Threshold. Part 10

"And what look would that be, exactly?" he asks, the thinnest, wry edge to his voice, the softest slur, and he sips at his drink. She's rubbing her hands together now like they're cold, like she needs to pee. Her grandmother's ledger is lying in her lap, and he's pretty sure she's afraid to let it out of her sight.

"I need you to give me a break, please," and she turns towards him, raises her voice just enough that there's no danger that she'll have to repeat herself. "I'm in the dark here, okay? I don't think I've ever been this kind of scared before."

"Well, then. By all means, welcome to the club," and he smiles again and raises his gla.s.s in her direction, gestures in a mock toast and takes a long drink.

"Please, Deacon. I mean it."

"I'm sorry. That was just a little too G.o.dd.a.m.ned ironic, you know?"

"But I'm right, aren't I? You saw something at the water works tunnel that you're not telling Sadie. You know what happened to Dancy."

Deacon leans slowly forward again and sets his gla.s.s back down on the coffee table, stares at the condensation on the dark wood, the overlapping rings of water to leave pale scars on the wax.

"Isn't it a little late to start believing in s.h.i.+t like this, Chance? I mean, you've made it this far just fine without the Easter Bunny or Jesus or f.u.c.king Santa Claus. Are you absolutely sure you want to blow it now and succ.u.mb to the irrational after all these years of faithful disbelief? h.e.l.l, what would Joe think?"

Deacon thinks that he can feel her glare, if looks could kill glare, and "Next time you're lying awake," she says, "trying to figure out why I left you, why I couldn't take any more, try to remember what you just said to me, Deacon."

"Touche," and he turns to face her, then, wipes his wet lips with the back of one hand. And Chance isn't even looking at him, gla.s.sy, nowhere stare of a junky or a taxidermied deer instead of what he expected, eyes fixed on nothing and no one in the world. An expression so lost, so turned back upon itself, that it makes the little hairs on the back of his neck p.r.i.c.kle and stand up, and he reaches for his whiskey.

"You're a son of a b.i.t.c.h," she says and runs her fingers over the cover of the ledger, not seeing it now instead of not seeing him.

"Yeah, right," Deacon says. He swallows a soothing mouthful of Jim Beam and rubs at his face, trying to rub away the familiar regret, that he can't take back words that are already history, that have found their mark and already done their damage.

"What did you see at the tunnel, Deke?" she asks again. "What happened to her?"

"I don't know what happened to her, all right? And if I told you what I saw out there, I don't care what sort of revelation or epiphany you've had, Chance, you wouldn't f.u.c.king believe me. Right now, I don't think I believe me."

"It has something to do with Elise," Chance says, and she's chewing at her lower lip so hard that Deacon thinks it's going to start bleeding. "It has something to do with why Elise died, and that night we broke into the tunnel. And it has something to do with why my grandmother killed herself."

"Maybe," Deacon says quietly, staring intently at the lumps of bourbonstained ice melting in his gla.s.s because he doesn't want to see that ugly, nowhere look on Chance's face anymore. "I don't know. I honestly don't know."

"That would be-" and she pauses, searching for just the right word, and Deacon keeps his eyes on his gla.s.s. "That would be elegant, wouldn't it? No, that would be sublime."

"Or schizophrenic," Deacon grumbles, and now he turns to pour himself another drink.

"If all these things, all these awful things, if they're all connected somehow-"

"Yeah, that would be very convenient, wouldn't it?"

Out on the porch, Sadie has stopped swinging, and for a moment there's only the wet sounds of whiskey being poured, the tinkle of ice against gla.s.s.

"I'm not joking," she says and begins rubbing at the cover of the ledger again.

"And I'm not making fun of you, Chance. But I don't want you to go getting paranoid on me and start seeing connections that aren't there. I don't want you to start believing in s.h.i.+t just because you need to believe in something. Not now."

"Do you think I'm going crazy?" and she looks up from the book in her lap, looks directly at Deacon this time instead of through him or past him, and at least some of the emptiness is gone from her eyes. She wants me to say yes, he thinks. That would be the kindest thing I could say to her, the most comforting thing.

"You know that isn't what I meant, Chance."

"Then do you think that was really a dog at the lab today?" she asks. "And whatever it was Sadie saw tonight, do you think that was a dog, too?"

