by Noah Broyles
Sorrel’s chair stilled, and his eyes shifted, like the lenses on a telescope, allowing it to see into vastly deeper space.
Again, the amorphous sound of chorusing voices wafted from deeper in the building. Sorrel passed a hand across the fuzz on the back of his bald head. Reaching out, he jostled the mouse and rattled the keyboard in front of the fat monitor, and then opened a rickety desk drawer.
“Gum, Brad?” He held out a small carton with a few foil-wrapped sticks.
Holding back a bemused frown, Brad hesitantly accepted. “You don’t have any cigarettes, I suppose? DeWitts’, perhaps?”
The sheriff cracked something distantly resembling a grin. The effect was hideous on his tight-skinned face. “You notice stuff. Guess that comes in handy.”
Keys clicked as he typed in a password.
“Do most folks have internet out here? I know it can be hard to get in rural places.”
“I’ve been tryin’ to up the access, but, to be honest, most don’t care.”
“Phone service?”
“Spotty, but it works. Most folks don’t make phone calls.”
“Really.”
“No one to call.” The mouse clicked, and the keys typed again. Was the man trying to act busy? Aloof?
“Huh.” Brad unwrapped the gum and glanced up at the ceiling lights. “Where’s the power substation?”
“Behind the grocery store.”
“Trash service?”
“Local woman runs that.”
Brad chewed. “I noticed a recurring name on several establishments; I wondered who it was: Adamah—”
“Here we are,” Sorrel interrupted. “Come here and look at this.” He scooted his chair and watched as Brad rounded the desk and bent down to look at the screen.
The gum squeezed between his molars.
Atop the webpage, the banner art depicted a silhouetted crane standing in a swamp of sharp marsh grass and bloodred water, looking backward. It was the Southern Gothic website. Sorrel had navigated to the contributors tab and scrolled to find one in particular. Now, the nine-year-old picture of a quietly defiant young man with thick black hair and black-rimmed glasses looked out of the screen.
Sorrel’s hand came up to grip Brad’s right shoulder while the other scrolled the mouse across the photo and accompanying author bio text.
“See, Brad, before I go spilling my guts to this guy here, I want to know if I can trust him. And from the picture, I can’t tell. And from the words, I can’t tell, either, because mostly its links to articles he wrote that I have to pay to read. And I don’t want to pay because I don’t know if what the guy writes is true, either, or if he twists stuff.”
He let the hand slide off. “I apologize for being short with you; I want this to go the right way. I’m sure you understand. Now, did I cut you off a minute ago? You were gonna say . . . ?”
Brad straightened up. He adjusted his glasses, looked away, and mechanically resumed chewing. The picture in the glass case looked across the room at him. “Did you go fishing with your dad a lot?”
Sorrel’s voice dimmed. “Never knew him.”
Brad glanced over.
The man was slumping again, gazing at the little shrine. “My mom said she was never meant to have kids. I wanted to, but never . . . Probably would have been a terrible dad, anyway. But for some reason, I always wanted to try and . . . guide someone.”
“Yeah,” Brad said quietly. “I understand.” Immediately, he wished he could drag the words back. They were too naked. He cleared his throat, digging for something to follow with.
Sorrel hadn’t noticed. He rubbed a finger on his temples. “I’ve got enough kids, anyway.” Suddenly, his face brightened. “Now that’s a great idea.” He closed the magazine tab and stood up. “Kind of a guest lecture, eh?”
Bewildered, Brad followed him out of the office. With a muted roar, the rain finally assailed the roof. The blurred footprints passed beneath them as they closed in on the door with the chanting voices he’d heard upon initially entering.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“School,” Sorrel said over his shoulder.
Brad slipped out his phone and glanced at the time.
It was 2:26 a.m.
11
The lights in the back half of the bleak room he led me to were burnt out. The walls were arrayed with posters of the state flag, state animal, state flower, and state motto; the floor was arrayed with school desks; the desks were arrayed with muddy-footed children.
