The Threshold Read online

  “That’s a wee house, hardly bigger than a baby’s own crib.” And John O’Connell laughed his big-bear laugh that shook the table and tickled something in Callie’s middle. The lady had drawn a row of tiny houses with peaked roofs all crowded together. Two long windows and a door took up almost the whole of their fronts. John sobered at his wife’s stunned look. “Well, now, Callie’s all of ten years old and soon to be a woman.” But he squirmed and couldn’t meet Luella’s eyes. “Can’t keep her in the dark about everything … forever.”

  “What Callie doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”

  “Haskell Gibson didn’t know better than to get too close to the workings,” John O’Connell answered his wife in an ominous tone, and waggled a finger at them all, “and he was hurt mortal bad.”

  2

  Aletha Kingman stood inside the miner’s shack and stared toward the exposed floor on which she’d sat while marmots whistled all over what was left of Alta. The rough wood of the door frame felt withery dry under her hand. Houses, like people, dry up when they get old. Was this where Callie had lived? Alta had not been abandoned until the 1940’s. That’s why so much of it was still intact. But that forest had taken more than forty years to grow back. Probably lots of people had lived here after Callie.

  Daylight penetrated cracks between the bare boards of the outer wall. Whole swaths of cloth hung colorless, worn to a gossamer thinness. Wads of newspaper had the print drowned out by weather stain. Odd patches of sheet metal and even squashed tin cans with the ribbing bumps still running through the middle and pieces of shredding linoleum—all bore witness to the desperation of generations to stop the herculean winters from leaking in. A heavy beige paper had been applied throughout at one period, and more recently a series of once-gaudy wallpapers now aged to pastel and gray.

  The marmots had quieted but Aletha could hear voices as the jeep travelers spread out to explore the ghost town. The dog’s barking sounded harsh and unnatural where memories slept and life had died. The shack had one small room and one tiny one, with a narrow staircase against the wall of the former. The tiny room had been a kitchen with a hole in the ceiling for a stovepipe, a back door, and two miniature window holes. A shelf under one window contained a sink that must have drained into a pail, because there was no sign of pipes.

  The larger room had a hole in the wall for a stovepipe, a front door, and two windows. Aletha turned her shoulders sideways to creep up the bowed stairs and wondered how a hearty miner had managed his shoulders in this space. The loft upstairs was so low no adult could hope to stand upright even under the center of the steeply pitched roof.

  Aletha supposed the woman who had come to claim Callie was the girl’s mother and she tried to imagine the two of them in this derelict place, unable to believe she was admitting that any of it had happened.

  The mother didn’t seem to have noticed Aletha, but she’d never really looked up. She’d swirled into the oval in a mild huff, bent to grasp the girl’s hand, and turned away. Her eyes had been on Callie the whole time. The woman’s hairdo was turn-of-the-century or before, done up in a big plop on top of her head with wispies coming down all around. She’d be long dead by now, probably Callie too. The little girl anyone would want to hug on sight had aged and withered and died already.

  Aletha left the shack to perch against the foundation across the road in as close to the same spot as she could remember. She’d stood for a long while, not particularly wanting to repeat the experience, when a head with a face and a monstrous bulge on the back of it appeared in the darkness of the doorway to the miner’s shack. Aletha gave a startled squeak. Eyes widened and met hers in a flash of anger. A man with a rolled sleeping bag on top of a fullframed backpack shifted and bent low to step out the door.

  “Sorry.” She tried to straighten the silly look off her face. “Guess I was expecting a ghost.”

  He forced a smile that didn’t pretend to go past his lips. His stubbled chin was as scruffy as Callie’s shoes. “Probably some around. Place like this.”

  He clomped off up the road in heavy boots. He’d broken the spell. Aletha brushed grit from the seat of her jeans, made another useless check for her sketchbook, and followed him. A slight chill reminded her of the lengthening shadows and shortening daylight. She wondered what this place did at night. The window holes of the boardinghouse were even now sinking into slanted shadow, like eye sockets in a weary face. Rows of eyes with formless silhouettes behind them, like memories or thoughts. Wraiths?

