by Noah Broyles
They stopped swaying. The gun was shivering against her skull. It bit into her skin as Walt tried to stabilize it.
“Shut your mouth.” He said it low, but it seemed loud. The music had stopped, and so had the voices. The house was still. “That’s enough.”
Missy lifted her right hand and held it toward his empty left one cinched tight beside his hip.
“Please. You’d have no peace. So stay.”
A bit of that unbearable sympathy she remembered from the Club moved on his stern, clean face. Even as his trigger finger tightened, his other hand relaxed and reached to hold hers.
“No, Missy.”
For just a moment, their hands slipped together. She felt that tingling, crumbling, endless sensation pass from her flesh into his. The gun jostled against the border of her eye socket as his fingers splayed open.
The weapon hit the boards and Walt reeled backward. “You’re—”
Missy picked up the gun.
“Outside, then. That way. Back door.”
Some of his carefully combed hair had fallen down, and as he turned automatically, hands up, she saw that the tight collar was chafing his neck, and a pulse of sorrow moved through her. Perhaps in some other life it would have worked. Or perhaps in a dream.
But then he began to speak very diplomatically as she pushed him up the hall and through the door and across the porch, down into the chirruping night garden where the house’s yellow windows made prints on the grass.
“We can’t stay, but we can certainly leave together, Missy, if that would satisfy you. You understand that this house is too remote for me to conduct a career from. I could find something closer to Nashville; though it might not be as grand as this, it would be better than our last apartment. I can sympathize with the dislike you had for—”
“It was you.” She said it softly, but he quickly changed course.
“What was? Tell me what you want, Missy.”
They were halfway toward the trees, at the center of the garden. The graves Irons had filled with Abe Daleder and the woman with dark hair stood mounded up in adjacent beds. Walt turned, and she forced her hand to tighten around the pistol grip.
“Tell me!” His raised hands were bloodless fists. “Tell me what you want. I’ll do it.”
“Nothing. It was always you, Walt.” A final, tiny smile drifted across her lips. “Where we lived didn’t matter. I didn’t care if it was grand or not, but what’s it worth if I’m alone? If we aren’t together? If I’m nothing to you?”
“I’ll stay!” he screamed.
Her smile dropped. “Yeah. Now you will.”
She shot him in his right leg first, and when he fell, she shot his left leg just below the knee. Then she threw away the gun and got behind him and dragged him over the railroad tie. As he wailed and thrashed, she pulled him through the weeds, positioning him beside the hole. He tried to crawl away, but a quick shove rolled him into the grave.
She noticed that the dirt walls muffled his screams a bit. Blood was running freely from his wounds. She grabbed the shovel and started flinging clods from the mound into the trough. They sounded awful pattering across his suit fabric; she tried to remember the rain of dirt against her own coffin. It didn’t help. She bashed his hands and his head with the shovel every time he tried to crawl out.
When she couldn’t bear his roaring anymore, she dumped a large shovelful of dirt into his mouth. The cries changed to wet gagging and the burn of frantic breath through nasal passages.
Breathing failed as he became more deeply submerged. Then the dirt pile was diminished and the hole was filled and only his fingers were visible, pale stalks protruding from dark soil, squirming like unearthed worms.
Throwing away the shovel, she left the garden and went down the hillside and knelt by the bank and dipped two buckets of water from Deep Creek. She lugged them back up to the garden and wet down the grave until it was a smooth, glistening bed of mud. When the sun rose, it would dry out in no time, leaving a hard-packed surface, dry and dusty.
The fingers were motionless now. She lay down in the mud and gathered them together into two pinkish bouquets. Kissing the fingertips, she murmured, “Yes. Now you’ll stay.”
43
As I dug, I unearthed a skeleton. Scores of summers and winters had withered away features, hair, and clothes, but it was not hard to deduce whose body this must have been.
—“The House of Dust”
Southern Gothic
“Adamah,” Brad said.
He lifted his hand away from the skeleton’s cavernous face. This wasn’t a grave he was digging. It was a mouth being opened. Already he was waist-deep between its lips.
“Get the bones out,” Jennifer said. The humid night deadened her voice. One arm was behind herself, the other pointing the gun at him. An old snub-nosed .38. Even a clumsy shot could kill.
“It’s in this soil,” he said. He extended both hands, feeling a bloodless chill sizzle through his nerves. “It drinks the air out of you.”
“Fine. He can go on top of the bones. Get out.” Backing away, she stepped out of the bed and bent down to grab the shoulders of Sorrel’s shirt.
Brad’s grip closed around the shovel shaft. Standing, he scrambled from the fresh hole. Jennifer noticed before he could reach her. In an instant, she released the sheriff and was standing again, backing away, gun up. “Put the shovel down, Brad.”
He took a half-step forward. Her arms stiffened and her lips rolled into a flat line. Another split second and she would do it.
“Put. It. Down.”
One hand up, he dropped the shovel.
