The House of Dust

by Noah Broyles

  I stood in the dance hall several times during those days, looking at the shape on the mirror above the fireplace, at its many outstretched arms. What drove this cult? What happened to those who entered that embrace?

  Jennifer slept at night, deeply, eerily. I did not. I sat in the study, computer open. Each time the chasm of sleep approached, a toppling, plummeting sensation jolted me awake and my eyes would land on the Newton’s cradle at the edge of my desk. Silent. Urging action. One muggy morning, I jerked up in my chair to find her kneeling beside the desk. She hardly noticed me. She was going through the death notes retrieved from the hospital, nodding to herself, smiling softly.

  This disturbed me. I consulted Pastor Burger at Simmons Creek and he advised us to depart immediately. I called Jennifer from the road. She sighed flatly when I asked if she was okay: “Brad. I’m fine.” Still, I decided it was time to conclude the investigation. In Three Summers, I parked by the Theater Grill and went in and had chicken fingers and tater tots for lunch. I looked across the street at the arched cut-glass window above the marquee sign in the theater’s limestone façade. The diner was empty besides a Stan Lee look-alike behind the counter. I asked him when the theater was last open, and he said, “I’m not giving any quotes,” and went into the back. Before leaving, I took pictures of some photos hanging on the wall that showed people gathered around town, all with their eyes shut.

  I got into the theater through the back door. Inside in the dark, in the dust, in the little projector room above the auditorium, I found an artifact that put all my other findings in place. A film, made by Miriam Larkin, which depicted the demise of a man who came to Three Summers one warm evening. He was welcomed at first, then led by a happy throng away from the town to the island where the house stood. And there, in the roots of a tree, he was buried alive.

  I left the place reeling. Now I knew: the old woman who I had driven to the cemetery had been placed in her grave alive, as had hundreds of others through the long history of the house. The community had been consumed by a cult. Jennifer and I would leave today. There was just one last call to pay.

  Jezebel Irons had said she was home during the midafternoon hours. So I went to see her. I drove back up Adamah Road and looked across the field at the house. Jezebel was home.

  I followed her voice into a room where gaps had been cut in the boards so people could crawl into the gloom below. I went down there and found her sitting in the half-light, a hole dug between her heels, waiting for me. I knew what Adamah was, but I didn’t know why he was, why this town was enthralled by a mythical being, why they buried living victims in his honor.

  She showed me. She had preserved Missy’s other severed hand. Burial, she said, imparted breath to Adamah, trapped in the ground. And as Queen of Hearts, Missy had breathed for Adamah and imparted his blessing: salvation in the past.

  To learn this, Jezebel compelled me to participate in a ritual with her: the burial of this hand that had held so much significance. I complied. And then I hallucinated my father, burned, bloody, black with oil, crouching with me in the dark.

  I fled.

  Sorrel met me on the road. He had been out to the house again. He told me to be out of there by midnight. He said we were becoming part of the cycles that had gripped this place for centuries. Jennifer, he said, was in trouble. Premature evening fell as I drove back to the house.

  From the records on my desk, Jennifer had discovered Jerimiah McCloud’s ancient antidote. She had spread mud across her body. She was calm. Collected. More peaceful than at any point since before Lila Simmons’s death.

  She had become something.

  She tried to share it with me, tried to smear dirt on my face. But I had seen the madness brought on by these rituals. And I saw now in her eyes not the loneliness I had come to love, but a contented companionship. I could not make her leave with me, and I could not make myself stay.

  The whole land seemed to hold its breath as I drove away. That was Monday, May 22. My last day in Three Summers.

  That evening, down in Lexington, disgusted in the face of my own cowardice, I received a call: Hettinga, returning my weeks-old voicemail. Through a cloak of static, he invited me to Atlanta, eager to share his knowledge. Believing he would know a way to extract Jennifer from the web of that place, I left at once.

