The Elementals

by Michael McDowell

  Luker agreed, and they walked along through half a foot of water. As they went the Gulf grew appreciably warmer and by the time that they were perhaps five yards away from the place where the Gulf flowed across Beldame to St. Elmo’s Lagoon, their legs were beginning to burn. A wave broke high against them and the water was as hot as that with which Odessa washed dishes. They ran frantically for the shore.

  When they had recovered a little, Big Barbara said, “Is there any point in going over to the lagoon?”

  “No,” said Luker, “even I know enough not to go out in the lagoon. At night? And that truck—”

  “Forgot about the truck,” sighed Big Barbara. “We’re gone be here all night, looks like.”

  “Looks like.”

  When they returned to the McCray house, they fashioned an excuse no one believed as to why their clothes were wet. It had seemed pointless to tell of the supernaturally heated water. Just that the channel was too high to be crossed—though this information came not unexpected—dragged on everyone’s spirit, and they sat for a long while without saying anything.

  The hours would be long until morning. India fell asleep with her head in Luker’s lap, and he slept with his head tilted back against the sofa. Leigh and Big Barbara lay in the hammocks that were strung in the living room. Indicative of the severity of the night was the fact that Odessa went so far as to draw her rocking chair close beside Dauphin’s on the braided rug, and then they rocked together, in rhythm and in silence.

  CHAPTER 31

  They had waited in the dark. They had listened in the dark for the sound of sand falling in the house until at last sleep had overcome them. When India awakened it was to find the room still dark, and herself blind in that darkness. Her head still rested on Luker’s lap, and she felt rather than heard his breath. Behind the couch, she heard Big Barbara mumbling in the hammock—she dreamed, and not pleasantly. Leigh’s breathing was rough too.

  When her eyes had accustomed to the lack of light, India saw that Dauphin still slept in the motionless rocker. His hand, which had held Odessa’s, dangled at the side. The black woman was not to be seen. India rose from the sofa without waking her father and went through the dining room into the kitchen. On the kitchen table were two of the three kerosene lamps which Odessa had prepared, set at lowest illumination. Through the panes of the back door India looked out at the Savage house.

  The pallid light of the waning moon allowed her to make out the perfect cone of sand that had covered it—as if the house had been a tiny model at the bottom of an hourglass. India had seen such a figure in a museum of curiosa in the Catskills. The turrets over the verandah stuck out on the far side, the tops of the second floor gables were visible, and the third floor with the window of Odessa’s room were still uncovered. But everything else, including all the doors and first-floor windows, had been neatly, malevolently, expeditiously inhumed.

  It was no dune that had enveloped the Savage house, for dunes are irregular things shaped by wind and tide; and this was a cold geometric figure that had chosen to manifest itself in the same space occupied by the Savage house. Its circumference precisely intersected the four corners of the building. The peak of the cone was invisible but was obviously set somewhere on the third floor: as if all these hundreds of tons of sand had spilled out from another dimension of space and through a single point in the air above Odessa’s bed.

  “So that’s what they wanted,” India said in a whisper to herself, “all the time what they wanted was Dauphin’s house. Well, now they’ve got it! I just wish I had my camera . . .”

  India cautiously opened the back door, pushed on the screen, and then stood on the back steps of the house. She peered into the blackness, hoping to find Odessa. Seeing no one, hearing nothing, she walked out into the yard, nearer to the Savage house. Now she could see that the cone of sand was still growing, most quickly where the sand spilled through the open windows of the house. Loose grains—millions altogether—tumbled silently from the top all the way down to the base.

  India thought suddenly that Odessa might only have gone upstairs from the living room, and that her own venturing outside was therefore a piece of arrant stupidity. She turned to hurry back into the safety of the McCray house, when her eyes scanned over the façade of the third house—in comparison to the sudden tumultuous destruction of the Savage house, its familiar lowering presence had seemed almost innocuous.

  A dull glow of amber light was visible in the living room window. It wavered, then disappeared. A moment later it showed itself again, but fainter, in both windows of the second floor.

  With the kerosene lamp, Odessa had entered the third house and gone upstairs.

  India didn’t allow herself the leisure to think. She ran back to the McCray house and quietly re-entered the kitchen. From the drawer beside the sink, she took out a sharp carving knife and a meat cleaver—she found that these two weapons only might be carried in a single hand. From the table she lifted one of the kerosene lamps and increased its illumination to exactly what she judged Odessa’s to have been. She slipped out into the yard, and unhesitatingly ran to the back door of the third house.

  Inside, she shone her lamp on the red-painted can on the kitchen table. It had not been there the week before, and India was certain as well that it had not been among the items which had been brought to Beldame from Mobile. She sniffed the air, and judged the can had gasoline in it. She pushed it an inch or two across the sand-covered table, and found it full.

  India looked around her, with less fear this time than the other. After all, now she knew that there was something unhuman inside the third house—at least she did not fear the surprise of that discovery.

