The nephew, surprised, whisked on in darkness, one year older. One year older, thought Will, on the earth, one year taller, bigger, meaner!
“Oh God, Jim, quick!” He jumped up, ran to the control box, the complex mysteries of brass switch and porcelain covering and sizzling wires. He struck the switch. But Jim, behind, babbling, tore at Will’s hands.
“Will, you’ll spoil it! No!”
Jim knocked the switch full back.
Will spun and slapped his face. Each clenched the other’s elbows, rocked, failed. They fell against the control box.
Will saw the evil boy, a year older still, glide around into night. Five or six more times around and he’d be bigger than the two of them!
“Jim, he’ll kill us!”
“Not me, no!”
Will felt a sting of electricity. He yelled, pulled back, hit the switch handle. The control box spat. Lightning jumped to the sky. Jim and Will, flung by the blast, lay watching the merry-go-round run wild.
The evil boy whistled by, clenched to a brass tree. He cursed. He spat. He wrestled with wind, with centrifuge. He was trying to clutch his way through the horses, the poles, to the outer rim of the carousel. His face came, went, came, went. He clawed. He brayed. The control box erupted blue showers. The carousel jumped and bucked. The nephew slipped. He fell. A black stallion’s steel hoof kicked him. Blood printed his brow.
Jim hissed, rolled, thrashed Will riding him hard, pressing him to grass, trading yell for yell, both fright-pale, heart ramming heart. Electric bolts from the switch flushed up in white stars a gush of fireworks. The carousel spun thirty, spun forty—“Will, let me up!”—spun fifty times. The calliope howled, boiled steam, ran ancient dry, then played nothing, its keys gibbering as only chitterings boiled up through the vents. Lightning unravelled itself over the sweated outflung boys, delivered flame to the silent horse stampede to light their way around, around with the figure lying on the platform no longer a boy but a man, no longer a man but more than a man and even more and even more, much more than that, around, around.
“He’s, he’s, oh he’s, oh look, Will, he’s—” gasped Jim, and began to sob, because it was the only thing to do, locked down, nailed tight. “Oh God, Will, get up! We got to make it run backward!”
Lights flashed on in the tents.
But no one came out.
Why not? Will thought crazily. The explosions? The electric storm? Do the freaks think the whole world’s jumping through the midway? Where’s Mr. Dark? In town? Up to no good? What, where, why?
He thought he heard the agonized figure sprawled on the carousel platform drum his heart superfast, then slow, fast, slow, very fast, very slow, incredibly fast, then as slow as the moon going down the sky on a white night in winter.
Someone, something, on the carousel wailed faintly.
Thank God it’s dark, thought Will. Thank God, I can’t see. There goes someone. Here comes something. There, whatever it is, goes again. There… there…
A black shadow on the shuddering machine tried to stagger up, but it was late, late, later still, very late, latest of all, oh, very late. The shadow crumbled. The carousel, like the earth spinning, whipped away air, sunlight, sense and sensibility, leaving only dark, cold, and age.
In a final vomit, the switch box blew itself completely apart.
All the carnival lights blinked out.
The carousel slowed itself through the cold night wind.
Will let Jim go.
How many times, thought Will, did it go around? Sixty, eighty… ninety…?
How many times? said Jim’s face, all nightmare, watching the dead carousel shiver and halt in the dead grass, a stopped world now which nothing, not their hearts, hands or heads, could send back anywhere.
They walked slowly to the merry-go-round, their shoes whispering.
The shadowy figure lay on the near side, on the plank floor, its face turned away.
One hand hung off the platform.
It did not belong to a boy.
It seemed a huge wax hand shrivelled by fire.
The man’s hair was long, spidery, white. It blew like milkweed in the breathing dark.
They bent to see the face.
The eyes were mummified shut. The nose was collapsed upon gristle. The mouth was a ruined white flower, the petals twisted into a thin wax sheath over the clenched teeth through which faint bubblings sighed. The man was small inside his clothes, small as a child, but tall, strung out, and old, so old, very old, not ninety, not one hundred, no, not one hundred and ten, but one hundred and twenty or one hundred and impossible years old.
Will touched.
The man was cold as an albino frog.
