Something Wicked This Way Comes

Chapter 1

The seller of lightning-rods arrived just ahead of the storm. He came along the street of Green Town, Illinois, in the late cloudy October day, sneaking glances over his shoulder. Somewhere not so far back, vast lightnings stomped the earth. Somewhere, a storm like a great beast with terrible teeth could not be denied.

So the salesman jangled and clanged his huge leather kit in which oversized puzzles of ironmongery lay unseen but which his tongue conjured from door to door until he came at last to a lawn which was cut all wrong.

No, not the grass. The salesman lifted his gaze. But two boys, far up the gentle slope, lying on the grass. Of a like size and general shape, the boys sat carving twig whistles, talking of olden or future times, content with having left their fingerprints on every movable object in Green Town during summer past and their footprints on every open path between here and the lake and there and the river since school began.

“Howdy, boys!” called the man all dressed in storm-colored clothes. “Folks home?”

The boys shook their heads.

“Got any money, yourselves?”

The boys shook their heads.

“Well—” The salesman walked about three feet, stopped and hunched his shoulders. Suddenly he seemed aware of house windows or the cold sky staring at his neck. He turned slowly, sniffing the air. Wind rattled the empty trees. Sunlight, breaking through a small rift in the clouds, minted a last few oak leaves all gold. But the sun vanished, the coins were spent, the air blew grey; the salesman shook himself from the spell.

The salesman edged slowly up the lawn.

“Boy,” he said. “What’s your name?”

And the first boy, with hair as blond-white as milk thistle, shut up one eye, tilted his head, and looked at the salesman with a single eye as open, bright and clear as a drop of summer rain.

“Will,” he said. “William Halloway.”

The storm gentleman turned. “And you?”

The second boy did not move, but lay stomach down on the autumn grass, debating as if he might make up a name. His hair was wild, thick, and the glossy color of waxed chestnuts. His eyes, fixed to some distant point within himself, were mint rock-crystal green. At last he put a blade of dry grass in his casual mouth.

“Jim Nightshade,” he said.

The storm salesman nodded as if he had known it all along.

“Nightshade. That’s quite a name.”

“And only fitting,” said Will Halloway. “I was born one minute before midnight, October thirtieth, Jim was born one minute after midnight, which makes it October thirty-first.”

“Hallowe’en,” said Jim.

By their voices, the boys had told the tale all their lives, proud of their mothers, living house next to house, running for the hospital together, bringing sons into the world seconds apart; one light, one dark. There was a history of mutual celebration behind them. Each year Will lit the candles on a single cake at one minute to midnight. Jim, at one minute after, with the last day of the month begun, blew them out.

So much Will said, excitedly. So much Jim agreed to, silently. So much the salesman, running before the storm, but poised here uncertainly, heard looking from face to face.

“Halloway. Nightshade. No money, you say?”

The man, grieved by his own conscientiousness, rummaged in his leather bag and seized forth an iron contraption.

“Take this, free! Why? One of those houses will be struck by lightning! Without this rod, bang! Fire and ash, roast pork and cinders! Grab!”

The salesman released the rod. Jim did not move. But Will caught the iron and gasped.

“Boy, it’s heavy! And funny-looking. Never seen a lightning-rod like this. Look, Jim!”

And Jim, at last, stretched like a cat, and turned his head. His green eyes got big and then very narrow.

The metal thing was hammered and shaped half-crescent, half-cross. Around the rim of the main rod little curlicues and doohingies had been soldered on, later. The entire surface of the rod was finely scratched and etched with strange languages, names that could tie the tongue or break the jaw, numerals that added to incomprehensible sums, pictographs of insect-animals all bristle, chaff, and claw.

“That’s Egyptian.” Jim pointed his nose at a bug soldered to the iron. “Scarab beetle.”

“So it is, boy!”

Jim squinted. “And those there—Phoenician hen tracks.”

“Right!”

“Why?” asked Jim.

“Why?” said the man. “Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder go when it dies? Boys, you got to be ready in every dialect with every shape and form to hex the St. Elmo’s fires, the balls of blue light that prowl the earth like sizzling cats. I got the only lightning-rods in the world that hear, feel, know, and sass back any storm, no matter what tongue, voice, or sign. No foreign thunder so loud this rod can’t soft-talk it!”

But Will was staring beyond the man now.

“Which,” he said. “Which house will it strike?”

“Which? Hold on. Wait.” The salesman searched deep in their faces. “Some folks draw lightning, suck it like cats suck babies’ breath. Some folks’ polarities are negative, some positive. Some glow in the dark. Some snuff out. You now, the two… I—”

“What makes you so sure lightning will strike anywhere around here?” said Jim suddenly, his eyes bright.

The salesman almost flinched. “Why, I got a nose, an eye, an ear. Both those houses, their timbers! Listen!”

They listened. Maybe their houses leaned under the cool afternoon wind. Maybe not.

“Lightning needs channels, like rivers, to run in. One of those attics is a dry river bottom, itching to let lightning pour through! Tonight!”

“Tonight?” Jim sat up happily.

“No ordinary storm!” said the salesman. “Tom Fury tells you. Fury, ain’t that a fine name for one who sells lightning-rods? Did I take the name? No! Did the name fire me to my occupations? Yes! Grown up, I saw cloudy fires jumping the world, making men hop and hide. Thought: I’ll chart hurricanes, map storms, then run ahead shaking my iron cudgels, my miraculous defenders, in my fists! I’ve shielded and made snug-safe one hundred thousand, count ’em, God-fearing homes. So when I tell you, boys, you’re in dire need, listen! Climb that roof, nail this rod high, ground it in the good earth before nightfall!”

“But which house, which!” asked Will.

The salesman reared off, blew his nose in a great kerchief, then walked slowly across the lawn as if approaching a huge time-bomb that ticked silently there.

He touched Will’s front porch newels, ran his hand over a post, a floorboard, then shut his eyes and leaned against the house to let its bones speak to him.

Then, hesitant, he made his cautious way to Jim’s house next door.

Jim stood up to watch.

The salesman put his hand out to touch, to stroke, to quiver his fingertips on the old paint.

“This,” he said at last, “is the one.”

Jim looked proud.

Without looking back, the salesman said, “Jim Nightshade, this your place?”

“Mine,” said Jim.

“I should’ve known,” said the man.

“Hey, what about me?” said Will.

The salesman snuffed again at Will’s house. “No, no. Oh, a few sparks’ll jump on your rainspouts. But the real show’s next door here, at the Nightshades’! Well!”

The salesman hurried back across the lawn to seize his huge leather bag.

“I’m on my way. Storm’s coming. Don’t wait, Jim boy. Otherwise—bamm! You’ll be found, your nickels, dimes and Indian-heads fused by electroplating. Abe Lincolns melted into Miss Columbias, eagles plucked raw on the backs of quarters, all run to quicksilver in your jeans. More! Any boy hit by lightning, lift his lid and there on his eyeball, pretty as the Lord’s prayer on a pin, find the last scene the boy ever saw! A box-Brownie photo, by God, of that fire climbing down the sky to blow you like a penny whistle, suck your soul back up along the bright stair! Git, boy! Hammer it high or you’re dead come dawn!”

And jangling his case full of iron rods, the salesman wheeled about and charged down the walk blinking wildly at the sky, the roof, the trees, at last closing his eyes, moving, sniffing, muttering. “Yes, bad, here it comes, feel it, way off now, but running fast…”

And the man in the storm-dark clothes was gone, his cloud-colored hat pulled down over his eyes, and the trees rustled and the sky seemed very old suddenly and Jim and Will stood testing the wind to see if they could smell electricity, the lightning-rod fallen between them.

“Jim,” said Will. “Don’t stand there. Your house, he said. You going to nail up the rod or ain’t you?”

“No,” smiled Jim. “Why spoil the fun?”

“Fun! You crazy? I’ll get the ladder! You the hammer, some nails and wire!”

But Jim did not move. Will broke and ran. He came back with the ladder.

“Jim. Think of your mom. You want her burnt?”

Will climbed the side of the house, alone, and looked down.

Slowly, Jim moved to the ladder below and started up.

Thunder sounded far off in the cloud-shadowed hills.

The air smelled fresh and raw on top of Jim Nightshade’s roof.

Even Jim admitted that.

Chapter 2

There’s nothing in the living world like books on water-cures, deaths-of-a-thousand-slices, or pouring white-hot lava off castle walls on drolls and mountebanks.

So said Jim Nightshade, that’s all he read. If it wasn’t how to burgle the First National, it was how to build catapults, or shape black bumbershoots into lurking bat costumes for Cabbage Night.

Jim breathed it out all fine.

And Will, he breathed it in.

With the lightning-rod nailed to Jim’s roof, Will proud, and Jim ashamed of what he considered mutual cowardice, it was late in the day. Supper over, it was time for their weekly jog to the library.

Like all boys, they never walked anywhere, but named a goal and lit for it, scissors and elbows. Nobody won. Nobody wanted to win. It was in their friendship they just wanted to run forever, shadow and shadow. Their hands slapped library-door handles together, their chests broke track tapes together, their tennis shoes beat parallel pony tracks over lawns, trimmed bushes, squirrelled trees, no one losing, both winning, thus saving their friendship for other times of loss.

So it was on this night that blew warm, then cool, as they let the wind take them downtown at eight o’clock. They felt the wings on their fingers and elbows flying, then, suddenly plunged in new sweeps of air, the clear autumn river flung them headlong where they must go.

Up step, three, six, nine, twelve! Slap! Their palms hit the library door.

Jim and Will grinned at each other. It was all so good, these blowing quiet October nights and the library waiting inside now with its green-shaded lamps and papyrus dust.

Jim listened. “What’s that?”

“What, the wind?”

“Like music…” Jim squinted at the horizon.

“Don’t hear no music.”

Jim shook his head. “Gone. Or it wasn’t even there. Come on!”

They opened the door and stepped in.

They stopped.

The library deeps lay waiting for them.

Out in the world, not much happened. But here in the special night, a land bricked with paper and leather, anything might happen, always did. Listen! and you heard ten thousand people screaming so high only dogs feathered their ears. A million folk ran toting cannons, sharpening guillotines; Chinese, four abreast, marched on forever. Invisible, silent, yes, but Jim and Will had the gift of ears and noses as well as the gift of tongues. This was a factory of spices from far countries. Here alien deserts slumbered. Up front was the desk where the nice old lady, Miss Watriss, purple-stamped your books, but down off away were Tibet and Antarctica, the Congo. There went Miss Wills, the other librarian, through Outer Mongolia, calmly toting fragments of Peiping and Yokohama and the Celebes. Way down the third book corridor, an oldish man whispered his broom along in the dark, mounding the fallen…

Will stared.

It was always a surprise—that old man, his work, his name.

That’s Charles William Halloway, thought Will, not grand-father, not far-wandering, ancient uncle, as some might think, but… my father.

So, looking back down the corridor, was Dad shocked to see he owned a son who visited this separate 20,000-fathoms-deep world? Dad always seemed stunned when Will rose up before him, as if they had met a lifetime ago and one had grown old while the other stayed young, and this fact stood between…

Far off, the old man smiled.

They approached each other, carefully.

“Is that you, Will? Grown an inch since this morning.” Charles Halloway shifted his gaze. “Jim? Eyes darker, cheeks paler; you burn yourself at both ends, Jim?”

“Heck,” said Jim.

“No such place as Heck. But hell’s right here under ‘A’ for Alighieri.”

“Allegory’s beyond me,” said Jim.

“How stupid of me,” Dad laughed. “I mean Dante. Look at this. Pictures by Mister Doré, showing all the aspects. Hell never looked better. Here’s souls sunk to their gills in slime. There’s someone upside down, wrong side out.”

“Boy howdy!” Jim eyed the pages two different ways and thumbed on. “Got any dinosaur pictures?”

Dad shook his head. “That’s over in the next aisle.” He strolled them around and reached out. “Here we are: Pterodactyl, Kite of Destruction! or what about Drums of Doom: The Saga of the Thunder Lizards! Pep you up, Jim?”

“I’m pepped!”

Dad winked at Will. Will winked back. They stood now, a boy with corn-colored hair and a man with moon-white hair, a boy with a summer-apple, a man with a winter-apple face. Dad, Dad, thought Will, why, why, he looks… like me in a smashed mirror!

And suddenly Will remembered nights rising at two in the morning to go to the bathroom and spying across town to see that one single light in the high library window and know Dad had lingered on late murmuring and reading alone under these green jungle lamps. It made Will sad and funny to see that light, to know the old man—he stopped to change the word—his father, was here in all this shadow.

“Will,” said the old man who was also a janitor who happened to be his father, “what about you?”

“Huh?” Will shook himself.

“You need a white-hat or a black-hat book?”

“Hats?” said Will.

“Well, Jim—” they perambulated, Dad running his fingers along the book spines—“he wears the black ten-gallon hats and reads books to fit. Middle name’s Moriarty, right, Jim? Any day now he’ll move up from Fu Manchu to Machiavelli here—medium-size dark fedora. Or over along to Dr. Faustus—extra large black Stetson. That leaves the white-hat boys to you, Will. Here’s Gandhi. Next door is St. Thomas. And on the next level, well… Buddha.”

“You don’t mind,” said Will, “I’ll settle for The Mysterious Island.”

“What,” asked Jim, scowling, “is all this talk about white and black hats?”

“Why—” Dad handed Jules Verne to Will—‘it’s just, a long time ago, I had to decide, myself, which color I’d wear.”

“So,” said Jim, “which did you pick?”

Dad looked surprised. Then he laughed uneasily.

“Since you need to ask, Jim, you make me wonder. Will, tell Mom I’ll be home soon. Get out of here, both of you. Miss Watriss!” he called softly to the librarian at the desk. “Dinosaurs and mysterious islands, coming up!”

The door slammed.

Outside, a weather of stars ran clear in an ocean sky.

“Heck.” Jim sniffed north, Jim sniffed south. “Where’s the storm? That darn salesman promised. I just got to watch that lightning fizz down my drainpipes!”

Will let the wind ruffle and refit his clothes, his skin, his hair. Then he said, faintly, “It’ll be here. By morning.”

“Who says?”

“The huckleberries all down my arms. They say.”

“Great!”

The wind flew Jim away.

A similar kite, Will swooped to follow.

Chapter 3

Watching the boys vanish away, Charles Halloway suppressed a sudden urge to run with them, make the pack. He knew what the wind was doing to them where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life. Somewhere in him, a shadow turned mournfully over. You had to run with a night like this, so the sadness could not hurt.

Look! he thought. Will runs because running is its own excuse. Jim runs because something’s up ahead of him.

Yet, strangely, they do run together.

What’s the answer, he wondered, walking through the library, putting out the lights, putting out the lights, putting out the lights, is it all in the whorls on our thumbs and fingers? Why are some people all grasshopper fiddlings, scrapings, all antennae shivering, one big ganglion eternally knotting, slip-knotting, square-knotting themselves? They stoke a furnace all their lives, sweat their lips, shine their eyes and start it all in the crib. Caesar’s lean and hungry friends. They eat the dark, who only stand and breathe.

That’s Jim, all bramble-hair and itchweed.

And Will? Why, he’s the last peach, high on the summer tree. Some boys walk by and you cry, seeing them. They feel good, they look good, they are good. Oh, they’re not above peeing off a bridge, or stealing an occasional dime-store pencil sharpener; it’s not that. It’s just, you know, seeing them pass, that’s how they’ll be all their life; they’ll get hit, hurt, cut, bruised, and always wonder why, why does it happen? how can it happen to them?

But Jim, now, he knows it happens, he watches for it happening, he sees it start, he sees it finish, he licks the wound he expected, and never asks why; he knows. He always knew. Someone knew before him, a long time ago, someone who had wolves for pets and lions for night conversants. Hell, Jim doesn’t know with his mind. But his body knows. And while Will’s putting a bandage on his latest scratch, Jim’s ducking, waving, bouncing away from the knockout blow which must inevitably come.

