Something Wicked This Way Comes

Chapter 45

The small parade moved, soundless, past the eternally revolving, ending-but-unending candy serpentine of Mr. Crosetti’s barber pole, past all the darkening or darkened shops, the emptying streets, for people were home now from the church suppers, or out at the carnival for the last side show or the last high-ladder diver floating like milkweed down the night.

Will’s feet, far away below, clubbed the sidewalk. One, two, he thought, someone tells me left, right. Dragonfly whispers: one-two.

Is Jim in the parade?! Will’s eyes flicked the briefest to one side. Yes! But who’s the other little one? The gone-mad, everything’s-interesting-so-touch-it, everything’s red-hot, pull-back, Dwarf! Plus the Skeleton. And then behind, who were all those hundreds, no, thousands of people marching along, breathing down his neck?

The Illustrated Man.

Will nodded and whined so high and silently that only dogs, dogs who were no help, dogs who could not speak, might hear.

And sure enough, looking obliquely over, he saw not one, not two, but three dogs who, smelling the occasion, their own parade, now ran ahead, now fell behind, their tails like guidons for the platoon.

Bark! thought Will, like in the movies! Bark, bring the police!

But the dogs just smiled and trotted.

Coincidence, please, thought Will. Just a small one!

Mr. Tetley! Yes! Will saw-but-did-not-see Mr. Tetley! Rolling the wooden Indian back into his shop, closing for the night!

“Turn heads,” murmured the Illustrated Man.

Jim turned his head. Will turned his head.

Mr. Tetley smiled.

“Smile,” murmured Mr. Dark.

The two boys smiled.

“Hello!” said Mr. Tetley.

“Say hello,” someone whispered.

“Hello,” said Jim.

“Hello,” said Will.

The dogs barked.

“A free ride at the carnival,” murmured Mr. Dark.

“Free ride,” said Will.

“At the carnival!” cracked Jim.

Then, like good machines, they shut up their smiles.

“Have fun!” called Mr. Tetley.

The dogs barked joy.

The parade marched on.

“Fun,” said Mr. Dark. “Free rides. When the crowds go home, half an hour from now. We’ll ride Jim round. You still want that, Jim?”

Hearing but not hearing, locked away in himself, Will thought, Jim, don’t listen!

Jim’s eyes slid: wet or oily, it was hard to tell.

“You’ll travel with us, Jim, and if Mr. Cooger doesn’t survive (it’s a near thing for him, we haven’t saved him yet, we’ll try again now) but if he doesn’t make it, Jim, how would you like to be partners? I’ll grow you to a fine strong age, eh? Twenty-two? twenty-five?”. Dark and Nightshade, Nightshade and Dark, sweet lovely names for such as we with such as the side shows to run around the world! What say, Jim?”

Jim said nothing, sewn up in the Witch’s dream.

Don’t listen! wailed his best friend, who heard nothing but heard it all.

“And Will?” said Mr. Dark. “Let’s ride him back and back, eh? Make him a babe in arms, a babe for the Dwarf to carry like a clown-child, roundabout in parades, every day for the next fifty years, would you like that, Will? to be a babe forever? not able to talk and tell all the lovely things you know? Yes, I think that’s best for Will. A plaything, a little wet friend for the Dwarf!”

Will must have screamed.

But not out loud.

For only the dogs barked, in terror; yiping, off they ran, as if pelted with rocks.

A man came around the corner.

A policeman.

“Who’s this?” muttered Mr. Dark.

“Mr. Kolb,” said Jim.

“Mr. Kolb!” said Will.

“Darning-needle,” whispered Mr. Dark. “Dragonfly.” Pain stabbed Will’s ears. Moss stuffed his eyes. Gum glued his teeth. He felt a multitudinous tapping, shuttling, weaving, about his face, all numb again.

“Say hello to Mr. Kolb.”

“Hello,” said Jim.

“…Kolb…” said the dreaming Will.

“Hello, boys. Gentlemen.”

“Turn here,” said Mr. Dark.

They turned.

Away toward meadow country, away from warm lights, good town, safe streets, the drumless march progressed.

Chapter 46

Stretched out over, a mile of territory the straggling parade now moved as follows:

At the edge of the carnival midway, stumping the grass with their dead feet, Jim and Will paced friends who constantly retold the wondrous uses of darning-needle dragonflies.

Behind, a good half mile, trying to catch up, walking mysteriously wounded, the Gypsy, who whorl-symboled the dust.

And yet farther back came the janitor-father, now slowing himself with remembrances of age, now pacing swiftly young with thoughts of the brief first encounter and victory, carrying his left hand patted to his chest, chewing medicines as he went.

At the midway rim, Mr. Dark looked back as if an inner voice had named the stragglers in his widely separated maneuver. But the voice failed, he was unsure. He nodded briskly, and Dwarf, Skeleton, Jim, Will thrust through the crowd.

Jim felt the river of bright people wash by all around but not touching. Will heard waterfall laughter here, there, and him walking through the downpour. An explosion of fireflies blossomed on the sky; the ferris wheel, exultant as a titanic fireworks, dilated above them.

Then they were at the Mirror Maze and sidling, coliding, bumping, careening through the unfolded ice ponds where stricken spider-stung boys much like themselves appeared, vanished a thousand times over.

That’s me! thought Jim.

But I can’t help me, thought Will, no matter how many of me there are!

And crowd of boys, plus crowd of reflected Mr. Dark’s illustrations, for he had taken off his coat and shirt now, crammed and crushed through to the Waxworks at the end of the maze.

“Sit,” said Mr. Dark. “Stay.”

Among the wax figures of murdered, gunshot, guillotined, garroted men and women the two boys sat like Egyptian cats, unblinked, untwitched, unswallowing.

Some late visitors passed through, laughing. They commented on all the wax figures.

They did not notice the thin line of saliva crept from the corner of one “wax” boy’s mouth.

They did not see how bright was the second “wax” boy’s stare, which suddenly brimmed and ran clear water down his cheek.

Outside, the Witch limped in through back alleys of rope and peg between the tents.

“Ladies and gentlemen!”

The last crowd of the night, three or four hundred strong, turned as a body.

The Illustrated Man, stripped to the waist, all nightmare viper, sabertooth, libidinous ape, clotted vulture, all salmon-sulphur sky rose up with annunciations:

“The last free event this evening! Come one! Come all!”

The crowd surged toward the main platform outside the freak tent, where stood Dwarf, Skeleton, and Mr. Dark.

“The Most Amazingly Dangerous, ofttimes Fatal—World Famous BULLET TRICK!”

The crowd gasped with pleasure.

“The rifles, if you please!”

The Thin One cracked wide a racked display of bright artillery.

The Witch, hurrying up, froze when Mr. Dark cried: “And here, our death-defier, the bullet-catcher who will stake her life—Mademoiselle Tarot!”

The Witch shook her head, bleated, but Dark’s hand swept down to swing her like a child to the platform, still protesting, which gave Dark pause, but, in front of everyone now, he went on:

“A volunteer, please, to fire the rifle!”

The crowd rumbled softly, daring itself to speak up.

Mr. Dark’s mouth barely moved. Under his breath he asked, “Is the clock stopped?”

“Not,” she whined, “stopped.”

“No?” he almost burst out.

He burnt her with his eyes, then turned to the audience and let his mouth finish the spiel, his fingers rapping over the rifles.

“Volunteers, please!”

“Stop the act,” the Witch cried softly, wringing, her hands.

“It goes on, damn you, worse than double-damn you,” he whispered, whistled fiercely.

Secretly, Dark gathered a pinch of flesh on his wrist, the illustration of a black-nun blind woman, which he bit with his fingernails.

The Witch spasmed, seized her breast, groaned, ground her teeth. “Mercy!” she hissed, half aloud.

Silence from the crowd.

Mr. Dark nodded swiftly.

“Since there are no volunteers—” He scraped his illustrated wrist. The Witch shuddered. “We will cancel our last act and—”

“Here! A volunteer!”

The crowd turned.

Mr. Dark recoiled, then asked: “Where?”

“Here.”

Far out at the edge of the crowd, a hand lifted, a path opened.

Mr. Dark could see very clearly the man standing there, alone.

Charles Halloway, citizen, father, introspective husband, night-wanderer, and janitor of the town library.

Chapter 47

The crowd’s appreciative clamor faded.

Charles Halloway did not move.

He let the path grow leading down to the platform.

He could not see the expression on the faces of the freaks standing up there. His eyes swept the crowd and found the Mirror Maze, the empty oblivion which beckoned with ten times a thousand million light years of reflections, counterreflections, reversed and double-reversed, plunging deep to nothing, face-falling to nothing, stomach-dropping away to yet more sickening plummets of nothing.

