”You can’t hurt me!” the boy shrieked.
”Funny,” said Charles Halloway. “I think I can”
He pressed the boy, almost lovingly, close, very close.
”Murder!” wailed the boy. “Murder.”
”I’m not going to murder you, Jed, Mr. Dark, whoever, whatever you are. You’re going to murder yourself because you can’t stand being near people like me, not this close, close, not this long.”
”Evil!” groaned the boy, writhing. “You’re evil!”
”Evil?” Will’s father laughed, which made the boy, wasp-stung and brambled by the sound, jerk all the more violently. “Evil?” The man’s hands were flypaper fastened to the small bones. “Strange hearing that from you, Jed. So it must seem. Good to evil seems evil. So I will do only good to you, Jed. I will simply hold you and watch you poison yourself. I will do good to you, Jed, Mr. Dark, Mr. Proprietor, boy, until you tell what’s wrong with Jim. Wake him up. Let him free. Give him life!”
”Can’t … can’t… “ The boy’s voice fell down a well inside his body, fading away, away “can’t…”
”You mean you won’t?”
” … can’t …”
”All right, boy, all right, then here and here and this and this …”
They looked like father and son long apart, passionately met, embraced, yet more embraced, as the man lifted his wounded hand to gently touch the stricken face as the crowd, the teem, of illustrations shivered and flew now this way and that in microscopic forays quickly abandoned. The boy’s eyes swiveled wildly, fixed upon the manes mouth. He saw there the strange and somehow lovely smile once flung as beatification to the Witch.
He gathered the boy somewhat closer and thought, Evil has only the power that we give it. I give you nothing. I take back. Starve. Starve. Starve.
The two matchstick lights in the boy’s affrighted eyes blew out.
The boy, and his stricken and bruised conclave of monsters, his felt but half-seen crowd, fell to earth.
There should have been a roar like a mountain slid to ruin.
But there was only a rustle, like a Japanese paper lantern dropped in the dust.
53
Charles Halloway stood for a long while, breathing deep, lungs aching, looking down at the body. The shadows swooned and fluttered in all the canvas alleys where odd assorted sizes of freaks and people, fleshed in their own terrors and sins, held to poles, moaning in disbelief. Somewhere, the Skeleton moved out in the light. Somewhere else, the Dwarf almost knew who he was, and scuttled forth like a crab from a cave to blink and blink again at Will bent working over Jim, at Will’s father bent to exhaustion over the still form of the silent boy, while the merry-go-round, at last, slow, slow, came to a stop, rocking like a ferryboat in the watery-blowing grass.
The carnival was a great dark hearth lit with gathered coals, as shadows came to stare and fire their gaze with the tableau by the carousel.
There in the moonlight lay the, illustrated boy named Dark.
There lay dragons slaughtered, towers ruined, monsters from dim ages toppled into rusted coinages pterodactyls smashed like biplanes from old and always meaningless wars, crustacea the color of emeralds abandoned on a white sand shore where the tide of life was going out, all, all the illustrations changing now, shifting, shriveling as the small flesh cooled. There the obscene wink of the navel eye gasped in on itself, there the nipple-iris of a trumpeting mastodon went blind and raved at its blindness; each and every picture remembered from the tall Mr. Dark now rendered down to miniature canvas pronged and forked over a boy’s tennis-racket bones.
More freaks, with faces the color of beds where so many had lost the battle of souls, emerged from the shadows to glide in a great and ever more curious carousel motion about Charles Halloway and his dropped burden.
Will paused in his desperate push and relaxation, push and relaxation, trying to shape Jim back to life, unafraid of the watchers in the dark, no time for that! Even if there were time, these freaks, he sensed, were breathing the night as if they had not been fed on such rare fine air in years!