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From the Dust Returned
Ray Douglas Bradbury
Enter the strange world of the Elliott family: it will change you forever…They have lived for centuries in a house of legend and mystery in upper Illinois – and they are not like other midwesterners. Rarely encountered in daylight hours, their children are curious and wild; their old ones have survived since before the Sphinx first sank its paws deep in Egyptian sands. And some sleep in beds with lids.Now the house is being readied in anticipation of the gala homecoming that will gather together the far-flung branches of this odd and remarkable family where they will mix their arcane skills and lifestyles, fall in and out of love and change the world around them forever.You have never seen their like before.
Ray Bradbury
From the Dust Returned
Dedication
To the two midwives of this book:
DON CONGDON,
who was in at the beginning in 1946,
AND JENNIFER BREHL,
who helped bring it to completion in 2000.
With gratitude and love.
Contents
Dedication
Prologue
The Beautiful One Is Here
Chapter 1
The Town and the Place
Chapter 2
Anuba Arrives
Chapter 3
The High Attic
Chapter 4
The Sleeper and Her Dreams
Chapter 5
The Wandering Witch
Chapter 6
Whence Timothy?
Chapter 7
The House, the Spider, and the Child
Chapter 8
Mouse, Far-Traveling
Chapter 9
Homecoming
Chapter 10
West of October
Chapter 11
Many Returns
Chapter 12
On the Orient North
Chapter 13
Nostrum Paracelsius Crook
Chapter 14
The October People
Chapter 15
Uncle Einar
Chapter 16
The Whisperers
Chapter 17
The Theban Voice
Chapter 18
Make Haste to Live
Chapter 19
The Chimney Sweeps
Chapter 20
The Traveler
Chapter 21
Return to the Dust
Chapter 22
The One Who Remembers
Chapter 23
The Gift
Afterword
How the Family Gathered
Keep Reading
About the Author
Praise
Also by the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
The Beautiful One Is Here
In the attic where the rain touched the roof softly on spring days and where you could feel the mantle of snow outside, a few inches away, on December nights, A Thousand Times Great Grandmère existed. She did not live, nor was she eternally dead, she … existed.
And now with the Great Event about to happen, the Great Night arriving, the Homecoming about to explode, she must be visited!
“Ready? Here I come!” Timothy’s voice cried faintly beneath a trapdoor that trembled. “Yes!?”
Silence. The Egyptian mummy did not twitch.
She stood propped in a dark corner like an ancient dried plum tree, or an abandoned and scorched ironing board, her hands and wrists trussed across her dry riverbed bosom, a captive of time, her eyes slits of deep blue lapis lazuli behind thread-sewn lids, a glitter of remembrance as her mouth, with a shriveled tongue wormed in it, whistled and sighed and whispered to recall every hour of every lost night four thousand years back when she was a pharaoh’s daughter dressed in spider linens and warm-breath silks with jewels burning her wrists as she ran in the marble gardens to watch the pyramids erupt in the fiery Egyptian air.
Now Timothy lifted the trapdoor lid of dust to call into that midnight attic world.
“Oh, Beautiful One!”
A faint pollen of dust fell from the ancient mummy’s lips.
“Beautiful no longer!”
“Grandma, then.”
“Not Grandma merely,” came the soft response.
“A Thousand Times Great Grandmère?”
“Better.” The old voice dusted the silent air. “Wine?”
“Wine.” Timothy rose, a small flacon in his hands.
“The vintage, child?” the voice murmured.
“B.C., Grandmère.”
“How many years?”
“Two thousand, almost three, B.C.”
“Excellent.” Dust fell from the withered smile. “Come.”
Picking his way through a litter of papyrus, Timothy reached the no-longer Beautiful One, whose voice was still incredibly lovely.
“Child?” said the withered smile. “Do you fear me?”
“Always, Grandmère.”
“Wet my lips, child.”
He reached to let the merest drop wet the lips that now trembled.
“More,” she whispered.
Another drop of wine touched the dusty smile.
“Still afraid?”
“No, Grandmère.”
“Sit.”
He perched on the lid of a box with hieroglyphs of warriors and doglike gods and gods with lions’ heads painted on it.
“Why are you here?” husked the voice beneath the serene riverbed face.
“Tomorrow’s the Great Night, Grandmère, I’ve waited for all my life! The Family, our Family, coming, flying in from all over the world! Tell me, Grandmère, how it all began, how this House was built and where we came from and—”
“Enough!” the voice cried, softly. “Let me recall a thousand noons. Let me swim down the deep well. Stillness?”
“Stillness.”
“Now,” came the whisper across four thousand years, “here’s how it was …”
CHAPTER 1
The Town and the Place
At first, A Thousand Times Great GrandmГЁre said, there was only a place on the long plain of grass and a hill on which was nothing at all but more grass and a tree that was as crooked as a fork of black lightning on which nothing grew until the town came and the House arrived.
We all know how a town can gather need by need until suddenly its heart starts up and circulates the people to their destinations. But how, you ask, does a house arrive?
The fact is that the tree was there and a lumberman passing to the Far West leaned against it, and guessed it to be before Jesus sawed wood and shaved planks in his father’s yard or Pontius Pilate washed his palms. The tree, some said, beckoned the House out of tumults of weather and excursions of Time. Once the House was there, with its cellar roots deep in Chinese tombyards, it was of such a magnificence, echoing facades last seen in London, that wagons, intending to cross the river, hesitated with their families gazing up and decided if this empty place was good enough for a papal palace, a royal monument, or a queen’s abode, there hardly seemed a reason to leave. So the wagons stopped, the horses were watered, and when the families looked, they found their shoes as well as their souls had sprouted roots. So stunned were they by the House up there by the lightning-shaped tree, that they feared if they left the House would follow in their dreams and spoil all the waiting places ahead.