“Now get out of there. I’ll do the rest myself.”
He walked slowly, and so did she. Like objects locked in orbit of each other, they traded places. Once among the crushed daffodils, she crouched and tugged at the delirious man, an animal cautiously moving its prey.
“Adamah,” Brad said again. “You know what that is?”
Wordless, she drew Sorrel toward the grave. His limbs flopped. If he wasn’t dead already, he was hovering just above it. Only moments now.
Brad swallowed an unexpected tightness in his throat. “It’s what these people are hooked on. Have been for two hundred years. It’s living breath in exchange for false visions of fulfilment and glory. After what addiction did to your family, I thought you’d be stronger, Jen.”
Sorrel’s body slid into the grave. Jennifer looked up through slack hair, and her voice was low. “Be careful, Brad.”
“I know you were hurt. I know it’s hard to move on. And maybe these people don’t have the greatest lives, either. But continuing this won’t help anything. It won’t fix anything.”
She picked up the shovel.
“Come on, Jen. You became a nurse to help people escape this kind of thing.”
She began heaving the dirt into the trench.
His voice hardened. “You’re drowning them. You’re a medium between here and down there, and you’re pumping them full of something terrible. The latest dealer, overdosing them on—”
Jennifer’s jaws twisted apart. She must have screamed, because her jaws gaped and he saw her teeth, but he heard no sound. Instead, he saw the shovel topple. He saw both of her arms come up, supporting the gun. He saw the muzzle bark yellow fire as she shot him.
On April 29, they sat in his car outside a little church in La Vergne. Jennifer shook.
Brad tried to crack the window to escape the sound of her panting. The driver’s-side window wasn’t working. She jolted when her window rolled down a bit. The hum of a distant lawn mower. And the sound of an organ playing a hymn. Muted by the church walls, but still recognizable: “The Old Rugged Cross.”
“Sounds like they’ve started,” he said. “We probably shouldn’t intrude. ”
“No.” She sucked in loudly thro
ugh her nose. Then she jerked the door handle. “Stay if you want.”
He got out, tucked his black shirt into his black jeans, and accompanied her across the crowded parking lot. The church was on a little knoll. They had to climb three sets of steps to reach the front door.
Jennifer wrenched the door open and strode inside. He followed.
The transition from sun to shade placed him briefly in a spectral world. He stood looking across the backs of pews and the backs of heads while an organ played and voices sang. Jennifer, in her black dress and black jacket, walked ahead, directly up a river of scarlet carpet toward an open casket at the front of the sanctuary.
Panic sliced his chest. They should sit at the back. He hurried after her. Folks in their dark funeral garb became more distinctive, lit by dappled sunshine from colored windows.
About halfway up the aisle, he caught her and wrapped his arm through hers to slow her. The singing dropped off behind them as people looked up from their hymnals. Straining a smile at those nearest, he softly tried to coax Jennifer toward the rear. She shook her head. Her eyes were focused forward. Her hair was pulled so tightly back it seemed to extend her forehead across her scalp.
“Jennifer!” he hissed.
They were three-quarters of the way up the church’s nave. Just six more pews. Still, she kept walking.
She wants to be near the family. Near the casket.
The body was clearly visible now. A teenage girl. Hair a loose, lush black. Face a contented smirk, slightly shrunken.
Three more pews.
Almost all the singing had stopped. Just the tremulous voices of the family in the front row remained. Quickly, they, too, faltered. Under the weight of silence, the boards beneath the red carpet creaked as Jennifer halted behind those hunched backs.
A woman at the end of the left-hand pew straightened. Her rigid spine leaned away from the back of the bench. Her hair was black, like the girl in the casket’s, and cut at a slant from the back of her head down to a point below her chin. The hair swayed as the woman turned in her pew and faced them. Her raven hair split on her forehead, and the points came together below her chin, leaving a candle flame of face. The flame ripped open as she saw Jennifer. A scream—an icy gale—blasted from her parted jaws. Both hands rose, fingers rigid. “You! You killed my baby! You killed, you killed, you killed, you killed my baby!”
Outside the church, inside the car, the woman was still audible through the cracked window. By the time he got them out of the parking lot, Jennifer was screaming, too.
The bullet tore through his abdomen.
The pain didn’t startle him. Shock must have done something to his brain because when he pressed his fingers against the wound, the blood oozing forth felt cold. He looked at Jennifer and tried consciously to calm his heartbeat. For an instant, she looked as shocked as he must. He thought about saying something consoling, like how it was okay, it wasn’t her fault.
Rapidly, though, clouds formed across her face. She dropped the gun and shivered for a moment, head jerking, as if caught between two dragging forces. Then, almost in slow motion, she doubled over, fists clenching, eyes squeezing shut. She dragged air deep into her gut, more air than seemed possible, an endless, thirsty, ravenous gasp.
Adamah. It was filling her. Sorrel was dead in the hole, and the shovel used to bury him was lying at her feet.
