Something Wicked This Way Comes

by Ray Douglas Bradbury

  Jim said nothing, sewn up in the Witch’s dream.

  Don’t listen! wailed his best friend, who heard nothing but heard it all.

  “And Will?” said Mr. Dark. “Let’s ride him back and back, eh? 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? Yes, I think that’s best for Will. A plaything, a little wet friend for the Dwarf!”

  Will must have screamed.

  But not out loud.

  For only the dogs barked, in terror; yiping, off they ran, as if pelted with rocks.

  A man came around the corner.

  A policeman.

  “Who’s this?” muttered Mr. Dark.

  “Mr. Kolb,” said Jim.

  “Mr. Kolb!” said Will.

  “Darning-needle,” whispered Mr. Dark. “Dragonfly.” Pain stabbed Will’s ears. Moss stuffed his eyes. Gum glued his teeth. He felt a multitudinous tapping, shuttling, weaving, about his face, all numb again.

  “Say hello to Mr. Kolb.”

  “Hello,” said Jim.

  “…Kolb…” said the dreaming Will.

  “Hello, boys. Gentlemen.”

  “Turn here,” said Mr. Dark.

  They turned.

  Away toward meadow country, away from warm lights, good town, safe streets, the drumless march progressed.

  Chapter 46

  Stretched out over, a mile of territory the straggling parade now moved as follows:

  At the edge of the carnival midway, stumping the grass with their dead feet, Jim and Will paced friends who constantly retold the wondrous uses of darning-needle dragonflies.

  Behind, a good half mile, trying to catch up, walking mysteriously wounded, the Gypsy, who whorl-symboled the dust.

  And yet farther back came the janitor-father, now slowing himself with remembrances of age, now pacing swiftly young with thoughts of the brief first encounter and victory, carrying his left hand patted to his chest, chewing medicines as he went.

  At the midway rim, Mr. Dark looked back as if an inner voice had named the stragglers in his widely separated maneuver. But the voice failed, he was unsure. He nodded briskly, and Dwarf, Skeleton, Jim, Will thrust through the crowd.

  Jim felt the river of bright people wash by all around but not touching. Will heard waterfall laughter here, there, and him walking through the downpour. An explosion of fireflies blossomed on the sky; the ferris wheel, exultant as a titanic fireworks, dilated above them.

  Then they were at the Mirror Maze and sidling, coliding, bumping, careening through the unfolded ice ponds where stricken spider-stung boys much like themselves appeared, vanished a thousand times over.

  That’s me! thought Jim.

  But I can’t help me, thought Will, no matter how many of me there are!

  And crowd of boys, plus crowd of reflected Mr. Dark’s illustrations, for he had taken off his coat and shirt now, crammed and crushed through to the Waxworks at the end of the maze.

  “Sit,” said Mr. Dark. “Stay.”

  Among the wax figures of murdered, gunshot, guillotined, garroted men and women the two boys sat like Egyptian cats, unblinked, untwitched, unswallowing.

  Some late visitors passed through, laughing. They commented on all the wax figures.

  They did not notice the thin line of saliva crept from the corner of one “wax” boy’s mouth.

  They did not see how bright was the second “wax” boy’s stare, which suddenly brimmed and ran clear water down his cheek.

  Outside, the Witch limped in through back alleys of rope and peg between the tents.

  “Ladies and gentlemen!”

  The last crowd of the night, three or four hundred strong, turned as a body.

  The Illustrated Man, stripped to the waist, all nightmare viper, sabertooth, libidinous ape, clotted vulture, all salmon-sulphur sky rose up with annunciations:

  “The last free event this evening! Come one! Come all!”

  The crowd surged toward the main platform outside the freak tent, where stood Dwarf, Skeleton, and Mr. Dark.

  “The Most Amazingly Dangerous, ofttimes Fatal—World Famous BULLET TRICK!”

  The crowd gasped with pleasure.

  “The rifles, if you please!”

  The Thin One cracked wide a racked display of bright artillery.