He smelled of moon swamps and old Egyptian bandages. He was something found in museums, wrapped in nicotine linens, sealed in glass.
But he was alive, puling like a babe, and shriveling unto death, fast, very fast, before their eyes.
Will was sick over the side of the carousel.
Then, falling against each other, Jim and Will sledge-hammered the insane leaves, the unbelievable grass, the insubstantial earth with their numbed shoes, fleeing off down the midway…
Chapter 24
Moths ticked off the high tin-shaded arc light which swung abandoned above the crossroads. Below, in a deserted gas station in the midst of country wilderness there was another ticking. In a coffin-sized phone booth speaking to people lost somewhere across night hills, two white-faced boys were crammed, holding to each other at every flit of bat, each sliding of cloud across the stars.
Will hung up the phone. The police and an ambulance were coming.
At first he and Jim had shout-whispered-wheezed at each other, pumping along, stumbling: they should go home, sleep, forget—no! they should take a freight train west!—no! for Mr. Cooger, if he survived what they’d done to him, that old man, that old old old man, would follow them over the world until he found them and tore them apart! Arguing, shivering, they ended up in a phone booth, and now saw the police car bouncing along the road, its siren moaning, with the ambulance behind. All the men looked out at the two boys whose teeth chattered in the moth-flicked light.
Three minutes later they all advanced down the dark midway, Jim leading the way, talking, gibbering.
“He’s alive. He’s got to be alive. We didn’t mean to do it! We’re sorry!” He stared at the black tents. “You hear? We’re sorry!”
“Take it easy, boy,” said one of the policemen. “Go on.”
The two policemen in midnight blue, the two internes like ghosts, the two boys, made the last turn past the ferris wheel and reached the merry-go-round.
Jim groaned.
The horses trampled the night air, in midplunge. Starlight glittered on the brass poles. That was all.
“He’s gone…”
“He was here, we swear!” said Jim. “One hundred and fifty, two hundred years old, and dying of it!”
“Jim,” said Will.
The four men stirred uneasily.
“They must’ve taken him in a tent.” Will started off. A policeman took his elbow.
“Did you say one hundred and fifty years old?” he asked Jim. “Why not three hundred?”
“Maybe he was! Oh God.” Jim turned, yelling. “Mr. Cooger! We brought help!”
Lights blinked on in the Freak Tent. The huge banners out front rumbled and lashed as arc lights flushed over them. The police glanced up. MR. SKELETON, THE DUST WITCH, THE CRUSHER, VESUVIO THE LAVA SIPPFR! danced soft, big, painted each on its separate flag.
Jim paused by the rustling freak show entry.
“Mr. Cooger?” he pleaded. “You… there?”
The tent flaps mouthed out a warm lion air.
“What?” asked a policeman.
Jim read the moving flaps.
“They said ‘yes.’ They said, ‘Come in.’”
Jim stepped through. The others followed.
Inside they squinted through crisscrossed tent pole
shadows to the high freak platforms and all the world-wandered aliens, crippled of face of bone, of mind, waiting there.
At a rickety card table nearby four men sat playing orange, lime-green, sun-yellow cards printed with moon beasts and winged sun-symbolled men. Here the akimbo Skeleton one might play like a piccolo; here the Blimp who could be punctured every night, pumped up at dawn; here the midget known as The Wart who could be mailed parcel post dirt-cheap; and next to him an even littler accident of cell and time, a Dwarf so small and perched in such a way you could not see his face behind the cards clenched before him in arthritic and tremulous oak-gnarled fingers.
The Dwarf! Will started. Something about those hands! Familar, familiar. Where? Who? What? But his eyes snapped on.
There stood Monsieur Guillotine, black tights, black long stockings, black hood over head, arms crossed over his chest, stiff straight by his chopping machine, the blade high in the tent sky, a hungry knife all flashes and meteor shine, much desiring to cleave space. Below, in the head cradle, a dummy sprawled waiting quick doom.
There stood the Crusher, all ropes and tendons, all steel and iron, all bone-monger, jaw-cruncher, horseshoe-taffy-puller.
