Chorus of Dust

by Justin Paul Walters

  “Sam!” My attention snapped back to the present, to the shadow that would soon overtake my sister if I didn’t do something. I wasn’t sure how I knew it, but there was no doubt in my mind that this shadow, whatever it was, would mean death for anyone who stood in its way. This time, there was no one to hold me back. I ran to her, struggling to block out the chorus that hammered against me. When I reached her, the shadow was almost upon us. I grabbed her shoulders and tried to pull her back. The forgotten knife was still in my hand, blade extended. She resisted me, and I accidentally swiped it across her arm. She didn’t seem to notice as blood trickled out of the wound, soaking into her shirt, and continued trying to push her way out into the field.

  The noise was so intense I thought I would pass out. With a final effort, I dropped the knife and wrapped my arms around her waist, then jerked her backward. She finally relented and fell back with me, and we both rolled out of the field into the grassy yard. I looked up to see the shadow looming over us. It sounds strange to talk about a shadow as if it has mass and substance, and believe me when I say that seeing it in person was a horrific thing to behold. It rose into the sky like a monolith emerging from the depths of the earth. The formless shape swallowed up everything around it, leaving only an empty darkness in its place. Though it didn’t cross the threshold where crop turned to grass, the shadow surged out toward us. A black tendril like a wisp of smoke brushed up against Sam’s face, leaving a deep gash across her cheek. I grabbed her under her arms and pulled her back once more toward the house, then collapsed from exhaustion.

  The dark form shimmered a final time before dissipating into the air. The music that had pummeled my senses only a second earlier ended abruptly, leaving utter silence in its place. My chest heaved, and I struggled to catch my breath. Finally, I got to my knees and crawled over to Sam. She lied on the ground with her eyes open and turned up to the stars, breathing calmly. Blood still seeped from the wounds on her face and arm.

  “Sam,” I whispered, “wake up. Come on, we need to go.” She didn’t move. I shook her gently and then tapped my fingers against her cheek. No response. “Sam!”

  She awoke as I said her name this last time and jumped with a start. Her eyes moved around quickly and then fixed onto mine. “Adem? What...”

  “It’s okay, you’ll be fine, but we need to get back inside,” I said. She blinked and reached a hand up to her face, touching the wound on her cheek. She winced, then looked at her blood-caked arm. Her eyes teared up and she began gasping for breath.

  “What is this? What are we doing out here?” she asked, panic creeping into her voice. Her head turned in every direction, and then her eyes settled on a single point on the ground just behind me. I looked back and saw the knife, its blade extended and bloody, laying in the grass. Sam felt the cut on her arm and looked back up at me. She screamed.

  “Wait, you don’t understand. There was a shadow, you were standing out here and it was coming for you, and…I helped you!”

  “Get away from me!” she shrieked. Sobbing now, she got to her feet and ran back to the house. I jumped up and followed behind her, but stopped when the patio door slammed shut.

  “God Dammit,” I said, then turned around and repeated, “God Dammit! What the fuck are you?” The only answer I received was the sound of crickets finally chirping back to life and the wind resuming its path through the fields. I locked my hands together behind my head. “Shit!”

  Defeated, I turned around and again walked back to the house. I slid the patio door open and approached Sam’s bedroom. I knocked and held my ear up to the door. She was weeping, but wouldn’t answer me. A quick jiggle on the doorknob told me that it was locked. I pressed my forehead to the wall.

  “Sam, I’m sorry. I know you’re scared, and you should be. I don’t know how to explain to you what just happened. Even if I could, you wouldn’t believe me. Just don’t give up on me, okay? I’ll figure out a way to fix this.” I waited. Nothing. I returned to my room and sat down on the bed. Only now did I realize that I was still dressed only in my briefs. The dresser mirror reflected a filthy individual, bone thin, with sunken eyes and pale skin. I made my way into the bathroom, undressed, and stepped into the shower.

