Threshold (19 page)

“A crow,” Chance says, “Just a crow,” but she can hear the doubt in her own voice, the adrenaline-hot confusion, and “I think I saw it out in the yard a few minutes ago,” she says.

“Jesus,” Sadie says again and takes a cautious, slow step towards the gore-smeared windowpane. “So what the hell was it
doing
?”

“No,”
Dancy growls, “not yet,” the old woman growling with Dancy’s throat, and she makes an abrupt and breathless noise, strangling noise, her mouth open too wide and both hands gripping desperately for the edges of the table as her white-rabbit eyes roll back in her head. “I
know
you,” she says. “I’ve
always
known you,” gravel and glass words ground flat between her teeth, and now there’s foam flecking her lips, foam like a mad dog or the edge of the sea.

“Oh god, Chance, I think she’s choking,” Sadie says, reaching for Dancy, moving too fast, too careless, knocking her purse off the corner of the table and everything spills out of it onto the kitchen floor. A rubber eyeball bounces clear of the jumble of cosmetics and spare change, the broken pink mirror and scraps of paper, bounces towards Chance, who’s still staring at the birdstained window. Not as if she doesn’t know what’s happening at the table, not like she can’t hear Dancy, but something about the crow too familiar, too real . . .

“Don’t you
look
at it,” Dancy Flammarion snarls, angry old woman or rabid animal snarl that finally makes Chance look away from the window. Sadie is standing directly behind Dancy’s chair now, both her arms tight around the girl’s skinny shoulders, her thumbs pressed together, pressed to the soft place where ribs meet sternum, Heimlich pressure point below the girl’s ribcage;
What’s that called?
Chance thinks.
That little piece of bone right there,
orderly classroom game to bring her back to earth again.

The xiphoid process,
she answers herself.
That little piece of bone is called the xiphoid process.

“No, Sadie,” she says, reaching into the sink. “She isn’t choking. She couldn’t talk if she were choking,” and Chance finds what she’s looking for, the spoon hiding beneath her cereal bowl.

“Then what the fuck’s wrong with her?” Sadie snaps back, not so very far from hysterical now, her wolfblue eyes gazing bright from their twin bruise pools of smudged eyeliner.

“I think it’s a seizure,” Chance says, pushing Sadie away, not meaning to be rough, but knowing it will seem that way to Sadie later, and Dancy’s body shudders on cue. Violent, living tremor like her muscles want off her bones, and her head jerks back, slams itself hard against the chair’s wooden headrest.

“Try to hold her still,” Chance says. “She’s going to hurt herself. She’s going to swallow her tongue.”

And this time Sadie doesn’t argue, holds both sides of Dancy’s pale face while Chance slips the spoon between her lips. Her teeth click castanet loud against the silver handle and her eyelids flutter and dance, tears from her eyes, a dark trickle of blood from one corner of her mouth.

“Don’t you die,” Sadie whispers, desperateloud whisper that’s almost a hiss. “Don’t you
dare
fuckin’ die on us,” and Chance realizes that Sadie’s started crying. Behind her, there’s a wild sound at the window, crowblack feathers against the glass, wings battering weakly, wanting in or only wanting Chance to turn around and see.
Look, Chance. Look quick,
but she keeps her eyes on Dancy, and in another moment or two the sound is gone, if it was ever really there, and Dancy’s body stops shaking, rattles down to sweatsoaked calm, and she opens her pink eyes wide.

“Jesus,” Sadie says. “Jesus Christ,” but now she sounds more relieved than scared, and Chance slides the spoon slowly from Dancy’s mouth. The metal drips blood and saliva, blood and spit running down Dancy’s chin, and Chance wipes it away with her hand.

“Can you hear me?” Chance asks, and Dancy nods her head slowly, but her eyes are still far away, focused somewhere beyond the kitchen, beyond the walls of the old house.

“I’m sorry,” she says, coughs once or twice, swallows, and this time Dancy wipes her own mouth. “It’s too late, isn’t it? I didn’t get here soon enough.”