Deacon licks his lips, his mouth suddenly dry as dust and old bones, but he sets the fresh whiskey back on the coffee table untouched. "No," he says. "No, I don't." And she nods and reaches out and takes his hand, so long since he's felt that touch that he can't even f.u.c.king remember the last time, and now she's squeezing his hand so hard it hurts.

"I want you and Sadie to stay here with me tonight," Chance says. "I'll drive you over to your place if there's anything you need, but I think we should stick together."

"Sure, okay," Deacon says, feeling drunk and stupid, and Chance sighs a long and ragged sigh, relieved rush of air across her teeth, and she lets go of his hand and turns back to the ledger. And that's almost as bad as anything he saw or only thought he saw at the tunnel, the sudden absence of her touch after that brief, unexpected contact almost as terrible as the scarecrow things that weren't dogs and the sorrow and resolve in Dancy Flammarion's pink eyes.

CHAPTER TEN.

Life Before Man LATE Sunday morning, and Chance cooked breakfast for Deacon and Sadie before she left the house-bacon and runny scrambled eggs, steaming black coffee, toast and Bama apple jelly-and no one said anything during the meal. Not a word about Dancy or the water works, menacing phantom dogs or what they should do next, and when they were finished she drove away to school alone, to the unavoidable meeting with Alice. Because the crate was still missing, everything in the crate and everything that came out of the crate still missing, as well-the chunk of hemat.i.te, the trilobites, the ugly pickled thing and the old jar of alcohol that had held it for more than a century, all the specimens that Chance hadn't even unpacked yet-all of it simply gone.

And now Chance is sitting in an uncomfortable molded plastic chair in Alice Sprinkle's office, modular chair the color of yellow Play-Doh in the middle of this cramped and disorderly broom-closet excuse for an office. She tries to sit still, rubs at her eyes and tries hard to look like she isn't thinking about a dozen things that seem more important than what Alice is saying to her.

"Girl, I promise if it was anybody else, I'd be asking for your keys right now," and Alice glares at Chance from the safe, other side of her papercluttered desk, other side of her thick bifocals, and Chance knows she's telling the truth. Knows that Alice is so protective of the shoddy little building and the treasures inside that she'd probably have done a lot worse than take back a set of keys if it had been someone else who ran off and left both doors standing wide open for two hours. Part of Chance wants to feel grateful, and part of her still suspects she should be ashamed of herself, jumping at shadows like a child, like a silly girl, letting her imagination take the place of common sense, but after the last two days she isn't much of either.

"I'm sorry," she says again, whether she actually means it or not; she's already lost track of how many times she's apologized in the twenty minutes since she walked into the office.

"Yeah, that's what you keep saying," and Alice takes another stick of Juicy Fruit from the pack lying in front of her, slowly peels the silver foil away from the chewing gum without ever taking her eyes off Chance. "But I still haven't heard you sound like you actually mean it."

"Of course I mean it," Chance says. "That was my grandmother's work, and it was important. I don't know what else you expect from me, Alice. I don't know what you want me to say."

Alice stares at her silently for a moment, the cold, familiar scrutiny in her eyes like Chance is just another one of her fossilized bugs beneath a microscope, something to be cla.s.sified and cataloged, something to be labeled and filed sensibly away, and "Maybe if you tried a little bit harder to help me understand," she says finally.

"How? I've told you what happened. I've told you three times what happened."

"Right. A stray dog came into the lab and it chased you," Alice says, making no attempt to hide the skepticism in her voice. "It scared you so badly, you went home and didn't even think to call anyone about it for nearly two hours. That's what you said."

Chance sighs and glances anxiously down at her backpack sitting on the floor between her boots. Her grandmother's ledger is in there, and she was up half the night reading the d.a.m.ned thing, understanding less and less with every page she turned. Meticulous notes that eventually disintegrated into undated, rambling speculation and strings of numbers, lengthy linear and quadratic equations and geometrical diagrams. The book frightens her, but right now it's better than facing the doubt on Alice Sprinkle's face, the doubt that might as well be an accusation, and she wishes Alice would tell her that she imagined the whole thing or that she's lying and be done with it.

