Something Wicked This Way Comes (20 page)

The crowd's appreciative clamor faded.

    Charles Halloway did not move.

    He let the path grow leading down to the platform.

    He could not see the expression on the faces of the freaks standing up there. His eyes swept the crowd and found the Mirror Maze, the empty oblivion which beckoned with ten times a thousand million light years of reflections, counterreflections,, reversed and double-reversed, plunging deep to nothing, face-falling to nothing, stomach-dropping away to yet more sickening plummets of nothing.

    And yet, wasn't there an echo of two boys in the powdered silver at the back of each glass? Did or did he not perceive, with the tremulous tip of eyelash if not the eye, their passage through, their wait beyond, warm wax amongst cold, waiting to be key-wound by terrors, run free in panics?

    No. thought Charles Halloway, don't think. Get on with this!

    "Coming!" he shouted.

    "Go get 'em, Pop!" a man said.

    "Yes," said Charles Halloway. " I will."

    And he walked down through the crowd.

    The Witch spun slowly, magnetized at the night-wandering volunteer's approach. Her eyelids jerked at their sewn black-wax threads behind dark glasses.

    Mr. Dark, the illustration-drenched, superinfested civilization of souls, leaned from the platform, gladly whetting his lips. Thoughts spun fiery Catherine wheels in his eyes, quick, quick, what, what, what!

    And the aging janitor, fixing a smile to his face like a white celluloid set of teeth from a Cracker Jack box, strode on, and the crowd opened as the sea before Moses and closed behind, and him wondering what to do? why was he here? but on the move, steadily, nevertheless.

    Charles Halloway's foot touched the first step of the platform.

    The Witch trembled secretly.

    Mr. Dark felt this secret, glanced sharply. Swiftly he put his hand out to grab for the good right hand of this fifty-four-year-old man.

    But the fifty-four-year-old man shook his head, would not give his hand to be held, touched, or helped up.

    "Thanks, no."

    On the platform, Charles Halloway waved to the crowd.

    The people set off a few firecrackers of applause.

    "But-" Mr. Dark was amazed- "your left hand, sir, you can't hold and fire a rifle if you have only the use of one hand!"

    Charles Halloway paled.

    "I'll do it," he said. "With one hand."

    "Hoorah!" cried a boy, below.

    "Go it, Charlie!" a man called, out beyond.

    Mr. Dark flushed as the crowd laughed and applauded even louder now. He lifted his hands to ward off the wave of refreshing sound, like rain that washed in from the people.

    "All right, all right! Let's see if he can do it!"

    Brutally, the Illustrated Man snapped a rifle from its locks, hurled it through the air.

    The crowd gasped.

    Charles Halloway ducked. He put up his right hand. The rifle slapped his palm. He grabbed. It did not fall. He had it good.

    The audience hooted, said things against Mr. Dark's bad manners which made him turn away for a moment, damning himself, silently.

    Will's father lifted the rifle, beaming.

    The crowd roared.

    And while the wave of applause came in, crashed, and went back down the shore, he looked again to the maze, where the sensed but unseen shadow-shapes of Will and Jim were filed among titanic razor blades of revelation and illusion, then back to the Medusa gaze of Mr. Dark, swiftly reckoned with, and on to the stitched and jittering sightless nun of midnight, sidling back still more. Now she was as far as she could sidle, at the far end of the platform, almost pressed to the whorled red-black rifle bull's-eye target.

    "Boy!" shouted Charles Halloway.

    Mr. Dark stiffened.

    "I need a boy volunteer to help me hold the rifle!" shouted Charles Halloway.

    "Someone! Anyone!" he shouted.

    A few boys in the crowd shifted around on their toes.

    "Boy!" shouted Charles Halloway. "Hold on. My son's out there. He'll volunteer, won't you, Will?"

    The Witch flung one band up to feel the shape of this audacity which came off the fifty-four-year-old man like a fever. Mr. Dark was spun round as if hit by a fast-traveling gunshot.

    "Will!" called his father.

    In the Wax Museum, Will sat motionless.

    "Will!" called his father. "Come on, boy!"

    The crowd looked left, looked right, looked back.

    No answer.

    Will sat in the Wax Museum.

    Mr. Dark observed all of this with some respect, some degree of admiration, some concern; he seemed to be waiting, just as was Will's father.    

    "Will, come help your old man!" Mr. Halloway cried, jovially.

