Threshold. Part 3

"I know," Jerome says. "But it is the 1938 edition."

"You just saw me leaving the bank, didn't you?" she asks the old man. He shrugs a guilty, unrepentant shrug while she flips carefully through the pages, past "The Willows" and "The Wendigo" and "Accessory Before the Fact," thinks about the cheap, dog-eared Dover paperback she's had for years, a rubber band around it so the loose pages don't get lost.

"Twelve fifty," Jerome says. "Because it's a discard, and because I know you'll give it a good home."

Sadie closes the book and lays it gently on the counter, already nodding her head, no point pretending she's going to leave the shop without the Blackwood and she doesn't have the heart to haggle with Jerome when she knows he's hardly making enough these days to keep the power bill paid; all his business swallowed up years ago by strip-mall megastores and now people buying their books off the Internet, so she smiles for him again, and Jerome says he'll hold onto it if she wants to browse around a while. And that's all she ever intended to do, of course, browse the shelves for an hour or two until she stopped feeling so p.i.s.sed at Deke, crisp money in her purse, but she knows how to be a good girl and Jerome never fusses if she hangs around without buying anything.

"How's Deke these days?" Jerome asks. "Haven't seen him around in weeks," putting the book into a small brown paper bag, now, folding the bag neatly closed.

"Maybe you better ask me that again a little later," she says, smile fading, and Sadie slips away into the history section, past towering, overcrowded Civil War shelves, shelves for ancient Rome and Greece, shortest cut to the one narrow shelf labeled "Spiritualism and The Occult," stuck way off by itself in the very back of the shop. Nothing too heavy or too spooky, a few beat-up, spinebroken copies of Aleiter Crowley and Eden Gray, Edgar Cayce and the prognostications of Nostradamus, various interchangeable manuals for the Tarot and I Ching; she's halfway through Yeats' A Vision, hoping that no one buys it before she's finished. Her place marked with a movie ticket stub from her purse, and Sadie finds a wobbly stool, one leg an inch too short, finds Yeats still waiting where she left him tucked safe and secret behind a copy of The Book of Mormon. There's a tin of Altoids in her purse, because Jerome won't let her smoke in the shop, and she digs it out, puts one of the powderwhite peppermints under her tongue, slides a coverless, water-damaged Witchcraft in Old and New England under the crippled stool, and in a moment she's lost in the soothing flow of words, concentration and focus to let her forget the argument with Deacon for a while.

Almost three months since the first night that Sadie Jasper slept with Deacon Silvey, and the first time that's all it was. She slept in his bed, lay very still and listened to his uneven breathing, the desperate sounds that people lost in nightmares make. Smelled his sweat and watched the restless flutter of his eyelids, wis.h.i.+ng she could see, could know the images rolling wild through his head. She held him because that's all he asked her to do, Hold me, Sadie, just f.u.c.king hold me tonight, okay? and somewhere near dawn he awoke suddenly, sat up straight, gulping air like a junky with a syringe full of adrenaline pouring into his heart, gasping like a drowned man coming back to life. Sadie groggy, confused, trying to force herself awake, and What's wrong, Deke? What's wrong? but he was already out of bed, already across the room and the bathroom door squeaking open. Deacon? and no answer but the water gurgling from the faucet into the ruststained sink, staccato lampcord click and then a white, white light like rubbing alcohol in her eyes.

Stumbling across the bedroom, stubborn shadows and her eyes trying to adjust to the light spilling out of the bathroom and she stubbed a toe against the edge of his chest of drawers. And then she was standing beside him, his face in the medicine cabinet mirror above the sink, face so pale, sickpale, scaredpale, cold water dripping from his chin and the end of his nose, dripping from his hair. No idea what to say to a face like that, what would comfort or console, and so she didn't say anything at all. Stood silent beside him and waited while he stared into his own frightened eyes, his own green eyes gone mad, madman's intensity in that stare, and "f.u.c.k," he whispered. "f.u.c.k me, f.u.c.k me," and when she touched his arm he flinched.

