The House of Dust

by Noah Broyles

She knows I care.

  Adamah Road was dead. He turned left while glancing at the lights down toward Three Summers: a few orange points on an inky canvas.

  A few minutes later, the car lurched across the railroad and then he was at the Simmons Pike intersection.

  The solitary house on the hill, the one he’d spotted on that first drive to the cemetery, was invisible.

  He turned right onto Simmons Pike and left the inhabited land behind. Fuzzy moonbeams like pale roots reached blindly down through the stuffy ceiling of clouds. Brad continued driving until he saw one brush the slender spire of Simmons Creek Baptist Church above the treetops.

  He parked the Accord in the deep grass on the roadside. He retrieved the shovel from the trunk and left the car. His shoes were silent on the pavement.

  Beside the road, the ground dipped in a small gully. The metallic chatter of flowing water drifted up. Simmons Creek, he guessed. He cut through the trees toward the churchyard. The air was tangy with walnuts.

  In the clearing stood the kudzu-covered church. He walked swiftly toward the graves, turning his eyes away from the stern gaze of the dark windows.

  The grass had not been cut since the last time he was here. The headstones were shorter than the waist-high blades; they reared up unexpectedly, forcing him to weave between them. But he had premeditated this walk so often that there was no difficulty in finding the plot.

  Week-old daffodils ringed the mound. Shriveled by sun and rehydrated by the river mist, they flopped around his fingers like dead eels as he collected them. He would replace them later.

  Soft shoots of grass covered the lumpy soil of the grave itself. Filling his lungs, he lifted the shovel. Disgust twisted his gut. Whoever she was, she deserved to lie in peace. But the thrall was too strong. This was why he’d come. He had to know.

  She was dead. She was dead when you took all those pills and said you were a doctor. Dead in the garden. Dead in the car. Dead in the grave.

  With a thud, the blade stabbed into the mound—inside his memory, the door to a visitation room in Angola Prison slammed shut.

  Ten years ago. His first case. A haggard face on the other side of a bolted-down table.

  Tender roots tore out gently as he pried up the first scoop. This grave had not been disturbed over the intervening week. Even if the woman had been somehow clinging to life when she went in the ground, chances were slim that she could have shifted her body into any sort of position to prove it. Just like the chances that a worn-out drug hustler was actually an unknown serial killer.

  The clouds thickened as he worked, the moonbeams retreating and leaving frosty pools in the thin places across the sky. The dew point was high and the imbalance in his system wrung more sweat from his skin than was natural. It dripped off his chin. His hands rubbed raw as he worked the shovel.

  What if he was desecrating this grave for nothing? What if he had spent the last of his money relocating them here, jeopardizing his fiancée’s recovery, for nothing? Stranding them in an empty town in a dead region of the world?

  Ten years, and how far had he progressed?

  Earthworms glistened in the dirt clods he wrenched up.

  As the lip of the excavation climbed past his knees, the earthworms petered out. As it reached his hips, Brad prepared himself for the swarming white ones that would take their place, feasting on the un-boxed corpse. Each time the blade tore away a fresh bite of dirt and the ground exhaled the trapped air, he wrinkled his nose against the anticipated scent of decay.

  By the time he was shoulder deep, Brad knew the body must be close. He carved out niches for his feet in the walls of the grave, so the carcass would not have to support his concentrated weight. He dug facing one direction for a few minutes, then rotated and dug out the other end. Fire rioted through his shoulders as he bent and hoisted the scoops of earth. How had Sorrel managed to dig this grave out in fifteen minutes? He’d spent at least forty-five already.

  He pulled his phone from his pocket and crouched down, turning on the flashlight. He ran his hand through the crumbled dirt. Her face should be here. But there were no worms. No putrid odor. Bracing himself, he dug his fingers deeper.

  Nothing.

  Blinking back sweat, he sat for a moment. Around him, loose streams of dirt trickled into the grave. Surely she hadn’t been deeper than this? He clawed at the earth and found it growing denser once more, pressing back beneath his fingernails. This new dirt had not been broken by a previous shovel.

