by Noah Broyles
He stared at her, then pushed a chuckle through his teeth and shrugged. Bending forward, he rested on his hands on the ground while stretching his legs out behind. Then he lowered his body onto the dirt. Its coolness sank through his clothes. His neck remained stiff, holding his face away from the earthen surface.
Jezebel’s hand gently pressed his head down. “I’ll help you. Tell me what’s been hanging on to you? What hasn’t been right?”
Brad’s nose rubbed against the dirt. He sucked in air and smelled the moldy ground. Its petrified dullness ached against his eyes. Blank, empty earth. He felt the stupidity of the situation. He started to get up, but her hand remained steady.
“It’s okay. I know what you think. I’m an idiot old woman who burns trash and lives in a broken-down town. But where’s the town that’s not broken? Where’s the place not trying to hide its trash? You don’t have to tell me your tiredness. Just think it—Adamah will know.”
The ground was getting thinner. The old weight was melting through him. He would fall through into—
No. There’s nothing down there.
“You don’t have to fight, Brad. No one will know. Only me, and you, and him.”
Her hand lightened on his head, but he stayed put, held by her dwindling voice. “What has been following you? What is following you? Don’t say it—Adamah knows. Just turn in your mind and look . . . look . . . ”
No.
But he was already there, lost in the bleary years in Providence after the funeral, drowning in the quiet of the house and the indifference of his mother, wandering through psychiatry sessions and Prozac bouts, surviving high school with headphones. Then he was south, at school, at Poynter, paid for by benefits awarded after the “accident.” And then he was on the road, in the muck, digging through trash, bottling tears, living off blood. The Futureless, The Devil’s Camp, Night Gallery, The Glass Elephant, Scarlet Seven Miles. Carefully crafted reports sent off to Atlanta to be printed and distributed and read and forgotten.
Ten years of hiding from the true crime. Ten years of dragging the original sin.
He was tired. And now it wasn’t just the blood in his feet that was shivering, but all over his body. Inches from his eyes, the earth was rippling. Softening. Seeping up around him.
Embracing.
He shut his eyes.
The accident wasn’t your fault.
Orange gouts of fire exploded in the darkness behind his eyelids. He jerked as the smell changed from incense and dry dirt to salt water and sulfurous burning. He opened his eyes, but the flames continued, blossoming through crumbly smoke, hot, thick, dark, getting hotter and thicker and darker, binding to him, weighting him.
Brad tried to stand up. Jezebel’s hand still pressed into his hair, holding him down. She was speaking again. Her words were different this time, however. They were soft and high.
“Hello. I see you there. Come on closer.”
She was speaking over him to someone out in the gloom beyond the lights.
“You honor us with your presence. Please, come closer.” Her voice dropped. “He’s coming, Mr. Ellison. For you.”
The smoke was in his throat. He choked. “Who’s coming?” His lips picked up earth.
The woman’s voice dwindled with each sentence. “He’s dressed in orange, in industrial-looking coveralls. His hair is black and greasy like yours, but it’s real grease that’s covering it. It’s all over his face . . . and his hands. Oh, he’s awful burned.”
The words were lost amid the flash flood of blood inside his brain. No one knew that. No one knew his dreams. Even Jennifer did not know them. It was impossible that this person who he barely knew could describe the demon that had stalked the perimeter of his mind since adolescence.
“No!” Pushing up from the pressure of her hand, he sat back. Her fingers, striving to hold him down, dragged his glasses off. He snatched them and crammed them back on. He turned, peering through the hazy lenses.
Empty dark. Nothing coming through the avenue of floor supports.
Of course.
“He’s there, Mr. Ellison. Just in front of you, past the lights. Why not say hello?”
Twisting back to face her, he fought off the heat of smoke and the icy imagination of eyes tracing his spine. “I came here for answers, ma’am, not rituals.”
“This is the answer.”
“Nothing is there! There is nothing in this ground!”
“There is. Let your eyes adjust.”
