by Noah Broyles
“Jennifer.”
“Yes, Brad?”
“You didn’t—” He bit off the end.
Jennifer stopped halfway up the stairs and turned. She said softly, “How dare you.”
His jaw tightened. He gripped the scarred railing and climbed toward her.
“Please, roll up your sleeves.”
She didn’t blink. She waited for him to reach the step below her, then jerked back her sleeves and stuck out her thin arms. Unblemished.
“Here, check my feet, too. Or do you want me to undress? ’Cause there’s a thousand places I could stick a needle. Or maybe you want to shine your flashlight in my eyes, or go upstairs and go through my stuff, or check my phone ’cause maybe I’m texting a dealer!”
“Stop it, Jen.” He turned away.
“I slept. I didn’t dream about dead people for once. And if it takes lying in a hole to do that, fine. I feel good, Brad. No thanks to you. I thought we were supposed to support each other.”
Heaviness wound around Brad’s feet as he went down the stairs. He waited for voice and footfalls to retreat, then drew a breath and walked to the front door.
Outside, Sorrel stood at the bottom of the porch steps, facing away. Crossing the whining boards, Brad looked down at him.
The man didn’t turn. His voice was soft. “Is she all right?”
“Why did you come out here?”
“To check on you both. What happened to her?”
“What happened to your people? I went to the old hospital. Didn’t expect to find the living among the dead.”
The sheriff’s fingertips kneaded his lean biceps. “Harlow is confined for her own safety. She went in the old mine one time. Tried to swim down to the bottom of the river another. Looking for rest in the wrong places. That night at the mill? I was waiting for her. To try for the hundredth time to talk her out of all that.”
“She needs someone to take care of her!” He was jittery with adrenaline.
“That’s what I’m doing! And that’s what you should be doing with your fiancée. In a state like that, she could end up in Deep Creek, or in the river.”
“Jennifer’s fine.”
“I’m glad.” Rotating, Sorrel looked up at him. “I really am. And I hope you are, too, Brad. I hope you do everything you can to keep her that way.” He backed away a couple steps before turning and walking to his car.
After he was gone, Brad sat in one of the rockers. He swayed slowly and watched the dust settle.
25
I stayed with her for ten days.
We went places in that time: down to Lexington, to the library, to eat at a little place called Dan’s Café, to visit Pinoak Lake. About the middle of the following week, the seventeenth, I think, we drove west for about seventy miles, following the course of the Locust River. While we were out and the signal was strong, I tried again to call Richard Hettinga, but he didn’t answer.
Jennifer took everything in stride. She was very quiet, and would smile occasionally, but always seemed slightly anxious to return to the house. When I tried to speak of the past, though, I detected ripples. She had not completely healed. Deeper currents flowed beneath her placid face. And deeper currents flowed beneath the things I had discovered—a connection I could feel but not yet express.
—“The House of Dust”
Southern Gothic
During the night, Missy imagined that the bathroom floor softened, molding to fit her body. She imagined the dust on her feet closed the wounds she had inflicted while trying to remove it.
The illusion of comfort almost lulled her to sleep. Almost. She heard Walt come in around seven o’clock in the morning. She watched the dawn light pool on the tile and waited for him to come find her. Kiss her. Undress her. Comfort her.
He didn’t bother.
Around eight, she came out into the bedroom and found the boy huddled beside her nightstand, staring trance-like at the eyes painted above the hallway door. When she took him to the kitchen and offered him toast, he wouldn’t eat. She took him to the front porch, and they sat in the rocking chairs and listened to the ticking sounds of the morning bugs.
“So who are your parents?” she asked. “Where do you belong?”
He gazed at the trees, mouth slightly agape, shaking his head.
Missy rolled her lips together and looked at the trees, too. “I know what you mean.”
The boy couldn’t stay. Eventually, the sheriff would come back. Maybe today. But she couldn’t take him away, either; she couldn’t risk triggering a fit like the one he’d had in the car yesterday. The farther they went, the worse he’d become. There had to be a closer place of safety. Someone in this town who could help.
Leaning her head back, she stared at the underside of the upper porch. Walt. Would he help?
At noon, she stood outside the closed study door and listened to the stillness inside. She eased it open. The doors leading to the porch were wide. Walt sat in his chair, sprawled forward on his desk, asleep in the rising heat. Same way he’d spent weekends at the apartment, when they weren’t making love. Leaning down, she said gently, “Walt?”
He twitched. His eyes slitted. They were leaden. “I’m really tired, Missy.”
The stubble on his face was verging toward a beard. It wasn’t like him to be so unkempt. “Can you tell me where you went last night? With the sheriff?”
“Missy . . . ” He said it like a chore. His eyelids resealed.
Missy remained bent down, studying him. He didn’t seem tired. He seemed dazed. Hunching closer, she sniffed his breath. No alcohol. No sign of injury, either. Just sweat and the musk of dry mud. Still, he had been out all night with that sheriff. Maybe with others. Together in that awful town.
Her eyes stayed on him as she slid open the lower left desk drawer, took the Pontiac keys, and shut it again. She backed out of the study and closed the door.
