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

by Ray Bradbury

“Criminently!”

sgraffito

Maybe the carnival likes accidents, gets a kick out of them. Or maybe they did something to her on purpose. Maybe they wanted to know more about us, our names, where we live, or wanted her to help them hurt us. Who knows what? Maybe she got suspicious or scared. Then they just gave her more than she ever wanted or asked for.”

“Tell you your husbands. Tell you your wives. Tell you your fortunes. Tell you your lives. See me, I know. See me at the show. Tell you the color of his eyes. Tell you the color of her lies. Tell you the color of his goal. Tell you the color of her soul. Come now, don’t go. See me, see me at the show.”

“Blind, yes, blind. But I see what I see, I see where I be,” said the Witch, softly. “There’s a man with a straw hat in autumn. Hello. And—why there’s Mr. Dark, and . . . an old man . . . an old man.”

“Now!” said Will’s father, loud. The Witch flinched. “Now, this is a fine cigar!” yelled Will’s father, turning with great pomp back to the counter. “Quiet . . .” said the Illustrated Man. The boys looked up. “Now—” The Witch sniffed the wind. “Got to light it again!” Mr. Halloway stuck the cigar in the eternal blue flame. “Silence . . .” suggested Mr. Dark. “Ever smoke, yourself?” asked Dad. The Witch, from the concussion of his fiercely erupted and overly jovial words, dropped one wounded hand to her side, wiped sweat from it, as one wipes an antenna for better reception, and drifted it up again, her nostrils flared with wind. “Ah!” Will’s father blew a dense cloud of cigar smoke. It made a fine thick cumulus surrounding the woman. “Gah!” she choked.

Ya. Something is up with Will’s father.

Physiognomonie. The secrets of the individual’s character as found in his face.

Two lines of Shakespeare said it. He should write them in the middle of the clock of books, to fix the heart of his apprehension: By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes.

Waiting, his flesh took paleness from his bones.

“I know Dad’s in there, but is it Dad? I mean, what if they came, changed him, made him bad, promised him something they can’t give but he thinks they can, and we go in there and some day fifty years from now someone opens a book in there and you and me drop out, like two dry moth wings on the floor, Jim, someone pressed and hid us between pages, and no one ever guessed where we went—”

Deep forests, dark caves, dim churches, half-lit libraries were all the same, they tuned you down, they dampened your ardor, they brought you to murmurs and soft cries for fear of raising up phantom twins of your voice which might haunt corridors long after your passage.

“Looks like we’re going to do a lot of talking about one particular carnival. Where’s it come from, where’s it going, what’s it up to? We thought it never hit town before. Yet, by God, look here.” He tapped a yellowed newspaper ad dated October 12, 1888, and ran his fingernail along under this: J. C. COOGER AND G. M. DARK PRESENT THE PANDEMONIUM THEATER CO. COMBINED SIDE SHOWS AND UNNATURAL MUSEUMS, INTERNATIONAL! “J.C. G.M.,” said Jim. “Those are the same initials as on the throwaways around town this week. But—it couldn’t be the same men. .

“1860. 1846. Same ad. Same names. Same initials. Dark and Cooger, Cooger and Dark, they came and went, but only once every twenty, thirty, forty years, so people forgot. Where were they all the other years? Traveling. And more than traveling. Always in October: October 1846, October 1860, October 1888, October 1910, and October now, tonight.” His voice trailed off. “. . . Beware the autumn people.

If I was ever a rare fine summer person, that’s long ago. Most of us are half-and-half. The August noon in us works to stave off the November chills. We survive by what little Fourth of July wits we’ve stashed away. But there are times when we’re all autumn people.”

us’ns against them’ns?”

“I’m a fool. Always looking over your shoulder to see what’s coming instead of right at you to see what’s here.

“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. Somehow, I feel the carnival watches, to see which we’re doing and how and why, and moves in on us when it feels we’re ripe.”

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.

“How do I know this? I don’t! I feel it. I taste it. It was like old leaves burning on the wind two nights ago. It was a smell like mortuary flowers. I hear that music. I hear what you tell me, and half what you don’t tell me. Maybe I’ve always dreamt about such carnivals, and was just waiting for it to come so’s to see it once, and nod. Now, that tent show plays my bones like a marimba. “My skeleton knows. “It tells me “I tell you.”

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. Besides, you’re inferring that’s the Devil out there. I only say it’s a type of creature has learned to live off souls, not the souls themselves.

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.

if you’re a miserable sinner in one shape, you’re a miserable sinner in another. Changing size doesn’t change the brain.

“Boys, you read Dickens?” Mr. Dark whispered. “Critics hate his coincidences. But we know, don’t we? life’s all coincidence. Turn death and happenstance flakes off him like fleas from a killed ox. Look!”

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.

then behind, who were all those hundreds, no, thousands of people marching along, breathing down his neck? The Illustrated Man.

“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.

Oh ya.

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. And lo! like Jericho and the trump, with musical thunders the glass gave up its ghosts, Charles Halloway cried out, released. He took his hands from his face. Fresh starlight and dying carnival glow rushed in to set him free. The reflected dead men were gone, buried under the cymbaled slide, the splash and surfing of glass at his feet.

electric jolts through his loins.

For some reason i was waiting for the use of the word loins.

The boy flung himself forward, and grabbed at Will’s father.

It's a trap

Good to evil seems evil.

Shout, Will, sing, but most of all laugh, you got that, laugh!” “I can’t!” “You must! It’s all we got. I know! In the library! The Witch ran, my God, how she ran! I shot her dead with it. A single smile, Willy, the night people can’t stand it. The sun’s there. They hate the sun. We can’t take them seriously, Will!”

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