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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 thi
“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!” a
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 gone, 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.
Chapter 48
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!”
“She’s… 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.