The Elementals

  While Lawton spoke, Big Barbara, whose place was on the dais next to the podium, stared up at her husband with a dizzying smile of conjugal admiration. Scarcely a man or woman in that audience but commented later how lucky the candidate was to have such a wife—and even those who liked Lawton, or professed to like him, said that they felt better about voting for him knowing that it would also be Big Barbara who would end up in Washington, D.C.

  After the Junior Chamber of Commerce luncheon, as they were driving back home, Dauphin passed the drugstore where the week before he had left off India’s film to be developed. He stopped and picked it up. Both he and Leigh were surprised that, when they handed it over to India, she thanked them but briefly and made no move to examine the photographs.

  “Aren’t you even gone look at ’em?” said Leigh.

  “I’ll look at ’em later,” replied the girl, and took the envelope off to her room.

  The action was of sufficient oddity to excite comment, and was reported to Luker a little later. Toward the end of the afternoon he came and sat in India’s room; he had a tall glass in his hand. “My God, it’s good to have a drink again. I think I suffered almost as much as Big Barbara.”

  “You had pills,” said India.

  “Shhh!” said her father. “I don’t want you telling anybody that! But the fact is I don’t think I took more than a couple of downs the whole time I was there.”

  “No ups?”

  “What the hell for? What is there to do on speed at Beldame?”

  India shrugged, dropped her chin on to her fist, and gazed out the window at the Great House. The Alabama foliage was grotesquely lush; trees seemed absolutely weighted down with leaves. The flowers in the gardens—hydrangeas, lilies, and showy annuals—drooped with blooms. Despite the absence of the family, the gardeners had been pridefully at work.

  “What’s wrong with you?” demanded Luker. “Are you mad because we had to leave Beldame?”

  She shook her head but did not look at him.

  “What then?”

  “I’m”—she struggled for a word—“disoriented,” she said at last.

  “Oh, yeah?” said her father softly. Then after a moment: “Dauphin brought back the pictures of the third house that you took. How’d they come out?”

  India glanced at him sharply and then turned away.

  He waited for an answer; when none came, he went on: “Did you look at them?”

  She nodded and scratched the windowsill with an unpainted fingernail.

  “Let me see them,” said Luker.

  India shook her head slowly.

  “They didn’t turn out?”

  India sniffed. “I’m no dummy,” she said. “I can work a light meter. I’ve got control over my apertures. Of course they came out.”

  “India,” said Luker, “you’re being coy and I hate it. You’re being like your mother, in fact. Are you going to show me the fucking pictures or not?”

  “You know,” she said, looking directly at him for the first time, “when I was taking those pictures, it was Odessa who told me where to stand and what to frame. She was with me the whole time—except for the last part. I didn’t tell you, but for the last half-dozen frames I went to the top of the dune again and took some pictures of that bedroom, that bedroom where I broke the window.”

  Luker nodded slowly and crunched ice. “And they all came out?”

  “A couple at the very end didn’t,” India replied. “There was some reflection on the windowpanes. The image isn’t all there.” She stood, walked to the dresser and took the envelope of photographs from one of the drawers there. “Oh, Luker,” she said as she handed it to him, “I’m scared, I’m still so scared.”

  He took the photographs in one hand, and with the other he drew her by the wrist. He would not open the envelope until she had left off weeping.

  The first nineteen of the black-and-white photographs were of India in her bedroom; forty-one more of the third house, taken from the back and the two sides. And the final ten were of the bedroom on the second floor that corresponded to India’s own in the McCray house. Luker nodded as he went slowly through them, and but for India’s having wept, would have pointed out where some composition might have been improved or the lighting and shutter speed adjusted to better effect. On the whole, however, he found them excellent work, and complimented India on them afterward, though with some puzzlement.

  “India,” he said, “these pictures are good. They’re better than good, in fact, they’re the best work that you’ve ever done. I don’t understand why you were afraid to show them to me. I mean, don’t you see that they’re good?”

  She nodded slowly, but still held her arm tightly wound round his.

  “I look at these and I want to go back down there with a four-by-five, even an eight-by-ten. Then we could get something really spectacular. Maybe we could rent one when we go back on Wednesday, if there’s a decent camera store in this town, we—”

  “These weren’t the only pictures I took,” said India, interrupting him softly.

  “Where are the others?”

  “I pulled them.”

  “Why?”

  After a few moments she answered: “I think Odessa should see them.”

  “Why Odessa? Wait a minute, India, now listen. Something upset you about these pictures, and I want to know what it is. I don’t want any more of this mystery. I tell you something—mystery is real boring. Now here, I want you to take a long swallow of this drink—it’s decent scotch and I know you like decent scotch—and then I want you to tell me what’s bothering you. I don’t intend to sit here the whole fucking afternoon, and play Twenty Fucking Questions.”

  India took a longer swallow than Luker expected. She rose and from the very back of another drawer of the dresser took a smaller stack of photographic prints. She handed them to her father.

  “Are these from the same rolls?”

