Threshold (41 page)

A sound from the other side of the bedroom door like a deep, hitching breath or the wind pushed out before a summer storm, and downstairs the laughing ends as abruptly as it began. The scritching stops, too, but Chance doesn’t lower the shotgun. Her arms are aching, her arms and shoulders, and the Winchester seems almost as heavy as if it were carved from stone, but she keeps it trained on the door, the white door and a chair stuck under the knob, the chest of drawers and the headboard of her bed.

“Little pig?” it whispers. “Can’t you hear me, little pig? Aren’t you listening?” and Chance slides a couple of feet farther away from the door, breaking the sunbeam now and it pours warm across her face, no idea how cold she was until that light touches her, no idea how tired, and she turns her head, lets the day wash pure and brilliant across her face. She shuts her eyes, drinking it in like medicine, strong and sobering medicine against madness.

That’s what this is, isn’t it? That’s all this can be,
she thinks, all of it too absurd to ever possibly be anything else. A crazy girl locked inside her house with a gun, locked up alone and hearing voices, seeing shit that isn’t there. If she’d really fired the shots she remembers firing, someone would have heard, Mr. Eldridge next door would have heard and called the police. None of this anything but her life finally catching up with her, Elise the last straw and then Dancy just enough to push her over the edge. Just like Alice said, and hell, even Deacon didn’t believe her.

“Little pig, little pig, let me come in,” the voice whispers eagerly from behind the door. Chance opens her eyes and glances towards it, the muzzle of the shotgun dragging along the floor, and she smiles, a weak, sick smile for her delusions, all the loss and hurt she’s bottled up, hidden away, fucking
lived
through, and these sad and shabby horrors are the best that her mind can conjure.

“No,” she says. “I
know
what you are now,” and turns her face back to the sun.

And the staring, misshapen thing pressed against the attic window smiles back at her, a shadow clinging tightly to the roof by spiderthin legs or arms, and Chance screams and raises the Winchester. The clinging thing opens its jaws wide, a silent, straining yawn to mock her, and there are eyes inside that mouth, wild eyes, an albino’s white rabbit eyes looking out at her. Chance pulls the trigger and the windowpane disintegrates in a deafening spray of buckshot and glass and stringy black flesh.

 

Driving all night, drinking cup after scalding cup of sour truckstop coffee to stay awake, bottles of Mountain Dew, and finally two foil packets of red ephedrine tablets that made his stomach hurt, made him feel like he was going to puke but kept his eyes wide open. Everything that might have already happened to Chance and Sadie to keep him moving and keep him from thinking too much about whatever he saw at the cabin, at the sinkhole, whatever chased him through Shrove Wood and all the way back to Eleanore Road. And then sunrise, and Birmingham, and Chance’s house doesn’t look any different than it did when he left.

He parks the Chevy halfway up the gravel driveway, cuts the engine, and sits there for a moment, gazing out at the house through the dirty windshield. Trying to see clearly past the adrenaline and cheap speed, the caffeine and fear, past jangling, strung-out nerves that want to color everything the same ruined shade of gray.

You just chill the fuck out, Deke. Get your goddamn head together before you go barging in there, scaring the shit out of them.
And that’s a good thought, Sadie and Chance safe and asleep in the musty sanctuary of that old house and
he’s
the worst thing they have to fear, a very good thought, indeed, and he grabs hold of it like a drowning man clutching thin air and hangs on. He reaches beneath the seat, and there’s the pistol, still four bullets in the cylinder, and it’s not like he’s going to need the damned thing, but a little insurance never hurt anyone, just in case. Deacon tucks it back into the front of his jeans and gets out of the car.

He makes it almost all the way to the front porch before Chance screams, has just enough time to look up before he hears the gunshot and the attic window explodes. Deacon ducks, covers his head with his arms, nothing but his own flesh to shield him from the jagged rain of glass and splinters, and one shard carves a long gash near his left elbow before it buries itself like a knife in the dewdamp grass at his feet. The blast echoes and fades as it rushes away from the house, escaping, losing itself at the speed of sound in the smoggy morning air, and Deacon stares down in surprise and shock at his own dark blood, blood to stain the glass that sliced his arm and the blood dripping steadily from his arm to the ground. A stickywet crimson puddle of himself and the grass all around him littered with sparkling fragments of the window, and then Chance screams again.

