Liminal States

by Zack Parsons

  I climbed the stairs and experienced a moment of leg-quivering vertigo at the realization that the apparatus was suspended above a deep shaft. I could see light reflecting from the surface of water far down the vertical shaft.

  This was where the men were being trained for Operation Westward—there could be no doubt. Coupled with my experience at Bendwool’s, I believed that Bishop and Shiftman were trying to travel through the Pool and out the other side, not by chance emergence, as my memory suggested, but by using some sort of capsule.

  I’ll confess, I’ve never liked science fiction pictures. Something about the rockets they fly in and the ridiculous ray guns doesn’t suit me the way a good old war or detective picture will get my blood going. Even though I live an unusual life because of the Pool, I would have scoffed at something like this being possible. But with all that had happened over the past week, I could now believe just about anything.

  I was examining a control pedestal with cranks and levers that seemed to control the flow of water into the shaft when I heard a bang. It was distant but followed by several more bangs. I leaped down the stairs and went limping out of the room with the training capsule. There it was again! Somewhere in the building something was making a lot of noise.

  I searched out the source as the noise continued. Following my ears brought me to a ramp descending into the basement level of the building. It was dark, lit only by emergency bulbs casting a red glow reminiscent of the danger stations of a submarine. These were housed in steel cages. The walls in the basement were unpainted and unadorned, and the floors were bare cement. The hall sloped deeper and deeper, into a land of pipes and ductwork, beneath the building.

  I reached a side passage and could see that it opened into a darkened room. Approaching carefully, I spotted a placard in the red glow of the emergency lamp. ZEROING.

  A switch activated the room’s overhead lights, and one by one long strips of fluorescents blinked to life. From floor to ceiling the room was covered in white tiles. There were drains set into the floor, and the surrounding tiles were stained brown. There was a single barber’s chair and beside it a rolling instrument table bereft of any instruments. One wall was decorated with medical diagrams of the human skull and the human brain. Tall metal cabinets and drawers sat completely open and empty.

  No, not entirely empty.

  A second instrument table was topped by a cardboard hatbox. The top of the box was labeled with a neatly applied decal. In a calligraphic font it read, HARROW MK. I. Inside the box was a broken, handheld machine somewhere between an electric drill and the tool an optometrist uses to measure eyesight. The particular device did not work when I pulled its trigger control, but it was easy to imagine the device’s u-shaped metal band held against a patient’s forehead and a trigger pull activating the drill to enter his skull.

  There was another bang. Very nearby now. It definitely sounded like a man pounding against something, possibly trapped.

  I returned to the hall and sought the source of the noise. It came from beyond a door similar to the one leading to the training-capsule room. This time, the sign on the door had not been scratched off. It warned, DO NOT OPEN WITHOUT ASSISTANCE.

  The loud thump shook the double door. What was I going to do? There was no assistance for me out there, so I opened it. It whirred and split and swung open toward me into the hall. I hoped to find Beau Reynolds.

  I found a horror. I was immediately assailed by the overpowering stench of human filth and death. A man—a Warren—shuffled out of the darkness, his face gaunt, his nails bloodied. He moaned and came toward me, and I could see that his forehead bore the scabbed mark of the zeroing device called a Harrow. As my eyes adjusted to the deep blackness of the room, I realized it was vast and filled with shuffling men dressed in rags or nothing at all. Some were babbling, some beating their fists against walls, but many were drawn in my direction by the light.

  “Beau Reynolds?” I shoved away the grotesque apparition of a man coming toward me. He fell to the floor and began writhing and moaning.

  “Beau Reynolds?” My voice echoed in the depths of the blackness.

  It was futile. The Harrow clearly reduced men to drooling idiots, and there would be no response to my shouts. All of them were Warrens, so there was no distinguishing them by appearance. Poor Reynolds was in there somewhere, or dead already, lost and locked away by whatever miserable authority ruled this place. Whoever it was, they had left no food or water for these men, and I could see that a number had perished already.

  The sight of them coming toward me in a shambling wave was too much to stand. They were desperate and unable to communicate. Filthy hands grabbed at my clothes and pulled at my arms, and I retreated, afraid of being smothered by them or worse. They hooted unintelligibly as I fled, and I could hear them continuing to moan and scream long after I escaped from their sight.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Ahead of me, the dark Oscuras towered in all of their folded detail. Behind me, across the open desert, the military men were preoccupied with the barbecued grasshopper and the flattened Cadillac. The fire had so utterly consumed both that they probably figured I was dead inside the car. Only a single plane remained in the air, circling lazily overhead, but I had a feeling that as soon as those poor bastards from the Center came wandering out, the military would have their hands full rounding them up.

  There was a road, four-laned, disappearing into the mountains. I approached across the desert, but there was no avoiding that road into the canyon. The entrance to the valley was dramatically widened. Some of this work was underway when I emerged in ‘34.

  There was a gravel road and efforts to install some sort of building to house and deal with the immediately emerged. The flow of men coming out of the Pool seemed to be accelerating as more of us walked the earth. The method of drawing names from a hat had long since been replaced with a card-and-tabulator system similar to that of a factory. Draw a card and punch in to your new life.