  India moved into the dining room, holding her knife and cleaver raised but without any tenseness apparent in her posture. She took a moment and curiously looked around in order to make out, by the superior light afforded by the lamp, those objects and shapes which had mystified her before. One bulky piece was evidently a large sideboard: a high carved corner remained uncovered and it bore on a tiny shelf a little silver pot, black with tarnish. The pictures on the walls were black with rot behind their glass, but looking closely at one that was on the near wall she could see that they formed a set depicting the important municipal structures of Mobile. A dinner plate of white bone china with a gold rim had been knocked off the table and was only half-buried in the sand. India reached down and picked it up. In the center was painted the initial S. The dune had come in farther, India judged, for the spilling sand had erased the prints that she and Odessa must have left the previous Tuesday night. Recalling suddenly the hallucinatory dinner party her father had once witnessed in that room, India dropped the plate back into the sand.

  She jumped through the narrow aperture into the living room. She looked around, automatically cataloging the furniture, mourning the smashed lamp, and backing cautiously away from the dune that lapped toward her from the other end of the room. She searched the base of it for movement, and was prepared to sever the hand from any arm that reached out toward her ankle.

  All at once India was overcome with the insanity of having looked over this place as if it were merely the home of one of Luker’s new friends which she was visiting for the first time. Something burrowed through that dune toward her, moving slowly so as not to disturb the sand and give away its location. Something else waited for her in one of the four bedrooms upstairs, and it would not be in the bedroom she guessed. And if she stood on the stairs that led to the third floor, something would lean over the edge and peer down at her. And where was Odessa now?

  India clattered up the stairs to the second-floor landing, and the white sand flew beneath her bare feet. Whatever was there was most likely to be in the room into which the sand had gained substantial entrance; something else had been in the bedroom that stood catercorner to it. The other two bedrooms were probably benign; their doors India tried first and found them locked.

  “Of course,” she said to herself al
oud, “Odessa locked them the other night.” But with that speech came again the thought: Where is Odessa?

  “Odessa!” she called. Then more bravely and loudly; “Odessa! Where the hell are you?”

  Turning the kerosene lamp up high and setting it exactly in the middle of the landing, she tried the door of the bedroom where she and Odessa had heard some heavy piece of furniture pushed up against the door.

  The door opened. The piece of furniture had been a small vanity with triptych mirror, and now it was shoved out of the way again. India could see the tracks it had made being pushed about the sandy floor. There were no footprints, however, to show the nature of the creature moving it.

  The room was furnished in only a rudimentary fashion; the only thing that stood out to India’s occluded mind was a large red vase, which looked shining and clean and even new, placed at the foot of the bed. It stood on a patch of bare floor: the sand beneath it had been swept away.

  India held on to the doorknob but turned back toward the landing. “Odessa!” the girl cried again, this time angrily.

  There was no answer.

  In frustration, India whirled around, lifted the vanity under the left-hand side drawers, and tumbled it over on to the floor. The mirrors smashed. Growling, she pushed the dresser across the sandy floor toward the red vase, but the knob of one of the drawers caught against an uneven board, and on this axis, the dresser simply turned in a circle. In another moment, India was staring into the landing. The door of the room across the way, the only room she had not tried, was now ajar. It had been shut before.

  India clambered over the spilled vanity, and ran across the landing; she kicked the door fully open.

  This room faced west. Odessa’s lamp, dim and flickering, was placed on the dresser and provided but the scantiest illumination of the room. The black woman lay on the floor, on her back, with her head turned toward the window. When India moved forward she could see that Odessa’s feet were buried in the dune of sand beneath the window. Haltingly, the black woman was being drawn into it. Her print dress caught on a nail; her back arched a little and then India heard the dress rip. Odessa’s body fell back to the floor and her progress into the sand resumed.

  Kneeling behind her and snagging her under the arms, India could feel with what surprising force Odessa was being pulled beneath the dune. “Odessa, Odessa,” she whispered, “let me—”

  The black woman was dead. India could feel that in the inert heaviness of her body, but that was only intuition compared to the proof afforded by the face that was suddenly tilted into the amber light from India’s lamp on the landing. The black woman’s visage was shiny with welling blood, no longer flowing but squeezed out by India’s rough handling. The coagulating blood that had pooled in Odessa’s empty eye sockets spilled out on to India’s jeans when she suddenly let go the black woman’s head.

  Three thin arms, smooth and gray and slightly shining in the amber light, were thrust out of the dune. The dead woman’s calves were clutched by many thick and nailless fingers. She was pulled beneath the sand more quickly than before.

  Appalled, India let go Odessa and scuttled away toward the bed.

  The hands soon disappeared back beneath the sand and Odessa was covered to the waist; there was some struggle to pull her all the way under but this failed. She lay still for a moment, then was jerked backwards—evidently by one of the hands thrust up through the sand and grasping the collar of her print dress. Now Odessa lay parallel to the wall, huddled against the dune. The sand began to spill over her. While India watched it was shaken over her face and it soaked up the blood there. It poured into her empty sockets, blackened for only a moment and then was covered with more sand that was white and pure.

  India remembered the black woman’s iterated injunction: “Eat my eyes . . .”

  Only one arm lay entirely uncovered and it was thrust out from Odessa’s corpse, resting on a bare patch of the rush matting, and convulsively fisted.

