The House of Dust

by Noah Broyles

  “Adamah,” he muttered. “Here you are again.” He snapped a picture.

  The doors were also plated with green brass, the large rectangular glass panes they had once contained replaced by plexiglass held with screws. Brad placed his hand against the right-side door. Heavily, it scraped open. No lock? No wire or chains? Did people still visit the place? He hung back for a moment, then slipped into the moldy dimness and waited near the threshold for his eyes to adjust.

  They did, slowly, and the hospital’s foyer became visible.

  It was a curious setup. Metal staircases to the right and left, and three walls in front that reached only halfway to the bare rafter ceiling. Beyond this little box, he guessed, was the hospital’s main holding room. A door stood in the wall directly opposite, wide enough to admit a stretcher. Buttressing the door were two metal-topped desks, and in the corners behind these desks were clusters of file cabinets.

  He crossed the room and crouched down, finding that the cabinets, like the building, were unlocked. He drew open the bottom drawer of the first one with a dry rasp. White-gray light from the outer ward drained over the foyer walls, highlighting dust that rose as he brushed his fingers across the bank of entombed documents.

  He began digging.

  Most of the papers were patient profiles. They gave a date, a name, body characteristics, and a brief summary of the medical condition upon admittance. Stapled to each profile sheet were various receipts detailing drugs administered along with dosage, and procedures performed along with time to complete. The most recent of these sheets was in the very back of the drawer: an almost untouched paper dated March 23, 1997. A woman named Mary Lasney had been admitted with a broken wrist. But an X had been drawn across the page with a black pen.

  Brad frowned and logged the sheet with his camera. Moving up to the next drawer, he found that, in jumbled fashion, the records were traveling back in time. The back of the drawer reached 1979. Men were being admitted regularly during this period. Broken appendages and head trauma were common; lung problems were most common. He nodded as he realized why.

  The mine across the river. The Adamah Mine, up and running and under the ownership of the woman called Marilyn Britain. He tipped his head back for a moment, trying to recall the convoluted path of ownership. The original company had been thrown out by a state prosecutor for unsafe work conditions in . . . 1962? His fingers trembled as he moved to the top drawer. Similar records as in the other drawers, ending in 1965.

  Sliding the drawer shut, he moved to the next cabinet. He squatted and reached for the handle, but just an inch short of it, his fingers froze.

  A heavy sound like a metal rod striking wood, slow and laborious, broke out on the floor above. It echoed through the rafters from a stationary point. Not footsteps. Perhaps a window, stirred by late-

  morning wind? After ten seconds, it stopped.

  Brad held his breath and counted back the same amount of time, then wrapped his fingers around the handle and pulled out the drawer.

  Even in this light, the sudden change was immediately discernible. Instead of bundles of limp white papers crammed into place, this drawer contained a block of crisp yellow pages about an inch thick.

  Drawing the stack out, he laid it on the floor. Radiance spilled across neat lines of text as he turned on the phone’s flashlight. A typewriter had been used to draw up the forms. Once again, names and body features were listed, but so were birthplaces. Cities and towns passed beneath his fingertips: Knoxville, Cookeville, Nashville, Maryville, Newport, Bristol, Jefferson City. Places outside of Tennessee, too, in Alabama and Georgia and North Carolina. None of the men were Three Summers natives.

  Again, he remembered the Martlet investigation, the time spent piecing together the list of names, prostitutes from across Louisiana and Alabama and Mississippi who had suddenly gone missing, no trace. Few details available on any of them, occasionally a sallow photograph.

  Faceless victims. As here, where birth dates were given—and death dates.

  These were death certificates.

  Causes of death were listed, each eerily identical: suffocation. In one instance, the secretary had added a colorful addendum: “Quenched by earth’s unremitting thirst.”

  The bang of the metal rod returned. Louder.

  The flashlight jarred in Brad’s hand. He shut it off. The sound clattered on above, lasting much longer this time. Using it as cover, he gathered up the rustling papers. He held them close and stood up. Stepping around the desk, he went to the doorway of the foyer and looked out into the deepness of the hospital’s main hall.

