"Heck," said Father, and was gone.
The two boys left alone with the witch looked at each other. "Gosh, right down the main street we go, all four of us, you, me, Dad, the witch! Dad's one in a million!"
"Tomorrow," said Douglas, "I go down and buy the rest of the machine from Mr. Black, for ten bucks, or he'll throw it out."
"Sure." Tom looked at the old woman there in the wicker chair. "Boy she sure looks alive. I wonder what's inside."
"Little tiny bird bones. All that's left of Mme. Tarot after Napoleon--"
"No machinery at all? Why don't we just cut her open and see?"
"Plenty of time for that, Tom."
"When?"
"Well, in a year, two years, when I'm fourteen or fifteen, then's the time to do it. Right now I don't want to know nothing except she's here. And tomorrow I get to work on the spells to let her escape forever. Some night you'll hear that a strange, beautiful Italian girl was seen downtown in a summer dress, buying a ticket for the East and everyone saw her at the station and saw her on the train as it pulled out and everyone said she was the prettiest girl they ever saw, and when you hear that, Tom--and believe me, the news will get around fast! nobody knowing where she came from or where she went--then you'll know I worked the spell and set her free. And then, as I said, a year, two years from now, on that night when that train pulls out, it'll be the time when we can cut through the wax
. With her gone, you're liable to find nothing but little cogs and wheels and stuff inside her. That's how it is."
Douglas picked up the witch's hand and moved it over the dance of life, the frolic of bone-white death, the dates and dooms, the fates and follies, tapping, touching, whispering her worn-down fingernails. Her face tilted with some secret equilibrium and looked at the boys and the eyes flashed bright in the raw bulb light, unblinking.
"Tell your fortune, Tom?" asked Douglas quietly.
"Sure."
A card fell from the witch's voluminous sleeve.
"Tom, you see that? A card, hidden away, and now she throws it out at us!" Douglas held the card to the light. "It's blank. I'll put it in a matchbox full of chemicals during the night. Tomorrow we'll open the box and there the message'll be!"
"What'll it say?"
Douglas closed his eyes the better to see the words.
"It'll say, 'Thanks from your humble servant and grateful friend, Mme. Floristan Mariani Tarot, the Chiromancer, Soul Healer, and Deep-Down Diviner of Fates and Furies.'"
Tom laughed and shook his brother's arm.
"Go on, Doug, what else, what else?"
"Let me see ... And it'll say, 'Hey nonny no! ... is't not fine to dance and sing? ... when the bells of death do ring ... and turn upon the toe ... and sing Hey nonny no!' And it'll say, 'Tom and Douglas Spaulding, everything you wish for, all your life through, you'll get ...' And it'll say that we'll live forever, you and me, Tom, we'll live forever...."
"All that on just this one card?"
"All that, every single bit of it, Tom."
In the light of the electric bulb they bent, the two boys' heads down, the witch's head down, staring and staring at the beautiful blank but promising white card, their bright eyes sensing each and every incredibly hidden word that would soon rise up from pale oblivion.
"Hey," said Tom in the softest of voices.
And Douglas repeated in a glorious whisper, "Hey ..."
Faintly, the voice chanted under the fiery green trees at noon.
"... nine, ten, eleven, twelve ..."
Douglas moved slowly across the lawn. "Tom, what you counting?"
"... thirteen, fourteen, shut up, sixteen, seventeen, cicadas, eighteen, nineteen ... !"