The House of Dust

by Noah Broyles

  Brad frowned. “And he suddenly decided to surrender these items?”

  She retrieved the gloves, twisting them together. “Seems so. Just before closing on Monday. He gave me the box and told me to keep it safe. He seemed flustered, so I asked what was going on. He said he’d been hearing a voice for a long time. He said he heard it through his feet. I’m not sure what that means. Anyway, he said that the day before, the voice had gotten louder and changed direction, so he was going to Atlanta.”

  “Why Atlanta?” Brad asked.

  She shrugged. “He’d be livid with me for telling you this, but I’m honestly not sure what else to do. He’s been a friend for years and he wasn’t well when he left here. He may have suffered a stroke, and that was contributing to his behavior. And now he isn’t answering his phone, which he always did before.”

  He came in the day after the old woman died. “Did he say where in Atlanta he was going?”

  Brooke shook her head.

  “If you can give me his contact, I’ll try to get in touch.”

  She nodded and handed her phone back. He took down Richard Hettinga’s number, then said, “Let’s see the stuff he left.”

  Brooke relaxed her hold on the gloves and handed him a pair. Slipping them on, he followed her across the main floor toward the children’s corner. Sunlight, turned watery by its passage through glass, came in behind a bank of picture books. It slanted across an area hemmed in by low shelves, across a low table, which sat atop a blue rug bordered by the letters of the alphabet. There was a small box atop the table.

  The librarian motioned and they sat in the child-size chairs. The box was no taller than Brad’s thumb. He could feel his pulse in his fingertips. At last something definite. Citable. Real. “You can open it,” Brooke said.

  Brad pulled the box toward him. Dust motes rose through the sunlight as he delicately lifted the lid. Inside lay a stack of four orange ten-by-thirteen envelopes. Drawing them out, he found names written on each: DeWitt, McCloud, Larkin, and Recent.

  “When I put everything back, I tried to remember the order he had things in,” Brooke mentioned. “I might have confused DeWitt and McCloud.”

  Pushing the box aside, he laid the envelopes out.

  “DeWitt founded everything, so he’s first. And obviously ‘Recent’ comes last.” He pushed the other two around. “We should be able to date them by the material.”

  He picked up the envelope labeled “DeWitt” and uncinched the clasps. His gloved fingers drew out the contents: a newspaper clipping, a loose photograph, and a small stack of photographs bundled together with a hand-drawn map.

  The map depicted the island, Angel’s Landing. The house and the road—dividing the forested southern half from the fields in the north along the river—were marked. Seemingly random places in the field were numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

  He turned to the bundled photos. Five of them. Likewise marked. They displayed ragged, shapeless garments, laid out on what might have been a basement floor to be photographed. Once white, all were heavily stained with red soil. Holes marred the coarse fabric of several. One was so disintegrated that the shreds had been arranged to represent the shape of the original outfit.

  A brief inscription marked the back of the first picture: Slave burial shrouds. Eight feet down. Dozens more suspected.

  Puckering his lips, he scanned the map again. Why bury them aimlessly throughout the field? Apart, unmarked, and at such depth. A form of humiliation? Given their lives, a denial of dignity in death was not to be unexpected. Even so, it seemed peculiar.

  The newspaper clipping was a headline and story fragment from The Nashville Daily Union dated April 10, 1862. “Rebel Holdout Destroyed on Shiloh Return.” The fragment read:

  A company of men returning from battle near Pittsburg Landing destroyed a plantation called Angel’s Landing, which is situated about ten miles north of Lexington, on the Locust River. This particular house and its inhabiters had been succoring enemy causes and were thought to likely continue so, so the house was put to fire and the resistors slain. The founder of the house, Darrin DeWitt, is popularly believed to have been slain by his slaves shortly after the completion of a cotton mill in the neighboring settlement of Three Summers more than a decade ago. His wife, Martha, has since— The ink blurred and the story concluded on the next line.

  The final fate of Martha DeWitt and her house is unknown, for shortly after the fighting and flames commenced, a dense fog rose, smothering the surrounding area for about four hours.

  Laying the fragile paper aside, Brad examined the loose photograph. It was grainy, but he could make out a small figure in a white cloak and hood, noosed, hanging from the jutting limb of a massive oak. Peering, he realized the body was not actually small, but regular size. The illusion came because the body had been partially lowered into a hole beneath the tree. Around the dead man, a few grim-faced soldiers lounged with rifles.

  Frowning, he turned the picture over: The hanging glen. 1866?

  “But the DeWitts were gone by then,” he murmured.

  “What?” Brooke was sitting crouched, elbows on the table.

  He checked inside the envelope again. “I’m just wondering why this is in the DeWitt folder if it’s after their time. Which it is, according to the clipping.”

  “Honestly, I think it’s just to have something to pad the folder. Richard would often lament how little documentary evidence there was—” She stopped. “And here I am talking like he’s dead.”

  Brad replaced the items in the envelope. “If his research was as exhaustive as you say, then I’m reconstructing a dinosaur from a few teeth.”

  “He knew more than is here,” Brooke said. “Much more. I can’t say for sure, but I think he grew up in that town. I think he had its history ingrained.”

