The Dry Season

I spent eight years cataloguing seed varieties for a nonprofit in the Midwest. My name is Elias, and I moved to Dusthollow, Arizona, in the summer of 2019, when the heat had bleached the desert to the color of old bone. My wife, Marta, had accepted a position as a field nurse for the county, and I was to spend the season documenting the crops that still survived in a valley that had been drying out for decades.

We rented a small adobe house at the edge of an abandoned pecan orchard, the trees skeletal and brittle, their limbs reaching out like desiccated fingers. The previous tenant, a retired professor, had left behind a library of moldering books and a peculiar collection of tin cans, all neatly labeled with dates but no contents. I found the house strangely soothing in its decay, but Marta complained of a persistent feeling of being watched. She said the nights were too quiet, that the absence of crickets or owls felt unnatural.

One evening, while unpacking a box of my own books, I noticed a thin crack running across the ceiling, from the corner above the bedroom door to the center of the living room. I didn’t think much of it; old houses settle. But the crack seemed to widen as the days passed, and I began to hear a faint, dry rustling sound inside the walls, like grains of sand shifting. Marta claimed she saw a thin line of dust accumulate on the floor beneath the crack each morning, as if something was brushing the ceiling from inside.

I decided to investigate the attic. The access was a square panel in the hallway ceiling, and I had to stand on a chair to push it open. A ladder unfolded, and I climbed into a space that smelled of hot plaster and old dust. There was no flooring, only beams and insulation, but in the corner I found a cardboard box wrapped in packing tape. It was heavy, and when I slit it open, I found a dozen journals, all written in the same cramped hand. They belonged to a man named Silas, who had lived here in the 1950s. The earliest entries were mundane notes about irrigation and harvests, but gradually they shifted to something else.

Silas wrote about a ‘presence’ in the walls, something that ‘thirsted’ and ‘fed on the dry heat.’ He described carving small channels in the adobe to let the wind through, believing it kept the thing calm. There were sketches of a spiral shape, and repeated phrases: ‘The dust remembers,’ ‘The hollow spaces sing,’ ‘When the rains fail, the hunger wakes.’ The final entry was dated just before his death in 1963. It read simply: ‘I have opened the way. It will not be long now.’

I read the journals aloud to Marta that night, trying to laugh it off as the ramblings of a lonely old man. But Marta grew pale. She said the spiral shape matched a pattern she had noticed on the kitchen wall, faintly visible beneath layers of paint. She also said that the dust on the floor had formed a spiraled pattern that morning, though she hadn’t touched it. I tried to dismiss it, but that night I had a dream of lying in a coffin filled with sand, and something slithering just beneath the surface, moving toward my mouth.

The next day, the heat reached 110 degrees. The air was so dry that my lips cracked and bled. I was working in the orchard, digging up a dead pecan tree, when I struck something hard. It was a metal pipe, about a foot wide, driven deep into the ground. It was warm to the touch, and when I put my ear to it, I heard that same rustling sound, but louder, more insistent. I pulled on the pipe, and it came loose with a groan of soil. Beneath it was a dark shaft, descending into blackness. I could feel a faint breeze rising from it, smelling of ancient earth and something metallic.

Marta came running when I called. We peered into the shaft, and I shouted, ‘Hello?’ The sound seemed to fall forever, then returned as a distorted echo, like a voice swallowing itself. Marta grabbed my arm and said, ‘Don’t do that again.’ Her face was ashen. She said she thought she saw something move in the darkness, a pale shape that twisted away. I told her it was just a trick of the light, but I wasn’t sure.

That night, we slept fitfully. I woke at 3 a.m. to a sound like the soft crunch of footsteps on dry leaves, coming from the living room. I crept out to find the dust on the floor had been disturbed, forming a trail that led from the crack in the ceiling to the hallway, then to the kitchen, and ending at the sink, where a single tap was dripping. The drip sounded oddly metallic. I turned the tap, but nothing came out. The pipes groaned, and then a thin stream of sand poured out, followed by a hiss of air.

I decided we had to leave the next morning. But as we packed, I noticed the crack in the ceiling had doubled in width, and from it hung a thin string of what looked like dried mucus. Marta said she saw the same substance on the kitchen wall. She said, ‘Elias, it’s following us.’ I looked at her, and for a moment, her eyes seemed to reflect a light that wasn’t there, a pale flicker like a distant star.

We drove out of Dusthollow, heading east. The sky was a stark blue, and the desert stretched endlessly. After an hour, we stopped for gas at a station that seemed abandoned. While I filled the tank, Marta went to the restroom. She came back trembling. She said the restroom was covered in the same spiral pattern, scratched into the concrete floor, and that the mirror had a message written in dust: ‘You cannot leave the dry season.’ I refused to believe it, but when I checked the mirror, the only dust was our own reflection.

We continued driving. The temperature gauge on the car began to climb even though the engine was cool. The road ahead seemed to shimmer and waver. Marta pointed at a shape on the horizon: a lone figure, wearing a wide-brimmed hat, standing perfectly still. As we approached, it vanished, and we saw it again further ahead. This happened three times, each time the figure seeming closer. Finally, we passed right by where he had been, and there was nothing but a small pile of dust on the asphalt.

Marta started crying, saying she felt the hunger, a dry ache in her chest, like her insides were turning to sand. I pulled over and tried to comfort her, but when I touched her skin, it was dry and hot, and specks of dust fell from her hair. I looked at her face, and for a split second, her eyes were empty sockets filled with swirling dust.

I don’t know how long we drove. Time lost meaning. The road never ended, and the landscape never changed. Eventually, the car ran out of gas, and we were stranded in the middle of nowhere. The sun was setting, painting the sky in shades of rust and bone. We got out and started walking, but the sand seemed to pull at our feet, and the sound of rustling filled our ears. We came upon a hill, and on top of it was a strange tree, bare and twisted, with a spiral pattern carved into its trunk. It was the same tree I had seen in my dream.

We have been here for… I don’t know how long. The days are all the same. We found shelter in a small cave, but we are running out of water. Marta hasn’t spoken in a week. She just stares at a crack in the cave wall, and it’s growing. Tonight, I saw something move within it, a suggestion of paleness, a ripple of dust. I realize now that Silas’s journals were a warning, and that the house was merely a doorway. The hunger is real, and it has been waiting for the rains to fail. I am writing this on the last page of one of Silas’s journals, using a pen I found in the cave. I am going to seal this in the metal pipe and drive it into the ground, hoping someone will find it. I can hear the rustling getting louder. The dust is rising from the floor, spinning into a shape. Marta is staring at me now, and her eyes are not her own. I think I know what I have to do. I think I have to open the way.