Something Wicked This Way Comes Read Online Free PDF Page B

fallen and slept in snow avalanches a thousand years, forever young, was this woman.
        She was as fair as this morning and fresh as tomorrow's flowers and lovely as any maid when a man shuts up his eyes and traps her, in cameo perfection, on the shell of his eyelids. The lightningrod salesman remembered to breathe.
        Once, long ago, travelling among the marbles of Rome and Florence, he had seen women like this, kept in stone instead of Ice. Once, wandering in the Louvre, he had found women like this, washed in summer colour and kept in paint. Once, as a boy, sneaking the cool grottoes behind a motion picture theatre screen, on his way to a free seat, he had glanced up and there towering and flooding the haunted dark seen a women's face as he had never seen it since, of such size and beauty built of milkbone and moonflesh, at to freeze him there alone behind the stage, shadowed by the, motion of her lips, the birdwing flicker of her eyes, the snowpaledeathshimmering illumination from her cheeks.
        So from other years there jumped forth images which flowed and found new substance here within the ice.
        What colour was her hair? It was blonde to whiteness and might take any colour, once set free of cold.
        How tall was she?
        The prism of the ice might well multiply her size or diminish her as you moved this way or that before the empty store, the window, the nightsoft raptapping everfingering, gently probing moths.
        Not important.
        For above all - the lightningrod salesman shivered - he knew the most extraordinary thing.
        If by some miracle her eyelids should open within that sapphire and she should look at him, he knew what colour her eyes would be.
        He knew what colour her eyes would be.
        If one were to enter this lonely night shop -
        If one were to put forth one's hand, the warmth of that hand would. . .what?
        Melt the ice.
        The lightningrod salesman stood there for a long moment, his eyes quickened shut.
        He let his breath out.
        It was warm as summer on his teeth.
        His hand touched the shop door. It swung open. Cold arctic air blew out round him. He stepped in.
        The door shut.
        The white snowflake moths tapped at the window.
     
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    Midnight then and the town clocks chiming on toward one and two and then three in the deep morning and the peals of the great clocks shaking dust off old toys in attics and shedding silver off old mirrors in yet higher attics and s up dreams about docks in all beds where children slept.
        Will heard it.
        Muffled away in the prairie lands, the chuffing of an engine, the slowslowfollowing dragonglide of a train.
        Will sat up in bed.
        Across the way, like a mirror image, Jim sat up, too.
        A calliope began to play oh so softly, grieving to itself, a million miles away.
        In one single motion, Will leaned from his window, as did Jim. Without a word they gazed over the trembling surf of trees.
        Their rooms were high, as boys' rooms should be. From these gaunt windows they could riflefire their gaze artillery distances past library, city hall, depot, cow barns, farmlands to empty prairie!
        There, on the world's rim, the lovely snailgleam of the railway tracks ran, flinging wild gesticulations of lemon or cherrycoloured semaphore to the stars.
        There, on the precipice of earth, a small steam feather uprose like the first of a storm cloud yet to come.
        The train itself appeared, link by link, engine, coalcar, and numerous and numbered allasleepandslumberingdream filled cars that followed the fireflysparked chum, chant, drowsy autumn hearthfire roar. Hellfires flushed the stunned hills. Even at this remote view, one imagined men with buffalohaunched arms shovelling black meteor falls of coal into the open boilers of the engine.
        The engine!
        Both boys vanished, came back to life