“God!” cried Luker, “thank God! India, where’s Odessa?”
India looked vaguely around the room, and had not answered when Dauphin appeared panting in the doorway. He was not used to running up stairs. He placed hands on opposite sides of the doorjamb and leaned inside as if fearful of placing a foot within.
“India!” Luker repeated. “Where’s Odessa?”
India slowly turned her head toward the dune and the window. When she looked back to her father and her uncle, she said slowly, “Now I can see what she saw.”
“Dauphin,” said Luker, “I’ll check the other two rooms on this floor. You go upstairs, see if Odessa’s up there.” He reached out, grabbed India’s arm, and jerked her toward him, hoping that the small violence would wrench her from her stupor.
“I see—” she began.
“Don’t think about what you saw,” said Luker, pulling her toward the door. “It wasn’t real. Nothing in this house is real. You know that, it’s all illusion. Nothing is what it seems—”
He tried the doors on the other rooms on the landing; both were locked. He heard Dauphin’s feet on the floor above; he was evidently pushing aside the beds, looking under them.
“India,” said Luker, holding her close against his chest, “you’ve got to tell me where Odessa is! You didn’t come in here by yourself, did you?”
She shook her head slowly, loosened herself from her father, and went to the locked door of the room at the southeastern corner of the house. Luker followed. India turned the knob and the door swung open. Inside, on the sandy floor of the room and behind the overturned vanity, stood a large red vase.
India’s breath was drawn in sharply; she ran inside, stooped and picked up the vase in her arms, and then smashed it against the foot of the iron bedstead. Sand poured out, and mixed in the sand were disarticulated gray bones and tatters of cloth. India picked up what appeared to be a femur and threw it against the wall, crying out, “Oh, shit! Oh, shit!”
“India!” cried Luker, shocked.
She turned to her father weeping. “Luker! You don’t know what’s in this house! You don’t know! Odessa knew! And now I know, I—”
From upstairs came the terrible noise of a bird beating its wings against the walls. They heard Dauphin cry out inarticulately. Then in a voice imitative of Luker’s own came the pronouncement, “Savage mothers eat their children up!”
Something was thrown through the window, shattering much glass. Dauphin cried out again, and then something fell heavily to the floor.
“Dauphin!” called Luker, racing out of the room.
“Wait!” cried India. “Wait!” Luker hesitated at the bottom of the stairs; India ran into the bedroom where he had found her, and from the bed took up the knife and the cleaver. The knife she gave her father. “I have to go first,” she hissed. “Let me go up there first.”
“India,” whispered Luker, “do you know what the fuck is up there?”
“Yeah,” she said grimly, “I do. I told you, I know what’s in this house now.”
“Just call him down, just call Dauphin down. Dauphin!” cried Luker. “Are you all right up there? Come on down!”
There was no reply, but while they waited for answer, they made out a dry and furtive rasp.
“What is that?”
“Luker, stay down here,” said India, and began to mount the stairs. When she looked back and found that he followed, she did not discourage him further. She went all the way up the stairs and into the room before she looked around.
All six beds had been knocked awry; the window at the northern end had been broken, something thrown through it. The rasp, no longer furtive, came from behind the sixth bed at that end of the room.
“Dauphin!” cried Luker as he rose into the room. “India,” he said, “what’s making that noise?”
With the cleaver raised, India went boldly toward the broken window. With her free hand she pulled back the last bed in a wide arc.
Luker had been close behind her with the lamp, but he had stopped with horror at what he saw revealed there.
Dauphin lay on the sandy floor, his throat slit open by a triangular shard of glass that was still embedded beneath his ear. His blood had soaked into the sand and formed a large red corona around his head. And on her knees, lapping up the bloody sand at the circumference of the unnatural halo, was Marian Savage. She raised her head and grinned. Her eyes were black with white pupils. Bloody sand spilled from her mouth.
