The House of Dust

by Noah Broyles

  The town petered out into abandoned lawns and weed-cracked drives running up to ivy-shrouded houses. I turned left at the first road I came to, still in sight of the town, still with the gray woman visible in my rearview mirror. Some part of me already itched to pull this thread.

  The road was straight, and the woods formed a green tunnel around it, diffusing the light to an even emerald gloaming. The hazy catacomb of forest absorbed the sound and motion of my car, adding to my delirium.

  Three miles later, I passed back into the sun, crossing a little clay-stained bridge that spanned a dark creek. The road that followed was in bad shape. Thick, empty fields appeared on my left. The fields ran down a mile or so to the glimmering green line of the river. The heat and the pills and budding nausea blurred my vision.

  I would have sped right past the old place if my gaze had not been suddenly pulled to the passenger-side window by that mysterious, magnetic presence possessed by things that wait.

  —“The House of Dust”

  Southern Gothic

  The house was up among the trees.

  Brad turned onto the strangled drive. The car crept through stripes of shadow and light, following a course that bent away from the house, then swooped around toward it again, bypassing what must have been in some past age a manicured front lawn, lost now beneath hordes of walnut and sycamore. Sticks and gravel popped beneath the tires. Curtains of Spanish moss drooped from the oaks along the drive, brushing across the roof, reaching through the open passenger window with a soft hiss as the car passed. A few pieces of moss clung to the border of the window as the car entered a clearing before the house.

  Even here, the light was subdued. The trees pressed in on the dirt and gravel patch, allowing only scant groundcover that consisted mostly of tall, gangly weeds. Brad stopped the car in front of the house and turned off the engine. Stepping out, he glanced up at the circle of sky above the clearing and for a moment imagined he was at the bottom of a hole. At the far top of the hole, rain clouds were overwhelming the sun.

  He could do it here, he thought. At least he would be out of the sun.

  But someone was in need. And he’d claimed to be the doctor.

  As Brad lowered his head, something mounted up between the eaves snagged his vision. It was a rusty circle with eight spokes that connected to a shape suspended in the center. An old wheel? Odd decoration. The shape at the center of the wheel looked almost human. He took off his glasses and cleaned them on the edge of his untucked dress shirt, then put them back on. The thing remained obscure, almost a part of the flaking wood behind it.

  Again, the heaviness cloaking him pulsated.

  He should take out his phone and snap a picture.

  But all that was over. All the pictures and interviews and investigations he did led back to this same feeling. He grabbed the canister of pills and the water bottle from the seat and slammed the door.

  Walking around the car, he looked up at the house. The architecture recalled other nineteenth-century plantation abodes: a huge front porch on the ground floor, and a second porch on the floor above, all supported by ivy-wrapped columns. The façade had been painted white at some point, then left to the mercy of the years and the secluded sunlight of the clearing, which had weathered it to a pale gray. The house rippled in the heat, a dead face beneath the surface of a pond. But it wasn’t dead. The other houses he’d visited scattered around the South that shared its architecture and its age were corpses propped up behind mowed lawns and painted fences, bright-windowed and manicured and ready for visitation.

  Here, the windows looked out from the back of the porches like deep-socketed eyes, panes hazy with a history of dusty summers, stained curtains for eyelids stitched shut with cobwebs. But not dead.

  The house had been asleep for many years, he decided. Soon he would join it. Asleep. Eyelids closed forever in the dust. He shook another pill between his lips and climbed the front steps.

  A rocking chair sat on the porch, between him and the front door. Its faded gray wood matched the house. Someone had once sat in this chair to rock slowly in the evening, to look over the breathless clearing and the gloomy trees. How would it be to sit down in that chair, to finish the pills, to drift off? He paused by the chair.

  He had said he was the doctor. He should check on the person in the house. But what could he do? His forefinger trailed across the armrest.