And yet, wasn’t there an echo of two boys in the powdered silver at the back of each glass? Did or did he not perceive, with the tremulous tip of eyelash if not the eye, their passage through, their wait beyond, warm wax amongst cold, waiting to be key-wound by terrors, run free in panics?

No, thought Charles Halloway, don’t think. Get on with this!

“Coming!” he shouted.

“Go get ’em, Pop!” a man said.

“Yes,” said Charles Halloway. “I will.”

And he walked down through the crowd.

The Witch spun slowly, magnetized at the night-wandering volunteer’s approach. Her eyelids jerked at their sewn black-wax threads behind dark glasses.

Mr. Dark, the illustration-drenched, superinfested civilization of souls, leaned from the platform, gladly whetting his lips. Thoughts spun fiery Catherine wheels in his eyes, quick, quick, what, what, what!

And the aging janitor, fixing a smile to his face like a white celluloid set of teeth from a Cracker Jack box, strode on, and the crowd opened as the sea before Moses and closed behind, and him wondering what to do? why was he here? but on the move, steadily, nevertheless.

Charles Halloway’s foot touched the first step of the platform.

The Witch trembled secretly.

Mr. Dark felt this secret, glanced sharply. Swiftly he put his hand out to grab for the good right hand of this fifty-four-year-old man.

But the fifty-four-year-old man shook his head, would not give his hand to be held, touched, or helped up.

“Thanks, no.”

On the platform, Charles Halloway waved to the crowd.

The people set off a few firecrackers of applause.

“But—” Mr. Dark was amazed—“your left hand, sir, you can’t hold and fire a rifle if you have only the use of one hand!”

Charles Halloway paled.

“I’ll do it,” he said. “With one hand.”

“Hoorah!” cried a boy, below.

“Go it, Charlie!” a man called, out beyond.

Mr. Dark flushed as the crowd laughed and applauded even louder now. He lifted his hands to ward off the wave of refreshing sound, like rain that washed in from the people.

“All right, all right! Let’s see if he can do it!”

Brutally, the Illustrated Man snapped a rifle from its locks, hurled it through the air.

The crowd gasped.

Charles Halloway ducked. He put up his right hand. The rifle slapped his palm. He grabbed. It did not fall. He had it good.

The audience hooted, said things against Mr. Dark’s bad manners which made him turn away for a moment, damning himself, silently.

Will’s father lifted the rifle, beaming.

The crowd roared.

And while the wave of applause came in, crashed, and went back down the shore, he looked again to the maze, where the sensed but unseen shadow-shapes of Will and Jim were filed among titanic razor blades of revelation and illusion, then back to the Medusa gaze of Mr. Dark, swiftly reckoned with, and on to the stitched and jittering sightless nun of midnight, sidling back still more. Now she was as far as she could sidle, at the far end of the platform, almost pressed to the whorled red-black rifle bull’s-eye target.

“Boy!” shouted Charles Halloway.

Mr. Dark stiffened.

“I need a boy volunteer to help me hold the rifle!” shouted Charles Halloway.

“Someone! Anyone!” he shouted.

A few boys in the crowd shifted around on their toes.

“Boy!” shouted Charles Halloway. “Hold on. My son’s out there. He’ll volunteer, won’t you, Will?”

The Witch flung one band up to feel the shape of this audacity which came off the fifty-four-year-old man like a fever. Mr. Dark was spun round as if hit by a fast-traveling gunshot.

“Will!” called his father.

In the Wax Museum, Will sat motionless.

“Will!” called his father. “Come on, boy!”

The crowd looked left, looked right, looked back.

No answer.

Will sat in the Wax Museum.

Mr. Dark observed all of this with some respect, some degree of admiration, some concern; he seemed to be waiting, just as was Will’s father.

“Will, come help your old man!” Mr. Halloway cried, jovially.

Will sat in the Wax Museum.

Mr. Dark smiled.

“Will! Willy! Come here!”

No answer.

Mr. Dark smiled more.

“Willy! Don’t you hear your old man?”

Mr. Dark stopped smiling.

For this last was the voice of a gentleman in the crowd, speaking up.

The crowd laughed.

“Will!” called a woman.

“Willy!” called another.

“Yoohoo!” A gentleman in a beard.

“Come on, William!” A boy.

The crowd laughed more, jostled elbows.

Charles Halloway called. They called. Charles Halloway cried to the hills. They cried to the hills.

“Will! Willy! William!”

A shadow shuttled and wove in the mirrors.

The Witch broke out chandeliers of sweat.

“There!”

The crowd stopped calling.

As did Charles Halloway, choked on the name of his son now, and silent.

For Will stood in the entrance of the Maze, like the wax figure that he almost was.

“Will,” called his father, softly.

The sound of this chimed the sweat off the Witch.

Will moved, unseeing, through the crowd.

And handing the rifle down like a cane for the boy to grasp, his father drew him up onto the stand.

“Here’s my good left hand!” announced the father.

Will neither saw nor heard the crowd sound forth a solid and offensive applause.

Mr. Dark had not moved, though Charles Halloway could see him, during all this, lighting and setting off cannon crackers in his head; but each, one by one, fizzled and died. Mr. Dark could not guess what they were up to. For that matter, Charles Halloway did not know or guess. It was as if he had written this play for himself, over the years, in the library, nights, torn up the play after memorizing it, and now forgotten what he had set forth to remember. He was relying on secret discoveries of self, moment by moment, playing by ear, no! heart and soul! And… now?!

The brightness of his teeth seemed to strike the Witch blinder! Impossible! She flung one hand to her glasses, her sewn eyelids!

“Closer, everyone!” called Will’s father.

The crowd gathered in. The platform was an island. The sea was people.

“Watch the bull’s-eye targeteer!”

The Witch melted in her rags.

The Illustrated Man looked left, found no pleasure in the Skeleton, who simply looked thinner; found no pleasure looking right to a Dwarf who blandly dwelt in squashed idiot madness.

“The bullet, please!” Will’s father said, amiably.

The thousand illustrations on his jerking horseflesh frame did not hear, so why should Mr. Dark?

“If you please,” said Charles Halloway. “The bullet? So I may knock that flea off the old Gypsy’s wart!”

Will stood motionless.

Mr. Dark hesitated.

Out in the choppy sea, smiles flashed, here, there, a hundred, two hundred, three hundred whitenesses, as if a vast titillation of water had been provoked by a lunar gravity. The tide ebbed.

The Illustrated Man, in slow motion, proffered the bullet. His arm, a long molasses undulation, lazed to offer the bullet to the boy, to see if he would notice; he did not notice.

His father took the missile.

“Mark it with your initials,” said Mr. Dark, by rote.

“No, with more!” Charles Halloway raised his son’s hand and made him hold the bullet, so he could take a penknife with his one good hand and carve a strange symbol on the lead.

What’s happening? Will thought. I know what’s happenmg. I don’t know what’s happening? What!?

Mr. Dark saw a crescent moon on the bullet, saw nothing wrong with such a moon, rammed it in the rifle, slapped the rifle back at Will’s father, who once more caught it deftly.

“Ready, Will?”

The boy’s peach face drowsed in the slightest nod.

Charles Halloway flicked a last glance at the maze, thought, Jim, you there still? Get ready!

Mr. Dark turned to go pat, conjure, calm his dust-crone friend, but cracked to a halt at the crack of the rifle being reopened, the bullet ejected by Will’s father, to assure the audience it was there. It seemed real enough, yet he had read long ago that this was a substitute bullet, shaped of a very hard steel-colored crayon wax. Shot through the rifle it would dissolve out the barrel as smoke and vapor. At this very moment, having somehow switched bullets, the Illustrated Man was slipping the real marked bullet into the Witch’s jerking fingers. She would hide it in her cheek. At the shot, she would pretend to jolt under the imagined impact, then reveal the bullet caught by her yellow rat teeth. Fanfare! Applause!

The Illustrated Man, glancing up, saw Charles Halloway with the opened rifle, the wax bullet. But instead of revealing what he knew, Mr. Halloway simply said, “Let’s cut our mark more clearly, eh, boy?” And with his penknife, the boy holding the bullet in his senseless hand, he marked this fresh new wax unmarked bullet with the same mysterious crescent moon, then snapped it back into the rifle.

“Ready?!”

Mr. Dark looked to the Witch.

Who hesitated, then nodded, once, faintly.

“Ready!” announced Charles Halloway.

