Something Wicked This Way Comes Read online

“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?”

  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 li
sten!” 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 chance! 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…?”

  Chapter 42

  Somewhere in the recumbent solitudes, the motionless but teeming millions of books, lost in two dozen turns right, three dozen turns left, down aisles, through doors, toward dead ends, locked doors, half-empty shelves, somewhere in the literary soot of Dickens’s London, or Dostoevsky’s Moscow or the steppes beyond, somewhere in the vellumed dust of atlas or Geographic, sneezes pent but set like traps, the boys crouched, stood, lay sweating a cool and constant brine.

  Somewhere hidden, Jim thought: He’s coming!

  Somewhere hidden, Will thought: He’s near!

  “Boys…?”

  Mr. Dark came carrying his panoply of friends, his jewel-case assortment of calligraphical reptiles which lay sunning themselves at midnight on his flesh. With him strode the stitch-inked Tyrannosaurus rex, which lent to his haunches a machined and ancient wellspring mineral-oil glide. As the thunder lizard strode, all glass-bead pomp, so strode Mr. Dark, armored with vile lightning scribbles of carnivores and sheep blasted by that thunder and arun before storms of juggernaut flesh. It was the pterodactyl kite and scythe which raised his arms almost to fly the marbled vaults. And with the inked and stencilled flashburnt shapes of pistoned or bladed doom came his usual crowd of hangers-on, spectators gripped to each limb, seated on shoulder blades, peering from his jungled chest, hung upside down in microscopic millions in his armpit vaults screaming bat-screams for encounters, ready for the hunt and if need be the kill. Like a black tidal wave upon a bleak shore, a dark tumult infilled with phosphorescent beauties and badly spoiled dreams, Mr. Dark sounded and hissed his feet, his legs, his body, his sharp face forward.

  “Boys…?”

  Immensely patient, that soft voice, ever the warmest friend to chilly creatures burrowed away, nested amongst dry books; so he scuttered, crept, scurried, stalked, tiptoed, wafted, stood immensely still among the primates, the Egyptian monuments to bestial gods, brushed black histories of dead Africa, stayed awhile in Asia, then sauntered on to newer lands.

  “Boys, I know you hear me! The sign reads: SILENCE! So, I’ll whisper: one of you still wants what we offer. Eh? Eh?”

  Jim, thought Will.

  Me, thought Jim. No! oh, no! not still! not me!

  “Come out.” Mr. Dark purred the air through his teeth. “I guarantee rewards! Whoever turns himself in wins it all!

  Bangity-bang!

  My heart! thought Jim

  Is that me? thought Will, or Jim!!?

  “I hear you.” Mr. Dark’s lips quivered. “Closer now. Will? Jim? Isn’t it Jim who’s the smart one? Come along, boy…!”

  No! thought Will.

  I don’t know anything! thought Jim, wildly.

  “Jim, yes…” Mr. Dark wheeled in a new direction. “Jim, show me where your friend is.” Softly. “We’ll shut him up, give you the ride that would have been his if he’d used his head. Right, Jim?” A dove voice, cooing. “Closer. I hear your heart jump!”

  Stop! thought Will to his chest.

  Stop! Jim clenched his breath. Stop!!

  “I wonder… are you in this alcove…?”

  Mr. Dark let the peculiar gravity of a certain group of stacks tug him forward.

  “You here, Jim…? Or… over behind…?”

  He shoved a trolley of books mindlessly off on rubber rollers to bump through the night. A long way off, it crashed and spilled its contents to the floor like so many dead black ravens.

  “Smart hide-and-seekers, both,” said Mr. Dark. “But someone’s smarter. Did you hear the carousel calliope tonight? Did you know, someone dear to you was down to the carousel? Will? Willy? William. William Halloway. Where’s your mother tonight?”

  Silence.

  “She was out riding the night wind, Willy-William. Around. We put her on. Around. We left her on. Around. You hear, Willy? Around, a year, another year, another, around, around!”

  Dad! thought Will. Where are you!

  In the far room, Charles Halloway, seated, his heart pounding, heard and thought, He won’t find them, I won’t move unless he does, he can’t find them, they won’t listen! they won’t believe! he’ll go away!

  “Your mother, Will,” called Mr. Dark, softly. “Around and around, can you guess which direction, Willy?”

  Mr. Dark circled his thin ghost hand in the dark air between the stacks.

  “Around, around, and when we let your mother off, boy, and showed her herself in the Mirror Maze, you should have heard the one single sound she made. She was like a cat with a hair ball in her so big and sticky there was no way to gag it out, no way to scream around the hair coming out her nostrils and ears and eyes, boy, and her old old old. The last we saw of her, boy Willy, she was running off away from what she saw in the mirrors. She’ll bang Jim’s house door but when his ma sees a thing, two hundred years old slobbering at the keyhole, begging the mercy of gunshot death, boy, Jim’s ma will gag the same way, like a hairballed cat sick but can’t be sick, and beat her away, send her beggaring the streets, where no one’ll believe, Will, such a kettle of bones and spit, no one’ll believe this was a rose beauty, your kind relations! So Will, it’s up to us to run find, ran save her, for we know who she is—right, Will, right, Will, right, right, right?!”

  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, murmure
d. “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.