So there they go, Jim running slower to stay with Will, Will running faster to stay with Jim, Jim breaking two windows in a haunted house because Will’s along, Will breaking one instead of none, because Jim’s watching. God, how we get our fingers in each other’s clay. That’s friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of the other.

Jim, Will, he thought, strangers. Go on. I’ll catch up, some day…

The library door gasped open, slammed.

Five minutes later, he turned into the corner saloon for his nightly one-and-only drink, in time to hear a man say:

“…I read when alcohol was invented, the Italians thought it was the big thing they’d been looking for for centuries. The Elixir of Life! Did you know that?

“No.” The bartender’s back was turned.

“Sure,” the man went on. “Distilled wine. Ninth, tenth century. Looked like water. But it burnt. I mean, it not only burnt the mouth and stomach, but you could set it on fire. So they thought they’d mixed water and fire. Fire-water, the Elixir Vitae, by God. Maybe they weren’t so far wrong thinking it was the Cure-all, the thing that worked miracles. Have a drink!?”

“I don’t need it,” said Halloway. “But someone inside me does.”

“Who?”

The boy I once was, thought Halloway, who runs like the leaves down the sidewalk autumn nights.

But he couldn’t say that.

So he drank, eyes shut, listening to hear if that thing inside turned over again, rustling in the deep bons that were stacked for burning but never burned.

Chapter 4

Will stopped. Will looked at the Friday night town.

It seemed when the first stroke of nine banged from the big courthouse clock all the lights were on and business humming in the shops. But by the time the last stroke of nine shook everyone’s fillings in his teeth, the barbers had yanked off the sheets, powdered the customers, trotted them forth; the druggist’s fount had stopped fizzing like a nest of snakes, the insect neons everywhere had ceased buzzing, and the vast glittering acreage of the dime store with its ten billion metal, glass and paper oddments waiting to be fished over, suddenly blacked out. Shades slithered, doors boomed, keys rattled their bones in locks, people fled with hordes of torn newspaper mice nibbling their heels.

Bang! they were gone!

“Boy!” yelled Will. “Folks run like they thought the storm was here!”

“It is!” shouted Jim. “Us!”

They stomp-pound-thundered over iron grates, steel trap-doors, past a dozen unlit shops, a dozen half-lit, a dozen dying dark. The city was dead as they rounded the United Cigar Store corner to see a wooden Cherokee glide in darkness, by himself.

“Hey!”

Mr. Tetley, the proprietor, peered over the Indian’s shoulder.

“Scare you, boys?”

“Naw!”

But Will shivered, feeling cold tidal waves of strange rain moving down the prairie as on a deserted shore. When the lightning nailed the town, he wanted to be layered under sixteen blankets and a pillow.

“Mr. Tetley?” said Will, quietly.

For now there were two wooden Indians upright in ripe tobacco darkness. Mr. Tetley, amidst his jest, had frozen, mouth open, listening.

“Mr. Tetley?”

He heard something far away on the wind, but couldn’t say what it was.

The boys backed off.

He did not see them. He did not move. He only listened.

They left him. They ran.

In the fourth empty block from the library, the boys came upon a third wooden Indian.

Mr. Crosetti, in front of his barber shop, his door key in his trembling fingers, did not see them stop.

What had stopped them?

A teardrop.

It moved shining down Mr. Crosetti’s left cheek. He breathed heavily.

“Crosetti, you fool! Something happens, nothing happens, you cry like a baby!”

Mr. Crosetti took a trembling breath, snuffing. “Don’t you smell it?”

Jim and Will sniffed.

“Licorice!”

“Heck, no. Cotton candy!”

“I haven’t smelled that in years,” said Mr. Crosetti.

Jim snorted. “It’s around.”

“Yes, but who notices? When? Now, my nose tells me, breathe! And I’m crying. Why? Because I remember how a long time ago, boys ate that stuff. Why haven’t I stopped to think and smell the last thirty years?”

“You’re busy, Mr. Crosetti,” Will said. “You haven’t got time.”

Mr. Crosetti wiped his eyes. “Where does that smell come from? There’s no place in town sells cotton candy. Only circuses.”

“Hey,” said Will. “That’s right!”

“Well, Crosetti is done crying.” The barber blew his nose and turned to lock his shop door. As he did this, Will watched the barber’s pole whirl its red serpentine up out of nothing, leading his gaze around, rising to vanish into more nothing. On countless moons Will had stood here trying to unravel that ribbon, watch it come, go, end without ending.

Mr. Crosetti put his hand to the light switch under the spinning pole.

“Don’t,” said Will. Then, murmuring, “Don’t turn it off.”

Mr. Crosetti looked at the pole, as if freshly aware of its miraculous properties. He nodded, gently, his eyes soft. “Where does it come from, where does it go, eh? Who knows? Not you, not him, not me. Oh, the mysteries, by God. So. We’ll leave it on!”

It’s good to know, thought Will, it’ll be running until dawn, winding up from nothing, winding away to nothing, while we sleep.

“Good-night!”

“Good-night.”

And they left him behind in a wind that very faintly smelled of licorice and cotton candy.

Chapter 5

Charles Halloway put his hand to the saloon’s double swing doors, hesitant, as if the grey hairs on the back of his hand, like antennae, had felt something beyond slide by in the October night. Perhaps great fires burned somewhere and their furnace blasts warned him not to step forth. Or another Ice Age had loomed across the land, its freezing bulk might already have laid waste a billion people in the hour. Perhaps Time itself fixed was draining off down an immense glass, with powdered darkness failing after to bury all.

Or maybe it was only that man in a dark suit, seen through the saloon window, across the street. Great paper rolls under one arm, a brush and bucket in his free hand, the man was whistling a tune, very far away.

It was a tune from another season, one that never ceased making Charles Halloway sad when he heard it. The song was incongruous for October, but immensely moving, overwhelming, no matter what day or what month it was sung:

Charles Halloway shivered. Suddenly there was the old sense of terrified elation, of wanting to laugh and cry together when he saw the innocents of the earth wandering the snowy streets the day before Christmas among all the tired men and women whose faces were dirty with guilt, unwashed of sin, and smashed like small windows by life that hit without warning, ran, hid, came back and hit again.

The whistling died.

Charles Halloway stepped out. Far up ahead, the man who had whistled the tune was motioning his arms by a telegraph pole, silently working. Now he vanished into the open door of a shop.

Charles Halloway, not knowing why, crossed the street to watch the man pasting up one of the posters inside the un-rented and empty store.

Now the man stepped out the door with his brush, his paste bucket, his rolled papers. His eyes, a fierce and lustful shine, fixed on Charles Halloway. Smiling, he gestured an open hand.

Halloway stared.

The palm of that hand was covered with fine black silken hair. It looked like—

The hand clenched, tight. It waved. The man swept around the corner. Charles Halloway, stunned, flushed with sudden summer heat, swayed, then turned to gaze into the empty shop.

Two sawhorses stood parallel to each other under a single spotlight.

Placed over these two sawhorses like a funeral of snow and crystal was a block of ice six feet long. It shone dimly with its own effulgence, and its color was light green-blue. It was a great cool gem resting there in the dark.

On a little white placard at one side near the window the following calligraphic message could be read by lamplight:

Halloway’s eyes leaped to the poster on the inside of the window.

And back to the cold long block of ice.

It was such a block of ice as he remembered from travelling magician’s shows when he was a boy, when the local ice company contributed a chunk of winter in which, for twelve hours on end, frost maidens lay embedded, on display while people watched and comedies toppled down the raw white screen and coming attractions came and went and at last the pale ladies slid forth all rimed, chipped free by perspiring sorcerers to be led off smiling into the dark behind the curtains.

And yet this vast chunk of wintry glass held nothing but frozen river water.

No. Not quite empty.

Halloway felt his heart pound one special time.

Within the huge winter gem was there not a special vacuum? a voluptuous hollow, a prolonged emptiness which undulated from tip to toe of the ice? and wasn’t this vacuum, this emptiness waiting to be filled with summer flesh, was it not shaped somewhat like a… woman?

Yes.

The ice. And the lovely hollows, the horizontal flow of emptiness within the ice. The lovely nothingness. The exquisite flow of an invisible mermaid daring the ice to capture it.

The ice was cold.

The emptiness within the ice was warm.

He wanted to go away from here.

But Charles Halloway stood in the strange night for a long time looking in at the empty shop and the two sawhorses and the cold waiting arctic coffin set there like a vast Star of India in the dark…

Chapter 6

Jim Nightshade stopped at the corner of Hickory and Main, breathing easily, his eyes fixed tenderly on the leafy darkness of Hickory Street.

“Will…?”

“No!” Will stopped, surprised at his own violence.

“It is just there. The fifth house. Just one minute, Will,” Jim pleaded, softly.

“Minute…?” Will glanced down the street.

Which was the street of the Theatre.

Until this summer it had been an ordinary street where they stole peaches, plums and apricots, each in its day. But late in August, while they were monkey-climbing for the sourest apples, the “thing” happened which changed the houses, the taste of the fruit, and the very air within the gossiping trees.

“Will! it’s waiting. Maybe something’s happening!” hissed Jim.

Maybe something is. Will swallowed hard, and felt Jim’s hand pinch his arm.

For it was no longer the street of the apples or plums or apricots, it was the one house with a window at the side and this window, Jim said, was a stage, with a curtain—the shade, that is—up. And in that room, on that strange stage, were the actors, who spoke mysteries, mouthed wild things, laughed, sighed, murmured so much; so much of it was whispers Will did not understand.

“Just one last time, Will.”

“You know it won’t be last!”

Jim’s face was flushed, his cheeks blazing, his eyes green-glass fire. He thought of that night, them picking the apples, Jim suddenly crying softly, “Oh, there!”

And Will, hanging to the limbs of the tree, tight-pressed, terribly excited, staring in at the Theatre, that peculiar stage where people, all unknowing, flourished shirts above their heads, let fall clothes to the rug, stood raw and animal-crazy, naked, like shivering horses, hands out to touch each other.

What’re they doing! thought Will. Why are they laughing? What’s wrong with them, what’s wrong!?

He wished the light would go out.

But he hung tight to the suddenly slippery tree and watched the bright window Theatre, heard the laughing and numb at last let go, slid, fell, lay dazed, then stood in dark gazing up at Jim, who still clung to his high limb. Jim’s face, hearth-flushed, cheeks fire-fuzzed, lips parted, stared in. “Jim, Jim, come down!” But Jim did not hear. “Jim!” And when Jim looked down at last he saw Will as a stranger below with some silly request to give off living and come down to earth. So Will ran off, alone, thinking too much, knowing what to think.

“Will, please…”

Will looked at Jim now, with the library books in his hands.

“We been to the library. Ain’t that enough?”

Jim shook his head. “Carry these for me.”

He handed Will his books and trotted softly off under the hissing whispering trees. Three houses down he called back: “Will? Know what you are? A darn old dimwit Episcopal Baptist!”

Then Jim was gone.

Will seized the books tight to his chest. They were wet from the hands.

Don’t look back! he thought.

I won’t! I won’t!

And looking only toward home, he walked that way.

Quickly.

Chapter 7

Halfway home, Will felt a shadow breathing hard behind him.

“Theatre closed?” said Will, not looking back.

Jim walked in silence beside him for a long while and then said, “Nobody home.”

“Swell!”

Jim spat. “Darn Baptist preacher, you!”

And around the corner a tumbleweed slithered, a great cotton ball of pale paper which bounced, then clung shivering to Jim’s legs.

Will grabbed the paper, laughing, pulled it off, let it fly! He stopped laughing.

The boys, watching the pale throwaway rattle and flit through the trees, were suddenly cold.

“Wait a minute…” said Jim, slowly.

All of a sudden they were yelling, running, leaping. “Don’t tear it! Careful!”

The paper fluttered like a snare drum in their hands.

Their lips moved, shadowing the words set in rococo type.

“Cooger and Dark’s…”

“Carnival!”

“October twenty-fourth! That’s tomorrow!”

“It can’t be,” said Will. “All carnivals stop after Labour Day—”

“Who cares? A thousand and one wonders! See! MEPHISTOPHELES, THE LAVA DRINKER! MR. ELECTRICO! THE MONSTER MONTGOLFIER?”

“Balloon,” said Will. “A Montgolfier is a balloon.”

“MADEMOISELLE TAROT!” read Jim. “THE DANGLING MAN. THE DEMON GUILLOTINE! THE ILLUSTRATED MAN! Hey!”

“That’s just an old guy with tattoos.”

“No.” Jim breathed warm on the paper. “He’s illustrated. Special. See! Covered with monsters! A menagerie!” Jim’s eyes jumped. “SEE! THE SKELETON! Ain’t that fine, Will? Not Thin Man, no, but SKELETON! SEE! THE DUST WITCH! What’s a Dust Witch, Will?”

“Dirty old Gypsy—”

“No.” Jim squinted off, seeing things. “A Gypsy that was born in the Dust, raised in the Dust, and some day winds up back in the Dust. Here’s more: EGYPTIAN MIRROR MAZE! SEE YOURSELF TEN THOUSAND TIMES! SAINT ANTHONY’S TEMPLE OF TEMPTATION!”

“THE MOST BEAUTIFUL—” read Will.

“—WOMAN IN THE WORLD,” finished JIM.

They looked at each other.

“Can a carnival have the Most Beautiful Woman on Earth in its side-show, Will?”

“You ever seen carnival ladies, Jim?”

“Grizzly bears. But how come this handbill claims—”

“Oh, shut up!”

“You mad at me, Will?”

“No, it’s just—get it!”

The wind had torn the paper from their hands.

The handbill blew over the trees and away in an idiot caper, gone.

“It’s not true, anyway,” Will gasped. “Carnivals don’t come this late in the year. Silly darn-sounding thing. Who’d go to it?”

“Me.” Jim stood quiet in the dark.

Me, thought Will, seeing the guillotine flash, the Egyptian mirrors unfold accordions of light, and the sulphur-skinned devil-man sipping lava, like gunpowder tea.

“That music…” Jim murmured. “Calliope. Must be coming tonight!”

“Carnivals come at sunrise.”

“Yeah, but what about the licorice and cotton candy we smelled, close?”

And Will thought of the smells and the sounds flowing on the river of wind from beyond the darkening houses, Mr. Tetley listening by his wooden Indian friend, Mr. Crosetti with the single tear shining down his cheek, and the barber’s pole sliding its red tongue up and around forever out of nowhere and away to eternity.

Will’s teeth chattered.

“Let’s go home.”

“We are home!” cried Jim, surprised.

For, not knowing it, they had reached their separate houses and now moved up separate walks.

On his porch, Jim leaned over and called softly.

“Will. You’re not mad?”

“Heck, no.”

“We won’t go by that street, that house, the Theatre, again for a month. A year! I swear.”

“Sure, Jim, sure.”

They stood with their hands on the doorknobs of their houses, and Will looked up at Jim’s room where the lightning-rod glittered against the cold stars.

The storm was coming. The storm wasn’t coming.

No matter which, he was glad Jim had that grand contraption up there.

“Night!”

“Night.”

Their separate doors slammed.

Chapter 8

Will opened the door and shut it again. Quietly, this time.

“That’s better,” said his mother’s voice.

Framed through the hall door Will saw the only theatre he cared for now, the familiar stage where sat his father (home already! he and Jim must have run the long way round!) holding a book but reading the empty spaces. In a chair by the fire mother knitted and hummed like a tea-kettle.

He wanted to be near and not near them, he saw them close, he saw them far. Suddenly they were awfully small in too large a room in too big a town and much too huge a world. In this unlocked place they seemed at the mercy of anything that might break in from the night.

Including me, Will thought. Including me.

Suddenly he loved them more for their smallness than he ever had when they seemed tall.