“No, there’s—”
The woman sprang from her crouch and came at him, catching his cheeks in her hands. In something that echoed maternal pleading, she said, “Let yourself have peace, Brad. You’ve done so well. You’ve come to a shallow place and broken through. For a moment, you felt the peace of Adamah. Now you’ll start to see.”
His lips puckered as he dragged himself free of her grip. Standing up as much as he could, he wiped his face with an arm, then grabbed his shoes.
“He’s behind you, Brad. He’s reaching out to shake hands. Who is he?”
“I’m leaving. If you really want to be helpful, you’ll tell me how you knew that.”
Jezebel’s chin jerked. “I didn’t. You’ve broken through. You’ll start to see.”
“I’m leaving.” His gaze skipped to the hole for a minute, where the severed hand of the house’s last resident lay. Buried alive. “We’re both leaving.”
Rotating, he stepped out of the light, right through the place where she said the burned man stood. Tingles rippled through his body.
“It’s too late for that,” the woman called. “You’ve broken through. Adamah will always be with you now.”
Taking advantage of the first opening he came to, he placed his shoes on the floor above, then braced his hands and glanced back at her one more time.
The woman was gone. Something much closer blocked her from view. Something dressed in orange and smeared with black, back hunched to avoid the ceiling. As he watched, it bent even lower so it could raise its head. Light came around a blistered face, a melancholy grin. Welts broke open on its cheeks, leaking fluid as it mouthed two words.
Hello, Brad.
His knees buckled. The weight was everywhere, crippling him. As he slammed into the floor, the figure leaned toward him, eyes shriveled, nose raw, hair burned away.
It wasn’t an accident, Brad.
The instant of paralysis departed.
Heaving to his feet, Brad floundered out onto the floor above. Clutching his shoes, he ran. The woman’s laughter warbled through the gaps as he navigated across the broken floor. The sound only faded as he slammed the house door shut behind him
Beyond the shadow of the porch, late-afternoon sun lanced his eyes. The residual smoke pooled in his belly as he stalked to the car. Seated in its heat, his stomach contracted. He bent and pressed his face into his fingertips, battling the urge to vomit.
It had been a hallucination. Just a hallucination, like so many he’d had before.
But what if it wasn’t a hallucination? He was depressive, but he wasn’t deranged. Yet over fifteen years he’d had the same vision. What if it wasn’t a vision? What if it was real? Living. Crawling after him out of Hell.
No. It was the nature of regrets to hang on, clenching even tighter each time they were disturbed. This place had split open his core. They had to leave. Jennifer couldn’t stay in that house a moment longer than it would take to pack. If she found out any of this, or somehow became entangled in it, or had a hallucination of her own, everything would shatter.
She’s already entangled. He fought the thought away, but it lunged to the surface again and again. Tugging on his shoes, blinking through sweat, he reviewed the previous week. Her apparent recovery, her deep slumber, her seeming calmness, her uncharacteristic carelessness.
Adamah brings peace.
He turned the key in the ignition.
The car tore down the drive. He pulled hard at the end, skidding onto Simmons Pike.
Adamah brings peace.
Chewing the steering wheel with his fingernails, he tried to think of how to explain it to her. That the retreat was over. That they would return to some urban scape less drowned in malaise, less prone to inspire delirium.
It didn’t matter what he said. It just had to be done. They had to leave.
Braking hard, he turned on Adamah Road and bore down on the accelerator.
The emergency lights only entered his consciousness when they were close. Refocusing, he discovered a black car with a domed strobe coming up the road, throttled siren wailing.
Sorrel. Didn’t matter.
The vehicles converged toward the railroad tracks that cut the road halfway to town. Brad’s foot remained steady.
Without warning, the sheriff’s car slung itself across both lanes and stopped broadside on the far edge of the tracks. Gulping air, Brad stomped on the brakes. The car lurched as it coasted across the rails, grinding to a halt fifteen feet short of the opposing vehicle.
