The House of Dust

by Noah Broyles

  She was already shaking her head before he finished. “There’s got to be another way. My fiancé bought that place for me. We lived in a two-room in Nashville and he’d go sit on the fire escape and smoke all evening because he got so tired of listening to me beg for a nicer place and . . . I’m sorry. Look. I know it’s got problems, but there’s always salvation, right? Jesus is stronger than the demons, right?” She faltered at the end, as Ellen King’s desperate journal entries needled her mind.

  They are coming out of the floor now—and the walls. They’re coming for me.

  “Yes,” Burger said. He glanced wearily at the dusty pews. His voice was quiet. “Christ is stronger. But Christ lives in hearts, not places. And only the heart armored with his Word can withstand the full attack of Satan in those evil places.”

  “I know evil places!” Missy felt a sickness smoldering in her guts, and she felt herself failing and the heat rising. “I know what it’s like to lie in a bed one night and lie on a metal table the next and have the life scraped out of me. All my life, I’ve—”

  For a moment, the pastor averted his eyes.

  “Didn’t he tell you what I was?”

  “Who?”

  “My fiancé. No? Well, I will: I used to be a hooker. And so maybe you think this is all happening because I used to live in sin. Maybe you think that’s all I still am. But that’s just wrong, because plenty of great people did bad things and turned their lives around. You know St. Augustine? He did plenty of bad things when he was young. But they still call him a Church Father. That’s big. That means there must be some leftovers for me.” She felt her chin sticking out the way it had when she fought with Grandmama.

  Letting go of Roy’s hand, she stood up to be at Burger’s height.

  He was nodding, and deep furrows had filled his high forehead. “Yes, Marilyn. Where there is sin, there is much more Grace. I will pray for you. And I will pray for Roy. But if you stay in that house, Satan will sift you like wheat. Leave now, and God will provide you another dwelling place. Go down to Lexington. Let the lease expire. Your fiancé can finish his work from—”

  “Lease? There’s no lease. We bought the house.”

  The pastor blinked. “Not from my understanding. The sheriff would never allow that house to be sold. The lease probably expires at the end of—”

  “There’s no lease! The house is ours. He told me that.”

  Burger simply shrugged.

  Missy felt the floor fracturing beneath her shifting feet. “It’s time for us to go.”

  Peeling Roy’s hands off the chair, she hauled him down from the pulpit platform and into the aisle.

  “Is there nothing I can do to help you, Marilyn?” Burger called.

  She started to shake her head but the smell of varnish infiltrated her sinuses afresh. Bending, she picked up three of the canisters waiting by the front pew and turned toward him. “Let me borrow these?”

  He appeared confused but motioned his unsteady hands.

  “Thank you.” Her tongue felt leaden. “Here, Roy, you carry one.”

  They left the church and walked down the steps in the hot, humming power line silence. When they reached the car, she threw the canisters in the back seat. The wire handles of the two she had carried were bent out of shape.

  26

  I stood in the dance hall several times during those days, looking at the shape on the mirror above the fireplace, at its many outstretched arms. What drove this cult? What happened to those who entered that embrace?

  Jennifer slept at night, deeply, eerily. I did not. I sat in the study, computer open. Each time the chasm of sleep approached, a toppling, plummeting sensation jolted me awake and my eyes would land on the Newton’s cradle at the edge of my desk. Silent. Urging action. One muggy morning, I jerked up in my chair to find her kneeling beside the desk. She hardly noticed me. She was going through the death notes retrieved from the hospital, nodding to herself, smiling softly.

  —“The House of Dust”

  Southern Gothic

  Brad helped her make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch. She wore her blond hair loose. She used to wear it in a ponytail all the time, except when sleeping. Even that first uncontrolled week in Nashville. As time went by, and he wrote worsening articles, and she worked through school, the ponytail became more severe, the hair tighter across her scalp. Even the night they got engaged, as she sat beside him on the couch, she had twined it over her shoulder.

