Threshold (2 page)

Chance laughs, but there was something strange and sad about the rain that she can’t quite remember, and she doesn’t start giggling again.

This rough stone wall set into the side of the mountain more than a hundred years ago, blockhouse of stone and mortar and dank air to cap the north end of the tunnel, mushroom and mud and mildew air, and “All aboard,” Elise says, and she pulls the gate shut behind them. Dull clang of iron on stone, and
She’s closing us in,
Chance thinks, so maybe she’s just a little afraid now, the pot starting to make her paranoid, but then Deacon has his flashlight out and he plays it across the slippery walls, the punky, wormgnawed support beams overhead. “What’s
that?
” Elise asks, and Deacon shines the light at the two great pipes that fill up most of the blockhouse, pipes like the mountain’s steel intestines, like something from an H. R. Giger painting; neither animal nor mineral, organs trapped somewhere in between.

Deacon puts one big hand on the closest pipe and “Damn,” he says. “It’s cold,” and Chance shivers again, opens her eyes and tries to remember having closed them. She’s alone and lying on the floor of the tunnel, lying in mud and water, and Deacon’s discarded flashlight isn’t very far away, close enough that she can reach out and touch it. It’s not shining very brightly anymore, batteries running low and when they’re gone there won’t be anything but this night beneath the mountain that never has a morning.

“Deacon?” she calls out, and her voice booms and echoes off the tunnel walls, and no one answers anyway. Just the steady, measured drip of water, and she gets up, dizzy so she leans against one of the pipes. The ceiling’s low, and she has to be careful not to hit her head, barely six feet, barely room to stand; Chance picks up the flashlight, something solid and radiant against the dark, against the disorientation, and her head crammed too full of marijuana smoke and the cold. She points the flashlight at the tunnel wall, squints at the rock, and there’s sandstone the bruised color of an overripe plum.

Ferruginous sandstone,
she thinks, sober, safe geologist thought getting in or out through the dumbing fog behind her eyes. Ferruginous sandstone, so she must be at least eighty yards or more into the tunnel, past the limestone, beyond the Ordovician and into the lowermost Silurian and the thick seams of iron ore. She looks at the angle of the rocks, gentle slant of seafloor beds lifted hundreds of millions of years ago, collision of continents to raise mountains, and “It’s cold,” Deacon says again. Deacon awestruck, marveling at the pipe beneath his hand, and “Yeah, well, me too,” Elise says.

A noise behind Chance, then, noise like something damp and heavy, something vast and soft moving through the tunnel, and the sucking undertow squelch of water swirling down a drain; meaty, counterclockwise sound, and she turns and shines the flashlight at the place she thinks it’s coming from. But there’s only Elise, standing a few feet away and squinting into the flashlight. She’s naked, nothing against her skin but mud and tunnel slime, the chill air, and there are tears streaking her dirty face. Sloe-eyed Elise, and maybe Chance has never really noticed before how beautiful she is, even now, scared and filthy, or especially now, her perfect mouth, the fragile slant of her shoulders, and she holds one hand up, like the light hurts her eyes or she doesn’t want Chance to see.

“He told me not to look, Chance,” she sobs. “He told me not to look at it, but I had to see.”

And then the flashlight flickers and dies, and the dark rushes around them like a flood, black past black, viscous bottom of the ocean blackness that wraps itself around them and Elise screams.
No,
Chance thinks,
don’t do that. Don’t do that because you’ll swallow, and it’ll get inside you,
or she’s trying to talk but can’t remember how to shape the words, how to put her tongue and teeth together to make sounds.

Something brushes past her in the dark, and
It’s cold,
she thinks.
Yes, it
is
cold,
cold as a sky without stars, as a grave, and then the flashlight flickers dimly back to life. But Elise is gone again, and there are only the pipes leading deeper into the tunnel, deeper into the punctured, bitter heart of the mountain.

“Did you hear that?”

And Elise laughs, knows that Deacon’s only trying to frighten her, but maybe Chance heard it too, starts to say so, but “No,” he says, shining the brilliant flashlight beam down the length of the pipes.

“Listen.”

Chance opens her eyes and stares into the night sky that is only dark, into the spring rain that whispers through the trees and takes away her tears. She can hear Elise somewhere nearby, incoherent, crying and Deacon’s trying to comfort her.

“ ‘. . . how many miles I’ve fallen by this time?’ ” but no one hears her, so no one answers, either, and the girl named Chance closes her eyes again and lets the rain kiss her face and hide the things she never saw.

—JOSEPH CAMPBELL (1949)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

M
ORNING after the funeral, latest funeral in what seems to Chance Matthews to have become a litany of caskets and wreaths and frowning undertakers that might go on forever, if there were anyone left she cared about, anyone left to die. All night she drove the narrow back roads north of the city, countrydark roads, just her and a pint bottle of Wild Turkey, the music blaring loud from her tape deck, chasing the headlights of her old Impala, trying to escape and knowing there was no way to go that far, that fast. No gravity greater than the pull of her loss, and now Chance sits on the hood of the car as the summer sun bleeds in through the trees on Red Mountain, seeps hot between dogwood and hackberry branches, and soon it will burn away the dew that sequin speckles the front yard of her dead grandparents’ house. The Impala’s engine pops and clicks its secret, exhausted car language as it cools after the long and restless night.

