by Zack Parsons
The silent brick houses that remained upright held the empty square frames of windows. These openings were black, so black he imagined things moving in their depths, uncoiling and turning and regarding him with long-dead faces and hollow, eyeless cavities. His rational mind fought to quiet the fear but could not, for this was no rational path he traversed; it was the sort often beset by spirits and devils and things that lurked in the shadows of dead cities.
After a very long time of crawling Gideon knelt before the yawning entrance of a cave tunnel. It was a true cave, dark, and all around him were the fallen walls of what seemed the largest and most elaborate of the pueblo structures, as if this ancient tunnel in the bedrock had held some ceremonial significance to the Indians. Many of these structural remnants had long since tumbled over the surrounding cliff and exposed the perilous drop. The walls that remained created slumping tunnels through which a deadened wind softly moaned.
Gideon hesitated only a moment at the threshold. Death was coming for him, whether outside or within the cave. His journey had brought him here and, seized by fatalistic curiosity, he intended to see that journey to its conclusion. Onward into the darkness, his hands became ragged and his trousers tore at the knees. The gold watch, still chained to his vest, spilled from his pocket as he descended into the cave and made a scraping sound as it dragged beneath him.
The last pricks of moonlight were gone. He knew darkness and the growing heat beneath his palms and the smell of the water. He crawled into the depths, the cave ceiling low overhead, and his hands passed across crystal and jagged rock and the smooth basalt deposited by the movement of oceans of fire.
He cast aside the valise, which was nearly in tatters anyway, and in the crushing heat he writhed out of his clothes and pushed them aside in the tunnel. He wrapped the chain of his pocket watch around his forearm and held the familiar shape in his hand. At least that might retain some value. Gold was always worth something wherever you ended up.
Several times in his journey he lost all strength and fell into a dreamless sleep and woke to terrifying darkness, unsure if he was alive or dead. He imagined insects and slippery creatures climbing over his body or across his hands, though he never truly encountered these things, and that was also a cause for unease. No bat or bug or even lichen grew in the tunnel, though the temperature and humidity rose to the sweltering heat of a jungle. Surely some creature could make this miserable bowel its home.
Gideon spilled out of the tunnel and slid several feet across sloping stone and into the basin of a large cavern. The walls were hot and coated in moisture. Queer amber and rose-colored light filtered down from the ceiling, transmitted by lava channels no bigger around than Gideon’s wrist. He reckoned they must pass all the way to the surface of the mountain, though, judging by the strange color of the light, perhaps through crystalline deposits or some other lens. The floor of this cavern was basalt and sloped conically down to a nearly circular pit in the center of the floor.
Gideon approached this warily, unsure on his feet and afraid the pit might open into a chamber filled with boiling magma. No, not magma; the pit was filled with water so rich with dissolved minerals that it possessed the color and consistency of cream. There was no obvious source for the water, and the surface of the pool was still and had a rich, queasy scent. It reminded Gideon of fresh marrow.
He forgot his caution in his thirst, forgot the danger of drinking unknown water, and he fell upon his aching knees and lay down on his numb belly. He leaned over the pool and lowered his face toward the opaque surface. He did not even care that his gold watch hung from his arm and dangled in the pool. He reached his hands into the hot liquid and brought out a cupped handful, nearly thick as pitch. He held it to his lips and drank. It tasted sweet and rich, was thicker even than the flooded creek, and it burned as he swallowed.
He stretched for more and saw by the filtered moonlight that something was wrong with his hand. His fingers shriveled and twitched, and there was a new smell in the air, like something cooking. Pain shot through his hand and raced up his arm. The stain of the liquid spread along his flesh, up his forearm, and burned his skin like some hungry disease. The chain unexpectedly fell from his arm, and the pocket watch splashed into the water.
Pain ripped at his inner throat and scoured down into his belly. It was agony beyond all reason. He grabbed at his neck with his fingers, but this only smeared the mud of the pool across his flesh.
