The Elementals (32 page)

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, staring 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.

Though she had not intended, she stopped a moment on the landing and gazed into the two open bedrooms. She saw nothing, and more importantly, she
felt
nothing. Whispering her father’s name as a kind of incantation for safety, she started down the stairs to the first floor.

The light of dawn penetrated but dimly into this part of the house, and India heard the thing before she saw it. Straining, she made out the creature’s form on the stairs below her as it dropped clumsily from one step to the next toward the living room—and her father. India stood at the head of the stairs, too frightened to proceed and too courageous to call out to Luker for assistance.

She flung the cleaver at it, but it was the dull side that struck solidly against the creature’s back. The weapon glanced off and fell between the balusters to the floor below.

The creature stopped and turned its expressionless unfeatured face to India. It presented one ear to her, and then the other; and then it began to struggle upward again.

India waited and held the knife poised. She trembled, and did not answer her father when he called again.

Luker appeared suddenly, climbing over the mound of sand between the living and dining rooms. “Goddamn it,” he hissed, “India, why didn’t you come on down, I was about to—”

With the lamp he had come to the foot of the stairs, and he now could see what was only three steps below his daughter. India knelt, with one hand gripping a baluster for her balance, and waited for the abomination to come within her reach.

Its small mouth worked, and she saw the grinding white teeth inside, tiny and countless. It turned its head from side to side, to catch her breathing first with one ear and then with the other. She could see the soft indentations where there ought to have been eyes, and even the vestigial bands of lashes buried in its doughy skin. Two small red scars it had instead of nostrils; beneath a pearl necklace there were scales on its thick neck, and thick red hair filled its ears. It stank.

Below, Luker had seen and retrieved the cleaver. He stood at the foot of the stairs, and called softly to his daughter: “India! India!”

India stepped back. When the monstrous thing was raising itself onto the landing, and reaching out at her with its bloated four-fingered hand, India drew back her bare foot from which Dauphin’s blood had not yet been worn away and kicked the thing solidly in its exposed breast.

It tumbled down several steps, spewing bile and sand. It flailed blindly but one of its arms caught between two balusters and its progress was halted with a jerk. It had nearly recovered its balance when, with a strangled voice, Luker ran up the stairs and brought the cleaver down against the side of its head. The necklace it wore was snapped, and the tiny perfect pearls scattered.

Not sand but brains and blood exploded from the wound that Luker had inflicted. India ran down and plunged the knife deep into its breast. Thin stinking blood was geysered up along the blade and drenched her hands.

Luker grabbed India’s wrist and started to pull her down the stairs, but she resisted. The baby still twitched, flinging sand and pearls.

She wrested out the cleaver, lifted it high, and brought it down against the creature’s neck. But all her strength wasn’t enough to sever it. The broken head only lolled down over the next step, as on a hinge. What contents of its misshapen head had not already spilled out began to seep through the wounds, and the unrecognizable and rotting internal organs pushed themselves out of the body through the opened neck.

India and her father fled the third house.

Luker set fire to it by tossing the kerosene lamp through the back door, which India held open. He took the empty gasoline can on to the verandah and with it knocked out all the windows on the first floor that were not covered with sand, to allow circulation of air through the place. By the time that he ran back to the jeep, where India was cowering in Big Barbara’s lap, flames were leaping through the smashed kitchen windows.

Leigh wanted to drive away, but he cautioned her to wait. “Want to make sure it catches.”

“No,” said India, looking up suddenly. “We can’t wait. We’ve got to get out of here!”

“India,” said Luker, “whatever that was in the house, we killed it, we—”

“It’s not just the third house,” she said, “it’s this whole place, we—”

“Oh!” cried Big Barbara, and pointed to the third house. There in the window of the bedroom that was over the living room—flames could now be seen on that side of the house as well—stood Lawton McCray. He was trying to raise the window, but it was evidently stuck in its frame.

“Oh, Lord!” cried Leigh. “Y’all have done gone and set that house on fire and
Daddy
is inside! Y’all didn’t even say Daddy was inside there. Y’all—”

“Lawton!” screamed Big Barbara.

“It’s not Lawton!” hissed India. “That’s why I said get out of here!”

“It
is
Lawton!” said Big Barbara. “Lawton!” she shouted, and waved her arms wildly. “Luker, you got to get him out of there, you got—”

“Barbara,” said Luker, “it’s not Lawton. If India says it’s not, then it’s not. And even if it was,” he added sullenly, turning away from the frantic figure of the man in the window of the burning house, “I couldn’t do anything anyway. You—”

“Drive off!” cried India.

“Lord, India!’ cried Leigh. “What kind of girl are you! That’s Daddy in there! Even if you don’t love him the way Mama and I do, it’s no reason just to watch him burn! And Dauphin’s body is in there! Dauphin is dead and Odessa’s probably dead too and now Daddy’s gone die, and you want me to just drive off!”

India nodded. “Yes, that’s exactly what I want. Just put it in gear, and drive off. Dauphin is dead, Odessa is dead, and we’re going to be dead if we don’t get away from this place right now. That’s not Lawton standing in the window, because Lawton is already dead.”

“How do you know that, child?” demanded Big Barbara.

“Did you see him?” said Luker.