And all about lay the tents, the breathing crowds, the anxious freaks, a Witch iced with hysteria, Jim hidden to be found, an ancient mummy still seated glowing with blue fire in his electric chair, and a merry-go-round waiting for the show to cease, the crowd to go, and the carnival to have its way with boys and janitor trapped if possible, and alone.

“Will,” said Charles Halloway conversationally, as he lifted the now suddenly heavy rifle. “Your shoulder here is my brace. Take the middle of the rifle, gently, with one hand. Take it, Will.” The boy raised a hand. “That’s it, son. When I say ‘hold,’ hold your breath. Hear me?”

The boy’s head tremored with the slightest affirmation.

He slept. He dreamed. The dream was nightmare. The nightmare was this.

And the next part of this was his father shouting:

“Ladies! Gentlemen!”

The illustrated Man clenched his fist. Will’s picture, lost in it, like a flower, was crushed.

Will twisted.

The rifle fell.

Charles Halloway pretended not to notice.

“Me and Will here will now, together, him being the good left arm I can’t use, do the one and only most dangerous, sometimes fatal, Bullet Trick!”

Applause. Laughter.

Quickly the fifty-four-year-old janitor, denying each year, laid the rifle back on the boy’s jerking shoulder.

“Hear that, Will? Listen! That’s for us!”

The boy listened. The boy grew calm.

Mr. Dark tightened his fist.

Will was taken with slight palsy.

“We’ll hit ’em bull’s-eye on, won’t we, boy!” said his father.

More laughter.

And the boy grew very calm indeed, with the rifle on his shoulder, and Mr. Dark squeezed tight on the peach-fuzz face nestled in the flesh of his hand, but the boy was serene in the laughter which still flowed and his father kept the hoop rolling thus:

“Show the lady your teeth, Will!”

Will showed the woman against the target his teeth. The blood fell away from the Witch’s f ace.

Now Charles Halloway showed her his teeth, too, such as they were.

And winter lived in the Witch.

“Boy,” said someone in the audience, “she’s great. Acts scared! Look!”

I’m looking, thought Will’s father, his left hand useless at his side his right hand up to the rifle trigger, his face to the sight as his son held the rifle unswervingly pointed at the bull’s-eye and the Witch’s face superimposed there, and the last moment come, and a wax bullet in the chamber, and what could a wax bullet do? A bullet that dissolved in transit, what use? why were they here, what could they do? silly, silly!

No! thought Will’s father. Stop!

He stopped the doubts.

He felt his mouth shape words with no sound.

But, the Witch heard what he said.

Above the dying laughter, before the warm sound was completely gone, he made these words, silently with his lips:

The crescent moon I have marked on the bullet is not a crescent moon.

It is my own smile.

I have put my smile on the bullet in the rifle.

He said it once.

He waited for her to understand.

He said it, silently, again.

And in the moment before the Illustrated Man himself translated the mouthings, quickly, Charles Halloway cried, faintly, “Hold!” Will held his breath. Far back among wax statues, Jim, hid away, dripped saliva from his chin. Strapped in electric chair a dead-alive mummy hummed power in its teeth. Mr. Dark’s illustrations writhed with sick sweat as he clenched his fist a final time, but—too late! Serene, Will held breath, held weapon. Serene, his father said, “Now.”

And fired the rifle.

Chapter 48

One shot!

The Witch sucked breath.

Jim, in the Wax Museum, sucked breath.

As did Will, asleep.

As did his father.

As did Mr. Dark.

As did all the freaks.

As did the crowd.

The Witch screamed.

Jim among the wax dummies, blew all the air from his lungs.

Will shrieked himself awake, on the platform.

The Illustrated Man let the air from his mouth in a great angry bray, whipping up his hands to stop all events. But the Witch fell. She fell off the platform. She fell in the dust.

The smoking rifle in his one good hand, Charles Halloway let his breath go slow, feeling every bit of it move from him. He still stared along the rifle sights at the target where the woman had been.

At the platform rim, Mr. Dark looked down at the screaming crowd and what they were screaming about.

“She’s fainted—”

“No. She slipped!”

“She’s… shot!”

At last Charles Halloway came to stand by the Illustrated Man, looking down. There were many things in his face: surprise, dismay, and some small strange relief and satisfaction.

The woman was lifted and put on the platform. Her mouth was frozen open, almost with a look of recognition.

He knew she was dead. In a moment, the crowd would know. He watched the Illustrated Man’s hand move down to touch, trace, feel for life. Then Mr. Dark lifted both her hands, like a doll, in some marionette strategy, to give her motion. But the body refused.

So he gave one of the Witch’s arms to the Dwarf, the other to the Skeleton, and they shook and moved them in a ghastly semblance of reawakening as the crowd backed.

“…dead…”

“But… there’s no wound.”

“Shock, you think?”

Shock, thought Charles Halloway, my God, did that kill her? Or the other bullet? When I fired the shot, did she suck the other bullet down her throat? Did she… choke on my smile! Oh, Christ!

“It’s all right! Show’s over! Just fainted!” said Mr. Dark. “All an act! All part of the show,” he said, not looking at the woman, not looking at the crowd, but looking at Will, who stood blinking around, out of one nightmare and fresh into the next as his father stood with him and Mr. Dark cried: “Everyone home! Show’s over! Lights! Lights!”

The carnival lights flickered.

The crowd, herded before the failing illumination, turned like a great carousel and as the lamps dimmed, hustled toward the few remaining pools of light as if to warm themselves there before braving the wind. One by one, one by one, the lights indeed were going off.

“Lights!” said Mr. Dark.

“Jump!” said Will’s father.

Will jumped. Will ran with his father who still carried the weapon that had fired the smile that had killed the Gypsy and put her to dust.

“Is Jim in there?”

They were at the maze. Behind them, on the platform, Mr. Dark bellowed: “Lights! Go home! All over. Done!”

“Is Jim in there?” wondered Will. “Yes. Yes, he is!”

Inside the Wax Museum, Jim still had not moved, had not blinked.

“Jim!” The voice came through the maze.

Jim moved. Jim blinked. A rear exit door stood wide. Jim blundered toward it.

“I’m coming for you, Jim!”

“No, Dad!”

Will caught at his father, who stood at the first turn of the mirrors with the pain come back to his hands racing up along the nerves to strike a fireball near his heart. “Dad, don’t go in!” Will gabbed his good arm.

Behind them, the platform was empty, Mr. Dark was running… where? Somewhere as the night shut in, the lights went off, went off, went off, the night sucked around, gathering, whistling, simpering, and the crowd, like a shake of leaves from one huge tree, blew off the midway, and Will’s father stood facing the glass tides, the waves, the gauntlet of horror he knew waited for him to swim through, stride through to fight the desiccation, the annihilation of one’s self that waited there. He had seen enough to know. Eyes shut, you’d be lost. Eyes open, you’d know such utter despair, such gravities of anguish would weight you, you might never drag past the twelfth turn. But Charles Halloway took Will’s hands away. “Jim’s there. Jim, wait! I’m coming in!”

And Charles Halloway took the next step into the maze.

Ahead flowed sluices of silver light, deep slabs of shadow, polished, wiped, rinsed with images of themselves and others whose souls, passing, scoured the glass with their agony, curried the cold ice with their narcissism, or sweated the angles and flats with their fear.

“Jim!”

He ran. Will ran. They stopped.

For the lights in here were going blind, one by one, going dim, changing color, now blue, now a color like lilac summer lightning which flared in haloes, then a flickerlight like a thousand ancient windblown candles.

And between himself and Jim in need of rescue, stood an army of one million sick-mouthed, frost-haired, white-tine-bearded men.

Them! all of them! he thought. That’s me!

Dad! thought Will, at his back, don’t be afraid. It’s only you. All only my father!

But he did not like their look. They were so old, so very old, and got much older the farther away they marched, wildly gesticulating, as Dad threw up his hands to fend off the revelation, this wild image repeated to insanity.

Dad! he thought, it’s you!

But, it was more.

And all the lights went out.

And both, squeezed still, in muffle-gasping silence, stood afraid.

Chapter 49

A hand dug like a mole in the dark.

Will’s hand.

It emptied his pockets, it delved, it rejected, it dug again. For while it was dark he knew those million old men might march, hustle, rush, leap, smash Dad with what they were! In this shut-up night, with just four seconds to think of them, they might do anything to Dad! If Will didn’t hurry, these legions from Time Future, all the alarms of coming life, so mean, raw, and true you couldn’t deny that’s how Dad’d look tomorrow, next day, the day after the day after that, that cattle run of possible years might sweep Dad under!