"It just doesn't make any G.o.dd.a.m.n sense," Alice mutters, almost whispering now, talking to herself, and she inspects the puttygray stick of Juicy Fruit before she folds it double and puts it in her mouth. "Why would someone want the stuff from that crate and, in fact, only the stuff from that crate? As far as I can tell, they didn't so much as touch the computers or the scopes or any of the cabinets, all the things they might have been able to sell . . ." and she trails off, chews her gum and stares intently down at the confusion of reprints and ungraded papers littering her desk, picks up a pencil and begins tapping the eraser end against the coffee-stained cover of a stratigraphy textbook.

"What I'm about to ask you next," Alice says, and she leans a little ways towards Chance, but she's still looking at the desktop, still tapping the pencil against the textbook. "I wouldn't even ask you something like this, except I figure that the cops are probably gonna do it, and I'd rather you heard it from me first."

"Ask me what, Alice?"

Alice lays the pencil down and looks up at Chance; there's something reluctant in her eyes, something more than hesitant and out of place on her face that's always so d.a.m.ned sure of itself, always so entirely confident.

"Yesterday you were pretty adamant about keeping the contents of that crate a secret. So I was wondering, is it possible, after I left, that you had second thoughts. Decided maybe you shouldn't have shown it to me, that maybe you shouldn't have brought it down to the lab at all-?"

"Oh, please," Chance moans, and she stands up, indignant and angrytired sigh to sum up almost everything she feels, and she reaches for her backpack, just wanting to be anywhere else in the world right now, wanting to get away fast.

"No, Chance. Wait," Alice says. "You have to understand, I'm only trying to make some kind of sense out of this."

"I did not f.u.c.king lie to you. Why the h.e.l.l do you think it makes sense that I would have lied to you? I've never lied to you."

"I'm sorry, but it makes more sense than a thief who steals nothing but that one crate. You have to see that, Chance. You have to try to look at this from my position."

"Yeah? And how do I know that you didn't take the crate, Alice? I mean, s.h.i.+t, that makes sense, too, doesn't it? You were the one that wanted to start showing that stuff all over campus-"

"Hey, hey, okay," and now Alice is standing up, too, the paperstrewn bulwark of the desk still safe between them, but the impatience and anger coming off Alice Sprinkle no less immediate for that barrier. "Just calm down, all right? If you say you didn't take it, then you didn't take it. Fine. I have no reason in the world not to believe you."

Chance's heart is racing, heart like a scared rabbit, heart like something hunted, something cornered, and she leans against the edge of the desk because her legs feel too weak to support her as the adrenaline drains away, quickly as it came, and leaves her feeling nauseous and dizzy.

"Then why the h.e.l.l did you ask me that? I didn't take it," she says, her voice as unsteady as her legs. "It was mine already, and if I'd changed my mind, I would have told you and then I would have carried it back home. That's all. I certainly wouldn't have needed to concoct this sort of crazy, bulls.h.i.+t story."

"Okay," Alice says and she sits back down. "That's cool. I believe you, Chance," and she takes another stick of Juicy Fruit from the pack on her desk.

Chance slides her arm through one of the canvas straps of the backpack and nods her head. "Yeah. Look, I've got to do something. Get some work done, anything to take my mind off this for a while. I'll be at the lab."

"That sounds like a good idea," and Alice rolls the gum wrapper into a tiny silver ball, tosses it in the general direction of a wastepaper basket and misses. "You see why I didn't go into basketball."

"I'll be at the lab if you need me," Chance says, and then she leaves Alice in her messy office with her suspicions and unanswered questions and closes the door behind her.

Moments of discovery, conspiracies of the unlikely and the inevitable, the dustdim glint of a rock from a quarry wall, a hammer's careless blow-one instant at the s.h.i.+ning end of a billion billion coincidences, and the course of a life is decided.

It's been almost three years since the day that Chance found her first tetrapod fossil in the scabby, bulldozer wastes of a Carbon Hill strip mine. Still only an undergraduate then, but she was already teaching the laboratory course and field trips for Introduction to Historical Geology, and one rainy March morning she drove a vanload of freshmen fifty miles to give them a firsthand look at the Walker County coalfields. They listened or pretended to listen while Chance explained the cycle of transgressive and regressive marine sedimentation that had created these rocks, as she guided them through the autumn-colored beds of sandstone and shale, the siltstones and conglomerates of the Pottsville Formation, all the countless earth-tone shades of red and orange and brown, tawny yellows and pale violetgrays, and here and there a preciousthin seam of anthracite coal like pure and crystallized midnight. The miners had sc.r.a.ped away the pine woods and topsoil to reveal the stratified remains of peat bogs and vast river deltas, lowland forests and barrier islands that had long ago lined the sh.o.r.es of a shallow western sea at the edge of a great floodplain. A time when all the world's land ma.s.ses were being driven together into the great Pangean supercontinent, almost a hundred million years before the first dinosaurs appeared.

