The House of Dust

by Noah Broyles

  For half a minute, the tires hummed. Then a humming sound began in the passenger seat.

  She looked at the boy. He was staring straight into the vinyl dashboard. Saliva flowed down his chin and formed a dangling cord. A mounting moan issued from his parted jaws.

  “It’s okay. We’re going far away.” She looked away to guide the car around a bend, then back. No change. Fixed eyes and jaws. Cry transforming to a gurgling wail.

  He’s becoming like the cat.

  Outside, a slouching steeple jutted above the treetops. A moment later, a white church flashed by, sitting in a clearing out toward the river.

  God’s house, Grandmama would say. Maybe it had a phone. She could call Walt now. But they’d already driven past. Too late. She couldn’t go back. Couldn’t waver.

  The moaning broke off. The boy sat up, spine straight. He peered out the windshield. But he did it very oddly, head back, looking down his nose. Then his lower lip jutted forward. The panting returned.

  With each breath, though, it became shallower. With each breath, she could hear more saliva building up in his windpipe, pooling, could see his throat straining as if he were drowning. Or being strangled. As if a noose were stretched between his neck and an anchor back in Three Summers. Each passing foot was pulling it tighter. Killing him.

  “What is it, Roy? Hey.” One hand left the wheel and reached for him. “Take it easy. Take it—”

  His head pivoted.

  His arched body twisted toward her even as his left hand reached back. His eyelids retracted into his sockets, and his eyes were goldfish bowls of black water. His throat clenched, sucking in a desperate breath as his hand fumbled behind, reaching for the door handle.

  Her voice was dead. She tried to say, “Don’t touch that,” but it withered.

  His lips rolled away from his teeth and his mouth opened, cavernous. The air inflow stopped for a split second. Then he screamed.

  The sound knifed through her eardrums.

  Her foot found the brakes. She reached for him, trying to make him stop, but he recoiled, and his hand tightened on the door handle. The door opened. Engine noise came in and mixed with his scream and filled the car.

  The vehicle lurched.

  The forest was a hot green blur. Except for just ahead. There the ground dipped, and a black hole opened up, and the road rushed into it.

  Missy swerved. The tires bucked. She looked ahead for a split second and when she looked back the boy was sliding over the edge of the seat, out the open door. A cry broke through her teeth as the body vanished.

  Missy threw herself forward, bearing all her weight on the brakes. She felt the land grow rough and rise beneath the tires. Her head bent toward the wheel, her body bracing as the car slid to a stop. The passenger door quivered like a broken wing. Gravel dust floated in.

  Flinging her own door open, Missy spilled out. The car had diverted onto an unpaved track. The road lay two dozen feet back. Stumblingly, she descended toward it.

  She hadn’t felt him under the tires. And she hadn’t been going that fast. He’s fine. But where was he?

  A mourning dove cooed in the trees. Mounds of honeysuckle grew around the mouth of a tunnel. No sound of cars. No cries or snapping sticks in the forest.

  “Roy?” Her voice was mangled.

  No response. She scanned the road a second time in both directions.

  There. Movement in the tunnel.

  She approached the entrance. Broken cement abraded her bare feet. The underground passage breathed on her with gritty coolness as she stepped into its shadow.

  Yes. There he was, visible against the light from the other end. Standing up at least. Hadn’t gotten far at all. Strangely, he was facing her direction. He was looking at her. His face was scrunched up, on the brink of tears. She approached carefully.

  “Roy!” Then more softly, “Hey.” Bits of old busted glass strewn across the pavement bit her soles. She ignored it, raising her arms. “Hey.”

  His head began to shake as she approached.

  “I won’t hurt you.” Blood was soaking through the right knee of his jeans. His palms were shredded from the fall. “Let’s go back to the car, huh?”

  With each step, the headshaking grew faster. The saliva pendulumed from his chin.

  “What is it?” She was a dozen feet from him.

  Roy raised a crooked finger and pointed at her.