So, quick!

Who has more pockets than a magician?

A boy.

Whose pockets contain more than a magician’s?

A boy’s.

Will seized forth kitchen matches!

“Oh God, Dad, here!”

He struck the match.

The stampede was close!

They had come running. Now, fixed by light, they widened their eyes, as did Dad, amazed their mouths at their own ancient quakes and masquerades. Halt! the match had cried. And platoons left, squads right, had stilt-muscled themselves to fitful rest, to baleful glare, itching for the match to whiff out. Then, given lease to run next time, they’d hit this old, very old, much older, terribly old man, suffocate him with Fates in one instant.

“No!” said Charles Halloway.

No. A million dead lips moved.

Will thrust the match forward. In the mirrors, a wizened multiplication of boy-apes did likewise, posing a single rosebud of blue-yellow flame.

“No!”

Every glass threw javelins of light which invisibly pierced, sank deep, found heart, soul, lungs, to frost the veins, cut nerves, send Will to ruin, paralyze and then kick-football heart. Hamstrung, the old old man foundered to his knees, as did his suppliant images, his congregation of terrified selves one week, one month, two years, twenty, fifty, seventy, ninety years from now! every second, minute, and long-after-midnight hour of his possible survival into insanity, there all sank grayer, more yellow as the mirrors ricocheted him through, bled him lifeless, mouthed him dry, then threatened to whiff him to skeletal dusts and litter his moth ashes to the floor.

“No!”

Charles Halloway struck the match from his son’s hand.

“Dad, don’t.”

For in the new dark, the restive herd of old men shambled forward, hearts hammering.

“Dad, we gotta see!”

He struck his second and final match.

And in the flare saw Dad sunk down, eyes clenched, fists tight, and all those other men who would have to shunt, crawl, scramble on knees once this last light was gone. Will grabbed his father’s shoulder and shook him.

“Oh, Dad, Dad, I don’t care how old you are, ever! I don’t care what, I don’t care anything! Oh, Dad,” he cried, weeping. “I love you!”

At which Charles Halloway opened his eyes and saw himself and the others like himself and his son behind holding him, the flame trembling, the tears trembling on his face, and suddenly, as before, the image of the Witch, the memory of the library, defeat for one, victory for another, swam before him, mixed with sound of rifle, shot, flight of marked bullet, surge of fleeing crowd.

For only a moment longer he looked at all of himselves, at Will. A small sound escaped his mouth. A little larger sound escaped his mouth.

And then, at last, he gave the maze, the mirrors, and all Time ahead, Beyond, Around, Above, Behind, Beneath or squandered inside himself, the only answer possible.

He opened his mouth very wide, and let the loudest sound of all free.

The Witch, if she were alive, would have known that sound, and died again.

Chapter 50

Jim Nightshade, out the back door of the maze lost on the carnival grounds, running, stopped.

The Illustrated Man, somewhere among the black tents, running, stopped.

The Dwarf froze.

The Skeleton turned.

All had heard.

Not the sound that Charles Halloway made, no.

But the terrific sounds that followed.

One mirror alone, and then a second mirror, followed by a pause, and then a third mirror, and a fourth and another after that and another after that and still another and another after that, in domino fashion, they formed swift spiderwebs over their fierce stares and then with faint tinkles and sharp cracks, fell.

One minute there was this incredible Jacob’s ladder of glass, folding, refolding and folding away yet again images pressed in a book of light. The next, all shattered to meteor precipitation.

The Illustrated Man, halted, listening, felt his own eyes, crystal, almost spiderweb and splinter with the sounds.

It was as if Charles Halloway, once more a choirboy in a strange sub-sub-demon church had sung the most beautiful high note of amiable humor ever in his life which first shook moth-silver from the mirror backs, then shook images from glass faces, then shook glass itself to ruin. A dozen, a hundred, a thousand mirrors, and with them the ancient images of Charles Halloway, sank earthward in delicious moonfalls of snow and sleety water.

All because of the sound he had let come from his lungs through his throat out his mouth.

All because he accepted everything at last, accepted the carnival, the hills beyond, the people in the hills, Jim, Will, and above all himself and all of life, and, accepting, threw back his head for the second time tonight and showed his acceptance with sound.

And lo! like Jericho and the trump, with musical thunders the glass gave up its ghosts, Charles Halloway cried out, released. He took his hands from his face. Fresh starlight and dying carnival glow rushed in to set him free. The reflected dead men were gone, buried under the cymbaled slide, the splash and surfing of glass at his feet.

“Lights… lights!”

A far voice cried away more warmth.

The Illustrated Man, unfrozen, vanished among the tents.

The crowd was now gone.

“Dad, what’d you do?”

But the match burned Will’s fingers, he dropped it, but now there was dim light enough to see Dad shuffle the trash, stir the mess of mirrored glass, heading back through the empty places where the maze had been and was no more.

“Jim?”

A door stood open. Pale carnival illumination, fading, poured through to show them wax figures of murderers and murderess.

Jim did not sit among them.

“Jim!”

They stared at the open door through which Jim had run to be lost in the swarms of night between black canvases.

The last electric light bulb went out.

“We’ll never find him now,” said Will.

“Yes,” said his father, standing in the dark. “We’ll find him.”

Where? Will thought, and stopped.

Far down the midway, the carousel steamed, the calliope tortured itself with musics.

There, thought Will. If Jim’s anywhere, its there, to the music, old funny Jim, the free-ride ticket hid in his pocket still, I bet! Oh, damn Jim, damn him, damn him! he cried, and then thought, no! don’t you, he’s damned already, or near it! So how do we find him in the dark, no matches, no lights, just the two of us, all of them, and us alone in their territory?

“How—” said Will, aloud.

But his father said “There,” very softly. With gratitude.

And Will stepped to the door, which was lighter now.

The moon! Thank God.

It was rising from the hills.

“The police…?”

“No time. It’s the next few minutes or nothing. Three people we got to worry about—”

“The freaks!”

“Three people, Will. Number one, Jim, number two, Mr. Cooger frying in his Electric Chair. Number three, Mr. Dark and his skinful of souls. Save one, kick the other two to hell and gone. Then I think the freaks go, too. You ready, Will?”

Will eyed the door, the tents, the dark, the sky with new light paling it.

“God bless the moon.”

Hands tight together, they stepped out the door.

As if to greet them, the wind flung up and down all the tent canvases in a great prehistoric thunder-kite display of leprous wings.

Chapter 51

They ran in urine smell of shadow, they ran in clean ice smell of moon.

The calliope steam-throb whispered, tatted, trilled.

The music! thought Will, is it running backward or forward?

“Which way?” Dad whispered.

“Through here!” Will pointed.

A hundred yards off, beyond a foothill of tents, there was a flare of blue light, sparks jumped up and fell away, then dark again.

Mr. Electrico! thought Will. They’re trying to move him, sure! Get him to the merry-go-round, kill or cure! And if they cure him, then, oh gosh, then, it’s angry him and angry Illustrated Man against just Dad and me! And Jim? Well, where was Jim? This way one day, that way the next, and… tonight? Whose side would he wind up on? Ours! Old friend Jim! Ours, of course! But Will trembled. Did friends last forever, then? For eternity, could they be counted to a warm, round, and handsome sum?

Will glanced left.

The Dwarf stood half enfolded by tent flaps, waiting motionless.

“Dad, look,” cried Will, softly. “And there—the Skeleton.”

Further over, the tall man, the man all marble bone and Egyptian papyrus stood like a dead tree.

“The freaks—why don’t they stop us?”

“Scared.”

“Of us?!”

Will’s father crouched and squinted out from around an empty cage.

“They’re walking wounded, anyway. They saw what happened to the Witch. That’s the only answer. Look at them.”

And there they stood, like uprights, like tent poles spotted all through the meadow grounds, hiding in shadow, waiting. For what? Will swallowed, hard. Maybe not hiding at all, but spread out for the running fight to come. At the right time, Mr. Dark would yell and they’d just circle in. But the time wasn’t right. Mr. Dark was busy. When he’d done what must be done, then he’d give that yell. So? So, thought Will, we got to see he never yells at all.

Will’s feet slithered in the grass.

Will’s father moved ahead.

The freaks watched with moon-glass eyes as they passed.

The calliope changed. It whistled sadly, sweetly, around a curve of tents, around a riverflow of darkness.

It’s going ahead! thought Will. Yes! It was going backward. But now it stopped and started again, and this time forward! What’s Mr. Dark up to?

“Jim!” Will burst out.

“Sh!” Dad shook him.