India raised the cleaver swiftly, and brought it down squarely between Marian Savage’s neck and shoulder. No blood but only more sand, pure and purely white, sprayed out. Marian Savage jerked and fell over. India wrested the cleaver out and plunged it deep into the woman’s belly, cutting through her blue shift—it seemed to have been made of the same material as the bedspreads. A geyser of sand spewed up from the heart of the dead woman, sand that was wet and foul.
“India! Stop!” Luker was terrified and repulsed. He knew that Marian Savage was dead, knew that dead Marian Savage had murdered Dauphin, but still he could not but try to prevent India from destroying the woman. His daughter was grim and maniacal.
India stepped over Dauphin’s body calmly and straddled Marian Savage. The woman dug her slender hands into India’s ankles, and Luker saw his daughter’s blood welling out beneath the dead woman’s nails. India had pulled the cleaver free again, and this time she buried it deep in the woman’s head; Marian Savage’s face was split in half, and India worked the cleaver from side to side, until the halves were turned down to the floor. The sand inside Marian Savage’s head was no longer pure and purely white, but gray and damp and lumped. The hands retained their grip on India’s ankles, but they had no strength in them now and India carefully disengaged them, and as an afterthought, severed them from the wrists with two vigorous chops that lodged the cleaver in the floor beneath.
From her father India took the knife and methodically slashed through all the remainder of the shuddering body. When at last she stepped back from what was no longer recognizable as dead Marian Savage, bits of dry flesh and shreds of cloth were left, but most lay under a concealing spray of sand. Only the bare feet and severed hands remained whole, and these somehow didn’t look real. However, poor Dauphin looked real enough, and India gazed on him pitifully. She stooped and carefully worked the triangle of glass from his neck. “We have to be careful when we lift him,” said India matter-of-factly to her horrified father, “because the neck is almost cut through. See how much blood there was! And I’ve stepped all in it! Look,” she said, standing on one bare foot, and exhibiting the sole of the other to Luker, “look how the sand sticks to it!”
Luker was certain that India had lost her mind. She had seen something downstairs that had deranged her—how else to explain her bravery in destroying the thing that had taken the form of Marian Savage? And now here he was, on the third floor of a house filled with evil and danger, expected to cart out the corpse of his best friend and protect his injured child. He pulled Dauphin’s corpse away from the circle of blood-drenched sand, scattering the remains of what had murdered him.
“Luker! India!” called Big Barbara from outside the house. Luker didn’t immediately reply, for he dreaded his mother discovering what had happened. India, however, stepped immediately to the window, and carefully avoiding the broken glass—after all, that was the way Dauphin had died—she craned her head out, and called down: “We’re up here! Dauphin and Odessa are dead!”
“India, no!” cried Luker. “You don’t want them to come inside this house! Get back!”
India ignored her father, and shouted to be heard over Big Barbara and Leigh’s cries. “Stay there! Don’t come up!”
“Why did you do that!” hissed Luker when India withdrew from the window. Dauphin’s corpse lay on the floor between them. India stooped and closed the dead man’s eyes with two fingers.
“Are you going to pretend that he isn’t dead? Luker, listen to me and do what I tell y
ou. Odessa is dead, and Dauphin is dead, and I saw what killed ’em.”
“That thing in the corner. It looked like Marian Savage—”
“No,” said India, with a smile. “Remember what you said, it wasn’t five minutes ago, ‘There’s nothing real in this house.’ Well, that’s right. That wasn’t Marian Savage, that wasn’t one of the Elementals either. That was just a kind of scarecrow, it was sand and skin and cloth. That’s why I could kill it, that’s why I could tear it apart. That’s what I took my pictures of. But there are things in this house that I can’t kill with a cleaver, you understand?”
“No,” said Luker, “I don’t understand. How do you know these things?”
“Odessa knew ’em, but Odessa’s dead and now I know ’em. Now listen, Luker, give me that knife and help me get Dauphin up on this bed.”
“We got to get him out of here!” said Luker.
“We’re not, though,” his daughter replied. “We’re going to leave him here.”
