Threshold. Part 1

Threshold.

Caitlin R Kiernan.

"All tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and as unlike the forms that we give them as Man, finally redeemed, will be like and unlike the fallen that we know."

-J. R. R. TOLKIEN (1947).

PROLOGUE.

In the Garden of Proserpine.

THE girl named Chance is standing in the rain, plain and skinny tall girl s.h.i.+vering beneath the April night sky p.i.s.sing rain like icywet needles, and she can't stop giggling. She's been giggling for almost half an hour now, at least since they left Deacon's apartment where the three of them finished off a dime bag of pot, Chance and Deacon and Elise getting stoned while they listened to Billie Holiday and argued about whether or not they'd all wind up in jail if they broke into the old water works tunnel on the mountain.

"Jesus, Deke," Elise says, "will you please hurry the h.e.l.l up? I'm freezing my a.s.s off out here," shaky, stammered words because her teeth are chattering so bad, and Chance is trying very hard to stop giggling, doesn't want to laugh at poor Elise soaked straight to the bone, drowned-rat Elise. She tries to imagine the cops pulling into the little lot at the bottom of the park, a dozen Birmingham cops with their strobing cop-car lights and blaring sirens, guns and s.h.i.+ny silver handcuffs.

"Well, don't you worry about that," Deacon says, and then he drops the bolt cutter in the mud and has to bend over to look for it. "There's every reason to believe we'll all drown first."

And that's it for the scary cops, and Chance is giggling again, laughing until her stomach hurts and Elise is glaring at her. She sits down in the wet gra.s.s and the sticky red mud, sits down before she falls down, and "At least hyena girl here's having a good time," Elise mumbles between her chattering teeth.

Deacon has the bolt cutter again, fumbles around in the dark for a moment before he manages to get its razor jaws over the hasp of the rusty padlock, and then he slices through tempered steel like it was b.u.t.ter. The lock falls off the gate and lands with a loud splash in a puddle at his feet. "Oh ye of little faith," he says, pulling away the heavy chain looped through the bars to hold the wrought-iron gate closed, and Elise claps her hands, slow and sarcastic applause as the gate swings open with an ugly, grinding noise. Rust-on-rust creak and squeal like the hull of a s.h.i.+p ripping wide, violated, shearing sound, steel and ice, and Chance is lying on her back staring up at the raindrops plunging towards her, kicked out of heaven and plunging towards the soggy earth.

" 'Down, down, down,' " she says, kindly quoting Lewis Carroll for the rain, " 'Would the fall never come to an end? I wonder how many miles I've fallen . . .' "

"You want to just leave her out here?" Elise asks, but Deacon is already hauling Chance to her feet. She s.h.i.+vers and leans against him, stealing the warmth off him, and kisses his stubbly chin, the arch of his long nose. "C'mon, girlie girl," he says, "shake a leg," one arm around her tight as they step through the low, square arch leading into the tunnel. "Time to go forth and explore the Stygian bowels of the world."

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 s.h.i.+nes 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 "d.a.m.n," he says. "It's cold," and Chance s.h.i.+vers 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 s.h.i.+nes 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, s.h.i.+ning 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.

PART I.

Maps and Legends.

"In our dreams the ageless perils, gargoyles, trials, secret helpers, and instructive figures are nightly still encountered; and in their forms we may see reflected not only the whole picture of our present case, but also the clue to what we must do to be saved."

-JOSEPH CAMPBELL (1949).

CHAPTER ONE.

Chance.

MORNING 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 f.u.c.k 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 f.u.c.k 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 s.h.i.+ne 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 pa.s.senger 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 s.h.i.+ngles 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 pa.s.sed from the indecent brightness of morning into the shadows and leftover sc.r.a.ps of night waiting inside; a house to anyone pa.s.sing 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-gla.s.s 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.

The first funeral when her parents died in a car wreck and Chance was left alive, backseat survivor bruised black and purple and her left arm broken in two different places, but still plenty alive enough to watch their caskets being lowered into the ground, to stand between her grandparents while a minister read things she didn't understand from the Bible, things she didn't want to understand, only wanting to go home, and what she remembers most is the car ride back to her grandparents' house, listening quietly while they argued because her mother and father weren't Christians, but there had been a minister, anyway.