But the name had tumbled from his mouth only because he heard the calliope summing the golden years ahead, felt Jim isolate somewhere, pulled by warm gravities, swung by sunrise notes, wondering what it could be like to stand sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years tall, and then, oh then, nineteen and, most incredible!—twenty! The great wind of time blew in the brass pipes, a fine, a jolly, a summer tune, promising everything and even Will, hearing, began to run toward the music that grew up like a peach tree full of sun-ripe fruit—

No! he thought.

And instead made his feet step to his own fear, jump to his own tune, a hum cramped back by throat, held fast by lungs, which shook the bones of his head and drowned the calliope away.

“There,” said Dad softly.

And between the tents, ahead, in transit, they saw a grotesque parade. Like a dark sultan in a palanquin, a half-familiar figure rode a chair borne on the shoulders of assorted sizes and shapes of darkness.

At Dad’s cry, the parade jolted, then broke into a run!

“Mr. Electrico!” said Will.

They’re taking him to the carousel!

The parade vanished.

A tent lay between them.

“Around here!” Will jumped, pulling his father. The calliope played sweet. To pull Jim, to draw Jim. And when the parade arrived with Electrico? Back the music would spin, back the carousel run, to shard away his skin, to freshen forth his years! Will stumbled, fell. Dad picked him up.

And then…

There arose a human barking, yapping, baying, whining, as if all had fallen. In a long-drawn moan, a gasp, a shuddering sigh, an entire crowd of people with crippled throats made chorus together.

“Jim! They’ve got Jim!”

“No…” murmured Charles Halloway, strangely. “Maybe Jim… or us… got them.”

They stepped around the last tent.

Wind blew dust in their faces.

Will clapped his hand up, squinched his nose. The dust was antique spice, burnt maple leaves, a prickling blue that teemed and sifted to earth. Swarming its own shadows, the dust filtered over the tents.

Charles Halloway sneezed. Figures jumped and scurried away from an upended, half-tilted object abandoned half-way between one tent and the carousel.

The object was the electric chair, capsized, with straps dangling from wooden arms and legs, and a metal headcap hanging from its top.

“But,” said Will. “Where’s Mr. Electrico!? I mean Mr. Cooger!?”

“That must have been him.”

“What must have been him?”

But the answer was there, sifting down the midway in the whorling wind devils… the burnt spice, the autumn incense that had floured them when they turned this corner.

Kill or cure, Charles Halloway thought. He imagined them rushed in the last few seconds, toting the ancient dustsack boneheap over starched grasses in his disconnected chair, perhaps only one in a running series of attempts to foster, encourage, preserve life in what was really nothing but a mortuary junkpile, rust-flakes and dying coals that no wind could blow alight again. Yet they must try. How many times in the last twenty-four hours had they run out on such excursions, only, in panic, to cease activity because the merest jolt, the slightest breath, threatened to shake old ancient Cooger down to mealmush and chaff? Better to leave him propped in electric-warm chair, a continual exhibit, an ever-going-on performance for gaping audiences, and try again, but especially try now, when, lights out, and crowds herded off in the dark, all threatened by one smile on a bullet, there was need of Cooger as he once was, tall, flame-headed, and riven with earthquake violence. But somewhere, twenty seconds, ten seconds ago, the last glue crumbled, the last bolt of life fell free, and the mummy-doll, the Erector-set grotesque disencumbered itself in smoke puffs and November leaflets, a broadcast of mortality along the wind. Mr. Cooger, threshed in a final harvest, was now a billion parchment flecks, tumbled sea-scrolls capered in meadows. A mere dust explosion in a silo of ancient grain: gone.

“Oh, no, no, no, no, no,” someone murmured.

Charles Halloway touched Will’s arm.

Will stopped saying “Oh, no, no, no.” He, too, in the last few moments, had thought the same as his father, of the toted corpse, the strewn bone-meal, the mineral-enriched hills of grass…

Now there was only the empty chair and the last particles of mica, the radiant motes of peculiar dirt crusting the straps. And the freaks, who had been toting the baroque dump, now fled to shadows.

We made them run, thought Will, but something made them drop it!

No, not something. Someone.

Will flexed his eyes.

The carousel, deserted, empty, traveled on its way through its own special time, forward.

But between the fallen chair and the carousel, standing alone, was that a freak? No…

“Jim!”

Dad knocked his elbow and Will shut up.

Jim, he thought.

And where, now, was Mr. Dark?

Somewhere. For he had started the carousel, hadn’t he? Yes! To draw them, to draw Jim, and—what else? Right now there was no time, for—

Jim turned from the spilled chair, turned and walk slowly toward the free, free ride.

He was going where he had always known he must go.

Like a weather vane in wild seasons he had tremored this way, wandered that, hesitated upon bright horizons and warm directions, only at last now to tilt and, half sleep-walking, tremble about in the bright brass pull and summer march of music. He could not look away.

Another step, and then another, toward the merry-go-round, there went Jim.

“Go get him, Will,” said his father.

Will went.

Jim raised his right hand.

The brass poles flashed by into the future, pulling the flesh like syrup, stretching the bones like taffy, the sunmetal color burning Jim’s cheeks, flinting his eyes.

Jim reached. The brass poles flick-knocked his fingernails, tinkling their own small tune.

“Jim!”

The brass poles chopped by in a yellow sunrise at night.

The music leaped in a clear fountain, high.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Jim opened his mouth with the same cry:

“Eeeeeeeeeeeeee!”

“Jim!” cried Will, running.

Jim’s palm slapped one brass pole. The pole whipped on.

He slapped another brass pole. This time, his palm glued itself tight.

Wrist followed fingers, arm followed wrist, shoulder and body followed arm. Jim, sleepwalked, was torn from his roots in the earth.

“Jim!”

Will reached, felt Jim’s foot flick from his grasp.

Jim swung round the waiting night in a great dark summer circle, Will racing after.

“Jim, get off! Jim, don’t leave me here!”

Flung by centrifuge, Jim grasped the pole with one hand, spun, and, as if by some lone lost and final instinct, gestured his other hand free to trail on the wind, the one part of him, the small white separate part that still remembered their friendship.

“Jim, jump!!”

Will snatched for that hand, missed, stumbled, almost fell. The first race was lost. Jim must circle once, alone. Will stood waiting the next charge of horses, the fling-about of boy not-so-much boy—

“Jim! Jim!”

Jim awoke! Circled half round, his face showed now July, now December. He seized the pole, bleating out his despair. He wanted, he did not want. He wished, he rejected, he ardently wished again, in flight, in heat-spell river of wind and blaze of metal, in jog of July and August horses whose hoofs thudded the air like thrown fruit, his eyes blazed. Tongue clamped in teeth, he hissed his frustration.

“Jim! Jump! Dad, stop the machine!”

Charles Halloway turned to see where the control box stood, fifty feet off.

“Jim!” Will’s side was stabbed with pain. “I need you! Come back!”

And, far over away on the far side of the carousel, traveling, fast-traveling, Jim fought with his own hands, the pole, the empty wind-whipped journey, the growing night, the wheeling stars. He let go the pole. He grabbed it. And still his right hand trailed down and out, begging Will’s last full ounce of strength.

“Jim!”

Jim came around. There, below, in the black-night station from which this train pulled away forever in a flurry of ticket-punch confetti, he saw Will—Willy—William Halloway, young pal, young friend who would seem younger still at the end of this journey, and not just young but unknown! vaguely remembered from some other time in some other year… but now that boy, that friend, that younger friend, ran along by the train, reached up, asking passage? or demanding he get off? which?!

“Jim! Remember me?”

Will lunged his final lunge. Fingers touched fingers, palm touched palm.

Jim’s face, white cold, stared down.

Will trot-paced the circling machine.

Where was Dad? Why didn’t he shut it off?

Jim’s hand was a warm hand, a familiar, a good hand. It closed on his. He gripped it yelling.

“Jim, please!”

But still they spun on the journey, Jim borne, Will dragged in a jog-crazy-trot.

“Please!”

Will jerked. Jim jerked. Trapped by Jim, Will’s hand was shot with July heat. It went, like a kept animal, held and fondled by Jim, along, around, into older times. So his hand, far-traveling, would be alien to himself, knowing things by night that he himself, abed, might only guess. Fourteen-year boy, fifteen-year hand! Jim had it, yes! cramped it tight, would not let go! And Jim’s face, was it older, from the journey round? Was he fifteen now, going on sixteen!?

Will pulled. Jim pulled opposite.

Will fell on the machine.

Both rode the night.

All of Will rode with friend Jim now.

“Jim! Dad!”

