Something Wicked This Way Comes

What kind of tune would Jim play to represent the carnival, Miss Foley, Mr Cooger, and/or the evil nephew?

Ten-fifteen. Ten-thirty.

No music.

Will did not like Jim sitting in his room thinking what? Of the Mirror Maze? What had he seen there? And, seeing, what did he plan?

Will stirred, restively.

Especially he did not like to think of Jim with no father between him and the tent shows and all that lay dark in the meadows. And a mother who wanted him around so very much, he just had to get away, get out, breathe free night air, know free night waters running toward bigger freer seas.

Jim! he thought. Let’s have the music!

And at ten-thirty-five, it came.

He heard, or thought he heard, Jim out in the starlight leaping way up and coming flat down like a spring tomcat on the vast xylophone. And the tune! Was or wasn’t it like the funeral dirge played backward by the old carousel calliope?!!

Will started to raise his window to be sure. But suddenly, Jim’s window slid quietly up.

He hadn’t been down on the boards! It was just Will’s wild wish that made the tune! Will started to whisper, but stopped.

For Jim, without a word, scuttled down the drainpipe.

Jim! Will thought.

Jim, on the lawn, stiffened as if hearing his name.

You’re not going without me, Jim?

Jim glanced swiftly up.

If he saw Will, he made no sign.

Jim, Will thought, we’re still pals, smell things nobody else smells, hear things no one else hears, got the same blood, run the same way. Now this first time ever, you’re sneaking out! Ditching me!

But the driveway was empty.

A salamander flicking the hedge, there went Jim.

Will was out the window, down the trellis, and over the hedge, before he thought: I’m alone. If I lose Jim, it’s the first time I’ll be out alone at night, too. And where am I going? Wherever Jim goes.

Lord, let me keep up!

Jim skimmed like a dark owl after a mouse. Will loped like a weaponless hunter after the owl. They sailed their shadows over October lawns.

And when they stopped. . .

There was Miss Foley’s house.

22

Jim glanced back.

Will became a bush behind a bush, a shadow among shadows, with two starlight rounds of glass, his eyes, holding the image of Jim calling up in a whisper toward the second-floor windows.

‘Hey there. . .hey. . .’

Good grief, thought Will, he wants to be slit and stuffed with broken Mirror Maze glass.

‘Hey!’ called Jim, softly. ‘You. . .!’

A shadow uprose on a dim-lit shade, above. A small shadow. The nephew had brought Miss Foley home, they were in their separate rooms or—Oh Lord, thought Will, I hope she’s safe home. Maybe, like the lightning-rod salesman, she -

‘Hey. . .!’

Jim gazed up with that funny warm look of breathless anticipation he often had nights in summer at the shadow-show window Theatre in that house a few streets over. Looking up with love, with devotion, like a cat Jim waited for some special dark mouse to run forth. Crouched, now slowly he seemed to grow taller, as if his bones were pulled by the in the window above, which now suddenly vanished.

Will ground his teeth.

He felt the shadow sift down through the house like a cold breath. He could wait no longer. He leaped forth.

‘Jim!’

He seized Jim’s arm.

‘Will, what you doing here?!’

‘Jim, don’t talk to him! Get out of here. My gosh, he’ll chew and spit out your bones!’

Jim writhed himself free.

‘Will, go home! You’ll spoil everything!’

‘He scares me, Jim, what you want from him!? This afternoon. . .in the maze, did you see something!!?’

‘. . .Yes. . .’

‘For gosh sakes, what!’

Will grabbed Jim’s shirt front, felt his heart bang under the chest bones. ‘Jim—’

‘Let go.’ Jim was terribly quiet. ‘If he knows you’re here, he won t come out. Willy, if you don’t let go, I’ll remember when—’

‘When what!’

‘When I’m older, darn it, older!’

Jim spat.

As if he was struck by lightning, Will jumped back.

He looked at his empty hands and put one up to wipe the spittle off his cheek.

‘Oh, Jim,’ he mourned.

And he heard the merry-go-round motioning, gliding on black night waters around, around, and Jim on a black stallion riding off and about, circling in tree-shadow and he wanted to cry out, Look! the merry-go-round I you want it to go forward, don’t you, Jim? forward instead of back! and you on it, around once and you’re fifteen, circling and you’re sixteen, three times more and nineteen! music! and you’re twenty and off, standing tall! not Jim any more, still thirteen, almost fourteen on the empty midway, with me small, me young, me scared!

Will hauled off and hit Jim, hard, on the nose.

Then he jumped Jim, wrapped him tight, and toppled him rolling down, yelling, in the bushes. He slapped Jim’s mouth, stuffed it, mashed it full of fingers to snap and bite at, suffocating the angry grunts and yells.

The front door opened.

Will crushed the air out of Jim, lay heavy on him, fisting his mouth tight.

Something stood on the porch. A tiny shadow scanned the town, searching for but not finding Jim.