  Something had to be done. I couldn’t go on like this, especially now that Sam was involved. The water flowed, washing the earth away, and I closed my eyes. The darkness did not await me there. Instead the haunting image of my sister’s frightened face stared back.

  THE PROFESSOR

  We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies.

  —Shirley Abbott

  The next morning, Sam was gone.

  I stood in the open doorway looking at her empty bedroom. It was immaculate. The bed was made, the floor and dresser clean, each knick-knack in its proper place. My own bedroom, even after the short time I’d been there, was littered with dirty clothes and cereal bowls. Her perfect order against my perfect chaos, as it was meant to be. I turned around to retreat back to my room when something out of the corner of my vision caught my attention. On the edge of the dining room table, where Grandaddy once sat, was a yellow piece of paper. I walked over and sat down. It was a note.

  Adem,

  I’m sorry to say goodbye like this, but after what happened last night, I think it’s for the best. I don’t know what’s going on with you. Do you know how badly you scared me? Do you understand how scared I am still? Even right now, I’m terrified that you’re going to wake up before I finish writing this.

  You need help, Adem. You’ve been on edge ever since you got here. You’re hearing voices at night that no one else can hear, freaking out over this urban legend, and then there was last night. I don’t know what you were doing with me out there. I don’t want to know. All that matters is that I need to get away from you right now.

  I still love you, despite what happened. I want to heal our relationship, but first you need to deal with your own issues. Please, see someone, get help. Until you do, I think it’s best if you keep your distance. When you’re ready, I’ll be here.

  Love,

  Samantha

  What else was there to say? Could I blame her?

  Maybe she was right. This whole situation was insane. It was the kind of thing you see in horror movies. Normal people, sane people, don’t experience what I’d seen and heard. They work, come home, and then eventually drift into a peaceful sleep. Any thoughts of ghosts or demons, of the creatures that go bump in the night, are relegated to their nightmares alone. Sanity always returns with the rising sun.

  No matter how hard I tried to convince myself of these truths, however, I found that I could not. I’d been though a great deal in the last ten years, in the process meeting a number of people who weren’t all there upstairs. There’s a fine line between rationality and lunacy, and the more exposure one is given to each perspective, the better one gets at determining exactly where that line is drawn. As horrifying and extraordinary as the events of the last two days seemed, I knew exactly which side they fell on.

  The song was real. The voice was real. The shadow, it too was real, along with all the cruelty and malice I felt emanating from it the moment before it dispersed back into the fields.

  Unfortunately, knowing the truth was the easy part. Every person on Earth knows the truth, at least as far as they’re concerned. It’s convincing others to believe in your truth that trips up most people. I needed a way to convince Sam that I wasn’t crazy, someone to verify my story and offer an explanation to back it up.

  I needed Professor Lanston Conroy.

  Back in my room, I rummaged through my pockets from the day before until I found his card. I got dressed and walked out to my car, then pulled out and sped toward town. There was no point in waiting. I needed answers.

  Terrance appeared to be deserted, as usual. Occasionally I would see an old black man hobbling dow
n the sidewalk, doing his best to avoid the tall weeds growing up through the cracks. I don’t mean that I saw several old men that looked alike; I mean it was the same old man I would see over and over again. At least, that’s how it looked to me, though with myself in a car and him on foot, it seemed impossible that he somehow could keep getting ahead of me. He had white hair with long sideburns creeping down his cheeks and wore a faded black suit and tie. His shirt was untucked and the tie hung loose. When I turned onto Uvalde Street, I saw the man once again, walking aimlessly. I slowed, pulling over to the curb beside him, and opened the window.

  “You okay, mister?” I asked. The man shook his head and kept walking. From his side profile, I thought that maybe I recognized him from the bar a couple of nights earlier. Was it one of the musicians that had been playing? “Hey!” I shouted again. This time the man stopped, then turned to face me. His pupils seemed to be glazed over with a dull film, and there were no irises to speak of. A faded splotch against a dull white canvas. He was blind.

