From the Dust Returned Read online

  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

  The World of Ray Bradbury…

  Dandelion Wine

  The Illustrated Man

  The Martian Chronicles

  The October Country

  Something Wicked This Way Comes

  Death Is a Lonely Business

  A Graveyard for Lunatics

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by Ray Bradbury

  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 s
un-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.