His mother’s fingers twitched, her mouth counted, the happiest woman he had ever seen. He remembered a greenhouse on a winter day, pushing aside thick jungle leaves to find a creamy pink hothouse rose poised alone in the wilderness. That was mother, smelling like fresh milk, happy, to herself, in this room.

Happy? But how and why? Here, a few feet off, was the janitor, the library man, the stranger, his uniform gone, but his face still the face of a man happier at night alone in the deep marble vaults, whispering his broom in the draughty corridors.

Will watched, wondering why this woman was so happy and this man so sad.

His father stared deep in the fire, one hand relaxed. Half-cupped in that hand lay a crumpled paper ball.

Will blinked.

He remembered the wind blowing the pale handbill skittering in the trees. Now the same color paper lay crushed, its rococo type hidden, in his father’s fingers.

“Hey!”

Will stepped into the parlour.

Immediately Mom opened a smile that was like lighting a second fire.

Dad stricken, looked dismayed, as if caught in a criminal act.

Will wanted to say, “Hey, what’d you think of the handbill…?”

But Dad was crammmg the handbill deep in the chair upholstery.

And mother was leafing the library books.

“Oh, these are fine, Willy!”

So Will just stood with Cooger and Dark on his tongue and said:

“Boy, the wind really flew us home. Streets full of paper blowing.”

Dad did not flinch at this.

“Anything new, Dad?”

Dad’s hand still lay tucked in the side of the chair. He lifted a grey, slightly worried, very tired gaze to his son:

“Stone lion blew off the library steps. Prowling the town now, looking for Christians. Won’t find any. Got the only one in captivity here, and she’s a good cook.”

“Bosh,” said Mom.

Walking upstairs, Will heard what he half expected to hear.

A soft fluming sigh as something fresh was tossed on the fire. In his mind, he saw Dad standing at the hearth looking down as the paper crinkled to ash:

“…COOGER… DARK… CARNIVAL… WITCH… WONDERS…”

He wanted to go back down and stand with Dad hands out, to be warmed by the fire.

Instead he went slowly up to shut the door of his room.

Some nights, abed, Will put his ear to the wall to listen, and if his folks talked things that were right, he stayed, and if not right he turned away. If it was about time and passing years or himself or town or just the general inconclusive way God ran the world, he listened warmly, comfortably, secretly, for it was usually Dad talking. He could not often speak with Dad anywhere in the world, inside or out, but this was different. There was a thing in Dad’s voice, up, over, down, easy as a hand winging soft in the air like a white bird describing flight pattern, made the ear want to follow and the mind’s eye to see.

And the odd thing in Dad’s voice was the sound truth makes being said. The sound of truth, in a wild roving land of city or plain country lies, will spell any boy. Many nights Will drowsed this way, his senses like stopped clocks long before that half-singing voice was still. Dad’s voice was a midnight school, teaching deep fathom hours, and the subject was life.

So it was this night, Will’s eyes shut, head leaned to the cool plaster. At first Dad’s voice, a Congo drum, boomed softly, horizons away. Mother’s voice, she used her water-bright soprano in the Baptist choir, did not sing, yet sang back replies. Will imagined Dad sprawled talking to the empty ceiling:

“…Will… makes me feel so old… a man should play baseball with his son…”

“Not necessary,” said the woman’s voice, kindly. “You’re a good man.”

“—in a bad season. Hell, I was forty when he was born! And you! Who’s your daughter? people say. God, when you lie down your thoughts turn to mush. Hell!”

Will heard the shift of weight as Dad sat up in the dark. A match was being struck, a pipe was being smoked. The wind rattled the windows.

“…man with poster under his arm…”

“…carnival…” said his mother’s voice, “…this late in the year?”

Will wanted to turn away, but couldn’t.

“…most beautiful… woman… in the world,” Dad’s voice murmured.

Mother laughed softly. “You know I’m not.”

No! thought Will, that’s from the handbill! Why doesn’t Dad tell!!?

Because, Will answered himself. Something’s going on. Oh, something is going on!

Will saw that paper frolicked in the trees, its words THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN, and fever prickled his cheeks. He thought: Jim, the street of the Theatre, the naked people in the stage of that Theatre window, crazy as Chinese opera, darn odd crazy as old Chinese opera, judo, ju-jitsu, Indian puzzles, and now his father’s voice, dreaming off, sad, sadder, saddest, much too much to understand. And suddenly he was scared because Dad wouldn’t talk about the handbill he had secretly burned. Will gazed out the window. There! Like a milkweed plume! White paper danced in the air.

“No,” he whispered, “no carnival’s coming this late. It can’t!” He hid under the covers, switched on his flashlight, opened a book. The first picture he saw was a prehistoric reptile trap-drumming a night sky a million years lost.

Heck, he thought, in the rush I got Jim’s book he’s got one of mine.

But it was a pretty fine reptile.

And flying toward sleep, he thought he heard his father, restless, below. The front door shut. His father was going back to work late, for no reason, with brooms, or books, downtown, away… away…

And mother asleep, content, not knowing he had gone.

Chapter 9

No one else in the world had a name came so well off the tongue.

“Jim Nightshade. That’s me.”

Jim stood tall and now lay long in bed, strung together by marsh-grass, his bones easy in his flesh, his flesh easy on his bones. The library books lay unopened by his relaxed right hand.

Waiting, his eyes were dark as twilight, with shadows under the eyes from the time, his mother said, he had almost died when he was three and still remembered. His hair was dark autumn chestnut and the veins in his temples and brow and in his neck and ticking in his wrists and on the backs of his slender hands, all these were dark blue. He was marbled with dark, was Jim Nightshade, a boy who talked less and smiled less as the years increased.

The trouble with Jim was he looked at the world and could not look away. And when you never look away all your life, by the time you are thirteen you have done twenty years taking in the laundry of the world.

Will Halloway, it was in him young to always look just beyond, over or to one side. So at thirteen he had saved up only six years of staring.

Jim knew every centimetre of his shadow, could have cut it out of tar paper, furled it, and run it up a flagpole—his banner.

Will, he was occasionally surprised to see his shadow following him somewhere, but that was that.

“Jim? You awake?”

“Hi, Mom.”

A door opened and now shut. He felt her weight on the bed.

“Why, Jim, your hands are ice. You shouldn’t have the window so high. Mind your health.”

“Sure.”

“Don’t say “sure” that way. You don’t know until you’ve had three children and lost all but one.”

“Never going to have any,” said Jim.

“You just say that.”

“I know it. I know everything.”

She waited a moment. “What do you know?”

“No use making more people. People die.”

His voice was very calm and quiet and almost sad.

“That’s everything.”

“Almost everything. You’re here, Jim. If you weren’t, I’d have given up long ago.”

“Mom.” A long silence. “Can you remember Dad’s face? Do I look like him?”

“The day you go away is the day he leaves forever.”

“Who’s going away?”

“Why, just lying there, Jim, you run so fast. I never saw anyone move so much, just sleeping. Promise me, Jim. Wherever you go and come back, bring lots of kids. Let them run wild. Let me spoil them, some day.”

“I’m never going to own anything can hurt me.”

“You going to collect rocks, Jim? No, some day, you’ve got to be hurt.”

“No, I don’t.”

He looked at her. Her face had been hit a long time ago. The bruises had never gone from around her eyes.

“You’ll live and get hurt,” she said, in the dark. “But when it’s time, tell me. Say good-bye. Otherwise, I might not let you go. Wouldn’t that be terrible, to just grab ahold?”

She rose up suddenly and went to put the window down.

“Why do boys want their windows open wide?”

“Warm blood.”

“Warm blood.” She stood alone. “That’s the story of all our sorrows. And don’t ask why.”

The door shut.

Jim alone, raised the window, and leaned into the absolutely clear night.

Storm, he thought, you there?

Yes.

Feel… away to the west… a real humdinger, rushing along!

The shadow of the lightning-rod lay in the drive below.

He sucked in cold air, gave out a vast exhilaration of heat.

Why, he thought, why don’t I climb up, knock that lightning-rod loose, throw it away?

And then see what happens?

Yes.

And then see what happens!

Chapter 10

Just after midnight.

Shuffling footsteps.

Along the empty street came the lightning-rod salesman, his leather valise swung almost empty in his baseball-mitt hand, his face at ease. He turned a corner and stopped.

Paper-soft white moths tapped at an empty store window, looking in.

And in the window, like a great coffin boat of star-colored glass, beached on two sawhorses lay a chunk of Alaska Snow Company ice chopped to a size great enough to flash in a giant’s ring.

And sealed in this ice was the most beautiful woman in the world.

The lightning-rod salesman’s smile faded.

In the dreaming coldness of ice like someone fallen and slept in snow avalanches a thousand years, forever young, was this woman.

She was as fair as this morning and fresh as tomorrow’s flowers and lovely as any maid when a man shuts up his eyes and traps her, in cameo perfection, on the shell of his eyelids. The lightning-rod salesman remembered to breathe.

Once, long ago, travelling among the marbles of Rome and Florence, he had seen women like this, kept in stone instead of ice. Once, wandering in the Louvre, he had found women like this, washed in summer color and kept in paint. Once, as a boy, sneaking the cool grottoes behind a motion picture theatre screen, on his way to a free seat, he had glanced up and there towering and flooding the haunted dark seen a women’s face as he had never seen it since, of such size and beauty built of milk-bone and moon-flesh, at to freeze him there alone behind the stage, shadowed by the motion of her lips, the bird-wing flicker of her eyes, the snow-pale-death-shimmering illumination from her cheeks.

So from other years there jumped forth images which flowed and found new substance here within the ice.

What color was her hair? It was blonde to whiteness and might take any color, once set free of cold.

How tall was she?

The prism of the ice might well multiply her size or diminish her as you moved this way or that before the empty store, the window, the night-soft rap-tapping ever-fingering, gently probing moths.

Not important.

For above all—the lightning-rod salesman shivered—he knew the most extraordinary thing.

If by some miracle her eyelids should open within that sapphire and she should look at him, he knew what color her eyes would be.

He knew what color her eyes would be.

If one were to enter this lonely night shop—

If one were to put forth one’s hand, the warmth of that hand would… what?

Melt the ice.

The lightning-rod salesman stood there for a long moment, his eyes quickened shut.

He let his breath out.

It was warm as summer on his teeth.

His hand touched the shop door. It swung open. Cold arctic air blew out round him. He stepped in.

The door shut.

The white snowflake moths tapped at the window.

Chapter 11

Midnight then and the town clocks chiming on toward one and two and then three in the deep morning and the peals of the great clocks shaking dust off old toys in attics and shedding silver off old mirrors in yet higher attics and stirring up dreams about docks in all beds where children slept.

Will heard it.

Muffled away in the prairie lands, the chuffing of an engine, the slow-slow-following dragon-glide of a train.

Will sat up in bed.

Across the way, like a mirror image, Jim sat up, too.

A calliope began to play oh so softly, grieving to itself, a million miles away.

In one single motion, Will leaned from his window, as did Jim. Without a word they gazed over the trembling surf of trees.

Their rooms were high, as boys’ rooms should be. From these gaunt windows they could rifle-fire their gaze artillery distances past library, city hall, depot, cow barns, farmlands to empty prairie!

There, on the world’s rim, the lovely snail-gleam of the railway tracks ran, flinging wild gesticulations of lemon or cherry-colored semaphore to the stars.

There, on the precipice of earth, a small steam feather uprose like the first of a storm cloud yet to come.

The train itself appeared, link by link, engine, coal-car, and numerous and numbered all-asleep-and-slumbering-dream filled cars that followed the firefly-sparked chum, chant, drowsy autumn hearthfire roar. Hellfires flushed the stunned hills. Even at this remote view, one imagined men with buffalo-haunched arms shovelling black meteor falls of coal into the open boilers of the engine.

The engine!

Both boys vanished, came back to life binoculars.

“The engine!”

“Civil War! No other stack like that since 1900!”

“The rest of the train, all of it’s old!”

“The flags! The cages! It’s the carnival!”

They listened. At first Will thought he heard the air whistling fast in his nostrils. But no—it was the train, and the calliope sighing, weeping, on that train.

“Sounds like church music!”

“Hell. Why would a carnival play church music?”

“Don’t say hell,” hissed Will.

“Hell.” Jim ferociously leaned out. “I’ve saved up all day. Everyone’s asleep so—hell!”

The music drifted by their windows. Goose pimples rose bid as boils on Will’s arms.

“That is church music. Changed.”

“For cri-yi, I’m froze, let’s go watch them set up!”

“At three a.m.?”

“At three a.m.!”

Jim vanished.

For a moment, Will watched Jim dance around over there, shirt uplifted, pants going on, while off in night country, panting, churning was this funeral train, all black-plumed cars, licorice-colored cages, and a sooty calliope clamouring, banging three different hymns mixed and lost, maybe not there at all.

“Here goes nothing!”

Jim slid down the drainpipe on his house, toward the sleeping lawns.

“Jim! Wait!”

Will thrashed into his clothes.

“Jim, don’t go alone!”

And followed after.

Chapter 12

Sometimes you see a kite so high, so wise it almost knows the wind. It travels, then chooses to land in one spot and no other and no matter how you yank, run this way or that, it will simply break its cord, seek its resting place and bring you, blood-mouthed, running.

“Jim! Wait for me!”

So now Jim was the kite, the wild twine cut, and whatever wisdom was his taking him away from Will who could only run, earthbound, after one so high and dark silent and suddenly strange.

“Jim, here I come!”

And running, Will thought, Boy, it’s the same old thing. I talk. Jim runs. I tilt stones, Jim grabs the cold junk under the stones and—lickety-split! I climb hills. Jim yells off church steeples. I got a bank account. Jim’s got the hair on his head, the yell in his mouth, the shirt on his back and the tennis shoes on his feet. How come I think he’s richer? Because, Will thought, I sit on a rock in the sun and old Jim, he prickles his arm-hairs by moonlight and dances with hop-toads. I tend cows, Jim tames Gila monsters. Fool! I yell at Jim. Coward! he yells back. And here we—go!

And they ran from town, across fields and both froze under a rail bridge with the moon ready beyond the hills and the meadows trembling with a fur of dew.

WHAM!

The carnival train thundered the bridge. The calliope wailed.

“There’s no one playing it!” Jim stared up.

“Jim, no jokes!”

“Mother’s honour, look!”

Going away, away, the calliope pipes shimmered with star explosions, but no one sat at the high keyboard. The wind, sluicing air-water air in the pipes, made the music.

The boys ran. The train curved away, gonging it’s under-sea funeral bell, sunk, rusted, green-mossed, tolling, tolling. Then the engine whistle blew a great steam whiff and Will broke out in pearls of ice.

Way late at night Will had heard—how often?—train whistles jetting steam along the rim of sleep, forlorn, alone and far, no matter how near they came. Sometimes he woke to find tears on his cheek, asked why, lay back, listened and thought, Yes! they make me cry, going east, going west, the trains so far gone in country deeps they drown in tides of sleep that escape the towns.

Those trains and their grieving sounds were lost forever between stations, not remembering, where they had been, not guessing where they might go, exhaling their last pale breaths over the horizon, gone. So it was with all trains, ever.

Yet this train’s whistle!

The wails of a lifetime were gathered in it from other nights in other slumbering years; the howl of moon-dreamed dogs, the seep of river-cold winds through January porch screens which stopped the blood, a thousand fire sirens weeping, or worse! the outgone shreds of breath, the protests of a billion people dead or dying, not wanting to be dead, their groans, their sighs, burst over the earth!

Tears jumped to Will’s eyes. He lurched. He knelt. He pretended to lace one shoe.

But then he saw Jim’s hands clap his ears, his eyes wet, too. The whistle screamed. Jim screamed against the scream. The whistle shrieked. Will shrieked against the shriek.

Then the billion voices ceased, instantly, as if the train had plunged in a fire storm off the earth.

The train skimmed on softly, slithering, black pennants fluttering, black confetti lost on its own sick-sweet candy wind, down the hill, with the boys pursuing, the air so cold they ate ice cream with each breath.