What now? Using the backs of his fingers, he brushed dirt from the front of his shirt. He threw open the car door and climbed out.
The sheriff did, too. Their doors slammed simultaneously.
The tracks spread away on either side. Insects ticked in the weeds growing from the gravel pilings. Brad approached the man, and the man approached, running a thumb over each sparse eyebrow.
“I drove out to the house again.”
Brad studied him through his dirty glasses. “What’s the obsession with my fiancée?”
“Same as yours about my . . . mom, I expect—the story of this town.” He stumbled on “mom,” then flinched a shrug. “Yeah, no point in me hidin’ stuff that’d just make you want to stick around. ’Cause you can’t anymore. Let this conversation serve as a notice that you’re to be out of that house by midnight.”
Brad spread his hands. “Sorry to spoil your fun, but that’s just what I was planning till you pulled in front of me.”
The man frowned at him, then looked past him up the road. “Where you been?”
His hands dropped. “Went down to the old theater and watched a movie. You have a favorite?”
Sorrel came in closer. “Stop bein’ a smart aleck, Brad. I needed you. I let you in here to write your piece because I thought it might clear away the clouds. This town needs sunlight. Needs to see a way out of these cycles. But I see you’re just bringing back the dark. And I shoulda seen it from the start.”
“Seen what?”
“That you’d get caught up in the whole thing. The Queen of Hearts, the rituals, the . . . ” He turned away like he might spit. “You know, for a while I didn’t know about any of it. But she’d pick out someone twice a year, summer and winter, and invite them over. Usually someone on the edge, less-liked, loners. Someone from out of town. So in ’73, some kids came poking around town one night in June on a rumor the old place was haunted. Two guys and a girl.
“Momma—” He chewed the word. “She drove down, picked them up, and sat on the porch with them, until dawn. I sat upstairs and listened. You could tell they were scared: the girl was crying, and guys were repeating themselves a lot. She just kept talking. Told them she knew all about being lost and knew what it was like to finally come home. At dawn, they walked out in the field, she and the kids. The town folks had dug three holes, and the kids just . . . stepped in. Richard Gilbert. Alec Mullen. Teresa Samson. I read their names later in a newspaper. Missing, it said. Never found.” He shook his head. “Any idea what that does to a kid’s mind?”
Brad moved a little to stand beside the man. They both looked east down the dead, desiccated miles of metal. “Why didn’t you ever do anything? Leave?”
“You know, there’s days that I come out to these tracks and I walk. Day after my brother left, I walked forty-seven miles. Farthest I ever been from here. Every step was the one I thought would break my feet. Finally a train showed up on the tracks ahead. And you know what I did? I hopped on and rode all the way back to this very crossing. Every couple years I try it again. But I always turn back around after a couple miles ’cause my feet stop working. Because what am I outside of this place? I mean, look at me. Started balding when I was eighteen. Fallow scalp in my youth.”
He rubbed his head and kicked gravel at the pointless comment. “You are where you come from, huh? Well, my dad was Ezra Larkin, sheriff of this hellhole town and son of a Queen of Hearts. And me from the womb of another Queen. Place is in my blood and bones. I am Three Summers. And Three Summers is everything it’s been. So when it goes down . . . ”
The desolation in the sheriff’s face made Brad take a step backward.
“You’re not like that, Brad. You can quit all this. So do it. Go. Now.”
Brad’s lips thinned. “Can’t quit. I’ll go, but I can’t quit. My dad left me an inheritance, too. That’s what’s in my blood that keeps me stuck. I’ll have to write everything.”
Sorrel surveyed him. “Got any proof? Besides creepy old photos and stories?”
Brad tapped his breast pocket. “Couple interviews: testaments to a cult that’s buried people alive for two hundred years. People will want to believe.”
Sorrel eyed the phone as if his gaze could crush it. Then his mouth twitched. “I don’t care what you write. But I’m not gonna let you stay around. I won’t let her drag us deeper into the pit.”
