Liminal States

by Zack Parsons

  Warren kicked what furniture he could easily reach into the path of the door. Jars fell to the earth floor and broken open and the shack filled with the strong smell of preserving fluid. His movements were awkward with the last arrow still stuck in him. The third arrow had fired between his ribs and landed shallow in the muscle of his chest. He gripped the arrow where it pierced him and shouted in pain and turned the head so it could slide back out through his ribs. The arrow plucked at his muscle and raised a mound of his skin as it came out with a gush of blood.

  He shook off the arrow and saw by the light of the stove that it was made of a single length of hollow bone. Such a long and straight bone corresponded to no animal he had ever seen. It was notched and tipped with an iron arrowhead.

  The Indians yanked open the door and pulled aside the furniture with little effort. They shouted in a tongue like that of the Navajo but he knew some words of that language and it was not the same. He was weak from losing blood and could hardly stand but he was determined to meet them on his feet. They pulled aside the last of the chairs and he came at them with the arrow as a dagger.

  They wielded wide blades of iron like billhooks and the first man that came in broke apart Warren’s arrow with a swing of his blade. Warren hit the man with his fist and staggered him back but it was a hopeless battle. They crowded into the shack and threw him against the hot stove and hacked at him with their blades.

  He fell into darkness amid the agony of their knives slicing open his limbs and scalp but he did not die. He awoke with his face sticky with blood and his limbs numb. The sky above was yellow and cloudless and cast a sickly light all around the gnarled veldt that thudded by beneath him. He dimly realized he was lashed to a travois being pulled by the Indians. Any hope of escape slid away from him as he lapsed once more into unconsciousness.

  Warren’s eyes opened again to find the Indians talking over him. There were many more now and when he lolled his head he could see he was in a village of gray hide tents and clay ovens. His vision was stung with blood and tears but he perceived the lip of an earthen wall surrounding them as if the village was raised from the bottom of a huge crater.

  Though he could not understand their words the warriors who brought him to the village were conversing with a man of authority. The medicine man or chief wore colored paint on his face and one eye was a ruin. His neck was decorated with a bib of bones like those used to make the door of the shack. The chief did not seem pleased the warriors had brought a live man. He barked a command and Warren was dragged deeper into the village. They took him past the piled bones of animals he did not recognize. He passed gray pelts stretched and drying revealed as covered in fine scales like those of a fish.

  Rotting heads decorated hunting spears. These were grisly trophies. The heads were greatly decayed but resembled no man or beast Warren had ever seen. The flattened oval shape was strange and they were smaller than a man’s and so pale they almost appeared as skulls. There was no hair and their jaws hung open along cleft lips and drooled black blood. Gray flies packed the clouded blue hemispheres of the corpses’ protruding eyes.

  Warren believed himself in hell or in a dream and so accepted the things he witnessed. The pain was real so he suspected it was hell. Two small men of great age and identical face came and sat beside Warren. They ate seeds from a clay cup and talked and prodded him with absent curiosity. One stuck a finger into the long slice covering Warren’s scalp and he cried out in pain. Their laughter brought a stout Indian woman from a nearby tent. She wore an apron of blue cloth turned to black by old blood. She shouted at the old men and began untying Warren.

  She tried to lift him from the travois but he was too heavy. She called and other women with curiously similar faces came from within the tent. Their hair was dark and knotted at the back with feathers. Three of them worked to lift him up from the sled and carried him loose as a doll into the tent dragging his heels through the chalky earth. The mounting loss of blood and various severed tendons prevented him from offering any real resistance.

  In the tent there was some relief from the day’s yellow heat. His vision narrowed as they laid him down upon a clay slab. Butchering tools hung from a wooden lattice above his face. As darkness pooled at the edges of his perception he was aware of another slab and another pale body beside him. This was where the savages skinned and butchered animals. They surrounded him and their rough hands were on his body. Merciful darkness closed in around him once more.

