The Liminal

On a train. Headed south.

The roads are impossible this time of year. Tourists and caravans and people who bought walking boots last Tuesday and think they know the hills. The train suits me better. Always has. You can think on a train. 

And there are the tunnels.

At the first one, a boy pressed his face to the glass and saw nothing but his own reflection. He didn’t know there were others looking in.

I felt it. Saw it.

Something moved in the black beyond the glass. Several somethings.

I nodded.

They waved back, in their fashion.

The liminal starts with the Latin, if memory serves. Limen. Threshold. 

The word is academic now—anthropologists use it, architects use it, therapists have gotten hold of it and done things I won’t comment on. But the original understanding was simpler and more serious.

The threshold is not decorative, but it can be dangerous.

It’s where the rules change.

Where what applied on one side does not necessarily apply on the other. Where you are briefly, uncomfortably, neither one thing nor another.

The rite of passage understood this. Every culture has understood this—even if they didn’t know why exactly. You mark the crossing because the crossing matters. You make it deliberate because if you don’t, it happens to you anyway. And if you cross it without reading the terms… well, that’s not a good thing. 

The faery ring is a threshold. Step in and you have consented to something. The ring doesn’t care that you didn’t know. Consent in the liminal has never required understanding.

The hedge is a boundary. The treeline is a boundary. The gate at the end of the path to that quintessential English cottage—boundary. The crossroads at midnight. The shoreline at dawn. The moment between sleeping and waking when you hear your name and can’t be certain which side of consciousness called it.

All of them thresholds. All of them asking the same question.

Are you sure you want to cross?

Most people don’t hear the question. They just cross.

There is a collection of cases I’ve been following for some time. The Author has written them up as folk horror. Fiction. But really she knows. 

I may have suggested the title. Blood in the Hedgerows. 

She bought me a pint for that one. 

Take a look. The liminal sings in each story. 

The hedge feeds on what bleeds on it. The boy who steps into the ring doesn’t come back. The policeman who drove through the gate posts knew the moment he was through. The air was different. The dark was different. The face he meets there—different. 

We chatted not long after. He said he’s changed. Looks at the world differently now. But can’t quite put his finger on it. 

The cases are real. The names are changed. The thresholds are exactly where they were. 

Second tunnel now.

Longer than the first. I felt the full weight of what’s above us. The rock. The root systems. The things that have been in the earth since before there was a word for earth.

Familiar. All of it.

I am, whatever else I am, a creature of the between. I know the threshold as the guidepost and the liminal as creation. 

Something pressed briefly against the glass from the outside. Curious. Gentle. Gone before the lights steadied.

I’m headed somewhere specific. Following something up. There’s a thing I need to see with my own eyes rather than hear about secondhand.

I’ll say more when I know more.

For now, the train moves. The tunnels come and go. The dark between them knows me, and I know it, and we have the comfortable understanding of things that have been acquainted for a very long time.