  No windows graced the back wall, and only the frontal ones gathered any of the light from the aging afternoon. Both right and left, rows and rows of bed frames, only half of them clothed with mattresses, extended across a floor of fractured gray tiles.

  His gaze walked the ceiling, trying to pen the source of the clunking sound.

  The noise stilled.

  If it was a person, why hadn’t they come down to confront him? He adjusted his grip on the papers and rotated, walking back toward the entrance. He chose the right-hand set of steps and pushed his glasses into place before ascending.

  The metal steps were blessedly quiet beneath his feet. The same could not be said of the wooden floor at the top. At the first shrill creak beneath his weight, he jolted back and retreated down a step, turning his head while sweat traveled from his palm onto the papers.

  No rapidly approaching figures appeared, though. No one in sight at all. No sound, even, except for a very faint buzz, traceable to the sagging ceiling fans running down the middle of the hall, grudgingly churning the dead air. Someone had left them running.

  Feathery light came in through the front windows and touched more beds, seventy-five at least. All with mattresses and ash-

  colored sheets. All made up and waiting. Brad drew out his phone and aimed it down the hall from where he was standing on the step, lining up a nice shot of pale cots beneath milky windows.

  He didn’t take the picture. In the far background of the shot, something disturbed the smooth surface of one of the beds. As he lowered the phone, several other beds at the southern end of the room—two dozen, perhaps—drew his focus. They were rumpled. Something lay beneath their top sheets.

  Shrouded forms. The unmistakable outline of two peaks, nose and toes, separated by a long gently sloping valley. Bodies.

  Brad’s pupils itched as he refused to blink. He left the stairs. Memories of the Martlet Mall circled in his mind: the wide, dim hall and the lost women leaning in shop windows, well dressed and dead.

  The aisle between the cots was suddenly a thousand feet long. Were they sick? Sleeping? Each was totally covered. And none of the covers stirred. His nostrils flared: no smell of decay. Just dust.

  The click of each step ricocheted off the walls as Brad advanced toward the occupied beds. Thin-armed radiance reached around him, blinding as he passed each window, folding across the veiled shape of the nearest body as he closed in on the beds. Should he leave? He wasn’t a doctor; he had no business disturbing a patient in bed.

  If this is still a patient. How could it be? This hospital had clearly been abandoned long ago.

  Keeping his phone raised, he pressed record on the camera app and stepped out of the aisle. He stopped beside the first bed. Through the lens, his hand looked very scrawny. For a heartbeat, he filmed it hovering above that splotchy, mildewed sheet. Then he pulled it back.

  A bald head. Cavernous eyes. Gasping jaws set with grimy pebble teeth. Inch after inch of a dusty, crumbling reddish body revealed as he drew the coverlet back. In places, the stuff stuck to the sheet and broke off from the body in clumps; what remained lost its fragile cohesion and disintegrated to reveal yellow bone.

  At the foot of the bed, Brad let the coverlet fall.

  The thing lay alone in the fresh light. A corp
se, a naked man, coated long ago in wet clay. His hair was withered. His straining mouth was clogged with dirt, quelling any thought he might still be alive.

  The phone shook as he moved to the next bed and the next bed, pulling back the covers from each faceless form. He should stop. He should leave. He should report this. He’d waited until he had all the info he needed on the mall’s deceased owner to report the embalmed bodies he’d found inside the Martlet, and so he’d faced legal consequences; he should remember that.

  Instead, the book in the basement came rushing back, The Utterances: A record of the things spoken by those anointed with Adamah. The words came, too, as if from the withered mouths around him, returned.

  It’s so dark.

  The air just trickles down here.

  How long is its arm?

  It’s coming through the cracks in the boards.

  The floor is standing up.

  All that, dated from the hot months of 1877. And then the September letter that detailed the death of Dr. McCloud at the hands of people smeared in dark paint.