  He awoke still upon the slab. He was not butchered or flayed. His wounds were sewn. The woman had applied poultices of strong herbs to his worst injuries. By the bitter taste in his mouth he supposed they had treated him with a decoction. He did not understand their actions but his head was swimming and he had very little control of his body. He suspected he still might die.

  He rolled his neck and his head flopped to the side. He could just make out the pale body arranged on the slab beside him. Pooled blood formed a line of purple flesh from the head to the foot of the naked figure. The nails were black. The limbs and slim body were covered in arrow wounds.

  For a moment he saw it as one of the fish-eyed creatures whose rotting heads decorated the Indians’ spears. It was not one of these creatures. It was a man.

  It was Gideon Long.

  Warren faded in and out of consciousness several more times and was not sure how much time passed. He saw the chief and the warriors above him and their faces were all of the same man but marked with different patterns of pigment. The chief spoke in a murmur, his words drumming like rain on a stone. Warren allowed the sound to carry him back into darkness.

  He emerged from that darkness to find a single warrior looking down at him. Warren lifted his head just a little to see him better. The man’s face bore a more elaborate scheme of pigment. His eyes were red flecked with black. Something was happening, like tongues of fire curling out around the Indian. Warren could not hold his head up any longer. As it fell back he was aware, for only a moment, of a huge, luminous presence in the tent.

  Words were spoken in the language of the Indians. What scared Warren was that the voice did not have a tone at all, but it was so loud it hurt his head behind his nose.

  Warren faded out and awoke once more. By the light of a lantern he saw the woman who saved him. She was occupied with preparing a small animal. As she worked she was singing in her language. The tune reminded him of Annie’s French lullabies. He watched her move at the edges of his vision.

  Suddenly there came a shrill whistle. She lifted her head and he could see worry on her face. She waited and listened and became stricken when there followed a series of whoops such as those he heard from the Indians when they ambushed him. These were war cries. The woman fled from the tent and left him in darkness straining to hear what was occurring outside the tent. He lost consciousness.

  He was aware of a keen pain. At his throat and at his groin and at his limbs. His eyes opened for only a moment but he saw white flesh fringed with barbs. Something tore at his wound atop his scalp. He heard a clatter like the violent shaking of dice in a cup and it surrounded him on all sides. Pain found a home in every part of his body that could still feel and for an instant he died.

  Warren Groves came out from the steaming depths of the earth and his sweat was cold upon his skin and the paleness of his new flesh seemed to glow in the moonlight. This was the place he remembered from before. The other must have only been a dream. He staggered to the edge of the cliff and fell upon his knees and lowered himself to his belly to look down upon the rocks. The ruined body of Gideon Long was there. The horses were gone.

  Warren was once more a stranger in this body. This was his face and his limbs but from another time. His arms and shoulders were youthful and muscular.

  He discovered a wooden placard left for him by his tormentor. It was the fresh grave marker of Gideon Long. It was leaned against the stone beside the entrance to the cave. Meant to be found. Beneath it were shoes and trousers and shirt�
��some of his own things stolen from his home and left for him. There was also a clay jug full of water. It had a sour smell and the taste of the vinegar, but Warren did not care. He drank and drank until he thought he might be sick.

  He took up the wooden cross in his hands. The date of Gideon Long’s death was roughly scratched out. Warren smashed the cross in half and broke it again into smaller fragments with a wrenching of his wrists. It snapped easily, and he shouted and flung its pieces across the terrace.

  What Gideon Long had told him was true. Only death could have supplied the pain Warren knew when he was thrown into the pool. He could scarcely recall the places between. He knew Hell followed by the blackness which lingered upon his thoughts like the forgotten name of a dear friend.

  He’d come back wrapped in a foal sac and drenched and spitting out that rotten soup and it left no doubt. He had died and come back. Come out of the cave not of Lazarus or Christ but like some terrible thing conjured from the pit. The sight of the heathen pueblo only furthered this notion.

