Liminal States

by Zack Parsons

  Stinging frost? I quickly wiped the substance onto the stone. My fingertip was red and throbbing. I stepped away from the fleshy membrane, mindful of the quickly expanding white.

  A scream echoed against the silent obelisks. It was louder than the crashing sea, so it must not be far. I pursued the sound as best I could. Another scream followed. I was sure I heard the word “God.” The wind was howling through the rocks. Each rumble of the distant volcanoes sent tremors through the pavement and stones skidding down the sides of the obelisks. These stones seemed small as they fell but thundered to the ground as big as cars and with the loudness of a cannonade.

  As I raced into the masonry, feet on cold stone, my heart pounded urgently in my chest, and I grew weary and breathless. There came a third scream, sudden, short, and ending in a gurgle. The empty howling of the wind followed. I wanted to call out, but I was afraid.

  I navigated the fallen obelisks. They were much larger than I thought from atop the ridge. The size of buildings in Chicago or New York. There were no windows or rooms, but they were not solid rock. Where they had split open, their internal structure was revealed as an octagonal honeycomb of cells and supporting walls. Some of these chambers opened onto the surface of the obelisks. The geometric black holes reminded me of the silent windows of the pueblo village. The wind howled through these sockets, and their bleak emptiness forced me to look away.

  I climbed up and over a jumble of spilled stones and approached the spot where I believed the last scream to have originated. I only found more of the white frost. Curious, I dragged a stone through it, and the bottom of the stone was covered in blood as well as the threads of the white material. I tossed the stone away and followed a faint trail of the frost into a narrowing of the rock. The trail emerged across the tilted boulevard and disappeared into one of the yawning octagonal chambers of a fallen obelisk.

  I hesitated at the threshold. Bestial noises echoed from the walls of the honeycombed structure. I imagined black talons against the stone and slavering jaws snapping for meat. I tried to steal myself with Ian Bendwool’s words as I entered this maddening world: “These events have already occurred. You are safe. This is the answer you have sought for so long.”

  The entrance was large enough for a man to ride through on the back of a horse but tilted at an extreme angle. I stepped in, balancing my bare feet on the sloped walls. The ammonia stench was eye-watering and rose from water that pooled in the lowest corner of the octagonal chamber.

  It was darker within the obelisk than without, but there was light. Stalks of pallid fungus sprouted from the water’s edge, and these were capped with fleshy, teardrop bulbs that phosphoresced blue. They brightened as I drew near. I stepped warily around and over them so that the bulbs did not touch my bare skin.

  With each shuffling step the bedlam sound of the demons grew louder and echoed through the tilting corridors. Their snarls reminded me of wolves fighting over food. Here and there I found traces of blood overgrown with the stinging rime that clung to floor and ceiling. The frost avoided the water filling the trough of the tilted octagonal chamber, but when I spit upon a patch, it grew rampantly around my saliva. More than once my toe or hand brushed against the frost unseen. Each time I recoiled with pain as if stung and quickly cleaned the frost from my body.

  I reached a smaller octagonal corridor that once ran horizontally through the obelisk, since realigned by gravity into a nearly vertical shaft. I placed my hands against the incline and judged whether or not I could scale it without tools.

  My toes touched something cold and yielding. There was a kind of grout where the corridor intersected with the octagonal cell. I leaned down and dragged a finger through it and brought it near enough to one of the glowing fungal bulbs to judge its consistency. It was a muddy brown paste of grit and decaying insect casings. Not grout at all, just refuse. The insect fragments glittered in the unearthly fungal luminescence. Pieces of the grasshopper? Each fragment crumbled at the slightest touch and was too rotted to judge the shape of its source.

  I shook the fragments from my hand and began my ascent of the smooth incline of the upended corridor. It was immediately exhausting, but I persevered. I made the mistake of looking back only once. The near-vertical shaft disappeared into darkness below. Above my head the sounds were becoming more distinct and vivid. Tender skin and fat separated from knitted muscle. Soft feet padded against the stone floor. I could hear them breathing. More than one of them. I could smell their rancid spore.