  Clay. Wet, sucking earth.

  All the bodies in front of him were gaping, drowned by dirt. Some retained thin vestiges of hair. Could these be the people from that distant summer, preserved somehow? Or had the practice continued into recent years? Seen as beneficial, or medicinal, or—

  He reached the final bed and tugged back the sheet and the body lunged at him. A scream like tearing paper scorched his ears. Grasping hands seized his right sleeve.

  Pounding metal shook the borders.

  One of the bed’s legs was shorter than the others. It banged against the floor as the writhing creature wrestled with his arm. The cell phone slipped from his captured hand. It landed amid the sheets. The thing released him and scooped it up.

  Not thing.

  It was a white-haired girl. Pale arms and legs, unnaturally long, whipping about. The billowing reek of excrement searing his nose as he wrenched the phone free from the weaker hands.

  “Not come to finish it?” the girl roared as Brad backed away. “I can’t wait forever! They’ll come through the floor! Even up here they’ll come through the floooorrrrrr!”

  The last part tumbled abruptly into a gentle purr. The flapping form stilled; the stretched face relaxed. Shriveled, lidless eyes stared at him. Brad stopped ten feet from the bed. Air rushed through his slack lips. “Harlow,” he said. The girl from the bridge, from the mill. “Harlow.”

  She was just a kid, a little girl. Tied up. Left alone. What had happened to her since the mill? What had this place done to her? He started to approach.

  Again rage contorted her face and she coughed out words: “Come to gloat?” Tilting her head back, she pushed out a high, thin scream and gyrated in the moldy sheets.

  Bile ravaged his throat as he backed away. The papers stuffed under his arm absorbed sweat. The phone grew hot in his hand as he squeezed. Sorrel had done this. And so had he, by not confronting Sorrel about her condition.

  Turning, he stalked up the aisle between the beds. As the screams followed him, he broke into a run. He tried to pound them from his ears on the stairs. He tried to scatter them in the gravel as he fled down the drive between the magnolias.

  The gate at the end was unlocked. He heaved it open and strode through the high grass to the vine-wrapped sheriff’s office. The parking lot was empty. He tried the door anyway and rammed his shoulder against it when it refused to open. Turning away, he jabbed through his phone contacts, searching for the sheriff. At that moment, the phone vibrated. Jennifer was calling.

  Briskly, he tapped answer. “Jen, I—”

  “You should get back here, Brad.” A parched voice. Sorrel’s voice.

  His tone leapt. “Why do you have my fiancée’s phone?”

  “I’m at the house. I had to contact you. It’s her—you better come.”

  Jennifer.

  He started walking.

  Through a closing throat, he said, “I’m coming.” Jamming the phone into his pocket, he gripped the death records from the hospital and ran up the western edge of town toward the grocery store and the power substation where he’d left his car. The muggy afternoon air burned cold in his lungs.

  24

  The cicadas were blaring when I leapt from my car in the house’s clearing, and in that instant a question and realization collided in my mind and shook me. Dr. McDowell on that first day had said he never heard the insects sing out here. They had started the night we moved in.

  —“The House of Dust”

  Southern Gothic

  The sheriff’s car stood parked in the center of the clearing. Brad threw the Accord door shut and strode toward it. A shout broke through the brushy wall of the woods. “Brad? Are you there?” It was Sorrel’s voice, rough, but elevated to something approaching panic.

  He ran. Twigs popped as he dashed into the woods. Holly branches dragged at his shirt. Sunlight particlized in the canopy, drifting hazy between the tree trunks. Sticks hooked his pant legs. Then the foliage parted and he pounded into a clearing centered by a vast, rising oak.

  Sorrel stood beneath the tree, coat off, sleeves rolled back, gripping a rope that looped over a jutting branch. A noose dangled at the end, four feet above the ground.

  Brad stumbled to a stop, taking it in and then making a quick turn to survey the rest of the area. He looked at the sheriff. “Jennifer?”