Chance squints at the rising sun, wishes she could push it back down, chase it away to the east forever and hang onto the night, the night and her drunkenness fading to hangover and shadows. Maybe no solace in the dark, but at least not this hateful reminder that the world hasn’t stopped turning, that it won’t, no matter how much she hurts.

“What the fuck now, Grandpa?” she whispers, and her voice just another thing that seems wrong, that seems improper, unseemly to be alive and breathing much less talking, but she asks again, anyway, and louder this time, “What the fuck now?”

And no answer but the birds and the traffic down on Sixteenth Avenue, the waking-up sounds, the people-going-on-about-their-business sounds, as if nothing at all has changed but the day of the week, the numbers on a calendar. Chance closes her eyes, and at least then there’s only the noise, only the hint of light filtered through her eyelids. And maybe that’s the trick, she thinks, to
make
a night to hide inside, a night that doesn’t have to stop until the emptiness inside her is gone and she can stand the thought of another sunrise, the thought of routine.

So Chance sits on the hood, green eyes closed and feeling the unwelcome July sun across her face, the gentler heat rising from the Impala’s engine block through her jeans, and she imagines all the ways to fashion a night, how to sew indigo skies and not even any stars or the moon unless she wants them there, unless she cuts holes for them to shine through, obsidian skies if that’s what it takes. A night to wrap around her to match the night coiled beneath her skin, eating her alive.

Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Chance,
her grandfather’s voice somewhere right behind her, ghostvoice from the passenger seat of the Impala, and Chance scrambles off the hood, all thoughts of retreat and nocturnal architecture gone in that instant of impossible surprise. But there’s no one and nothing standing by the car but her, and Chance feels foolish and ashamed and angry all at once, meaner emotions swimming against her grief, silverbright flotsam to snag her attention for an instant before they drift away and there’s nothing but the sadness again. So not her grandfather’s voice at all, only her memory of her grandfather’s voice, some part of herself so sick of the loss and the guilt and the deadness inside speaking in a voice that maybe she’ll pay attention to, maybe, and Chance leans forward, both palms open on the stillwarm hood of the Chevy, and she’s crying again before she can stop the tears, can’t stop what she doesn’t see coming. And nothing to do but stand there, little drops of water and salt wringing themselves from her eyes to splash across the rustorange car.

Her great-grandfather built this house, something fine a hundred years ago and it’s not like it hasn’t been kept up, not like it’s been allowed to sink into ruin and neglect the way so many its age have, and this is the house where Chance has lived since she was five years old. Her great-grandfather a schoolteacher who married a schoolteacher, and he built his new bride this modest shelter of gingerbread shingles and walls that have never been painted any color but the same sensible white, sandstone block and mortar chimneys and a lightning rod fixed to one high cornice where gable meets sky, pointing like a cast-iron finger towards heaven. And way up high, the window into what was the attic long before it became Chance’s bedroom.

She climbs the stone steps slow, up to the big front porch that stretches halfway around the house. And there’s the Boston fern and its shattered red clay pot, soil strewn across the whitewashed porch boards and the fronds already going brown. Her grandfather was carrying the fern out to the porch, a whole morning spent repotting the root-bound plant, and now it marks the spot where he was standing when his heart stopped beating for the last time. No one’s picked it up, swept away the dirt and broken pottery shards, but there are footprints in the dry black soil, footprints of paramedics and policemen, and in places the dirt is ground deeply into the wood, pressed flat where Joe Matthews lay two whole hours before Chance came home and found the body already cold and stiff.

She kicks the wad of wilting fern and dirt, and for a second it’s airborne, then skitters and rolls across the porch, trailing rootsy bits of itself as it goes, finally coming to rest against another, unbroken pot, a huge philodendron to shade the dying fern from the morning sun. And she doesn’t feel any better, worse maybe, because the fern was something her grandfather cared about. She looks quickly away from it, one hand fast into a pocket of her jeans for her keys and in a moment the front door swings open on the foyer, the mustycool, familiar smell of the house beyond spilling out around her.

She crosses the threshold, shoescuffed strip of varnished pine to mark her reluctant steps, right foot across, left foot next, and she’s passed from the indecent brightness of morning into the shadows and leftover scraps of night waiting inside; a house to anyone passing by, but Chance knows that it’s become something more: a dim and whispering box to hold all the memories of her life, a memorial. Frame for a thousand reminders she doesn’t need because she couldn’t forget if she tried, wouldn’t if she could. And she just wants it to be a plain old house again.

She slowly pulls the front door shut behind her and sits on the floor, still cool and the door at her back now, whole world at her back, and she squints down the long hall running past the stairs all the way back to the kitchen and the room where her grandfather kept all his cardboard boxes and wooden crates of rocks, the cloth and plastic bags of fossils and minerals that have never been opened or cleaned or labeled. Two rooms and between them a gaudy, narrow rectangle of daylight, day sneaking in through the lead-glass window set into the back door.

And it all washes back over her again, the indisputable reality of it, truth that smells like carnations and a shovelful of red cemetery dirt—that they are
dead,
gone,
all
of them, and she’s as alone at twenty-three as someone who has outlived an entire lifetime of family and friends and lovers. An old, old woman in such young skin, and the truth and her mind push each other away, opposing magnetic poles, and Chance shuts her eyes again, and in a moment the air has stopped smelling like funerals and there’s nothing but the velvetsoft odor of dust and the ghost of her grandfather’s pipe.