  Two couples and the dog were loading into the jeep next to her car. They ground off on what Aletha’s map showed to be Boomerang Road. The same map warned that her little Datsun would have to travel back the way it had come, which had been bumpy enough.

  The man with the backpack was setting up a small tent on the leveled space in the midst of flattened buildings that once meant things to living people. He was unusually tall and she wondered how he could fit in the tent. Aletha slid into the Datsun, started the engine, and was about to close the door when the backpacker was suddenly there holding on to it. “Is there any way I could hitch a ride if you’re going somewhere near Telluride? Maybe just to the highway? I’m out of everything except granola. I hate granola.”

  “Well, I … guess.”

  “Thanks. Just a minute and I’ll get my tent.”

  Aletha thought seriously of taking off without him. She’d learned how dangerous it was to trust people. But if he’d meant to do her harm he could have yanked her out of the car when he held the door. No need to get neurotic over a poor man who needed a lift. She greeted him with an apologetic smile when he stuffed his gear into the backseat and slid in beside her. With him came the reek of wood smoke so thick she rolled her window down for air. His smile was reserved and tightened her back up a bit. “Aletha Kingman. I’m staying in Telluride. I’ll take you on in.”

  “Cree Mackelwain. Thanks.”

  She backed and turned the Datsun on the road between the boardinghouse and the commissary, headed down the hill past Callie’s house slowly because of the rocks and washouts.

  He studied her and she sensed he was nervous riding with her. He had to be half again her size. “Do you live in Telluride?”

  “Just staying there. For a while.” Cree Mackelwain put his hand to the dashboard. “Will you please watch the road?”

  “I’ve had a wild afternoon.” She laughed and heard hysteria. Only a trace.

  It was the time of day deer move out of cover toward water. But Cree didn’t look into the forest at the roadsides. Twilight grayed the colors around them; not enough to make the headlights of any use, but enough to fuzz vision. The hard-sprung Datsun didn’t take the unsurfaced road well and the woman seemed to aim for every chuckhole and rock in it at a speed to match her flaky laugh. He shouldn’t complain; not many lone females would have picked up a camp-ripe backpacker.

  He was struggling to think of something halfway pleasant to say when they rounded a curve where two trees and a wooden tower blocked their path. Cree hit the windshield when she hit the brakes, even though he was braced against the dash. Pebbles flew as the Datsun’s rear skidded around and the front hung up over the far side of a drainage ditch, throwing him back against the seat.

  “That’s some reaction time, lady,” he said when he realized they’d stalled.

  She stared at her hands on the steering wheel. “It was the tear again.”

  “Tear in what?”

  “The tear in what I’m seeing today.”

  Cree glanced out the side window. No tower, no trees blocked the road. “For just a moment … the road we’re on wasn’t there.”

  “You saw it too?” Her whisper croaked, “I thought it was just me.” She drew a piece of ragged pink rock on the end of a chain out from under her sweatshirt and began to worry it with her fingers. Then she bit it.

  Shoving his breathing back under control Cree stepped down into the ditch. The Datsun had hung up on a bank soft with dead red pine needl
es about six inches from a hard live tree trunk. “This kind of thing happen to you often?”

  “I saw a little ghost named Callie by that shack this afternoon, but other than that I don’t think I’ve done this before. I don’t need any of this. I just got out of …” She grabbed three times for the door handle before she made contact and then disappeared into the ditch on the other side.

  “Just got out of what?”

  “It scared me.” He took her arm and forced her to walk up and down the road. “If you saw it too,” she said, “then maybe the tear was there. And what do I do with that?”

  Cree had rarely met anyone who could talk so much and make so little sense. He wished she had a big nose or thick hips or something. But she was slight and … honey-colored. “That was a tram tower we saw. Tram used to go right along here.” He walked into the trees, kicked an ancient wooden plank, took hold of a loop of rusted metal cable that stuck up stiffly from the soil. “This is part of what we saw. They shipped ore concentrates in buckets down to a railroad that used to run below.”

