John the Unjust, the Terrible, staggered into the police station in the late afternoon, barely able to stand, his voice a retching whisper.
The sheriff took his feet down off his desk and waited for the wild man to gain his breath and speak.
“I am here to report a family,” he gasped. “A family of sin and wickedness who abide, who hide, seen but unseen, here, there, nearby.”
The sheriff sat up. “A family? And wicked, you say?” He picked up a pencil. “Just where?”
“They live” The wild man stopped. Something had struck him in the chest. Blinding lights burned his eyes. He swayed.
“Could you give me a name?” said the sheriff, mildly curious.
“Their name” Again a terrific blow struck his midriff. The church bells exploded.
“Your voice, my god, your voice!” cried John.
“My voice?”
“It sounds like” John pushed his hand out toward the sheriff’s face. “Like”
“Yes?”
“It’s her voice. She’s behind your eyes, back of your face, on your tongue!”
“Fascinating,” said the sheriff, smiling, his voice terribly soft and sweet. “You were going to give me a name, a family, a place”
“No use. If she’s here. If your tongue is her tongue. Gods!”
“Try,” said the fine and gentle voice inside the sheriffs face.
“The Family is!” cried the staggering, raving man. “The House is!” He fell back, struck again in his heart. The bells roared. The church bells wielded him as iron clapper.
He cried a name. He shouted a place.
Then, riven, he lunged out of the office.
After a long moment the sheriffs face relaxed. His voice changed. Low now and brusque, he seemed stunned in recall.
“What,” he asked himself, “did someone say? Damn, damn. What was that name? Quick, write it down. And that house? Where did someone say?”
He looked at his pencil.
“Oh, yeah,” he said at last. And again, “Yeah.”
The pencil moved. He wrote.
The trapdoor to the attic burst upward and the terrible, the unjust man was there. He stood over Cecy’s dreaming body.
“The bells,” he said, his hands to his ears. “They’re yours! I should’ve known. Hurting me, punishing me. Stop! We’ll burn you! I’ll bring the mob. Oh God, my head!”
With one last crushing gesture he crammed his fist to his ears and dropped dead.
The lonely woman of the House moved to look down at the body while Timothy, in the shadows, felt his companions panic and twitch and hide.
“Oh, Mother,” said Cecy’s quiet voice from her wakened lips. “I tried to stop him. Didn’t. He named our name, he said our place. Will the sheriff remember?”
The lonely woman of midnights had no answer.
Timothy, in the shadows, listened.
From Cecy’s lips far off and now near and clear came the soundings of the bells, the bells, the awful holy bells.
The sounding of the bells.
Chapter Twenty-one
Return To The Dust
Timothy stirred in his sleep.
The nightmare came and would not go away.
Within his head the roof caught fire. The windows trembled and broke. Throughout the great House wings shivered and flew, beating against the panes until they shattered.
Crying out, Timothy sat bolt upright. Almost immediately one word and then a tumble of words spilled from his lips:
“Nef. Dust witch. Great Times A Thousand Times Grandmere … Nef … “
She was calling him. There was silence, yet she called. She knew the fire and the wild beating of wings and the broken panes.
He sat for a long while before he moved. “Nef … dust … A Thousand Times Great Grandmere … “
Born into death two thousand years before the crown of thorns, the Gethsemane garden, and the empty tomb. Nef, mother to Nefertiti, the royal mummy who drifted on a dark boat past the deserted Mount of the Sermon, scraped over the Rock at Plymouth and land-sailed to Little Fort in upper Illinois, surviving Grant’s twilight assaults and Lee’s pale dawn retreats. Seated for funeral celebrations by the Family Dark she was, over time, stashed from room to room, floor to floor, until this small hemp-rope, tobacco-leaf-brown, ancestral relic was lifted, light as balsa wood, to the upper attics where she was covered, smothered, then ignored by a Family eager for survival and forgetful of unremembered deaths’ leftovers.
Abandoned to attic silence and the drift of golden pollens on the air, sucking in darkness as sustenance, breathing out only quiet and serenity, this ancient visitor waited for someone to pull aside the accumulated love letters, toys, melted candles and candelabras, tattered skirts, corsets, and headlined papers from wars won-then-lost in instantly neglectful Pasts.
Someone to dig, rifle, and find.
Timothy.
He had not visited her in months. Months. Oh Nef, he thought.
Nef from the mysterious isle arose because he came and leafed, dug, and tossed aside until just her face, her sewn-shut eyes were framed in autumn book leaves, legal tracts, and jackstraw mouse bones.
“Grandmere!” he cried. “Forgive me!”
