Something Wicked This Way Comes

by Ray Douglas Bradbury

  Will was taken with slight palsy.

  “We’ll hit ’em bull’s-eye on, won’t we, boy!” said his father.

  More laughter.

  And the boy grew very calm indeed, with the rifle on his shoulder, and Mr. Dark squeezed tight on the peach-fuzz face nestled in the flesh of his hand, but the boy was serene in the laughter which still flowed and his father kept the hoop rolling thus:

  “Show the lady your teeth, Will!”

  Will showed the woman against the target his teeth. The blood fell away from the Witch’s f ace.

  Now Charles Halloway showed her his teeth, too, such as they were.

  And winter lived in the Witch.

  “Boy,” said someone in the audience, “she’s great. Acts scared! Look!”

  I’m looking, thought Will’s father, his left hand useless at his side his right hand up to the rifle trigger, his face to the sight as his son held the rifle unswervingly pointed at the bull’s-eye and the Witch’s face superimposed there, and the last moment come, and a wax bullet in the chamber, and what could a wax bullet do? A bullet that dissolved in transit, what use? why were they here, what could they do? silly, silly!

  No! thought Will’s father. Stop!

  He stopped the doubts.

  He felt his mouth shape words with no sound.

  But, the Witch heard what he said.

  Above the dying laughter, before the warm sound was completely gone, he made these words, silently with his lips:

  The crescent moon I have marked on the bullet is not a crescent moon.

  It is my own smile.

  I have put my smile on the bullet in the rifle.

  He said it once.

  He waited for her to understand.

  He said it, silently, again.

  And in the moment before the Illustrated Man himself translated the mouthings, quickly, Charles Halloway cried, faintly, “Hold!” Will held his breath. Far back among wax statues, Jim, hid away, dripped saliva from his chin. Strapped in electric chair a dead-alive mummy hummed power in its teeth. Mr. Dark’s illustrations writhed with sick sweat as he clenched his fist a final time, but—too late! Serene, Will held breath, held weapon. Serene, his father said, “Now.”

  And fired the rifle.

  Chapter 48

  One shot!

  The Witch sucked breath.

  Jim, in the Wax Museum, sucked breath.

  As did Will, asleep.

  As did his father.

  As did Mr. Dark.

  As did all the freaks.

  As did the crowd.

  The Witch screamed.

  Jim among the wax dummies, blew all the air from his lungs.

  Will shrieked himself awake, on the platform.

  The Illustrated Man let the air from his mouth in a great angry bray, whipping up his hands to stop all events. But the Witch fell. She fell off the platform. She fell in the dust.

  The smoking rifle in his one good hand, Charles Halloway let his breath go slow, feeling every bit of it move from him. He still stared along the rifle sights at the target where the woman had been.

  At the platform rim, Mr. Dark looked down at the screaming crowd and what they were screaming about.

  “She’s fainted—”

  “No. She slipped!”

  “She’s… shot!”

  At last Charles Halloway came to stand by the Illustrated Man, looking down. There were many things in his face: surprise, dismay, and some small strange relief and satisfaction.

  The woman was lifted and put on the platform. Her mouth was frozen open, almost with a look of recognition.

  He knew she was dead. In a moment, the crowd would know. He watched the Illustrated Man’s hand move down to touch, trace, feel for life. Then Mr. Dark lifted both her hands, like a doll, in some marionette strategy, to give her motion. But the body refused.

  So he gave one of the Witch’s arms to the Dwarf, the other to the Skeleton, and they shook and moved them in a ghastly semblance of reawakening as the crowd backed.

  “…dead…”

  “But… there’s no wound.”

  “Shock, you think?”

  Shock, thought Charles Halloway, my God, did that kill her? Or the other bullet? When I fired the shot, did she suck the other bullet down her throat? Did she… choke on my smile! Oh, Christ!

  “It’s all right! Show’s over! Just fainted!” said Mr. Dark. “All an act! All part of the show,” he said, not looking at the woman, not looking at the crowd, but looking at Will, who stood blinking around, out of one nightmare and fresh into the next as his father stood with him and Mr. Dark cried: “Everyone home! Show’s over! Lights! Lights!”

  The carnival lights flickered.

  The crowd, herded before the failing illumination, turned like a great carousel and as the lamps dimmed, hustled toward the few remaining pools of light as if to warm themselves there before braving the wind. One by one, one by one, the lights indeed were going off.

  “Lights!” said Mr. Dark.

  “Jump!” said Will’s father.

  Will jumped. Will ran with his father who still carried the weapon that had fired the smile that had killed the Gypsy and put her to dust.

  “Is Jim in there?”

  They were at the maze. Behind them, on the platform, Mr. Dark bellowed: “Lights! Go home! All over. Done!”

  “Is Jim in there?” wondered Will. “Yes. Yes, he is!”

