Luker sat in a corner of his room on a rush mat and watched the perspiration drip from his crooked elbows and the inside of his knees. India had collapsed feverish across the foot of her bed, with her mouth gaping and contracting like that of a dying fish.
Downstairs, Dauphin lay in his bathing suit in the hammock and rocked himself by means of a cane pole that he pushed against the wall. Odessa sat nearby, holding her Bible far away from her so that her sweating hands would not stain the pages. The sounds in that house were the creaking of the hammock hardware, the occasional turning of the thin pages of Odessa’s Bible, Luker and India’s uneven and heavy breath, and Big Barbara’s pillow-stifled weeping.
Leigh was alone in the Savage house, and Leigh was the first to whom something happened that day.
* * *
In her bathing suit, she lay in a hammock that was suspended across the southwestern corner of the living room. Deep sleep in such heat was impossible, and she could manage no more than a troubled slumber; but even that was restful after the previous night’s sleeplessness. It might have been exhaustive collapse, she told herself, rather than sleep; but that was her last conscious thought.
When she awoke—and it was Odessa’s footsteps in the bedroom directly above that roused her—the sun had appreciably lowered in the sky. She turned her head a little, and saw there was no one else in the room. Odessa, in the slight abatement of heat, had evidently come from the McCray house to work the bedrooms upstairs. Leigh began to rock the hammock, and wondered if she could fall asleep again.
There was nothing to think about—the heat precluded rational considerations—so she drowsily followed Odessa’s footsteps in the room above. The vibrations shook the hammock slightly. Odessa moved from Dauphin’s side of the bed over to Leigh’s; evidently she was changing the sheets. A walk to the chest where the linens were kept. Leigh stared straight up and followed Odessa’s feet as clearly as if they had been printed there, like beginners’ dance steps. Odessa shuffled around the bed as the linens were changed, then over to the dresser. Why to the dresser? Leigh wondered. Then back to the head of the bed. Oh, thought Leigh then, she had left the pillowcases on the bench before the dresser. Around the bed once more, back to the dresser with linens, then to the window and pause—probably to see how low the sun now was, or whether the tide had begun to come back in. She heard the window being lowered in the sash. Leigh raised her arm to look at her watch, then remembered that she had not worn it today because in such heat even so slight an encumbrance proved uncomfortable. She had left it on the dresser, she—
Leigh sat bolt upright in the hammock so that its hardware jarred and creaked. She twisted her head up. The room directly above her was not her and Dauphin’s bedroom, but one which she knew had not been occupied in twenty years—since Bothwell Savage, alone at Beldame, had had some sort of attack, and died in it. Why then had Odessa been changing the sheets on the bed?
Sweating now with a nervousness she dared not ascribe to any particular thought or fear, Leigh halted the hammock and sat very still listening for Odessa’s footsteps: in that room directly overhead, in the hallway above, in another bedroom, or coming down the stairs.
The house was silent. She heard nothing but her own stertorous breathing.
The silence appalled her. The Gulf was so distant and so accustomed a voice that she did not hear it speak.
Weak-kneed, she stood out of the hammock and went to the base of the staircase. She called Odessa’s name, and then repeated the call when there was no answer.
Softly calling over and over again, “Odessa! Odessa!” she mounted the stairs. She did not pause on the second floor but went all the way to the top of the house. Odessa was not in her room.
She came down to the second floor again. The doors of all four bedrooms were closed. She dreaded to open any, but determined at last to try that of her own bedroom.
The room was empty, but the bed had been made; the two other used bedrooms on the floor were empty as well, but neat, kept in readiness for the guests who were never invited to Beldame.
At last she turned to the fourth door, which opened into the room that was situated directly over that end of the living room where she had slept. It was surely in this room and no other that she had heard Odessa’s footsteps. “Odessa!” she called as she turned the knob and gently kicked the door open.
What she saw first was that the window had not been lowered closed, it had been raised. Of course, she thought to herself, of course these windows wouldn’t have been kept open with no one living in here, they—
Then she noticed the rest of the room—or rather, she understood what she ought to have realized from the first.