"I told them we didn't want it," her grandmother kept saying. "I told them that Henry and Carol said they didn't want it, and you know d.a.m.n well that they didn't, you know how many times they said they didn't."

"Mrs. Sawyer wanted it," her grandfather said, sounding as tired as Chance, and her grandmother blew her nose loud into her handkerchief, made an angry sound through her teeth, and "It wasn't Mrs. Sawyer's funeral, Joe," she said. Her grandfather didn't reply, and Chance's arm hurt, but she was too tired to cry anymore, watched the houses and trees and fireplugs slipping past instead.

So she went to live with them in their big house on the mountain above the city, and six weeks later a doctor cut the plaster cast off her arm, bones healed and bruises fading, and no one much seemed to notice all the other ways she had been hurt. In the beginning, whenever her grandmother visited her parents' graves, Chance was always with her, flowerbright bouquets and her last name carved deep in granite like a spelling lesson. Sometimes she asked questions, and "Your mom and dad are asleep," her grandmother would reply, or "You'll understand when you're a little older," but never sounding as if she believed what she was saying.

Sometimes her grandmother would wander among the other tombstones, reading the other names aloud or to herself, and Chance would lie down on the green cemetery gra.s.s, her ear pressed against the earth, listening for her father's snore, the way her mother sometimes talked in her sleep. But never anything, and finally her grandmother caught her, made her promise never to do it again.

"That's disrespectful, lying on someone's grave like that," and then she was crying too hard to explain what she meant.

And one night, when Chance was six and had a cold so bad she'd already missed a week of school, she woke up and her mother was sitting in the chair beside her bedroom window, sitting very still and watching her, the January moonlight s.h.i.+ning through her like she was made of gla.s.s. Her eyes like pearls, and Chance stared back at her, fevery, and her throat too raw to say anything, wis.h.i.+ng she had a drink of water or a Grapico, but afraid her mother might disappear if she moved. She finally drifted back to sleep, and when she woke again it was morning and her mother was gone, nothing in the chair but winterpale sunlight on the cover of McElligot's Pool by Dr. Seuss. She told her grandmother, who said it had been a dream, only a dream because of the fever, said that people with bad fevers sometimes dreamed very strange things, but she sat up with Chance the next night, and the next, sat there in the chair where her mother had sat, every night until she was well again. Standing guard or waiting, and Chance never asked which.

And then, fifteen years old when her grandmother hung herself from the lowest limb of a water oak behind the house, coa.r.s.e knots tied around strong wood and her frail neck and she stood on a ladder to reach, stepped off to fall. A long night of thunder and lightning, and Chance, teenage girl caught between two storms, the one raging outside and the one trapped inside the house, laid awake listening to the raindrops shattering themselves against the roof and windows. Listening to her grandparents downstairs, up later than usual and arguing, angry, bitter words pa.s.sing between them, thrown like china cups and saucers. She'd seen it coming, like the storm clouds building themselves anvil-tall across the western horizon just before dark. Always so hot in her attic room by August, nothing but an old electric desk fan, and that night Chance hadn't bothered to turn down the covers, had tried to read for an hour or so. But the storm and their voices and the sweat that dripped from her face to splotch the pages all too distracting, and finally she'd given up and the secondhand paperback copy of Dandelion Wine folded open to Chapter Five on the floor, discarded for the night, while she tried to understand what they were fighting about. A word here, half a sentence there, m.u.f.fled puzzle rising up through the floorboards.

". . . but I'm not the one trying to pretend it never even happened, now am I?"

"I don't know what you want from me, Esther."

"Just stop treating me like I'm crazy so you don't have to think about it anymore," and a door slamming very hard somewhere in the house then, before the last word, the very last word, and maybe she didn't even hear that part at all, or heard it wrong; the sounds too faint, housesifted, her grandmother sobbing, and one of them (Chance was never sure which, if either) said, "Dicranurus," one word of Latin or Greek that meant nothing to her, repeated again and again like a litany or invocation, but not that unusual to hear Latin in the house, her grandfather still teaching geology at the university, her grandmother a retired paleontologist, so the word made strange only by circ.u.mstance, by context, that she was hearing it then. She found a pencil on her desk, schoolyellow No. 2 Ticonderoga nub, and scribbled a phonetic spelling inside the back cover of Dandelion Wine before she lay back down.

