Free From the Dust Returned by Ray Bradbury Page B

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.

Chapter Thirteen
Nostrum Paracelsius Crook
    "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—

    "Why do I say all this?" Nostrum P. C. went on. Yes, why? Five dozen or so strange faces leaned forward. "The wars in Europe have ravened the sky, shredded the clouds, poisoned the winds. Even the west-to-east oceanic currents of the heavens are redolent of sulfur and brimstone. The trees of China, they say, from their recent wars, are bereft of birds. The Orient wise are thus grounded where the trees lie empty. Now, the same threatens in Europe. Our shadow cousins not long ago made it to the Channel and across to England where they might survive. But that is mere guesswork. When the last castles of England decay and the people waken from what they call superstition, our cousins may well be in failing health and soon be melted down to sod."
    All gasped. There was a soft wail that stirred the Family.
    "Most of you," the ancient man went on, "may stay on. You are welcome here. There are bins and cupolas and outdwellings and peach trees aplenty, so settle in. It is however, an unhappy circumstance. Because of it I have said what I have said."
    "Don't tell me what I am doing," Timothy recited.
    "I don't want to know," whispered the five dozen Family members.
    "But now," said Nostrum P. C, "we must know. You must know. Over the centuries we have given no name, found no label, that signified self, which summed up the totality of … us. Let us begin."
    But before anyone could start there was a great silence at the front portal of the house, such a silence as might come from the repercussion of a thunderous knock never delivered. It was as if a vast mouth with wind-filled cheeks had exhaled upon the door and shivered it to announce all things half visible, there but not there.
    The ghastly passenger had arrived with all the answers.
    No one ever imagined or could figure how the ghastly passenger survived and made it across the world to October Country, upper Illinois. It was only guessed that perhaps somehow he prolonged himself in deserted abbeys and empty churches and lost graveyards of Scotland and England and finally sailed across in a ghost ship to land in Mystic Seaport, Connecticut, and somehow threaded his way among the forest, across the country, to finally arrive in upper Illinois.
    This happened on a night when there was little rain except for a small patch of clouds that moved across the landscape and finally battered the front porch of the great House. There was a shimmering and stammering of locks on the portal and when the doors swung wide, there stood at long last the first of a fine new batch of immigrant members of the Family: the ghastly passenger