The Elementals

by Michael McDowell

  “Why can’t we wait till the morning?” India asked. “Why can’t we wait till it’s light out?”

  “Because they’s in the house now, and we got to keep ’em from getting out.” She placed a firm hand on India’s shoulder. “They already been in Mr. Dauphin’s house, got in this afternoon when Miz Leigh was ’sleep. I went up there and I read the Bible at it and I shut the window and I locked the door—but I don’t know whether that got rid of it or not. I think it did. I think I done chased it out. I think it’s gone back up there and we saw it in the window. I don’t want to see no more traveling tonight.”

  The door opened, grating thickly on sand. India followed Odessa inside, convulsively grasping the woman’s skirts.

  India shone the feeble light around the room; she could make out little but that it was an old-fashioned kitchen, with a pump and a wood-burning stove (in Beldame, where had they gotten wood?). In the center of the room was a large table stacked with dishes and pots; but all the cupboards and doors were closed, and the long-preserved neatness of the room was unsettling.

  They stood next to the table for more than a minute, motionless and scarcely breathing, listening to the sounds in the house. Beneath the dull drone of the Gulf was an insistent sizzle of falling sand. India shone her light into the corners of the ceiling and saw sand trickling there in tiny intermittent streams and piling up in the corners.

  “I don’t hear anything,” said India. “There’s nobody here. What I saw upstairs was just the reflection of the moon. I wasn’t really awake when I saw it—I’m probably not really awake now.”

  What was the smell of a house that had been shut for decades? India hadn’t anything to compare it with, but Odessa knew that it was the smell of the dessicated leaves on the floor of the Savage mausoleum.

  The kitchen was hot and dry and dead. Odessa stepped quietly and quickly through a swinging door into the dining room. India followed, but what she saw on the other side startled her so that she lost her grip on the door and it swung loudly shut behind her.

  In her preoccupied terror of entering the third house when she knew it to be not empty, she had forgot the encroaching dune, actually forgot it. And here it was, reproduced in the high square room just as it was outside, sloping gently from the top of the windows at the front, down to her feet. She was actually standing in it; Odessa’s opening the door had leveled a large arc in the sand. Even in that lightless interior, the dune gleamed. It was smooth and dry, and when India shone the slight beam of her flashlight over it, she could see the topmost layer of grains sliding down. Perhaps, she considered thickly, they were set in motion by her and Odessa’s trembling presence in a house that had known only stillness for decades.

  In the middle of the room was a dining table set with chairs; though of this nothing showed but a little corner of the table, and the two chairs that were on the kitchen side. And these were already firmly anchored in the dune. The candles in the iron chandelier had entirely wilted in some severe heat of years past. On the side wall, blackened paintings had been knocked awry by the falling sand, but remained on their hooks; slowly they were being covered. The draperies on the windows had been caught by sand at the hems and dragged from the valances. The ceiling buckled noticeably toward the front of the house: the room above was that which corresponded to her own bedroom, the room into which she had allowed the sand to enter. Now it was evidently building up there to such an extent that it threatened the flooring. These details India made out but did not fully register at the time; they were seen only with the aid of the flashlight. Other bulky contours tokened something scarcely buried, but these forms she could not rightly interpret.

  Her question at least was answered: the dune had got inside the house, and the effect was more wonderful—and more terrible—than she had imagined. The room, three-quarters filled with sand, was intensely claustrophobic.

  “Odessa,” she whispered, “I don’t know if it’s safe—”

  Odessa was no longer in the dining room. India looked frantically around, reaching out her hand hoping to catch hold of the black woman’s dress. The beam of the flashlight flew wildly over the sand.

  Odessa had not gone back through the swinging door into the kitchen: India would have heard that. She shone the flashlight toward the double doorway she knew opened between this and the living room. It was almost blocked by the sand. A triangular space remained between the wall and the dune only sufficient to sidle through. Without thinking, India hurried over, planted her feet into sand that was more than a foot deep here, and swung through into the living room. “Odessa!” she called again, and Odessa answered with a jangle of her keys from the foot of the stairs.

  India shone the light in her face. “Are you going up there?” she asked incredulously, forgetting her curiosity about the furnishings and state of the living room.

  Odessa nodded dully. “Got to,” she said in a normal voice. “And you got to come too. Cain’t find the locks ’less I got some light.”

  India drew in her breath deeply and followed Odessa up the steps, holding on to the hem of her dress as they proceeded.

  The landing was bare and dark; a thin layer of sand grated beneath their feet. The doors to all four bedrooms were open, but Odessa warned her not to shine the flashlight inside the rooms. The black woman pulled the first of the doors shut. India then raised the light and shone it on the lock of the door. Without hurry Odessa tried the keys until she found one that fit; she turned it, nodded when the bolt shot, then rattled the knob to make certain that the door would not open.

  She pulled the second door shut; India shifted the light, and the process was repeated. This was the room into which she had peered that first day at Beldame. And whatever had shut the bedroom door that day had been standing where she stood now. The key turned in the lock, but it was not Odessa who rattled the knob. Whatever had been locked inside wanted to get out.

