5
Charles Halloway put his hand to the saloon’s double swing doors, hesitant, as if the grey hairs on the back of his hand, like antennae, had felt something beyond slide by in the October night. Perhaps great fires burned somewhere and their furnace blasts warned him not to step forth. Or another Ice Age had loomed across the land, its freezing bulk might already have laid waste a billion people in the hour. Perhaps Time itself fixed was draining off down an immense glass, with powdered darkness failing after to bury all.
Or maybe it was only that man in a dark suit, seen through the saloon window, across the street. Great paper rolls under one arm, a brush and bucket in his free hand, the man was whistling a tune, very far away.
It was a tune from another season, one that never ceased making Charles Halloway sad when he heard it. The song was incongruous for October, but immensely moving, overwhelming, no matter what day or what month it was sung:
I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
Their words repeat great
Of peace on earth, good will to men!
Charles Halloway shivered. Suddenly there was the old sense of terrified elation, of wanting to laugh and cry together when he saw the innocents of the earth wandering the snowy streets the day before Christmas among all the tired men and women whose faces were dirty with guilt, unwashed of sin, and smashed like small windows by life that hit without warning, ran, hid, came back and hit again.
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep!
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good will to men!”
The whistling died.
Charles Halloway stepped out. Far up ahead, the man who had whistled the tune was motioning his arms by a telegraph pole, silently working. Now he vanished into the open door of a shop.
Charles Halloway, not knowing why, crossed the street to watch the man pasting up one of the posters inside the un-rented and empty store.
Now the man stepped out the door with his brush, his paste bucket, his rolled papers. His eyes, a fierce and lustful shine, fixed on Charles Halloway. Smiling, he gestured an open hand.
Halloway stared.
The palm of that hand was covered with fine black silken hair. It looked like —
The hand clenched, tight. It waved. The man swept around the corner. Charles Halloway, stunned, flushed with sudden summer heat, swayed, then turned to gaze into the empty shop.
Two sawhorses stood parallel to each other under a single spotlight.
Placed over these two sawhorses like a funeral of snow and crystal was a block of ice six feet long. It shone dimly with its own effulgence, and its colour was light green-blue. It was a great cool gem resting there in the dark.
On a little white placard at one side near the window the following calligraphic message could be read by lamplight:
Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show —
Fantoccini, Marionette Circus, and Your
Plain Meadow Carnival. Arriving
Immediately! Here on Display, one of
our many attractions:
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IN THE WORLD
Halloway’s eyes leaped to the poster on the inside of the window.
And back to the cold long block of ice.
It was such a block of ice as he remembered from travelling magician’s shows when he was a boy, when the local ice company contributed a chunk of winter in which, for twelve hours on end, frost maidens lay embedded, on display while people watched and comedies toppled down the raw white screen and coming attractions came and went and at last the pale ladies slid forth all rimed, chipped free by perspiring sorcerers to be led off smiling into the dark behind the curtains.
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IN THE WORLD
And yet this vast chunk of wintry glass held nothing but frozen river water.
No. Not quite empty.
Halloway felt his heart pound one special time.
Within the huge winter gem was there not a special vacuum? a voluptuous hollow, a prolonged emptiness which undulated from tip to toe of the ice? and wasn’t this vacuum, this emptiness waiting to be filled with summer flesh, was it not shaped somewhat like a…woman?