Liminal States

by Zack Parsons

  Warren pursued his quarry through the Dakota badlands. He was shadowed by riders of the Lakota Indians but they did not attack him or interfere. He became so exhausted and cold that he fell asleep in his saddle beneath a frost-heavy blanket. When he awoke it was night and his horse stood idle in the midst of stacked cairns of frost-silver rocks.

  He was near a long and snowy hill without trees and upon this he saw a strange shape nearly as big as his horse. It was the grasshopper idol restored to life and it regarded him with luminous red eyes and opened mandibles large enough to tear off his hand. He reached for his gun and brought it up and the creature was gone into the snowy night. He could not be sure if it was ever there or if he truly saw it lift into the sky on black wings and disappear.

  The Lakota found him frozen to his horse and took him to their village elder and warmed him by the fire. They were curious but unafraid. He screamed with memories of the hell he’d seen between life and death. The Lakota poked and prodded him and gave him bitter herb that numbed his mouth when he chewed it. He dressed in the furs they gave him but pushed away any further help.

  He left the yellow warmth of the tent and strode in the midst of the snow-drifted wigwams. Men wrapped in heavy furs and brandishing rifles stood guard outside the tents. Women and children watched through the seams of buffalo hide.

  Warren Groves found his horse and climbed into its saddle. He could feel them watching as he disappeared into the blizzard. When he found Gideon he killed him by hand and the snow turned a brilliant shade of red.

  Gideon attempted an ambush in Utah. In the desert of sun-red rocks and eerie standing stones. It was where Gideon had made himself a preacher of End Times and had himself a church and congregation and a stockpile of guns. Warren survived being shot in his chest and in each leg and he blazed a trail of reckoning through Gideon’s faithful. His appearance of skins and scalps and jagged scars and brutal weapons illuminated their notion of avenging angels.

  The men crumpled at the first discharge of Warren’s guns and he stalked them and shot them down. He hacked at them with a bowie knife and a tomahawk and throttled a girl who stabbed him through the belly with a knitting needle. The survivors were routed from the church. They screamed prayers to God for salvation. Gideon holed up in the unfinished bell tower. He shot through the door and poorly quoted scripture and so Warren pushed the church piano up against the door and set fire to the building.

  He watched it burn. Yanked the knitting needle from his guts and walked back to his horses as the flames reached high into the sky. The horses were by then as mean and terrible as their rider. They stood resolute with dark eyes devoid of animal fear.

  The law knew of Warren. In Arizona a marshal who chased him all the way from Houston caught him hanging Gideon from the beam of an old prospector cabin. Gideon was dead already and his face was as purple as a plum. The marshal thought he might convince Warren to surrender by aiming a shotgun at his chest. Warren drew and fired and killed the man so quick the marshal never pulled the trigger.

  In Colorado trading post Warren found his likeness printed on a wanted poster. He stared at the paper for a long time. Five hundred dollars was a substantial reward. The drawing was rendered in such detail that only a witness to his atrocities could have created such an image. He wondered if Gideon circulated his description.

  The old man at the trading post recognized Warren and tried to draw a gun. Warren shot him in the belly and he fell and set to dying in a lot of pain with his face resting upon the floor.

  Two young girls came out from the back at the sound of the gun and they saw the man fallen and began raising a fearful cry. An older woman came out with her hair all pinned up and a white apron tied over a gingham dress and her hands covered in flour. She didn’t fall to her knees. She grabbed for the gun. Warren shot her too. He aimed to wound but wasn’t too sure she’d last long. He was sick and left the trading post wondering on what was the use of that.

  By the time he reached Providence he was hardly a man at all. The folks in the streets in their fine suits cowered and ran from the sight of him. Horses stomped their feet. Dogs growled. The sailors and whores stared out at him from the sordid lairs that crowded Narragansett Bay. Men from lands as savage and strange as any part of America felt they beheld something new.

  This was not a beast of Ceylon or Singapore or the lands of the Musselmen. It wasn’t a creature of the howling Carpathians or the lush green valleys of the Alps. There was no brass idol built for it on any forsaken island of the Mediterranean. He was no old and musty myth.

  Warren Groves was a new thing of American mud and bones and stinking scalps, his neck hung with a collar of thumbs and tongues. His knives were notched bones and his eyes were dark and reachless as if he perceived a different world entire to that of mortal menHe bore the scars of a hundred wounds on his hide and did not die. Warren felt no shame or gladness at their fear. He only felt the open sore of his hate.

  There was a sanitarium on a hill beside a river that smelled of industry. Warren did not know the river’s name or care to but the sanitarium was called Straymore. It was where Gideon’s mother had died six years ago. Why Gideon would be going back did not concern Warren.

  The orderlies and nurses came to the windows at the beat of his horses’ hooves on the brick-paved path. They locked the doors and called for the police when they saw him in the saddle.

  He blasted the doors with a shotgun and went inside and ignored the cries of alarm and the immediate lunatic chorus of the patients. He stalked the din and the guttering gas-lit halls. His footsteps echoed against the curving tiles and he found the place where Gideon sat waiting and reading a newspaper.

  “I thought you—” Gideon said and Warren emptied both guns into him and left him slumped in the chair. The two were surrounded by smoke. The newspaper was still held and holed and splattered with blood in Gideon’s lifeless hands. There was nothing else for Warren at Straymore and yet something beckoned him through the door beside Gideon.

  The room was small but the whitewashed brick walls made it seem larger. The windows facing the door were open to the air so that long curtains of diaphanous blue billowed into the room on the cool breeze and gave the light filling the room an overcast quality. A bed stood against one wall. Beside it stood a small table stacked haphazardly with books and periodicals. The folio atop the pile was a booklet of French songs.

  A rolling chair made from wood and wicker sat facing the windows with its high back to Warren. There was someone sitting in the chair and quietly humming in a tuneless manner. He approached cautiously but without cause for fear.

  His guns and vengeance faced the one thing that could break them. Annabelle Groves sat in the rolling chair in a formless blue gown and stared out the dimmed windows at an overgrown garden. She was humming a song familiar to Warren.

  He hugged her and kissed her cheek. She hardly reacted. Her gaze was fixed upon the garden. He was forced to turn the chair away from the windows to compel her to look at him. In the gaslight filtering in from the hall her youthful face was slack. He shook her and she kept humming and staring away. She was the brass left after the bullet was gone.

  Footsteps and hollering came down the hall. Warren lifted his wife up onto his shoulder and left a bloody path as he departed Straymore. He routed the orderlies and with them some police who fled from the sound of his guns and went falling and shouting away down the halls. Some other men got in his way and had to die.

  He threw Annie over the back of her horse and rode out through the cobbled streets and winding colonial tenements. He followed the Narragansett River until he found a secluded tributary shaded by old trees that hung their heavy boughs above the stream. A lonely boat was tied to the roots of a tree.

  The horses stood and ate grass and Warren carried Annie down into the water and stood with her and stroked her face. He held her so that she looked into his eyes. She gazed through him and to someplace beyond. There was nothing left in there that w
as Annie Groves.

  “I am truly sorry,” Warren said.He held her down beneath the water and drowned her. She only fought at the last moment and then only weakly and then she was dead. He carried her out of the stream and laid her in the boat. It was a canoe of old wood and filled with fallen branches that crackled beneath her weight. He piled old leaves and dry branches upon her and doused her in the antiseptic rotgut he carried in his saddle. She lit easily and burned with orange fire and turned to smoke. He pushed off the burning boat and sent it into the stream to flow and join the river and follow it to the sea.

  She disappeared from view and Warren took to the saddle and breathed deeply and resolved to find a conclusion. Every fiber of him hurt. This sick endeavor needed its ending.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The San Francisco hotel called the Seaside wasn’t beside the sea. It stood three stories and was flat-fronted to give the impression of greater splendor. It was early in the evening and still light out but the place was curiously quiet. Other hotels seemed to be doing a brisk business. This discrepancy made Warren tie his horses up a good distance away and cross the street with his guns out. There was no doorman or guard at the door and none of the usual sort of gold digger and soiled doves he expected to find congregating on the portico.