Gideon tried to scream, but no sound came. He tried to rise to his feet and began to stumble. Across the pool from him lay the dog, calm and watching him with those blue eyes. Gideon tried to take a step, but his bad knee gave out, and he pitched forward, directly toward the placid surface of the pool.
For a moment he felt the warmth of the pool swallowing him up. Almost pleasant for that moment, but then came a searing, boiling heat that was like flames against every bit of his flesh. Father was laughing. Brother lay slain on the Missouri grass. Sister’s fat finger was banded in gold by her fatter husband. Mother was buried in Providence by her sisters. He thought of the coward, Robert Broken Horse. Of Sheriff Groves, who had stolen everything from him.
And he thought of Annabelle, the letters he’d written and the gifts he’d given, the fortune he’d spent pursuing her, the touch of her hand on his, a long ago dance at the Whitney, her lips as soft as any woman’s he had ever known and twice as sweet. The way of her smile.
Gideon spilled out his ingredients into the pool. Richest and blackest of all was the cruelty given to him by the horse Apollyon, and this stained the liquid and effervesced. Every crack and crevice yawned and widened, and his body broke apart, and Gideon did not remember any more, and there was nothing left of him at all except for everything that mattered.
Sheriff Groves rode for the lights of Spark and he spurred his horse uphill till it gnashed and foamed at the bit. The other men had fallen behind but he no longer cared. He could see the lanterns still burning at his house. He could see Doc Carson’s horse tied at the trough and his stomach turned sour.
He burst in through the door and startled Doc Carson who sat drinking a cup of whiskey at the table with his head down and his shoulders bent.
“Annie?” said Sheriff Groves.
“Warren,” said Doc Carson and he tried to put his hands on Sheriff Groves.
He pushed Doc Carson away and nearly knocked him to the floor. Nel came out of the bedroom and she held a pile of bloody towels to her breast.
“Where is she?” he asked Nel.
He didn’t wait for an answer. He started toward the door of the bedroom. Nel said something urgent. He didn’t have ears for it or care what it was.
He threw open the door and Annie was beneath the blankets. He took them in his hand and pulled them off her body and he stood and held the corner of the sheet while he looked down at the cut-open corpse that used to be his wife. He saw the fine bits. He saw the way her mouth hung open and her head turned to the side and he studied the slit that went up her middle and the way she was opened up like a butcher’s work. The room smelled of blood.
Sheriff Groves sat in the chair beside her and he still held to the corner of the sheet. It dragged over Annie’s mutilated body. He said nothing and only stared at her face with his arms hanging at his sides. He could hear Nel and Doc Carson speaking in the kitchen but he made no effort to discern what they said. They left him alone.
But not long enough by his reckoning. Hardly.
“Warren,” said Nel and she came into the room. “Doc did everything he could.”
Warren said nothing.
“He saved the baby,” she said. She held out the bloody towel to him and he saw that it held the ugly raisin of an infant swaddled within. It looked sickly and its arm moved to its face.
“It’s a girl,” said Nel.
“Take that out of here,” he said.
“Warren,” said Nel.
She pressed the swaddled babe into his arms. He took it gently and he saw only An
nie in its tiny face. It seemed black-eyed and terribly fragile. He could imagine no future with the child. He could not conceive of lullabies and wooden toys. He felt sick looking at it. He felt afraid.
He held the child out to Nel and she reluctantly took it back.
“Get it out,” he said.
“Warren ...”
“I can’t be having a child to look after. Not now. Get it out of here.”
“She named it Claire, and she—”
Warren reached down to his hip and took out his pistol and he cocked the hammer back and pointed it at Nel. He did not turn his body and only barely inclined his head toward the midwife. Her mouth hung open in surprise.
“Get it out, by God,” Sheriff Groves said. “I ain’t gonna tell you again.”
Nel clutched the child to her breast and fled from the room. She shouted at Doc Carson and he left the house with her and at last Warren Groves sat alone in peace with the body of his wife. After a long while he got up and walked around to the side of the bed he usually slept on and though the sheets were dark with blood he lay down beside his wife in his filthy trail clothes.