How easy it might be to just stand, ride, go round with Jim, if he couldn’t pull Jim off, just leave him on and, dear pals, travel! The juices of his body swam, binding his sight, they drummed his ears, shot electric jolts through his loins…

Jim shouted. Will shouted.

They traveled half a year in slithering orchard-warm dark before Will seized Jim’s arm tight and dared to leap from so much promise, so many fine tall-growing years, flail out, off, down, pull Jim with. But Jim could not let go the pole, could not give up the ride.

“Will!”

Jim, half between machine and friend, one hand on each, screamed.

It was like a great tearing of cloth or flesh.

Jim’s eyes went blind as a statue’s.

The carousel whirled.

Jim screamed, fell, spun crazily, on the air.

Will tried to break his fall, but Jim struck earth rolling. He lay, silent.

Charles Halloway hit the carousel control switch. Empty, the machine slowed. Its horses paced themselves down from their trot toward some far midsummer night.

Together, Charles Halloway and his son knelt by Jim to touch his wrist, to put ear to his chest. Jim’s eyes, skinned white, were fixed on the stars.

“Oh, God,” cried Will. “Is he dead?”

Chapter 52

“Dead…?”

Will’s father moved his hand over that cold face, the cold chest.

“I don’t feel…”

A long way off, someone cried for help.

They looked up.

A boy came running down the midway bumping into the ticket booths, falling over tent ropes, looking back over his shoulder.

“Help! He’s after me!” the boy cried. “The terrible man! The terrible man! I want to go home!”

The boy flung himself forward, and grabbed at Will’s father.

“Oh, help, I’m lost, I don’t like it. Take me home. That man with the tattoos!”

“Mr. Dark!” gasped Will.

“Yes!” gibbered the boy. “He’s down that way! Oh, stop him!”

“Will—” his father rose—“take care of Jim. Artificial respiration. All right, boy.”

The boy trotted off. “This way!”

Following, Charles Halloway watched the distraught boy who led him; observed his head, his frame, the way his pelvis hung from his spine.

“Boy,” he said, by the shadowed merry-go-round, twenty feet around from where Will bent to Jim. “What’s your name?”

“No time!” cried the boy. “Jed. Quick, quick!”

Charles Halloway stopped.

“Jed,” he said. The boy no longer moved, but turned, chafing his elbows. “How old are you, Jed?”

“Nine!” said the boy. “My gosh, this is no time! We—”

“This is a fine time, Jed,” said Charles Halloway. “Only nine? So young. I was never that young.”

“Holy cow!” shouted the boy, angrily.

“Or unholy something,” said the man, and reached out. The boy backed away. “You’re only afraid of one man, Jed. Me.”

“You?” The boy still backed off. “Cut it out! Why, why?”

“Because, sometimes good has weapons and evil none. Sometimes tricks fail. Sometimes people can’t be picked off, led to deadfalls. No divide-and-conquer tonight, Jed. Where were you taking me, Jed? To some lion’s cage you got fixed and ready? To some side show, like the mirrors? To someone like the Witch? What, what, Jed, what? Let’s just roll up your right shirt sleeve, shall we, Jed?”

The great moonstone eyes flashed at Charles Halloway.

The boy leaped back, but not before the man had leaped with him, seized his arm, grabbed the back of his shirt and instead of simply rolling up the sleeve as first suggested, tore the entire shirt off the boy’s body.

“Why, yes, Jed,” said Charles Halloway, almost quietly. “Just as I thought.”

“You, you, you, you!”

“Yes, Jed, me. But especially you, look at you.”

And look he did.

For there, on the back of the small boy’s hand, on the fingers, and up along the wrist scrambled blue serpents, blue-venomed snake eyes, blue scorpions scuttling about blue shark maws which gaped eternally hungry to feed upon all the freaks crammed and stung-sewn cheek by jowl, skin to skin, flesh to flesh all up and down the chest, the tiny torso, and tucked in the secret gathering places on this small small very small body, this cold and now shocked and trembling body.

“Why, Jed, that’s fine artwork, that is.”

“You!” The boy struck.

“Yes, still me.” Charles Halloway took the blow in the face and clamped a vise, on the boy.

“No!”

“Oh, yes,” said Charles Halloway, using just his good right hand, his ruined left hand hanging limp. “Yes, Jed, jump, squirm, go ahead. It was a fine idea. Get me off alone, fix me, then go back and get Will. And when the police come, why, you’re just a boy nine or ten and the carnival, oh, no, it’s not yours, doesn’t belong to you. Stay here, Jed. Why you trying to get out from under my arm? The police look and the owners of the show have vanished, isn’t that it, Jed? A fine escape.”

“You can’t hurt me!” the boy shrieked.

“Funny,” said Charles Halloway. “I think I can.”

He pressed the boy, almost lovingly, close, very close.

“Murder!” wailed the boy. “Murder.”

“I’m not going to murder you, Jed, Mr. Dark, whoever, whatever you are. You’re going to murder yourself because you can’t stand being near people like me, not this close, close, not this long.”

“Evil!” groaned the boy, writhing. “You’re evil!”

“Evil?” Will’s father laughed, which made the boy, wasp-stung and brambled by the sound, jerk all the more violently. “Evil?” The man’s hands were flypaper fastened to the small bones. “Strange hearing that from you, Jed. So it must seem. Good to evil seems evil. So I will do only good to you, Jed. I will simply hold you and watch you poison yourself. I will do good to you, Jed, Mr. Dark, Mr. Proprietor, boy, until you tell what’s wrong with Jim. Wake him up. Let him free. Give him life!”

“Can’t… can’t…” The boy’s voice fell down a well inside his body, fading away, away “can’t…”

“You mean you won’t?”

“…can’t…”

“All right, boy, all right, then here and here and this and this…”

They looked like father and son long apart, passionately met, embraced, yet more embraced, as the man lifted his wounded hand to gently touch the stricken face as the crowd, the teem, of illustrations shivered and flew now this way and that in microscopic forays quickly abandoned. The boy’s eyes swiveled wildly, fixed upon the manes mouth. He saw there the strange and somehow lovely smile once flung as beatification to the Witch.

He gathered the boy somewhat closer and thought, Evil has only the power that we give it. I give you nothing. I take back. Starve. Starve. Starve.

The two matchstick lights in the boy’s affrighted eyes blew out.

The boy, and his stricken and bruised conclave of monsters, his felt but half-seen crowd, fell to earth.

There should have been a roar like a mountain slid to ruin.

But there was only a rustle, like a Japanese paper lantern dropped in the dust.

Chapter 53

Charles Halloway stood for a long while, breathing deep, lungs aching, looking down at the body. The shadows swooned and fluttered in all the canvas alleys where odd assorted sizes of freaks and people, fleshed in their own terrors and sins, held to poles, moaning in disbelief. Somewhere, the Skeleton moved out in the light. Somewhere else, the Dwarf almost knew who he was, and scuttled forth like a crab from a cave to blink and blink again at Will bent working over Jim, at Will’s father bent to exhaustion over the still form of the silent boy, while the merry-go-round, at last, slow, slow, came to a stop, rocking like a ferryboat in the watery-blowing grass.

The carnival was a great dark hearth lit with gathered coals, as shadows came to stare and fire their gaze with the tableau by the carousel.

There in the moonlight lay the illustrated boy named Dark.

There lay dragons slaughtered, towers ruined, monsters from dim ages toppled into rusted coinages pterodactyls smashed like biplanes from old and always meaningless wars, crustacea the color of emeralds abandoned on a white sand shore where the tide of life was going out, all, all the illustrations changing now, shifting, shriveling as the small flesh cooled. There the obscene wink of the navel eye gasped in on itself, there the nipple-iris of a trumpeting mastodon went blind and raved at its blindness; each and every picture remembered from the tall Mr. Dark now rendered down to miniature canvas pronged and forked over a boy’s tennis-racket bones.

More freaks, with faces the color of beds where so many had lost the battle of souls, emerged from the shadows to glide in a great and ever more curious carousel motion about Charles Halloway and his dropped burden.

Will paused in his desperate push and relaxation, push and relaxation, trying to shape Jim back to life, unafraid of the watchers in the dark, no time for that! Even if there were time, these freaks, he sensed, were breathing the night as if they had not been fed on such rare fine air in years!

And as Charles Halloway watched, and the fox-fire, lobster-moist, phlegm-trapped eyes watched from distances, the boy-who-had-been-Mr.-Dark grew yet colder, as death cut the timbers of nightmares, and the calligraphies, the smoky lightnings of sketch that coiled and crouched and soared like terrible banners of a lost war, began to vanish one by one from the strewn small body.

