Threshold. Part 8

"Well, I'm not your grandmother, if that's what you mean," she says, and Chance pa.s.ses the purplered rock to Alice Sprinkle; a long moment of silence while she examines the cl.u.s.ter of spiny trilobites through her bifocals, and she grins, any sign of irritation melting quickly from her face. "You and that box, girl, you're getting to be like some kind of G.o.dd.a.m.n magic act, you know that? 'Hey Rocky. Watch me pull a rabbit outta my hat,' " and then Alice glances at her wrist.w.a.tch and frowns, hands the rock back to Chance.

"Jesus, I was supposed to be over at Campbell Hall ten minutes ago."

"They're Dicranurus, aren't they?" Chance asks while Alice gathers up a stack of files and her pack of Winstons from the confusion on the table. "I know this rock's a lot older than any record for the genus, but I think that's what they are, anyway."

"Yeah, well, I think you're probably right," Alice says, talking fast now and another glance at her watch, another frown. "We've got some stuff from the Haragan Formation of Oklahoma around here somewhere. It should be in the computer, and I'm pretty sure there are a few Dicranurus. Oh, and have a look at Ceratonurus while you're at it, just to be sure."

"Yeah," Chance says. "Well, thanks," and Alice rushes past her towards the open door, trailing a cloud of cigarette smoke and agitation; she stops in the doorway, framed in the fading late afternoon sunlight. "So, does this mean that you're back among the living?" she asks. Chance shrugs, and "We'll see," she says. "Let's take this one thing at a time."

"Call me tonight," Alice says, smiling again, and then she's gone, and Chance is standing alone, looking down at the trilobites and thinking about Dancy Flammarion and magic tricks.

In her dream, this is the day after the night that something crawled out of the woods and took her mother away, and Dancy's sitting on her bed pretending to read, sitting on the threadbare quilt her mother made before she was born, crazy quilt of leftover reds and browns and daisy yellows, and her grandmomma is still watching the cabin door. Sits at the table with the double-barreled Winchester across her lap, and she doesn't take her eyes off the door or the big broken window next to it. The Bible and a box of shotgun sh.e.l.ls on the table, a gla.s.s of water and the bloodstone onyx and silver rosary that Dancy's grandfather brought back with him from Germany; every now and then, she picks up the rosary and fingers the vivid green beads specked with red, red and green like drops of blood on moss, whispers her prayers, and sometimes Dancy whispers along with her, matching word for word, breath for breath, and other times she stares at the pages of her book of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, one of her mother's books from when she went off to Pensacola, and the pages are turning like autumn leaves.

There are things of which I may not speak, all these poems she knows by heart, all these words, knows them with her eyes shut. She only has six books, besides her grandmother's Bible, and she stares at the yellowbrittle pages, but she's listening to the cicadas in the trees, every noise from the scalding day beyond the cabin's walls, and if a twig snaps or a single blade of gra.s.s bends, she'll hear it. The day a hushed tangle of sound, the droning rise and fall of insect voices and an alligator bellowing off towards Wampee Creek, and Dancy looks back down at her book of poems.

There are dreams that cannot die . . .

Flutter of wings then, like the day she surprised a flock of vultures picking at the carca.s.s of a wild pig, and they all took off at once, loud and unexpected rustle of carrion feathers against air, but that sound trapped within the close pine walls of the cabin now. Her grandmother hasn't heard, hasn't moved, but the angel is standing on the other side of the room, watching Dancy with its flaming holocaust eyes. "You let her die," Dancy says. "You let them both die," because she remembers that in a few minutes she'll look up, past the table and through the shattered window and he'll be standing right there at the edge of the trees, watching them like he wasn't afraid of the sun or shotguns or angels or anything. Smiling at them, all ripping teeth and skin the color of soot and blacksnakes, and Julia Flammarion's blood still drying in his matted hair.

There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak . . .

"They have seen two such huge walkers in the wasteland," the angel says, angeltongue to make the sun seem cold, to make the sun a cinder, and "I won't listen anymore," Dancy whispers, resentful, everything she's lost and everything she'll lose wrapped up like Christmas for the angel to hear. "I'm not your f.u.c.king butcher anymore."

Fire drips from the angel's lips to scorch the floor, drip, drip, drip like molten lead, and now Dancy can hear rain beginning to fall on the tar-paper roof of the cabin. Fat summer raindrops, and it's the sweetest sound, almost, sweet as the end of a fever, as ripe red apples.