So the House arrived first and its arrival was the stuff of further legends, myths, or drunken nonsense.
It seems there was a wind that rose over the plains bringing with it a gentle rain that turned into a storm that funneled a hurricane of great strength. Between midnight and dawn, this portmanteau-storm lifted any moveable object between the fort towns of Indiana and Ohio, stripped the forests in upper Illinois, and arrived over the as-yet-unborn site, settled, and with the level hand of an unseen god deposited, shakeboard by shakeboard and shingle by shingle, an arousal of timber that shaped itself long before sunrise as something dreamed of by Rameses but finished by Napoleon fled from dreaming Egypt.
There were enough beams within to roof St. Peter’s and enough windows to sun-blind a bird migration. There was a porch skirted all around with enough space to rock a celebration of relatives and boarders. Inside the windows loomed a cluster, a hive, a maze of rooms, sufficient to a roster, a squad, a battalion of as yet unborn legions, but haunted by the promise of their coming.
The House, then, was finished and capped before the stars dissolved into light and it stood alone on its promontory for many years, somehow failing to summon its future children. There must be a mouse in every warren, a cricket on every hearth, smoke in the multitudinous chimneys, and creatures, almost human, icing every bed. Then: mad dogs in yards, live gargoyles on roofs. All waited for some immense thunderclap of the long departed storm to shout: Begin!
And, finally, many long years later, it did.
CHAPTER 2
Anuba Arrives
The cat came first, in order to be absolute first.
It arrived when all the cribs and closets and cellar bins and attic hang-spaces still needed October wings, autumn breathings, and fiery eyes. When every chandelier was a lodge and every shoe a compartment, when every bed ached to be occupied by strange snows and every banister anticipated the down-slide of creatures more pollen than substance, when every window, warped with ages, distorted faces looking from shadows, when every empty chair seemed occupied by things unseen, when every carpet desired invisible footfalls and the water pump on the back stoop inhaled, sucking vile liquors toward a surface abandoned because of the possible upchuck of nightmares, when all the parquetry planks whined with the oilings of lost souls, and when all the weathercocks on the high roofs gyred in the wind and smiled griffin teeth, while deathwatch beetles ticked behind the walls …
Only then did the royal cat named Anuba arrive.
The front door slammed.
And there was Anuba.
Clothed in a fine pelt of arrogance, her quiet engine quieter, centuries before limousines. She paced the corridors, a noble creature just come from a journey of three thousand years.
It had commenced with Rameses when, shelved and stored at his royal feet, she had slept away some few centuries with another shipload of cats, mummified and linen-wrapped, to be awakened when Napoleon’s assassins had tried to gun-pock the lion icon Sphinx’s face before the Mamelukes’ gunpowder shot them into the sea. Whereupon the cats, with this queen feline, had loitered in shop alleys until Victoria’s locomotives crossed Egypt, using tomb-filchings and the asphalt linen-wrapped dead for fuel. These packets of bones and flammable tar churned the stacks in what was called the Nefertiti-Tut Express. The black smokes firing the Egyptian air were haunted by Cleopatra’s cousins who blew off, flaking the wind until the Express reached Alexandria, where the still unburned cats and their Empress Queen shipped out for the States, bundled in great spools of papyrus bound for a paper-mashing plant in Boston where, unwound, the cats fled as cargo on wagon trains while the papyrus, unleafed among innocent stationery printers, murdered two or three hundred profiteers with terrible miasmal bacteria. The hospitals of New England were chock-full of Egyptian maladies that soon brimmed the graveyards, while the cats, cast off in Memphis, Tennessee, or Cairo, Illinois, walked the rest of the way to the town of the dark tree, the high and most peculiar House.
And so Anuba, her fur a sooty fire, her whiskers like lightning sparks, with ocelot paws strolled into the House on that special night, ignoring the empty rooms and dreamless beds, to arrive at the main hearth in the great parlor. Even as she turned thrice to sit, a fire exploded in the cavernous fireplace.
While upstairs, fires on a dozen hearths inflamed themselves as this queen of cats rested.
The smokes that churned up the chimneys that night recalled the sounds and spectral sights of the Nefertiti-Tut Express thundering the Egyptian sands, scattering mummy linens popped wide as library books, informing the winds as they went.
And that, of course, was only the first arrival.
CHAPTER 3
The High Attic
“And who came second, Grandmère, who came next?”
“The Sleeper Who Dreams, child.”
“What a fine name, Grandmère. Why did the Sleeper come here?”
“The High Attic called her across the world. The attic above our heads, the second most important high garret that funnels the winds and speaks its voice in the jet streams across the world. The dreamer had wandered those streams in storms, photographed by lightnings, anxious for a nest. And here she came and there she is now! Listen!”
A Thousand Times Great GrandmГЁre slid her lapis lazuli gaze upward.
“Listen.”
And above, in a further layer of darkness, some semblance of dream stirred …
CHAPTER 4
The Sleeper and Her Dreams
Long before there was anyone to listen, there was the High Attic Place, where the weather came in through broken glass, from wandering clouds going nowhere, somewhere, anywhere, and made the attic talk to itself as it laid out a Japanese sand garden of dust across its planks.
What the breezes and winds whispered and murmured as they shook the poorly laid shingles no one could say except Cecy, who came soon after the cat to become the fairest and most special daughter of the Family as it settled in with her talent for touching other people’s ears, thence inward to their minds and still further their dreams; there she stretched herself out on the ancient Japanese garden sands and let the small dunes shift her as the wind played the rooftop. There she heard the languages of weather and far places and knew what went beyond this hill, or the sea on one hand and a farther sea on the other, including the age-old ice which blew from the north and the forever summer that breathed softly from the Gulf and the Amazon wilds.
