The Elementals

by Michael McDowell

  Dauphin, ever dutiful, took it upon himself to rescue them. Scorning superficialities, he said to India without preface: “Luker told me that I shouldn’t have come out here to Beldame after Mama died, that I’d do better staying in Mobile—”

  “Yes,” said India, not understanding why this remark should have been directed to her. “I know that’s what he said. But you don’t think so.”

  “No, I don’t. Beldame is the place where I’ve been the happiest in my life. I’m twenty-nine years old and I’ve been coming to Beldame every summer since I was born. I’ve never wanted to go anywhere else. The summers I spent here with Luker, you just cain’t imagine how happy I was then—and how miserable I was when it was time to go back to Mobile! Luker wouldn’t speak to me when we got back home. We were best friends at Beldame, but in Mobile he wouldn’t give me the time of day.”

  “You were three years younger than me,” shrugged Luker. “And I had an image to maintain.”

  “It made me very unhappy,” said Dauphin, smiling. “Anyway, I still came out here even after Luker got married and didn’t come any more. Mama and Odessa and I would come out, and I was pretty happy then too. And all that time Leigh was growing up, and she was so smart—she was valedictorian of her class in high school and she made the dean’s list at Vanderbilt and she was winning beauty contests right and left—”

  “I was Fire Queen of Mozart,” said Leigh with self-deprecation. “And one time I won an electric toothbrush in a poetry contest.”

  “Anyway,” said Dauphin to India, “I thought that the most wonderful thing in the world was that when we were at Beldame together she’d walk down the beach with me.”

  “That’s because I knew you had about eighteen million dollars in your checking account,” said Leigh to her husband.

  He paid her no mind. “And one day we were sitting here at this table, just her and me—”

  “I was upstairs telling Marian what was gone happen,” said Big Barbara.

  “And Odessa was in the kitchen trying to smack a wasp,” laughed Leigh, “and all the time that Dauphin was trying to propose, we’d hear this thwack thwack thwack on the walls, and all the pans would rattle.”

  “—and I said, ‘Hey, Leigh, I know you’re smart, and I know you’re beautiful and there’re about eighteen million men who would jump off the back of a moving truck just to get the chance to say something nice to you, but I’ve got a lot of money and if we get married you sure will have a good time spending it . . .”

  “And I said, ‘Dauphin, I sure will!’” said Leigh. “And I sure do!”

  “Well, Barbara,” said Luker, “now that Leigh has been taken care of, I hope that you and Lawton have changed your will to leave me sole beneficiary of the McCray Fertilizer Company.”

  “That will depend on how you treat me in future,” said Big Barbara.

  Odessa came out of the kitchen to pour more coffee and remove the dishes. India’s question was almost lost under the clatter of the plates. “Dauphin, are you frightened of the third house too?”

  “Yes,” he answered, without hesitation.

  “What makes you ask such a question, child?” demanded Big Barbara.

  “Because Luker’s afraid of it.”

  “Luker,” said his mother, “have you been telling that child tales?”

  Luker didn’t answer.

  “India,” said Leigh, “there’s nothing in the third house. People just think there is because it’s been abandoned so long, and it’s getting covered up with sand and so forth. I mean, the place looks . . .” She didn’t want to finish that sentence.

  “It looks as if something were wrong with it,” said Luker. “That’s all. India asked me why we never invited anybody down here but family, and I told her about Dauphin’s graduation party.”

  “Oh, that was nothing!” said Big Barbara. “India, that was nothing! That was ten little girls sitting up late and telling each other ghost stories and all of ’em getting scared together, because Beldame is a lonely place at night if you’re not used to it. They made it all up. I was in the house that night and I didn’t see anything. There were about ten boys staying here in the Savage house, and they didn’t see anything. There wasn’t anything to see.”

  “But you still don’t invite anybody down,” said India.

  “People like excitement and bright lights these days,” said Big Barbara, “they don’t want to come to poky old Beldame, where there’s nothing to do but memorize the tide tables.”

  “Anyway,” said Leigh, “there’s no point in you being afraid of the third house, India. The only reason Dauphin and Luker and I are afraid is that we grew up with it. We were always making up stories about it, saying there was somebody who lived inside—somebody who was always hiding in the rooms where we couldn’t see him. We’d dare each other to look through the windows, and when we looked through the windows whoever was inside would be hiding under the bed or behind the couch or something.”

  “Today,” said India, “this afternoon, I—”

  “India was very foolish today,” interrupted her father, “and she climbed to the top of the dune at the front of the third house. She looked in one of the windows.”

  Dauphin appeared horrified by this, and Big Barbara spluttered her alarm. Leigh said, “India, you ought not to have done that. Luker, you ought not to have let her. That sand isn’t firm, she could have slipped right under! The sand at that end of Beldame is treacherous, just treacherous!”

  “I looked in the window, and—”

  “No!” said Big Barbara. “We are going to stop talking about all this—because it’s just nonsense. Isn’t it, Odessa?” Odessa had come in with more coffee.

  “Sure is,” said Odessa. “Nothing in the third house ’cept sand and dust.”

