The Elementals (9 page)

“Anyway,” he went on, “all three families used to stay out here from the middle of May until the middle of September. That must have been about twenty people, not including servants and guests. It wasn’t that it was so much cooler here in the summer, it’s just that Mobile wasn’t healthy. A lot of people died of swamp fever. And the houses passed on down through the Savage family. During the Depression, two of ’em got sold, this house and the third house—though if you ask me the Savages were fools not to keep this one, the one that faces the Gulf. Lawton and Big Barbara got it in
1950
from some people named Hightower who owed them money, and Lawton accepted the house as payment—or part payment. We started coming down every year, and Big Barbara and I would stay almost the whole summer. That’s when Big Barbara and Marian Savage got to be such good friends. And they were pregnant with Leigh and Mary-Scot at the same time. And of course Dauphin and Darnley and I played together all day long. Darnley was my age.”

“So no one stayed in the third house then either?”

Luker shook his head. “Not since I’ve been coming here. It wasn’t always covered with sand, of course. I don’t think that even started much more than twenty years ago. Before that, the place was just closed up, and nobody came. I can’t remember exactly what the story was. The house was sold in the Depression, like I said, and people came to stay here. But they didn’t stay long—I think that was it. They bought the house but they’d never use it, and when the Savages made some of their money back in World War II, I think they bought the house back. It’s something like that—Dauphin could tell you for sure.”

“Why did the people who bought the third house stop coming here? Did something happen?”

“I don’t know,” said Luker with a shrug. “I don’t remember what the story was. It’s strange to think about all this again, there’s a lot I’ve really forgotten. After we had been coming a few years, Leigh and Mary-Scot were born, and a few years after that Darnley started spending his summers at this sailing camp in North Carolina. That was when Dauphin and I became really close. I’m three years older than he is. It’s funny you should call it
the third house
, because that’s what we always called it. It used to scare me, and Leigh too. That’s why my bedroom is where it is—because from there, you can’t see the third house. I was scared to get up at night and look at it, I was scared there was something that lived inside it.”

“But you put me in a room that looks out on it,” said India.

“But you’re not scared,” said Luker. “I’ve raised you not to be scared of things like that.”

“Is there a lot more sand now than when you were here last time?”

Luker hesitated before answering. He slapped at a sand fly on his arm. “I don’t know,” he said, “I’d have to go look at it.”

“Let’s go look,” said India. “I want to see what it’s like. Get your camera, and you can take pictures. Maybe if we could get inside, you could take pictures of me in a room that’s half filled with sand—that’d be hot!”

“Oh,” said Luker softly, “don’t get so fired up, India. We’ve got all the time in the world. There’s so little to do at Beldame, maybe you ought to save a little of the excitement for when you’re
really
bored.” He pushed his foot against the floorboards, and propelled the swing into a wide sideways arc. Through the open window of the Savage house they heard Odessa putting up groceries in the kitchen cabinets.

Chapter
7

India, who had her mother’s delicate skin, wore long sleeves and a coolie hat when Luker toured her around the spit. They started at a point just in front of their own house and walked to the wide shallow depression that looked like a dry riverbed. Through this channel, at high tide, St. Elmo’s Lagoon flowed into the Gulf, and cut off Beldame entirely from the peninsular mainland. They walked along St. Elmo’s Lagoon—India marveling at the beauty of the placid green water.

“I don’t know why you haven’t told all your friends in New York about Beldame,” said India. “I mean, it’s the perfect place for a house party. Your friends have money, they could afford to fly down for a weekend. There’s nothing like this on Long Island—there’s nothing that’s this remote.”

Luker didn’t like the question, and that was apparent to India. “Beldame is a very private place,” he said to her finally. “It’s a family place. It belongs to us—the McCrays and the Savages. We’ve never invited a whole lot of people to come down.”

“Ever?” demanded India. “Have there ever been guests at Beldame?”