So, lying asleep, Cecy inhaled the seasons and heard the rumorings of towns on the prairies over the mountains and if you asked her at meals she would tell you the violent or serene occupations of strangers ten thousand miles away. Her mouth was always full of gossips of people being born in Boston or dying in Monterey, heard during the night as her eyes were shut.
The Family often said if you stashed Cecy in a music box like those prickly brass cylinders and turned her, she would play the ships coming in or the ships in departure and, why not, all the geographies of this blue world, and then again, the universe.
She, in sum, was a goddess of wisdom, and the Family, knowing this, treated her like porcelain, let her sleep all hours, knowing that when she woke, her mouth would echo twelve tongues and twenty sets of mind, philosophies enough to crack Plato at noon or Aristotle at midnight.
And the High Attic waited now, with its Arabian seashores of dust, and its Japanese pure white sands, and the shingles shifted and whispered, remembering a future just hours ahead, when the nightmare delights came home.
So the High Attic whispered.
And, listening, Cecy quickened.
Before the tumult of wings, the collision of fogs and mists and souls like ribboned smokes, she saw her own soul and hungers.
Make haste, she thought. Oh, quickly now! Run forth. Fly fast. For what?
“I want to be in love!”
CHAPTER 5
The Wandering Witch
Into the air, over the valleys, under the stars, above a river, a pond, a road, flew Cecy. Invisible as autumn winds, fresh as the breath of clover rising from twilight fields, she flew. She soared in doves as soft as white ermine, stopped in trees and lived in leaves, showering away in fiery hues when the breeze blew. She perched in a lime-green frog, cool as mint by a shining pool. She trotted in a brambly dog and barked to hear echoes from the sides of distant barns. She lived in dandelion ghosts or sweet clear liquids rising from the musky earth.
Farewell summer, thought Cecy. I’ll be in every living thing in the world tonight.
Now she inhabited neat crickets on the tar-pool roads, now prickled in dew on an iron gate.
“Love,” she said. “Where is my love!?”
She had said it at supper. And her parents had stiffened back in their chairs. “Patience,” they advised. “Remember, you’re remarkable. Our whole Family is odd and remarkable. We must not marry with ordinary folk. We’d lose our dark souls if we did. You wouldn’t want to lose your ability to �travel’ by wish and desire, would you? Then be careful. Careful!”
But in her high attic room, Cecy had touched perfume to her throat and stretched out, trembling and apprehensive, on her four-poster, as a moon the color of milk rose over Illinois country, turning rivers to cream and roads to platinum.
“Yes,” she sighed. “I’m one of an odd family that flies nights like black kites. I can live in anything at all—a pebble, a crocus, or a praying mantis. Now!”
The wind whipped her away over fields and meadows.
She saw the warm lights of cottages and farms glowing with twilight colors.
If I can’t be in love, myself, she thought, because I’m odd, then I’ll be in love through someone else!
Outside a farmhouse in the fresh night a dark-haired girl, no more than nineteen, drew up water from a deep stone well, singing.
Cecy fell—a dry leaf—into the well. She lay in the tender moss of the well, gazing up through dark coolness. Now she quickened in a fluttering, invisible amoeba. Now in a water droplet! At last, within a cold cup, she felt herself lifted to the girl’s warm lips. There was a soft night sound of drinking.
Cecy looked out from the girl’s eyes.
She entered into the dark head and gazed from the shining eyes at the hands pulling the rough rope. She listened through the shell ears to this girl’s world. She smelled a particular universe through these delicate nostrils, felt this special heart beating, beating. Felt this strange tongue move with singing.
The girl gasped. She stared into the night meadows.
“Who’s there?”
No answer.
Only the wind, whispered Cecy.
“Only the wind.” The girl laughed, but shivered.
It was a good body, this girl’s. It held bones of finest slender ivory hidden and roundly fleshed. This brain was like a pink tea rose, hung in darkness, and there was cider wine in this mouth. The lips lay firm on the white, white teeth and the brows arched neatly at the world, and the hair blew soft and fine on her milky neck. The pores knit small and close. The nose tilted at the moon and the cheeks glowed like small fires. The body drifted with feather-balances from one motion to another and seemed always humming to itself. Being in this body was like basking in a hearth fire, living in the purr of a sleeping cat, stirring in warm creek waters that flowed by night to the sea.
Yes! thought Cecy.
“What?” asked the girl, as if she’d heard.
What’s your name? asked Cecy carefully.
“Ann Leary.” The girl twitched. “Now why should I say that out loud?”
Ann, Ann, whispered Cecy. Ann, you’re going to be in love.
As if to answer this, a great roar sprang from the road, a clatter and a ring of wheels on gravel. A tall man drove up in an open car, holding the wheel with his monstrous arms, his smile glowing across the yard.
“Ann!”
“Is that you, Tom?”
“Who else?” He leaped from the car, laughing.
“I’m not speaking to you!” Ann whirled, the bucket in her hands slopping.
No! cried Cecy.
Ann froze. She looked at the hills and the first stars. She stared at the man named Tom. Cecy made her drop the bucket.
“Look what you’ve done!”
Tom ran up.
“Look what you made me do!”
He wiped her shoes with a kerchief, laughing.
“Get away!” She kicked at his hands, but he laughed again, and gazing down on him from miles away, Cecy saw the turn of his head, the size of his skull, the flare of his nose, the shine of his eyes, the girth of his shoulders, and the hard strength of his hands doing this delicate thing with the handkerchief. Peering down from the secret attic of this lovely head, Cecy yanked a hidden copper ventriloquist’s wire and the pretty mouth popped wide: “Thank you!”
