The House of Dust

by Noah Broyles

  Sure enough, locked.

  She steadied herself on the desk and raised the hammer. The handle and lock face tarnished and deformed as she rained blows. The shocks vibrated up her arm like springs jumping together. The wood flecked white and began to split.

  Missy’s lips drew together. There was no reversing this.

  A last blow, and the drawer recoiled and drifted open.

  A gun lay inside. A little snub-nosed revolver. A .38, like Grandmama’s. Her arm quivered as she laid the hammer aside. Hush now, honey, Grandmama had said. They’re not comin’ around here. I’ll have to put that somewhere you can’t reach it, though.

  Missy swallowed. Just a gun.

  Still, it took her gaze a few seconds to penetrate past the weapon to the manila folder it lay atop. She pinched the edge of the folder, dragged it out, and shut the drawer. When she laid it on the desk, her fingertips were tingling.

  Sinking into his chair, she opened the folder.

  A letter. Legal allegations. She almost laid it aside, but her gaze snagged on a cluster of letters: HUG. She scanned down the page.

  Dear Mr. Collins,

  Concerning your allegations of sex abuse against staff at the Atlanta Home for Underprivileged Girls (HUG) last spring, I wanted to follow up briefly with some questions about your own connections with the place and also with the Back Creek Club, a bar and brothel in northern DeKalb County—

  “Huh.” It was like a bag of cement hitting the floor. “Well, what do you want to know, Missy?”

  She slammed the paper down. Her splayed hand propelled her from the chair and pushed aside the letter to reveal the next document. But there was no time to read it.

  Walt stood in the doorway. He’d finally shaved. His mustache was sharp again, and pink patches of irritated skin stood out on his sweaty cheeks. His combed hair slumped.

  He approached, hands thrust deep in his pockets. She didn’t try to smile. She didn’t back away, either. She found the edge of the desk and held on to it.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Just tryin’ to find out if you still care for me.” Scanning the next document, she shrugged. “By the looks of things, you don’t.” A lease for the house and property at Angel’s Landing, expiring the first day of—

  Crisp cologne wafted over her as he came around the desk and stood close beside her. Withdrawing his glasses from his breast pocket, he placed them on his nose and leaned past her to read the document. That scent had enchanted her when they first met. Most of the men were so sour.

  When he straightened, he was breathing through his nose. “I don’t care? Because I waited to see if you liked it before dumping in tens of thousands of dollars?”

  “You didn’t have to spend anything. I just wanted us together more.”

  “You didn’t seem to want me much in that apartment.”

  “Of course I did. That’s why I hated that place. It was tiny, it was nothing, it was temporary. I was temporary. I wanted a home. And that’s what you said this was. But this”—she looked at the paper— “says it stops being ours on September first. Four months. You tell me to do all this work for four months. You distract me for four months. Is that how long it takes to decide what to do with me? To have your fill?”

  The red patches were becoming scarlet on his shaking head. “Don’t care?” he repeated, as if he hadn’t heard anything else. As if it were just registering.

  She edged away.

  “I understand. People are getting nosy. You can’t be hooked to a whore. Not permanently. You just came to the Club to see what sort of people you were sending to jail. And there was somethin’ fascinating about that dirty prostitute Missy. But in the end she was still just dirt. To be washed off. And this house? Just something to make her behave.”

  “I don’t care?” Walt said. He looked at her. Deathly calm, like the instant before an avalanche. If she withdrew, would it trigger the quake? She backed off anyway.

  “I don’t care?” He lunged.

  Missy tried to scramble away from the desk, but his fingers were on her shirt, gathering fistfuls of loose fabric. Her feet fought. She shoved her hands against his shoulders, but he was too strong. He drove her against the wall. The lips of the bookshelves slammed against her spine.

  “You were nothing!” he shouted. “I took you from that place, and I shared everything with you. I tried everything to keep you. You think it was easy? And when I brought you here, it was because I wanted to keep you longer, and maybe make you happy, just a bit. But it can’t work, hiding out here with you. It can’t work, Missy. You can’t be in my life. ’Cause I’m a coward. I’m nothing.”

