They found the boys huddled in the back of the police car.
They looked as though they wanted to go home.
Pursuits
She could feel the mirrors waiting for her in each room much the same as you felt, without opening your eyes, that the first snow of winter has just fallen outside your window.
Miss Foley had first noticed, some years ago, that her house crowded with bright shadows of herself. Best, then, to was ignore the cold sheets of December ice in the hall, above the bureaus, in the bath. Best skate the thin ice, lightly. Paused, the weight of your attention might crack the shell. Plunged through the crust, you might drown in depths so cold, so remote that all the Past lay carved in tombstone marbles there. Ice water would syringe your veins. Transfixed at the mirror sill you would stand forever, unable to lift your gaze from the proofs of Time.
Yet tonight, with the echo of the running feet of the three boys dying away, she kept feeling snow fall in the mirrors of her house. She wanted to thrust through the frames to test their weather. But she was afraid that doing this might cause all the mirrors to somehow assemble in billionfold multiplications of self, an army of women marching away to become girls and girls marching to become Infinitely small children. So many people, crammed in one house, would provoke suffocation.
So what must she do about mirrors, Will Halloway, Jim Nightshade, and…the nephew?
Strange. Why not say my nephew?
Because, she thought, from the first when he came in the door, he didn’t belong, his proof was not proof, she kept waiting for…what?
Tonight. The carnival. Music, the nephew said, that must be heard, rides that must be ridden. Stay away from the maze where winter slept. Swim around with the carousel where summer, sweet as clover, honey-grass, and wild mint, kept its lovely time.
She looked out at the night lawn from which she had not yet retrieved the scattered jewels. Somehow she guessed this was a way the nephew had of getting rid of the two boys who might stop her using this ticket she took from the mantel:
CAROUSEL. ADMIT ONE.
She had waited for the nephew to come back. With time passing, she must act on her own. Something must be done not to hurt no, but slow down interference from such as Jim and Will. No one must stand between her and nephew, her and carousel, her and lovely gliding ride-around summer.
The nephew had said as much, by saying nothing, by just holding her hands, and breathing baked-apple-pie scent from his small pink mouth upon her face.
She lifted the telephone.
Across town she saw the light in the stone library building, as all the town had seen it, over the years. She dialled. A quiet voice answered. She said:
“Library? Mr Halloway? This is Miss Foley. Will’s teacher. In ten minutes, please, meet me in the police station…Mr Halloway?”
A pause.
“Are you still there…?
26
“I”d have sworn,” said one interne. “When we first got there…that old man was dead.
The ambulance and the police car had pulled up at the same moment at the crossroads, going back into town. One of the intermes had called over. Now one of the policemen called back:
“You’re joking!
The internes sat in their ambulance. They shrugged.
“Yeah. Sure. Joking.”
They drove on ahead their faces as quiet and white as their uniforms.
The police followed, with Jim and Will huddled in back, trying to say more, but the police started talking and laughing, retelling everything that happened to one another, so Will and Jim wound up lying, giving wrong names again, saying they lived around the comer from the police station.
They let the police drop them at two dark houses near the station and they ran up on those porches and grabbed the doorknobs and waited for the prowl car to swing off around the corner into the station, and then they came down and followed and stood looking at the yellow lights of the station all sun-coloured at midnight and Will glanced over and saw the whole evening come and go in Jim’s face and Jim watching the police station windows as if at any moment darkness might fill every room and put the lights out forever.