“Oh, sure!” replied Luker. “Lots of times—but not recently, I guess.”

“Not since when?”

Luker shrugged. “Not since Dauphin got out of high school.”

“Why did you stop inviting people?”

“Oh, we just realized that guests—that people not in the family—didn’t really take to Beldame.”

“
I
love it,” said India.

“You’re family, dummy.”

“To have a family is real strange,” said India thoughtfully. “All these people you wouldn’t have anything to do with except that they’re related to you. It’s easier for you because you grew up with a whole bunch of people. I’ve only had you.”

“Better just me than your mother and me together.”

“That’s the truth!” exclaimed India. “But what made you all of a sudden decide not to invite any more people to Beldame?”

“Oh, I’m not exactly sure . . .”

“Yes you are,” said India. “Tell, tell.”

“Well, Dauphin had a party down here. It was right after his graduation, and he invited a bunch of his friends down for the weekend—”

“Were you here?”

“I was taking extra courses at Columbia that summer. I couldn’t come. But Big Barbara and Leigh were here, and they had all the girls stay over at our house. The boys stayed at the Savages’. Odessa and Marian Savage were down too, of course, keeping an eye on things.”

“And something happened?”

Luker nodded.

“What?” demanded India.

“I’m not sure . . .”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I’m not really sure if anything happened. Probably nothing happened. But all the girls were sleeping in our house, and they had the two bedrooms on the western side—the one you’re in now and the one next to it, that also looks out on the third house. So they were up late on Saturday night, talking and gossiping and putting their hair up and whatever else high school girls do when they go to the beach, and they saw something outside.”

“What’d they see?”

“Well, they thought they saw a woman . . .”

“A woman? What sort of woman?”

“They couldn’t see very clearly. It was just a woman—she was fat and had on a long dress, that’s all they could tell.”

“What was she doing? Was she just walking around the yard or something? Maybe it was Marian Savage.”

“Marian Savage was very thin, even before she got cancer. No, this was a big fat woman—and she was walking on the roof of the third house.”

“What?”

“She was up on the roof over the verandah, just walking around and looking in all the windows and trying to raise them from the outside. They couldn’t see very well because it was so dark. They—”

“Did the woman get inside the third house?”

“There wasn’t any woman,” said Luker. “They imagined it. It was a collective hallucination or something. There wasn’t anybody there. You saw how hard it is to get out to Beldame—nobody’s going to come in the middle of the night. Especially not a fat woman in a long dress. And there’s no way to get up to that roof without a ladder and there weren’t any ladders around the next morning. They imagined it all.”

“Maybe she was a burglar or something.”

“Fat women make terrible burglars, India. And besides, why would a burglar come out here when there were lots of other people around, when most of the time the place is completely deserted? And those girls were screaming, too—and the woman never even turned around to look at them.”

“Where’d she go then? What happened to her?”

“The girls said she just went around the corner and disappeared and they didn’t see her again.”

“Maybe she got through a window on the other side of the house. Did anybody go in the house the next day?”

“Of course not. There was no woman. But the girls were scared. They got Big Barbara up, and Odessa and Marian Savage, and they all went back to Mobile that night. And since then, we haven’t asked anybody to come back to Beldame. And I get the feeling from what Big Barbara has said, that most people wouldn’t come even if they got asked.”

This exchange had brought them to the front of the Savage house. Luker stopped and pointed at the slight movement of darkness visible through the second-floor window. “Odessa is getting ready for the others. She’s been coming here as long as anybody else. They offered her one of the bedrooms on the second floor—the one, in fact, that looks out over the third house—but she wouldn’t take it. She took the third floor instead. She has it all to herself and she claims that the heat doesn’t bother her. After spending about thirty summers up there, I guess it really doesn’t.”

Luker had paused before the house, and to India it appeared that he would much rather continue to talk of Odessa than to complete their circumambulation of Beldame. She pulled him past the Savage house to the very tip of the spit. Here the lowering sun sparkled on the cross-hatching patterns of colliding waves.

