Something Wicked This Way Comes (3 page)

Halfway home, Will felt a shadow breathing hard behind him.

    'Theatre dosed?' said Will, not looking back.

    Jim walked in silence beside him for a long while and then said, 'Nobody home.'

    'Swell!'

    Jim spat. 'Dam Baptist preacher, you!'

    And around the corner a tumbleweed slithered, a great cotton ball of pale paper which bounced, then clung shivering to Jim's legs.

    Will grabbed the paper, laughing, pulled it off, let it fly! He stopped laughing.

    The boys, watching the pale throwaway rattle and flit through the trees, were suddenly cold.

    'Wait a minute. . .' said Jim, slowly.

    All of a sudden they were yelling, running, leaping. 'Don't tear it! Careful!

    The paper fluttered like a snare drum in their hands.

    'COMING, OCTOBER TWENTY-FOURTH!'

    Their lips moved, shadowing the words set in rococo type.

    'Cooger and Dark's. . .'

    'Carnival!'

    'October twenty-fourth! That's tomorrow!'

    'It can't be,' said Will. 'All carnivals stop after Labour Day - '

    'Who cares? A thousand and one wonders! See! MEPHISTOPHELES, 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?'

    '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 0F TEMPTATION!'

    THE MOST BEAUTIFUL - ' read Will.

    ' - wOMAN 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 tom 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's 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 Theatre, 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 room 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.

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 theatre 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 mothers 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 draughty 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 colour paper lay crushed, its rococo type hidden, in his father's fingers.

    'Hey!'

    Will stepped into the parlour.

    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 crammmg 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 grey, 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 no 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 pattern, 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 windows.

    '. . .man with poster 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 Theatre, the naked people in the stage of that Theatre window, crazy as Chinese opera, darn odd crazy as old Chinese opera, judo, ju-jitsu, 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.

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 centimetre 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 have 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 good-bye. 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 in 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!