"It's just me, Deke," but no sign that he understood, that he'd even heard her, and he turned away from the mirror, turned and stared at the big cast-iron bathtub, stared into the tub, and by then Sadie was staring, too, straining to see whatever could drain the last, stingy bit of color from Deacon's face, bitterhard Deacon Silvey who never showed anything he didn't want you to see. A sound from his lips a lost child might make, and he sank to his knees beside the tub and began to cry.

"It's Elise, isn't it?" she whispered, fearful, tentative whisper, and for an answer he slammed both fists into the side of the tub, furious blows that should have shattered his knuckles, but only left his hands bruised and bleeding.

"Get away from me, Sadie," he growled. "Get the h.e.l.l away from me right this G.o.dd.a.m.ned minute," and she shook her head no, reached instead for his injured hands and turned her back on the bathtub. Whatever it was he saw in there nothing meant for her, probably nothing meant for anyone anymore. His skin so cold, dead man's hands, and she rubbed them, friction to bring him back, kicking and screaming if that's the way it had to be.

"Was it a dream, Deke? Did you have a dream about Elise or . . ." and pausing then because she knew how dangerous the words would be, how thin the ice beneath them, between them, was becoming.

"Was it a dream, or is she here?"

And his face like crystalperfect condemnation for a moment, crazy, burning face like a holy man confronted with some blasphemy too terrible to forgive and there could be only punishment. He's going to kill me, she thought, no other way she could imagine an end to that expression, release from that rage, and then he closed his eyes and squeezed her hands tight, squeezed so hard it hurt, and he was shaking his head, the fire gone from his face as quickly as it had come. But she knew that he had let nothing go, had only pulled it all back inside himself somehow.

And before the moment was gone, before he'd smothered the last sparking embers, she asked the question again, the fury on his face all the proof she needed that it had been the right question; a hiss through Deacon's clenched teeth like steam, then, demon breath to scald, and he slowly opened his eyes, fresh tears escaping and rolling down his stubbled cheeks.

"You really think there's any G.o.dd.a.m.ned difference?" he asked. "You really think that matters?"

"No," she said, pulling him closer to her, arms around him now, circle of her arms to bind him and keep him safe. "I don't think there's really any difference at all."

For almost two months, Sadie has been trying to write a novel; not a very good novel, she knows that much, of that much she's absolutely certain, but something inside her that wants out. No matter that it's nothing anyone will ever want to read, that when she finally finds the place where the story ends, all the pages will go into a box and the box will go under her bed or onto the top shelf of a closet, because she has no intention of ever letting anyone read it, no delusions of agents or publishers, no fantasies of an audience.

This makes it her book, and if she's deluded herself about anything it's that this fact somehow makes the writing of it more pure, more genuine, unsullied by the things that other people might want to read, or might not want to read.

Pecking it all out on a temperamental old Macintosh SE II that she found in a Dumpster behind an accounting firm on Morris Avenue, actually found the thing; no mouse in the Dumpster, but it wasn't that hard to shoplift one. So she sits in the cold whitegray light of the computer screen and pecks with two fingers, left and right index fingers because she never learned to type, and the Mac hums and sometimes it makes angryrude R2D2 noises for no apparent reason. Plugged into an outlet in one corner of Deke's bedroom, sitting on the floor between the bed and a stack of the science-fiction novels he reads; and that's where she writes, legs crossed, slouched like a vulture over the keyboard, and Deacon keeps telling her she's going to wind up with a pinched nerve or carpal tunnel syndrome, some office monkey yuppie s.h.i.+t like that if she doesn't move the Mac to the kitchen table and sit in a chair while she writes. But Deacon's kitchen smells too much like his refrigerator, like the ancient gas stove, so she's content with her nappy patch of carpet.

No printer, of course, so every single word stored on the hard drive and one blue backup diskette that Deke made her buy at Kinko's. "Just in case," he said, because the building's wiring has seen better days, and how much can you trust a computer you found in the garbage, anyway? She makes herself write at least two whole pages every night, four or five on a really good night, writes while Deke lies on the bed reading Ben Bova or Robert Heinlein, sipping his cheap gin or Thunderbird, and the sound of her two fingers dancing slowly, uncertainly, over the plastic alphabet keys. Making a story from the messy thoughts and half-thoughts in her head, building a world and lives and taking them apart again, fitting the pieces together another way until it feels right, as right as she can make it feel.