“Oh, so you have manners?” The smell of leather on his hands, the smell of the open car from his clothes into the tender nostrils, and Cecy, far, far away over night meadows and autumn fields, stirred as with some dream in her bed.
“Not for you, no!” said Ann.
Hush, speak gently, said Cecy. She moved Ann’s fingers out toward Tom’s head. Ann snatched them back.
“I’ve gone mad!”
“You have.” He nodded, smiling but bewildered. “Were you going to touch me?”
“I don’t know. Oh, go away!” Her cheeks glowed with pink charcoals.
“Run! I’m not stopping you.” Tom got up. “Changed your mind? Will you go to the dance with me tonight?”
“No,” said Ann.
Yes! cried Cecy. I’ve never danced. I’ve never worn a long gown, all rustly. I want to dance all night. I’ve never known what it’s like to be in a woman, dancing; Father and Mother would not permit. Dogs, cats, locusts, leaves, everything else in the world at one time or another I’ve known, but never a woman in the spring, never on a night like this. Oh, please—we must dance!
She spread her thought like the fingers of a hand within a new glove.
“Yes,” said Ann Leary. “I don’t know why, but I’ll go with you tonight, Tom.”
Now inside, quick! cried Cecy. Wash, tell your folks, get your gown, into your room!
“Mother,” said Ann, “I’ve changed my mind!”
The car was roaring down the pike, the rooms of the farmhouse jumped to life, water was churning the bath, the mother was rushing about with a fringe of hairpins in her mouth. “What’s come over you, Ann? You don’t like Tom!”
“True.” Ann stopped amidst the great fever.
But it’s farewell summer! thought Cecy. Summer back before the winter comes.
“Summer,” said Ann. “Farewell.”
Fine for dancing, thought Cecy.
“… dancing,” murmured Ann Leary.
Then she was in the tub and the soap creaming on her white seal shoulders, small nests of soap beneath her arms, and the flesh of her warm breasts moving in her hands and Cecy moving the mouth, making the smile, keeping the actions going. There must be no pause, or the entire pantomime might fall in ruins! Ann Leary must be kept moving, doing, acting, wash here, soap there, now out!
“You!” Ann caught herself in the mirror, all whiteness and pinkness like lilies and carnations. “Who are—?”
A girl seventeen. Cecy gazed from her violet eyes. You can’t see me. Do you know I’m here?
Ann Leary shook her head. “I’ve loaned my body to a last-of-summer witch, for sure.”
Close! laughed Cecy. Now, dress!
The luxury of feeling fine silk move over an ample body! Then the halloo outside.
“Ann, Tom’s back!”
“Tell him, wait.” Ann sat down. “I’m not going to that dance.”
“What?” cried her mother.
Cecy snapped to attention. It had been a fatal moment of leaving Ann’s body for an instant. She had heard the distant sound of the car rushing through moonlit country and thought, I’ll find Tom, sit in his head and see what it’s like to be in a man of twenty-two on a night like this. And so she had started quickly down the road, but now, like a bird to a cage, flew back to clamor in Ann’s head.
“Ann!”
“Tell him to leave!”
“Ann!”
But Ann had the bit in her mouth. “No, no, I hate him!”
I shouldn’t have left—even for a moment. Cecy poured her mind into the hands of the young girl, into the heart, into the head, softly, softly. Stand up, she thought.
Ann stood.
Put on your coat!
Ann put on her coat.
March!
“No!”
March!
“Ann,” said her mother, “get on out there. What’s come over you?”
“Nothing, Mother. Good night. We’ll be home late.”
Ann and Cecy ran together into the vanishing summer night.
A room full of softly dancing pigeons ruffling their quiet, trailing feathers, a room full of peacocks, a room full of rainbow eyes and lights. And in the center of it, around, around, around, danced Ann Leary.
Oh, it is a fine evening, said Cecy.
“Oh, it’s a fine evening,” said Ann.
“You’re odd,” said Tom.
The music whirled them in dimness, in rivers of song; they floated, they bobbed, they sank, they rose for air, they gasped, they clutched each other as if drowning and whirled on in fans and whispers and sighs to “Beautiful Ohio.”
Cecy hummed. Ann’s lips parted. The music came out.
Yes, odd, said Cecy.
“You’re not the same,” said Tom.
“Not tonight.”
“You’re not the Ann Leary I knew.”
No, not at all, at all, whispered Cecy, miles and miles away. “No, not at all,” said the moved lips.
“I’ve the funniest feeling,” said Tom. “About you.” He danced her and searched her glowing face, watching for something. “Your eyes, I can’t figure it.”
Do you see me? asked Cecy.
“You’re here, Ann, and you’re not.” Tom turned her carefully, this way and that.
“Yes.”
“Why did you come with me?”
“I didn’t want to,” said Ann.
“Why, then?”
“Something made me.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.” Ann’s voice was faintly hysterical.
Now, now, hush, whispered Cecy. Hush, that’s it. Around, around.
They whispered and rustled and rose and fell away in the dark room, with the music turning them.
“But you did come,” said Tom.
“I did,” said Cecy and Ann.
“Here.” And he danced her lightly out an open door and walked her quietly away from the hall and the music and the people.
They climbed in and sat together in his open car.
“Ann,” he said, taking her hands, trembling. “Ann.” the way he said her name it was as if it wasn’t her name. He kept glancing into her pale face, and now her eyes were open again. “I used to love you, you know that,” he said.
“I know.”
“But you’ve always been distant and I didn’t want to be hurt.”
“We’re very young,” said Ann.
“No, I mean, I’m sorry,” said Cecy.
