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And again her hieroglyphs shook and the attic sighed and creaked like a ship in a rising sea.
“What can we do?” Timothy asked.
“Escape to all directions. They cannot follow so many flights. The House must be vacant by midnight, when they will come with torches.”
“Torches?”
“Isn’t it always fire and torches, torches and fire?”
“Yes.” Timothy felt his tongue move, stunned with remembrance. “I have seen films. Poor running people, people running after. And torches and fire.”
“Well then. Call your sister. Cecy must warn all the rest.”
“This I have done!” cried a voice from nowhere.
“Cecy!?”
“She is with us,” husked the old woman.
“Yes! I’ve heard it all,” said the voice from the beams, the window, the closets, the downward stairs. “I am in every room, in every thought, in every head. Already the bureaus are being ransacked, the luggage packed. Long before midnight, the House will be empty.”
A bird unseen brushed Timothy’s eyelids and ears and settled behind his gaze to blink out at Nef.
“Indeed, the Beautiful One is here,” said Cecy in Timothy’s throat and mouth.
“Nonsense! Would you hear another reason why the weather will change and the floods come?” said the ancient.
“Indeed.” Timothy felt the soft presence of his sister press against his windowed eyes. “Tell us, Nef.”
“They hate me because I am the accumulation of the knowledge of Death. That knowledge is a curse to them instead of a useful burden.”
“Can,” started Timothy, and Cecy finished, “can death be remembered?”
“Oh, yes. But only by the dead. You the living are blind. But we who have bathed in Time, and been reborn as children of the earth and inheritors of Eternity, drift gently in rivers of sand and streams of darkness, knowing the bombardment from the stars whose emanations have taken millions of years to rain upon the land and seek us out in our plantations of eternally wrapped souls like great seeds beneath the marbled layers and the bas-relief skeletons of reptile birds that fly on sandstone, with wingspreads a million years wide and as deep as a single breath. We are the keepers of Time. You who walk the earth know only the moment, which is whisked away with your next exhalation. Because you move and live, you cannot keep. We are the granaries of dark remembrance. Our funerary jars keep not only our lights and silent hearts, but our wells, deeper than you can imagine, where in the subterranean lost hours, all the deaths that ever were, the deaths on which mankind has built new tenements of flesh and ramparts of stone moving ever upward even as we sink down and down, doused in twilights, bandaged by midnights. We accumulate. We are wise with farewells. Would you not admit, child, that forty billion deaths are a great wisdom, and those forty billion who shelve under the earth are a great gift to the living so that they might live?”
“I guess.”
“Do not guess, child. Know. I will teach, and that knowledge, important to living because only death can set the world free to be born again—that is your sweet burden. And tonight is the night when your task begins. Now!”
At which moment, the bright medal in the center of her golden breast flared. The light blazed up to swarm the ceiling like a thousand summer bees threatening, by their very flash and friction, to fire the dry beams. The attic seemed to spin with the rush-around light and heat. Every slat, shingle, crossbeam groaned and expanded, while Timothy raised his arms and hands to ward off the swarms, staring at the kindled bosom of Nef.
“Fire!” he cried. “Torches!”
“Yes,” hissed the old, old woman. “Torches and fire. Nothing stays. All burns.”
And with this, the architecture of the long-before-Gettysburg-and-Appomattox House smoked on her breastplate.
“Nothing stays!” cried Cecy, everywhere at once, like the fireflies and summer bees bumping to char the beams. “All goes!”
And Timothy blinked and bent to watch the winged man, and the sleeping Cecy, and the Unseen Uncle (invisible save for his passing like the wind through clouds or snowstorms, or wolves running in fields of black wheat, or bats in wounded zigzag flights devouring the moon), and a double dozen of other aunts and uncles and cousins striding the road away from town. Or soaring, to lodge in trees a mile off and safe, as the mob, the torchlit madness, flowed up old Nef-Mum’s chest. Off out the window Timothy could see the real mob coming with torches, heading toward the House like a backward flow of lava, on foot, bike, and car, a storm of cries choking their throats.
Even as Timothy felt the floorboards shift, like a scale from which weights are dropped, with seventy times a hundred pounds in flight they jumped overboard from porches. The House skeleton, shaken free, grew tall as winds vacuumed the now-empty rooms and flapped the ghost curtains and sucked the front door wide to welcome the torches and fire and the crazed mob.
“All goes,” cried Cecy, a final time.
And she abandoned their eyes and ears and bodies and minds and, restored to her body below, ran so lightly, quickly, her feet left no tread in the grass.
There was a storm of activity. All around the House things were happening. Air was rushing up the flue of the chimneys. Ninety-nine or one hundred chimneys were all sighing or moaning and mourning at the same time. Shingles seemed to be flying off the roof. There was a great fluttering of wings. There was a sound of much weeping. All the rooms were being emptied. In the middle of all this excitement, all this activity, all this flurry, Timothy heard Great Grandmère say:
