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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 su
“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 ru
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.