Threshold (14 page)

Chance gets up off the toilet seat, and now the condensation on the bathroom window is rising in wispy tendrils of steam, steam like little tentacles, and she can feel the heat from the light on her face.

“I’m not supposed to show you anything,” Elise whispers, small and scared childwhisper, and Chance looks away from the light, the devouring light and the restless feather shadows, and she sees what’s lying in the empty bathtub.

Waking up on the floor, waking up on the floor a lot these days, dreamsweat chill and the gooey aftertaste of Chef Boyardee in her mouth, and for a little while Chance just lies there staring at the television screen. Familiar images to drive away the bad things in her head, John Wayne and Henry Fonda, black-and-white phosphor security blanket when there’s no one alive she can call out to, no one to turn on a light and tell her it was only a nightmare and it’s over now, no one to hold her or mumble something irrelevant and reassuring. Her left arm’s gone to sleep, jabbing pins and needles when she rolls over onto her back to stare at the ceiling, the light and dark watercolor patterns the TV screen makes on the high ceiling.

Gunfire and startled shouts from the television, and Chance realizes that she’s going to throw up, tries a trick that Deacon taught her, counting backwards from one hundred—ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven—but it’s too late for that, and at least she manages to reach the downstairs bathroom before she pukes up all the half-digested ravioli. Heaving into the toilet bowl until her stomach’s empty again, wondering if it’s food poisoning, if maybe she caught a bug, and then she flushes and leans back against the tub, the tile floor cool against her skin. Chance wipes at her mouth with a wad of toilet paper, tosses it away and closes her eyes, heart beating slower now, and she feels better already, the sickness fading almost as quickly as it came.

Not thinking about the bathroom because it would only remind her of the dream, trying not to think about anything but
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence
playing loud in the living room. John Wayne hiding in the alleyway so that Jimmy Stewart thinks he’s the one that killed Lee Marvin, that he’s the hero and so he’ll get the girl in the end. One of her grandfather’s favorite movies, almost anything with John Wayne one of his favorites, and there are hot tears running down her face before she can think of something else. No thought safe anymore, no memory or thought that hasn’t been ruined for her, that isn’t waiting to cut, waiting to bite, and then the phone starts ringing.

“Leave me the fuck alone,” she yells at it, but yelling makes her stomach roll again, so she stops.

Fourth ring and then the answering machine clicks on, Joe Matthews’ voice, and Jesus Christ, she hasn’t even changed the message on the fucking answering machine and her grandfather’s rambling on about leaving your name and number, the date and time, her grandfather talking from the grave. His voice trapped and rattling from the tinny answering-machine speaker, and Chance manages to get to her feet, stands up to walk the ten or fifteen steps to the gossip bench in the hall, when the machine beeps and her stomach feels so bad she sits quickly back down on the edge of the tub. A pause before Deacon Silvey clears his throat, and “Chance?” he asks, like he knows she’s sitting there, like he
could
know, and “Pick up if you’re listening,” and then a longer pause.

The very last person in the world she wants to talk to, so maybe this is still the nightmare, maybe if she pinches herself really hard, she’ll wake up.

“Yeah. Okay,” he says, and the skeptical tone in his voice that says,
I know you’re there. I know you just don’t want to speak to me.
“Look. There’s something we have to talk about and it’s entirely too goddamn weird to go into over the phone.”

“Right,” Chance mumbles and looks back at the toilet bowl, the wad of tissue she used to wipe the vomit from her mouth floating around in there, and her stomach cramps at the sight of it.

“I know you don’t want to talk to me. I wouldn’t have called, but—”

“You’re an asshole,” Chance mumbles.

“But there’s this girl, and she says she talked to you at the downtown library a few days ago. She says you’ll remember her, that you gave her twenty bucks. Look, Chance. This is just too strange for me to try and explain over the telephone, so call me back. Call me back tonight, okay?”