  Inside the Wax Museum, Jim still had not moved, had not blinked.

  “Jim!” The voice came through the maze.

  Jim moved. Jim blinked. A rear exit door stood wide. Jim blundered toward it.

  “I’m coming for you, Jim!”

  “No, Dad!”

  Will caught at his father, who stood at the first turn of the mirrors with the pain come back to his hands racing up along the nerves to strike a fireball near his heart. “Dad, don’t go in!” Will gabbed his good arm.

  Behind them, the platform was empty, Mr. Dark was running… where? Somewhere as the night shut in, the lights went off, went off, went off, the night sucked around, gathering, whistling, simpering, and the crowd, like a shake of leaves from one huge tree, blew off the midway, and Will’s father stood facing the glass tides, the waves, the gauntlet of horror he knew waited for him to swim through, stride through to fight the desiccation, the annihilation of one’s self that waited there. He had seen enough to know. Eyes shut, you’d be lost. Eyes open, you’d know such utter despair, such gravities of anguish would weight you, you might never drag past the twelfth turn. But Charles Halloway took Will’s hands away. “Jim’s there. Jim, wait! I’m coming in!”

  And Charles Halloway took the next step into the maze.

  Ahead flowed sluices of silver light, deep slabs of shadow, polished, wiped, rinsed with images of themselves and others whose souls, passing, scoured the glass with their agony, curried the cold ice with their narcissism, or sweated the angles and flats with their fear.

  “Jim!”

  He ran. Will ran. They stopped.

  For the lights in here were going blind, one by one, going dim, changing color, now blue, now a color like lilac summer lightning which flared in haloes, then a flickerlight like a thousand ancient windblown candles.

  And between himself and Jim in need of rescue, stood an army of one million sick-mouthed, frost-haired, white-tine-bearded men.

  Them! all of them! he thought. That’s me!

  Dad! thought Will, at his back, don’t be afraid. It’s only you. All only my father!

  But he did not like their look. They were so old, so very old, and got much older the farther away they marched, wildly gesticulating, as Dad threw up his hands to fend off the revelation, this wild image repeated to insanity.

  Dad! he thought, it’s you!

  But, it was more.

  And all the lights went out.

  And both, squeezed still, in muffle-gasping silence, stood afraid.

  Chapter 49

  A hand dug lik
e a mole in the dark.

  Will’s hand.

  It emptied his pockets, it delved, it rejected, it dug again. For while it was dark he knew those million old men might march, hustle, rush, leap, smash Dad with what they were! In this shut-up night, with just four seconds to think of them, they might do anything to Dad! 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!

  So, quick!

  Who has more pockets than a magician?

  A boy.

  Whose pockets contain more than a magician’s?

  A boy’s.

  Will seized forth kitchen matches!

  “Oh God, Dad, here!”

  He struck the match.

  The stampede was close!

  They had come running. Now, fixed by light, they widened their eyes, as did Dad, amazed their mouths at their own ancient quakes and masquerades. Halt! the match had cried. And platoons left, squads right, had stilt-muscled themselves to fitful rest, to baleful glare, itching for the match to whiff out. Then, given lease to run next time, they’d hit this old, very old, much older, terribly old man, suffocate him with Fates in one instant.

  “No!” said Charles Halloway.

  No. A million dead lips moved.

  Will thrust the match forward. In the mirrors, a wizened multiplication of boy-apes did likewise, posing a single rosebud of blue-yellow flame.

  “No!”

  Every glass threw javelins of light which invisibly pierced, sank deep, found heart, soul, lungs, to frost the veins, cut nerves, send Will to ruin, paralyze and then kick-football heart. Hamstrung, the old old man foundered to his knees, as did his suppliant images, his congregation of terrified selves one week, one month, two years, twenty, fifty, seventy, ninety years from now! every second, minute, and long-after-midnight hour of his possible survival into insanity, 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.

  “No!”

  Charles Halloway struck the match from his son’s hand.

  “Dad, don’t.”

  For in the new dark, the restive herd of old men shambled forward, hearts hammering.

  “Dad, we gotta see!”

  He struck his second and final match.

  And in the flare saw Dad sunk down, eyes clenched, fists tight, and all those other men who would have to shunt, crawl, scramble on knees once this last light was gone. 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, and suddenly, as before, the image of the Witch, the memory of the library, defeat for one, victory for another, swam before him, mixed with sound of rifle, shot, flight of marked bullet, surge of fleeing crowd.

  For only a moment longer he looked at all of himselves, at Will. A small sound escaped his mouth. A little larger sound escaped his mouth.

  And 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.

  The Witch, if she were alive, would have known that sound, and died again.

  Chapter 50

  Jim Nightshade, out the back door of the maze lost on the carnival grounds, running, stopped.

  The Illustrated Man, somewhere among the black tents, running, stopped.

  The Dwarf froze.

