That was was the vital cement, wasn't it? Could he say how he felt about their all being here tonight on this wild world running around a big sun which fell through a bigger space falling through yet vaster immensities of space, maybe toward and maybe away from Something? Could he say: we share this billon-mile-an-hour ride. We have common cause against the night. You start with little common causes. Why love the boy in a March field with his kite braving the sky? Because our fingers burn with the hot string singeing our hands. Why love some girl viewed from a train, bent to a country well? The tongue remembers iron water cool on some long lost noon. Why weep at strangers dead by the road? They resemble friends unseen in forty years. Why laugh when clowns are hit by pies? We taste custard, we taste life. Why love the woman who is your wife? Her nose breathes in the air of a world that I know; therefore I love that nose. Her ears hear music I might sing half the night through; therefore I love her ears. Her eyes delight in seasons of the land; and so I love those eyes. Her tongue knows quince, peach, chokeberry, mint and lime; I love to hear it speaking. Because her flesh knows heat, cold, affliction, I know fire, snow and pain. Shared and once again shared experience. Billions of prickling textures. Cut one sense away, cut part of life away. Cut two senses; life halves itself on the instant. We love what we know, we love what we are. Common cause, common cause, common cause of mouth, eye, ear, tongue, hand, nose, flesh, heart, and soul. the vital cement, wasn't it? Could he say how he felt about their all being here tonight on this wild world running around a big sun which fell through a bigger space falling through yet vaster immensities of space, maybe toward and maybe away from Something? Could he say: we share this billon-mile-an-hour ride. We have common cause against the night. You start with little common causes. Why love the boy in a March field with his kite braving the sky? Because our fingers burn with the hot string singeing our hands. Why love some girl viewed from a train, bent to a country well? The tongue remembers iron water cool on some long lost noon. Why weep at strangers dead by the road? They resemble friends unseen in forty years. Why laugh when clowns are hit by pies? We taste custard, we taste life. Why love the woman who is your wife? Her nose breathes in the air of a world that I know; therefore I love that nose. Her ears hear music I might sing half the night through; therefore I love her ears. Her eyes delight in seasons of the land; and so I love those eyes. Her tongue knows quince, peach, chokeberry, mint and lime; I love to hear it speaking. Because her flesh knows heat, cold, affliction, I know fire, snow and pain. Shared and once again shared experience. Billions of prickling textures. Cut one sense away, cut part of life away. Cut two senses; life halves itself on the instant. We love what we know, we love what we are. Common cause, common cause, common cause of mouth, eye, ear, tongue, hand, nose, flesh, heart, and soul.

But...how to say it?

'Look,' he tried, 'put two men in a rail car, one a soldier, the other a farmer. One talks war, the other wheat; and bore each other to sleep. But let one spell long-distance running, and if the other once ran the mile, why, those men will run all night like boys, sparking a friendship up from memory. So, all men have one one business in common: women, and can talk that till sunrise and beyond. Hell.' business in common: women, and can talk that till sunrise and beyond. Hell.'

Charles Halloway stopped, flushed, self-conscious again, knowing vaguely there was a target up ahead but not quite how to get there. He chewed his lips.

Dad, don't stop, thought Will. When you talk, it's swell in here. You'll save us. Go on.

The man read his son's eyes, saw the same look in Jim, and walked slowly around the table, touching a night beast here, a clutch of ragged crones there, a star, a crescent moon, an antique sun, an hourglass that told time with bone dust instead of sand.

'Have I said anything I started out to say about being good? God, I don't know. A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if, half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little about him and his family, you might just jump in front of his killer and try to stop it. Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know, is bad, or amoral, at least. You can't act if you don't know. Acting without knowing takes you right off the cliff. God, God, you must think I'm crazy, this talk. Probably think we should be out duck-shooting, elephant-gunning balloons, like you did, Will, but we got to know all there is to know about those freaks and that man heading them up. We can't be good unless we know what bad is, and it's a shame we're working against time. Show'll close and the crowds go home early on a Sunday night. I feel we'll have a visit from the autumn people, then. That gives us maybe two hours.'