  “Just what is it you do for a living, Mr. Mackelwain?” she asked in total disregard of the conversation he thought they were having. Her hair seemed to catch what little light was left in the world.

  “I’m unemployed.” She was impossible to talk to. “So what do you do?”

  “Same as you.”

  Cree offered to drive once they’d pushed the Datsun back onto the road, but she refused. “Let’s just hope the road continues on into this year,” she said.

  Both kept quiet with their thoughts on the way into Telluride. Cree had thrown out about every explanation he could come up with for the roadblock that wasn’t there. He’d even toyed with the idea this Aletha person had some kind of power to induce hallucinations in others. He threw that one out with a snort he tried to transform into a laugh when she glanced at him. He was bone weary after four days on the trail. That’s why, when she’d parked the Datsun on the main street of Telluride’s little business district, he was surprised to hear himself say, “Buy you a drink at the Sheridan in about an hour?”

  She peered over the car roof at him and shrugged. “Sure.”

  Aletha hurried through the lobby of the New Sheridan Hotel, which was the oldest hotel in town and its lobby the tiniest, most unimposing lobby imaginable. It had an ornate cage for the registration clerk and a booth displaying souvenirs where she’d bought the little piece of quartz on a chain she wore around her neck. Take a piece of Telluride home with you, the sign above the booth read. She’d chosen that particular one because it had a pretty pinkish stain to it, whereas the others were more a milky white. They all had gold and silver glitters that flashed in the sunlight. She’d decided that it would bring her luck.

  A narrow stairway led off the hall on the way to the dining room up to a landing where one turned abruptly onto a staircase that swept to the top of the building, with only a small level space as a step-off point to the second and third floors. Balustraded balconies allowed entrance to the rooms on both floors and looked down upon the illogical and abrupt ending of the staircase.

  In her room Aletha switched on the light and took the antique cigar box out of her suitcase. She used it to keep stationery, letters, and stamps in, but she looked now with new interest at the little girl in the oval picture ringed with flowers on the cigar-box lid. This child had a velvet bonnet atop her sausage curls. It was tied under her chin with ribbons that seemed to blow in the wind. She too had a dimple in each plump cheek, heavy lashes, and eyes of delighted innocence. Aletha’s mother collected old advertising posters. Many used representations of little girls with that look of guileless helplessness. “Establishment pornography of yesteryear,” Helen announced often and with a certain glee. “Dirty old men always were and always will be.”

  Cree Mackelwain was waiting in the bar when Aletha arrived. The place had old smoky glass in the mirror behind the bottles, old photographs of a long-dead Telluride on the walls, and the requisite blare of new music. They sat at a table and had to shout. Cree Mackelwain looked dark even after an obvious scrubbing-up and a shave.

  “So … have you talked yourself out of it yet?”

  He grinned. “Just about.”

  “Don’t worry, by tomorrow you’ll have yourself convinced either nothing happened or somehow it was my doing.” She described Callie to him, and the smell of sulfur. They fell into an uncomfortable silence. He was not a comfortable person. He rallied and tried to talk about his backpack trip but kept searching her face as if he doubted anything was getting through. Finally they sat and watched other people talk. He went to the bar to get himself another beer and a burgundy for her, lingered to speak to an eastern cowboy in an expensive western shirt.

  “So … uh … you said you just got out?” Cree placed the burgundy before her. “Don’t tell me. Let me guess. You had a nervous breakdown,” he said gracelessly, “and you’ve just been released from the hospital and you are on a needed vacation, right?”

  “Wrong.” Aletha raised the glass of purple-red wine and looked him straight-on over the top of it. “I just got out of prison.”

  Cree sat perfectly still a moment, staring into his beer. Then he raised it to his lips and almost choked on a mouthful when he exploded into laughter. Three guys standing up to the massive bar cheered when Aletha slapped money down on the table and walked out.

