The Elementals

by Michael McDowell

  Though she had not intended, she stopped a moment on the landing and gazed into the two open bedrooms. She saw nothing, and more importantly, she felt nothing. Whispering her father’s name as a kind of incantation for safety, she started down the stairs to the first floor.

  The light of dawn penetrated but dimly into this part of the house, and India heard the thing before she saw it. Straining, she made out the creature’s form on the stairs below her as it dropped clumsily from one step to the next toward the living room—and her father. India stood at the head of the stairs, too frightened to proceed and too courageous to call out to Luker for assistance.

  She flung the cleaver at it, but it was the dull side that struck solidly against the creature’s back. The weapon glanced off and fell between the balusters to the floor below.

  The creature stopped and turned its expressionless unfeatured face to India. It presented one ear to her, and then the other; and then it began to struggle upward again.

  India waited and held the knife poised. She trembled, and did not answer her father when he called again.

  Luker appeared suddenly, climbing over the mound of sand between the living and dining rooms. “Goddamn it,” he hissed, “India, why didn’t you come on down, I was about to—”

  With the lamp he had come to the foot of the stairs, and he now could see what was only three steps below his daughter. India knelt, with one hand gripping a baluster for her balance, and waited for the abomination to come within her reach.

  Its small mouth worked, and she saw the grinding white teeth inside, tiny and countless. It turned its head from side to side, to catch her breathing first with one ear and then with the other. She could see the soft indentations where there ought to have been eyes, and even the vestigial bands of lashes buried in its doughy skin. Two small red scars it had instead of nostrils; beneath a pearl necklace there were scales on its thick neck, and thick red hair filled its ears. It stank.

  Below, Luker had seen and retrieved the cleaver. He stood at the foot of the stairs, and called softly to his daughter: “India! India!”

  India stepped back. When the monstrous thing was raising itself onto the landing, and reaching out at her with its bloated four-fingered hand, India drew back her bare foot from which Dauphin’s blood had not yet been worn away and kicked the thing solidly in its exposed breast.

  It tumbled down several steps, spewing bile and sand. It flailed blindly but one of its arms caught between two balusters and its progress was halted with a jerk. It had nearly recovered its balance when, with a strangled voice, Luker ran up the stairs and brought the cleaver down against the side of its head. The necklace it wore was snapped, and the tiny perfect pearls scattered.

  Not sand but brains and blood exploded from the wound that Luker had inflicted. India ran down and plunged the knife deep into its breast. Thin stinking blood was geysered up along the blade and drenched her hands.

  Luker grabbed India’s wrist and started to pull her down the stairs, but she resisted. The baby still twitched, flinging sand and pearls.

  She wrested out the cleaver, lifted it high, and brought it down against the creature’s neck. But all her strength wasn’t enough to sever it. The broken head only lolled down over the next step, as on a hinge. What contents of its misshapen head had not already spilled out began to seep through the wounds, and the unrecognizable and rotting internal organs pushed themselves out of the body through the opened neck.

  India and her father fled the third house.

  Luker set fire to it by tossing the kerosene lamp through the back door, which India held open. He took the empty gasoline can on to the verandah and with it knocked out all the windows on the first floor that were not covered with sand, to allow circulation of air through the place. By the time that he ran back to the jeep, where India was cowering in Big Barbara’s lap, flames were leaping through the smashed kitchen windows.

  Leigh wanted to drive away, but he cautioned her to wait. “Want to make sure it catches.”

  “No,” said India, looking up suddenly. “We can’t wait. We’ve got to get out of here!”

  “India,” said Luker, “whatever that was in the house, we killed it, we—”

  “It’s not just the third house,” she said, “it’s this whole place, we—”

  “Oh!” cried Big Barbara, and pointed to the third house. There in the window of the bedroom that was over the living room—flames could now be seen on that side of the house as well—stood Lawton McCray. He was trying to raise the window, but it was evidently stuck in its frame.

  “Oh, Lord!” cried Leigh. “Y’all have done gone and set that house on fire and Daddy is inside! Y’all didn’t even say Daddy was inside there. Y’all—”

  “Lawton!” screamed Big Barbara.

  “It’s not Lawton!” hissed India. “That’s why I said get out of here!”

  “It is Lawton!” said Big Barbara. “Lawton!” she shouted, and waved her arms wildly. “Luker, you got to get him out of there, you got—”

  “Barbara,” said Luker, “it’s not Lawton. If India says it’s not, then it’s not. And even if it was,” he added sullenly, turning away from the frantic figure of the man in the window of the burning house, “I couldn’t do anything anyway. You—”

  “Drive off!” cried India.

