Multi-column

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Thoughts

Highlights

id746123827

They sleep not, except they have done mischief;
And their sleep is taken away,
unless they cause some to fall
For they eat the bread of wickedness,
And they drink the wine of violence.
PROVERBS 4: 16-17 πŸ”—

id746123853

I know not all that may be coming, but be it what
it will, I'll go to it laughing.
STUBB in Moby Dick πŸ”—

id746124004

But you take October, now. School's been on a month and you're riding easier in the reins, jogging along. You got time to think of the garbage you'll dump on old man Prickett's porch, or the hairy-ape costume you'll wear to the YMCA the last night of the month. And if it's around October twentieth and everything smoky-smelling and the sky orange and ash grey at twilight, it seems Hallowe'en will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft flap of bedsheets around corners. πŸ”—

id746126333

James Nightshade πŸ”—

id746127422

But two boys, far up the gentle slope, lying on the grass. Of a like size and general shape, the boys sat carving twig whistles, talking of olden or future times, content with having left their fingerprints on every movable object in Green Town during summer past and their footprints on every open path between here and the lake and there and the river since school began. πŸ”—

id746127741

So much Will said, excitedly. So much Jim agreed to, silently. So much the salesman, running before the storm, but poised here uncertainly, heard looking from face to face. πŸ”—

id746128419

The entire surface of the rod was finely scratched and etched with strange languages, names that could tie the tongue or break the jaw, numerals that added to incomprehensible sums, pictographs of insect-animals all bristle, chaff, and claw. πŸ”—

id746128927

'Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What colour is lightning? Where does thunder go when it dies? Boys, you got to be ready in every dialect with every shape and form to hex the St Elmo's fires, the balls of blue light that prowl the earth like sizzling cats. πŸ”—

id746129739

Any boy hit by lightning, lift his lid and there on his eyeball, pretty as the Lord's prayer on a pin, find the last scene the boy ever saw! πŸ”—

id746130009

And jangling his case full of iron rods, the salesman wheeled about and charged down the walk blinking wildly at the sky, the roof, the trees, at last closing his eyes, moving, sniffing, muttering. 'Yes, bad, here it comes, feel it, way off now, but running fast. . .' πŸ”—

id746130536

Jim breathed it out all fine.
Β  Β  And Will, he breathed it in. πŸ”—

id746130694

But here in the special night, a land bricked with paper and leather, anything might happen, always did. Listen! and you heard ten thousand people screaming so high only dogs feathered their ears. A million folk ran toting cannons, sharpening guillotines; Chinese, four abreast, marched on forever. Invisible, silent, yes, but Jim and Will had the gift of ears and noses as well as the gift of tongues. This was a factory of spices from far countries. Here alien deserts slumbered. πŸ”—

id746131056

'I mean Dante. Look at this. Pictures by Mister DorΓ©, showing all the aspects. Hell never looked better. Here's souls sunk to their gills in slime. There's someone upside down, wrong side out.' πŸ”—

id746131351

Dad, thought Will, why, why, he looks. . .like me in a smashed mirror! πŸ”—

id746131474

'Will,' said the old man who was also a janitor who happened to be his father πŸ”—

id746131954

Outside, a weather of stars ran clear in an ocean sky. πŸ”—

id746132006

The wind flew Jim away.
Β  Β  A similar kite, Will swooped to follow. πŸ”—

id746132064

He knew what the wind was doing to them where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life. πŸ”—

id746132098

Will runs because running is its own excuse. Jim runs because something's up ahead of him.
Β  Β  Yet, strangely, they do run together. πŸ”—

id746132239

And Will? Why he's the last peach, high on the summer tree. Some boys walk by and you cry, seeing them. They feel good, they look good, they are good. Oh, they're not above peeing off a bridge, or stealing an occasional dime-store pencil sharpener; it's not that. It's just, you know, seeing them pass, that's how they'll be all their life; they'll get hit, hurt, cut, bruised, and always wonder why, why does it happen? how can it happen to them? πŸ”—

id746132307

But Jim, now, he knows it happens, he watches for it happening, he sees it start, he sees it finish, he licks the wound he expected, and never asks why; he knows. He always knew. Someone knew before him, a long time ago, someone who had wolves for pets and lions for night conversants. Hell, Jim doesn't know with his mind. But his body knows. And while Will's putting a bandage on his latest scratch, Jim's ducking, waving, bouncing away from the knockout blow which must inevitably come. πŸ”—

id746132435

So there they go, Jim running slower to stay with Will, Will running faster to stay with Jim, Jim breaking two windows in a haunted house because Will's along, Will breaking one instead of none, because Jim's watching. God how we get our fingers in each other's clay. That's friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of the other. πŸ”—