And there the Lava Sipper, Vesuvio of the chafed tongue, of the scalded teeth, who spun scores of fireballs up, hissing in a ferris of flame which streaked shadows along the tent roof.
Nearby, in booths, another thirty freaks watched the fires fly until the Lava Sipper glanced, saw intruders, and let his universe fall. The suns drowned in a water tub.
Steam billowed. All froze in a tableau.
An insect stopped buzzing.
Will glanced swiftly.
There, on the biggest stage, a tattoo needle poised like a blowgun dart in his rose-crusted hand, stood Mr. Dark, the Illustrated Man.
His picture crowds flooded raw upon his flesh. Stripped bare to the navel, he had been stinging himself, adding a picture to his left palm with this dragonfly contraption. Now with the insect droned dead in his hand, he wheeled. But Will, staring beyond him, cried:
“There he is! There’s Mr. Cooger!”
The police, the internes, quickened.
Behind Mr. Dark sat the Electric Chair.
In this chair sat a ruined man, last seen strewn wheezing in a collapse of bones and albino wax on the broken carousel. Now he was erected, propped, strapped in this device full of lightning power.
“That’s him! He was… dying.”
The Blimp ascended to his feet.
The Skeleton spun about, tall.
The Wart flea-hopped to the sawdust.
The Dwarf let fall his cards and flirted his now mad, now idiot eyes ahead, around, over.
I know him, thought Will. Oh, God, what they’ve done to him!
The lightning-rod salesman!
That’s who it was. Squeezed tight, smashed small, convulsed by some terrible nature into a clenched fist of humanity…
The seller of lightning-rods.
But now two things happened with beautiful promptitude.
Monsieur Guillotine cleared his throat.
And the blade, above, in the canvas sky, like a homing hawk scythed down. Whisper-whisk-slither-thunder-rush-wham!
The dummy head, chop-cut, fell.
And falling, looked like Will’s own head, own face, destroyed.
He wanted, he did not want, to run lift the head turn it to see if it held his own profile. But how could you ever dare do that? Never, never in a billion years, could one empty that wicker basket.
The second thing happened.
A mechanic, working at the back of an upright glass-fronted coffin booth, released a trip wire. This made a last cog click within the machinery under the sign, MLLE TAROT, THE DUST WITCH. The wax woman’s figure within the glass box nodded her head and fixed the boys with her pointing nose as the boys passed, leading the men. Her cold wax hand brushed the Dust of Destiny on a ledge within the coffin. Her eyes did not see; they were sewn shut with laced black-widow web, dark threads. A waxworks fright, good and proper, she was, and the policemen beamed, viewing her, and strolled on, and beamed at Monsieur Guillotine for his act too, and moving, the police were relaxing now, and seemed not to mind being called late on a jolly venture into a rehearsing world of acrobats and seedy magicians.
“Gentlemen!” Mr. Dark and his mob of illustrations surged forward on the pine platform, a jungle beneath each arm, an Egyptian viper scrolled on each bicep. “Welcome! You’re just in time! We’re rehearsing all our new acts!” Mr. Dark waved and strange monsters gaped their fangs from his chest, a Cyclops with a navel for a squinted moron eye twitched on his stomach as he strode.
Lord, thought Will, is he bringing that crowd with him or is the crowd pulling him along by his skin?
From all the creaked platforms, from the muffled sawdust, Will felt the freaks wheel and fix their eyes, enchanted, as were internes and police, by this illustrated throng of humanity that in one agglomerative move dominated and filled the immediate air and tent sky with silent shootings for attention.
Now part of the wasp-needle tattooed population spoke. It was Mr. Dark’s mouth over and above this calligraphic explosion, this railroad accident of monsters in tumult upon his sweating skin. Mr. Dark chanted forth the organ tones from his chest. His personal electric blue-green populations trembled, even as the real freaks on the sawdust tent floor trembled, even as, hearing in their most secret marrow, Jim and Will trembled and felt more freak than the freaks themselves.
“Gentlemen! Boys! We’ve just perfected the new act! You’ll be the first to see!” cried Mr. Dark.
