Something Wicked This Way Comes Read Online Free PDF Page B

never seen it since, of such size and beauty built of milk-bone and moon-flesh, at to freeze him there alone behind the stage, shadowed by the, motion of her lips, the bird-wing flicker of her eyes, the snow-pale-death-shimmering 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 night-soft rap-tapping ever-fingering, gently probing moths.
        Not important.
        For above all - the lightning-rod 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 lightning-rod 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.

11
    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 slow-slow-following dragon-glide 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 rifle-fire their gaze artillery distances past library, city hall, depot, cow barns, farmlands to empty prairie!
        There, on the world's rim, the lovely snail-gleam of the railway tracks ran, flinging wild gesticulations of lemon or cherry-coloured 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, coal-car, and numerous and numbered all-asleep-and-slumbering-dream filled cars that followed the firefly-sparked chum, chant, drowsy autumn hearthfire roar. Hellfires flushed the stunned hills. Even at this remote view, one imagined men with buffalo-haunched arms shovelling black meteor falls of coal into the open boilers of the engine.
        The engine!
        Both boys vanished, came back to life binoculars.
        'The engine!'
        'Civil War! No other stack like that since 1900!'
        'The rest of the train, all of it's old'
        'The flags! The cages! It's the carnival!'
        They listened. At first Will thought he heard the air whistling fast in his nostrils. But no - it was the train, and the calliope sighing, weeping, on that train.
        'Sounds like church music!'
        'Hell. Why would a carnival play church music?'
        'Don't say hell,' hissed Will.
        'Hell.' Jim ferociously leaned out. 'I've saved up all day. Everyone's asleep so - hell!'
        The music drifted by their windows. Goose pimples rose bid as boils on Will's arms.
        'That is church music. Changed.'
        'For cri-yi, I'm froze, let's go watch them set up!'
        'At three