"They know of no father," the angel roars and murmurs and wails, all those things at once, because it hasn't noticed the rain or it just doesn't care, "whether in earlier times any was begotten for them among the dark spirits."

The cool rain against the roof, and Dancy closes her eyes, so good to finally close her eyes and hear nothing now but the rain, falling harder and harder, and she doesn't care that the angel won't shut up or that this isn't the way it happened. This is the way it's happening this time, and that's good enough for her.

"You can't sleep here," her grandmother says, old woman with her rosary beads and shotgun bending close, old woman that smells like dust and wintergreen candy.

"Now once again is the cure in you," the angel says, and the angel smells like nothing real.

"Wake up. You can't sleep here, miss," and Dancy doesn't want to wake up ever again, wants the rain to melt her like sugar and sand, wash her away bit by bit until there's nothing left but a sticky place on the bed, but the old woman is shaking her, and when she opens her eyes, it isn't her grandmother, some other old woman getting wet from the sprinkler, shaking Dancy awake on the lawn of the church.

"You can't sleep here," the old woman says again indignantly, and Dancy stares up at her, the wet, consoling gra.s.s pressed into her cheek, her clothes soaked straight through, and now that she's awake the old woman retreats to the sidewalk where the sprinkler can't reach her. "Please don't make me call the police, miss," she says. "I don't want to have to call the police."

Dancy sits up and wipes sprinkler water from her eyes; her skin has turned the hot color of pink carnations, no telling how long she's been lying in front of the church, the sun burning her skin, and never mind the heat, she's s.h.i.+vering, and her mother told her all the things that can happen if she ever gets a bad sunburn. Dancy reaches for her duffel bag lying a few feet away from her on the lawn, and she almost remembers how she got here, dim recollections of the long and stumbling walk across the parking lot, sinking to her knees in the wet gra.s.s.

"We can't have people sleeping on the gra.s.s," the old woman says, and now she sounds as bewildered as she sounds indignant. "This is a house of G.o.d. We can't have people sleeping on the gra.s.s."

"I'm sorry," Dancy says, and the sprinkler sweeps back over her, a few seconds of rain, and then it's gone again. "I didn't mean to fall asleep."

"Well, okay," the old woman mumbles. "Okay, I guess, but you understand that we can't have people sleeping here," so Dancy gets to her feet, picks up the duffel bag, every inch of exposed skin like she's fallen into a bed of fire ants, but she keeps moving anyway, doesn't even wait for the traffic light to turn green, walks across the street and she stands for a moment in the shade of an elm tree growing in front of a post office. The old woman's still watching her like she's afraid Dancy will come sneaking back the moment she turns away; Dancy smiles at her, but the old woman only glares suspiciously from her dry spot on the sidewalk.

Dancy notices that the dishrag bandage has come off her hand, lies b.l.o.o.d.y and discarded on the lawn in front of the church. The cut has gone an angry, violated red at the edges, stiff and starting to swell, and it hurts too much to make a fist. She takes a deep breath of air so hot that her hair and clothes have already begun to dry, and looks over her shoulder at the steep road that leads past the post office and a health-food store, steep road leading up the mountain and towards the water works tunnel; I know exactly what's coming, she thinks, because she does, and Dancy starts walking again.

After Alice left, Chance switched on the antique electric fan sitting on top of one of the cabinets, something to stir the stagnant, smoky air, a token gesture against the heat. A quick search of the lab's computer catalog turned up one whole drawer of fossils collected from the Haragan Formation of Coal County, Oklahoma, all of them tucked away in Cabinet 25, Drawer 4; ancient sh.e.l.ls and calcite exoskeletons exposed on marly limestone or weathered completely free of the rock, stored in cardboard trays and gla.s.s vials, hand-printed labels for hundreds of brachiopods and net-like bryozoans, horn corals and trilobites, and each one filled out in her grandmother's handwriting. Exquisitely preserved trilobites with poetic and tongue-twisting names like Leonaspis williamsi and Huntonia lingulifer, and towards the back of the metal drawer, one small Ceratonurus and several large examples of the subspecies Dicranurus hamatus elegans.

