The Dust Witch.
The Witch who might draw skulls and bones in the dust, then sneeze it away.
Jim looked to Will and Will to Jim; both read their lips: the Witch!
But why a wax crone flung out in a night balloon to search? thought Will, why none of the others, with their lizard-venom, wolf-fire, snake-spit eyes? Why send a crumbled statue with blind-newt lashes sewn tight with black-widow thread?
And then, looking up, they knew.
For the Witch, though peculiar wax, was peculiarly alive. Blind, yes, but she thrust down rust-splotched fingers which petted, stroked the sluices of air, which cut and splayed the wind, peeled layers of space, blinded stars, which hovered and danced, then fixed and pointed as did her nose.
And the boys knew even more.
They knew that she was blind, but special blind. She could dip down her hands to feel the bumps of the world, touch house roofs, probe attic bins, reap dust, examine draughts that blew through halls and souls that blew through people, draughts vented from bellows to thump-wrist, to pound-temples, to pulse-throat, and back to bellows again. Just as they felt that balloon sift down like an autumn rain, so she could feel their souls disinhabit, reinhabit their tremulous nostrils. Each soul, a vast warm fingerprint, felt different, she could roil it in her hand like clay; smelled different, Will could hear her snuffing his life away; tasted different, she savored them with her raw-gummed mouth, her puff-adder tongue; sounded different, she stuffed their souls in one ear, tissued them out the other!
Her hands played down the air, one for Will, one for Jim.
The balloon shadow washed them with panic, rinsed them with terror.
The Witch exhaled.
The balloon, freed of this small sour ballast, up-rose. The shadow passed.
"Oh God!" said Jim. "Now they know where we live!"
Both gasped. Some monstrous baggage brushed and dragged across the shingles of Jim's house.
"Will! She's got me!"
"No! I think--"
The drag, brush, rustle scurried from bottom to top of Jim's roof. Then Will saw the balloon whirl up, fly off toward the hills.
"She's gone, there she goes! Jim, she did something to your roof. Shove the monkey pole over!"
Jim slid the long slender clothesline pole over, Will fixed it on his sill, then swung out, hand over hand, swung until Jim pulled him through his window and they bare-footed it into Jim's clothes closet and boosted and hoisted each other up inside the attic that smelled like lumber mills, old, dark, and too silent. Perched out on the high roof, shivering, Will cried: "Jim, there it is."
And there it was, in the moonlight.
It was a track like a snail paints on a sidewalk. It glistered. It was silver-slick. But this was a path left by a gigantic snail that, if it existed at all, weighed a hundred pounds. The silver ribbon was a yard across. Starting down at the leaf-filled rain trough, the silver track shimmered to the rooftop, then tremored down the other side.
"Why?" gasped Jim. "Why?"
"Easier than looking for house numbers or street names. She marked your roof so you can see it for miles around, night or day!"
"Ohmigosh." Jim bent to touch the track. A faint evil-smelling glue covered his finger. "Will, what'll we do?"
"I got a hunch," the other whispered, "they won't be back till morning. They can't just start a rumpus. They got some plan. Right now--there's what we do!"
Coiled across the lawn below like a vast boa constrictor, waiting for them, was the garden hose.
Will was gone, down, fast, and didn't knock anything over or wake anyone up. Jim, on the roof, was surprised, in no time at all, when Will came scuttling up all panting teeth, the water-fizzing hose in his fist.
"Will, you're a genius!"
"Sure! Quick!"
They dragged the hose to drench the shingles, to wash the silver, flood the evil mercury paint away.