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

by Ray Bradbury

Take September, a bad month:

Truth

one strange wild dark long year, Halloween came early. One year Halloween came on October 24, three hours after midnight.

James Nightshade of 97 Oak Street was thirteen years, eleven months, twenty-three days old.

Is this Pushing Daisies?

William Halloway was thirteen years, eleven months and twenty-four days old.

It is indeed

The metal thing was hammered and shaped half-crescent, half-cross.

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. Listen! and you heard ten thousand people screaming so high only dogs feathered their ears. A million folk ran toting cannons, sharpening guillotines; Chinese, four abreast, marched on forever. Invisible, silent, yes, but Jim and Will had the gift of ears and noses as well as the gift of tongues. This was a factory of spices from far countries. Here alien deserts slumbered. Up front was the desk where the nice old lady. Miss Watriss, purple-stamped your books, but down off away were Tibet and Antarctica, the Congo. There went Miss Wills, the other librarian, through Outer Mongolia, calmly toting fragments of Peiping and Yokohama and the Celebes. Way down the third book corridor, an oldish man whispered his broom along in the dark, mounding the fallen spices.

Look! he thought. Will runs because running is its own excuse. Jim runs because something’s up ahead of him. Yet, strangely, they do run together.

Jim, now, he knows it happens, he watches for it happening, he sees it start, he sees it finish, he licks the wound he expected, and never asks why: he knows. He always knew. Someone knew before him, a long time ago, someone who had wolves for pets and lions for night conversants. Hell, Jim doesn’t know with his mind. But his body knows.

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.

“Will? Know what you are? A darn old dimwit Episcopal Baptist!”

idiot caper,

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.

The lightning-rod salesman remembered to breathe. Once, long ago, traveling among the marbles of Rome and Florence, he had seen women like this, kept in stone instead of ice. Once, wandering in the Louvre, he had found women like this, washed in summer color and kept in paint. Once, as a boy, sneaking the cool grottos behind a motion picture theater screen, on his way to a free seat, he had glanced up and there towering and flooding the haunted dark seen a woman’s face as he had never seen it since, of such size and beauty built of milk-bone and moon-flesh as to freeze him there alone behind the stage, shadowed by the motion of her lips, the bird-wing flicker of her eyes, the snow-pale-death-shimmering illumination from her cheeks. So from other years there jumped forth images which flowed and found new substance here within the ice.

idiot tune

His mouth tasted of night damps.

Women never wake then, do they? They sleep the sleep of babes and children.

Who are these women? How do I become one?

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!

Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make the flesh that holds fast and binds eternity. They live inside the gift, know power, accept, and need not mention it. Why speak of Time when you are Time, and shape the universal moments, as they pass, into warmth and action?

“Thank you, Will, Jim, oh thank you, I’d of drowned! I mean . . . oh, Will you were right! 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!”

“Miss Foley,” he said, “what did she look like?” Miss Foley’s voice was pale but calm. “The fact is . . . she looked like myself, many, many years ago. “I’ll go home now,” she said.

A bad thing happened at sunset. Jim vanished.

Ooooh. Giving credence to my have to save Jim theory

It made a sound of iron indigestion.

“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. Mysteries and mysteries. Storm salesman. Storm salesman’s bag. If we don’t look now, we might never know.”

Bright purple, black, green and lightning-blue eels, worms, and Latin scrolls slid to view on his wrist. “Boy!” cried Will. “You must be the Tattooed Man!” “No.” Jim studied the stranger. “The Illustrated Man. There’s a difference.”

The merry-go-round was running, yes, but . . . It was running backward.

The music, thought Will, what is it? And how do I know it’s backside first?

The carousel wheeled, a great back-drifting lunar dream, the horses thrusting, the music in-gasped after, while Mr. Cooger, as simple as shadows, as simple as light, as simple as time, got younger. And younger. And younger.

Perhaps inspired part of King's Fairy Tale?

At Miss Foley’s house, they glanced up. In one of the softly lit front windows, someone stood looking out. A boy, no more and no less than twelve years old. “Will!” cried Jim, softly. “That boy—” “Her nephew . . .?” “Nephew, heck! Keep your head away. Maybe he can read lips. Walk slow. To the corner and back. You see his face? The eyes, Will! That’s one part of people don’t change, young, old, six or sixty! Boy’s face, sure, but the eyes were the eyes of Mr. Cooger!”

