The Stories of Ray Bradbury (99 page)

‘Nefertiti,’ it said.

Timothy froze. I froze. Agatha stopped treading water.

‘Nefertiti?’ asked Tim.

‘What does that mean?’ demanded Agatha.

‘I know.’

The salesman nodded me to tell.

‘Nefertiti,’ I whispered, ‘is Egyptian for The Beautiful One Is Here.’

‘The Beautiful One Is Here,’ repeated Timothy.

‘Nefer,’ said Agatha, ‘titi.’

And we all turned to stare into that soft twilight, that deep far place from which the good warm soft voice came.

And she was indeed there.

And, by her voice, she was beautiful…

That was it.

That was, at least, the most of it.

The voice seemed more important than all the rest.

Not that we didn’t argue about weights and measures:

She should not be bony to cut us to the quick, nor so fat we might sink out of sight when she squeezed us.

Her hand pressed to ours, or brushing our brow in the middle of sickfever nights, must not be marble-cold, dreadful, or oven-hot, oppressive, but somewhere between. The nice temperature of a baby chick held in the hand after a long night’s sleep and just plucked from beneath a contemplative hen; that, that was it.

Oh, we were great ones for detail. We fought and argued and cried, and Timothy won on the color of her eyes, for reasons to be known later.

Grandmother’s hair? Agatha, with girls’ ideas, though reluctantly given, she was in charge of that. We let her choose from a thousand harp strands hung in filamentary tapestries like varieties of rain we ran amongst. Agatha did not run happily, but seeing we boys would mess things in tangles, she told us to move aside.

And so the bargain shopping through the dime-store inventories and the Tiffany extensions of the Ben Franklin Electric Storm Machine and Fantoccini Pantomime Company was done.

And the always flowing river ran its tide to an end and deposited us all on a far shore in the late day…

It was very clever of the Fantoccini people, after that.

How?

They made us wait.

They knew we were not won over. Not completely, no, nor half completely.

Especially Agatha, who turned her face to her wall and saw sorrow there and put her hand out again and again to touch it. We found her fingernail marks on the wallpaper each morning, in strange little silhouettes, half beauty, half nightmare. Some could be erased with a breath, like ice flowers on a winter pane. Some could not be rubbed out with a washcloth, no matter how hard you tried.

And meanwhile, they made us wait.

So we fretted out June.

So we sat around July.

So we groused through August and then on August 29, ‘I have this feeling,’ said Timothy, and we all went out after breakfast to sit on the lawn.

Perhaps we had smelled something in Father’s conversation the previous night, or caught some special furtive glance at the sky or the freeway trapped briefly and then lost in his gaze. Or perhaps it was merely the way the wind blew the ghost curtains out over our beds, making pale messages all night.

For suddenly there we were in the middle of the grass. Timothy and I, with Agatha, pretending no curiosity, up on the porch, hidden behind the potted geraniums.

We gave her no notice. We knew that if we acknowledged her presence, she would flee, so we sat and watched the sky where nothing moved but birds and highflown jets, and watched the freeway where a thousand cars might suddenly deliver forth our Special Gift…but…nothing.

At noon we chewed grass and lay low…

At one o’clock, Timothy blinked his eyes.

And then, with incredible precision, it happened.

It was as if the Fantoccini people knew our surface tension.

All children are water-striders. We skate along the top skin of the pond each day, always threatening to break through, sink, vanish beyond recall, into ourselves.

Well, as if knowing our long wait must absolutely end within one minute! this
second
! no more, God, forget it!

At that instant, I repeat, the clouds above our house opened wide and let forth a helicopter like Apollo driving his chariot across mythological skies.

And the Apollo machine swam down on its own summer breeze, wafting hot winds to cool, reweaving our hair, smartening our eyebrows, applauding our pant legs against our shins, making a flag of Agath’s hair on the porch, and, thus settled like a vast frenzied hibiscus on our lawn, the helicopter slid wide a bottom drawer and deposited upon the grass a parcel of largish size, no sooner having laid same than the vehicle, with not so much as a God bless or farewell, sank straight up, disturbed the calm air with a mad ten thousand flourishes and then, like a skyborne dervish, tilted and fell off to be mad some other place.

Timothy and I stood riven for a long moment looking at the packing case, and then we saw the crowbar taped to the top of the raw pine lid and seized it and began to pry and creak and squeal the boards off, one by one, and as we did this I saw Agatha sneak up to watch and I thought. Thank you, God, thank you that Agatha never saw a coffin, when Mother went away, no box, no cemetery, no earth, just words in a big church, no box, no box like
this…
!