  He was kissing her frantically then, and his hands left her shirt and clawed into her hair, pulling it from its tie and dragging it around her face, straining it in its roots until she sobbed.

  Eventually he weakened enough that she could shove him back. He stumbled all the way to the desk and knocked the stack of yellow papers from its corner. They cascaded down as he slid to the floor.

  Missy staggered. She pressed the back of her hand against her sore lips and teeth and lurched toward the porch doors. She rested against them, eyes bleary, the heel of her palm on the glass.

  No. Not Walt. Not her Walt. She let her hand drop. She rasped, “Not nothing.”

  He stirred. In the glass, she watched him stand up. “I am nothing.”

  His hands went back into his pockets. “I am.”

  His shoes clopped across the silent floor. “I am.”

  His reflection loomed around her shoulders.

  A yell gushed up her throat as she spun around and dove away from him. He caught her on the floor, pinning her with his knee, cramming the handkerchiefs from his pocket into her mouth. Her hands came up, and he caught those, too, and tied them behind her back with a sinewy cord, falling over her as she thrashed.

  She gagged. The porch doors rattled as she kicked, until he tied her ankles, too. The lump of cloth had sucked all the moisture from her mouth, but still she managed to expel it halfway through her jaws before he jammed it back in and tied a last loop of cloth around her skull.

  Then he stood up, and she heard him turn a confused circle. She writhed on the boards, knees and forehead burning as she tried to flip onto her back. Again he knelt down, and one unsteady hand stroked her hair as he might have stroked a dying horse.

  “I am Marilyn.”

  His arms came around her and picked her up, and the smell of his cologne came through the dust that had smeared onto her nose from the floor. Now the sweat was palpable. Holding her tight as she flopped, he carried her down the hallway and down the stairs.

  The front door was open and a rusted pickup sat in the clearing in the bluing evening.

  Someone’s feet came around the vehicle, but she couldn’t see who it was from that angle. The pickup bed squeaked open, followed by a rasp and a huff and a crunch as something weighty was set in the gravel. He moved forward again. Then she was being lowered. Placed. Pale wood walls came around her, crushing her shoulders closer. Her body pressed down heavily on her bound hands as his arms withdrew. A fresh, sticky smell crowded away all the other smells.

  Pine.

  She was in a coffin.

  Two men stood above her. Walt and Sheriff Ezra. Above them, a swath of sky and sighing trees, sharp in the surrendering daylight.

  Then darkness came down and fitted in place. The lid. She heaved. The lid jostled and then was held in place while banging started all around her ears. Hammering.

  They were hammering it on. Hammering her in. Hammering the light and air away.

  Missy roared in the darkness.

  29

  I drove back up Adamah Road and looked across the field at the house. Jezebel was home.

  —“The House of Dust”

  Southern Gothic

  The
gray house stood gaunt and sharp against the late-afternoon sky.

  Brad crossed the porch to the front door. He smoothed back the hair on each side of his head and used two fingers on his cheeks to lift his expression from the ditch it had fallen into. A solid minute of knocking yielded no results. So, he tried the handle.

  Inside, a large dim hallway stretched as empty as the loft of a summer barn to a branching staircase at the back of the house. A smell like lilac ashes radiated from a room to his right. He stepped toward the doorway.

  The room was empty except for a mild, almost-odorless smoke. A few slow flies cut trails through the fog. No sign of Jezebel Irons.

  As he stepped deeper into the room, the gloom and smoke cleared, revealing something extraordinary. Huge holes cut into the floorboards.

  Oval gaps about five feet long. They pitted the room’s entire floor.

  Immediately, the hive of bare patches inside the Adamah Cotton Mill reprinted on his mind. Here, a twisted network of jigsawed wood laced between the openings. The blue smoke wafted from the gaps like fetid breath from sleeping mouths.