    Will sat in the Wax Museum.

    Mr. Dark smiled.

    "Will! Willy! Come here!"'

    No answer.

    Mr. Dark smiled more.

    "Willy! Don't you hear your old man?"

    Mr. Dark stopped smiling.

    For this last was the voice of a gentleman in the, crowd, speaking up.

    The crowd laughed.

    "Will!" called a woman.

    "Willy!" called another.

    "Yoohoo!" A gentleman in a beard.

    "Come on, William!" A boy.

    The crowd laughed more, jostled elbows.

    Charles Halloway called. They called. Charles Halloway cried to the hills. They cried to the hills.

    "'Will! Willy! William!"

    A shadow shuttled and wove in the mirrors.

    The Witch broke out chandeliers of sweat.

    "There!"

    The crowd stopped calling.

    As did Charles Halloway, choked on the name of his son now, and silent.

    For Will stood in the entrance of the Maze, like the wax figure that he almost was.

    "Will," called his father, softly.

    The sound of this chimed the sweat off the Witch.

    Will moved, unseeing, through the crowd.

    And handing the rifle down like a cane for the boy to grasp, his father drew him up onto the stand.

    "Here's my good left hand!" announced the father.

    Will neither saw nor heard the crowd sound forth a solid and offensive applause.

    Mr. Dark had not moved, though Charles Halloway could see him, during all this, lighting and setting off cannon crackers in his head; but each, one by one, fizzled and died. Mr. Dark could not guess what they were up to. For that matter, Charles Halloway did not know or guess. It was as if he had written this play for himself, over the years, in the library, nights, torn up the play after memorizing it, and now forgotten what he had set forth to remember. He was relying on secret discoveries of self , moment by moment, playing by ear, no! heart and soul! And . . . now?!

    The brightness of his teeth seemed to strike the Witch blinder! Impossible! She flung one hand to her glasses, her sewn eyelids!

    "Closer, everyone!" called Will's father.

    The crowd gathered in. The platform was an island. The sea was people.

    "'Watch the bull's-eye targeteer!"

    The Witch melted in her rags.

    The Illustrated Man looked left, found no pleasure in the Skeleton, who simply looked thinner; found no pleasure looking right to a Dwarf who blandly dwelt in squashed idiot madness.

    "The bullet, please!" Will's father said, amiably.

    The thousand illustrations on his jerking horseflesh frame did not hear, so why should Mr. Dark?

    "If you please," said Charles Halloway. "The bullet? So I may knock that flea off the old Gypsy's wart!"

    Will stood motionless.

    Mr. Dark hesitated.

    Out in the choppy sea, smiles flashed, here, there, a hundred, two hundred, three hundred whitenesses, as if a vast titillation of water had been provoked by a lunar gravity. The tide ebbed.

    The Illustrated Man, in slow motion, proffered the bullet. His arm, a long molasses undulation, lazed to offer the bullet to the boy, to see if he would notice; he did not notice.

    His father took the missile.

    "Mark it with your initials," said Mr. Dark, by rote.

    "No, with more!" Charles Halloway raised his son's hand and made him hold the bullet, so he could take a penknife with his one good hand and carve a strange symbol on the lead.

    What's happening? Will thought. I know what's happenmg. I don't know what's happening? What!?

    Mr. Dark saw a crescent moon on the bullet, saw nothing wrong with such a moon, rammed it in the rifle, slapped the rifle back at Will's father, who once more caught it deftly.

    "Ready, Will?"

    The boy's peach face drowsed in the slightest nod.

    Charles Halloway flicked a last glance at the maze, thought, Jim, you there still? Get ready!

    Mr. Dark turned to go pat, conjure, calm his dust-crone friend, but cracked to a halt at the crack of the rifle being reopened, the bullet ejected by Will's father, to assure the audience it was there. It seemed real enough, yet he had read long ago that this was a substitute bullet, shaped of a very hard steel-colored crayon wax. Shot through the rifle it would dissolve out the barrel as smoke and vapor. At this very moment, having somehow switched bullets, the Illustrated Man was slipping the real marked bullet into the Witch's jerking fingers. She would hide it in her cheek. At the shot, she would pretend to jolt under the imagined impact, then reveal the bullet caught by her yellow rat teeth. Fanfare! Applause!

