The Elementals

by Michael McDowell

  Through her weeping, Big Barbara smiled with anticipation of this happy prospect.

  CHAPTER 25

  Lawton McCray had kept company with Lula Pearl Thorndike for nine years—she had once been poor, but oil had been discovered in her modest pecan orchard only three weeks after Hurricane Clara had ripped up and carried away all but four of her trees. It was she who had put him on to the business of trying to sell Beldame by introducing him to Sonny Joe Black, the oil company’s principal local representative for the Alabama panhandle. Sonny Joe Black told Lawton, in strictest confidence, of the proposed drilling off the Baldwin County coast.

  Lawton expressed more than casual interest in the proposed transaction, and after conferring with his superiors, Sonny Joe Black brought back an offer of $2 million for Beldame, to be divided equally between him and Dauphin Savage. Dauphin Savage would officially be told, by the oil company, that Lawton had received a much smaller price for his much smaller parcel of land. In fact, the oil company would be paying Lawton for his assistance in the transacting of the sale. A million dollars would allow Lawton McCray to diversify his business; a man at his age, fifty-three, ought to be in something more than just fertilizer.

  The first meeting that Lawton had held to introduce Sonny Joe Black to Dauphin had gone well he thought, but the second, in Mobile when Dauphin had come back for the reading of Marian Savage’s will, had been disappointingly inconclusive. It didn’t look as if Dauphin were going to give up the houses without a fight. Lawton had hinted to his son-in-law that he was just waiting for a high enough price to be named before he sold the house that he and Big Barbara owned, but this was bluff. The oil company could do nothing without the entire spit of land called Beldame; Lawton’s deed included the house, but only fifty feet of beachfront and five thousand square feet of property. The rest was owned and controlled by Dauphin.

  Lawton had a further disappointment in his plans. After she had talked to Dauphin and Luker in the afternoon, Big Barbara told her husband that she was going to allow him his divorce—on the sole condition that the house at Beldame came to her. “We got these scales here,” said Big Barbara, “and on one side we’re gone put in Beldame—that’s my side. And on your side, we’re gone put Lula Pearl Thorndike and about four hundred tons of fertilizer . . .”

  Lawton saw that he had made a grievous error in pushing for the divorce from Big Barbara—for it worked as a lever only when she didn’t want to be separated from him. And actually to lose his influential wife, his rich daughter and son-in-law, and Beldame too would be more than carelessness—it might be a fatal mistake. That night, when he contemplated the fireworks that burst over the battleship Alabama at a harborside festival, Lawton thought of a way of reconciling his family to the sale of Beldame.

  He’d just burn the three houses down.

  And once he had determined on a course, Lawton McCray wasn’t a man to allow the grass to grow under his feet. Second thoughts and indecision were crippling to a man who wanted to get ahead in this world, and he had long ago learned the value of immediate action. He wondered, for a time, whether he ought not confide in Sonny Joe Black, who stood to make a great deal in bonuses and commissions if the sale of Beldame were effected. With this promise of wealth, Sonny Joe might well be persuaded into a little helpful conspiracy. But upon further reflection, Lawton determined to reveal his plans to no one. Arson was a desperate piece of business, and to admit his culpability even to one so congenial as Sonny Joe Black was doubtless an imprudence. He would do the job alone.

  Two hours before the dawning of Independence Day Lawton arrived at the fertilizer plant in Belforest. There he placed five five-gallon cans of gasoline into the trunk of the Continental, and drove north to Bay Minette. He parked the Continental in the driveway of Lula Pearl Thorndike’s big new house, and transferred the cans of gasoline to the back of a small pickup truck that was left over from Lula Pearl’s days as a meager pecan-farmer; these he covered with a tarpaulin so that those who passed him on the highway would not know his cargo. For this operation, Lula Pearl herself came out; but she was better trained than Big Barbara, and did not pry.

  “You coming back?” she ventured to ask when he was pulling out of the driveway.