Jim was at the window now, looking out across the town to the far black tents and the calliope that played by the turning of the world in the night.

'Is it bad?' he asked. it bad?' he asked.

'Bad?' cried Will, angrily. 'Bad. You ask that!?'

'Calmly,' said Will's father. 'A good question. Part of that show looks just great. But the old saying really applies: you can't get something for nothing. Fact is, from them, you get nothing for something. They make you empty promises, you stick our your neck and - wham!'

'Where'd they come from?' asked Jim. 'Who are they?'

Will went to the window with his father and they both looked out and Charles Halloway said, to those far tents: 'Maybe once it was just one man walking across Europe, jingling his ankle bells, a lute on his shoulder making a hunchbacked shadow, before Columbus. Maybe a man walked around in a monkey skin a million years ago, stuffing himself with other people's unhappiness, chewed their pain all day like spearmint gum, for the sweet savour., and trotted faster, revivified by personal disaster. Maybe this son after him refined his father's deadfalls, mantraps, bone-crunchers, head-achers, flesh-twitchers, soul-skinners. These laid the scum on lonely ponds from which came vinegar gnats to snuff up noses, mosquitoes to ride summer-night flesh and sting forth those bumps that carnival phrenologists dearly love to fondle and prophesy upon. So from one man here, one man there, walking as swift as his oily glances, it became scuttles of dogmen begging gifts of trouble, pandering misery, seeking under carpets for centipede treads, watchful of night sweats, harkening by all bedroom doors to hear men twist basting themselves with remorse and warm-water dreams.

'The stuff of nightmare is their plain bread. They butter it with pain. They set their clocks by death-watch beetles, and thrive the centuries. They were the men with the leather-ribbon whips who sweated up the Pyramids seasoning it with other people's salt and other people's cracked hearts. They coursed Europe on the White Horse of the Plague. They whispered to Caesar that he was mortal, then sold daggers at half-price in the grand March sale. Some must have been lazing clowns, foot props for emperors, princes, and epileptic popes. Then out on the road, Gypsies in time, their populations grew as the world grew, spread, and there was more delicious variety of pain to thrive on. The train put wheels under them and here they run down the long road out of the Gothic and Baroque; look at their wagons and coaches, the carving like medieval shrines, all of it stuff once drawn by horses, mules, or, maybe, men.'

'All those years.' Jim's voice swallowed itself. The same same people? You think Mr Cooger, Mr Dark are both a couple hundred years old?' people? You think Mr Cooger, Mr Dark are both a couple hundred years old?'

'Riding that merry-go-round they can shave off a year or two, any time they want, right?'

'Why, then - ' the abyss opened at Will's feet - 'they could live forever forever!'

'And hurt hurt people.' Jim turned it over, again and again. 'But why, why all the hurt?' people.' Jim turned it over, again and again. 'But why, why all the hurt?'

'Because,' said Mr Halloway. 'You need fuel, gas, something to run a carnival on, don't you? Women live off gossip, and what's gossip but a swap of headaches, sour spit, arthritic bones, ruptured and mended flesh, indiscretions, storms of madness, calms after the storms? If some people didn't have something juicy to chew on, their choppers would prolapse, their souls with them. Multiply their their pleasure at funerals, their chuckling through breakfast, obituaries, add all the cat-fight marriages where folks spend careers ripping skin off each other and patching it back upside around, add quack doctors slicing persons to read their guts like tea leaves, then sewing them tight with fingerprinted thread., square the whole dynamite factory by ten quadrillion, and you got the black candlepower of this one carnival. pleasure at funerals, their chuckling through breakfast, obituaries, add all the cat-fight marriages where folks spend careers ripping skin off each other and patching it back upside around, add quack doctors slicing persons to read their guts like tea leaves, then sewing them tight with fingerprinted thread., square the whole dynamite factory by ten quadrillion, and you got the black candlepower of this one carnival.