  3

  This promised to be one of the finest days of Callie’s young life. Luella and John O’Connell went to the funeral for Haskell Gibson in Telluride. And Callie had Bram and Charles to herself. With the Fourth of July and Christmas as the only scheduled holidays and a seven-day work week as standard, camps closed down for funerals, giving everyone a time to mourn the dead and ease life’s tensions in town.

  All but a few of the camp children had gone with their parents on down the winding Boomerang Road in a procession that had started before dawn. Many of the single miners rode the tram buckets to Ophir Loop and then took the train on into Telluride. Callie and Bram had been left behind to save on expenses.

  She sat in the privy now, humming blissfully and contemplating a whole day to do with as she wished. A panicked fly buzzed his struggles in a web near the roof and a brown spider the size of a shooter marble watched from a crevice close by. Callie kicked the seat with the heel of her shoe, making a familiar hollow thud, thud, thud. The privy was already becoming sun-warmed and fragrant but Callie much preferred this place in summer. In winter there was ice on the seat. She cleaned herself with a square of newspaper and stepped out into the sun.

  Bram sprawled across the porch stroking Charles, who reclined majestically on his chest. Charles lived in the warm places under their house. He’d been living there when the O’Connells moved in and had no intention of moving out just because Luella did not like cats. She often tried to chase him off but Charles would circle around her and slip under the house where the broom couldn’t reach. Charles was not a clean cat as cats go, which was unfortunate, since he was all white. But living under the house and sometimes scrounging rodents or tidbits from dinner pails over at the mill, or scraps left out on the town garbage heap next to the O’Connells’ cabin, had given him a distinctly blotchy appearance.

  “Come here, Callie, and listen. You can hear Charles purr now that the mill’s shut down.”

  Charles’s purr sounded more like a rattle somewhere deep in his breathing. But the little sounds they didn’t usually hear—like the drone of bees, the sad cry of the train whistle down at the Loop—made this golden day even more special. Callie could even hear Bram’s stomach gurgle.

  “Let’s go see if Aunt Lilly’s done her baking yet.” He stood and draped the cat over his shoulder. Charles stiffened and his ears went back. His tail flapped this way and that across Bram’s chest. Charles preferred always to do his own walking. The mill rose in tiers to one side, houses or cabins lined the other, and above these a row of homes that boasted such things as separate bedrooms, encl
osed porches, and even pantries. The white schoolhouse sat shuttered. Bram crossed over and kicked the door. Charles leapt off and away from him.

  “The new teacher will be here next week and you have to stop work and go to school,” Callie taunted, and hiked herself atop the hitching rail.

  “I’m old enough to earn a wage and we need the money.” He gave the door another kick. “I’m a man and I want to work.” Bram had gone through all the schoolbooks Ma’am had brought with her from Ohio as well as what education was offered him in their nomadic life. He could read anything in the Bible Ma’am asked him to. She hoped to locate in a big town with a high school in the next year or so.

  Because of the heavy snows, school was usually in session in Alta from May to October, but a teacher had not been found until late this year and she’d promised to stay on through December. Callie couldn’t wait. Lessons with Ma’am were not as much fun as being in a schoolroom with other children. Luella had taught in a one-room country school near her farm home in Ohio before she’d caught the eye of the big Irishman who was passing through. Married teachers were almost unheard of. Even though teachers were needed wherever they went, Luella never considered the job. Her big Irishman continued to call her Ma’am in gentle fun anyway, and Callie and Bram could think of her in no other way.

  Callie and Bram walked on, past the commissary and the cookhouse, and stopped to give a few words of encouragement to Mary Jane, the blindfolded mule tethered to a stump on a patch of grass beside the road. Mary Jane had hauled ore cars on the five-hundred level for the last six months and the only light she’d seen had been from miners’ candles and carbide lamps.

  Aunt Lilly sat on her front step, her chin in her hands. She didn’t look up when they stood before her. “Wonder what’s ailing Aunt Lilly, Bram.”

  “She’s fretting because she didn’t get to go to Telluride.”

  Lilly gave a half-grimace, half-grin. “Cookies are cooling on the table.”