  The orange lights came out along the interstate, the clock climbed toward midnight, and Jennifer shadowed every thought. What was she doing back in that dark land, far from the city lights? I should have been more aware of her; aware of how we were slipping. But it happened during those ephemeral midweek days when I was unearthing the intergenerational connections between house and town. Before I realized we’d become a part of it.

  It was midnight when I arrived in Atlanta. Down in the Gulch, down near the old Atlanta Constitution Building, I met the man I supposed to be Richard Hettinga. In the quiet of the night, he recounted the history of the house as a vast cycle of violent men and ethereal women. Each time a man brought a new Queen, the town was replenished and the cycle was sustained.

  He told me about darkness that had possessed a young boy named Roy. He told of a Three Summers gathering in 1962, where burning cold had passed through the boy’s body, and the endless void that had filled his chest, and he told how a woman named Missy had saved him from burial and absorbed the darkness; a woman who feared cruelty and longed for the peace that comes with utter silence. He told how she killed the town sheriff, a man named Ezra, and became Queen.

  “You were that little boy?” I asked Hettinga.

  “I was Roy. The Queen of Hearts raised me. And I raised her son, Sorrel. I wish I could have helped him escape that place.”

  I said, “Tell me how someone becomes a Queen of Hearts.”

  He told me to follow him. The deep red taillights of Hettinga’s car led the way along miles of dark roads until a very different part of Atlanta was passing outside my windows. Amber streetlights shone down on buckling sidewalks and overturned trash cans. When he turned onto a residential street, the headlights flashed across barred windows. The car stopped before one of the old houses.

  This was the childhood home of the old woman I had found, Missy. This was where she had, by accident one summer night in 1949, killed her grandmother, who was being abused by a visiting man. Hettinga directed me to the backyard to find the place where she laid the body. A bed of daffodils. A patch of earth where she had sat for days, mourning her accidental crime.

  The scene triggered something in me. My own past broke open more vividly than it ever had before. It appeared again as my father. It pursued me down the dark neighborhood streets as I left. It drove me off the road and into darkness.

  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.

  I resurfaced in Piedmont Atlanta Hospital on June 1. The nurse said a car accident had knocked me into a coma. I had been dehydrated, malnourished, and severely sleep deprived. And my fiancée had been calling.

  “Who?”

  “She said her name’s Jennifer? She’s been sending those every day.”

  A bouquet of daffodils graced my bedside table.

  “When can I leave?” I asked.

  They said Sunday. That was Friday. In the intervening time, I wrote most of this article. Heather, my editor, who is based in Atlanta and listed as an emergency contact, never bothered to come see me. I didn’t care. This wasn’t for her anymore, or Southern Gothic. It was about the thing that had chased me in circles for years. The thing that was manifest in that little town, inside that house, in

  the body of my fiancée.

  I was released midafternoon on June 3. The rental car took the last of my money.

  I arrived at the house in the aftermath of a party. Sorrel was there. He attacked me
. He broke my phone. He said I would never publish this article. In my weakened state, he dragged me into the woods and hung me from an oak. As I was lifted into the air, I saw an angel in a white garment step from the twilight. She held a gun.

  It was Jennifer, saving me. She ordered me to bring Sorrel’s body to the garden behind the house. Although he was not dead, she told me to bury him. And when I hesitated, she turned the gun on me.

  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. This was the previous cycle’s version of me—the partner of the last Queen. This was Walt Collins. This was history coming back to claim the house and town for another generation.

  Jennifer would never kill me. But the Queen of Hearts would. She had been changed not by a demon, but by the quiet land and the blemished community and the stagnant pull of old time. Someone of deep pain welcomed without spite into this fold, ready now to perform its deadly rites.

  So, I killed the Queen of Hearts. And she killed me.

  The South is a ghost, and so am I. Wandering the ways of the night, we return and return to find the place where we died. Walking circles, running cycles, never reaching beyond, never breaking free. Traveling through time, orbiting a black star.