  I swallowed. “Can…uh, can you tell me how to get to Harmony Books?” Embarrassment immediately flushed into my cheeks. What a stupid question to ask this man. To my surprise, he pointed across the street, and when I looked in that direction I noticed a small storefront. It didn’t say it was a bookstore. In fact, it appeared to be abandoned, just like every other shop on the street, in this entire city. I turned my head back around and jerked with a start to find the man now leaning against my car, his head poking through the passenger side window. His breath reeked of garlic and beer. His eyes darted around my face, seemingly unable to focus on any single point.

  “Yo’ blood gon’ be spilled, son. Ain’t nothin’ you c’n do now t’ change that.” I stared at him, at a loss for how to respond. He pulled his head out from the car, stepped back up onto the sidewalk, and resumed his sojourn. He turned into a side alley, and then he was gone.

  I watched the sidewalk where he’d been walking, waiting to see if he would show up again. My hands were shaking. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a short flash of movement coming from the other side of the street and turned my head to look. I’ll be damned. There, walking into the abandoned store the blind man had pointed out, carrying a small stack of books, was Lanston Conroy. Immediately I forgot about the old man and got out of my car. When I reached the door and propped it open, a welcoming scent of old paper and musk greeted me. The interior of the store was entirely unlike its dilapidated facade. Shelves of neatly organized books lined the floor in rows all the way to the back of the store. The walls were decorated with paintings and antique fixtures. Everything was spotless, but well used. Used well, one might say.

  Lanston appeared from a back room just after I stepped into the store. He looked up at me and smiled. “Good morning!” he said. “Welcome to Harmony Books.” He held out his hand as he approached me. When I didn’t shake, he squinted his eyes and dropped his outstretched arm, but retained his smile. “You okay, son?”

  “I don’t know, professor. Am I?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t...” He searched my face. It was obvious that he didn’t know who I was.

  I held my hand up, fingers pointing in to my chest. “Adem Comeaux. I met you over at Eli’s Bar a couple of nights ago.” Lanston looked at the ground, digging through his memory. “Professor, we talked for a long time. About my Grandaddy, Sid.”

  “Yes,” Lanston said, raising his eyes back to mine. “Yes, I remember.”

  “I guess I didn’t leave much of an impression.”

  Lanston laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. “No, it’s not that. I’m an old man, remember, so my memory already isn’t as good as it used to be. On top of that, I was shit-faced drunk, so that’s two strikes against me. Yes, it’s coming back to me now.” He nodded, then turned around and started walking to the counter on the right wall of the store.

  “All of it?” I asked. He stopped.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The demon. You were telling me about the earth-demon.” Lanston turned back around to face me and leaned against the counter. He reached up and stroked the long, white bristles of his beard.

  “I remember that you didn’t want to hear it. You split out of there like a whore in church on Sunday.”

  I walked closer to him. “I know, I’m sorry. But I’m here now, and I’m listening.”

  The professor snorted and shook his head. “Adem, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but like I already said, I was drunk. I was giving you a hard time. It’s the only thing I seem to be good at these days.” Lanston’s eyes moved around the store, once again avoiding contact with mine, just as he had done in the bar. He waved his hand dismissively. “It’s nothing but an old town legend. Forget about it.”

  “Don’t bullshit me, professor,” I said, taking a step closer to him. “I’m not stupid. Even if you were drunk, you believed what you told me.”

  Lanston straightened up. “Now who do you think you are, walking into my store and—”

  “I saw it,” I said. He cut himself off and looked at me. I walked over to a set of high-backed chairs and sat down. They flanked a bronze statue of a Greek philosopher on either side. Plato or Aristotle or some shit, I didn’t care enough to ask. Lanston walked over and sat down in the other chair, then leaned over with his elbows on his knees.

  “What do you mean, you saw it?” he asked.

