The House of Dust

by Noah Broyles

  “How did it happen?”

  She worked her gum forward and began chewing again. “I don’t know you.”

  He shrugged—fair enough—and stepped back to look along the front windows. “Well, have you ever lived in a place like this before?”

  “Why?”

  “I’d like to know your plans for the place. Sometimes people model their homes on the places they grew up in.”

  “Well, I know I’d like a couple more locks on the back door.”

  “Were there a lot of locks on the doors of your childhood home?”

  She switched her gaze to the police cruiser sitting out by the steps. Its two-tone paint was spotless, the silver siren on the roof gleaming beside the fat red flashing light. “If you’re asking if I like to be left alone, the answer is yes. You’ve delivered the package. I have things to do.”

  “Okay,” he said softly. “But I didn’t deliver everything.” He lifted a stack of envelopes from the satchel and approached, holding them toward her.

  “Just leave them there.” She motioned vaguely.

  He paused, face inscrutable. Then he retreated a few feet and left the stack beside the rocking chair.

  “Good afternoon,” he said, and went down the steps.

  As the car left the clearing, she advanced to the pillar at the top of the stairs and watched him drive away. She listened until the engine had diminished up the tired road. Then she went back to the rocking chair and sank slowly into it.

  She hadn’t sat in any of the chairs until now; they were actually quite comfortable. The wadded notebook and the box flopped down in her lap as she relaxed her arms.

  Bending over, she gingerly retrieved the stack of letters. The top one was simply addressed, The House, Angel’s Landing.

  The rest were the same.

  Her fingers went stiff. With such vagueness, they could only have come from the town. And by the sheriff’s manner, they could only have been written to her.

  Brittle skin split as she cut herself while opening the first letter. The thick paper inside wicked away the blood.

  She unfolded it and read the simple lines. Then the last part of her dream came true. Printed in pen were the words: Welcome, Queen of Hearts.

  That name—from her dream.

  There were eighteen more letters.

  Her heartbeat pulsed through her fingertips. The folded papers fell around her chair like wounded birds as she ripped into each one.

  They were all written the same, and said the same.

  Welcome, Queen of Hearts.

  Missy gathered the letters and carried them to the burn pile. They wilted and caught fire. But as she folded her arms, an odd flavor of excitement bled into the fear quickening her heartbeat.

  She looked back to the porch. A smile pulled at the sides of her mouth as she watched the chairs rocking in the breeze.

  14

  Although I had taped wax paper back in place around the hand, I had to stop halfway to town and wrap it in a Walgreens bag and put it in the trunk because of the smell.

  —“The House of Dust”

  Southern Gothic

  Three Summers was empty that Sunday morning.

  At the Texaco, a man with blue cataract eyes recognized the description of the garbage truck and said it belonged to Jezebel Irons. This time of day, she would be across the river at the waste facility. He gave directions and then frowned when asked where everyone else was.

  “They had to go to church.”

  After crossing the Locust River Bridge out of Three Summers, the way to the facility was an inconspicuous little turnoff from the main road, perhaps a quarter mile into the woods. Weeds sprouted from the faulted pavement and formed a thick fringe along the road. Lichen-covered tree trunks hunched together and blocked the river from view. The sallow smell of rot thickened the air, growing stronger as he drove. Brad’s lips pinched together and his eyes, dry and tired after his sleepless night, searched the curves of the road. Staying clean would make rest impossible for a while, but a lack of Prozac wasn’t the only thing keeping him awake. It was the thing in the trunk. And his fiancée’s dreams.

  She just needs time to adjust. Heal.

  After two miles, a chain-link gate—open just enough to allow a car entrance—jutted out of the woods to obstruct the road. Brad edged through, leaving the wooded gloom and entering a vast gravel lot that lay along the riverbank. To his right, the lot stretched to the base of the nearby ridge. A few thousand feet off, the derelict tower he had seen that first day from the graveyard rose beside the ridge. Faint words were visible across its oxidized side: adamah mining co.

  Below the tower, the mouths of dead mine shafts pockmarked the hillside, vestiges of a past industry. Large newer buildings constructed of white corrugated metal occupied much of the level ground between the ridge and the river. Block letters on the nearest building tagged it as part of Irons’ Waste Solutions.

  Rows of fans were mounted beneath the eaves of these buildings, sucking the hot, sour air from the interiors and blowing it across the gravel lot. A parking lot along the inside of the chain-link fence held a fleet of trucks similar to the one that had visited their house the night before.

  Smoke rose from a point farther in the complex.

  The roads between the processing buildings were marked deeply by truck tires. Brad steered through them, heading toward the smoke. He emerged in an open area near the base of the ridge, where he stopped the car.

  A smoldering mountain of trash occupied the center of the clearing. Blackened debris made up the base of the mound, and shredded pinkish-white heaps were piled on top. Bitter smoke billowed from simmering crevasses, bearing ash into the sky. The flakes drifted down again and settled across the windshield.

  Taking out his phone, he rested it on the steering wheel and snapped a picture. He spotted activity on the ridge and raised the lens.