  “It’s Martha-Ann,” said India calmly. “I saw her inside. And it was this room.”

  Odessa did not reply. She pulled the third door shut and locked it. The knob of the second door continued to rattle. Whatever was on the other side put its mouth to the keyhole and whistled at them on the landing.

  The fourth room overlooked the yard; in its window India had seen a white face she had mistaken for the reflection of the moon. The door flew shut of its own accord, and some large piece of furniture was slammed against it from the inside. Calmly, Odessa pressed the last of the keys into the lock and turned it.

  “Go on, child,” said Odessa, and waved India toward the stairs; but the landing was so dark now that India did not see this motion. Her flashlight’s beam was trained on the staircase that led upward.

  “What about the third floor?” she asked. The doorknob of the second room began to rattle again—What the hell am I doing here? thought India—and more furniture scraped in the fourth room.

  “No door up there to lock,” said Odessa. “Anything up there, it’s got the run of the house. Nothing we can do. Go on down, child.”

  India turned the flashlight beam downward and descended the stairs into the living room. The moon had emerged from the clouds and shone through the window that was at the back of the house, grayly illumining that long room. Here the dune, in a larger space, seemed not so monstrous as in the dining room.

  The room was furnished with a long-preserved casualness, with fine rugs and painted wicker furniture. The fabrics, much-decayed, were small-patterned and, India suspected, had been dyed in bright colors. Now all was black and gray, except the sand, which caught and reflected the moonlight with a sickly white pallor. The dune, like a freeze-frame of a tidal wave, had swept through a third of the room.

  India shone her flashlight on the dune; more sand slipped down its gentle plane. The individual falling grains caught and refracted the white light. Odessa’s steps were on the stairs behind her, and India was about to turn when a square table against the outside wall was suddenly tipped over. A large lamp, with
an intricate stained-glass shade made in imitation of clusters of wisteria, was smashed on the floor. Startled, India dropped the flashlight. It fell on to a bare portion of floor and the light was extinguished. On her knees India struggled soundlessly against the gritty surface; she found the flashlight again but it would not light. She became aware then that upstairs the banging of the door of the second bedroom and the scraping of furniture in the fourth bedroom had abruptly left off. Its place was taken by a furtive, shallow dry spraying noise—as if it were the breath of some creature that might exhale sand.

  “Odessa,” she whispered.

  “Quick, child,” said the black woman, her voice urgent for the first time since they had entered the house. Odessa was already in the dining room, but India could see nothing.

  India scrambled toward the black triangle that would allow her into the safety of the dining room. The dry breathing had grown louder and closer; India held the flashlight as a weapon.

  When she stood, a long-fingered hand closed tightly over her ankle. Hard nails punctured her skin, and she felt her blood welling to the surface. Instinctively, India brought the flashlight down hard against it—whatever it was. There was a dry gasp of breath—India felt sand sprayed lightly against her bare leg—and the grip was loosened. She leaped through the doorway into the dining room. Odessa grabbed her arm and dragged her through the kitchen and out the back door.

  PART III

  THE ELEMENTALS

  CHAPTER 22

  By the time they rose next morning, the curse of hot weather had been broken: there was a gray drizzle and the temperature was in such enormous contrast to that of the previous day that at their early breakfast, which for a change was served to them all at a single sitting, they declared themselves positively chilled. Their packing had been put off, and Luker, holding a second cup of coffee tightly in his hands for the warmth it provided, suggested that they take only what was necessary. “If we leave most of our things here,” he said, “we’ll have to come back after the holiday. India and I don’t really have to get back to New York just yet, so I think we ought to try to keep it going.” He glanced at his daughter, thinking that she would applaud this measure, but India—who was unaccountably wearing mirrored sunglasses at the table—glanced palely away, and would not look at him.

  “Good,” said Leigh, “’cause, Luker, I don’t think you should leave Alabama until it’s decided what’s gone ’come of Beldame. You’re the only one who’ll really fight with Daddy, and it may come to just that.”

  “I’d like to rip his balls off and staple ’em to the roof of his mouth,” said Luker. The others had all grown so used to his vulgarity of speech they didn’t even flinch.

  Thus it was decided to remain in Mobile from the first of July—that was today, Saturday—through the following Wednesday, the fifth. Anything Lawton wanted them to do, they should do without complaint and with as good a grace as could be got up for the occasion, whether it be a Rotary dinner, a speech in the park, or a tour of the shopping malls. If all went well they should be back in time for Dauphin’s birthday on the sixth.

  They brought down their bags, locked the houses, and had driven away by ten o’clock. Leigh, Dauphin, and Big Barbara went in the jeep; Luker, Odessa, and India in the Scout. To Luker’s astonishment India sat in Odessa’s lap for the entire drive back to their cars in Gasque.

  “Oh, I know,” said Luker to his daughter when they transferred into the Fairlane, “you’re just sorry about leaving Beldame. I feel the same way. New York is one extreme, Beldame’s the other. Mobile is in the middle, and you and me—we like the extremes.”

