Mayhem came in the dark, in the rain and wind. First, it yanked off a downspout on the rear of Linda Beymer's Ellenwood home, then shrieked around the corner to the bedroom where she slept. She and her partner, Kelly Hetterscheidt, jumped up.

Looking out her bedroom window, Beymer saw a dark funnel, a tornado. It whipped like a snake.

The tornado hissed by and struck neighbor Erica Hudson's home. Brick and vinyl went flying. Half its two-car garage vanished — gone, just gone, in little pieces of wood and insulation and drywall.

"It crumbled in on itself," Beymer recalled Monday morning, a day after the twister hurtled past her house. She nodded toward the remains of Hudson's home, unstable, uninhabitable, dismantled by a force unimaginable.

"This," she said, "was a progression of force that just astounds the mind."

A series of funnels whirled out of the sky in Georgia early Sunday, killing two people in Laurens and Gwinnett counties, officials said. The twisters damaged about 6,000 homes and caused an estimated $50 million in damages, a sum likely to increase. The storms prompted the governor to declare a state of emergency in 13 counties. In the metro area, Carroll and Clayton counties were hardest hit. A tornado destroyed about a half-dozen homes in Carroll County, said Carroll County Fire Chief Gary Thomas. No one, he said, was injured.

Two subdivisions in Ellenwood, in Clayton's northeastern tip, also took a pounding. Before Sunday morning, they were neighborhoods where two-story houses shared backyard fences and nearly everyone had a barbecue grill. They had young trees growing in front yards, and, along a ridge, older hardwoods that had weathered decades of nature's stormy moods.

But nothing could withstand the tantrum that nature pitched before daylight Sunday. The tornado splintered fences and sent grills tumbling like fall leaves. It left beds in yards and pajamas in trees. It left so much white, tattered insulation everywhere that some tracts look like a snowstorm passed through.

The tornado touched 173 homes in the Ellenwood area, displacing 53 families, said County Commission Chairman Eldrin Bell.

Robbie Sims and her son, Barrington, were among the displaced. She stood Monday in the tattered remains of her living room, feeling as battered as her house. She nodded at a jumble of chairs and chunks of drywall on her sofa. Sunlight cast the room in blue, the color of a tarp carpenters nailed to her exposed roof trusses the day before. A clock, blown to the floor from her fireplace mantel, stopped ticking at 5:29.

"Nothing can prepare you for this," said Sims, raising her voice as a news helicopter thumped past. The tornado, she said, "seemed to go on forever."

The tornado careened like a top. It spun neatly between some houses, not lifting a shingle. It paused at others, kicking away roofs.

The tornado gave as well as took away. It ripped the air conditioner from Roderick Rayner's home, but gave him a trampoline — bounced from a neighbor's yard to his. It shattered a window at Dwight Jones' house, but left him with a sun deck. It rested in his back yard, a jumble of twisted metal and shingles. He has no idea from where it came.

"For that thing to just come through the air?" he asked. "Amazing, just amazing."

His wife, Janet Jones, pointed at a series of destroyed fences. "It looks like a huge bowling ball rolled through," she said.

The Joneses, like some others, kept their child home from school Monday. Rose Jones, 10, stuck near her parents Monday.

"We are currently assessing how many of our students were impacted by the storm," said Charles White, spokesman for Clayton public schools. "Every situation is a unique situation, but we're making sure students have the materials they need to learn."

The storm had an impact on parts of Ellenwood, said Jewel Young. An American Red Cross volunteer, she spent Sunday and Monday assessing home damages in the Ellenwood area. She pointed at a hilltop house, where a missing wall revealed a bed covered with a pink quilt.

"Some of them don't look so good," she said.

None likely looked worse than Hudson's. She was visiting her mother in St. Louis for Mother's Day when she saw a news report on TV — something about a tornado. Ellenwood, Ga., read words on the screen. Hudson called her uncle, a Clayton resident.

Keeping her on the line, he drove to the subdivision, where people were staring at mayhem's path.

"He said, 'I hate to tell you this,'" said Hudson, who returned to Georgia Monday, "'but it's gone.'"

Hudson looked at the shell of the home she bought six years ago. She could see another house, on another street, through the remains of hers.

Staff writers Chandler Brown, Mike Morris and S.A. Reid contributed to this report.