"When you gonna let me read it?" Deacon asks her once a week, the question like clockwork, and sometimes she shrugs and sometimes it makes her angry and she tells him he can read it when there's an ice rink in h.e.l.l. Always the same mock hurt from Deke, the same pretend affront or indignity, and she likes the way he looks when he isn't really sulking.

"Well, you can at least tell me what it's about," and she tells him that's even worse than asking if he can read it. An insult, the a.s.sumption that what she's doing can be reduced to a convenient synopsis. "That's what's wrong with you," she says, "you're a G.o.dd.a.m.n reductionist."

"Whoa, girl. Who's been teaching you all these big f.u.c.king words?" and she flings a copy of Dune or Again, Dangerous Visions at him, something thick with some weight, with some gravity. She rarely ever actually hits him; there's a jumbled pile of paperbacks on her side of the bed, books that have missed Deke's head by inches.

"That's okay," he says, or "Whatever," smiles and takes a sip from his jelly gla.s.s of liquor, bottle of wine the color of an eggplant or the color of nothing at all. "It's probably just some of that trashy Lovecraft s.h.i.+t you read. 'The Moldering Big Toe of Dagon' or 'The Whisperer from Behind the Laundry Hamper,' something like that," and so she has to throw another book at him.

"You haven't even ever read Lovecraft, dumb-a.s.s," and he always rolls his eyes and mutters something condescending, "When you were still watching G.o.dd.a.m.n Sesame Street, kiddo, when you were still into Mr. Rogers and King Friday, Mr. f.u.c.king Greenjeans, kiddo."

"You know, I always thought Mr. Moose was especially creepy, didn't you?" and "Now you're trying to change the subject," he says. Never exactly like that, but never very different, either. Comfortable little ritual, something almost approaching domestic, as close as they'll probably ever get to domestic. And maybe she will let him read it one day, when she's done. When she's finished the last sentence, transferred the last muddy thought from her head to the screen, and it's all there to speak for itself.

Maybe that would prove that she loves him, that it's not just the s.e.x or a weakness for irredeemable losers, the romance of a life of poverty with an alcoholic of questionable sanity and dubious hygiene. Not just that they saw a ghost together one night a long time ago, saw something in a warehouse once that might have been a ghost, or that they both like Charlie Parker and Joy Division. That would be showing him a part of her soul, a part of her mind, that she's never risked showing anyone. The raw and squirming part that indifferent high-school counselors were always prying at, the part therapists tried to trick her into showing them for free, the part her parents hated her for. The light and the darkness behind her eyes, the soft places.

But it would also mean admitting how much of what she's writing is about him, the patchwork bits and pieces she's learned about him, about Elise's suicide and why he can't ever stop loving Chance Matthews. It would mean confessing her own resentment in words more honest than she's ever had the nerve to say to his face.

And then there are her own bad dreams, the dreams about the mountain, the secret places below the mountain, and perhaps that would be the worst of all.

"It's starting to rain," Jerome says, and Sadie glances up from the Yeats, and the old man's pointing towards the high and shadowy ceiling of the bookshop. "Just thought you might want to know, since I ain't never seen you carrying an umbrella."

"Thanks," she says, her head still lost in Yeats' cyclical theories of history, marking her place with the ticket stub and returning the volume to its hiding place behind The Book of Mormon.

"I got an extra one you can borrow, though, if you want it," Jerome says, and Sadie glances at her Sanrio wrist.w.a.tch, trying to figure out how it got so late so fast.

"Sure," she says. "Thanks."

She follows him back to the register, pays the twelve fifty, plus tax, for the book of ghost stories, and he's wrapped it in a second bag, plastic grocery bag from the Piggly Wiggly, so it won't get wet, hands her the umbrella, and she thanks him again. Big umbrella the color of overripe bananas, the color of a banana Popsicle, but at least it'll keep her dry. The door jingles shut behind her, and she stands for a moment beneath the raggedy bookshop awning, green-and-white canvas stripes, looking out at the stormslick street, up at the sky gone dark as silt and ashes, and the falling rain makes an incongruous sound, like eggs frying in a skillet. Sadie opens the umbrella and sighs when she sees that there's a giant smiley face printed on the underside, smirking, happy cartoon face to leer down at her while she splashes through the puddles.

