Something Wicked This Way Comes

by Ray Douglas Bradbury

  “Great!” said Jim.

  “Jim,” said Will. “We been out all day. Your mom’s sick.”

  “I forgot.” Jim flashed him a look filled with purest snake-poison.

  Flick. The nephew made an X-ray of both, showing them, no doubt, as cold bones trembling in warm flesh. He stuck out his hand.

  “Tomorrow, then. Meet you by the side-shows.”

  “Swell!” Jim grabbed the small hand.

  “So long!” Will jumped out the door, then turned with a last agonized appeal to the teacher.

  “Miss Foley…?”

  “Yes, Will?”

  Don’t go with that boy, he thought. Don’t go near the shows. Stay home, oh please! But then he said:

  “Mr. Crosetti’s dead.”

  She nodded, touched, waiting for his tears. And while she waited, he dragged Jim outside and the door swung shut on Miss Foley and the pink small face with the lenses in it going blink-click, snapshotting two incoherent boys, and them fumbling down the steps in October dark, while the merry-go-round started again in Will’s head, rushing while the leaves in the trees above cracked and fried with wind.

  Aside, Will spluttered, “Jim, you shook hands with him! Mr. Cooger! You’re not going to meet him!?”

  “It’s Mr. Cooger, all right. Boy, those eyes. If I met him tonight, we’d solve the whole shooting match. What’s eating you, Will?”

  “Eating me!” At the bottom of the steps now, they tussled in fierce and frantic whispers, glancing up at the empty windows where, now and again, a shadow passed. Will stopped. The music turned in his head. Stunned, he squinched his eyes. “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’!”

  “But why played backward?”

  “Mr. Cooger was marching away from the grave, not toward it, wasn’t he, getting younger, smaller, instead of older and dropping dead?”

  “Willy, you’re terrific!”

  “Sure, but—” Will stiffened. “He’s there. The window, again. Wave at him. So long! Now, walk and whistle something. Not Chopin, for gosh sakes—”

  Jim waved. Will waved. Both whistled, “Oh, Susanna.”

  The shadow gestured small in the high window.

  The boys hurried off down the street.

  Chapter 20

  Two suppers were waiting in two houses.

  One parent yelled at Jim, two parents yelled at Will.

  Both were sent hungry upstairs.

  It started at seven o’clock It was done by seven-three.

  Doors slammed. Locks clanked.

  Clocks ticked.

  Will stood by the door. The telephone was locked away outside. And even if he called, Miss Foley wouldn’t answer. By now she’d be gone beyond town… good grief? Anyway, what could he say? Miss Foley, that nephew’s no nephew? That boy’s no boy? Wouldn’t she laugh? She would. For the nephew was a nephew, the boy was a boy, or seemed such.

  He turned to the window. Jim, across the way, stood facing the same dilemma, in his room. Both struggled. It was too early to raise the windows and stage-whisper to each other. Parents below were busy growing crystal-radio peach-fuzz in their ears, alert.

  The boys threw themselves on their separate beds in their separate houses, probed mattresses for chocolate chunks put away against the lean years, and ate moodily.

  Clocks ticked.

  Nine. Nine-thirty. Ten.

  The knob rattled, softly, as Dad unlocked the door.

  Dad! thought Will. Come in! We got to talk!

  But Dad chewed his breath in the hall. Only his confusion, his always puzzled, half-bewildered face could be felt beyond the door.

  He won’t come in, thought Will. Walk around, talk around, back off from a thing, yes. But come sit, listen? When had he, when would he, ever?

  “Will…?”

  Will quickened.

  “Will…” said Dad, “be careful.”

  “Careful?” cried mother, coming along the hall. “Is that all you’re going to say?”

  “What else?” Dad was going downstairs now. “He jumps, I creep. How can you get two people together like that? He’s too young, I’m too old. God, sometimes I wish we’d never…”

  The door shut. Dad was walking away on the sidewalk.