It was late afternoon when she finally finished with her lecture and turned the students loose to clamber over the towering spoil piles in search of fossil seed ferns, sandstone casts of Calamites trunks and the garskin bark of extinct scale trees. Earlier in the day, Chance had found a thick layer of shale studded with rustbrown siderite concretions, and she retraced her steps to that spot, picked out a reasonably comfortable place in the rubble to sit, and began breaking the hard nodules open with her crack hammer. If she were lucky, she might find the imprint of an insect inside one of them, or perhaps a jellyfish or a primitive shrimp-like crustacean, something uncommon and delicate from the steamy Carboniferous rivers and brackish lagoons. Most of the concretions were empty, of course, but still more interesting than ferns, and she had almost an hour to kill before it was time to load up the van and head back to Birmingham.

Chance had split sixty or seventy of the rounded, oblong concretions, and nothing to show for her trouble but a couple of pyritized snails and a few tonguebroad leaves of Neuropteris and Asterotheca, that and the heap of broken stone scattered about her feet. Bored and discouraged, she looked at her watch, was thinking of calling everyone in fifteen minutes early, and then she noticed a nodule the size of a softball embedded firmly in the quarry wall. She popped it free with a chisel, and the stone split cleanly in two on the very first blow, cleaved easily along the bedding plane created by the dead thing inside, and Chance stared amazed at the extraordinary fan-shaped fossil she'd exposed.

Something that was no longer a fish's fin, but not yet precisely a foot either, eight tiny "fingers" formed from the arrangement of hourgla.s.s carpals and metacarpals, and each petrified bone in perfect articulation with the next; a less tidy confusion of wrist bones towards the center of the rock, the upper end of the "fingers," before the stocky radius and ulna, and finally the short, squarish humerus, and she realized that she was holding the forelimb of an animal that had never been found in that part of the country, much less the state, some new species from the wide gray territory between fish and amphibian. Half an hour later, Chance was still sitting on the ground, still gawking at the fossil, when one of her students finally wandered over and asked if they shouldn't be heading back to town soon.

After that, two months of field work at the strip mine and a nearby railroad cut turned up seven more specimens, mostly limb material and a few vertebrae, but Chance also discovered a toothy lower jaw and a few bits of a broad froglike skull in another concretion. And that October she attended the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Field Museum in Chicago where she presented a preliminary report on the Carbon Hill tetrapod, and the following summer a formal description of the fossils was published in the Journal of Paleontology-"A new temnospondyl amphibian from Alabama"-in which she christened the creature Walkerpeton carbonhillensis.

Her grandfather had always wanted Chance to begin her graduate work somewhere besides Birmingham, someplace with a vertebrate paleo program or at least a geology department with money for research and an interest in science beyond the purely pragmatic economic aspects. And though he did manage to talk her into applying to a few southeastern schools, North Carolina State and the University of Florida, Duke and Louisiana State, and even though she was eagerly accepted by every one of them, Chance didn't want to leave him alone. One heart attack already, and he was all the family she had left in the world, so she stayed at UAB and took her place among the teaching a.s.sistants, mostly practical-minded microfossil geeks headed for high-paying jobs with oil companies and private consulting firms.

Content with her decision, or at least resigned to it, Chance continued to prowl the mines and quarries, patiently uncovering new remains of Walkerpeton, and by the time her thesis topic was approved, she'd attracted the attention and respect of researchers from as far away as London and Munich. This girl from an undistinguished college in the boonies, and she'd also discovered another new tetrapod and at least four new species of actinistian and rhipidistian fish, and her days were filled with the mysteries and revelations of their ancient, alien skeletons. But never mysteries whose understandings lay any farther away from her than the familiar confines of the rational, the empirical, and never revelations that left her with anything other than a deeper respect for the methods of science and a deeper faith in the constant, foreseeable patterns of nature.