"Yeah, well f.u.c.k you, too," she says to the smiley face and glances over her shoulder. Jerome's watching her from his chair behind the counter; he nods his head once, waves good-bye, and she waves back, tucks the twice-wrapped book beneath one arm and crosses Twentieth Street.

Back home, the dank and mildewstinking halls of Quinlan Castle, and she pauses on the concrete front steps to shake the rain off Jerome's happy yellow umbrella, flaps it open and closed, open and closed, making a furious noise like the death throes of a giant bat or a pterodactyl, spraying a thousand droplets across the steps and the sidewalk. The storm has almost pa.s.sed, just a sickly drizzle now and the thunder fading away, distant, m.u.f.fled cacophony done with Birmingham and taking its wrath elsewhere.

On the way upstairs, she pa.s.ses Mrs. Schmidt who lives across the hall, elderly Mrs. Schmidt who hears voices if she forgets to take her medication, who has an ugly little dog of no discernible breed named Tinkle, and once she brought Sadie and Deke a plate of hot oatmeal cookies that tasted faintly of fish. Sadie smiles at her, says h.e.l.lo, and the old woman smiles back, her no-denture smile, healthy pink gums but no teeth, and she lightly touches Sadie's arm, and "I told her to come back when you or Deacon were at home," she says.

"Who?" Sadie asks, groaning inside because this is probably just something Mrs. Schmidt got into her head halfway through General Hospital, something crazy, and Sadie doesn't have the patience for it today.

"The albino girl," Mrs. Schmidt replies, her trembling fingers still resting on Sadie's forearm, age spots and skin like wrinkled silk, and "Oh, her eyes were so pink, just like a white Easter rabbit's."

"There was an albino girl looking for us?"

"Yes," Mrs. Schmidt says, leaning closer now, and she smells like menthol and violets. "She was sitting in front of your door eating a bag of gumdrops, and when I asked her what she was doing there, she said waiting. Just waiting. And I told her that she should come back when you were home."

"Did you remember to take your pills this morning, Mrs. Schmidt?" Sadie asks, trying not to sound annoyed or patronizing. "The green ones?" Puzzled squint from the old woman for a second, and then she blinks and smiles again. "Yes, dear," she says, laughs softly, and "She wasn't that sort of a girl at all."

"Well, I just wanted to be sure. You know, just in case," Sadie says, still not certain whether to believe Mrs. Schmidt or not. "It isn't good for you to miss your pills."

"Thank you, dear. It's very nice of you to worry about me. But she said that she would find you," and then the old woman says good-bye and is toddling unsteadily away towards the row of mailboxes by the front door. Sadie watches her go, and she's pretty sure she doesn't believe that there was an albino sitting at their front door eating gumdrops.

She takes the stairs two or three at a time, out of breath and her heart racing when she reaches the third floor and the musty smell is worse up here because the landlords refuse to fix a seeping, rotten patch of ceiling at the far end of the hallway. The plaster like soft and molded cheese down there, a couple of places where it's fallen away completely and you can see the lath, can look straight up into the attic darkness showing between the timegray wood slats. So, the perpetual stench of rotten ceiling, and if it rains long enough, small, pinkwhite mushrooms sprout from the carpet below the hole. The mushrooms seem to make Deacon nervous, though she's never asked him why, and he doesn't ever walk down to that end of the hall alone.

Digging through her purse for the door key, the ring with a toothy rubber vampire bat on it and keys to places she hasn't lived for years, keys to her parents' house, keys to a car she wrecked last summer, and of course it's hiding at the bottom under all the other purse junk. As usual, the lock sticks, and she's wrestling with it when she notices the mound of black gumdrops on the threshold, neat and sugared pile of discarded candy, and so the troublesome door forgotten for the moment, the rubber bat left dangling from the lock, as she bends down for a closer look. Black gumdrops, eight of them, and Sadie picks one up and looks at it like she's never seen one before, glances across the hall to Mrs. Schmidt's door. Certainly not impossible that the old woman put them there herself, like the time she drew big X's and O's in blue chalk on every door in the building; Sadie sets the gumdrop back on top of the pile and opens the door, thinking that she'll just leave them there and let Deke figure out what to do about it, probably best to forget the whole thing anyway, and that's when she sees the folded sheet of paper that someone's slid under the door.