'All the meannesses we harbour, they borrow in redoubled spades. They're a billion times itchier for pain, sorrow, and sickness than the average man. We salt our lives with other people's sins. Our flesh to us tastes sweet. But the carnival doesn't care if it stinks by moonlight instead of sun, so long as it gorges on fear and pain. That's the fuel, the vapour that spins the carousel, the raw stuffs of terror, the excruciating agony of guilt, the screams from real or imagined wounds. The carnival sucks that gas, ignites it, and chugs along its way.'

Charles Halloway took a breath, shut his eyes, and said: 'How do I know this? I don't! I feel feel it. I it. I taste taste it. It was like old leaves burning on the wind two nights ago. It was a smell like mortuary flowers. I hear that music. I hear what you tell me, and half what you it. It was like old leaves burning on the wind two nights ago. It was a smell like mortuary flowers. I hear that music. I hear what you tell me, and half what you don't don't tell me. Maybe I've tell me. Maybe I've always always dreamt about such carnivals, and was just waiting for it to come sols to see it once, and nod. Now, that tent show plays my bones like a marimba. dreamt about such carnivals, and was just waiting for it to come sols to see it once, and nod. Now, that tent show plays my bones like a marimba.

'My skeleton knows knows.

'It tells me. tells me.

'I tell you.' tell you.'

40

'Can they...' said Jim. 'I mean... do they... buy souls?'

'Buy, when they can get them free?' said Mr. Halloway. 'Why, most men jump at the chance to give up everything for nothing. There's nothing we're so slapstick with as our own immortal souls. Besides, you're inferring that's the, Devil out there. I only say it's a type of creature has learned to live off souls, not the souls themselves. That always worried me in the old myths. I asked myself, why would Mephistopheles want a soul? What does he do do with it when he gets it, of what use is it? Stand back while I throw my own theory over the plate. Those creatures want the gas off souls who can't sleep nights, that fever by day from old crimes. A dead soul is no kindling. But a live and raving soul, crippled with self-damnation, oh that's a pretty snoutful for such as them. with it when he gets it, of what use is it? Stand back while I throw my own theory over the plate. Those creatures want the gas off souls who can't sleep nights, that fever by day from old crimes. A dead soul is no kindling. But a live and raving soul, crippled with self-damnation, oh that's a pretty snoutful for such as them.

'How do I know this? I observe. The carnival is like people, only more so. A man, a woman, rather than walk away from, or kill, each other, ride each other a lifetime, pulling hair, extracting fingernails, the pain of each to the other like a narcotic that makes existence worth the day. So the carnival feels ulcerated egos miles off and lopes to toast its hands at that ache. It smells boys ulcerating to be men, paining like great unwise wisdom teeth, twenty thousand miles away, summer abed in winter's night. It feels the aggravation of middle-aged men like myself, who gibber after long-lost August afternoons to no avail. Need, want, desire, we burn those in our fluids, oxidize those in our souls, which jet streams out lips, nostrils, eyes, cars, broadcasts from antennae-fingers, long or short wave, God only knows, but the freak-masters perceive Itches and come crab-clustering to Scratch. It's traveled a long way on an easy map, with people handy by every crossroad to lend it lustful pints of agony to power it on. So maybe the carnival survives, living off the poison of the sins we do each other, and the ferment of our most terrible regrets.'

Charles Halloway snorted.

'Good grief, how much have I said out loud, how much to myself, the last ten minutes?'

'You,' said Jim, 'talk a lot.'

'In what language, dammit!' cried Charles Halloway, for suddenly it seemed he had done no more than other nights walking exquisitely alone, deliciously propounding his ideas to halls which echoed them once, then made them vanish forever. He had written books a lifetime, on the, airs of vast rooms in vast buildings, and had it all fly out the vents. Now it all seemed fireworks, done for color, sound, the high architecture of words, to dazzle the boys, powder his ego, but with no mark left on retina or mind after the color and sound faded; a mere exercise in self-declamation. Sheepishly he accosted himself.

'How much of all this got through? One sentence out of five, two out of eight?'

'Three in a thousand,' said Will.

Charles Halloway could not but laugh and sigh in one.

Then Jim cut across with: 'Is... is it... Death?'