  The Witch, hurrying up, froze when Mr. Dark cried: “And here, our death-defier, the bullet-catcher who will stake her life—Mademoiselle Tarot!”

  The Witch shook her head, bleated, but Dark’s hand swept down to swing her like a child to the platform, still protesting, which gave Dark pause, but, in front of everyone now, he went on:

  “A volunteer, please, to fire the rifle!”

  The crowd rumbled softly, daring itself to speak up.

  Mr. Dark’s mouth barely moved. Under his breath he asked, “Is the clock stopped?”

  “Not,” she whined, “stopped.”

  “No?” he almost burst out.

  He burnt her with his eyes, then turned to the audience and let his mouth finish the spiel, his fingers rapping over the rifles.

  “Volunteers, please!”

  “Stop the act,” the Witch cried softly, wringing, her hands.

  “It goes on, damn you, worse than double-damn you,” he whispered, whistled fiercely.

  Secretly, Dark gathered a pinch of flesh on his wrist, the illustration of a black-nun blind woman, which he bit with his fingernails.

  The Witch spasmed, seized her breast, groaned, ground her teeth. “Mercy!” she hissed, half aloud.

  Silence from the crowd.

  Mr. Dark nodded swiftly.

  “Since there are no volunteers—” He scraped his illustrated wrist. The Witch shuddered. “We will cancel our last act and—”

  “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.

  Chapter 47

  The crowd’s appreciative clamor faded.

  Charles Halloway did not move.

  He let the path grow leading down to the platform.

  He could not see the expression on the faces of the freaks standing up there. His eyes swept the crowd and found the Mirror Maze, the empty oblivion which beckoned with ten times a thousand million light years of reflections, counterreflections, reversed and double-reversed, plunging deep to nothing, face-falling to nothing, stomach-dropping away to yet more sickening plummets of nothing.

  And yet, wasn’t there an echo of two boys in the powdered silver at the back of each glass? Did or did he not perceive, with the tremulous tip of eyelash if not the eye, their passage through, their wait beyond, warm wax amongst cold, waiting to be key-wound by terrors, run free in panics?

  No, thought Charles Halloway, don’t think. Get on with this!

  “Coming!” he shouted.

  “Go get ’em, Pop!” a man said.

  “Yes,” said Charles Halloway. “I will.”

  And he walked down through the crowd.

  The Witch spun slowly, magnetized at the night-wandering volunteer’s approach. Her eyelids jerked at their sewn black-wax threads behind dark glasses.

  Mr. Dark, the illustration-drenched, superinfested civilization of souls, leaned from the platform, gladly whetting his lips. Thoughts spun fiery Catherine wheels in his eyes, quick, quick, what, what, what!

  And the aging janitor, fixing a smile to his face like a white celluloid set of teeth from a Cracker Jack box, strode on, and the crowd opened as the sea before Moses and closed behind, and him wondering what to do? why was he here? but on the move, steadil
y, nevertheless.

  Charles Halloway’s foot touched the first step of the platform.

  The Witch trembled secretly.

  Mr. Dark felt this secret, glanced sharply. Swiftly he put his hand out to grab for the good right hand of this fifty-four-year-old man.

  But the fifty-four-year-old man shook his head, would not give his hand to be held, touched, or helped up.

  “Thanks, no.”

  On the platform, Charles Halloway waved to the crowd.

  The people set off a few firecrackers of applause.

  “But—” Mr. Dark was amazed—“your left hand, sir, you can’t hold and fire a rifle if you have only the use of one hand!”

  Charles Halloway paled.

  “I’ll do it,” he said. “With one hand.”

  “Hoorah!” cried a boy, below.

  “Go it, Charlie!” a man called, out beyond.

  Mr. Dark flushed as the crowd laughed and applauded even louder now. He lifted his hands to ward off the wave of refreshing sound, like rain that washed in from the people.

  “All right, all right! Let’s see if he can do it!”

  Brutally, the Illustrated Man snapped a rifle from its locks, hurled it through the air.

  The crowd gasped.

