Страница 44 из 48
At Dad’s cry, the parade jolted, then broke into a run!
“Mr. Electrico!” said Will.
They’re taking him to the carousel!
The parade vanished.
A tent lay between them.
“Around here!” Will jumped, pulling his father. The calliope played sweet. To pull Jim, to draw Jim. And when the parade arrived with Electrico? Back the music would spin, back the carousel run, to shard away his skin, to freshen forth his years! Will stumbled, fell. Dad picked him up.
And then…
There arose a human barking, yapping, baying, whining, as if all had fallen. In a long-drawn moan, a gasp, a shuddering sigh, an entire crowd of people with crippled throats made chorus together.
“Jim! They’ve got Jim!”
“No…” murmured Charles Halloway, strangely. “Maybe Jim… or us… got them.”
They stepped around the last tent.
Wind blew dust in their faces.
Will clapped his hand up, squinched his nose. The dust was antique spice, burnt maple leaves, a prickling blue that teemed and sifted to earth. Swarming its own shadows, the dust filtered over the tents.
Charles Halloway sneezed. Figures jumped and scurried away from an upended, half-tilted object abandoned half-way between one tent and the carousel.
The object was the electric chair, capsized, with straps dangling from wooden arms and legs, and a metal headcap hanging from its top.
“But,” said Will. “Where’s Mr. Electrico!? I mean Mr. Cooger!?”
“That must have been him.”
“What must have been him?”
But the answer was there, sifting down the midway in the whorling wind devils… the burnt spice, the autumn incense that had floured them when they turned this corner.
Kill or cure, Charles Halloway thought. He imagined them rushed in the last few seconds, toting the ancient dustsack boneheap over starched grasses in his disco
“Oh, no, no, no, no, no,” someone murmured.
Charles Halloway touched Will’s arm.
Will stopped saying “Oh, no, no, no.” He, too, in the last few moments, had thought the same as his father, of the toted corpse, the strewn bone-meal, the mineral-enriched hills of grass…
Now there was only the empty chair and the last particles of mica, the radiant motes of peculiar dirt crusting the straps. And the freaks, who had been toting the baroque dump, now fled to shadows.
We made them run, thought Will, but something made them drop it!
No, not something. Someone.
Will flexed his eyes.
The carousel, deserted, empty, traveled on its way through its own special time, forward.
But between the fallen chair and the carousel, standing alone, was that a freak? No…
“Jim!”
Dad knocked his elbow and Will shut up.
Jim, he thought.
And where, now, was Mr. Dark?
Somewhere. For he had started the carousel, hadn’t he? Yes! To draw them, to draw Jim, and—what else? Right now there was no time, for—
Jim turned from the spilled chair, turned and walk slowly toward the free, free ride.
He was going where he had always known he must go.
Like a weather vane in wild seasons he had tremored this way, wandered that, hesitated upon bright horizons and warm directions, only at last now to tilt and, half sleep-walking, tremble about in the bright brass pull and summer march of music. He could not look away.
Another step, and then another, toward the merry-go-round, there went Jim.
“Go get him, Will,” said his father.
Will went.
Jim raised his right hand.
The brass poles flashed by into the future, pulling the flesh like syrup, stretching the bones like taffy, the sunmetal color burning Jim’s cheeks, flinting his eyes.
Jim reached. The brass poles flick-knocked his fingernails, tinkling their own small tune.
“Jim!”
The brass poles chopped by in a yellow sunrise at night.
The music leaped in a clear fountain, high.
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
Jim opened his mouth with the same cry:
“Eeeeeeeeeeeeee!”
“Jim!” cried Will, ru
Jim’s palm slapped one brass pole. The pole whipped on.
He slapped another brass pole. This time, his palm glued itself tight.
Wrist followed fingers, arm followed wrist, shoulder and body followed arm. Jim, sleepwalked, was torn from his roots in the earth.
“Jim!”
Will reached, felt Jim’s foot flick from his grasp.
Jim swung round the waiting night in a great dark summer circle, Will racing after.
“Jim, get off! Jim, don’t leave me here!”
Flung by centrifuge, Jim grasped the pole with one hand, spun, and, as if by some lone lost and final instinct, gestured his other hand free to trail on the wind, the one part of him, the small white separate part that still remembered their friendship.
“Jim, jump!!”
Will snatched for that hand, missed, stumbled, almost fell. The first race was lost. Jim must circle once, alone. Will stood waiting the next charge of horses, the fling-about of boy not-so-much boy—
“Jim! Jim!”
Jim awoke! Circled half round, his face showed now July, now December. He seized the pole, bleating out his despair. He wanted, he did not want. He wished, he rejected, he ardently wished again, in flight, in heat-spell river of wind and blaze of metal, in jog of July and August horses whose hoofs thudded the air like thrown fruit, his eyes blazed. Tongue clamped in teeth, he hissed his frustration.
“Jim! Jump! Dad, stop the machine!”
Charles Halloway turned to see where the control box stood, fifty feet off.
“Jim!” Will’s side was stabbed with pain. “I need you! Come back!”
And, far over away on the far side of the carousel, traveling, fast-traveling, Jim fought with his own hands, the pole, the empty wind-whipped journey, the growing night, the wheeling stars. He let go the pole. He grabbed it. And still his right hand trailed down and out, begging Will’s last full ounce of strength.
“Jim!”
Jim came around. There, below, in the black-night station from which this train pulled away forever in a flurry of ticket-punch confetti, he saw Will—Willy—William Halloway, young pal, young friend who would seem younger still at the end of this journey, and not just young but unknown! vaguely remembered from some other time in some other year… but now that boy, that friend, that younger friend, ran along by the train, reached up, asking passage? or demanding he get off? which?!
“Jim! Remember me?”
Will lunged his final lunge. Fingers touched fingers, palm touched palm.
Jim’s face, white cold, stared down.
Will trot-paced the circling machine.
Where was Dad? Why didn’t he shut it off?