  I reached the rim of the corridor and pulled myself up by my fingers. I lay with my belly against the cool stone and did my best to stifle the sound of my labored breathing. My cheek was pressed flat to the floor, my ear listening for their movement. They were very close. They snuffled and clicked to one another as they ate their meal. I slowly lifted my head. Sweat-slackened hair fell into my eyes. It was dark.

  But I could see.

  The demons were the size of very small men or very large dogs. Their hairless bodies and limbs were slender and multijointed, and they crouched on their folded legs and held their arms near their torsos. Their flesh was pale white, darkening to blue and lavender at their joints. Their fingers were not clawed at all; they seemed almost webbed, and they held morsels of bleeding meat to their mouths in a manner similar to grasshoppers.

  Their oblate heads were smooth, and their bulbous blue eyes rotated independently and focused pinprick pupils here and there. They possessed no visible ears, and only the bifurcated pinkness of the flesh above their mouths suggested nostrils. Each time one opened the lipless curl of its mouth, it exposed chitinous plates clattering and tearing through raw red meat.

  These creatures seemed to be the source of the trophy heads atop spears in the long ago Indian village. Those heads were drooping with decay and deformed from wounds. They were also nearly the same as the creature I had seen in the Paramount vault. That beast was more fantastic in its appearance, more like a creature from a Hollywood picture, distorted, perhaps, by my memory. These were bestially real.

  Two of the demons hissed and clicked their mouth-plates together in communication or challenge. They began to tug on either end of a piece of muscle tissue. They shifted to the right and in the process revealed the body sprawled upon the floor.

  Gideon Long raised his head and looked directly at me with tears welling in his eyes. His mouth was stained by blood. His chest and belly were torn open, and the creatures plucked meat and giblets from his innards. He began to speak, his voice gurgling and choking, but only nonsense words emerged. Pulsing streams of blood coursed out of his nostrils and over his lips. His legs were shattered and bleeding from compound fractures. His arms were similarly broken and useless, and he flopped them like a bird’s broken wings as the demons pulled more of his flesh to their clattering jaws.

  I reached out blindly and felt along the filthy floor. My hand closed around a heavy rock. I pulled myself to my knees and to my feet and stood. The loathsome sound of the demonic feeding stopped. Their blue eyes rotated, and the pinprick pupils focused on me standing with the rock hanging in my hand. The nearest creature strained its long neck and clattered its teeth in challenge.

  I stepped forward, and the demons stepped back. I took another step toward them and shouted something, although my head was swimming, and no words came easily. I drove them back with more shouting, and they snapped and hissed at me, crouching very low to the ground and moving from side to side as though searching for an opening. I stood at the feet of Gideon’s mutilated body. I looked down into my old enemy’s face, and the man was pleading.

  “Help me,” I think he was begging, though it might have been, “Kill me.”

  The initial shock of my appearance was wearing off. The demons were edging closer, walking sideways and attempting to circle around me. They were cautious, but I could sense they were not truly afraid. They’d had a taste of human flesh and knew how delicious I could be.

  I only had one chance. I lifted the rock
in both hands, up over my head. The demons stared at me, eyes shining in the darkness, jaws poised to tear at my flesh. I howled and brought the stone crashing down on Gideon Long’s forehead. His skull caved in, and dark blood ran out from beneath the rock. He thrashed once and lay still.

  The demons hissed and snapped their jaws at me. They were lithe and agile, and as they leaped and scrambled at me over Gideon’s corpse, they revealed the full power contained within their corded muscles. I fled before them. I jumped down the corridor, sliding so fast that my legs and back burned and squealed against the stone. The demons followed, their white bodies and long limbs moving like spiders nimbly down the shaft of the upended corridor.

  I fell, ankles and shin bones nearly breaking as I slammed into the insect refuse at the bottom of the shaft. I picked myself up and limped on into the octagonal chamber. The creatures were not as tall as I, but their stride was impossibly long. I could not outrun these creatures. One of them was upon me. I swung wildly, connecting with its shoulder. It weighed very little and was flung to the side. It leaped up, unharmed. I splashed through the stinging trough of water.

