Something Wicked This Way Comes (17 page)

    "Can they . . ." said Jim. "I mean . . . do they . . . buy souls?"

    "Buy, when they can get them free?" said Mr. Halloway. "Why, most men jump at the chance to give up everything for nothing. There's nothing we're so slapstick with as our own immortal souls. Besides, you're inferring that's the, Devil out there. I only say it's a type of creature has learned to live off souls, not the souls themselves. That always worried me in the old myths. I asked myself, why would Mephistopheles want a soul? What does he do with it when he gets it, of what use is it? Stand back while I throw my own theory over the plate. Those creatures want the gas off souls who can't sleep nights, that fever by day from old crimes. A dead soul is no kindling. But a live and raving soul, crippled with self-damnation, oh that's a pretty snoutful for such as them.

    "How do I know this? I observe. The carnival is like people, only more so. A man, a woman, rather than walk away from, or kill, each other, ride each other a lifetime, pulling hair, extracting fingernails, the pain of each to the other like a narcotic that makes existence worth the day. So the carnival feels ulcerated egos miles off and lopes to toast its hands at that ache. It smells boys ulcerating to be men, paining like great unwise wisdom teeth, twenty thousand miles away, summer abed in winter's night. It feels the aggravation of middle-aged men like myself, who gibber after long-lost August afternoons to no avail. Need, want, desire, we burn those in our fluids, oxidize those in our souls, which jet streams out lips, nostrils, eyes, cars, broadcasts from antennae-fingers, long or short wave, God only knows, but the freak-masters perceive Itches and come crab-clustering to Scratch. It's traveled a long way on an easy map, with people handy by every crossroad to lend it lustful pints of agony to power it on. So maybe the carnival survives, living off the poison of the sins we do each other, and the ferment of our most terrible regrets."

    Charles Halloway snorted.

    "Good grief, how much have I said out loud, how much to myself, the last ten minutes?"

    "You," said Jim, "talk a lot."

    "In what language, dammit!" cried Charles Halloway, for suddenly it seemed he had done no more than other nights walking exquisitely alone, deliciously propounding his ideas to halls which echoed them once, then made them vanish forever. He had written books a lifetime, on the, airs of vast rooms in vast buildings, and had it all fly out the vents. Now it all seemed fireworks, done for color, sound, the high architecture of words, to dazzle the boys, powder his ego, but with no mark left on retina or mind after the color and sound faded; a mere exercise in self-declamation. Sheepishly he accosted himself.

    "How much of all this got through? One sentence out of five, two out of eight?"

    "Three in a thousand,"' said Will.

    Charles Halloway could not but laugh and sigh in one.

    Then Jim cut across with:

    "Is . . . is it . . . Death?"

    "The carnival?" The old man lit his pipe, blew smoke, seriously studied the patterns. "No. But I think it uses Death as a threat. Death doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. Butwe've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing. And the carnival wisely knows we're more afraid of Nothing than we are of Something. You can fight Something. But . . . Nothing? Where do you hit it? Has it a heart, soul, butt-behind, brain? No, no. So the carnival just shakes a great croupier's cupful of Nothing at us, and reaps us as we tumble back headover-heels in fright. Oh, it shows us Something that might eventually lead to Nothing, all right. That flourish of mirrors out there in the meadow, that's a raw Something, for sure. Enough to knock your soul sidewise in the saddle. It's a hit below the belt to see yourself ninety years gone, the vapors of eternity rising from you like breath off dry ice. Then, when it's frozen you stiff, it plays that fine sweet soul-searching music that smells of fresh-washed frocks of women dancing on back-yard lines in May, that sounds like haystacks trampled into wine, all that blue sky and summer night-on-the-lake kind of tune until your head bangs with the drums that look like full moons beating around the calliope. Simplicity. Lord, I do admire their direct approach. Hit an old man with mirrors, watch his pieces fall in jigsaws of ice only the carnival can put together again. How? Waltz around back on the carousel to 'Beautiful Ohio' or 'Merry Widow.' But they're careful not to tell one thing to people who go riding to its music."

    "What?" asked Jim.

    "Why, that if you're a miserable sinner in one shape, you're a miserable sinner in another. Changing size doesn't change the brain. If I made you twenty-five tomorrow, Jim, your thoughts would still be boy thoughts, and it'd show! Or if they turned me into a boy of ten this instant, my brain would still be fifty and that boy would act funnier and older and weirder than any boy ever. Then, too, time's out of joint another way."

    "Which way?" asked Will.

    "If I became young again, all my friends would still be fifty, sixty, wouldn't they? I'd be cut off from them, forever, for I couldn't tell them what I'd up and done, could I? They'd resent it. They'd hate me. Their interests would no longer be mine, would they? Especially their worries. Sickness and death for them, new life for me. So where's the place in this world for a man who looks twenty but who is older than Methuselah, what man could stand the shock of a change like that? Carnival won't warn you its equal to postoperative shock, but, by God, I bet it is, and more!

