Witch! Here! He ran leaving patterns, ran feeling crazy fine, wild as a hare who has chewed some secret, delicious, sweetly poisonous root that now gallops him berserk. Knees striking his chin, shoes crushing wet leaves, he soared over a hedge, his hands full of bristly porcupine weapons, fear and joy a tumble of mixed marbles in his mouth.
He looked back. The balloon swung near! It inhaled, exhaled itself along from tree to tree, from cloud to cloud.
Where am I going? he thought. Wait! The Redman house! Not lived in in years! Two blocks more!
There was the swift shush of his feet in the leaves and the big shush of the creature in the sky, while moonlight snowed everything and stars glittered.
He pulled up in front of the Redman house, a torch in each lung, tasting blood, crying out silently: here! this is my house!
He felt a great river change its bed in the sky.
Good! he thought.
His hand turned the doorknob of the old house. Oh God, he thought, what if they are inside, waiting for me?
He opened a door on darkness.
Dust came and went in that dark, and a harpstring gesticulation of spiders. Nothing else.
Will jumped two at a time up the crumbling stairs, around and out on the roof where he stashed his weapons behind the chimney and stood tall.
The balloon, green as slime, printed with titan pictures of winged scorpions, ancient phoenixes, smokes, fires, clouded weathers, swung its wicker basket wheezing, down.
Witch, he thought, here!
The dank shadow struck him like a batwing.
Will toppled. He flung up his hands. The shadow was almost black flesh, striking.
He fell. He clutched the chimney.
The shadow draped him, hushing down.
It was cold as a sea cave in that cloud-dark.
But suddenly the wind, of itself, veered.
The Witch hissed in frustration. The balloon swam a washing circle up around.
The wind! thought the boy wildly, it's on my side!
No, don't go! he thought. Come back.
For he feared she had smelled his plan.
She had. She itched for his scheme. She snuffed, she gasped at it. He saw the way her nails filed and scraped the air as if running over grooved wax to seek patterns. She turned her palms out and down as if he were a small stove burning softly somewhere in a nether world and she came to warm her hands at him. As the basket swung in an upglided pendulum he saw her squinched blind-sewn eyes, the ears with moss in them, the pale wrinkled apricot mouth mummifying the air it drew in, trying to taste what was wrong with his act, his thought. He was too good, too rare, too fine, too available to be true! surely she knew that!
And knowing it, she held her breath.
Which made the balloon suspend itself, half between inhale and exhale.
Now, tremulously, experimentally, daring to test, the Witch inhaled. The balloon, so weighted, sank. Exhaled--so freed of vapor--the craft ascended!
Now, now, the waiting, the holding of dank sour breath in the wry tissues of her childlike body.
Will waggled his fingers, thumb to nose.
She sucked air. The weight of this one breath skimmed the balloon down.