The House of Dust

by Noah Broyles

  Tugging and sweating, she pulled her out of the bedroom, slid her down the hall, and dragged her outside onto the patio. Mutt quit barking, sniffed her once, and ran off to his house. Missy got the shovel lying by the patio and went out to the corner of the fence where the thick cluster of daffodils grew.

  She began to dig a trench in the middle of the daffodils. The hot work and sweet smell made her stomach squeeze. Blisters formed and popped in her palms. The creek on the other side of the fence gurgled.

  Finally, the scrape in the ground was maybe deep enough. She went back to the patio. Grandmama was stiff as she hauled her across the lawn. She didn’t really fit in the hole, so she mounded the dirt up on top of her.

  Wobbling all over, she sat down to rest. The daffodils lay around her, green ground fingers, their blossoms bright, full of warm scent. She picked up a handful of dirt and crumbled it over the mound.

  Brad peered through the back door glass at the dark backyard. “So she buried her out there?”

  “In the back right corner.” Hettinga was behind him. “And I’ll tell you, I had a time tracing down the police record from 1949. Apparently, no one checked in on Missy for over a week. Then someone got annoyed because that dog was barking nonstop, and called the police.”

  “And where was she?”

  “Just sitting out there, alone with the body.” A pause. “Were you all alone when you visited the house?”

  “I actually lived there for a couple weeks.”

  A pause. “But alone, right?”

  “Let’s take a look out there.” Brad used his shirttail to turn the doorknob. Outside, the gritty smell of dead cigarettes flavored the patio. More oak pollen mounded across the pavement.

  Hettinga followed him out. “You were alone, though, right?”

  Brad played the light through the deep grass beyond the patio. “No. My fiancée was with me.”

  The slender man held totally still. “You didn’t leave here there alone.”

  He stayed quiet until he knew he could refrain from shouting, until he could speak evenly.

  “As I said, all this will go into an article for a magazine called Southern Gothic. Once that article is published, I’m hopeful that it will dispel the myth around the place.”

  Drawing a breath, he raised the flashlight and looked out at the chain-link fence at the edge of its rays. “Now, you said the right corner?”

  “Myth,” Hettinga repeated in a smoky whisper. “You think Adamah’s a myth?”

  “You said the right corner.” Stepping off the concrete, he waded across the yard, careful of broken glass among the weeds.

  “Haven’t you seen things to the contrary?” Hettinga was following without a rustle. “Isn’t that why you left? Because you were afraid he might be real? Afraid he might bring up something from the past?”

  Brad ignored him; he was ready to be rid of the man. Approaching the back of the yard, he neared a six-foot chain-link fence, braided with ivy and honeysuckle, obscuring whatever lay on the other side. He slowed. A pungent scent radiated from somewhere just ahead. Something dead lay in the weeds. He flashed the light around before proceeding cautiously. The fence drew together at the corner of the yard. Daffodils bent around his feet.

  Then the light hit a black dress shoe.

  Brad stopped.

  The shoe was connected to a suited leg, and the leg was connected to a body.

  “There’s someone back here!” Clenching his nostrils, he moved around beside the corpse. The flashlight lens made rings on the back of the person’s jacket. The arms stretched up from the shoulders, as if the man had been about to dive into a pond. The fingers were buried in the ground just short of the fence corner. The face was planted in the ground, white hair drooping down around the balding skull. The skin was gray. Days dead. No sign or injury.

  “Did you not find this?” Brad asked him.

  Hettinga stood utterly still, his grimy suit hanging from him loosely. His high forehead gleamed greasily, his white hair disheveled His eyes were staring, unresponsive.

  Baring his teeth, Brad crouched and gripped the left arm and rolled the corpse over.

  Dirt spilled from gaping jaws. Yellow eyes wept trails of scrambling ants. The face was that of an old man. A face with a high forehead and a white goatee. A face with gaunt cheeks. From weeks ago in a library picture and from tonight in the half-light. From behind him.