A score of freaks glanced fearfully round as if the moon had suddenly filled itself full and they could see; they chafed their wrists as if chains had fallen from them, chafed their necks as if weights had crumbled from their bowed shoulders. Stumbled forth after long entombments, they blinked swiftly, disbelieving the packet of their misery sprawled near the spent carousel. If they dared they might have bent to tremble their hands over that suddenly death-sweet mouth, the marbling brow. As it was they watched, benumbed, as their portrait pictures, the vital stuffs of their mortal greed, rancor, and poisonous guilt, the emerald abstracts of their self-blinded eyes, self-wounded mouths, self-trapped bodies melted one by one from this insignificant mound of snow. There melted the Skeleton! there the sidewise-scuttling crayfish Dwarf! Now the Lava Sipper took leave of autumn flesh, followed by the black Executioner from London Dock, there soared off and gone went the Human Montgolfier, the Balloon Man, Avoirdupois the Magnificent! deflated to purest air, there! there fled mobs and bands, as death washed the drawing board clean!

Now there lay just a plain dead boy, unbruised by pictures, staring up at the stars with Mr. Dark’s empty eyes.

“Ahhhh…”

In a chorus of release, the strange people in the shadows sighed.

Perhaps the calliope gave a last ringmaster’s bark. Perhaps thunder turned, sleeping, in the clouds. Suddenly all wheeled about. The freaks stampeded. North, south, east, west, free of tent, master, dark law, free above all of each other, they ran like albino pigs, tuskless boars, and stricken sloths before storms.

It must have been, it seemed, each yanked a rope, loosed a tent-peg, running.

For now the sky was shaken with a fatal respiration, the breathing down, the insunk rattle and pule of collapsing darkness as the tents gave way.

With hiss of viper, swirl of cobra, the ropes insanely raveled, slithered, snapped, cut grass with frictioned whips.

The networks of the vast Main Freak Tent convulsed, parted bones, small from medium, and medium from brontosaur magnificent. All swayed with impending fall.

The menagerie tent shut up like a dark Spanish fan.

Other small tents, caped figures in the meadow, fell down at the wind’s command.

Then at last, the Freak Tent, the great melancholy mothering reptile bird, after a moment of indecision, sucked in a Niagara of blizzard air, broke loose three hundred hempen snakes, crack-rattled its black sidepoles so they fell like teeth from a cyclopean jaw, slammed the air with acres of moldered wing as if trying to kite away but, earth-tethered, must succumb to plain and most simple gravity, must be crushed by its own locked bulk.

Now this greatest tent stated out hot raw breaths of earth, confetti that was ancient when the canals of Venice were not yet staked, and wafts of pink cotton candy like tired feather boas. In rushing downfalls, the tent shed skin; grieved, soughed as flesh fell away until at last the tall museum timbers at the spine of the discarded monster dropped with three cannon roars.

The calliope simmered, moronic with wind.

The train stood, an abandoned toy, in a field.

The freak oil paintings clapped hands high on the last standing pennant poles, then plummeted to earth.

The Skeleton, the only strange one left, bent to pick up the body of the porcelain boy-who-was-Mr. Dark. He moved away into the fields.

Will, in a swift moment, saw the thin man and his burden go over a hill among all the footprints of the vanished carnival race.

Will’s face shadowed this way, then that, pulled by the swift concussions, the tumults, the deaths, the fleeing away of souls. Cooger, Dark, Skeleton, Dwarf-who-was-Lightning-Rod-Salesman, don’t run, come back! Miss Foley, where are you? Mr. Crosetti! it’s over! Be still! Quiet! It’s all right. Come back, come back!

But the wind was blowing their footprints out of the grass and they might run forever now trying to outflee themselves.

So Will turned back astride Jim and pushed the chest and let go, pushed and let go, then, trembling, touched his dear friend’s cheek.

“Jim…?”

But Jim was cold as spaded earth.

Chapter 54

Beneath the cold was a fugitive warmness, in the white skin lay some small color, but when Will felt Jim’s wrist there was nothing and when he put his ear to the chest there was nothing.

“He’s dead!”

Charles Halloway came to his son and his son’s friend and knelt down to touch the quiet throat, the unstirred rib cage.

“No.” Puzzled. “Not quite…”

“Dead!”

The tears burst from Will’s eyes. But then, as swiftly, be felt himself knocked, struck, shaken.

“Stop that!” cried his father. “You want to save him?!”

“It’s too late, oh, Dad!”

“Shut up! Listen!”

But Will wept.

And again his father hauled off and hit him. Once on the left cheek. Once on the right cheek, hard.

All the tears in him were knocked flying; there were no more.

“Will!” His father savagely jabbed a finger at him and at Jim. “Damn it, Willy, all this, all these, Mr. Dark and his sort, they like crying, my God, they love tears! Jesus God, the more you bawl, the more they drink the salt off your chin. Wail and they suck your breath like cats. Get up! Get off your knees, damn it! Jump around! Whoop and holler! You hear! Shout, Will, sing, but most of all laugh, you got that, laugh!”

“I can’t!”

“You must! It’s all we got. I know! In the library! The Witch ran, my God, how she ran! I shot her dead with it. A single smile, Willy, the night people can’t stand it. The sun’s there. They hate the sun. We can’t take them seriously, Will!”

“But—”

“But hell! You saw the mirrors! And the mirrors shoved me half in, half out the grave. Showed me all wrinkles and rot! Blackmailed me! Blackmailed Miss Foley so she joined the grand march Nowhere, joined the fools who wanted everything! Idiot thing to want: everything! Poor damned fools. So wound up with nothing like, the dumb dog who dropped his bone to go after the reflection of the bone in the pond. Will, you saw: every mirror fell. Like ice in a thaw. With no rock or rifle, no knife, just my teeth, tongue and lungs, I gunshot those mirrors with pure contempt! Knocked down ten million scared fools and let the real man get to his feet! Now, on your feet, Will!”

“But Jim—” Will faltered.

“Half in, half out. Jim’s been that, always. Sore-tempted. Now he went too far and maybe he’s lost. But he fought to save himself, right? Put his hand out to you, to fall free of the machine? So we finish that fight for him. Move!”

Will sailed up, giddily, yanked.

“Run!”

Will sniffed again. Dad slapped his face. Tears flew like meteors.

“Hop! Jump! Yell!”

He banged Will ahead, shuffled with him, shoved his hand in his pockets, tearing them inside out until he pulled forth a bright object.

The harmonica.

Dad blew a chord.

Will stopped, staring down at Jim.

Dad clouted him on the car.

“Run! Don’t look!”

Will ran a step.

Dad blew another chord, yanked Will’s elbow, flung each of his arms.

“Sing!”

“What?”

“God, boy, anything!”

The harmonica tried a bad “Swanee River.”

“Dad.” Will shuffled, shaking his head, immensely tired. “Silly…!”

“Sure! We want that! Silly damn fool man! Silly harmonica! Bad off-key tune!”

Dad whooped. He circled like a dancing crane. He was not in the silliness yet. He wanted to crack through. He had to break the moment!

“Will: louder, funnier, as the man said! Oh, hell, don’t let them drink your tears and want more! Will! Don’t let them take your crying, turn it upside down and use it for their own smile! I’ll be damned if death wears my sadness for glad rags. Don’t feed them one damn thing, Willy, loosen your bones! Breathe! Blow!”

He seized Will’s hair, shook him.

“Nothing… funny…”

“Sure there is! Me! You! Jim! All of us! The whole shooting works! Look!”

And Charles Halloway pulled faces, popped his eyes, mashed his nose, winked, cavorted like chimpanzee-ape, waltzed with the wind, tap-danced the dust, threw back his head to bay at the moon, dragging Will with him.

“Death’s funny, God damn it! Bend, two, three, Will. Soft-shoe. Way down upon the Swanee River—what’s next, Will?… Far far away! Will, your God—awful voice! Damn girl soprano. Sparrow in a tin can. Jump, boy!”

Will went up, came down, cheeks hotter, a wincing like lemons in his throat. He felt balloons grow in his chest.

Dad sucked the silver harmonica.

“That’s where the old folks—” Will spoke.

“Stay!” bellowed his father.

Shuffle, tap, bounce, jog.

Where was Jim! Jim was forgotten.

Dad jabbed his ribs, tickling.

“De Camptown ladies sing this song!”

“Doo-dah!” yelled Will. “Doo-dah!” he sang it now, with a tune. The balloon grew. His throat tickled.

“Camptown race track, five miles long!”