  Now it hung limp.

  They vacuumed curtains until early afternoon, and he coughed explosively the entire time. The dust seemed attracted to his lungs. She, on the other hand, only occasionally rubbed her nose. When they set about window-washing, he kept on coughing.

  As her cloth squeaked across the glass, Jennifer finally said, “Really, you look like hell. Shouldn’t you be out working on your story?”

  He sniffed heavily. “We need to stay together.” The line he’d used when he gave her the ring. The ring that was right out there in the car, in the glove box.

  “Brad . . . ” Jennifer shook her head at her reflection. “Brad, I’m fine. You’re the one who’s . . . ”

  “Who’s what?” His hand with the rag pressed too hard. With a sharp crack, a smooth, arcing line appeared in the glass.

  “Careful!” She gazed at him while tenderly wiping her pane. “Can’t you feel how old these windows are?”

  Minutes later, from the car, he could see her standing behind the same window, face obscured by her loose hair and the frail glass.

  He thought to drive just to the bridge, but the heat compelled him into the tree tunnel, and then he drove all the way up the dead green road to the bright brink of Adamah Road. There he paused, panting.

  Jennifer was not healing. She was changing. Something she had encountered in her sleep or in the pit had stuck. Sunk in. Altered her. Was altering. Every moment a little more.

  No. There’s nothing down there. Whatever’s wrong with her, you brought here with you.

  Turning right, he drove out of town. The swarm of questions he had collected over those quiet days coalesced around the image of Jen’s calm, ungrieving face. At the end of Adamah Road, he sat for a minute and looked at the wide field and the sudden hill and the gray house atop it.

  Jezebel Irons had invited him over almost two weeks ago to talk more about the Queen of Hearts and Adamah. But no car was out front. Instead, he turned right and drove down Simmons Pike.

  Queen of Hearts. Adamah. He pinched the wheel.

  Simmons Creek Baptist Church sat hunched and abandoned as usual on the riverbank, but something had changed. Brad scanned the leafy exterior as he stepped from the car. His eyes landed on the ripped-out flooring. It was now completely smothered by kudzu.

  As he approached, though, significant tears in the foliage became evident. Someone had reclaimed a substantial number of the boards from the green fist. Stepping around the corner, he glanced down the west side of the building.

  The ladder the pastor had been using more than a week ago leaned in the same spot. The grass surrounding the church had grown higher to match the graveyard. Dread lanced him—he suppressed it. He walked to the doors and knocked.

  No answer.

  He tried a second time, then tested the latch. The door groaned open, exhaling stale hot air.

  It was dim inside. Curtains still cloaked the closed windows. The pews sat dull and empty and the needling smell of the dry earth beneath them pricked his nostrils. But not all the floor was bare. A slew of loose boards had been arranged down the center aisle like a bridge toward the pulpit.

  A hunched figure in black pastoral garb sat on the steps beneath the pulpit, hands folded, head bowed.

  “Pastor Burger?” The unsecured boards clunked beneath Brad’s feet. “How are you? I realize it’s been a little while.” Closing in, he slo
wed when the man still did not look up. “Sir?”

  “Have a seat, Mr. Ellison.” The pastor’s voice was low and steady, but his folded hands trembled. “And what has the Devil been doing for you today?”

  Brad eased down onto the step beside him. For a while, he said nothing, deciding whether there was anything to say, whether his fears would sound foolish when put into words.

  “I’m concerned about my fiancée. She had an . . . episode since we last spoke. She’ll probably be fine.”

  “You don’t believe in Adamah.”

  “You do?”

  “I believe in what’s up there.” His eyes nodded to the rafters. “Which compels that I also believe in what’s down there.”

  Brad looked at the half-restored flooring. “What is down there?”

  “Satan, who imagined he could be like God. Who warred against God. Who was thrown down from Heaven with the angels that rebelled with him. Who tempted our first parents to sin and was condemned to crawl in the dust.”

