The House of Dust

by Noah Broyles

  The pictures were taken at night, she thought. The camera flash was bright.

  But it was impossible: All of them happened to blink at the same moment in every single photograph? The camera had not captured even a sliver of an eye. They must have closed their eyes on purpose, she thought. But why? Why such a strange photo? She swallowed, and the sound was loud in the diner. Awareness returned.

  Everyone had left. Except the sheriff.

  She turned. He was standing there, arms crossed.

  “Roy is being dealt with. I’m sure he won’t bother you again.”

  “I’m grateful.”

  “How else can I serve you?”

  There was an echo of the little boy’s mocking tone in his words. She pulled the purse strap back onto her shoulder. “I have a very sick cat in the car. Does Three Summers have a vet?”

  Ezra considered for a moment. “One that should serve. I’ll drive you there.”

  “Oh, I’d rather not leave the car here.”

  His grin twisted free again. “We’re not all so bad.” A pause. “Let me drive your car, then. You’ll need to be shown the way.”

  “Thank you, Sheriff.”

  “It’s Ezra, you remember. Ezra Larkin.”

  “I remember.”

  “And you’re Missy.”

  “I’m Missy.”

  “Ezra and Missy.” He tasted it and nodded. “All right then.”

  Together, they went to the door.

  18

  For the next two days, I stayed in the study, patching together the scraps I had collected in a document titled, “The House of Dust.” On the third day, Wednesday, I rolled out a photocopy of the town map, took a pen, and drew a line across Three Summers, connecting the old mill at the eastern edge, the theater in the center of town, and the old hospital at its western edge.

  If I wanted to learn about Adamah, the obvious way was to explore the shrines dedicated to it.

  —“The House of Dust”

  Southern Gothic

  When Brad left, she was in the backyard, sitting near one of the flower beds amid the thickening noontime heat. From the porch steps, he could see her head was down and one hand was moving rhythmically at the edge of the bed. Digging.

  “Jennifer?”

  She looked up quickly at his approach and spoke with the hazy focus of someone skirting sleep. “I guess you’re heading out.”

  Her right hand was heavy with dirt. She’d dug a small trench out of the weeds and daffodils. Her ponytail was loose, her bangs greasy on her forehead. She wore her pale blue pajamas, the ones that reminded him of medical scrubs.

  “Jen.” Brad pushed down the questions crowding his throat. “What are you doing?”

  “You remember the night it rained?”

  “Saturday.” The night he went to Three Summers. The night she woke up laughing.

  “That’s when it must have happened.”

  “What, Jen?”

  She pointed with her clean hand. A couple feet away, two squirrels lay in the shaggy grass. Bodies muddy. Eyes glazed. Dead.

  “I found them this morning. They were in that mud slick by the back steps. Got stuck, I guess. Had their heads all jammed down in the . . . must have suffocated.”

  Brad crouched. He put his hand beside her in the grass. “How’s it going with you?”

  It was what she’d said to him on that day four years ago, when he’d left Jasper after completing the investigation that resulted in his “Scarlet Seven Miles” story. He’d gone to the diner each morning for a week, camped in the corner booth, writing the story of a monster who’d kidnapped an Alabama family and dragged them behind his pickup along the nearby stretch of Interstate 24.

  Halfway through the week, she’d ventured over and asked if she could share the space. Her break coincided with the late lunch rush and the other tables were full. He’d rewritten the same sentence eighty different ways just to keep the keys clicking, to show he was working, that her presence didn’t faze him. And when she’d caught him frowning at her reading a textbook on the brain, she said, “Got something against psychology?” He just shrugged.

  On the last day in the diner, after the keys stopped clicking, the article finished, she looked up and said, “How’s it going with you?”

  And Brad realized she was the first person in years to ask him that besides his editor, Heather, and when she asked it, it meant How much of your next article is written?