Chance pulls a stool over to the cabinet, retrieves the chunk of Red Mountain iron ore, and spends almost half an hour comparing it to the Oklahoma fossils. Invertebrates not her strong point, more used to puzzling over crushed sc.r.a.ps of fish and tetrapod skulls, but she can see that the trilobites from the crate are virtually identical to the specimens of Dicranurus from the Haragan, the Oklahoma fossils perhaps fifty million years younger and not so well preserved, but the same genus, if not the same species.

"And that means what, exactly?" Chance asks, her voice low but seeming very loud in the empty lab. Her head too full of questions, and most of them have nothing at all to do with trilobites. No, that would be simple, she thinks. That would be easy, better than the ghosts dredged up by this box of oddities, better than trying to recall exactly what it was she did and did not hear the stormy night her grandmother hung herself. What she does and does not know about her grandfather, trying to imagine why he would have hidden any of these things, buried Esther Matthews' last, hard work instead of finis.h.i.+ng it himself. Obvious now that they must have been arguing about these fossils the night she died, these fossils and maybe the thing in the jar, as well, but why? The trilobites almost certainly a new and undescribed species, and a Silurian record of the genus Dicranurus would be a small but important addition to the long story of trilobite evolution, evidence that one lineage of the group was far older than previously suspected, but still a common enough sort of discovery, the sort of problem her grandmother spent her life solving.

Chance slides the drawer full of Haragan fossils back into the gray steel cabinet, closes the door and locks it. Questions for a dead man, and maybe she's better off not asking them. Perhaps there's nothing left to do but follow Alice's advice and pa.s.s the things from the crate along to the people best suited to solve whatever mysteries they pose, whatever scientific mysteries, and leave the rest alone. Secrets between her grandparents that she might be happier not knowing, their secrets, their problems, and neither of them burdened with them any longer. So she sits on the stool in front of Cabinet 25, listening to the whir of the fan across the room, and stares blankly down at the fossils embedded in the piece of ore.

So what about Dancy, and what about Elise? What about Deacon? and she suspects these are only more questions better left unanswered; too many unlikely or impossible connections drawn for the wrong reasons, string art for loss and hurt and insanity, too little that she can hold in her hands, that she can see; Chance turns the rock over, and there's the star-shaped fossil on the bottom and the smaller polyhedron centered within the stellate impression. She'd completely forgotten about it, and I'll have to remember to show you to Alice, she thinks. No doubt it's only some echinoderm she's never seen before, a poorly preserved crinoid or an eocrinoid, possibly something rarer, a very early true starfish, perhaps, and wouldn't that make this chunk of rock something special?

The sunlight through the windows is getting dim, already fading away towards twilight, towards the merciful end of this long, weird day, and Chance squints to get a better view of the fossil. She counts the sides of the polyhedron, and there are seven, not an unusual number for the plates of some pelmatozoans, so it's probably only a crinoid after all. She tilts the rock a little to one side, and the flat surface of the plate glimmers beneath the stark row of fluorescents overhead, an almost oily sheen off the septahedron.

Unpleasant light, Chance thinks. An unclean, slippery sort of light, and she scolds herself for letting all the weirdness get to her, letting it freak her out like children telling spooky stories. But then the rock seems to wink at her again, briefest flash of greasy light, and there's something else, the realization that it's difficult to look directly at the septahedral plate for very long, that it seems to force her eyes away after only a few seconds.

She carries the piece of iron ore back across the room to the table with the microscope. There's a wooden case somewhere in all the clutter, polished wooden case with a pair of digital calipers inside, and that's what she needs right now, the mundane certainty of measurements to clear her head. She sets the rock aside and begins searching under computer printouts and pages torn from notebooks, Alice's tray of broken shale, and she doesn't find the calipers, but there's a protractor, black lines and numbers printed on translucent green plastic. And that's even better, really, following the vertical and horizontal axes to find the specific angles of the septahedron, simple and everyday exercise to bring her back down to earth.

Chance reaches for the rock again, hears something outside, and she pauses, thinks she hears footsteps at the gravel edge of the parking lot; probably Alice finished with her meeting and dropping back by to see if Chance is still working, hoping that she is and wanting to talk, or it's just someone taking a shortcut. Chance glances towards the lab door standing wide open, the last of the day in sunset reds and oranges bleeding away outside, and then the footsteps stop somewhere near one corner of the building, corner closest to her and closest to the door. And immediately there's another sound, a snuffling animal sound that makes Chance think of pigs and dogs, and her skin p.r.i.c.kles with the sudden urge to shut the door, to run and shut it quickly, but she makes herself stand still and listen.