id746132893

But by the time the last stroke of nine shook everyone's fillings in his teeth, the barbers had yanked off the sheets, powdered the customers, trotted them forth; the druggist's fount had stopped fizzing like a nest of snakes, the insect neons everywhere had ceased buzzing, and the vast glittering acreage of the dime store with its ten billion metal, glass and paper oddments waiting to be fished over, suddenly blacked out. Shades slithered, doors boomed, keys rattled their bones in locks, people fled with hordes of torn newspaper mice nibbling their heels. πŸ”—

id746133123

Will watched the barber's pole whirl its red serpentine up out of nothing, leading his gaze around, rising to vanish into more nothing. On countless moons Will had stood here trying to unravel that ribbon, watch it come, go, end without ending. πŸ”—

id746133362

'Good-night.'
Β  Β  And they left him behind in a wind that very faintly smelled of licorice and cotton candy. πŸ”—

id746134373

Perhaps Time itself fixed was draining off down an immense glass, with powdered darkness failing after to bury all. πŸ”—

id746135191

Suddenly there was the old sense of terrified elation, of wanting to laugh and cry together when he saw the innocents of the earth wandering the snowy streets the day before Christmas among all the tired men and women whose faces were dirty with guilt, unwashed of sin, and smashed like small windows by life that hit without warning, ran, hid, came back and hit again. πŸ”—

id746140444

For it was no longer the street of the apples or plums or apricots, it was the one house with a window at the side and this window, Jim said, was a stage, with a curtain - the shade, that is - up. And in that room, on that strange stage, were the actors, who spoke mysteries, mouthed wild things, laughed, sighed, murmured so much; so much of it was whispers Will did not understand. πŸ”—

id746141655

'Jim!' And when Jim looked down at last he saw Will as a stranger below with some silly request to give off living and come down to earth. So Will ran off, alone, thinking too much, knowing what to think. πŸ”—

id746153035

'Carnivals come at sunrise.'
Β  Β  "Yeah, but what about the licorice and cotton candy we smelled, close?'
Β  Β  And Will thought of the smells and the sounds flowing on the river of wind from beyond the darkening houses, Mr Tetley listening by his wooden Indian friend, Mr Crosetti with the single tear shining down his cheek, and the barber's pole sliding its red tongue up and around forever out of nowhere and away to eternity. πŸ”—

id746156398

He wanted to be near and not near them, he saw them close, he saw them far. Suddenly they were awfully small in too large a room in too big a town and much too huge a world. In this unlocked place they seemed at the mercy of anything that might break in from the night.
Β  Β  Including me, Will thought. Including me.
Β  Β  Suddenly he loved them more for their smallness than he ever had when they seemed tall. πŸ”—

id746156586

That was mother, smelling like fresh milk, happy, to herself, in this room.
Β  Β  Happy? But how and why? Here, a few feet off, was the janitor, the library man, the stranger, his uniform gone, but his face still the face of a man happier at night alone in the deep marble vaults, whispering his broom in the draughty corridors.
Β  Β  Will watched, wondering why this woman was so happy and this man so sad. πŸ”—

id746157159

Some nights, abed, Will put his ear to the wall to listen, and if his folks talked things that were right, he stayed, and if not right he turned away. If it was about time and passing years or himself or town or just the general inconclusive way God ran the world, he listened warmly, comfortably, secretly, for it was usually Dad talking. He could not often speak with Dad anywhere in the world, inside or out, but this was different. There was a thing in Dad's voice, up, over, down, easy as a hand winging soft in the air like a white bird describing flight pattern, made the ear want to follow and the mind's eye to see.
Β  Β  And 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. Many nights Will drowsed this way, his senses like stopped clocks long before that half-singing voice was still. Dad's voice was a midnight school, teaching deep fathom hours, and the subject was life. πŸ”—

id746157368

Will wanted to turn away, but couldn't.
Β  Β  '. . .most beautiful. . .woman. . .in the world,' Dad's voice murmured.
Β  Β  Mother laughed softly. 'You know I'm not.'
Β  Β  No! thought Will, that's from the handbill! Why doesn't Dad tell!!?
Β  Β  Because, Will answered himself. Something's going on. Oh, something is going on!
Β  Β  Will saw that paper frolicked in the trees, its words THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN, and fever prickled his cheeks. πŸ”—

id746157623

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

id746157743

He looked at her. Her face had been hit a long time ago. The bruises had never gone from around her eyes.
Β  Β  '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?' πŸ”—

