Something Wicked This Way Comes

So, looking back down the corridor, was Dad shocked to see he owned a son who visited this separate 20,000-fathoms-deep world? Dad always seemed stunned when Will rose up before him, as if they had met a lifetime ago and one had grown old while the other stayed young, and this fact stood between. . . .

Far off, the old man smiled.

They approached each other, carefully.

‘Is that you, Will? Grown an inch since this morning.’ Charles Halloway shifted his gaze. ‘Jim? Eyes darker, cheeks paler; you bum yourself at both ends, Jim?’

‘Heck.’ said Jim.

‘No such place as Heck. But hell’s right here under ‘A’ for Alighieri.’

‘Allegory’s beyond me,’ said Jim.

‘How stupid of me,’ Dad laughed. ‘I mean Dante. Look at this. Pictures by Mister Dore, showing all the aspects. Hell never looked better. Here’s souls sunk to their gills in slime. There’s someone upside down, wrong side out.’

‘Boy howdy!’ Jim eyed the pages two different ways and thumbed on. ‘Got any dinosaur pictures?’

Dad shook his head. ‘That’s over in the next aisle.’ He strolled them around and reached out. ‘Here we are: Pterodactyl, Kite of Destruction! or what about Drums of Doom: The Saga of the Thunder Lizards! Pep you up, Jim?’

‘I’m pepped!’

Dad winked at Will. Will winked back. They stood now, a boy with corn-coloured hair and a man with moon-white hair, a boy with a summer-apple, a man with a winter-apple face. Dad, Dad, thought Will, why, why, he looks. . .like me in a smashed mirror!

And suddenly Will remembered nights rising at two in the morning to go to the bathroom and spying across town to see that one single light in the high library window and know Dad had lingered on late murmuring and reading alone under these green jungle lamps. It made Will sad and funny to see that light, to know the old man—he stopped to change the word—his father, was here in all this shadow.

‘Will,’ said the old man who was also a janitor who happened to be his father, ‘what about you?’

‘Huh?’ Will shook himself.

‘You need a white-hat or a black-hat book?’

‘Hats?’ said Will.

‘Well, Jim—’ they perambulated, Dad running his fingers along the book spines—’he wears the black ten-gallon hats and reads books to fit. Middle name’s Moriarty, right, Jim? Any day now he’ll move up from Fu Manchu to Machiavelli here—medium-size dark fedora. Or over along to Dr Faustus—extra large black Stetson. That leaves the white-hat boys to you, Will. Here’s Gandhi. Next door is St Thomas. And on the next level, well. . .Buddha.’

‘You don’t mind,’ said Will, ‘I’ll settle for The Mysterious Island.’

‘What,’ asked Jim, scowling, ‘is all this talk about white and black hats?’

‘Why—’ Dad handed Jules Verne to Will—‘it’s just, a long time ago, I had to decide, myself, which colour I’d wear.’

‘So,’ said Jim, ‘which did you pick?’

Dad looked surprised. Then he laughed uneasily.

‘Since you need to ask, Jim, you make me wonder. Will, tell Mom I’ll be home soon. Get out of here, both of you. Miss Watriss!’ he called softly to the librarian at the desk. ‘Dinosaurs and mysterious islands, coming up!’

The door slammed.

Outside, a weather of stars ran clear in an ocean sky.

‘Heck.’ Jim sniffed north, Jim sniffed south. ‘Where’s the storm? That darn salesman promised. I just got to watch that lightning fizz down my drainpipes!’

Will let the wind ruffle and refit his clothes, his skin, his hair. Then he said, faintly, ‘It’ll be here. By morning.’

‘Who says?’

‘The huckleberries all down my arms. They say.’

‘Great!’

The wind flew Jim away.

A similar kite, Will swooped to follow.

3

 Watching the boys vanish away, Charles Halloway suppressed a sudden urge to run with them, make the pack. He knew what the wind was doing to them where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life. Somewhere in him, a shadow turned mournfully over. You had to run with a night like this, so the sadness could not hurt.

Look! he thought. Will runs because running is its own excuse. Jim runs because something’s up ahead of him.

Yet, strangely, they do run together.

What’s the answer, he wondered, walking through the library, putting out the lights, putting out the lights, putting out the lights, is it all in the whorls on our thumbs and fingers? Why are some people all grasshopper fiddlings, scrapings, all antennae shivering, one big ganglion eternally knotting, slip-knotting, square-knotting themselves? They stoke a furnace all their lives, sweat their lips, shine their eyes and start it all in the crib. Caesar’s lean and hungry friends. They eat the dark, who only stand and breathe.

That’s Jim, all bramble-hair and itchweed.