The snuffling is getting louder, right up against the wall now, maybe less than five feet between her and whatever's making the noise, five feet and a brick wall. Chance puts the protractor down again, and she keeps her eyes on the open door.

It's just a dog, just a hungry, stray dog sniffing about for something to eat, and she tries to picture the ribsythin mongrel in her head, the skittish kind of stray that always looks as if it expects you to kick it, that flinches if you so much as look at it hard.

The snuffling stops as abruptly as it began, but another sound to take its place, like a very big dog panting, breathless, wet pant from mottled canine lips, and under that, much softer, hardly as loud as Chance's heartbeat, a noise no dog could make. A wheezing, satisfied sigh and then a laugh that isn't anything like a laugh, a thin and labored sound trying to pa.s.s itself off for a laugh. And a long shadow falling across the crumbling square of concrete set in front of the door, falling across the threshold and into the lab itself, crooked, laughing shadow like the sun s.h.i.+ning past the mockery of a dog made from sticks and baling wire.

And Chance turns and runs, no more room left inside for explanations, no room for deciding what can and cannot be with that shadow slipping towards her, dragging its maker close behind. She follows the long, dark hall that divides the lab straight down the middle, doesn't bother fumbling about for the light switch because it can't be more than fifty yards to the door at the other end, fifty yards of pitch darkness, and the only light is back the way she came. She can hear it behind her now, the uneven click and sc.r.a.pe of claws on the cement floor, the panting noise, and then Chance runs into the door, hits it so hard she almost falls, sees stars or only pinp.r.i.c.k holes in the gloom, and there's a long and terrible moment when she can't find the doork.n.o.b, another when it's locked and she has to search for the dead bolt. Certain that she isn't alone in the hallway now, that the snuffling, laughing thing is striding though the darkness on its long stilt legs, broomstick, mophandle legs, and then the dead bolt turns and the door swings open, and Chance tumbles out into daylight. Almost falls again, and she runs at least another hundred feet across the gravel and asphalt before she stops and looks behind her, and there's nothing back there but the lab door standing open and the taunting blackness coiled inside.

Dancy knows perfectly well where the entrance to the water works tunnel is, spent enough hours, enough days, at the library studying the maps and diagrams of Red Mountain in a book called Birmingham Bound, finally snuck the book into a restroom and carefully ripped out the relevant pages, has been keeping them folded at the bottom of her duffel bag in case she forgot. But she hasn't forgotten, doesn't need to open up the wet duffel and find the maps because she remembers: follow Nineteenth Street South, all the way to the place where it dead ends at Valley View Park. More like the streets have forgotten where they're supposed to lead, and she keeps turning when she means to go straight, has walked the same circle around Ramsey High School three times now, almost like her ninth birthday when she and her mother took the bus into Milligan to see a carnival. A big, noisy carnival on the edge of town and she got lost in the hall of mirrors. Almost like that, walking three times around the same block, reading lies on street signs, pa.s.sing corners that aren't there until she looks over her shoulder.

The sun has begun to set, too low now to make her sunburn worse, and the air's cooler, but there's precious little comfort there, not when her skin's already gone the color of a boiled crawfish; fat blisters on the backs of her hands, on her sweatsmooth cheeks, enough aches and chills that she's sure she's running a fever, and pretty soon it'll be dark and They won't have to bother playing games with street corners anymore.

Dancy looks up, stops walking and counting the cracks in the sidewalk, counting off her steps, and she sees that she's standing in front of the high school again. The cut on her hand is bleeding, fresh drops of blood spattering the cement at her feet, and her other arm's gone numb from carrying the duffel. She lets the heavy bag slide off her shoulder, thump to the ground, and stares up at the high and cloudless sky, knows that it would be so easy to just sit down and wait for this to end, caught in their clever mirrorstreet trap, going round and round until night comes cras.h.i.+ng down on top of her, and then the nightwalkers can take their time. Then they can do all the things they've always promised they would do, sooner or later, worse things even than what they did to her mother before she finally died.

"All this crazy s.h.i.+t, and now you're just gonna give up?" and Dancy turns to see who said that, already knows, but turning anyway, and the smiling, rawboned man from the bus is sitting near the bottom of the stairs that lead up to the whitewashed front doors of the high school. The man from the parking lot, and his face has grown almost as long and hairy as a wolf's, no need for masks with twilight so close.