'The carnival?' The old man lit his pipe, blew smoke, seriously studied the patterns. 'No. But I think it uses Death as a threat. Death doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. But we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing. And the carnival wisely knows we're more afraid of Nothing than we are of Something. You can fight Something. But... Nothing? Where do you hit it? Has it a heart, soul, butt-behind, brain? No, no. So the carnival just shakes a great croupier's cupful of Nothing at us, and reaps us as we tumble back head over-heels in fright. Oh, it shows us Something that might eventually lead to Nothing, all right. That flourish of mirrors out there in the meadow, that's a raw Something, for sure. Enough to knock your soul sidewise in the saddle. It's a hit below the belt to see yourself ninety years gone, the vapors of eternity rising from you like breath off dry ice. Then, when it's frozen you stiff, it plays that fine sweet soul-searching music that smells of fresh-washed frocks of women dancing on back-yard lines in May, that sounds like haystacks trampled into wine, all that blue sky and summer night-on-the-lake kind of tune until your head bangs with the drums that look like full moons beating around the calliope. Simplicity. Lord, I do admire their direct approach. Hit an old man with mirrors, watch his pieces fall in jigsaws of ice only the carnival can put together again. How? Waltz around back on the carousel to 'Beautiful Ohio' or 'Merry Widow.' But they're careful not to tell one thing to people who go riding to its music.'

'What?' asked Jim.

'Why, that if you're a miserable sinner in one shape, you're a miserable sinner in another. Changing size doesn't change the brain. If I made you twenty-five tomorrow, Jim, your thoughts would still be boy thoughts, and it'd show! Or if they turned me me into a boy of ten this instant, my brain would still be fifty and that boy would act funnier and older and weirder than any boy ever. Then, too, time's out of joint another way.' into a boy of ten this instant, my brain would still be fifty and that boy would act funnier and older and weirder than any boy ever. Then, too, time's out of joint another way.'

'Which way?' asked Will.

'If I became young again, all my friends would still be fifty, sixty, wouldn't they? I'd be cut off from them, forever, for I couldn't tell them what I'd up and done, could I? They'd resent it. They'd hate me. Their interests would no longer be mine, would they? Especially their worries. Sickness and death for them, new life for me. So where's the place in this world for a man who looks twenty but who is older than Methuselah, what man could stand the shock of a change like that? Carnival won't warn you its equal to postoperative shock, but, by God, I bet it is, and more!

'So, what happens? You get your reward: madness. Change of body, change of personal environment, for one thing. Guilt, for another, guilt at leaving your wife, husband, friends to die the way all men die - Lord, that alone would give a man fits. So more fear, more agony for the carnival to breakfast on. So with the green vapors coming off your stricken conscience you say you want to go back the way you were! The carnival nods and listens. Yes, they promise, if you behave as they say, in a short while they'll give you back your twoscore and ten or whatever. On the promise alone of being returned to normal old age, that train travels with the world, its side show populated with madmen waiting to be released from bondage, meantime servicing the carnival, giving it coke for its ovens.'

Will murmured something.

'What?'

'Mss Foley,' mourned Will. 'Oh, poor Miss Foley, they got her now, just like you say. Once she got what she wanted it scared her, she didn't like it, oh, she was crying so hard, Dad, so hard; now I bet they promise her someday she can be fifty again if she'll mind. I wonder what they're doing with her, right now, oh, Dad, oh, Jim!'

'God help her.' Will's father put a heavy hand out to trace the old carnival portraits. 'They've probably thrown her in with the freaks. And what are they? Sinners who've traveled so long, hoping for deliverance, they've taken on the shape of their original sins? The Fat Man., what was he once? If I can guess the carnival's sense of irony, the way they like to weight the scales, he was once a ravener after all kinds and varieties of lust. No matter, there he lives now, anyway, collected up in bursting skin. The Man, Skeleton, or whatever, did he starve his wife's, children's spiritual as well as physical hungers? The Dwarf? Was he or was he not your friend, the lightning-rod salesman, always on the road, never settling, ever-moving, facing no encounters, running ahead of the lightning and selling rods, yes, but leaving others to face the storm, so maybe, through accident, or design, when he fell in with the free rides, he shrank not to a boy but a mean ball of grotesque tripes, all self-involved. The fortune-telling, Gypsy Dust Witch? Maybe someone who lived always tomorrow and let today slide, like myself, and so wound up pen having to guess other people's wild sunrises and sad sunsets. You tell me, you've seen her near. The Pinhead? The Sheep Boy? The Fire Eater? The Siamese Twins, good God, what were they? twins all bound up in tandem narcissism? We'll never know. They'll never tell. We've guessed, and probably guessed wrong, on ten dozen things the last half hour. Now - some plan. Where do we go from here?'

