Threshold by Caitlin R. Kiernan Read Free Book Online Page B

slide open like secret panels in the wall, and Dancy holds the elevator until Chance gets there. “Third floor?” she asks, making sure, still smiling, and Chance, more confused than ever and showing it, nods her head. “Thanks,” she says, and so Dancy presses the peppermintwhite button with a bold black number 3 printed on it. The button glows yellow, and the elevator doors slide slowly, quietly, closed again.

    Two years, almost, since the first time she dreamed about Chance. Her mother was still alive then, her grandmother was still alive, and a hurricane spinning furious counterclockwise somewhere south of their cabin in the Okaloosa wilderness, big hurricane waiting somewhere offshore, sitting out there past Eglin Air Force Base and Fort Walton Beach, past the suburbs and beachfront tourist traps, crouched over gulfdeep water and just the tattered edges were almost enough to drown the swamps, to rattle the windows and bend the pines until they creaked and groaned. Her mother listening to the radio while her grandmother stared nervously at the raindark windows, oil-lamp shadows on the walls like goblins, and Dancy had fallen asleep watching them, listening to the weather reports, the excited voices of men and women relaying the storm’s speed and position, trying to second-guess its grayblue intentions.
    Finally, too sleepy to be scared anymore, nothing she could do anyway, nothing any of them could do but hope the storm moved on south or west, anywhere but north, and “We should’a got out of here while we still could,” her mother kept saying, accusing tone in her voice to blame her grandmother, blame her that they hadn’t run; her grandmother accepting the blame by not saying a word in her own defense, just watching the windows, and Dancy shut her eyes, trusting the goblin shadows to keep their distance, and in a moment she was asleep.
    And at least the storm had the decency to stay out of her head, out of her dreams, and instead she was standing in front of a big white house, nowhere she’d ever been before, and You’d have to be very rich to live in a house like that, she thought, a house with electricity and so many rooms, a house in a city. The sun hot on her exposed skin, but the grass was cool against her bare feet, bare toes, and that’s when she saw the girl sitting in the window, high-up attic window looking down at her. The girl with brown hair and green eyes looking straight at her, but not seeing her.
    Dancy waved and the girl ignored her or didn’t notice, no change in her blank, unblinking expression, and Dancy turned around, hoping she might see what the girl was looking at. I’m standing on a mountain, she thought, staring down at treetops and rooftops and the city skyline farther out, glass and steel and stone towers, concrete highway ribbons. She’d never been on a mountain before, even a small one like this, and it made her a little dizzy, the sky closer than it should be, the world tilted at an unnatural angle, and she sat down on the cool green grass to keep from falling.
    “Don’t look at it,” the girl in the window called down to her. “Don’t look at it, Dancy,” so the girl did know she was there after all, and Dancy turned to say that she’d been rude, to pretend not to see her before, and what wasn’t she supposed to look at, anyway. But the girl was gone, nothing there now but an empty attic window, lacewhite curtains to flap and twist in a hot breeze that hadn’t been there a second before.
    And a sound then, like a freight train far away, railroad rumble as the steel begins to hum and the ballast shift, but she knew that it wasn’t really a train, that this sound came from the ground beneath her, railroad or thunder trapped somewhere underground and getting louder. Something she could feel now, tremors through the palms of her hands, the tips of her fingers, and then the girl was standing over her, the brown-haired girl standing over her, and one hand held out,