The House of Dust

by Noah Broyles

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2021 Noah Broyles

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Inkshares, Inc., San Francisco, California

  www.inkshares.com

  Edited by Adam Gomolin, Barnaby Conrad, & Pamela McElroy

  Cover design by Tim Barber

  Interior design by Kevin G. Summers

  ISBN: 9781947848870

  e-ISBN: 9781947848887

  LCCN: 2019930695

  First edition

  Printed in the United States of America

  To my mom and dad.

  Thank you for the typewriter.

  Contents

  WHISPER FROM THE DUST

  1

  2

  3

  HER FEET GO DOWN

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  THEY THAT SLEEP

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  BRING ME UP SAMUEL

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  THE LONG HOME

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  There is the house whose people sit in darkness;

  dust is their food. . . they are clothed like birds

  with wings for covering, they see no light. . .

  I entered the house of dust and saw the kings of the earth,

  their crowns put away forever; rulers and princes,

  all those who once. . . ruled the world in the days of old.

  —The Epic of Gilgamesh

  Editor’s Note

  On June 4, 2018, a rental car registered to Bradley Ellison—Southern Gothic’s crime writer—was found in a McDonald’s parking lot in Lexington, Tennessee. The driver’s-side window was shattered, and the writer was inside, dead from a gunshot wound.

  During the month prior to this tragedy, Mr. Ellison had been working with great enthusiasm on a project centered around a house in rural Tennessee. After we had expressed concern about the quality of his latest publications in this magazine, he assured us that this project would restore our faith in him.

  Mr. Ellison certainly tells a fantastic tale in this—his last—article. But while Southern Gothic has been able to verify the locations, the events themselves are unverifiable. The locals Mr. Ellison interacted with proved reclusive, even hostile, when approached later by some of our colleagues. We trust, however, that when judging this piece, our readers will remember the caliber of Mr. Ellison’s reporting on the Serene Flats murders.

  Mr. Ellison expresses opinions in this article about the staff of this magazine, specifically myself, that may be shocking to our readers. We have decided not to edit these out for the sake of honesty and integrity. Mr. Ellison was entitled to his opinions, and we are entitled to ours—that his attacks are unfair and incorrect.

  After carefully considering all of these factors, we have decided to publish the entire article, raw and unedited, as it was sent to us on that midsummer night last year, mere minutes before its author’s death. Mr. Ellison did not consider it finished, and neither do we. We consider it a beginning, though to what future we cannot yet know. Awareness, perhaps, will make these types of tragedies less common. Southern Gothic has always embraced controversy, and with the publication of this piece we do so with a clear head. Even so, reader discretion is advised.

  —Heather Graff, Editor in Chief

  This issue of Southern Gothic

  is dedicated to the memory of

  Bradley Oswald Ellison

  June 7, 1987–June 3, 2018

  WHISPER FROM THE DUST

  1

  I got off the interstate to commit suicide.

  I was supposed to interview a police chief in Jackson about a carjacking cold case, but my tire blew out with thirty miles to go. The delay killed the appointment, and the trouble I had swapping tires revealed my own inadequacy even more. The car rode unlevel on the spare, droning the prospect of another failed investigation into my bones. Heat pressed through the sunroof, pounding memories of my fiancée’s screaming face through my sweaty scalp. Both those pillars of my life—collapsing. When I saw the next off-ramp, I put on my signal.

  It was one of those dead, pointless exits in rural Tennessee that serves perhaps a dozen people a day. Left was the interstate underpass. Right was blank road. I wanted a quiet place to do it. I went right, out into the wilderness, leaving the world and all its weight behind.

  But the weight followed me.

  It was the end of April, but outside the grimy glass, the afternoon trees wore the tired green of late summer. I searched for a shady gravel patch along the shoulder. The broken driver’s-side window control clicked beneath my forefinger as the rising pressure crushed open a primal place in my brain filled with flames and billowing smoke and the searing smell of raw oil. My eyes watered. I tried to still my finger but couldn’t.

  The clicking only stopped when I saw the sign. It leaned drunkenly among thick honeysuckle at the far edge of the highway. My vision cleared. Buried beneath many spray-painted desecration attempts lay the official black lettering:

  Three Summers—Two Miles

  Just beyond the sign, a leafy mouth opened in the wall of the woods, the shrouded access point to the forgotten town. It would do. I turned across the highway and stopped my car amid the brackish twilight.

  An RIA .38 Special rode in the glove box. I took it out and braced it against my temple. The movements of my jaw, clenching and unclenching, translated along its length into my hand. I could already smell the sulfur, already feel the fiery track of the bullet through my brain. The window would shatter. The flies would come through the breach and settle on my body. Eventually, someone would happen down this road and find my car. Word would get out, swirl across local networks, then end up in Atlanta on the desk of my editor, Heather. My own death would be the last violent, meaningless story I provided her. I might just as well have stepped out in traffic while changing the car tire back on the interstate.