  It can’t last. My dad tried to teach me this with his last Christmas gift. But I did not listen. I journeyed on, while the plantation houses became wedding venues, and the cotton fields became factory buildings, always searching . . . searching . . .

  I’m going to send this to you now, Heather. Do what you want with it. This is my last article.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A book is a house.

  And a house starts with a dream. This dream began as a bicycle ride down a few quiet back roads in my native East Tennessee and a pondering on what might lie behind that quiet. What might stir in the green forest shadows? What might happen in the houses behind the trees? Who might come down these roads in the dead of afternoon? It began with stillness and sunlight and the name “Holiday” on a real estate sign and a few lines from the Epic of Gilgamesh.

  But tools are needed to turn a dream into a plan. And for that I must thank my parents, who purchased that typewriter when I was fourteen, when I began writing seriously, and purchased a laptop soon after, and then another laptop, and put food on the table, and never pried into what was taking shape beneath the sound of those clattering keys.

  And a plan needs encouragement to flourish, and for that I must thank my siblings—Ryan, Laura, Chris, Anna—who asked what I was writing now and when it would be done. And my siblings-in-law, Roger and Rose. And my friends, too, especially Luke and Rachel, who asked when I would finally publish something. And the professors of the Carson-Newman University English department, who were always enthusiastic about my pursuits, especially Dr. Mraovic-O’Hare, and Dr. Underwood, and Dr. Sobiech, and Dr. McMasters (from whom I stole a line in this book). Thank you all.

  But ultimately a plan needs an architect, and for that I must thank Adam Gomolin of Inkshares. He worked tirelessly with me, taking this book from its earliest state (through more drafts than I care to mention) until it reached its final form. Adam’s ability to discern the proper threads to pull that will draw together the tapestry of a book is truly staggering. I could not ask for a better advisor or advocate.

  And, of course, a house must have builders to make it take shape, and those builders were the wonderful readers and editors and designers who helped lay down the floors and nail on the roof and mix the proper color paint for each scene. Avalon Radys, who read the book and runs Inkshares and keeps us all on track. Kurt Mueller, Amanda Desiree, Chase Pletts, Laramie Dean, Grant Bayliss, and J-F. Dubeau, who all took time to read and consider and critique and encourage. And Sorcha Groundsell and Barnaby Conrad, both of whom brought their special talent to this story in its final days as a manuscript, honing, sharpening, taking it to a state I never could have. And Pam McElroy and Kaitlin Severini, whose meticulous care and attention to each page of this book during copyedit smoothed away my numerous errors and inconsistences of spelling and punctuation and setting and plot and much, much more. Thank you all.

  But ultimately, a house needs inhabitants. And for that I must thank you, dear reader, for reading. For stepping through the door and sitting for a while and experiencing this story with me. Thank you.

  And, finally, a house needs ghosts to haunt it, and for that I must thank those masters of the genre who inspired me. Edgar Allan Poe, who dreamed of a kingdom by the sea. Shirley Jackson, who invited us into the modern haunted house. William Faulkner, who made us reconsider time. Flannery O’Connor, who acquainted us with sublimity and absurdity. And Michael McDowell, who steeped us in atmosphere. All these luminaries contributed to dreams and ideas in deeper, more subliminal, and more profound ways than I can truly express. What is a writer without his forebearers?

  And eternally, thanks be to God, without whom I can do nothing.

  inkshares

  INKSHARES is a reader-driven publisher and producer based in Oakland, California. Our books are selected not by a group of editors, but by readers worldwide.

  While we’ve published books by established writers like Big Fish author Daniel Wallace and Star Wars: Rogue One scribe Gary Whitta, our aim remains surfacing and developing the new author voices of tomorrow.

  Previously unknown Inkshares authors have received starred reviews and been featured in The New York Times. Their books are on the front tables of Barnes & Noble and hundreds of independents nationwide, and many have been licensed by publishers in other major markets. They are also being adapted by Oscar-winning screenwriters at the biggest studios and networks.

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