Oh

I’m so scared I could sprinkle dust.

“Jim, the music that the calliope played when Mr. Cooger got younger—” “Yeah?” “It was the ‘Funeral March’! Played backwards!” “Which ‘Funeral March’?” “Which! Jim, Chopin only wrote one tune! The ‘Funeral March’!”

Both were sent hungry upstairs.

Thank goodness they're not Merricat

Boys have never been known to go straight up to houses to ring bells to summon forth friends. They prefer to chunk dirt at clapboards, hurl acorns down roof shingles, or leave mysterious notes flapping from kites stranded on attic window sills. So it was with Jim and Will.

Look! the merry-go-round! you want it to go forward, don’t you, Jim? forward instead of back! and you on it, around once and you’re fifteen, circling and you’re sixteen, three times more and nineteen! music! and you’re twenty and off, standing tall! not Jim any more, still thirteen, almost fourteen on the empty midway, with me small, me young, me scared!

last mm past the ferris wheel

What?

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! That’s who it was. Squeezed tight, smashed small, convulsed by some terrible nature into a clenched fist of humanity . . . The seller of lightning rods.

The Illustrated Man sucked in a mighty breath. The freaks inhaled! The vast ingasped sigh might have, seemed to, stir Mr. Electrico. His sword twitched. Its tip leaped to spark-sting Will’s shoulder, then sizzle over in blue-green explosions at Jim. Lightning shot Jim’s shoulder.

“I dub thee . . . asses and foolssssss . . . I dub . . . thee . . . Mr. Sickly . . . and . . . Mr. Pale .

Miss Foley had first noticed, some years ago, that her house was crowded with bright shadows of herself. Best, then, to ignore the cold sheets of December ice in the hall, above the bureaus, in the bath. Best skate the thin ice, lightly. Paused, the weight of your attention might crack the shell. Plunged through the crust, you might drown in depths so cold, so remote, that all the Past lay carved in tombstone marbles there. Ice water would syringe your veins. Transfixed at the mirror sill, you would stand forever, unable to lift your gaze from the proofs of Time.

She had waited for the nephew to come back. With time passing, she must act on her own. Something must be done not to hurt, no, but slow down interference from such as Jim and Will. No one must stand between her and nephew, her and carousel, her and lovely gliding ride-around summer.

Jehoshaphat! You still don’t see we can’t do business with those ulmers and goffs!”

“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.” “That’s not good enough, Dad!” “Good is no guarantee for your body. It’s mainly for peace of mind—”

no man’s a hero to himself. I’ve lived with me a lifetime, Will. I know everything worth knowing about myself—”

since when did you think being good meant being happy?” “Since always.” “Since now learn otherwise. Sometimes the man who looks happiest in town, with the biggest smile, is the one carrying the biggest load of sin. There are smiles and smiles; learn to tell the dark variety from the light. The seal-barker, the laugh-shouter, half the time he’s covering up. He’s had his fun and he’s guilty. And men do love sin, Will, oh how they love it, never doubt, in all shapes, sizes, colors, and smells.

On the other hand, that unhappy, pale, put-upon man walking by, who looks all guilt and sin, why, often that’s your good man with a capital G, Will. For being good is a fearful occupation; men strain at it and sometimes break in two. I’ve known a few. You work twice as hard to be a farmer as to be his hog. I suppose it’s thinking about trying to be good makes the crack run up the wall one night. A man with high standards, too, the least hair falls on him sometimes wilts his spine. He can’t let himself alone, won’t lift himself off the hook if he falls just a breath from grace.

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

“Me? I’m the original sad man. I read a book and it makes me sad. See a film: sad. Plays? they really work me over.”

“Death makes everything else sad. But death itself only scares. If there wasn’t death, all the other things wouldn’t get tainted.”

akimbo and arustle

Nothing much else happened, all the rest of that night.

Perhaps only one person in town heard and guessed that the carousel was working again. The door to Miss Foley’s house opened and shut; her footsteps hurried away along the street.

Perhaps the carnival has come to town before