  “I got to,” he replied. “I’m leaving the car here. Listen, Lula Pearl,” he said, looking at her sternly, “I was here all last night. I got here ’bout midnight, and I’m gone be here till ’bout noon. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “Every word, Lawton, every word,” she replied, and turned uneasily to go back into her house.

  The drive to Gulf Shores took an hour and a quarter. Inside the cab of the truck, Lawton wore dark mirrored sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat. Despite his nervous haste, he did not allow himself to drive quickly, and took a residential route through Loxley, Robertsdale, and Foley, in order to avoid the police stations of those small towns. He was known. It was scarcely six o’clock when he reached Gulf Shores, and no one in that resort community was up yet. No one saw him turn onto the Dixie Graves Parkway. He left the highway before he got to Gasque and skirted those houses altogether; the pickup truck was not so happy a vehicle on sand as were Dauphin’s jeep and Big Barbara’s Scout, and twice it got stuck. Though the cab of the truck was air-conditioned, and the day was not yet hot, Lawton broke out into a terrible sweat. He couldn’t relish being mired near Beldame carrying a load of gasoline in a truck that didn’t even belong to him.

  The tide was high when he finally reached the place, and thirty feet of rapidly moving water separated him from Beldame; but for this he was prepared. Also in the back of the truck was a small fishing boat equipped with an outboard motor. With some difficulty he took this out himself and carefully tied its towline to the bumper of the truck before he placed it in the channel. The water that poured in from the Gulf and made St. Elmo’s Lagoon even saltier than it already was knocked the boat violently about. Lawton loaded the five five-gallon cans, and at the last eased himself into the boat. He started the motor, untied the line, and the little boat, rocking precariously, was suddenly shot forward into St. Elmo’s Lagoon. Away from the channel, the lagoon was calm—dead was perhaps a more accurate description of its reflective lifeless surface—and in five minutes more, he had pulled up before the Savage house. He had brought the tarpaulin with him and covered the cans of gasoline; though he was certain no one remained here, he felt he could not be too careful in such a matter as this. He pulled the boat onto the shore of the lagoon and tied it to a post that had been planted for that purpose.

  He stood in the yard between the three houses and called out. No one answered. He banged on the back doors of both the Savage and the McCray houses. No one came to him. He looked from one to the other trying to decide which he should burn first.

  Having no experience in arson other than the igniting of an overinsured two-family black tenement he had owned some years back, he decided that it might be as well to begin with the third house. It was in poorer repair than the others—it was in no repair at all, properly speaking—and there would be no wonder to investigators, if any investigators bothered to visit so remote a place as Beldame, that the house had caught sudden fire. In fact, looking at it now, Lawton idly wondered that the house looked as good as it did. His house here and the Savages’ had required a little work every summer: some part of the roof replaced, windows reglazed, verandah supports shored up, rotten boards taken up and new ones put down. But that third house looked not much worse than the other two, and he was certain that no work had been done on it since he started to come to Beldame in 1951. Well, he considered, probably it was the sand that preserved it.

  From the boat he took a can of gasoline and brought it on to the side verandah of the third house. He could empty one can in the third house, two in the Savage house, and two in his own; that ought to do it. Once the houses started to burn, nothing could save them. There wasn’t a fire department within thirty miles. People on vacation at the beach—and they, nearest nei
ghbors at Gasque, were six miles away—probably weren’t even up yet, and even if they were couldn’t do much more than come and watch. It was possible that some small fishing boat out in the Gulf would see the smoke and report it to the Coast Guard, but by that time Lawton would be long gone. In all probability the houses would burn to the ground and leave nothing but rubble and sheets of dirty glass where the sand had melted and been fused by the heat. Even if it were ever discovered that the houses had been deliberately set afire, Lawton had provided himself an alibi: Lula Pearl would say he had spent the night with her, and his unmistakable pink Continental in the front yard would be noticed by the nosy and early-rising neighbors. It was a perfect plan, and would bear him the perfect fruit of a million dollars in the bank.

