Threshold Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  PART I - Maps and Legends

  CHAPTER ONE - Chance

  CHAPTER TWO - Dancy

  CHAPTER THREE - Deacon

  CHAPTER FOUR - Sadie

  CHAPTER FIVE - The Dead and the Moonstruck

  CHAPTER SIX - Touched

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT - At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners

  PART II - The Dragon

  CHAPTER NINE - The Other Word for Catchfly

  CHAPTER TEN - Life Before Man

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - The Forked and Shining Path

  CHAPTER TWELVE - Trollholm

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - In the Water Works

  EPILOGUE

  GLOSSARY OF PALEONTOLOGICAL AND GEOLOGICAL TERMS

  Daughter of Hounds

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  “Caitlín R. Kiernan writes like a Gothic cathedral on fire.”

  —Poppy Z. Brite

  Praise for Threshold

  “A distinctively modern tale that invokes cosmic terrors redolent of past masters H. P. Lovecraft and Algernon Blackwood. . . . A finale that veers unexpectedly from a seemingly inevitable display of supernatural fireworks to a subtly disarming denouement only underscores the intelligence behind this carefully crafted tale of awe-inspired nightmare.”—Publishers Weekly

  “Threshold is a bonfire proclaiming Caitlín Kiernan’s elevated position in the annals of contemporary literature. It is an exceptional novel you mustn’t miss.”

  —Cemetery Dance

  “[Caitlín R. Kiernan is] the most singular voice to enter the genre since Neil Gaiman popped up in graphic novels and Stephen King made movies live inside books. . . . Beginning with the instant classic Silk and continuing through her short fiction to this extraordinary new novel, Kiernan hasn’t missed a step yet. . . . If you haven’t sampled her work yet, you haven’t really been reading the future of horror and dark fantasy, only its past.”—SF Site

  “Kiernan’s prose is tough and characterized by nightmaish description. Her brand of horror is subtle, the kind that is hidden in the earth’s ancient strata and never stays where it can be clearly seen.”—Booklist

  “Threshold confirms Kiernan’s reputation as one of dark fiction’s premier stylists. Her poetic descriptions ring true and evoke a sense of cosmic dread to rival Lovecraft. Her writing envelopes the reader in a fog concealing barely glimpsed horrors that frighten all the more for being just out of sight.”—Gauntlet Magazine

  Murder of Angels

  “Lyrical and earthy, Murder of Angels is that rare book that gets everything right. . . . The darkness is poetic, the fantasy is gritty, and the real-world sections are rooted in deep and true emotions.”—Charles de Lint

  Low Red Moon

  “The story is fast-paced, emotionally wrenching, and thoroughly captivating. . . . Kiernan only grows in versatility, and readers should continue to expect great things from her.”—Locus

  “Low Red Moon fully unleashes the hounds of horror, and the read is eerie and breathtaking. . . . The familiar caveat ‘not for the faint of heart’ is appropriate here—the novel is one of sustained dread punctuated by explosions of unmitigated terror.”—Irish Literary Review

  “Effective evocations of the supernatural . . . a memorable expansion of the author’s unique fictional universe.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Silk

  Winner of the International Horror Guild Award

  for Best First Novel

  Nominated for the British Fantasy Award

  “A debut novel of a level of accomplishment most young horror/dark fantasy writers could not begin to approach. [Caitlín R. Kiernan’s] tightly focused, unsparing, entranced gaze finds significance and beauty in the landscape it surveys.” —Peter Straub

  “A remarkable novel. [Caitlín R. Kiernan] tells a powerful and disturbing story with creepy intensity and a gift for language that borders on the scary. Deeply, wonderfully, magnificently nasty.”—Neil Gaiman

  “A daring vision and an extraordinary achievement.”

  —Clive Barker

  “If the title alone doesn’t make you want to read Silk, the first page will do the trick. Kiernan’s work is populated with the physically freaky, mentally unstable, sexually marginalized characters who have caused so much consternation in conventional circles—but Caitlín R. Kiernan is headed in an entirely different direction. Her unfolding of strange events evokes not horror, but a far larger sense of awe.”—Poppy Z. Brite

  “[Kiernan] has what it takes to excite me as a reader. . . . Think of Poppy Z. Brite with slightly more accessible prose and characters who aren’t quite so outré. . . . I just loved this book and can’t wait to see what she writes next.”

  —Charles de Lint

  This book is best read aloud.—CRK

  ROC

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin

  Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Roc trade paperback edition.

  First Roc Mass Market Printing, January 2007

  Copyright © Caitlín R. Kiernan, 2001

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-03447-7

  http://us.penguingroup.com

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

  —J. R. R. TOLKIEN (1947)

  PROLOGUE

  In the Garden of Proserpine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Chance laughs, but there was something strange and sad about the rain that she can’t quite remember, and she doesn’t start giggling again.

  This rough stone wall set into the side of the mountain more than a hundred years ago, blockhouse of stone and mortar and dank air to cap the north end of the tunnel, mushroom and mud and mildew air, and “All aboard,” Elise says, and she pulls the gate shut behind them. Dull clang of iron on stone, and She’s closing us in, Chance thinks, so maybe she’s just a little afraid now, the pot starting to make her paranoid, but then Deacon has his flashlight out and he plays it across the slippery walls, the punky, wormgnawed support beams overhead. “What’s that?” Elise asks, and Deacon shines the light at the two great pipes that fill up most of the blockhouse, pipes like the mountain’s steel intestines, like something from an H. R. Giger painting; neither animal nor mineral, organs trapped somewhere in between.