"h.e.l.l, you might as well have stayed on the bus, girl, done like you said and rode it all the way to Graceland."

A rustyblue Volkswagen bug rattles by, and the man on the steps smiles and waves to the driver and the driver smiles and waves back. Dancy wonders exactly what the woman in the car saw, and then the chills are back and she's s.h.i.+vering too hard to care. Her head feels light, head like a rubber helium balloon, and she puts her bleeding hand around her throat to keep it from floating away.

"Ain't you never even heard of umbrellas?"

"I'm sick," she says to the man, and he blinks his eyes like swollen red-wasp stings, eyes like blind things inside his skull wanting out, and "No," he says. "You're dying. I think you've been dying all along."

Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to let go, Dancy thinks. Maybe it would be good, and she can see her head rising up and up above the trees and the rooftops, sailing away into the summer sky, and then she wouldn't have to listen to men with wolf faces and running-sore eyes.

"Frankly, I'm a little disappointed. I thought you'd put up more of a fight," the man says. "We were all impressed, the way you handled things back there in Florida. I thought, 'Look at this one here. This one's gonna teach us all a thing or two.' "

"He killed my mother," Dancy whispers, and she's disappointed, too, has turned loose of her throat, but her head's still on her shoulders, just a sticky smear at her throat from her bleeding hand, sticky handprint smear on the collar of her T-s.h.i.+rt. "He killed my mother, and then he killed my grandmother."

"That's right," the man says and runs a long pinkred tongue around his muzzle, maybe the sight of her blood making him hungry, and he leans towards her and sniffs at the air. "He did. But you fixed his little red wagon, didn't you? You even waited around until his momma came looking for him, and you put some holes in her, too, didn't you? d.a.m.n, you were gonna send us all to h.e.l.l. Isn't that what you said?"

"No. That's what the angel said," and Dancy doesn't think she can stand up much longer, wants to sit down on the sidewalk beside her duffel bag if the smiling man intends to talk her to death.

"There ain't no angels, girl. I thought you would've figured that out by now."

"Can I sit down, please? I think this will all make more sense if I sit down," but the smiling man laughs and shakes his head. He holds out a hand to Dancy, opens his long fingers and there's a fat silkwhite roll of twine lying in his hairy palm.

"Not just yet," he says firmly. "You've done us harm, child, and we expect a little more sport for our trouble," but when she reaches for the twine it rolls out of his hand and bounces down the steps towards her. Dancy stoops to pick it up, moves slow because she's very dizzy, and when she looks back at the place the man was sitting he's gone.

This is what they want me to do, isn't it? she thinks, They want me to find the tunnel; it doesn't make sense, but she's pretty sure that doesn't matter anymore, all of it gone beyond making sense, and Dancy ties one end of the smiling man's twine around the trunk of a small dogwood tree growing in front of the high school. A strong square knot, and she tugs at it with what's left of her strength until she's sure it's strong enough, sure that it won't slip loose. Then she crosses the street, leaves a careful, straight line of string on the blacktop, and when she's on the other side, loops it twice around the post of a bright yellow school-zone sign before turning left and trailing it along the ground behind her half a block to the corner of Thirteenth Avenue and Nineteenth Street.

Another loop around another silver post, and this time she turns right, turns south, and when she looks back the school is already growing small and distant and she knows she's found her way out of the maze, that he's shown her the way out. Dancy unwinds the twine as she walks, lets it fall to the ground to mark the way she's come, Hansel and Gretel bread-crumb trick, something she'll recognize if she starts going around in circles again.

She's almost all the way to the corner of Fourteenth and Nineteenth before she realizes that she left her duffel bag back at the high school, everything she owns in there: the few small things she saved from the cabin before it burned, photographs of her mother and grandmother and grandfather, her grandmother's rosary, the big carving knife. But she doesn't have the strength to walk all the way back and retrieve it, not if she's going to reach the park, if she's ever going to reach the tunnel at the end of this road.

Dancy tries not to think about the duffel bag, crosses the street, is busy wrapping the twine tight around one leg of a mailbox when she hears the sound and looks up. Sharp and wooden sound like someone tapping a broomstick hard against the pavement, sound like tapping broomsticks and rustling straw. She's heard that sound once before, tap-tapping along a midnight alley in Savannah, and she tries to stop s.h.i.+vering for a minute, long enough to listen, tries not to think about how bad she hurts.

