by Noah Broyles
“No.” He braced the pistol with both hands. “Do you renounce the devil inside of you?”
“I . . . ” She shook her head. Her lips bunched tight against tears. “I’m not strong enough. I need your help.” Another step. “Help me get clean. Please.”
Such a gentle voice. Without his glasses, and with the sweat in his eyes, and with the air itself sweating, she was blurry. A blurry shape motioning to him. Closing in. Reaching.
“Please help—”
Brad pulled the trigger. Her head split.
She pitched backward. There was no echo. The report vanished into the fog and into the glowing, staring house.
She lay prone in the gravel. Her reaching arm stayed sticking up. As he stood there, puddles formed in her eyes and in her open palm. It was raining. Returning to the car, he replaced the gun in the glove box and withdrew the other item stowed there. He took it back to the corpse.
He dropped the ring into Jennifer’s hand.
44
The South is a ghost, and so am I.
—“The House of Dust”
Southern Gothic
From among the weeds, Missy plucked three daffodils.
The first she placed on Abe Daleder’s grave. The second, on the grave of the woman with thin dark hair, the woman who had risen from the floor at the gray house, who oversaw the burial ceremony of Roy. Between their graves, in the central flower bed, she pressed the last daffodil into a little mound of mud covering Walt’s hands. There.
Inside the house, she eased the back door shut. Repose was reigning. Enough rocks had been thrown into the pond to break open the surface, and now the earth was bleeding its vast tranquility up through the roots of the house, through every splinter of wood and sliver of glass, hazing the atmosphere in every room. The creak of her footsteps was wonderfully lonely as she stole across the dance hall, between the prostrate bodies, each paled just slightly by fine dust.
They slept in the parlor, too, and in the hall upstairs, and in the open bedrooms and in the study, and in the wicker chairs on the upper porch. On the front porch, they lay curled up by the columns and slumped in the rockers.
Only one chair had been left vacant. The central one.
Easing herself into it, Missy rocked slowly. She leaned her head back and drank in the reverie. Gradually, she became conscious of each sliver of silence and shiver of movement, each stitch in the tapestry of the dark country. Stillness in Three Summers and along the dark miles of the forest road. Silky water slipping below the clay-stained bridge. Cicadas in the trees, crickets in the fields, fireflies among the stars. Peace in the house at night. And then, before her closing eyes, the island morphed, melting into another place.
A golden land.
45
Wandering the ways of the night, we return and return to find the place where we died.
—“The House of Dust”
Southern Gothic
The McDonald’s in Lexington was crowded. Nine o’clock at night and people were shouldering through the glowing, greasy doors.
Brad found a place at the outskirts of the parking lot and eased his seat back. He couldn’t feel his fingers anymore, but he managed to get the laptop open and navigate to the document containing the article he wrote from the Atlanta hospital bed. His eyes weren’t working well, either, so he tripled the font size to examine the text.
It was a mess. Twisted histories. Ancient names. But always the same story. Always the same being looming behind the cycles, the same rituals.
Sorrel’s words returned: This is your monument to Adamah.
Unbidden, he shivered. The dry scent of cooling pavement drifted in through the shattered window. And then the softer smell of the land beyond the lot. Mown grass. Dry, hardened earth. As the gentle current continued, the odors grew stronger.
Brad forced his fingers to move.
With clumsy swipes and clicks, he cut out most of the material, leaving only one history. His own. A story he’d never told before. The one that had followed him. The one he had hidden behind all the others. But even in that one, the specter remained, woven into his final month.
He leaned his head back. Chills needled every part of his body. He was almost over.
In the side mirror, people moved as dark outlines against the restaurant windows. Blinking heavily, he became aware of something beyond the windshield, standing beneath a light pole in the neighboring lot. A man with burnt, seeping arms folded across a blackened orange jumpsuit. Shriveled eye sockets gazing toward the car.
This is your monument to Adamah. Sunlight will make it grow.
Brad shut his eyes. He listened to the far-off tapping down a tunnel of his brain and found himself nodding faintly along with it as weight bore over him. It was time to let it out. To let it go. To trust the world with the truth.
But not all of it.
Words blurred as he altered the ending, deforming the truth of what had been present in Atlanta and tonight at Angel’s Landing. What was closing in on him even now. He buried it in metaphor and myth. It was an ending to the cycles and the thing in the house. It was his ending.
When he was done, the article was still a chaotic collage. It didn’t matter. His death would sanctify it in Heather’s eyes. She would publish it. And people would read it. Marvel at it. And, eventually, forget it.
He typed “My last article” in the subject line and hit send.
Then he slouched over, head resting against the window frame. Out below the light pole, the figure had vanished.
He blew a long, painful breath.
Blood still trickled from his side, but much more slowly now.
The night sighed on his cheek, flavored thickly with the musk of earth. Not dry earth now, though. Damp, crumbly soil. Like the car had been transported to the center of a verdant field.
Movement outside the window, filling his periphery. A figure of raw darkness.
It leaned down. It reached for him. Its arms came through the razor fragments of the window and were everywhere, tingling, smothering, embracing him.