  The Skeleton turned.

  All had heard.

  Not the sound that Charles Halloway made, no.

  But the terrific sounds that followed.

  One mirror alone, and then a second mirror, followed by a pause, and then a third mirror, and a fourth and another after that and another after that and still another and another after that, in domino fashion, they formed swift spiderwebs over their fierce stares and then with faint tinkles and sharp cracks, fell.

  One minute there was this incredible Jacob’s ladder of glass, folding, refolding and folding away yet again images pressed in a book of light. The next, all shattered to meteor precipitation.

  The Illustrated Man, halted, listening, felt his own eyes, crystal, almost spiderweb and splinter with the sounds.

  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 which first shook moth-silver from the mirror backs, then shook images from glass faces, then shook glass itself to ruin. A dozen, a hundred, a thousand mirrors, and with them the ancient images of Charles Halloway, sank earthward in delicious moonfalls of snow and sleety water.

  All because of the sound he had let come from his lungs through his throat out his mouth.

  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.

  “Lights… lights!”

  A far voice cried away more warmth.

  The Illustrated Man, unfrozen, vanished among the tents.

  The crowd was now gone.

  “Dad, what’d you do?”

  But the match burned Will’s fingers, he dropped it, but now there was dim light enough to see Dad shuffle the trash, stir the mess of mirrored glass, heading back through the empty places where the maze had been and was no more.

  “Jim?”

  A door stood open. Pale carnival illumination, fading, poured through to show them wax figures of murderers and murderess.

  Jim did not sit among them.

  “Jim!”

  They stared at the open door through which Jim had run to be lost in the swarms of night between black canvases.

  The last electric light bulb went out.

  “We’ll never find him now,” said Will.

  “Yes,” said his father, standing in the dark. “We’ll find him.”

  Where? Will thought, and stopped.

  Far down the midway, the carousel steamed, the calliope tortured itself with musics.

  There, thought Will. If Jim’s anywhere, its there, to the music, old funny Jim, the free-ride ticket hid in his pocket still, I bet! Oh, damn Jim, damn him, damn him! he cried, and then thought, no! don’t you, he’s damned already, or near it! So how do we find him in the dark, no matches, no lights, just the two of us, all of them, and us alone in their territory?

  “How—” said Will, aloud.

  But his father said “There,” very softly. With gratitude.

  And Will stepped to the door, which was lighter now.

  The moon! Thank God.

  It was rising from the hills.

  “The police…?”

  “No time. It’s the next few minutes or nothing. Three people we got to worry about—”

  “The freaks!”

  “Three people, Will. Number one, Jim, number two, Mr. Cooger frying in his Electric Chair. Number three, Mr. Dark and his skinful of souls. Save one, kick the other two to hell and gone. Then I think the freaks go, too. You ready, Will?”

  Will eyed the door, the tents, the dark, the sky with new light paling it.


  “God bless the moon.”

  Hands tight together, they stepped out the door.

  As if to greet them, the wind flung up and down all the tent canvases in a great prehistoric thunder-kite display of leprous wings.

  Chapter 51

  They ran in urine smell of shadow, they ran in clean ice smell of moon.

  The calliope steam-throb whispered, tatted, trilled.

  The music! thought Will, is it running backward or forward?

  “Which way?” Dad whispered.

  “Through here!” Will pointed.

  A hundred yards off, beyond a foothill of tents, there was a flare of blue light, sparks jumped up and fell away, then dark again.

  Mr. Electrico! thought Will. They’re trying to move him, sure! Get him to the merry-go-round, kill or cure! And if they cure him, then, oh gosh, then, it’s angry him and angry Illustrated Man against just Dad and me! And Jim? Well, where was Jim? This way one day, that way the next, and… tonight? Whose side would he wind up on? Ours! Old friend Jim! Ours, of course! But Will trembled. Did friends last forever, then? For eternity, could they be counted to a warm, round, and handsome sum?

  Will glanced left.

  The Dwarf stood half enfolded by tent flaps, waiting motionless.

  “Dad, look,” cried Will, softly. “And there—the Skeleton.”

  Further over, the tall man, the man all marble bone and Egyptian papyrus stood like a dead tree.

  “The freaks—why don’t they stop us?”

  “Scared.”

  “Of us?!”

  Will’s father crouched and squinted out from around an empty cage.

  “They’re walking wounded, anyway. They saw what happened to the Witch. That’s the only answer. Look at them.”

  And there they stood, like uprights, like tent poles spotted all through the meadow grounds, hiding in shadow, waiting. For what? Will swallowed, hard. Maybe not hiding at all, but spread out for the running fight to come. At the right time, Mr. Dark would yell and they’d just circle in. But the time wasn’t right. Mr. Dark was busy. When he’d done what must be done, then he’d give that yell. So? So, thought Will, we got to see he never yells at all.