Something Wicked This Way Comes

‘Jim, yes . . .’ Mr. Dark wheeled in a new direction. ‘Jim, show me where your friend is.’ Softly. ‘We’ll shut him up, give you the ride that would have been his if he’d used his head. Right, Jim?’ A dove voice, cooing. ‘Closer. I hear your heart jump!’

Stop! thought Will to his chest.

Stop! Jim clenched his breath. Stop!!

‘I wonder . . . are you in this alcove . . . ?’

Mr. Dark let the peculiar gravity of a certain group of stacks tug him forward.

‘You here, Jim . . .? Or . . . over behind . . . ?’

He shoved a trolley of books mindlessly off on rubber rollers to bump through the night. A long way off, it crashed and spilled its contents to the floor like so many dead black ravens.

‘Smart hide-and-seekers, both,’ said Mr. Dark. ‘But someone’s smarter. Did you hear the carousel calliope tonight? Did you know, someone dear to you was down to the carousel? Will? Willy? William. William Halloway. Where’s your mother tonight?’

Silence.

‘She was out riding the night wind, Willy-William. Around. We put her on. Around. We left her on. Around. You hear, Willy? Around, a year, another year, another, around, around!’

Dad! thought Will. Where are you!

In the far room, Charles Halloway, seated, his heart pounding, heard and thought, He won’t find them, I won’t move unless he does, he can’t find them, they won’t listen! they won’t believe! he’ll go away!

‘Your mother, Will,’ called Mr. Dark, softly. ‘Around and around, can you guess which direction, Willy?’

Mr. Dark circled his thin ghost hand in the dark air between the stacks.

‘Around, around, and when we let your mother off, boy, and showed her herself in the Mirror Maze, you should have heard the one single sound she made. She was like a cat with a hair ball in her so big and sticky there was no way to gag it out, no way to scream around the hair coming out her nostrils and ears and eyes, boy, and her old old old. The last we saw of her, boy Willy, she was running off away from what she saw in the mirrors. She’ll bang Jim’s house door but when his ma sees a thing, two hundred years old slobbering at the keyhole, begging the mercy of gunshot death, boy, Jim’s ma will gag the same way, like a hairballed cat sick but can’t be sick, and beat her away, send her beggaring the streets, where no one’ll believe, Will, such a kettle of bones and spit, no one’ll believe this was a rose beauty, your kind relations! So Will, it’s up to us to run find, ran save her, for we know who she is—right, Will, right, Will, right, right, right?!’

The dark man’s voice hissed away to silence.

Very faintly now, somewhere in the library, someone was sobbing.

Ah . . .

The Illustrated Man gassed the air pleasantly from his dank lungs.

Yesssssssssss . . .

‘Here . . .’ he, murmured. ‘What? Filed under B for Boys? A for Adventure? H for Hidden. S for Secret. T for Terrified? Or filed under J for Jim or N for Nightshade, W for William, H for Halloway? Where are my two precious human books, so I may turn their pages, eh?’

He kicked a place for his right foot on the first shelf of a towering stack.

He shoved his right foot in, put his weight there, and swung his left foot free.

‘There.’

His left foot hit the second shelf, knocked space. He climbed. His right foot kicked a hole on the third shelf, plunged books back, and so up and up he climbed, to fourth shelf, to fifth, to six, groping dark library heavens, hands clutching shelfboards, then scrabbling higher to leaf night to find boys, if boys there were, like bookmarks among books.

His right hand, a princely tarantula, garlanded with roses, cracked a book of Bayeaux tapestries aspin down the sightless abyss below. It seemed an age before the tapestries struck, all askew, a ruin of beauty, an avalanche of gold, silver, and sky-blue thread on the floor.

His left hand, reaching the ninth shelf as he panted, grunted, encountered empty space—no books.

‘Boys, are you here on Everest?’

Silence. Except for the faint sobbing, nearer now.

‘Is it cold here? Colder? Coldest?’

The eyes of the Illustrated Man came abreast of the eleventh shelf.

Like a corpse laid rigid out, face down just three inches away, was Jim Nightshade.

One shelf further up in the catacomb, eyes trembling with tears, lay William Halloway.

‘Well,’ said Mr. Dark.

He reached a hand to pat Will’s head.

‘Hello,’ he said.

43

To Will, the palm of the hand that drifted up was like a moon rising.

Upon it was the fiery blue-inked portrait of himself. Jim, too, saw a hand before his face.

His own picture looked back at him from the palm.

The hand with Will’s picture grabbed Will.

The hand with Jim’s picture grabbed Jim.

Shrieks and yells.

The Illustrated Man heaved.

Twisting, he fell-jumped to the floor.

The boys, kicking, yelling, fell with him. They landed on their feet, toppled, collapsed, to be held, reared, set right, fistfuls of their shirts in Mr. Dark’s fists.

‘Jim!’ he said. ‘Will! What were you doing up there, boys? Surely not reading?’

‘Dad!’

‘Mr. Halloway!’

Will’s father stepped from the dark.