  A hundred yards off, a yellow CAT wheel loader, its scoop trailing clumpy gray powder, was descending a dirt track from one of the mine shafts. The rumble of its engine faded through the silence. A gouge in a charred section of the cremation heap showed where it had taken its last bite.

  Climbing from the car, Brad walked back to the trunk and took out the Walgreen’s bag. He placed it on the hood and stood beside it.

  The wheel loader came off the track and drove into the clearing. It powered down. The door opened, and the woman from last night climbed down. The same woman who’d rapped on his car window when he’d first arrived in Three Summers. She pulled a dust mask off her nose and mouth and glanced at him, running a hand through her short silver hair.

  Abruptly, she approached. “Good morning, Doc. Something I can do for you?” It was a dull, thin table knife of a voice, but the glimmer of a smile twisted her lips, remembering his lie.

  Brad tried to look contrite. “It’s Bradley Ellison. I’m sorry for misleading you that day.”

  She stopped a dozen feet away from him and tugged off a pair of gloves, eyeing him in a way that said she knew that, too, was a lie. “Misleading, yeah. Medicine is an area that you might not want to pretend about. But we were all a little crazy that day. I should have recognized right away you weren’t the doctor, but so few folks drive through here, and the timing was right, so I thought you must have come for a reason.” Mud clung to her fingertips, and a gleam lurked in her pewter eyes.

  “Well, today I just came to return this.” He held out the bag.

  “What have you got there?”

  “Take a look.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “No, really. It shouldn’t startle you. You’re obviously comfortable with rotting things.”

  Jezebel studied the ground for a minute, pushing the gloves into her back pocket, then stepped past him.

  He blinked, then set the bag in the shade below the car and fol
lowed her. “Can I at least ask why you brought it?”

  She was moving down a gravel avenue between the corrugated metal structures that led toward the river. Humidity seeped from the grimy ground and bled off potholes brimming with brown water from the previous night’s rain. “Why’d you say you were the doctor?” A quick laugh, as if the answer were obvious. “No, that’s okay. Ask anything you want.”

  Brad swallowed. “I know you dug Marilyn Britain’s body up. Why bring a piece to the house?”

  “Look, I’m sorry I scared you. I was hoping it might ease things up for you and your wife.”

  “That”—he had caught up to Jezebel, but he paused to point back toward the Walgreens bag—“was meant to help us?”

  Jezebel didn’t stop. “Again, didn’t mean to scare you. Or her.”

  Brad pulled out his phone, turned on the mic, dropped it into his breast pocket, and caught up again. “Do you think you could explain that?”

  She shrugged. “Local superstition. Burial appeases the one below.”

  “The one being?”

  “The angel of the earth.”

  He hesitated, then ventured a guess. “Adamah.”

  “The angel Adamah, yes.”

  “Adamah has been a part of this community since the beginning.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And Adamah lives in the ground.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And I’m assuming you buy into this superstition, at least partially?”

  “I do.”

  Gravel crunched. “So explain why you would dig up the old woman and chop her into pieces. That doesn’t sound like a good way to appease anyone.”

  The woman tugged at the mask hanging around her neck. “I’m going to ignore the way you phrased that because I think it’s clear you have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  He grimaced. “How’d you come by the hand? Did you act alone or were other townsfolk involved?”

  “Since I doubt you’ll report in good faith,” she replied, “I don’t think I’ll divulge specifics.”

  “You know I could take all this to Sorrel.”

  “Do it. I haven’t admitted anything.”

  She was right. Too hasty, too desperate.

  Lead into it. “Tell me about your establishment,” he said. “Seems sizable.”

  “That’s right. We collect ninety percent of the waste in Henderson county, as well as some collection in surrounding counties—Carroll, Decatur, Madison. We bring it all back here: sort through it, burn some, contract with recyclers for some, bury the rest.”

  “Bury it in the mine.”

  “That’s right. Dump the ashes, too.”

  “Adamah doesn’t mind that? Dumping trash down where he lives?”

  Jezebel didn’t smile. “I actually take it seriously. I try to be respectful. If you saw how waste is handled in most places, you’d understand what I mean: trash just thrown in random holes. But here we’ve got an exhausted mine that runs deep. We’re refilling those tunnels. Healing . . . healing wounds, almost.” She seemed uncomfortable with the analogy and hunched her shoulders beneath her denim jumper.

  “The mine bore his name, though, from what I can see.” Brad paused and glanced back at the rusted tower and the faded name. “It’s like a monument.”

  “Well, all of them end. A new one will come.”

  “New one? New monument?” He remembered the Adamah Theater in town. And Adamah Road. There were other places, too. Different structures, but all named the same. Variations on the same theme. As if nothing were enough.

  His eyes moved to the dark column of smoke. “What year did the mine close?”

  “2000.”

  2000.

  A pebble leapt away from his toe—tap, tap, tap—and the echo of distant heat flared across his skin. For an instant, he saw a figure standing beside the smoldering cremation fire. No, standing in the fire. A figure dressed in orange. Its claw of a hand reached toward him.

