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

by Ray Bradbury

Drums of Doom: The Saga of the Thunder Lizards!

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.

Why haven’t I stopped to think and smell the last thirty years?”

Mr. Crosetti looked at the pole, as if freshly aware of its miraculous properties. He nodded, gently, his eyes soft. “Where does it come from, where does it go, eh? Who knows? Not you, not him, not me. Oh, the mysteries, by God. So. We’ll leave it on!”

Charles Halloway shivered. Suddenly there was the old sense of terrified elation, of wanting to laugh and cry together when he saw the innocents of the earth wandering the snowy streets the day before Christmas among all the tired men and women whose faces were dirty with guilt, unwashed of sin, and smashed like small windows by life that hit without warning, ran, hid, came back and hit again.

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep: “God is not dead, nor doth He sleep! The Wrong shall fail, The Right prevail, With peace on earth, good will to men!”

“That’s just an old guy with tattoos.” “No.” Jim breathed warm on the paper. “He’s illustrated. Special.

holding a book but reading the empty spaces.

He wanted to be near and not near them, he saw them close, he saw them far. Suddenly they were awfully small in too large a room in too big a town and much too huge a world. In this unlocked place they seemed at the mercy of anything that might break in from the night. Including me, Will thought. Including me.

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

the odd thing in Dad’s voice was the sound truth makes being said.

“No use making more people. People die.”

“Warm blood.” She stood alone. “That’s the story of all our sorrows. And don’t ask why.”

The train curved away, gonging its undersea funeral bell, sunk, rusted, green-mossed, tolling, tolling.

Those trains and their grieving sounds were lost forever between stations, not remembering where they had been, not guessing where they might go, exhaling their last pale breaths over the horizon, gone. So it was with all trains, ever.

Oh God, midnight’s not bad, you wake and go back to sleep, one or two’s not bad, you toss but sleep again. Five or six in the morning, there’s hope, for dawn’s just under the horizon. But three, now, Christ, three A.M. ! Doctors say the body’s at low tide then. The soul is out. The blood moves slow. You’re the nearest to dead you’ll ever be save dying. Sleep is a patch of death, but three in the morn, full wide-eyed staring, is living death!

It’s a long way back to sunset, a far way on to dawn, so you summon all the fool things of your life, the stupid lovely things done with people known so very well who are now so very dead—And

My God, did you see her, she’s lost, drowned in there, poor girl, oh the poor lost sweet . . . save her, oh, we must save her!”

“What? What’s so important you forget everything?” “Why—” Jim examined his friend, curiously, twilight in his face—“no one can tell you. You find out yourself.

Its horses, goats, antelopes, zebras, speared through their spines with brass javelins, hung contorted as in a death rictus, asking mercy with their fright-colored eyes, seeking revenge with their panic-colored teeth.

For there stood Jim and there was this tall man, each examining the other as if he were a reflection in a shop window late at night.

“Oh, Will, I wish we could go home, I wish we could eat. But it’s too late, we saw! We got to see more! Don’t we?” “Lord,” said Will, miserably. “I guess we do.”

When rivers flooded, when fire fell from the sky, what a fine place the library was, the many rooms, the books. With luck, no one found you.

Good grief, thought Will, he wants to be slit and stuffed with broken Mirror Maze glass.

Looking up with love, with devotion, like a cat Jim waited for some special dark mouse to run forth.

And so they ran, three animals in starlight. A black otter. A tomcat. A rabbit. Me, thought Will, I’m the rabbit. And he was white, and much afraid.

the figure lying on the platform no longer a boy but a man no longer a man but a more than a man and even more and even more, much more than that,

The man was cold as an albino frog.

THE DUST WITCH,

The Dwarf let fall his cards and flirted his now mad, now idiot eyes ahead, around, over. I know him, thought Will. Oh, God, what they’ve done to him! The lightning-rod salesman!

beautiful promptitude.

agglomerative

The freaks leaped in a frolic of shock, then calmed as the carnival owner continued with great ease, patting and soothing his own illustrations, which somehow patted and soothed the freaks.

“I dub thee . . . asses and foolssssss . . . I dub . . . thee . . . Mr. Sickly . . . and . . . Mr. Pale . . . !” Mr. Electrico finished. The sword tapped them. “A . . . sssshort . . . sad life . . . for you both!”

In the bad dreams of William, the “ulmers” moaned and gibbered and had no faces. In the equally bad dreams of Jim, the “goffs,” his peculiar name for them, grew like monster meringue-paste mushrooms, which fed on rats which fed on spiders which fed, in turn, because they were large enough, on cats.

what’d we talk about, me with my pockets full of kite-string and marbles and frog-eyes, and you with clean nice and empty pockets and making fun, is that what we’d talk, and you able to run faster and ditch me—” “I’d never ditch you, Will—” “Ditch me in a minute.

“Oh, Jim, Jim, you do see, don’t you? Everything in its time, like the preacher said

I swear. Mom’s honor.”

“Dad? Am I a good person?” “I think so. I know so, yes.” “Will—will that help when things get really rough?” “It’ll help.” “Will it save me if I need saving? I mean, if I’m around bad people and there’s no one else good around for miles, what then?” “It’ll help.”

“Good is no guarantee for your body. It’s mainly for peace of mind—”

“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 . . .?”

since when did you think being good meant being happy?” “Since always.” “Since now learn otherwise.

men do love sin, Will, oh how they love it, never doubt, in all shapes, sizes, colors, and smells. Times come when troughs, not tables, suit our appetites.

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? with the last piece of lemon cake waiting in the icebox, middle of the night, not yours, but you lie awake in a hot sweat for it, eh?

a hot spring day, noon, and there you are chained to your school desk and away off there goes the river, cool and fresh over the rock-fall. Boys can hear clear water like that miles away.

minute by minute, hour by hour, a lifetime, it never ends, never stops, you got the choice this second, now this next, and the next after that, be good, be bad, that’s what th...

Add up all the rivers never swum in, cakes never eaten, and by the time you get my age, Will, it’s a lot missed out on. But then you console yourself, thinking, the more times in, the more times possibly drowned, or choked on lemon frosting. But then, through plain dumb cowardice, I guess, maybe you hold off from too much, wait, play it safe.

I found you can’t wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else.

I saw then and there you take a man half-bad and a woman half-bad and put their two good halves together and you got one human all good to share between.