They climbed a last rise to look down.

“Boy,” whispered Jim.

The train had pulled off into Rolfe’s moon meadow, so-called because town couples came out to see the moon rise here over a land so wide, so long, it was like an inland sea, filled with grass in spring, or hay in late summer or snow in winter, it was fine walking here along its crisp shore with the moon coming up to tremble in its tides.

Well, the carnival train was crouched there now in the autumn grass on the old spur near the woods and the boys crept and lay down under a bush, waiting.

“It’s so quiet,” whispered Will.

The train just stood in the middle of the dry autumn field, no one in the locomotive, no one in the tender, no one in any of the cars behind, all black under the moon, and just the small sounds of its metal cooling, ticking on the rails.

“Ssst,” said Jim. “I feel them moving in there.”

Will felt the cat-fuzz on his body bramble up by the thousands.

“You think they mind us watching?”

“Maybe,” said Jim, happily.

“Then why the noisy calliope?”

“When I figure that,” Jim said, “I’ll tell you. Look!”

Whisper.

As if exhaling itself straight down from the sky, a vast moss-green balloon touched at the moon.

It hovered two hundred yards above and away, quietly riding the wind.

“The basket under the balloon, someone in it!”

But then a tall man stepped down from the train caboose platform like a captain assaying the tidal weathers of this inland sea. All dark suit, shadow-faced, he waded to the centre of the meadow, his shirt as black as the gloved hands he now stretched to the sky.

He gestured, once.

And the train came to life.

At first a head lifted in one window, then an arm, then another head like a puppet in a marionette theatre. Suddenly two men in black were carrying a dark tent-pole out across the hissing grass.

It was the silence that made Will pull back, even as Jim leaned forward eyes moon-bright.

A carnival should be all growls, roars like, timberlands stacked, bundled, rolled and crashed, great explosions of lion dust, men ablaze with working anger, pop bottles jangling, horse buckles shivering, engines and elephants in full stampede through rains of sweat while zebras neighed and trembled like cage trapped in cage.

But this was like old movies, the silent theatre haunted with black-and-white ghosts, silvery mouth opening to let moon-light smoke out, gestures made in silence so hushed you could hear the wind fizz the hair on your cheeks. More shadows rustled from the train, passing the animal cages where darkness prowled with unlit eyes and the calliope stood mute save for the faintest idiot tune the breeze piped wandering up the flues.

The ringmaster stood in the middle of the land. The balloon like a vast mouldy green cheese stood fixed to the sky. Then darkness came.

The last thing Will saw was the balloon swooping down, as clouds covered the moon.

In the night he felt the men rush to unseen tasks. He sensed the balloon, like a great fat spider, fiddling with the lines and poles, rearing a tapestry in the sky.

The clouds arose. The balloon sifted up.

In the meadow stood the skeleton main poles and wires of the main tent, waiting for its canvas skin.

More clouds poured over the white moon. Shadowed, Will shivered. He heard Jim crawling forward, seized his ankle, felt him stiffen.

“Wait!” said Will. “They’re bringing out the canvas!”

“No,” said Jim. “Oh, no…”

For somehow instead, they both knew, the wires high-flung on the poles were catching swift clouds, ripping them free from the wind in streamers which, stitched and sewn by some great monster shadow, made canvas and more canvas as the tent took shape. At last there was the clear-water sound of vast flags blowing.

The motion stopped. The darkness within darkness was still.

Will lay, eyes shut, hearing the beat of great oil-black wings as if a huge, ancient bird had drummed down to live, to breathe, to survive in the night meadow.

The clouds blew away.

The balloon was gone.

The men were gone.

The tents rippled like black rain on their poles.

Suddenly it seemed a long way to town.

Instinctively, Will glanced behind himself.

Nothing but grass and whispers.

Slowly he looked back at the silent, dark seemingly empty tents.

“I don’t like it,” he said.

Jim could not tear his eyes away.

“Yeah,” he whispered. “Yeah.”

Will stood up. Jim lay on the earth.

“Jim!” said Will.

Jim jerked his head as if slapped. He was on his knees, he swayed up. His body turned, but his eyes were fastened to those black flags, the great side-show signs swarming with unguessed wings, horns, and demon smiles.

A bird screamed.

Jim jumped. Jim gasped.

Cloud shadows panicked them over the hills to the edge of town.

From there, the two boys ran alone.

Chapter 13

The air was cold blowing in through the wide-open library window.

Charles Halloway had stood there for a long time.

Now, he quickened.

Along the street below fled two shadows, two boys above them matching shadow stride for stride. They softly printed the night air with treads.

“Jim!” cried the old man. “Will!”

But not aloud.

The boys went away towards home.

Charles Halloway looked out into the country.

Wandering alone in the library, letting his broom tell him things no one else could hear, he had heard the whistle and the disjointed-calliope hymns.

“Three,” he now said, half-aloud. “Three in the morning…”

In the meadow the tents, the carnival waited. Waited for someone, anyone to wade along the grassy surf. The great tents filled like bellows. They softly issued forth exhalations of air that smelled like ancient yellow beasts.

But only the moon looked in at the hollow dark, the deep caverns. Outside, night beasts hung in midgallop on a carousel. Beyond lay fathoms of Mirror Maze which housed a multifold series of empty vanities one wave on another, still, serene, silvered with age, white with time. Any shadow, at the entrance, might stir reverberations the color of fright, unravel deep-buried moons.

If a man stood here would he see himself unfolded away a billion times to eternity? Would a billion images look back, each face and the face after and the face after that old, older, oldest? Would he find himself lost in a fine dust away off deep down there, not fifty but sixty, not sixty but seventy, not seventy but eighty, ninety, ninety-nine years old?

The maze did not ask.

The maze did not tell.

It simply stood and waited like a great arctic floe.

“Three o’clock…”

Charles Halloway was cold. His skin was suddenly a lizard’s skin. His stomach filled with blood turned to rust. His mouth tasted of night damps.

Yet he could not turn from the library window.

Far off, something glittered in the meadow.

It was moonlight, flashing on a great glass.

Perhaps the light said something, perhaps it spoke in code.

I’ll go there, thought Charles Halloway, I won’t go there.

I like it, he thought, I don’t like it.

A moment later the library door slammed.

Going home, he passed the empty store window.

Inside stood two abandoned sawhorses.

Between lay a pool of water. In the water floated a few shards of ice. In the ice were a few long strands of hair.

Charles Halloway saw but chose not to see. He turned and was gone. The street was soon as empty as the hardware-store window.

Far away, in the meadow, shadows flickered in the Mirror Maze, as if parts of someone’s life, yet unborn, were trapped there, waiting to be lived.

So the maze waited, its cold gaze ready, for so much as a bird to come look, see, and fly away shrieking.

But no bird came.

Chapter 14

“Three,” a voice said.

Will listened, cold but warming, glad to be in with a roof above, floor below, wall and door between too much exposure, too much freedom, too much night.

“Three…”

Dad’s voice, home now, moving down the hall, speaking to itself.

“Three…”

Why, thought Will, that’s when the train came. Had Dad seen, heard, followed?

No, he mustn’t! Will hunched himself. Why not? He trembled. What did he fear?

The carnival rushing in like a black stampede of storm waves on the shore out beyond? Of him and Jim and Dad knowing, of the town asleep, not knowing, was that it?

Yes. Will buried himself, deep. Yes…

“Three…”

Three in the morning, thought Charles Halloway, seated on the edge of his bed. Why did the train come at that hour?

For, he thought, it’s a special hour. Women never wake then, do they? They sleep the sleep of babes and children. But men in middle age? They know that hour well. Oh God, midnight’s not bad, you wake and go back to sleep, one or two’s not bad, you toss but sleep again. Five or six in the morning’s not bad there’s hope, for dawn’s just under the horizon. But three, now, Christ, three a.m.! The blood moves slow. You’re the nearest to dead you’ll ever be save dying. Sleep is a patch of death, but three in the morn, full wide-eyed staring, is living death! You dream with your eyes open. God, if you had strength to rouse up, you’d slaughter your half dreams with buckshot! But no, you lie pinned to a deep well-bottom that’s burned dry. The moon rolls by to look at you down there, with its idiot face. It’s a long way back to sunset, a far way on to dawn, so you summon all the fool things of your life, the stupid lovely things done with people known so very well who are now so very dead—And wasn’t it true, had he read it somewhere, more people in hospitals die at 3 a.m. than at any other time…?

Stop! he cried silently.

“Charlie?” his wife said in her sleep.

Slowly, he took off the other shoe.

His wife smiled in her sleep.

Why?

She’s immortal. She has a son.

Your son, too!

But what father ever really believes it? He carries no burden, he feels no pain. What man, like woman, lies down in darkness and gets up with child? The gentle, smiling ones own the good secret. Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make the flesh that holds fast and binds eternity. They live inside the gift, know power, accept, and need not mention it. Why speak of Time when you are Time, and shape the universal moments, as they pass, into warmth and action? How men envy and often hate these warm clocks, these wives, who know they will live forever. So what do we do? We men turn terribly mean, because we can’t hold to the world ourselves or anything. We are blind to continuity, all breaks down, falls, melts, stops, rots, or runs away. So, since we cannot shape Time, where does that leave men? Sleepless. Staring.

Three a.m. That’s our reward. Three in the morn. The soul’s midnight. The tide goes out, the soul ebbs. And a train arrives at an hour of despair. Why?

“Charlie…?”

His wife’s hand moved to his.

“You… all right… Charlie?”

She drowsed.

He did not answer.

He could not tell her how he was.

Chapter 15

The sun rose yellow as a lemon.

The sky was round and blue.

The birds looped clear water songs in the air.

Will and Jim leaned from their windows.

Nothing had changed.

Except the look in Jim’s eyes.

“Last night…” said Will. “Did or didn’t it happen?”

They both gazed toward the far meadows.

The air was sweet as syrup. They could find no shadows, anywhere, even under trees.

“Six minutes!” cried Jim.

“Five!”

Four minutes later, cornflakes lurching in their stomachs, they frisked the leaves to a fine red dust going out of town.

With a wild flutter of breath, they raised their eyes from the earth they had been treading.

And the carnival was there.

“Hey…”

For the tents were lemon like the sun, brass like wheat fields a few weeks ago. Flags and banners bright as blue-birds snapped above lion-colored canvas. From booths painted cotton-candy colors fine Saturday smells of bacon and eggs, hot dogs and pancakes swam with the wind. Everywhere ran boys. Everywhere, sleepy fathers followed.

“It’s just a plain old carnival,” said Will.

“Like heck,” said Jim. “We weren’t blind last night. Cone on!”

They marched one hundred yards straight on and deep into the midway. And the deeper they went, the more obvious it became they would find no night men cat-treading shadow while strange tents plumed like thunder clouds. Instead, close up, the carnival was mildewed rope, moth-eaten canvas, rain-worn, sun-bleached tinsel. The side-show paintings, hung like sad albatrosses on their poles, flapped and let fall flakes of ancient paint, shivering and at the same time revealing the unwondrous wonders of a thin man, fat-man, needle-head, tattooed man, hula dancer…

They prowled on but found no mysterious midnight sphere of evil gas tied by Mysterious Oriental knots to daggers plunged in dark earth, no maniac ticket takers bent on terrible revenges. The calliope by the ticket booth neither screamed deaths nor hummed idiot songs to itself. The train? Pulled off on a spur in the warming grass, it was old, yes, and welded tight with rust, but it looked like a titanic magnet that had collected to itself, from locomotive bone-yards across three continents, drive shafts, flywheels, smoke stacks, and hand-me-down second-rate nightmares. It did not cut a black and mortuary silhouette. It asked permission but to lie dead in autumn strewings, so much tired steam and iron gunpowder blowing away.

“Jim! Will!”

Here came Miss Foley, their seventh-grade schoolteacher, along the midway, all smiles.

“Boys,” she said, “what’s wrong? You look as if you lost something.”

“Well,” said Will, “last night, did you hear that calliope—”

“Calliope? No—”

“Then why’re you out here so early, Miss Foley?” asked Jim.

“I love carnivals,” said Miss Foley, a little woman lost somewhere in her grey fifties, beaming around. “I’ll buy hot dogs and you eat while I look for my fool nephew. You seen him?”

“Nephew?”

“Robert. Staying with me a few weeks. Father’s dead, mother’s sick in Wisconsin. I took him in. He ran out here early today. Said he’d meet me. But you know boys! My, you look glum.” She shoved food at them. “Eat! Cheer up! Rides’ll open in ten minutes. Meantime, I think I’ll spy through that Mirror Maze and—”

“No,” said Will.

“No what?” asked Miss Foley.

“No Mirror Maze.” Will swallowed. He stared at fathoms of reflections. You could never strike bottom there. It was like winter standing tall, waiting to kill you with a glance. “Miss Foley,” he said at last, and wondered to hear his mouth say it, “don’t go in there.”

“Why not?”

Jim peered, fascinated, into Will’s face. “Yeah, tell us. Why not?”

“People get lost,” said Will, lamely.

“All the more reason. Robert might be wandering, loose, and not find his way out if I don’t grab his ear—”

“Never can tell—” Will could not take his eyes off the millions of miles of blind grass—“what might be swimming around in there…”

“Swimming!” Miss Foley laughed. “What a lovely mind you have, Willy. Well, yes, but I’m an old fish. So…”

“Miss Foley!”

Miss Foley waved, poised, took a step, and vanished into the mirror ocean. They watched as she settled, wandered, sank deep, deep, and was finally dissolved, grey among silver.

Jim grabbed Will. “What was all that?”

“Gosh, Jim, it’s the mirrors! They’re the only things I don’t like. I mean, they’re the only things like last night.”

“Boy, boy, you been out in the sun,” snorted Jim. “That maze there is…” His voice trailed off. He sniffed the cold air blowing out as from an ice house between the tall reflections.

“Jim? You were saying?”

But Jim said nothing. After a long time he clapped his hand to the back of his neck. “It really does!” he cried in soft amaze.

“What does?”

“Hair! I read it all my life. In scary stories, it stands on end! Mine’s doing it—now!”

“Gosh, Jim. So’s mine!”

They stood entranced with the delicious cold bumps on their necks and the suddenly stiffened small hairs quilled up over their scalps.

There was a flourish of light and shadow.

Bumping through the Mirror Maze they saw two, four, a dozen Miss Foleys.

They didn’t know which one was real, so they waved to all of them.

But none of the Miss Foleys saw or waved back. Blind she walked. Blind, she tacked her nails to cold glass.

“Miss Foley!”

Her eyes, flexed wide as from blasts of photographic powder, were skinned white like a statue’s. Deep under the glass, she spoke. She murmured. She whimpered. Now she cried. Now she shouted. Now she yelled. She knocked glass with her head, her elbows, tilted drunken as a light-blind moth, raised her hands in claws. “Oh God! Help!” she wailed. “Help, oh God!”

Jim and Will saw their own faces, pale, their own eyes, wide, in the mirrors as they plunged.

“Miss Foley, here!” Jim cracked his brow.

“This way!” But Will found only cold glass.

A hand flew from empty space. An old woman’s hand, sinking for the last time. It seized anything to save itself. The anything was Will. She pulled him under.

“Will!”

“Jim! Jim!”

And Jim held him and he held her and pulled her free of the silently rushing mirrors coming in from the desolate seas.

They stepped into sunlight.

Miss Foley, one hand to her bruised cheek, bleated, muttered, then laughed quickly, then gasped, and wiped her eyes.

“Thank you, Will, Jim, oh thank you, I’d of drowned! I mean… oh, Will you were right! My God, did you see her, she’s lost, drowned in there, poor girl, oh the poor lost sweet… save her, oh, we must save her!”

“Miss Foley, boy, you’re hurting.” Will firmly removed her fists from clenching the flesh of his arm. “There’s no one in there.”

“I saw her! Please! Look! Save her!”