The first bad dream about a week after she moved in with Deke, right before she found the computer, and if Sadie told him that he might start talking about synchronicity and meaningful coincidence. But she hasn't told him. Hasn't told anyone, admitting the nightmares to n.o.body but herself and the Mac, confidence kept between her and the squat box of microchips and cybergreen circuit board. The black and waterdripping dreams, wandering someplace beneath the city, and she's never alone, but never quite sure who's with her, their voices always indistinct, their faces lost in the darkness. A strangling smell like stagnant water and something dead, something drowned, and the moldy hallway stench magnified a thousandfold. Walking and listening to the voices up ahead, wondering if she should call out, if she's lost, if they're all lost and searching for a way out, but she's never said a word. Hugs herself against the damp and cold, against the deadwetdecay smells, and the rocks beneath her feet are slick with slime and mud, with whatever can grow untouched by the sun.

And at first these strange dreams like deja vu, maddeningly familiar but a fleeting, intangible sort of familiarity, always fading with her first cup of coffee, her first cigarette of the morning. Then one night she was bored and channel-surfing on Deke's c.r.a.ppy Salvation Army television and she flipped past a PBS doc.u.mentary, Nova or Nature, something about bats or caves, and suddenly the pieces fit together, dot-to-dot revelation, and Sadie remembered when she was ten years old and she had other dreams of being lost underground, nightmares that lasted for a whole month after her parents took her to Kentucky to see Mammoth Cave.

The trip a present for her tenth birthday, and the three of them following a guide who explained about stalagmites and stalact.i.tes as he led them deeper and deeper underground, farther from the light, farther from the day. Travertine flowstone formations like monsters hulking in the shadows, waiting until no one was looking so they could reach out and drag her screaming into the forever night of the caverns. They pa.s.sed bottomless reflecting pools where pale, eyeless salamanders and crayfish lived, lingered before fantastic gardens of calcite and quartz. And at some point all the lights were turned out, sixty blindperfect seconds so that everyone would know how dark the cave really was, how absolute and complete that blackness, and she held desperately onto her mother, feeling dank and insubstantial teeth sink straight through her skin, all the way to her bones.

And these new nightmares st.i.tching now to then, these dreams to those, and sometimes the two bleed together and she's ten again, lost under Birmingham and trying to find her parents or the way back to the world above, trying to catch up with the mumbling voices ahead of her. So close she should be able to reach out and touch whoever it is that's talking, but if she holds her hands out, there's only the chilly underground air and the dark between her fingertips. Except for once, and most of the time she'd rather pretend that isn't actually part of the dreams; a figment of her imagination's daystarved imagination, a dream's insane dream, and in that subterranean place she did not reach out with urgent, imploring fingers and brush the shoulder of a dead girl. Did not feel that skin like ice, but Sadie Jasper's never been a very good liar, even when she's only lying to herself, and in that one dream the lights finally did come back on, and she saw that the grand cathedral theater of Mammoth Cave had become a narrow tunnel, purposeful mine shaft sort of tunnel, so maybe she'd wandered away from her parents, away from the guide. Maybe all she had to do was stop and retrace her steps. But the dead girl turned around, instead, and Sadie knew that face, even though the hungry worms and beetles had been at it for days and days, even though she never met Elise Alden, no eyes left, but she knew that face, and she saw the blackred gashes that ran from the girl's wrists to the bends of her elbows. And the girl smiled for her like a polar night sky where every star has died.

A single white sheet of paper, folded twice, and her name and Deacon's scribbled across the front in pencil, scribbled like someone in a hurry or maybe just someone with s.h.i.+tty handwriting, ugly cursive, and Sadie carries the note to the couch and sits down. The door left wide open, and she sets her purse, the book and the yellow umbrella down on the floor at her feet. Unfolds the sheet of paper, and there's more of the same tight scrawl, all the words tilting sharply to the left, and You do not know me yet, it says at the very top. You do not know me yet, but there is not much time left. I waited all day long and now the woman with the dog says I should go and I am afraid she'll call the police so I am writing you this note instead.

