Threshold (40 page)

“Is
that
all you want, Mr. Silvey? A little trip down the Lethe,” and Deacon looks up, blinking, and the hitchhiker is standing on the other side of the pool. He smiles his too-wide smile and squats down on the bank among the roots, slips his long fingers below the surface. “You should’ve just said somethin’ before. Hell, I got all kinds of connections, you know.”

Above him, the copperhead is draped across a low limb, dead snake bleeding from its crushed skull, venom and drops of blood, stickywet drops of life and death wasted on the water which is neither alive nor dead. The man stirs the pool with his hand and shakes his head.

“She told you there ain’t no answers here, didn’t she? I swear, that little whore has a mouth on her. Worse than her goddamn momma. Of course, that ain’t nothing I hadn’t already tried to tell you, if you’d half a mind to listen.”

“You . . .” Deacon croaks, his throat raw, and he gags again before he can say anything else. “You’re the one, aren’t you? The one that killed her mother.”

The hitchhiker scratches thoughtfully at his chin, takes his other hand from the pool and holds it a few inches above the water, watches the crystal beads forming at the tips of his fingers and falling, one by one, back into the lake.

“No sir,” he says. “That wasn’t me. There are no answers here, Deke. No answers
anywhere.
That’s what she said, and she was right. No motherfucking answers.”

Deacon’s drawn the pistol and is pointing it at the man, but his hands are shaky and his eyes still watering so it’s hard to see. He pulls the hammer back, and “Maybe I’m losing interest in answers,” he says.

“If I was you, I wouldn’t go waving that thing at people unless you mean to go all the way,” and the man stands and wipes his wet hand on his pants. “You’re just not a killer. Not unless you count your own hopes and dreams, and maybe a pint bottle of Kentucky bourbon here and there.”

Deacon stares down the pistol’s stubby barrel and blinks, trying to clear his eyes, his mouth sour with the taste of vomit.

“Now, if it was the albino girl, if it was her pointing that thing at me, I
might
be worried. Say what you want about her, toys in the attic and all, but that little girl had the courage of her convictions. And you wanna know what else?”

“Shut up, fucker,” Deacon says, because the tall man’s voice is worse than his headache, full of edges sharp as steel and broken glass, twisting wormjawed voice digging its way into him, and
All I have to do is pull the trigger,
he thinks.
All I have to do is pull the goddamn trigger.

“You better use those five bullets you got wisely, Mr. Silvey, ’cause right now, out here, I ain’t the only thing in these woods you got to worry about.”

And then Deacon sees them, all the spindle legs and crimson eyes creeping out of the trees behind the man, separating themselves from the shadows, bones and twigs bundled together with barbed wire and string.

“We like a little sport, now and again,” the man says, smiles, and this time his smile is as wide as the Cheshire Cat’s, unreal, ear-to-ear grin, and his teeth are huge and glint black like obsidian arrowheads.

“You start running now, Deacon Silvey, and we’ll be along directly.”

And Deacon lowers the pistol slow, because he doesn’t need someone to tell him he’s not a hero, and does exactly what the hitchhiker says, turns and runs back through the woods, down the path towards the cabin. The briars grab at his face and arms, thorns to scratch, to draw blood and stinging welts across his skin, and he makes it almost as far as the clearing before he hears them coming. The clumsy sounds they make moving through the trees, the dry rustle of leaves and
thump, thump, thump
of hard paws against the earth.

Past the clearing, the ruined cabin sinking swiftly into night and the fairy flicker of a hundred fireflies, and he’s almost all the way to the Chevy before he stops and looks back. There’s no sign of them, nothing but the darkening forest and the dirt road, no hitchhiker or ruby eyes slinking towards him through the gloom. Not even the pursuing noises they made. He’s breathing so hard it’s only a matter of time before he starts throwing up again, heart pounding and a stitch in his side, and Deacon has no idea how long it’s been since he’s run, really
run.
Probably not since he was a kid, since before he took his first drink.

