Something Wicked This Way Comes (4 page)

    '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 trapdrumming 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.

9

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 marshgrass, his bones easy in his flesh, his flesh easy on his bones. The library books lay unopenedby 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 goodbye. 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 lightningrod 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 lightningrod loose, throw it away?

    And then see what happens?

    Yes.

    And then see what happens!

10

Just after midnight.

    Shuffling footsteps.

    Along the empty street came the lightningrod salesman, his leather valise swung almost empty in his baseballmitt hand, his face at ease. He turned a corner and stopped.

    Papersoft white moths tapped at an empty store window, looking in.

    And in the window, like a great coffin boat of starcoloured glass, beached on two sawhorses lay a chunk of Alaska Snow Company ice chopped to a size great enough to flash in a giant's ring.

    And sealed in this ice was the most beautiful woman in the world.

    The lightningrod salesman's smile faded.

    In the dreaming coldness of ice like someone fallen and slept in snow avalanches a thousand years, forever young, was this woman.

    She was as fair as this morning and fresh as tomorrow's flowers and lovely as any maid when a man shuts up his eyes and traps her, in cameo perfection, on the shell of his eyelids. The lightningrod salesman remembered to breathe.

    Once, long ago, travelling among the marbles of Rome and Florence, he had seen women like this, kept in stone instead of Ice. Once, wandering in the Louvre, he had found women like this, washed in summer colour and kept in paint. Once, as a boy, sneaking the cool grottoes behind a motion picture theatre screen, on his way to a free seat, he had glanced up and there towering and flooding the haunted dark seen a women's face as he had never seen it since, of such size and beauty built of milkbone and moonflesh, at to freeze him there alone behind the stage, shadowed by the, motion of her lips, the birdwing flicker of her eyes, the snowpaledeathshimmering illumination from her cheeks.

    So from other years there jumped forth images which flowed and found new substance here within the ice.

    What colour was her hair? It was blonde to whiteness and might take any colour, once set free of cold.

    How tall was she?

    The prism of the ice might well multiply her size or diminish her as you moved this way or that before the empty store, the window, the nightsoft raptapping everfingering, gently probing moths.

    Not important.

    For above all - the lightningrod salesman shivered - he knew the most extraordinary thing.

    If by some miracle her eyelids should open within that sapphire and she should look at him, he knew what colour her eyes would be.

    He knew what colour her eyes would be.

    If one were to enter this lonely night shop -

    If one were to put forth one's hand, the warmth of that hand would. . .what?

    Melt the ice.

    The lightningrod salesman stood there for a long moment, his eyes quickened shut.

    He let his breath out.

    It was warm as summer on his teeth.

    His hand touched the shop door. It swung open. Cold arctic air blew out round him. He stepped in.

    The door shut.

    The white snowflake moths tapped at the window.

11

Midnight then and the town clocks chiming on toward one and two and then three in the deep morning and the peals of the great clocks shaking dust off old toys in attics and shedding silver off old mirrors in yet higher attics and s up dreams about docks in all beds where children slept.

    Will heard it.

    Muffled away in the prairie lands, the chuffing of an engine, the slowslowfollowing dragonglide of a train.

    Will sat up in bed.

    Across the way, like a mirror image, Jim sat up, too.

    A calliope began to play oh so softly, grieving to itself, a million miles away.

    In one single motion, Will leaned from his window, as did Jim. Without a word they gazed over the trembling surf of trees.

    Their rooms were high, as boys' rooms should be. From these gaunt windows they could riflefire their gaze artillery distances past library, city hall, depot, cow barns, farmlands to empty prairie!

    There, on the world's rim, the lovely snailgleam of the railway tracks ran, flinging wild gesticulations of lemon or cherrycoloured semaphore to the stars.

    There, on the precipice of earth, a small steam feather uprose like the first of a storm cloud yet to come.

    The train itself appeared, link by link, engine, coalcar, and numerous and numbered allasleepandslumberingdream filled cars that followed the fireflysparked chum, chant, drowsy autumn hearthfire roar. Hellfires flushed the stunned hills. Even at this remote view, one imagined men with buffalohaunched arms shovelling black meteor falls of coal into the open boilers of the engine.

    The engine!

    Both boys vanished, came back to life binoculars.

    'The engine!'

    'Civil War! No other stack like that since 1900!'