  “What?”

  In an echoed whisper, he said, “There’s something behind you.”

  Missy stopped. He wasn’t pointing at her. He was pointing just past her, to something over her left shoulder. But there had been no one on the road, and she had heard no one come out of the woods. “There’s nothing there, Roy.” She continued forward. “Don’t be scared. We’re alone.”

  “Don’t! Don’t come closer. It’s following you. It’s right behind you.”

  She knelt down just a couple feet from him. “Roy, we need to get back in the car.”

  His chin jerked. “It was in the car. Sitting behind you.”

  “There wasn’t anyone in the car.”

  “It was reaching around your seat, trying to get me.” His arm shuddered. “Like it is now. It’s leaning down. Its head is right next to yours.”

  A chill stroked her neck.

  “No! There’s nothing—”

  Glass crunched behind her.

  Missy shot to her feet and turned. Something dressed in black was approaching. Something small, walking with a slight crouch. Her spine hardened and her fists closed. It was a man, she saw now, with a shaved head and wide ears. A tightlipped smile spread across his thin face as he crept closer through the gloom.

  “Hello, there,” the man said.

  “Hello.”

  “What are you running from?”

  “Nothing.” Missy moved to shelter Roy as the man edged to look around her.

  He caught a glimpse anyway. “Boy’s hurt, isn’t he?”

  “I’ll take care of him.”

  “You’re hurt, too.”

  “I’m fine.”

  The man had stopped ten feet off.

  “You can go on,” she told him. “We don’t need your help.”

  The man tilted his head. Then he fell to one knee and began untying his shoes. The laces hissed in the silence. Missy reached back for Roy’s hand. The boy did not flinch at her touch.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  “At least take my shoes, since you have none.”

  She glanced down. Her filthy feet against the concrete, her clothes smeared with dirt, sweat stains beneath her armpits, and hair hanging around her face. He must know what was happening here. He was trying to stall her. So they could come.

  “We have to go,” she said.

  She drew Roy forward quickly, giving the stranger a wide berth.

  The man paused and watched them pass. “Do you know where you’re going?”

  Walt, she thought, but didn’t reply. Instead, she murmured to Roy, “Let’s go to the car. We’ll get help. We’ll be fine.”

  “The thing went away,” he whispered. “But it will come back.”

  “No, no,” she hushed.

  When they reached daylight, she looked back. The man wasn’t following. He was standing in the middle of the tunnel, one shoe off, watching them go.

  21

  Anger smoldered inside me over the girl who had blinded herself. It was one thing to travel the underside of the South and see abused adults: Hilary Wegner from Serene Flats with her broken mind, the Tampa University hiking party’s severed ears, even the burnt survivors of the New Horizon oil rig. But it was another thing to see a child in such condition. How had she been allowed to wander alone, to harm herself? I needed answers.

  —“The House of Dust”

  Southe
rn Gothic

  Rough pavement changed to gravel as Brad turned off Simmons Pike and followed the drive up to the doors of Simmons Creek Baptist Church.

  Slamming the car door, he squinted toward the vine-strangled structure. The leaves looked especially lush in the afternoon sun. Through the quiet, a melodious singing hooked his ear. He followed it toward the building and then around the heap of torn-up flooring that he had noticed last time, at the southwest corner. The kudzu had progressed from that initial tendril on Sunday; now dozens of fingers wrapped around the pile of boards.

  A frail, balding man in black dress pants and a white undershirt stood atop a ladder positioned between two windows. He was tearing down ragged kudzu vines, dropping them in a pile on the ground.

  The window nearby was open, and fuzzy voices were coming from within, frail remnants of a radio transmission: Visions of rapture now burst on my sight; angels, descending, bring from above echoes of mercy, whispers of love.

  Brad approached the base of the ladder, dragging his feet through the grass to try to attract the man’s attention. Gaining no notice, he cleared his throat and called up, “Good afternoon, sir.”