  I breathed deeply, then released. “The first time was a few nights ago. The same night I met you at the bar, actually. Something woke me up.”

  “The song,” Lanston said.

  “Yes, the goddamn song. I got up and looked outside, and I heard a voice call to me. I saw a shadow creeping across the fields, darker than any I’d ever seen before. But then it disappeared. I woke my sister up, and we kind of got into a fight, and then I came to the bar. I didn’t think anything of it after that, not even when you started telling me about the history of the farm and everything later that night.”

  “But that wasn’t the last time you saw it.”

  “No, it wasn’t.” I told him about everything that had happened the night before, how Sam had sleepwalked out into the field, and how the shadow tried to attack her. He listened intently, never once questioning my story. When I finished, he continued to lean over, resting his elbows on his knees and running the fingers of both hands through his thick beard. He stared intently at the statue between us, as if he were beseeching it to impart some pearl of otherworldly wisdom to him. Finally, he leaned back in his chair and spoke.

  “You’re right Adem, I wasn’t being honest with you earlier. You’ve certainly been blessed with the gift of discernment, haven’t you? Almost everything I told you at the bar the other night was absolutely true.”

  “Almost everything?”

  “I have been friends with Sid for several years,” he said. “But we knew each other long before we became friends. The first time I met him was about thirty years ago, when you were still a little boy. Your sister was only a baby. I’d just been hired on as an Assistant Professor at the university when he came to see me. Your father was with him.”

  A lump lodged itself in my throat. “My…Dad?”

  Lanston nodded. “I wrote my dissertation over demonology and its connections to southern folklore, and a large section of it was devoted to the legend of the earth-demon. It’s such a prevalent myth in these parts, it was virtually unavoidable. Somehow Sid must have heard about it, either in a paper or through word of mouth, I suppose. The next thing I knew, he and your father were knocking on my door.”

  “What did they want?”

  “The same thing you want, Adem. They wanted help. Sid told me that he was a young man the first time he heard the song, when he first saw the demon. A week later, he found his little boy’s mangled body out in the field. They called it an accident, something to do with the new farming machinery. The authorities never investigated, apparently. Things were different back then. If a farmer—an upstanding, well-respected m
ember of the community in those days—if he told you how it was, then that was how it was. No questions asked. But Sid knew better. He’d seen the demon already, he had witnessed what it could do. They all knew it, but no one wanted to come out and admit the truth.”

  “And what was the truth?”

  “That his son was a sacrifice.”

  “Sacrifice? Professor, Grandaddy didn’t even have another son. My Dad was an only child. He would have told us about something like that.”

  “You sure about that?” I opened my mouth to answer but then caught myself. I suddenly realized that I wasn’t sure about anything. “This entity, this evil spirit that is bound to your family’s land, it wants only one thing. Death. It yearns for it, hungers after it. A sacrifice paid in blood is all that will satisfy it, and even then, only for a while. In the end, it is insatiable. By the time the next generation takes ownership of the land, its hunger returns and the cycle repeats itself. Just like it did with Sid’s father, and with Wesley Comeaux before him.”

  I rubbed my temples. It seemed like my head had been aching for days, and none of this was helping. The urge to once again get up and leave like I had at the bar two nights earlier welled up inside of me, but I forced myself to remain seated. After all, was it really all that crazy? I’d seen the demon with my own eyes, hadn’t I? I’d heard the song blasting into my mind, watched the shadow cross over the cotton fields and try to take my sister. The time for denial had long passed. This was real.

  “You were telling me that my dad and Grandaddy came to visit you,” I said, “that they wanted help. What sort of help?”

  “When your father was old enough, Sid transferred partial ownership of the farm to him, with full ownership to come on Sid’s retirement or passing. The very night they finalized the papers, your father began to hear the song. Sid must have already anticipated what was coming, so when your dad told Sid about it, he was already prepared to come and see me. The very next day they showed up at my door.”