    The Illustrated Man, glancing up, saw Charles Halloway with the opened rifle, the wax bullet. But instead of revealing what he knew, Mr. Halloway simply said, ""Let's cut our mark more clearly, eh, boy?"' And with his penknife, the boy holding the bullet in his senseless hand, he marked this fresh new wax unmarked bullet with the same mysterious crescent moon, then snapped it back into the rifle.

    "Ready?!"

    Mr. Dark looked to the Witch.

    Who hesitated, then nodded, once, faintly.

    "Ready!" announced Charles Halloway.

    And all about lay the tents, the breathing crowds, the anxious freaks, a Witch iced with hysteria, Jim hidden to be found, an ancient mummy still seated glowing with blue fire in his electric chair, and a merry-go-round waiting for the show to cease, the crowd to go, and the carnival to have its way with boys and janitor trapped if possible, and alone.

    "Will," said Charles Halloway conversationally, as he lifted the now suddenly heavy rifle. "Your shoulder here is my brace. Take the middle of the rifle, gently, with one hand. Take it, Will." The boy raised a hand. "That's it, son. When I say 'hold,' hold your breath. Hear me?"

    The boy's head tremored with the slightest affirmation.

    He slept. He dreamed. The dream was nightmare. The nightmare was this.

    And the next part of this was his father shouting:

    "Ladies! Gentlemen!"

    The illustrated Man clenched his fist. Will's picture, lost in it., like a flower, was crushed.

    Will twisted.

    The rifle fell.

    Charles Halloway pretended not to notice.

    "Me and Will here will now, together, him being the good left arm I can't use, do the one and only most dangerous, sometimes fatal, Bullet Trick!"

    Applause. Laughter.

    Quickly the fifty-four-year-old janitor, denying each year, laid the rifle back on the boy's jerking shoulder.

    "Hear that, Will? Listen! That's for us!"

    The boy listened. The boy grew calm.

    Mr. Dark tightened his fist.

    Will was taken with slight palsy.

    "We'll hit 'em bull's-eye on, won't we, boy!" said his father.

    More laughter.

    And the boy grew very calm indeed, with the rifle on his shoulder, and Mr. Dark squeezed tight on the peach-fuzz face nestled in the flesh of his hand, but the boy was serene in the laughter which still flowed and his father kept the hoop rolling thus:

    "Show the lady your teeth, Will!"

    Will showed the woman against the target his teeth. The blood fell away from the Witch's f ace.

    Now Charles Halloway showed her his teeth, too, such as they were.

    And winter lived in the Witch.

    "'Boy," said someone in the audience, "she's great. Acts scared! Look!"

    "I'm looking, thought Will's father, his left hand useless at his side his right hand up to the rifle trigger, his face to the sight as his son held the rifle unswervingly pointed at the bull's-eye and the Witch's face superimposed there, and the last moment come, and a wax bullet in the chamber, and what could a wax bullet do? A bullet that dissolved in transit, what use? why were they here, what could they do? silly, silly!

    No! thought Will's father. Stop!

    He stopped the doubts.

    He felt his mouth shape words with no sound.

    But, the Witch heard what he said.

    Above the dying laughter, before the warm sound was completely goes, he made these words, silently with his lips:

    The crescent moon I have marked on the bullet is not a crescent moon.

    It is my own smile.

    I have put my smile on the bullet in the rifle.

    He said it once.

    He waited for her to understand.

    He said it, silently, again.

    And in the moment before the Illustrated Man himself translated the mouthings, quickly, Charles Halloway cried, faintly, "Hold!" Will held his breath. Far back among wax statues, Jim, hid away, dripped saliva from his chin. Strapped in electric chair a dead-alive mummy hummed power in its teeth. Mr. Dark's illustrations writhed with sick sweat as he clenched his fist a final time, but-too late! Serene, Will held breath, held weapon. Serene, his father said, "Now."

    And fired the rifle.

One shot!

    The Witch sucked breath.

    Jim, in the Wax Museum, sucked breath.

    As did Will, asleep.

    As did his father.

    As did Mr. Dark.

    As did all the freaks.

    As did the crowd.

    The Witch screamed.

    Jim among the wax dummies, blew all the air from his lungs.

    Will shrieked himself awake, on the platform.

    The Illustrated Man let the air from his mouth in a great angry bray, whipping up his hands to stop all events. But the Witch fell. She fell off the platform. She fell in the dust.

    The smoking rifle in his one good hand, Charles Halloway let his breath go slow, feeling every bit of it move from him. He still stared along the rifle sights at the target where the woman had been.