  “Yes,” said India curtly, and Luker was puzzled.

  India was still severely frightened by what had happened the night before. She had been certain, as she fled the house, that she had barely escaped with her life. The rest of that night she had spent trembling in a hammock in the Savage living room, unable at all to sleep, and keeping both eyes open and focused on the comforting presence of Odessa, who dozed in a rocking chair. Every sound had frightened her, and the steady drop in the temperature—it must have fallen thirty degrees in three hours—made her very cold.

  In the dawn she ventured to wake Odessa. “Odessa,” she said, “I want to know what happened.”

  “Nothing happened,” replied Odessa. “I got you out.”

  “Something tried to get me. What was it?”

  “I thought I got ’em locked in those rooms.” She shrugged. “I didn’t get ’em all, I guess.”

  “There was something in that second bedroom, something that rattled the doorknob, and then there was something else in the fourth bedroom, something that slammed the door. Then there was whatever tried to pull me under the sand. So there were three things in that house.”

  “Un-unh,” said Odessa, shaking her head. “That’s just what they want you to think.”

  “What do you mean? Why isn’t that right? One, two, three. Three things in the house, we counted them!”

  “See,” said Odessa, “that’s how they work. When we was upstairs and they let us lock ’em in those rooms, they was pretending they couldn’t get out. ‘Keys and locks can hold us in,’ they was saying. Then we get downstairs and they’re down there too, wanting to pull you under the sand.”

  “But that’s still three! Two of ’em upstairs and one downstairs, even if two of ’em were still just pretending to be locked in!”

  “No,” said Odessa. “You don’t know how many they was, you don’t know! They might all be fifty of ’em in there, or they might be just one moving around a lot. You seeing what they want you to see—you not seeing what’s really there.”

  “If they can do all that,” said India sullenly, “then how did we manage to get away?”

  Big Barbara returned to her husband’s house, where he was waiting for her with a typewritten list of all the places she was to go in the next few days. They must leave almost immediately for a Junior Chamber of Commerce luncheon.

  “Lawton,” she said with a nervous smile, “I got to tell you what I did at Beldame.”

  “Barbara, all you got to do is get dressed or we gone be late. I’m speaking, and it don’t do for the speaker to come in late.”

  “You got to listen to me though. You got to hear what I’ve done for you, Lawton. I got myself off the bottle, that’s what I did. I don’t need it now. I’m not gone be drinking any more. You don’t have to worry about me. I know I’ve still got faults—we all still got our faults no matter what we do—but mine don’t have anything to do with liquor any more. I got so much energy, I’ve been sitting on the beach all day thinking of ways to help you with this campaign. Listen,” she said feverishly, unnerved by her husband’s cold gaze, “I think I’d love to live in Washington for a few years—I know it’s gone be more than a few years though, once you get up there, they’re not ever gone let you out of Congress—and Lawton, I’m gone be so much help to you! I can give a good party—you know I can, even Luker says I can and Luker hates parties. I’m gone see if Dauphin and Leigh won’t let me have Odessa for a while and Odessa’s gone fly up and help me give the best parties you ever saw in your life. We’re gone have people coming and going like our foyer was a hotel lobby! That’s what I’ve been thinking about at Beldame, Lawton. I know you’re gone win, I’m gone be right behind you too, in everything you do, I’m gone—”

  “Now we gone be late for sure!” interrupted Lawton McCray angrily.

  Luker and India again took the guest wing of the Small House; but Lawton McCray did not provide his son and granddaughter with any itinerary to be followed for his political benefit. They had the time free to themselves.

  Luker questioned India whether anything were wrong.

  “Where’s Odessa?” she said.

  “She went home for a while. She’ll be back later in the afternoon. You know,” he said to India, who still had not removed her sunglasses, “it’s strange how much you’ve become attached to Odessa—”

&
nbsp; “What’s wrong with it?” India demanded sharply.

  “Nothing,” said her father. “It’s just strange, since when we first went down to Beldame you wouldn’t give her the time of day.”

  “She has inner qualities.”

  “Are you saying that with a straight face?”

  India wouldn’t reply.

  They listened to the television noontime report while they were eating their lunch and discovered that for the past week Mobile had been enjoying a spate of abnormally temperate weather: cool mornings, rainy afternoons, positively chilly nights.

  “Isn’t that strange,” said Luker. “And it was hotter than hell at Beldame, for the whole goddamn week. Fifty miles away, and we were in a-whole-nother climate.”

  Leigh and Dauphin were at the Junior Chamber of Commerce luncheon too, and tried not to appear too interested in Big Barbara’s decisions when the waiter came around to ask if anyone wanted a cocktail before the food was served. Big Barbara flushed—not with the decision, which was an easy one, but with the consciousness that she was being watched. Like I was the weather, she told herself. On her way to the ladies’ room, halfway through the meal, she stopped at Leigh and Dauphin’s table, leaned between them and whispered: “Y’all don’t need to worry about me. With everybody complimenting me on my tan, I haven’t had time to raise a glass to my lips!”