From the Dust Returned

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 Grandmère 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 Grandmère 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.