From the Dust Returned (3 page)

They climbed in and sat together in his open car. "Ann," he said, taking her hands, trembling. "Ann." But 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 earthbound crea-ture?"

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.

"And
me,
Grandmere?" said Timothy. "Did I come in through the High Attic window?"

"You did not come, child, but 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, Grandmere,
what
?"

The ancient mouth lisped and murmured and murmured and lisped … 

"To start with, the House itself … "

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.