  Brad turned away, running his knuckles across his forehead. He and Jezebel resumed walking. He said, “You must employ a lot of people to keep an operation like this running.”

  “Right around eighty. All from town.”

  “Looks like you’re the last real business left.”

  “That’s true enough. When the mine shut down, I got permission to use the land and set up operations.”

  “You say you got permission. Didn’t you have to pay?”

  She shrugged. “Owner let me have it. Nothing else it could be used for. The ground was tired. And empty.”

  “Did local folks own it?”

  A vague nod. “Local folks. They sold it off in the fifties, but the company that took over was shut down by the state prosecutor because of unsafe working conditions. So, the locals took over again and ran it until it was exhausted in 2000.”

  “What were the owners’ names?”

  “Originally, it was the Larkins.”

  “And after the company got kicked out?”

  “It got muddled after that.”

  “I like muddle.”

  She was silent.

  “Who got the money? A mine like this had to rake in millions. But when I look around the town, I don’t see much sign of affluence. Same goes for the old house.”

  Jezebel shook her head. “A whole lot went into legal battles. The company that got kicked out wasn’t happy with the way things went. They fought it for a long time, and she—”

  “She?”

  Jezebel Irons rubbed her nose with the back of her hand, then waved the hand. “Yeah.”

  “Marilyn Britain.”

  “Yeah.”

  “The woman who occupied the house before we came. She seemed to have some strong connection to the community. And to you.”

  They were at the river now. The odor of mud and decomposing plants cloaked them.

  After years of construction on the lot, gravel had spilled and collected down the bank and stuck in the mud, lying now in mossy mounds just beneath the surface, interrupting the current and dimpling the surface of the thick green water.

  “What did she do to get dug up and cut up and reburied in her own basement?”

  Jezebel was staring fixedly across the river. Music came from the direction of her stare, and Brad followed her gaze to the white church on the opposite shore. The windows must be open, for he could faintly hear the organ playing. He recognized the tune. They had played it at the funeral of his fiancée’s patient. “The Old Rugged Cross.” The singing had died as they advanced up the aisle that day. The eyes had turned. Then the screaming started.

  “Queen of Hearts,” she said, turning toward him to answer his question.

  He blinked. “Queen of Hearts?”

  “They have a special connection to Adamah. This place, this bit of the world, has always suffered from a festering unknown. A heaviness. A burden.” She tapped her chest and looked at him. “You ever felt that?”

  The music wafted. Like the hymn he’d heard despite his headphones at that funeral much longer ago. Meaningless condolence that could not lift the pressing weight. “Sometimes,” he said.

  “The Queen soothes that. But Sorrel . . . ” She motioned across the water. “He wants things different. He always resented her. So he took her and threw her in that grave. Wasted the . . . ” She did not finish.

  “Why did he resent her?”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t really want to have him. But she didn’t want a procedure, either. So he was just sort of there, growing up in that house.”

  “Marilyn Britain was his mother?” He had vaguely suspected something like this, but it still came with a jolt. It made their drive to the cemetery with her body seem even more bizarre.

  “Yeah. I think he identified her with her role. And he
resented the role.”

  “The role as Queen of Hearts. Is there another Queen of Hearts?”

  “Not yet. But there will be. There always will be.”

  “And how is the connection with Adamah formed?”

  Jezebel’s arm twitched; she checked her watch. “If you’d like to stop by my house someday, I’d be happy to talk more. I’m usually there midafternoon.”

  Brad withheld a sigh. “That’d be great. Where do you live?”

  “The house up on the hill at the end of Adamah Road.”

  “I know the place.”

  She paused, then added, “If you’re going over to the church, you can keep driving up the riverbank a bit and you’ll come to Hanging Elephant Bridge. Used to be railroad, but we modified it to accommodate cars.”

  He resisted questioning her about the odd name. “Thanks. I’ll check it out.”

  “Tell your fiancée I said hello.”

  At Hanging Elephant Bridge, thick boards had been laid across the rails and buttressed by beams from below. The boards creaked as his tires passed over them. There was little clearance to either side, and no barrier protected the edge. Squeezing the residual unsteadiness from his fingers, Brad edged the car across. Sixty feet below, the river crawled along its course.

  On the far bank, Brad followed the gravel-covered tracks until the road abandoned them and bent down through the woods to Simmons Pike.

  There, to his right, the road dipped to pass through a tunnel beneath the tracks on its way west. Brad turned left, the way toward the church. The woods thinned out as he drove, allowing pockets of meadow and glimpses of the river. Soon, the spire appeared above the treetops.

  In the churchyard, cars clustered around the vine-wrapped building. Sorrel’s old police cruiser crouched by the doors.

  Brad pulled in beside it and stepped out. The smell of smoke was blessedly absent on this side of the water. As he approached the door, he glanced out at the graveyard. A mound of orange dirt marked the refilled grave, doubtless Sorrel’s hasty work.

  Closer by, a great heap of boards lay beside the building’s southwest corner, not far from the entrance. Torn-up flooring, by the look of it. A few tenuous fingers of kudzu reached from the building to claim the mound. He took a picture.