  On her knees and leaning far forward, India pried apart the dead woman’s fingers. Her eyeballs, one of them crushed and bloody and the other intact and still threaded with the optic nerve, lay on her bloody palm.

  India took them up.

  Odessa’s corpse was swallowed like a black beetle into an anthill.

  CHAPTER 32

  Luker was gradually roused by the rising consciousness of India’s absence—her head no longer heavy in his lap. He opened his eyes and looked slowly around. Seeing that Odessa was gone too, Luker guessed what might have become of the black woman and his daughter.

  He rose quietly, went over to Dauphin and, clapping his hand over his brother-in-law’s mouth, gently shook him. Dauphin rocked suddenly into wakefulness, tripping over a bad dream. Luker pointed to sleeping Big Barbara and Leigh in the hammocks and Dauphin understood the need for silence; he followed Luker into the kitchen.

  “I know they’ve gone in the third house,” whispered Luker shaking his head. “Goddamn ’em both, I just wonder whether Odessa took India or India took Odessa. They both got diced mushrooms for brains.”

  Dauphin was pained. “Why the hell would they go in there?”

  “Because they thought they had to, because they thought it was necessary.”

  “Wait—” whispered Dauphin, who had suddenly remembered why they had all been together in the McCray living room. He went to the kitchen window and stared out at his own house across the yard. “Good God!” he exclaimed, too loudly, when he saw that it had been almost entirely usurped by a perfect cone of sand, gleaming yellowish-white now in the vivid rays of the setting moon and the first purplish-gray light of the dawning day. Already the cone, though it did not yet surmount the house, was higher than any dune that Dauphin had ever seen along the Gulf coast; and its perfect, unhesitating symmetry of form was unsettling, even mocking—as if they were all being dared to think it a natural phenomenon.

  It was decidedly unnatural.

  “Oh, shit,” whispered Luker when he came to the window. “Oh, shit!”

  “You don’t think they went back in there, do you?” asked Dauphin, and Luker shook his head.

  “They’re in the third house. India’s an asshole. Last week she got scared shitless by that place, by something that was in there. She’s not gone let something scare her shitless without a fight. She’s too dumb to do the smart thing and run away. She doesn’t believe in any of this, she doesn’t believe it’s really happening. She thinks she’s in a fucking dream, a fucking film called India at the Mouth of Hell, and she’s gone jump right through the mirror because she’s been fucking telling herself none of it is real!”

  “But Odessa’s with her,” said Dauphin.

  “Odessa’s no better. Odessa thinks she’s gone protect us. If you ran out of hot water, Dauphin, Odessa’d cut open her wrist and let you bathe in her blood, you know she would! No matter what she thought was in that house, she’d walk inside and wrestle it down to give you time to get away. We got to go in there after ’em.”

  “Oh, Lord, Luker, I have never been inside the third house!”

  “I’ve got to go in there after India—that asshole, I ought to punch her out for a stunt like this. Listen Dauphin, I’m gone go in there by myself, I’m—”

  “No! I’ll go with you, I—”

  “You go wake up Barbara and Leigh. Then take these suitcases out to the jeep. Get ready to go. I’m gone go get those two and drag ’em out, and then we’re leaving and we’re not waiting for coffee.”

  Taking up the third kerosene lamp, Luker went quickly out the door, and did not look back at Dauphin. He did not look either at the enormous cone of sand that had eclipsed the Savage house. He moved slowly through the yard, despite his sense of the necessity of haste. Something was different in the air of Beldame, something in its breath that he had never tasted before: a stillness and heaviness that had nothing to do with temperature or moisture. Astronomers of old had thought that space was filled with a lambent ether through which the s
tars and planets swam; and Luker thought he moved now through just such an ether. It hadn’t weight or heat so much as a charged density that made even the drawing of breath a difficulty. Holding aloft the lamp, he realized that there was no dust in the air, no dancing motes. There was no dust at Beldame, only sand, and that sand so heavy it all sank to the earth—or piled itself mockingly into unnaturally perfect geometric shapes.

  The ether gave no real resistance to his movement, not the way wind would have, or water, but still as he mounted the back steps of the third house and reached for the handle of the kitchen door, he had the distinct sensation of parting liquid with his outstretching hand. The door was unlocked and he went inside into the kitchen.

  He stared at the can of gasoline on the table and called India’s name. There was no answer, and he called Odessa’s. His voice rattled the panes in the windows. In the kitchen the air seemed of even greater density than outside.

  He went into the dining room and was startled by the extent to which the room had filled with sand; there seemed scarcely room to breathe. He hurried into the living room and called out again for India and Odessa.

  He went up the stairs slowly and stood on the landing. One of the bedroom doors was open. He held the lamp high before him, and called his daughter’s name.

  The room was empty.

  His call was echoed from downstairs: “India! Odessa!” in Dauphin’s voice.

  “I’m up here!” called Luker, and tried the door of the next room. It was unlocked and Luker pushed it open.

  Inside the bedroom—the same he had seen in his daughter’s photographs—stood India, with one hand on the bedpost. Behind her was the small dune of sand which had broken through the window; and outside the window and over the dune, hung the engorged ocher moon.