From the Dust Returned (9 page)

"I—" The Frenchman drew back, sucking his teeth in disbelief. "Forgive me!" he gasped. "Regrets!"

And turned to shove at his son. "Troublemaker. Get!" Their door slammed.

"Paris!" echoed through the train.

"Hush and hurry!" advised Minerva Halliday as she bustled her ancient friend out onto a platform milling with bad tempers and misplaced luggage.

"I am
melting
!" cried the ghastly passenger.

"Not where
I'm
taking you!" She displayed a picnic hamper and flung him forth to the miracle of a single remaining taxicab. And they arrived under a stormy sky at the Pere Lachaise cemetery. The great gates were swinging shut. The nurse waved a handful of francs. The gate froze.

Inside, they wandered off-balance but at peace amongst ten thousand monuments. So much cold marble was there, and so many hidden souls, that the old nurse felt a sudden dizziness, a pain in one wrist, and a swift coldness on the left side of her face. She shook her head, refusing this. And they stumbled on among the stones.

"Where do we picnic?" he said.

"Anywhere," she said. "But carefully! For this is a
French
cemetery! Packed with disbelief.
Armies
of egotists who burned people for their faith one year only to be burned for
their
faith the next! Pick! Choose!" They walked. The ghastly passenger nodded. "This first stone. Beneath it:
nothing.
Death final, not a
whisper
of time. The
second
stone: a woman, a secret believer because she loved her husband and hoped to see him again in eternity … a murmur of spirit here, the turning of a heart.
Better.
Now this third gravestone: a writer of thrillers for a French magazine. But he
loved
his nights, his fogs, his castles.
This
stone is a proper temperature, like a good wine. Here we shall sit, dear lady, as you decant the champagne and we wait to catch our train."

She offered a glass. "
Can
you drink?"

"One can try." He took it. "One can only try."

The ghastly passenger almost "died" as they left Paris. A group of intellectuals, fresh from seminars about Sartre's "nausea," and hot-air-ballooning about Simone de Beauvoir, streamed through the corridors, leaving the air behind them boiled and empty.

The pale passenger became paler.

The second stop beyond Paris, another invasion! A group of Germans surged aboard, loud in their disbelief of ancestral spirits, doubtful of politics, some even carrying books titled
Was God Ever Home
?

The Orient ghost sank deeper in his X-ray-image bones.

"Oh, dear," cried Miss Minerva Halliday, and ran to her own compartment to plunge back and toss down a cascade of books.

"
Hamlet
!" she cried, "his father, yes?
A Christmas Carol.
Four ghosts!
Wuthering Heights.
Kathy returns, yes? To haunt the snows? Ah,
The Turn of the Screw,
and … 
Rebecca
! Then—my favorite!
The Monkey's Paw
! Which?"

But the Orient ghost said not a Marley word. His eyes were locked, his mouth sewn with icicles.

"Wait!" she cried.

And opened the first book … 

Where Hamlet stood on the castle wall and heard his ghost of a father moan, and so she said these words:

" 'Mark me … my hour is almost come … when I to sulphurous and tormenting flames … must render up myself..

And then she read:

" 'I am thy father's spirit, Doomed for a certain term to walk the night … ' "

And again:

" ' … if thou didst ever thy dear father love … O, God! … Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder' "

And yet again:

" ' … Murder most foul' "

And the train ran in the night as she spoke the last words of Hamlet's father's ghost:

" ' … Fare thee well at once … ' "

" ' … Adieu, adieu! Remember me.' "

And she repeated:

" ' … remember me!' "

And the Orient ghost quivered. She seized a further book:

" ' … Marley was dead, to begin with … ' "

As the Orient train thundered across a twilight bridge above an unseen stream.

Her hands flew like birds.

" 'I am the Ghost of Christmas Past!' "

Then:

" 'The Phantom Rickshaw glided from the mist and clop-clopped ofF into the fog—' "

And wasn't there the faintest echo of a horse's hooves behind, within the Orient ghost's mouth?

" 'The beating beating beating, under the floorboards, of the old man's Tell-tale Heart!' " she cried, softly.

And
there!
like the leap of a frog. The first pulse of the Orient ghost's heart in more than an hour.

The Germans down the corridor fired off a cannon of disbelief.

But
she
poured the medicine:

" 'The Hound bayed out on the Moor—' "

And the echo of that bay, that most forlorn cry, came from her traveling companion's soul, wailed from his throat.

As the night grew on and the moon arose and a Woman in White crossed a landscape, as the old nurse said and told, a bat that became a wolf that became a lizard scaled a wall on the ghastly passenger's brow.

And at last the train was silent with sleeping, and Miss Minerva Halliday let the last book drop with the thump of a body to the floor.

"
Requiescat in pace
?" whispered the Orient traveler, eyes shut.

"Yes." She smiled, nodding. "
Requiescat in pace
." And they slept.

And at last they reached the sea.

And there was mist, which became fog, which became scatters of rain, like a proper drench of tears from a seamless sky.

Which made the ghastly passenger open, ungum his mouth, and murmur thanks for the haunted sky and the shore visited by phantoms of tide as the train slid into the shed where the mobbed exchange would be made, a full train becoming a full boat.

The Orient ghost stood well back, the last figure on a now self-haunted train.

"Wait," he cried, softly, piteously. "That boat! There's no place on it to hide! And the
customs
!"

But the customs men took one look at the pale face snowed under the dark cap and ear muffs, and swiftly flagged the wintry soul onto the ferry.