The last pine plank fell away.

Timothy and I gasped. Agatha, between us now, gasped, too.

For inside the immense raw pine package was the most beautiful idea anyone ever dreamt and built.

Inside was the perfect gift for any child from seven to seventy-seven.

We stopped up our breaths. We let them out in cries of delight and adoration.

Inside the opened box was…

A mummy.

Or, first anyway, a mummy case, a sarcophagus!

‘Oh, no!’ Happy tears filled Timothy’s eyes.

‘It can’t be!’ said Agatha.

‘It is, it is!’

‘Our very own?’

‘Ours!’

‘It must be a mistake!’

‘Sure, they’ll want it back!’

‘They can’t
have
it!’

‘Lord. Lord, is that real gold!? Real hieroglyphs! Run your fingers over them!’

‘Let
me
!’

‘Just like in the museums! Museums!’

We all gabbled at once. I think some tears fell from my own eyes to rain upon the case.

‘Oh, they’ll make the colors run!’

Agatha wiped the rain away.

And the golden mask-face of the woman carved on the sarcophagus lid looked back at us with just the merest smile which hinted at our own joy, which accepted the overwhelming upsurge of a love we thought had drowned forever but now surfaced into the sun.

Not only did she have a sun-metal face stamped and beaten out of purest gold, with delicate nostrils and a mouth that was both firm and gentle, but her eyes, fixed into their sockets, were cerulean or amethystine or lapus lazuli, or all three, minted and fused together, and her body was covered over with lions and eyes and ravens, and her hands were crossed upon her carved bosom and in one gold mitten she clenched a thonged whip for obedience, and in the other a fantastic ranunculus, which makes for obedience out of love, so the whip lies unused…

And as our eyes ran down her hieroglyphs it came to all three of us at the same instant:

‘Why, those signs!’ ‘Yes, the hen tracks!’ ‘The birds, the snakes!’

They didn’t speak tales of the Past.

They were hieroglyphs of the Future.

This was the first queen mummy delivered forth in all time whose papyrus inkings etched out the next month, the next season, the next year, the next
lifetime
!

She did not mourn for time spent.

No. She celebrated the bright coinage yet to come, banked, waiting, ready to be drawn upon and used.

We sank to our knees to worship that possible time.

First one hand, then another, probed out to niggle, twitch, touch, itch over the signs.

‘There’s me, yes, look! Me, in sixth grade!’ said Agatha, now in the fifth. ‘See the girl with my-colored hair and wearing my gingerbread suit?’

‘There’s me in the twelfth year of high school!’ said Timothy, so very young now but building taller stilts every week and stalking around the yard.

‘There’s me,’ I said, quietly, warm, ‘in college. The guy wearing glasses who runs a little to fat. Sure, Heck.’ I snorted. ‘That’s me.’

The sarcophagus spelled winters ahead, springs to squander, autumns to spend with all the golden and rusty and copper leaves like coins, and over all, her bright sun symbol, daughter-of-Ra eternal face, forever above our horizon, forever an illumination to tilt our shadows to better ends.

‘Hey!’ we all said at once, having read and reread our Fortune-Told
scribblings, seeing our lifelines and lovelines, inadmissible, serpentined over, around, and down. ‘Hey!’

And in one séance table-lifting feat, not telling each other what to do, just doing it, we pried up the bright sarcophagus lid, which had no hinges but lifted out like cup from cup, and put the lid aside.

And within the sarcophagus, of course, was the true mummy!

And she was like the image carved on the lid, but more so, more beautiful, more touching because human-shaped, and shrouded all in new fresh bandages of linen, round and round, instead of old and dusty cerements.

And upon her hidden face was an identical golden mask, younger than the first, but somehow, strangely wiser than the first.

And the linens that tethered her limbs had symbols on them of three sorts, one a girl of ten, one a boy of nine, one a boy of thirteen.

A series of bandages for each of us!

We gave each other a startled glance and a sudden bark of laughter.

Nobody said the bad joke, but all thought:

She’s all wrapped up in us!

And we didn’t care. We loved the joke. We loved whoever had thought to make us part of the ceremony we now went through as each of us seized and began to unwind each of his or her particular serpentines of delicious stuffs!

The lawn was soon a mountain of linen.

The woman beneath the covering lay there, waiting.

‘Oh, no,’ cried Agatha. ‘She’s dead, too!’