  “India,” said her grandmother, “we wouldn’t let you play on an abandoned roller coaster, and we’re not gone let you play around the third house either. It’s rotted and it’s dangerous.”

  India placed her hand over her coffee cup and wouldn’t take any more.

  Dauphin had admitted to India his fear, but refused to elaborate upon it. However, it was certain that he had taken the bedroom at the northeastern corner of the house for Leigh and himself. From its two windows, you could see nothing but St. Elmo’s Lagoon, which shone with a sickly green phosphorescence. It was the loneliest and saddest vista that Beldame afforded, and this especially at night. Nowhere were nights blacker than at Beldame; there wasn’t a streetlight within thirty miles of the place. Just offshore the Gulf was deep and had no need of buoys. When everyone had gone to bed and the lights in the houses were extinguished, there were only the stars overhead and the wide rippling ribbon of St. Elmo’s Lagoon. The new moon was a black patch stitched onto a blacker quilt.

  After supper, when Luker, India, and Big Barbara had crossed the yard together and gone into their own house, Dauphin stood at the window of his and Leigh’s room and looked out at the lagoon. Above, he heard the footsteps of Odessa and Leigh on the third floor. When Leigh came down he begged her to read in bed until he had fallen asleep.

  “All right,” she said, “why?”

  “Because,” he replied simply, “I’m afraid to be the last one asleep at Beldame.”

  “Even when I’m in bed right next to you?”

  He nodded.

  “What did you used to do when you had to sleep all by yourself?” Leigh asked.

  “I made Odessa sit up with me. I’ve never been the last one to go to sleep at Beldame.”

  “Dauphin, why haven’t you ever told me this before?”

  “I was afraid you would think I was being stupid.”

  Leigh laughed. “Why are you telling me now?”

  “Oh, because of what India was talking about tonight.”

  “The third house?”

  “Yes. I don’t like talking about it. It’s not that I’m still afraid—”

  “But you are,” said his wife. “You are still afraid of
it.”

  He nodded. “I guess I am. It’s funny to be back now. And it’s odd, I thought I’d be thinking the whole time about Mama, but I got here, and I was out sitting in the swing, and it wasn’t till just now that I remembered that Mama died in that swing. I wasn’t thinking about her, I was just thinking about the third house . . .”

  “Dauphin, I don’t think you’re foolish. Mama and Marian, they were the foolish ones, raising us to be superstitious, raising us to be scared of things. If we have any children, I’m gone raise ’em different. They’re not gone hear a word about the third house.”

  “That’d probably be best,” said Dauphin. “It’s not good, I can tell you, to grow up all the time scared of things.”

  Leigh turned on the bedside light and read a Cosmopolitan that was dated fifteen months back. Dauphin fell asleep with his head buried in her side, and his arm reaching across her breast. Even his feet were tangled in her legs—for protection against the third house.

  When he felt the warmth of the rising sun on the sheet that lay across his body, he tried to avoid waking. Leigh lay within his arms but did not rouse when he squeezed her. Still he did not open his eyes, hoping that despite the increased warmth—which already was making him sweat—and despite the light that burned carmine against the inside of his lids, he would be overtaken by sleep again.

  Experimentally, he pushed away from Leigh, and turned his back to her. But sleep would not come again, and Leigh did not wake. The effort of keeping his eyes closed became at last too great, and he allowed them to open. A large rectangle of red light—carefully outlined and divided like the window—was focused on the door into the hallway; as he stared it shifted a little, dropping toward the knob. It was probably not later than five.

  He waited for Odessa’s step on the floor above. He knew in which of the half-dozen beds she slept, and that it lay directly above the dresser. As soon as she put her foot upon the floor, he would know it. And when she had dressed herself and he heard her footsteps on the stairs, he would allow himself to rise. He had not minded admitting to his wife that he was fearful of being the last to go to sleep at Beldame; but he would have been ashamed to have it known that he was also frightened of being the first to rise. Anyone could understand night terror, but what could one say of a man whose fears persisted through the dawn?

  Dauphin jerked: the footfall had come, but in an unexpected place, just above the chifforobe in the opposite corner. Dauphin wondered what could have induced Odessa to change a habit of thirty-five years, and this season sleep in a different bed. He stared at the spot where her foot had sounded. Why had Odessa . . .

  Why had he heard no more footsteps? he wondered suddenly, lifting his head from the pillow for the first time.

  Then more footsteps sounded: Odessa moving carefully about the room, knowing she could be heard in the rooms below. For the duration of thirty summers at Beldame (he had first come to the place in Marian Savage’s pregnant belly), Dauphin had risen within minutes of Odessa. He had always been the first for whom Odessa prepared breakfast, at the same time that she fixed her own; and it was only this meal, in this place, and only with Dauphin that Odessa broke her own rule against eating with her employers. At Beldame, at six-fifteen every morning, Odessa and Dauphin Savage shared breakfast at the kitchen table.

  Dauphin also knew that the staircase to the third floor emerged directly into the middle of the room above him, just at the foot of the fourth bed. There was no door to open, and presently Dauphin heard Odessa descending the stairs.