—“The House of Dust”
Southern Gothic
There were twelve of them.
He guessed they were between the ages of eight and fifteen. The fifteen-year-old wore a full beard. The eight-year-old’s head was sideways as she played with her topknot. All were dressed to varying degrees of shabbiness in worn denim and fraying cotton. And all twenty-four grimy feet were pressed solidly against the polished tile.
The twenty-four eyes stared at the newcomers in the doorway. Brad had interviewed a caretaker at a daycare once and had avoided the gazes that followed him across the playground. He knew if he stopped, if he looked, he would become lost in them. Children’s eyes were too deep: wells that time had not yet filled with trash. He dared not touch and spoil.
Movement disturbed the bunch. The girl with the topknot shot from her chair and floundered through the desks toward Brad and Sorrel. The sheriff stepped inside quickly, motioning Brad to follow, and shut the door just as the girl reached them.
“Jackie!”
At the front of the room, a woman started up and came around a desk. She wore khaki pants and an untucked blue button-down and her hair was cut short with bangs. She rushed over, stopping short as Sorrel grabbed one of the girl’s flailing arms.
“Hey now! Where are you going, young lady?”
“I want to drink the rain!” she cried, twisting in the sheriff’s grasp.
Brad blinked and remembered the tall girl on the bridge. Harlow. Why wasn’t she here? Trying to sound casual, he asked, “Why do you want to drink the rain?”
The girl stopped writhing and stared at him. “Because that’s what he does.”
Before Brad could ask who he was, Sorrel said, “Ms. Harper.”
The woman moved closer and took the girl’s other arm. “Come on, Jackie. We can’t drink the rain right now.”
As she tugged the girl back to her desk, Sorrel ushered Brad to the front of the room. Squeezing his shoulder once more, he said, “Kids, I want to introduce you to a man you might see around town for the next week or two, Brad Ellison. He’s a writer for a big magazine, and he thinks we’re interesting enough that he wants to write about us. Who knows, maybe they’ll turn us into a documentary. The world, watching Three Summers, and each of you. Wouldn’t that be fine?”
The fingers bit deeper. Brad barely concealed a wince.
“Now he’s going to talk to us for a couple minutes and tell us about the stories he writes; that way, we can know what to talk about if he tries to interview us. You write about cults a lot, don’t you, Mr. Ellison? Maybe start by defining for us what a cult is.”
“I rarely write about cults.”
Another pincer squeeze to his shoulder. “No, I’ve done my homework, and as I understand it, your first big article was pretty cultish. Tell us that story, Mr. Ellison.”
Sorrel let go and stepped away. He walked into the gloomy rear of the room and motioned an irresolute Ms. Harper to join him in the empty desks at the back of the little huddle.
Brad’s hands were humid in his pockets. He could feel his stomach folding together. Just the soothers working out of my system. He said, “I’m not sure that kind of story would be . . . ”
The bearded boy gazed at him sleepily. Jackie played an imaginary piano on her desk and looked around restlessly. The faces of the other chi
ldren were blank. Beneath each desk, their dirty feet were set close together. But several were moving now, methodically lifting one foot, then the other, as if pedaling an invisible bicycle.
“I’m not sure that story would be appropriate for this sort of setting.”
What was this setting? What was going on? The dead lights at the back of the room made his position here by the teacher’s desk seem almost stage-lit. He waited for the camera crew to shuffle in behind him, to capture the too-perfect setup for a Netflix doc: the rural kids in the chilly classroom in the dead of night. Being indoctrinated. Bound into the fold.
“Aw, we’re rough around the edges ourselves, Brad,” Sorrel assured him. “Tell us first what sort of stuff you write generally.” Sorrel looked at the backs of the barefoot youth. “Don’t you want to know what Mr. Ellison writes about, kids?”
Their feet moved and their eyes settled on him, drinking him in like rain. Twelve children.