"Instead of what," Sadie whispers, frowning at the piece of paper, the sticky, gumdrop fingerprints at the edges, and the handwriting is getting worse as it goes along, so she has to hold the note closer to her face and squint.

I will tell you why I am and then something that's been scratched out, violentsudden graphite scratches to obliterate a mistake, three or four words written down and then taken back, thought better of, and I need to talk to you both very soon. You know a girl named Chance who lives in a big house on the mountain and I have already talked to her. I have not told her why, but when I do she will not believe me but I know that you both will. I am sorry I had to leave a note like this. I am not a bad person, and then printed much more legibly below the last line, Dancy Flammarion.

"Your door is open," and Sadie looks up from the note and there's Mrs. Schmidt standing in the doorway, clutching a fat wad of junk mail in her left hand. She's stepped on the little pile of gumdrops, one of her blue bedroom slippers squas.h.i.+ng them flat. "You really shouldn't leave your door standing open like that, Sadie. It's not a good neighborhood anymore."

"I know," Sadie says, and then she glances back down at the note, that last line before the signature.

I am not a bad person.

"There are all sorts of people wandering about that don't belong here. Let me close the door for you, Sadie," and Sadie looks up at the old woman, the deep worry lines on Mrs. Schmidt's creased face even deeper than usual.

"Thank you, Mrs. Schmidt," Sadie says, and when the door is shut and she's alone again, she reads the note over from the beginning.

CHAPTER FIVE.

The Dead and the Moonstruck ALICE Sprinkle has hands like a bricklayer, st.u.r.dylong fingers and calluses and muscle, all the white and inconsequential scars that come from twenty years spent climbing around in limestone quarries, shale quarries, road cuts. Scars and the damage the sun does to a woman's skin, the fine wrinkles and her nails thick and nubby, a fresh Band-Aid wrapped around her left index finger; Chance smiles politely at her across the cluttered kitchen table and pours Alice another cup of coffee.

"I just can't see any reason for it, Chance," Alice says and sighs, lifts her grayblue china cup and blows hard on the steaming black liquid inside. Breath to send tiny ripples across the dark surface, and "It's a G.o.dd.a.m.ned, stupid waste," she says.

"You really don't have to keep saying that," Chance says quietly, trying to sound confident, trying to sound like she doesn't know she's losing this argument again, and she drinks her own coffee, scaldingquick mouthful and a glance out the kitchen window at the summer night filling up the backyard. July night full of crickets and the metronome cicada thrum, a little cooler now because of the thunderstorms this afternoon, and the gra.s.s out there will still be wet, the soil underfoot still damp.

"Maybe I wouldn't, if you'd listen to reason," Alice says, setting her cup down too hard, and a few drops of coffee slosh over the brim, run down the side of the cup to stain the tablecloth. "What do you think Joe would say if he knew what you were doing? You think he wouldn't be telling you the same things I am?"

"Joe's dead," Chance says, looks away from the backyard, back to her cup, and "Yeah, well, and you know what? You're not," Alice Sprinkle says, leaning towards Chance now. Not exactly anger on her face, but something more angry than simple concern.

"I just need some time to get my head together, Alice. That's not stupid. My grandfather just died, okay? It's not stupid if I can't deal with school right now."

"But that's not what you said. You said you didn't think you'd be coming back. You said you didn't see the point."

Chance closes her eyes for a moment, and that is what she said, more or less, two days since she talked to Alice on the phone, Dr. Alice K. Sprinkle from her thesis committee, and she should've known better, should have simply dropped out of sight and let everyone figure it out for themselves. But all the responsible parts of her mind refusing to shut down along with the parts that give a s.h.i.+t about fossils and grade-point averages and where she was going to do her doctoral work, all the parts that drove her through six years of college in less than five. The parts that got her published in the Journal of Paleontology and Palaios when she was still an undergrad. She should have vanished and let them wonder. Instead, she called Alice, I don't think I'll be coming back, nothing but cold silence from the other end of the phone as she stuttered out her practiced apologies and suggested someone who might be good to take over her Tuesday/ Thursday freshman ES 102 lab. "I'll be by in a few days to clean out my office," she said, and Alice said nothing but, "We'll talk about this later, Chance." So now here they are, later, talking about it in her dead grandfather's kitchen, talking about it since six o'clock this evening, arguing in smaller and smaller circles, and Chance always wrong, always the one who isn't making sense.

