by Noah Broyles
—“The House of Dust”
Southern Gothic
The cardboard box had ridden in the trunk of his car for ten years. The corners were blunted. The flaps hissed as Brad’s trembling fingers pulled them apart.
The thing inside had last seen the light of day four years ago. That sweaty afternoon just before he started his final fruitful investigation that resulted in the “Scarlet Seven Miles” story. That afternoon, he’d read the reviews of his then most recent article, “The Glass Elephant,” before finding out how many Prozac capsules he could down without water. That afternoon, he’d met his fiancée. June 8, 2014.
The box flaps fell limply open. As he dug down into the box, crumbling newspaper rustled around his arm and then boiled up as he lifted the treasure out. He held it before his face. The silver ball bearings suspended between taut plastic thread chattered together, frigid teeth in December air: tap, tap, tap.
The late Christmas gift. The last gift. And his father’s last words to him still clearly visible, written neatly and quickly on the outside of the box. It can’t go on forever.
He set the Newton’s cradle on the desk, then stood back to examine it. There. His hands quivered on his waist. The thing had sat on the dash of his car four years ago, clicking loudly as he tried to choke down the pills.
How many more investigations? How many more years scraping up sins? How many more failed attempts to find peace? he’d asked himself.
Blinking hard, he bent forward and used his sleeve to clean off a patch in front of the high-back chair that loomed behind the desk. The gray grit showed up starkly on the black cloth, so he rolled his cuffs up. He unzipped his computer bag and placed his laptop in the clean spot.
He turned back toward his bag, and his fingers hesitated. Quivered. What if he just needed a little . . . ?
No. He thrust his hand inside and withdrew the crushed orange Prozac canister. He held it up to his face and shook it once. The pills tap, tap, tapped inside. They, too, had been a fixture in his car for over a decade, and in his life before that. Since winter of 2001. Since he was thirteen. Since his mom decided he was not recuperating from the loss properly and might be a danger to himself or others, and so he should see a psychiatrist.
Ten milligrams daily. Her gift to him.
He tossed the crushed container in a wastepaper basket beside the desk. No crutches. No contingencies. He’d dropped off last Sunday, after the funeral, and jitters had set in strong this morning. A tiny motor buzzed in the back of his skull, revving each time he turned his head, flushing energy down his arms. It was always tough while the stuff flushed from his system. But if this investigation was going to salvage anything, if it was going to stave off the gray drowning feeling, the hallucinations, then it would have to be conducted with a clear head. Like the one four years ago, that had revived his career for a bit. Like the one ten years ago, that had started it all.
The first thing to do was discover what the previous resident had left behind.
Brad rounded the desk. He lifted one of the cradle’s beads and let it drop. The ensuing clicks followed him out of the study into the quiet upstairs hall. Because of the lower ceiling, the atmosphere felt closer here than in the bottom part of the house. Clingy. The air reticent to move, as in a stopped-up creek bed.
Brad drew out his phone and pointed it down the hall, capturing the lamps sprouting from the walls between the bedroom doorways, the sagging green-and-white wallpaper, and the wound-colored paint beneath. He looked down at the floors, gritty and gray. Failing health must have prevented the old woman from upkeeping the place. Or apathy. There were no signs of neighborly help. Why? Had she been a recluse? Sorrel had said this plantation was her ground. If her funeral had proved anything, it was that she held significance in the community.
Her funeral.
Her lonely corpse at the bottom of the hole. Her eyes, closed, then wide apart. Screaming. Pleading. Alive.
It wasn’t real. It was just your sick imagination.
Tonight, he thought. Tonight he’d go back.
A door stood directly across the hall from the one leading into the study. Its metal knob was grooved and resembled a gourd, a pumpkin, perhaps. Agriculture would have been vital when this place was built. With his phone, he snapped a picture, then tried the door. Locked. He rattled the handle and applied pressure with his shoulder, but it would not give, so he moved down the hall to the next door.
This door opened easily and silently. Within, a window framed by floor-length floral curtains looked into the interlocking upper branches of the forest. Hazy light revealed a twin bed and companion nightstand. Stepping inside, he found a red velvet chair waiting out of sight behind the door. Otherwise, the room was bare. The only sign of past habitation was a rumpled spot near the head of the bed where someone might have sat. He photographed that, too.
Passing along the stairwell railing, he found the next door unlocked as well. He pushed it open. Almost identical. His fingers pulsed on the knob and the cavernous quiet brought back his “Glass Elephant” article again; brought him back to his walk through the old house on the edge of the salt marsh in Hyde County, North Carolina. In that case, too, the old woman who’d inhabited the house had recently died, leaving everything a frozen testament to her final day. Dull, readers had called it, because that was the plot: himself, Brad Ellison, pacing through the old house, piecing together its owner’s possible history.
Sound interrupted the memory. Thumps from downstairs. His fiancée, moving around. Alone in one of the big rooms. Trying to tidy. He felt a twinge. He should go help. He would. But this came first. She understood his work.
The next door, the one at the back of the house, opened to the guest bathroom. A bowing floor and torn-out portions of the wall told a tale of water damage sometime in the recent past. Nothing related to the old woman, though.
