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“Sleep on it,” she said. “You may change your mind by sunset.”
She shut the bin on him.
“Well,” he said.
“Good morning, dear,” she said.
“Good morning,” he said, muffled, enclosed.
The sun rose. She hurried upstairs.
Cecy awoke fr
om a deep dream of sleep.
She looked upon reality and decided her wild and special world was the very world she preferred and needed. The dim outlines of the dry desert attic were familiar, as were the sounds below in a House that was all stir and bustle and wing-flurry at sunset, but now at noon was still with that dead stillness that the ordinary world assumes. The sun was fixed in the sky and the Egyptian sands that were her dreaming bed only waited for her mind with a mysterious hand to touch and inscribe there the charting of her travels.
All this she sensed and knew, and so with a dreamer’s smile she settled back with her long and beautiful hair as cushion to sleep and dream and in her dreams …
She traveled.
Her mind slipped over the flowered yard, the fields, the green hills, over the ancient drowsy streets of town, into the wind and past the moist depression of the ravine. All day she would fly and meander. Her mind would pop into dogs to sit, all bristles, and taste ripe bones, sniff tangy-urined trees to hear as dogs hear, run as dogs run, all smiles. It was more than telepathy, up one flue and down another. It was entry to lazing cats, old lemony maids, hopscotch girls, lovers on morning beds, then unborn babes’ pink, dream-small brains.
Where would she go today?
She decided.
She went!
At this very instant there burst into the silent House below a fury of madness. A man, a crazed uncle of such reputation as would cause all in the Family to start and pull back in their own midnights. An uncle from the times of the Transylvanian wars and a crazed lord of a dreadful manor who impaled his enemies on spikes thrust into their bowels to leave them suspended, thrashing in horrible deaths. This uncle, John the Unjust, had arrived from dark lower Europe some months past only to discover there was no room for his decayed persona and his dreadful past. The Family was strange, perhaps outré, in some degree rococo, but not a scourge, a disease, an annihilation such as he represented with crimson eye, razored teeth, taloned claw, and the voice of a million impaled souls.
A moment after his mad burst into the noon-quiet House, empty save for Timothy and his mother who stood guard while the others slept under threat by the sun, John the Terrible elbowed them out of the way and ascended with ravening voice to rage the dreaming sands around Cecy, causing a Sahara storm about her peace.
“Damn!” he cried. “Is she here? Am I too late?”
“Get back,” said the dark mother rising in the attic confines with Timothy near. “Are you blind? She’s gone and might not be back for days!”
John the Terrible, the Unjust, kicked the sands at the sleeping maid. He seized her wrist to find a hidden pulse. “Damn!” he cried again. “Call her back. I need her!”
“You heard me!” Mother moved forward. “She’s not to be touched. She’s got to be left as she is.”
Uncle John turned his head. His long hard red face was pocked and senseless.
“Where’d she go? I must find her!”
Mother spoke quietly. “You might find her in a child running in the ravine. You might find her in a crayfish under a rock in the creek. Or she might be playing chess behind an old man’s face in the courthouse square.” A wry look touched the mother’s mouth. “She might be here now, looking out at you, laughing, not telling. This might be her talking with great fun.”
“Why—” He swung heavily around. “If I thought—”
Mother continued, quietly. “Of course she’s not here. And if she was, there’d be no way to tell.” Her eyes gleamed with a delicate malice. “Why do you need her?”
He listened to a distant bell, tolling. He shook his head, angrily.
“Something … inside …” He broke off. He leaned over her warm, sleeping body. “Cecy! Come back! You can if you want!”
The wind blew softly outside the sun-feathered windows. The sand drifted under her quiet arms. The distant bell tolled again and he listened to the drowsy summer-day sound of it, far, far away.
“I’ve worked for her. The past month, awful thoughts. I was going to take the train to the city for help. But Cecy can catch these fears. She can clean the cobwebs, make me new. You see? She’s got to help!”