  A weight fell upon my back. Fingers speared into the flesh of my shoulder, reached beneath the muscle and bone, and snapped the clavicle with an electric jolt of pain and a pop that resonated throughout my body. I screamed and swung my head, colliding with the face of the demon, mashing one of its huge eyes into its socket. The creature yowled and released its hold on my broken bone. It tumbled from my back and into the trough of water.

  Pale and clattering, another demon leaped onto me. I fell and rolled onto my back. The water burned cold against my flesh. The creature pinned my hands to the ground and in a frenzy began biting and licking the exposed flesh and bone of my upper arm. I returned the favor, sinking my teeth into the demon’s sinewy neck.

  Cool black blood gushed into my mouth. It tasted bitter. The demon immediately released me, and I scrambled away, getting to my feet and dashing out of the octagonal chamber. Blood was pouring down my chest, dripping everywhere I went. My bloody footprints were turning white behind me.

  The demons pursued me across the tilting boulevard. More had joined the hunt, white bodies contrasting with the black obelisks and debris in the ancient street. My smell was in the air. They were flooding out of hidden warrens and ruined black towers, hissing and clattering their jaws behind me. Pain radiated from my shoulder wound. The white frost was on me now, spreading across my bleeding flesh.

  I climbed the octagonal rocks, hand over foot. I kicked and punched and clawed at the demons that attempted to seize me. They bit off two of my fingers and began fighting over them as they rolled in among the rocks. A one-eyed demon leaped at me from above and nearly pulled me down, but I was able to fling the creature aside.

  I climbed the rise, and the sight of the cream-colored sea filled me with relief. I ran, slipping, fighting, and shouting, for the shore. The demons were crawling on all fours along the rocks, closing their mob pincer around me as their numbers grew.

  There was something else. Some other creature, swooping black overhead. Thrumming wings beat the air against my back. The movement startled the demons blocking the way ahead of me, and they fled out of my path. I took the opportunity. Laughing madly, I ran past the hissing beasts and threw myself over the last octagonal piles of coastline.

  As I dove into the white sea, as I felt the viscous evil begin to unravel my flesh, my eyes opened into light.

  I was tied to a chair, squinting against the brightness of a white-painted door in a white-painted room. The crash of the waves and the frustrated yowling of the demons receded like the ridiculous details of any remembered dream. I was drenched with fever-sweat. My limbs were bruised and raw beneath the ropes, and my body felt beaten to hell, probably because it was.

  Sweat dripped from my nose. I could not move or say anything for a long time. Something was wrong with my eyes. It was so bright, I could not stand to open them more than slits. People were shouting on the other side of the door. I wasn’t sure who or what they were saying.

  “Hey,” I yelled, my voice hoarse. “Let me out of the chair.”

  There was a thump, followed by a long silence. I strained to hear something more. There was a sudden burst of shouting and a distant gunshot. Two gunshots. It was hard to make sense of what was happening. Screaming. A woman screaming. Veronica!

  “Let me out of here!” I shouted. “You son of a bitch! Let me out!”

  I frantically worked a foot loose from the ropes and kicked out the leg of the chair. I crumpled to the floor in a heap and broke my other leg free. The chair was well-made but ancient. I twisted it beneath my body and held it steady with my wrists while I used my body weight and my arm muscles to snap one of the arms off. When I’d finally managed to free myself, I did not hesitate to snap the shelf from the wall and use the board to hammer the hinges off the door.

  “Goddamn you, Bendwool!”

  I hammered the narrow end of the board into the door. I was at the ragged edge of exhaustion, my eyes still so dilated I could barely see, but I battered my way through. I tripped over a pile of records, the black platters cracking underfoot and spilling out onto the floor. I raced outside, past Ian Bendwool and whatever nonsense he was spouting, into the blinding light, and up the stairs.