“What do you mean?” Tom dropped her hands.
The night was warm and the smell of the earth shimmered up all about them where they sat, and the fresh trees breathed one leaf against another in a shaking and rustling.
“I don’t know,” said Ann.
“Oh, but I know,” said Cecy. “You’re tall and you’re the finest-looking man in all the world. This is a good evening; this is an evening I’ll always remember, being with you.” She put out the alien cold hand to find his reluctant hand again and bring it back, and warm it and hold it very tight.
“But,” said Tom, blinking, “tonight you’re here, you’re there. One minute one way, the next minute another. I wanted to take you to the dance tonight for old times’ sake. I meant nothing by it when I first asked you. And then, when we were standing at the well, I knew something had changed, really changed, about you. There was something new and soft, something …” He groped for a word. “I don’t know, I can’t say. Something about your voice. And I know I’m in love with you again.”
“No,” said Cecy. “With me, with me.”
“And I’m afraid of being in love with you,” he said. “You’ll hurt me.”
“I might,” said Ann.
No, no, I’d love you with all my heart! thought Cecy. Ann, say it for me. Say you’d love him!
Ann said nothing.
Tom moved quietly closer to put his hand on her cheek.
“I’ve got a job a hundred miles from here. Will you miss me?”
“Yes,” said Ann and Cecy.
“May I kiss you goodbye?”
“Yes,” said Cecy before anyone else could speak.
He placed his lips to the strange mouth. He kissed the strange mouth and he was trembling.
Ann sat like a white statue.
Ann! said Cecy. Move! Hold him!
Ann sat like a carved doll in the moonlight.
Again he kissed her lips.
“I do love you,” whispered Cecy. “I’m here, it’s me you see in her eyes, and I love you if she never will.”
He moved away and seemed like a man who had run a long distance. “I don’t know what’s happening. For a moment there …”
“Yes?”
“For a moment I thought—” He put his hands to his eyes. “Never mind. Shall I take you home now?”
“Please,” said Ann Leary.
Tiredly he drove the car away. They rode in the thrum and motion of the moonlit car in the still early, only eleven o’clock summer-autumn night, with the shining meadows and empty fields gliding by.
And Cecy, looking at the fields and meadows, thought, It would be worth it, it would be worth everything to be with him from this night on. And she heard her parents’ voices again, faintly, “Be careful. You wouldn’t want to be diminished, would you—married to a mere earth-bound creature?”
Yes, yes, thought Cecy, even that I’d give up, here and now, if he would have me. I wouldn’t need to roam the lost nights then, I wouldn’t need to live in birds and dogs and cats and foxes, I’d need only to be with him. Only him.
The road passed under, whispering.
“Tom,” said Ann at last.
“What?” He stared coldly at the road, the trees, the sky, the stars.
“If you’re ever, in years to come, at any time, in Green Town, Illinois, a few miles from here, will you do me a favor?”
“What?”
“Will you do me the favor of stopping and seeing a friend of mine?” Ann Leary said this haltingly, awkwardly.
“Why?”
“She’s a good friend. I’ve told her of you. I’ll give you her address.” When the car stopped at her farm she drew forth a pencil and paper from her small purse and wrote in the moonlight, pressing the paper to her knee. “Can you read it?”
He glanced at the paper and nodded bewilderedly.
He read the words.
“Will you visit her someday?” Ann’s mouth moved.
“Someday.”
“Promise?”
“What has this to do with us?” he cried savagely. “What do I want with names and papers?” He crumpled the paper into a tight ball.
“Oh, please promise!” begged Cecy.
“… promise …” said Ann.
“All right, all right, now let be!” he shouted.
I’m tired, thought Cecy. I can’t stay. I must go home. I can only travel a few hours each night, moving, flying. But before I go …
“… before I go,” said Ann.
She kissed Tom on the lips.
“This is me kissing you,” said Cecy.
Tom held her off and looked at Ann Leary and looked deep, deep inside. He said nothing, but his face began to relax slowly, very slowly, and the lines vanished away, and his mouth softened from its hardness, and he looked deep again into the moonlit face held here before him.
Then he lifted her out and without so much as good night drove quickly down the road.
Cecy let go.
Ann Leary, crying out, released from prison, it seemed, raced up the moonlit path to her house and slammed the door.
Cecy lingered for only a little while. In the eyes of a cricket she saw the warm night world. In the eyes of a frog she sat for a lonely moment by a pool. In the eyes of a night bird she looked down from a tall, moon-haunted elm and saw the lights go out in two farmhouses, one here, one a mile away. She thought of herself and her Family, and her strange power, and the fact that no one in the Family could ever marry any one of the people in this vast world out here beyond the hills.
Tom? Her weakening mind flew in a night bird under the trees and over deep fields of wild mustard. Have you still got the paper, Tom? Will you come by someday, some year, sometime, to see me? Will you know me then? Will you look in my face and remember where it was you saw me last and know that you love me as I love you, with all my heart for all time?
She paused in the cool night air, a million miles from towns and people, above farms and continents and rivers and hills. Tom? Softly.
Tom was asleep. It was deep night; his suit was hung on a chair. And in one silent, carefully upflung hand upon the white pillow, by his head, was a small piece of paper with writing on it. Slowly, slowly, a fraction of an inch at a time, his fingers closed down upon and held it tightly. And he did not even stir or notice when a blackbird, faintly, wondrously, beat softly for a moment against the clear moon crystals of the windowpane, then, fluttering quietly, stopped and flew away toward the east, over the sleeping earth.
CHAPTER 6
Whence Timothy?
“And me, Grandmère?” said Timothy. “Did I come in through the High Attic window?”
