The growing silence, now the bell had stopped, gripped Chris. A chill made itself felt in his feet and spread rapidly over his body so that he gave a convulsive shiver. He was about to turn and go out when, at the farthest end of the gloomy shop, a small primrose oblong of light seeped for a little way along the floor and a door opened. Fascinated, Chris stared, as into this distant pallor stepped the short and remarkably spidery figure of a man. Mr. Wicker's back being toward the source of light, Chris could not see his face. The figure paused, with a fragile hand scarcely bigger than that of a child's on the doorhandle, and then came forward.
The silence, Chris noticed, was still unbroken as Mr. Wicker advanced toward him, and Chris shuddered again as he stood waiting and watching, but whether it was with cold or with fear—and the room was indeed very dank and unaired—it would have been hard to say.
When Mr. Wicker had come within a few feet of Chris, the final vestiges of daylight from outside reached the extraordinary man facing the boy, and for the first time Chris was able to examine the old man who was more legend than fact throughout Georgetown.
William Wicker's face in itself was not forbidding. What made an icy mouse seem to run the length of Chris's spine was the impression of enormous age in the appearance of the man confronting him. The thin lips crackled the withered and multi-wrinkled cheeks in the ghost of what had once been a smile. The nose, once hawk-like and proud and denoting strength of character and purpose, was now pinched by the ever-tightening fingers of a progression of years. The double fans of minute wrinkles breaking from eye corner to temple and joining with those over the cheekbones were drawn into the horizontal lines across the domed forehead. Little tufts of white fuzz above the ears were all that remained of the antiquarian's hair, but what drew and held Chris's gaze were the old man's eyes.
Mr. Wicker's eyes were not those of an old man at all. They had the vigor of a man in the prime of life, and their presence in that puckered face of age which confronted Chris was horribly disconcerting. Chris blinked and looked again. Yes, they were still there. Eyes so deeply brown they might well have been black, but clear, sparkling, and with a decided glint of humor and mischief. While the boy had been too frightened to move at the sight of Mr. Wicker's ancient cheeks, pinched nose, and hairless head, he was encouraged by the friendly eyes. Chris could not help but like those eyes, even though it was hard to believe they belonged to the man before him.
As though from a great distance Mr. Wicker's voice came to his ears, and this too, Chris found difficult to credit. There, not four feet in front of him was the old shopkeeper, and yet the high thin voice might have come from anywhere else—the rafters, the room beyond the lighted door; anywhere.
"Well, my boy? You wanted something?"
Chris swallowed and his voice came back to him. "Yes sir," he said. "I saw your sign, and I know a boy who needs the job." He looked at Mr. Wicker as though he were unable to look elsewhere. "He's a schoolmate of mine. Jakey Harris, his name is, and he really needs the job. I wondered—" Mr. Wicker's eyes, laughing at him just a little, confused Chris and he began to stammer.