Threshold. Part 7

For a moment, Chance can't take her eyes off the amazing little animals on the maroon chunk of ore, knows that whatever Dancy wants her to see can't be half this incredible. But "Please," Dancy says, "it's important," so Chance turns the rock over, only expecting to find more of the trilobites.

"That's why your grandfather hid these things," Dancy says. "That's why your grandmother died."

And as far as Chance can tell, it's just another fossil, not a trilobite but something she's never seen before, and she holds the rock closer to her face, turns so she isn't blocking the noonday light through the windows. A perfect star-shaped impression in the stone, no bigger than a quarter, and at its center a sort of polyhedron, upraised polyhedric structure that she thinks has seven sides, but there might be more, and its smooth surface glints iridescent in the light.

"What are you?" she asks the rock, as if it might answer, and then Dancy is holding up something else, forcing her to look away from the strange fossil; a small bottle, old-fas.h.i.+oned apothecary bottle, Chance thinks, ground gla.s.s stopper shoved in tight, and there's an inch or two of tea-colored liquid inside. Chance sets her grandmother's journal down on a big cardboard box that originally held cans of Green Giant creamed corn, "Fort Payne Chert, Happy Hollow, '65" scrawled on one side in her grandfather's hand, and she takes the bottle from Dancy.

"This is where it all begins," the albino girl says. "The teeth of the dragon."

Chance ignores her, stares into the small bottle, the murky liquid inside, and there's something else, something like a fat slug, curled up dead and floating on its side. And then she sees the segments, the armored segments of its wormlike body, and the fine and bristling hairs growing between the plates.

"The dragon has a hundred thousand children," Dancy says, "And it was old when the angels fell from Heaven."

"What is it, Chance?" Deacon asks. "What the h.e.l.l's she talking about?" and Chance turns towards him, turns slow and holds the bottle out for him to see.

"You tell me, Deke," and Chance sits down on the floor beside Dancy to see what else has been waiting out the last eight years inside the ammo crate.

Midafternoon before Chance is finally alone in the big house, sits alone in the kitchen and stares at the wooden crate where Deacon left it sitting on the table, where she asked him to put it before she apologized and herded all three of them towards the front door. "I have to have some time to myself," she said. "To think."

And an expression on Dancy's face then that was almost panic, the joy or relief at her discovery replaced abruptly by alarm, and "No, Chance. There isn't time," she said and grabbed hold of Chance's s.h.i.+rtsleeve. "They'll know that you found it, that you've begun to see what's going on. It's not safe to be alone."

Chance glanced at Deacon and Sadie, beseeching glance, and "We'll come back tomorrow," Sadie said, rea.s.suring words and a hand on Dancy's shoulder, something meant to comfort her, but no room for comfort in that face, those pink eyes tinted magenta by the purple sungla.s.ses.

"Tomorrow will be too late," she said, and then to Chance, "We haven't even talked about the tunnel. We have to talk about the tunnel, and we have to go there, today, while there's still time."

"That tunnel's been there for more than a hundred years, Dancy. It'll still be there in the morning," and Chance very gently pried Dancy's fingers from the sleeve of her T-s.h.i.+rt. "I have to read the things my grandmother wrote in this ledger," she said. "There's a lot I have to think about."

"It's not safe," and Dancy was getting hysterical, close to tears, close to something Chance didn't want to hear or see, maybe another of the seizures or she was about to start talking in the creepy old woman voice again. And "You won't be safe here all by yourself, not when they come," Dancy pleaded. "None of us will be safe when they find out what we know." She brushed Sadie's hand off her shoulder then, wiped it roughly, quickly, away like a dangerous insect or the uninvited touch of an unclean person, a beggar or a leper, but her eyes still fixed on Chance.

"G.o.dd.a.m.n it, there isn't anything left to understand, and you don't need to understand. That's what they want you to do, to try to make sense of what's been happening, to try and understand what there's no way to understand. They want you to think about it, because then you'll start doubting everything, and that buys them time."

"Dancy," Chance said, trying hard to sound calm, hiding the anger blooming hot and violent inside her.

