From the Dust Returned (8 page)

But on some nights Grandpere edges over through the attic toward Grandmere, no four thousand, now fourteen, years old.

"You! At
your
age!" she shrieks.

And she flails and flails him until, laughing in five voices, Grandpere gives up, falls back, and pretends to sleep, alert with five kinds of alertness, ready for another try.

Perhaps in four thousand years.

Incredibly, what went up had to come down.

In a blizzard of darkness all over the world, the winds blew backward, and what stormed up hesitated on the verge of the horizon and then fell back upon the continent of America.

All over upper Illinois storm clouds gathered and began to rain, and they rained souls and they rained departed wings and they rained tears from people who had to give up traveling and return to the Homecoming and were sad instead of glad.

All over the skies of Europe and the skies of America what had been a happy occasion was now melancholy, driven back by clouds of oppression and prejudice and disbelief. The inhabitants of the Homecoming returned to the threshold
of
the House and slid in through the windows, the garrets, the cellars, and hid away fast to astound the Family who wondered, how come? A second Homecoming? Was the world coming to an end? And yes, it was, their world, anyway. This rain of souls, this storm of lost people, clustered on the roof, brimmed the basement among the wine kegs, and waited for some sort of revela-tion, which then caused the members of the Family to decide to meet in council and welcome one by one those people who needed to be hidden from the world.

And the first of these strange lost souls was in a train traveling north through Europe, traveling north toward fogs and mists and to fine and nourishing rains …

It was on the Orient Express heading away from Venice to Paris to Calais that the old woman noticed the ghastly passenger.

He was a traveler obviously dying of some dread disease.

He occupied compartment 22 on the third car back and had his meals sent in, and only at twilight did he rouse to come sit in the dining car surrounded by the false electric lights and the sound of tinkling crystal and women's laughter.

He arrived this night, moving with a terrible slowness, to sit across the aisle from this woman of some years, her bosom like a fortress, her brow serene, her eyes filled with a kindness that had mellowed with time.

There was a black medical bag at her side, and a thermometer tucked in her mannish lapel pocket.

The ghastly man's paleness caused her left hand to crawl up along her lapel to touch the thermometer.

"Oh, dear," whispered Miss Minerva Halliday.

The maitre d' was passing. She touched his elbow and nodded across the aisle.

"Pardon, but where is that poor man going?"

"Calais and London, madam. If God is willing."

And he hurried off.

Minerva Halliday, her appetite gone, stared across at that skeleton made of snow.

The man and the cutlery laid before him seemed one. The knives, forks, and spoons jingled with a silvery cold sound. He listened, fascinated, as if to the voice of his inner soul as the cutlery crept, touched, chimed; a tintinnabulation from another sphere. His hands lay in his lap like lonely pets, and when the train swerved around a long curve his body, mindless, swayed now this way, now that, toppling.

At which moment the train took a greater curve and knocked the silverware chittering. A woman at a far table, laughing, cried out: "I don't
believe
it!"

To which a man with a louder laugh shouted:

"Nor do
I
!"

This coincidence caused, in the ghastly passenger, a terrible melting. The doubting laughter had pierced his ears.

He visibly shrank. His eyes hollowed and one could almost imagine a cold vapor gasped from his mouth.

Miss Minerva Halliday, shocked, leaned forward and put out one hand. She heard herself whisper:

"
I
believe!"

The effect was instantaneous.

The ghastly passenger sat up. Color returned to his white cheeks. His eyes glowed with a rebirth of fire. His head swiveled and he stared across the aisle at this miraculous woman with words that cured.

Blushing furiously, the old nurse with the great warm bosom flinched, rose, and hurried off.

Not five minutes later, Miss Minerva Halliday heard the maitre d' hurrying along the corridor, tapping on doors, whispering. As he passed her open door, he glanced at her.

"Could
it
be that you are—"

"No," she guessed, "not a doctor. But a registered nurse. Is it that old man in the dining car?"

"Yes, yes! Please, madam, this way!"

The ghastly man had been carried back to his own compartment.

Reaching it, Miss Minerva Halliday peered within.

And there the strange man lay, his eyes wilted shut, his mouth a bloodless wound, the only life in him the joggle of his head as the train swerved.

My God, she thought, he's
dead
!

Out loud she said, "I'll call if I need you."

The maitre d' went away.

Miss Minerva Halliday quietly shut the sliding door and turned to examine the dead man—for surely he was dead. And yet … 

But at last she dared to reach out and to touch the wrists in which so much ice water ran. She pulled back, as if her fingers had been burned by dry ice. Then she leaned forward to whisper into the pale man's face.

"Listen very carefully.
Yes
?"

For answer, she thought she heard the coldest throb of a single heartbeat.

She continued. "I do not know how I guess this. I know who you are, and what you are sick of—"

The train curved. His head lolled as if his neck had been broken.

"I'll tell you what you're dying from!" she whispered. "You suffer a disease—of
people
!"

His eyes popped wide, as if he had been shot through the heart. She said: "The people on this train are killing you.
They
are your affliction."

Something like a breath stirred behind the shut wound of the man's mouth.

"Yessss … sss."

Her grip tightened on his wrist, probing for some pulse:

"You are from some Middle European country, yes? Somewhere where the nights are long and when the wind blows, people
listen?
But now things have changed, and you have tried to escape by travel, but … "

Just then, a party of young, wine-filled tourists bustled along the outer corridor, firing off their laughter.

The ghastly passenger withered.

"How do … you … " he whispered, " … know … thisss?"

