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FROM THE DUST RETURNED
A Family Remembrance
Ray Bradbury
WILLIAM MORROW 75years of publishing
An imprint of Harper Collins Publishers
Lovingly scanned by Lord Blix
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 Grandmere 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, theHomecoming about to
explode, she must be visited!
"Ready? Here I come!" Timothy's voice cried faintly beneath a trapdoor thattrembled."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 wriststrussed across her dry riverbed
bosom,
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a captive of time, her eyes slits of deep bluelapislazuli 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 apharaoh'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 faintpollen 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
Grandmere?" "Better." The
old voice dusted the silent air."Wine?"
"Wine."Timothyrose , a smallflacon in hishands.
"The vintage, child?" the voice murmured. "B.C., Grandmere .""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,
Grandmere." "Wet my lips, child."
He reached to let themerest drop wet the lips that nowtrembled. "More," she whispered.
Another drop of wine touched the dusty smile.
"Still
afraid?" "No, Grandmere ." "Sit."
He perched on the lid of a box with hieroglyphs of warriors and doglike gods and gods with lions' heads
painted
onit.
"Why are you here?"husked the voice beneath the serene riverbed face.
"Tomorrow's the Great Night, Grandmere, I've waited for all my life! The Family,
our
Family, coming,
flyingin from all over the world! Tell me, Grandmere , 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 One
THE TOWN AND THE PLACE
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At first, A Thousand Times Great Grandmere 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 andcirculates 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, echoingfacades 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
thatfun- neled a hurricane of great strength. Between midnight and dawn, this portmanteau-storm lifted
anymoveable 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, anarousal 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 itsf uture 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.
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Chapter Two
ANUBAARRIVES
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
gyredin the wind and smiled griffin teeth, whiledeathwatch 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 ajourney 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 anothershipload 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- filchingsand the asphalt linen-wrapped dead for
fuel. These packets of bones and flammable tar
churnedthe 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
terriblemiasmal bacteria. The hospitals of New England were chock-full of Egyptian maladies that soon
brimmed the graveyards, while the cats, cast of Fin 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.
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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 Three
THE HIGH ATTIC
"And who came second, Grandmere, who came
next?"
"The Sleeper Who Dreams, child." "What a fine
name, Grandmere . 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 thatf unnels 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 Grandmere slid herlapis lazuli gaze upward. "Listen."
And above, in af urther layer of darkness, some semblance of dream stirred...
Chapter Four
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 therooftop. 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 theage-
oldice 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
inMonterey, 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.
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