Threshold (36 page)

“It’s lying to you,” Dancy says, her wellbottom voice even more hollow than before. “There’s no comfort here. Everything burns down here.”

Sadie doesn’t open her eyes, has learned her lesson, and maybe whatever’s left of Dancy isn’t something anyone can see, or she’s speaking from somewhere much too far away.

“Oh, Dancy. I should have tried harder to
make
them listen—”

“Go
home,
Sadie. Please. There’s still time. I’m not your responsibility. I never was—” and then a sound that’s almost like radio static, not a sound from outside but coming from inside her head, radio static, white noise, and it
does
burn. Like ice crystals growing beneath her skin, blooming glass flowers to tear her apart, cell from frozen cell, and she gasps and opens her eyes. An instant when she’d swear that she’s seeing her breath in the stifling air, less than an instant, before the static in her head fades away to the softest crackle and then to nothing at all.

And on the other side of the furrow, standing small in the useless shade of the trees, Dancy Flammarion bows her head and raises her left hand, sad and forgiving gesture like a plaster saint, and Sadie calls out to her. Screams her name, but suddenly there’s a breeze blowing across the park, a wind that stinks of mold and stagnant water and it rustles the leaves of the trees, ruffles Dancy’s clothes and hair, and she dissolves as completely as a tear swallowed by an ocean.

 

The lopping shears left only a few futile dents and scratches on the steel hasp of the padlock, its blades either too dull or Sadie too weak or both, and by the time she finishes painting the design onto the front of the blockhouse, blood and small pieces of flesh have been falling from the cloudless July sky for almost fifteen minutes. There’s laughter coming from someplace just inside the tunnel, a low, guttural chuckle from something hiding behind the pipes. The laugh and the stickysick
plop plop plop
of blood and meat hitting the ground, and both these things only prove she’s right, Sadie knows that. Cheap horror movie tricks to scare her away so she
must
be right.

She wipes the blood from her eyes and takes a couple of steps back from the blockhouse, slides in the mud and almost falls; the ground has turned the deepest red beneath her feet, a red that’s almost black, and the mud is speckled with restless white bodies, hungry maggots and grubs, and she lets the paintbrush fall from her slippery fingers. It lands in a small puddle, splashes her ankles with stringy clots and gristle, and Sadie stares up at the bold black lines she’s traced on the stones. The wall almost as bloody as the mud, but the lines still plain enough to see, the star, the inner heptagon, and Sadie stands beneath the bleeding sky, the same wounded sky she invented two days before, and stares past the iron bars into the mouth of the water works tunnel.

Run, Sadie, run fast. It’s not too late to run away,
but that’s not Dancy, clumsy lost girl impersonation, and it only wants her to run because she be might be fun to chase.

“Come on out, motherfucker. I’m getting tired of waiting for you,” and the darkness crouched inside the tunnel laughs at her again, but she doesn’t have to wait for very long.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

B
ARELY half past noon and already the heat is a demon stretching itself wide across the monotonous South Alabama landscape, a greedy, suffocating heat to lick at the pine sap and sandyred soil, at Deacon trapped inside the shitty little Chevy. Sweat drips from his hair, trickles down his skin into his eyes, and he squints painfully through the bugspattered windshield at the burning day and licorice-black strip of Highway 55, the watershimmer mirage rising off the blacktop to make him that much thirstier. He’s been swigging lukewarm Gatorade for hours, but the orange liquid tastes vaguely like baby aspirin and, besides, it doesn’t seem to do anything much for the thirst. The wind whipping through the open windows is hot and smells like melting asphalt and the dense forests crowding at the edges of the road, and it’s easy for Deacon to imagine that the trees and brambles are pressing closer and closer on each side, taking back the highway, and the vanishing point up ahead is merely proof that they’re succeeding.

Trying not to think about Chance or Sadie, about what he will or won’t find in Milligan, and he glances at the odometer. One of the few things on the dashboard that seems to be working right, working at all, and he sees that he’s driven almost two hundred miles since leaving Birmingham. Two hundred miles and most of it interstate, before he took the exit for Andalusia half an hour ago. It was better on the interstate, the breeze through the windows just the slightest bit cooler when he was driving fast. Now he’s a lot more worried about cops, plenty of places for them to hide, waiting patiently, laying speed traps along the narrow highway, and he’s trying to stay under sixty. But it’s all guesswork anyhow, since the speedometer is one of the things that doesn’t work.