"I've seen all of this before," Dancy said, and there were tears leaking from behind her sungla.s.ses, tears starting to roll down her pale cheeks. "I know exactly what's coming."

"Chance, maybe we should listen to her," Sadie said. "She knew about the box, didn't she, so how can you be so sure . . ." But the look on Chance's face enough to cut her short, the look that showed her anger and the brittle end of her patience even if she didn't say it out loud.

"Tomorrow, Sadie," she said, firm, no room left for debate.

"Yeah," Deacon replied, careful to keep his eyes down so that Chance couldn't see them, so he couldn't see her, either. "Tomorrow. I gotta be at work in a few hours, anyway, or old lady Taylor's gonna bust a gut. I've already been late twice this month."

And Chance called a taxi and followed them to the door, Deacon hauling Dancy's duffel bag, severed finger and all, and Dancy crying harder, begging Chance to let them stay. Sadie was trying to console her, promising her that everything would be fine, that Chance could take care of herself and nothing was going to happen to any of them.

Five more minutes before the taxi pulled up out front, a bright green Pontiac sedan this time instead of a station wagon. "You'll see," Dancy said, hard to make out what she was saying through the tears and the snot, the breathless, hitching sobs. "I can't protect you if I'm not here."

And then Chance reached into a front pocket of her jeans and pulled out her big Swiss Army knife, five sharp blades folded up snug in the apple-red plastic casing, a corkscrew, tweezers, and a bottle opener, and she put it in Dancy's hand. The taxi driver honked, and Dancy stared down at the knife, confused. "My grandfather gave me this for my tenth birthday, Dancy, and I want you to hold onto it for me, just until tomorrow morning. It means more to me than almost anything else I own, and if I wasn't absolutely sure I'd be seeing you again real soon, there's no way I'd let you keep it for me."

"C'mon. We gotta go," Deacon said, and Dancy looked up at her, no sign of comfort in her face, no sign she believed a single word that Chance had said, but she nodded once and squeezed the Swiss Army knife tight in her hand. Then Sadie and Deacon led her to the Pontiac, and in a moment the driver was turning right, back towards Five Points, leaving Chance alone in her driveway.

And now she sits in the kitchen, 2:37 by the clock on the wall above the stove, and she's holding the chunk of ore and sandstone from the crate, turning it over and over in her hand, examining the trilobites and the odd star-shaped impression on the other side of the rock, glancing occasionally at the dried blood on the window where the crow crashed into the gla.s.s that morning, or at the stoppered bottle of alcohol and the dark segmented thing floating inside. Like the pieces of a puzzle, or some of them are the pieces of a puzzle and the real trick is figuring out which ones are and which ones aren't. Not used to feeling stupid, but that's the way she feels, and maybe if sensible Alice Sprinkle were here, or her grandfather, maybe they could show her something perfectly obvious, something right in front of her nose to make sense of all this, to tie it all together: the stuff from the crate and the suicidal bird, Dancy Flammarion and the night that she and Deacon and Elise got stoned and decided to break into the old water works tunnel.

Five more minutes, ten, and she packs the fossils and the dead thing in the jar back into the crate (and there are other things in there, as well, things she hasn't had the nerve to look too closely at yet), leaves the ledger lying on the table and carries the rest out to her car, sets it carefully on the Impala's backseat. Sat.u.r.day afternoon, so maybe n.o.body will be at the lab, maybe she'll have it to herself for a few hours, if she's lucky. Chance goes back up the front porch steps to lock the door, checks it twice, and she's turning towards the car again when she notices the dead crow lying at the edge of the porch, ebony wings spread wide and the crimsondark cavity in its breast like a bullet hole.

Chance uses the toe of her boot to scoot the bird off the porch and into the gra.s.s, leaves a b.l.o.o.d.y smear on the wood, but that'll just have to wait until later. And she tries not to think about Dancy or the crows, tries not to think about anything in particular, as she walks quickly back to the car.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners AFTER Deacon has gone to the laundromat, Dancy sits in the kitchen by herself and stares out the window over the stove, watches the bright patch of sky visible between the curtains, sunfaded chintz the color of b.u.t.termilk and decorated with smiling baby-blue cats. There's a can of c.o.ke open and getting warm, going flat on the table in front of her, the can that Sadie opened for her, c.o.ke and some stale Oreos like she was a five-year-old. Chance Matthews' fancy pocketknife is lying beside the c.o.ke can, and every now and then Dancy looks away from the patch of sky and stares at the knife for a few minutes instead, those two things, the knife and the summer sky, and she listens to Sadie in the bedroom, typing slow at her computer.

