Something Wicked This Way Comes (Green Town, #2)

by Ray Bradbury

One year Halloween came on October 24, three hours after midnight.

Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder go when it dies?

Like all boys, they never walked anywhere, but named a goal and lit for it, scissors and elbows. Nobody won. Nobody wanted to win. It was in their friendship they just wanted to run forever, shadow and shadow. Their hands slapped library door handles together, their chests broke track tapes together, their tennis shoes beat parallel pony tracks over lawns, trimmed bushes, squirreled trees, no one losing, both winning, thus saving their friendship for other times of loss.

The library deeps lay waiting for them. Out in the world, not much happened. But here in the special night, a land bricked with paper and leather, anything might happen, always did.

“Is that you, Will? Grown an inch since this morning.” Charles Halloway shifted his gaze. “Jim? Eyes darker, cheeks paler; you burn yourself at both ends, Jim?” “Heck,” said Jim. “No such place as Heck. But hell’s right here under ‘A’ for Alighieri.” “Allegory’s beyond me,” said Jim. “How stupid of me,” Dad laughed. “I mean Dante. Look at this. Pictures by Mister Doré, showing all the aspects. Hell never looked better. Here’s souls sunk to their gills in slime. There’s someone upside down, wrongside out.” “Boy howdy!” Jim eyed the pages two different ways and thumbed on. “Got any dinosaur pictures?”

So there they go, Jim running slower to stay with Will, Will running faster to stay with Jim, Jim breaking two windows in a haunted house because Will’s along, Will breaking one window instead of none, because Jim’s watching. God, how we get our fingers in each other’s clay. That’s friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of the other.

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IN THE WORLD! And yet this vast chunk of wintry glass held nothing but frozen river water. No. Not quite empty. Halloway felt his heart pound one special time. Within the huge winter gem was there not a special vacuum? a voluptuous hollow, a prolonged emptiness which undulated from tip to toe of the ice? and wasn’t this vacuum, this emptiness waiting to be filled with summer flesh, was it not shaped somewhat like a . . . woman? Yes. The ice. And the lovely hollows, the horizontal flow of emptiness within the ice. The lovely nothingness. The exquisite flow of an invisible mermaid daring the ice to capture it.

Suddenly he loved them more for their smallness than he ever had when they seemed tall.

The trouble with Jim was he looked at the world and could not look away. And when you never look away all your life, by the time you are thirteen you have done twenty years taking in the laundry of the world.

“Don’t say ‘sure’ that way. You don’t know until you’ve had three children and lost all but one.” “Never going to have any,” said Jim. “You just say that.” “I know it. I know everything.” She waited a moment. “What do you know?” “No use making more people. People die.” His voice was very calm and quiet and almost sad. “That’s everything.” “Almost everything. You’re here, Jim. If you weren’t, I’d given up long ago.” “Mom.” A long silence. “Can you remember Dad’s face? Do I look like him?” “The day you go away is the day he leaves forever.”

If one were to enter this lonely night shop— If one were to put forth one’s hand, the warmth of that hand would . . . what? Melt the ice.

Fool! I yell at Jim. Coward! he yells back. And here we—go!

So what do we do? We men turn terribly mean, because we can’t hold to the world or ourselves or anything. We are blind to continuity, all breaks down, falls, melts, stops, rots, or runs away. So, since we cannot shape Time, where does that leave men? Sleepless. Staring.

You think I like being thirteen all the time? Not me! But for cri-yi, Jim, face it, you don’t really want to be twenty!” “What else we talked about all summer?” “Talk, sure. But throwing yourself head first in that taffy machine and getting your bones pulled long, Jim, you wouldn’t know what to do with your bones then!” “I’d know,” said Jim, in the night. “I’d know.”

War allegory?

“Dad,” said Will, his voice very faint. “Are you a good person?” “To you and your mother, yes, I try. But no man’s a hero to himself. I’ve lived with me a lifetime, Will. I know everything worth knowing about myself—” “And, adding it all up . . .?” “The sum? As they come and go, and I mostly sit very still and tight, yes, I’m all right.” “Then, Dad,” asked Will, “why aren’t you happy?” “The front lawn at . . . let’s see . . . one-thirty in the morning . . . is no place to start a philosophical . . .” “I just wanted to know is all.”

For being good is a fearful occupation; men strain at it and sometimes break in two.

“Oh, it would be lovely if you could just be fine, act fine, not think of it all the time. But it’s hard, right?

there was the little girl, crouched, face buried in her hands, weeping as if the town were gone and the people in it and herself lost in terrible woods.

But now, in the doorway, in the cold rain, there was time to think of Miss Foley afraid of mirror mazes, Miss Foley alone not so long ago at the carnival, and maybe screaming when they did what they finally did to her, around and around, around and around, too many years, more years than she had ever dreamed of shucked away, rubbing her raw, leaving her naked small, alone, and bewildered because unknown-even-to-herself, around and around, until all the years were gone and the carousel rocked to a halt like a roulette wheel, and nothing gained and all lost and nowhere for her to go, no way to tell the strangeness, and nothing to do but . . . weep under a tree, alone, in the autumn rain. . . .

