Something Wicked This Way Comes. RAY BRADBURY

Because, Will answered himself. Something’s going on. Oh, something is going on!

Will saw that paper frolicked in the trees, its words THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN, and fever prickled his cheeks. He thought: Jim, the street of the Theatre, the naked people in the stage of that Theatre window, crazy as Chinese opera, darn odd crazy as old Chinese opera, judo, ju-jitsu, Indian puzzles, and now his father’s voice, dreaming off, sad, sadder, saddest, much too much to understand. And suddenly he was scared because Dad wouldn’t talk about the handbill he had secretly burned. Will gazed out the window. There! Like a milkweed plume! White paper danced in the air.

“No,” he whispered, “no carnival’s coming this late. It can’t!” He hid under the covers, switched on his flashlight, opened a book. The first picture he saw was a prehistoric reptile trap-drumming a night sky a million years lost.

Heck, he thought, in the rush I got Jim’s book he’s got one of mine.

But it was a pretty fine reptile.

And flying toward sleep, he thought he heard his father, restless, below. The front door shut. His father was going back to work late, for no reason, with brooms, or books, downtown, away…away…

And mother asleep, content, not knowing he had gone.

9

No one else in the world had a name came so well off the tongue.

“Jim Nightshade. That’s me.”

Jim stood tall and now lay long in bed, strung together by marsh-grass, his bones easy in his flesh, his flesh easy on his bones. The library books lay unopened-by his relaxed right hand.

Waiting, his eyes were dark as twilight, with shadows under the eyes from the time, his mother said, he had almost died when he was three and still remembered. His hair was dark autumn chestnut and the veins in his temples and brow and in his neck and ticking in his wrists and on the backs of his slender hands, all these were dark blue. He was marbled with dark, was Jim Nightshade, a boy who talked less and smiled less as the years increased.

The trouble with Jim was he looked at the world and could not look away. And when you never look away all your life, by the time you are thirteen you have done twenty years taking in the laundry of the world.

Will Halloway, it was in him young to always look just beyond, over or to one side. So at thirteen he had saved up only six years of staring.

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

Will, he was occasionally surprised to see his shadow following him somewhere, but that was that.

“Jim? You awake?”

“Hi, Mom.”

A door opened and now shut. He felt her weight on the bed.

“Why, Jim, your hands are ice. You shouldn’t have the window so high. Mind your health.”

“Sure.”

“Don’t say “sure” that way. You don’t know until you’ve had three children and lost all but one.”

“Never going to have any,” said Jim.

“You just say that.”

“I know it. I know everything.”

She waited a moment. “What do you know?”

“No use making more People. People die.”

His voice was very calm and quiet and almost sad.

“That’s everything.”

“Almost everything. You’re here, Jim. If you weren’t, I”d have given up long ago.”

“Mom.” A long silence. “Can you remember Dad’s face? Do I look like him?”

“The day you go away is the day he leaves forever.”

“Who’s going away?”

“Why, just lying there, Jim, you run so fast. I never saw anyone move so much, just sleeping. Promise me, Jim. Wherever you go and come back, bring lots of kids. Let them run wild. Let me spoil them, some day.

“I’m never going to own anything can hurt me.”

“You going to collect rocks, Jim? No, some day, you’ve got to be hurt.”

“No, I don’t”

He looked at her. Her face had been hit a long time ago. The bruises had never gone from around her eyes.

“You’ll live and get hurt,” she said, in the dark. “But when it’s time, tell me. Say good-bye. Otherwise, I might not let you go. Wouldn’t that be terrible, to just grab ahold?”

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