Will opened the door and shut it again. Quietly, this time.

“That’s better,” said his mother’s voice.

Framed through the hall door Will saw the only theatre he cared for now, the familiar stage where sat his father (home already! he and Jim must have run the long way round!) holding a book but reading the empty spaces. In a chair by the fire mother knitted and hummed like a tea-kettle.

He wanted to be near and not near them, he saw them close, he saw them far. Suddenly they were awfully small in too large a room in too big a town and much too huge a world. In this unlocked place they seemed at the mercy of anything that might break in from the night.

Including me, Will thought. Including me.

Suddenly he loved them more for their smallness than he ever had when they seemed tall.

His mother’s fingers twitched, her mouth counted, the happiest woman he had ever seen. He remembered a greenhouse on a winter day, pushing aside thick jungle leaves to find a creamy pink hothouse rose poised alone in the wilderness. That was mother, smelling like fresh milk, happy, to herself, in this room.

Happy? But how and why? Here, a few feet off, was the janitor, the library man, the stranger, his uniform gone, but his face still the face of a man happier at night alone in the deep marble vaults, whispering his broom in the draughty corridors.

Will watched, wondering why this woman was so happy and this man so sad.

His father stared deep in the fire, one hand relaxed. Half-cupped in that hand lay a crumpled paper ball.

Will blinked.

He remembered the wind blowing the pale handbill skittering in the trees. Now the same color paper lay crushed, its rococo type hidden, in his father’s fingers.

“Hey!”

Will stepped into the parlour.

Immediately Mom opened a smile that was like lighting a second fire.

Dad stricken, looked dismayed, as if caught in a criminal act.

Will wanted to say, “Hey, what’d you think of the handbill…?”

But Dad was crammmg the handbill deep in the chair upholstery.

And mother was leafing the library books.

“Oh, these are fine, Willy!”

So Will just stood with Cooger and Dark on his tongue and said:

“Boy, the wind really flew us home. Streets full of paper blowing.”

Dad did not flinch at this.

“Anything new, Dad?”

Dad’s hand still lay tucked in the side of the chair. He lifted a grey, slightly worried, very tired gaze to his son:

“Stone lion blew off the library steps. Prowling the town now, looking for Christians. Won’t find any. Got the only one in captivity here, and she’s a good cook.”

“Bosh,” said Mom.

Walking upstairs, Will heard what he half expected to hear.

A soft fluming sigh as something fresh was tossed on the fire. In his mind, he saw Dad standing at the hearth looking down as the paper crinkled to ash:

“…COOGER… DARK… CARNIVAL… WITCH… WONDERS…”

He wanted to go back down and stand with Dad hands out, to be warmed by the fire.

Instead he went slowly up to shut the door of his room.

Some nights, abed, Will put his ear to the wall to listen, and if his folks talked things that were right, he stayed, and if not right he turned away. If it was about time and passing years or himself or town or just the general inconclusive way God ran the world, he listened warmly, comfortably, secretly, for it was usually Dad talking. He could not often speak with Dad anywhere in the world, inside or out, but this was different. There was a thing in Dad’s voice, up, over, down, easy as a hand winging soft in the air like a white bird describing flight pattern, made the ear want to follow and the mind’s eye to see.

And the odd thing in Dad’s voice was the sound truth makes being said. The sound of truth, in a wild roving land of city or plain country lies, will spell any boy. Many nights Will drowsed this way, his senses like stopped clocks long before that half-singing voice was still. Dad’s voice was a midnight school, teaching deep fathom hours, and the subject was life.

So it was this night, Will’s eyes shut, head leaned to the cool plaster. At first Dad’s voice, a Congo drum, boomed softly, horizons away. Mother’s voice, she used her water-bright soprano in the Baptist choir, did not sing, yet sang back replies. Will imagined Dad sprawled talking to the empty ceiling:

“…Will… makes me feel so old… a man should play baseball with his son…”

“Not necessary,” said the woman’s voice, kindly. “You’re a good man.”

“—in a bad season. Hell, I was forty when he was born! And you! Who’s your daughter? people say. God, when you lie down your thoughts turn to mush. Hell!”

Will heard the shift of weight as Dad sat up in the dark. A match was being struck, a pipe was being smoked. The wind rattled the windows.

“…man with poster under his arm…”

“…carnival…” said his mother’s voice, “…this late in the year?”

Will wanted to turn away, but couldn’t.

“…most beautiful… woman… in the world,” Dad’s voice murmured.

Mother laughed softly. “You know I’m not.”

No! thought Will, that’s from the handbill! Why doesn’t Dad tell!!?

Because, Will answered himself. Something’s going on. Oh, something is going on!

Will saw that paper frolicked in the trees, its words THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN, and fever prickled his cheeks. He thought: Jim, the street of the Theatre, the naked people in the stage of that Theatre window, crazy as Chinese opera, darn odd crazy as old Chinese opera, judo, ju-jitsu, Indian puzzles, and now his father’s voice, dreaming off, sad, sadder, saddest, much too much to understand. And suddenly he was scared because Dad wouldn’t talk about the handbill he had secretly burned. Will gazed out the window. There! Like a milkweed plume! White paper danced in the air.

“No,” he whispered, “no carnival’s coming this late. It can’t!” He hid under the covers, switched on his flashlight, opened a book. The first picture he saw was a prehistoric reptile trap-drumming a night sky a million years lost.

Heck, he thought, in the rush I got Jim’s book he’s got one of mine.

But it was a pretty fine reptile.

And flying toward sleep, he thought he heard his father, restless, below. The front door shut. His father was going back to work late, for no reason, with brooms, or books, downtown, away… away…

And mother asleep, content, not knowing he had gone.

No one else in the world had a name came so well off the tongue.

“Jim Nightshade. That’s me.”

Jim stood tall and now lay long in bed, strung together by marsh-grass, his bones easy in his flesh, his flesh easy on his bones. The library books lay unopened by his relaxed right hand.

Waiting, his eyes were dark as twilight, with shadows under the eyes from the time, his mother said, he had almost died when he was three and still remembered. His hair was dark autumn chestnut and the veins in his temples and brow and in his neck and ticking in his wrists and on the backs of his slender hands, all these were dark blue. He was marbled with dark, was Jim Nightshade, a boy who talked less and smiled less as the years increased.

The trouble with Jim was he looked at the world and could not look away. And when you never look away all your life, by the time you are thirteen you have done twenty years taking in the laundry of the world.

Will Halloway, it was in him young to always look just beyond, over or to one side. So at thirteen he had saved up only six years of staring.

Jim knew every centimetre of his shadow, could have cut it out of tar paper, furled it, and run it up a flagpole—his banner.

Will, he was occasionally surprised to see his shadow following him somewhere, but that was that.