The first policeman, his hand casually nestled to his pistol holster, squinted up at that vast corral of beasts and beings. “This boy said—”
“Said?!” The Illustrated Man barked a laugh. The freaks leaped in a frolic of shock, then calmed as the carnival owner continued with great ease, patting and soothing his own illustrations, which somehow patted and soothed the freaks. “Said? But what did he see? Boys always scare themselves at sideshows, eh? Run like rabbits when the freaks pop out. But tonight, especially tonight!”
The policemen glanced beyond to the Erector-set-papier-mâché relic constricted in the Electric Chair.
“Who’s he?”
Will saw fire lick up through Mr. Dark’s smoke-clouded eyes, saw him just as quickly snuff it out. “The new act. Mr. Electrico.”
“No! Look at the old man! Look!” Will yelled. The police turned to appraise his demon cry.
“Don’t you see!” said Will. “He’s dead! Only thing holds him up is the straps!”
The internes gazed up at the great flake of winter flung into and held by the black chair.
Oh gosh, thought Will, we thought it would all be simple. The old man, Mr. Cooger, dying, so we bring doctors to save him, so he forgives us, maybe, maybe, the carnival doesn’t hurt us, lets us go. But now this, what’s next? He’s dead! It’s too late! Everyone hates us!
And Will stood among the others feeling the cold air waft down from the unearthed mummy, from the cold mouth and cold eyes locked up in frozen eyelids. Inside the frozen nostrils not a white hair stirred. Mr. Cooger’s ribs under his collapsed shirt were stone-rigid and his teeth under his clay lips were dry-ice cold. Put him out at noon and fog would steam off him.
The internes glanced at each other. They nodded.
The policemen, at this, took one step forward.
“Gentlemen!”
Mr. Dark scuttled a tarantula hand up an electric brass switchboard.
“One hundred thousand volts will now burn Mr. Electrico’s body!”
“No, don’t let him!” Will cried.
The policemen took another step. The internes opened their mouths to speak. Mr. Dark flicked a swift demanding glance at Jim. Jim cried:
“No! It’s all right!”
“Jim!”
“Will, yes, it’s okay!”
“Stand back!” The spider clutched the switch handle. “This man is in
a trance! As part of our new act, I have hypnotized him! He could suffer injury if you shocked him from his spell!”
The internes shut their mouths. The police stopped moving.
“One hundred thousand volts! Yet he will come forth alive, whole in sound mind and body!”
“No!”
A policeman grabbed Will.
The Illustrated Man and all the men and beasts asprawl in frenzies on him now snatched and banged the switch.
The tent lights snuffed out.
Policemen, internes, boys jumped up their flesh in cobbles and boils.
But now in the swift midnight shuttering, the Electric Chair was a hearth and on it the old man blazed like a blue autumn tree.
The police flinched back, the internes leaned ahead, as did the freaks, blue fire in their eyes.
The Illustrated Man, hand glued to switch, looked upon the old old old man.
The old man was flint-rock dead, yes, but electricity alive sheathed over him. It swarmed on his cold shell ears, it flickered in his deep-as-an-abandoned-stone-well nostrils. It crept blue eels of power on his praying-mantis fingers and his grasshopper knees.
The Illustrated Man’s lips thrust wide, perhaps he yelled, but no one heard against the immense fry, blast, the slam and sizzle of power which prowled in around over under about man and prisoning chair. Come alive! cried the hum! Come alive! cried the storming color and light. Come alive! yelled Mr. Dark’s mouth, which no one heard but Jim, reading lips, read thunderous loud in his mind, and Will the same, Come alive! willing the old man to five, start up, tick, hum, work juice, summon spit, ungum spirit, melt wax soul…
“He’s dead!” But no one heard Will, either, no matter how he pushed against the lightning clamour.
Alive! Mr. Dark’s lips licked and savoured. Alive. Come alive. He racheted the switch to the last notch. Live, live! Somewhere, dynamos protested, skirled, shrilled, moaned a bestial energy. The light turned bottle-green. Dead, dead, thought Will. But live alive! cried machines, cried flame and fire, cried mouths of crowds of livid beasts on illustrated flesh.
So the old man’s hair stood up in prickling fumes. Sparks, bled from his fingernails, dripped seething spatters on pine planks. Green simmerings wove shuttles through dead eyelids.
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