Something Wicked This Way Comes

  "Who cares? A thousand and one wonders! See! MEPHISTOPHELE, THE LAVA DRINKER! MR. ELECTRICO! THE MONSTER MONTGOLFIER?"

  "Balloon," said Will. "A Montgolfier is a balloon."

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

  "That's just an old guy with tattoos."

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

  "Dirty old Gypsy--"

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

  "THE MOST BEAUTIFUL--" read Will.

  "--WOMA N IN THE WORLD," finished Jim.

  They looked at each other.

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

  "You ever seen carnival ladies, Jim?"

  "Grizzly bears. But how come this handbill claims--"

  "Oh, shut up!"

  "You mad at me, Will?"

  "No, it's just--get it!"

  The wind had torn the paper from their hands.

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

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

  "Me." Jim stood quiet in the dark.

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

  "That music ..." Jim murmured. "Calliope. Must be coming tonight!"

  "Carnivals come at sunrise."

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

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

  Will's teeth chattered.

  "Let's go home."

  "We are home!" cried Jim, surprised.

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

  On his porch, Jim leaned over and called softly.

  "Will. You're not mad?"

  "Heck, no."

  "We won't go by that street, that house, the Theater, again for a month. A year! I swear."

  "Sure, Jim, sure."

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

  The storm was coming. The storm wasn't coming.

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

  "Night!"

  "Night."

  Their separate doors slammed.

  Chapter 8

  WILL OPENED the door and shut it again. Quietly, this time.

  "That's better," said his mother's voice.

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

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

  Including me, Will thought. Including me.

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

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

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

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

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

  Will blinked.

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

  "Hey!"

  Will stepped into the parlor.

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

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

  Will wanted to say, "Hey, what'd you think of the handbill ...?"

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

  And mother was leafing the library books.

  "Oh, these are fine, Willy!"

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

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

  Dad did not flinch at this.

  "Anything new, Dad?"

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

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

  "Bosh," said Mom.

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

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

  "... COOGER ... DARK ... CARNIVAL ... WITCH ... WONDERS ..."

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

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

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

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

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

  "... Will ... makes me feel so old... a man should play baseball with his son.... "

  "Not necessary," said the woman's voice, kindly. "You're a good man."

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

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

  "... man with posters under his arm ..."

  "... carnival ..." said his mother's voice, "... this late in the year??"

  Will wanted to turn away, but couldn't.

  "... most beautiful ... woman ... in the world," Dad's voice murmured.

  Mother laughed softly. "You know I'm not."

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

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

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

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

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

  But it was a pretty fine reptile.

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

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

  Chapter 9

  NO ONE else in the world had a name came so well off the tongue.

  "Jim Nightshade. That's me."

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Jim? You awake?"

  "Hi, Mom."

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

  "Why, Jim, your hands are ice. You shouldn't have the window so high. Mind your health."

  "Sure."

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

  "Never going to have any," said Jim.

  "You just say that."

  "I know it. I know everything."

  She waited a moment. "What do you know?"

  "No use making more people. People die."

  His voice was very calm and quiet and almost sad.

  "That's everything."

  "Almost everything. You're here, Jim. If you weren't, I'd given up long ago."

  "Mom." A long silence. "Can you remember Dad's face? Do I look like him?"

  "The day you go away is the day he leaves forever."

  "Who's going away?"

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

  "I'm never going to own anything can hurt me."

  "You going to collect rocks, Jim? No, some day, you've got to be hurt."

  "No, I don't.

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

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

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

  "Why do boys want their windows open wide?"

  "Warm blood."

  "Warm blood." She stood alone. "That's the story of all our sorrows. And don't ask why."

  The door shut.

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

  Storm, he thought, you there?

  Yes.

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

  The shadow of the lightning rod lay on the drive below.

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

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

  And then see what happens?

  Yes.

  And then see what happens!

  Chapter 10

  JUST AFTER midnight.

  Shuffling footsteps.

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

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

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

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

  The lightning-rod salesman's smile faded.

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

  She was as fair as this morning and fresh as tomorrow's flowers and lovely as any maid when a man shuts up his eyes and traps her, in cameo perfection, on the shell of his eyelids.

  The lightning-rod salesman remembered to breathe.

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

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

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

  How tall was she?

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

  Not important.

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

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

  He knew what color her eyes would be.

  If one were to enter this lonely night shop--

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

  Melt the ice.

  T
he 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 around him. He stepped in.

  The door shut.

  The white snowflake moths tapped at the window.

  Chapter 11

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

  Will heard it.

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

  Will sat up in bed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The engine!

  Both boys vanished, came back to lift 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!"