"Damn you!" he cried. "Get it over with! I'm here!"
So the Witch wheeled swift as a black clothes dummy on rubber rollers and swayed over him.
He did not even look at her. Such weights and pressures of despair and exertio
n fought for his attention, he could only free his eyes to watch the inside of his lids upon which multiple and ever-changing looms of terror jigged and gamboled.
"Very simple." The whisper bent low. "Stop the heart."
Why not, he thought, vaguely.
"Slow," she murmured.
Yes, he thought.
"Slow, very slow."
His heart, once bolting, now fell away to a strange disease, disquiet, then quiet, then ease.
"Much more slow, slow ..." she suggested.
Tired, yes, you hear that, heart? he wondered.
His heart heard. Like a tight fist it began to relax, a finger at a time.
"Stop all for good, forget all for good," she whispered.
Well, why not?
"Slower ... slowest."
His heart stumbled.
And then for no reason, save perhaps for a last look around, because he did want to get rid of the pain, and sleep was the way to do that ... Charles Halloway opened his eyes.
He saw the Witch.
He saw her fingers working at the air, his face, his body, the heart within his body, and the soul within the heart. Her swamp breath flooded him while, with immense curiosity, he watched the poisonous drizzle from her lips, counted the folds in her stitch-wrinkled eyes, the Gila monster neck, the mummy-linen ears, the dry-rivulet river-sand brow. Never in his life had he focused so nearly to a person, as if she were a puzzle, which once touched together might show life's greatest secret. The solution was in her, it would all spring clear this moment, no, the next, no, the next, watch her scorpion fingers! hear her chant as she diddled the air, yes, diddled was it, tickling, tickling, "Slow!" she whispered. "Slow!" And his obedient heart pulled rein. Diddle-tickle went her fingers.
Charles Halloway snorted. Faintly, he giggled.
He caught this. Why? Why am I ... giggling ... at such a time!?
The Witch pulled back the merest quarter inch as if some strange but hidden electric light socket, touched with wet whorl, gave shock.
Charles Halloway saw but did not see her flinch, sensed but seemed in no way to consider her withdrawal, for almost immediately, seizing the initiative, she flung herself forward, not touching, but mutely gesticulating at his chest as one might try to spell an antique clock pendulum.
"Slow!" she cried.
Senselessly, he permitted an idiot smile to balloon itself up from somewhere to attach itself with careless ease under his nose.
"Slowest!"
Her new fever, her anxiety which changed itself to anger was even more of a toy to him. A part of his attention, secret until now, leaned forward to scan every pore of her Halloween face. Somehow, irresistibly, the prime thing was: nothing mattered. Life in the end seemed a prank of such size you could only stand off at this end of the corridor to note its meaningless length and its quite unnecessary height, a mountain built to such ridiculous immensities you were dwarfed in its shadow and mocking of its pomp. So with death this near he thought numbly but purely upon a billion vanities, arrivals, departures, idiot excursions of boy, boy-man, man and old-man goat. He had gathered and stacked all manner of foibles, devices, playthings of his egotism and now, between all the silly corridors of books, the toys of his life swayed. And none more grotesque than this thing named Witch Gypsy Reader-of-Dust, tickling, that's what! just tickling the air! Fool! Didn't she know what she was doing!
He opened his mouth.
Of itself, like a child born of an unsuspecting parent, one single raw laugh broke free.