His hand dangled alongside the bed and after a time the dog they called Ringo crept fearfully into the room and licked his hand. He scratched the animal on the head and put his hand across his chest and then closed his eyes and allowed himself to feel the full weariness of a single day. Only then did he drift off to sleep with the weight of his wife beside him for the very last time.
The creature heaved from the pool’s recondite depths, limbs and head bound in pale mucilage, bobbing to the surface in the manner of a linen-wrapped corpse flooded out of a grave. The creature within moved and pushed at its cocoon and was thrust partially upon the cavern floor by force of unseen current. It broke its arms free from its binding and pulled itself up the slope, slid with its belly upon the stone, moaned inhumanly, writhed, tore at the cowl covering its face, and vomited out great quantities of viscous broth.
It clawed and kicked until it could lie flat against the heat of the stone and its legs and feet were out of the pool. It ripped away the milk-white envelope of congealed fluid covering its body and shucked this membrane from its head and discarded the wet slop. In this way the creature’s pale flesh was gradually revealed in the shape of a man.
“Alive,” the thing said, and it rolled onto its back.
It had memories, sticky and submerged, only slowly returning to the surface and full of things of a sort and shape that had a name but were not understood. These were discrete and esoteric things. The back of a pretty girl as she leaned against a tree. A train stopped on a bridge. Birds in the air above a coast, tethered by the wind like kites. A woman slumped and sobbing on the floor beside a neatly made bed. White sand so close, the individual grains could be seen. A punch in the nose by a ginger-haired boy. A friend, a brother, rigging a sailing boat. A giant horse and on its back a withered, laughing king.
There were other, older memories, receding to feelings. Wrong things. They dwindled but never ended, and their yawning, bottomless nature made the creature afraid to consider them. They were borrowed and unwelcome.
The moonlight that filtered into the chamber was dim, amaranthine pink and citrine, throbbing with the tempo of the earth, and within its feeble shafts the creature glimpsed every light of Revelation, from Apollo’s labors to the fire on Horeb, to the molten glow of the smelter’s pour.
The creature scooped more of the scum from its eyes and nostrils and spit up even more from its belly. The world was being indexed. Its brain was recovering the context for jumbled words and memories.
“Help me,” the creature said, and it knew the language it spoke.
It began to crawl away from the pool, which it feared yet did not know for certain why. Its grip was strong but greased with fluids from the pool, and it slipped as it placed its hands one after another and clawed its way up the hot rocks. The creature’s palm fell upon tiny pebbles, and as its weight shifted, these dug into the flesh without piercing the skin. The creature lifted its hand, some of the pebbles falling away, catching the moonlight and glittering gold.
“What?” wondered the creature. It examined the gold pebbles and turned them over and felt sick with realization. Teeth. His teeth. My teeth. Gideon’s teeth.
Gideon Long’s gold teeth.
He felt with his tongue and found every tooth real and whole in his mouth. Where before there were gold fillings and gold teeth there were new, enameled teeth. Every tooth in its place. No, there were more than usual. His wisdom teeth, which he recalled vividly being quartered and extracted in London, were still there, not only present in his mouth but aligned such that they emerged from the flesh and caused no discomfort.
Gideon’s fingers discovered another object nearby. His gold pocket watch, stripped of chain and glass and painted hands. Only the gold shell remained. He recalled its falling into the pool. Disappearing before his fall.
He climbed to his feet and stood in the heated crucible of the pool chamber and laughed. His knee was no longer lame, and his body was no longer weak or dying. He was not just alive, not just whole; he was boiling with vigor. Youth. Scars and marks on his flesh had disappeared.
Gideon stopped laughing. There was something else in the room. A dark mound lay beside the pool. It was in the shape of a man, covered in the same envelope that had sheathed Gideon’s body when he emerged. He stood motionless and waited to see whether or not it would give some sign of life, but it did not stir.
He cautiously crept nearer and nearer, stealing glances at the pool as though its liquid might surge out and reclaim this impossible gift. It was surely a man in shape, features obscured by the membrane that clung to its body. Gideon touched it with his toe several times, but when this did not provoke a reaction, he crouched beside it and, pinching the membrane between fingers and thumbs, lifted and tore it away. The thing within stank of the fresh, hot marrow of opened bones.