  “Yes,” she said. “They’re not in sequence. But they’re all from the second roll.”

  The first few photographs were of architectural details of the house: casements mostly, but one also of the turret of the verandah that protruded from the dune at the front of the house. “These are just as good as the others,” said Luker wonderingly, “I don’t see—”

  And then he saw.

  Something was leaning against the turret, on its shadowed shingles. The outline of an emaciated figure—something not much more than a skeleton wrapped in a tissue of flesh—was evidently trying to escape the camera’s lens by leaning very close along the line of the turret. But the protruding ribs showed a little against the sky, as did the chin and jaw of the thrown-back head. The knees and spindly thighs could be seen, but the lower legs and feet were buried in the sand that covered the verandah roof. Whatever it was had been the same color as the slate-gray shingles. The long fingers of one withered hand protruded onto the sunlit portion of the turret. It appeared that whoever—whatever—this was had been caught as it scurried around the turret out of the sight of India and Odessa in the yard.

  Luker looked down at India; she was crying again.

  “India,” he said, “when you took this picture—”

  “I didn’t see anything,” she whispered. “There wasn’t anything up there.”

  Luker quickly flipped through the pictures he had just gone through.

  “That was the worst one of those,” said India, “but look . . .” On each of the other prints she pointed out something Luker had missed: a dark bony arm laid across a windowsill, a dark withered hand fingering the rotten curtains inside the rooms of the third house. Luker shook his head in frustrated disbelief. “I hate this,” he whispered. “I told you not to—”

  India still held two prints in her hand, face down.

  “Those are the worst?”

  India nodded. “Do you want to see them?”

  “No,” he said, “of course I don’t want to see them, but show me.”

  She flipped the first one
over into his hand. It was a photograph of the verandah showing the handsome curve of the dune that was overtaking the lagoon side of the third house. But Luker saw at once the fat gray creature that was huddled behind the low porch railing. From its crouched position, and the fact that most of it was hidden by the railing posts, it was not possible to reconstruct its shape—Luker thought that it might be the animated fetus of an elephant. Only that part of its head from the round flat ear to the round flat eye was visible. Its white pupil stared out into the camera lens.

  “It makes me want to vomit,” said India matter-of-factly.

  The second photograph that India handed her father was of the bedroom on the second floor of the house. All the other pictures of that room had been marred by the reflections on the glass of the windows; but this one was not. The crosspieces of the window frame were visible, but it was as if the glass had not been there at all.

  The photograph showed the chifforobe on the far side of the room; its door was open and the mirror on the inside of the door reflected a part of the room that was not directly visible from where India had stood. And against the outside wall of that bedroom a woman crouched in the edge of the dune of sand that had come through the broken window. She grinned into the camera; her eyes were black with white pupils. A parrot had embedded its claws into her shoulder, arched, and spread its wings.

  “It’s Nails,” said India.

  “And it’s Marian Savage,” said India’s father.

  CHAPTER 23

  “Tricks,” said Odessa, when she was shown the photographs that India had taken of the third house. “It’s all tricks.” She had looked at them cursorily and handed them directly back to India.

  “But there are pictures here, Odessa. You can’t look at these and tell me it’s a trick of the light, because I know it isn’t. There’s something on the roof, you can see his chest and his chin and his legs; and there’s something on the porch because it’s looking right in the camera, and here’s this dead woman upstairs—and I know who it is because I saw her in her coffin at the funeral!”

  Odessa was adamant. “It’s tricks. All of it’s tricks.”

  India shook her head and looked to her father. “How can she say that?” she pleaded. “Nobody played tricks with that camera or that film. This film got developed at a drugstore, it all goes through a machine, they don’t even look at it there! And I’ve looked at the negatives. All the images are on the negatives too.”

  “No,” said Odessa, “wasn’t nothing there. Spirits got in the camera, that’s all. They wasn’t there when you took the pictures. They got inside the camera and got on the film.”

  “I would have seen them if they had been there,” said India weakly, and both Odessa and Luker nodded agreement with her. They sat in the glassed-in porch of the Small House early on Sunday afternoon, the second of July. Leigh and Dauphin had gone to a summer flower show at the Armory, this not only in order to please Lawton but also to keep an eye on Big Barbara, and make certain that her plastic glass contained ginger ale and not champagne.

  Luker fidgeted for a minute, and when he spoke it was with a tone of voice that tokened unhappy resignation and giving-in. “India, listen,” he said, “the images that you see on those photographs are images of things that weren’t really there.”

  “I don’t understand,” said India plaintively, for she could tell that her father was sincere in this incredulity.

  “It was the Elementals,” he said quietly. “It was the Elementals playing tricks on you—playing tricks on all of us.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Elementals—what are Elementals?”

  “That’s the kind of spirits that’s in the third house,” said Luker. He had another drink, and had prepared India one as well. It was weaker than his own, but not much.

