From the Dust Returned

“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 g

olden 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!”