  A slow, cold tingle broke out on the finger. Pulling it away,

  he found dust clinging to the sweaty tip. Silvery. Sharp, almost. He rubbed it off and skirted the chair, avoiding nail heads that jutted from the shrunken floorboards.

  The house’s door was oak, swollen and weathered black. Brad knocked twice.

  The moments dripped by, the rustle of leaves joined by the creak of withered timber. From the edge of his vision at least two dozen more rocking chairs ranged across the porch. He turned his head to study them. The nearest one leaned far forward. The next was leaned back. So down the line, all caught at the edge of movement.

  Who had arranged them like that? Obviously no one besides the sick person lived here, otherwise the door would be opening. What would one person do with all those—

  He stopped himself. He didn’t need the beginning of another story. Just an ending.

  Tipping his head back, he swallowed another pill.

  Still staring down the porch, he reached up to knock again when the fog inside his brain thickened further. Dizziness erupted. His hand splayed out as he braced himself against the wood. How many pills was this? Ten? Eleven? It was time to lie down. Brad pushed himself away from the door.

  Take a seat, Brad, he thought. There are so many. Surely one must be for you.

  He felt it as his fingers left the wood: something cool and smooth.

  It came into focus on the door like blood welling through a bandage: a tarnished metal symbol embedded in the wood. The same symbol he’d seen on the peak of the house. A circle, with a human body at the center. The figure reached out toward the circle with two legs and six arms. Its head was bald. It had no eyes.

  Brad backed away from the door as grass sprouted from his spine. He couldn’t stay on the porch. The thing wouldn’t let him go to sleep. It would demand to be understood. It would demand that he open the door and enter the dark house.

  Raking his hair back, he descended the steps to the clearing and walked quickly along the edge of the porch to the corner. A faint trail wandered along the side of the house through weeds and ivy. He stuffed the pill bottle into his breast pocket and followed the path. The air was swampy. The woods pressed in close on his left.

  His hand snagged a vine as he walked, and he idly ripped it down. A portion of a window frame up on the second floor broke apart and rotten wood rained down. Brad paused.

  The surest way to get someone’s attention was to break something. But no barking dogs or angry voices disturbed the stillness.

  Because the owner is inside, dead, he thought.

  At the back of the house was a sunlit clearing where the moldering smell of the woods faded. Sugar rose around his knees, blown from the trumpets of hundreds of daffodils bursting in small yellow explosions from beds all across the yard. The land sloped gently beneath his feet, stretching down to the dark wall of the woods a hundred feet off. Milky air filled his lungs; that funeral smell of flowers.

  Once more the weight dragged on his shoulders. So many flowers. Like the funeral this morning when his fiancée screamed at him. Like the funeral long ago when the awful load first came to settle across him.

  This would be a good place to finish it.

  He stopped somewhere near the middle of the garden and took the pills from his pocket. The water bottle crinkled in his left hand as he unscrewed the cap. Up above, the clouds were congealing, but down here the air was motionless. He closed his eyes. He opened his mouth. The canister’s hard lip m
et his own.

  A raspy sigh—long, low, crawling—entered his ear. A whisper.

  His hand froze.

  The grease smears on his skin burned. Their scent filled his nose. With a sharp crack, the pill canister split in his hand. The water bottle thumped into the grass and the liquid chuckled softly as it drained away. Dizziness washed over him. His knees buckled. He slumped to the ground.

  As he lifted his head and opened his eyes, he saw two bare feet protruding from a flower bed three yards away.

  For a moment, his head cleared. The person in need. He crawled toward the feet. The daffodils filling the bed were different—yellow petals with tiny reddish trumpets. Clambering in among them, he pulled the stems and blossoms aside.

  A body lay facedown in a little hollow in the dirt. It was a woman. Brilliant white hair spread across her shoulders and halfway down her back. A white dress shrouded her body, snug enough to be flattering and slack enough to be comfortable, a cross between a ballgown and a nightgown, with lacy sleeves and shoulders. A young woman’s dress. But the bony feet peeping beneath the hem were dusty gray, laced by a patchwork of ruptured veins.