  Charles Halloway ducked. He put up his right hand. The rifle slapped his palm. He grabbed. It did not fall. He had it good.

  The audience hooted, said things against Mr. Dark’s bad manners which made him turn away for a moment, damning himself, silently.

  Will’s father lifted the rifle, beaming.

  The crowd roared.

  And while the wave of applause came in, crashed, and went back down the shore, he looked again to the maze, where the sensed but unseen shadow-shapes of Will and Jim were filed among titanic razor blades of revelation and illusion, then back to the Medusa gaze of Mr. Dark, swiftly reckoned with, and on to the stitched and jittering sightless nun of midnight, sidling back still more. Now she was as far as she could sidle, at the far end of the platform, almost pressed to the whorled red-black rifle bull’s-eye target.

  “Boy!” shouted Charles Halloway.

  Mr. Dark stiffened.

  “I need a boy volunteer to help me hold the rifle!” shouted Charles Halloway.

  “Someone! Anyone!” he shouted.

  A few boys in the crowd shifted around on their toes.

  “Boy!” shouted Charles Halloway. “Hold on. My son’s out there. He’ll volunteer, won’t you, Will?”

  The Witch flung one band up to feel the shape of this audacity which came off the fifty-four-year-old man like a fever. Mr. Dark was spun round as if hit by a fast-traveling gunshot.

  “Will!” called his father.

  In the Wax Museum, Will sat motionless.

  “Will!” called his father. “Come on, boy!”

  The crowd looked left, looked right, looked back.

  No answer.

  Will sat in the Wax Museum.

  Mr. Dark observed all of this with some respect, some degree of admiration, some concern; he seemed to be waiting, just as was Will’s father.

  “Will, come help your old man!” Mr. Halloway cried, jovially.

  Will sat in the Wax Museum.

  Mr. Dark smiled.

  “Will! Willy! Come here!”

  No answer.

  Mr. Dark smiled more.

  “Willy! Don’t you hear your old man?”

  Mr. Dark stopped smiling.

  For this last was the voice of a gentleman in the crowd, speaking up.

  The crowd laughed.

  “Will!” called a woman.

  “Willy!” called another.

  “Yoohoo!” A gentleman in a beard.

  “Come on, William!” A boy.

  The crowd laughed more, jostled elbows.

  Charles Halloway called. They called. Charles Halloway cried to the hills. They cried to the hills.

  “Will! Willy! William!”

  A shadow shuttled and wove in the mirrors.

  The Witch broke out chandeliers of sweat.

  “There!”

  The crowd stopped calling.

  As did Charles Halloway, choked on the name of his son now, and silent.

  For Will stood in the entrance of the Maze, like the wax figure that he almost was.

  “Will,” called his father, softly.

  The sound of this chimed the sweat off the Witch.

  Will moved, unseeing, through the crowd.

  And handing the rifle down like a cane for the boy to grasp, his father drew him up onto the stand.

  “Here’s my good left hand!” announced the father.

  Will neither saw nor heard the crowd sound forth a solid and offensive applause.

  Mr. Dark had not moved, though Charles Halloway could see him, during all this, lighting and setting off cannon crackers in his head; but each, one by one, fizzled and died. Mr. Dark could not guess what they were up to. For that matter, Charles Halloway did not know or guess. It was as if he had written this play for himself, over the years, in the library, nights, torn up the play after memorizing it, and now forgotten what he had set forth to remember. He was relying on secret discoveries of self, moment by moment, playing by ear, no! heart and soul! And… now?!

  The brightness of his teeth seemed to strike the Witch blinder! Impossible! She flung one hand to her glasses, her sewn eyelids!

  “Closer, everyone!” called Will’s father.

  The crowd gathered in. The platform was an island. The sea was people.

  “Watch the bull’s-eye targeteer!”

  The Witch melted in her rags.

  The Illustrated Man looked left, found no pleasure in the Skeleton, who simply looked thinner; found no pleasure looking right to a Dwarf who blandly dwelt in squashed idiot madness.