  Will wanted to fling up the window and call. Suddenly, Dad was so lost in the night. Not me, don’t worry about me, Dad, he thought, you, Dad, stay in! It’s not safe! Don’t go!

  But he didn’t shout. And when he softly raised the window at last, the street was empty, and he knew it would be just a matter of time before that light went on in the library across town. 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. How could they!—when you were off to Tanganyika in ’98, Cairo in 1812, Florence in 1492!?

  “…careful…”

  What did Dad mean? Did he smell the panic, had he heard the music, had he prowled near the tents? No. Not Dad ever.

  Will tossed a marble over at Jim’s window.

  Tap. Silence.

  He imagined Jim seated alone in the dark, his breath like phosphorous on the air, ticking away to himself.

  Tap. Silence.

  This wasn’t like Jim. Always before, the window slid up, Jim’s head popped out, ripe with yells, secret hissings, giggles, riots and rebel charges.

  “Jim, I know you’re there!”

  Tap.

  Silence.

  Dad’s out in the town. Miss Foley’s with you-know-who! he thought. Good gosh, Jim, we got to do something! Tonight!

  He threw a last marble.

  …tap…

  It fell to the hushed grass below.

  Jim did not come to the window.

  Tonight, thought Will. He bit his knuckles. He lay back cold straight stiff on his bed.

  Chapter 21

  In the alley behind the house was a huge old-fashioned pine-plank boardwalk. It had been there ever since Will remembered, since civilization unthinkingly poured forth the dull hard unresisting cement sidewalks. His grandfather, a man of strong sentiment and wild impulse, who let nothing go without a roar, had flexed his muscles in favour of this vanishing landmark, and with a dozen handymen had toted a good forty feet of the walk into the alley where it had lain like the skeleton of some indefinable monster through the years, baked by sun, lushly rotted by rains.

  The town clock struck ten.

  Lying abed, Will realized he had been thinking about Grandfather’s vast gift from another time. He was waiting to hear the boardwalk speak. In what language? Well…

  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.

  Late nights, if there were gravestones to be leapfrogged or dead cats to be hurled down sour people’s chimneys, one or the other of the boys would prowl out under the moon and xylophone-dance on that old hollow-echoing musical boardwalk.

  Over the years, they had tuned the walk, prising up an A board and nailing it here, lifting up an F board and pounding it back down there until the walk was as near onto being melodious as weather and two entrepreneurs could fashion it.

  By the tune treaded out, you could tell the night’s venture. If Will heard Jim tramping hard on seven or eight notes of “Way Down Upon the Swanee River,” he scrambled out knowing it was moon-trail time on the creek leading to the river caves. If Jim heard Will out leaping about like a scalded airedale on the timbers and the tune remotely suggested “Marching Through Georgia,” it meant plums, peaches, or apples were ripe enough to get sick on out beyond town.

&n
bsp; So this night Will held his breath waiting for some tune to call him forth.

  What kind of tune would Jim play to represent the carnival, Miss Foley, Mr. Cooger, and/or the evil nephew?

  Ten-fifteen. Ten-thirty.

  No music.

  Will did not like Jim sitting in his room thinking what? Of the Mirror Maze? What had he seen there? And, seeing, what did he plan?

  Will stirred, restively.

  Especially he did not like to think of Jim with no father between him and the tent shows and all that lay dark in the meadows. And a mother who wanted him around so very much, he just had to get away, get out, breathe free night air, know free night waters running toward bigger freer seas.

  Jim! he thought. Let’s have the music!

  And at ten-thirty-five, it came.

  He heard, or thought he heard, Jim out in the starlight leaping way up and coming flat down like a spring tomcat on the vast xylophone. And the tune! Was or wasn’t it like the funeral dirge played backward by the old carousel calliope?!!

  Will started to raise his window to be sure. But suddenly, Jim’s window slid quietly up.

