the low ceiling. “And? Are you gonna tell me what it is, or is that none of my business?”

Chance shrugs again but she doesn’t answer, stoops and picks the crate up off the floor instead, carries it over to the table while Alice hastily clears off a space big enough for her to put it down, shoves aside a stack of books, several thick volumes of the
Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology
and a few old journals.

“I don’t want you to tell anyone else about this stuff,” Chance says, setting the crate in the small, uncluttered spot Alice has made on the table. “Maybe later, but not now, okay? I want you to
promise
me that you’ll keep this to yourself.”

“Scout’s honor and hope to die,” Alice says, “etcetera, etcetera,” and then she crosses her heart, takes another drag off her cigarette, and “Shit, we can take a blood oath if you think it’s necessary.”

Chance reaches down through the top layer of excelsior and pulls out the stoppered bottle. She hands it to Alice, who puts her cigarette between her lips so both hands are free, holds the bottle a few inches from her face, and stares through her bifocals at the dark thing floating inside, no particular expression now, only silent contemplation, maybe the faintest flicker of surprise. She slowly tilts the bottle on its side and shakes it gently, causing the thing inside to bob and roll over.

“Well, it beats the hell out of me,” she says, mumbling around the filter of her cigarette. “I’ve never seen anything like it. But whatever it is, I don’t think Esther found it. Not originally, anyway.” She taps hard at the yellowed label about the size of a large postage stamp that’s pasted onto one side of the bottle. “Did you happen to notice this?”

“Yeah,” Chance says, “I did,” and Alice holds the bottle a little closer to her face, squints to make out the spidery sepia-colored handwriting on the label, antique ink faded to an almost illegible scrawl. “Birmingham Water Works tunnel, Red Mountain, Alabama,” and she pauses for a moment, squints harder to read the second line. “October 1888. Or 1886. I’m not sure which.”

“ ’88,” Chance says. “They didn’t dig the tunnel until ’88, so it can’t be ’86.”

“Damn, this is one peculiar bug. Do you have any idea what Esther was doing with it?”

Chance glances at the crate again. “There’s a letter in there from someone at the Survey. Apparently she wrote to them about the tunnel, asking if they had anything important from the site, I guess. They sent her this.”

“I doubt it’s what she had in mind,” Alice says and turns the bottle for a different view of the thing inside. “What was it doing at the Survey?”

“The letter says that a foreman at the water works excavation sent it to them that October. He wanted to know what it was. I assume he found it when they were digging the tunnel.”

Alice smiles, small, approving smile for Chance, and “As usual, our girl’s done her homework,” she says. “I think we should have a closer look at this little bastard, don’t you?”

“There’s more,” Chance says, “a lot more,” and she’s reaching back into the crate, already has her hand around the chunk of iron ore, but “No,” Alice says firmly. “Let’s take this one thing at a time.”

Dancy knows where the tunnel is, remembers everything important from all the stolen newspaper clippings and a library book on the industrial history of Birmingham, and after she leaves the castle, after she takes a deep breath and steps from mildewcool shadows into the firestorm brilliance of the summer afternoon, she heads southwest towards the mountain. As straight a line as possible with so many buildings and chain-link fences in her way, razor wire and concrete obstructions, and it doesn’t matter that the sun has begun its painful, slow descent, westward slide from a bluewhite and blindscorched Heaven, but still hours until dark and the air sizzles against her white skin, light to sear its way through the purple sunglasses that Sadie gave her and set her brain on fire. Who needs a dragon when the whole sky’s ablaze, when every breath fills her lungs with gasoline and smoke and the smell of streets that have begun to melt and flow like sticky coalblack, brimstone rivers?

The day on Their side, and if the night ever comes, They own that as well, own that
twice
as much, both light and darkness set against her, and Dancy tries not to think about that, lugs her heavy duffel across Twentieth Street while the asphalt sucks wetly at the soles of her shoes; wanting to suck her all the way down to the grindstone belly of the World—and then she’s on the sidewalk again, concrete-narrow sanctuary, but she can hear the sniggering - laughter leaking from beneath the street, taunting, gravelthroated laughter for this crazy girl who thinks she’s going to do anything but die. Anything but burn forever between gnashing teeth like red-hot pokers, and she wipes at her forehead, wipes away the sweatsalt that stings her eyes and blurs her vision. Dancy turns her back on the laughing things below the street, and here’s an alley in front of her, a mean rind of halfshadow clinging to one side of the alley, and she squeezes herself into this niggardly shade, presses herself scrapbook rosepetal flat against the old bricks and mortar as far as the wall runs.