Dull click when he hangs up, and then the phone beeps again, beeps like it’s pissed off, pissed at Chance for sitting there and making Deke leave a message. For making it speak to Deacon with a dead man’s voice; Chance flushes the toilet again and turns off the bathroom light behind her. When she gets to the gossip bench in the hall, she jabs the eject button hard with one finger and the answering machine spits out the miniature cassette tape. She holds it tightly in her palm for a minute, squeezes the plastic, and there’s hardly any weight at all, when something that hurt so much to hear should weigh a ton. Chance thinks about smashing the tape against the wall or hurling it to the floor, stomping it to translucent shards and a tangled mess of black magnetic ribbon. Pretends for a moment she could ever do a thing like that, could ever be that decided, that resolute, the sort of thing that Alice Sprinkle would do, surely, but Chance can only open her palm and stare at it, Memorex and the two tiny spools that seem so innocent, so mute, and she sets it on the edge of the bench next to the telephone book. Which is what Chance Matthews would do, she thinks,
exactly
what Chance Matthews would do.

Her shadow in the colorless television glow from the living room, the noise of John Wayne burning down his own house because he’s drunk and alone and he probably wants to burn down a lot of other things, too, but the ranch house will have to do. Chance stares at the phone a few more minutes, and then she picks up the receiver and dials Deacon’s number.

 

Over an hour before there’s finally a knock at the front door. Chance is sitting on the sofa in the living room eating Saltine crackers, trying to settle her stomach, has half the lights downstairs burning now and the television turned off. Thinking about the argument with Deacon when he wouldn’t tell her what was going on over the phone, and the second one when he wanted her to come all the way over to his place at one o’clock in the morning to find out. She jumps at the sound of his knuckles against wood,
blam blam blam
like he wants to break the door down, and she drops a half-eaten Saltine.

“Just one goddamn minute!” Yelling loud, but he starts knocking again anyway;
blam blam blam blam;
Chance stoops to retrieve the Saltine, brushes cracker crumbs from her blue jeans to the floor, and “I’m
coming!
” she yells at the front door. Ten bucks from her back pocket for Deke to pay the taxi, the only way she could talk him into coming to her, promising to pay the carfare so she didn’t have to smell the must and decay of Quinlan Castle, the smell like mold and nests of fat cockroaches, almost enough to get her puking again, just thinking about the place.

Chance opens the door and there’s Deacon in a once-black Velvet Underground T-shirt that’s been washed so many times it’s almost gray, black turning the dingy gray of mouse fur or mockingbird feathers, and he’s squinting, blinking at the light from the front porch, from the foyer. He has a big armygreen duffel bag in one hand, and she thinks maybe he isn’t drunk, thinks maybe he’s actually sober, and then she notices Sadie Jasper standing there beside him and the albino girl holding her hand like a weird twin sister, Sadie’s paler shadow, and Chance shoves the ten-dollar bill into Deke’s hand before he can ask for it.

“Here,” she says. “And hurry.” Deacon blinks at the ten once or twice, and then he’s on his way back down to the driveway, back down to the old Ford station wagon trying to pass for a taxi, one headlight and its motor purring like a huge impatient cat.
A cat with really bad sinuses,
Chance thinks, and then Sadie smiles her waxyblack smile and tries to look happy to be there, points at the albino girl, and “This is Dancy,” she says. “I think you two have met already.”

“Yeah,” Chance says, talking to Sadie, but still watching Deacon as he hands the guy in the station wagon the ten and waits for change. “At the library,” she says.

“Your grandfather was a geologist,” Dancy says, not smiling, but there’s something gentle in her voice, a soothing voice when Chance’s nerves are humming like electric guitar strings, humming like the cicadas in the humidwarm night.

“Yeah,” Chance says, “he was,” and then Deke is on his way back up to the house, the station wagon turning around behind him, rear wheels flinging a little gravel, and the driver’s probably ticked off because Deacon stiffed him on the tip, Chance thinks, thinks Deke probably pocketed the change and now he’s hoping she won’t think to ask if there was any.