The room had been given over to storage. Here were superfluous dressers and broken beds, rolled-up mats, and stacks of faded curtains, extra cushions for the gliders, and trunks containing whatever there was at Beldame to be kept for long periods of time.
But the entire floor of the room was covered with this detritus of a century of habitation; one had to weave one’s way carefully among the stacks and piles and rows of objects. And in the place where Leigh had listened to Odessa’s steps as she made up the bed, stood a pyramid of half a dozen crates, marked variously Dishes, Glasses, and Mama’s Clothes.
And over what little one could see of the floor was a glaze of white sand. No prints were visible in it—no one had walked there.
Unthinking, unable to think, for the heat was worse in this closed room than anywhere else at Beldame, Leigh moved to the window, threading her way among boxes and heaps of books. Every step kicked the sand away, leaving proof of her progress. Despite the open window, the room was stifling, the air thick and weighty and dry. She could scarcely breathe in the atmosphere which provided as little nourishment as the sand that covered Beldame. She lurched to the window, and gasped for her breath. Looking out, she saw Odessa at the corner of the McCray verandah; automatically she waved.
Odessa looked up, cupped her hands and shouted to her: “Get out of that room, Miz Leigh!”
In the midst of her bewilderment, she had forgot how great her fright was. Leigh slammed the window down and fled the room. There was sand even on the doorknob, and she feverishly brushed it off her hand as she clattered down the stairs.
CHAPTER 20
After what she had experienced that afternoon, Leigh was nervous being in the Savage house at all but, for Dauphin’s sake and the others’, she tried not to show her fear at the supper table. It was still so hot, however, that they were hard put even to remember one another’s names, much less take note of stray gestures and carefully repressed emotions.
“Mr. Dauphin,” said Odessa when she was clearing the dishes, “I been thinking you and Miz Leigh ought to sleep over at the McCray house tonight. Not no breeze off the lagoon, hasn’t been no breeze off the lagoon all day long, you sleep over there, you gone get the breeze off the Gulf.”
“All right,” said Dauphin, “it doesn’t much matter where we go to bed tonight, we’re not gone be able to sleep anyway.” This was much to the relief of Leigh, who had anticipated some trouble in getting her husband out of the house. When she had told Odessa of the spirit-invaded bedroom, Odessa had advised against spending the night in the Savage house.
“You come with ’em,” said Big Barbara to Odessa, “you gone sweat your eyes out up there on the third floor.”
“Oh, I cain’t do that,” replied Odessa, “I cain’t get to sleep in any bed but my own! I’ll be all right,” she added, with a meaningful glance at Leigh.
The heat had exhausted them altogether. It was impossible to pack even though they knew they must be off early. Easier to hope for cooler weather, for rain in the morning; and if the heat continued, why then it could be no worse than it was now. Conversation that evening was impossible; when Dauphin and Luker leaned over the jigsaw puzzle, perspiration obscured their vision and dripped saltily on to the pieces. Leigh sat in the swing a little while and pretended to feel the cooling b
reeze that Odessa had promised. India walked along the shore, out of sight of the houses, until she came to the course of water that ran from the lagoon to the Gulf. When the sense of being on an island suddenly overwhelmed her, she hurried back to the McCray house.
On pretense of restlessness, Big Barbara wandered the rooms of the house, skirting her eyes into corners hoping to see bottles of liquor secreted in the shadows. She was the first to go to bed. Luker followed soon after, on the threshold of his room swallowing a Quaalude that he had reserved for such an emergency. Leigh and Dauphin could have had the fourth bedroom in the house but elected instead for the hammocks in the living room. Swinging in the darkness there, unable to sleep, they talked for a long while. Wanting very much to tell her husband of the ranging footsteps in the locked, cramped room of the Savage house, but not daring to speak for Dauphin’s sake, Leigh decided to divulge another secret instead. “Dauphin,” she said, “you know I told you I was going in for a checkup day after tomorrow . . . ?”