  He wished that he remembered more about this business; he hadn’t set fire to a house in more than twenty years. He couldn’t, for instance, recall how far he ought to stand back when he was tossing a lighted match into a pool of spilled gasoline, nor estimate the time it took a small and unhampered fire to gain irreversible control over a wooden structure. He needed to get away as soon as possible, and yet must make certain that the fires in the houses would not simply burn out. He was fortunate, he considered, in having a dry morning, though for this particular project he might have ordered a hotter one.

  He was also nervous about this very beginning. He unscrewed the cap from the can, but hesitated simply to slosh the flammable liquid over the verandah boards. He didn’t like the look of the dune at the end: what if a few of the boards were consumed and the porch gave way? The dune of sand might then rush forward and smother the fire that he had so carefully set; that obviously wouldn’t do. It would be much better if the fire began in one of the back rooms of the third house, and ate inward, outward, and upward all at once. To his surprise the back door of the place was unlocked; he was pleased that he did not have to break a window. He walked through the kitchen, placed the can of gasoline on the table, and peered into the dining room. That room, at the front of the house, was almost filled with sand. It would do no good to start the fire there.

  It occurred then to Lawton that he might as well take a look over the entire place. He had never been inside the house before and was somewhat curious to know what it contained; he was surprised, in fact, that none of them had ever bothered to explore it. And, since the floor plan of this house was identical to the other two, he might get some idea, looking over the rooms, of the best place to set his fire in all three. It might, for instance, make sense to pour the gasoline over the bedroom floors, thereby igniting both the first and second stories at once.

  Leaving the can then on the kitchen table—he was surprised to find no dust there but only a fine layer of white sand—he went back through the dining room and struggled through the double doors into the living room, crunching on the glass of a lamp that had toppled over and smashed on the floor. He climbed the stairs carefully, fearful of rotten wood and not wanting to slip on the fine, undisturbed layers of white sand that coated each step.

  On the second floor, three of the bedrooms’ doors were closed but the fourth stood ajar, and the early morning sun through the eastern window lighted the landing dimly. Lawton pushed this door open farther and peered inside. The room was furnished in an old-fashioned manner, and the sand had penetrated here too, leaving everything beneath a ghostly layer of fine whiteness. He tried the other doors on the landing: all were unlocked, and each opened onto an old-fashioned, fully furnished bedroom. Only in the last had the sand entered to any great extent. The dune had built up against one of the windows outside, crashed through the lower panes and spilled a few cubic yards of sand onto the floor. He decided that the kitchen was the best place to begin after all; fire burned upward, so it made most sense to begin low. He turned around in the hallway, glancing once more into each of the four bedrooms and was about to descend the stairs into the living room, when a slight noise—like that of a single footfall—arrested his step and momentarily stopped his heart.

  The sound had come from the third floor.

  It was nothing, of course: the house reacting to the presence of a human being after thirty years of bearing no weight other than that of the gradually intruding sand. But he must see all the same, and more carefully than he had ascended from the first to the second floors did he now tread the steps that went from the second to the third.

  There was no door here, only an opening in the floor. He paused with only his head through the trap and looked about. He could count six three-quarter-width beds, each with a rotting blue spread whose fringe dragged the floor. On all the boards the white sand lay a quarter-inch deep and entirely undisturbed. Nothing had trod that floor in thirty years, and he had heard the house resettling. Through the windows at either end of the room he could see only the bluish-white cloudless sky.

  He turned himself around on the step and was about to descend again with complete reassurance—his thought was that he might not have to waste even the whole of a single five-gallon can on this house—when a small ring of metal, about two inches in diameter, rolled off one of the beds and onto the floor, in front of him. It left a little pattern of arcs as it spun to rest in the sand. Still thinking of the apportionment of the gasoline between the three houses, Lawton picked up the ring of metal: it was a chased silver bracelet, and evidently meant for a very tiny arm.

  And it was warm.

