EXCERPT: Liminal States, by Zack Parsons

The cliff pueblo’s paths of white brick were crumbling and precarious. Many of the structures were reduced to yawning, brick-lined holes in the foundational granite, and in these Gideon could see drifts of sand and old bones. He might survive a fall into one such hole, but he would never be able to climb back out. The ladders were tricks—they broke and fell apart at the slightest weight—and so Gideon attempted to follow the footprints left by the dog.

His vision at night was never very keen, and now, barely able to stand, he chose to crawl on hands and knees to steady himself and to even see the tracks left by the white dog. When he lost sight of them, he relied on his sense of smell, for he was able to detect the sweetness of water in the air.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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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.

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