  The pastor’s tired eyes studied the barren stretches of earth beneath the pews. “One of those fallen angels is here, Mr. Ellison. In this land. In this ground. This church is an embattled outpost. Beulah is the name of Heaven’s border region, and this land is the back door to Hell.”

  Brad thought about his phone, about recording, but decided against it. This went beyond names and dates. “Why did you come here?”

  “I was called,” the man said hollowly. “I was a boy with my mother in Arkansas in 1942 when a letter came from my father. He had been brought to Camp Simmons, just south of here, for army training. He described an uneasy malaise across the nearby town of Three Summers and said he wished there were a pastor in an abandoned church by the river. He never returned from war, but I tried to follow. Broke my back without ever being deployed. A cripple is of little use in the military, so I joined the ministry. Still, I was not expecting such a battlefield.”

  “I assume not many converted.”

  “One. One soul. Perhaps I went about it all wrong. Instead of seeking God, I was pursuing Satan. Is there a difference? I should know.”

  “That one soul was your friend?”

  “Richard Hettinga. He grew up in this town. I rebuked an evil spirit that was plaguing him. He did not return for many years after, but God’s word bore fruit. He collected artifacts that chronicled the dark history of the region, drawing the ire of the Queen. She cast him out, and he willingly departed. It’s phone conversations with him that have kept my spirit buoyed over the years.”

  Brad didn’t mention the difficulty he’d had trying to contact the man in recent days. Instead he said, “Sorrel once mentioned something about a brother.”

  “It was Hettinga. Sorrel was a young man when he left. He felt bitterness toward his mother, and toward me, I think. But it was necessary. The darkness must be lifted. He sees that now. You and he and Hettinga will do what I have only been able to pray for: bring an end to these cycles of slavery.

  “The cycles began with the evil of human bondage, and have continued for two centuries, holding this town in place. No freedom. You are the agent God has sent to end it. A man of words where a man of the gospel failed.”

  A touch of the manic quality he remembered from the end of their last conversation had returned to the pastor’s voice. A latent energy moved in his eyes, a pent-up zeal from the sermons he never preached. Brad watched the man consciously quell it.

  “I’m sorry. Last week I turned eighty-two. Just now it struck me that I’ll only see you for a couple more minutes in my life. Believe me when I say you are an agent of God.”

  “I don’t think I’d be a very good agent,” Brad said.

  “But you’ll write your article, won’t you?”

  “I’m more concerned about my fiancée at the moment.”

  Burger sighed and wiped his hand across his brow.

  “Then take her and leave. Now. This afternoon. Richard Hettinga will help you finish the article.”

  “You think it’s that urgent?”

  “The Evil One reaches up for all who enter this land. He is reaching for your fiancée right now, to transform her into his vessel.”

  Brad looked away. He’d been with her there for over a week. Nothing had happened.

  There’s nothing down there. No Devil.

  “You don’t believe?” Burger said.

  Brad examined the dusty church. The air and the light were constricting. The warmth drew sweat from his scalp. He shook his head.

  “It’s dangerous not to believe.”

  And there’s nothing above, either. Biting back the words, Brad rose.

  “I really appreciate your time. It’s been insightful.”

  As he walked back down the unsteady aisle of boards, he heard the pastor clamber to his feet. The effort must have drained him, for he only weakly called, “I will pray for you.”

  There’s only what’s inside people.

  Brad glanced back from the door. “I appreciate it,” he said again.

  In the car, he checked to make sure Richard Hettinga hadn’t returned his calls. Then he started the engine. He saw movement reflected in the rearview mirror. His pulse quickened.

  The church door was open. Burger was standing, but barely, clutching the door for support with one fist. His other hand jutted straight out, finger rigid, pointing at the back of the car. His cavernous eyes sunk deeper into his skull. The mottled flesh across his face stretched painfully as his jaws twisted apart. Even across the yard and through the glass, his bellowing voice was audible.