  He reached out for the spread of the bed from which the bracelet had fallen and jerked at it. The rotten fringe went to gritty dust in his hands.

  With two high strides he mounted the rest of the steps into the room; he turned around, so little expecting to find anything there that he did not even bother to brace himself.

  He should have. On the third bed from the western side of the house, cradled in a depression of sand, lay an infant. It was alive, but ought not to have been. It was large and fleshy with misshapen clawlike hands and feet. Its head, rather like Lawton’s own, with a massive slack jaw and no chin to speak of, had indentations of flesh where there ought to have been eyes and a lump of unopened flesh where there ought to have been a nose. Its hair was red and thick with feverish perspiration. It breathed noisily through its mouth, which was filled with small fine teeth, and flailed its thick extremities in the sand that lay an inch deep on the bed. When it turned over in its pointless convulsive movement, Lawton saw that it had a rotting vestigial tail. He had never even dreamed of such a monstrosity.

  What was perhaps most terrible about the creature was its dress: a dainty blue starched pinafore, though stained with urine and feces. There were rings on its misshapen fingers and bracelets on its thick wrists. Its monstrously large ears had been pierced and set with gold earrings. A single strand of pearls was chokingly embedded in the scaly flesh of its neck.

  Its noisy breathing and movement left off of a sudden. It turned that unseeing head toward Lawton, and its arms reached out to him. Its mouth moved as if to form words.

  Stuttering his terror, Lawton raced down the stairs to the second floor landing. He had put his foot on the first step leading down to the first floor, when he was suddenly stopped by what he saw through the window of the bedroom opposite. This looked out on to the Gulf of Mexico, and on the Gulf—about a hundred yards from shore—was a small sailboat with a bright red and orange sail. A man stood in the boat, holding jauntily on to the mast, and waved toward Beldame. To me, thought Lawton, and with that thought lost his balance. He slipped on the sand that covered the stairs, and fell all the way to the bottom. His leg was caught underneath him, and he registered first the loud cracking of his thigh and only then the excruciating pain.

  He knew that his leg was broken—and broken badly. Still he must get out of that house: he’d crawl out, crawl to the boat, head around the lagoon and out to the Gulf. In the Gulf he’d ditch all but one can of the gasoline, and that would get him to Gulf Shores. He did not allow to intrude into his plans the thought of what that thing upstairs might be and how it might have g
ot there; he was almost glad for the pain in his leg for it distracted him from his real fear.

  Sweating and trying desperately to suppress his groaning—he did not want to give away his position to that thing on the third floor, for though it had appeared helpless, he could not think it altogether without power—Lawton crawled toward the narrow space that led from the living room into the dining room. He was lucky that there was no blood, he considered, though already his thigh was swollen to twice its normal size, and every step that he dragged it represented a long bolt of pain.

  At last he reached the doorway and rested a moment on the mound of sand that lay a foot deep there; it was more comfortable than the bare floor. He wiped the perspiration from his brow and was carefully maneuvering himself to get through that narrow space when he heard another noise from upstairs. There were footsteps, slow and quiet but not surreptitious. Lawton tried to scramble through the doorway, but his leg was caught against the frame; he pulled and nearly fainted from the pain that tore up through his body. His head fell back but was cushioned by the sand; now he heard the doors of the bedrooms pushed farther open. Footsteps entered each of the rooms, again without hurry or secretiveness.

  He was being sought for.

  Once more Lawton pulled, and as he reeled and cried out in his agony, his broken leg came free of the doorjamb and he was wholly into the dining room. He heard the footsteps, light footsteps really, not those of an adult—and certainly not those of that monster on the third floor. Someone had been hiding on the third floor, someone had been beneath one of the beds, peering at him through the rotting blue fringe of one of those bedspreads. Under which bed had he been concealed, Lawton wondered, as he pulled himself toward the swinging kitchen door. Why hadn’t he looked under the beds? Someone had to have put that thing there, it certainly wasn’t capable of locomotion itself. Someone—