A final unexplored doorway stood across the hall.
It was different from the rest. The wood was almost black, contrasting with the pale wallpaper. It was wider, too, with double doors mounted with latches instead of a knob.
He tested the latches, then pushed the doors inward.
Stale air, still tinged by the sour breath of the last inhabitant, hung heavily within. A window with white curtains looked out on the back garden. The wallpaper was white, gilded with twisting vines. The floorboards, like the door, were almost black. Daylight sunk into them.
He stepped deeper into the room.
A stand holding a porcelain washbasin, a great dresser with a cracked mirror, and a large vine-carved wardrobe were all made of the same black wood. Across the room, far enough from the window that the gloom could reassert itself, sat the dead woman’s bed, shrouded by gauzy curtains.
Brad stopped and photographed the room, capturing the piled dishes by the side of the bed, and the skirts and shirts and underclothes strewn from the parted lips of the wardrobe, all reminiscent of a woman younger than the one laid in the ground last week.
No distinctive decorations, though. Nothing that told the woman’s story.
Unless . . .
The nightstands. The place where people kept medications and journals and other relics from the innards of their lives. They should contain at least a few clues.
Pocketing the phone, he advanced to the nightstand on the left side of the bed, wrinkling his nose against the rancid smell that came through the cascade of yellowed bed curtains. He bent down and slid the top drawer open. Within, alone, lay a pocket-sized hardcover book, remarkably clean. Gold lettering on the spine read, The Book of Common Prayer.
Carefully lifting the cover, he examined the dedication page. In a tiny hand was written: Presented to Walter Lloyd Collins on the occasion of his confirmation, July 27, 1947. “Do the first works.” Revelation 2:5.
He paged through it but discovered no further inscriptions.
St
ill, it was a name. It was someone who had perhaps lived in this house at one time, slept in this bed. Replacing the book, he closed the drawer and opened the lower ones. Nothing.
Standing, he rubbed his nose against the mossy smell radiating from the curtains. He started to turn away when something within the canopy caught his eye.
A dark form lay in the bed, just feet from where he stood.
For a second, his heart stalled. The form was utterly still.
Slowly, he extended a hand toward the curtain. His unsteady fingers rippled the gauze. He parted the cloth to stare down at the bed.
Earth. Rust-colored. Mounded on the near side of the naked mattress. A dry heap, granular with age, stretching from the head to the foot of the bed. And marked by a shallow horizontal indentation three-quarters of the way up. His eyes moved to the other side of the bed, where the mattress cratered, and then back.
An arm had made the impression in the mound of dirt. An arm extended by a sleeper nestled beside it.
The old woman had dug up a piece of the yard and brought it here to be her companion.
He clutched the curtain until he thought it might tear. Letting it fall, he backed away, cramming his hands into his pockets. His mind vibrated.
She was downstairs somewhere, but she would come up soon enough. She’d find this. She understood his job and the kind of places it brought him. But she wouldn’t understand this. He didn’t understand this.
He left the room, closed the door quietly, and descended to the first floor, pausing at the bottom of the staircase to listen. Gentle, plodding footfalls from the dance hall. He thought about going in and saying something cheerful and distracting.
Not now. Not yet.
He went up the hall to the kitchen, a room with stained yellow tile, scarred yellow countertops, and slack-jawed yellow cabinets. No garbage bags under the sink, though, or any other means of containing the dirt.
Returning to the hall, he pulled aside the curtain across the back door. The porch outside was only partially complete. Part of a failed addition, he guessed. Ineffectual mosquito netting stretched between the beams. A ceiling fan hung from the rafters. Nothing to remove the dirt with.
He restrained a sigh and turned back into the hall. At the far end, the front door was standing wide, and the slack late-afternoon heat was perceptible even here at the back of the house. Closer, halfway down the hall, was a door under the staircase. The way to the basement.
He might find a container down there that he could use to remove the dirt. Brad walked toward the door. He stepped into the nook beneath the stairs and resolutely grabbed the handle. The door squeaked open like a dry jaw.
Maybe in his article he could say that dread had filled him the moment he did that. Like the archeologists entering King Tut’s tomb, he felt the curse descending. All nonsense, of course. Instead, what he really thought about was the shuffling whisper of his fiancée’s footsteps on the other side of the wall. If they stopped, it would be time to come up.
Their gentle hiss, hiss, hiss followed him down into the dark.
The ceiling sloped with the stairs, always hovering a foot above his head. The passage was close, and the steps were oddly soft. They turned right, and it was cold at the bottom. He stepped off the last stair and smooth dirt pressed against his shoes. The damp smell, like the underbelly of a bridge, was strong in his face.
Drawing out his phone, he turned on the flashlight. The LED’s cold glare cut through the nearby darkness. Bedposts and chairs and racks of suit coats and bookshelves and tables and a tube television and couches all crashed toward him like waves of a frozen sea. Finding a box should prove easy enough.
He stepped forward.
Something trickled across his scalp.
Quickly, he raised his flashlight and grabbed reflexively at the air with his other hand.
