The Elementals (13 page)

“That’s bullshit,” said India contemptuously. “You’re scared shitless of the third house, that’s all.”

“Of course I am,” said Luke, rolling over with something like anger. “It’s a fucking childhood trauma, and we’ve all got childhood traumas . . .”

“I don’t.”

“Your whole life is a fucking trauma,” said Luker. “You just don’t know it yet. Wait’ll you grow up, then you’ll see how fucked-up you were . . .”

“Can I borrow your camera?” India persisted.

“I told you yes,” said Luker. As she walked off back toward the houses, he called after her: “India,
be careful
!
”

From his room, India took her father’s second-best Nikon and his light meter and carried them out into the yard. Odessa sat on the back steps of the Savage house, shelling peas in a wide pan and tossing the pods into a newspaper laid open at her feet. India measured the available light, and snapped on the wide-angle lens and a sunlight filter. Odessa rose from the steps and came to her side. She pointed to the second floor of the house. “Mr. Dauphin and Miz Leigh sleeping,” she said in a whisper. “You gone take some pictures?”

“Of the third house,” replied India.

“Why? Nobody lives there. Why you want pictures of that old place?” Odessa frowned—and there was warning, not curiosity, in her voice.

“Because it’s very strange looking. It’ll make good photographs. Have you ever been inside?”

“No!”

“I’d like to take some pictures inside the house,” mused India.

“There’s no air inside that house,” said Odessa. “You’d suffocate.”

India raised the camera, framed the house quickly, and took a picture. She half expected Odessa to object, but the black woman said nothing. India moved a couple of steps away and took another photograph.

“Luker says the place is dangerous—”

“It is,” said Odessa quickly, “you just don’t know what—”

“He says it’s structurally unsafe.”

“What?” said Odessa, not understanding.

“Luker says the boards will give way. I think he’s just scared. I—”

“Don’t stand there,” said Odessa. “Cain’t see anything from there, move over there.” She pointed to a spot on the broken-shell walk a yard closer to the house. Puzzled, India moved there and took another photograph.

Odessa nodded, satisfied, then pointed out another spot, several places to the left, but inconveniently close to a thorny bush, so that India’s ankles were scratched.

India could not imagine what knowledge this black woman had of photographic setups, that she could dictate these positions. But Odessa pushed India all around that yard, told her on which windows and architectural details to focus, and whether the camera should be held horizontally or vertically. And all this in a whisper, so as not to disturb the sleepers on the second floor. India obeyed her mechanically.

In the camera the compositions seemed to frame themselves perfectly, and often India had no more to do than check the lighting and trip the shutter. She anticipated happily showing her father a set of splendid photographs of the third house and the dune that was slowly burying it.

After fifteen or so changes of positions, and perhaps two dozen photographs—Odessa sometimes demanded that a particular picture be taken twice—the black woman said, “All right. That’s enough, child. You’ll get what you want out of that. And once you see those pictures, you’ll have had enough of the third house, I can tell you.”

“Thank you,” said India, who now thought that Odessa’s directions had been merely to keep her from mounting the back steps of the place or going too near the windows. “But I still have the other side of the house to do.”

“Child,” said Odessa softly, “don’t . . .”

India looked Odessa in the eye. “I think you’re all crazy,” she said, then went around to the other side of the dune to photograph what little was visible of the front of the house.

She had intended to regard her father’s commands to the letter, but as she stood alone at the base of the dune with the shallow Gulf waters breaking in low waves directly behind her, she understood that she must, at all costs, keep at bay the fear of the third house that was fast rising in her. It was necessary that she conquer it, as all the others evidently had not.

It was not the entire house that frightened her, but only that single room that corresponded to the one in which she slept in the McCray house—the door of which had been slowly pulled shut as she watched through the window. India wondered now why she had said nothing of what she had seen to any of the others. Partly, she considered, she had been afraid, afraid to describe an experience that smacked of the supernatural. Partly, Luker’s reluctance to talk of the house had infected her as well. Too, India had never been an obvious child, and to speak of what was uppermost in her mind seemed a crass superficiality. At the last, the occurrence, the vision—whatever it had been, had seemed meant for India alone. And India wasn’t one to betray a confidence.