Twelve victims of the explosion. The scent of raw oil in his nose. The flash of bright orange at the edges of his eyes. The heaviness. The burden that had to be lifted.
“Crime,” he said.
“Crime,” Sorrel repeated.
“That’s my department. I write about crimes, both historic and modern.”
“What sort of crimes?”
“Murders, mostly.”
“They do tend to be the most interesting kind. Any we’ve heard of?”
“They tend to be obscure, which brings the challenge to my job. My most famous article—the one that launched my career, really—unearthed the Serene Flats murders. It was called ‘The Futureless.’”
“That’s the one. The cult one. Tell us about it. Tell us what a cult actually looks like.”
The kids were quiet. Waiting. A bewildered moth wandered the yellowed ceiling tiles between the lights. A clock on the back wall stood at 2:30.
“We dismiss at three,” Ms. Harper said, reading him.
“Serene Flats,” Sorrel prompted. “Word was a guy named James Bell killed everyone.”
The name brought back the weight of those early days. The dragging demand for the truth that pulled him down through layer after layer of false reports and bad evidence. James Bell’s long-dead voice whispered in his mind. Show them I’m innocent.
Brad found the dry glow of the floor around his feet changing to the gleam of wet pavement. The rain sighed overhead. The taste of sodden air entered his mouth.
“Serene Flats was a housing project built in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1969. The clientele was predictably lower class: unwed couples, seniors struggling to maintain their independence, and a fair number of single folks. The place had a steady turnover rate but still ran smoothly for the first five years of its existence. The only illicit activity that took place was drug use, and, you know, considering the populace, that wasn’t surprising or unexpected—certainly not to the management. When trouble came, though, it came in a big way.”
He remembered Heather’s enthusiasm when she first read the story, her call that came around this same time of night, her promise that he would be the hottest true-crime writer of the decade: book deals, film sales, TV specials. None of it panned out. He didn’t want it to, really. With fame came exposure. Scrutiny. Questions about his own story.
“On the morning of July 3, 1974, water was reported leaking under the doorway of unit twenty. When the tenant, Sarah Murphy, did not respond, the maintenance men used a master key. The chain was also securing the door, so they had to cut it. Ms. Murphy was found dead in her bathtub.”
He paused. The children’s eyes seemed not just deep, but dry. Faucets cut off from their water source. He could drop coins into those eyes and they would rattle down through their legs, into an underground labyrinth. A shared reservoir that could be poisoned. They didn’t need to know these things. Life would teach them soon enough. But not him, not here, not yet.
Tell them I’m innocent, came the imagined voice.
“Mr. Ellison?” Sorrel’s voice cut through his thoughts.
Tell them about their world.
“Tell them,” he persisted.
Tell them my story, came the voice he had created for James Bell.
“Tell them, Brad.”
Sorrel’s voice had merged with the plea in his mind, bearing down on him in dark harmony.
“Her wrists were slit,” he said. “Apparent suicide. The police were ready to accept the obvious. That is, until the next morning, when Jimmy Olympus, who lived in unit twenty-one, appeared to have suffered the same fate.”
“More water under the door?” Sorrel said.
“Same in all respects. Naturally, this put the residents of the building in a rather paranoid state of mind. They seemed to be part of an Agatha Christie novel, where each night the next highest unit number would experience death. The management advised everyone to lock their doors and even hired a security detail to watch that side of the building. Next morning, the same phenomenon was found in unit twenty-eight, this time striking down Al Jeffries and Nancy Cillian.”
“My, my,” the sheriff murmured.
“By that time, some people had had enough. There was a total of fourteen units on that side of the building. The residents of units twenty-five, twenty-nine, and thirty-three chose to evacuate.”
“Surprised they didn’t do so sooner.”
“And that more people didn’t choose to evacuate,” Brad added.
