She had waited for the nephew to come back. With time passing, she must act on her own. Something must be done not to hurt, no, but slow down interference from such as Jim and Will. No one must stand between her and nephew, her and carousel, her and lovely gliding ride-around summer.

The nephew had said as much, by saying nothing, by just holding her hands, and breathing baked-apple-pie scent from his small pink mouth upon her face.

She lifted the telephone.

Across town she saw the light in the stone library building, as all the town had seen it, over the years. She dialled. A quiet voice answered. She said:

“Library? Mr. Halloway? This is Miss Foley. Will’s teacher. In ten minutes, please, meet me in the police station… Mr. Halloway?”

A pause.

“Are you still there…?

“I’d have sworn,” said one interne. “When we first got there… that old man was dead.”

The ambulance and the police car had pulled up at the same moment at the crossroads, going back into town. One of the internes had called over. Now one of the policemen called back:

“You’re joking!”

The internes sat in their ambulance. They shrugged.

“Yeah. Sure. Joking.”

They drove on ahead their faces as quiet and white as their uniforms.

The police followed, with Jim and Will huddled in back, trying to say more, but the police started talking and laughing, retelling everything that happened to one another, so Will and Jim wound up lying, giving wrong names again, saying they lived around the corner from the police station.

They let the police drop them at two dark houses near the station and they ran up on those porches and grabbed the doorknobs and waited for the prowl car to swing off around the corner into the station, and then they came down and followed and stood looking at the yellow lights of the station all sun-colored at midnight and Will glanced over and saw the whole evening come and go in Jim’s face and Jim watching the police station windows as if at any moment darkness might fill every room and put the lights out forever.

On my way back into town, thought Will, I threw away my tickets. But—look…

Jim still has his, in his hand.

Will trembled.

What did Jim think, want, plan, now that dead men lived and only lived through the fire of white-hot electric chair machines? Did he still very much love carnivals? Will searched. Faint echoes, yes, they came, they went in Jim’s eyes, for Jim, after all, was Jim, even standing here with the calm light of Justice falling on his cheekbones.

“The Chief of Police,” Will said. “He’d listen to us—”

“Yeah,” said Jim. “He’d wake just long enough to send for the butterfly net. Hell, William, hell, even I don’t believe what’s happened the last twenty-four hours.”

“But we got to find someone higher up, keep trying, now we know what the score is.”

“Okay, what’s the score? What’s the carnival done so bad? Scared a woman with a mirror maze? So, she scared herself, the police’d say. Burgled a house? Okay, where’s the burglar? Hiding inside an old man’s skin? Who’d believe that? Who’d believe an old old man was ever a boy of twelve? What else is the score? Did a lightning-rod salesman disappear? Sure, and left his bag. But he could’ve left town—”

“That dwarf in the side-show—”

“I saw him, you saw him, looks kinda like the lightning-rod man, sure, but again, can you prove he was ever big? No, just like you can’t prove Cooger was ever small, so that leaves us right here, Will, on the sidewalk, no proof except what we saw, and us just kids, the carnival’s word against ours, and the police had a fine time anyway there. Oh gosh, it’s a mess. If only, if only there was still some way to apologize to Mr. Cooger—”

“Apologize?” Will yelled. “To a man-eating crocodile? Jehoshaphat! You still don’t see we can’t do business with those ulmers and goffs!”

“Ulmers? Goffs?” Jim gazed upon him thoughtfully, for that was how the boys talked of the creatures who dragged and swayed and slumped through their dreams. In the bad dreams of William, the “ulmers” moaned and gibbered and had no faces. In the equally bad dreams of Jim, the “goffs,” his peculiar name for them, grew like monster meringue-paste mushrooms, which fed on rats which fed on spiders which fed, in turn, because they were large enough, on cats.

“Ulmers! Goffs!” said Will. “You need a ten-ton safe to fall on you? Look what happened to two folks already, Mr. Electrico, and that terrible crazy dwarf! All kinds of things can go wrong with people on that darn machine. We know, we seen it. Maybe they squashed the lightning-rod man down that way on purpose, or maybe something went wrong. Fact is, he wound up in a wine press anyway, got run over by a steam-roller carousel and’s so crazy now he doesn’t even know us! Ain’t that enough to scare the Jesus out of you, Jim? Why, maybe even Mr. Crosetti—”

“Mr. Crosetti’s on vacation.”

“Maybe yes, maybe no. There’s his shop. There’s the sign: CLOSED ON ACCOUNT OF ILLNESS. What kind of illness, Jim? He eat too much candy out at the show? He get seasick on everybody’s favourite ride?”

“Cut it, Will.”

“No, sir, I won’t cut it. Sure, sure, the merry-go-round sounds keen. You think I like being thirteen all the time? Not me! But for cri-yi, Jim, face it, you don’t really want to be twenty!”

“What else we talked about all summer?”

“Talk, sure. But throwing yourself head first in that taffy machine and getting your bones pulled long, Jim, you wouldn’t know what to do with your bones then!”

“I’d know,” said Jim, in the night. “I’d know.”

“Sure. You’d just go away and leave me here, Jim.”

“Why,” protested the other, “I wouldn’t leave you, Will. We’d be together.”

“Together? You two feet taller and going around feeling your leg-and-arm-bones? You looking down at me, Jim, and what’d we talk about, me with my pockets full of kite-string and marbles and frog-eyes, and you with clean nice and empty pockets and making fun, is that what we’d talk, and you able to run faster and ditch me—”

“I’d never ditch you, Will—”

“Ditch me in a minute. Well, go on, Jim, just go on leave me because I got my pocket knife and there’s nothing wrong with me sitting under a tree playing mumblety-peg while you get yourself plain crazy with the heat of all those horses racing around, but thank God they’re not racing any more—”

“And it’s your fault!” cried Jim. He stopped.

Will stiffened and made fists. “You mean I should’ve let young mean-and-terrible get old mean-and-terrible enough to chew our heads off? Just let him ride around and hock his spit in our eye? and maybe you with him, waving good-bye, going around again, waving so long! and all I got to do is wave back, Jim, that what you mean?”

“Sh,” said Jim. “Like you say, it’s too late. The carousel’s broke—”

“And when it’s fixed, they ride old horrible Cooger back, make him young enough so he can speak and remember our names, and then they come like cannibals after us, or just me, if you want to get in good with them and go tell them my name and where I live—”

“I wouldn’t do that, Will.” Jim touched him.

“Oh, Jim, Jim, you do see, don’t you? Everything in its time, like the preacher said only last month, everything one by one, not two by two, will you remember?”

“Everything,” said Jim, “in its time…”

And then they heard voices from the police station. In one of the rooms to the right of the entrance, a woman was talking now, and men were talking.

Will nodded to Jim and they ran quietly over to pick their way through bushes and look into the room.

There sat Miss Foley. There sat Will’s father.

“I don’t understand,” said Miss Foley. “To think Will and Jim would break in my house, steal, run off—”