The lab almost exactly the way she left it the day before, exactly the same except for the missing crate, and Chance stands just inside the front doorsill, staring at the vacant place on the table where the crate should be. The place where she left it, and standing there in the solitude while Sunday morning turns quickly into Sunday afternoon, surrounded by silent specimen cabinets and whitewashed walls, it's a lot more difficult to discount the things she thought she saw and heard, to pretend she wasn't and isn't still afraid. So maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all. Maybe she'd be better off spending the day at home, and she thinks about grabbing a handful of files and a couple of fossils from her desk; not entirely comfortable leaving Deacon and Sadie alone anyway, and if she tells them not to bother her, just leave me alone for a few hours, a couple of hours, please, then her bedroom or her grandparents' study is as good a place to work as the lab, a better place, really.

Exactly who the h.e.l.l are you trying to kid this time? as if she'd ever actually intended to work on her thesis today, as if she could possibly think about cladograms and morphometrics, anything half so sane and comprehensible, with the riddles of her grandmother's journal still unanswered. And Chance glances back over her shoulder, the heat and brilliant midday slant of sunlight through the open door, the wide asphalt desolation of the parking lot beyond, and she feels a little dizzy, the subtlest disorientation as if the world outside were moving slowly away from her.

It's not safe, she thinks, one of the last things that Dancy said to her. You won't be safe here all by yourself, not when they come, and remembering the lost look on her face when she said that, the urgent and emphatic cast of her eyes, sends a sudden rash of chill b.u.mps up and down Chance's arms despite the stuffy warmth of the lab.

"C'mon. Get a G.o.dd.a.m.ned grip," she whispers, aloud and to herself, even though she hasn't felt like she's had a grip on much of anything since Friday night, not since Dancy called out the name of a trilobite from the foot of the staircase, not since the newspaper clippings and the rotting finger in the old baby-food jar. These small and impossible things to take her mind apart, incremental drift from sanity towards this moment when anything seems as probable, as reasonable, as anything else.

Chance swallows hard and pulls the lab door slowly closed behind her; it clicks shut, metal-loud click in the quiet, and she takes a deep breath, exhales, and walks past the table where she left the vanished crate and its contents, slips her pack off her shoulder and follows the dark and narrow hallway back to the office that she shares with two other geology grad students.

But an office only in the loosest possible sense of the word, three graffiti-scarred, wooden school desks that were probably antiques when her mother and father were children, a reversible chalkboard and a few nubs of colored chalk. One squeaky, rusted file cabinet that might have been painted industrial gray a long time ago rubbing shoulders with a pressboard bookshelf crammed way beyond capacity and all its shelves have started to sag. There's an untidy a.s.sortment of field gear on the walls-screens and bundles of nylon rope, shovels and Marsh picks hung on nails and hooks-because the "office" serves double duty as a toolshed. One of the other students, a short and excitable guy named Winston, has taped a poster up above the file cabinet, color photograph of a rugged, misty seash.o.r.e, Oregon or northern California, maybe, and THINGS TAKE TIME printed in bold white letters across the bottom.

Chance's desk is neater than the others, but that's not saying much, and she sets her pack on a fat bundle of last week's pop quizzes that she hasn't yet gotten around to grading. Sits down in the swivel chair she bought for five dollars and fifty cents at a Salvation Army thrift store a year ago, torn leatherette the muddy color of red clay, and there's a spring broken in the base so she always has to be careful not to lean too far back or the chair flips over and dumps her on the hard concrete floor. She undoes the frayed canvas straps and opens the backpack, pulls out her grandmother's ledger and stares at the cover; there's nothing she's ever felt before to match the incongruous mix of dread and excitement she feels every time she looks at the book, the jangling, bitter alloy of fear and something almost pleasurable, a sickening sort of thrill, and she thinks that maybe this is the way that people who like to ride roller coasters must feel. Chance begins reading the words written on the cover aloud, the unremarkable words written in Esther Matthews' unremarkable hand.

"Notes on Trilobita of the Red Mountain Formation, Lower and Middle Silurian . . ." and she trails off, then, knows it all by heart now anyway, the long t.i.tle and the date scribbled underneath. She opens the book to the place she's marked with a Hershey bar wrapper, the page where her grandmother's notes on trilobites and bio-stratigraphy end and the obsessive attempt to solve an elusive geometry problem begins. #134 stamped in navy-blue ink at the upper-left-hand corner, and under that the last lines of an entry from July 28th, 1991, a comparison of the compound eyes of two closely related trilobites, Cryp tolithus and Onnia, and a hopeful comment that she might have access to a scanning electron microscope soon; a few lines left blank and then, halfway down the page, there's a seven-sided polygon drawn neatly in pencil.