Downstairs, they passed all the hideous wallpaper that needed ripping down and crossed the floorboards that needed shining. They went out to the car. The boy struggled a bit, but she forced him in. They had to try for help.
After crossing the clay-stained bridge, she buckled her seat belt. It immediately felt too constricting against her chest, so she unclipped it and flung it away. Her hands climbed up and down the wheel. In the passenger seat, the boy sat inert. As the speeding tires brought them closer to town, though, he grew restless. His left hand stiffened and began to thump against the center console. “I’m not taking you back to them,” she said.
At Adamah Road, she told him to lie down on the floorboard. He slithered beneath his seat belt and lay on the dirty carpet and drummed his hand. As they approached Simmons Pike, he began keening. Could he feel the presence of those trenches thrumming up from the ground? “We’re not going back,” she repeated.
Taking the turn hard, she drove west. They passed the lonely gray house and the field of trenches where she had found the boy. Soon the woods came back and hid the property. The road wiggled on into the wilderness. Then, just as it had yesterday, a gray-shingled steeple broke through the trees up ahead on the left.
The sight of it did not bring the cathartic flood she had hoped for. A smattering of the shingles on the spire’s peaked sides were missing; torn off, perhaps, by high wind, leaving the tar paper and, in places, the pale wood.
As she turned into the drive, the high grass of the churchyard crowded in around the car, coming right up to the edge of the gravel. Beyond, in a paint-peeling state of dejection, the holy house looked out at her arrival from windows with crooked-shutter eyelids.
No cars occupied the rounded gravel patch by the front steps, but tire tracks went off through the grass to a place behind the building. Missy stopped the car in the middle of the parking area and looked out her window at the cemetery. Trampling feet had cut paths between the forgotten headsto
nes to a more recent smear of red dirt. Had the person laid to rest been dead? Or bound, screaming until the dirt crowded into their mouth?
She blinked and remembered the boy. “Come on,” she said. “We’re here.”
Power lines drooping across the yard from the road buzzed softly as she helped him from the car. She brushed off his clothes and then looked down at herself and realized she was wearing slacks and an oversized T-shirt. Hardly church clothes. Taking his hand, she repeated, “Come on.”
The right side of the double doors was open, though the way it slumped on its hinges made it look more like an accident than an invitation. An acrid smell drifted out to meet them. It coated the insides of her nose and caused her to hesitate on the threshold. She glanced at Roy. He was not looking at the doorway, but over his shoulder at the graveyard.
Tightening her nostrils, she pulled him forward.
The church had no lobby or antechamber. When she stepped through the doors she was in the sanctuary. A portable radio sat behind the back pew, its antennas extended. The fuzzy voices of a 1940s choir rode in on waves of static. Their song accompanied her as she surveyed the room.
Are you washed? (are you washed?) In the blood? (in the blood?) In the soul-cleansing blood of the Lamb?
None of the lantern-like lights were on, but the windows allowed in a syrupy sort of light to highlight the cracked plaster walls. The pews were dusty. The air tasted oily.
Are your garments spotless? Are they white as snow? Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?
At the front, in the right corner, a side door was propped open with a floor fan. The machine hummed loudly. The air carried a sharp smell, almost like varnish. The floorboards up there were darker than the ones toward the rear, and gleaming. Someone was at work here, sanding and finishing.
Unease corkscrewed through her intestines. She looked down at the boy again. His chin still clutched his shoulder. This time, she looked back, too.
A figure in black was rising up in the doorway. A short man was climbing the steps, one thin arm clutching the railing, propelling him up. His head was sunk between vulture-like shoulders. His eyes, deep-set, were fixed on her. It was the man from yesterday. The stranger in the tunnel who offered her his shoes.
She had nowhere to go, so she retreated into the church. As he strode in, she backed up the aisle.
“Good afternoon,” the man thundered. A little smile twisted the corners of his mouth as he pursued. “I’m Mark Burger. I’m the pastor here at Simmons Creek. I’m glad you’re both safe.”
“We’re leaving,” Missy said. “We were just passing and saw the door opened so—but we’re leaving.”
“What were you looking for?”
“Oh, nothing.”
“Would you like to talk about it?”
She was at the head of the aisle now. The fresh varnish off the boards burned her throat, but she stopped and took a big gulp of it. This little man wasn’t what a minister should look like. A minister was the giant who had served the church Grandmama had made her go to. He had bent down, down to her, and looked at her through his thick yellowed glasses. He had smiled and remembered her name. “I hope to see you next week, Miss Missy. Remember you’re God’s special creation.” And that made her smile a little bit, because she imagined maybe it was true.
This man was too small. And he was wearing tattered work clothes. And his fingers were scuttling busily along the tops of his pockets as he stopped a few feet from her. But he was all there was.
“I . . . ” She took a breath. “Yes. Thank you.”
She followed him over the freshly varnished floor, up onto a dais and past the pulpit. Again, she noticed his shaved head and wondered if he might have been in the military. He led them to a row of chairs against the front wall. A big wooden cross hung from the wall, flanked on either side by a framed picture: one showed a pair of stone slabs marked with numbers; the other was of Jesus.
