The Elementals

by Michael McDowell

  They looked at one another silently. Odessa sat in a chair against the kitchen wall; in a moment Leigh reappeared in the doorway. With no one speaking and everyone still for the first time that evening, another sound came to the fore.

  “What’s that?” whispered Big Barbara.

  “Shhh!” said Luker.

  They were silent again. There was a hiss, irregular and not loud, and it seemed to come from all sides of them.

  They had begun supper when it was still fairly light out, but now it was deep dusk, and the room was dark and shadowed around them. At Luker’s request Odessa switched on the overhead light.

  From all the corners and moldings of the room fell a fine spray of white sand. It had piled up in a white line all around the baseboards. From the doorway Leigh looked up, and grains of sand spilled painfully into her eyes; sand spilled from the ceiling into Odessa’s hair and she vigorously brushed it out again. When they hurried toward the table in the center of the room their sandals scraped across the glaze of sand that coated the floor.

  CHAPTER 29

  Sand had got not only into the sugar bowl, but into all the cabinets of the kitchen and spilled out when Odessa pulled open the doors. Even closed canisters of coffee and tea had got sand into them and the sink drains were stopped with sand. It was mounding at the ends of counters. Coffee and Dauphin’s cake were abandoned on the table, and it didn’t even seem worthwhile to clear the dishes.

  Leigh and Dauphin went upstairs and found that in their bedroom, where the windows had been opened, sand had blown through the screens and left everything gritty and white. Leigh was glad that she had not yet unpacked, for all the clothes that had been left in the closed drawers of the dresser and chifforobe were filled with sand as well. In the other bedrooms sand had blown against the windows, leaving them opaque as with frost. They did not get up to the third floor at all, for the sand was falling so thickly there it proved an absolute shower down the staircase. The sound of falling sand, never letting up as they went room to room, was disheartening.

  Luker moved around the first floor, shutting the windows and closing the doors. He stood on a tall chair and examined the ceiling all around, but could not discover how the sand gained entrance. It spilled from everywhere, and seemed to increase in intensity with every passing minute.

  India and Big Barbara sat together very still on the wicker sofa in the living room, pulled away from the wall, and looked about them with distress. At last India stood, placed a newspaper over her head to protect her from the pure white and heavy sand that spilled from the molding and went to the window that opened onto the verandah. “It’s piling up fast out there,” she said quietly to Big Barbara.

  “But how can it?” demanded her grandmother. “Like the house decided to fall apart just bang! And it’s not like there’s wind outside either.”

  “The house isn’t falling apart,” said India. “It’s just beginning to fill up with sand, like the third house.”

  “But that was natural,” argued Big Barbara. “That happened natural-like. The dune built up and took over. Look round India, the sand’s coming out of everywhere here! How’d sand get in the sugar bowl when it had a cover on it? Where’s all this sand coming from?”

  India shrugged. “You think it’s just this house, or is it the other one too?”

  “Oh, lord!” cried Big Barbara, considering this dreadful possibility for the first time. “But we ought to go see!” She rose, but India took her hand.

  “No, don’t go yet. Don’t go outside until . . .”

  “Till what?” demanded Big Barbara.

  India hesitated. “. . . Till we ask Odessa if it’s all right.”

  Big Barbara considered this, then to India’s surprise, agreed without demur or discussion. “Odessa!” she called out, and in another moment Odessa appeared from the kitchen.

  “Odessa,” said Big Barbara, “something awful is happening in this house—” As if in ironic emphasis there was a loud electric sputtering from the kitchen; when Odessa opened the door, they discovered that some of the electrical wiring had been short-circuited.

  “Luker! Dauphin!” called Big Barbara. “Leigh! Y’all come on down here! Don’t stay upstairs!” Big Barbara feared electricity.

  “Something awful is happening,” said India, repeating her grandmother’s words. In places the sand was two inches deep along the baseboards. However, despite the sand’s falling from the ceiling to the floor all around, there was no dust in the room: the sand was of uniformly heavy grains. “It would probably be best if we got out of here, but I don’t know if it would be safe to leave. Odessa, is it all right to go outside?”