  “Lord, India!’ cried Leigh. “What kind of girl are you! That’s Daddy in there! Even if you don’t love him the way Mama and I do, it’s no reason just to watch him burn! And Dauphin’s body is in there! Dauphin is dead and Odessa’s probably dead too and now Daddy’s gone die, and you want me to just drive off!”

  India nodded. “Yes, that’s exactly what I want. Just put it in gear, and drive off. Dauphin is dead, Odessa is dead, and we’re going to be dead if we don’t get away from this place right now. That’s not Lawton standing in the window, because Lawton is already dead.”

  “How do you know that, child?” demanded Big Barbara.

  “Did you see him?” said Luker.

  India nodded. “In the dining room. I think it was Lawton who brought the gasoline can down. He’s dead, there’re three people dead in that house right now, and there’s nobody who’s alive. That’s why you shouldn’t look back. Don’t look back at it, there’s no telling what you’ll see standing in the windows, there’s—”

  “Come on, Leigh!” shouted Luker, and Leigh drove off.

  No one said anything as they drove the length of Beldame. They steadfastly kept their eyes ahead, and no one looked back to the three houses.

  They came to the channel. They braced and were silent as the jeep plunged into the shallow water. Not one of them but half imagined that they would be stopped and never allowed to leave Beldame.

  The jeep pulled up on to the sand on the far side. By the time they reached Gasque they could no longer see the gray smoke from the fire that consumed the third house.

  EPILOGUE

  At Gasque they exchanged the jeep for the black Mercedes. They drove to Gulf Shores and telephoned the highway patrol to inform them that during the night one of the three houses at Beldame had burned down, and that three persons had died inside: Lawton McCray, candidate for United States congressional representative; Dauphin Savage, third richest man in Mobile; and Odessa Red, a black woman in the latter’s employ.

  Luker, Big Barbara, Leigh, and India had determined on the implausible story that they four had returned to Mobile for a single day to do more grocery shopping and check on airline reservations and mail. When they returned early on Friday morning they discovered the third house in flames. Perhaps, Luker ventured to suggest, the three unfortunate persons had gone inside the place exploring, having heard some sound suggestive of burglars or intruders, and one of Lawton’s cigarettes had ignited the dry rotting wood or the flimsy rotting draperies. All three had been overcome by smoke and were trapped.

  It was a terrible tragedy, the highway patrol concurred, and it probably happened just that way. The third house had been
burned right down to the dune and what little remained of it was a few walls and sticks of furniture that lay behind the glassy surface of that mound of fused sand. In the subsequent formal investigation three men from the Baldwin County fire marshal’s office stomped about the blackened ruins of the third house for a quarter of an hour and later noted in writing that they had found nothing that pointed to the fire’s being of anything but wholly accidental origin.

  These three men in fact were far more struck by the strange dune of sand that seemed to have risen out of St. Elmo’s Lagoon, on purpose to swallow the house there. Luker, Big Barbara, Leigh, and India, who had driven back along the Dixie Graves Parkway following the police, had seen from the road that the perfect cone that surmounted the Savage house had appreciably softened its contours. Now, by stretching one’s imagination, one could judge it a natural if still improbable phenomenon of wind and drifting sand.

  In two days’ time three coffins were delivered to Mobile, though a man in the Mobile County sheriffs office privately cautioned Luker that they were empty. Not enough had been found in the wreckage of the third house to spear on the end of a pointed stick. This information was related to Big Barbara, Leigh, and India, who were more relieved by the information than not. Three funeral services were held in Mobile the following day, in three different churches. Early in the morning at the Zion Grace Baptist Church, Johnny Red threw himself wailing across the top of Odessa’s empty coffin, and after the service begged Leigh to lend him a hundred dollars to tide him over until he could find a buyer for Odessa’s house.

  Dauphin’s funeral was at the Church of St. Jude Thaddeus in the early afternoon, and no one was in attendance but the four who knew how he had died and Sister Mary-Scot. Leigh went up to her sister-in-law, whispered to her a few moments, and then Sister Mary-Scot put away the silver knife that was intended to pierce Dauphin’s breast. She crossed herself repeatedly throughout the service. An empty coffin was sealed into the niche above Marian Savage. The day before, when preparing the mausoleum for an interment, the caretaker had discovered that the plaque memorializing Marian Savage had fallen from its place and smashed on the marble floor. A square of plywood preserved Leigh from the distressing sight of the foot of her mother-in-law’s coffin.