  His tired heart kicked back into high gear. He knew he was at the bottom of the grave. He was crouching in the space she had occupied. His hand groped the spot where her head had lain. Where her eyes had opened.

  But the old woman was no longer there.

  9

  All around me in the churchyard the dead lay coldly, their presence seeping through the crumbling grave walls.

  —“The House of Dust”

  Southern Gothic

  I’m buried, Missy thought. Then she was rushing up from sleep, and her eyelids jumped apart.

  Darkness spilled into her pupils. The smell of dirt crowded her nose. The back of her skull lay against a hard edge. Her muscles were stiff, limbs locked in place, one knee raised, her arms fastened at her sides. A mealy slime thick as cake batter wrapped her body. Her jaws gaped apart. In the back of her mouth, a wet clod nestled in her throat.

  She gagged, forcing her teeth wider as she coughed the lump onto her tongue. From there, she maneuvered it over the brink of her lips. It rolled off her chin and landed with a strange plop on her collarbone. She coughed again and the sound echoed oddly.

  I’ve been buried.

  Deliberately, she felt every finger and toe and probed her body. The tendons and muscles were as tight as cold cables. It took a long moment of obstinance before each responded. Until she reached the big toe on her right foot. Despite all her concentration, it remained motionless. She rubbed it with the next toe over. Her big toe was bent down and lodged in something. Numbness had permeated it.

  And then she felt something climbing up her leg. Hard and cold, it inched across her skin. It passed over her knee and climbed her thigh.

  Missy hauled in a breath and thrashed her foot, tugging on the lodged toe. Her other toes pressed down around it, and she felt the rusty edge of the drain.

  The drain!

  Of course. She was in the house, lying in the tub. That had been gum in her mouth.

  The immobilizing tension drained from her limbs. The thing wandering up her body was a circular knob of rubber: the drain stop. She gripped the sides of the tub and pulled herself into a sitting position. It was hard to believe she had fallen asleep in here, much less slept for hours.

  She looked across the gloomy bathroom. The door was open. The bedroom beyond was black. He must be asleep out there. Why hadn’t he awakened her? Groaning again, she leaned down and slipped her hands beneath her right foot. The rusty drain gripped her toe like a gorging serpent’s mouth. The dirt smell built as she tugged at her foot and the water lapped more and more violently against the porcelain sides.

  Her throat closed on a scream as she saw herself sucked into the drain, assailed by the same force that had held her in the creek mud. It was here again, inside the house, inside the rusty pipe, tiny hands clamped around her toe, trying to drag her down into the darkness beneath the island.

  With a splash, her toe came free and her foot jerked out of the water. Rising, Missy climbed out of the tub. Her hand found the hanger beside the bathtub and locked around it. She held on while the blood flowed back into her trembling legs. Her breath steadied in the silence. She blinked hard, clearing the last fog of sleep from her brain.

  And then she realized that the silence was wrong. The water rising through the pipes had whined in the same way it had at Grandmama’s old house. The water draining away should cough and gurgle in the
same way also. But the stillness was complete.

  Bending toward the tub, she examined the dark water. The ripples had already stilled. Had the stopper somehow become lodged back in the drain?

  Don’t check, a piece of her whispered. It doesn’t matter. Leave it.

  But she wasn’t about to have her actions dictated by fear in her own house, especially in such a straightforward situation. She dipped her hand into the tub. Gritty sediment swirled up as her fingers touched the bottom. The water churned sluggishly around her arm as she pushed her hand toward the drain. The corroded rim rasped against her nails.

  The stopper wasn’t there. Just the open mouth. And the water hanging in stasis above it. Her hand hovered over the opening for a moment, trying to detect a current. There must be something lodged in the pipe. She began to withdraw her hand.

  It had moved only inches when a force clamped around her splayed fingers. Binding them together, it dragged her hand down toward the drain and sucked her fingers in up to the knuckles. Her cry bounced off the flat water as she dropped to her knees. Pushing back with her left hand on the edge of the tub, she jerked hard. Her hand came free.