“There’s nothing back there,” he says, says it loud and angry to make himself brave, loud so the night slipping over Shrove Wood can hear him, so anything hiding in the night can hear. “Nothing at all,” and he walks the last fifteen or twenty feet to the car. Deacon lays the pistol on the roof of the Chevy and reaches into his pocket for the keys, but he keeps his eyes on the dirt road, on the trees, because it’s one thing to shout at the night and another thing altogether to believe a word of what he’s said.

And the keys aren’t in his pocket.

He bends over, squints through the driver’s-side window, and there they are, still dangling from the ignition switch. Too busy with the glove compartment and the gun, too worried about the time, to remember to put the goddamn keys in his pocket, and he swears and punches the glass hard, but it doesn’t break. More likely he’s broken his knuckles, broken his hand, and then he hears them again. Footsteps on the road and their eager, panting breath. He looks up, and the hitchhiker is standing in front of the car, still standing on two feet, but looking more like the twiggy dog things than any sort of man, and he laughs a thin and hollow laugh.

“Is there a problem?” he asks, and Deacon thinks that it must be hard to talk through the knotted mess of wire and sticks that his face is becoming as the deceiving flesh peels back in dead and brittle ribbons to show what’s underneath, what was always underneath. “Have we been careless again, Mr. Silvey?”

And right now what seems far more incredible to Deacon than anything he’s seen, or imagined that he’s seen, since turning onto Eleanore Road, since leaving Birmingham, is the calm and perfect clarity that washes over him as he stares into the hitchhiker’s face. Clarity even through the smothering migraine, so maybe a stingy smidgen of strength locked away somewhere inside him after all, or this is simply how insanity feels. This detachment, and he reaches for the revolver lying on the top of the Chevy.

“I
told
you not to come here,” the hitchhiker growls. “I showed you the cards and told you to get your ass back home,” and then he can’t say anything else because there’s nothing left inside his mouth but bare bone and dog teeth, straw and copper wire. Deacon slams the butt of the pistol against the windshield, everything he has behind the blow, but the glass only cracks, concentric, spiderweb ring of a crack no bigger than a silver dollar. The hitchhiker’s claws scrape loud against the hood of the car, as he clambers forward and leans towards Deacon, that skull loose and lolling on trashheap shoulders, and for the second time Deacon cocks the pistol.

“I don’t have
time
for this shit,” he says, squeezes the trigger and the Chevy’s window explodes, diamondshard shower of safety glass and the slug buries itself deep in the passenger seat. The shot louder than he ever would have thought from such a little gun, and the boom echoes and rolls away through Shrove Wood. Deacon unlocks the door and slides in behind the wheel, already turning the key in the ignition before he looks up at the hitchhiker again. But there’s nothing out there now but the trees silhouetted against the indigo sky, a violetred rind of sunset above the forest, and he puts the Chevy into reverse and bounces backwards onto Eleanore Road.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

D
AWN, and Chance sits alone on the floor of her attic bedroom in the big white house that her great-grandfather built, sits with the loaded shotgun across her lap, a half-empty box of shells beside her, and listens to the sounds still coming from the other side of the door. The restless, snuffling animal noises from the narrow stairs that lead to the attic and the fainter, infrequent voices and less-recognizable commotions from downstairs. Outside, the sky is finally turning blue again, palest grayblue from first-light mauve, and the sun is beginning to dapple the leaves with a shifting wash of warmer colors, honey and amber against the summer greens; in the wide and cityclogged valley below the mountain, the sun glints bright off the distant windows of the downtown skyline, the high and sensible, unhaunted glass office buildings of another world.

Not like the zombie movies, surviving the night and now a clean, new day to drive away the monsters. Not like that at all. But she didn’t expect it to be that way, because the voices have been telling her for hours that the sun makes no difference to them. Something that they’d rather avoid, but nothing that can stop them, and Chance has no reason to doubt the things they say. They told her that Sadie and Deacon wouldn’t come back, that she was alone, and they were right about that, so why wouldn’t they be right about the sun, as well? The slanted yellow shaft of morning light through the bedroom window means nothing more than the time since Deacon left her here, at least twenty-four hours now, though she can’t be sure exactly how long it’s been. Deacon and Sadie both already gone when she woke up on Monday, and she called Deacon’s apartment and let the phone ring fourteen times before she finally hung up. Chance didn’t bother calling again, because she knew there wasn’t any point.