  The man jerked and the ladder trembled. His head strained over a hunched shoulder and deep-set eyes focused on Brad, then narrowed. Totteringly, he descended the ladder. His frown became a smile and he stuck out a green-stained hand. Then, thinking better of it, he clasped both behind his back. “I’m sorry. Been waging war against this kudzu since 1963. I tell you, it grows a mile a minute.” His voice was parched.

  Brad mustered a smile. “It looks like you’re putting up a valiant effort.”

  “It only wants the structure, not the lawn. Which I suppose I should be thankful for, because you can see how well I’ve been doing on that count.” The man leaned back a bit, the small talk seemingly an excuse to scrutinize Brad.

  Brad pretended not to notice, nodding wry sympathy at the man’s words and glancing up at the building. “Some of your congregants should be out helping you. The kids could probably use a summertime job.”

  The older man’s gaze broke off. He rotated and retrieved a cloth from one of the ladder’s rungs and mopped his face. With his back turned, Brad studied the way his neck jutted forward and his shoulders sloped precipitously beneath his sweaty T-shirt. He noticed his hand grip the ladder as he replaced the rag, as if fortifying himself.

  Then the man turned back around and they both resumed smiles.

  “You’re the pastor? Pastor Burger?”

  “And you’re the writer, Bradley Ellison. I’ve been expecting you.”

  “Speaking of kids, there’s one I wanted to ask you about. I’m . . . very concerned about her. Named Harlow? I don’t know her last name.”

  “Harlow is her last name. Her mother, Susan, is buried out there.” The man waved a slender arm toward the northern edge of the graveyard, near the riverbank. “All the recent arrivals are out there.”

  Brad looked across the high grass toward the plots. “That’s interesting. Her father, from what I was able to gather, is buried beneath the floor of the old Adamah Cotton Mill.”

  The man’s arm fell. His voice did, too. “Yes. I imagine he is.”

  “How recently did her mother die?”

  “I’m ashamed to say I can’t recall exactly. My mind is not what it once was. But we can look.”

  He beckoned, and they left the mowed grass around the church, wading through weeds toward the graves.

  “I bring it up because she seems to be taking the losses very hard. She’s harming herself. I’ve also found her out alone at night, standing in the road. As far as I’ve been able to tell, there’s no one to take care of her.” He remembered his drive through Three Summers on Saturday night, the strange activity of its people. “I was hoping you might have some insight on her condition.”

  “It’s the cult,” Burger said.

  Something about the man’s bluntness set him at ease. He felt free to be blunt in return. “Do you mind if I record?”

  A moment’s hesitation, eyes frozen, considering. Then a quick jerk of his head. “Not at all.”

  Brad folded his arms, phone unobtrusive in the crook of his elbow. “You mean the cult of Adamah?”

  “The cult of the Queen of Hearts.”

  Jezebel Irons had mentioned that name on Sunday, as they stood on the far side of the river at the waste plant. It was a title for Marilyn Britain, or Missy, as her true name was. Someone with a special connection to Adamah.

  “Adamah may be its root,” the pastor continued, “but the Queen of Hearts is its flower. And the suffering of the Harlow child is part of its bitter fruit.”

  They had reached the new graves. There were five of them, each already crowded with weeds, rough headstones sunken in the soft reddish soil.

  Burger’s wavering hand moved across them. “2017. Susan the last, in November. Beau the first, in March. None before.”

  Brad frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean before that, no bodies had been laid to rest here since 1971. And even then, it was not a town native.” Turning, he nodded toward the far side of the simmering cemetery, near the road. “A man was driving drunk down the pike and wrecked going through the tunnel under the railroad.”

  Brad looked between the distant spot and the new graves and considered Burger’s claim about the Queen of Hearts cult. It did not mesh. As if the pastor had rehearsed this presentation but was delivering the pieces in jumbled order.

  Slowly, Brad asked, “The people buried here . . . how many of them have you actually witnessed being put in the ground?”