    At the platform rim, Mr. Dark looked down at the screaming crowd and what they were screaming about.

    "She's fainted-"

    "No. She slipped!"

    "Shes . . . shot!"

    At last Charles Halloway came to stand by the Illustrated Man, looking down. There were many things in his face: surprise, dismay, and some small strange relief and satisfaction.

    The woman was lifted and put on the platform. Her mouth was frozen open, almost with a look of recognition.

    He knew she was dead. In a moment, the crowd would know. He watched the Illustrated Man's hand move down to touch, trace, feel for life. Then Mr. Dark lifted both her hands, like a doll, in some marionette strategy, to give her motion. But the body refused.

    So he gave one of the Witch's arms to the Dwarf, the other to the Skeleton, and they shook and moved them in a ghastly semblance of reawakening as the crowd backed.

    ". . . dead

    "But . . . there's no wound."

    "Shock, you think?"

    Shock, thought Charles Halloway, my God, did that kill her? Or the other bullet? When I fired the shot, did she suck the other bullet down her throat? Did she . . . choke on my smile! Oh, Christ!

    "It's all right! Show's over! Just fainted!" said Mr. Dark. "All an act! All part of the, show," he said, not looking at the woman, not looking at the crowd, but looking at Will, who stood blinking around, out of one nightmare and fresh into the next as his father stood with him and Mr. Dark cried: "Everyone home! Show's over! Lights! Lights!"

    The carnival lights flickered.

    The crowd, herded before the failing illumination, turned like a great carousel and as the lamps dimmed, hustled toward the few remaining pools of light as if to warm themselves there before braving the wind. One by one, one by one, the lights indeed were going off.

    "Lights!" said Mr. Dark.

    "Jump!" said Will's father.

    Will jumped. Will ran with his father who still carried the, weapon that had fired the, smile that had killed the Gypsy and put her to dust.

    "Is Jim in there?"

    They were at the maze. Behind them, on the platform, Mr. Dark bellowed: "Lights! Go home! All over. Done!"

    "Is Jim in there?" wondered Will. "Yes. Yes, he is!"

    Inside the Wax Museum, Jim still had not moved, had not blinked.

    "Jim!" The voice came through the maze.

    Jim moved. Jim blinked. A rear exit door stood wide. Jim blundered toward it.

    "I'm coming for you, Jim!"

    "No, Dad!"

    Will caught at his father, who stood at the first turn of the mirrors with the pain come back to his hands racing up along the nerves to strike a fireball near his heart. "Dad, don't go in!" Will gabbed his good arm.

    Behind them, the platform was empty, Mr. Dark was running . . . where? Somewhere as the night shut in, the lights went off, went off, went off, the night sucked around, gathering, whistling, simpering, and the crowd, like a shake of leaves from one huge tree, blew off the midway, and Will's father stood facing the glass tides, the waves, the gauntlet of horror he knew waited for him to swim through, stride through to fight the desiccation, the annihilation of one's self that waited there. He had seen enough to know. Eyes shut, you'd be lost. Eyes open, you'd know such utter despair, such gravities of anguish would weight you, you might never drag past the twelfth turn. But Charles Halloway took Will's hands away. "Jim's there. Jim, wait! I'm coming in!"

    And Charles Halloway took the next step into the maze.

    Ahead flowed sluices of silver light, deep slabs of shadow, polished, wiped, rinsed with images of themselves and others whose souls, passing, scoured the glass with their agony, curried the cold ice with their narcissism, or sweated the angles and flats with their fear.

    "Jim!"

    He ran. Will ran. They stopped.

    For the lights in here were going blind, one by one, going dim, changing color, now blue, now a color like lilac summer lightning which flared in haloes, then a flickerlight like a thousand ancient windblown candles.

    And between himself and Jim in need of rescue, stood an army of one million sick-mouthed, frost-haired, white-tine-bearded men.

    Them! all of them! he thought. That's me!

    Dad! thought Will, at his back, don't be afraid. It's only you. All only my father!

    But he did not like their look. They were so old, so very old, and got much older the farther away they marched, wildly gesticulating, as Dad threw up his hands to fend off the revelation, this wild image repeated to insanity.

    Dad! he thought, it's you!

    But, it was more.

    And all the lights went out.

    And both, squeezed still, in muffle-gasping silence, stood afraid.