  Jennifer hadn’t smiled when she said it. She hadn’t raised her eyebrows. She’d just looked at him, and all his tension receded as he realized what a relief it was to be with someone who placed no obligation on him to be cheerful or bright.

  In the grass, her hand touched his. “I’m fine, Brad.”

  “You haven’t been sleeping. I’ve heard you. You’ve been mourning.”

  “Well.” She examined her caked fingers. “You never really stop mourning, do you? You go through the day and you’re fine. You’re fine. And then at night you split wide open.”

  This is what happens when you stop caring. His mom’s words.

  “I need you to recover, Jen. People who don’t recover get hooked on things. You’re stronger than that.”

  “I’m sloppy. I should have noticed. I could have pulled them out of it.” She was staring at the dead squirrels.

  Brad folded his fingers around hers. They were so limp. And dry. “It was an accident.”

  With a tug, her hand withdrew. “I’m glad I came here, Brad. I belong in a place like this.” She squinted up at the silent trees. “Where I can’t cause any more accidents.”

  “Jen—”

  Abruptly, she looked at him. “Go on. You’ve got work to do.”

  On the drive into Three Summers, in the flickering green along the tree tunnel road, he decided to spend time with her that evening, instead of his computer in the study.

  At least make her smile.

  She had smiled so much their first week together in Nashville. Not big smiles, just crooks at the corners of her lips. Smiles in the grocery store, smiles in the elevator up to the eighteenth floor, smiles in the little kitchen while they cooked. Even after their third night together, when she cried her way out of a dream of her departed family, all of them stuck full of needles, she’d mustered a smile as he held her close and rocked her in the sheets. And at the week’s end, in Riverfront Park, as they sat in the grass and looked across the water at LP Field, she’d leaned her head against him and said, “I’ve been awfully happy these last couple days.”

  Now nothing. No smiles since her patient’s funeral, since the screaming drove them from the church and she tore off her engagement ring. No smiles in the house.

  Half a month. Grief had its time. Regret, eventually, had to relent.

  DeWitt Street was sunken in silent heat. The row of box elders stood in stasis along its broken sidewalk beside the field. No cars hid beneath their shade, and none lined up before the buildings on the far side of the street. He got out and looked across the heat-laden lot at the mill.

  In the afternoon glare, the bricks were the color of old scabs. No sound came from within, and no movement disturbed its eye socket windows. The mill lay amid the high grass, bulky and collapsing, a whale carcass of a building.

  And I’m the maggot, burrowing in, Brad thought. He checked his phone. 1:37. A dead time in this town if any existed. Sorrel had said he avoided the heat of the day. He would go in, snoop for half an hour, then leave. And he would keep his ears attentive for any tires or footfalls. In this stillness, that should be manageable.

  It was not fear of the man, but if interaction between them could be minimized it would benefit them both. For now, at least.

  Retrieving his shovel from the trunk, Brad waded out into the grass. The brilliance of the sun brought tears. When he reached the sliver
of shade beneath the front wall, he pulled his shirt collar up and wiped the sweat from his nose so his glasses would not slip down. The little door to the interior was there, but he decided to first walk the perimeter.

  Nothing unusual presented itself during his hike down the long southern wall. At the corner, he paused to snap a photo of the decaying roofline against the bleached-out sky.

  As he passed along the rear wall, however, an oddity appeared near the center of the façade. The outline of a doorway, much larger than the one on the far side of the building, had been filled in with a paler shade of brick. What was now the back of the building, he realized, had in a distant decade been its front. Carts mounded high with cotton would have passed through this door, coming in from the fields up Angel’s Landing way.

  Now, graffiti filled the space as if it were a canvas; writhing, twisting shapes that sprouted from ground level. No words, just tangled, slashing lines and spray-painted circles. Dropping the shovel, Brad raised the phone and backed into the weeds a little way to snap a picture.

  He frowned at the wall through the viewfinder.