  “Then why all this? If he already knew.”

  “I think so people would believe him.”

  A smile drew up the corner of Brad’s mouth, and he lifted the next envelope with a little added reverence. “With that I can empathize.”

  The McCloud file was more bountiful: a stack of photographs accompanied by a small collection of documents. He decided on the photos first, flicking through the stiff cards.

  The first one was a picture of the house. It was taken from a distance, and the façade was blackened by fire. But the mansion was not abandoned. The chairs on the front porch were visible, and all were occupied by slumping, bent-necked people in gray clothes.

  Dead? Sleeping?

  On the back, the words were stark: Sleeping sickness.

  The next photo was taken behind the house. The garden was in bloom in black and white. The trees around the edge of the garden were much sparser back then; the creek was visible through the trunks like a long black snake. Among the garden beds themselves, people lay sprawled, hands flung out.

  Brooke stirred. “You said you’re living there? I don’t know how you can do it.”

  “Ah, just do my job for long enough.”

  “But living there all alone . . . ”

  “No, my—”

  An odd sort of terror crystallized across his heart as, for an instant, he imagined his fiancée sitting back there right now, perhaps idly pulling weeds in the exact spot where these bodies had once lain. Perhaps disturbing bones beneath the garden soil.

  “My wife is there.” He shuffled faster.

  The remainder depicted the town throughout the 1870s. There was no bridge spanning the river then, and only a single row of brick buildings lay along a dirt road, looking across at a huge structure with a high chimney. The cotton mill, and what was now DeWitt Street on the eastern edge of town. But as the pictures progressed, they showed the construction of a second huge building, this one half a mile opposite the first. A white structure with a crenulated roof and an abundance of windows.

  He had
seen this building, too, by storm light, when driving up to the sheriff’s office. It lay now behind high grass and a chain-link fence. The building’s name was written on the back of the photos: Angel Adamah Hospital.

  He lingered over that for a moment, before examining the next picture. A panorama of a vast field, striped by trenches. Each trench was filled with shirtless young men, working to deepen and broaden their ditch. The field beneath the lonely hill house, he realized, the one he’d spotted on the way to the funeral. On the back was written, Preparing for war, 1917.

  And then, abrupt among the landscapes, the last picture: a portrait. A woman standing just before the porch steps of the house. Long black hair rippled across each shoulder, reaching to the hands clasped at her waist. Her face was narrow, her lips so slim they blended with the rest of her pale face; she almost appeared to have no mouth.

  On the back was written simply, Magdalene.

  An itch crawled just below his skull. Something about the photo was familiar. If he reached for it too quickly, the similarity would recede, so he resolved to brood on it. He stacked the photographs and set them aside, reaching for the documents.

  All besides one were contemporaneous newspaper clippings that seemed to match the photographs in the folder: “Curious Malady Leads to Congregation at Ruin,” “Yankee Dr. Sets Up Practice at Former Plantation,” “Construction Begins on Rural Hospital,” and “Army Establishes Camp Near Three Summers.”

  The distinctive item among the group was a letter. Paper whispered dryly as he unfolded the single sheet. A clog of words occupied an ancient page dated September 12, 1877.

  Clement,

  I am not sure if word has traveled beyond the immediate vicinity, but I can decidedly say that a recent event has convinced me to get out of Adamah Hospital as soon as possible: the utterly shocking demise of the chief physician, Dr. Jerimiah McCloud. I was unfortunate enough to witness his final moments, and will not hold you in contempt if you resent me later for relating those moments to you.

  The truth is, Saturday was hot and my fever was running high. Even with all the windows open, the ward was unbearable. There is a grove of walnut trees near the southwest corner of the building, and I went to sit among them about 3:00. Mostly concealed, I there observed, after a while, Dr. McCloud come out of the facility and go to a pump that stands in the backyard and begin washing his arms from what appeared to be a bloody operation; his clothes were all stained.

  He had nearly concluded when two creatures rushed from the very door he had exited. I say creatures, for though they were human, they seemed possessed by something unnatural, beyond madness attributable to illness. They were cloaked in some sort of thick ooze, as if coated with plaster, and they traveled with great speed.

  A refuse heap of materials left over from the building’s construction lay near the pump, and each assailant snatched up a stone block and were upon the doctor before I could call a warning.

  They battered him with the stones until he fell, and then, one at his head and one at his foot, they beat upon him until I suppose every bone in his body became soft. I shall not describe his cries, for I cannot remember them. I do recall how his right arm remained sticking up behind him for some time during the assault, gripping the pump handle, and how water ran down from the spout, turning the earth to mud. Though it seemed long, it could not have been much over two minutes later when his attackers flung aside the rocks and folded his body more times than should have been possible, until he was a small lump on the ground.

  They retrieved their stones and began to hammer him into the ground. It was then that the hospital guard appeared. Forthrightly, he drew his pistol, approached them in their madness, and shot them both.

  I stayed where I was for a while, until evening came and his remains were carried away, and the others. Then I saw the silent woman who was his wife appear and sit beside the residue of her husband and stroke the earth where he had been, even, I thought, smiling as she did it.