Charles Halloway placed forth a map of the town and drew in the location of the carnival with a blunt pencil.

'Do we keep hiding out? No. With Miss Foley, and so many others involved, we just can't. Well, then, how do we attack so we won't be picked off first thing? What kind of weapons - '

'Silver bullets.' cried Will suddenly.

'Heck, no!' snorted Jim. 'They're not vampires!'

'If we were Catholic, we could borrow church holy water and - '

'Nuts,' said Jim. 'Movie stuff. It don't happen that way in real life. Am I wrong, Mr. Halloway?'

'I wish you were, boy.'

Will's eyes glowed fiercely. 'Okay. Only one thing to do: trot down to the meadow with a couple gallons of kerosene and some matches - '

'That's against the law!' Jim exclaimed.

'Look who's talking! talking!'

'Hold on!'

But everyone stopped right then.

Whisper.

A faint tide of wind flowed up along through the library corridors and into this room.

'The front door,' Jim whispered. 'Someone just opened it.'

Far away, a gentle click. The draft that had for a moment stirred the boys' trouser cuffs and blown the man's hair, ceased.

'Someone just closed closed it.' it.'

Silence.

Just the great dark library with its labyrinths and hedgerow mazes of sleeping books.

'Someone's inside inside.'

The boys half rose, bleating in the backs of their mouths.

Charles Halloway waited, then said one word, softly: 'Hide.'

'We can't leave you - '

'Hide.'

The boys ran and vanished in the dark maze. Charles Halloway then rigidly, slowly, breathing in, breathing out, forced himself to sit back down, his eyes on the yellowed newspapers, to wait, to wait, then again... to wait some more.

41

A shadow moved among shadows.

Charles Halloway felt his soul submerge.

It took a long time for the, shadow and the man it escorted to come stand in the doorway of the room. The shadow seemed deliberate in its slowness so as to shingle his flesh and cheesegrate his steadily willed calm. And when at last the shadow reached the door it brought not one, not a hundred, but a thousand people with it to look in.

'My name is Dark,' said the voice.

Charles Halloway let out two fistfuls of air.

'Better known as the Illustrated Man,' said the voice. 'Where are the boys?'

'Boys?' Will's father turned at last to appraise the tall man who stood in the door.

The Illustrated Man sniffed the yellow pollen that whiffed up from the ancient books as quite suddenly Will's father saw them laid out in full sight, leaped up, stopped, then began to close them, one by one, as casually as possible.

The Illustrated Man pretended not to notice.

'The boys are not home. The two houses are empty. What a shame, they'll miss those free rides.'

'I wish I knew where they were.' Charles Halloway started carrying the books to the shelves. 'Hell, if they knew you were here with free tickets, they'd shout for joy.'

'Would they?' Mr. Dark let his smile melt like a white and pink paraffin candy toy he no longer had appetite for. Softly, he said, 'I could kill you.'

Charles Halloway nodded, walking slowly.

'Did you hear what I said?' barked the Illustrated Man.

'Yes.' Charles Halloway weighed the books, as if they were his judgment. 'But you won't kill now. You're too smart. You've kept the show on the road a long time, being smart.'

'So you've read a few papers and think you know all about us?'

'No, not all. Just enough to scare me.'

'Be more scared then,' said the crowd of night-crawling illustrations locked under black suiting, speaking through the thin lips. 'One of my friends, outside, can fix you so it seems you died of most natural heart failure.'

The blood banged at Charles Halloway's heart, knocked at his temples, tapped twice at his wrists.

The Witch, he thought.