Will jumped to the maze entrance and stopped. The ticket taker gave him an idle glance of contempt. Will backed away to Miss Foley.

“I swear, no one went in ahead or after you, ma’am. It’s my fault, I joked about the water, you must’ve got mixed up, lost, and scared…”

But if she heard, she went on biting the back of her hand, her voice the voice of someone come out of the sea after no air, a long dread time deep, no hope of life and now set free.

“Gone? She’s at the bottom! Poor girl. I knew her. ‘I know you!’ I said when I first saw her a minute ago. I waved, she waved. ‘Hello!’ I ran!—bang! I fell. She fell. A dozen, a thousand of her fell. ‘Wait!’ I said. Oh, she looked so fine, so lovely, so young. But it scared me. ‘What’re you doing here?’ I said. ‘Why,’ I think she said, ‘I’m real. You’re not!’ she laughed, way under water. She ran off in the maze. We must find her! Before—”

Miss Foley, Will’s arm around her, took a last trembling breath and grew strangely quiet.

Jim was staring deep into those cold mirrors, looking for sharks that could not be seen.

“Miss Foley,” he said, “what did she look like?”

Miss Foley’s voice was pale but calm.

“The fact is… she looked like myself, many, many years ago.

“I’ll go home now,” she said.

“Miss Foley, we’ll—”

“No. Stay. I’m just fine. Have fun, boys. Enjoy.”

And she walked slowly away, alone, down the midway.

Somewhere a vast animal made water. Ammonia made the wind turn ancient as it passed.

“I’m leaving!” said Will.

“Will,” said Jim. “We’re staying until sundown, boy, dark sundown, and figure it all. You chicken?”

“No,” murmured Will. “But… anybody want to dive back in that maze?”

Jim gazed fiercely deep into the bottomless sea, where now only the pure light glanced back at itself, help up emptiness upon emptiness beyond emptiness before their eyes.

“Nobody.” Jim let his heart beat twice. “…I guess.”

Chapter 16

A bad thing happened at sunset.

Jim vanished.

Through noon and after noon, they had screamed up half the rides, knocked over dirty milk-bottles, smashed kewpie-doll winning plates, smelling, listening, looking their way through the autumn crowd trampling the leafy sawdust.

And then quite suddenly Jim was gone.

And Will, not asking anyone but himself, absolutely silent certain-sure, walked steadily through the late crowd as the sky was turning plum colored until he came to the maze and paid his dime and stepped up inside and called softly just one time:

“…Jim…”

And Jim was there, half in, half out of the cold glass tides like someone abandoned on a seashore when a close friend has gone far out, and there is wonder if he will ever come back. Jim stood as if he had not moved so much as an eyelash in five minutes, staring, his mouth half-open, waiting for the next wave to come in and show him more.

“Jim! Get outa there!”

“Will…” Jim sighed faintly. “Let me be.”

“Like heck!” With one leap, Will grabbed Jim’s belt and hauled. Shuffling backward, Jim did not seem to know he was being dragged from the maze, for he kept protesting in awe at some unseen wonder: “Oh, Will, oh, Willy, Will, oh, Willy…”

“Jim, you nut. I’m taking you home!”

“What? What? What?”

They were in cold air. The sky was darker than plums now, with a few clouds burning late sun-fire above. The sun-fire flamed on Jim’s feverish cheeks, his open lips, his wide and terribly rich green shining eyes.

“Jim, what’d you see in there? The same as Miss Foley?”

“What, what?

“I’m gonna bust your nose! Come on!” He hustled, pulled, shoved, half carried this fever, this elation, unstruggling friend.

“Can’t tell you, Will, wouldn’t believe, can’t tell you, in there, oh, in there, in there…”

“Shut up!” Will socked his arm. “Scare heck outa me, just like she scared us. Bugs! It’s almost suppertime. Folks’ll think we’re dead and buried!”

They were striding now, slashing the autumn grass with their shoes, beyond the tents in the hay-smelling, leaf-mould fields, Will glaring at town, Jim staring back at the high now-darkening banners as the last of the sun hid under the earth.

“Will, we got to come back. Tonight—”

“Okay, come back alone.”

Jim stopped.

“You wouldn’t let me come alone. You’re always going to be around, aren’t you, Will? To protect me?”

“Look who needs protection.” Will laughed and then did not laugh again, for Jim was looking at him, the last wild light dying in his mouth, and caught in the thin hollows of his nostrils and in his suddenly deep-set eyes.

“You’ll always be with me, huh, Will?”

Jim simply breathed warm upon him and his blood stirred with the old, the familiar answers: yes, yes, you know it, yes, yes.

And turning together, they stumbled over a clanking dark mound of leather bag.

Chapter 17

They stood for a long moment over the huge leather bag.

Almost secretively, Will kicked it. It made the sound of iron indigestion.

“Why,” said Will, “that belongs to the lightning-rod salesman!”

Jim slipped his hand through the leather mouth and hefted forth a metal shaft clustered with chimeras, Chinese dragons all fang, eyeball and moss-green armour, all cross and crescent; every symbol around the world that made men safe, or seemed to, clung there, greaving the boys’ hands with odd weight and meaning.

“Storm never came. But he went.”

“Where? And why did he leave his bag?”

They both looked to the carnival where dusk colored the canvas billows. Shadows ran coolly out to engulf them. People in cars honked home in tired commotions. Boys on skeleton bikes whistled dogs after. Soon night would own the midway while shadows rode the ferris wheel up to cloud the stars.

“People,” said Jim, “don’t leave their whole life lying around. This is everything that old man owned. Something important—” Jim breathed soft fire—“made him forget. So he just walked off and left this here.”

“What? What’s so important you forget everything?”

“Why—” Jim examined his friend, curiously, twilight in his face—“no one can tell you. You find it yourself. Mysteries and mysteries. Storm salesman. Storm salesman’s bag. If we don’t look now, we might never know.”

“Jim, in ten minutes—”

“Sure! Midway’ll be dark. Everyone home for dinner. Just us alone. But won’t it feel great? Just us! And here we go, back in!”

Passing the Mirror Maze, they saw two armies—a billion Jims, a billion Wills—collide, melt, vanish. And like those armies, so vanished the real army of people.

They boys stood alone among the encampments of dusk thinking of all the boys in town sitting down to warm food in bright rooms.

Chapter 18

The red-lettered sign said: OUT OF ORDER! KEEP OFF!

“Sign’s been up all day. I don’t believe signs,” said Jim.

They peered in at the merry-go-round which lay under a dry rattle and roar of wind-tumbled oak trees. Its horses, goats, antelopes, zebras, speared through their spines with brass javelins, hung contorted as in a death rictus, asking mercy with their fright-colored eyes, seeking revenge with their panic-colored teeth.

“Don’t look broke to me.”

Jim ambled across the clanking chain, leaped to a turntable surface vast as the moon, among the frantic but forever spelled beasts.

“Jim!”

“Will, this is the only ride we haven’t looked at. So…”

Jim swayed. The lunatic carousel world stirred atilt with his lean bulk. He strolled through brass forests amidst animal rousts. He swung astride a plum-dusk stallion.

“Ho, boy, git!”

A man rose from machinery darkness.

“Jim!”

Reaching out from the shadows among the calliope tubes and moon-skinned drums the man hoisted Jim yelling out on the air.

“Help, Will, help!”

Will leaped through the animals.

The man smiled easily, welcomed him handily, swung him high beside Jim. They stared down at bright flame-red hair, bright flame-blue eyes, and rippling biceps.

“Out of order,” said the man. “Can’t you read?”

“Put them down,” said a gentle voice.

Hung high, Jim and Will glanced over at a second man standing tall beyond the chains.

“Down,” he said again.

And they were carried through the brass forest of wild but uncomplaining brutes and set in the dust.

“We were—” said Will.

“Curious?” This second man was tall as a lamp post. His pale face, lunar pockmarks denting it, cast light on those who stood below. His vest was the color of fresh blood. His eyes-brows, his hair, his suit were licorice black, and the sun-yellow gem which stared from the tie-pin thrust in his cravat was the same unblinking shade and bright crystal as his eyes. But in this instant, swiftly, and with utter clearness, it was the suit which fascinated Will. For it seemed woven of boar-bramble, clock-spring hair, bristle, and a sort of ever-trembling, ever-glistening dark hemp. The suit caught light and stirred like a bed of black tweed-thorns, interminably itching, covering the man’s long body with motion so it seemed he should excruciate, cry out, and tear the clothes free. Yet here he stood, moon-calm, inhabiting his itch-weed suit and watching Jim’s mouth with his yellow eyes. He never looked once at Will.

“The name is Dark.”

He flourished a white calling card. It turned blue.

Whisper. Red.

Whisk. A green man dangled from a tree stamped on the card.

Flit. Shh.

“Dark. And my friend with the red hair there is Mr. Cooger. Of Cooger and Dark’s…”

Flip-flick-shhh.

Names appeared, disappeared on the white square:

“…Combined Shadow Shows…”

Tick-wash.

A mushroom-witch stirred mouldering herb pots.

“…and cross-continental Pandemonium Theatre Company…”

He handed the card to Jim. It now read:

Calmly, Jim read it. Calmly, Jim put a fist into his copious and richly treasured pockets, rummaged, and held out his hand.

On his palm lay a dead brown insect.

“Here,” Jim said. “Fix this.”

Mr. Dark exploded his laugh. “Superb! I will!” He extended his hand. His shirt sleeve pulled up.

Bright purple, black green and lightning-blue eels, worms, and Latin scrolls slid to view on his wrist.

“Boy!” cried Will. “You must be the Tattooed Man!”

“No.” Jim studied the stranger. “The Illustrated Man. There’s a difference.”

Mr. Dark nodded, pleased. “What’s your name, boy?”

Don’t tell him! thought Will, and stopped. Why not? he wondered, why?

Jim’s lips hardly twitched.

“Simon,” he said.

He smiled to show it was a lie.

Mr. Dark smiled to show he knew it.

“Want to see more, ‘Simon’?”

Jim would not give him the satisfaction of a nod.

Slowly, with great mouth-working pleasure, Mr. Dark pushed his sleeve high to his elbow.

Jim stared. The arm was like a cobra weaving, bobbing, swaying, to strike. Mr. Dark clenched his fist, wriggled his fingers. The muscles danced.

Will wanted to run around and see, but could only watch, thinking Jim, oh, Jim!

For there stood Jim and there was this tall man, each examining the other as if he were a reflection in a shop window late at night. The tall man’s brambled suit, shadowed out now to color Jim’s cheeks and storm over his wide and drinking eyes with a look of rain instead of the sharp cat-green they always were. Jim stood like a runner who has come a long way, fever in his mouth, hands open to receive any gift. And right now it was a gift of pictures twitched in pantomime, as Mr. Dark made his illustrious jerk cold-skinned over his warm-pulsed wrist as the stars came out above and Jim stared and Will could not see and a long way off the last of the town people went away toward town in their warm cars, and Jim said, faintly, “Gosh…” and Mr. Dark rolled down his sleeve.

“Show’s over. Suppertime. Carnival’s shut up until seven. Everyone out. Come back, ‘Simon,’ and ride the merry-go-round, when it’s fixed. Take this card. Free ride.”

Jim stared at the hidden wrist and put the card in his pocket.

“So long!”

Jim ran. Will ran.

Jim whirled, glanced back, leaped, and for the second time in the hour, vanished.

Will looked up into the tree where Jim squirmed on a limb, hidden.

Mr. Dark and Mr. Cooger were turned away, busy with the merry-go-round.

“Quick, Will!”

“Jim…?”

“They’ll see you. Jump!”

Will jumped. Jim hauled him up. The great tree shook. A wind roared by in the sky. Jim helped him cling, gasping, among the branches.

“Jim, we don’t belong here!”

“Shut up! Look!” whispered Jim.

Somewhere in the carousel machinery there were taps and brass knockings, a faint squeal and whistle of calliope steam.

“What was on his arm, Jim?”

“A picture.”

“Yeah, but what kind?”

“It was—Jim shut his eyes. “It was—a picture of a… snake… that’s it… snake.” But when he opened his eyes, he would not look at Will.

“Okay, if you don’t want to tell me.”

“I told you, Will, a snake. I’ll get him to show it to you, later, you want that?”

No, thought Will, I don’t want that.

He looked down at the billion footprints left in the sawdust on the empty midway and suddenly it was a lot closer to midnight than to noon.

“I’m going home…”

“Sure, Will, go on. Mirror mazes, old teacher-ladies, lost lightning-rod bags, lightning-rod salesmen disappear, snake pictures dancing, unbroken merry-go-rounds, and you want to go home!? Sure, old friend, Will, so long.”

“I…” Will started down the tree, and froze.

“All clear?” cried a voice below.

“Clear!” someone shouted at the far end of the midway.

Mr. Dark moved, not fifty feet away to a red control box near the merry-go-round ticket booth. He glared in all directions. He glared into the tree.

Will hugged, Jim hugged the limb, tightened into smallness.

“Start up!”

With a pop, a bang, a jangle of reins, a lift and downfall, a rise and descent of brass, the carousel moved.

But, thought Will, it’s broke, out of order!

He flicked a glance at Jim, who pointed wildly down.

The merry-go-round was running, yes, but…

It was running backward.

The small calliope inside the carousel machinery rattle-snapped its nervous-stallion shivering drums, clashed its harvest-moon cymbals, toothed its castanets, and throatily choked and sobbed its reeds, whistles, and baroque flutes.

The music, Will thought, it’s backwards, too!

Mr. Dark jerked about, glanced up, as if he had heard Will’s thoughts. A wind shook the trees in black tumults. Mr. Dark shrugged and looked away.

The carousel wheeled faster, shrieking, plunging, going roundabout-back!

Now Mr. Cooger, with his flaming red hair and fire-blue eyes, was pacing the midway, making a last check. He stood under their tree. Will could have let spit down on him. Then the calliope gave a particularly violent cry of foul murder which made dogs howl in far counties, and Mr. Cooger, spinning, ran and leaped on the backwhirling universe of animals who, tail first, head last, pursued an endless circling night toward unfound and never to be discovered destinations. Hand-slapping brass poles, he flung himself into a seat where with his bristly red hair, pink face, and incredible sharp blue eyes he sat silent, going back around, back around, the music squealing swift back with him like insucked breath.

The music, thought Will, what is it? And how do I know it’s backside first? He hugged the limb, tried to catch the tune, then hum it forward in his head. But the brass bells, the drums hammered his chest, revved his heart so he felt his pulse reverse, his blood turn back in perverse thrusts through all his flesh, so he was nearly shaken free to fall, so all he did was clutch, hang pale, and drink the sight of the backward-turning machine and Mr. Dark, alert at the controls, on the sidelines.

It was Jim who first noticed the new thing happening, for he kicked Will, once, Will looked over, and Jim nodded frantically at the man in the machine as he came around the next time.

Mr. Cooger’s face was melting like pink wax.

His hands were becoming doll’s hands.

His bones sank away beneath his clothes; his clothes then shrank down to fit his dwindling frame.

His face flickered going, and each time around he melted more.

Will saw Jim’s head shift, circling.

The carousel wheeled, a great back-drifting lunar dream the horses thrusting, the music in-gasped after, while Mr. Cooger, as simple as shadows, as simple as light, as simple as time, got younger. And younger. And younger.

Each time he wheeled to view he sat alone with his bones, which shaped like warm candles burning away to tender years.

He gazed serenely at the fiery constellations, the children-inhabited trees, which went away from him as he removed himself from them and his nose finished and his sweet wax ears reshaped themselves to small pink roses.

Now no longer forty where he had begun his back-spiraled journey, Mr. Cooger was nineteen.

