Chapter 13
THE AIR was cold blowing in through the wide-open library window.
Charles Halloway had stood there for a long time.
Now, he quickened.
Along the street below fled two shadows, two boys above them matching shadow stride for stride. They softly printed the night air with treads.
"Jim!" cried the old man. "Will!"
But not aloud.
The boys went away toward home.
Charles Halloway looked out into the country.
Wandering alone in the library, letting his broom tell him things no one else could hear, he had heard the whistle and the disjointed calliope hymns.
"Three," he now said, half-aloud. "Three in the morning ..."
In the meadow, the tents, the carnival waited. Waited for someone, anyone to wade along the grassy surf. The great tents filled like bellows. They softly issued forth exhalations of air that smelled like ancient yellow beasts.
But only the moon looked in at the hollow dark, the deep caverns. Outside, night beasts hung in mid-gallop on a carousel. Beyond lay fathoms of Mirror Maze which housed a multifold series of empty vanities one wave on another, still, serene, silvered with age, white with time. Any shadow, at the entrance, might stir reverberations the color of fright, unravel deep-buried moons.
If a man stood here would he see himself unfolded away a billion times to eternity? Would a billion images look back, each face and the face after and the face after that old, older, oldest? Would he find himself lost in a fine dust away off deep down there, not fifty but sixty, not sixty but seventy, not seventy but eighty, ninety, ninety-nine years old?
The maze did not ask.
The maze did not tell.
It simply stood and waited like a great arctic floe.
"Three o'clock ..."
Charles Halloway was cold. His skin was suddenly a lizard's skin. His stomach filled with blood turned to rust. His mouth tasted of night damps.
Yet he could not turn from the library window.
Far off, something glittered in the meadow.
It was moonlight, flashing on a great glass.
Perhaps the light said something, perhaps it spoke in code.
I'll go there, thought Charles Halloway, I won't go there.
I like it, he thought, I don't like it.
A moment later the library door slammed.
Going home, he passed the empty store window.
Inside stood two abandoned sawhorses.
Between lay a pool of water. In the water floated a few shards of ice. In the ice were a few long strands of hair.
Charles Halloway saw but chose not to see. He turned and was gone. The street was soon as empty as the hardware-store window.