There's no clock in the kitchen, but she knows it must be almost four by now, a few more hours until dark, only a few more hours until dark, and there's nothing left for her to say that will make them listen.

"He doesn't like the light," her mother says. "He'll wait until dark," and when Dancy turns away from the window, turns towards the corner where she heard her mother's voice, she almost expects to see her, her sharp blue eyes and chestnut hair, so disappointment when there's nothing but the peeling wallpaper and a couple of dead roaches. Disappointment, and it makes her mad, makes her glare at the dead bugs like they're to blame somehow that her mother isn't there.

"But it was daytime, wasn't it, Momma?" she asks the c.o.c.kroaches, savoring the bitterness, the tiny black flakes of fury hiding somewhere deep down inside her. "It was broad daylight, and he just came on ahead anyway."

And it got him killed, didn't it? her mother replies, but this time Dancy knows the voice is only in her head, and she stops glaring at the bugs, looks back at the knife. Chance's pretty red knife. Dancy has a knife of her own, her grandmother's big carving knife hidden at the bottom of her duffel bag, and maybe it doesn't fold up all nice and neat, doesn't have five blades and a screwdriver, but it always gets the job done. She touches the silver cross stamped into the red plastic, silver cross inside a sort of s.h.i.+eld, five-sided emblem, and Dancy doesn't know what it's supposed to mean, and maybe it doesn't mean anything.

You gotta be strong now, Dancy, her mother says. Strong for all of us, and for just a moment it's that last terrible day in the swamp again, and she can smell the heat and gun-powder smoke, can smell blood, and she closes her eyes, wants to tell her dead mother's voice to leave her alone, please just leave her alone now because she's been strong for a long, long time and it hasn't made any difference at all. So much fear and guilt, all the things she's done that she'll never be sure if they were right or wrong, and it might go on this way the rest of her life and it still wouldn't make any difference.

It don't make you crazy just because n.o.body else can see what's true, her mother says, but now her voice seems farther away, hushed and far away as the sky, almost, fading like Deacon's ugly curtains, and Dancy doesn't want to hear any more, squeezes her eyes shut as tightly as she can and shakes her head. "I'm not strong," she says. "I'm tired. I'm tired, and I want to stop now." Almost says, I just want to go home, but she's the one that built the fire when it was over, watched from the pines and brambles while the cabin burned down around her mother and her grandmother and the smoke turned the Florida twilight sky as dark as midnight.

Dancy opens her eyes then, sudden, certain impression that she isn't alone, and there might have been a quick and cindergray blur at the window, something staring into the kitchen with eyes like poisonous black berries, there one instant and gone the next. And then there's only the bright and empty sky again and her right hand hurts. She looks down at it and sees she's holding Chance's knife, the largest blade folded out and a gash in her palm from the base of her thumb all the way to her middle finger; a big pool of her blood collecting in the s.p.a.ce between the stale Oreos and the can of Coca-Cola, blood flowing down and around her wrist like a liquid bracelet before it drips to the tabletop.

I know exactly what's coming.

Dancy drops the knife, stares at all that wasted blood for a minute and then she gets up and goes to the sink, careful to keep her eyes away from the window, whatever may or may not be out there, while she runs cold and stinging tap water over the cut. She finds an orange-and-white striped dish towel that looks almost clean and wraps it around her hand, finds another hidden behind half a loaf of moldy bread and a jar of peanut b.u.t.ter, and she uses it to wipe up the pool of blood on the kitchen table. When she's done, she rinses the b.l.o.o.d.y towel and hangs it over the faucet to dry, her hand really starting to hurt now, starting to ache all the way to the bone, and she sits back down at the table, cradles her hand to her chest and listens to Sadie still pecking slowly away at her keyboard.