India nodded. “In the dining room. I think it was Lawton who brought the gasoline can down. He’s dead, there’re three people dead in that house right now, and there’s nobody who’s alive. That’s why you shouldn’t look back. Don’t look back at it, there’s no telling what you’ll see standing in the windows, there’s—”

“Come on, Leigh!” shouted Luker, and Leigh drove off.

No one said anything as they drove the length of Beldame. They steadfastly kept their eyes ahead, and no one looked back to the three houses.

They came to the channel. They braced and were silent as the jeep plunged into the shallow water. Not one of them but half imagined that they would be stopped and never allowed to leave Beldame.

The jeep pulled up on to the sand on the far side. By the time they reached Gasque they could no longer see the gray smoke from the fire that consumed the third house.

Epilogue

At Gasque they exchanged the jeep for the black Mercedes. They drove to Gulf Shores and telephoned the highway patrol to inform them that during the night one of the three houses at Beldame had burned down, and that three persons had died inside: Lawton McCray, candidate for United States congressional representative; Dauphin Savage, third richest man in Mobile; and Odessa Red, a black woman in the latter’s employ.

Luker, Big Barbara, Leigh, and India had determined on the implausible story that they four had returned to Mobile for a single day to do more grocery shopping and check on airline reservations and mail. When they returned early on Friday morning they discovered the third house in flames. Perhaps, Luker ventured to suggest, the three unfortunate persons had gone inside the place exploring, having heard some sound suggestive of burglars or intruders, and one of Lawton’s cigarettes had ignited the dry rotting wood or the flimsy rotting draperies. All three had been overcome by smoke and were trapped.

It was a terrible tragedy, the highway patrol concurred, and it probably happened just that way. The third house had been burned right down to the dune and what little remained of it was a few walls and sticks of furniture that lay behind the glassy surface of that mound of fused sand. In the subsequent formal investigation three men from the Baldwin County fire marshal’s office stomped about the blackened ruins of the third house for a quarter of an hour and later noted in writing that they had found nothing that pointed to the fire’s being of anything but wholly accidental origin.

These three men in fact were far more struck by the strange dune of sand that seemed to have risen out of St. Elmo’s Lagoon, on purpose to swallow the house there. Luker, Big Barbara, Leigh, and India, who had driven back along the Dixie Graves Parkway following the police, had seen from the road that the perfect cone that surmounted the Savage house had appreciably softened its contours. Now, by stretching one’s imagination, one could judge it a natural if still improbable phenomenon of wind and drifting sand.

In two days’ time three coffins were delivered to Mobile, though a man in the Mobile County sheriffs office privately cautioned Luker that they were empty. Not enough had been found in the wreckage of the third house to spear on the end of a pointed stick. This information was related to Big Barbara, Leigh, and India, who were more relieved by the information than not. Three funeral services were held in Mobile the following day, in three different churches. Early in the morning at the Zion Grace Baptist Church, Johnny Red threw himself wailing across the top of Odessa’s empty coffin, and after the service begged Leigh to lend him a hundred dollars to tide him over until he could find a buyer for Odessa’s house.

Dauphin’s funeral was at the Church of St. Jude Thaddeus in the early afternoon, and no one was in attendance but the four who knew how he had died and Sister Mary-Scot. Leigh went up to her sister-in-law, whispered to her a few moments, and then Sister Mary-Scot put away the silver knife that was intended to pierce Dauphin’s breast. She crossed herself repeatedly throughout the service. An empty coffin was sealed into the niche above Marian Savage. The day before, when preparing the mausoleum for an interment, the caretaker had discovered that the plaque memorializing Marian Savage had fallen from its place and smashed on the marble floor. A square of plywood preserved Leigh from the distressing sight of the foot of her mother-in-law’s coffin.

Lawton McCray’s service was held at the St. James Episcopal Church on Government Boulevard, where he and Big Barbara had been married and their children baptized. It was widely attended, and Big Barbara reserved the pew directly behind the family for the sole occupancy of Lula Pearl Thorndike, who wore a tight black dress with a gold-plated pecan fastened to the collar.

What with three ceremonies in three different churches, and three burials at three different cemeteries afterward, the four survivors were exhausted by that evening. They put a black wreath on the door of the Small House, turned out all the lights so that those who wished to proffer consolation would be discouraged from ringing the bell—there had been quite enough of that in the past three days—and sat very still on the glassed-in porch. They agreed that it was the hypocrisy of the day more than anything else that had been so enervating. They had mourned over three empty coffins: two blue and one silver.

“I don’t even know what I feel,” said Leigh, and in this she spoke for them all. “All that that happened down at Beldame, it was so horrible. It was so
wrong
.
And there was nothing we could do to stop it. And since then, we’ve just lied and lied and lied about what happened. It’s a wonder anybody believed any of it. But with all these lies I haven’t even had the time to think what it all means, I mean, about Dauphin being dead. Every time I hear a noise, I look up, and I think it’s gone be Dauphin coming through the door. Or I wake up in the morning, and I think ‘Oops! Time to go get Odessa!’ Or I hear the telephone and I think it’s Daddy, wanting Dauphin to do something for him. Y’all got to give me ’bout a month—’bout a month of waiting for ’em all just to walk in the room, and say, ‘Hi y’all’—before I can bring myself to believe that they all really and truly died down there.”