  No, I did not want a violent death.

  I replaced the gun and picked up an orange canister from the passenger-side floorboard. Ten milligrams would buoy me up. Lift the weight. Bring me back to the surface. But there was fire on the surface. The endless fight to stay afloat. The story I could never tell.

  I gripped the canister. It would take about a dozen pills to get sleepy, a dozen more to soar from my body for good. But I couldn’t swallow one pill dry, let alone twenty-four.

  “Some water,” I said aloud. “I need a drink of water.”


  —“The House of Dust”

  Southern Gothic

  Brad started the car and stepped on the gas.

  A winding kaleidoscope of fragmented sunlight and pavement sucked him into the breathless forest. The car lurched through potholes and tilted as the road slithered carelessly along a hillside. It felt like the roller coaster at the Enchanted Forest, back when he was a kid. What if we die? his dad had said. Know what you’ll say when you die, Brad? I know what I’ll say: Amen.

  The leaves thickened overhead, and the branches hunched down and locked together, vines twisting around to secure them in place. The headlights blinked on automatically, and the dash display brightened. He was going almost fifty. But instead of the hum of tires, silence rose around his legs, filling up the car. Heavy. Squeezing. Dragging him down.

  Brad screwed his hands tighter around the wheel. The headlights swept across a band of twilit forest as the car rounded another bend. Ahead, the trees ended abruptly. He pressed on the brakes. The glowing whiteness of the afternoon opened onto an ancient bridge.

  It was barely wide enough for two cars, with low barriers on either side. Below the gray concrete span crawled a slow green river. A battered sign leaned nearby: locust river bridge. Someone had spray-painted it with a different word: Adamah.

  Something twisted inside him at the sight of it. He shook it off and rolled the Accord into the glare, across the bridge. Casting a sidelong glance at the water seventy feet below, he imagined stepping on the gas and giving the steering wheel a quick jerk. Down, down, into the—

  No.

  He just needed a drink.

  As Brad crossed the bridge, the bleached bones of the town faded through the shimmering heat. Three Summers. The settlement occupied a half mile of shoreline. A main street connected to the bridge and cut through the heart of the silent town, between old brick buildings that lined the street with the slumping gallantry of veterans from some half-remembered war.

  No birds perched along the town’s uneven line of roofs. And no one was in sight. Just sunlight on the abandonment.

  Immediately to his right as he bumped off the bridge stood a huge white house with faded green trim and wraparound porches on both floors. A small, high-grown yard and a rusted ironwork fence separated it from the street. A sign by the gate announced it as the Locust River Hotel. This time, the name had not been crossed out.

  Brad’s eyes turned. A placard on the side of the brick building opposite labeled the main street Adamah Road.

  The dragging weight wavered.

  Lifting the pill canister, he rattled it and pressed on the gas, following the street deeper into the town. All he needed was a glass of water.

  Hazy-windowed drugstores, vacant warehouses, and four-story apartment buildings crept by outside. Shrouded windows. Empty alleys. Then an intersection. He stopped.

  The street cutting in front of him was called Larkin Street, quiet as a cemetery path. A diner, the Theater Grill, occupied the first floor of a shuttered building out the passenger-side window. A silent cinema, the Adamah Theater, stood diagonally opposite, its sandstone façade rising in a worn art deco chevron, most of the large bulbs along its marquee sign shattered.

  Somewhere in the back of his brain, curiosity clawed. Twisting around in his seat, he searched shop fronts along the cracked sidewalk for signs of life. Finding nothing, he leaned against the glass to examine the higher floors of the surrounding structures. Curtains stirred in several windows, as if faces had just withdrawn.

  Where were the people? And the theater bulbs: Were they a tale of neglect or violence?

  Violence.

  Years spent chronicling it. Brutish and pointless.

  The weight came rushing back, thick, cloaking him like oil.

  He needed to escape. To rest. He drove on.

  After a bit, the buildings ended, and two roads that bordered the edge of town curved in to join the main street. Beyond this intersection, the last few mundane structures buttressed the street. On the right, the decaying brick hulk of a building called Knowles Furniture Warehouse slid past to reveal Grammy’s Grocery, a long, low, sundried shell from the fifties fronted by a flotilla of rusted shopping carts. To the left stood a Texaco gas station, its sign faded pink. He idled for a moment in the dead street, examining each.

  In the grocery store parking lot, someone had poured tar across cracks in the cement, smothering the thirsty grass that grew there, leaving stiff black shoots that stretched like charred fingers toward the sky.

  A woman with short silver hair, wearing a gray sweater and dirty cargo pants, had just climbed from a green seventies model Ford Falcon. She was barefoot, her grimy, gray-fleshed feet pressed unyieldingly against the sweltering pavement. She stared at him through dark sunglasses.

