”Around here!” Will jumped, pulling his father. The calliope played sweet. To pull Jim, to draw Jim. And when the parade arrived with Electrico? Back the music would spin, back the carousel run, to shard away his skin, to freshen forth his years! Will stumbled, fell. Dad picked him up.
And then …
There arose a human barking, yapping, baying, whining, as if all had fallen. In a long-drawn moan, a gasp, a shuddering sigh, an entire crowd of people with crippled throats made chorus together.
”Jim! They’ve got Jim!”
”No …” murmured Charles Halloway, strangely. “Maybe Jim … or us … got them.”
They stepped around the last tent.
Wind blew dust in their faces.
Will clapped his hand up, squinched his nose. The dust was antique spice, burnt maple leaves, a prickling blue that teemed and sifted to earth. Swarming its own shadows, the dust filtered over the tents.
Charles Halloway sneezed. Figures jumped and scurried away from an upended, half-tilted object abandoned half-way between one tent and the carousel.
The object was the electric chair, capsized, with straps dangling from wooden arms and legs, and a metal headcap hanging from its top.
”But,” said Will. “Where’s Mr. Electrico!? I mean Mr. Cooger!?”
”That must have been him.”
”What must have been him?”
But the answer was there, sifting down the midway in the whorling wind devils … the burnt spice, the autumn incense that had floured them when they turned this comer.
Kill or cure, Charles Halloway thought. He imagined them rushed in the last few seconds, toting the ancient dustsack boneheap over starched grasses in his disconnected chair, perhaps only one in a running series of attempts to foster, encourage, preserve life in what was really nothing but a mortuary junkpile, rust-flakes and dying coals that no wind could blow alight again. Yet they must try. How many times in the last twenty-four hours had they run out on such excursions, only, in panic, to cease activity because the merest jolt, the slightest breath, threatened to shake old ancient Cooger down to mealmush and chaff? Better to leave him propped in electric-warm chair, a continual exhibit, an ever-going-on performance for gaping audiences, and try again, but especially try now, when, lights out, and crowds herded off in the dark, all threatened by one smile on a bullet, there was need of Cooger as he once was, tall, flame-headed, and riven with earthquake violence. But somewhere, twenty seconds, ten seconds ago, the last glue crumbled, the last bolt of life fell free, and the mummy-doll, the Erector-set grotesque disencumbered itself in smoke puffs and November leaflets, a broadcast of mortality along the wind. Mr. Cooger, threshed in a final harvest, was now a billion parchment flecks, tumbled sea-scrolls capered in meadows. A mere dust explosion in a silo of ancient grain: gone.
”Oh, no. no, no,, no,, no,” someone murmured.
Charles Halloway touched Will’s arm.
Will stopped saying “Oh, no, no, no.” He, too, in the last few moments, had thought the same as his father, of the toted corpse, the strewn bone-meal, the mineral-enriched hills of grass…
Now there was only the empty chair and the last particles of mica, the radiant motes of peculiar dirt crusting the straps. And the freaks, who had been toting the baroque dump, now fled to shadows.
We made them run, thought Will, but something made them drop it!
No, not something. Someone.
Will flexed his eyes.
The carousel, deserted, empty, traveled on its way through its own special time, forward.
But between the fallen chair and the carousel, standing alone, was that a freak? No …
”Jim!”
Dad knocked his elbow and Will shut up.
Jim, he thought.
And where, now, was Mr. Dark?
Somewhere. For he had started the carousel, hadn’t he? Yes! To draw them, to draw Jim, and—what else? Right now there was no time, for—
Jim turned from the spilled chair, turned and walk slowly toward the free, free ride.
He was going where he had always known he must go.
Like a weather vane in wild seasons he had tremored this way, wandered that, hesitated upon bright horizons and warm directions, only at last now to tilt and, half sleep-walking, tremble about in the bright brass pull and summer march of music. He could not look away.