Threshold (26 page)

She walked quietly from the bed, her bare feet almost silent on the carpet, and stood for a moment in the doorway staring at the ratty sofa where Dancy wasn’t sleeping. Only the final, unreliable dregs of dusk to illuminate the room, murky sunset light the color of raisins, and a gauzy haze of cigarette smoke drifting a few feet above the floor. No sign of Dancy anywhere, here or in the kitchen, so Sadie called her name once, “Dancy?” but no one answered, and she didn’t like the way her voice sounded in the empty apartment, the way it bounced back at her from the gray walls and grayer corners. Not quite an echo, but still the impression that someone was taunting her, throwing her words in her face and smiling at her unease.

Sadie kept both eyes on the room as she fumbled for the switch plate on the wall, and in another moment the darkness was gone, washed away by warmsafe incandescent bulbs, and she could see that Dancy was gone, as well. An empty spot where her duffel bag had been, no one left in the apartment but Sadie, and she looked at the front door, half expecting to find it standing open, but it wasn’t. She walked across the room to the kitchen, and there were the Coke and the uneaten Oreos waiting for her on the table.

The next five minutes spent walking through the apartment again, turning on all the lights as she went; maybe just a game, Dancy Flammarion’s idea of hide-and-go-seek, but there were only so many places to hide in Deacon’s apartment: the bathtub, underneath the bed, behind the sofa, and five minutes was more than time enough to check them all twice. So Sadie searched the hallway, too, one end to the other, from the damp spot where the ceiling leaked to the top of the stairs, walked downstairs to the front door, and then back up to the apartment. And finally, when there was no more denying that Dancy was gone, Sadie sat down on the sofa and stared at the floor between her feet, the carpet the color of vomit, her black toenails; half an hour before, and her head had been so full, reeling from all the things that Deacon and Chance wouldn’t explain to her, the stranger things that Dancy had only ever hinted at, the unexpected outpouring of words. And now she felt as tired, as empty, as the moment before she found the pile of black gumdrops on the threshold. Maybe just some crazy girl, after all, and gullible Sadie wanting to believe as badly as Deacon and Chance wanted to deny, needing the same way they needed, and in the end the crazy girl had gotten bored with them all or moved on to the next delusion, had walked out on her, and in a few weeks Deacon would tell her how silly they’d all been and there must be a hundred rational explanations.

Or . . .

We haven’t even talked about the tunnel,
and Sadie looked up quickly, knew that she was still alone and only remembering something Dancy said while they waited for the taxi to take them away from Chance’s house. Something else exciting and nonsensical, but Sadie stared at the closed door, the doorknob and her heart beating too fast.

We have to talk about the tunnel, and we have to go there,
today,
while there’s still time.

The urgency in Dancy’s voice more immediate than mere memory could ever be, and there was a noise from the bedroom or the bathroom, a bumping, clumsy sort of a noise, and Sadie stood up very slowly. Watching the doorway to the bedroom, swallowing the tin-foil adrenaline taste at the back of her throat, and “Dancy!” she called out, shouting loud enough that everyone on the third floor probably got an earful. “This isn’t funny anymore, goddamnit!”

But it wasn’t Dancy that answered her, not really an answer at all, a laugh, maybe. A dry and perfectly humorless sound that was
meant
to be a laugh. A sound to make Sadie think of dead leaves and cold wind, of dark streets and the forsaken places where men left the skeletons of trains to decay beneath impossible rains of meat and blood.

It’s not safe,
and whatever was making the sound that wasn’t laughter must have been remembering all the things that Dancy said, too, because it snorted once and there was the shattering sound of the bathroom mirror breaking, shards of glass falling into the sink, bouncing off the porcelain and smashing against the tile floor.

“Run, Sadie.
Now,
” and it didn’t matter if it was her voice she was hearing, or Dancy’s she was remembering, and Sadie didn’t stop and look back until she was outside Quinlan Castle and standing in the dark on the other side of Twenty-first Street.

 

And if she’d been braver, she might have gone to the entrance to the tunnel in Valley View Park instead of going to Deacon. If she’d been half the person she’d always hoped she could be, because that’s what Dancy had said, wasn’t it? “We have to talk about the tunnel, and we have to
go
there, today,” and so she knew that was where Dancy had gone. And Sadie also knew that she’d gone there alone, that it hadn’t mattered if Chance believed her or Deacon believed her, not in the end, because Dancy believed, and finally there had been no other option.