The sun was almost directly overhead. India knew that she could not go away without looking into that room once more. She snapped the cap over the camera lens and quickly climbed to the top of the dune. On the way she tossed aside her coolie hat, fearful that it would flaw her balance. Her foot unearthed the fleur-de-lis that she had broken off the frieze; she picked it up and flung it into the sea. She grabbed hold of another, and stood before the window once more.

She wasn’t certain whether she had hoped to find the door closed or open; whatever her preference might have been, the door remained closed. Probably, it occurred to her now with considerable relief, the shutting of the door had been the result merely of the atmospheric change in the room occasioned by the breaking of the pane. But whatever the case, the fact was that now the room looked quite different. She realized quickly however that this was only on account of the difference in light. An entirely new set of objects in the room was delineated, it seemed; and those she distinctly remembered were now hidden in obscurity. Above the door was a plate painted with a proverb she could not at such a distance decipher. Two slats had fallen out of the bed frame. On the shelf of the dresser she saw a chipped cup piled high with silver coins: half-dollars and dimes.

But she could no longer see the line of red dust on the rush matting. The broken picture frame behind the bed was only a shadow. The shaving implements atop the dressing table appeared an indistinguishable jumble.

On the floor beneath the window was a mound of sand as high as the window and fanning gently out from the broken pane, at greatest to a distance of about four feet. It replicated in miniature the dune that crouched outside the house. The pressure of her weight sent more sand through the aperture, and at a place on the left-hand arc of the fan, the delta buried several more knots of the rush matting.

The destruction was not so bad as it might have been, India supposed, but she didn’t recall pleasurably that her agency had begun it. How easily the sand had got in, she knew; and how difficult it would be to clear the room of it now, she could scarcely imagine.

She took half a dozen photographs of the room, with the regular lens, attempting to record everything that could be seen through that window. She must hold the camera with only one hand, for with the other she maintained her balance and position. With the slow shutter speed required to capture the dim interior, she feared that the slight trembling of her hand might blur the image. She smiled to think that her indiscretion would be discovered by Luker only when he saw the developed prints—but that might not be for weeks, and by then, who knew? she might actually have gone inside the third house. Luker’s fear was obviously groundless—as he had said, a childhood trauma and nothing more. She herself had been frightened by the third house, but only momentarily; she had returned and proved both that she was not afraid and that there was nothing to fear.

One shot more would finish the second roll of film. She held the camera up to the window and peered through the viewer, focusing on the mirrored door of the opened chifforobe. It reflected a portion of the front wall otherwise invisible to India. Looking through the camera at this mirrored door, she caught sight of a slight but agitated movement in the sand—as if something burrowed beneath. She quickly lowered the camera, and peered through the window; though she twisted and leaned far to the right, she could not see directly that portion of the sand heap figured in the mirror. She returned her gaze to the mirror, and watched mystified as the sand slowly bulged and twisted.

She looked down at the broken window. Sand spilled through still, but at only a slow rate, and it now accumulated to the right side of the window, not the left.

Now she could see the shape of whatever was beneath the sand—yet that was not it precisely. The shape rather seemed to form out of the sand itself. It was human, but small, about India’s own size.

The sand twisted and spilled over itself in ropes and nobs, sculpting the form and image of a child. In a few seconds, it became obvious the child was female.

When the figure was complete the sand was still again, breathlessly still. Amazed, India raised her camera and focused it on the mirror in the chifforobe; she even remembered to adjust for the discrepancy of reflected distance.

She looked through the viewer and framed the shot.

As she pressed the shutter, the prone figure of sand sat suddenly up. The sand on her breast and head fell quickly away. It was a little grinning black girl whose short hair had been carefully divided into eight squares, braided and ribboned. Her dress was red, ill-made, and coarsely textured—the cloth seemed exactly the same as that of the bedspread, even to a fringed hem around the bottom.

India stood at the window, the camera dangling against her beating breast. The heat of the sun tore at her uncovered head.

The black child crawled toward the window and the sand spilled off her as she came, every second revealing more blackness of her skin, more redness of her stiff red dress. India made herself look down through the panes.

The Negro child pawed up the dune to the window and lifted her black face to stare into India’s. Sand welled in the corners of her white-pupilled black eyes. She opened her mouth to laugh, but no sound, only a long ribbon of white dry sand spilled out of it.