"I think you know very well what your career meant to Joe," Alice says and lights a cigarette, even though she knows how much it bothers Chance, that Chance doesn't like people smoking in the house. She taps a Winston from a half-empty pack and lights it, blows a single ghostperfect smoke ring towards the light above the table, dim bulb in a frosted antique globe.

"This work you're doing in the Parkwood and Pottsville with those new fish and tetrapods, and the trackways, Dr. Bierce keeps telling me how important this stuff is. How your work on Middle Carboniferous vertebrates is gonna raise some eyebrows," and Alice takes another drag off the Winston, doesn't take her eyes off Chance. "Do you have any idea how proud of you Joe was? He never would've pushed you to go into paleo', but you know how happy he was when that's what you wanted."

"Look, I don't need this f.u.c.king guilt trip," the words tumbling out of Chance's mouth in a growl, never mind that she knows this is exactly what Alice Sprinkle wants, trying to provoke, digging for a flintstrike spark of pa.s.sion and here it is and maybe if she digs just a little deeper she can build a fire.

Alice still talking, like she didn't hear the resentment in Chance's voice, like she doesn't care, and "So it's not just what Joe wanted, it's what you want, Chance. G.o.dd.a.m.n, you're f.u.c.king brilliant. You know that. I know you know that. And you love-"

"Don't try to tell me what I love, Dr. Sprinkle," she says, hard and formal words to build a wall between them, t.i.tles and last names because she knows the familiarity is only working against her.

"Call it whatever you want. I don't care what you call it. But it's rarer than brains," and Alice taps her temple hard with her bandaged index finger for emphasis. "I see smarts every G.o.dd.a.m.n day of the week. Smart is cheap stuff, kiddo. You're smart, but you do this because you'll never be whole without it, and you're so G.o.dd.a.m.n lucky that your grandparents were there to back you up. You know what my mother did when I told her what I wanted to do with my life? First she asked what the h.e.l.l a 'paleontologist' was, and then, when I told her, she cried. My dad, he just wanted to know if it meant I was a lesbian."

"I'm sorry," Chance says, and her stomach hurts from all the black coffee and no supper, her head from all the talk, and the clock on the wall above the oven says it's almost nine.

"Yeah, well, whatever. I did it anyway, didn't I? But if just once they had encouraged me, had even tried to understand. If just once they had pretended to be proud of me. That's why I'm in your face like this, Chance. This is what you want, and Joe was so proud of you."

"You're not being fair," and immediately Chance knows she shouldn't have said that, a weakness she shouldn't have shown, and Alice rocks back in her chair and smokes her Winston and watches Chance silently.

"I just can't think right now," Chance says, no growl left in her, almost a whisper; shaky, whispered words, and in another minute or two she'll be crying again; last thing in the world she wants, to start bawling in front of this implacable, determined woman. "Can't you see that? I can't act like everything's normal, like nothing's changed."

Not precisely silence then, but no one saying anything else, either; brittlelong moments filled up with all the outside insect noises getting in, and finally Alice exhales, loud, cigarette-smoky exhalation, and she stubs the Winston out in the unused saucer meant for her coffee cup. Chance not looking at her, staring at the yellow sunflowers on the tablecloth, yellow flowers with black eyes, and "I can show myself out," Alice says. "Thanks for the coffee."

"I just need some time, that's all. Just a little time," Chance says.

"Yeah," Alice Sprinkle replies. "Maybe you do. But I'm taking over your Tuesday/Thursday, just until you get your head together. We'll talk again next week, Chance." And the woman leaves her alone in the kitchen with the dirty china cups and the smell of coffee and cigarette smoke.