  He hadn’t been down on the boards! It was just Will’s wild wish that made the tune! Will started to whisper, but stopped.

  For Jim, without a word, scuttled down the drainpipe.

  Jim! Will thought.

  Jim, on the lawn, stiffened as if hearing his name.

  You’re not going without me, Jim?

  Jim glanced swiftly up.

  If he saw Will, he made no sign.

  Jim, Will thought, we’re still pals, smell things nobody else smells, hear things no one else hears, got the same blood, run the same way. Now this first time ever, you’re sneaking out! Ditching me!

  But the driveway was empty.

  A salamander flicking the hedge, there went Jim.

  Will was out the window, down the trellis, and over the hedge, before he thought: I’m alone. If I lose Jim, it’s the first time I’ll be out alone at night, too. And where am I going? Wherever Jim goes.

  Lord, let me keep up!

  Jim skimmed like a dark owl after a mouse. Will loped like a weaponless hunter after the owl. They sailed their shadows over October lawns.

  And when they stopped…

  There was Miss Foley’s house.

  Chapter 22

  Jim glanced back.

  Will became a bush behind a bush, a shadow among shadows, with two starlight rounds of glass, his eyes, holding the image of Jim calling up in a whisper toward the second-floor windows.

  “Hey there… hey…”

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

  “Hey!” called Jim, softly. “You…!”

  A shadow uprose on a dim-lit shade, above. A small shadow. The nephew had brought Miss Foley home, they were in their separate rooms or—Oh Lord, thought Will, I hope she’s safe home. Maybe, like the lightning-rod salesman, she—

  “Hey…!”

  Jim gazed up with that funny warm look of breathless anticipation he often had nights in summer at the shadow-show window Theatre in that house a few streets over. Looking up with love, with devotion, like a cat Jim waited for some special dark mouse to run forth. Crouched, now slowly he seemed to grow taller, as if his bones were pulled by the in the window above, which now suddenly vanished.

  Will ground his teeth.

  He felt the shadow sift down through the house like a cold breath. He could wait no longer. He leaped forth.

  “Jim!”

  He seized Jim’s arm.

  “Will, what you doing here?!”

  “Jim, don’t talk to him! Get out of here. My gosh, he’ll chew and spit out your bones!”

  Jim writhed himself free.

  “Will, go home! You’ll spoil everything!”

  “He scares me, Jim, what you want from him!? This afternoon… in the maze, did you see something!!?”

  “…Yes…”

  “For gosh sakes, what!”

  Will grabbed Jim’s shirt front, felt his heart bang under the chest bones. “Jim—”

  “Let go.” Jim was terribly quiet. “If he knows you’re here, he won’t come out. Willy, if you don’t let go, I’ll remember when—”

  “When what!”

  “When I’m older, darn it, older!”

  Jim spat.

  As if he was struck by lightning, Will jumped back.

  He looked at his empty hands and put one up to wipe the spittle off his cheek.

  “Oh, Jim,” he mourned.

  And he heard the merry-go-round motioning, gliding on black night waters around, around, and Jim on a black stallion riding off and about, circling in tree-shadow and he wanted to cry out, 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!

  Will hauled off and hit Jim, hard, on the nose.

  Then he jumped Jim, wrapped him tight, and toppled him rolling down, yelling, in the bushes. He slapped Jim’s mouth, stuffed it, mashed it full of fingers to snap and bite at, suffocating the angry grunts and yells.

  The front door opened.

  Will crushed the air out of Jim, lay heavy on him, fisting his mouth tight.

  Something stood on the porch. A tiny shadow scanned the town, searching for but not finding Jim.

  But it was just the boy Robert, the friendly nephew, come almost casually forth, hands in pockets, whistling under his breath, to breathe the night air as boys do, curious for adventures that they themselves must make, that rarely happen by. Threshed tight, mortally locked and bound to Jim, staring up, Will was all the more shaken to see the normal boy, the airy glance, the unassuming poise, the small, the easy self in which no man at all was revealed by street light.