“I know,” whispered Dauphin, mindful of those trying to sleep upstairs. “What about it?”
“Nothing,” said Leigh. “It’s just that I think I’m getting pregnant . . .”
“Are you really?” He giggled, and their hammocks shook with their happiness.
* * *
India knew that she would not be able to sleep if she went upstairs to her room. She lay in the porch swing and with one leg pressed against the chain, gently propelled it in an easy rocking arc. A drapery of black netting kept the mosquitoes and flies off her. She listened to the slow regular creaking of the chain, the breaking of high tide’s waves so close by, and now and then caught a whisper of Leigh and Dauphin’s conversation through the open living room window. As long as they were awake she did not fear, though all the lights of Beldame had been extinguished, though she was alone on the porch. From where she was she could not see the third house. She would rest quietly here until sleep was irresistible and then go upstairs to her bed; in the morning she would leave for Mobile, perhaps not to return. She could not but savor this last evening alone outside. The stars, that provided light but no illumination, made lightless Beldame seem the blackest place on earth.
She fell asleep in the swing, and when she awoke the porch was no longer uniformly black, but mysteriously slanted with shadows. The waxing moon had risen over the Gulf and now shone directly overhead. What awakened her, rousing her slowly from her heat-drugged slumber, was the sound of footsteps on the porch; steps that had mounted the stairs at the back and worked their way around to where she lay. It was Odessa, obviously, who had come over from the Savage house, restless and awake—or unwilling to spend the night there alone. So familiar had India become with the tides that by the sound of the waves—how distant they were from the house—she could tell that she had slept for nearly three hours. It was past one o’clock, and what was Odessa doing up so late as that? India tugged the mosquito netting from her head, sat up in the swing, and looked down the length of the porch.
No one was there.
“Odessa!” she called softly, but her voice still cracked. “Odessa!” she called more loudly, uneasy that the black woman wasn’t there—that no one was there.
She rose slowly from the swing, telling herself that she was quiet so as not to disturb Leigh and Dauphin sleeping inside, but knowing that her care was indicative only of her fear.
“Odessa!” she whispered. “Where are you? It’s time to go to bed!”
She moved around the swing, steadying it with her hand, and proceeded down the length of the porch. It was dark here, though the moonlight shone on the tops of the railings, rendering them brilliant as the sand beyond. The sand glowed with the moonlight, muting the whitecaps of the Gulf and the phosphorescence of the lagoon. Beyond the porch the sand was a frozen sealike whiteness, pallid and terrible.
She went to the end of the porch and looked all around. The houses of Beldame were great blocks of darkness anchored in that shining sea of moonlit sand.
The tide’s not yet gone out, India thought. We’re still an island.
She looked up at the vivid gibbous moon and hated it for its imperfection of shape. She looked where it was reflected in the second-floor window of the third house, in the casement of the room that corresponded to Big Barbara’s. It quivered in that glass, but that reflected movement was the result only of India’s own trembling.
The steps she had dreamed: they were the tag-end of some amorphous vision in her brain, an auditory hallucination brought on by the heat, by her cramped posture in the swing, by the insidious suggestion of Odessa’s superstition.
She turned to go inside, and in that act of turning, she caught sight of the footprints that led up from the sandy yard to the verandah. The moonlight caught them in such a way to bring them full into her vision: small footprints of a deformed bare foot drawn out in sand on the wooden steps. They weren’t the residue of someone who had walked barefoot across the yard either, leaving a bold print on the first pair of steps and increasingly lighter prints as he went farther on to the porch: each of the prints was as perfectly formed as if someone had sifted sand onto the boards through a delicate stencil. They were the residue of something that was made of sand.
The footprints came up the stairs and down the porch to where she stood; but behind her, toward the swing where she had slept, they were lost in the shadows.
India kicked off her sandals, and by sense of touch she followed the trail of sandy prints into the darkness of the verandah. The steps led up to the swing and then stopped.
India looked wildly about. She hopped to the edge of the porch, desperately brushing the sand from the soles of her feet. To the left was the lagoon and the Gulf to the right; before her the gleaming sand of Beldame stretched toward a black and amorphous horizon.
