The ringmaster stood in the middle of the land. The balloon like a vast mouldy green cheese stood fixed to the sky. Then darkness came.
The last thing Will saw was the balloon swooping down, as clouds covered the moon.
In the night he felt the men rush to unseen tasks. He sensed the balloon, like a great fat spider, fiddling with the lines and poles, rearing a tapestry in the sky.
The clouds arose. The balloon sifted up.
In the meadow stood the skeleton main poles and wires of the main tent, waiting for its canvas skin.
More clouds poured over the white moon. Shadowed, Will shivered. He heard Jim crawling forward, seized his ankle, felt him stiffen.
“Wait! “ said Will. “They’re bringing out the canvas l”
“No,” said Jim. “Oh, no…”
For somehow instead, they both knew, the wires high-flung on the poles were catching swift clouds, ripping them free from the wind in streamers which, stitched and sewn by some great monster shadow, made canvas and more canvas as the tent took shape. At last there was the clear-water sound of vast flags blowing.
The motion stopped. The darkness within darkness was still.
Will lay, eyes shut, hearing the beat of great oil-black wings as if a huge, ancient bird had drummed down to live, to breathe, to survive in the night meadow.
The clouds blew away.
The balloon was gone.
The men were gone.
The tents rippled like black rain on their poles.
Suddenly it seemed a long way to town.
Instinctively, Will glanced behind himself.
Nothing but grass and whispers.
Slowly he looked back at the silent, dark seemingly empty tents.
“I don’t like it he said.
Jim could not tear his eyes away.
“Yeah,” he whispered. “Yeah.”
Will stood up. Jim lay on the earth.
”Jim!” said Will.
Jim jerked his head as if slapped. He was on his knees, he swayed up. His body turned, but his eyes were fastened to those black flags, the great side-show signs swarming with unguessed wings, horns, and demon smiles.
A bird screamed.
Jim jumped. Jim gasped.
Cloud shadows panicked them over the hills to the edge of town.
From there, the two boys ran alone.
13
The air was cold blowing in through the wide-open library window.
Charles Halloway had stood there for a long time.
Now, he quickened.
Along the street below fled two shadows, two boys above them matching shadow stride for stride. They softly printed the night air with treads.
“Jim!” cried the old man. “Will!”
But not aloud.
The boys went away towards home.
Charles Halloway looked out into the country.
Wandering alone in the library, letting his broom tell him things no one else could hear, he had heard the whistle and the disjointed-calliope hymns.
“Three,” he now said, half-aloud. “Three in the morning…”
In the meadow the tents, the carnival waited. Waited for someone, anyone to wade along the grassy surf. The great tents filled like bellows. They softly issued forth exhalations of air that smelled like ancient yellow beasts.
But only the moon looked in at the hollow dark, the deep caverns. Outside, night beasts hung in midgallop on a carousel. Beyond lay fathoms of Mirror Maze which housed a multifold series of empty vanities one wave on another, still, serene, silvered with age, white with time. Any shadow, at the entrance, might stir reverberations the colour of fright, unravel deep-buried moons.
If a man stood here would he see himself unfolded away a billion times to eternity? Would a billion images look back, each face and the face after and the face after that old, older, oldest? Would he find himself lost in a fine dust away off deep down there, not fifty but sixty, not sixty but seventy, not seventy but eighty, ninety, ninety-nine years old?
The maze did not ask.
The maze did not tell.
It simply stood and waited like a great arctic floe.
“Three o”clock…”
Charles Halloway was cold. His skin was suddenly a lizard’s skin. His stomach filled with blood turned to rust. His mouth tasted of night damps.
Yet he could not turn from the library window.
Far off, something glittered in the meadow.