And another parking lot then, this one as wide as the whole Gulf of Mexico, as wide as a dead sea gone all the colors of coal and blackbirds, but a shimmering glimpse of cool green trees on the other side, trees and grass and a sprinkler spraying endless crystal drops. Dancy sets her duffel down behind a pink garbage Dumpster with a hippopotamus stenciled on it, another stingy pool of shadow here, and she huddles in it, in the soursweet reek of roasting garbage and the buzzing flies trying to ruin this air that’s only stifling.

“What happened to your hand, Dancy?”

She looks up, and there’s a tall, thin man standing a few feet away, standing right out there in the sun, sunk up to his ankles in the blacktop but he doesn’t seem to notice or he simply doesn’t care.

“I
know
you,” she says, and she does, the jug-eared man from the bus, the man with all those yellow teeth crammed into his wide, wide mouth, and he smiles for her now, showing her all those teeth at once.

“You’re a long way from Memphis, aren’t you?” the man asks. “A long, long way from Graceland.”

The man looks up at the sky, narrows his eyes against the day and wipes his forehead with a red-and-white checkered handkerchief.

“Are you lost, Dancy?” he asks, honey and rattlesnake voice, and “Do you need someone to show you the way? I can do that, you know. I know
all
the roads—”

“I don’t want anything from you,” she says, her throat too dry to sound brave, to sound tough, barely enough spit left to make words at all, and she swallows a thick mouthful of nothing but the parking-lot hot air. “So you may as well crawl right back where you came from and leave me alone.”

The tall man stops smiling and folds his sweatstained handkerchief neatly before he stuffs it back into a front pocket of his gray trousers. The asphalt is all the way up to his knees now, pulling him down into the bubbling goo, and he holds a hand out to Dancy, and for a moment she thinks how wonderful and dark it would be beneath the ground, how cool down there where the sun’s never been.

“You weren’t made for this world,” the man says. “But there are roads I could show you, night roads that wind forever between milkwhite trees, and the starlight would kiss your skin like ice. There are roads where nothing ever burns, and the sun is only a fairy tale to frighten pale children to bed.”

Dancy looks down at her duffel bag, and there are things hidden in there that might frighten the tall and toothy man away, that might send him howling and slithering back to all the Others, but the canvas bag seems so far away and his twiglong fingers are so close. All she’d have to do is reach out and take his hand, let those skeletal fingers carry her off to the dark and soothing cold.

“That’s a girl,” the man says, his breath falling about her like a shroud of spring water and night. “That’s a good, good girl. You know, none of this was ever really about you, Dancy. You shouldn’t have to suffer this way. Your mother should have told you the truth, the
whole
truth, and none of this would have been necessary.”

And then Dancy’s fingertips brush the edge of something vast and sharp and raw, something made of lies and flesh sewn from lies, something that’s never been anything but hungry. A devouring hunger that goes on and on until the very end of time, end of the world starvation in that icing touch, and she pulls her injured, dishragswaddled hand back, makes a fist and drives her short nails through the cloth and into the flesh of her palm, squeezes hard until she knows her hand is bleeding again, until the pain is wiping the toothy man’s smile from his face, his voice from her mind. She can hear the buzzing, garbagebloated flies again, can feel the indifferent July heat on her cheeks, only the sun eating away at her now, and there’s no sign the man was ever there. Just the choking smells of tar and trash, car exhaust, and Dancy picks up her duffel bag, which seems at least twice as heavy now, steps out from behind the pink Dumpster. She fixes her eyes on the faraway sprinkler, tiny shower sweeping back and forth across the lush green lawn of what might be a church, great graywhite building of stone and confidence, imagines the water falling against her blistering skin, and Dancy steps out of the shadow and into the parking lot.

“Well, my first guess would have been an amphineuran of some sort,” Alice Sprinkle says, looking away from the black rubber eyepieces of the stereomicroscope. The thing from the jar is lying in a small glass dish, with a little of the tea-colored alcohol to keep it from drying out. “But it’s not a chiton,” she says, leans back in her chair and reaches for her pack of Winstons on the tabletop. “It has the right sort of gills and those
look
like calcareous spicules there between the plates, but the plates themselves are all wrong. For one thing, chitons only have one overlapping row of dorsal plates. This thing here has a dorsal
and
a ventral set, almost completely encircling the body with no room for a functional foot. So it isn’t an amphineuran. I don’t think it’s a mollusk at all.”

Alice takes a cigarette from the pack and lights it, careful to blow the smoke away from Chance who’s sitting next to her, staring at the thing in the dish. “And it’s not a worm,” Chance says vacantly, the idea that it could possibly be a worm discarded half an hour ago.