  It was strange that the tag artists had limited themselves to that one section of the building. The paint wove its way back and forth up the doorway. There was only one unpainted area, a spot on the right side of the doorway, just visible above the high grass. It wasn’t brick. It was a slab of stone.

  Lowering the phone, he moved back to the wall, crouching, tracing his fingers over the weatherworn stone. Markings etched its surface. Letters. But the contours were eaten away. The inscription was illegible.

  Huffing, he sat back and dropped his phone. Roots popped as he ripped up a large grass clump. Digging earth from the clod, he smeared it across the stone’s face. His fingertips burned as he rubbed dirt into the crevices of the lettering. Gradually, words emerged.

  Adamah Cotton Mill

  Est. 1842

  D. DeWitt

  “Darrin,” he muttered. “Darrin DeWitt.” So all this went back at least 175 years.

  The Lenoir Cotton Mill had been built around the same time in another part of the state. Destroyed by fire in the 1990s, its remnant was now a museum to old industry. This place out in the silence, far from any traveled road, forgotten, was remarkably preserved. Sorrel’s plans for it must run along similar lines. Salvage it from the waves of weeds; bring back the people.

  He tried to rub the dirt from his fingers, but he found it reluctant to leave. He took the shovel and proceeded around the building, detouring the collapsed remains of the old chimney. On the town side once more, he proceeded along the wall to the crouched little entrance and ducked inside.

  Lethargic heat occupied the close corridor. A memory flashed of moving down the silent hallway in the mildewed house near Interstate 24 where the “Scarlet Seven Miles” family was held during their final days, where the sound of weeping seemed to have stained the walls.

  Quickly, Brad pushed away the memory and proceeded to the main room.

  The space was just as chasmal as it had been in the dark. The dirt floor stretched out long and dim before suddenly brightening halfway across the room where the upper levels had fallen in.

  No trace of the old floor remained. Perhaps there had never been a floor. Perhaps the plodding workers’ feet and the clattering cacophony of the machines had thrummed uninterrupted deep into the earth.

  Brad stopped at the center of the room, in the twilit space where sunlight blasted down ahead and shade hung thick behind. This was where Sorrel had stood.

  Crouching again, he touched the floor, gently, like it was the hide of a slumbering beast. The sheriff had watered and swept the floor to make it match the rest. Which meant the floor had been disturbed.

  Dug up.

  Raising his eyes, he squinted at the grassy sunlit yard that made up the second half of the mill. There were naked oval patches of dirt in the grass, each about five feet long, the size of a bathtub. There were dozens of them, spreading all the way back to the wall.

  Brad snapped a picture of the array. The grass had been cultivated or worn that way for a purpose. He picked up the shovel. It was time to uncover the cause.

  The edge of the blade bit into the shaded ground. He placed one foot on the shovel’s neck and prepared to hoist his weight onto the blade when a dull clank skipped around him off the walls.

  Startled, he stumbled off the shovel.

  The sound came again, from behind him.

  Rotating around the shovel, he examined the recesses of the mill.

  A figure in the doorway. A woman watching.

  Not a woman, a girl, unnaturally tall. The one from the bridge in the dark. Harlow.

  She wore jeans, a tie-dyed T-shirt, and green flip-flops. Yellow-

  white hair was held back by a dirty sweatband. She held a two-gallon bucket in her right hand. It clanked against the wall as she stepped through the doorway. A soft splash followed.

  She was bringing water.

  Brad stared at her. She stared back. Then she took her left hand from the wall and stretched it toward him. Her fingers twitched.

  As he watched her next movements, his lips parted.

  Her hand returned to the wall. She pushed it across the brick, following it along the wall into the corner of the room. In the corner, the hand slipped onto the next wall. Again, she followed it, walking steadily, bucket locked in her right hand. Occasionally, water sloshed over its edge.

  When she reached sunlight, she stopped. She was directly parallel to Brad. A ninety-degree turn brought them facing. Harlow walked directly toward him, deliberately placing one foot before the other, her mouth opening and closing like a drowning fish.