“You did not come, child. You were found. Left at the door in a basket with Shakespeare for footprop and Poe’s Usher as pillow. With a note pinned to your blouse: HISTORIAN. You were sent, child, to write us up, list us in lists, register our flights from the sun, our love of the moon. But the House, in a way, did call and your small fists hungered to write.”
“What, Grandmère, what?”
The ancient mouth lisped and murmured and murmured and lisped …
“To start with, the House itself …”
CHAPTER 7
The House, the Spider, and the Child
The House was a puzzle inside an enigma inside a mystery, for it encompassed silences, each one different, and beds, each a different size, some having lids. Some ceilings were high enough to allow flights with rests where shadows might hang upside down. The dining room nested thirteen chairs, each numbered thirteen so no one would feel left out of the distinctions such numbers implied. The chandeliers above were shaped from the tears of souls in torment at sea five hundred years lost, and the basement cellar kept five hundred vintage-year bins and strange names on the wine tucked therein and empty cubbies for future visitors who disliked beds or the high ceiling perches.
A network of webways was used by the one and only spider dropping down from above and up from below so the entire House was a sounding spinneret tapestry played on by the ferociously swift Arach, seen one moment by the wine bins and the next in a plummeting rush to the storm-haunted garret, swift and soundless, shuttling the webs, repairing the strands.
How many rooms, cubicles, closets, and bins in all? No one knew. To say one thousand would exaggerate, but one hundred was nowhere near truth. One hundred and fifty nine seems an agreeable amount, and each was empty for a long while, summoning occupants across the world, yearning to pull lodgers from the clouds. The House was a ghost arena, yearning to be haunted. And as the weathers circled Earth for a hundred years, the House became known, and across the world the dead who had lain down for long naps sat up in cold surprise and wished for stranger occupations than being dead, sold off their ghastly trades and prepared for flight.
All of the autumn leaves of the world were shucked and in rustling migrations, hovered mid-America and sifted down to clothe the tree which one moment stood bare and the next was ornamented with autumn falls from the Himalayas, Iceland, and the Capes, in blushed colors and funeral-somber array, until the tree shook itself to full October flowering and burst forth with fruit not unlike the cut gourds of All Hallows.
At which time …
Someone, passing on the road in dark Dickensian storms, left a picnic basket by the front iron gate. Within the basket something wailed and sobbed and cried.
The door opened and a welcoming committee emerged. This committee consisted of a female, the wife, extraordinarily tall, and a male, the husband, even taller and gaunter, and an old woman of an age when Lear was young, whose kitchen boiled with only kettles and in the kettles soups better left from menus, and it was these three who bent to the picnic basket to fold back the dark cloth over the waiting babe, no more than a week or two old.
They were astonished at his color, the pink of sunrise and daybreak, and the sound of his respiration, a spring bellows, and the beat of his fisting heart, no more than a hummingbird’s caged sound, and on impulse the Lady of the Fogs and Marshes, for that is how she was known across the world, held up the smallest of mirrors which she kept not to study her face, for that was never seen, but to study the faces of strangers should something be wrong with them.
“Oh, look,” she cried, and held the mirror to the small babe’s cheek, and Lo! there was total surprise.
“Curse all and everything,” said the gaunt, pale husband. “His face is reflected!”
“He is not like us!”
“No, but still,” said the wife.
The small blue eyes looked up at them, repeated in the mirror glass. “Leave it,” said the husband.
And they might have pulled back and left it to the wild dogs and feral cats, save that at the last instant, the Dark Lady said “No!” and reached to lift, turn, and deliver the basket, babe and all, up the path and into the House and down the hall to a room that became on the instant the nursery, for it was covered on all four walls and topmost ceiling with images of toys put by in Egyptian tombs to nurse the play of pharaohs’ sons who traveled a thousand-year river of darkness and had need of joyous instruments to fill dark time and brighten their mouths. So all about on the walls capered dogs, cats; here too were depicted wheatfields to plow through to hide, and loaves of mortality bread and sheaves of green onions for the health of the dead children of some sad pharaoh. And into this tomb nursery came a bright child to stay at the center of a cold kingdom.
And touching the basket, the mistress of the winter-autumn House said, “Was there not a saint with a special light and promise of life called Timothy?”
“Yes.”
“So,” said the Dark Lady, “lovelier than saints, which stops my doubt and stills my fear, not saint, but Timothy he is. Yes, child?”
And hearing his name, the newcomer in the basket gave a glad cry.
Which rose to the High Attic and caused Cecy in the midst of her dreams to turn in her tidal sleep and lift her head to hear that strange glad cry again which caused her mouth to shape a smile. For while the House stood strangely still, all wondering what might befall them, and as the husband did not move and the wife leaned down half wondering what next to do, Cecy quite instantly knew that her travels were not enough, that beginning now here, now there with seeing and hearing and tasting there must be someone to share it all and tell. And here the teller was, his small cry giving announcement to the fact that no matter what might show and tell, his small hand, grown strong and wild and quick, would capture it and scribble it down. With this assurance sensed, Cecy sent a gossamer of silent thought and welcome to reach the babe and wrap it round and let it know they were as one. And foundling Timothy so touched and comforted gave off his crying and assumed a sleep that was a gift invisible. And seeing this, the frozen husband was given to smile.
And a spider, heretofore unseen, crept from the blanketings, probed all the airs about, then ran to fasten on the small child’s hand as nightmare papal ring to bless some future court and all its shadow courtiers, and held so still it seemed but stone of ebony against pink flesh.
And Timothy, all unaware of what his finger wore, knew small refinements of large Cecy’s dreams.
CHAPTER 8
Mouse, Far-Traveling
As there was one spider in the House, there had to be—A singular mouse.