The pastor arranged two chairs opposite one for himself and sat down. The fan in the open doorway droned a dozen feet behind him.
Missy sat slowly. Roy stood behind his chair. When she tried to pull him around in front of it, he whined and she dropped her hand.
“This is where the choir sits,” she blurted.
Pastor Burger raised his pale eyebrows. “If we had one, yes, that’d be right.”
“My grandmama took me to church.” She added uselessly, “Well, sometimes.”
“But that was a while back?”
“Yes.”
He folded his busy hands. “What are your names?”
A breath. “I’m Marilyn. This is Roy.”
“And what has the Devil been doing for you today?”
“Oh. I’m not really here for me, to be honest. It’s him.” She motioned to Roy. “He needs . . . something. I don’t know any doctors close by, so I came here.” Jesus was frowning from the corner of her eye. “I mean—” But she couldn’t lie to him again, so she folded her hands in her baggy shirt.
“The child,” Burger said, ignoring her wording. “Is he yours?”
“No! He’s . . . ” Didn’t he know this community at all? “I think he’s an outcast or something.”
She looked at Roy. He was clutching the back of his chair, examining his knuckles.
“How did he come to your care?”
“I found him in trouble, sort of took him in.”
“Trouble.”
“Yes.” The shirt fabric strained against her fingers.
Ask him. Ask him. It clawed at her. Then, hot Atlanta Sundays with Grandmama again. Packed in the shuffling departure line. The giant bending down. Trust in the Lord, my dear.
Ask. Trust.
“Pastor, what I really wanted to talk to you about—and I guess you won’t think this is silly because you said it a minute ago—is . . . ”
Ask. Trust.
“. . . devils.”
Pastor Burger sat forward, his hands struggling with the bonds of his folded fingers.
“You’re new to Three Summers?” he asked.
“We moved here a couple weeks ago.”
“To the old plantation on the island?”
“Angel’s Landing.” The protective way she spoke the title felt odd.
Burger didn’t notice. “You heard of me from your husband?”
“My—no. Just passin’ by one day I noticed your building.”
“Your husband did come by. He seemed troubled when I met him. And something similar, I take it, is afflicting you.”
Missy nodded. “And Roy. And everyone, I think. The whole town. They don’t all show it, and they try to cover over it, but there’s something inside dragging them down.” Her feet shifted. “I know I’m not the only one. Others must have come to you with this? You said my fiancé did?”
“Your . . . fiancé was interested mainly in the graveyard’s occupants; he’s working on the Locust River Mine case, I understand. But I could see it in him. And yes, I can see it in others. In the sheriff. In the few townsfolk who speak to me. A great weariness. A sense that each is a traveler crossing an endless field, searching for a shade tree.”
She said quietly, “Are they possessed?”
Burger tilted his head back for a moment and closed his eyes. Missy clutched the inside of her shirt and looked between him and the picture of Jesus.
In a higher and softer voice, eyes still closed, the pastor intoned, “In the field of this world, the Lord’s enemies creep through the wheat, planting tares to diminish the harvest. Both are permitted to grow together until Christ shall come with his sharp sickle. But until that mighty day? Yes, I find myself assigned to a portion of the field filled with tares, where the footprints of the enemy abound in the rocky soil.” His eyes opened and fixed on Roy. “And this child has witnessed the handiwork of the enemy, has he not?”
<
br /> She didn’t know what any of it meant, but she knew the answer: “Yes.”
The pastor reared up from his chair. Roy sank down behind his chair and watched the man through the slats.
“Roy,” Pastor Burger said. “Tell me what happened to you.”
Missy tried to steady her voice. “Stand up, Roy. Don’t be scared. The pastor won’t hurt you.”
His voice came back in a small quaver. “But he will.”
“No, he—” Her heart locked up. She stood. “It’s here?”
“Here,” he repeated.
Pastor Burger’s eyes darted. “In this room?”
Roy was looking past him. “Behind you,” he whispered. “It’s crawling out of the fan.”
Pastor Burger wheeled around. Missy pressed her heels together.
“Is it coming closer?” the pastor demanded.
“Just standing there. It’s motioning with all its left hands.”
The pastor’s hand stiffened, and his chair screamed across the floor to crash against the others. Something ravenous leapt into his eyes. Forcing his neck up and his shoulders down, he straightened and raised his right hand. The fingers trembled, rigid. He strode toward the open door and the fan and his yell made her jolt.
“Unclean spirit! In the name of Christ, I command you to depart from this place!”
The fan went on blowing. The light in the doorway did not flicker. He stood there for a long time. Slowly, he reverted to his sunken stance. When he finally came back, Missy was holding Roy’s hand while he cowered behind the chair.
“It’ll keep coming back,” she said. “It came yesterday, and last night, and now . . . How do I make it stop?”
“I will pray for you,” the pastor said. “But you need to get out.”
“You mean leave the house?”
“That house.” He sighed. “I’m not from here, so I don’t know the history, but I know it is one of blood. There are places even the Lord will abandon so they rot away. Evil resides in that ground, like nuclear radiation, poisoning everyone who makes their home there.”