From the Dust Returned
Enter the strange world of the Elliott family: it will change you forever…They have lived for centuries in a house of legend and mystery in upper Illinois – and they are not like other midwesterners. Rarely encountered in daylight hours, their children are curious and wild; their old ones have survived since before the Sphinx first sank its paws deep in Egyptian sands. And some sleep in beds with lids.Now the house is being readied in anticipation of the gala homecoming that will gather together the far-flung branches of this odd and remarkable family where they will mix their arcane skills and lifestyles, fall in and out of love and change the world around them forever.You have never seen their like before.
Читать From the Dust Returned онлайн беплатно
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.