  The skeleton of floor whined as he moved farther among the archipelago of holes.

  Suspicion slid gently up his back. A static electric wave of dizziness washed through him. He imagined pale arms sprouting from the holes, reaching for his feet. The smoke must be making him dizzy. He focused on placing his feet.

  Then a pewter-colored voice rose with the smoke. “I can feel you up there.”

  He stopped.

  “Come on down.”

  Jezebel Irons’s voice. Below the floor. Crouching, he peered into one of the murky holes. “Ms. Irons? It’s Bradley Ellison.” He hesitated. “Are you all right, ma’am?”

  A cough, followed by a dry chuckle. “Come on down, Mr. Ellison. I’m just about to start.” The dull monotony of her tone from their first conversation had taken on the careless cadence of someone awake too long.

  He hesitated only a moment. Bracing his hands on the floor, he lowered his feet into the darkness. A good portion of his body slid in before his straining toes touched ground. Letting himself down onto his heels, Brad found the floor level with his shoulders. He did a quick turn, like a swimmer gathering oxygen and checking for landmarks, and noticed a messy rendition of the Adamah symbol painted in red across the room’s inner wall.

  Then he ducked down.

  It was like plunging into a scummy lake. The smoke was thicker, and light from above did not shaft through it. It smelled of rot. Squinting, he turned on the balls of his feet.

  About twenty feet off, the woman sat in a bubble of light, leaning against the foundation wall. Her legs stuck out before her, and her hands pressed the earthen floor. She looked toward him with drawn-down eyelids.

  “I’d like to be more hospitable, but it’s on days like these . . . ”

  “No problem,” he breathed. Still crouching, he hobbled toward her.

  Extension cords coiled around support beams to feed a crescent of workshop lights set on the floor before her. The light flowed toward a small hole, perhaps a foot deep and a foot wide, dug between Jezebel’s heels.

  “You’ve been crying,” she said.

  Brad sat back on his haunches. “It’s the smoke.”

  “It’s incense. Stuff just smokes and smokes. Cuts down on the smell. Flies, too.”

  “Why are there flies?”

  A sleepy smile pulled her face apart. “You didn’t come here today by accident. You’re shaken, I can see. You’ve come from another shallow place?”

  “I didn’t know this was a shallow place.”

  “It became one. When the mine was dug and the town had more traffic and we needed a private gathering place. But these later years . . . not much activity. Just me sittin’ down here most afternoons.”

  Their voices were close in the low space.

  “I was at the theater,” Brad said. “I watched one of the films in the projector room. I’d like to ask you about it and record our conversation.”

  “Memories must be fragile things for you.”

  He tapped the mic. “Maybe.”

  “Go ahead anyway.”

  “How long have people been buried alive in Three Summers?”

  Jezebel’s eyes closed softly. “Since the beginning. Since before the beginning. Since the foundations of the house were laid. Or maybe it happened before that—thousands of years before. Maybe this was Eden, and Adamah was the first burial, forced onto his belly in the dust by God?”

  Brad swallowed the smoke. “I don’t understand. Who is killed? And how many? And why?”

  The eyelids parted. In the brightness, the blood vessels in her sclera were starkly apparent. “Why? Haven’t you read any scripture, Mr. Ellison?” Gathering her feet away from the hole, she sat up and rubbed calloused hands up her face and back through her short hair. “Take off your shoes.”

  He did not move. Was she serious?

  Jezebel sat forward. Her face was fully alert now. The blend of darkness and yellow light had smoothed the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, masking her with an odd youthfulness. She beckoned to his feet. “This is a shallow place. You want to know? I’ll show you.”

  Dropping the phone into his breast pocket, Brad unlaced his shoes. His fingers jerked stiffly. What was he doing?

  The woman watched as he slipped off each shoe. “Socks, too.”

  “Good thing about the incense,” he said clumsily. She didn’t smile. The next minute, hard, dry dirt kissed his bare feet. He squatted across from her, the hole between them.