So all day Monday come and gone and nothing stranger than the persistent sense that she’d finally awakened from a long nightmare. She might even have been able to persuade herself that
was
the truth, every bit of this a bad dream, if not for the undeniable bits and pieces scattered around the house, all the inconveniently tangible remains: her ruined car, Dancy Flammarion’s mangled duffel bag on the kitchen table and the marked-up copy of
Beowulf
on her chest of drawers, Sadie’s bloodstained clothes in the bathroom, her grandmother’s ledger. These grim souvenirs to give her madness form, to validate insanity, and, finally, the message that Alice Sprinkle left on her answering machine after she found the things Chance drew in colored chalk on the walls and ceiling of the lab.

“No, I won’t call the police,” she said. “I won’t do that,” but she would have the locks changed immediately, and she left the name and phone number of a psychiatrist.

“Please get help, Chance. I’m sorry there wasn’t more I could do for you.”

And that’s what Chance was thinking about when it started, when it started
again,
not long after midnight, sitting in the front porch swing drinking a Coke, sitting there in the dark, staring at the buckled place where her car was still jammed beneath the warped and broken boards: how quickly and completely her life had slipped away and how there was nothing she could ever do to get it back. Thinking about Alice’s message and everything it meant, when she noticed the red eyes watching her from the edges of the yard. Eyes like hot, fireplace embers, and at first she only stared back at them, not quite comprehending, too numb to feel the threat. And then, moving slow as stalking cats, cats stalking small and helpless animals, they began to come closer to the house, and she could make out the rough shapes behind those eyes, but even then Chance didn’t move, sat still and watched as they crept across the lawn towards her.

Come on,
she thought, wondering if maybe they could hear the unspoken things inside her head.
Come on. You’ve already taken everything that matters to me anyway. Get it over with.

Something like peace in that thought, something merciful in the simple, hopeless finality of it, but then they were near enough that she could clearly make out their faces, what they had instead of faces caught in the light of the living-room windows, and Chance stood up and walked very slowly to the front door. Because it was plain enough to see these things had neither peace nor mercy to offer her, and she remembered Elise’s face, Elise trapped in the writhing arms of something that would never die and would never let her die, either.

“It’s only your memories keeping her there,” one of the voices whispers from the other side of the bedroom door, a sexless, dogthroated voice like dry ice and burning straw. “Or don’t you know that?” and Chance pumps the Winchester once and points it at the door, the door and the makeshift barricade of furniture.

“Your guilt,” it says, and downstairs, far away, there’s laughter.

“Shut up,” her finger on the trigger, and she wants to shoot, but there would be a hole, then, a way in, a way for her to see out, and so she only stares at the door down the long, single barrel of the gun.

“If you truly want to help her, then you’re pointing that shotgun in the wrong direction, little pig,” the voice says; downstairs, the laughter is growing louder, getting hysterical, a lunatic’s laughter working its way up through the floor and filling the bedroom like bad air.

“But all you have to do is turn it around. Open the door, and we’ll show you how. Open the door, Chance, and we’ll do it
for
you.”

And then something begins to scratch at the bottom of the door again, determined
scritch, scritch, scritch
of steelsharp claws against the old wood, and without lowering the Winchester she scoots backwards, away from the sound, moving instinctively away from the door, towards the window and the brightening morning sun.

“It only hurts for an instant, and then nothing ever has to hurt again.”

“
You
can die, too,” she says to the voice, the scritching thing, and that’s true. She knows that’s true because she’s already killed two of them downstairs. Just enough time for her to get to the gun before they found a way into the house, the gun and the box of shells from her grandfather’s room, loading it as quickly as she could and when she looked up two of them were watching her from the hallway. The buckshot tore them apart, roared through the house, and all these hours later her ears are still ringing.