That carnival, boy, do they know how to punish so you can’t hit back. They just shake you up and change you so no one ever knows you again and let you run free, it’s okay, go ahead, talk, ‘cause folks are too scared of you to listen.

Were Jim and Will, then, featured all angelic, pure, half-innocent, peering up through the sidewalk at marching terror? Did the boys represent the ideal for your Woman, Man, or Child of Excellent Bearing, Color, Balance, and Summer Disposition? Conversely . . . Charles Halloway turned a page . . . did the scurrying freaks, the Illustrated Marvel, bear the foreheads of the Irascible, the Cruel, the Covetous, the mouths of the Lewd and Untruthful? the teeth of the Crafty, the Unstable, the Audacious, the Vainglorious, and your Murderous Beast? No. The book slipped shut.

By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes. So vague, yet so immense. He did not want to live with it. Yet he knew that, during this night, unless he lived with it very well, he might have to live with it all the rest of his life.

For some, autumn comes early, stays late through life where October follows September and November touches October and then instead of December and Christ’s birth, there is no Bethlehem Star, no rejoicing, but September comes again and old October and so on down the years, with no winter, spring, or revivifying summer.

Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars.

Such are the autumn people. Beware of them.’”

So the carnival steams by, shakes any tree: it rains jackasses.

individuals with no one, they think, or no one actual, to answer their ‘Help!’ Unconnected fools, that’s the harvest the carnival comes smiling after with its threshing machine.”

You don’t have to stay foolish and you don’t have to be wrong, evil, sinful, whatever you want to call it. There’s more than three or four choices.

Somewhere we turned in our carnivore’s teeth and started chewing blades of grass. We been working mulch as much as blood, into our philosophy, for quite a few lifetimes.

Since then we measure ourselves up the scale from apes, but not half so high as angels.

So that man, the first one, knew what we know now: our hour is short, eternity is long. With this knowledge came pity and mercy, so we spared others for the later, more intricate, more mysterious benefits of love.

“So, in sum, what are we? We are the creatures that know and know too much. That leaves us with such a burden again we have a choice, to laugh or cry. No other animal does either. We do both, depending on the season and the need.

Could he say love was, above all, common cause, shared experience? That was the vital cement, wasn’t it?

Could he say: we share this billion-mile-an-hour ride. We have common cause against the night.

Why love the woman who is your wife? Her nose breathes in the air of a world that I know; therefore I love that nose. Her ears hear music I might sing half the night through; therefore I love her ears. Her eyes delight in seasons of the land; and so I love those eyes. Her tongue knows quince, peach, chokeberry, mint and lime; I love to hear it speaking. Because her flesh knows heat, cold, affliction, I know fire, snow, and pain.

We love what we know, we love what we are. Common cause, common cause, common cause of mouth, eye, ear, tongue, hand, nose, flesh, heart, and soul. But . . . how to say it?

“Have I said anything I started out to say about being good? God, I don’t know. A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if, half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little about him and his family, you might just jump in front of his killer and try to stop it.

Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know, is bad, or amoral, at least.

We can’t be good unless we know what bad is, and it’s a shame we’re working against time.

“The stuff of nightmare is their plain bread. They butter it with pain. They set their clocks by death-watch beetles, and thrive the centuries.

“Why, most men jump at the chance to give up everything for nothing. There’s nothing we’re so slapstick with as our own immortal souls.

The carnival is like people, only more so. A man, a woman, rather than walk away from, or kill, each other, ride each other a lifetime, pulling hair, extracting fingernails, the pain of each to the other like a narcotic that makes existence worth the day.

Need, want, desire, we burn those in our fluids, oxidize those in our souls, which jet streams out lips, nostrils, eyes, ears, broadcasts from antennae-fingers, long or short wave, God only knows,

Death doesn’t exist. It never did, it never will. But we’ve drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we’ve got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.

we’re more afraid of Nothing than we are of Something. You can fight Something. But . . . Nothing? Where do you hit it?

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.

“Here! A volunteer!” The crowd turned. Mr. Dark recoiled, then asked: “Where?” “Here.” Far out at the edge of the crowd, a hand lifted, a path opened. Mr. Dark could see very clearly the man standing there, alone. Charles Halloway, citizen, father, introspective husband, night-wanderer, and janitor of the town library.

All because he accepted everything at last, accepted the carnival, the hills beyond, the people in the hills, Jim, Will, and above all himself and all of life, and, accepting, threw back his head for the second time tonight and showed his acceptance with sound.

Evil has only the power that we give it. I give you nothing. I take back. Starve. Starve. Starve.

Get up! Get off your knees, damn it! Jump around! Whoop and holler! You hear! Shout, Will, sing, but most of all laugh, you got that, laugh!” “I can’t!” “You must! It’s all we got.