  Richard Hettinga.

  Springing up, he whipped around. The yard was empty. The man had vanished. Reeling, he turned back around. The body lay there still. Hettinga’s body, undoubtedly. Impossibly.

  Automatically, he reached for his phone. Had to get a picture. In the wavering light, he placed the head and shoulders in the viewfinder. The camera saw it too. It was real.

  A tremor rattled along the fence.

  It jarred him, and the picture smeared.

  Turning, he listened as a strumming sound moved up the outside of the vine-wrapped fence, approaching. Raising the light, Brad tracked its movement by the shaking leaves. A person, running their hand along the wire barrier. They stopped, just parallel to him on the other side.

  “Mr. Hettinga?”

  No, Hettinga was lying dead in front of him. The thing he had spent the last several hours with was . . . what? A hallucination? His mind was glitching. He clawed for a memory of stopping by a pharmacy on the trip down, refilling his Prozac. But he hadn’t. And he couldn’t have imagined the detailed, almost encyclopedic history of Three Summers.

  It wasn’t a hallucination. It was the thing from the house. It had followed him. And now it was standing on the other side of the fence.

  A greasy hand emerged from the leaves to press against the wire, sending another tremor along the fence. He held the flashlight beam on it.

  “What do you want?” Brad whispered.

  A newscaster’s voice came from the other side, tinny sounding, perhaps from a radio. “Thirteen people died today following an explosion on an oil rig ninety miles off the Alabama coast.”

  Brad retreated a step. I’m in a dream.

  The low, miserable chuckle that followed was very real.

  The hand tightened against the fence. The skin creased around the wire. Then the palm broke through, splitting and reforming like gel, followed by burnt, glistening fingers. Next came an arm in an orange canvas suit. The stench from the body was borne away on a wind of black tar as a heat-shriveled man strained through the wire. Straightening, he grinned. Grass bent as he stalked toward Brad.

  For a moment, an electric current from the ground held Brad quivering in place. The flashlight slid from his grip and with it plummeted any tenuous hope of standing his ground.

  He fled. Flailing through the high grass, he pounded to the back door. He burst into the house and tumbled down the short hall, slamming into the doorframe at the end. In the living room, he tripped over an invisible stool and slammed against the front door.

  Heavy feet came down the hall behind him. Breaths rattled in a paper-dry throat.

  Wrestling the front door open, Brad tore across the lawn. Dead Hettinga’s car still stood in the drive. The other was gone, the odd hybrid driven by . . .

  I’m in a dream.

  Ripping open his own car door, he fell inside, turned the key, and brought his foot to the gas pedal in a single motion. Squealing away from the curve, he glanced back. The man in orange bounded across the shaded lawn. He stopped in the middle of the street, in a pool of light. He reached after the speeding car.

  Brad looked away from the rearview.

  I’m in a dream.

  Jamming his foot farther down, he quickly moved it to the brake as a stop sign loomed out of the darkness. The car bucked and slid to a stop. Slapping his face, he looked out. Barred-up houses set behind shaggy yards crowded with cars and fallen bicycles. The glow of
TV screens in a few windows. Moths dancing in the halos around the streetlights.

  It wasn’t a dream. It was Atlanta at four in the morning.

  The orange man walked up outside his window and rapped on the glass.

  Barking, Brad kicked the accelerator. The engine roared with his heart. The needle climbed past thirty, forty, fifty. The intersection dwindled. Sweat bit his eyes. He glanced at the driver’s-side window. Grimy marks from knuckles clung to the glass.

  It wasn’t a dream.

  Just get out of here. Get out of the neighborhood. Away from the place where Hettinga had died and Missy had buried her grandmother. It couldn’t follow him. Or could it?

  It was not confined to the corner of a backyard fence or all the corners of the world. It had been with him in the Gulch. It was real. It was chasing him. His eyes flicked up to the mirror.