“Leave my fiancée out of this.”
“What happened to her, Brad? It must’ve been something real bad.” The sheriff’s tone sent a chill up his back.
“Why? What’s she done?”
“I went out there. You need to go home to her, Brad. You need to get her and leave now.”
30
That was Tuesday, May 22. My last day in Three Summers.
—“The House of Dust”
Southern Gothic
Heat filled up the coffin. Heat from her squirming body. Heat from itching blisters on her arms as the pickup lurched across rough pavement, running splinters into her skin. Heat from the breath burning through her nose, reflecting back in her face thick and sappy from the pine lid.
Missy tasted grit on the rag in her mouth and remembered the lurching cars that would drive a half mile off the main highway to the pine-shaded parking lot in front of the Club. She remembered the exhaust and cigarette smoke that mixed with the smell of those pines
as the patrons came and went.
Mostly, she remembered his car, creeping down the drive and wandering around the lot in an uncommitted hunt for a parking spot. She had stepped out for a fresh breath after a long day in the dank interior. She rubbed the clammy chill of the new air conditioner off her skin and watched the dust stick to the bright red paint of his car as he drove around. She remembered his head turning as he passed her.
Missy had lifted her head and stared at the cool evening sky. She stayed like that as shoes came crunching across the lot. Trailing blades of the decorative pampas grass shivered across his silver suit legs as he came up the side of the building. When he stopped, she looked down and he adjusted the knot of his tie. They had both been so young not so long ago.
“Hello,” he said, smelling like cologne. “I see your sign every evening as I drive by.”
Her tired cheeks smiled. “Hello, sir. Come right on in.”
Then he did something weird: he held out his hand. Missy felt a switch in her blood.
He wants to hold my hand?
When the pickup stopped, both doors slammed. “Wait for the car to pass,” she heard Ezra say.
Immediately, she started thrashing again. The box rocked, scooting across the truck bed. She screamed into the gag. Trembling and snorting, she maintained the cries until the car, obl
ivious, whisked past.
The tailgate banged down. Hands grabbed the coffin and dragged it out. Arching her body, she slammed her hands against the lid. She was carried a few dozen feet and then the box was roughly set down. Rusty door hinges squeaked. Then she was lifted again.
Even inside the coffin, she heard the sounds change. Scuffing footsteps, huffing breaths—everything became louder. A clunking echo as again she was set down.
“Okay,” Ezra said.
Walt, speaking low, hoping she wouldn’t hear: “The lid won’t come off?”
“No. But we can put that on top of it if you want.”
Feet scuffed again. A heavy item clunked down on the lid.
“Feel better?”
No reply. Walt must have nodded. Timid. Just as he had been that evening at the Club.
They had sat at the bar, and Missy watched him drink. The comfortable way he wore that tight collar told her he was the kind who ate Sunday dinner in a jacket and tie. She smiled at the way he sucked air through his nose and blinked rapidly every time he sipped his cocktail, cheeks ballooning to cough.
“Need a handkerchief?” she’d asked.
“No,” he said. “No, no.”
“And the highballs here aren’t even real drinks, just ice cubes with alcohol rubes.”
There was a latent sense of angst in those watering eyes that flashed at the people around the Club. They returned to her as he drained the glass. “Where’s your cigarette machine?”
“I’ll get them. Give me some money.”
“I can get them.”
“You wouldn’t know how.” She smiled and opened her palm. “Sorry. I don’t mean to be snarky. I hate snarky people.”
Reluctantly, he reached into his coat and found some change. Missy slid off her stool and wove through the tables to the machines by the door. Theresa was cursing at the hostess stand.
“What’s wrong?” She put the change in the machine.
“Sound system’s down,” Theresa said. “Boss just came in and went in the back, but I’m the one by the door, so I’m the one who gets chewed-out.”
Missy smiled and fished out the new pack of smokes. “You’re new, darling—you don’t know chewed out.”