The Swiss Army knife is lying on the table where she dropped it, her blood already beginning to crust on the s.h.i.+ny stainless steel blade, and Dancy takes a sip of the lukewarm c.o.ke, holds it in her mouth a moment before she swallows.

And there are no voices now, not her dead mother's, or her grandmother, or the angel with his eyes like furnace embers and his wings like a bluegray flock of herons before a hurricane. All of them forsaking her, finally, abandoning her, and maybe that's the price for having admitted that she's tired, that she's too scared to go down to the dragon alone.

"This is where it starts," she whispers, picking up Chance's red knife in her left hand, knife red as her blood, and "This is where it ends," she says.

Dancy wipes the blade on her jeans, then folds it shut again and slips it into a back pocket. She doesn't take anything else but her duffel bag, stands at the front door for a moment because there's something comforting in the clack-clack-clack sound of Sadie Jasper's fingers moving over the plastic keys, Sadie making words. And then Dancy steps out into the musty hallway and pulls the door very quietly shut behind her.

Today Chance isn't lucky, and when she pulls up outside the lab Alice's old Toyota pickup's parked out front under the negligible shade of a crooked sycamore tree and all the louvered windows are cranked open just in case there's a breeze. Chance curses, glances at the crate in the backseat, and she almost turns around and drives straight home again; not up to Alice and certainly not up to trying to explain to Alice what she doesn't half understand herself, so almost five whole minutes spent sitting in the hot afternoon sun, sweating and listening to the unhappy rumble of the idling motor and an old Nirvana song playing loud on the radio, before she sighs and pulls the Impala up next to the truck.

This tiny building, stingy rectangle of autumnred and s.h.i.+tbrown bricks, concrete blocks and peeling white paint, stranded on a neglected island of gra.s.s and gravel in the middle of a faculty parking lot on the shabby north edge of campus. Browngreen island in a baking black asphalt sea, and almost fifteen years ago one of Esther Matthews' students carefully printed PALEONTOLOGY LAB on one of the doors, one heavy metal door at each end of the building. But no other indication that this is anything but an eyesore, maybe someplace to store files or janitorial supplies, and "Welcome to the endlessly rewarding and glamorous limbo of pure science," Alice Sprinkle says whenever she brings a new student to the lab for the first time.

The door's already unlocked, already open, and Chance finds Alice at a big table in the front room, this end of the building mostly set aside for collection storage, so there are dozens of squat steel Lane cabinets, all the same battles.h.i.+p gray, stacked two high along the walls and another double row down the center of the room; but this one table near the door where Alice sits beneath a cloud of cigarette smoke, and she's staring through the lens of a fluorescent magnifying lamp at a plastic tray of shale fragments, fine shale shards the color of charcoal, and she stirs intently at the bits of rock with a pair of tweezers.

"Well, h.e.l.lo there, stranger," she says, not looking up from the tray, from the lamp. "Didn't expect to see you this afternoon, certainly not after what you said yesterday."

Chance sets the heavy crate down on the bare concrete floor before she replies. "Well, I didn't exactly expect to be here, either," she says, keeping her eyes on the crate.

"So what's in the box?" Alice asks, and Chance shrugs and shakes her head. "That's a good question," and then, before Alice can say anything else, "Do you know what my grandmother was working on when she died?" and she raises her head, risks a glimpse at the older woman.

And now Alice does look up, lays her tweezers on the table and stares thoughtfully at Chance over the dull glare from the lamp. She's wearing her gla.s.ses and the thick bifocal lenses make her eyes look huge and fish-like.

"That was a pretty long time ago, Chance."

"Yeah, but do you remember?" and then she looks back down at the crate.

"Not offhand. I think she was collecting again. She'd just finished a report for the Geological Survey, so she was probably out in the field. She always liked being in the field more than sitting around this s.h.i.+thole."

"Do you know what she was collecting, Alice?" and Chance hates sounding anxious, sounding impatient, wishes that Alice Sprinkle could have been anywhere but here this afternoon, anywhere else and then they wouldn't even be having this conversation.