  The man stood fifty feet behind. Motionless in the shadow of an overhanging tree. Reaching.

  The vehicle swerved as he lost and regained control. A pile of brush protruded into the road. He whipped the wheel and narrowly missed two parked cars. He pushed the car past sixty. Yet when his eyes lifted to the rearview mirror, he saw the man in orange standing twenty feet behind him in the glow of a streetlight. How could that be?

  Manically, his eyes flicked back and forth between the windshield and the rearview mirror. He had to watch for a place to turn; had to keep the man in sight. The road extended ahead forever: an endless stream of black-eyed houses and orange streetlights. And each time his eyes returned to the rearview mirror, the thing was a bit closer to the car. Inexorably, it closed the distance. The unwavering hand, sharp-tipped with blackened bone, floated toward the back glass.

  Brad didn’t realize he was yelling until the windshield began to fog-up with his breath. The car skidded as the orange man leaned across the trunk. His seared flesh swelled against the glass. His gravel eyes looked into Brad’s pupils. Everything except the amber avenue of cars and pavement became a haze as his hands melded with the steering wheel.

  He only fell silent when something touched him. A warm, heavy weight on his right arm. He looked down.

  A claw hand folded around his forearm.

  It was in the car.

  Silently, frantically, Brad released the wheel. He writhed away from the grip, fighting it with his other hand, tearing at it. Grilled flesh came away beneath his nails.

  Abruptly free, the vehicle veered.

  At the edge of sight, a power pole rushed toward the hood of the car.

  He had time to blink just once before everything shattered.

  THE LONG HOME

  38

  For days, I swam through oil and cold water and fire. I wasn’t swimming to escape the fire. I was swimming to escape the thing that followed me through it: a man made of fire.

  —“The House of Dust”

  Southern Gothic

  Missy was in a dream.

  The sky was golden. It had clouds painted on it—smooth, smeary ones. It was evening or morning, or maybe afternoon. The river was a flat expanse and golden, too. So was the grass. She was standing on the island, up by the old dock.

  She looked at the pebbles beneath her feet and found dozens of tiny points of light glittering off each one. She was wearing the lacy white dress. Her feet were beautiful. When she turned her hands, they were smooth and flawless, tinged gold. She was beautiful.

  When she spread her arms, everything around her opened up. She had been in a motionless painting and now the world was unrolling, inflating like a balloon. She walked up the old road as trees popped into fullness. Birds scurried through the air. Wind touched her face, bringing with it an entire landscape she could not see: the smell of earth, the hint of water that was cool and mossy.

  The smell transported her. She was still walking up the road, but she was also by a creek. It was the creek behind the house, but different. An old boathouse was here, with a rowboat at the shoreline. She stepped in, and it glided away from the shore. She sat down, not bothering to touch the oars. She was borne along by water and time. Moss hung from arching branches. She lay back and the tips brushed around her, across her.

  At the sensation, she found herself in the bedroom of the house, lying on moon-drenched sheets, tingling as a man’s fingers trailed across her body. One finger was banded by a wedding ring. She turned her face toward the window, smiling dreamily, and listened to the chorus of the night insects.

  A new window opened. She was on the front step of her old house in Atlanta, and the bugs were singing just as loudly, and it was evening. She was nine. But shouldn’t she have the right to walk down the street without fear? There was a gun in her hand. And she so wanted to take a walk and enjoy the evening air. Her dog, Mutt, sat beside her, wagging his tail. She left the porch and started up the street. But the thump of a passing boombox sucked her off to . . .

  The Club. She was dancing in pink light with all the men swilling cocktails, and she enjoyed it, until she saw the professor from Emory shake his head and get up from a table in the back, carrying away the latest volume of the encyclopedia. She ran after him.