  Still, it was her posture that drew his attention most. Her arms were thrown out before her, and her hands were buried in the dirt. Clawlike furrows extended behind her hands, and daffodils lay uprooted around her. She had been digging. Burrowing into the earth.

  “Ma’am?” Brad said. “Can you hear me?”

  Bending closer, he caught a glimpse of her face in profile, pressed against the dirt. She was certainly old, but she hadn’t aged in the normal way. No wrinkles ran along her jaw or gathered around the visible eye. Her face had eroded, like a statue with the fine details rubbed away. The eye was open, the brow wrinkled slightly. Frustration. She hadn’t finished the grave.

  “Ma’am?” he said again. “Can you hear me?”

  A sick twist of joy gripped part of him. The horrible part that lived for strange deaths and the circumstances surrounding them. The part that thrilled at the thought of a new investigation to lift his burden.

  He straightened. It wasn’t a good idea to disturb the body, but he needed to be sure she was gone. And he needed to see the rest of her face.

  Trembling—from the drugs, of course—he reached for her shoulder.

  “You dressed for the occasion, I see.” The drawling, broken voice came from behind him.

  Brad twisted around. Two men were coming through the garden. The leader, the one who had spoken, wore a black suit and shirt. He was reedy, and his head was reluctantly bald. His skin clung to his skull. His eyes were thin and black.

  Brad bent stiffly to brush his own dark clothes: jeans and a dress shirt. He used the opportunity to locate the pill bottle among the flowers. “It’s what I always wear.” Slipping the bottle into his pocket, he stood. “I found her this way. She’s dead.”

  The men stopped a few feet short of the flower bed. The second one, dressed in khakis and carrying a medical bag, tried to step past the first. The bony-faced man stuck out his arm. “No, no. If a fake doctor can tell she’s dead, there’s not much a real one can do.”

  His bright dark eyes stared at the woman for several seconds, then moved back to Brad. “You can head on out, now.” He glanced at the doctor. “You too. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

  The doctor pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and nodded, wiping his face. “Of course, of course.” He caught Brad’s eyes for just a moment, then turned and hiked toward the house. Brad stepped out of the flowers. He glanced back as the man in black crouched beside the woman in white.

  “Go on,” the man said. As he bent farther over the body, Brad caught sight of a pistol strapped to his hip beneath the coat. Brad’s pulse stumbled and he turned and walked away.

  At the front of the house he watched the doctor toss his bag in the back seat of a silver Dodge pickup. He took a little brush out of the door pocket and proceeded to go over his clothes inch by inch. He looked at Brad as he stood, hands in his pockets, watching. “How’d you get this far out?”

  Brad shrugged. “I was just driving. I ended up here.”

  The doctor tapped his head. “I mean up here. I saw the pill bottle you picked up back there. I see your posture now. You’re in some pretty deep water.”

  Glancing up as wind stirred the treetops around the clearing, the doctor continued, “I know things can get kind of lonely in a rural community. Especially this one. I’ve been out here several times over the past year to check on that woman, all hours of the day and night. But the birds never sing. Nor the cicadas. It’s eerie, almost. You can hear the dust falling. At least there’s the wind.”

  “My dad used to say wind is the cousin of loneliness,” Brad said absently. For an instant, there was a second hand in his pocket, wrapped around his own. His dad’s hand as they wandered the Enchanted Forest, just the two of them, on a Tuesday afternoon. Never Mom, they’d already split. If Dad had cared about family time, she’d said, he wouldn’t work a job where he was gone a month at a time. So they walked alone, listening to the wind move through the Enchanted Forest. Wind is the cousin of loneliness, Brad. You learn that out there. Maybe you’re already learning it here.

  His throat throbbed. He squeezed the canister in his pocket.