The moon was suddenly obscured by clouds, and the entire vista winked out. Beldame was so still that even the sound of the screen door of the Savage house being opened softly and closed as carefully did not escape her. She ran to the end of the porch and straining, could just make out Odessa standing on the back steps of the Savage house.
India ran out into the yard: the black woman did not seem surprised to see her.
“Odessa!” cried India in a whisper. “I’m so glad it was you that came up on the porch, I was—”
“Wasn’t me, child . . .”
India was astonished, and then frightened. Odessa had turned to face the third house.
India looked up. Though the moon was still obscured, its reflection remained in that upstairs window. But it wasn’t the moon—a face, pale and with only the barest suggestion of features, was slowly retreating from the window into the darkness of the third house.
CHAPTER 21
Odessa jangled as she walked with determination across the yard. India was afraid to accompany the black woman, but more fearful of being left behind. “What’s that in your pockets?” demanded India in a whisper, seeing they were weighted down.
“Keys, child,” the black woman replied. “I got the keys to the third house.”
Hopping beside Odessa, India drew in her breath sharply. “Hey, where’d you get ’em?”
“Oh, had ’em all the time. Always had ’em.”
“Are we going in?” cried India. “Are we actually going inside the third house?” When Odessa nodded, India tugged at her skirt. “Listen, why don’t we wait till tomorrow? Why don’t we wait till it’s light out?”
“Be too late,” said Odessa. “We got to protect ourselves.”
“What about those seeds? We ate all those seeds, you said that would protect us. You said—”
“One time before I used those seeds, child, and they protected me, and they protected ever’body at Beldame. That was right after Martha-Ann got killed. They worked then, but they not working now. The spirits let ’em work the first time—they tried to fool me into thinking the seeds was always gone work, they just let us feel like we was protected. But the seeds ain’t work
ing, I can tell. So we got to go inside.”
“I know somebody’s in there,” said India, actually hanging on to Odessa’s skirt to prevent her from getting closer to the third house. A corner of the moon was momentarily uncovered and they were draped in its pallid glow. “There was somebody looking down at us from the window. We can’t go in there when we know somebody’s waiting inside.”
“Child,” said Odessa, “you don’t have to go with me.”
“What have you got to protect you? Have you got a gun?”
“No, but if I had, I’d have it with me right now. People say that a gun’s no good against spirits, but you cain’t never tell what’s gone stop a spirit and what’s not. They ain’t going by our rules, not for a minute. I got the Bible. I’m gone read out of the Bible—and I got the keys, I’m gone see if I can lock ’em in their rooms.”
“Spirits can go through walls,” asserted India.
“You don’t know!” exclaimed Odessa. “You been telling me from can to cain’t that you don’t know nothing about spirits, and now you telling me spirits cain’t be locked inside a room! Well, child, you just tell me how you know they cain’t!”
“I don’t know,” admitted India nervously. “Maybe they can. Are you actually going to go in there and try to lock ’em up?”
Odessa shrugged. “I don’t know exactly what I’m gone do.” She took India by the hand. “You gone hold the flashlight for me?”
Though full of fear, India nodded and took the flashlight that Odessa pulled from her dress pocket. She clicked it on and flashed it over the back porch of the third house. In dark night, illumined only in that quavering white circle, it appeared truly indistinguishable from either the McCray or the Savage house. “I’m afraid,” she said.
“’Course you are,” said Odessa, “and so am I, but you said you wanted to go inside, and if you don’t go in now, you maybe not never gone get the chance.” She took out a large ring of old-fashioned keys, similar to those that India had found in some of the doors of the McCray house. Odessa went boldly to the kitchen door, as if she were returning there after only an afternoon’s grocery shopping, and tried four keys in the lock before one turned. India stood trembling on the step below Odessa, pressing her shoulder against the black woman’s thigh, and trying to focus the flashlight on the keyhole. The moon had fallen behind deeper clouds and all Beldame was rendered black.