There’s country music blaring from the radio, nothing but country and gospel stations this far south, and so he’s going with the lesser of two evils, a twangy stream of Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood, but at least it’s something to keep him company. Something besides the sound of the wheels on the road, the unnerving assortment of noises that come from the Chevy’s engine at irregular intervals. And every now and then there’s a Johnny Cash or Patsy Cline song, like water holes in the wasteland, something small but genuine to keep him going.

A mile past Red Level, someplace that isn’t actually any place at all, a crossroads and a gas station, two rusty house trailers and they both looked deserted, when he spots the hitchhiker standing by a faded Pepsi Cola billboard. A very tall man standing in the sun without a hat, an old green knapsack on one shoulder, and he’s holding up a cardboard and crayon sign with ENTERPRISE printed neatly on it. He sees the Chevy coming and smiles, holds his sign a little higher so there’s no chance that the driver won’t see him. And
It might not be so bad, a little company,
Deacon thinks, better than the damned radio, and maybe the guy doesn’t look harmless, but then who does? He pulls over, raising a thick cloud of dust and sand, and a second later the hitchhiker leans in through the passenger-side window and smiles one of the widest smiles that Deacon’s ever seen. Wide and nicotine-stained teeth the dingy color of old ivory or bone, and the man reaches inside and shakes Deacon’s hand. He has eyes so brown they seem almost black, oildark eyes and long black hair slicked down close to his scalp.

“I’m mighty grateful to you,” the hitchhiker says. “Been standing there since dawn this morning, and nobody’s even slowed down to look twice. And old Mr. Sun up there’s a bull-bitch on wheels, if you catch my meaning.”

“I can only take you as far as Andalusia,” Deacon says, and the man’s still pumping his arm up and down, up and down, like he expects quarters or a gush of cold spring water to come spilling from Deacon’s lips. “I’m turning south there, for Florida.”

“Yeah? Well, Andalusia will do just fine, then,” the man says and finally releases Deacon’s hand. He opens the car door, letting in more of the dust, and Deacon coughs a dry cough into the palm of his hand and reaches for the half-empty Gatorade bottle tucked into the shadows beneath his seat. The man throws his knapsack into the back, lays the cardboard sign on top of it, and gets in, slams the door so hard it rattles the whole car.

“You got folks down in Florida?” the hitchhiker asks. “Or is it business?”

“Just business,” Deacon says and unscrews the cap on the Gatorade bottle, takes a long swallow, washing dust and grit down his throat and trying to pretend it’s an ice cold beer instead. The man keeps talking, watching the dust cloud start to settle on the hood of the car or maybe whatever he can see farther down the highway.

“Florida ain’t so bad, you know, except for all the goddamned tourists, all those goddamned, pasty-assed Yankee tourists trying to get away from the snow.”

“Is that right?” Deacon asks, wipes his mouth on the back of his hand and briefly considers finishing off the Gatorade, only an inch or so left in the bottle, anyway.

“Well, if you ask me, that’s exactly right. But the deep-sea fishing’s still good, Yankees or no Yankees.”

Deacon wipes his mouth again and decides to save the rest of the baby aspirin-flavored Gatorade until later, much too easy to imagine Soda’s car breaking down before he reaches the next town or convenience store, and he’d rather not think about being stuck out here with nothing at all to drink. He puts the cap back on the bottle and returns it to its place beneath the seat. The transmission makes an ugly, grinding sound when he shifts the stick back into drive, but Deacon ignores it, beginning to get used to the car’s repertoire of complaints, and he pulls back out onto the highway.

“Where you coming from?” the hitchhiker asks, and Deacon points out the window, points north, and “Birmingham,” he says. “That’s where I live.”

“I’ve been lots of worse places,” the man says and takes a deck of cards from the pocket of his shirt. Deacon switches off the radio, and the knob comes away in his hand; he curses and tosses it out the window.

“Not exactly a goddamned Rolls-Royce, is it?” the man says and chuckles softly to himself, cuts the deck of cards once and shuffles them. “But listen to me, like I got a gold-plated chariot to haul my ass around in.”