  Forgive me for writing—I had hoped to gain strength from the sharing of this horror.

  Julian

  Brad laid the letter aside.

  His back and legs were cramped from hunching in the tiny chair. He wet his lips. “I found something similar in the plantation house. A record book of patient’s words. Utterances of Adamah, I think it was called.”

  A disquieted sigh from across the table. “I’m sure Richard would love to see that.”

  After packing away the material, Brad reached for the third envelope. “Larkin,” he muttered.

  First was a twine-bound stack of photographs with a card placed atop them: Party Field Massacre, June 21, 1923. Photos Taken June 23.

  The pictures were slick between his gloved fingers. The first showed a gray field stretching down to a gray river, beyond which rose a gray ridge. Pale gray objects speckled the darker gray field. Gray and white remnants of carnival-like tents also lay sprawled on the grass, as if blown by wind.

  He tapped the photo. “I know that place. It’s the field in front of the house. The field’s all grown up now, and there are a few trees, but that’s it. This picture must have been taken from the road.”

  He lifted the next picture. A young woman in a gray dress, lying in the grass. One arm was beside her body, the other thrown above her head in almost a swimming posture. Her face was turned toward the camera, mouth open, eyes closed. “She’s dead.”

  “They’re all dead,” Brooke said.

  He chuckled mirthlessly. “Massacre. Makes sense.”

  In the next photo, a man with a pistol and a large mustache sat in the field, leaned up against a barrel. Behind him lay the ruins of one of the tents. A tangle of wire and blackened canvas was all that remained. “It burned,” he said. “But it rained. The tent wasn’t completely consumed. And look at the man’s hair, plastered down around his head and then dried stiff.”

  Feeling for the next, he found it was the last picture. As he retied the twine, he said, “So why did they kill each other?”

  “Richard mentioned that event. An ownership dispute after the First World War.”

  “What happened to the last family, the McClouds? And who won the dispute? And . . . ”

  His words dried up at the next loose photograph. In sepia yellow, it depicted a swath of river. The span of a bridge crossed the top of the picture, connecting two forested banks. Atop the bridge, a rail-mounted crane had swung its boom over the water. A cable extended down from the boom and looped around the neck of an elephant. The beast’s trunk was jutted in a stiff curve down from its face. Its limbs dangled limp from its bulky body. The soles of its lower feet hung twenty feet above the river.

  Flipping the photograph, Brad nodded, then shook his head. “Hanging Elephant Bridge. I drove across it this morning.”

  “That’s something of a local legend,” Brooke said. “The poor thing broke its hip while performing in downtown Three Summers back in the twenties. Its trainer tried to bury it without actually putting it down. They dug a huge pit and led it in, but once they started putting the dirt in, it became frightened. The trainer was standing near the hole. It grabbed him and pulled him in and flung him against the wall. While he was lying unconscious, before they could retrieve him, it stepped on his head. So they got the beast out, attached it to that rail-mounted crane, dragged it out to the bridge, and hung it. When it was dead, they just let it fall in.”

  Brad had gone through the accompanying newspapers while she spoke. “It says here the trainer’s name was Rex Emil, a carnival owner. Says he was the husband of Miriam Larkin. And it says the event where the elephant was injured was the opening of the Adamah Theater.”

  The little chair groaned as he leaned it back from the table.

  “What?” Brooke asked.

  “A pattern.” Dust motes frolicked between them. “Does that name ring any bells? Adamah? Anything aside from wha
t’s here?”

  She shook her head. “Why?”

  “Because it connects all of this. People driven by devotion to this Adamah put up a building in town, named it in its honor. And then something happens to knock them off. And that pattern repeats over, what, eighty years? Antebellum to Roaring Twenties.”

  “That’s amazing.”

  “That’s not a coincidence.”

  “What is Adamah, exactly?”

  “I don’t know.” Idly, he flipped through shots of the town growing, the new theater glowing, the Locust River Bridge being built. “A supernatural being. They call it an angel. And this pattern . . . an order of worship?”

  He paused at another portrait. A woman with short blond hair, dark lips smoothly smiling, and too-large eyes staring, standing before the house. Again, the itch darted across his cranium. He flipped the picture. Miriam Larkin, circa 1930.

  “I don’t know what to make of those last ones,” Brooke said.

  Reluctantly, he laid the portrait aside and examined the final four photographs. They were all shot from the same angle: looking through a doorway into a room with curtained windows and a long table. In profile, a body lay upon the table. A woman in a white dress, arms at her sides, palms open. Her eyes were closed, but her jaws were parted slightly. The hair, though whitish, was styled the same as in the portrait he had just seen.

  “This must be Miriam Larkin,” he said.

  Weary light came through the windows, touching Miriam’s body and the figure of a little boy. He stood behind the table, staring over the body. His face was hidden because he was looking with the light.

  “That’s the dining room,” Brad said. “They laid her on the table for a visitation.”

  The four pictures were duplicates. Except they weren’t.

  As he went through them again, he found that the light diminished. And so did the body.

  It collapsed. The form beneath the clothes shriveled. In the final one, a withered corpse was lying where a whole one had been just before.