Around went the reverse parade of horse, pole, music, man become young man, young man fast rendered down to boy…

Mr. Cooger was seventeen, sixteen…

Another and another time around under the sky and trees and Will whispering, Jim counting the times around, around, while the night air warmed to summer heat by friction of sun-metal brass, the passionate backturned flight of beasts, wore the wax doll down and down and washed him clean with the still stranger musics until all ceased, all died away to stillness the calliope shut up its brassworks, the ironmongery machines hissed off, and with a last faint whine like desert sands blown backup Arabian hourglasses, the carousel rocked on seaweed waters and stood still.

The figure seated in the carved white wooden sleigh chair was very small.

Mr. Cooger was twelve years old.

No. Will’s mouth shaped the word. No. Jim’s did the same.

The small shape, stepped down from the silent world, its face in shadow, but its hands newborn wrinkled pink, held out in raw carnival lamplight.

The strange man-boy shot his gaze up, down, smelling fright somewhere, terror and awe in the vicinity. Will balled himself tight and shut his eyes. He felt the terrible gaze shoot through the leaves like brown needle-darts, pass on. Then, rabbit-running, the small shape lit off down the empty midway.

Jim was first to stir the leaves aside.

Mr. Dark was gone, too, in the evening hush.

It seemed to take Jim forever to fall down to earth. Will fell after and they both stood, clamorous with alarms, shaken by concussions of silent pantomime, blasted by events all the more numbing because they ran off into the night unknown. And it was Jim who spoke from their mutual confusion and trembling as each held to the other’s arm, seeing the small shadow rush, luring them across the meadow.

“Oh, Will, I wish we could go home, I wish we could eat. But it’s too late, we saw! We got to see more! Don’t we?”

“Lord,” said Will miserably. “I guess we do.”

And they ran together, following they didn’t know what on out and away to who could possibly guess where.

Chapter 19

Out on the highway the last faint water-colors of the sun were gone beyond the hills and whatever they were chasing was so far ahead as to be only a swift-fleck now shown in lamplight, now set free, running, into dark.

“Twenty-eight!” gasped Jim, “Twenty-eight times!”

“The merry-go-round, sure!” Will jerked his head. “Twenty-eight times I counted, it went around back!”

Up ahead the small shape stopped and looked back.

Jim and Will ducked in by a tree and let it move on.

“It”, thought Will. Why do I think “it”? He’s a boy, he’s a man… no… it is something that has changed, that’s what it is.

They reached and passed the city limits, and swiftly jogging, Will said, “Jim, there must’ve been two people on that ride, Mr. Cooger and this boy and—”

“No. I never took my eyes off him!”

They ran by the barber shop. Will saw but did not see a sign in the window. He read but did not read. He remembered, he forgot. He plunged on.

“Hey! He’s turned on Culpepper Street! Quick!”

They rounded a corner.

“He’s gone!”

The street lay long and empty in the lamplight.

Leaves blew on the hopscotch-chalked sidewalks.

“Will, Miss Foley lives on this street.”

“Sure, fourth house, but—”

Jim strolled, casually whistling, hands in pockets, Will with him. At Miss Foley’s house they glanced up.

In one of the softly lit front windows, someone stood looking out.

A boy, no more and no less than twelve years old.

“Will!” cried Jim, softly. “That boy—”

“Her nephew…?”

“Nephew, heck! Keep your head away. Maybe he can read lips. Walk slow. To the corner and back. You see his face? The eyes, Will! That’s one part of people don’t change, young, old, six or sixty! Boy’s face, sure, but the eyes were the eyes of Mr. Cooger!”

“No!”

“Yes!”

They both stopped to enjoy the swift pound of each other’s heart.

“Keep moving.” They moved. Jim held Will’s arm tight, leading him. “You did see Mr. Cooger’s eyes, huh? When he held us up fit to crack our heads together? You did see the boy, just off the ride? He looked right up near me, hid in the tree, and boy! It was like opening the door of a furnace! I’ll never forget those eyes! And there they are now, in the window. Turn around. Now, let’s walk back easy and nice and slow… We got to warn Miss Foley what’s hiding in her house, don’t we?”

“Jim, look, you don’t give a darn about Miss Foley or what’s in her house!”

Jim said nothing. Walking arm in arm with Will he just looked over at his friend and blinked once, let the lids come down over his shiny green eyes and go up.

And again Will had the feeling about Jim that he had always had about an old almost forgotten dog. Some time every year that dog, good for many months, just ran on out into the world and didn’t come back for days and finally did limp back all burred and scrawny and odorous of swamps and dumps; he had rolled in the dirty mangers and foul dropping-places of the world, simply to turn home with a funny little smile pinned to his muzzle. Dad had named the dog Plato, the wilderness philosopher, for you saw by his eyes there was nothing he didn’t know. Returned, the dog would live in innocence again, tread patterns of grace, for months, then vanish, and the whole thing start over. Now, walking here he thought he heard Jim whimper under his breath. He could feel the bristles stiffen all over Jim. He felt Jim’s ears flatten, saw him sniff the new dark. Jim smelled smells that no one knew, heard ticks from clocks that told another time. Even his tongue was strange now, moving along his lower, and now his upper lip as they stopped in front of Miss Foley’s house again.

The front window was empty.

“Going to walk up and ring the bell,” said Jim.

“What, meet him face to face?!”

“My aunt’s eyebrows, Will. We got to check, don’t we? Shake his paw, stare him in his good eye or some such, and if it is him—”

“We don’t warn Miss Foley right in front of him, do we?”

“We’ll phone her later, dumb. Up we go!”

Will sighed and let himself be walked up the steps wanting but not wanting to know if the boy in this house had Mr. Cooger hid but showing like a firefly between his eyelashes.

Jim rang the bell.

“What if he answers?” Will demanded. “Boy, I’m so scared I could sprinkle dust. Jim, why aren’t you scared, why?”

Jim examined both of his untrembled hands. “I’ll be darned,” he gasped. “You’re right! I’m not!”

The door swung wide.

Miss Foley beamed out at them.

“Jim! Will! How nice.”

“Miss Foley,” blurted Will. “You okay?”

Jim glared at him. Miss Foley laughed.

“Why shouldn’t I be?”

Will flushed. “All those darn carnival mirrors—”

“Nonsense, I’ve forgotten all about it. Well, boys, are you coming in?”

She held the door wide.

Will shuffled a foot and stopped.

Beyond Miss Foley, a beaded curtain hung like a dark blue thunder shower across the parlour entry.

Where the colored rain touched the floor, a pair of dusty small shoes poked out. Just beyond the downpour the evil boy loitered.

Evil? Will blinked. Why evil? Because. “Because” was reason enough. A boy, yes, and evil.

“Robert?” Miss Foley turned, calling through the dark blue always-falling beads of rain. She took Will’s hand and gently pulled him inside. “Come meet two of my students.”

The rain poured aside. A fresh candy-pink hand broke through, all by itself, as if testing the weather in the hall.

Good grief, thought Will, he’ll look me in the eye! see the merry-go-round and himself on it moving back, back. I know it’s printed on my eyeball like I been struck by lightning!

“Miss Foley!” said Will.

Now a pink face stuck out through the dim frozen necklaces of storm.

“We got to tell you a terrible thing.”

Jim struck Will’s elbow, hard, to shut him.

Now the body came out through the dark watery flow of beads. The rain shushed behind the small boy.

Miss Foley leaned toward him, expectant. Jim gripped his elbow, fiercely. He stammered, flushed, then spat it out:

“Mr. Crosetti!”

Quite suddenly, clearly he saw the sign in the barber’s window. The sign seen but not seen as they ran by:

“Mr. Crosetti!” he repeated, and added swiftly. “He’s… dead!”

“What… the barber?”

“The barber?” echoed Jim.

“See this haircut?” Will turned, trembling, his hand to his head. “He did it. And we just walked by there and the sign was up and people told us—”

“What a shame.” Miss Foley was reaching out to fetch the strange boy forward: “I’m so sorry. Boys, this is Robert, my nephew from Wisconsin.”

Jim stuck out his hand. Robert the Nephew examined it, curiously. “What are you looking at?” he asked.

“You look familiar,” said Jim.

Jim! Will yelled to himself.

“Like an uncle of mine,” said Jim, all sweet and calm.

The nephew flicked his eyes to Will, who looked only at the floor, afraid the boy would see his eyeballs whirl with the remembered carousel. Crazily, he wanted to hum the backward music.

Now, he thought, face him!

He looked up straight at the boy.

And it was wild and crazy and the floor sank away beneath for there was the pink shiny Hallowe’en mask of a small pretty boy’s face, but almost as if holes were cut where the eyes of Mr. Cooger shone out, old, old, eyes as bright as sharp blue stars and the light from those stars taking a million years to get here. And through the little nostrils cut in the shiny mask, Mr. Cooger’s breath went in steam, came out ice. And the Valentine candy tongue moved small behind those trim white candy-kernel teeth.

Mr. Cooger, somewhere behind the eye-slits, went blink-click with his insect-Kodak pupils. The lenses exploded like suns, then burnt chilly and serene again.

He swivelled his glance to Jim. Blink-click. He had Jim flexed, focused, shot, developed, dried, filed away in the dark. Blink-click.

Yet this was only a boy standing in a hall with two other boys and a women…

And all the while Jim gazed steadily, back, feathers unruffled, taking his own pictures of Robert.

“Have you boys had supper?”, asked Miss Foley. “We’re just sitting down—”

“We got to go!”

Everyone looked at Will as if amazed he didn’t want to stick here forever.

“Jim—” he stammered. “Your mom’s home alone—”

“Oh, sure,” Jim said, reluctantly.

“I know what.” The nephew paused for their attention. When their faces turned, Mr. Cooger inside the nephew went silently blink-click, blink-click, listening through the toy ears, watching through the toy-charm eyes, whetting the doll’s mouth with a Pekingese tongue. “Join us later for dessert, huh?”

“Dessert?”

“I’m taking Aunt Willa to the carnival.” The boy stroked Miss Foley’s arm until she laughed nervously.

“Carnival?” cried Will, and lowered his voice. “Miss Foley, you said—”

“I said I was foolish and scared myself,” said Miss Foley. “It’s Saturday night, the best night for tent shows and showing my nephew the sights.”

“Join us?” asked Robert, holding Miss Foley’s hand. “Later?”

“Great!” said Jim.

“Jim,” said Will. “We been out all day. Your mom’s sick.”

“I forgot.” Jim flashed him a look filled with purest snake-poison.

Flick. The nephew made an X-ray of both, showing them, no doubt, as cold bones trembling in warm flesh. He stuck out his hand.

“Tomorrow, then. Meet you by the side-shows.”

“Swell!” Jim grabbed the small hand.

“So long!” Will jumped out the door, then turned with a last agonized appeal to the teacher.

“Miss Foley…?”

“Yes, Will?”

Don’t go with that boy, he thought. Don’t go near the shows. Stay home, oh please! But then he said:

“Mr. Crosetti’s dead.”

She nodded, touched, waiting for his tears. And while she waited, he dragged Jim outside and the door swung shut on Miss Foley and the pink small face with the lenses in it going blink-click, snapshotting two incoherent boys, and them fumbling down the steps in October dark, while the merry-go-round started again in Will’s head, rushing while the leaves in the trees above cracked and fried with wind.

Aside, Will spluttered, “Jim, you shook hands with him! Mr. Cooger! You’re not going to meet him!?”

“It’s Mr. Cooger, all right. Boy, those eyes. If I met him tonight, we’d solve the whole shooting match. What’s eating you, Will?”

“Eating me!” At the bottom of the steps now, they tussled in fierce and frantic whispers, glancing up at the empty windows where, now and again, a shadow passed. Will stopped. The music turned in his head. Stunned, he squinched his eyes. “Jim, the music that the calliope played when Mr. Cooger got younger—”

“Yeah?”

“It was the ‘Funeral March’! Played backwards!”

“Which ‘Funeral March’?”

“Which! Jim, Chopin only wrote one tune! The ‘Funeral March’!”

“But why played backward?”

“Mr. Cooger was marching away from the grave, not toward it, wasn’t he, getting younger, smaller, instead of older and dropping dead?”

“Willy, you’re terrific!”

“Sure, but—” Will stiffened. “He’s there. The window, again. Wave at him. So long! Now, walk and whistle something. Not Chopin, for gosh sakes—”

Jim waved. Will waved. Both whistled, “Oh, Susanna.”

The shadow gestured small in the high window.

The boys hurried off down the street.

Chapter 20

Two suppers were waiting in two houses.

One parent yelled at Jim, two parents yelled at Will.

Both were sent hungry upstairs.

It started at seven o’clock It was done by seven-three.

Doors slammed. Locks clanked.

Clocks ticked.

Will stood by the door. The telephone was locked away outside. And even if he called, Miss Foley wouldn’t answer. By now she’d be gone beyond town… good grief? Anyway, what could he say? Miss Foley, that nephew’s no nephew? That boy’s no boy? Wouldn’t she laugh? She would. For the nephew was a nephew, the boy was a boy, or seemed such.

He turned to the window. Jim, across the way, stood facing the same dilemma, in his room. Both struggled. It was too early to raise the windows and stage-whisper to each other. Parents below were busy growing crystal-radio peach-fuzz in their ears, alert.

The boys threw themselves on their separate beds in their separate houses, probed mattresses for chocolate chunks put away against the lean years, and ate moodily.

Clocks ticked.

Nine. Nine-thirty. Ten.

The knob rattled, softly, as Dad unlocked the door.

Dad! thought Will. Come in! We got to talk!

But Dad chewed his breath in the hall. Only his confusion, his always puzzled, half-bewildered face could be felt beyond the door.

He won’t come in, thought Will. Walk around, talk around, back off from a thing, yes. But come sit, listen? When had he, when would he, ever?

“Will…?”

Will quickened.

“Will…” said Dad, “be careful.”

“Careful?” cried mother, coming along the hall. “Is that all you’re going to say?”

“What else?” Dad was going downstairs now. “He jumps, I creep. How can you get two people together like that? He’s too young, I’m too old. God, sometimes I wish we’d never…”

The door shut. Dad was walking away on the sidewalk.

Will wanted to fling up the window and call. Suddenly, Dad was so lost in the night. Not me, don’t worry about me, Dad, he thought, you, Dad, stay in! It’s not safe! Don’t go!

But he didn’t shout. And when he softly raised the window at last, the street was empty, and he knew it would be just a matter of time before that light went on in the library across town. When rivers flooded, when fire fell from the sky, what a fine place the library was, the many rooms, the books. With luck, no one found you. How could they!—when you were off to Tanganyika in ’98, Cairo in 1812, Florence in 1492!?

“…careful…”

What did Dad mean? Did he smell the panic, had he heard the music, had he prowled near the tents? No. Not Dad ever.

Will tossed a marble over at Jim’s window.

Tap. Silence.

He imagined Jim seated alone in the dark, his breath like phosphorous on the air, ticking away to himself.

Tap. Silence.

This wasn’t like Jim. Always before, the window slid up, Jim’s head popped out, ripe with yells, secret hissings, giggles, riots and rebel charges.

“Jim, I know you’re there!”

Tap.

Silence.

Dad’s out in the town. Miss Foley’s with you-know-who! he thought. Good gosh, Jim, we got to do something! Tonight!

He threw a last marble.

…tap…

It fell to the hushed grass below.

Jim did not come to the window.

Tonight, thought Will. He bit his knuckles. He lay back cold straight stiff on his bed.

Chapter 21

In the alley behind the house was a huge old-fashioned pine-plank boardwalk. It had been there ever since Will remembered, since civilization unthinkingly poured forth the dull hard unresisting cement sidewalks. His grandfather, a man of strong sentiment and wild impulse, who let nothing go without a roar, had flexed his muscles in favour of this vanishing landmark, and with a dozen handymen had toted a good forty feet of the walk into the alley where it had lain like the skeleton of some indefinable monster through the years, baked by sun, lushly rotted by rains.

The town clock struck ten.