  Brad opted for the gas station. Pulling into the shade under the awning by one of the pumps, he examined the storefront. There were no lights on inside, but a car—an eighties model Jeep Wagoneer with the wood paneling missing from the driver’s-side door—sat by the icebox out front. A paper sign taped to the door of the icebox said: free water. restrooms out of order.

  Clutching the cylinder of pills in one hand, Brad opened the car door. The crumbly quality of the air struck him as he stepped out. The air was hot and gritty and prickled against his skin. Maybe there was a mine nearby, stirring up the bowels of the earth. He traversed the trailing gas pump hoses and walked to the front of the establishment.

  Pulling open the icebox door, he reached inside and felt the clammy air wrap around his hand. Plastic water bottles floated in a dim, lukewarm pond. He glanced again at the windows of the store. They were obscured by banners advertising beer and cigarettes.

  Well, it wouldn’t matter if the water was corrupted. His dead stomach wouldn’t care. He fished a bottle from the cooler and let the door fall shut. The slimy label came away in his hand. He tossed it into an overflowing trash can by the gas pump.

  Hornets orbited the columns that supported the canopy, buzzing in the stillness. His mind was buzzing, too. His hand shook as he opened the car door. This was it.

  In the quiet of the car, the weight wrapped him. Smothering. Binding. He cracked open the bottle and took a quick sip. It was briny, but it opened his throat. Lifting the canister, he sucked two pills into his mouth. As he lowered his hand, the stinging smell of grease caught in his nose. Bile rushed into his throat. For a moment, there was nothing but the horrible, thick sweetness of raw oil inside the car. For a moment, orange flickered in the corner of his vision. Fire.

  Brad gulped another mouthful of brackish water to quench the sensations. Examining the back of his hand, he found it smeared with grease. Residue from changing the tire back on the interstate. Nothing to panic over. What did it matter, anyway? He pushed his sweaty hair back and let out a long breath.

  Orange still danced at the edge of his right eye. It was his imagination. It should have gone away.

  Brad turned his head.

  A man was crossing the parking lot of Grammy’s Grocery. He wore a bright orange jumpsuit, stained from head to foot with black smears. He walked with his right hand stretched out in front of him, and the slightest limp dragging at his right leg. He was just a hundred feet or so off and coming steadily. Coming toward the car. In the heat radiating from the pavement, his figure rippled.

  The weight clenched around Brad’s heart.

  Water splashed as he set the bottle down. His fingers found the lock switch and pressed it. Facing forward, he shook the canister and downed two more pills. Blinking hard, he looked right again.

  The man was crossing the barren street. Pebbles skittered before his heavy boots. The noonday sun pooled his shadow around his feet like an inverse halo.

  Brad shut his eyes. He swallowed two more pills, then poured some of the water across his pounding head.

  “Come on,” he muttered. “Come
on.”

  The frantic brain could play so many tricks to try to save itself. It was trying that now, throwing a rope to things he’d left in his wake, hauling them back into the light.

  He forced two more pills into his mouth and opened his eyes.

  The man was now on Brad’s side of the road. Coming across the sidewalk. Coming toward the car. His arm bent at the elbow, palm open, rocking up and down. Beckoning.

  Brad saw his face. Burned, blistered, peeling skin, glistening with black oil. Eyebrows scorched away. Steady gray eyes seared and shrunken to gravels.

  He knew those eyes.

  He tried to turn away, to flail, but couldn’t. The weight was too pervasive, constricting his chest, dragging at his limbs, wringing even the color from his vision.

  It was here.

  The hand reached toward the passenger-side window. Thumping the glass. He felt it. Felt the car move.

  His eyes winced shut. He forced the bottle to his lips, his head back, and downed the pills. That made six. No, eight.

  The car rattled again. The hand was thumping against the window.

  “Sir!” A muffled voice came through the glass. “Sir!”

  Brad opened his eyes again. The heaviness hovered around him. The gray woman stood outside the window. The barefoot one who had looked at him across the parking lot. She was bent down, sunglasses pushed up on her head, peering in.

  “Sir!”

  Brad found the ignition and turned the key. He rolled the window down a crack.

  The woman looked in at him. Her eyes were the same color as her hair. Her fingertips on the edge of the glass were painted with dry mud.

  Brad stared at her.

  “Are you the doctor?”

  A portion of the pressure ebbed. He nodded faintly. “Yes. I’m the doctor.”

  “Then go!” the woman said. She pounded on the glass again and pointed up the avenue. “Keep going, then first road on your left. Cross a bridge, and you’ll come to the house.”

  2

  I don’t know why I answered yes. To ease the weight, perhaps, forestall the inevitable.