The angle of each intersection and the length of each side noted in handwriting almost too small to read, but each side longer or shorter than the one before and after, each angle a little more or less obtuse. Chance has never been a whiz at math, but she knows the impossibility of ever constructing a regular heptagon, a polygon with seven sides of equal length and equal angles. One of those nasty quirks of the universe, like pi or Schrodinger's cat, a seemingly simple and ultimately insoluble equation or paradox. She flips past page #134, past dozens more heptagons drawn as carefully as the first, all the sums of their sides and angles duly noted, scrawled proofs and endless streams of numbers that mean about as much to Chance as Sanskrit or j.a.panese. But it's easy enough to see what her grandmother was trying to do, plain as day, page after page after page of figures and she was merely wrestling with the impossible, merely attempting to construct the unconstructable.

No, Chance thinks, That's not it at all. She was trying to reproduce the impossible. Trying to draw something on paper that she'd seen, or something that she was looking at even as she measured and calculated, even as she filled these pages with her drawings and numbers.

Alone in her room the night before, the last hour or two before dawn, Deacon and Sadie asleep downstairs, and that's when Chance first made the connection between these futile calculations and the strange fossil on the chunk of iron ore from the crate. One side dotted with the perfect Dicranurus exuviae and the other marked only by a single, enigmatic impression, the odd fossil she thought might be a starfish, or some other echinoderm. And the seven-sided polyhedron inside that star, the thing that caught the late afternoon sunlight through the lab windows and flashed it back some way that made her uneasy, that made it difficult to keep her eyes focused on the stone.

Directly below the first heptagon her grandmother has written the closest thing to an explanation that Chance has found anywhere in the ledger, and she reads it again, strains and frets at the words like a madwoman trying to force reality back into focus one last time. Knows already that it won't make any difference, that it can't, that these words are more d.a.m.ning than all the rest of it combined- the night in the tunnel, Elise's suicide, the things that Deacon sees, Dancy and her fairy-tale cosmos of angels and monsters-but she reads it anyway, because it's all she has, because she doesn't have the strength or will to close the book and put it away forever.

Ink that dried ten long years ago, and when she's finished reading, Chance gets up and walks the short distance to the chalkboard, the ledger still open in her left hand, and she takes a stubby green piece of Crayola chalk from a plastic bowl on top of the file cabinet. Chalk the sweetsoft color of mint candy, and she searches impatiently through the pages until she finds the detailed diagram Esther Matthews made of the thing on the rock, all that's left of it now. Chance copies the star-shaped outer structure first, draws each line as straight as she can manage without a ruler or a yardstick, and then she adds the upraised, inner heptahedron, and stares at what she's drawn there. But there's nothing startling or strange in this geometry, no answer to anything in the convergence of these green lines against black paint, and Chance rubs at her forehead with her right hand. The first, faint twinges of a headache kicking in somewhere towards the front of her skull, even though she hardly ever gets headaches, and she closes her eyes. It was only a fossil, she thinks. It was only a fossil, and my grandmother was only a crazy old lady. I don't understand because there's nothing here to understand.

And then a sudden realization so obvious it seems almost silly, something she should have seen at the start, something that her grandmother had to have seen at some point, and Chance opens her eyes again, and the imperfect polyhedron is still waiting for her, snug inside its star.

"Imperfect, because it's only a plane figure, right?" talking loud, and it doesn't matter because there's no one to hear her, no one to answer or wonder. "The fossil was three-dimensional," and Chance places the rough tip of the chalk at the lowermost point of the heptagon, and this time she draws curved lines to connect the intersections.

"Curve the f.u.c.king lines," she says, "then all the sides and angles could be congruent," just like the thing in the hemat.i.te, close enough, maybe, and Chance traces over her seven curved lines again, pressing down so hard that the chalk begins to crumble and bits of it fall to the floor and speckle the tops of her boots.

She pauses, trying to remember the moment the day before when she placed the protractor against the stone, the moment before she thought she heard something moving around outside the lab.

But the edges weren't curved, were they? The edges of the fossil were straight.

