"Darning-needle dragonfly, sew up these ears, so they not hear!"
Cold sand funneled Will's ears, burying her voice. Muffled, far away, fading, she chanted on with a rustle, tick, tickle, tap, flourish of caliper hands.
Moss grew in Jim's ears, swiftly sealing him deep.
"Darning-needle dragonfly, sew up these eyes so they not see!"
Her white-hot fingerprints rolled back their stricken eyeballs to throw the lids down with bangs like great tin doors slammed shut.
Will saw a billion flashbulbs explode, then suck to darkness while the unseen darning-needle insect out beyond somewhere pranced and fizzed like insect drawn to sun-warmed honeypot, as closeted voice stitched off their senses forever and a day beyond.
"Darning-needle dragonfly, have done with eye, ear, lip and tooth, finish hem, sew dark, mound dust, heap with slumber sleep, now tie all knots ever so neat, pump silence in blood like sand in river deep. So. So."
The Witch, somewhere outside the boys, lowered her hands.
The boys stood silent. The Illustrated Man took his embrace from them and stepped back.
The woman from the Dust sniffed at her twin triumphs, ran her hand a last loving time over her statues.
The Dwarf toddled madly about in the boys' shadows, nibbling daintily at their fingernails, softly calling their names.
The Illustrated Man nodded toward the library.
"The janitor's clock. Stop it."
The Witch, mouth wide, savoring doom, wandered off into the marble quarry.
Mr. Dark said: "Left, right. One, two."
The boys walked down the steps, the Dwarf at Jim's side, the Skeleton at Will's.
Serene as death, the Illustrated Man followed.
Chapter 44
SOMEWHERE NEAR, Charles Halloway's hand lay in a white-hot furnace, melted to sheer nerve and pain. He opened his eyes. At the same moment he heard a great breath as the front door swung shut and a woman's voice came singing in the hall:
"Old man, old man, old man, old man ...?"
Where his left hand should be was this swelled blood pudding which pulsed with such ecstasies of pain it fed forth his life, his will, his whole attention. He tried to sit up, but the pain hammerblowed him down again.
"Old man ...?"
Not old! Fifty-four's not old, he thought wildly.
And here she came on the worn stone floors, her moth-fingers tapping, scanning braille book tides, as her nostrils siphoned the shadows.
Charles Halloway hunched and crawled, hunched and crawled, toward the nearest stack, cramming pain back with his tongue. He must climb out of reach, climb where books might be weapons flung down upon any night-crawling pursuer....
"Old man, hear you breathing...."
She drifted on his tide, let her body be summoned by every sibilant hiss of his pain.
"Old man, feel your hurt...."
If he could fling the hand, the pain, out the window! where it might lie beating like a heart, summoning her away, tricked, to go seek this awful fire. Bent in the street, he imagined her brisking her palms at this throb, an abandoned chunk of delirium.
But no, the hand stayed, glowed, poisoned the air, hurrying the strange nun-Gypsy's tread as she gasped her avaricious mouth most ardently.