The details tasted bittersweet as he spoke them, remembering the days of investigation that had resulted in each one: the cheap hotels, swampy prisons, forgotten records, and reluctant witnesses. “We must now introduce the person who, in my opinion, is the real victim of the whole ordeal. His name was James Bell, and he was an aspiring author. He lived on the other side of the building. The string of supposed murders fascinated him. It turns out he had been plotting a book with a similar concept in mind—unexplainable deaths in an apartment complex. According to witnesses in the building across from him, he would sit daily before his window and watch the other residents’ comings and goings, smiling weirdly on occasion.”
The children remained expressionless.
Tell them . . .
Brad’s words came more slowly as he unloaded the story.
“The twist, of course, was the hardest part of the man’s novel. He decided it would be worth his while to make a small investigation into what was truly going on behind his walls. On the fourth night, this would have been July 7, he went out and sat in his car, which was parked at the far end of the building in question. He watched, and the police watched, but all was quiet that night.”
“No one died this time?”
“No one.” He frowned. “Bell sat in his apartment that next day and wrote out scenarios from the killer’s point of view, detailing how each murder was committed. He drew sketches of the place. He then spent the next night, from three to almost seven, sneaking around, trying to catch a glimpse of the killer and attempting to establish in his mind the look of the place at night.
“It rained that night. James Bell went up on the roof anyway. He thought that was the answer—he had heard people walking around on the roof before, though it had only been the maintenance men. The ceiling had always seemed thin, to him, and the footsteps so heavy they might step right through into his apartment. It seemed the only possibility left. He stayed up there all night, crawling back and forth, waiting for someone to appear.”
“No one did,” Sorrel said softly.
Brad blinked. “In the morning, around seven, with the rain still falling, he came down as the police were forcing entry into one last unit—a tenant named Phillipa Meynes had not responded. With the patios and steps drenched from the rain, it was difficult to find the telltale sign of nefarious activity, but she hadn’t been seen for days, so they made a check. And she was there, two weeks dead in her tub. Fi
rst victim, last found.”
He leaned back, mentally projecting the crime-scene pictures onto the fiberglass ceiling tiles. Broken vases, busted lava lamps, scattered beds, shredded books, blood- and alcohol-stained furniture, and dark soggy carpet. And the bathrooms, of course, where bodies, some clothed, some not, lay in the water and blood. “Five in all.”
“It seems so obvious,” Sorrel said. “They did it themselves.”
“Not obvious in the heat of bad press,” he replied. “The police were naturally furious. Though James Bell tried to avoid them, he was spotted coming down from the roof. They arrested him on the spot, both for his skin, and for the cuts the night on the roof had inflicted on his skin. They raided his apartment and found the sketches and written scenarios. They also found large amounts of various drugs—as an aspiring author, he had to have some source of income. He still had plenty of connections from his childhood in Birmingham, and the occupation allowed him to work a couple of hours each night and have the days to himself. The police questioned his neighbors and learned about his days staring out his window. They learned about his nocturnal habits, and they learned from one man that his car was wet every night when he returned. Since he had no family, no positive witnesses on his side, and a suddenly hostile management team at Serene Flats that had been destroyed by the affairs, he was quickly convicted of all the murders. He was sentenced to life in prison.”
“He there now?”
Brad shook his head slowly. “No. Died there in 1992.”
“And I’m guessing from the way you told it that you believe he was innocent.”
“He was. He acted stupidly, but he was no killer. The opposite, in fact. He wanted justice for the killer and for the world—thus his little investigation and his desire to write crime novels where the bad guys go to jail.”
“But how do you know?”
The kids were watching now. Their shuffling had slowed. Their gazes had livened. He had broken through into the backwater where their minds floated, and hooked them.
Tell them . . .
“Cults are terrible things. I know because I looked behind all the anomalies and all the faces and found the real killer. He called himself Jeremiah Johnson. Everyone else, all the dealers and mules, called him Disney. The man with the fairy dust. He ran a drug den outside Jackson. It was a nineteenth-century hotel on the outskirts, shrouded by sycamores outside and satin inside. Every night there was like something out of the Bible that needed fire and brimstone poured down on it.”