And there's a noise then from somewhere close behind her, wet and ripping noise like a head of lettuce being torn slowly apart, torn in half, a rending that's almost as much a feeling as a sound. Chance doesn't turn to see, doesn't want to move, but the pain in her head has doubled, trebled, hot tears streaming down her cheeks from the force of it now, and she shuts her eyes again so she won't have to look at what she's drawn on the blackboard. As if simply closing her eyes might make the pain and the terrible sound go away, and "I'm not afraid anymore," she whispers angrily between clenched teeth.

What could have been a second or an hour, an indefinite interval when the sound behind her might have changed somehow, might have climbed the slightest octave or been joined by yet another voice, another sensation, and Chance smells something that makes her think of dark places that are never dry, that will never see the sun.

"I will not be afraid," she says again. "Whatever the h.e.l.l is happening to me, I won't be afraid."

"No one's trying to scare you, Chance," but she screams when it touches her, and the lifeless voice that can't be Elise Alden's seems to drip like blood and honey from a wound in the shredding heart of the sound.

Her head has stopped hurting, but the fetidwet smell grown so strong, sour night and tiny white mushrooms, and it's almost thick enough to suffocate, thick enough that Chance reaches instinctively to wipe it from her nostrils and mouth. She gags, and wherever she is now, it isn't the lab. Rough stone at her back, moss-slicked wall of rock and frigid rivulets of water tracing their way crookedly down from somewhere overhead. And she's blind or there's no trace of light here, one or the other or both, and when she takes a hesitant step forward her boots squelch loud in the mud.

"I'm not supposed to show you anything," Elise says softly from someplace nearby, her voice unmistakable, but changed, too, withered, a blighted garden of a voice, and "I think they're losing patience with both of us," she says.

"Elise? f.u.c.k." Chance is groping frantically about in the darkness, her fingers for ten surrogate eyes. "Let me see you! If it's really you, then let me see, G.o.dd.a.m.n it!"

"It's nothing you can ever even imagine, Chance. It's nothing you can know, and when you've opened your eyes down here, it's nothing you'll ever be able to doubt again."

Chance swings her right arm in a wild and clumsy arc, striking out in the direction she thinks the voice is coming from, the withered voice that can't be Elise no matter who it sounds like or who wants her to think it is, and she touches something damp and cold, like dangling strips of raw liver, a trembling curtain of flesh, and her hand comes away sticky and chilled.

"There will be nonsense in it," the voice whispers, sweet and bittersad whisper before it laughs at her and a wind begins to blow. Lukewarm wind to stir the blackness and the Antarctic cold, and Chance wipes her hand on her jeans, trying to scrub away the stain and the memory of what she's touched. There are new smells on the wind, the healthy scent of green and growing things, the way a summer day can smell, or a greenhouse, sugarsmooth aroma of budding trees and water flowing free across coa.r.s.e and sparkling sand. Everything this boundless darkness isn't, and Chance turns away from the voice, away from the raw and quivering ma.s.s that's stolen Elise's voice for its own.

And she's standing on the sloping, pebblestrewn bank of a broad river, crystal-green waters that slip gently past on their way to the sea, that ripple and eddy beneath the high tropical sun. A river like this to put the Mississippi to shame, a river even the Amazon could only envy, restless depths to divide a forest of strange trees, giant club mosses and the towering evergreen Lepidodendron that stand as tall and straight as redwoods, their ancient branches spread out above a billowing carpet of ferns. No sound here but the river lapping hungry at the edge of the forest, the sigh of the wind in the leaves and the rasping drone of insects. The Paleozoic sunlight falls in cathedral-brilliant shafts across a million shades of green, and Chance knows that she has already walked the broken sedimentary memory of this world, the shale and sandstone ruin of it. Has spent so many years struggling to read its stingy carbonized remains, and here it is laid out before her, made whole again, restored, and suddenly she's crying, tears as warm as the sun and the wind.

"My G.o.d," and something else that she's already forgotten, thoughts silenced on her tongue because there are no words she knows to express what she feels, the utter joy and terror of these sights, this Eden stretching wide beneath the gemblue sky.

"We did not think you believed in G.o.ds."

She turns around, and Elise is standing where the ferns end and the beach begins, standing there in the s.h.i.+fting, dappled shadow of the trees, and she squints painfully through the light at Chance. Elise, but not Elise's eyes, eyes that have been consumed by their own pupils, collapsed into the infinite gravity of their own visions. She's wet and naked and her wrists are bleeding.