“We cain’t do that!”
“We have to,” said India. “We can’t drive him back to town like this, he’s got his throat cut. It doesn’t look like he died a natural death. And Odessa’s downstairs, buried under about a ton of sand, and she doesn’t have—” India broke off. She concluded. “We’d have a hard time explaining what happened to her too.”
“But are we gone send the police down here?” her father asked, not even wondering why he should be asking his daughter’s advice.
“No,” said India.
“What are we gone say then? That Dauphin and Odessa just skipped town together? Do we tell people they went out of town for a while, and then wait seven years and hope everybody forgets that they ever existed? India, you’re only thirteen years old, you really think you’re smart enough to make decisions like this?”
“Luker, listen, it’s not safe to stay in this house. But there’s something we have to do before we go.”
“What’s that?”
India handed her father the carving knife and began to unbutton Dauphin’s shirt with trembling bloody fingers. Her manner of calm suddenly altered to one of great agitation. “Hurry!” she cried. “Help me!”
Luker was loath, but India’s glare forced his obedience. With their right hands placed on the handle of the carving knife, they plunged it into Dauphin’s chest. It hit the sternum and glanced aside, shredding up a long flap of flesh and his right nipple. Luker pulled away, but India commanded him back; this time they turned the blade sideways and pressed it between two ribs to pierce Dauphin Savage’s unbeating heart. Blood welled up along the blade. India withdrew the knife and picked up the cleaver with the same hand.
“Now,” she said to Luker, “run downstairs, get out of this house. Don’t look in any of the bedrooms, just get out—and wait for me three minutes.”
“What if you haven’t come out?”
“Then drive off!”
“You’re not through in here?!”
“Get out, Luker!”
Luker ran down the stairs, splintering his hand on the railing. On the landing two doors were open. Crawling toward him across the floor of the bedroom littered with fragments of broken red pottery was an abomination of a baby. It was large and malformed, without eyes or nose but with ears unnaturally large and teeth unnaturally small and numerous. Its hands and feet were fleshy and clawlike. The rings on its fingers clacked against the floor as it came.
“Get out!” screamed India from above, and Luker ran.
CHAPTER 33
India listened to Luker’s progress through the house; she went to the window and peered out, and nodded with satisfaction when she saw him fly to Big Barbara and Leigh. She heard him begin his tale of woe long before he reached the two women, confirming the deaths of Dauphin and Odessa.
Because she had actually put into her mouth and swallowed the eyeballs that the black woman had gouged out of her own sockets as she was dying, India now saw what Odessa could see. The house was indeed inhabited by spirits, Elementals Luker had called them, and that name did as well as any other. But to give so definite a name to a spirit or spirits whose character was so distinctly indefinite was more misleading than convenient. And Odessa had been right: the Elementals were not what had shown up in her photographs. They did not take the shape of a toad the size of a collie, they were not Marian Savage and her parrot Nails, they were not an emaciated creature of bones and stretched flesh that crawled about the turrets—the Elementals were simply presences, amorphous and unsubstantial. They were indefinite as to number, size, power, age, personality, and habit—all India knew now for certain was that they partook of the air inside the rooms, they were in the sand. When storms came to Beldame and rain washed down the roof of the third house, the Elementals were swept over the shingles and spilled over the rotted gutters. When the sun poured into the rooms through the closed windows, the Elementals were in every degree of rising shimmering heat. They were the mechanism of the locks in the doors, they were the rot that destroyed fabrics, and they were the black detritus that gathered in drawers that hadn’t been opened in three decades.
What had killed Dauphin, what had lapped at his pooled blood was something formed out of the air and the sand—the sand particularly. The Elementals had taken scraps of cloth and scraps of skin, sewn it and stuffed it with sand. It was an animated rag doll that India had destroyed with her cleaver, and afterward she had watched the shavings and the cloth shrivel with speckled rot.