id746157995

In the dreaming coldness of ice like someone fallen and slept in snow avalanches a thousand years, forever young, was this woman.
Β  Β  She was as fair as this morning and fresh as tomorrow's flowers and lovely as any maid when a man shuts up his eyes and traps her, in cameo perfection, on the shell of his eyelids. πŸ”—

id746158023

Once, long ago, travelling among the marbles of Rome and Florence, he had seen women like this, kept in stone instead of Ice. Once, wandering in the Louvre, he had found women like this, washed in summer colour and kept in paint. Once, as a boy, sneaking the cool grottoes behind a motion picture theatre screen, on his way to a free seat, he had glanced up and there towering and flooding the haunted dark seen a women's face as he had never seen it since, of such size and beauty built of milk-bone and moon-flesh, at to freeze him there alone behind the stage, shadowed by the, motion of her lips, the bird-wing flicker of her eyes, the snow-pale-death-shimmering illumination from her cheeks. πŸ”—

id746158381

Their rooms were high, as boys' rooms should be. From these gaunt windows they could rifle-fire their gaze artillery distances past library, city hall, depot, cow barns, farmlands to empty prairie!
Β  Β  There, on the world's rim, the lovely snail-gleam of the railway tracks ran, flinging wild gesticulations of lemon or cherry-coloured semaphore to the stars.
Β  Β  There, on the precipice of earth, a small steam feather uprose like the first of a storm cloud yet to come.
Β  Β  The train itself appeared, link by link, engine, coal-car, and numerous and numbered all-asleep-and-slumbering-dream filled cars that followed the firefly-sparked chum, chant, drowsy autumn hearthfire roar. Hellfires flushed the stunned hills. Even at this remote view, one imagined men with buffalo-haunched arms shovelling black meteor falls of coal into the open boilers of the engine.
Β  Β  The engine!
Β  Β  Both boys vanished, came back to life binoculars. πŸ”—

id746511141

And running, Will thought, Boy, it's the same old thing. I talk. Jim runs. I tilt stones, Jim grabs the cold junk under the stones and - lickety-split! I climb hills. Jim yells off church steeples. I got a bank account. Jim's got the hair on his head, the yell in his mouth, the shirt on his back and the tennis shoes on his feet. How come I think he's richer? Because, Will thought, I sit on a rock in the sun and old Jim, he prickles his arm-hairs by moonlight and dances with hop-toads. I tend cows, Jim tames Gila monsters. Fool! I yell at Jim. Coward! he yells back. And here we - go! πŸ”—

id746511315

moon ready beyond the hills and the meadows trembling with a fur of dew. πŸ”—

id746511675

broke out in pearls of ice. πŸ”—

id746512888

The train skimmed on softly, slithering, black pennants fluttering, black confetti lost on its own sick-sweet candy wind, down the hill, with the boys pursuing., the air so cold they ate ice cream with each breath. πŸ”—

id746513122

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. πŸ”—

id746514525

In the meadow the tents, the carnival waited. Waited for someone, anyone to wade along the grassy surf. The great tents filled like bellows. They softly issued forth exhalations of air that smelled like ancient yellow beasts. πŸ”—

id746514619

If a man stood here would he see himself unfolded away a billion times to eternity? Would a billion images look back, each face and the face after and the face after that old, older, oldest? Would he find himself lost in a fine dust away off deep down there, not fifty but sixty, not sixty but seventy, not seventy but eighty, ninety, ninety-nine years old?
Β  Β  The maze did not ask.
Β  Β  The maze did not tell.
Β  Β  It simply stood and waited like a great arctic floe. πŸ”—

id746539579

We are blind to continuity, all breaks down, falls, melts, stops, rots, or runs away. So, since we cannot shape Time, where does that leave men? Sleepless. Staring.
Β  Β  Three a.m. That's our reward. Three in the morn. The soul's midnight. The tide goes out, the soul ebbs. And a train arrives at an hour of despair. Why? πŸ”—

id746539706

For the tents were lemon like the sun, brass like wheat fields a few weeks ago. Flags and banners bright as blue-birds snapped above lion-coloured canvas. From booths painted cotton-candy colours fine Saturday smells of bacon and eggs, hot dogs and pancakes swam with the wind. Everywhere ran boys. Everywhere, sleepy fathers followed. πŸ”—

id746541187

'Miss Foley!'
Β  Β  Her eyes, flexed wide as from blasts of photographic powder, were skinned white like a statue's. Deep under the glass, she spoke. She murmured. She whimpered. Now she cried. Now she shouted. Now she yelled. She knocked glass with her head, her elbows, tilted drunken as a light-blind moth, raised her hands in claws. 'Oh God! Help!' she wailed. 'Help, oh God!' πŸ”—