  But she soon found she wasn’t running after him, but up the old road. She laughed as she realized she didn’t need his books anymore: she had arrived. It was a golden summer on her golden island by the golden river. She lived here happily with a perfect husband and . . . yes, one adoring little boy. She knelt in the drive and held out her arms, and he ran to her through a yard that was a clean expanse of smooth grass and ancient trees while her husband, now faceless, stood on the front porch and clapped. He was sweaty and dirty from work. Missy walked with the boy toward the house, passing below a sturdy bough of the central oak where a man in a suit dangled. A handwritten sign strung around his neck said Traitor.

  They went inside. As her husband’s arm came around her, she was back in bed, tangled with him in the sheets.

  She was also in the boat, voyaging down the twilit river.

  She was also swaying in the Club.

  And holding a pistol to blast the head off each person who had committed a crime in her neighborhood, all of them conveniently lined up along the evening sidewalk.

  Everything melted into a collage. For the space of a held breath, she was hanging above the golden land, seeing and experiencing all of it. She was in the thick earth, and the humidity, and the boggy creeks, and the oppressive heat, and the cracked roads, and the silent afternoons. She was within them and above them, a participant and an observer.

  Then, like the final humming note of a symphony, it faded.

  She woke into a morning frisky with the scent of distant rain clouds. It was June now.

  She sat up in the sheets and hugged her knees as a heavy chill swept her. It was always going to end this way. No shoulder to lean on. No hand to hold. Just dreams. Just her.

  It was enough. The beautiful vastness from the night at the mill welled up through the mattress into her limbs and she grinned and stretched out her arms so her body could contain it.

  Dressed in shorts and a green sleeveless top, she made oatmeal for herself and Roy and watched him while he ate. His appetite was good, and physically he seemed recovered. But his words, if he spoke, came singularly or in pairs, suggesting some interior damage that might never resolve. Still, she would do her best.

  After breakfast, she went up to the study and got a piece of paper and a pen and wrote:

  Dear Walt,

  I am still alive. I think you should come see me. How about this Sunday? I’m sure you can find the time. The house will be all fixed up.

  Always yours,

  Missy

  Besides the town documents that Ezra had moved to the house, there were envelopes and stamps in the desk drawers. Walt’s gun, she noticed, was gone. She wrote out the address of his Nashville office on an envelope, stamped it, then got her purse and
the car keys from the bedroom. She went downstairs.

  “Hey, Roy?” She rattled the keys. “Want to ride along?”

  He shrugged and followed her out the door. The Three Summers sheriff’s cruiser was parked out front. She frowned at the hazy windshield as they drove away, deciding the rain couldn’t come soon enough.

  As they approached Three Summers, she asked, “Where’s the post office?”

  He pointed to a squat little beige building on the left, first in line in the row of downtown structures. Parking at the curb, she told him to wait in the car, then she crossed the street and went inside the post office. Behind the counter stood the lanky red-haired man she remembered from the Theater Grill and the gray house. His head was down, hat brim hiding his face as the soft snap of playing cards punctuated the shallow stillness. Behind him, by a door leading to the rear room, a scruffy taxidermized eagle perched atop a dusty postage scale.

  Missy moved past the cordoned waiting line and stopped before the counter. When the man’s head did not rise, she cleared her throat. Looking up, he immediately began swaying and pushed his cap brim back. “Morning, ma’am.”

  Abe was his name. He had been at the cotton mill. He had not joined in the chanting as she came out of the grave.

  “Good morning. I’d like to mail this?” She held out the envelope.

  Plucking the letter from her fingers, he turned it over and over, not looking at it. “Okay. Just fine, just fine.”

  “The postage is okay?”

  “Postage is just fine.”

  “Good.” She hesitated. The envelope rotated. The man swayed. “One other thing. Is there any way I could . . . sort of get a message around without having to write a lot of letters?”

  “Like maybe phone?”

  “If I don’t want to phone a lot of people, either.”

  His lips twisted doubtfully.

  “See, I figured since you go around to all the houses already that you could spread the word.”