Going through the motions, everyday ch.o.r.es to keep both her feet on the ground, dustdry eyes, and Chance cleans the kitchen, empties Alice's cigarette ash from the china saucer, rinses the old percolator, rearranges the clutter on the table so it's the same mess disorganized another way. She carries out half a bag of trash and leaves it on the curb for the rumbling green garbage truck to haul off in the middle of the night. Brief and meaningless things that take away some of the time and require no thought, as little thought as possible. And then her stomach growls, emptysick feeling now to remind Chance that she hasn't eaten since breakfast, her belly as hollow as everything else, so she opens some Chef Boyardee ravioli and eats it cold from the can, sits on the floor in front of the television, flipping channels and not tasting the tomato sauce and whatever it is that's supposed to be meat. A doc.u.mentary on the Learning Channel about coral reefs off the coast of Australia, but that only makes her think about school, her unfinished thesis, so she keeps flipping, finally settles on a Humphrey Bogart film she can't remember the name of, Humphrey Bogart as a Devil's Island convict, and she turns the volume up loud enough that she doesn't have to listen to the summer night sounds outside the living-room windows.

Running alone through the water works tunnel, through the dimly lit hallways of the apartment building where Elise lived, where she lives because she isn't dead yet, because this time Chance isn't at home, isn't sitting in her room with her head stuck in her work while Elise is dying behind one of these doors. Doors painted the color of dried blood and vomit, and there are no numbers on them, nothing to distinguish one from another and no doork.n.o.bs, gaping rustrimmed holes where the doork.n.o.bs should be, corrosion the same flaking color as blood, and white light spills from the rooms through the holes.

"How the f.u.c.k are people supposed to know where anyone lives," Deacon says, Deacon somewhere close behind her, and she tells him to shut up. She doesn't want him here, all his fault anyway, and he knows it. Selfish, but not that stupid, Elise dying because of him, and Chance follows the spiraldown halls that tilt and lead them around and around, dizzying whorl inside a snail's cast-off sh.e.l.l, floors warped and walls buckled.

No, not apartments, Chance thinks. Elise didn't die at home, did she? and then Deacon's ahead of her, no memory of him pa.s.sing her, but there he is anyway, standing in front of one of the doors. The painwhite light from the doork.n.o.b hole eating at the legs of his jeans, his raggedy black tennis shoes, and he puts his fingers through the hole, slides them into the light, into the room behind the door, and there's an ugly, tearing sound like raw meat and waxed paper, and Chance looks away. Coward, she thinks, but the light suddenly so bright, bright past blinding, and she can feel it scorching her bare skin, searing Hiros.h.i.+ma flash to swallow her whole, and that means that Deacon's opened the door, that means he's found her.

And a hot wind is filling the motel hallway then, and he's shouting but the wind steals all the words, nothing left but the familiar sh.e.l.l of his voice. Chance is on her knees, screaming his name, and she can feel the light getting inside her, getting into her bones.

"You learn things over here," Elise says, and now Chance is sitting on the toilet in a bathroom with dirtywhite ceramic tile on the walls while Elise Alden bleeds to death in the tub. "Oh, not as much as you might think, but more than is really necessary, I suspect. More than I wanted to know."

"Deacon opened the door," Chance says, trying not to look at the bathwater like cherry Kool-Aid.

"That's one of the things he does."

No idea what Elise means, and Chance can't remember what it is that she's supposed to be doing, something urgent that doesn't seem to matter anymore. Hard to think because the room smells like blood, and "Aren't you cold?" she asks the dead girl.

"They tell me things," Elise says, like an answer.

"I don't understand," Chance replies. "I don't know what you're talking about," because she doesn't, and Elise smiles, not a pretty smile, a crooked smile to hide something worse, and "You're not supposed to," she says. "Not yet. But I think you will."

Elise bends forward a little, pulls a chain to let the water out of the bathtub.

"Deacon opened the door," she says. "That's one of the things he can do."

"f.u.c.k him," and Chance is getting nauseous from the commingled smell of Elise's blood and bathroom cleansers, disinfectant and the crimson water swirling down the drain. Tired of sitting in a dirty motel bathroom, talking about Deacon Silvey, smelling blood and Lysol. "He put you here. He doesn't give a s.h.i.+t about anyone in the world but himself."

"I'm supposed to show you something, Chance."

And there's an impatient flutter from the other side of the tiny window above the bathtub, abrupt flutter like a flock of starlings all taking off at once, flutter like a hundred frantic, feathered wings, and Chance didn't even notice the window before. Perfect rectangle of smudgy gla.s.s, and there's a bright light s.h.i.+ning in.