"Well, if I had to bet cash money on it, I'd say trilobites. Esther was usually looking for trilobites. But I'm not telling you anything that you don't already know, Chance."

"No," Chance says. "You're not," and Alice points at the ammo crate, raises both her eyebrows above the wire rims of her gla.s.ses so that her eyes look even larger. "I don't have to be a terribly clever lady to guess this has something to do with whatever's in that box there."

"Some stuff my grandfather must have packed up after she died. I found it this afternoon."

Alice lights a cigarette and blows smoke towards the low ceiling. "And? Are you gonna tell me what it is, or is that none of my business?"

Chance shrugs again but she doesn't answer, stoops and picks the crate up off the floor instead, carries it over to the table while Alice hastily clears off a s.p.a.ce big enough for her to put it down, shoves aside a stack of books, several thick volumes of the Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology and a few old journals.

"I don't want you to tell anyone else about this stuff," Chance says, setting the crate in the small, uncluttered spot Alice has made on the table. "Maybe later, but not now, okay? I want you to promise me that you'll keep this to yourself."

"Scout's honor and hope to die," Alice says, "etcetera, etcetera," and then she crosses her heart, takes another drag off her cigarette, and "s.h.i.+t, we can take a blood oath if you think it's necessary."

Chance reaches down through the top layer of excelsior and pulls out the stoppered bottle. She hands it to Alice, who puts her cigarette between her lips so both hands are free, holds the bottle a few inches from her face, and stares through her bifocals at the dark thing floating inside, no particular expression now, only silent contemplation, maybe the faintest flicker of surprise. She slowly tilts the bottle on its side and shakes it gently, causing the thing inside to bob and roll over.

"Well, it beats the h.e.l.l out of me," she says, mumbling around the filter of her cigarette. "I've never seen anything like it. But whatever it is, I don't think Esther found it. Not originally, anyway." She taps hard at the yellowed label about the size of a large postage stamp that's pasted onto one side of the bottle. "Did you happen to notice this?"

"Yeah," Chance says, "I did," and Alice holds the bottle a little closer to her face, squints to make out the spidery sepia-colored handwriting on the label, antique ink faded to an almost illegible scrawl. "Birmingham Water Works tunnel, Red Mountain, Alabama," and she pauses for a moment, squints harder to read the second line. "October 1888. Or 1886. I'm not sure which."

" '88," Chance says. "They didn't dig the tunnel until '88, so it can't be '86."

"d.a.m.n, this is one peculiar bug. Do you have any idea what Esther was doing with it?"

Chance glances at the crate again. "There's a letter in there from someone at the Survey. Apparently she wrote to them about the tunnel, asking if they had anything important from the site, I guess. They sent her this."

"I doubt it's what she had in mind," Alice says and turns the bottle for a different view of the thing inside. "What was it doing at the Survey?"

"The letter says that a foreman at the water works excavation sent it to them that October. He wanted to know what it was. I a.s.sume he found it when they were digging the tunnel."

Alice smiles, small, approving smile for Chance, and "As usual, our girl's done her homework," she says. "I think we should have a closer look at this little b.a.s.t.a.r.d, don't you?"

"There's more," Chance says, "a lot more," and she's reaching back into the crate, already has her hand around the chunk of iron ore, but "No," Alice says firmly. "Let's take this one thing at a time."

Dancy knows where the tunnel is, remembers everything important from all the stolen newspaper clippings and a library book on the industrial history of Birmingham, and after she leaves the castle, after she takes a deep breath and steps from mildewcool shadows into the firestorm brilliance of the summer afternoon, she heads southwest towards the mountain. As straight a line as possible with so many buildings and chain-link fences in her way, razor wire and concrete obstructions, and it doesn't matter that the sun has begun its painful, slow descent, westward slide from a bluewhite and blindscorched Heaven, but still hours until dark and the air sizzles against her white skin, light to sear its way through the purple sungla.s.ses that Sadie gave her and set her brain on fire. Who needs a dragon when the whole sky's ablaze, when every breath fills her lungs with gasoline and smoke and the smell of streets that have begun to melt and flow like sticky coalblack, brimstone rivers?

