The carousel slowed itself through the cold night wind.
Will let Jim go.
How many times, thought Will, did it go around? Sixty, eighty ... ninety ...?
How many times? said Jim's face, all nightmare, watching the dead carousel shiver and halt in the dead grass, a stopped world now which nothing, not their hearts, hands or heads, could send back anywhere.
They walked slowly to the merry-go-round, their shoes whispering.
The shadowy figure lay on the near side, on the plank floor, its face turned away.
One hand hung off the platform.
It did not belong to a boy.
It seemed a huge wax hand shriveled by fire.
The man's hair was long, spidery, white. It blew like milkweed in the breathing dark.
They bent to see the face.
The eyes were mummified shut. The nose was collapsed upon gristle. The mouth was a ruined white flower, the petals twisted into a thin wax sheath over the clenched teeth through which faint bubblings sighed. The man was small inside his clothes, small as a child, but tall, strung out, and old, so old, very old, not ninety, not one hundred, no, not one hundred ten, but one hundred twenty or one hundred thirty impossible years old.
Will touched.
The man was cold as an albino frog.
He smelled of moon swamps and old Egyptian bandages. He was something found in museums, wrapped in nicotine linens, sealed in glass.
But he was alive, puling like a babe, and shriveling unto death, fast, very fast, before their eyes.
Will was sick over the side of the carousel.
Then, falling against each other, Jim and Will sledge-hammered the insane leaves, the unbelievable grass, the insubstantial earth with their numbed shoes, fleeing off down the midway....
Chapter 24
MOTHS TICKED off the high tin-shaded arc light which swung abandoned above the crossroads. Below, in a deserted gas station in the midst of country wilderness there was another ticking. In a coffinsized phone booth speaking to people lost somewhere across night hills, two white-faced boys were crammed, holding to each other at every flit of bat, each sliding of cloud across the stars.
Will hung up the phone. The police and an ambulance were coming.
At first he and Jim had shout-whispered-wheezed at each other, pumping along, stumbling: they should go home, sleep, forget--no! they should take a freight train west!--no! for Mr. Cooger, if he survived what they'd done to him, that old man, that old old old man, would follow them over the world until he found and tore them apart! Arguing, shivering, they ended up in a phone booth, and now saw the police car bouncing along the road, its siren moaning, with the ambulance behind. All the men looked out at the two boys whose teeth chattered in the moth-flicked light.
Three minutes later they all advanced down the dark midway, Jim leading the way, talking, gibbering.
"He's alive. He's got to be alive. We didn't mean to do it! We're sorry!" He stared at the black tents. "You hear? We're sorry!"
"Take it easy, boy," said one of the policemen. "Go on."
The two policemen in midnight blue, the two internes like ghosts, the two boys, made the last mm past the ferris wheel and reached the merry-go-round.
Jim groaned.
The horses trampled the night air, in midplunge. Starlight glittered on the brass poles. That was all.
"He's gone...."
"He was here, we swear!" said Jim. "One hundred fifty, two hundred years old, and dying of it!"