She held the door wide.
Will shuffled a foot and stopped.
Beyond Miss Foley, a beaded curtain hung like a dark blue thunder shower across the parlor entry.
Where the colored rain touched the floor, a pair of dusty small shoes poked out. Just beyond the downpour the evil boy loitered.
Evil? Will blinked. Why evil? Because. "Because" was reason enough. A boy, yes, and evil.
"Robert?" Miss Foley turned, calling through the dark blue always-falling beads of rain. She took Will's hand and gently pulled him inside. "Come meet two of my students."
The rain poured aside. A fresh candy-pink hand broke through, all by itself, as if testing the weather in the hall.
Good grief, thought Will, he'll look me in the eye! see the merry-go-round and himself on it moving back, back. I know it's printed on my eyeball like I been struck by lightning!
"Miss Foley!" said Will.
Now a pink face stuck out through the dim frozen necklaces of storm.
"We got to tell you a terrible thing."
Jim struck Will's elbow, hard, to shut him.
Now the body came out through the dark watery flow of beads. The rain shushed behind the small boy.
Miss Foley leaned toward him, expectant. Jim gripped his elbow, fiercely. He stammered, flushed, then spat it out:
"Mr. Crosetti!"
Quite suddenly, clearly, he saw the sign in the barber's window. The sign seen but not seen as they ran by:
CLOSED ON ACCOUNT OF ILLNESS.
"Mr. Crosetti!" he repeated, and added, swiftly, "He's ... dead!"
"What ... the barber?"
"The barber?" echoed Jim.
"See this haircut?" Will turned, trembling, his hand to his head. "He did it. And we just walked by there and the sign was up and people told us--"
"What a shame." Miss Foley was reaching out to fetch the strange boy forward. "I'm so sorry. Boys, this is Robert, my nephew from Wisconsin."
Jim stuck out his hand. Robert the Nephew examined it, curiously. "What are you looking at?" he asked.
"You look familiar," said Jim.
Jim! Will yelled to himself.
"Like an uncle of mine," said Jim, all sweet and calm.
The nephew flicked his eyes to Will, who looked only at the floor, afraid the boy would see his eyeballs whirl with the remembered carousel. Crazily, he wanted to hum the backward music.
Now, he thought, face him!
He looked up straight at the boy.
And it was wild and crazy and the floor sank away beneath for there was the pink shiny Halloween mask of a small pretty boy's face, but almost as if holes were cut where the eyes of Mr. Cooger shone out, old, old, eyes as bright as sharp blue stars and the light from those stars taking a million years to get here. And through the little nostrils cut in the shiny wax mask, Mr. Cooger's breath went in steam came out ice. And the Valentine candy tongue moved small behind those trim white candy-kernel teeth.