The day on Their side, and if the night ever comes, They own that as well, own that twice as much, both light and darkness set against her, and Dancy tries not to think about that, lugs her heavy duffel across Twentieth Street while the asphalt sucks wetly at the soles of her shoes; wanting to suck her all the way down to the grindstone belly of the World-and then she's on the sidewalk again, concrete-narrow sanctuary, but she can hear the sn.i.g.g.e.ring - laughter leaking from beneath the street, taunting, gravelthroated laughter for this crazy girl who thinks she's going to do anything but die. Anything but burn forever between gnas.h.i.+ng teeth like red-hot pokers, and she wipes at her forehead, wipes away the sweatsalt that stings her eyes and blurs her vision. Dancy turns her back on the laughing things below the street, and here's an alley in front of her, a mean rind of halfshadow clinging to one side of the alley, and she squeezes herself into this n.i.g.g.ardly shade, presses herself sc.r.a.pbook rosepetal flat against the old bricks and mortar as far as the wall runs.

And another parking lot then, this one as wide as the whole Gulf of Mexico, as wide as a dead sea gone all the colors of coal and blackbirds, but a s.h.i.+mmering glimpse of cool green trees on the other side, trees and gra.s.s and a sprinkler spraying endless crystal drops. Dancy sets her duffel down behind a pink garbage Dumpster with a hippopotamus stenciled on it, another stingy pool of shadow here, and she huddles in it, in the soursweet reek of roasting garbage and the buzzing flies trying to ruin this air that's only stifling.

"What happened to your hand, Dancy?"

She looks up, and there's a tall, thin man standing a few feet away, standing right out there in the sun, sunk up to his ankles in the blacktop but he doesn't seem to notice or he simply doesn't care.

"I know you," she says, and she does, the jug-eared man from the bus, the man with all those yellow teeth crammed into his wide, wide mouth, and he smiles for her now, showing her all those teeth at once.

"You're a long way from Memphis, aren't you?" the man asks. "A long, long way from Graceland."

The man looks up at the sky, narrows his eyes against the day and wipes his forehead with a red-and-white checkered handkerchief.

"Are you lost, Dancy?" he asks, honey and rattlesnake voice, and "Do you need someone to show you the way? I can do that, you know. I know all the roads-"

"I don't want anything from you," she says, her throat too dry to sound brave, to sound tough, barely enough spit left to make words at all, and she swallows a thick mouthful of nothing but the parking-lot hot air. "So you may as well crawl right back where you came from and leave me alone."

The tall man stops smiling and folds his sweatstained handkerchief neatly before he stuffs it back into a front pocket of his gray trousers. The asphalt is all the way up to his knees now, pulling him down into the bubbling goo, and he holds a hand out to Dancy, and for a moment she thinks how wonderful and dark it would be beneath the ground, how cool down there where the sun's never been.

"You weren't made for this world," the man says. "But there are roads I could show you, night roads that wind forever between milkwhite trees, and the starlight would kiss your skin like ice. There are roads where nothing ever burns, and the sun is only a fairy tale to frighten pale children to bed."

Dancy looks down at her duffel bag, and there are things hidden in there that might frighten the tall and toothy man away, that might send him howling and slithering back to all the Others, but the canvas bag seems so far away and his twiglong fingers are so close. All she'd have to do is reach out and take his hand, let those skeletal fingers carry her off to the dark and soothing cold.

"That's a girl," the man says, his breath falling about her like a shroud of spring water and night. "That's a good, good girl. You know, none of this was ever really about you, Dancy. You shouldn't have to suffer this way. Your mother should have told you the truth, the whole truth, and none of this would have been necessary."