  Those changes did not prepare me for the extensive construction in the valley. The pueblos that had once lined the terraces were gone; the stairs were gone, all replaced with scaffolding and poured concrete. There were two paved ramps leading up to the cave entrance, which was itself widened even more. A second bore hole, far larger than the cave leading to the Pool, descended into the mountainside at ground level at a downward grade. This tunnel was accessed by a rail line that ran parallel to the highway-style road.

  As had been the case for Bishop’s version of Spark, this new construction was serviced by a number of shops advertising companies and products under the Bishop umbrella. The shops here appeared much more recently used but were nevertheless shuttered up. A number of derelict buses sat in a row alongside the road, and pallets of construction material were sheltered beneath heavy tarps. There was a huge flagpole between the ramps; presumably once it had hoisted an American flag, but that was gone.

  I parked the jeep near the flagpole and climbed the ramps on foot. A fly buzzed at my face, and I swatted it away. It buzzed back in at me, and I swatted it away again. I stopped in place. I turned, halfway up the ramp, and looked down at the shops and derelict vehicles. There were birds hopping to and fro in the dust, searching for bugs to eat. Flies were buzzing around the last bins of trash set out behind the shops. The wind shivered the tarps, and they rattled loudly as it gusted down into the valley.

  The magic had been dispelled. The stillness that had once reigned was encroached upon by the natural world. I ascended the ramp as quickly as I could, wheezing and coughing, spitting sickness onto the ground. When I blinked, I witnessed echelons of false light glimmering in the vascular darkness. I fell to my knees at the summit of the ramp. The wind was whipping the dust into whirling ribbons and blowing grit into my eyes and nose and mouth.

  I managed to get myself to my feet, swaying, staggering into the darkness of the cave. The sound of the wind grew louder here, scouring through the darkness like the hot air from a trumpet
er. The wind was not just entering the cave but circulating. Ventilation shafts or possibly the additional excavation had clearly opened it up more to the elements.

  The tunnel was now wide enough for a jeep, and I walked a thudding road formed from metal supports and wooden planking. The strings of miners’ lights I recalled were replaced with the soft orange glow of sodium lamps buzzing every few feet. Signs warned me to watch my step or wear my hard hat or check the temperature. The heat increased as I delved deeper into the mountain, but these were minor differences, not the searing furnace of before.

  The cavern of the Pool was transformed. The mountain was excavated, the chamber dramatically enlarged to house an enormous gantry crane similar to but larger than the one used in the Center’s training room. The Pool’s surroundings were remodeled to be more hospitable, with a garish WELCOME sign erected just behind sloping stairs descending out of view and into the Pool.

  I walked to the edge, my footsteps echoing in the emptiness. I peered down, afraid, somehow knowing what I would see. Or wouldn’t.

  The Pool, the white cauldron of our unnatural birth, was gone. There was only a yawning blackness, a deep void that had once contained the liquid. I sat down on the lip of the stairs and dangled my legs over the void. I whistled, tunelessly at first but soon turning into an old French lullaby. Only knew the music, not the words.

  I stopped my whistling and closed my eyes. There was only one way left. One path. I’d come all this way for nothing, but if the Pool still existed to endanger Veronica, then there was a way for me to get there. I reached for a last cigarette, but I had none. A last bite of Brown Barrel. My flask was empty.

  “Good-bye, cruel world.” I laughed, and I pitched myself forward into the pit. Death was not so quick as I had imagined. I never guessed how deep the Pool was, but I learned at a terminal velocity, plummeting into the hollow darkness for many seconds, deeper and deeper, passing a light from the lower tunnel, deeper still, feeling the heat of the rock around me, all the way to the bottom. Accelerating into the rock that waited to cradle my flesh.

  Bursting from the liquid, gasping, disoriented by the dreams I tunneled between and the cowl that surrounded my flesh. Hands lifted me from the cold ground, and I was carried to showers. Rough brushes and hot water scoured the membrane from my body. Men in white suits with hoses blasted away all of the filth of my creation.

  Towels. Still hard to make sense of it. The light was so bright. I staggered along, allowing myself to be guided into a warm room with a padded bench. There were clothes here for me. They fit perfectly. How was that? Did they know I was coming? No, no, of course. All of us were the same size.

  “Casper Cord,” I said to one of the men helping me dress.

  That was a name. A good name. My name before ... My memories were returning. I shoved away the hands and tried to run for the door, but it was too late. More men entered the room. They were strong and forceful and held me upright. There was the sharp sting of an injection in my arm, and I began to slacken. My will to fight back dissolved into a gauzy pleasure, and I relaxed onto the padded bench.

  Much later I was awakened. Ethan Bishop was there, dressed in a white tie and tuxedo. Or was it Harlan Bishop, assuming the role of his son at long last? There was no way to be certain. I was not sure it even mattered, the false son being as twisted as the father.

  “So nice of you to announce yourself,” said Bishop, leaning over me. “You’d forced us to quarantine every Warren emerging from the Pool to prevent you from running amok. Now that we have you, we can let those other poor fellows be on their way.”

  “Licorice?” Bishop offered me a wrapped candy. I took it from him automatically. “I think you and I should go for a walk.”