"I am a special nurse with a special memory. I saw, I met, someone like you when I was six—"

"Saw?" the pale man exhaled.

"In Ireland, near Kileshandra. My uncle's house, a hundred years old, full of rain and fog and there was walking on the roof late at night, and sounds in the hall as if the storm had come in, and then at last this shadow entered my room. It sat on my bed and the cold from his body made
me
cold. I remember and know it was no dream, for the shadow who came to sit on my bed and whisper … was much … like you."

Eyes shut, from the depths of his arctic soul, the old sick man mourned in response:

"And who … and
what … 
am I?"

"You are not sick. And you are not dying … You
are
—"

The whistle on the Orient Express wailed a long way off.

"—a ghost," she said.

"Yessss!" he cried.

It was a vast shout of need, recognition, assurance. He almost bolted upright.

"Yes!"

At which moment there arrived in the doorway a young priest, eager to perform. Eyes bright, lips moist, one hand clutching his crucifix, he stared at the collapsed figure of the ghastly passenger and cried, "May I—?"

"Last rites?" The ancient passenger opened one eye like the lid on a silver box. "From you? No." His eye shifted to the nurse. "
Her
!"

"Sir!" cried the young priest.

He stepped back, seized his crucifix as if it were a parachute ripcord, spun, and scurried off.

Leaving the old nurse to sit examining her now even more strange patient until at last he said:

"How," he gasped, "can
you
nurse me?"

"Why—" She gave a small self-deprecating laugh. "We
must
find a way."

With yet another wail, the Orient Express encountered more mileages of night, fog, mist, and cut through it with a shriek.

"You are going to Calais?" she said.

"And beyond, to Dover, London, and perhaps a castle outside Edinburgh, where I will be safe—"

"That's almost impossible—" She might as well have shot him through the heart. "No, no, wait, wait!" she cried. "Impossible … without
me
! I will travel with you to Calais and across to Dover."

"But you do not
know
me!"

"Oh, but I dreamed you as a child, long before I met someone like you, in the mists and rains of Ireland. At age nine I searched the moors for the Baskerville Hound."

"Yes," said the ghastly passenger. "You are English and the English
believe
!"

"True. Better than Americans, who
doubt.
French? Cynics! English is best. There is hardly an old London house that does not have its sad lady of mists crying before dawn."

At which moment, the compartment door, shaken by a long curve of track, sprang wide. An onslaught of poisonous talk, of delirious chatter, of what could only be irreligious laughter poured in from the corridor. The ghastly passenger wilted.

Springing to her feet, Minerva Halliday slammed the door and turned to look with the familiarity of a lifetime of sleep-tossed encounters at her traveling companion.

"You, now," she asked, "who exactly are
you
?"

The ghastly passenger, seeing in her face the face of a sad child he might have encountered long ago, now described his life:

"I have 'lived' in one place outside Vienna for two hundred years. To survive, assaulted by atheists as well as true believers, I have hid in libraries, in dust-filled stacks, there to dine on myths and moundyard tales. I have taken mid-night feasts of panic and terror from bolting horses, baying dogs, catapulting tomcats … crumbs shaken from tomb lids. As the years passed, my compatriots of the unseen world vanished one by one as castles tumbled or lords rented out their haunted gardens to women's clubs or bed-and-breakfast entrepreneurs. Evicted, we ghastly wanderers of the world have sunk in tar, bog, and fields of disbelief, doubt, scorn, or outright derision. With the populations and disbeliefs doubling by the day, all of my specter friends have fled. Where, I know not. I am the last, trying to train across Europe to some safe, rain-drenched castle keep where men are properly frightened by soots and smokes of wandering souls. England and Scotland for me!"

His voice faded into silence.

"And your name?" she said, at last.

"I
have
no name," he whispered. "A thousand fogs have visited my family plot. A thousand rains have drenched my tombstone. The chisel marks were erased by mist and water and sun. My name has vanished with the flowers and the grass and the marble dust." He opened his eyes.

"
Why
are you doing this?" he said. "
Helping
me?"

And at last she smiled, for she heard the right answer fall from her lips:

"I have never in my life had a
lark
."

"Lark!?"

"My life was that of a stuffed owl. I was not a nun, yet never married. Treating an invalid mother and a half-blind father, I gave myself to hospitals, tombstone beds, cries at night, and medicines that are not perfume to passing men. So, I am something of a ghost myself, yes? And now, tonight, sixty-six years on, I have at last found in you a
patient
! Magnificently different, fresh, absolutely
new.
Oh, Lord, what a challenge. I will pace you, to face people off the train, through the crowds in Paris, then the trip to the sea, off the train, onto the ferry! It will indeed be a—"

"Lark!" cried the ghastly passenger. Spasms of laughter shook him. "Larks? Yes,
that
is what we are!"

"But," she said, "in Paris, do they not
eat
larks even while they roast priests?"

He shut his eyes and whispered, "Paris? Ah, yes."

The train wailed. The night passed.

And they arrived in Paris.

And even as they arrived, a boy, no more than six, ran past and froze. He stared at the ghastly passenger and the ghastly passenger shot back a remembrance of Antarctic ice floes. The boy gave a cry and fled. The old nurse flung the door wide to peer out.

The boy was gibbering to his father at the far end of the corridor. The father charged along the corridor, crying:

"What goes on here? Who has frightened my—?"

The man stopped. Outside the door he now fixed his gaze on this bleak occupant on the slowing braking Orient Express. He braked his own tongue, "—my son."

The ghastly passenger looked at him quietly with fog-gray eyes.