  A few oil lamps were burning but the shutters were closed and it was dark in the hotel. There were wooden tables and a bar and a player piano. The walls were festooned with ugly landscape paintings and dusty game trophies. There was a dice table and a card table and there was not a person in the saloon.

  Warren cocked back the hammers on his pistols and tried to wish his boots to silence as he stalked across the floorboards. The knives hung from his belt clinked together softly like a chime. There was a door in the back that said OFFICE and an inner balcony and stairs. Warren started for the door and felt a prickling at his neck.

  “Guns down, Warren Groves. You got three men with rifles pointed at your back. Come to shooting, we will put bullets in you. Go on and put your guns down, and let’s talk.”

  The voice was familiar. Not Gideon. Warren resisted the urge to spin around and fire and he put his guns on the floor. He turned slowly with his hands raised. Three men knelt along the balcony with rifles aimed at him. They were well dressed but looked to be hard men. Pinkertons maybe. Bounty hunters. A mountain of a man stood behind these three and he held a long-barrel Colt of ruinous caliber pointed at Warren.

  Pat Cole. He had a pointed beard and a thick mustache but it was surely him.

  “It ain’t good to see you.” Pat closed the hammer on his gun and lifted his aim. The other three men kept their rifles pointed at Warren’s chest.

  Pat Cole came down the stairs slowly and with a pronounced limp.

  “Pat,” said Warren. It was the first time in a long while he had heard his own voice. “Pat, you shouldn’t be here.”

  “We were warned by the man you were following.”

  “Gideon Long.”

  Pat finished descending the stairs and limped to stand before Warren. He looked him up and down and could not hide his disgust.

  “My God, Warren. You done lost yourself to violence. Look at you. Festooned like a savage and twice as ripe.”

  “I came to put an end to all this, Pat. Leave me be, and I won’t be a trouble to nobody no more.”

  “You killed Gideon Long. In the streets of Spark near on eighteen months ago. Don’t you remember? You been on the warpath ever since. Killing through every state and territory. Word is you killed a marshal. Chasing a ghost.”

  “Chasing him.”

  “A ghost. I’ve heard the tales. The wild-eyed man looking for Gideon Long. Killing anyone who looked like him—”

  “Was him.”

  “Warren, I loved you like a brother. I dug up that body to be sure. Because I loved you. Gideon Long was rotting in his box.”

  “Where is he now? The man who tipped you off. Is he here?”

  “You’ve lost it, so I reckon there ain’t much more point to this, but I got to know. Why Turk? Why did you kill him? Was it for his horse? You right his name in that black book you keep?”

  The book Warren had told Libby Cole about was buried somewhere safe. Page after page bore the name Gideon Long. Warren looked Pat Cole in the eye and searched for some vestige of their friendship. He didn’t find it. Pat Cole’s mind was all made up and he was no different than the people who shrank away and looked upon Warren like a devil.

  The next instant was sound and fire. Every man shot at least once and every bullet and nearly every piece of shot found a home in human meat. Pat Cole was killed straightaway. He lay heavily across Warren like the body of a bear and had a half dozen rifle bullets in his back. Warren was shot to hell by some of the same bullets and a couple of others that went through his arm and his good shooting hand.

  The men on the balcony were all three still alive though only briefly based on their wounds. Warren got to them good with the little sawed-off two-barrel he hung in all his knives so nobody would even see it. He tried to push out from under Pat Cole’s body and couldn’t. His strength was going fast. He could barely lift his arms.

  The smoke was still in the air when Gideon came from the back of the hotel. His boots were pointed and black and new and they clumped heavily on the floorboards. All around was the noise of blood splashing from heights and pouring out across the floor by the pitcher. Gideon stood triumphantly over Warren. He was different. Had a scar on his cheek and a mouthful of gold teeth that glittered.