  “The bullet, please!” Will’s father said, amiably.

  The thousand illustrations on his jerking horseflesh frame did not hear, so why should Mr. Dark?

  “If you please,” said Charles Halloway. “The bullet? So I may knock that flea off the old Gypsy’s wart!”

  Will stood motionless.

  Mr. Dark hesitated.

  Out in the choppy sea, smiles flashed, here, there, a hundred, two hundred, three hundred whitenesses, as if a vast titillation of water had been provoked by a lunar gravity. The tide ebbed.

  The Illustrated Man, in slow motion, proffered the bullet. His arm, a long molasses undulation, lazed to offer the bullet to the boy, to see if he would notice; he did not notice.

  His father took the missile.

  “Mark it with your initials,” said Mr. Dark, by rote.

  “No, with more!” Charles Halloway raised his son’s hand and made him hold the bullet, so he could take a penknife with his one good hand and carve a strange symbol on the lead.

  What’s happening? Will thought. I know what’s happenmg. I don’t know what’s happening? What!?

  Mr. Dark saw a crescent moon on the bullet, saw nothing wrong with such a moon, rammed it in the rifle, slapped the rifle back at Will’s father, who once more caught it deftly.

  “Ready, Will?”

  The boy’s peach face drowsed in the slightest nod.

  Charles Halloway flicked a last glance at the maze, thought, Jim, you there still? Get ready!

  Mr. Dark turned to go pat, conjure, calm his dust-crone friend, but cracked to a halt at the crack of the rifle being reopened, the bullet ejected by Will’s father, to assure the audience it was there. It seemed real enough, yet he had read long ago that this was a substitute bullet, shaped of a very hard steel-colored crayon wax. Shot through the rifle it would dissolve out the barrel as smoke and vapor. At this very moment, having somehow switched bullets, the Illustrated Man was slipping the real marked bullet into the Witch’s jerking fingers. She would hide it in her cheek. At the shot, she would pretend to jolt under the imagined impact, then reveal the bullet caught by her yellow rat teeth. Fanfare! Applause!

  The Illustrated Man, glan
cing up, saw Charles Halloway with the opened rifle, the wax bullet. But instead of revealing what he knew, Mr. Halloway simply said, “Let’s cut our mark more clearly, eh, boy?” And with his penknife, the boy holding the bullet in his senseless hand, he marked this fresh new wax unmarked bullet with the same mysterious crescent moon, then snapped it back into the rifle.

  “Ready?!”

  Mr. Dark looked to the Witch.

  Who hesitated, then nodded, once, faintly.

  “Ready!” announced Charles Halloway.

  And all about lay the tents, the breathing crowds, the anxious freaks, a Witch iced with hysteria, Jim hidden to be found, an ancient mummy still seated glowing with blue fire in his electric chair, and a merry-go-round waiting for the show to cease, the crowd to go, and the carnival to have its way with boys and janitor trapped if possible, and alone.

  “Will,” said Charles Halloway conversationally, as he lifted the now suddenly heavy rifle. “Your shoulder here is my brace. Take the middle of the rifle, gently, with one hand. Take it, Will.” The boy raised a hand. “That’s it, son. When I say ‘hold,’ hold your breath. Hear me?”

  The boy’s head tremored with the slightest affirmation.

  He slept. He dreamed. The dream was nightmare. The nightmare was this.

  And the next part of this was his father shouting:

  “Ladies! Gentlemen!”

  The illustrated Man clenched his fist. Will’s picture, lost in it, like a flower, was crushed.

  Will twisted.

  The rifle fell.

  Charles Halloway pretended not to notice.

  “Me and Will here will now, together, him being the good left arm I can’t use, do the one and only most dangerous, sometimes fatal, Bullet Trick!”

  Applause. Laughter.

  Quickly the fifty-four-year-old janitor, denying each year, laid the rifle back on the boy’s jerking shoulder.

  “Hear that, Will? Listen! That’s for us!”

  The boy listened. The boy grew calm.

  Mr. Dark tightened his fist.