But there's only the scoldingharsh squawk of a mockingbird somewhere close by, and the constant city sound of traffic; Dancy stands up, so dizzy and hot, and she only wants to lie down on the cooling sidewalk. The eastern sky turning indigo and violet while the west burns alive, and there's a cold crescent moon hanging in between; the heavens like a velvet lullaby for her, an apology for what the sun has done to her skin and what the night gives shelter. Lie down, Dancy. Lie down and close your eyes, but the memory of what she saw that night in Savannah enough to get her moving again, unwinding more of this ball of string that isn't getting any smaller, and she knows she could walk all the way back to Florida and it never would.

This unhealing cleft in the side of the mountain, deep furrow between park-tended gra.s.s and trees that have already turned the dusk beneath their branches into night; steep red earth on either side and rough gray boulders, and Dancy walks up to the gates of the water works tunnel. Hundreds of miles, a thousand, to bring her finally to this spot, to stand before this grim and mosscrusted facade of limestone blocks and mortar, the entrance with its rusty iron gate and a small window set high on either side. No bars across the windows, but they're both so small and so high that it doesn't matter, because no one's going in or coming out that way.

This is the ravenous stone face that Dancy's dreamt of so many times, the same yawning, toothless mouth and those vacant, hollow eyes. Face of the thing that killed her mother and the vengeful ebony thing that came to take its body back into the swamp, the face of the smiling man from the Greyhound bus and the black-haired woman in Waycross with stubby, writhing tentacles where her b.r.e.a.s.t.s should have been, the pretty boy in Savannah who showed her a corked amber bottle that held three thousand ways to suffer, three thousand ways to hurt, before she killed him. All of them dead because that's what the angel said, and she's standing here holding tight to these iron bars so she doesn't fall, too weak to stand, and the mountain looming above her, because this is where the angel said she had to go.

This entrance to all the nowhere places where their G.o.ds sleep, where they've slept since the first day, the first scorching sunrise, and Chance Matthews should be here beside her, Chance and Deacon, and she should have her duffel bag and all the things inside. All this way, and now she knows that this is as far as she goes, that she can only stand and stare between the bars into the blackness beyond this gate sealed with loops of chain like serpent coils and a s.h.i.+ny new padlock, can only glimpse the elbow bends of enormous water pipes, the corroded valves slick with mold.

Dancy's started shaking so badly that her teeth clack loud as a pocketful of pennies, loud as jumping railroad steel under locomotive wheels, and she shuts her eyes, sits down with her back against the gate, her back to the abyss and its mushroom-damp exhalations. Doesn't move again until her head has stopped swimming enough that she can tell up from down, right from left, and she reaches into her jeans pocket and takes out Chance's red knife.

She opens the largest blade and uses it to sever the twine, and then Dancy drops the rest, and the ball of string rolls away into the shadows, rolling all the way back to the smiling man, for all she knows or cares. She ties the free end to one of the iron bars, ties it tight, a knot to match the one around the dogwood's trunk, and there are sounds coming from the trees now, from the dark beneath the trees, and the spindly things crouched there, broomstick legs and the huffing breath of thirsty dogs.

"What the h.e.l.l are you waiting for?" she asks the soulless crimson eyes watching her, not wanting to cry, wanting to be brave at the end, and Dancy crosses herself and waits for them to come.

PART II.

The Dragon.

"Chaos and muck and filth-the indeterminable and the unrecordable and the unknowable-and all men are liars-and yet-"

-CHARLES FORT (1919).

CHAPTER NINE.

The Other Word for Catchfly.

SADIE at the window, the fluorescent-bright inside of the laundromat window, and she's watching the street, the sidewalk streetlight pools and the less certain s.p.a.ces in between, the big pine trees and oaks at the edge of Rushton Park all blending together in the dark. Deacon's still on the phone, still trying to find someone willing to drop whatever they're doing and come in on a Sat.u.r.day night, someone with nothing better to do, nothing worse, but no luck so far. His reflection is superimposed over her view of Highland Avenue, so Sadie can see him watching her from his stool behind the counter without taking her eyes off the street or the park or the trees. Looking ahead of herself and behind at the same time, and Deacon frowns and shakes his head, because he knows she can see him, eyes in the back of her head, and she nods.

