From the Dust Returned

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.

Now Timothy lifted the trapdoor lid of dust to call into that midnight attic world.

“Oh, Beautiful One!”

A faint pollen of dust fell from the ancient mummy’s lips.

“Beautiful no longer!”

“Grandma, then.”

“Not Grandma merely,” came the soft response.

“A Thousand Times Great Grandmère?”

“Better.” The old voice dusted the silent air. “Wine?”

“Wine.” Timothy rose, a small flacon in his hands.

“The vintage, child?” the voice murmured.

“B.C., Grandmère.”

“How many years?”

“Two thousand, almost three, B.C.”

“Excellent.” Dust fell from the withered smile. “Come.”

Picking his way through a litter of papyrus, Timothy reached the no-longer Beautiful One, whose voice was still incredibly lovely.

“Child?” said the withered smile. “Do you fear me?”

“Always, Grandmère.”

“Wet my lips, child.”

He reached to let the merest drop wet the lips that now trembled.

“More,” she whispered.

Another drop of wine touched the dusty smile.

“Still afraid?”

“No, Grandmère.”

“Sit.”