  Missy was on her feet in an instant. She took a step back. The gurgle she had been waiting for finally emanated from the tub. She flexed her fingers.

  She looked back at the doorway, expecting to see his shadowy form standing there. Surely her cry would have awakened him?

  He wasn’t there, but the smell of dirt and flowers remained. That would be the open window. See? Everything had an explanation.

  Missy waited for her breathing to settle, then wrapped herself in the white bathrobe. A metallic scent stung her nose as she arranged the collar on her neck. Her fingers smelled like gunk from the drain. No, like old blood.

  She waded through the shadows to the sink and the mirror. Water coughed out of the pipes. She hesitated, then dipped her hands under the faucet. When she drew them away and sniffed again, the taint remained. All the pipes must be corroded.

  Shutting off the water, she lifted her hands just in front of her eyes. They were surprisingly hard to see. The shape was there, but her skin was next to invisible. Behind her, the tub gulped down the water.

  Frowning, Missy lowered her hands and leaned toward the mirror. In the dim glass, a bathrobe leaned toward her. Hair hung above it, and bits of a face. But not enough—

  Not enough face.

  She found the light switch on the wall and flipped it up. And then she stood perfectly still.

  I am buried, she thought again.

  Dirt covered her. It gleamed on her arms, a brown glaze.

  It stained the exposed portion of her neck and smeared the bathrobe where she had touched it. It climbed up her neck, far past the line where the water had touched her skin, spreading across her cheeks and inside her nose, and up onto her forehead and into the roots of her hair.

  This wasn’t sludge vomited by the pipes and spread through the bathwater.

  This had been rubbed into her skin. Hands had touched her.

  Made her filthy.

  And now her prints were on the sink and the wall and the light switch. Her mouth was too full and her lungs too empty to scream.

  No stranger could have snuck in and done this. Not with the house locked up for the night and her fiancé sitting just down the hall. This wasn’t the work of a stranger. This was him. He placed the flower. He put the dirt in the tub. To try to break me.

  The tub coughed. She spun around and pressed back against the basin. She watched the black water drain out of sight, languidly, taking its time, mocking her in its exit. A smeary residue remained behind, its reminder to her. That it could come back. That she’d always be filthy.

  Iron bands wrapped her lungs as she imagined how he had entered the dark room, smiling down at her, pouring dirt into the tub. The floor rose toward her. Her forehead and nose mashed against the white tiles.

  The bonds burst, and she dragged in air. Pushing onto her knees, then her feet, she shuffled toward the bedroom. One nightstand lamp was on. His body was not among the rumpled sheets. In fact, his side of the covers had not even been drawn back. Could he still be in the study working?

  Going to the doorway, she peered down the corridor. Dusty light yawned from the study.

  Then she heard footsteps on the first floor, traveling at a strangely rapid gait. Her eyes moved to the inky staircase.

  No one came up.

  The feet passed the stairs and moved toward the back of the house.

  She wanted to stomp down and scream at him and have him reassure her—lie to her—and hug her. She wanted to be hugged. Even the lies would feel better than this.

  Retreating to the bed, she lay down. Her flesh was crusted with grime. She shut her eyes against the light and picked at the stuff on her hands. It came away in scales. She brushed it off the sheets.

  After a while, she realized that her hands felt the same: the roughness was not going away. Her silt-crusted eyelids opened to examine her fingers. She sat up and rolled toward his side of the bed and held her hands in the light.

  It wasn’t just a feeling; they were wrinkled. And not the waterlogged wrinkles from too long in the tub.

  The skin was dry. Shriveling back from her nails. Cracking around her knuckles. Scabby, like droughted soil. The hands of an old woman.

  10

  Someone had taken her.

  —“The House of Dust”

  Southern Gothic

  The road flowed from the darkness into the white bubble of the headlights.