    "So, what happens? You get your reward: madness. Change of body, change of personal environment, for one thing. Guilt, for another, guilt at leaving your wife, husband, friends to die the way all men die-Lord, that alone would give a man fits. So more fear, more agony for the carnival to breakfast on. So with the green vapors coming off your stricken conscience you say you want to go back the way you were! The carnival nods and listens. Yes, they promise, if you behave as they say, in a short while they'll give you back your twoscore and ten or whatever. On the promise alone of being returned to normal old age, that train travels with the world, its side show populated with madmen waiting to be released from bondage, meantime servicing the carnival, giving it coke for its ovens."

    Will murmured something.

    "What?"

    "Mss Foley," mourned Will. "'Oh, poor Miss Foley, they got her now, just like you say. Once she got what she wanted it scared her, she didn't like it, oh, she was crying so hard, Dad, so hard; now I bet they promise her someday she can be fifty again if she'll mind. I wonder what they're doing with her, right now, oh, Dad, oh, Jim!"

    "God help her." Will's father put a heavy hand out to trace the old carnival portraits. "They've probably thrown her in with the freaks. And what are they? Sinners who've traveled so long, hoping for deliverance, they've taken on the shape of their original sins? The Fat Man., what was he once? If I can guess the carnival's sense of irony, the way they like to weight the scales, he was once a ravener after all kinds and varieties of lust. No matter, there he lives now, anyway, collected up in bursting skin. The Man, Skeleton, or whatever, did he starve his wife's, children's spiritual as well as physical hungers? The Dwarf? Was he or was he not your friend, the lightning-rod salesman, always on the road, never settling, ever-moving, facing no encounters, running ahead of the lightning and selling rods, yes, but leaving others to face the storm, so maybe, through accident, or design, when he fell in with the free rides, he shrank not to a boy but a mean ball of grotesque tripes, all self-involved. The fortune-telling, Gypsy Dust Witch? Maybe someone who lived always tomorrow and let today slide, like myself, and so wound up pen having to guess other people's wild sunrises and sad sunsets. You tell me, you've seen her near. The Pinhead? The Sheep Boy? The Fire Eater? The Siamese Twins, good God, what were they? twins all bound up in tandem narcissism? We'll never know. They'll never tell. We've guessed, and probably guessed wrong, on ten dozen things the last half hour. Now-some plan. Where do we go from here?"

    Charles Halloway placed forth a map of the town and drew in the location of the carnival with a blunt pencil.

    "Do we keep hiding out? No. With Miss Foley, and so many others involved, we just can't. Well, then, how do we attack so we won't be picked off first thing? What kind of weapons-"

    "Silver bullets." cried Will. suddenly.

    "Heck, no!" snorted Jim. "They're not vampires!"

    "If we were Catholic, we could borrow church holy water and-"

    "Nuts," said Jim. "Movie stuff. It don't happen that way in real life. Am I wrong, Mr. Halloway?"

    "I wish you were, boy."

    Will's eyes glowed fiercely. "Okay. Only one thing to do: trot down to the meadow with a couple gallons of kerosene and some matches-"

    "That's against the law!" Jim exclaimed.

    "Look who's talking!"

    'Hold on!"

    But everyone stopped right then.

    Whisper.

    A faint tide of wind flowed up along through the library corridors and into this room.

    "The front door," Jim whispered. "Someone just opened it."

    Far away, a gentle click. The draft that had for a moment stirred the boys' trouser cuffs and blown the man's hair, ceased.

    "Someone just closed it."

    Silence.

    Just the great dark library with its labyrinths and hedgerow mazes of sleeping books.

    "Someone's inside."

    The boys half rose, bleating in the backs of their mouths.

    Charles Halloway waited, then said one word, softly:

    "Hide."

    "We can't leave you-"

    "Hide."

    The boys ran and vanished in the dark maze. Charles Halloway then rigidly, slowly, breathing in, breathing out, forced himself to sit back down, his eyes on the yellowed newspapers, to wait, to wait, then again . . . to wait some more.

A shadow moved among shadows.

    Charles Halloway felt his soul submerge.

    It took a long time for the, shadow and the man it escorted to come stand in the doorway of the room. The shadow seemed deliberate in its slowness so as to shingle his flesh and cheesegrate his steadily willed calm. And when at last the shadow reached the door it brought not one, not a hundred, but a thousand people with it to look in.

    "My name is Dark," said the voice.

    Charles Halloway let out two fistfuls of air.

    "Better known as the Illustrated Man," said the voice. "Where are the boys?"

    "Boys?" Will's father turned at last to appraise the tall man who stood in the door.

    The Illustrated Man sniffed the yellow pollen that whiffed up from the ancient books as quite suddenly Will's father saw them laid out in full sight, leaped up, stopped, then began to close them, one by one, as casually as possible.

    The Illustrated Man pretended not to notice.

    "The boys are not home. The two houses are empty. What a shame, they'll miss those free rides."

    "I wish I knew where they were."" Charles Halloway started carrying the books to the shelves. "Hell, if they knew you were here with free tickets, they'd shout for joy."

    "Would they?" Mr. Dark let his smile melt like a white and pink paraffin candy toy he no longer had appetite for. Softly, he said, "I could kill you."

    Charles Halloway nodded, walking slowly.

    "Did you hear what I said?" barked the Illustrated Man.

