"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 man's 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.
Chapter 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 Are 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 coinage, 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!
And as Charles Halloway watched, and the fox-fire, lobster-moist, phlegm-trapped eyes watched from distances, the boy-who-had-been-Mr.-Dark grew yet colder, as death cut the timbers of nightmares, and the calligraphies, the smoky lightnings of sketch that coiled and crouched and soared like terrible banners of a lost war, began to vanish one by one from the strewn small body.
A score of freaks glanced fearfully round as if the moon had suddenly filled itself full and they could see; they chafed their wrists as if chains had fallen from them, chafed their necks as if weights had crumbled from their bowed shoulders. Stumbled forth after long entombments, they blinked swiftly, disbelieving the packet of their misery sprawled near the spent carousel. If they dared they might have bent to tremble their hands over that suddenly death-sweet mouth, the marbling brow. As it was they watched, benumbed, as their portrait pictures, the vital stuffs of their mortal greed, rancor, and poisonous guilt, the emerald abstracts of their self-blinded eyes, self-wounded mouths, self-trapped bodies melted one by one from this insignificant mound of snow. There melted the Skeleton! there the sidewise-scuttling crayfish Dwarf! Now the Lava Sipper took leave of autumn flesh, followed by the black Executioner from London Dock, there soared off and gone went the Human Montgolfier, the Balloon Man, Avoirdupois the Magnificent! deflated to purest air, there! there fled mobs and bands, as death washed the drawing board clean!
Now there lay just a plain dead boy, unbruised by pictures, staring up at the stars with Mr. Dark's empty eyes.
"Ahhhh ..."
In a chorus of release, the strange people in the shadows sighed.
Perhaps the calliope gave a last ringmaster's bark. Perhaps thunder turned, sleeping, in the clouds. Suddenly all wheeled about. The freaks stampeded. North, south, east, west, free of tent, master, dark law, free above all of each other, they ran like albino pigs, tuskless boars, and stricken sloths before storms.
It must have been, it seemed, each yanked a rope, loosed a tent-peg, running.
For now the sky was shaken with a fatal respiration, the breathing down, the insunk rattle and pule of collapsing darkness as the tents gave way.
With hiss of viper, swirl of cobra, the ropes insanely raveled, slithered, snapped, cut grass with frictioned whips.
The networks of the vast Main Freak Tent convulsed, parted bones, small from medium, and medium from brontosaur magnificent.
All swayed with impending fall.
The menagerie tent shut up like a dark Spanish fan.