The gelatinous membrane parted and retracted like rubber, and the corpse’s face—for it was surely a dead thing—was revealed in the gloomy light. It was a man, young and rather handsome, with the pronounced features of a savage, though paler of flesh. The face was familiar, though Gideon did not immediately recognize it. He stared for several seconds and then, realizing who it was, pulled his hands away.
This was the body of the man Gideon had murdered in the desert. The Apache called Speaks With Knife, youthful and free of defects and yet not restored to life. There was no sign of the violence Gideon had inflicted, not even a mark on his cheek. Gideon furiously ripped at the membrane and saw that the place where his fatal shot had struck the Indian was perfect and smooth.
Some part of the body moved, and Gideon recoiled. The corpse was not dead at all, only sleeping, and as it came awake, it moved its arms wildly and shouted without words. The loud voice was bestial. It brayed with wild fear.
Gideon realized the man was sliding very slowly down into the pool, and as his feet were sucked back into the liquid, there was a bubbling that Gideon recognized. The body of Speaks With Knife screamed in pain. Its limbs were trapped within the membranous sheath. Its dark eyes bulged in horror. Gideon rubbed his arms and face and felt a sympathetic burning, the agony of the pool was so immediately recalled.
It was devouring the Indian, slowly. Bones popped and limbs twisted, and the man, now only moaning and gurgling, rolled onto his side as he was resorbed and digested into the liquid. The Indian’s long black hair trailed behind his head and was the last thing to disappear as the Indian slid beneath the surface and was gone. The bubbling ceased, and the pool was again placid and silent.
“Why?” wondered Gideon. “Why would this strange pool produce an idiot simulacrum of a dead man? To torment me? Or was it only coincidence, a creature plucked from my mind?”
Gideon felt a thrill upon recalling the Indian’s blood that had cursed his boots, soaking into the leather, becoming sticky beneath his toes. He was no longer transfixed and fle
d from the chamber, crawling into the darkness of the tunnel, up from the stinking, primordial cave and out, gasping, into the cold, open air and the canyon pueblo. His entire body steamed, naked, but Gideon did not shiver. He gazed up at the stars above, and the moon, and he gathered his thoughts and, on reflection, felt not fear but elation. Triumph.
Gideon looked at the stars and the moon and sneered. Poor, stymied God. Meaningless fate. He mocked the broken mandala. He shouted and exulted at the Revelation of the new flesh. Against all possibility and conspiring fortune, in the face of certain obliteration, Gideon Long still existed.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Warren Groves awoke at the first graying of the sky and enjoyed a single moment of forgetfulness. In the wan light of the bedroom he saw Annie as alive beside him and only sleeping. The slack parting of her lips and the sunken flesh of her cheeks and the butcher’s stink soon dismissed this illusion. Warren sat up and threw back the cover and faced again the full horror of his wife’s mortal wounds.
He dragged the washtub outside and emptied it into the dirt. He carried it back into the house and filled it again with water he heated in kettles and he cut hunks from a piece of soap and let them dissolve into the water until it was cloudy and steaming hot. He lifted Annie’s body in his arms and it seemed to weigh nothing at all and he put it into the water and with her sponge he cleaned her.
Warren never looked directly at the body. The thing of her. He laved it in soap water and scrubbed the stains from its marionette hands and only stared at the way the water surrounding it was gradually discolored to a rusty brown. When the body was clean he laid it out on the table and sewed it shut and her belly looked deflated and horrible for what was gone. He wrapped her in a clean sheet sprinkled with lime from the barn so that he did not have to look at her any longer and so the flies would not plant their maggots in her flesh.
He had no appetite and he sought to quench his thirst with the bottle of whiskey Doc Carson had left on the stove. He took it with him into the barn and drank and alone lifted up the massive end of an old viga pulled from the ruin of a Spanish monastery and he slid the beam onto a sawbuck.