He couldn’t move. His vision went. His feeling went. For a moment he was nothing but a thought: the word his dad had sworn to say before he died.
“Amen,” Brad whispered.
The House of Dust
The day after Christmas of 1999, my dad called me out on the back patio. It was a Sunday morning and there was a church on the other side of the chain-link fence. We lived in Rhode Island, so it was cold, but my dad had been sitting out there for the last half hour, smoking and listening to the hymns.
“Hey, Brad,” he said. “I didn’t realize it was Christmas yesterday till I heard them singing over there last night. Sorry about that.”
I shrugged.
“Don’t worry, though, I got you something. Come here.”
We sat in plastic lawn chairs by a wire table spray-painted yellow, and he opened a cardboard box.
“Instructions,” he muttered, tossing a booklet aside. “Why would you need instructions for this?”
It was a Newton’s cradle. He pulled back one of the beads, let it fall, and I watched the one on the far side of the row leap away. For a few seconds, they took turns tapping out their cadence. I huddled down in my chair, pressing my hands between my knees.
“You like it?” he said.
“How long does it go for?”
“Not forever, thank God. That’d be annoying. No, it stops after a bit. See?”
The jittering beads settled into stillness.
“I wish it would go on,” I said.
“If it weren’t for friction, they’d never stop,” he said. “They’d go on forever. But the world’s full of friction.” He chuckled dryly. “Anyway, you can play with it after I’m gone.”
He re-boxed it and sat back and kept smoking.
“Why do you listen to that stuff?” I asked, nodding toward the church.
My dad shrugged. “I’m grateful. Jesus rose from the dead so I won’t have to.” He grinned. “Go on now, I don’t want you to breathe too much of this stuff.”
“Why do you smoke?” I asked.
“They don’t like it on the rig. Got to do it here.”
“Why don’t they like it on the rig?”
My dad let his head loll back. He looked at the sky, then over at me.
“Go back inside, Brad.”
I obeyed and pretended to be asleep on the couch that afternoon when he came to say goodbye. He stood over me for a while, then went and got the cardboard box with the cradle in it. I heard the hiss of a Magic Marker across its surface. Then he left for the airport.
When I opened my eyes, the box sat on the coffee table. Written across the side were the words: It can’t go on forever.
Five days later, on New Year’s Eve, the New Horizon oil rig sixty-four miles off the Alabama coast caught fire. Twelve men died: Jacob Nilsen, Forrest Blakny, Earl Hoagland, Clifford Jones, Jason Gomez, Micah Dreyer, Daryl Farmer, Clive Kinsey, Warner Shultz, Tony Andre, Fenton Lee, Zed Lennon. And Martin Parker Ellison, who caused the explosion. I knew he hated the company. I knew he blamed my mom’s departure on his brutal schedule. I knew it would happen.
I told no one. I did nothing. And afterward, I did worse than nothing. I tried to atone. I revealed the sins of others so I would never have to recount my own. I wrote articles for this magazine, Southern Gothic; but what is the gothic if not rooted in denial and darkness? I must let in the light.
I met Jennifer in 2014.
She worked at a little diner in Marion County, in southern Tennessee. I was doing research there for “Scarlet Seven Miles” (see Mar/Apr 2015 issue) and used the spot as my office during the week I visited. I noticed that she did not go outside to smoke during her breaks like so many of the other workers.
Instead, since the place was usually crowded, she asked if it would be possible to sit at my table and study her medical books, because, well, that’s where the light was best. Of course I said, “Of course,” and then went back to writing the story of a monster who dragged a kidnapped family along a seven-mile stretch of local interstate behind his pickup, while she studied the anatomy of the brain. In that tense silence, a connection formed between us.
When I left town, I asked for her number. I called her, then I visited her, then I asked her to move to Nashville, where I would help pay her school bills. And then, in late October of 2017, I asked her to marry me because the rest of my life was looking pretty grim.
Heather at Southern Gothic was quite literally baying for blood. She asked me to present summaries of my upcoming stories; it was hard to admit that I didn’t have any upcoming stories. I set out on a driving tour of the South, deciding I needed fuller immersion despite my almost ten years of residence.
I spent the early months of 2018 cruising through hundreds of miles of brown winter forests and gray winter fields and past blue winter oceans and rivers and lakes. My hopes of finding something unique to write about sank along with the balance in my bank account. But always behind me, around the last bend, was the idea of a man with a burned face, and a crime that might have been averted. That drove me more than my editor’s shrill commands.
But nothing materialized in these months of wandering. I began to rely heavily on antidepressants, first prescribed after my dad’s death to beat back the pursuing clouds. It seemed that if there was always another gruesome tragedy to expose, then my job was pointless. Nothing was changed by my reporting on the gory details. No lives were being healed, no progress was being made. I was recycling nightmares, and only people in faraway office buildings were collecting the treasure created by all this spilled blood.
In early February of 2018, my editor, Heather, called me from Atlanta to complain. She did it, however, in an unusually subtle way. Lily Verner, Heather explained, was a bright recent grad who was writing a series of five true crime articles set in an allegedly haunted oil field in Alabama. After reading the first one, Heather had bought the series. They would serve for almost a full year’s worth of issues. She let an ensuing silence tell me the rest: after eight months of nothing from me, Southern Gothic was seeking fresh blood.