  Deacon puts one big hand on the closest pipe and “Damn,” he says. “It’s cold,” and Chance shivers again, opens her eyes and tries to remember having closed them. She’s alone and lying on the floor of the tunnel, lying in mud and water, and Deacon’s discarded flashlight isn’t very far away, close enough that she can reach out and touch it. It’s not shining very brightly anymore, batteries running low and when they’re gone there won’t be anything but this night beneath the mountain that never has a morning.

  “Deacon?” she calls out, and her voice booms and echoes off the tunnel walls, and no one answers anyway. Just the steady, measured drip of water, and she gets up, dizzy so she leans against one of the pipes. The ceiling’s low, and she has to be careful not to hit her head, barely six feet, barely room to stand; Chance picks up the flashlight, something solid and radiant against the dark, against the disorientation, and her head crammed too full of marijuana smoke and the cold. She points the flashlight at the tunnel wall, squints at the rock, and there’s sandstone the bruised color of an overripe plum.

  Ferruginous sandstone, she thinks, sober, safe geologist thought getting in or out through the dumbing fog behind her eyes. Ferruginous sandstone, so she must be at least eighty yards or more into the tunnel, past the limestone, beyond the Ordovician and into the lowermost Silurian and the thick seams of iron ore. She looks at the angle of the rocks, gentle slant of seafloor beds lifted hundreds of millions of years ago, collision of continents to raise mountains, and “It’s cold,” Deacon says again. Deacon awestruck, marveling at the pipe beneath his hand, and “Yeah, well, me too,” Elise says.

  A noise behind Chance, then, noise like something damp and heavy, something vast and soft moving through the tunnel, and the sucking undertow squelch of water swirling down a drain; meaty, counterclockwise sound, and she turns and shines the flashlight at the place she thinks it’s coming from. But there’s only Elise, standing a few feet away and squinting into the flashlight. She’s naked, nothing against her skin but mud and tunnel slime, the chill air, and there are tears streaking her dirty face. Sloe-eyed Elise, and maybe Chance has never really noticed before how beautiful she is, even now, scared and filthy, or especially now, her perfect mouth, the fragile slant of her shoulders, and she holds one hand up, like the light hurts her eyes or she doesn’t want Chance to see.

  “He told me not to look, Chance,” she sobs. “He told me not to look at it, but I had to see.”

  And then the flashlight flickers and dies, and the dark rushes around them like a flood, black past black, viscous bottom of the ocean blackness that wraps itself around them and Elise screams. No, Chance thinks, don’t do that. Don’t do that because you’ll swallow, and it’ll get inside you, or she’s trying to talk but can’t remember how to shape the words, how to put her tongue and teeth together to make sounds.

  Something brushes past her in the dark, and It’s cold, she thinks. Yes, it is cold, cold as a sky without stars, as a grave, and then the flashlight flickers dimly back to life. But Elise is gone again, and there are only the pipes leading deeper into the tunnel, deeper into the punctured, bitter heart of the mountain.

  “Did you hear that?”

  And Elise laughs, knows that Deacon’s only trying to frighten her, but maybe Chance heard it too, starts to say so, but “No,” he says, shining the brilliant flashlight beam down the length of the pipes.

  “Listen.”

  Chance opens her eyes and stares into the night sky that is only dark, into the spring rain that whispers through the trees and takes away her tears. She can hear Elise somewhere nearby, incoherent, crying and Deacon’s trying to comfort her.

  “ ‘. . . how many miles I’ve fallen by this time?’ ” but no one hears her, so no one answers, either, and the girl named Chance closes her eyes again and lets the rain kiss her face and hide the things she never saw.

  PART I

  Maps and Legends

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

  —
JOSEPH CAMPBELL (1949)

  CHAPTER ONE

  Chance

  MORNING after the funeral, latest funeral in what seems to Chance Matthews to have become a litany of caskets and wreaths and frowning undertakers that might go on forever, if there were anyone left she cared about, anyone left to die. All night she drove the narrow back roads north of the city, countrydark roads, just her and a pint bottle of Wild Turkey, the music blaring loud from her tape deck, chasing the headlights of her old Impala, trying to escape and knowing there was no way to go that far, that fast. No gravity greater than the pull of her loss, and now Chance sits on the hood of the car as the summer sun bleeds in through the trees on Red Mountain, seeps hot between dogwood and hackberry branches, and soon it will burn away the dew that sequin speckles the front yard of her dead grandparents’ house. The Impala’s engine pops and clicks its secret, exhausted car language as it cools after the long and restless night.

  Chance squints at the rising sun, wishes she could push it back down, chase it away to the east forever and hang onto the night, the night and her drunkenness fading to hangover and shadows. Maybe no solace in the dark, but at least not this hateful reminder that the world hasn’t stopped turning, that it won’t, no matter how much she hurts.

  “What the fuck now, Grandpa?” she whispers, and her voice just another thing that seems wrong, that seems improper, unseemly to be alive and breathing much less talking, but she asks again, anyway, and louder this time, “What the fuck now?”