And then she fell asleep and dreamed that the thunder was something more than simple sound, something dark and brooding far above the world, and the rain fell from it in hissing, acid streaks the color of old motor oil, greasy rain to steam on the gra.s.s and trees, to clot in the rain spouts and mud holes. The sound of her grandfather's cries getting through faint at first, old man's voice basketwoven between the grayblack rain, between the deafening movements of the thing in the sky. Chance would not remember waking up, coming awake by syrupslow degrees, and then she was standing in her underwear and a mostly white Smas.h.i.+ng Pumpkins T-s.h.i.+rt on the back porch, and this rain was cold and blacker than in her dream. Her grandfather was hanging onto a ladder, halfway up a ladder and wrestling desperately with something dangling from a limb of the big oak tree.

"Grandpa!" Chance yelled, shouting to be heard above the crash and wail of the thunderstorm. "Help me, Chance," and her grandfather not looking away from the limp thing in the tree. "Jesus Christ, help me get her down." And by then Chance could see, her mind not yet ready to believe what she was seeing, but that didn't make it any less so. The thing in the tree moved, turning in the wind or maybe from the force of her grandfather sawing at the rope with a kitchen knife. Chance stepped towards the ladder, bare feet in mud and wet gra.s.s and part of her still wandering in the nightmare, not wanting the oily rain to touch her, not wanting to look up. But the rope broke, snapped like a firecracker, and her grandmother's body fell lifeless to the ground.

A few hours after her grandmother's funeral and the house filled with aunts and uncles and cousins, people Chance didn't really know and didn't want to see, at least no ministers this time, but everyone bringing food like your grandmother dying made you want to f.u.c.king eat. The house stinking of ca.s.seroles and hams and b.u.t.ter beans, apple pies and chocolate cake, and Joe Matthews drunk in the front parlor, drinking gla.s.s after gla.s.s of Jack Daniel's whiskey like it was water, water to make him forget. Chance was hiding in the library, and she could hear the women pretending to be busy in the kitchen, her Great-uncle William telling her grandfather, "That ain't gonna help, Joe. You're just gonna make yourself sick, that's all. You need to eat something. Let me have Patsy get you some coffee and something to eat."

Chance wanting to defend her grandfather, but not about to leave the library, dustysafe sanctuary of shelves and gla.s.s cases and the musty smell of all the books, the door locked from the inside against birdnervous aunts who thought maybe a few slabs of smoked ham and a spoonful of mashed potatoes would make anything better, would make anything right again. Chance was sitting at the big, walnut-burl table her grandparents had always used for looking over their topographic and geologic maps, their stratigraphic sections, big, unpolished chunks of powderwhite Sylacauga marble at each corner for paperweights, green felt glued to the bottom of the rocks so they wouldn't scratch the wood; this place for finding points of reference, orientation, place for protractors and slide-rule calculations, place for not being lost-and that's where she found the book, Handworterbuch der Naturwissenshaften, 1933, and Chance's eyes moving absently down a yellowed page, detailed engravings of trilobites, and they had always been her favorite fossils, her grandmother's specialty. There were hundreds or thousands of the petrified arthropods tucked away in cabinets and drawers throughout the house, most smaller than a thumbnail, but a few giants over a foot long. And so nothing out of the ordinary about this page, German and Latin, Devonian trilobites of the subfamily Miraspidinae, ill.u.s.trations of fossils from Africa and Oklahoma, and way down at the bottom of the page Chance found the word, the name she'd scribbled in the back of Dandelion Wine three nights before, Dicranurus, and a circle drawn around four of the ill.u.s.trations in faded red pencil, four views of the trilobite and a red circle like a fairy charm to contain the drawings inside. Dicranurus monstrosus, the specimen figured from Oulmes, Morocco, coiled like a tiny gargoyle on the page; spines so long they might as well be tentacles and the twin projections that spiraled like ram's horns from its head. A chill along her arms, then the back of her neck like a gust of cold air and one finger cautiously crossing the red circle, another half second and Chance would have touched the image of the creature itself, but someone started hammering at the door. "Chance? Are you in there, honey? Chance? You should come out and eat something."

