The Itinerant Dust

My name is Elias, and I’ve always prided myself on being a man of reason. Ghosts, gods, and the like were the province of the gullible. I needed proof, cold and hard. But that was before the summer I spent cataloging the abandoned homesteads along the dried-up riverbeds of the High Desert, a project funded by the historical society. It was in one of those forgotten houses, a place called the Corvus place, that I found something that broke my world.

The house was a skeleton of splintered wood and sagging roofs, half-buried in shifting sand. I was documenting the remaining artifacts when I noticed a cellar door, warped and crusted with salt. It was sealed with a padlock that looked almost new, incongruous against the decay. Curiosity, that cursed trait, got the better of me. I broke the lock and descended into a darkness that smelled of old copper and dry rot. The single beam of my flashlight revealed walls covered in strange, spiraling scratches, and in the center, a circle of salt surrounding a small, leather-bound journal. It was open, and the last entry was dated exactly one hundred years to the day.

I took the journal back to my tent, intending to add it to my collection. That night, the wind began to howl, and sleep came fitfully. I dreamed I was lying in the bed of that decaying house, but it was whole and furnished. I saw myself from above, a small, scrawny figure in a dusty flannel, and a voice, ancient and grating like shifting gravel, whispered in my ear. ‘If you sleep uncovered, the throat is slit. The blade of the wind will find it.’ I watched in terror as my dream-self rose, as if pulled by invisible strings, and walked toward my real, sleeping body. A jolt of ice shot through me, and I woke with a gasp, sitting bolt upright.

The tent was pitch black. I fumbled for my lantern, heart hammering against my ribs. As the light flickered on, something was standing at the foot of my cot. A figure, not of shadow, but of shifting, dusty motes, like a column of suspended sand. It had no face, but I felt it staring. ‘Who the hell are you?’ I shouted, my voice cracking. The figure didn’t answer. It simply dissolved, a puff of grit drifting to the ground.

I didn’t sleep that night. I read the journal, her hands shaking. It was a chronicle of a family, the Corvuses, who had died in a sandstorm that suffocated the entire valley. The last entry was a warning: ‘The winds are hungry. He expects the offering. If we are forgotten, he will rise and take his due.’ I dismissed it as the ravings of a frightened man.

The next morning, I packed my equipment and drove back to the motel in town. But the strangeness followed me. Every night, at the same hour, I would feel a weight on my chest, and that gravelly voice would whisper the same warning. I took to sleeping under the covers, even in the stifling heat, and I kept a knife under my pillow.

As the week wore on, the warnings grew more specific. The voice would hiss details of my life, things no one knew. It knew about my failed marriage, about the daughter I hadn’t spoken to in years, about the guilt I carried. It knew the exact sound of my breathing, my heartbeat. It was inside my head, a splinter I couldn’t extract.

Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I returned to the Corvus house with a can of gasoline. I would burn the journal, the house, everything. As I descended the cellar steps for the last time, the air grew thick and cold. The spiraling scratches on the walls seemed to writhe in my peripheral vision. When I reached the center, the circle of salt was disturbed, as if something had crawled through it. The journal was gone.

I heard a sound behind me, a dry, rasping breath. I turned, and there it was, the dusty figure, more solid now. It had a form, a tall, gaunt shape with long arms. It was holding the journal. Its jaws, if it had any, moved, and the voice that had haunted my nights now came from the air itself, ‘You came back. The offering is complete.’

I screamed, but no sound came out. The figure lunged, and I felt a cold wind. I fell, and I never hit the ground. I am still falling. I am writing this from the space between moments, the same night repeating over and over. The voice whispers, ‘If you sleep uncovered, the throat is slit,’ and I watch myself, a hundred times, wake and scream. The motes of dust that form me are all that’s left of Elias, and they scatter with every dawn, only to re-form. If you ever find a journal in a cellar, leave it be. And never, ever sleep uncovered.