From the Dust Returned Read Online Free PDF Page A

Family skirted him as if he were the bishop's son! If only wings would sprout from his shoulders! He bared his back, stared. No wings. No flight!
    Downstairs were slithering sounds of black crepe rising in all the halls, all the ceilings, every door! The scent of burning black tapers rose up the banistered stairwell with Mother's voice and Father's, echoing from the cellar.
    "Oh, Arach, will they let me be, really be, in the party?" said Timothy. The spider whirled at the end of its silk, alone to itself. "Not just fetch toadstools and cobwebs, hang crepe, or cut pumpkins. But I mean run around, jump, yell, laugh, heck, be the party. Yes !?"
    For answer, Arach spun a web across the mirror, with one word at its center: Nil !
    All through the House below, the one and only cat ran in a frenzy, the one and only mouse in the echoing wall said the same in nervous graffiti sounds, as if to cry: "The Homecoming!" everywhere.
    Timothy climbed back to Cecy, who slept deep. "Where are you now, Cecy?" he whispered. "In the air? On the ground?"
    "Soon," Cecy murmured.
    "Soon," Timothy beamed. "All Hallows! Soon!"
    He backed off studying the shadows of strange birds and loping beasts in her face.
    At the open cellar door, he smelled the moist earth air rising. "Father?"
    "Here!" Father shouted. "On the double!"
    Timothy hesitated long enough to stare at a thousand shadows blowing on the ceilings, promises of arrivals, then he plunged into the cellar.
    Father stopped polishing a long box. He gave it a thump. "Shine this up for Uncle Einar!"
    Timothy stared.
    "Uncle Einar's big! Seven feet?"
    "Eight!"
    Timothy made the box shine. "And two hundred and sixty pounds?"
    Father snorted. "Three hundred! And inside the box?"
    From the Dust Returned
    "Space for wings ?" cried Timothy.
    "Space," Father laughed, "for wings."
     
    At nine o'clock Timothy leaped out in the October weather. For two hours in the now-warm, now-cold wind he walked the small forest collecting toadstools.
    He passed a farm. "If only you knew what's happening at our House!" he said to the glowing windows. He climbed a hill and looked at the town, miles away, settling into sleep, the church clock high and round and white in the distance. You don't know, either, he thought.
    And carried the toadstools home.
    In the cellar ceremony was celebrated, with Father incanting the dark words, Mother's white ivory hands moving in the strange blessings, and all the Family gathered except Cecy, who lay upstairs. But Cecy was there. You saw her peering from now Bion's eyes, now Samuel's, now Mother's, and you felt a movement and now she rolled your eyes and was gone.
    Timothy prayed to the darkness.
    "Please, please, help me grow to be like them, the ones'll soon be here, who never grow old, can't die, that's what they say, can't die, no matter what, or maybe they died a long time ago but Cecy calls, and Mother and Father call, and Grandmere who only whispers, and now they're coming and I'm nothing, not like them who pass through walls and live in trees or live underneath until seventeen-year rains flood them up and out, and the ones who run in packs, let me be one! If they live forever, why not me?"
    "Forever," Mother's voice echoed, having heard. "Oh, Timothy, there must be a way. Let us see ! And now—"
    The windows rattled. Grandmere's sheath of linen papyrus rustled. Deathwatch beetles in the walls ran amok, ticking.
    "Let it begin," Mother cried. "Begin!"
     
    And the wind began.
    It swarmed the world like a great beast unseen, and the whole world heard it pass in a season of grief and lamentation, a dark celebration of the stuffs it carried to disperse, and all of it funneling upper Illinois. In tidal sweeps and swoons of sound, it robbed the graves of dust from stone angels' eyes, vacuumed the tombs of spectral flesh, seized funeral flowers with no names, shucked druid trees to toss the leaf-harvest high in a dry downpour, a battalion of shorn skins and fiery eyes that burned crazily