The power of the Elementals waned and waxed; India could feel it in the quality of the air if she raised her hand from her side to her face. She could gauge it by the dimness or sharpness of a mirrored image in one of the bedrooms. For several minutes after she had split open Marian Savage, she and Luker had been safe. All the Elementals’ energy had been focused into the creation and animation of that terrible effigy, and for a little time after that, the Elementals had no power to harm them.
However, just before she and her father had plunged the knife into Dauphin’s breast, India had felt the Elementals rising in the room. To her eyes, the air seemed to grow thickly yellow with their exhalations. Odessa’s eyesight was still new to her, and she could not yet interpret to a nicety; but she had realized it was imperative that Luker get out.
In the east the sky was beginning to lighten to a pinkish gray, though in the west it was still fully black. The moon was sinking below the horizon. Its last livid yellow rays were shed on the huddled group of mourners, and India could hear Big Barbara’s sobbing, and Leigh’s insistent and disbelieving questions. They seemed to have forgotten that she was still in the house. India looked out the window, not minding that she stood barefoot in the remains of the thing that had killed Dauphin—not minding Dauphin’s corpse on the bed behind her. And as she watched her family below, she thought; and as she thought, she understood something else. That these effigies: the things in the photographs—Martha-Ann, Marian Savage and Nails, and the three hands that were thrust out of the dune in the bedroom below—were only the three-dimensional equivalents of hallucinations. They had form and substance, but they weren’t real. Yet something had killed Odessa, and slowly enough that she had had time to pluck out her eyes; something had sliced open Dauphin’s throat; and she remembered those nails dug into her ankles. Her ankles still bled. If they were only hallucinations in three dimensions, they still couldn’t be got rid of with rapid blinking or brave anathema.
And something waited for her downstairs.
“Don’t go back inside,” pleaded Big Barbara.
Luker looked at her in dumbfounded surprise. “India is still in there. And whatever killed Dauphin and Odessa is in there with her.”
Leigh started to speak, but was inarticulate.
“You two go on and get in the jeep. Get it started up. I’m going in and get her.” Luker ran toward the third house, and Big Barbara and Leigh moved stuporously toward the parked vehicles on the edge of the yard.
Big Barbara and Leigh sat in the jeep, s
taring straight before them at the Savage house, watching as every moment more and more of it disappeared beneath the growing cone of sand. It was roseate pink in the dawn. Now you couldn’t see the windows of the second floor at all, and the entire verandah was covered. Sand had spilled into the edge of the yard, and was smothering the vegetation there. Mechanically, Leigh backed the jeep up, and remarked to her mother, “We could just be sitting here and that sand would come cover us up, we didn’t watch it.”
“Oh, what we gone do, Leigh? What we gone do when we get out of this place?” She wept softly. “What we gone do without Dauphin?”
“Mama, I got no idea.” She turned and looked dully at the façade of the third house—its windows glazed with the reflection of the pink sky in the east. “You think we gone lose Luker and India too?”
“India!” Luker shouted from the kitchen. “India! I’m gone burn this fucking house down and you in it if you don’t get your ass down here!”
He unscrewed the cap from the gasoline can that was on the kitchen table—no longer wondering how it had got there—and cradling it like a baby, he splashed its contents all over the floor and along the counter tops. When it was empty he slung it vindictively through the back window breaking all six panes in the upper frame.
Despite the influx of fresh air, the fumes of the gasoline in the room were nearly asphyxiating. He opened the door into the dining room and called up again, hysterically: “India! Are you fucking alive! Answer me!”
“Luker!” he heard her shout from above, but her voice was distant. “I’m coming!”
She ran down the stairs from the third floor to the second-floor landing; she carried the knife in her left hand and the cleaver in her right. She looked down at the floor, fearful of being tripped, and held her weapons raised. She had not yet decided whether to stop and fight, and risk dying as horribly as had Odessa and Dauphin, or whether simply to run to Luker and flee Beldame. She smelled the fumes of the gasoline and began to hope that fire would destroy the house and the Elementals with it.
The Elementals Page 25