  “I did not think you would kill your friend.”

  Warren said nothing but continued to struggle beneath Pat Cole’s body. Gideon saw the struggle and put a foot on the corpse and stood so heavily that the air groaned from its lungs and Warren could hardly breathe himself.

  “Do you see how they perceive your actions? Your oldest friends see only madness and depravity. You have relinquished your humanity in your thirst for blood, and I have lost mine by dying again and again. You and I are now a species apart.”

  Gideon took out a derringer from his suit vest and aimed it between Warren’s eyes.

  “Someday we might be friends, but not yet. Until you realize the futility of what you are doing, we cannot reconcile.”

  “Annie.” Warren’s voice was barely a gasp.

  “You did not have to kill her. There was no harm to her being alive.”

  Warren moaned and spit blood. He felt much as he had when Gideon had beaten him and taken him to the cave. No. Not quite so hopeless. Warren whispered something so quiet that Gideon could not possibly hear him.

  “What was that?” Gideon leaned in and held a hand to his ear. “What did you say?”

  This was the moment Warren had prepared for. He felt the heat and heard the soft hiss buried beneath Pat Cole and for an instant it became a whoosh. Gideon’s expression betrayed that he heard it too.

  The dynamite exploded and Gideon and Warren were sent on their way.

  Warren was a president without his constituents. In this state he existed in the valley apart from any human notion of time. It was a dream place or a real place where no man could walk. It was not the empty desert or the Pueblo canyon but some mix of the two. The sky was ugly yellow and there were no clouds at all. The shack was there but it seemed swaybacked and shrunken.

  Warren realized he could not get inside. He pulled and pulled at the door and beat it with his fists and was denied entrance. He cried out in anger and heard himself as echoes breaking against the walls of black rock.

  He despised the plaintive sound and so fell silent and leaned against the door and pressed his palms to the wood. He became still as stone.

  A great length of time passed and Warren spied a jackrabbit upon a nearby rock. Its fur was pure white and its eyes were the same brilliant blue as those of the Indian dog that had come to him after Gideon’s attack. The rabbit seemed to regard him curiously. It sniffed at the air and twitched its ears and then turned and began hopping a
way. He followed it. The rocks were sharp beneath his feet. It entered the narrowing canyon that folded upon itself and concealed the way ahead by its convolutions.

  The rabbit stopped at the foot of a man. His face was hidden by canyon shadow. The rabbit seemed confused and rose up on its back legs and sniffed at the bare shins of the human figure. The man reached down and took up the rabbit by the scruff of its neck. He stepped toward Warren so that his face was revealed.

  It was Warren’s own face. The eyes were dark red and flecked with black as if the Oscura stone had splintered into twin pools of blood.

  So this is hell again, thought Warren. Is this the devil who thinks he owns my soul? The man snapped the rabbit’s neck and dashed its limp body to the rocks. Warren was furious and smashed the man with his fists and knocked him to the ground. The man did not resist and so Warren crushed him with a stone. His anger poured out of him as blood beneath the rock.

  Tired and sick and afraid that he might never escape this place Warren continued into the valley’s narrowing meander. It became so constricted he shuffled with his back and chest against the wind-smoothed rocks. When it seemed he might become trapped in the canyon it finally widened and he emerged into the silent bowl of an unfamiliar canyon. The stones ascended in tapering pillars like cave formations. The sky overhead had turned pink.

  The canyon was filled with rabbits. There were too many of them to be counted and they were, all white and all with the same blue eyes. Warren was not at all relieved to see them.

  The wind picked up and began to howl through the valley and the stone shaped the air into a primal voice. The rabbits were all looking at him. There was a light in the sky growing larger and brighter. A second sun was falling down. The wind roared. The shadows crawled and poured out from every surface as the star fell lower and lower and cast every object and man into shivering relief.

  A sudden quiet. A sudden gasp of stillness. A man stood up from the midst of the rabbits. His flesh was pale. His face was that of Warren Groves but his eyes were brilliant blue.