  Lawton McCray’s service was held at the St. James Episcopal Church on Government Boulevard, where he and Big Barbara had been married and their children baptized. It was widely attended, and Big Barbara reserved the pew directly behind the family for the sole occupancy of Lula Pearl Thorndike, who wore a tight black dress with a gold-plated pecan fastened to the collar.

  What with three ceremonies in three different churches, and three burials at three different cemeteries afterward, the four survivors were exhausted by that evening. They put a black wreath on the door of the Small House, turned out all the lights so that those who wished to proffer consolation would be discouraged from ringing the bell—there had been quite enough of that in the past three days—and sat very still on the glassed-in porch. They agreed that it was the hypocrisy of the day more than anything else that had been so enervating. They had mourned over three empty coffins: two blue and one silver.

  “I don’t even know what I feel,” said Leigh, and in this she spoke for them all. “All that that happened down at Beldame, it was so horrible. It was so wrong. And there was nothing we could do to stop it. And since then, we’ve just lied and lied and lied about what happened. It’s a wonder anybody believed any of it. But with all these lies I haven’t even had the time to think what it all means, I mean, about Dauphin being dead. Every time I hear a noise, I look up, and I think it’s gone be Dauphin coming through the door. Or I wake up in the morning, and I think ‘Oops! Time to go get Odessa!’ Or I hear the telephone and I think it’s Daddy, wanting Dauphin to do something for him. Y’all got to give me ’bout a month—’bout a month of waiting for ’em all just to walk in the room, and say, ‘Hi y’all’—before I can bring myself to believe that they all really and truly died down there.”

  On Wednesday, the twelfth of July, Luker and India flew back to New York. Luker spent three days answering mail and returning phone calls, then he and India went up to Woodstock and stayed in the house of a friend who preferred Fire Island for his summers. It was cool and forested and lonely there, and Luker and India sought to recover themselves. They never talked of Beldame.

  Leigh and Big Barbara made an extended tour of the western National Parks, staying four days at each. By the middle of November they had returned together to the Small House, and Luker and India came down for Thanksgiving. Between Christmas and New Year’s Leigh was delivered of twin boys, whom she named Dauphin and Darnley.

  Lawton’s will was probated that February, but Dauphin’s not until several months later—the Savage holdings were enormous, and the entire business was complicated by the fact that when Dauphin died, his mother’s estate had been far from resolved. But as soon as she had clear control of the property, Leigh sold Beldame to the oil company that had wanted it, and the oil company was happy to have it—this was a full year after Lawton had first suggested the sale to his family. In the meantime none of them had returned to Beldame, and it was with misgiving that they crossed the Tensaw River into Baldwin County at all. Big Barbara had leased the fertilizer business to some of Lawton’s relatives, who cheated her shamefully in return for the way that Lawton had treated them in decades past—and Big Barbara thought this only fair. She never went down to Belforest, because the ride and the name put her too much in mind of Beldame.

  It was late that summer, six weeks after the oil company signed the papers on the property known as Beldame, that Hurricane Frederic slammed into the coast of Alabama. Ninety percent of the pecan trees in Baldwin Country, many of them more than seventy-five years old, were uprooted. What the crashing tides didn’t smash in Gulf Shores, the wind and rains did. The Gulf waters simply broke across the entire peninsula there. It leveled the dunes and buried Dixie Graves Parkway. It shoved Gasque into Mobile Bay. Nothing at all remained to show where Beldame had been, not a stick of wood, not a foundation brick, not a tatter of cloth caught on a blasted sea rose. Sand spat up from the Gulf filled St. Elmo’s Lagoon and it was now no more than a damp depression along the coast. The channel that had kept Dauphin and Odessa at Beldame the night before they were killed wasn’t even a ditch now.

  The oil company had to hire surveyors to tell them where the property was they had bought.

  Luker and India made but one more trip to Alabama, in the autumn following the destruction of Beldame. India, however, expressed so great an aversion to the twins, Dauphin and Darnley, that she could not be persuaded to remain under the same roof with them. To Leigh, she said only, “I hate children. They make me break out.” But to her father, India confided, “Remember, I can see what Odessa saw. And those babies aren’t McCrays—they’re Savages.”

  Table of Contents

  Noonday Devils

  Prologue

  Part I

  Savage Mothers

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part II

  THE THIRD HOUSE

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part III

  THE ELEMENTALS

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Part IV

  EYESIGHT

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapt
er 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33