From the Dust Returned. Рэй Брэдбери

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      Dedication

      To the two midwives of this book:

      DON CONGDON,

      who was in at the beginning in 1946,

      AND JENNIFER BREHL,

      who helped bring it to completion in 2000.

      With gratitude and love.

      Contents

      Dedication

      Prologue

       The Beautiful One Is Here

      Chapter 1

       The Town and the Place

      Chapter 2

       Anuba Arrives

      Chapter 3

       The High Attic

      Chapter 4

       The Sleeper and Her Dreams

      Chapter 5

       The Wandering Witch

      Chapter 6

       Whence Timothy?

      Chapter 7

       The House, the Spider, and the Child

      Chapter 8

       Mouse, Far-Traveling

      Chapter 9

       Homecoming

      Chapter 10

       West of October

      Chapter 11

       Many Returns

      Chapter 12

       On the Orient North

      Chapter 13

       Nostrum Paracelsius Crook

      Chapter 14

       The October People

      Chapter 15

       Uncle Einar

      Chapter 16

       The Whisperers

      Chapter 17

       The Theban Voice

      Chapter 18

       Make Haste to Live

      Chapter 19

       The Chimney Sweeps

      Chapter 20

       The Traveler

      Chapter 21

       Return to the Dust

      Chapter 22

       The One Who Remembers

      Chapter 23

       The Gift

       Afterword

      How the Family Gathered

       Keep Reading

       About the Author

       Praise

       Also by the Author

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

      PROLOGUE

      The Beautiful One Is Here

      In the attic where the rain touched the roof softly on spring days and where you could feel the mantle of snow outside, a few inches away, on December nights, A Thousand Times Great Grandmère existed. She did not live, nor was she eternally dead, she … existed.

      And now with the Great Event about to happen, the Great Night arriving, the Homecoming about to explode, she must be visited!

      “Ready? Here I come!” Timothy’s voice cried faintly beneath a trapdoor that trembled. “Yes!?”

      Silence. The Egyptian mummy did not twitch.

      She stood propped in a dark corner like an ancient dried plum tree, or an abandoned and scorched ironing board, her hands and wrists trussed across her dry riverbed bosom, a captive of time, her eyes slits of deep blue lapis lazuli behind thread-sewn lids, a glitter of remembrance as her mouth, with a shriveled tongue wormed in it, whistled and sighed and whispered to recall every hour of every lost night four thousand years back when she was a pharaoh’s daughter dressed in spider linens and warm-breath silks with jewels burning her wrists as she ran in the marble gardens to watch the pyramids erupt in the fiery Egyptian air.