“You got here as soon as you could,” Sadie says, crying harder now, brushing colorless strands of hair from Dancy’s face and sobbing the grateful way a mother cries because her child hasn’t drowned after all, because it isn’t lost in the woods anymore. “God, kiddo. You scared the shit out of us, you know that?”

“I’m sorry,” Dancy says again, and then she turns in her chair and looks towards the kitchen door, towards the hall and the front of the house, blinks and wipes at her watering eyes; Chance looks, too, and Deacon’s standing there, leaning sickly, unsteadily, against the door frame, watching them.

“No more bullshit, Chance,” he says hoarsely and glances down at the floor, at his big bare feet.

“I don’t know what you’re—” but he holds one hand out like a traffic cop, cutting her off. “Okay,” Chance says, wanting to take back the words before they’re even out of her mouth. “No more bullshit,” and Deacon turns around and walks slowly away into the shadowy heart of her house.

Almost half an hour later, almost noon, and Dancy is resting quietly on the living-room sofa. Chance wanted to call an ambulance, had even picked up the telephone, but “She hasn’t got any money,” Sadie said. “She hasn’t got any money, and she sure as hell hasn’t got any insurance.” Then when Chance offered to pay the bills herself, Dancy frowned and shook her head. “No. I’ll be all right now,” she said, and then Sadie covered her up snug with a caramel-colored afghan that Chance’s Aunt Josie gave her grandfather last Christmas. So no one has said anything else about ambulances or doctors or hospitals; Dancy lies on the big sofa with her eyes half opened or half closed behind her new purple sunglasses, and Sadie sits on the floor beside her, holding her hand, keeping watch.

She isn’t your daughter,
Chance wants to say.
She isn’t your little sister,
but she doesn’t, because maybe Sadie has never had anyone to care for, to watch over, and maybe that’s what Dancy needs more than anything else right now.

“No more bullshit,” Dancy says and turns her head towards Deacon, who’s standing alone on the other side of the room, staring out a window at the sunwashed gravel driveway like he’s waiting for someone.

“So where do we start?” he asks, asks no one in particular, and he doesn’t look away from the window.

“What’s a
Dicranurus
?” Dancy replies, turning away from Deacon, and now she’s looking up at Chance through her bug-eyed purple sunglasses. “I
know
it means something. I know you know what it means, Chance.”

“It’s just a trilobite,” she says. “A kind of Devonian trilobite, that’s all,” and Dancy and Sadie are looking at her like she’s suddenly started speaking in tongues.

“Hold on a minute. It’s probably easier if I show you,” and so she leaves them in the living room, glad for an excuse to get away from Dancy’s questions and Deacon’s sullen, hungover resignation, even if it’s only for a few minutes; she follows the hall to the door of her grandparents’ study, door she hasn’t opened since the day after Joe Matthews’ funeral, day that seems years and years ago already when it’s hardly been two weeks. She closes it behind her, and nothing has changed in here, only a little more dust and the faintest beginnings of that shuttered, shut-away room smell. Chance pulls a brass cord on one of the Tiffany lamps, releases gentle stained-glass light to chase away the shadows. It doesn’t take her long to find what she’s looking for, eight years since she closed the heavy German monograph and slid it back into its assigned place on the crowded shelves, but she remembers. Chance takes it down and pauses for a moment before she pulls the lamp cord again, before she gives the room back to the shadows and cobwebs and dust, thinking about what Alice Sprinkle said the night before and how weird things have gotten, how fast they’ve gotten that way.

“Well, so what the hell would
you
do, Alice?” she says, and the sound of the lamp switching off seems very loud in the small, still room.

 

Back in the living room, she finds Dancy sitting up, the cushions arranged neatly behind her back and Aunt Josie’s caramel afghan still covering her legs. Sadie’s sitting on the sofa next to her now, one arm around Dancy’s shoulders, and Deacon hasn’t moved from his spot at the window. Stands there like his head isn’t killing him and his stomach doesn’t feel like shit, like he doesn’t need a drink when she knows perfectly well he’s hurting. But she’s glad he’s trying not to let it show, and
At least that’s something,
Chance thinks.