“I don’t know anything about marine geology, or whatever it’s called,” said Luker, “so I’m not exactly sure what’s happening here. But when I was your age there was a lot more beach here, but that’s all underwater now, and it’s not much more than a sandbar—and not a very safe sandbar at that. It
looks
safe but I wouldn’t trust it. When I was little the dune was just starting to build up, and Marian Savage would complain about all the sand that blew up on the porch of the third house. We didn’t know then that the entire house was going to be covered. Every time we’d come back we’d find the dune a little higher. Now look,” he said, standing with his back to the water, “from here you can barely see over the top of the sand.”

What India could see of the third house was most of the second floor and the single window at the top. The sun reflecting in the unbroken glass of these windows blinded her.

She jumped forward and placed her foot on the base of the dune; the texture of the sand there was sufficiently different from that of the beach that one might speak of “the base of the dune.”

“What are you doing?” demanded Luker sharply.

“I’m going to climb to the top and look in the windows. Come on!” She trudged a couple of steps upward.

“No!” cried Luker. India turned and smiled: she was testing him. His reluctance to talk of the house except at her prompting had been obvious.

“You’re still scared of it,” she said. “You were scared of it when you were a little boy, and you’re still scared of it now, aren’t you?” She stood several feet higher than he, and her feet sank slowly in the loose fine sand.

“Yes,” he replied, “of course I am. Ask Leigh, and she’ll tell you that she’s scared of it too.”

“What about Dauphin? Is he scared of the third house?”

Luker nodded.

“And what about Big Barbara and Odessa?”

“Why should they be scared?” asked Luker. “When they started coming to Beldame, they were already grown up. I think the house probably just works on children. There’s nothing wrong with it, there aren’t any stories about ghosts or anything like that. It’s probably just that the house was empty, and that the sand was creeping up on it, and it was so boring here that there wasn’t anything better to do than get scared, that’s all.”

“Then climb up here with me and let’s look in the windows. I want to see if the sand has gotten inside the house.”

“It’s not safe, India.”

“Goddamn it, Luker, it’s a goddamn sand dune, and you’ve been on enough of ’em on Fire Island, haven’t you?” she demanded with sarcasm.

“Yes,” he replied. “But those were permanent dunes on the Island, they—”

“Dunes aren’t permanent,” said India sententiously, “that’s what makes them dunes, and besides, this one’s only about fifteen feet high.” Without waiting for her father’s permission, she turned and strode quickly toward the top. Her sandaled feet sank deep in the fine white sand, and were difficult to raise. She paused, removed the sandals, and tossed them down to Luker. He picked them up, knocked them against his thigh, and swung them impatiently by their straps.

India headed for the window on the left, in order to see into the room that corresponded to her own. Sand reached up to the second of four rows of panes in the casement.

Barefoot, India attained the top of the dune. She would have slid down again but that she grabbed hold of one of the carved fleurs-de-lis that friezed the second floor of the house. She pulled herself up straight before the casement and stared down through the window into a room that was structurally identical to her own.

She was never sure afterward what she had expected, but whatever that expectation had been, it was not fulfilled by what she saw.

The chamber, which perfectly resembled her own in the matter of proportion, woodwork, and ornamentation, was furnished in a style she recognized as late Victorian. There was a mahogany bedstead with four high posts with carved pineapples for finials; a wardrobe, dresser, and dressing table of the same wood were carved in the same style. Rush matting had been laid over the floor and the walls were covered in a striped paper of green and black. From a picture molding hung a number of dark-framed prints, only slightly askew on their triangled wires. On a table beside the bed was a ruby-glass carafe with a ruby-glass tumbler inverted over the mouth. India could see that it still held water. On the dressing table was a jumble of brushes, and an opened box with a mirror that she suspected was a shaving kit.