Chapter
12

India never told what she had seen. She scrambled and slid down the dune, raced around to the front of the McCray house, and fled upstairs to her own room. A stultifying weariness overcame her, and she fell immediately asleep crossways on the bed, her father’s Nikon still hanging around her neck. Grain by grain two small mounds of sand were formed beneath her dangling feet.

When Luker awakened her hours later, he declared that she had suffered sunstroke. Long-sleeved clothing and hats were not going to be enough until she could get used to the Alabama sun: she must stay in-of-doors during the worst of the day’s heat. Early morning and late afternoon she might walk about or swim in the Gulf, though for no more than fifteen minutes at the time. “Too much sun,” he warned her, “is a kind of poison, especially for someone who’s as fair-skinned as you.”

“Does it cause hallucinations?” India wanted to know.

Luker, pointedly not demanding why she should ask so leading a question, replied merely, “Sometimes . . .” and told her she ought to get ready for supper.

And in the days that followed, the overwhelming stately routine of Beldame buried everything, even fear. At the end of her first week there, India understood how Luker and Dauphin and Odessa could contemplate returning to the place, when they were evidently very much afraid of the third house and whatever inhabited it. Days at Beldame were so exquisitely dull and stuffy, so brightly illumined and so hot to the touch, that the quivers and fretwork of emotion were quite burned away.

India had previously entertained no sympathy for the Southern way of life, with its pervasive friendliness, its offhanded viciousness, its overwhelming lassitude. She had always wanted to punch it into shape, to make it sit up straight and say what it meant—but Beldame proved too much for her. She was bewitched, as surely as Merlin by Nimue. By afternoon her physical indolence was such that she could scarcely raise her arm, and ten minutes’ consideration was hardly enough to decide whether to move from the swing on the McCray verandah to the glider on the Savage porch. It was probably a good thing that she had unpacked in the first minutes of her arrival at Beldame, for had she put it off, it might not have been accomplished yet. The very air was soporific, the food swung in the belly like ballast from meal to meal, the furniture seemed specifically designed to accommodate the human form in sleep. There was nothing sharp at Beldame, even the corners of the houses seemed rounded off. There were no sudden or shrill noises, for the surf never left off its masking roar. Worry, clever thought, conversation all were crushed by the weight of the atmosphere.

Days and nights were dull, but they were never tedious. The autumn before, India and Luker had gone to England together, and ridden the train from London to Glasgow. The Midlands were stupidly industrial, the Lake Country magnificent, but it was the unending monotonous barren hills of southwestern Scotland that most intrigued India and her father. There was grandeur in a vista that was wholly and even aggressively uninteresting. So it was with Beldame: nothing happened there, nothing
could
happen there. Days were entirely characterized by the weather: it was a hot day, or it was a day that wasn’t so very hot; it rained, or it looked as if it might rain; or it had rained yesterday but would probably be only hot today. India had quickly lost the flow of the days of the week: time divided itself into brief arbitrary runs of hot days and rainy days. The words
yesterday
and
tomorrow
might have been excised from their vocabulary: for yesterday had entertained nothing that was worth today’s speech, and tomorrow could promise no change from today. Transfixed, as out of a train window, India stared at life at Beldame.

The Savage house rose early, and the McCray house rose late; and the time of everyone’s rising, that never varied more than a quarter of an hour, constituted the length and breadth of the morning’s conversation. Odessa stood in the kitchen and prepared a succession of breakfasts. Late in the morning, everyone but India and Odessa lay upon the beach for an hour or so, and it was rare that they did not all fall directly asleep again. At noontime when the sun was so strong that not even Luker could abide it, everyone came inside and worked crossword puzzles, or read paperback books someone had bought in Mobile fifteen years before, or worked one of the great jigsaw puzzles that was always laid out on the McCrays’ dining room table. At one o’clock, by which time breakfast had been sufficiently digested, they sat down to lunch; and after lunch, they returned to their frivolous occupations for half an hour before they began to yawn, stretching out on gliders or climbing unsteadily into hammocks to sleep. During all the long afternoon, Odessa sat and worked at the jigsaw. It infuriated India that the black woman’s proficiency was never augmented by her long hours at the puzzle; she remained abysmally slow at it always.