And then, on April 24, 2018, the final blow fell. My fiancée, interning at Nashville General, administered the wrong medication to a teenage girl named Lila Simmons. It was an accident. Lila needed an MRI. She was claustrophobic about the machine. Jennifer went to key in the sedative and selected the wrong autofill option.
It ended her career before it could begin, and it also ended our engagement because she insisted we attend Lila’s funeral. The way her mother screamed when she saw Jennifer was a way I’ve never heard anyone scream. That scream made Jennifer scream, too. It made her say she was evil. It made her rip off her ring in the car and throw it onto the floor and say I needed to leave her.
Later that afternoon, far from Nashville, I got off the interstate to commit suicide.
I was supposed to interview a police chief in Jackson about a carjacking cold case, but my tire blew out with thirty miles to go. The delay killed the appointment, and the trouble I had swapping tires revealed my own inadequacy even more. The car rode unlevel on the spare, droning the prospect of another failed investigation into my bones. Heat pressed through the sunroof, pounding memories of my fiancée’s screaming face through my sweaty scalp. Both of those pillars of my life—collapsing. When I saw the next off-ramp, I put on my signal.
It was one of those dead, pointless exits in rural Tennessee that serves perhaps a dozen people a day. Left was the interstate underpass. Right was blank road. I wanted a quiet place to do it. I went right, out into the wilderness, leaving the world and all its weight behind.
But the weight followed me.
It was the end of April, but outside the grimy glass, the afternoon trees wore the tired green of late summer. I searched for a shady gravel patch along the shoulder. The broken driver’s-side window control clicked beneath my forefinger as the rising pressure crushed open a primal place in my brain filled with flames and billowing smoke and the searing smell of raw oil. My eyes watered. I tried to still my finger and couldn’t.
The clicking only stopped when I saw the sign. It leaned drunkenly among thick honeysuckle at the left edge of the highway. My vision cleared. Buried beneath many spray-painted desecration attempts lay the official black lettering:
Three Summers—Two Miles
Just beyond the sign, a leafy mouth opened in the wall of the woods, the shrouded access point to the forgotten town. It would do. I turned across the highway and stopped my car amid the brackish twilight.
An RIA .38 Special rode in the glove box. I took it out and braced it against my temple. The movements of my jaw, clenching and unclenching, translated along its length into my hand. I could already smell the sulfur, already feel the fiery track of the bullet through my brain. The window would shatter. The flies would come through the breach and settle on my body. Eventually, someone would happen down this road and find my car. Word would get out, swirl across local networks, then end up in Atlanta on the desk of my editor, Heather. My own death would be the last violent, meaningless story I provided to her. I might just as well have stepped out in traffic while changing the car tire back on the interstate.
No, I did not want a violent death.
I replaced the gun and picked up an orange canister from the passenger-side floorboard. Ten milligrams would buoy me up. Lift the weight. Bring me back to the surface. But there was fire on the surface. The endless fight to stay afloat. The story I could never tell.
I gripped the canister. It would take about a dozen pills to get sleepy, a dozen more to soar from my body for good. But I couldn’t swallow one pill dry, let alone twenty-four.
“Some water,�
� I said aloud. “I need a drink of water.”
Stepping on the gas, I fled down the ancient road, crossed an ancient concrete span over a waterway called Locust River, and came to the town of Three Summers.
It was a place forgotten by our world, a place of early-
twentieth-century brick buildings and dead neon signs. I stopped in at a Texaco station for a drink—one of the few places still open—and tried again to swallow the pills in the shade of the gas pump canopy. But a vision of a burnt man in an orange canvas suit welled up out of the heat and knocked on my window. It was by far the most vivid hallucination of my father I’d had since he died.
It resolved into a gray-colored old woman who insisted, in the mistaken belief that I was a doctor, that I visit a nearby residence. Apparently, a person of some local importance was ill.
I don’t know why I answered yes. To ease the weight, perhaps, forestall the inevitable.
The town petered out into abandoned lawns and weed-cracked drives running up to ivy-shrouded houses. I turned left at the first road I came to, still in sight of the town, still with the gray woman visible in my rearview mirror. Some part of me already itched to pull this thread.
The road was straight, and the woods formed a green tunnel around it, diffusing the light to an even emerald gloaming. The hazy catacomb of forest absorbed the sound and motion of my car, adding to my delirium.
Three miles later, I passed back into the sun, crossing a little clay-stained bridge that spanned a dark creek. The road that followed was in bad shape. Thick, empty fields appeared on my left. The fields ran down a mile or so to the glimmering green line of the river. The heat and the pills and budding nausea blurred my vision.
I would have sped right past the old place if my gaze had not been suddenly pulled to the passenger-side window by that mysterious, magnetic presence possessed by things that wait. A murky drive led me up along through a twisting avenue of live oaks, and at its end I found a fine old plantation house, shrouded by woods and swamped by weeds, but beautifully preserved. And around back, in a verdant garden, I found the body of a woman. Like the house, she had been touched by many years, but remained beautiful.