  At any moment, Robert, in full cry, might leap to play with them, tangle legs, lock arms, bark-snap like pups in May, the whole thing end with them strewn in laughing tears on the lawn, the terror spent, the fear melted off in dew, a dream of nothings quickly gone such as dreams go when the eye snaps wide. For there indeed stood the nephew, his face round fresh, and cream-smooth as a peach.

  And he was smiling down at the two boys he now saw locked limb in limb on the grass.

  Then, swiftly, he darted in. He must have run upstairs, scrabbled about, and hurtled down again, for suddenly as the two boys outthrashed, outgripped, outraged each other, there was a rain of tinkling, rattling glitter on the lawn.

  The nephew leaped the porch rail and landed panther-soft, imbedded in his shadow, on the grass. His hands were delicious with stars. These he liberally sprinkled. They thudded, slithered, winked at Jim’s side. Both boys lay stricken by the rain of gold and diamond fire that pelted them.

  “Help, police!” cried Robert.

  Will was so shocked he let go Jim.

  Jim was so shocked he let go Will.

  Both reached at the same time for the cold strewn ice.

  “Good grief, a bracelet!”

  “A ring! A necklace!”

  Robert kicked. Two trash cans at the curb fell thundering.

  A bedroom light, above, flicked on.

  “Police!” Robert threw one last spray of glitter at their feet, shut up his fresh-peach smile like locking an explosion away in a box, and shot away down the street.

  “Wait!” Jim jumped. “We won’t hurt you!”

  Will tripped him, Jim fell.

  The window upstairs opened. Miss Foley leaned out. Jim, on his knees, held a woman’s wrist watch. Will blinked at a necklace in his hands.

  “Who’s there!” she cried. “Jim? Will? What’s that you got?!”

  But Jim was running. Will stopped only long enough to see the window empty itself with a wail as Miss Foley pulled in to see h
er room. When he heard her full scream, he knew she had discovered the burglary.

  Running, Will knew he was doing just what the nephew wanted. He should turn back, pick up the jewels, tell Miss Foley what happened. But he must save Jim!

  Far back, he heard Miss Foley’s new cries turn on more lights! Will Halloway! Jim Nightshade! Night runners! Thieves! That’s us, thought Will, oh my Lord! That’s us! No one’ll believe anything we say from now on! Not about carnivals, not about carousels, not about mirrors or evil nephews, not about nothing!

  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.

  Chapter 23

  They hit the carnival grounds at a good twenty miles an hour, give or take a mile, the nephew in the lead, Jim close behind, and Will further back, gasping, shotgun blasts of fatigue in his feet, his head, his heart.

  The nephew, running scared, looked back, not smiling.

  Fooled him, thought Will, he figured I wouldn’t follow, figured I’d call the police, get stuck, not be believed, or run hide. Now he’s scared I’ll beat the tar out of him, and wants to jump on that ride and run around getting older and bigger than me. Oh, Jim, Jim, we got to stop him, keep him young, tear his skin off!

  But he knew from Jim’s running there’d be no help from Jim. Jim wasn’t running after nephews. He was running toward free rides.

  The nephew vanished around a tent far ahead. Jim followed. By the time Will reached the midway, the merry-go-round was popping to life. In the pulse, the din, the squeal-around of music the small fresh-faced nephew rode the great platform in a swirl of midnight dust.

  Jim, ten feet back, watched the horses leap, his eyes striking fire from the high-jumped stallion’s eyes.

  The merry-go-round was going forward!

  Jim leaned at it.

  “Jim!” cried Will.

  The nephew swept from sight borne around by the machine. Drifted back again he stretched out pink fingers urging softly: “…Jim…?”

  Jim twitched one foot forward.

  “No!” Will plunged.

  He knocked, seized, held Jim; they toppled; they fell in a heap.