“It isn’t even mine. I borrowed it from a friend.”

“Well, it’s sure as coon shit better than standing back there getting a sunstroke. Even if it ain’t got an air conditioner, it’s better than that.”

“Oh, it
has
one,” Deacon says, “but it only blows warm air,” and the man laughs again, shuffles his deck of cards and turns the top card faceup.

“Well, look at that,” the hitchhiker says, and he whistles through his teeth. “Not exactly what I had in mind.”

Deacon glances from the road to the cards and sees that they’re not playing cards, a tattered, dog-eared pack of tarot cards, instead, and the hitchhiker is holding The Tower between his left thumb and index finger. The lightning-struck tower perched on its rocky crag, fire from its windows and two figures plummeting towards the earth. “You see that there?” he asks and taps the card.

“What?” and so the man taps the card again.

“These drops of light here, falling down out of the clouds. The Hebrews call those things ‘yods.’ They sort of represent the descent of the life force into the material plane. Light falling out of the sky like rain.”

“I’ve never picked up a hitchhiker who read the tarot before,” Deacon says, and the man smiles again, showing off his yellowbrown teeth, and he places The Tower back on the top of the deck.

“I’ve been carrying this old deck of cards around with me since the war. I used to have a book to tell me what they all meant, but it got lost somewhere. I’d already memorized most of it, though.”

“Which war?” Deacon asks him, and the man shrugs his skinny shoulders and shakes his head.

“You think one’s any different from the next? I mean, when it comes right down to brass tacks, people killing each other since they figured out how, that’s all. Give them pretty names and numbers, but it’s all the same to the worms. Worms can’t count or read, and what’s more, they got the good sense to stay down in the dark where the light don’t come dripping out of the clouds onto their heads.”

And Deacon’s starting to think picking the hitchhiker up wasn’t such a great idea after all, that perhaps he should have stuck with the road noise and honky-tonk music; already enough things in his head to give him the willies without this guy pulling out a deck of tarot cards and lecturing him about cabalism and worms.

“All the upheaval in the world in this card here,” the man says. “The destruction of order and tradition, all your beliefs like a candle flickering in a hurricane. Enlightenment, but at a
cost,
you see.”

“You’re starting to sound like a preacher,” Deacon says, and he’s trying to make a joke out of it, but the man nods his head and slips the card back into the deck.

“Yeah? Well that’s one of the things I’ve been. That’s one of the things I’ll be again someday, I expect,” and he turns over the second card. “The Queen of Pentacles, reversed,” he says. But this time Deacon doesn’t look at the card, keeps his eyes fixed straight ahead of him, the road and the pine trees and the unsheltering sky.

“Maybe this ain’t where you’re supposed to be today, this long, hot road going down to the sea. Maybe there’s something else you’re supposed to be doing, somewhere else. Neglected duties, and the Queen here, she says you’ve been thinking just that very thing all morning long.”

“Does she now?” and he’s straining to sound more skeptical than nervous, but his throat so dry it’s almost sore, and if he only had one goddamn beer, one stinking Bud or Sterling or PBR, maybe this fucker wouldn’t be getting under his skin. “What else does she say?”

“Someone you don’t trust, she says, someone you think ain’t precisely what they been telling you,” and he puts the Queen of Pentacles on the bottom of the deck and turns over another card. “The Eight of Staves. But, then, we already
know
you’re on a journey. Question is, what’s waiting for you at the end? What’ll be left when you get back home?”

“Well, I suppose that’s what you’re going to show me next,” Deacon says, glances at the man, and it’s okay that there’s an angry edge to his voice; if he can’t fake disbelief, he can at least make it clear that this whole shtick is beginning to piss him off, and maybe the hitchhiker will take the hint and put the cards back into his shirt pocket.

“Dead dog,” the man says, points at the windshield, and Deacon looks back at the road just in time to see the sun-bloated corpse sprawled completely across his lane, the thick cloud of green-bottle flies and its body swollen big enough that it might as well be a deer as a dog; he cuts the wheel sharply to the left, but hits it, anyway, plowing headlong through bone and rot and fur. The back tires squeal as the car fishtails, and for a moment Deacon thinks he’s lost control, a few more seconds and he’ll be careening into the trees.