“Okay.
Dicranurus,
” she says, sitting down on the edge of the coffee table in front of Dancy and Sadie as she opens the book, turns the old pages carefully until she finds the right one. She’s trying not to think about the last time she looked at this book, the fact that she never bothered to ask her grandfather about it because she forgot or she really didn’t want to know, trying not to notice the chill bumps prickling her arms, her legs underneath her jeans. And here it is, four views of
Dicranurus monstrosus
: dorsal, anterior, left lateral view, and a meticulously drafted close-up of the thorny head, the cephalon, and the sloppy pencil-red circle enclosing all four illustrations. She turns the book around so that Dancy can see the pictures.

The albino girl leans forward a few inches and squints at the yellowed page through her sunglasses, reaches one hand out and touches the paper with the tip of an index finger. “It’s like a horseshoe crab, isn’t it?” she asks, and Chance shrugs.

“Well, horseshoe crabs are actually more closely related to spiders than to trilobites, but yeah, I suppose there’s a resemblance. They’re both arthropods.”

“It’s sure an ugly little bastard,” Sadie says, and Dancy glances at her and then back to the book.

“Sometimes I used to find horseshoe crabs in the swamps back home,” she says. “They were
huge.
”

“This bug here wasn’t more than two or three inches long,” and Chance holds up her right hand, thumb and index finger a couple of inches apart for Dancy to see what she means. “Ugly, I guess, but not very big.”

“Why’s there a red circle drawn around it?” Dancy asks, focused on nothing now but the four drawings of the grotesque creature. She stares up at Chance, her face expectant, expecting an answer, and Chance can only shake her head and shrug.

“I’m not sure. I think my grandmother might have been studying these trilobites when she died.”

“When she
killed
herself,” Deacon says coldly from his place at the window, doesn’t turn around, and “Yeah,” Chance says, glares over her right shoulder at Deacon. “When she killed herself.”

“She drew the circle?” Dancy asks, tracing its sloppy, uneven diameter with her finger.

“As far as I know, but I can’t say for sure.”

“These are
all
dead,” and that’s not really a question but it makes Chance less nervous to talk, and so she answers it anyway. “Yeah, they are. Trilobites died out at the end of the Permian Period, about two hundred and fifty million years ago. A
lot
of things went extinct at the end of the Permian. It’s one of what paleontologists call the ‘Big Five,’ the five major extinction events. The fourth one got the dinosaurs.”

“You’re lecturing,” Deacon says, takes a step closer to the window, and he lights a cigarette.

“She wanted to know, Deke. She asked, and I’m telling her. What the hell do you
want
me to do?”

“It’s okay,” Dancy says and smiles faintly, looks past Chance to Deacon. “I need to know,” and then she goes back to tracing the red circle with her finger. “Circles hold things inside, circles protect,” she says, and there’s a dry hint of the old woman voice again, just a hint, but enough to give Chance a fresh attack of goose bumps.

“They keep things in or they keep things out,” Dancy says, almost whispering, almost singsong, and leaning closer to the book now, the weak smile already faded, and she cocks her head to one side like a cat, curious, considering, her eyes far away, and “So, you can find these around here?” she asks Chance.

“No. Well, not exactly. This species,
monstrosus,
is from Africa, but I think there’s another kind of
Dicranurus
from the Devonian of Oklahoma. I don’t know of any from Alabama, but I suppose it’s possible. Africa and Alabama were still connected then, the way the continental plates were arranged—”

“Monstrosus,”
Dancy says softly, interrupting, excited and talking to herself if she’s talking to anyone at all; she stands up, pulling free of Sadie, and the afghan slides off her lap to the floor. Chance doesn’t move, sits with the book open on her knees, no idea what she’s supposed to do next, but she’s pretty sure that Dancy shouldn’t be getting this worked up after the scene in the kitchen.