  Luker and Dauphin heard this question from the staircase. Leigh just behind them asked, “What’d India say?” But for Leigh the question need not be put: she carried her suitcase in her hand.

  Odessa said, “Ain’t safe nowhere tonight.”

  The other lights on the first floor sputtered out, and their only illumination was from the bulb on the landing above.

  “Y’all come on,” said Big Barbara, and went for the door. Luker grabbed India’s hand and dragged her forward. Dauphin and Leigh clattered down the stairs and followed after, brushing the sand from their hair. “Odessa,” cried Leigh, when the black woman appeared to hesitate, “we need you, come on!”

  There was a shower of sand spilling off the roof like rainwater, and they held their hands above their heads when they jumped through it. The six ran to the other side of the yard before turning to look back at the house they had just abandoned.

  The night was dark, the waning moon hid behind a cloud. The Gulf waves broke behind them, but louder than that was the sizzle of falling sand before them. A single light was on in Leigh and Dauphin’s bedroom, shaking and dim behind the curtain of showering sand. Soon it too shorted out and the house sizzled in darkness.

  “I don’t understand what’s happening there,” said Big Barbara. “Where’s that sand coming from? It’s not blowing in or anything. It’s falling down from everywhere, it’s like it’s being poured down from the sky. Maybe if there was more light we could see something. If it was day maybe we could see what’s happening. Is our place all right, you think?” She turned toward the McCray house.

  “Yes,” said Luker, “I don’t hear anything. All the sand is at the Savage house, thank God.”

  “What’s causing it?” said Leigh. “I mean, this is . . .” She trailed off in consternation.

  Dauphin ran into the McCray house and fetched a flashlight. When he came out again he advanced across the yard and shone its feeble beam over the back porch and kitchen doorway. The sand was falling more heavily still but because it now accumulated on its own hills and mounds, rather than on bare wooden surfaces, it was quieter than before. “Y’all, I’m gone walk around the other side, and see—”

  “Don’t!” cried Leigh and “Don’t do that, Mr. Dauphin,” said Odessa.

  “All right,” he said, and retreated. “Maybe we ought to go inside.”

  “Maybe we ought to get the fuck out of this place altogether,” suggested Luker.

  “We cain’t, it’s getting to be high tide,” said Dauphin. “It won’t be low tide till almost morning.”

  “Then we’re going for sure,” said Leigh. “I’m not waiting round here to get covered up with sand in my bed, buried alive under a dune.”

  There was unanimity: they would leave at dawn, when the channel was sufficiently shallow for the two vehicles to get across.

  “I hate this,” whispered Leigh as they turned all to go into the McCray house. “I don’t understand why it had to happen all of a sudden-like when we were just sitting there talking at the supper table.”

  “I think this is Lawton’s doing,” said Luker. “It’s like him. Destroy the houses so that we have to sell the place.”

  “Luker!” exclaimed Big Barbara. “What are you saying? Are you saying that your father is sitting up on the roof with a pail and a shovel, pouring dow
n sand on us? Is that what you’re saying?”

  Luker shook his head. “No, no—it’s just that it’s like something he’d do.” He looked back sadly at the Savage house from the safety of McCray porch. “It took the sand twenty years to get at the third house, and this one’s going to be gone in a single night. Dauphin,” he said, turning to his brother-in-law, “maybe . . .”

  Dauphin shook his head: there was no question but that the house had been usurped forever, and that for that loss there was no comfort.

  Luker was the first inside the McCray house; he immediately started to lower all the windows in the house, and Dauphin followed him room to room, checking for accumulations of sand in the corners and along the baseboards. Odessa was the last; she looked once to the Savage house and attended to its sibilant destruction. She glanced at the lowering presence of the third house, an undifferentiated square façade of black against a black sky, stepped inside and locked the door.