Sadie stood beneath a street lamp and stared up at the castle silhouetted against the last fiery rind of the day, absurd edifice of rough sandstone blocks and corner towers lost in a wilderness of office buildings, watched the windows of her and Deacon’s apartment; all the lights burning and she couldn’t even remember if she’d shut the door behind her. There she was standing on the street, barefoot and afraid of something she might have heard or something she might only have imagined after five hours alone with her own bizarre thoughts.

Scaring myself half to fucking death, that’s what I’m doing,
she thought.
That’s all I’m doing,
and the noises she heard had probably come from the apartment next door, if they’d come from anywhere at all. The guys next door and their PlayStation, all hours of the day and night, fighting zombies and wrecking cars, the volume cranked up so loud the windows rattled. Either video games or one of the kung-fu movies they were always watching over there, and Sadie stepped off the curb, first uncertain step back towards the castle, when a shadow moved slow across the bedroom curtains. A flowing, liquid shadow that almost seemed a thing unto itself, shadow of nothing but itself, and she stopped, one foot in the street, and watched as it moved across the window. As indistinct and undeniable as the edges of an eclipse, and in another moment it was gone and she was standing on the curb again.

“C’mon, baby,” she whispered to herself, trying to salvage the meanest scrap of calm, to sound the way that Deacon would sound—scared, because anyone sane would be scared, but together. Much too easy to let the fear shut her down, and so she turned her eyes away from the third-floor bedroom window and towards the north flank of the light-speckled mountain, the darker ridge raised against the indigo sky and the dim form of Vulcan outlined against the coming night, the great iron statue standing like the city’s pagan, patron saint of steel and fire, rusting guardian towering high above Southside.

That’s where she is, isn’t it?
Sadie thought.
Right up there,
and she pictured Dancy standing alone outside the pad-locked gate to the water works tunnel, peering between the corroded bars into the damp black core of the mountain. If Dancy looked up through the trees she would be able see the statue, too, looming huge from his pedestal a few hundred feet farther up the slope from her and almost directly above the park.

Sadie crossed the street, careful not to look at the castle as she passed by it, trying hard not to think about anything but Dancy alone in the darkness at Vulcan’s feet, alone because they were all three too busy or frightened or stubborn to go with her.
If I don’t have the courage, maybe shame will do. Maybe shame is enough to keep me moving,
and she followed the asphalt and chain-link margin of a parking lot towards the welcoming noise and traffic of Twentieth Street. Later, secure in the whitestark light of the laundry, she would tell herself the thing that hobbled out of a row of bushes ahead of her was only a dog, a big, hungry stray with legs long and thin as rails, its ribs and spine showing straight through its mangy fur. She would tell herself that, and she wouldn’t let herself think too much about the sounds it was making, or where she’d heard them before.

Sadie stood very still, not believing and knowing that her belief was irrelevant, while it sniffed at the concrete a moment before raising its wobbly head and turning towards her. It moved as slowly as the shadow she’d seen at the bedroom window; slow, but this movement as jerky as a marionette, wooden blocks dangling on puppet strings and eyes like hateful buttons of bluegreen fire. And when it sat back on its narrow haunches, turned its head to one side, and stretched its black lips back in a wide, wide smile, she forgot about courage and shame and she ran.

 

“No, Pooh, I swear, you’re a goddamn lifesaver,” Deacon says, and the girl with the chemistry textbook, whose real name is Winnie, pretends to smile. He gives her a twenty, and she stares at it a moment like the bribe might be counterfeit before she folds it once and stuffs the bill into the bib pocket of her overalls.

“Yeah, thanks,” Sadie says and Pooh shrugs and glances down at Sadie’s dirty feet.

“Jesus, Deke. You really ought to buy your girlfriend some shoes,” and she turns away, drops her textbook loudly onto the mint-green Formica countertop; Sadie starts to tell her to fuck off, never fucking mind, they can find somebody else, but Deacon jabs her hard with his elbow, and then he’s talking again before Sadie can even open her mouth.

“Well, like I said, I’m gonna
try
and make it back by midnight, but I can’t promise anything. I don’t really know how this will turn out.”

“Yeah,” Pooh says. “Whatever. I’m here now. I might as well work,” and she opens her book, flips aimlessly through the glossy pages, and Deacon takes Sadie’s arm and leads her out of the laundromat into the warm summer night.