And then Dancy's fingertips brush the edge of something vast and sharp and raw, something made of lies and flesh sewn from lies, something that's never been anything but hungry. A devouring hunger that goes on and on until the very end of time, end of the world starvation in that icing touch, and she pulls her injured, dishragswaddled hand back, makes a fist and drives her short nails through the cloth and into the flesh of her palm, squeezes hard until she knows her hand is bleeding again, until the pain is wiping the toothy man's smile from his face, his voice from her mind. She can hear the buzzing, garbagebloated flies again, can feel the indifferent July heat on her cheeks, only the sun eating away at her now, and there's no sign the man was ever there. Just the choking smells of tar and trash, car exhaust, and Dancy picks up her duffel bag, which seems at least twice as heavy now, steps out from behind the pink Dumpster. She fixes her eyes on the faraway sprinkler, tiny shower sweeping back and forth across the lush green lawn of what might be a church, great graywhite building of stone and confidence, imagines the water falling against her blistering skin, and Dancy steps out of the shadow and into the parking lot.

"Well, my first guess would have been an amphineuran of some sort," Alice Sprinkle says, looking away from the black rubber eyepieces of the stereomicroscope. The thing from the jar is lying in a small gla.s.s dish, with a little of the tea-colored alcohol to keep it from drying out. "But it's not a chiton," she says, leans back in her chair and reaches for her pack of Winstons on the tabletop. "It has the right sort of gills and those look like calcareous spicules there between the plates, but the plates themselves are all wrong. For one thing, chitons only have one overlapping row of dorsal plates. This thing here has a dorsal and a ventral set, almost completely encircling the body with no room for a functional foot. So it isn't an amphineuran. I don't think it's a mollusk at all."

Alice takes a cigarette from the pack and lights it, careful to blow the smoke away from Chance who's sitting next to her, staring at the thing in the dish. "And it's not a worm," Chance says vacantly, the idea that it could possibly be a worm discarded half an hour ago.

"Nope," Alice says, "it's not a worm." She sets her cigarette in an ashtray made from a huge fossil oyster sh.e.l.l and looks through the microscope again.

"There's no sign of a cerebral ganglion or any visible sensory organs, unless that's what all those little hairs along the midline are for. But this b.a.s.t.a.r.d's got a mouth on him, I'll tell you that much," and Alice picks up a probe and pokes gently at the front end of the thing, pushes the first set of plates apart, and Chance leans closer, watches over her shoulder. "There's a radula, attached to the floor of what must be the digestive ca.n.a.l," Alice says, "almost like a snail, so I'm guessing it's some sort of a predator. And look at this," and now Alice is using the probe to point at the rear of the animal.

"The mantle tissue here's been torn, and this last set of plates is broken along the back edges, like this thing was bitten in two or cut in half, so whatever it is, we don't even have a whole specimen. Which just f.u.c.king figures," and she takes her eyes away from the microscope again and rubs at them, pushes her chair back from the table. "Have a look for yourself," she says.

Chance leans over the scope, and there's nothing through the eyepieces but a dusky, drawn-out blur, so she plays with the fine adjustment a moment, rotates the k.n.o.bs up and down until the blur resolves, solidifies, and she's looking at the thing from the stoppered jar, magnified ten times, and if it was ugly before, now it's something from a monster movie.

"I know you've spent the last couple of years fooling around with your little fis.h.i.+es and salamanders and s.h.i.+t," Alice says, faintest and insincere hint of derision in her voice because she once tried to steer Chance towards studying invertebrate fossils, instead. "So I don't know if you quite appreciate exactly how utterly full-tilt weird this thing here is."

"I think I'm beginning to get an idea," and Chance rotates the microscope's nosepiece to the next highest setting, refocuses at 40x, and she's looking at the armored head, uses a pair of forceps to get a better view of the sharp and h.o.r.n.y radula, pinkwhite tongue like a minute rasping file, tongue made for boring through the hard sh.e.l.ls of other animals.

"Then you know that we need to show this to someone over in biology, someone with a little more experience with recent animals," Alice says, but Chance shakes her head no, and "You already promised," she says.

"Yeah," Alice replies, sullen, defeated, and starting to sound more than a little annoyed with Chance, not someone who's exactly in the habit of hiding her feelings. "I promised," she sighs.

"Now, have a look at this," Chance says, changing the subject, trying to ignore the disgruntled tone in Alice's voice, plenty enough time for that later, and she turns away from the microscope, reaches into the crate again, and this time she takes out the chunk of hemat.i.te and sandstone. "You're pretty good with trilobites, right?"