  Warren dressed and as he did recalled the fleeting dream he had known between death and life. He suspected it was no dream at all and not someplace described in verse. It was a place all the same, and by the oiled way it slipped from his memory, he was meant to forget all about it. Even his body desired to forget it. He refused that pull of oblivion and said aloud what detail he remembered so that he might better fix it in his mind. The radiant, blue-eyed figure. Creeping pale figures hidden in shadow. A shack full of jars and cages. Full of ... what?

  He repeated the words so many times, they lost their meaning, and he was unsure any were remembered at all or if he only imagined them. Details he suspected to be false crept in and became part of the sequence. In frustration he yielded to the unraveling nature. He was not allowed to remember these things. Not this time.

  Warren collected the kindling of the grave marker and bound it together in his hand. There was no shortage of loose stones, but it took a quite a search in the moonlight to locate a suitable flint. While he searched, he gathered ossified timbers from the pueblo and fragments of the crumbling ladders. There were no growing plants or wild animals. No birds overhead.

  The first discovery was of the char pit. He almost did not see it because its entrance was covered by a fallen section of wall. It was deep and dark and blackened nearly to the rim. Warren climbed down into it, and his hands became immediately covered by soot.

  At the bottom he discovered a great many blackened bones. Some tribes known to the Navajo ate men, he knew, but these bones did not tell the story of cannibals. There were no carving marks or notches in the femurs or arm bones. These bodies were burned with the flesh still on them and reduced to fragments by the heat.

  The bones were very old—nearly as old, he suspected, as the crumbled ladders. But they were all of the same historic age. Burned all at once. A massacre? Adults but no children. Whoever perpetrated the mass killing and burning had not killed the children.

  Warren piled his kindling near the cave entrance and, following a tiring effort with the flint, he set a fire. The timbers and ladder pieces were so dry, they flashed and hissed when they burned. The pieces of the cross provided a stable base for the fire, though there was not much to last long. Warren selected the longest of these fragments and wrapped one end tightly in strips of cloth torn from his shirttail.

  It was a feeble torch and would not burn long, but it provided light enough to chase out the shadows, and, so equipped, Warren was able to search the cliff on its various levels and look into the nooks and alcoves, natural and not. Most of these niches were empty or contained crude paintings of animals and men or fragments of pottery. Warren learned from the paintings that the former inhabitants of the pueblo had hunted deer and sheep using bow and arrow and spear and hunting dogs and had revered the sun and moon.

  The color was gone from the markings on the pottery, and the etchings on the broken pieces were difficult to discern. At length Warren picked out among the repeating patterns wolves and cougars and other animals. There were a few broken dolls in one of the alcoves, and Warren imagined these held by the children and left behind as they were taken by another tribe. Finding these and other hidden traces of the culture that had once inhabited the village, he began to imagine he walked among them or they with him, and he was unsure which would be a ghost.

  His torch had nearly gone out when he found a path leading up to a higher terrace. It was so narrow that he could hardly navigate it, and even the subdued winds of the canyon gave him pause. He teetered on the path that overlooked a sheer drop to the floor of the valley. He cupped one hand around the torch to keep the meager flame going, and this left him little stability or balance. His cautious ascent knocked loose stones that clattered down the mountain, and he very nearly fell when he stepped wrong.

  The path opened onto a terrace much smaller than the others. There was a domed entrance of brick set against the side of the mountain, and Warren could see that this was some lodge or chamber carved out of the mountain by hand. The stonework must have required years with the primitive tools of the Indians.

  Warren held the torch into the tunnel. It was not tall enough for him to stand upright, but he was able to carefully enter. A collapse partially blocked the tunnel with timbers and fallen bricks and boulders. Each step he took into the tunnel sent stones skittering away and loosed more rocks.

  He steadied his breathing and continued and was careful to avoid the ancient timbers that extended into his path and seemed to brace the tunnel ceiling against further collapse. He passed from the squat tunnel to the high dome of a chamber built by human hands. It was too perfectly round to have occurred naturally. His fingers trailed along the wall and felt the dimpled marks left by chisels.