  “Seventeen. Not counting Missy Holiday. Or Marilyn, as she introduced herself to me.”

  “And how many of those were exhumed?”

  A sideways glance. “You were the one who discovered her absence, yes? None besides her were taken. She was the Queen, though, so I should have been more cautious of her body.”

  As if by silent agreement, they moved toward the center of the yard, toward her grave. Brad walked gradually to keep pace with the man. The grass whispered around their knees.

  “You say that, besides 2017, no one has been buried here since 1971. Do you have an explanation for that?”

  “The cult,” Burger repeated. His lips disappeared between his teeth. “It follows a pattern. A cycle. Haven’t you asked yourself why there are no graves in Three Summers?”

  Brad hesitated. “I assumed this was the site.”

  “It was for some. For those who died between the cycles and were less bound by Adamah’s influence. Or for those who were placed here as cover. Or for those like the man in the wreck, who happened to die near here, unclaimed. But look around: there isn’t enough room here for two centuries of death.”

  Peering at the passing headstones, Brad remembered the slave shroud photos from the library, and the rough map charting the unmarked graves they had been condemned to. Given their status in life, mistreatment in death seemed almost a given. But had the practice extended past the antebellum years, and to other groups?

  “So Harlow’s father being buried in the mill is not the exception,” Brad surmised.

  “Not outside of a cycle. Outside of a cycle, they will go to certain sites that they consider sacred, places dedicated to Adamah. But inside the cycles, when there is a Queen to give permission, they all wish to be buried on the island, because that is her home.”

  “But those five back there died in 2017, when Marilyn Britain was still alive.”

  “In the waning years of a cycle, a Queen is often not herself.” Burger hesitated. Sweat beads had reformed on his brow. “Despite my years here, I have not been able to learn the exact history. I know that before Missy, there was a woman named Miriam Larkin whose death was rather strange.”

  Again he remembered the photos from the library: the body disintegrating
on the table. “What are these cycles exactly?”

  “Periods of waxing and waning influence by the woman who occupies the house on Angel’s Landing.”

  Once more, something about the answer struck him as rehearsed. How long had this man waited to have this conversation?

  “And what happens when there is no Queen? No influence?”

  Burger shook his head. “Fractured influence, weakened, sprouting from many places. People feel great weariness. They feel untethered. Perhaps you noticed a certain friction in Three Summers since arriving.”

  “And how was it when you arrived?”

  “Even greater strife. That was 1960. It had been twenty years since the last Queen died. A couple had briefly lived in the house sometime in the forties and died suddenly. Destroyed by Satan for resisting the pull to become part of the cycle. Then when I came, men were perishing in the mine at a rapid rate. Their bodies surround us now.”

  They stopped to examine the hunched little stones rising around their feet. “Were they buried like her?” Brad asked. “No casket?”

  “No. They kept a supply of pinewood caskets down at the hospital. When a poor soul died over there, they’d load them in a box. If there was no family that wanted them back—and most times there was not—then they would be laid to rest here. This one, for instance. Paul Arterburn.”

  “1935 to 1962,” Brad read.

  “He’d be my age, were he still alive,” Burger mused. Shaking his head, he looked up, then motioned to the walnut trees shouldering the yard. “The first sleepers are in the woods. A few Union soldiers, I believe, although the markers are so worn it’s hard to say.”

  They continued walking, and Brad studied the names of the stones they passed, trying to piece together what the pastor had told him. Jacob Wiersbe, crusted in lichen; Oswald Burns, fallen down; Floyd Stringfield, wrapped in Johnsongrass.

  For a second, he thought he saw another name: Martin Parker Ellison. His brow clinched. That name, cut in stone, was long ago and far away. He’d returned to the cemetery where it stood just once, a month after the funeral. Headphones on, he’d stood shivering in the February cold, examining the marble slab his mom would never have paid for, even though the dead had willed her all his money. The company had paid for it. To show how sorry they were for the accident.