For a few steps he went backward, trying to dredge up the courage to turn his back on the thing in the flower bed. Pain lit up his torso as he finally turned. He used the burst of adrenaline to charge across the garden. On the porch steps, he fell. As blood-slippery fingers fought with the screen door, a burst of footfalls broke out on the grass, rapid as galloping hooves. It had her fully now, and she was following. Fast.
As he tore across the porch, pounding feet sounded on the steps.
The back doorknob rattled inside his fist. It opened the next second and Brad burst through.
The lights were blinding. The piano music had stopped.
Flying feet clattered across the porch behind, and he turned and slammed the door. A frantic search revealed no lock. He knew that. He leaned against the door. For a couple heartbeats, the hall was still. Then rustling, like wind stirring treetops, came through the dining room, rasping his ears. The people in the dance hall, finally sleeping.
By his hip, the doorknob turned. Gradually, pressure built. He braced himself even as frosty weariness crawled up his legs. His splayed hands turned white. Lowering his head, he pressed his chin into his chest and felt sweat slide down his nose.
The pressure lifted for a moment. Then a blow struck the door. It vibrated through his frame. Then nothing.
Seconds dripped past. Blood seeped from his side, chilled his shirt, plummeted to the floor. Perspiration slicked his skin and his glasses slipped from his nose and clattered onto the floor.
In the split second before a blink, something dark darted from beneath the door and grabbed the glasses. It retracted with them until they bent and shattered against the threshold.
The saliva inside Brad’s mouth dried. “Jennifer,” he rasped.
A sigh came from the other side of the door. A deep current from an ancient cave. “Oh, Brad.”
The darkness reappeared below the door. A silvery residue taking the form of two hands. Fuzzy, thin, impossibly long, they spread like a stain across the bright boards toward his feet.
Brad screamed.
He peeled away from the wood.
He hurtled down the hall.
Behind him, the door fell off its hinges. Her drumming feet quickly overtook his staggering legs. As he passed the foot of the staircase, her arms came around his neck, then her legs around his waist.
Brad stumbled. The front door was there, wide open. But all resiliency left his legs. They crumpled.
The door. Get through. To the car.
She lay on top of him, kneading his shoulder. His nerves were flakes of wood in the presence of a fire, glowing and curling up. She pulled her body up along his and bent down. Her hair piled on the floor beside his head.
“Shh, Brad. I know you want to rest.”
He crawled, dragging them both by his fingernails.
Jennifer’s right hand moved from his shoulder. It burrowed under his shirt and pressed against the wound in his side. The pain wasn’t debilitating. But the black hole of despair that opened up inside of him was. The massive weight, like an anchor tied to his heart.
It was the same feeling he had experienced when she told him after the funeral to leave her forever, when she had pulled off the ring and thrown it onto the floor. The same feeling, cold and gray, that had flooded him so many times before that, ever since his father died. It snuffed out the light and will and purpose and strength in him. It inundated everything with a crushing emptiness that settled deep in his chest: no escape.
Murders. Memories. Unfinished business. The dead at Serene Flats in Mississippi, at the Martlet Mall in Louisiana, in the salt marshes in North Carolina, on the interstate near Jasper, and dozens more all across the South. They were his legacy. His life’s work.
His hands lay on the threshold. His chin was propped on the floor. His veins were draining; his life was painted out behind him on the hall floor. He stared out at the ashen evening.
“Sleep,” she whispered above him. Gentle. A healer’s words. “Sleep well.”
The softest rain fell beyond the porch: a coalescence of the rising mist.
“It’s okay,” she assured him. “You’ve wanted this for so long. Rest.”
Rain. Back on that first day. Sorrel standing right out there. Bury her before the rain comes.
Muscles stiffened. Teeth ground together. Gagging in air, Brad dragged himself onto the porch. Her claws dug into his shoulder. She leaned down again. “It’s time to stop, Brad.”
The jutting nail heads
tore his shirt. They gouged his flesh. He was at the edge of the porch. The car was pulled up before the steps.
Trembling, he reached out into the rain. He gripped the top step and hauled his body over the edge. As he tumbled down, she dislodged. They fell into the gravel together. She lay there quietly, watching him.
Wiggling toward the car, Brad gripped the door handle. He pulled himself up and the door opened. Behind, she climbed languidly to her feet. “You left me, Brad.”
The glove box popped open. His hand strained inside and closed around the gun. As her feet crunched through the gravel, he hauled himself around to face her, pistol raised.
She stopped. “You abandoned me. We were supposed to support each other.”
He held the gun still for a full minute as she stared at him, and then it began to tremble.
It was her. Blond hair, tired face, lonely eyes. Beautiful in the falling rain.
“Jennifer.”
“Brad.”
“Jennifer,” he said again.
She stepped closer. “Yes.”
“You . . . you told me to kill you if you ever became addicted.”
Delicately, she pushed her loose hair behind her ears. “I’m fine, Brad.”