Will murmured something.
“What?”
“Miss 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.
Chapter 41
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?”