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 Grandmère … 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 Grandmère …”
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.
“Grandmère!” 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?”
“… Yesssss …” came the whisper. She sewed one eyelid 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!”