The dark man’s voice hissed away to silence.
Very faintly now, somewhere in the library, someone was sobbing.
Ah…
The Illustrated Man gassed the air pleasantly from his dank lungs.
Yesssssssssss…
“Here…” he, murmured. “What? Filed under B for Boys? A for Adventure? H for Hidden. S for Secret. T for Terrified? Or filed under J for Jim or N for Nightshade, W for William, H for Halloway? Where are my two precious human books, so I may turn their pages, eh?”
He kicked a place for his right foot on the first shelf of a towering stack.
He shoved his right foot in, put his weight there, and swung his left foot free.
“There.”
His left foot hit the second shelf, knocked space. He climbed. His right foot kicked a hole on the third shelf, plunged books back, and so up and up he climbed, to fourth shelf, to fifth, to six, groping dark library heavens, hands clutching shelfboards, then scrabbling higher to leaf night to find boys, if boys there were, like bookmarks among books.
His right hand, a princely tarantula, garlanded with roses, cracked a book of Bayeaux tapestries aspin down the sightless abyss below. It seemed an age before the tapestries struck, all askew, a ruin of beauty, an avalanche of gold, silver, and sky-blue thread on the floor.
His left hand, reaching the ninth shelf as he panted, grunted, encountered empty space—no books.
“Boys, are you here on Everest?”
Silence. Except for the faint sobbing, nearer now.
“Is it cold here? Colder? Coldest?”
The eyes of the Illustrated Man came abreast of the eleventh shelf.
Like a corpse laid rigid out, face down just three inches away, was Jim Nightshade.
One shelf further up in the catacomb, eyes trembling with tears, lay William Halloway.
“Well,” said Mr. Dark.
He reached a hand to pat Will’s head.
“Hello,” he said.
Chapter 43
To Will, the palm of the hand that drifted up was like a moon rising.
Upon it was the fiery blue-inked portrait of himself. Jim, too, saw a hand before his face.
His own picture looked back at him from the palm.
The hand with Will’s picture grabbed Will.
The hand with Jim’s picture grabbed Jim.
Shrieks and yells.
The Illustrated Man heaved.
Twisting, he fell-jumped to the floor.
The boys, kicking, yelling, fell with him. They landed on their feet, toppled, collapsed, to be held, reared, set right, fistfuls of their shirts in Mr. Dark’s fists.
“Jim!” he said. “Will! What were you doing up there, boys? Surely not reading?”
“Dad!”
“Mr. Halloway!”
Will’s father stepped from the dark.
The Illustrated Man rearranged the boys tenderly under one arm like kindling, then gazed with genteel curiosity at Charles Halloway and reached for him. Will’s father struck one blow before his left hand was seized, held, squeezed. As the boys watched, shouting, they saw Charles Halloway gasp and fall to one knee.
Mr. Dark squeezed that left hand harder and, doing this, slowly, certainly, pressured the boys with his other arm, crushing their ribs so air gushed from their mouths.
Night spiraled in fiery whorls like great thumbprints inside Will’s eyes.
Will’s father, groaning, sank to both knees, flailing his right arm.
“Damn you!”
“But,” said the carnival owner quietly, “I am already.”
“Damn you, damn you!”
“Not words, old man,” said Mr. Dark. “Not words in books or words you say, but real thoughts, real actions, quick thought, quick action, win the day. So!”
He gave one last mighty clench of his fist.
The boys heard Charles Halloway’s finger bones crack. He gave a last cry and fell senseless.
In one motion like a solemn pavane, the Illustrated Man rounded the stacks, the boys, kicking books from shelves, under his arms.
Will, feeling walls, books, floors fly by, foolishly thought, pressed close. Why, why, Mr. Dark smells like… calliope steam!
Both boys were dropped suddenly. Before they could move or regain their breath, each was gripped by the hair on their head and roused marionettes—wise to face a window, a street.
“Boys, you read Dickens?” Mr. Dark whispered. “Critics hate his coincidences. But we know, don’t we? Life’s all coincidence. Turn death and happenstance flakes off him like fleas from a killed ox. Look!”
Both boys writhed in the iron-maiden clutch of hungry saurians and bristly apes.
Will did not know whether to weep with joy or new despair.
Below, across the avenue, passing from church going home, was his mother and Jim’s mother.
Not on the carousel, not old, crazy, dead, in jail, but freshly out in the good October air. She had been not a hundred yards away in church during all the last five minutes!
Mom! screamed Will, against the hand which, anticipating his cry, clamped tight to his mouth.
“Mom,” crooned Mr. Dark, mockingly. “Come save me!”
No, thought Will, save yourself, run!
But his mother and Jim’s mother simply strolled content, from the warm church through town.
Mom! screamed Will again, and some small muffled bleat of it escaped the sweaty paw.
Will’s mother, a thousand miles away over on that side-walk, paused.
She couldn’t have heard! thought Will. Yet—
She looked over at the library.
“Good,” sighed Mr. Dark. “Excellent, fine.”
Here! thought Will. See us, Mom! Run call the police!
“Why doesn’t she look at this window?” asked Mr. Dark quietly. “And see us three standing as for a portrait. Look over. Then, come running. We’ll let her in.”
Will strangled a sob. No, no.
His mother’s gaze trailed from the front entrance to the first-floor windows.
“Here,” said Mr. Dark. “Second floor. A proper coincidence, let’s make it proper.”
Now Jim’s mother was talking. Both women stood together at the curb.
No, thought Will, oh, no.
And the women turned and went away into the Sunday-night town.
Will felt the Illustrated Man slump the tiniest bit.
“Not much of a coincidence, no crisis, no one lost or saved. Pity. Well!”
Dragging the boys’ feet, he glided down to open the front door.
Someone waited in the shadows.
A lizard hand scurried cold on Will’s chin.
“Halloway,” husked the Witch’s voice.
A chameleon perched on Jim’s nose.
“Nightshade,” whisked the dry-broom voice.
Behind her stood the Dwarf and the Skeleton, silent, shifting, apprehensive.
Obedient to the occasion, the boys would have given their best stored yells air, but again, on the instant recognizing their need, the Illustrated Man trapped the sound before it could issue forth, then nodded curtly to the old dust woman.
The Witch toppled forward with her seamed black wax sewn-shut iguana eyelids and her great proboscis with the nostrils caked like tobacco-blackened pipe bowls, her fingers tracing, weaving a silent plinth of symbols on the mind.
The boys stared.
Her fingernails fluttered, darted, feathered cold winter-water air. Her pickled green froes breath crawled their flesh in pimples as she sang softly, mewing, humming, glistering her babes, her boys, her friends of the slick snail-tracked roof, the straight-flung arrow, the stricken and sky-drowned balloon.