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

by Ray Bradbury

That always worried me in the old myths. I asked myself, why would Mephistopheles want a soul? What does he do with it when he gets it, of what use is it?

Those creatures want the flaming gas off souls who can’t sleep nights, that fever by day from old crimes. A dead soul is no kindling. But a live and raving soul, crisped with self-damnation, oh that’s a pretty snoutful for such as them.

observe. The carnival is like people, only more so.

Now it all seemed fireworks, done for color, sound, the high architecture of words, to dazzle the boys, powder his ego, but with no mark left on retina or mind after the color and sound faded;

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.

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

Silence. Just the great dark library with its labyrinths and hedgerow mazes of sleeping books.

“A Bible? How very charming, how childish and refreshingly old-fashioned.” “Have you ever read it, Mr. Dark?” “Read it! I’ve had every page, paragraph, and word read at me, sir!”

“Damn you!” “But,” said the carnival owner quietly, “I am already.”

“Boys, you read Dickens?” Mr. Dark whispered. “Critics hate his coincidences. But we know, don’t we? life’s all coincidence.

saurians

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.

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.

Make him a babe in arms, a babe for the Dwarf to carry like a clown-child, roundabout in parades, every day for the next fifty years, would you like that, Will? to be a babe forever? not able to talk and tell all the lovely things you know?

Mr. Dark, the illustration-drenched, superinfested civilization of souls,

the stitched and jittering sightless nun of midnight,

And winter lived in the Witch.

the smile that had killed the Gypsy and put her to dust.

If Will didn’t hurry, these legions from Time Future, all the alarms of coming life, so mean, raw, and true you couldn’t deny that’s how Dad’d look tomorrow, next day, the day after the day after that, that cattle run of possible years might sweep Dad under!

there all sank grayer, more yellow as the mirrors ricocheted him through, bled him lifeless, mouthed him dry, then threatened to whiff him to skeletal dusts and litter his moth ashes to the floor.

Will grabbed his father’s shoulder and shook him. “Oh, Dad, Dad, I don’t care how old you are, ever! I don’t care what, I don’t care anything! Oh, Dad,” he cried, weeping. “I love you!” At which Charles Halloway opened his eyes and saw himself and the others like himself and his son behind holding him, the flame trembling, the tears trembling on his face,

then, at last, he gave the maze, the mirrors, and all Time ahead, Beyond, Around, Above, Behind, Beneath or squandered inside himself, the only answer possible. He opened his mouth very wide, and let the loudest sound of all free.

It was as if Charles Halloway, once more a choirboy in a strange sub-sub-demon church had sung the most beautiful high note of amiable humor ever in his life

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.

Mr. Dark and his skinful of souls.

“God bless the moon.”

clean ice smell of moon.

the last glue crumbled, the last bolt of life fell free, and the mummy-doll, the Erector-set grotesque disencumbered itself in smoke puffs and November leaflets, a broadcast of mortality along the wind. Mr. Cooger, threshed in a final harvest, was now a billion parchment flecks, tumbled sea-scrolls capered in meadows. A mere dust explosion in a silo of ancient grain: gone.

“Jim!” Will’s side was stabbed with pain. “I need you! Come back!”

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

The boy, and his stricken and bruised conclave of monsters, his felt but half-seen crowd, fell to earth. There should have been a roar like a mountain slid to ruin. But there was only a rustle, like a Japanese paper lantern dropped in the dust.

soughed

they might run forever now trying to outflee themselves.

Idiot thing to want: everything!

Oh, hell, don’t let them drink your tears and want more! Will! Don’t let them take your crying, turn it upside down and use it for their own smile! I’ll be damned if death wears my sadness for glad rags. Don’t feed them one damn thing,

“Nothing . . . funny . . .” “Sure there is! Me! You! Jim! All of us! The whole shooting works!

“Death’s funny, God damn it!

they all fell, rolled in the grass, all hoot-owl and donkey, all brass and cymbal as it must have been the first year of Creation, and Joy not yet thrown from the Garden.

“Dad, will they ever come back?” “No. And yes.” Dad tucked away his harmonica.“No, not them. But yes, other people like them. Not in a carnival. God knows what shape they’ll come in next.

Maybe, said their eyes, they’re already here.

the City Hall clock, the Baptist church clock, the Methodist, the Episcopalian, the Catholic church, all the clocks, struck twelve. The wind was seeded with Time.

Is Death important? No. Everything that happens before Death is what counts.

I was twelve years old when it got its biggest jolt when Mr. Electrico arrived on Labor Day weekend, 1932, sat in his electric chair to be “electrocuted,” dubbed me with his fiery sword until my hair rose and sparks jumped from my nostrils, and cried, “Live forever!” Next day, I ran back to the carnival grounds to find out just how to do that. Mr. Electrico introduced me to all the carnival freaks behind the scenes, including the Hippo Lady, the Human Skeleton, and the Illustrated Man. We sat on the beach and he listened to my grand ideas about my irresistible future. When I had run out of gas, Mr. Electrico said, “We’ve met before.” “Oh, no, sir,” I said, “this is the first time Ie’ve ever talked to you.” “No, no,” he said, “you were my best friend at the battle of the Ardennes Forest outside Paris in October 1918, were wounded, and died in my arms. And here you are with a new face, new name, but the light coming from your eyes is the soul of my lost friend. Welcome back to the world.” I wandered out of the carnival, stunned, and stood by the rushing horses of the carousel listening to the calliope wheezing “Beautiful Ohio,” and wept. I knew that something amazing had struck me with electric fire and changed me forever. Within eight weeks I began to write. I wrote every day after that, for the next sixty-five years.

So there you have the long journey from carousel to carousel, circus to carnival, and my suspicion, shared by Walt Disney, that something was rotten in the Denmark behind the freak tent canvas. Disney created Disneyland as a bright antidote. He made a new world.