A vine, white as a bloodless vein, twined around his fingers. He tugged it and felt a gentle pop. It spiraled down, and he looked toward the ceiling.
The wooden rafters, what he could see of them, were bone gray. A writhing flesh of hundreds of pale vines had burst through the brick walls and flowed across the ceiling, wrapping rafters and burrowing between splits in the wood. The vines were smooth, lacking both root and leaf structure. Whatever plant produced them must have some connection to the surface and sunlight, but even so, what sustenance caused them to reach down here? And why cling to the ceiling? Only occasionally did a tendril break away and dangle toward the floor.
At least they had not broken through the dance hall floor. Their density, though, was such that it masked sound. Only vaguely were his fiancée’s overhead footsteps audible through them.
His light jerked back to the floor when he stepped forward and rammed something with his foot. A cardboard box.
Perfect. He squatted down. The box lay on its side, the corners severely blunted, as if it had been hurled down the stairs. Parting the flaps, he began to shake the contents out. Tiny shirts, socks, and trousers tumbled onto the floor.
Not this box. He righted it and began to replace the items. The tags had been cut out, but they were a half-century old, at least, judging by the style and quality of the fabric. A child had been raised in this house during the fifties or sixties. At least for a little while. Straightening, he chewed his lip and stared through his dirty glasses at the mess.
Then he stepped into the forest of junk.
It was all a hopeless jumble. A gilt chair here, draped with once gaudy dresses now dry and stiff as last year’s leaves. Over there, a circular gun rack with various late-eighteenth-century military rifles, each piece corroded by damp. Near the back wall, a collapsing harrow that must once have turned the fields above. All interspersed with hutches and cabinets and a large collection of tall mahogany Victrola record players.
Surprisingly few containers, though. This was a raw dumping ground for the closets and upper shelves and lower drawers of many generations.
A treasure trove, but without any contextual keys.
In reviews of “The Glass Elephant,” they said he had invented too much of the context. Heather, his editor, had chastised him. Just because the old woman happened to place an order for a glass elephant each day that a body was found in that marsh, each day across decades, and then one last time on the day of her own death, did not mean the events were connected. Just because she was lonely did not mean she was a killer. Just because she was dead did not mean they could besmirch her name.
He stood at the back of the room and held out the flashlight, looking across the waves of refuse once more. And then he noticed something. A tangential pattern to the clutter. It was as tenuous a connection as he had drawn in his first “investigative” assignments at Poynter, but it was something.
It was the way clutter seemed to have been fed down the chute of the stairs in great gluts, shifting toward the back of the room by the accumulated pressure of the batch that followed. It was the fact that a poster stand stood beside the chair with old dresses. It was a battered casket, lid lifted, lying near the rifle rack. It was a series of coarse linen shirts and trousers, tacked up along the rear cinder-block wall above the harrow, all fragile with age and hazy with sweat and soil.
They were like props belonging to separate scenes of a play. Like rings dating a tree.
Panning the light, he clambered through the mess to the poster stand. He swiped the grime from the poster, and bright colors emerged, depicting a pert-mouthed woman in a white dress looking over her shoulder at a diminishing line of people in colorful party regalia. They followed her with smiles and tightly closed eyes. In the background, through a palatial parkland, a splendid house dumped yellow light through its windows. This house.
He moved the light down and found a title: miriam larkin in the sleepwalkers.
Shuffling backward, he found two more posters rolled up on the floor. He grabbed them a
nd went to a nearby table. His hands shook as he unrolled them and pinned down the corners with a collection of floral-painted music boxes.
The first showed the same woman, Miriam Larkin, standing in a white dress among the trees before the house. But only the upper portion of her body was visible. Her legs were buried, and the dirt was mounded around her waist. Miriam’s arms were crossed on her chest, and her eyes were closed. Short white bangs fringed across her forehead in an early-thirties Hollywood-style. The picture was titled The Thin Land.
The last poster was damaged. Water had blurred the ink, but he was able to make out things that at first looked like leaves tumbling down from heavy clouds toward the field in front of the house. Miriam Larkin stood in the field in the white dress and raised her hands to receive them. And then he realized they weren’t leaves falling—they were people. The picture was called Angel’s Island.
Brad leaned closer. Something about—
Of course. The dress. It was currently lying miles away in the cemetery, clothing the dead woman.
The latch on one of the music boxes gave, and the lid popped open. Brad jerked away, muscles taut. Tinny music squeaked out. Shaking his head, trying to dispel the tingles, he turned and shuffled over to the casket.
Dust had tarnished the pearlescent silk.
A book lay inside. Small, black, bound by a leather strap. Lifting it out, he propped it on the edge of the casket and unbound the strap. The spine creaked as he opened the cover. The paper was thick. The tinny melody from the music box continued as he examined the first page. A hurried hand had written: The Utterances: A record of the things spoken by those anointed with Adamah. May 1, 1877.
Adamah. The name of the main road through the town. The name of the theater at the town intersection: Adamah Theater. A tumbler fell into place. Adamah. The whispered word. The one the townsfolk had uttered sotto voce in the eerie reverie of their goodbye at her funeral.