But Jim, now, he knows it happens, he watches for it happening, he sees it start, he sees it finish, he licks the wound he expected, and never asks why; he knows. He always knew. Someone knew before him, a long time ago, someone who had wolves for pets and lions for night conversants. Hell, Jim doesn’t know with his mind. But his body knows. And while Will’s putting a bandage on his latest scratch, Jim’s ducking, waving, bouncing away from the knockout blow which must inevitably come.
So there they go, Jim running slower to stay with Will, Will running faster to stay with Jim, Jim breaking two windows in a haunted house because Will’s along, Will breaking one instead of none, because Jim’s watching. God how we get our fingers in each other’s clay. That’s friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of the other.
Jim, Will, he thought, strangers. Go on. I’ll catch up, some day. . . .
The library door gasped open, slammed.
Five minutes later, he turned into the corner saloon for his nightly one-and-only drink, in time to hear a man say:
‘. . .I read when alcohol was invented, the Italians thought it was the big thing they’d been looking for for centuries. The Elixir of Life! Did you know that?
‘No.’ The bartender’s back was turned.
‘Sure.’ the man went on. ‘Distilled wine. Ninth, tenth century. Looked like water. But it burnt. I mean, it not only burnt the mouth and stomach, but you could set it on fire. So they thought they’d mixed water and fire. Fire-water, the Elixir Vitae, by God. Maybe they weren’t so far wrong thinking it was the Cure-all, the thing that worked miracles. Have a drink!?’
‘I don’t need it,’ said Halloway. ‘But someone inside me does.’
‘Who?’
The boy I once was, thought Halloway, who runs like the leaves down the sidewalk autumn nights.
But he couldn’t say that.
So he drank, eyes shut, listening to hear if that thing inside turned over again, rustling in the deep bons that were stacked for burning but never burned.
4
Will stopped. Will looked at the Friday night town.
It seemed when the first stroke of nine banged from the big courthouse clock all the lights were on and business humming in the shops. But by the time the last stroke of nine shook everyone’s fillings in his teeth, the barbers had yanked off the sheets, powdered the customers, trotted them forth; the druggist’s fount had stopped fizzing like a nest of snakes, the insect neons everywhere had ceased buzzing, and the vast glittering acreage of the dime store with its ten billion metal, glass and paper oddments waiting to be fished over, suddenly blacked out. Shades slithered, doors boomed, keys rattled their bones in locks, people fled with hordes of torn newspaper mice nibbling their heels.
Bang! they were gone!
‘Boy!’ yelled Will. ‘Folks run like they thought the storm was here!’
‘It is!’ shouted Jim. ‘Us!’
They stomp-pound-thundered over iron grates, steel trap-doors, past a dozen unlit shops, a dozen half-lit, a dozen dying dark. The city was dead as they rounded the United Cigar Store corner to see a wooden Cherokee glide in darkness, by himself.
‘Hey!’
Mr Tetley, the proprietor, peered over the Indian’s shoulder.
‘Scare you, boys?’
‘Naw!’
But Will shivered, feeling cold tidal waves of strange rain moving down the prairie as on a deserted shore. When the lightning nailed the town, he wanted to be layered under
sixteen blankets and a pillow.
‘Mr Tetley?’ said Will, quietly.
For now there were two wooden Indians upright in ripe tobacco darkness. Mr Tetley, amidst his jest, had frozen, mouth open, listening.
‘Mr Tetley?’
He heard something far away on the wind, but couldn’t say what it was.
The boys backed off.
He did not see them. He did not move. He only listened.
They left him. They ran.
In the fourth empty block from the library, the boys came upon a third wooden Indian.
Mr Crosetti, in front of his barber shop, his door key in his trembling fingers, did not see them stop.
What had stopped them?
A teardrop.
It moved shining down Mr Crosetti’s left cheek. He breathed heavily.
‘Crosetti, you fool! Something happens, nothing happens, you cry like a baby!’
Mr Crosetti took a trembling breath, snuffing. ‘Don’t you smell it?’
Jim and Will sniffed.
‘Licorice!’
‘Heck, no. Cotton candy!’
‘I haven’t smelled that in years,’ said Mr Crosetti.
Jim snorted. ‘It’s around.’