Deacon forgets all about the blood and the pain, forgets the desperate, stupid fantasies that this house and those inside have somehow been spared, and he crosses the remaining distance to the porch in three or four long strides. No front steps, so he uses the wrecked Impala instead, clambers onto the trunk and from the trunk to the car’s roof, rusty metal that pops loud and sags beneath his weight. And that’s when he sees all the ugly scrapes and gouges in the porch boards, and the front door busted in and hanging crooked and half off its hinges.

He calls out for Sadie, shouts her name twice at the top of his lungs, three times without a reply, before he draws the revolver, steps off the Impala onto the porch, and the wood creaks underfoot. Behind him, the roof of the car pops back into shape, and “Sadie!” he shouts again. “Goddamn it, somebody in there answer me!” but the morning is quiet and still, no birds or insects, not even the sound of cars down on Sixteenth to break the spell.

Deacon cocks the hammer and takes a step towards the door, another step and from here he can see that the gouges don’t end at the threshold; the doorsill torn completely away, and the scrape marks disappear into the house, as if someone’s dragged the tines of a heavy iron rake across the wood.

Or claws,
he thinks.
Claws could do that,
remembering the marks the hitchhiker left on the hood of Soda’s car. He holds the gun out in front of him, both hands around the butt of the pistol, cold steel and plastic slick against his sweaty palms, and he follows the marks into the house.

 

Chance sits with her back to the wall, squeezed into the corner where her bed used to be, before she pulled it apart to build the barricade. From here she can see the window and the bedroom door, so no more nasty surprises. No more misdirection, getting her to look the other way while something comes sneaking up from behind. There are a few tatters of flesh and gristle the greenblack of ripe avocado skin draped across the windowsill, a few oily spatters on her face and arms, but most of the thing went over the side. She has the box of 20-gauge Federal cartridges in her lap now and takes turns pointing the shotgun at the door and the shattered window, rests the barrel on her knee, trying to take a little of the weight off her arms.

The scratching and snuffling noises have stopped, nothing at all from the stairs since she pulled the trigger, so maybe they’ve gone. Maybe three’s her lucky number, and they have better things to do than getting picked off one by one. Or maybe she just can’t hear them anymore, the ringing in her ears so loud now that she might be deaf for life. Her right arm and shoulder hurt like hell from the recoil, and there’s probably already a bruise, something in there dislocated or broken for all she knows.

“Listen to them, Chance, please,” and Sadie is standing in the shadows on the other side of the room. Sadie just like the last time Chance saw her, the green shirt from her grandfather’s closet, the borrowed boots too big for her feet, her black hair like it’s never been introduced to a comb. And blood. Her skin and clothes slicked with dried and clotting blood like she’s bathed in the stuff, like someone drowned in blood and come back, slaughterhouse Ophelia, and when she opens her mouth to speak, it leaks from her lips and runs down her chin.

“They only want us not to think about them,” she says, and then a pause, and she rubs at her left temple, rubs like she has a headache or is trying hard to remember something very important that she’s almost forgotten. “Our thoughts make spirals in their world,” she says.

“You’re not Sadie Jasper,” and Chance pumps the shotgun again, aiming at Sadie now instead of the door or the window. “I know they want me to think you’re Sadie, but you’re not her.”

Sadie rubs at her head again, pain or a frantic concentration in that gesture, that maroonslick mask passing itself off as her face, grotesque parody of Sadie trying to remember something that’s right there on the tip of her tongue. Something she must have known for certain only a second ago, and she gazes at the floor for a moment and then looks back to Chance.

“I
told
them that I wouldn’t be Sadie like this. Not like
this
. But they didn’t give me a choice. Please, Chance. They won’t let me go. They won’t let
any
of us go, until no one knows about them anymore.”

“I don’t believe you,” Chance says, knows that she’s lying, but right now a lie that even she doesn’t believe is better than the alternative, so she says it again. “I don’t believe you’re Sadie.”