She ran. I stopped her. ‘Idiot. She’s not dead
or
alive. Where’s your key?’

‘Key?’

‘Dummy,’ said Tim, ‘the key the man gave you to wind her up!’

Her hand had already spidered along her blouse to where the symbol of some possible new religion hung. She had strung it there, against her own skeptic’s muttering, and now she held it in her sweaty palm.

‘Go on,’ said Timothy. ‘Put it in!’

‘But
where
?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake! As the man said, in her right armpit or left ear. Gimme!’

And he grabbed the key and, impulsively moaning with impatience and not able to find the proper insertion slot, prowled over the prone figure’s head and bosom and at last, on pure instinct, perhaps for a lark, perhaps just giving up the whole damned mess, thrust the key through a final shroud of bandage at the navel.

On the instant:
spunnng!

The Electrical Grandmother’s eyes flicked wide!

Something began to hum and whir. It was as if Tim had stirred up a hive of hornets with an ornery stick.

‘Oh,’ gasped Agatha, seeing he had taken the game away, ‘let
me
!’

She wrenched the key.

Grandma’s nostrils
flared
! She might snort up steam, snuff out fire!

‘Me!’ I cried, and grabbed the key and gave it a huge…
twist
!

The beautiful woman’s mouth popped wide.

‘Me!’

‘Me!’

‘Me!’

Grandma suddenly sat up.

We leapt back.

We knew we had, in a way, slapped her alive.

She was born, she was
born
!

Her head swiveled all about. She gaped. She mouthed. And the first thing she said was:

Laughter.

Where one moment we had backed off, now the mad sound drew us near to peer, as in a pit where crazy folk are kept with snakes to make them well.

It was a good laugh, full and rich and hearty, and it did not mock, it accepted. It said the world was a wild place, strange, unbelievable, absurd if you wished, but all in all, quite a place. She would not dream to find another. She would not ask to go back to sleep.

She was awake now. We had awakened her. With a glad shout, she would go with it all.

And go she did, out of her sarcophagus, out of her winding sheet, stepping forth, brushing off, looking around as for a mirror. She found it.

The reflections in our eyes.

She was more pleased than disconcerted with what she found there. Her laughter faded to an amused smile.

For Agatha, at the instant of birth, had leapt to hide on the porch.

The Electrical Person pretended not to notice.

She turned slowly on the green lawn near the shady street, gazing all about with new eyes, her nostrils moving as if she breathed the actual air and this the first morn of the lovely Garden and she with no intention of spoiling the game by biting the apple…

Her gaze fixed upon my brother.

‘You must be—?’

‘Timothy. Tim,’ he offered.

‘And you must be—?’

‘Tom,’ I said.

How clever again of the Fantoccini Company.
They
knew.
She
knew. But they had taught her to pretend not to know. That way we could feel great, we were the teachers, telling her what she already knew! How sly, how wise.

‘And isn’t there another boy?’ said the woman.

‘Girl!’ a disgusted voice cried from somewhere on the porch.

‘Whose name is Alicia—?’

‘Agatha!’ The far voice, started in humiliation, ended in proper anger.

‘Algernon, of course.’

‘Agatha!’ Our sister popped up, popped back to hide a flushed face.

‘Agatha.’ The woman touched the word with proper affection. ‘Well, Agatha, Timothy, Thomas, let me
look
at you.’

‘No,’ said I, said Tim. ‘Let us look at
you
. Hey…’

Our voices slid back in our throats.

We drew near her.

We walked in great slow circles round about, skirting the edges of her territory. And her territory extended as far as we could hear the hum of the warm summer hive. For that is exactly what she sounded like. That was her characteristic tune. She made a sound like a season all to herself, a morning early in June when the world wakes to find everything absolutely perfect, fine, delicately attuned, all in balance, nothing disproportioned. Even before you opened your eyes you knew it would be one of those days. Tell the sky what color it must be, and it was indeed. Tell the sun how to crochet its way, pick and choose among leaves to lay out carpetings of bright and dark on the fresh lawn, and pick and lay it did. The bees have been up earliest of all, they have already come and gone, and come and gone again to the meadow fields and returned all golden fuzz on the air, all pollen-decorated, epaulettes at the full, nectar-dripping. Don’t you hear them pass? hover? dance their language? telling where all the sweet gums are, the syrups that make bears frolic and lumber in bulked ecstasies, that make boys squirm with unpronounced juices, that make girls leap out of beds to catch from the corners of their eyes their dolphin selves naked aflash on the warm air poised forever in one eternal glass wave.