‘Yes, but who notices? When? Now, my nose tells me, breathe! And I’m crying. Why? Because I remember how a long time ago, boys ate that stuff. Why haven’t I stopped to think and smell the last thirty years?’
‘You’re busy, Mr Crosetti,’ Will said. ‘You haven’t got time.’
Mr Crosetti wiped his eyes. ‘Where does that smell come from? There’s no place in town sells cotton candy. Only circuses.’
‘Hey,’ said Will. ‘That’s right!’
‘Well, Crosetti is done crying.’ The barber blew his nose and turned to lock his shop door. As he did this, Will watched the barber’s pole whirl its red serpentine up out of nothing, leading his gaze around, rising to vanish into more nothing. On countless moons Will had stood here trying to unravel that ribbon, watch it come, go, end without ending.
Mr Crosetti put his hand to the light switch under the spinning pole.
‘Don’t,’ said Will. Then, murmuring, ‘Don’t turn it off.’ Mr Crosetti looked at the pole, as if freshly aware of its miraculous properties. He nodded, gently, his eyes soft. ‘Where does it come from, where does it go, eh? Who knows? Not you, not him, not me. Oh, the mysteries, by God. So. We’ll leave it on!’
It’s good to know, thought Will, it’ll be running until dawn, winding up from nothing, winding away to nothing, while we sleep.
‘Good-night!’
‘Good-night.’
And they left him behind in a wind that very faintly smelled of licorice and cotton candy.
5
Charles Halloway put his hand to the saloon’s double swing doors, hesitant, as if the grey hairs on the back of his hand, like antennae, had felt something beyond slide by in the October night. Perhaps great fires burned somewhere and their furnace blasts warned him not to step forth. Or another Ice Age had loomed across the land, its freezing bulk might already have laid waste a billion people in the hour. Perhaps Time itself fixed was draining off down an immense glass, with powdered darkness failing after to bury all.
Or maybe it was only that man in a dark suit, seen through the saloon window, across the street. Great paper rolls under one arm, a brush and bucket in his free hand, the man was whistling a tune, very far away.
It was a tune from another season, one that never ceased making Charles Halloway sad when he heard it. The song was incongruous for October, but immensely moving, overwhelming, no matter what day or what month it was sung:
I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
Their words repeat great
Of peace on earth, good will to men!
Charles Halloway shivered. Suddenly there was the old sense of terrified elation, of wanting to laugh and cry together when he saw the innocents of the earth wandering the snowy streets the day before Christmas among all the tired men and women whose faces were dirty with guilt, unwashed of sin, and smashed like small windows by life that hit without warning, ran, hid, came back and hit again.
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
‘God is not dead, nor doth He sleep!
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good will to men!’
The whistling died.
Charles Halloway stepped out. Far up ahead, the man who had whistled the tune was motioning his arms by a telegraph pole, silently working. Now he vanished into the open door of a shop.
Charles Halloway, not knowing why, crossed the street to watch the man pasting up one of the posters inside the un-rented and empty store.
Now the man stepped out the door with his brush, his paste bucket, his rolled papers. His eyes, a fierce and lustful shine, fixed on Charles Halloway. Smiling, he gestured an open hand.
Halloway stared.
The palm of that hand was covered with fine black silken hair. It looked like –
The hand clenched, tight. It waved. The man swept around the corner. Charles Halloway, stunned, flushed with sudden summer heat, swayed, then turned to gaze into the empty shop.
Two sawhorses stood parallel to each other under a single spotlight.
Placed over these two sawhorses like a funeral of snow and crystal was a block of ice six feet long. It shone dimly with its own effulgence, and its colour was light green-blue. It was a great cool gem resting there in the dark.
On a little white placard at one side near the window the following calligraphic message could be read by lamplight:
Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show –
Fantoccini, Marionette Circus, and Your
Plain Meadow Carnival. Arriving
Immediately! Here on Display, one of
our many attractions:
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IN THE WORLD
Halloway’s eyes leaped to the poster on the inside of the window.
And back to the cold long block of ice.
It was such a block of ice as he remembered from travelling magician’s shows when he was a boy, when the local ice company contributed a chunk of winter in which, for twelve hours on end, frost maidens lay embedded, on display while people watched and comedies toppled down the raw white screen and coming attractions came and went and at last the pale ladies slid forth all rimed, chipped free by perspiring sorcerers to be led