  Jezebel met his gaze and held it. Then her jaw split.

  Slowly and loudly, she breathed into the air. It washed across his face, warm and faintly bitter. He did not flinch. He waited for her to speak. After a while, she did.

  “You asked why. Because Adamah is in the dust. He is smothered by it. He was cursed by God to crawl in it. But we were cursed, too. Cursed to toil and regret. Surely you can see this is a tired land. Full of tired people who get up every morning feeling the ache of broken history, broken families, broken dreams. Tired because we were cursed to be tired. To live by the sweat of our brows until we return to the dust. Adamah is in the dust. Adamah knows our tiredness. So we share with him breath, and he shares with us rest.”

  “Share breath . . . the live burials.”

  “Yes. When we do not share breath, we feel fatigue, anger, the burden of our past mistakes. And so we must share breath to gain his peace. It is a high price. But it must be paid regularly. Unless we have someone here who can breathe for Adamah.”

  “Like a medium.”

  Her eyes were bright now. Slumping to the right, she crawled to the edge of the light and reached into the darkness. Carefully, she lifted something. It came into the radiance swaying from a wire handle. A cast-iron pot. The lid rattled as she set it down. Brad’s grip tightened on his knees as a waft of green odor reached his nose.

  Jezebel’s palm hovered above the pot as she spoke. “Once, this contained the crumbled remains of Miriam Larkin, retrieved from the house.”

  The image from the library, a woman disintegrating on the dining room table at the house, jumped into his memory.

  “Through the years, her dust was sprinkled on these floors. But here is something better.” Her grip closed around the pot lid and lifted it away. The stomach-squeezing smell of rot boiled up and a few flies escaped as she reached inside.

  What came out looked like a fat brown dead spider, legs drawn together. In the light, it was more clear: a clawed-up little hand. Skin peeling, nails long, joints blackened. Cupping the thing, the woman held it toward him.

  Brad shook his head. For the microphone, he said, “To be clear, what you’re showing me is a severed hand, several weeks decayed.”

  “Her hand.” An element of rapture had entered the vanill
a voice. “A medium’s hand. You’re observant, so I’m sure you’ve noticed how for us the feet are important; they connect us to the earth, to Adamah. Many go without shoes. But for her—for the Queen—it is also the hands. Beautiful hands. Adamah’s hands. She breathes for him, and he fills her and spills from her like a broken vessel. He uses her to reach and touch. Give peace.”

  He hardly heard. “You cut off Marilyn Britain’s hands and returned the body to Sorrel.”

  “Sorrel.” Her voice wrinkled. “He wants to escape Adamah, destroy the order of the Queen of Hearts. But you can’t live without peace.” She lowered the claw into the hole. “Adamah brings peace.”

  As she raked dirt over the hand, Jezebel beckoned, and after a moment of hesitation, Brad rubbed a bit of dirt over the brink of the hole. Withdrawing quickly, he asked, “How is peace given?”

  “By returning us to the past—the real source of our tiredness. When we set things right there, we are refreshed.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No? Don’t you feel the tiredness the past causes? Mistakes, regrets, everything that left you where you are today? Don’t you feel tired, Mr. Ellison?” The words slid out as a heavy sigh. His focus faltered as memories moved.

  “I . . . suppose that sometimes, like anyone, I . . . ”

  “That’s what I saw when you came in. Not tears. Tiredness.” She moved away from the hole. “Lie down.”

  A lurch in his heartbeat. Harlow, sitting on the floor of the old mill, had invited him to do the same thing. Perspiration formed between his feet and the floor as a gentle burning gripped them. Like the blood being drawn away. Something sucking him down. His toes stuck briefly as he shifted.

  It’s not real. There’s nothing down there. It’s just rituals. Just dirt.

  “You need to know. If you don’t, you’ll never understand. Lie down. Feel Adamah’s peace for yourself.”

  It’s just dirt.