Sadie looks towards the ceiling and smiles, more blood spilling from her mouth, and she raises her arms as if she would worship the sky hidden beyond paint and plaster and shingles, her ghostblue eyes like someone who’s waited a thousand years to be even this close to the sun again.

“Don’t make me do this, Sadie,” Chance says, realizes that she’s crying now, hot tears streaking her face, salt to sting her eyes, and she slips her trembling index finger through the trigger guard. “Go back and tell them not to make me do this to you.”

Sadie closes her eyes, and her head droops to one side, but her face still turned towards the unseen morning sky. When she speaks, it’s the deliberate speech of someone reciting a poem or a pledge, something memorized and care taken with each and every word.

“Where great things go on unceasingly . . . yet wholly different in kind . . . where immense and terrible personalities hurry by, intent on vast purposes . . .
vast
purposes, Chance.”

And Chance is getting to her feet, back braced against the wall and the sudden swell and surge of anger to give her strength, despite the exhaustion and the fear, the ache in her shoulder.

“Are you really that
afraid
of me?” she screams at the barricaded door, screams through her tears, and something on the stairs begins to mutter excitedly to itself or to something else. “You cowardly fuckers, you cowardly, fucking
shits.
You
are
afraid, aren’t you? You
can’t
do this yourself. You’re too goddamn scared of dying to even
try.
”

Sadie opens her eyes, raises her head, and she watches Chance. Like someone watching the world slipping away from them, and slowly she lowers her arms.

“You’re
dead,
Sadie,” Chance whispers, whispers like someone pleading with a drunk who wants to drive, a sleepy child who refuses to go to bed. And Sadie smiles again, smiles and shows teeth, but not her teeth, crooked needle teeth like a blind abyssal fish, row upon row stained crimson and gums as black as coal.

“The division,” she says and hugs herself, arms tight around her own shoulders like she’s freezing, speaking from some white and polar place. “The division here is
so
thin that it leaks through somehow. Their
sound
. . . the humming of their region . . . It’s
in
the willows. It’s the willows themselves humming, because here the willows have been made symbols of the forces that are against us.”

Chance raises the shotgun and aims it at Sadie’s face, and the dead girl glares stubbornly back at her.

“Not the willows. I didn’t mean to say that. It’s the
trilobites,
Chance. The trilobites your grandmother found, and the thing in the bottle—”

“Please god, Sadie,” Chance says, “I can’t handle any more of this. I fucking swear I can’t,” and she takes a step towards Sadie, closing the distance between them because she knows she’ll never be able to pull the trigger again if she misses the first time.

“You’re not
listening
to me, Chance. Do you know how much this fucking
hurts
, and you’re not even listening,” and now Sadie has changed, Sadie or the fabrication that only wants her to believe it’s Sadie, if that makes any difference. Those blue eyes bright and furious, and it moves so quickly that Chance doesn’t have time to shoot, seems to slide across the bedroom floor like butter across a hot skillet, a thousand times smoother than that even: motion without the slightest effort, without the burden of time or distance. And Sadie has
grown,
no more of her than before, but what there is stretched somehow, and now the shotgun’s clutched in the twiggy fingers of her left hand, Chance’s chin held painfully in her right.

“I’m not supposed to tell you
anything,
bitch,” Sadie says, hisses angry past all those barbed and crooked teeth. “But you learn, over here.”

Outside, something has started slamming itself repeatedly against the bedroom door, something hitting the door like a battering ram,
blam, blam, blam,
and already the wood has begun to warp and crack. Another minute, and it’ll be in the room with them.

“It’s what the trilobites
mean,
” Sadie says, Wonderland nightmare after the drink-me bottle, and so now she has to crouch down low to look Chance in the eyes. “Time, and what people find when they start looking in time. The willows, if they look in the tunnel. If they look behind the wall.”

Sadie leans very close then, her lips pressed to Chance’s ear, whispering, and her lips are cold, but her voice is colder, the freezing words pouring out of her, and “I don’t give a shit about
you,
” she says. “But Dancy’s in here, and I won’t have them getting Deacon, too.”