that special night, ignoring the empty rooms and dreamless beds, to arrive at the main hearth in the great parlor. Even as she turned thrice to sit, a fire exploded in the cavernous fireplace.
While upstairs, fires on a dozen hearths inflamed themselves as this queen of cats rested.
The smokes that churned up the chimneys that night recalled the sounds and spectral sights of the Nefertiti-Tut Express thundering the Egyptian sands, scattering mummy linens popped wide as library books, informing the winds as they went.
And that, of course, was only the first arrival.
CHAPTER 3
The High Attic
“And who came second, Grandmère, who came next?”
“The Sleeper Who Dreams, child.”
“What a fine name, Grandmère. Why did the Sleeper come here?”
“The High Attic called her across the world. The attic above our heads, the second most important high garret that funnels the winds and speaks its voice in the jet streams across the world. The dreamer had wandered those streams in storms, photographed by lightnings, anxious for a nest. And here she came and there she is now! Listen!”
A Thousand Times Great Grandmère slid her lapis lazuli gaze upward.
“Listen.”
And above, in a further layer of darkness, some semblance of dream stirred …
CHAPTER 4
The Sleeper and Her Dreams
Long before there was anyone to listen, there was the High Attic Place, where the weather came in through broken glass, from wandering clouds going nowhere, somewhere, anywhere, and made the attic talk to itself as it laid out a Japanese sand garden of dust across its planks.
What the breezes and winds whispered and murmured as they shook the poorly laid shingles no one could say except Cecy, who came soon after the cat to become the fairest and most special daughter of the Family as it settled in with her talent for touching other people’s ears, thence inward to their minds and still further their dreams; there she stretched herself out on the ancient Japanese garden sands and let the small dunes shift her as the wind played the rooftop. There she heard the languages of weather and far places and knew what went beyond this hill, or the sea on one hand and a farther sea on the other, including the age-old ice which blew from the north and the forever summer that breathed softly from the Gulf and the Amazon wilds.
So, lying asleep, Cecy inhaled the seasons and heard the rumorings of towns on the prairies over the mountains and if you asked her at meals she would tell you the violent or serene occupations of strangers ten thousand miles away. Her mouth was always full of gossips of people being born in Boston or dying in Monterey, heard during the night as her eyes were shut.
The Family often said if you stashed Cecy in a music box like those prickly brass cylinders and turned her, she would play the ships coming in or the ships in departure and, why not, all the geographies of this blue world, and then again, the universe.
She, in sum, was a goddess of wisdom, and the Family, knowing this, treated her like porcelain, let her sleep all hours, knowing that when she woke, her mouth would echo twelve tongues and twenty sets of mind, philosophies enough to crack Plato at noon or Aristotle at midnight.
And the High Attic waited now, with its Arabian seashores of dust, and its Japanese pure white sands, and the shingles shifted and whispered, remembering a future just hours ahead, when the nightmare delights came home.
So the High Attic whispered.
And, listening, Cecy quickened.
Before the tumult of wings, the collision of fogs and mists and souls like ribboned smokes, she saw her own soul and hungers.
Make haste, she thought. Oh, quickly now! Run forth. Fly fast. For what?
“I want to be in love!”
CHAPTER 5
The Wandering Witch
Into the air, over the valleys, under the stars, above a river, a pond, a road, flew Cecy. Invisible as autumn winds, fresh as the breath of clover rising from twilight fields, she flew. She soared in doves as soft as white ermine, stopped in trees and lived in leaves, showering away in fiery hues when the breeze blew. She perched in a lime-green frog, cool as mint by a shining pool. She trotted in a brambly dog and barked to hear echoes from the sides of distant barns. She lived in dandelion ghosts or sweet clear liquids rising from the musky earth.
Farewell summer, thought Cecy. I’ll be in every living thing in the world tonight.
Now she inhabited neat crickets on the tar-pool roads, now prickled in dew on an iron gate.
“Love,” she said. “Where is my love!?”
She had said it at supper. And her parents had stiffened back in their chairs. “Patience,” they advised. “Remember, you’re remarkable. Our whole Family is odd and remarkable. We must not marry with ordinary folk. We’d lose our dark souls if we did. You wouldn’t want to lose your ability to ‘travel’ by wish and desire, would you? Then be careful. Careful!”
But in her high attic room, Cecy had touched perfume to her throat and stretched out, trembling and apprehensive, on her four-poster, as a moon the color of milk rose over Illinois country, turning rivers to cream and roads to platinum.
“Yes,” she sighed. “I’m one of an odd family that flies nights like black kites. I can live in anything at all—a pebble, a crocus, or a praying mantis. Now!”
The wind whipped her away over fields and meadows.
She saw the warm lights of cottages and farms glowing with twilight colors.
If I can’t be in love, myself, she thought, because I’m odd, then I’ll be in love through someone else!
Outside a farmhouse in the fresh night a dark-haired girl, no more than nineteen, drew up water from a deep stone well, singing.
Cecy fell—a dry leaf—into the well. She lay in the tender moss of the well, gazing up through dark coolness. Now she quickened in a fluttering, invisible amoeba. Now in a water droplet! At last, within a cold cup, she felt herself lifted to the girl’s warm lips. There was a soft night sound of drinking.
Cecy looked out from the girl’s eyes.
She entered into the dark head and gazed from the shining eyes at the hands pulling the rough rope. She listened through the shell ears to this girl’s world. She smelled a particular universe through these delicate nostrils, felt this special heart beating, beating. Felt this strange tongue move with singing.
The girl gasped. She stared into the night meadows.
“Who’s there?”
No