“Well, come on,” she says to Sadie and the albino girl, and they follow her inside, and Chance leaves the door open for Deacon.

 

All of them in Chance’s living room, Chance at one end of the long sofa and Sadie at the other, Deke in a gingham armchair near the silent television, and Dancy Flammarion sitting on a footstool in the middle of the room, facing Chance, the duffel bag Deacon was carrying at her feet now, and “I can see monsters,” she says again.

Chance stops staring at her and looks across the room at Deacon. He shrugs a small, apprehensive sort of shrug and rubs hard at his eyes like they hurt, like the light’s too bright, covers them with his right hand.

“Monsters,” Chance says, repeating the word carefully just in case there are secrets hidden somewhere between the two syllables, something that she’s missing, secret code or the punch line to a joke that she isn’t getting. But Dancy only nods her head, the same quiet grace in that movement as in her voice, and an earnest intensity in her pink eyes that makes it hard for Chance to look directly at her for very long.

“Deacon,” Chance says, his name spoken quiet like a warning, but he still has his hand over his eyes.

“It’s okay,” Dancy says. “I already know that you can’t see them. I know you don’t believe in monsters.”

“I’m sorry, Dancy. I don’t think I even understand what you’re trying to say, or why you’re saying it to me,” and Sadie glances at Chance, quick and scowling glance from Sadie Jasper’s iceblue eyes, eyes almost as strange as Dancy’s.
Maybe that’s it,
Chance thinks.
Maybe she sees the monsters too,
and she has to bite down hard on the inside of her lower lip to stifle a nervous laugh; everything way too weird and getting weirder, but still not sure if this is a joke, and she suspects it might be rude to laugh.

“The Children of Cain,” Dancy says earnestly, and Chance can taste blood in her mouth, only a trace, but salty and warm, real enough to keep her in line. She’s trying to remember the day in the library, all the details, but nothing she can recall that made her doubt the girl’s sanity, and sure, Deke’s a jerk, but this isn’t his style, too bizarre and sure as hell too much trouble for Deacon Silvey to stage anything half this twisted.

“Slow down,” Sadie says to the albino girl. “You’re going too fast. It’s coming out all wrong.”

“I’m sorry,” Dancy says, smiles softly, looks almost embarrassed, and she scoots her footstool a few inches closer to Chance. “I’m tired. I didn’t sleep very much last night.”

“Jesus,” Deacon hisses from his chair. “Just fucking spit it the hell out and let’s get this over with. Please,” and Chance knows from the fraying tone in his voice that this isn’t a joke; now she’s sure it’s not some sick prank to make her look like an ass, whatever else it might be.

“Dancy can see monsters,” Sadie says, and the way she says it, as if she might actually believe it was true, makes the fine hairs on the back of Chance’s neck prickle, goose bumps on her arms. “And she has been sent by an angel to kill them. Show her what you showed us, Dancy.”

“But she doesn’t believe me,” Dancy whispers, and she’s still watching Chance, but her smile’s gone, a sad and wary sort of face, instead, all the calm drained from her voice. “She isn’t ever going to believe me.”

“Yes, she will,” Sadie says, coaxing patience like a teacher with a difficult student, a mother with a frightened child. “You just got ahead of yourself, that’s all. Show her, Dancy.”

Dancy bends over then, opens the duffel bag and begins digging around inside it, burrowing through the grimy-looking tangle of shirts and jeans; a sock that might have been white a long time ago tumbles out, and Chance tries to pretend she hasn’t noticed it. When Dancy sits back up she’s holding a handful of yellowed newspaper clippings and a small jar, baby-food jar, Chance thinks, Gerber’s strained peas or carrots or something like that, but the label’s missing.

“I kept this from the first one. My grandmomma told me to keep it, so I wouldn’t forget,” and the lid on the jar makes a sharp metallic
pop
when she unscrews it. Dancy shakes the jar once and hands it to Chance.