    'The rest of the train, all of it's old'

    'The flags! The cages! It's the carnival!'

    They listened. At first Will thought he heard the air whistling fast in his nostrils. But no - it was the train, and the calliope sighing, weeping, on that train.

    'Sounds like church music!'

    'Hell. Why would a carnival play church music?'

    'Don't say hell,' hissed Will.

    'Hell.' Jim ferociously leaned out. 'I've saved up all day. Everyone's asleep so - hell!'

    The music drifted by their windows. Goose pimples rose bid as boils on Will's arms.

    'That is church music. Changed.'

    'For criyi, I'm froze, let's go watch them set up!'

    'At three a.m.?'

    'At three a.m.!'

    Jim vanished.

    For a moment, Will watched Jim dance around over there, shirt uplifted, pants going on, while off in night country, panting, churning was this funeral train, all blackplumed cars, licoricecoloured cages, and a sooty calliope clamouring, banging three different hymns mixed and lost, maybe not there at all.

    'Here goes nothing!'

    Jim slid down the drainpipe on his house, toward the sleeping lawns.

    'Jim! Wait!'

    Will thrashed into his clothes.

    'Jim, don't go alone!'

    And followed after.

12

Sometimes you see a kite so high, so wise it almost knows the wind. It travels, then chooses to land in one spot and no other and no matter how you yank, run this way or that, it will simply break its cord, seek its resting place and bring you, bloodmouthed, running.

    'Jim! Wait for me!'

    So now Jim was the kite, the wild twine cut, and whatever wisdom was his taking him away from Will who could only run, earthbound, after one so high and dark silent and suddenly strange.

    'Jim, here I come!'

    And running, Will thought, Boy, it's the same old thing. I talk. Jim runs. I tilt stones, Jim grabs the cold junk under the stones and - licketysplit! I climb hills. Jim yells off church steeples. I got a bank account. Jim's got the hair on his head, the yell in his mouth, the shirt on his back and the tennis shoes on his feet. How come I think he's richer? Because, Will thought, I sit on a rock in the sun and old Jim, he prickles his armhairs by moonlight and dances with hoptoads. I tend cows, Jim tames Gila monsters. Fool! I yell at Jim. Coward! he yells back. And here we - go!

    And they ran from town, across fields and both froze under a rail bridge with the moon ready beyond the hills and the meadows trembling with a fur of dew.

    WHAM!

    The carnival train thundered the bridge, The calliope wailed.

    'There's no one playing it!' Jim stared up.

    'Jim, no jokes!'

    'Mother's honour, look!'

    Going away, away, the calliope pipes shimmered with star explosions, but no one sat at the high keyboard. The wind, sluicing airwater air in the pipes, made the music.

    The boys ran. The train curved away, gonging it's undersea funeral bell, sunk, rusted, greenmossed, tolling, tolling. Then the engine whistle blew a great steam whiff and Will broke out in pearls of ice.

    Way late at night Will had heard - how often? - train whistles jetting steam along the rim of sleep, forlorn, alone and far, no matter how near they came. Sometimes he woke to find tears on his cheek, asked why, lay back, listened and thought, Yes! they make me cry, going east, going west, the trains so far gone in country deeps they drown in tides of sleep that escape the towns.

    Those trains and their grieving sounds were lost forever between stations, not remembering, where they had been, not guessing where they might go, exhaling their last pale breaths over the horizon, gone. So it was with all trains, ever.

    Yet this train's whistle!

    The wails of a lifetime were gathered in it from other nights in other slumbering years; the howl of moondreamed dogs, the seep of rivercold winds through January porch screens which stopped the blood, a thousand fire sirens weeping, or worse! the outgone shreds of breath, the protests of a billion people dead or dying, not wanting to be dead, their groans, their sighs, burst over the earth!

    Tears jumped to Will's eyes. He lurched. He knelt. He pretended to lace one shoe.

    But then he saw Jim's hands clap his ears, his eyes wet, too. The whistle screamed. Jim screamed against the scream. The whistle shrieked. Will shrieked against the shriek.

    Then the billion voices ceased, instantly, as if the train had plunged in a fire storm off the earth.

    The train skimmed on softly, slithering, black pennants fluttering, black confetti lost on its own sicksweet candy wind, down the hill, with the boys pursuing., the air so cold they ate ice cream with each breath.