And she closed the book, slammed it shut and put it away, had long ago learned the exact position of every book in the library so it wasn't hard to find the empty place where it belonged. "I'm coming," she called to the voice behind the door. "I'll be out in a moment," and always meaning to come back to the book later, always meaning to ask her grandfather about the ugly little trilobite held within the red circle, but in time she forgot it, and forgot the dream of a night sky that leaked steaming, oilslick tears.

Three months before her grandfather's heart attack, the violent last gasps of spring on the scalding heels of summer, and the day she broke up with Deacon there were tornadoes, black and twisting clouds touching down all the way from Arkansas to Georgia. Civil defense sirens going off like doomsday, and she gave him the news outside the cruddy, little bar where he spent so much of his time. The place where he sat and drank himself stupid and numb so he didn't have to face the world. All the weeks it had taken her to find the nerve, the careful, padded words, to end something that was already over; Deacon listened, and when she was finished he shrugged his bony shoulders, ran the fingers of one hand through his hair and looked up at the angry sky.

"Yeah," he said. "Okay, whatever," so calm, so f.u.c.king resigned, and she wanted to hit him then, all his drunkard's bulls.h.i.+t and even the sleeping around on her and that was the first time she'd ever wanted to hit him.

"Jesus, is that all you have to say to me? Three G.o.dd.a.m.n years and that's all you can think of to say to me?" And he just smiled a little, then, stubbly b.u.m's smile for her, and he rubbed hard at his chin.

"What do you want me to say, Chance? You know I'm not going to change your mind, and I don't feel like arguing with you right now," and so she left him standing there, turned around and stalked quickly, determinedly, away; most of the things she'd meant to say left unspoken, the disbelief at what he'd done with Elise and the sloppy, half-a.s.sed way he'd tried to lie about it, the straw that broke the camel's back. All the soursharp anger still bottled up hot behind her eyes, and she walked all the way home through the siren wail and thunder- and lightning-scented wind.

And hours later, almost dark and the thunderstorms had blown themselves away east, left the city wet and gray, and Chance was trying to concentrate on a stack of notes for her thesis, envelope of black-and-white photographs of the flat and dimpled skulls of primitive amphibians and fish with fingers, anything but Deacon Silvey and her screwed-up life, when the phone rang and it was Elise. A bad connection from the weather and that brittle, hesitant sound in her voice that said she'd been crying and might start again at the drop of a hat.

"It's my fault, isn't it?" she asked, and "No," Chance said, trying hard to sound like she was absolutely certain she meant what she was saying.

"Yes it is. I know it is. How can you even pretend that it isn't? If I hadn't-"

"Deke's a f.u.c.king drunk, and I can't deal with it anymore. That's all the reason I needed."

"You had that much reason from the start, Chance. He was a drunk when you met him."

"So I'm a slow learner. I'm a m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.t. Rub it in, why don't you."

Elise sighed, and "You wouldn't have ever left him over that," she said. "Not if I hadn't slept with him."

"If you say so. Fine. But I need to go now. I have work to do."

A long pause, and Chance stared at her notes and photographs, listened impatiently to the static and silence as Elise sc.r.a.ped up the courage to finish what she'd begun.

"Chance, what happened to us in the water works tunnel that night? I've been trying to remember, trying to be sure that what I do remember is what really did happen . . . but it's all so blurry now, it's all so . . ." and she trailed off, then, running out of words or resolve. Chance kept her eyes on the photos, the incontestable reality of her fossils, the comfort of tangible things, and when she finally replied, she used words that were just as safe, just as black and white.

"You can't remember what happened because you were stoned. h.e.l.l, Elise, I don't know. We got turned around in there somehow. We got scared and confused and lost track of the time. It was dark. But mostly, we were stoned."

"That's what Deacon kept telling me," Elise said, almost whispering. "He doesn't want to talk about it, either."

"I didn't say I didn't want to talk about it."

"But you don't, do you? It frightens you just to think about it."

"Why the f.u.c.k do you bother asking me questions if you already know all the answers?"

"I know it's my fault. I know."