Lying abed, Will realized he had been thinking about Grandfather’s vast gift from another time. He was waiting to hear the boardwalk speak. In what language? Well…

Boys have never been known to go straight up to houses to ring bells to summon forth friends. They prefer to chunk dirt at clapboards, hurl acorns down roof shingles, or leave mysterious notes flapping from kites stranded on attic window sills.

So it was with Jim and Will.

Late nights, if there were gravestones to be leapfrogged or dead cats to be hurled down sour people’s chimneys, one or the other of the boys would prowl out under the moon and xylophone-dance on that old hollow-echoing musical boardwalk.

Over the years, they had tuned the walk, prising up an A board and nailing it here, lifting up an F board and pounding it back down there until the walk was as near onto being melodious as weather and two entrepreneurs could fashion it.

By the tune treaded out, you could tell the night’s venture. If Will heard Jim tramping hard on seven or eight notes of “Way Down Upon the Swanee River,” he scrambled out knowing it was moon-trail time on the creek leading to the river caves. If Jim heard Will out leaping about like a scalded airedale on the timbers and the tune remotely suggested “Marching Through Georgia,” it meant plums, peaches, or apples were ripe enough to get sick on out beyond town.

So this night Will held his breath waiting for some tune to call him forth.

What kind of tune would Jim play to represent the carnival, Miss Foley, Mr. Cooger, and/or the evil nephew?

Ten-fifteen. Ten-thirty.

No music.

Will did not like Jim sitting in his room thinking what? Of the Mirror Maze? What had he seen there? And, seeing, what did he plan?

Will stirred, restively.

Especially he did not like to think of Jim with no father between him and the tent shows and all that lay dark in the meadows. And a mother who wanted him around so very much, he just had to get away, get out, breathe free night air, know free night waters running toward bigger freer seas.

Jim! he thought. Let’s have the music!

And at ten-thirty-five, it came.

He heard, or thought he heard, Jim out in the starlight leaping way up and coming flat down like a spring tomcat on the vast xylophone. And the tune! Was or wasn’t it like the funeral dirge played backward by the old carousel calliope?!!

Will started to raise his window to be sure. But suddenly, Jim’s window slid quietly up.

He hadn’t been down on the boards! It was just Will’s wild wish that made the tune! Will started to whisper, but stopped.

For Jim, without a word, scuttled down the drainpipe.

Jim! Will thought.

Jim, on the lawn, stiffened as if hearing his name.

You’re not going without me, Jim?

Jim glanced swiftly up.

If he saw Will, he made no sign.

Jim, Will thought, we’re still pals, smell things nobody else smells, hear things no one else hears, got the same blood, run the same way. Now this first time ever, you’re sneaking out! Ditching me!

But the driveway was empty.

A salamander flicking the hedge, there went Jim.

Will was out the window, down the trellis, and over the hedge, before he thought: I’m alone. If I lose Jim, it’s the first time I’ll be out alone at night, too. And where am I going? Wherever Jim goes.

Lord, let me keep up!

Jim skimmed like a dark owl after a mouse. Will loped like a weaponless hunter after the owl. They sailed their shadows over October lawns.

And when they stopped…

There was Miss Foley’s house.

Chapter 22

Jim glanced back.

Will became a bush behind a bush, a shadow among shadows, with two starlight rounds of glass, his eyes, holding the image of Jim calling up in a whisper toward the second-floor windows.

“Hey there… hey…”

Good grief, thought Will, he wants to be slit and stuffed with broken Mirror Maze glass.

“Hey!” called Jim, softly. “You…!”

A shadow uprose on a dim-lit shade, above. A small shadow. The nephew had brought Miss Foley home, they were in their separate rooms or—Oh Lord, thought Will, I hope she’s safe home. Maybe, like the lightning-rod salesman, she—

“Hey…!”

Jim gazed up with that funny warm look of breathless anticipation he often had nights in summer at the shadow-show window Theatre in that house a few streets over. Looking up with love, with devotion, like a cat Jim waited for some special dark mouse to run forth. Crouched, now slowly he seemed to grow taller, as if his bones were pulled by the in the window above, which now suddenly vanished.

Will ground his teeth.

He felt the shadow sift down through the house like a cold breath. He could wait no longer. He leaped forth.

“Jim!”

He seized Jim’s arm.

“Will, what you doing here?!”

“Jim, don’t talk to him! Get out of here. My gosh, he’ll chew and spit out your bones!”

Jim writhed himself free.

“Will, go home! You’ll spoil everything!”

“He scares me, Jim, what you want from him!? This afternoon… in the maze, did you see something!!?”

“…Yes…”

“For gosh sakes, what!”

Will grabbed Jim’s shirt front, felt his heart bang under the chest bones. “Jim—”

“Let go.” Jim was terribly quiet. “If he knows you’re here, he won’t come out. Willy, if you don’t let go, I’ll remember when—”

“When what!”

“When I’m older, darn it, older!”

Jim spat.

As if he was struck by lightning, Will jumped back.

He looked at his empty hands and put one up to wipe the spittle off his cheek.

“Oh, Jim,” he mourned.

And he heard the merry-go-round motioning, gliding on black night waters around, around, and Jim on a black stallion riding off and about, circling in tree-shadow and he wanted to cry out, Look! the merry-go-round! you want it to go forward, don’t you, Jim? forward instead of back! and you on it, around once and you’re fifteen, circling and you’re sixteen, three times more and nineteen! music! and you’re twenty and off, standing tall! not Jim any more, still thirteen, almost fourteen on the empty midway, with me small, me young, me scared!

Will hauled off and hit Jim, hard, on the nose.

Then he jumped Jim, wrapped him tight, and toppled him rolling down, yelling, in the bushes. He slapped Jim’s mouth, stuffed it, mashed it full of fingers to snap and bite at, suffocating the angry grunts and yells.

The front door opened.

Will crushed the air out of Jim, lay heavy on him, fisting his mouth tight.

Something stood on the porch. A tiny shadow scanned the town, searching for but not finding Jim.

But it was just the boy Robert, the friendly nephew, come almost casually forth, hands in pockets, whistling under his breath, to breathe the night air as boys do, curious for adventures that they themselves must make, that rarely happen by. Threshed tight, mortally locked and bound to Jim, staring up, Will was all the more shaken to see the normal boy, the airy glance, the unassuming poise, the small, the easy self in which no man at all was revealed by street light.

At any moment, Robert, in full cry, might leap to play with them, tangle legs, lock arms, bark-snap like pups in May, the whole thing end with them strewn in laughing tears on the lawn, the terror spent, the fear melted off in dew, a dream of nothings quickly gone such as dreams go when the eye snaps wide. For there indeed stood the nephew, his face round fresh, and cream-smooth as a peach.

And he was smiling down at the two boys he now saw locked limb in limb on the grass.

Then, swiftly, he darted in. He must have run upstairs, scrabbled about, and hurtled down again, for suddenly as the two boys outthrashed, outgripped, outraged each other, there was a rain of tinkling, rattling glitter on the lawn.

The nephew leaped the porch rail and landed panther-soft, imbedded in his shadow, on the grass. His hands were delicious with stars. These he liberally sprinkled. They thudded, slithered, winked at Jim’s side. Both boys lay stricken by the rain of gold and diamond fire that pelted them.

“Help, police!” cried Robert.

Will was so shocked he let go Jim.

Jim was so shocked he let go Will.

Both reached at the same time for the cold strewn ice.

“Good grief, a bracelet!”

“A ring! A necklace!”

Robert kicked. Two trash cans at the curb fell thundering.

A bedroom light, above, flicked on.

“Police!” Robert threw one last spray of glitter at their feet, shut up his fresh-peach smile like locking an explosion away in a box, and shot away down the street.

“Wait!” Jim jumped. “We won’t hurt you!”

Will tripped him, Jim fell.

The window upstairs opened. Miss Foley leaned out. Jim, on his knees, held a woman’s wrist watch. Will blinked at a necklace in his hands.

“Who’s there!” she cried. “Jim? Will? What’s that you got?!”

But Jim was running. Will stopped only long enough to see the window empty itself with a wail as Miss Foley pulled in to see her room. When he heard her full scream, he knew she had discovered the burglary.

Running, Will knew he was doing just what the nephew wanted. He should turn back, pick up the jewels, tell Miss Foley what happened. But he must save Jim!

Far back, he heard Miss Foley’s new cries turn on more lights! Will Halloway! Jim Nightshade! Night runners! Thieves! That’s us, thought Will, oh my Lord! That’s us! No one’ll believe anything we say from now on! Not about carnivals, not about carousels, not about mirrors or evil nephews, not about nothing!

And so they ran, three animals in starlight. A black otter. A tomcat. A rabbit.

Me, thought Will, I’m the rabbit.

And he was white, and much afraid.

Chapter 23

They hit the carnival grounds at a good twenty miles an hour, give or take a mile, the nephew in the lead, Jim close behind, and Will further back, gasping, shotgun blasts of fatigue in his feet, his head, his heart.

The nephew, running scared, looked back, not smiling.

Fooled him, thought Will, he figured I wouldn’t follow, figured I’d call the police, get stuck, not be believed, or run hide. Now he’s scared I’ll beat the tar out of him, and wants to jump on that ride and run around getting older and bigger than me. Oh, Jim, Jim, we got to stop him, keep him young, tear his skin off!

But he knew from Jim’s running there’d be no help from Jim. Jim wasn’t running after nephews. He was running toward free rides.

The nephew vanished around a tent far ahead. Jim followed. By the time Will reached the midway, the merry-go-round was popping to life. In the pulse, the din, the squeal-around of music the small fresh-faced nephew rode the great platform in a swirl of midnight dust.

Jim, ten feet back, watched the horses leap, his eyes striking fire from the high-jumped stallion’s eyes.

The merry-go-round was going forward!

Jim leaned at it.

“Jim!” cried Will.

The nephew swept from sight borne around by the machine. Drifted back again he stretched out pink fingers urging softly: “…Jim…?”

Jim twitched one foot forward.

“No!” Will plunged.

He knocked, seized, held Jim; they toppled; they fell in a heap.

The nephew, surprised, whisked on in darkness, one year older. One year older, thought Will, on the earth, one year taller, bigger, meaner!

“Oh God, Jim, quick!” He jumped up, ran to the control box, the complex mysteries of brass switch and porcelain covering and sizzling wires. He struck the switch. But Jim, behind, babbling, tore at Will’s hands.

“Will, you’ll spoil it! No!”

Jim knocked the switch full back.

Will spun and slapped his face. Each clenched the other’s elbows, rocked, failed. They fell against the control box.

Will saw the evil boy, a year older still, glide around into night. Five or six more times around and he’d be bigger than the two of them!

“Jim, he’ll kill us!”

“Not me, no!”

Will felt a sting of electricity. He yelled, pulled back, hit the switch handle. The control box spat. Lightning jumped to the sky. Jim and Will, flung by the blast, lay watching the merry-go-round run wild.

The evil boy whistled by, clenched to a brass tree. He cursed. He spat. He wrestled with wind, with centrifuge. He was trying to clutch his way through the horses, the poles, to the outer rim of the carousel. His face came, went, came, went. He clawed. He brayed. The control box erupted blue showers. The carousel jumped and bucked. The nephew slipped. He fell. A black stallion’s steel hoof kicked him. Blood printed his brow.

Jim hissed, rolled, thrashed Will riding him hard, pressing him to grass, trading yell for yell, both fright-pale, heart ramming heart. Electric bolts from the switch flushed up in white stars a gush of fireworks. The carousel spun thirty, spun forty—“Will, let me up!”—spun fifty times. The calliope howled, boiled steam, ran ancient dry, then played nothing, its keys gibbering as only chitterings boiled up through the vents. Lightning unravelled itself over the sweated outflung boys, delivered flame to the silent horse stampede to light their way around, around with the figure lying on the platform no longer a boy but a man, no longer a man but more than a man and even more and even more, much more than that, around, around.

“He’s, he’s, oh he’s, oh look, Will, he’s—” gasped Jim, and began to sob, because it was the only thing to do, locked down, nailed tight. “Oh God, Will, get up! We got to make it run backward!”

Lights flashed on in the tents.

But no one came out.

Why not? Will thought crazily. The explosions? The electric storm? Do the freaks think the whole world’s jumping through the midway? Where’s Mr. Dark? In town? Up to no good? What, where, why?

He thought he heard the agonized figure sprawled on the carousel platform drum his heart superfast, then slow, fast, slow, very fast, very slow, incredibly fast, then as slow as the moon going down the sky on a white night in winter.

Someone, something, on the carousel wailed faintly.

Thank God it’s dark, thought Will. Thank God, I can’t see. There goes someone. Here comes something. There, whatever it is, goes again. There… there…

A black shadow on the shuddering machine tried to stagger up, but it was late, late, later still, very late, latest of all, oh, very late. The shadow crumbled. The carousel, like the earth spinning, whipped away air, sunlight, sense and sensibility, leaving only dark, cold, and age.

In a final vomit, the switch box blew itself completely apart.

All the carnival lights blinked out.

The carousel slowed itself through the cold night wind.

Will let Jim go.

How many times, thought Will, did it go around? Sixty, eighty… ninety…?

How many times? said Jim’s face, all nightmare, watching the dead carousel shiver and halt in the dead grass, a stopped world now which nothing, not their hearts, hands or heads, could send back anywhere.

They walked slowly to the merry-go-round, their shoes whispering.

The shadowy figure lay on the near side, on the plank floor, its face turned away.

One hand hung off the platform.

It did not belong to a boy.

It seemed a huge wax hand shrivelled by fire.

The man’s hair was long, spidery, white. It blew like milkweed in the breathing dark.

They bent to see the face.

The eyes were mummified shut. The nose was collapsed upon gristle. The mouth was a ruined white flower, the petals twisted into a thin wax sheath over the clenched teeth through which faint bubblings sighed. The man was small inside his clothes, small as a child, but tall, strung out, and old, so old, very old, not ninety, not one hundred, no, not one hundred and ten, but one hundred and twenty or one hundred and impossible years old.

Will touched.

The man was cold as an albino frog.

He smelled of moon swamps and old Egyptian bandages. He was something found in museums, wrapped in nicotine linens, sealed in glass.

But he was alive, puling like a babe, and shriveling unto death, fast, very fast, before their eyes.

Will was sick over the side of the carousel.

Then, falling against each other, Jim and Will sledge-hammered the insane leaves, the unbelievable grass, the insubstantial earth with their numbed shoes, fleeing off down the midway…

Chapter 24

Moths ticked off the high tin-shaded arc light which swung abandoned above the crossroads. Below, in a deserted gas station in the midst of country wilderness there was another ticking. In a coffin-sized phone booth speaking to people lost somewhere across night hills, two white-faced boys were crammed, holding to each other at every flit of bat, each sliding of cloud across the stars.

Will hung up the phone. The police and an ambulance were coming.

At first he and Jim had shout-whispered-wheezed at each other, pumping along, stumbling: they should go home, sleep, forget—no! they should take a freight train west!—no! for Mr. Cooger, if he survived what they’d done to him, that old man, that old old old man, would follow them over the world until he found them and tore them apart! Arguing, shivering, they ended up in a phone booth, and now saw the police car bouncing along the road, its siren moaning, with the ambulance behind. All the men looked out at the two boys whose teeth chattered in the moth-flicked light.

Three minutes later they all advanced down the dark midway, Jim leading the way, talking, gibbering.

“He’s alive. He’s got to be alive. We didn’t mean to do it! We’re sorry!” He stared at the black tents. “You hear? We’re sorry!”

“Take it easy, boy,” said one of the policemen. “Go on.”

The two policemen in midnight blue, the two internes like ghosts, the two boys, made the last turn past the ferris wheel and reached the merry-go-round.

Jim groaned.

The horses trampled the night air, in midplunge. Starlight glittered on the brass poles. That was all.

“He’s gone…”

“He was here, we swear!” said Jim. “One hundred and fifty, two hundred years old, and dying of it!”

“Jim,” said Will.

The four men stirred uneasily.