  CHAPTER 30

  “I’m not going to bed,” said Big Barbara. “I have no intention of lying down tonight. I’m gone sit right here on this sofa and wait for the sun and I would very much appreciate it if one or two of you would sit up with me.”

  They all would, they declared. No one could imagine sleeping. Big Barbara and Luker and India had packed their things, and brought down their suitcases and put them beside the kitchen door. Except for what was in Leigh’s bag that she rescued from the Savage house, everything else there was abandoned. They sat at the Gulf end of the living room, and drew the curtains across the windows that looked out on the Savage house—though it was impossible to see what was happening there in the black night.

  They simply waited, and when they talked it was not of Big Barbara’s divorce or Leigh’s pregnancy, but simply of the sand. In the silences they listened for the soft hissing fall that they feared would start up around them here. Odessa, after having set up several kerosene lamps against the possibility of electrical shortage here as well, sat a little apart, with her chin on the back of her fisted hand.

  At midnight Luker said quietly, “We all saw what happened across the way and we all know what happened wasn’t natural and cain’t be explained. It wasn’t the wind because there wasn’t any wind. And it wasn’t just sand that had always been caught in the timbers because why would it have all come out at once? And how did it get into things that were tight closed? Odessa said it even got in the boxes of food that we brought with us from Mobile yesterday.”

  “What are you saying to us?” asked Dauphin.

  “I’m saying what happened wasn’t natural.”

  “Good lord, Luker!” cried Leigh. “Don’t you think we know that! Whoever heard of sand falling out of the ceiling?”

  “But even if it wasn’t natural,” Luker went on, “I think something caused it, isn’t that right, Odessa?”

  Odessa raised her fist and that nodded her head.

  “Now y’all,” said Luker, reverting into a Southern accent to a degree that India had never before heard, “the night ’fore we left here to go back to Mobile, India and Odessa went in the third house—”

  Here came exclamations of wonder and surprise from Big Barbara, Dauphin, and Leigh.

  “—and fools they were to do it!” judged Luker.

  “Out of their minds!” cried Big Barbara.

  “Crazy!” said Leigh.

  “—but they did,” said Luker. “And there was something there. There was something upstairs and there was something downstairs and something grabbed India’s leg. Show ’em your leg, India.”

  India raised her pants’ leg and exhibited her ankle, which still was not quite healed.

  “What was it?” demanded Dauphin. “Maybe it was some kind of animal that was living in the sand. Maybe it was a mole or a ’coon or something like that. Maybe it was a big crab—”

  “It pushed over a table,” said India calmly, “and then it reached out and it wrapped its fingers around my leg, and if Odessa hadn’t been there it would have pulled me under.”

  “Now Odessa, is this true?” said Big Barbara, though she didn’t for a minute doubt her granddaughter’s word in this matter.

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Odessa.

  “So what I think,” said Luker after a moment, “is that whatever was in the third house and tried to get India is what’s causing the sand in the Savage house. That’s what I think.”

  “Whatever was in the third house has now got in my house,” said Dauphin. “That’s what you think?”

  Luker nodded, and so did Odessa.

  “Yes,” said Leigh, “I think so too. I didn’t say anything about it, but the other day I was over there lying down in the hammock all by myself and I heard these footsteps upstairs and I thought it was Odessa making the beds. I went upstairs and it wasn’t Odessa and it wasn’t even our bedroom, the footsteps were in that bedroom that nobody ever goes in, except the floor was covered with sand and nobody had been in there for five years. I guess that’s when they got in. That’s why I wouldn’t sleep over there that last night. I don’t know why we came back here. You’d think we’d have more sense . . .”

  “Yeah, you’d think . . .” agreed Dauphin with a confused shake of his head.

  “So what do we do now?” said Big Barbara.