“They ought to call her Eeyore,” Sadie grumbles, and Deacon nods his head, keeps a firm grip on her right arm like he’s afraid she’s going to turn around, go right back inside the Wash-N-Fold and pick a fight with Pooh. But that’s just fine with Sadie. It’s good to have him close, good to feel him there beside her. “So, what now, Miss Jasper?” he asks, and Sadie points southwest, in the direction of the little park and the tunnel entrance. A mile or more between here and there, and it’ll take them at least another twenty or twenty-five minutes to walk that far.

“Now we have to find her. We have to make sure that she’s okay,” and without another word, Sadie leads him around the corner.

 

Less than a block from the park, and Sadie steps on a chunk of broken bottle, viciousgreen 7UP shard hiding in the grass and dandelions at the edge of the sidewalk, overgrown edge of someone’s yard, and it leaves an inch-long gash in the heel of her right foot.

“Jesus, we’re almost
there,
” she says. “We can’t stop now,” and she’s trying to act like it doesn’t hurt like hell, like she hasn’t noticed all the blood on the concrete. But Deacon makes her sit down anyway, and he squints grimly at the cut by the dim yellow light from a nearby porch.

“It’s pretty deep,” he says, scowling at the bottom of her foot. “I think you’re gonna need stitches.”

“Well, I can fucking need stitches later,” and Sadie starts to get up, but he makes her sit back down again.

“I can’t let you walk on that, baby. I wasn’t kidding when I said it was deep,” and now he’s hastily unlacing one of his sneakers, takes it off and pulls his sock off as well. Sadie hardly even notices what he’s doing, stares anxiously towards the park, her eyes following the row of sodium-arc fireflies and lamplit windows bracketing the street, electric fairy trail that ends in Dancy and the hole in Red Mountain. She can see the edge of the park from where she’s sitting, and there aren’t any lights at all back there. Just the night curled in on itself, pressed black against the earth. “It’s trying to stop me, Deacon,” she says, her voice gone as brittle as a handful of old newspaper clippings, so close to tears now, but she doesn’t care. “It’s trying to keep me from getting to her.”

“What are you talking about, Sadie?
What’s
trying to stop you?” Deacon slips the white tube sock on over Sadie’s injured foot and she flinches, grimaces and closes her eyes; she can feel the hot tears leaking down her cheeks, tears that have a lot more to do with anger than any pain, more to do with the bottomless conviction that she’s failed Dancy than her fear of laughing shadows or scrawny, grinning dog monsters.

“Why won’t you tell me what happened at the apartment? What did you see back there?” and she looks up at him, then, no time or patience for this, every second they sit here talking a second lost, a second wasted, and “Why won’t
you
tell me about the tunnel, Deke?” she asks him, hoping she sounds every bit as resentful as she feels. “
You
haven’t told me a goddamn thing since this began. Like it’s all some holy fucking secret between you and Chance, like I’m just too stupid to understand, or it’s none of my business. Like I’m too big a flake to deal with it. Well, fine. Wonderful. It doesn’t matter anymore. Right now all that matters is that you find Dancy before something happens, because there’s no one else to help her.”

Deacon watches her silently for a moment, the surprised, uncertain expression on his face that says maybe he’s seeing her for the first time, that perhaps he’s never seen more than a pale ghost of this angry, bleeding girl, and “Yeah,” he says finally. “But you’re staying here, Sadie. Promise me you’ll wait right here for me to come back.”

“Cross my heart,” and she does, draws a big X across her left breast, then glances down at Deacon’s ridiculous white sock stuck on her foot. Cottonwhite sock turning scarlet, and “Be careful,” she says. “I don’t
know
what I saw, if I even saw anything at all, but . . .” and she pauses, hunting words that aren’t there. “It was something wrong, Deacon.”

Part of her hoping that he’ll laugh at her, tell her she’s full of shit, but Deacon only rubs at his stubbly cheeks and puts his tennis shoe back on his bare foot. “Everything’s gonna be okay,” he says, and Sadie can tell how much he wants her to believe him, even if he doesn’t believe himself. So she smiles, and Deacon leans forward and kisses her, a quick kiss that leaves her lips tingling, the faint, musky taste of him on her mouth, and she tries to stop crying. He stands up and points at the porch behind her.