“They must’ve taken him in a tent.” Will started off. A policeman took his elbow.

“Did you say one hundred and fifty years old?” he asked Jim. “Why not three hundred?”

“Maybe he was! Oh God.” Jim turned, yelling. “Mr. Cooger! We brought help!”

Lights blinked on in the Freak Tent. The huge banners out front rumbled and lashed as arc lights flushed over them. The police glanced up. MR. SKELETON, THE DUST WITCH, THE CRUSHER, VESUVIO THE LAVA SIPPFR! danced soft, big, painted each on its separate flag.

Jim paused by the rustling freak show entry.

“Mr. Cooger?” he pleaded. “You… there?”

The tent flaps mouthed out a warm lion air.

“What?” asked a policeman.

Jim read the moving flaps.

“They said ‘yes.’ They said, ‘Come in.’”

Jim stepped through. The others followed.

Inside they squinted through crisscrossed tent pole shadows to the high freak platforms and all the world-wandered aliens, crippled of face of bone, of mind, waiting there.

At a rickety card table nearby four men sat playing orange, lime-green, sun-yellow cards printed with moon beasts and winged sun-symbolled men. Here the akimbo Skeleton one might play like a piccolo; here the Blimp who could be punctured every night, pumped up at dawn; here the midget known as The Wart who could be mailed parcel post dirt-cheap; and next to him an even littler accident of cell and time, a Dwarf so small and perched in such a way you could not see his face behind the cards clenched before him in arthritic and tremulous oak-gnarled fingers.

The Dwarf! Will started. Something about those hands! Familar, familiar. Where? Who? What? But his eyes snapped on.

There stood Monsieur Guillotine, black tights, black long stockings, black hood over head, arms crossed over his chest, stiff straight by his chopping machine, the blade high in the tent sky, a hungry knife all flashes and meteor shine, much desiring to cleave space. Below, in the head cradle, a dummy sprawled waiting quick doom.

There stood the Crusher, all ropes and tendons, all steel and iron, all bone-monger, jaw-cruncher, horseshoe-taffy-puller.

And there the Lava Sipper, Vesuvio of the chafed tongue, of the scalded teeth, who spun scores of fireballs up, hissing in a ferris of flame which streaked shadows along the tent roof.

Nearby, in booths, another thirty freaks watched the fires fly until the Lava Sipper glanced, saw intruders, and let his universe fall. The suns drowned in a water tub.

Steam billowed. All froze in a tableau.

An insect stopped buzzing.

Will glanced swiftly.

There, on the biggest stage, a tattoo needle poised like a blowgun dart in his rose-crusted hand, stood Mr. Dark, the Illustrated Man.

His picture crowds flooded raw upon his flesh. Stripped bare to the navel, he had been stinging himself, adding a picture to his left palm with this dragonfly contraption. Now with the insect droned dead in his hand, he wheeled. But Will, staring beyond him, cried:

“There he is! There’s Mr. Cooger!”

The police, the internes, quickened.

Behind Mr. Dark sat the Electric Chair.

In this chair sat a ruined man, last seen strewn wheezing in a collapse of bones and albino wax on the broken carousel. Now he was erected, propped, strapped in this device full of lightning power.

“That’s him! He was… dying.”

The Blimp ascended to his feet.

The Skeleton spun about, tall.

The Wart flea-hopped to the sawdust.

The Dwarf let fall his cards and flirted his now mad, now idiot eyes ahead, around, over.

I know him, thought Will. Oh, God, what they’ve done to him!

The lightning-rod salesman!

That’s who it was. Squeezed tight, smashed small, convulsed by some terrible nature into a clenched fist of humanity…

The seller of lightning-rods.

But now two things happened with beautiful promptitude.

Monsieur Guillotine cleared his throat.

And the blade, above, in the canvas sky, like a homing hawk scythed down. Whisper-whisk-slither-thunder-rush-wham!

The dummy head, chop-cut, fell.

And falling, looked like Will’s own head, own face, destroyed.

He wanted, he did not want, to run lift the head turn it to see if it held his own profile. But how could you ever dare do that? Never, never in a billion years, could one empty that wicker basket.

The second thing happened.

A mechanic, working at the back of an upright glass-fronted coffin booth, released a trip wire. This made a last cog click within the machinery under the sign, MLLE TAROT, THE DUST WITCH. The wax woman’s figure within the glass box nodded her head and fixed the boys with her pointing nose as the boys passed, leading the men. Her cold wax hand brushed the Dust of Destiny on a ledge within the coffin. Her eyes did not see; they were sewn shut with laced black-widow web, dark threads. A waxworks fright, good and proper, she was, and the policemen beamed, viewing her, and strolled on, and beamed at Monsieur Guillotine for his act too, and moving, the police were relaxing now, and seemed not to mind being called late on a jolly venture into a rehearsing world of acrobats and seedy magicians.

“Gentlemen!” Mr. Dark and his mob of illustrations surged forward on the pine platform, a jungle beneath each arm, an Egyptian viper scrolled on each bicep. “Welcome! You’re just in time! We’re rehearsing all our new acts!” Mr. Dark waved and strange monsters gaped their fangs from his chest, a Cyclops with a navel for a squinted moron eye twitched on his stomach as he strode.

Lord, thought Will, is he bringing that crowd with him or is the crowd pulling him along by his skin?

From all the creaked platforms, from the muffled sawdust, Will felt the freaks wheel and fix their eyes, enchanted, as were internes and police, by this illustrated throng of humanity that in one agglomerative move dominated and filled the immediate air and tent sky with silent shootings for attention.

Now part of the wasp-needle tattooed population spoke. It was Mr. Dark’s mouth over and above this calligraphic explosion, this railroad accident of monsters in tumult upon his sweating skin. Mr. Dark chanted forth the organ tones from his chest. His personal electric blue-green populations trembled, even as the real freaks on the sawdust tent floor trembled, even as, hearing in their most secret marrow, Jim and Will trembled and felt more freak than the freaks themselves.

“Gentlemen! Boys! We’ve just perfected the new act! You’ll be the first to see!” cried Mr. Dark.

The first policeman, his hand casually nestled to his pistol holster, squinted up at that vast corral of beasts and beings. “This boy said—”

“Said?!” The Illustrated Man barked a laugh. The freaks leaped in a frolic of shock, then calmed as the carnival owner continued with great ease, patting and soothing his own illustrations, which somehow patted and soothed the freaks. “Said? But what did he see? Boys always scare themselves at sideshows, eh? Run like rabbits when the freaks pop out. But tonight, especially tonight!”

The policemen glanced beyond to the Erector-set-papier-mâché relic constricted in the Electric Chair.

“Who’s he?”

Will saw fire lick up through Mr. Dark’s smoke-clouded eyes, saw him just as quickly snuff it out. “The new act. Mr. Electrico.”

“No! Look at the old man! Look!” Will yelled. The police turned to appraise his demon cry.

“Don’t you see!” said Will. “He’s dead! Only thing holds him up is the straps!”

The internes gazed up at the great flake of winter flung into and held by the black chair.

Oh gosh, thought Will, we thought it would all be simple. The old man, Mr. Cooger, dying, so we bring doctors to save him, so he forgives us, maybe, maybe, the carnival doesn’t hurt us, lets us go. But now this, what’s next? He’s dead! It’s too late! Everyone hates us!

And Will stood among the others feeling the cold air waft down from the unearthed mummy, from the cold mouth and cold eyes locked up in frozen eyelids. Inside the frozen nostrils not a white hair stirred. Mr. Cooger’s ribs under his collapsed shirt were stone-rigid and his teeth under his clay lips were dry-ice cold. Put him out at noon and fog would steam off him.

The internes glanced at each other. They nodded.

The policemen, at this, took one step forward.

“Gentlemen!”

Mr. Dark scuttled a tarantula hand up an electric brass switchboard.

“One hundred thousand volts will now burn Mr. Electrico’s body!”

“No, don’t let him!” Will cried.

The policemen took another step. The internes opened their mouths to speak. Mr. Dark flicked a swift demanding glance at Jim. Jim cried:

“No! It’s all right!”

“Jim!”

“Will, yes, it’s okay!”

“Stand back!” The spider clutched the switch handle. “This man is in a trance! As part of our new act, I have hypnotized him! He could suffer injury if you shocked him from his spell!”

The internes shut their mouths. The police stopped moving.

“One hundred thousand volts! Yet he will come forth alive, whole in sound mind and body!”

“No!”

A policeman grabbed Will.

The Illustrated Man and all the men and beasts asprawl in frenzies on him now snatched and banged the switch.

The tent lights snuffed out.

Policemen, internes, boys jumped up their flesh in cobbles and boils.

But now in the swift midnight shuttering, the Electric Chair was a hearth and on it the old man blazed like a blue autumn tree.

The police flinched back, the internes leaned ahead, as did the freaks, blue fire in their eyes.

The Illustrated Man, hand glued to switch, looked upon the old old old man.

The old man was flint-rock dead, yes, but electricity alive sheathed over him. It swarmed on his cold shell ears, it flickered in his deep-as-an-abandoned-stone-well nostrils. It crept blue eels of power on his praying-mantis fingers and his grasshopper knees.

The Illustrated Man’s lips thrust wide, perhaps he yelled, but no one heard against the immense fry, blast, the slam and sizzle of power which prowled in around over under about man and prisoning chair. Come alive! cried the hum! Come alive! cried the storming color and light. Come alive! yelled Mr. Dark’s mouth, which no one heard but Jim, reading lips, read thunderous loud in his mind, and Will the same, Come alive! willing the old man to five, start up, tick, hum, work juice, summon spit, ungum spirit, melt wax soul…

“He’s dead!” But no one heard Will, either, no matter how he pushed against the lightning clamour.

Alive! Mr. Dark’s lips licked and savoured. Alive. Come alive. He racheted the switch to the last notch. Live, live! Somewhere, dynamos protested, skirled, shrilled, moaned a bestial energy. The light turned bottle-green. Dead, dead, thought Will. But live alive! cried machines, cried flame and fire, cried mouths of crowds of livid beasts on illustrated flesh.

So the old man’s hair stood up in prickling fumes. Sparks, bled from his fingernails, dripped seething spatters on pine planks. Green simmerings wove shuttles through dead eyelids.

The Illustrated Man bent violently above the old old dead dead thing, his prides of beasts drowned deep in sweat, his right hand thrust in hammering demand upon the air: Live, live.

And the old man came alive.

Will yelled himself hoarse.

And no one heard.

For now, very slowly, as if roused by thunder, as if the electric fire were new dawn, one dead eyelid peeled itself slowly open.

The freaks gaped.

A long way off in the storm, Jim was yelling, too, for Will had his elbow tight and felt the yell pouring out through the bones, as the old man’s lips fell apart and frightful sizzles zigzagged between lips and threaded teeth.

The Illustrated Man cut the power to a whine. Then, turning, he fell to his knees, and put out his hand.

Away off up there on the platform, there was the faintest stir as of an autumn leaf beneath the old man’s shirt.

The freaks exhaled.

The old old man sighed.

Yes, Will thought, they’re breathing for him, helping him, making him to live.

Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale—yet it looked like an act. What could he say, or do?

“…lungs so… so… so…” someone whispered.

The Dust Witch, back in her glass box?

Inhale. The freaks breathed. Exhale. Their shoulders slumped.

The old old man’s lips trembled.

“…heart beat… one… two… so… so…”

The Witch again? Will feared to look.

A vein ticked a small watch in the old man’s throat.

Very slowly now that right eye of the old man opened full wide, fixed, stared like a broken camera. It was like looking through a hole in space, with no bottom forever. He grew warmer.

The boys, below, grew colder.

Now the old and terribly-wise-with-nightmare eye was so wide and so deep and so alive all to itself in that smashed porcelain face that there at the bottom of the eye somewhere the evil nephew peered along and out at the freaks, internes, police, and…

Will.

Will saw himself, saw Jim, two little pictures posed in reflection on that single eye. If the old man blinked, the two images would be crushed by his lid!

The Illustrated Man on his knees, turned at last and gentled all with his smile.

“Gentlemen, boys, here indeed is the man who lives with lightning!”

The second policeman laughed; this motion shook his hand off his holster.

Will shuffled to the right.

The old spittle-eye followed sucking at him with its emptiness.

Will squirmed left.

As did the phlegm that was the old man’s gaze, while his chill lips peeled wide to shape, reshape an echoed gasp, a flutter. From deep below the old man bounced his voice ricocheting off the dank stone walls of his body until it fell out his mouth:

“…welcome… mmmmmm…”

The words fell back in.

“well… cummm… mmmm…”

The policemen nudged each other with identical smiles.

“No!” cried Will, suddenly. “That’s no act! He was dead! He’d die again if you cut the power—!”

Will slapped his own hand to his mouth.

Oh Lord, he thought, what am I doing? I want him alive, so he’ll forgive us, let us be! But, oh Lord, even more I want him dead, I want them all dead, they scare me so much I got hairballs big as cats in my stomach!

“I’m sorry…” he whispered.

“Don’t be!” cried Mr. Dark.

The freaks made a commotion of blinks and glares. What next from the statue in the cold sizzling chair? The old old man’s one eye gummed itself. The mouth collapsed, a bubble of yellow mud in a sulphur bath.

The Illustrated Man banged the switch a notch grinning wildly at no one. He thrust a steel sword in the old man’s empty glove-like hand.

A drench of electricity prickled from the sere music-box tines of the ancient stubbled cheeks. That deep eye showed swift as a bullet hole. Hungry for Will, it found and ate of his image. The lips steamed:

“I… sssaw… the… boysssssss… ssssneak into… thee tent… tttttt…”

The desiccated bellows refilled, then pin-punctured the swamp air out in faint wails:

“…We… rehearsing… sssso I thought… play… thissss trick… pretend to be… dead.”

Again the pause to drink oxygen like ale, electricity like wine.

“…let myself fall… like… I… wasssss… dying… The… boysssssssss… ssscreaming… ran!”

The old man husked out syllable on syllable.

“Ha.” Pause. “Ha.” Pause. “Ha.”

Electricity hemstitched the whistling lips.

The Illustrated Man coughed gently. “This act, it tires Mr. Electrico…”

“Oh, sure.” One of the policemen started. “Sorry.” He touched his cap. “Fine show.”

“Fine,” said one of the internes.

Will glanced swiftly to see the interne’s mouth, what it looked like saying this, but Jim stood in the way.

“Boys! A dozen free passes!” Mr. Dark held them out. “Here!”

Jim and Will didn’t move.

“Well?” said one policeman.

Sheepishly, Will reached up for the flame-colored tickets, but stopped as Mr. Dark said, “Your names?”

The officers winked at each other.

“Tell him, boys.”

Silence. The freaks watched.

“Simon,” said Jim. “Simon Smith.”

Mr. Dark’s hand, holding the tickets, constricted.

“Oliver,” said Will. “Oliver Brown.”

The Illustrated Man sucked in a mighty breath. The freaks inhaled! The vast ingasped sigh might have seemed to stir Mr. Electrico. His sword twitched. Its tip leaped to spark-sting Will’s shoulder, then sizzle over in blue-green explosions at Jim. Lightning shot Jim’s shoulder.

The policemen laughed.

The old old man’s one wide eye blazed.

“I dub thee… asses and foolssssss… I dub… thee… Mr. Sickly… and… Mr. Pale…!”

Mr. Electrico finished. The sword tapped them.

“A… sssshort… sad life… for you both!”

Then his mouth slit shut, his raw eye glued over. Containing his cellar breath, he let the simple sparks swarm his blood like dark champagne.

“The tickets,” murmured Mr. Dark. “Free rides. Free rides. Come any time. Come back. Come back.”

Jim grabbed, Will grabbed the tickets.

They jumped, they bolted from the tent.

The police, smiling and waving all around, followed at their leisure.

The internes, not smiling, like ghosts in their white suits, came after.

They found the boys huddled in the back of the police car.

They looked as though they wanted to go home.