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He opened his mouth very wide, and let the loudest sound of all free.
The Witch, if she were alive, would have known that sound, and died again.
Chapter 50
Jim Nightshade, out the back door of the maze lost on the carnival grounds, ru
The Illustrated Man, somewhere among the black tents, ru
The Dwarf froze.
The Skeleton turned.
All had heard.
Not the sound that Charles Halloway made, no.
But the terrific sounds that followed.
One mirror alone, and then a second mirror, followed by a pause, and then a third mirror, and a fourth and another after that and another after that and still another and another after that, in domino fashion, they formed swift spiderwebs over their fierce stares and then with faint tinkles and sharp cracks, fell.
One minute there was this incredible Jacob’s ladder of glass, folding, refolding and folding away yet again images pressed in a book of light. The next, all shattered to meteor precipitation.
The Illustrated Man, halted, listening, felt his own eyes, crystal, almost spiderweb and splinter with the sounds.
It was as if Charles Halloway, once more a choirboy in a strange sub-sub-demon church had sung the most beautiful high note of amiable humor ever in his life which first shook moth-silver from the mirror backs, then shook images from glass faces, then shook glass itself to ruin. A dozen, a hundred, a thousand mirrors, and with them the ancient images of Charles Halloway, sank earthward in delicious moonfalls of snow and sleety water.
All because of the sound he had let come from his lungs through his throat out his mouth.
All because he accepted everything at last, accepted the carnival, the hills beyond, the people in the hills, Jim, Will, and above all himself and all of life, and, accepting, threw back his head for the second time tonight and showed his acceptance with sound.
And lo! like Jericho and the trump, with musical thunders the glass gave up its ghosts, Charles Halloway cried out, released. He took his hands from his face. Fresh starlight and dying carnival glow rushed in to set him free. The reflected dead men were gone, buried under the cymbaled slide, the splash and surfing of glass at his feet.
“Lights… lights!”
A far voice cried away more warmth.
The Illustrated Man, unfrozen, vanished among the tents.
The crowd was now gone.
“Dad, what’d you do?”
But the match burned Will’s fingers, he dropped it, but now there was dim light enough to see Dad shuffle the trash, stir the mess of mirrored glass, heading back through the empty places where the maze had been and was no more.
“Jim?”
A door stood open. Pale carnival illumination, fading, poured through to show them wax figures of murderers and murderess.
Jim did not sit among them.
“Jim!”
They stared at the open door through which Jim had run to be lost in the swarms of night between black canvases.
The last electric light bulb went out.
“We’ll never find him now,” said Will.
“Yes,” said his father, standing in the dark. “We’ll find him.”
Where? Will thought, and stopped.
Far down the midway, the carousel steamed, the calliope tortured itself with musics.
There, thought Will. If Jim’s anywhere, its there, to the music, old fu
“How—” said Will, aloud.
But his father said “There,” very softly. With gratitude.
And Will stepped to the door, which was lighter now.
The moon! Thank God.
It was rising from the hills.
“The police…?”
“No time. It’s the next few minutes or nothing. Three people we got to worry about—”
“The freaks!”
“Three people, Will. Number one, Jim, number two, Mr. Cooger frying in his Electric Chair. Number three, Mr. Dark and his skinful of souls. Save one, kick the other two to hell and gone. Then I think the freaks go, too. You ready, Will?”
Will eyed the door, the tents, the dark, the sky with new light paling it.
“God bless the moon.”
Hands tight together, they stepped out the door.
As if to greet them, the wind flung up and down all the tent canvases in a great prehistoric thunder-kite display of leprous wings.
Chapter 51
They ran in urine smell of shadow, they ran in clean ice smell of moon.
The calliope steam-throb whispered, tatted, trilled.
The music! thought Will, is it ru
“Which way?” Dad whispered.
“Through here!” Will pointed.
A hundred yards off, beyond a foothill of tents, there was a flare of blue light, sparks jumped up and fell away, then dark again.
Mr. Electrico! thought Will. They’re trying to move him, sure! Get him to the merry-go-round, kill or cure! And if they cure him, then, oh gosh, then, it’s angry him and angry Illustrated Man against just Dad and me! And Jim? Well, where was Jim? This way one day, that way the next, and… tonight? Whose side would he wind up on? Ours! Old friend Jim! Ours, of course! But Will trembled. Did friends last forever, then? For eternity, could they be counted to a warm, round, and handsome sum?
Will glanced left.
The Dwarf stood half enfolded by tent flaps, waiting motionless.
“Dad, look,” cried Will, softly. “And there—the Skeleton.”
Further over, the tall man, the man all marble bone and Egyptian papyrus stood like a dead tree.
“The freaks—why don’t they stop us?”
“Scared.”
“Of us?!”
Will’s father crouched and squinted out from around an empty cage.
“They’re walking wounded, anyway. They saw what happened to the Witch. That’s the only answer. Look at them.”
And there they stood, like uprights, like tent poles spotted all through the meadow grounds, hiding in shadow, waiting. For what? Will swallowed, hard. Maybe not hiding at all, but spread out for the ru
Will’s feet slithered in the grass.
Will’s father moved ahead.
The freaks watched with moon-glass eyes as they passed.
The calliope changed. It whistled sadly, sweetly, around a curve of tents, around a riverflow of darkness.
It’s going ahead! thought Will. Yes! It was going backward. But now it stopped and started again, and this time forward! What’s Mr. Dark up to?
“Jim!” Will burst out.
“Sh!” Dad shook him.
But the name had tumbled from his mouth only because he heard the calliope summing the golden years ahead, felt Jim isolate somewhere, pulled by warm gravities, swung by sunrise notes, wondering what it could be like to stand sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years tall, and then, oh then, nineteen and, most incredible!—twenty! The great wind of time blew in the brass pipes, a fine, a jolly, a summer tune, promising everything and even Will, hearing, began to run toward the music that grew up like a peach tree full of sun-ripe fruit—
No! he thought.
And instead made his feet step to his own fear, jump to his own tune, a hum cramped back by throat, held fast by lungs, which shook the bones of his head and drowned the calliope away.
“There,” said Dad softly.
And between the tents, ahead, in transit, they saw a grotesque parade. Like a dark sultan in a palanquin, a half-familiar figure rode a chair borne on the shoulders of assorted sizes and shapes of darkness.