  Two Gideons dressed in white hospital coats lifted me to my feet, and both supported me and forced me forward as I walked alongside Bishop. We were in the gleaming halls of a newly built facility. It reminded me of the sort of place where an experimental aircraft would be built or some other precision machine, but it had the disinfected smell of a hospital.

  “I wish you’d been here for the wedding,” said Bishop. “Finally, the wedding Annie deserved, not that pauper’s church. Of course it was only a formality. She and I have had such a long and magnificent romance, it really was destiny, for her to emerge from nothing and for you, faithful Casper, to lead my bloodhounds right to her. But where were you off to? What took you so long?”

  “Spark,” I muttered.

  “Of course!” Bishop snapped his fingers. “That would explain those poor, sick Warrens running wild in the desert. Troubled types, meant to be kept in the Center. General Shiftman was quite cross about that. A lot of explaining and covering up to do with his friends in the Air Force, but I consider what you gave me more than a fair trade.”

  “Where is she?” I demanded.

  “Your friend was easier to spot than you,” said Bishop as we stopped beside an observation window of the sort used in hospital nurseries. Inside was a Warren strapped to a bed. There was an IV running into his arm and a monitor with twitching armatures scribbling out his vital statistics. The Warren was youthful but had startling white hair.

  “All of Milo Gardener’s duplicates come out looking like that,” said Bishop. “We’re still trying to figure out why exactly. The others are so helpful, you know? Real go-getters committed to the cause. They serve in his honor. They call themselves the Gardeners. I like that, don’t you? Weeding out the troublemakers. Tending the—”

  “Let him go,” I said.

  “Eventually,” said Bishop. “I have an offer for him. I think he may be convinced to cooperate when he realizes what a kindhearted man I am. How I can forgive past deeds and even give him a measure of what he desires most. He helped create the Gardeners, after all. I’d like to see him honored.”

  Bishop began to walk away. The two Gideon orderlies forced me to follow him.

  We rode by elevator to a wood-paneled suite decorated with artifacts of the past. The ocean was visible from a picture window, a ship moving near the horizon, steam above its angled stacks.

  “Where are we?”

  “What?” asked Bishop. “Oh, you hadn’t realized. Ha-ha, I’d thought you a detective. We’re in San Pedro, of course. Power generation was always a cover for the construction.”

  “You moved it here? Why?”

  “To possess it,” said Bishop, and he seemed to grow annoyed. “This is what it wanted. To be near the sea. Could you not feel that yearning each time you emerged?”

  “No,” I said, in disbelief. “It doesn’t talk to me.”

  “No, of course not,” said Bishop. “You lack the connection we have with the Pool. You feel burdened by your existence, and we revel in it. Ah! Here we are.”

  We had reached a heavy door carved with delicate depictions of bathing women. They were spirits of the water, nymphs and mermaids, frolicking in the surf and beneath the carved waves. Bishop opened the door with a key he took from his pocket.

  The room was appointed in the height of cloying femininity. Flowers, real and decorative, covered every surface and wall. There was a luxurious four-poster bed within. Veronica seemed to float upon the ruffled bedclothes. She was resplendent in a white wedding gown. Her hair was teased into fat curls, and her breasts heaved within the corseted gown.

  “She is my beautiful princess,” said Bishop. “But I am no miser; I will share. There will soon be enough of her to go around.”

  Her eyes were open and staring up at the coffered ceiling and its brass fleur-de-lys.

  “Could I talk to her?” I asked. “Alone?”

  Bishop chuckled and said, “Of course.”

  He and his men left the room and shut the door behind them. I went to her on the bed, tentatively, afraid she might already be dead.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Casper?” Her head turned slowly. “You look so young. What happened?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” I sat on the bed b
eside her and smoothed a lock of hair from her face.

  “I’m married,” she said, and she lifted her hand to show me an extravagant diamond ring with a gold serpentine band. “He took so many pictures. He said they were for the papers. There was a new reel too.” She reached and took my hand, her expression knitting into confusion. She squeezed my fingers. “I ... I had a dream that I was swimming. There was water all around me, and I was falling deeper and deeper.”

  She described what could only be her descent into the Pool.

  “It felt like the tide was pulling me apart until I was not in the water, I was of the water.” She wet her lips. “It was beautiful. I could see everyone I remembered. My sister, Maxwell and Cecelia, my mother and father, Holly—they were all there with me, but my father told me to leave. I didn’t want to, but I swam up out of the water. I leaped from the waves. I’m here now.”

  She looked at me earnestly. “Is that strange? Is that a bad dream?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s a fine dream.”

  Her face abruptly contorted into an expression of panic.

  “I can’t leave here, can I? I can’t!” She squeezed my hand so hard, it hurt. “They’re with my sister. You have to go to them. You have to make sure they’re safe.”

  “Who? Who is?”

  “My children,” she said. “Max and Cecelia. They’re at my sister’s house in Montebello. Will you take care of them? Promise me? Please! Promise me!”

  I remembered. When I’d followed her after we first met. She went to the modest house in Montebello and was greeted by children. She lifted them into her arms and kissed their faces.