  He lifted his torch above his head and revealed the inner curve of the white-painted dome and the hundreds of odd black crosses marking the ceiling. These reminded him of the symbols painted on the tunnel wall in his dream. They were almost like Christian crosses only there was no care put into making their shape. He stumbled over fallen stones and came to a strange idol built from clay.

  It was a grasshopper of size almost equal to a horse and it sat up like a man upon a stone bench. Its limbs were arranged with the intention of meaning and each of its clawed hands gripped a long-desiccated frond of herb or flower. The craftsmanship was exquisite even by the standards of modern men with modern tools.

  Warren intended to wipe the thick dust from its bulbous face but at the lightest contact the statue collapsed. It did not tip but rather fell apart into brittle pieces that cracked upon the stone floor. Warren backed away as the upper segments of the insect idol crumbled into a heap. Only the long bulb of the idol’s back end and a pair of thick limbs remained on the bench. The statue was hollow.

  Warren stooped and picked up a fragment of the statue’s head. It was a thin and brittle piece of the idol’s faceted eye. He held it up to the torchlight and was surprised to see the light show through the amber curve of the fragment. He sought out a piece of a limb in the mess upon the floor and lifted it up and found that the tubular appendage contained fine white material like threads or cloth rotted away by the years. He dipped his finger into the piece and it became coated in brown smut.

  He moved to return the arm segment to the floor and as he did the fragment moved as if jointed and snapped into two pieces. A certain fear seized him that this might not be a statue at all but the remains of some strange animal. He dismissed the fear but nevertheless began to back out of the chamber. His foot collided with a stone and Warren turned his ankle and nearly fell. He caught himself on the wall, and his torch illuminated a series of crude paintings that ran in a ring around the width of the chamber.

  At that moment the chamber began to come apart as suddenly as the statue. Warren caught only a glimpse of the painting as he retreated quickly. Stones clattered down all around him, and ancient timbers snapped and broke into the room. He reached the tunnel, and a black p
our of stones filled in the chamber and buried the room and its strangeness under tons of rubble.

  He stumbled away from the plume of choking dust exhaled from the tunnel. When he closed his eyes he could still see the painting illuminated by torchlight. Children knelt on bended knee before the devil idol of the grasshopper. The idol did not sit upon a stone bench but stood on four legs and before it was a pile of human bodies surrounded by fire.

  Warren salvaged pieces of fallen timber from the blocked tunnel and returned these to his campfire down the treacherous path. The fire had nearly gone out while he was exploring but he was able to stoke the flames and the hissing smoky fire of the desiccated timbers warmed his hands.

  By the light of the fire his thoughts turned to the nature of oblivion. Whether it was an irrevocable state or another place and whether men could come and go as they pleased. He thought of Annie and the permanence of her death. He wondered if she could be dug up and somehow restored to life by the pool. Placed into it a corpse and spit back out a living woman.

  Warren dismissed such thoughts as ghoulish tampering with the order of things. Even if it were possible and she could live again she would never forgive his transgression. Annie was gone. Forever gone. He remembered the way her muscles had felt stiff in his arms as he laid her into the coffin. What might come back from that could not be her.

  He considered his own remove from humanity. Whether he truly was Warren Groves or something else entirely. Had he visited hell? Had he escaped it? He feared that he might be seized by an invisible spirit and compelled to do things to repay his debt. He imagined that this insect Beelzebub worshipped by long-ago savages might be a master.

  Warren thought most of all of Gideon Long and all his transgressions. He was a murderer and a usurper. He’d twisted the beauty of Warren’s life with Annie into something to be doubted. It was Gideon Long who blamed Warren for abandoning Annie. There was truth to that. Warren had abandoned her and fled from that house and her birth pains. He had left his wife to die alone, and he had abandoned his daughter.