“Not … so … loud … ” whispered her voice, a ventriloquist’s thrown syllables from four thousand years of quiet echoes. “‘You … will … shatter … me.”
And indeed platelets of dry sand fell from her bandaged shoulders, hieroglyphs tattered on her breastplate.
“Look … “
A tiny spiral of dust brushed along her ciphered bosom where gods of life and death posed as stiffly as tall rows of ancient corn and wheat.
Timothy’s eyes grew wide.
“That.” He touched the face of a child sprung up in a field of holy beasts. “Me?”
“Indeed.”
“Why did you call me?”
“Be … cause … it … is … the … end.” The slow words fell like golden crumbs from her lips.
A rabbit thumped and ran in Timothy’s chest.
“End of what!?”
One of the sewn eyelids of the ancient woman opened the merest crack to show a crystal gleam tucked within. Timothy glanced up at the attic beams where that gleam touched its light.
“This?” he said. “Our place?”
” … \esssss … ” came the whisper. She sewed one eye-lid back up, but opened the other with light.
Her fingers, trembling across her bosom pictographs, touched like a spider as she whispered:
“This … “
Timothy responded. “Uncle Einar!”
“He who has wings?”
“I’ve flown with him.”
“Rare child. And this?”
“Cecy!”
“She also flies?”
“With no wings. She sends her mind”
“Like ghosts?”
“Which use people’s ears to look out their eyes!”
“And this?” The spider fingers trembled.
There was no symbol where she pointed.
“Ah,” Timothy laughed. “My cousin, Ran. Invisible. Doesn’t need to fly. Can go anywhere and no one knows.”
“Fortunate man. And this and this and yet again this?”
Her dry finger moved and scratched.
And Timothy named all of the uncles and aunts and cousins and nieces and nephews who had lived in this House forever, or a hundred years, give or take bad weather, storms, or war. There were thirty rooms and each more filled with cobwebs and nightbloom and sneezes of ectoplasms that posed in mirrors to be blown away when death’s-head moths or funeral dragonflies sewed the air and flung the shutters wide to let the dark spill in.
Timothy named each hieroglyphic face and the ancient woman gave the merest nod of her dusty head as her fingers lay on a final hieroglyph.
“Do I touch the maelstrom of darkness?”
“This House, yes.”
And it was so. There lay this very House, embossed with lapis lazuli and trimmed with amber and gold, as it must have been when Lincoln went unheard at Gettysburg.
And as he gazed, the bright embossments began to shiver and flake. An earthquake shook the frames and blinded the golden windows.
“Tonight,” mourned the dust, turned in on itself.
“But,” cried Timothy, “after so long. Why now?”
“It is the age of discovery and revelations. The pictures that fly through the air. The sounds that blow in the winds. Things seen by many. Things heard by all. Travelers on the road by the tens of millions. No escape. We have been found by the words in the air and the pictures sent on light beams into rooms where children and children’s parents sit while Medusa, with insect-antenna coif, tells all and seeks punishment.”
“For what?”
“No reason is needed. It is just the revelation of the hour, the meaningless alarms and excursions of the week, the panic of the single night, no one asks, but death and destruction are delivered, as the children sit with their parents behind them, frozen in an arctic spell of unwanted gossip and unneeded slander. No matter. The dumb will speak, the stupid will assume, and we are destroyed.
“Destroyed … ” she echoed.
And the House on her bosom and the House beams above the boy shook, waiting for more quakes.
“The floods will soon arrive … inundations. Tidal waters of men … “
“But what have we done?”
“Nothing. We have survived, is all. And those who come to drown us are envious of our lives lived for so many centuries. Because we are different, we must be washed away. Hist!”
And again her hieroglyphs shook and the attic sighed and creaked like a ship in a rising sea.
“What can we do?” Timothy asked.
“Escape to all directions. They cannot follow so many flights. The House must be vacant by midnight, when they will come with torches.”
“Torches?”
“Isn’t it always fire and torches, torches and fire?”
“Yes.” Timothy felt his tongue move, stunned with remembrance. “I have seen films. Poor running people, people running after. And torches and fire.”
“Well then. Call your sister. Cecy must warn all the rest.”
“This I have done!” cried a voice from nowhere.
“Cecy!?”
“She is with us,” husked the old woman.
“Yes! I’ve heard it all,” said the voice from the beams, the window, the closets, the downward stairs. “I am in every room, in every thought, in every head. Already the bureaus are being ransacked, the luggage packed. Long before midnight, the House will be empty.”
A bird unseen brushed Timothy’s eyelids
