And the boys knew even more.
They knew that she was blind, but special blind. She could dip down her hands to feel the bumps of the world, touch house roofs, probe attic bins, reap dust, examine draughts that blew through halls and souls that blew through people, draughts vented from bellows to thump-whist, to pound-temples., to pulse-throat, and back to bellows again. Just as they felt that balloon sift down like an autumn rain, so she could feel their souls disinhabit, reinhabit their tremulous nostrils. Each soul, a vast warm fingerprint, felt different, she could roll it in her hand like clay; smelled different, Will could hear her snuffing his life away; tasted different, she savoured them with her raw-gummed mouth, her puff-adder tongue; sounded different, she stuffed their souls in one ear, tissued them out the other!
Her hands played down the air, one for Will, one for Jim.
The balloon shadow washed them with panic, rinsed them with terror.
The Witch exhaled.
The balloon, freed of the small sour ballast, uprose. The shadow passed.
“Oh God!” said Jim. “Now they know where we live!”
Both gasped. Some monstrous baggage brushed and dragged across the shingles of Jim’s house.
“Will! She’s got me!”
“No! I think — “
The drag, brush, rustle scurried from bottom to top of Jim’s roof. Then Will saw the balloon whirl up, fly off toward the hills.
“She’s gone, there she goes! Jim, she did something to your roof. Shove the monkey pole over!”
Jim slid the long slender clothesline pole over, Will fixed it on his sill, then swung out, hand over hand, swung until Jim pulled him through his window and they barefooted it into Jim’s clothes closet and boosted and hoisted each other up inside the attic that smelled like lumber mills, old, dark, and too silent. Perched out on the high roof, shivering, Will cried: “Jim, there it is.”
And there it was, in the moonlight.
It was a track like a snail paints on a sidewalk. It glistened It was silver-slick. But this was a path left by a gigantic snail that, if it existed at all, weighed a hundred pounds. The silver ribbon was a yard across. Starting down at the leaf-flued rain trough, the silver track shimmered to the rooftop, then tremored down the other side.
“Why?” gasped Jim. “Why?”
“Easier than looking for house numbers or street names. She marked your roof so you can see it for miles around, night or day!”
“Ohmigosh.” Jim bent to touch the track. A faint evil-smelling glue covered his finger. “Will, what’ll we do?”
“ I’ve got a hunch,” the other whispered, “they won’t be back till morning. They can’t just start a rumpus. They got some plan. Right now — there’s what we do!”
Coiled across the lawn below like a vast boa constrictor, waiting for them, was the garden hose.
Will was gone, down, fast, and didn’t knock anything over or wake anyone up. Jim, on the roof, was surprised, in no time at all, when Will came scuttling up all panting teeth, the water-fizzing hose in his fist.
“Will, you’re a genius!”
“Sure! Quick!”
They dragged the hose to drench the shingles, to wash the silver, flood the evil mercury paint away.
Working, Will glanced off at the pure colour of night turning toward morn and saw the balloon trying to make decisions on the wind. Did it sense, would it come back? Would she mark the roof again, and they have to wash it off, and she mark it and they wash it, until dawn? Yes, if need be.
If only, thought Will, I could stop the Witch for good. They don’t know our names or where we live, Mr Cooger’s too near dead to remember or tell. The Dwarf — if he is the lightning-rod man — is mad — and, God willing, won’t recollect! And they won’t dare bother Miss Foley until morning. So, grinding their teeth way out in the meadows, they’ve sent the Dust Witch to search…
“I’m a fool,” grieved Jim, quietly, rinsing the roof where the lightning-rod had been. “Why didn’t I leave it up?”
“Lightning hasn’t struck yet,” Will said. “And if we jump lively, it won’t. Now — over here!”