  I reached the top of the stairs, and through the whiteout haze of sunlight I glimpsed Veronica for just a moment. I saw the scarlet silk of her hair whipping in the wind as Ethan Bishop’s convertible disappeared. I raced to the parking lot, but the hood on my poor Tudor was up, and the engine was sabotaged.

  When I returned to Ian Bendwool’s house, the old man was smiling as if nothing had occurred. I grabbed him by his ratty sweater and hauled him out of his chair. He offered no resistance.

  “You said someone told you about Veronica. Who?” I demanded.

  “The voice,” said Ian Bendwool, and he pointed to his countertop. I realized he was indicating an old candlestick telephone.

  “The voice was a telephone call? You told them I was here?”

  “No,” said Bendwool. “I didn’t mention you. I told them she was here.”

  “You lousy fink!” I threw him down on the floor.

  I was the Judge. I was a killer to the manner born. When I was only a boy, I murdered my father with a piece of glass. When I was a man, I killed horse thieves and bandits and Apache Indians. I’d killed Gideon Long dozens of times, fought in every war America had conceived to inflict upon the world, and slaughtered better men than myself for the mistake of standing beneath the wrong flag.

  I stared into my own aged face, smiling its grotesque, peg-toothed smile. The enemy half. The betrayer. I flowed through the decades like a red river and never more red than in that moment. It’s not a good thing to let the anger take over, but sometimes there just isn’t any stopping it.

  “What did you see?” Bendwool asked in a sweet voice. “Please, tell me what was there. I need to know how you saw it.”

  “Let me show you,” I said.

  Bendwool’s telephone was as heavy as the stone I had used to smash in Gideon’s skull. I raised it above my head and brought it down and learned firsthand it worked just as well as a stone on Ian Bendwool.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I was able to put my heap back together with the bootlegger’s tool kit in the trunk. I patched the hoses with tape and replaced the missing spark plug. A man running homemade white lightning from the mountains to the city can’t afford to call a towing truck if he breaks down. Same goes for a professional killer, though my credentials were in question after I let an old loon like Bendwool put one over on me.

  There was a service station down the coast, and while the zipped-up skippy in the white coverall was filling my car up with gasoline, I cleaned up in the john. I ran a comb through my graying hair. Seeing myself in the mirror, how gaunt I was becoming, my pupils huge and black from the herbs, reminded me of the sickness in my lungs. That put me on my knees and
coughing into the toilet like one of those boxes with the cat and the poison pill. Observation has consequences or whatever.

  Stars exploded behind my eyelids with each cough. My body worked through its convulsions, but my mind was elsewhere.

  I knew that if I got all the way back to Los Angeles as mad as I was, there would be a slaughter. Most likely I’d get myself killed and wouldn’t do any good for anyone. Ethan Bishop had taken Veronica, but he couldn’t have her. Not even a rich, entitled son of a bitch, the scion of the most powerful industrialist in America, could kidnap a woman against her will and get away with it.

  A splash of cold water chased away my last thoughts of revenge. A lanky mechanic with a marijuana grin sold me his pair of sunglasses to cope with my blown-out pupils. I paid too much, so when I begged to use the station’s telephone, he let me have at it for free. I called the only man I could think to call. The man I knew who would help me even if he hated my guts, because nothing was more important to him than gloating over my inabilities.

  “I’ll be there with bells on,” said Kapinski. “And if this little adventure is some sort of trick, you know I am going to run you in for murder. Put you in irons. See how the boys in county jail like a piece of red cop meat thrown in with them.”

  “Murder ain’t gonna stick to me,” I said.

  “We’ll see.” Kapinski laughed.

  I beat him to San Pedro. Pulled to the side of the road overlooking the main entrance to Bishop’s monster of a power station. Those partly-built cooling towers made it look like the ruins of a giant castle. Throw up a wall and a moat, and you’d have one hell of a fortress.

  Kapinski and his cavalry showed up late. I was getting jittery, wishing I could just charge in there all by myself, when a blue Buick slid out of traffic and pulled in behind me. Kapinski got out of the passenger side. He had a nasty smile on his face, and his head looked swollen a full hat size.