"Look, man, yeah, I know it's Sat.u.r.day night, all right?" he says, and he's starting to sound the way her stomach feels. "So why don't you just say no and get it the h.e.l.l over with so I can call somebody else?"

A pickup truck full of teenagers cruises slowly past the laundromat, and Sadie can feel the whump whump whump of its stereo through the plate gla.s.s; s.h.i.+tty rap and a truck-load of drunken white boys all looking for a cop to pull them over, a couple of nights in the Birmingham jail, and maybe that would rub a little bit of the suburbia off their dumb a.s.ses. She closes her eyes and doesn't open them again until she can't hear the pounding music anymore, until there's nothing but the night outside, and That's right, she thinks. Nothing at all but the night.

"Jesus, didn't I say to just forget about it, Soda," Deacon growls and hangs up the phone, rubs hard at his eyes, and Sadie turns around, sits down in one of the hard plastic chairs lined up in front of the window.

"Why don't you call Peggy? Maybe if you tell her it's an emergency," but Deacon coughs up a dry sc.r.a.p of a laugh and squints at the wall clock hanging above the vending machine that sells little boxes of soap powder and fabric softener.

"You know she's already looking for an excuse to tell me to hit the road. Making her come all the way down here on a Sat.u.r.day night would probably be the last straw."

"But if you told her it's an emergency," Sadie says again. "Deke, she couldn't fire you if it was an emergency," trying hard not to sound impatient, but she's looking at the clock, too, and it's almost an hour now since she left the apartment, longer than that since she realized that Dancy was gone.

"Is that what this is? An emergency?"

"What's that supposed to mean?" And the quick, accusing edge in her voice unintended, unantic.i.p.ated, but it feels good regardless; better than sitting here like she isn't scared, playing calm because she doesn't want Deacon to see what's going on inside her head.

"It means maybe we should let her go. She isn't your responsibility, and she sure as h.e.l.l isn't mine."

Deacon licks at his thin, dry lips, and Sadie can tell how badly he wants a drink, probably the only thing in the world he wants more than for her to shut up and leave him alone, a beer and a shot of cheap bar-brand whiskey, maybe a dark corner where he can get drunk in peace.

"We can't save her, Sadie," he says, and she glances down at the dirty linoleum floor, her bare feet against the scuffed red and dirtywhite squares like a chessboard; Your move now, babycakes, small and mocking whisper wedged in somewhere behind her eyes, wedged beneath her skin, voice to speak from the weary part of herself that wishes Dancy Flammarion had picked someone else's life to screw around with. But it's only a very small voice, and in a moment she looks back up at Deacon.

"You know, it's one thing to be a drunk. I've never judged you for being a drunk. But it's something else to be a coward."

"I never figured there was a whole h.e.l.l of a lot of difference," he says, and then there's a long and leadheavy silence between them, nothing to mark the time but the monotonous slosh and throb from one of the was.h.i.+ng machines. Silence to let Sadie's anger get almost as big as her fear, time enough that she knows he's seen it in her eyes. And she doesn't pretend that she can't see the contempt in his, as well, that she doesn't know just how far she's pushed him, and any moment now he'll tell her to go f.u.c.k herself. f.u.c.k herself and all the creepy, little albino lunatics she can find, while she's at it, and then Deacon sighs loud and looks down at the telephone and his list of names and numbers; after he starts dialing again, Sadie turns back to the window and the wide night full of shadows still waiting for her.

The long nub end of the afternoon spent at her keyboard, her hands moving so much slower than her racing mind. The frustrating lag between her thoughts and the hunt and peck; a hot flood of ideas where there had been months of trickling, uncertain sentences, and Sadie trying to keep up with herself, wis.h.i.+ng she'd taken typing in high school, scared that this inspiration would soon grow restless, impatient with her, and slink back to whatever hole it crawled out of. Listening to the same Brian Eno alb.u.m over and over on her headphones and smoking too much, as if that would help. Finis.h.i.+ng a stale pack of Lucky Strikes left from the last time Deacon quit instead of her Djarum cloves, and it was dark by the time she finally began to run out of steam.

Ten new pages on the Mac's hard drive, ten and half, really, when she'd never done better than seven before; she fished the last of the Luckys from the pack and lit it with a wooden kitchen match, squinted through smoke at the softly glowing screen. Her words, her jumbled, mad thoughts tamed or simply broken, made language, and she took another drag off the Lucky, exhaled, and read the last sentence aloud.