  Before the man could reply, a trill of birdsong penetrated the clearing. It landed in his ears as human laughter. Very rapid, as if released from behind a cork. Something rare, but something he recognized. Something he had heard last Saturday night as Jennifer struggled from sleep.

  Again, his head jerked around. But it wasn’t coming from the trees. It was coming out of the ground.

  “Where is she!”

  Sorrel glared at the noose. “She used the old rope to go down the hole.”

  Brad stepped forward. Hole?

  Then he saw it, just below the place where the noose dangled. A narrow chasm opening between two of the oak’s huge roots. Charging forward, he slammed onto his knees and looked into the pit.

  Pale light drained down the sheer sides and landed on Jennifer’s body twenty feet below. She was still in her pajamas. Her hair lay loose on the pit floor. And she was quivering.

  No. Laughing.

  A second peal rose up, bubbly, intoxicated.

  He felt his face constricting as he looked at Sorrel, but there was no hint of triumph or gloating in the man’s eyes. Instead, he nodded at the noose.

  Brad looked, too, then understood.

  Pulling the noose larger, he stepped into it. He cinched it tight below his hips and stepped to the edge. For a second, he flailed as the feeling of depth opened below him. There’s nothing down there except Jen. He eased off the edge.

  Sorrel staggered and braced himself as he let out the rope, lowering Brad into the pit.

  The cool, dampish musk of earth closed around him. The light diminished. His feet kicked the walls, releasing small dirt cataracts. The keening sound of the cicadas faded, replaced by the solemn silence of the deep ground.

  A third laugh rattled up around him before his feet touched bottom. Dropping to his knees, he gripped Jennifer’s shoulders. The muscles below her shirt knotted up. Her flesh was cold. Her hands flapped gently as he pulled her up against him. The fingernails were black with dirt.

  His eyes jumped to the floor where she had lain. It was scarred with furrows. She had been digging. Like in the garden. Only now there was nothing dead in sight. She was digging for herself. Digging toward something.

  Cold leached through his pants and spread through his legs. There’s nothing down here.

  His heart kicked harder as he leaned over her. “You’re getting out of here, honey.”

  A lilting murmur escaped her lips:
“I have to get closer.” She spoke with happy hopelessness. But her eyes were closed.

  Sleeping. Locked inside a dream.

  And if she came out of it here, it would only add to her instability.

  “Hush now.” Trembling, he folded her close and stood to give some slack to the rope before jerking on it. To yell would risk waking her. But nothing happened.

  The cold climbed his legs. What if Sorrel left them here? What if he had thrown Jennifer down here and tricked him into going in after her?

  Again, he jerked the rope.

  This time, it responded, tightening against his legs. Brad held her tight to keep from brushing the narrow walls. She groaned slightly but did not cry out as they were lifted. At the top, he grabbed the nearest root and dragged them both onto solid ground. Standing, he kicked off the rope.

  Sorrel stood a little way off, hands raw, chest heaving.

  “Is she all right?” he called.

  Brad kept his lips tight. Swiftly, he carried her through the branches and green dimness to the light of the clearing and the house. Climbing the stairs, he crossed the porch and jammed the door open and lurched through. He closed it behind them and leaned against it, hugging her.

  Jennifer stirred as he moved toward the stairs. Her head shifted and her eyes flickered.

  “Shhh,” Brad soothed.

  “No. It’s okay. I can stand.” She was awake.

  He let her down by the foot of the staircase. She looked at her clothes.

  “I guess I should clean up.”

  “You were—”

  “I know.”

  “You were asleep, Jen.”

  “I know. Finally, right?” She shrugged uncertainly. “And I feel fine. Good, actually. Rested. Maybe . . . maybe things will start to be fine again.”

  Turning, she carefully climbed the stairs.

  This was wrong. He’d longed for those words, but hearing them was wrong. Something had changed in her. Maybe the grief was at last relenting, but what had brought the change while she was sleeping? What had driven her out of the house and into the woods? Into a pit?