  “Ad-am-ah! Leave him!”

  27

  I called Jennifer from the road. She sighed flatly when I asked if she was okay: “Brad. I’m fine.” Still, I decided it was time to conclude the investigation. In Three Summers, I parked by the Theater Grill and went in and had chicken fingers and tater tots for lunch. I looked across the street at the arched cut-glass window above the marquee sign in the theater’s limestone façade. The diner was empty besides a Stan Lee look-alike behind the counter. I asked him when the theater was last open, and he said, “I’m not giving any quotes,” and went into the back. Before leaving, I took pictures of some photos hanging on the wall that showed people gathered around town, all with their eyes shut.

  —“The House of Dust”

  Southern Gothic

  Liquid, rippling heat filled the alley behind the theater. Beneath a faded canvas awning stood a single metal door, corroded brown. The knob was gone and the hole was plugged up with plastic grocery bags. Tugging the knot free, Brad threaded his finger through and pried the door open.

  A bubble of investigative excitement broke through the membrane of anxiety constricting his brain. Perhaps, since this place was more recently built, it would contain a greater number of clues. Clues to the people’s interactions with the Adamah being. Seances or something. Fumbling out his phone, he tapped on the flashlight.

  The air was marginally cooler inside. The door thumped shut and the darkness grew dense. A staircase cloaked in ragged carpet slanted down to the right.

  He eased down the stairs, gripping an old brass railing. On the last step, it became clear that he was not entering a basement. Nor a service hallway, either. It was a wide hallway that stretched before him and bent left at the edge of his light. The carpet under his feet was a rich cobalt, vivid despite a frosting of dust. The zipper-like bodies of centipedes fled his roving light.

  Brad moved up the hall. Blue drapes hung against the gold-painted walls, which were adorned with decoratively framed posters. Names he remembered from the house’s basement stuck out—The Thin Land, Angel’s Island—as well as some new ones: The Quiet Visitor, Shade Tree Kingdom. Every poster featured the pale-haired woman whose portrait he had studied in the library, Miriam Larkin. Her name painted in scrolly letters. Her face, with oddly long eyes, l
ooking from below green trees and staring out blue windows and holes in the ground.

  Just gazing out. Like she was when I left. He dismissed the thought as he stepped around the bend in the hall. A doorway in the left wall caught his eye.

  A doorway framed by drapes. It must lead somewhere special. As he stepped into the doorless threshold and felt a vast openness pressing against his face, he realized just where he was headed.

  The theater. He wasn’t beneath it. He was in the access hall just outside of it. Holding his phone flashlight high, he saw row after row of blue velvet seats emerging from the gloom like relics in a sunken ocean liner. They sloped past him, from the main entrance off to his right down toward the stage and the huge screen on his left.

  As he moved into the vastness, a recollection touched him: rushing through stale buttery darkness behind his dad, popcorn bucket in hand, searching for a seat as The Matrix began. They ended up at the very front and missing the first couple of minutes of the movie, but his dad had already seen it four times and filled him in on everything they’d missed, explaining things before they happened, excitedly ruining the experience. As they walked out of the theater, his dad tapped his skull and said with curious levity, See, Brad? We have to see through it all and make hard choices sometimes.

  Reaching the main aisle, he turned left and descended toward the stage. At the bottom, he rotated and shone the light up across the auditorium. All of it lay underground, below street level. The façade, the walls, all of it was just a superstructure to shield this crater. Up at the top of the main aisle, light bled down the stairs from the foyer above.

  They wanted to be closer to Adamah. But what had they actually done here? Did this place have a function beyond a movie house? Proceeding along the edge of the stage, he found a small set of steps at the end that led up to the dais. Cautiously, he advanced onto the stage. The searing sound of complete quiet tunneled into his ears, and he suddenly felt the presence of all those empty seats.