" 'I can't get it off,' Val said, and she held out her red hands for Wendy to see."

This scene, and the girls named Wendy and Val were hiding in the rusted sh.e.l.l of an old caboose, a wide and desolate place just across the tracks from Morris Avenue where dozens of box cars and engines lay abandoned, and, in the story, something like meat started falling from the cloudless sky. A hailstorm of blood and marbled flakes of something that wanted to be meat, and the girls huddled together in the dark, listening to the sticky, spattering sounds the stuff made as it struck the steel roof of the caboose. Red smears down the one window that wasn't broken, Val afraid to even look outside, and then Sadie knew that it was time to stop for the day, because the words were coming too easily, too fast, and that usually meant that she was getting tired and wasn't thinking hard enough anymore. She saved the file to her back-up diskette, switched off the computer, and leaned back against the edge of the bed to finish her cigarette.

And that's when she remembered Dancy. A glance at the alarm clock beside the bed, 8:07 PM, so almost five whole hours sitting here on the floor, hunched over the keyboard, and it was no wonder her typing fingers were numb and her back ached, no wonder she needed to p.i.s.s, and Dancy was probably asleep out on the couch. Was probably exhausted after the weird s.h.i.+t at Chance Matthews' house and grateful for a quiet place to rest for a while. Sadie stubbed out the b.u.t.t of the Lucky Strike in the saucer she was using for an ashtray, looked at the dark computer screen one more time, some part of her reluctant to walk away, uncomfortable with the thought of leaving Val and Wendy trapped inside the caboose while the sky hemorrhaged above them.

She walked quietly from the bed, her bare feet almost silent on the carpet, and stood for a moment in the doorway staring at the ratty sofa where Dancy wasn't sleeping. Only the final, unreliable dregs of dusk to illuminate the room, murky sunset light the color of raisins, and a gauzy haze of cigarette smoke drifting a few feet above the floor. No sign of Dancy anywhere, here or in the kitchen, so Sadie called her name once, "Dancy?" but no one answered, and she didn't like the way her voice sounded in the empty apartment, the way it bounced back at her from the gray walls and grayer corners. Not quite an echo, but still the impression that someone was taunting her, throwing her words in her face and smiling at her unease.

Sadie kept both eyes on the room as she fumbled for the switch plate on the wall, and in another moment the darkness was gone, washed away by warmsafe incandescent bulbs, and she could see that Dancy was gone, as well. An empty spot where her duffel bag had been, no one left in the apartment but Sadie, and she looked at the front door, half expecting to find it standing open, but it wasn't. She walked across the room to the kitchen, and there were the c.o.ke and the uneaten Oreos waiting for her on the table.

The next five minutes spent walking through the apartment again, turning on all the lights as she went; maybe just a game, Dancy Flammarion's idea of hide-and-go-seek, but there were only so many places to hide in Deacon's apartment: the bathtub, underneath the bed, behind the sofa, and five minutes was more than time enough to check them all twice. So Sadie searched the hallway, too, one end to the other, from the damp spot where the ceiling leaked to the top of the stairs, walked downstairs to the front door, and then back up to the apartment. And finally, when there was no more denying that Dancy was gone, Sadie sat down on the sofa and stared at the floor between her feet, the carpet the color of vomit, her black toenails; half an hour before, and her head had been so full, reeling from all the things that Deacon and Chance wouldn't explain to her, the stranger things that Dancy had only ever hinted at, the unexpected outpouring of words. And now she felt as tired, as empty, as the moment before she found the pile of black gumdrops on the threshold. Maybe just some crazy girl, after all, and gullible Sadie wanting to believe as badly as Deacon and Chance wanted to deny, needing the same way they needed, and in the end the crazy girl had gotten bored with them all or moved on to the next delusion, had walked out on her, and in a few weeks Deacon would tell her how silly they'd all been and there must be a hundred rational explanations.

Or . . .

We haven't even talked about the tunnel, and Sadie looked up quickly, knew that she was still alone and only remembering something Dancy said while they waited for the taxi to take them away from Chance's house. Something else exciting and nonsensical, but Sadie stared at the closed door, the doork.n.o.b and her heart beating too fast.

We have to talk about the tunnel, and we have to go there, today, while there's still time.