  “Just what we planned,” replied Luker. “Get out of here soon as the tide goes out. Get out of here and never come back. Odessa, you think it’ll ever be safe to come back to Beldame?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. Her mouth was set and her hands gesticulated helplessly. Then she spoke at surprising length: “I don’t know why y’all all the time coming to me with questions when I don’t know much more than any of y’all. When I knew something was gone happen I did what I could to protect us. I gave us special things to eat—India helped me there. Those rolls I made one day, those were s’posed to protect us, but they didn’t do no good. Then I went and locked doors, and I’m staying up half the night looking out the window and watching ’gainst anything happening, and it don’t do no good. I keep on thinking, ‘They in the third house, they not go bother us long as we keep out of the way,’ but that’s not how they thinking about things. Un-unh. They do what they want. They filling up the Savage house with sand, maybe they want the Savage house to live in. Maybe they got more of ’em and they need the room, maybe they’s only one of ’em and always been just one, and he done got tired of the third house and wants to move. Maybe they’s three and maybe they’s seven, and maybe they’s upstairs in this house right now. I’m tired of trying to think ’em out and I’m not no good at it anyway. Maybe they want revenge, ’cept nobody’s done ’em no harm. Probably they just mean. Probably that’s it, they just mean and want to cause grief.”

  “Are they gone let us out of here?” asked Big Barbara softly.

  “Miz Barbara, I just got through saying I didn’t know nothing! If I knew something to keep us safe, don’t you think I’d be doing it right now? I used to think I knew what would keep us safe, but I don’t any more. One time they gone see a cross and they gone back off, and next time they just gone laugh and make you feel like a fool. That’s real meanness in a spirit. And I tell you, they laughing now, they laughing real hard.”

  Despite general agreement that it was high tide, Luker tried to persuade Dauphin to walk with him to the channel—perhaps they would find that it was shallow enough still to get across. But Leigh would not hear of Dauphin’s leaving her, and Dauphin felt such pride in being wanted by his wife that he couldn’t be persuaded. India couldn’t be parted from Odessa, and finally it was Big Barbara who accompanied Luker.

  They went out the front of the house and walked along the Gulf; they could not see the Savage house except as a piece of blackness that blocked out the phosphorescence of St. Elmo’s Lagoon, and the noise of the breakers covered the sound of the falling sand. In less than ten minutes they had reached the channel and found that it flowed deep and swift from the Gulf into the lagoon. With the moon still beneat
h clouds, the night was intensely dark and even the Gulf white-caps scarcely showed. There was only the shining green surface of the lagoon. “Maybe we can wade across,” said Luker.

  “No!” cried Big Barbara, and tugged at her son’s hand. “Luker, you know what that channel’s like—drag you under, drag you out! Remember what happened to poor old Martha-Ann!”

  “Martha-Ann didn’t die in the channel.”

  “Luker, you been coming to Beldame for thirty years, and you ought to know enough by now to know you cain’t cross the channel ’cept when it’s low tide.”

  “No, I don’t know that, all I know is everybody says you cain’t.”

  “There’s reasons.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know, but Luker, things are going wrong right and left out here, and now is not the time to start making ’speriments.”

  Luker pulled his mother closer to the channel. “Let me just stick my foot in, see how swift the water is—” He plunged his foot into the water, screamed, and fell back on to the ground. He pushed his foot beneath the sand.

  “Luker, what’s wrong!”

  “It’s hot! It’s fucking hot! That’s what’s the matter, and I burned my fucking toes off. Goddamn . . .”

  Big Barbara knelt at the edge of the channel; it was so dark she could not really see the surface of the water and lowered a single finger slowly. The tip of it touched scalding water, and she withdrew it precipitously.

  “Well, I never!” she cried. “Gulf water never gets like this, Luker!”

  “’Course not!”

  They were silent for a moment.

  “Let’s try the Gulf,” said Big Barbara. Luker limped along on his scalded foot, and Big Barbara dragged him. They stood on the shore and the waves broke coolly against their legs. “Well this is all right,” she said. “I cain’t see it but I think the channel begins ’bout twenty yards down there. Why don’t we go down and see where the hot water begins, maybe we can get across there . . .”