  “You knew more about this than you let on,” said India, and he nodded glumly. “You two have been treating me like a child! So now you tell me why I’m supposed to look at these photographs that have got monsters and dead people on them and say to myself, ‘Hey, India, they weren’t really there . . .’”

  Odessa sat rocking with her arms folded across her breasts; she’d say nothing. Luker must talk.

  “Well,” he said, “you must know there are two kinds of spirits. Good spirits and evil spirits—”

  “I don’t believe in spirits,” cried India.

  “Shut the fuck up! You’ve got the goddamn pictures, and you want to know what’s on ’em, well, I’m gone tell you, and don’t give me this bullshit about not believing in things! I don’t believe in things either. God’s dead and the devil lives under a rock! But I know enough to know that I’m not supposed to go in the third house and that’s what I’m telling you now, so sit there and shut up and don’t be such a bitch! This is hard.”

  India was still.

  “Well, to begin with, there’re good spirits and there’re evil spirits . . .”

  India rolled her eyes and took a long swallow of her drink.

  “And I guess you can guess what kind of spirits are in the third house. And the evil spirits in the third house are called Elementals.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Know what?”

  “How do you know they’re called Elementals? I mean, you don’t seem to know anything about ’em really, but then you give ’em this big name, why—”

  “That’s what Mary-Scot calls ’em,” said Odessa. “Mary-Scot went and talked to the priests and then came back and told us they were Elementals.”

  “And you’re going by what a priest tells you?” India said accusingly to her father.

  Luker shrugged. “It’s a . . . convenient name, India, that’s all. It sounds better than saying spirit or ghost. But really all we know is that there’re presences in the house at Beldame, and they’re evil.”

  “And they’re called Elementals because they belong to the elements of nature or something like that?”

  “Right.”

  “Big deal,” she said. “So how the hell did they get in the third house?”

  Luker shrugged and Odessa made echo.

  “All right,” said India. “So they’re in there. And so there’re three of ’em. And one of ’em is this thing that hangs out on the roof and one of ’em looks like an aborted frog that’s the size of a collie and one of ’em is Dauphin’s mother.”

  “No,” said Odessa.

  “No,” said Luker. “That’s the thing about Elementals. You don’t know what they are or what they’re like. They don’t have any real shape. You don’t even know if they have real bodies or not. They showed up on your film, but you didn’t see ’em when you took the pictures, did you?”

  “No.”

  “They might have been in the camera itself.”

  “Yeah,” said India contemptuously, “maybe they came up and pasted pictures of themselves on the lens.”

  “Something like that,” said Luker. “See, the point is you can’t assume that spirits—and especially Elementals—work the way you and I do. Just because you get an image of them on your negative doesn’t mean that they were really there. All it means is there were spirits in the house.”

  “But what do they look like?”

  “They don’t look like nothing,” said Odessa, “they’s just tricks and badness. They’s this and they’s that, and this and that’s not ever gone be what you expecting. They look like anything they want.”

  “That’s right,” said Luker. “Maybe they knew you hated frogs so they put on their frog costume.”

  “I love frogs,” said India. “It’s lizards I hate.”

  “That’s not the point. The point is they can look like anything. They can look like Marian Savage—”

  “Or Martha-Ann,” said India cruelly, glancing at Odessa.

  “Or anything they want. See, they want to fool you, India. They want you to look at those pictures and say, ‘My God, there’s three of ’em, and they have this shape and this shape and thi
s shape, and if I can avoid ’em, then I’ll be all right.’”

  India thought this over for several moments: the business was insane.

  “But why don’t they just show themselves like they really are?”

  “Because they don’t have any particular shape,” said Luker. “Because they’re just presences.”

  “So why do they go to all this trouble? I mean when you look at these pictures—and they’re not faked—we’re talking about a major work schedule for somebody. Why do they want to fool us like that?”

  “Don’t know,” said Odessa shortly. “Don’t nobody know that.”

  “Then are they dangerous?” asked India of the black woman.

  Odessa regarded her sharply. “Look at your leg, child.” India wore long pants; she slowly shook her head. Luker reached down and pushed up the corduroy pants leg. India’s right ankle was badly bruised.

  “What happened?” demanded Luker.

  “I fell,” said India meanly. “There was this Elemental, and it turned itself into a banana peel and it made me go and slip on it. Listen Luker, I want to know how much you know about all this. Have you had any run-ins?”

  “Just one,” replied Luker, “but mine wasn’t so bad. It was poor old Mary-Scot who got the worst of it.”

  “What happened to Mary-Scot—and what happened to you, Luker?”

  “India, why don’t you leave well enough alone?”

  “Goddamn it!” cried India. “It’s not ‘well enough’ so far as I’m concerned! I’ve got bruises, you saw ’em! Listen, Luker, last night Odessa and I went inside that fucking house and there were two bedrooms that had something in ’em. We locked the doors, and we were just going out when something knocked over a table right in front of me. There was something inside that dune. It tried to pull me under the sand. I’ve taken about five showers since we got back to Mobile, and I can still feel that sand on me. That’s not what I call ‘well enough.’”