“Oh, doo-dah day!”

Man and boy did a minuet.

And in midstep it happened.

Will felt the balloon grow huge within him.

He smiled.

“What?” Dad was surprised by those teeth.

Will snorted. Will giggled.

“What say?” asked Dad.

The force of the exploding warm balloon alone shoved Will’s teeth apart, kicked his head back.

“Dad! Dad!”

He bounded. He grabbed his Dad’s hand. He raced crazily, hollering, quacking like a duck, clucking like a chicken. His palms hit his throbbing knees. Dust flow off his soles.

“Oh, Susanna!”

“Oh, don’t you cry—”

“—for me!”

“For I’m come from—”

“Alabama with my—”

“Banjo on my—”

Together. “Knee!”

The harmonica knocked teeth, wheezing, Dad hocked forth great chords of squeeze-eyed hilarity, turning in a circle, jumping up to kick his heels.

“Ha!” They collided, half-collapsed, knocked elbows, cracked heads, which blew the air out faster. “Ha! Oh God, ha! Oh God. Will, Ha! Weak! Ha!”

In the middle of wild laughter—

A sneeze!

They spun. They stared.

Who lay there on the moonlit earth?

Jim? Jim Nightshade?

Had he stirred? Was his mouth wider, his eyelids quivering? Were his cheeks pinker?

Don’t took! Dad swung Will handily round in a further reel. They do-si-doed, hands extended, the harmonica seeping and guzzling raw tunes from a father who storked his legs and turkeyed his arms. They hopped Jim one way, hopped back, as if he were but a lump-stone on the grass.

“Someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah! Someone’s in the kitchen—”

“—I know-oh-oh-oh!”

Jim’s tongue slid out on his lips.

No one saw this. Or if they saw, ignored it, fearing it might pass.

Jim did the final things himself. His eyes opened. He watched the dancing fools. He could not believe. He had been off on a journey of years. Now, returned, no one said “Hi!” All jigged Sambo-style. Tears might have jumped to his eyes. But before they could start, Jim’s mouth curved. He gave up a ghost of laughter. For, after all there indeed was silly Will and his silly old janitor dad racing like gorillas knuckle-dusting the meadows, their faces a puzzlement. They toppled above him, clapped bands, wiggled cars, bent to wash him all over with their now bright full-river flowing laughter that could not be stopped if the sky fell or the earth rent open, to blend their good mirth with his, to fuse-light and set him off in a detonation which could not stop exploding from ladyfingers to four-inchers to doomsday cannon crackers of delight!

And looking down, jolt-dancing his bones loose and delicious, Will thought: Jim don’t remember he was dead, so we won’t tell, not now—some day, sure, but not… Doo-dah! Doo-dah!

They didn’t even say “Hello, Jim’ or “Join in the dance,” they just put out hands as if he had fallen from their swung pandemonium commotion and needed a boost back into the swarm. They yanked Jim. Jim flew. Jim came down dancing.

And Will knew, hand in hand, hot palm to palm, they had truly yelled, sung, gladly shouted the live blood back. They had slung Jim like the newborn, knocked his lungs, slapped his back, shocked joyous breath to where it made room.

Then Dad bent and Will leaped over him and Will bent and Dad jumped him and they both waited crouched in a line, wheezing songs, deliciously tired, while Jim swallowed spit, and ran full tilt. He got half over Dad when they all fell, rolled in the grass, all hoot-owl and donkey, all brass and cymbal as it must have been the first year of Creation, and Joy not yet thrown from the Garden.

Until at last they drew up their feet, socked each other’s shoulders, embraced knees tight, rocking, and looking with swift bright happiness at each other, growing wine-drunkenly quiet.

And when they were done smiling at each other’s faces as at burning torches, they looked away across the field.

And the black tent poles lay in elephant boneyards with the dead tents blowing away like the petals of a great black rose.

The only three people in a sleeping world, a rare trio of tomcats, they basked in the moon.

“What happened?” asked Jim, at last.

“What didn’t!” cried Dad.

And they laughed again, when suddenly Will grabbed Jim, held him tight and wept.

“Hey,” Jim said, over and over, quietly. “Hey… hey…”

“Jim, Jim,” Will said. “We’ll be pals forever.”

“Sure, hey sure.” Jim was very quiet now.

“It’s all right,” said Dad. “Have a small cry. We’re out of the woods. Then we’ll laugh some more, going home.”

Will let Jim go.

They got to their feet and stood looking at each other. Will examined his father, with fierce pride.

“Oh, Dad, Dad, you did it, you did it!”

“No, we did it together.”

“But without you it’d all be over. Oh, Dad, I never knew you. I sure know you now.”

“Do you, Will?”

“Darn right!”

Each, to the other, shimmered in bright halos of wet light.

“Why then, hello. Reply, son, and curtsey.”

Dad held out his hand. Will shook it. Both laughed and wiped their eyes, then looked quickly at the foot prints scattered in the dew over the hills.

“Dad, will they ever come back?”

“No. And yes.” Dad tucked away his harmonica. “No, not them. But yes, other people like them. Not in a carnival. God knows what shape they’ll come in next. But sunrise, noon, or at the latest, sunset tomorrow they’ll show. They’re on the road.”

“Oh, no,” said Will.

“Oh, yes,” said Dad. “We got to watch out the rest of our lives. The fight’s just begun.”

They moved around the carousel slowly.

“What will they look like? How will we know them?”

“Why,” said Dad, quietly, “maybe they’re already here.”

Both boys looked around swiftly.

But there was only the meadow, the machine, and themselves.

Will looked at Jim, at his father, and then down at his own body and hands. He glanced up at Dad.

Dad nodded, once, gravely, and then nodded at the carousel, and stepped up on it, and touched a brass pole.

Will stepped up beside him. Jim stepped up beside Will.

Jim stroked a horse’s mane. Will patted a horse’s shoulders.

The great machine softly tilted in the tides of night.

Just three times around, ahead, thought Will. Hey.

Just four times around, ahead, thought Jim. Boy.

Just ten times around, back, thought Charles Halloway.

Lord.

Each read the thoughts in the other’s eyes.

How easy, thought Will.

Just this once, thought Jim.

But then, thought Charles Halloway, once you start, you’d always come back. One more ride and one more ride. And, after awhile, you’d offer rides to friends, and more friends until finally…

The thought hit them all in the same quiet moment.

…finally you wind up owner of the carousel, keeper of the freaks… proprietor for some small part of eternity of the traveling dark carnival shows…

Maybe, said their eyes, they’re already here.

Charles Halloway stepped back into the machinery of the merry-go-round, found a wrench, and knocked the flywheels and cogs to pieces. Then he took the boys out and he hit the control box one or two times until it broke and scattered fitful lightnings.

“Maybe this isn’t necessary,” said Charles Halloway. “Maybe it wouldn’t run anyway, without the freaks to give it power.” But he hit the box a last time and threw down the wrench.

“It’s late. Must be midnight straight up.”

Obediently, the City Hall clock, the Baptist church clock, the Methodist, the Episcopalian, the Catholic church, all the clocks, struck twelve. The wind was seeded with Time.

“Last one to the railroad semaphore at Green Crossing is an old lady!”

The boys fired themselves off like pistols.

The father hesitated only a moment. He felt the vague pain in his chest. If I run, he thought, what will happen? Is Death important? No. Everything that happens before Death is what counts. And we’ve done fine tonight. Even Death can’t spoil it. So, there went the boys and why not… follow?

He did just that.

And Lord! it was fine printing their life in the dew on the cool fields that new dark suddenly-like-Christmas morning. The boys ran as tandem ponies, knowing that someday one would touch base first, and the other second or not at all, but now this first minute of the new morning was not the minute or the day or morning of ultimate loss. Now was not the time to study faces to see if one was older and the other too much younger. Today was just another day in October in a year suddenly better than anyone supposed it could ever be just a short hour ago, with the moon and the stars moving in a grand rotation toward inevitable dawn, and them loping, and the last of this night’s weeping done, and Will laughing and singing and Jim giving answer line by line, as they breasted the waves of dry stubble toward a town where they might live another few years across from each other.

And behind them jogged a middle-aged man with his own now solemn, now amiable, thoughts.

Perhaps the boys slowed. They never knew. Perhaps Charles Halloway quickened his pace. He could not say.

But, running even with the boys, the middle-aged man reached out.

Will slapped, Jim slapped, Dad slapped the semaphore signal base at the same instant.

Exultant, they banged a trio of shouts down the wind.

Then, as the moon watched, the three of them together left the wilderness behind and walked into the town.