From the Dust Returned by Ray Bradbury Read Free Book Online Page A

self-destroyed. A clap of thunder banged across country, shook the skies, knocked the wind-blown essences of cousins through mill-fans, while Cecy, with a gasp, sat straight up and gave one shriek that shot the cousins home. All four, at the moment of concussion, had been in various asylum bins, prying trap-door skulls to peek in at maelstroms of confetti the colors of madness, the dark rainbows of nightmare.
    "What happened?" cried Jack from Cecy's mouth.
    "What!" said Philip, moving her lips.
    "My god." William stared from her eyes.
    "The barn burned," said Peter. "We're lost!"
    The Family, soot-faced in the smoking yard, turned like a traveling minstrel's funeral and stared up at Cecy in shock.
    "Cecy?" called Mother, wildly. "Is someone with you?"
    "Me, Peter!" shouted Peter from her lips.
    "Philip!"
    "William!"
    "Jack!"
    The souls counted off from Cecy's tongue.
    The Family waited.
    Then, as one, the four young men's voices asked the final, most dreadful question:
    "Didn't you save just one body?"
    The Family sank an inch into the earth, burdened with a reply they could not give.
    "But—" Cecy held on to her elbows, touched her own chin, her mouth, her brow, inside which four live ghosts wrestled for room. "But—what'll I do with them?" Her eyes searched all those faces below in the yard. "My cousins can't stay! They can't stand around in my head !"
    What she cried after that, or what the cousins babbled, crammed like pebbles under her tongue, or what the Family said, running like burned chickens in the yard, was lost.
    With Judgment Day thunders, the rest of the barn fell.
    With a vast whisper the ashes blew away in an October wind that leaned this way and that on the attic roof.
    "It seems to me," said Father.
    "Not seems, but is !" said Cecy, eyes shut.
    "We must farm the cousins out. Find temporary hospices until such time as we can cull new bodies—"
    "The quicker the better," said four voices from Cecy's mouth, now high, now low, now two gradations between.
    Father continued in darkness. "There must be someone in the Family with a small room in the backside of their cerebellum! Volunteers!"
    The Family sucked in an icy breath and stayed silent. Great Grandmere, far above in her own attic place, suddenly whispered: "I hereby solicit, name, and nominate the oldest of the old!"
    As if their heads were on a single string, everyone turned to blink at a far corner where their ancient Nile River Grandpere leaned like a dry bundle of two-millennia-before-Christ wheat.
    The Nile ancestor husked, "No!"
    "Yes!" Grandmere shut her sand-slit eyes, folded her brittle arms over her tomb-painted bosom. "You have all the time in the world."
    "Again, no!" The mortuary wheat rustled.
    "This," Grandmere murmured, "is the Family, all strange-fine. We walk nights, fly winds and airs, wander storms, read minds, work magic, live forever or a thousand years, whichever. In sum, we're Family, to be leaned on, turned to, when—"
    "No, no!"
    "Hush." One eye as large as the Star of India opened, burned, dimmed, died. "It's not proper, four wild men in a slim girl's head. And there's much you can teach the cousins. You thrived long before Napoleon walked in and ran out of Russia, or Ben Franklin died of pox. Fine if the boys' souls were lodged in your ear some while. It might straighten their spines. Would you deny this?"
    The ancient ancestor from the White and Blue Niles gave only the faintest percussion of harvest wreaths.
    "Well, then," said the frail remembrance of Pharaoh's daughter. "Children of the night, did you hear!?"
    "We heard!" cried the ghosts from Cecy's mouth.
    "Move!" said the four-thousand-year-old mummification.
    "We move!" said the four.
    And since no one had bothered to say which cousin went first, there was a surge of phantom tissue, a tide-drift of storm on the unseen wind.
    Four different expressions lit Grandpere's harvest ancestor's face. Four earthquakes shook his brittle frame. Four smiles ran scales along his yellow