“After all you’ve done to the Family?” said Mother.
“I did nothing!”
“When we had no room here, when we were full to the gables, you swore at us—”
“You have always hated me!”
“We feared you, perhaps. You have a history that is dreadful.”
“No reason to turn me away!”
“Much reason. Nevertheless, if there had been room—”
“Lies. Lies!”
“Cecy wouldn’t help you. The Family wouldn’t approve.”
“Damn the Family!”
“You have damned them. Some have disappeared in the past month since our refusal. You have been gossiping in town; it’s only a matter of time before they might come after us.”
“They might! I drink and talk. Unless you help, I might drink more. These damned bells! Cecy can stop them.”
“These bells,” said the lonely wraith of a woman. “When did they begin? How long have you heard them?”
“Long?” He paused and rolled his eyes back as if to see. “Since you locked me out. Since I went and—” He froze.
“Drank and talked too much and made the winds blow the wrong way around our roofs?”
“I did no such thing!”
“It’s in your face. You speak one thing and threaten another.”
“Hear this, then,” John the Terrible said. “Listen, dreamer.” He stared at Cecy. “If you don’t return by sunset, to shake my mind, clear my head …”
“You have a list of all our dearest souls, which you will revise and publish with your drunken tongue?”
“You said it, I didn’t.”
He stopped, eyes shut. The distant bell, the holy, holy bell was tolling again. It tolled, it tolled, it tolled.
He shouted over its sound. “You heard me!”
He reared to plunge out of the attic.
His heavy shoes pounded away, down the stairs. When the noises were gone, the pale woman turned to look, quietly, at the sleeper.
“Cecy,” she called softly. “Come home!”
There was only silence. Cecy lay, not moving, for as long as her mother waited.
John the Terrible, the Unjust, strode through the fresh open country and into the streets of town, searching for her in every child that licked an ice pop and in every small white dog that padded by on its way to some eagerly anticipated nowhere.
Uncle John stopped to wipe his face with his handkerchief. I’m afraid, he thought. Afraid.
He saw a code of birds strung dot-dash on the high telephone wires. Was she up there laughing at him with sharp bird eyes, shuffling feathers, singing?
Distantly, as on a sleepy Sunday morning, he heard the bells ringing in a valley in his head. He stood in blackness where pale faces drifted.