Ray Bradbury

Two boys' lives are changed forever when a sinister travelling carnival stops at their Illinois town.

A Novel

Something Wicked This Way Comes

loisesya

“There was only one thing sure. 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.”

Kat Albanese

The odd thing in dad’s voice was the sound truth makes being said. The sound of truth, in a wild roving land of city or plain country lies, will spell any boy.

She rose up suddenly and went to put the window down. 

“Why do boys want their windows open wide?"

"Warm blood." She stood alone. “That's the story of all our sorrows. And don't ask why.”

Dad’s voice was a midnight school, teaching deep fathom hours, and the subject was life.

Jim knew every centimeter of his shadow, could have cut it out of tar paper, furled it, and run it up a flagpole—his banner.

A carnival should be all growls, roars like timberlands stacked, bundled, rolled and crashed, great explosions of lion dust, men ablaze with working anger, pop bottles jangling, horse buckles shivering, engines and elephants in full stampede through rains of sweat while zebras neighed and trembled like cage trapped in cage. 

But this was like old movies, the silent theater haunted with black-and-white ghosts, silvery mouths opening to let moonlight smoke out, gestures made in silence so hushed you could hear the wind fizz the hair on your cheeks.

More shadows rustled from the train, passing the animal cages where darkness prowled with unlit eyes and the calliope stood mute save for the faintest idiot tune the breeze piped wandering up the flues.

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.

A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if, half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little about him and his family, you might just jump in front of his killer and try to stop it. Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know, is bad, or amoral, at least. You can't act if you don't know. Acting without knowing takes you right off the cliff.

So the carnival steams by, Shakes any tree: it rains jackasses. Separate jack-asses, I should say, individuals with no one, they think, or no one actual, to answer their "Help!” Unconnected fools, that's the harvest the carnival comes smiling after with its threshing machine.

"It's late. Must be midnight straight up."

Obediently, the City Hall clock, the Baptist church clock, the Methodist, the Episcopalian, the Catholic church, all the clocks, struck twelve. The wind was seeded with Time.

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