He nipped Laura, gently, over the neck vein. The candle flames swayed drunkenly. The wind climbed around on the roof outside. The relatives stared from all the doors. He popped toadstools into his mouth, swallowed, then beat his arms against his flanks and circled. ‘Look, Uncle Einar! I can fly, at last!’ Beat went his hands. Up and down pumped his feet. The faces flashed past him.
At the top of the stairs, flapping, he heard his mother cry, ‘Stop, Timothy!’ far below. ‘Hey!’ shouted Timothy, and leaped off the top of the well, thrashing.
Halfway down, the wings he thought he owned dissolved. He screamed. Uncle Einar caught him.
Timothy flailed whitely in the receiving arms. A voice burst out of his lips, unbidden. ‘This is Cecy! This is Cecy! Come see me, all of you, upstairs, first room on the left!’ Followed by a long trill of high laughter. Timothy tried to cut it off with his tongue.
Everybody was laughing. Einar set him down. Running through the crowding blackness as the relatives flowed upstairs toward Cecy’s room to congratulate her, Timothy banged the front door open.
‘Cecy. I hate you. I hate you!’
By the sycamore tree, in deep shadow, Timothy spewed out his dinner, sobbed bitterly and thrashed in a pile of autumn leaves. Then he lay still. From his blouse pocket, from the protection of the matchbox he used for his retreat, the spider crawled forth. Spid walked along Timothy’s arm. Spid explored up his neck to his ear and climbed in the ear to tickle it. Timothy shook his head. ‘Don’t, Spid. Don’t.’
The feathery touch of a tentative feeler probing his eardrum set Timothy shivering. ‘Don’t, Spid!’ He sobbed somewhat less.
The spider traveled down his cheek, took a station under the boy’s nose, looked up into the nostrils as if to seek the brain, and then clambered softly up over the rim of the nose to sit, to squat there peering at Timothy with green-gem eyes until Timothy filled with ridiculous laughter. ‘Go away, Spid!’
Timothy sat up, rustling the leaves. The land was very bright with the moon. In the house he could hear the faint ribaldry as Mirror, Mirror was played. Celebrants shouted, dimly muffled, as they tried to identify those of themselves whose reflections did not, had not ever, appeared in a glass.
‘Timothy.’ Uncle Einar’s wings spread and twitched and came in with a sound like kettledrums. Timothy felt himself plucked up like a thimble and set upon Einar’s shoulder. ‘Don’t feel badly, Nephew Timothy. Each to his own, each in his own way. How much better things are for you. How rich. The world’s dead for us. We’ve seen so much of it, believe me. Life’s best to those who live the least of it. It’s worth more per ounce, Timothy, remember that.’
The rest of the black morning, from midnight on, Uncle Einar led him about the house, from room to room, weaving and singing. A horde of late arrivals set the entire hilarity off afresh. Great-great-great-great and a thousand more great-greats Grandmother was there, wrapped in Egyptian cerements. She said not a word, but lay straight as a burnt ironing board against the wall, her eye hollows cupping a distant, wise, silent glimmering. At the breakfast, at four in the morning, one-thousand-odd-greats Grandmama was stiffly seated at the head of the longest table.
The numerous young cousins caroused at the crystal punch bowl. Their shiny olive-pit eyes, their conical, devilish faces and curly bronze hair hovered over the drinking table, their hard-soft, half-girl half-boy bodies wrestling against each other as they got unpleasantly, sullenly drunk. The wind got higher, the stars burned with fiery intensity, the noises redoubled, the dances quickened, the drinking became more positive. To Timothy there were thousands of things to hear and watch. The many darknesses roiled, bubbled, the many faces passed and repassed …
‘Listen!’
The party held its breath. Far away the town clock struck its chimes, saying six o’clock. The party was ending. In time to the rhythm of the striking clock, their one hundred voices began to sing songs that were four hundred years old, songs Timothy could not know. Arms twined, circling slowly, they sang, and somewhere in the cold distance of morning the town clock finished out its chimes and quieted.
Timothy sang. He knew no words, no tune, yet the words and tune came round and high and good. And he gazed at the closed door at the top of the stairs.
‘Thanks, Cecy,’ he whispered. ‘You’re forgiven. Thanks.’
Then he just relaxed and let the words move, with Cecy’s voice, free from his lips.
Good-bys were said, there was a great rustling. Mother and Father stood at the door to shake hands and kiss each departing relative in turn. The sky beyond the open door colored in the east. A cold wind entered. And Timothy felt himself seized and settled in one body after another, felt Cecy press him into Uncle Fry’s head so he stared from the wrinkled leather face, then leaped in a flurry of leaves up over the house and awakening hills …
Then, loping down a dirt path, he felt his red eyes burning, his fur pelt rimed with morning, as inside Cousin William he panted through a hollow and dissolved away …
Like a pebble in Uncle Einar’s mouth, Timothy flew in a webbed thunder, filling the sky. And then he was back, for all time, in his own body.
In the growing dawn, the last few were embracing and crying and thinking how the world was becoming less a place for them. There had been a time when they had met every year, but now decades passed with no reconciliation. ‘Don’t forget,’ someone cried, ‘we meet in Salem in 1970!’
Salem. Timothy’s numbed mind turned the words over. Salem, 1970. And there would be Uncle Fry and a thousand-times-great Grandmother in her withered cerements, and Mother and Father and Ellen and Laura and Cecy and all the rest. But would he be there? Could he be certain of staying alive until then?
With one last withering blast, away they all went, so many scarves, so many fluttery mammals, so many sere leaves, so many whining and clustering noises, so many midnights and insanities and dreams.
Mother shut the door. Laura picked up a broom. ‘No,’ said Mother. ‘We’ll clean tonight. Now we need sleep.’ And the family vanished down cellar and upstairs. And Timothy moved in the crape-littered hall, his head down. Passing a party mirror, he saw the pale mortality of his face all cold and trembling.
‘Timothy,’ said Mother.
She came to touch her hand on his face. ‘Son,’ she said, ‘we love you. Remember that. We all love you. No matter how different you are, no matter if you leave us one day.’ She kissed his cheek. ‘And if and when you die, your bones will lie undisturbed, we’ll see to that. You’ll lie at ease forever, and I’ll come visit every Allhallows Eve and tuck you in the more secure.’
The house was silent. Far away the wind went over a hill with its last cargo of dark bats, echoing, chittering.
Timothy walked up the steps, one by one, crying to himself all the way.
‘It will take only a minute,’ said Uncle Einar’s sweet wife.
‘I refuse,’ he said. ‘And that takes but a second.’
‘I’ve worked all morning,’ she said, holding to her slender back, ‘and you won’t help? It’s drumming for a rain.’
‘Let it rain,’ he cried, morosely. ‘I’ll not be pierced by lightning just to air your clothes.’
‘But you’re so quick at it.’
‘Again, I refuse.’ His vast tarpaulin wings hummed nervously behind his indignant back.
She