From the Dust Returned

le two-page spread of my October House and my Family streaming through the autumn air and loping along the ground.

When the story finally appeared, I had grand meetings with Charles Addams in New York. We planned a collaboration: Over a period of years I would write more stories and Addams would illustrate them. Ultimately, we would gather them all, stories and drawings, into a book. The years passed, some stories were written, we stayed in touch but went our separate ways. My plans for a possible book were delayed by my good fortune in landing the job of writing the screenplay for John Huston’s Moby Dick. But over the years, I kept revisiting my beloved Elliotts. That once-discrete tale, “Homecoming,” became the cornerstone, a building block for the Life Story of the Elliott Family: their genesis and demise, their adventures and mishaps, their loves and their sorrows. By the time the last of these stories was written, dear Charles Addams had passed into that Eternity inhabited by the creatures of his and my world.

That, briefly, is the history of From the Dust Returned. Beyond this I might add that all my characters are based on the relatives who wandered through my grandmother’s house on those October evenings when I was a child. My Uncle Einar was real, and the names of all the others in the book were once similarly attached to cousins or uncles or aunts. Though long dead, they live again and waft in the chimney flues, stairwells, and attics of my imagination, kept there with great love by this chap who was once fantastically young and incredibly impressed with the wonder of Halloween.

Recently, the nice folks at the Tee and Charles Addams Foundation sent me a copy of a letter I wrote to Charlie Addams in 1948—all about his wonderful painting of the “Homecoming” house, and the nascent plans we had to collaborate on an illustrated book. Dated February 11,1948, the letter (written on my long-gone manual typewriter) reads, in part: “… let me say that I can’t imagine putting out the book without you.... It will become a sort of Christmas Carol idea, Halloween after Halloween people will buy the book, just as they buy the Carol, to read at the fireplace, with lights low. Halloween is the time of year for storytelling …. I believe in this more than I have believed in anything in my writing career. I want you to be in it with me.” Interestingly, my agent had been talking to William Morrow about the possibility of doing such a book, and so it is rather poetic, I think, that Morrow is publishing this book today, with Charlie’s superb illustration on the cover. How I wish he were here to see this project come to fruition!

RAY BRADBURY

Summer 2000

The World of Ray Bradbury …

…is a marvelous, magical place, full of awesome wonders, delicious terrors, and the simplest of pleasures. We invite you to experience the storytelling genius of Ray Bradbury in the following selection of excerpts from some of his best known works. All you have to do is turn the page…

Dandelion Wine

Twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding knows Green Town, Illinois, is as vast and deep as the whole wide world that lies beyond the city limits. It is a pair of brand-new tennis shoes, the first harvest of dandelions for Grandfather’s renowned intoxicant, the distant clang of the trolley’s bell on a hazy afternoon. It is yesteryear and tomorrow blended into an unforgettable always. But as young Douglas is about to discover, summer can be more than the repetition of established rituals whose mystical power holds time at bay. It can be a best friend moving away, a human time machine who can transport you back to the Civil War, or a sideshow automaton able to glimpse the bittersweet future.

It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.

Douglas Spaulding, twelve, freshly wakened, let summer idle him on its early-morning stream. Lying in his third-story cupola bedroom, he felt the tall power it gave him, riding high in the June wind, the grandest tower in town. At night, when the trees washed together, he flashed his gaze like a beacon from this lighthouse in all directions over swarming seas of elm and oak and maple. Now …

“Boy,” whispered Douglas.

A whole summer ahead to cross off the calendar, day by day. Like the goddess Siva in the travel books, he saw his hands jump everywhere, pluck sour apples, peaches, and midnight plums. He would be clothed in trees and bushes and rivers. He would freeze, gladly, in the hoar-frosted ice-house door. He would bake, happily, with ten thousand chickens, in Grandma’s kitchen.

But now—a familiar task awaited him.

One night each week he was allowed to leave his father, his mother, and his younger brother Tom asleep in their small house next door and run here, up the dark spiral stairs to his grandparents’ cupola, and in this sorcerer’s tower sleep with thunders and visions, to wake before the crystal jingle of milk bottles and perform his ritual magic.

He stood at the open window in the dark, took a deep breath and exhaled.

The street lights, like candles on a black cake, went out. He exhaled again and again and the stars began to vanish.

Douglas smiled. He pointed a finger.

There, and there. Now over here, and here …

Yellow squares were cut in the dim morning earth as house lights winked slowly on. A sprinkle of windows came suddenly alight miles off in dawn country.

“Everyone yawn. Everyone up.”

The great house stirred below.

“Grandpa, get your teeth from the water glass!” He waited a decent interval. “Grandma and Great-grandma, fry hot cakes!”

The warm scent of fried batter rose in the drafty halls to stir the boarders, the aunts, the uncles, the visiting cousins, in their rooms.

“Street where all the Old People live, wake up! Miss Helen Loomis, Colonel Freeleigh, Miss Bentley! Cough, get up, take pills, move around! Mr. Jonas, hitch up your horse, get your junk wagon out and around!”

The bleak mansions across the town ravine opened baleful dragon eyes. Soon, in the morning avenues below, two old women would glide their electric Green Machine, waving at all the dogs. “Mr. Tridden, run to the carbarn!” Soon, scattering hot blue sparks above it, the town trolley would sail the rivering brick streets.

“Ready John Huff, Charlie Woodman?” whispered Douglas to the Street of Children. “Ready!” to baseballs sponged deep in wet lawns, to rope swings hung empty in trees.

“Mom, Dad, Tom, wake up.”

Clock alarms tinkled faintly. The courthouse clock boomed. Birds leaped from trees like a net thrown by his hand, singing. Douglas, conducting an orchestra, pointed to the eastern sky.