  “That’s interesting.” The doctor had finished brushing off his shoes. “In that case, I’d advise you to get in your car and follow me out of here. GPS can’t help you in these parts.”

  Brad withdrew his hands, folding his arms. “I’ll take my chances. Thanks anyway.”

  The man climbed into his truck, pulled around through the weeds, and roared down the drive in a cyclone of dust.

  Brad sat down on the porch steps. He drew the canister from his pocket and examined the cracks in the orange plastic. He could hear his labored heartbeat. The blood was moving sluggishly through his veins. A few more pills and it would all be over. He needed the water, though. It was lying back there by the flower bed. Near the body. Drained away. But perhaps a few drops remained.

  He stood up and walked toward the corner of the house. His feet caught as the man in black appeared around the edge of the house. He was carrying the woman. Her white hair fell over his arm and stuck to his suit, clinging there as if by static, the individual strands standing out against the fabric like lightning across a dark sky.

  The man’s face reddened when he saw Brad. “I told you to leave. You’re on my property now.”

  “I left something back there.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Time to go.”

  Brad stopped a dozen feet from him and stared through the hazy lenses of his glasses. “I’m going to get it, and then I’ll go. I see you’ve got a gun under that coat. If you want to shoot me while I’m walking back there, fine. I really don’t care.”

  The man scowled. Something else moved in his eyes, though, as he examined Brad’s careless stance. A hunger, almost. A gleam of admiration kindled by the frictional spark between them. Quickly, he quenched it and shifted the body in his arms. “Want to atone for your lie?”

  “What?” Brad said.

  “She needs a ride to the cemetery. We don’t have a hearse.”

  The word uncloaked a gray memory. Brad, much younger, riding in a car, following one of those dark, distended vehicles along a January road. His mom, tapping the steering wheel, impatient at the procession’s slowness. Then, the frigid graveyard.

  “You want to use my car as a hearse?”

  The man nodded slowly.

  Brad stared at him. A thunderclap broke over some distant field and vibrated across the intervening miles and shook the air between them.

  “Come on.” The man stepped past him. “We need to bury her before the rain comes.”

  3

  After crossing the clay-stained bridge, the darkness in the tunnel of trees was made heavier by the approaching s
torm. I switched on the headlights and discovered dozens of cars parked along both sides of the road, sitting crookedly in the depression edging the woods. Under the passing headlight beams, solemn, staring faces faded in and out of existence behind the windshield of each vehicle. The people of Three Summers had come to pay their respects.

  “We’ve been expecting this,” the man in black said by way of explanation.

  “Why didn’t they come to the house?” I asked.

  “That island was her ground,” he replied. “Invitation only.”

  —“The House of Dust”

  Southern Gothic

  In the back seat, the body lay quietly. In the back glass, headlights flashed as the cars turned to follow.

  The bony-faced man rolled down his window and let the restless air wander in from beneath the canopy of trees. “So, what are you, exactly?”

  Something itched on the back of Brad’s neck. Her lifeless hand had brushed him there as they laid her in the car. He nodded toward the back seat, fighting the fog behind his eyes. “Tell me her name.”

  “So, a reporter type.”

  “I’m driving the woman to her final rest. Figured I could know.”

  “Final rest . . . ” the man said contemplatively.

  “What about you? What’s your name?”

  “Name’s Sorrel. I’m the sheriff of this little backwater, doing my best to keep things quiet and peaceable. Your name?”

  “Brad.”

  “Well, Brad, what pulled you down into our part of the world? Things getting tough for a writer out there?”

  The man was studying him in the windshield reflection. Brad’s temples throbbed as he caught sight of himself in the rearview mirror. Gaping pupils. Glassy eyes. Glistening forehead. Overdose. The symptoms were familiar.

  “Dredging for a story, huh?” The sheriff spoke slowly. “Something impossible but true and with a happy ending.”

  “No.” It came out unbidden as the car bumped along the ruptured road. “No happy endings in my field. Just justice. Sometimes.”