Escaped from life into mortality and a First Dynasty Egyptian tomb, this small ghost rodent at last fled free when some curious Bonaparte soldiers broke the seal and let out great gusts of bacterial air which killed the troops and confused Paris long after Napoleon departed and the Sphinx prevailed, with French gun-pocks in her face, and Fate splayed her paws.
The ghost mouse, so dislodged from darkness, excursioned to a seaport and shipped out with but not among the cats for Marseilles and London and Massachusetts and a century later, arrived just as the child Timothy cried on the Family’s doorstep. This mouse rattle-tapped under the doorsill to be greeted by an alert eight-legged thing, its multiple knees fiddling above its poisonous head. Stunned, Mouse froze in place and wisely did not move for hours. Then, when the arachnid papal ring presence tired of surveillance and departed for breakfast flies, Mouse vanished into the woodwork, rattle-scratched through secret panelings to the nursery. There, Timothy the babe, in need of more fellows no matter how small or strange, welcomed him beneath the blanket to nurse and befriend him for life.
So it was that Timothy, no saint, grew and became a young manchild, with ten candles lit on his anniversary cake.
And the House and the tree and the Family, and Great Grandmère and Cecy in her attic sands, and Timothy with his attendant Arach in one ear and Mouse on his shoulder and Anuba on his lap, waited for the greatest arrival of all …
CHAPTER 9
Homecomimg
“Here they come,” said Cecy, lying there flat in the High Attic dust.
“Where are they?” cried Timothy near the window, staring out.
“Some of them are over Europe, some over Asia, some of them over the Islands, some over South America!” said Cecy, her eyes closed, the lashes long, brown, and quivering, her mouth opening to let the words whisper out swiftly.
Timothy came forward upon the bare plankings and litters of papyrus. “Who are they?”
“Uncle Einar and Uncle Fry, and there’s Cousin William, and I see Frulda and Helgar and Aunt Morgianna, and Cousin Vivian, and I see Uncle Johann! Coming fast!”
“Are they up in the sky?” cried Timothy, his bright eyes flashing. Standing by the bed, he looked no more than his ten years. The wind blew outside; the House was dark and lit only by starlight.
“They’re coming through the air and traveling along the ground, in many forms,” said Cecy, asleep. She lay motionless and thought inward on herself to tell what she saw. “I see a wolflike thing crossing a dark river—at the shallows—just above a waterfall, the starlight burning his pelt. I see maple leaves blowing high. I see a small bat flying. I see many creature beasts, running under the forest trees and slipping through the highest branches; and they’re all heading here!”
“Will they be here in time?” The spider on Timothy’s lapel swung like a black pendulum, excitedly dancing. He leaned over his sister. “In time for the Homecoming?”
“Yes, yes, Timothy!” Cecy stiffened. “Go! Let me travel in the places I love!”
“Thanks!” In the hall, he ran to his room to make his bed. He had awakened at sunset, and as the first stars had risen, he had gone to let his excitement run with Cecy.
The spider hung on a silvery lasso about his slender neck as he washed his face. “Think, Arach, tomorrow night! All Hallows’ Eve!”
He lifted his face to the mirror, the only mirror in the House, his mother’s concession to his “illness.” Oh, if only he were not so afflicted! He gaped his mouth to show the poor teeth nature had given him. Corn kernels, round, soft, and pale! And his canines? Unsharpened flints!
Twilight was done. He lit a candle, exhausted. This past week the whole small Family had lived as in their old countries, sleeping by day, rousing at sunset to hurry the preparation.
“Oh, Arach, Arach, if only I could really sleep days, like all the rest!”
He took up the candle. Oh, to have teeth like steel, like nails! Or the power to send one’s mind, free, like Cecy, asleep on her Egyptian sands! But, no, he even feared the dark! He slept in a bed! Not in the fine polished boxes below! No wonder the Family skirted him as if he were the bishop’s son! If only wings would sprout from his shoulders! He bared his back, stared. No wings. No flight!
Downstairs were slithering sounds of black crepe rising in all the halls, all the ceilings, every door! The scent of burning black tapers rose up the banistered stairwell with Mother’s voice and Father’s, echoing from the cellar.
“Oh, Arach, will they let me be, really be, in the party?” said Timothy. The spider whirled at the end of its silk, alone to itself. “Not just fetch toadstools and cobwebs, hang crepe, or cut pumpkins. But I mean run around, jump, yell, laugh, heck, be the party. Yes!?”
For answer, Arach spun a web across the mirror, with one word at its center: Nil!
All through the House below, the one and only cat ran in a frenzy, the one and only mouse in the echoing wall said the same in nervous graffiti sounds, as if to cry: “The Homecoming!” everywhere.
Timothy climbed back to Cecy, who slept deep. “Where are you now, Cecy?” he whispered. “In the air? On the ground?”
“Soon,” Cecy murmured.
“Soon,” Timothy beamed. “All Hallows! Soon!”
He backed off studying the shadows of strange birds and loping beasts in her face.
At the open cellar door, he smelled the moist earth air rising. “Father?”
“Here!” Father shouted. “On the double!”
Timothy hesitated long enough to stare at a thousand shadows blowing on the ceilings, promises of arrivals, then he plunged into the cellar.
Father stopped polishing a long box. He gave it a thump. “Shine this up for Uncle Einar!”
Timothy stared.
“Uncle Einar’s big! Seven feet?”
“Eight!”
Timothy made the box shine. “And two hundred and sixty pounds?”
Father snorted. “Three hundred! And inside the box?”
“Space for wings?” cried Timothy.
“Space,” Father laughed, “for wings.”