  Brad’s eyes moved between the worn pavement and his dim phone screen. Pictures flicked past beneath his thumb. Each had been distorted by the flash, bright at the center and gloomy along the edges. They showed the grave.

  First, he had photographed it from a few feet away, capturing the full length of the rectangular hole, with its fringe of drooping grass on one side and the edge of the dirt heap on the other. In the next he stood over the grave, taking in the crumbling lips of the maw, the uneven floor glowing down below like a wet tongue. In the third he lay on the ground and stretched his arm into the hole, showing the shovel marks riddling the floor. And in the fourth he had crouched in the bottom of the pit, taking a close-up of the place where her head had lain.

  Just those four pictures. He flipped through them again and again. Faster and faster. But no white-shrouded body appeared in the grave. No staring face appeared in the dirt. The body was gone.

  Someone had taken it. Or . . .

  Brad brushed sweat from his forehead. The phone slipped from his knee and thumped onto the floorboard. He left it, staring out at the worn paint delineating the narrow lanes. Someone had taken her body. Who?

  The townsfolk were obvious suspects—one, or perhaps a group of them. Surely the sheriff had not been involved. He had been the one insisting on a hasty burial. He had cut short their bizarre actions during the interment. But he had also known Brad was watching. And he knew what Brad was.

  He was protective of her. Maybe he knew I would try something like this.

  The moon had withdrawn to a backlight seeping through the dense curtain of cloud. Brad turned left at the intersection and followed Adamah Road toward Three Summers.

  He would go to Sorrel first. If he was involved, it would show in his face. And if he wasn’t, at least he would appreciate the tip and maybe even cooperate with his investigation.

  The car bucked across the derelict railroad ties. Ahead, the town lights beamed through the murk.

  He was going about forty-five when a sound came out of the gloom.

  A droning hum wafting through the window, its volume rising with each passing second. He pressed the brakes and shifted his hands on the wheel to avoid the prickles that pushed through the vinyl. He knew that sound. It called back hot suburban days in Providence, wandering the sidewalk
s the summer after the funeral to escape the heaviness of the house. Without the sun in the sky, though, the hum was distinctly off.

  The car slowed as the sweet, sharp, nostalgic scent washed across the road. It tasted wrong in the dead post-midnight air. The pale shape of Grammy’s Grocery faded into view up ahead on the left. He followed the humming to the last yard before the grocery store. There a row of spruce trees separated the residence from the parking lot. Something moved along that line of trees.

  A lawn mower with weakly glowing headlights moved up the edge of the yard by the road, spewing grass clippings across the lawn. The rider was in his fifties and wore work boots, patched jeans, and a dirty T-shirt emblazoned with an orange T for the University of Tennessee. Sunglasses pushed back on his head restrained a curly thicket of gray hair. His eyes did not drift from his work as the car passed.

  “He’s cutting his grass,” Brad said aloud. He looked at the clock. 1:37 a.m.

  Leaning out the window, he looked after the man. As the lawn mower faded from the backwash of the headlights, he saw it pass over a rough section of ground. The body atop it swayed, as if the man were stuck to the seat with superglue.

  Probably drunk. Slowly, he lowered his foot onto the gas. Find Sorrel.

  Passing the grocery store, he looked briefly out at the lot. Of the four lamp poles, only two emitted any light, a sallow green radiance that drizzled across a half dozen parked cars. It brushed up against the side of the neighboring warehouse and revealed something that he’d not noticed before.

  An enormous mural was painted across the bricks. The characters bore the happy ruddy features of 1940s-era advertising. In the foreground, a woman wearing a strapless red dress smiled out at the desolate street. She held a long white cigarette in a two-fingered grip by her rouged cheek. Bold letters proclaimed: She Smokes DeWitt’s!

  Behind her, blandly handsome men in hats looked on with envy.

  But time had worked its ravages. The woman’s dress had faded. Her teeth were crumbling as the paint flaked away from the brick wall, and her eyes were becoming jagged holes. The admiring faces were almost obliterated.