  Brad’s toes clenched inside his shoes. Those eyes were impossibly large and white. But they looked through him, past him, at nothing.

  Her gasping mouth was forming numbers, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.

  Gripping the shovel, Brad held himself in place. She’s blind. And she’s counting toward this exact spot.

  Abruptly, Harlow stopped ten feet away. Her mouth stilled. She sank to her knees. The bucket clanked down beside her. Her head remained up. Those too-large eyes stared at him as both hands reached for the ground. Something was wrong with those eyes besides their blindness.

  A smile spread across her face as she leaned forward and drilled her fingers into the ground. Dragging her fingers back toward her body, she raked deep furrows in the dirt. She repeated the action. And then again, her hands widening, clawing at a larger swath of ground, like a huge, flightless bird preparing her nest.

  Once the ground had been sufficiently wounded, her dirty hands fumbled for the bucket. She slowly poured the water across the ground. It pooled on the hard surface and flowed in dark tentacles into the gashes.

  Dropping the empty bucket, the girl plunged her hands back into the mess, smearing the dampness into a wet lather, until the ground wrinkled around her fingers. Her head lolled back as she worked, her face slightly contorted, the skin around her blank eyes twitching.

  The air left Brad as he realized what was wrong with her eyes. The eyelids were missing. Cut away. Only ragged fringes remained to hold the opaque pebbles in place.

  Very gently, he lay down the shovel and drew his phone from his breast pocket. Tapping the red camera button, he filmed even as loathing gripped him.

  She was hurt. She needed help. She was a child.

  He froze as her hands stilled and the squelching sound of mud ceased. She sat, legs tucked beneath her, head down. But not entirely still; she trembled.

  Then she lifted her hands, each dripping mud, and pressed them into her eyes. Dark water snaked down her arms and stained her shirt. Breath hissed through her teeth as she pushed the mud into her sockets. Her roving eyeballs were now smeared dark.

  Bile rose in Brad’s throat. His teeth gnawed the knuckles of his free
hand even as he held the camera toward her. The killer in “Scarlett, Seven Miles” had photographed the kidnapped family’s faces before hauling them, bound, onto the interstate. Southern Gothic had rushed to publish them. His nausea hadn’t abated for months. Why was he recording this?

  After half a minute, she stopped. She dropped her hands. They lay in the mud puddle, palms up. Her head drifted. Slow, black tears oozed down her cheeks.

  Brad dropped the phone. It smacked the earth.

  The girl looked up. Then she reared away from the ground. “Who’s there?”

  Brad stumbled to his feet. “It’s Bradley Ellison. The guy from the house.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Just came to have a look at the place. I’m . . . I’m sorry if I disturbed you.”

  She wavered in the mud. “You came with her, didn’t you?”

  “Who?”

  “Her. Is she here now?” Her arms extended toward him once more.

  Jennifer? “No . . . ”

  “I dreamed of you.” The mud was streaking away, leaving her eyes yellow. Her voice calmed to a lilt, spiraling like a falling leaf. “Both of you. I dreamed that you came out of the forest and crossed the bridge to Three Summers. She led the way in a white dress, and you followed, wearing glasses without lenses. Do you really wear glasses?”

  “I do.”

  “I’m glad you’re here.” The corners of Harlow’s mouth lifted, the dirty tear marks on her cheeks bending out of shape. “I hope soon more will come.”

  “Is there a reason they would?” He glanced at the phone. If it was still recording, he would at least have audio. Again, disgust punched him. How often had he swooped in, scooped up testimony, and left the victims to rot without another thought?

  She’s just a kid. A child.

  “They’ll come because of you,” Harlow said. Seeming to read his bewilderment, she added, “You don’t understand it yet? I don’t really either. But soon, maybe. Soon.”

  He hesitated. “I want to understand. That’s why I’m here. Why are you here?”

  “For my old man.”