To be surrounded by dumb voices, ignorant elbows, layers of people shoving as the boat shuddered and moved and the nurse saw her fragile icicle melt yet again.

It was a mob of children shrieking by that made her say: "Quickly!"

And she all but carried the wicker man in the wake of the boys and girls.

"No," cried the old passenger. "The noise!"

"It's special!" The nurse hustled him through a door. "A medicine! Here!"

The old man stared.

"Why," he murmured. "This is—a playroom."

She steered him into the midst of all the screams.

"Children! Storytelling time!"

They were about to run again when she added,
"Ghost
-story-telling time!"

She pointed casually to the ghastly passenger, whose pale moth fingers grasped the scarf about his
icy
throat.

"All fall
down
!" said the nurse.

The children plummeted with squeals all about the Orient traveler, like Indians around a teepee. They stared up along his body to where blizzards ran odd temperatures in his gaping mouth.

"You
do
believe in ghosts, yes?" she said.

"Oh,
yes
!" was the shout. "Yes!"

It was as if a ramrod had shot up his spine. The Orient traveler stiffened. The most brittle of tiny flinty sparks fired his eyes. Winter roses budded in his cheeks. And the more the children leaned, the taller he grew, and the warmer his complexion. With one icicle finger he pointed at their faces.

"I," he whispered, "I," a pause. "Shall tell you a fright-full tale. About a
real
ghost!"

"Oh,
yes
!" cried the children.

And he began to talk and as the fever of his tongue conjured fogs, lured mists, and invited rains, the children hugged and crowded close, a bed of charcoals on which he happily baked. And as he talked Nurse Halliday, backed off near the door, saw what he saw across the haunted sea, the ghost cliffs, the chalk cliffs, the safe cliffs of Dover and not so far beyond, waiting, the whispering towers, the murmuring castle deeps, where phantoms were as they had always been, with the still attics waiting. And staring, the old nurse felt her hand creep up her lapel toward her thermometer. She felt her own pulse. A brief darkness touched her eyes.

And then one child said: "Who
are
you?"

And gathering his gossamer shroud, the ghastly passenger whetted his imagination, and replied.

It was only the sound of the ferry landing whistle that cut short the long telling of midnight tales. And the parents poured in to seize their lost children, away from the Orient gentleman with the frozen eyes whose gently raving mouth shivered their marrows as he whispered and whispered until the ferry nudged the dock and the last boy was dragged, protesting, away, leaving the old man and his nurse alone in the children's playroom as the ferry stopped shuddering its delicious shudders, as if it had listened, heard, and deliriously enjoyed the long-before-dawn tales.

At the gangplank, the Orient traveler said, with a touch of briskness, "No. I'll need no help going down. Watch!"

And he strode down the plank. And even as the children had been tonic for his color, height, and vocal cords, so the closer he came to England, pacing, the firmer his stride, and when he actually touched the dock, a small happy burst of sound erupted from his thin lips and the nurse, behind him, stopped frowning, and let him run toward the train.

And seeing him dash like a child before her, she could only stand, riven with delight and something more than delight. And he ran and her heart ran with him and suddenly knew a stab of amazing pain, and a lid of darkness struck her and she swooned.

Hurrying, the ghastly passenger did not notice that the old nurse was not beside or behind him, so eagerly did he go.

At the train he gasped, "There!" safely grasping the compartment handle. Only then did he sense a loss, and turned.

Minerva Halliday was not there.

And yet, an instant later, she arrived, looking paler than before, but with an incredibly radiant smile. She wavered and almost fell. This time it was he who reached out.

"Dear lady," he said, "you have been so kind."

"But," she said, quietly, looking at him, waiting for him to truly see her, "I am not leaving."

"You … ?"

"I am going with you," she said.

"But your plans?"

"Have changed. Now, I have nowhere
else
to go."

She half turned to look over her shoulder.

At the dock, a swiftly gathering crowd peered down at someone lying on the planks. Voices murmured and cried out. The word "doctor" was called several times.

The ghastly passenger looked at Minerva Halliday.

Then he looked at the crowd and the object of the crowd's alarm lying on the dock: a medical thermometer lay broken under their feet. He looked back at Minerva Halliday, who still stared at the broken thermometer.

"Oh, my dear kind lady," he said, at last. "Come."

She looked into his face. "Larks?" she said.

He nodded. "Larks!"

And he helped her up into the train, which soon jolted and then dinned and whistled away along the tracks toward London and Edinburgh and moors and castles and dark nights and long years.

"I wonder who she was?" said the ghastly passenger, looking back at the crowd on the dock.

"Oh, Lord," said the old nurse. "I never really knew."

And the train was gone.

It took a full twenty seconds for the tracks to stop trembling.

"Don't tell me who I am. I don't want to know."

The words moved out into the silence of the great barn behind the incredibly huge House.

Nostrum Paracelsius Crook spoke them. He had been the first but three to arrive and now had threatened never to leave, which bent the backs and wrecked the souls of all who had gathered here the twilight of some days after the Homecoming.

Nostrum P. C, as he was known, had a crook in his back and a similar affliction halfway across his mouth. One eye, also, tended to be half shut or half open depending on how you stared at him, and the eye behind the lid was pure fire crystal and tended to stay crossed.

"Or, in other words … " Nostrum P. C. paused and then said:

"Don't tell me what I am
doing.
I don't want to know." There was a puzzled whisper amongst the members of the Family gathered in the lofty barn.

A third of their number had flown or scurried back across the sky or wolf-trotted along the riversides north and south and east and west, leaving at least sixty cousins, uncles, grandfathers, and strange visitors behind. Because—