Chance glanced across the room at the clock beside her bed, the anger too close to the surface now, and she knew if she didn't get off the phone very soon she'd end up telling Elise all the things she actually did blame her for.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I've got an important meeting with my major professor early in the morning. I'll call you tomorrow, I promise," and "Forgive me," Elise whispered, and she hung up first, before Chance could say anything else.

It rained the day they buried Elise, picture-perfect funeral for a girl who swallowed a whole month's worth of Pamelor all at once, then slashed her arms from wrist to elbow, who died alone in an overflowing tub of bloodcold water in a motel that rented rooms to hookers and crack dealers, pay in cash by the hour, and Elise had paid them for a whole night.

"You take just as long as you have to," her grandfather said, one hand resting on her shoulder, gesture they both knew couldn't comfort, and he gave Chance his big bat-black umbrella before following the others back to their cars; but wrong that she should be dry and Elise in the wet ground, so she let it fall from her hand as soon as her grandfather was out of sight, and the wind s.n.a.t.c.hed the umbrella away, sent it bouncing and rolling off down the hill until it snagged in the lee of a towering granite angel. And Chance sat with her while the late April rain needled Oak Hill Cemetery, persistent drizzle to scrub the old and weathered tombstones clean, to wash clayorange rivulets from the fresh wound in the gra.s.s where the workmen had just finished filling in Elise's grave. They took away the big green canopy and the plasticfalse squares of Astroturf, still another month before her marker would be delivered so there was only the uneven mound of mud, the gaudy flowers left to drown under the gray sky, wreaths of roses and carnations, Styrofoam and wire, baby's breath and ferns. Took away all the metal folding chairs, too, except the one Chance was sitting on, and maybe they were afraid to ask for it, maybe figured it was better to come back later.

Nothing left to say, no peace to make with a corpse as dead and still as the earth piled in on top of the casket, just the ugly hole inside Chance and nothing that would ever fill that in. A place in the world where Elise had been and that place left as empty as the moment before she was born, as empty as the moment before the universe. The price you pay for not believing in G.o.d, she thought.

"Is that it, Elise?" and her voice so loud, so big, in the rainhushed cemetery quiet. "Do people believe so this doesn't have to hurt so much?" and that's all she could say because she was already crying again, her tears stolen by the rain, salt absorbed, and if only the storm could begin to dilute the drysocket ache trying to take her apart, if only she could crawl in after Elise and let the f.u.c.king worms have them both.

But another hour, hour and a half and night coming early, and she got up, s.h.i.+vering, dripping, took one rose from the grave, retrieved the umbrella, and walked away down the deadstudded hill to where Joe Matthews was waiting for her in the car. And the next day Chance turned twenty-three.

"Forgive me," Elise says, and Chance is standing alone outside the building where Deacon lives, Quinlan Castle like a bad joke or the entrance to the world's shoddiest amus.e.m.e.nt park; bizarre medieval facade wrapped tight around squalid little apartments, c.o.c.kroaches and one whole side of the building condemned, abandoned to the homeless people who have broken in through first-floor windows and torn up the carpet for their smoky, toxic fires.

"It wasn't your fault," she says, though she knows Elise can't hear her, says it anyway as she climbs the steps, the mustydark stairwell, and the door to Deke's third-floor apartment is painted the color of ketchup. Maybe this time she knows better than to open the door, knows better than to look inside. Maybe this time she can just turn around and what she doesn't know really won't hurt her, won't hurt Elise, either. But the door's already open, even though she doesn't remember reaching for the handle, doesn't even remember turning her key in the lock, and nothing's any different this time than all the times before.

"Were you raised in a barn?" Deacon asks, and so Chance pulls the door closed behind her. "I can't afford to air-condition the whole G.o.dd.a.m.n building," and she knows the old window unit hasn't worked since last July, the apartment always so hot, never even a breeze through the open windows, but she doesn't say anything, stands perfectly still as Elise scrambles for her clothes.

"I thought maybe you really weren't coming back this time," Deke says, lifts Elise's candypink bra off the back of his sofa and hands it to her. "I thought maybe you and that s.h.i.+tty old car would just keep driving. h.e.l.l, I guess I should've known better."