  He had risen from the bed and slipped on his pajamas, intending to follow her downstairs. Unwilling to risk waking Leigh, Odessa would not speak to him until they were together in the kitchen. The square of red morning sunlight burnished the brass knob of the door; Dauphin turned the key in the lock, and pulled the door open.

  Marian Savage stood there. In her hands she held a large red vase that he had never seen before. “Dauphin,” she said.

  Dauphin smiled, then remembered that his mother was dead.

  PART II

  THE THIRD HOUSE

  CHAPTER 10

  While Dauphin Savage dreamed that his dead mother had come to the door of his bedroom, India McCray stood at her window and stared at the third house. In the black hour before dawn when the prickled stars were cloud-obscured, and St. Elmo’s Lagoon provided only a scant spectral glow, she could see almost nothing of the building that so intrigued her. With a little shudder, she realized that she had never been in a place so dark as this. All her life she had lived in the city, where night was characterized not by blackness but only by a relative diminution of light. There were streetlamps and neon signs and uncurtained windows, car headlamps and a haze of red reflected light that covered New York from sundown until dawn. At Beldame, in the night, light was extinguished, and India was as if stricken blind.

  The silence of the place oppressed her. The waves that broke on the shore, a few dozen yards distant, were an irritating reverberation in her ears and seemed unconnected to any physical source. India felt that the unpredictable and ever-changing pattern of the noise—which was all the more static and monotonous for its undeviating inconstancy—covered a real silence in the place, a sinister waiting silence. Things might move and things might shift themselves without her being able to hear them over the powerful thunder of the waves.

  She had been awakened by some jarring noise beneath the regular surf and, knowing that whatever had spoken had spoken in the third house, she had gone immediately to the window. She stood fingering the curtain and cocked her ear. Perhaps the noises she heard after that, creaking doors and breaking glass, were but her imagination. In the waves one could hear anything: the sirens’ call or the scraping tread of the dead on the sand.

  The windows of the third house began to reflect the lightening sky in the east. The panes of glass burned a cold gray while the rest of the house remained the same undifferentiated black as the sky beyond it.

  India returned to her bed and slept dreamlessly until ten o’clock. When she awakened, she did not remember that she had risen in the hour before dawn.

  She did not have breakfast, for everyone else had already eaten and the idea of being specially waited on by Odessa appalled her. She poured herself a cup of coffee from the pot that was keeping warm on the stove and then wandered into the living room of the Savage house. Big Barbara was there alone.

  “India,” she said, “come and sit by me.”

  India did so, and asked, “How do you feel this morning?”

  “Oh, law! This morning I look one day older than God and a year younger than water! Last night I didn’t close my eyes. At five o’clock this morning I was still awake in my bed, turning and tossing and thinking about Big D.”

  “Dallas?”

  “Dying, precious—Big D is death.”

  “Is that because you didn’t have anything to drink last night?”

  “Child, that is a rude thing to say to me! I wonder why Luker didn’t feed you a spoonful of manners when you were little!”

  India shrugged. “Alcoholism is a disease,” she said. “Like athlete’s foot. Or herpes. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Luker and I have lots of friends who are alcoholics. And speed freaks too.”

  “Well, it’s still not what I choose to talk about with my own family. But I tell you what I do want to talk about . . .”

  “What?”

  “I want you to tell me about your life in New York City. I want to know how you spend your days. I want you to tell me about all your little friends, and what you and Luker do when you’re alone together. India, you’re my one and only grandchild and I hardly ever get to see you.”

  “All right,” said India hesitantly. “You ask me questions and I’ll answer them.” She took a bolstering sip of her black coffee. There were things about her father India knew very well but could not possibly reveal to her grandmother; she must be on her guard to say nothing that would dismay or too much astonish Big Barbara.


  “Oh, I’m so happy!” cried Big Barbara. “India, you bring that cup and we’ll go out on our verandah and look at the Gulf. You and I will get the benefit of the breeze.”

  Big Barbara and India crossed the yard and seated themselves in the swing on the McCray verandah. If they stood at the porch rail they could see the single blanket on which Luker, Leigh, and Dauphin lay sunning. From her room India retrieved a morsel of sewing, the blue work shirt she was embroidering.

  “All right,” she said to her grandmother, snapping the hoop shut around the front pocket, “what did you want to know?”

  “I want to know everything! You tell me what you want me to hear.”

  India thought, then smiled. “I’ll tell you about my mother, how’s that?”

  Big Barbara pulled back so quickly that the swing rocked on its chains and India broke a needle against her thimble. “Not a word, child! Don’t mention that woman! That sloozy! I’d like to grind her soul into a blacktopped road! That’s what would make me happy!”

  “What’s a sloozy?” asked India.

  “That’s something between a slut and a floozy—and that was your mother!”

  “I’m sorry I mentioned her, then. Let’s see. What else can I tell you? I’ll tell you—”

  “What do you know about her?” demanded Big Barbara. “You haven’t seen her, have you? Child, that woman left you high and dry. Right now I hope she’s selling encyclopedias door to door, I hope she’s picking potatoes in Louisiana, I hope she’s at the end of the earth, I hope—”