    "Yes." Charles Halloway weighed the books, as if they were his judgment. "But you won't kill now. You're too smart. You've kept the show on the road a long time, being smart."

    "So you've read a few papers and think you know all about us?"

    "'No, not all. Just enough to scare me."

    "Be more scared then,"' said the crowd of night-crawling illustrations locked under black suiting, speaking through the thin lips. "One of my friends, outside, can fix you so it seems you died of most natural heart failure."

    The blood banged at Charles Halloway's heart, knocked at his temples, tapped twice at his wrists.

    The Witch, he thought.

    His lips must have formed the words.

    "The Witch." Mr. Dark nodded.

    The other shelved the books, withholding one.

    "Well, what have you there?" Mr. Dark squinted. ""A Bible? How very charming, how childish and refreshingly old-fashioned."

    "Have you ever read it, Mr. Dark?"'

    "'Read it! I've had every page, paragraph, and word read at me, sir!" Mr. Dark took time to light a cigarette and blow smoke toward the NO SMOKING sign, then at Will's father. "Do you really imagine that books can harm me? Is naiveté really your armor? Here!"

    And before Charles Halloway could move, Mr. Dark ran lightly forward and took the Bible. He, held it in his two hands.

    "Aren't you surprised? See, I touch, hold, even read from it."

    Mr. Dark blew smoke on the pages as he riffled them.

    "Do you expect me to fall away into so many Dead Sea scrolls of flesh before you? Myths, unfortunately, are just that. Life, and by life I could mean so many fascinating things, goes on, makes shift for itself, survives wildly, and I not the least wild among many. Your King James and his literary version of some rather stuffy poetic materials is worth just about this much of my time and sweat."

    Mr. Dark hurled the Bible into a wastepaper basket and did not look at it again.

    "I hear your heart beating rapidly," said Mr. Dark. "'My ears are not so finely tuned as the Gypsy's, but they hear. Your eyes jump beyond my shoulder. The boys hide out there in the warrens? Good. I would not wish for their escape. Not that anyone will believe their gibberings, in fact it's good advertisement for our shows, people titillate, night-sweat, then come prowling down to look us over, lick their lips, and wonder about investing in our special securities. You came, you prowled, and it wasn't just for curiosity. How old are you?"

    Charles Halloway pressed his lips shut.

    "Fifty?" purred Mr. Dark. "Fifty-one?" he murmured.

    "Fifty-two? Like to be younger?"

    "No!"

    "No need to yell. Politely, please."' Mr. Dark hummed, strolling the room, running his hand over the books as if they were years to be counted. "Oh, it's nice to be young really. Wouldn't forty be nice, again? Forty's ten years nicer than fifty, and thirty's twenty years nicer by an incredible long shot."

    "I won't listen!" Charles Halloway shut his eyes.

    Mr. Dark tilted his head, sucked on his cigarette, and observed. "Strange, you shut your eyes, not to listen. Clapping your hands over your ears would be better-"

    Will's father clapped his hands to his ears, but the voice came through.

    "Tell you what," said Mr. Dark, casually, waving his cigarette. "If you help me within fifteen seconds I'll give you your fortieth birthday. Ten seconds and you can celebrate thirty-five. A rare young age. A stripling, almost, by comparison. I'll start counting by my watch and by God, if you should jump to it, lend a hand, I might just cut thirty years off your life! Bargains galore, as the posters say of it! Starting all over again, everything fine and new and glorious, all the things to be done and thought and savored again. Last chancel Here goes. One, Two. Three. Four-"

    Charles Halloway hunched away, half crouched, propped hard against the shelves, grinding his teeth to drown the sound of counting.

    "You're losing out, old man, my dear old fellow," said Mr. Dark. "Five. Losing. Six. Losing very much. Seven. Really losing. Eight. Frittering away. Nine. Ten. My God, you fool! Eleven. Halloway! Twelve. Almost gone. Thirteen! Gone! Fourteen! Lost! Fifteen! Lost forever!"

    Mr. Dark put down his arm with the watch on it.

    Charles Halloway, gasping,, had turned away to bury his face in the smell of ancient books, the feel of old and comfortable leather, the taste of funeral dust and pressed flowers.

    Mr. Dark stood in the door now, on his way out.

    "Stay there," he directed. "'Listen to your heart. I'll send someone to fix it. But, first, the boys . . ."

    The crowd of unsleeping creatures, saddled upon tall flesh, strode quietly forth into darkness, borne with and all over upon Mr. Dark. Their cries and whines and utterances of vague but excruciating excitements sounded in his husky summoning:

    "'Boys? Are you there? Wherever you are . . . answer."

    Charles Halloway sprang forward, then felt the room spin and whirl him, as that soft, that easy, that most pleasant voice of Mr. Dark went calling through the dark. Charles Halloway fell against a chair, thought: Listen, my heart! sank down to his knees, he said, Listen to my heart! it explodes! Oh God, it's tearing free!-and could not follow.

    The Illustrated Man trod cat-soft in the labyrinths of shelved and darkly waiting books.

    "Boys . . . ? Hear me . . . ?"

    Silence.

    "Boys . . .?"