At nine o’clock Timothy leaped out in the October weather. For two hours in the now-warm, now-cold wind he walked the small forest collecting toadstools.
He passed a farm. “If only you knew what’s happening at our House!” he said to the glowing windows. He climbed a hill and looked at the town, miles away, settling into sleep, the church clock high and round and white in the distance. You don’t know, either, he thought.
And carried the toadstools home.
In the cellar ceremony was celebrated, with Father incanting the dark words, Mother’s white ivory hands moving in the strange blessings, and all the Family gathered except Cecy, who lay upstairs. But Cecy was there. You saw her peering from now Bion’s eyes, now Samuel’s, now Mother’s, and you felt a movement and now she rolled your eyes and was gone.
Timothy prayed to the darkness.
“Please, please, help me grow to be like them, the ones’ll soon be here, who never grow old, can’t die, that’s what they say, can’t die, no matter what, or maybe they died a long time ago but Cecy calls, and Mother and Father call, and Grandmère who only whispers, and now they’re coming and I’m nothing, not like them who pass through walls and live in trees or live underneath until seventeen-year rains flood them up and out, and the ones who run in packs, let me be one! If they live forever, why not me?”
“Forever,” Mother’s voice echoed, having heard. “Oh, Timothy, there must be a way. Let us see! And now—”
The windows rattled. Grandmère’s sheath of linen papyrus rustled. Deathwatch beetles in the walls ran amok, ticking.
“Let it begin,” Mother cried. “Begin!”
And the wind began.
It swarmed the world like a great beast unseen, and the whole world heard it pass in a season of grief and lamentation, a dark celebration of the stuffs it carried to disperse, and all of it funneling upper Illinois. In tidal sweeps and swoons of sound, it robbed the graves of dust from stone angels’ eyes, vacuumed the tombs of spectral flesh, seized funeral flowers with no names, shucked druid trees to toss the leaf-harvest high in a dry downpour, a battalion of shorn skins and fiery eyes that burned crazily in oceans of ravening clouds that tore themselves to flags of welcome to pace the occupants of space as they grew in numbers to sound the sky with such melancholy eruptions of lost years that a million farmyard sleepers waked with tears on their faces wondering if it had rained in the night and no one had foretold, and on the storm-river across the sea which roiled at this gravity of leave-taking and arrival until, with a flurry of leaves and dust commingled, it hovered in circles over the hill and the House and the welcoming party and Cecy above all, who in her attic, a slumberous totem on her sands, beckoned with her mind and breathed permission.
Timothy from the highest roof sensed a single blink of Cecy’s eyes and—
The windows of the House flew wide, a dozen here, two dozen there, to suck the ancient airs. With every window gaped, all the doors slammed wide, the whole House was one great hungry maw, inhaling night with breaths gasping welcome, welcome, and all of its closets and cellar bins and attic niches shivering in dark tumults!
As Timothy leaned out, a flesh-and-blood gargoyle, the vast armada of tomb dust and web and wing and October leaf and graveyard blossom pelted the roofs even as on the land around the hill shadows trotted the roads and threaded the forests armed with teeth and velvet paws and flickered ears, barking to the moon.
And this confluence of air and land struck the House through every window, chimney, and door. Things that flew fair or in crazed jags, that walked upright or jogged on fours or loped like crippled shades, evicted from some funeral ark and bade farewell by a lunatic blind Noah, all teeth and no tongue, brandishing a pitchfork and fouling the air.
So all stood aside as the flood of shadow and cloud and rain that talked in voices filled the cellar, stashed itself in bins marked with the years they had died but to rise again, and the parlor chairs were seated with aunts and uncles with odd genetics and the kitchen crone had helpers who walked more strangely than she, as more aberrant cousins and long-lost nephews and peculiar nieces shambled or stalked or flew into pavanes about the ceiling chandeliers and feeling the rooms fill below and the grand concourse of unnatural survivals of the unfit, as it was later put, made the pictures tilt on the walls, the mouse run wild in the flues as Egyptian smokes sank, and the spider on Timothy’s neck take refuge in his ear, crying an unheard “sanctuary” as Timothy ducked in and stood admiring Cecy, this slumberous marshal of the tumult, and then leaped to see Great Grandmère, linens bursting with pride, her lapis lazuli eyes all enflamed, and then falling downstairs amidst heartbeats and bombardments of sounds as if he fell through an immense birdcage where were locked an aviary of midnight creatures all wing hastening to arrive but ready to leave until at last with a great roar and a concussion of thunder where there had been no lightning the last storm cloud shut like a lid upon the moonlit roof, the windows, one by one, crashed shut, the doors slammed, the sky was cleared, the roads empty.
And Timothy amidst it all, stunned, gave a great shout of delight.
At which a thousand shadows turned. Two thousand Beast eyes burned yellow, green, and sulfurous gold.
And in the roundabout centrifuge, Timothy with mindless joy was hurled by the whirl and spin to be flung against a wall and held fast by the concussion, where, motionless, forlorn, he could only watch the carousel of shapes and sizes of mist and fog and smoke faces and legs with hooves that, jounced, struck sparks as someone peeled him off the wall in jolts! “Well, you must be Timothy! Yes, yes! Hands too warm. Face and cheeks too hot. Brow perspiring. Haven’t perspired in years. What’s this?” A snarled and hairy fist pummeled Timothy’s chest. “Is that a small heart? Hammering like an anvil? Yes?”
A bearded face scowled down at him.
“Yes,” said Timothy.
“Poor lad, none of that now, we’ll soon stop it!”
And to roars of laughter the chilly hand and the cold moon face lurched away in the roundabout dance.
“That,” said Mother, suddenly near, “was your Uncle Jason.”
“I don’t like him,” whispered Timothy.
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