Something Wicked This Way Comes (4 page)

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-coloured 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 colour 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 colour was her hair? It was blonde to whiteness and might take any colour, 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 colour her eyes would be.

    He knew what colour 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.

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 s 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-coloured 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-coloured 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.

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 l'

    '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.