Then Dad bent and Will leaped over him and Will bent and Dad jumped him and they both waited, crouched in a line, wheezing songs, deliciously tired, while Jim swallowed spit, and ran full tilt. He got half over Dad when they all fell, rolled in the grass, all hoot-owl and donkey, all brass and cymbal as it must have been the first year of Creation, and Joy not yet thrown from the Garden.
Until at last they drew up their feet, socked each other's shoulders, embraced knees tight, rocking, and looking with swift bright happiness at each other, growing wine-drunkenly quiet.
And when they were done smiling at each other's faces as at burning torches, they looked away across the field.
And the black tent poles lay in elephant boneyards with the dead tents blowing away like the petals of a great black rose.
The only three people in a sleeping world, a rare trio of tomcats, they basked in the moon.
"What happened?" asked Jim, at last.
"What didn't!" cried Dad.
And they laughed again, when suddenly Will grabbed Jim, held him tight and wept.
"Hey," Jim said, over and over, quietly. "Hey ... hey ..."
"Oh, Jim, Jim," Will said. "We'll be pals forever."
"Sure, hey sure." Jim was very quiet now.
"It's all right," said Dad. "Have a small cry. We're out of the woods. Then we'll laugh some more, going home."
Will let Jim go.
They got to their feet and stood looking at each other. Will examined his father, with fierce pride.
"Oh, Dad, Dad, you did it, you did it!"
"No, we did it together."
"But without you it'd all be over. Oh, Dad, I never knew you. I sure know you now."
"Do you, Will?"
"Dam right!"
Each, to the other, shimmered in bright halos of wet light.
"Why then, hello. Reply, son, and curtsey."
Dad held out his hand. Will shook it. Both laughed and wiped their eyes, then looked quickly at the footprints scattered in the dew over the hills.
"Dad, will they ever come back?"
"No. And yes." Dad tucked away his harmonica.
"No, not them. But yes, other people like them. Not in a carnival. God knows what shape they'll come in next. But sunrise, noon, or at the latest, sunset tomorrow they'll show. They're on the road."
"Oh, no," said Will.
"Oh, yes," said Dad. "We got to watch out the rest of our lives. The fight's just begun."
They moved around the carousel slowly.
"What will they look like? How will we know them?"
"Why," said Dad, quietly, "maybe they're already here."
Both boys looked around swiftly.
But there was only the meadow, the machine, and themselves.
Will looked at Jim, at his father, and then down at his own body and hands. He glanced up at Dad.
Dad nodded, once, gravely, and then nodded at the carousel, and stepped up on it, and touched a brass pole.
Will stepped up beside him. Jim stepped up beside Will.
Jim stroked a horse's mane. Will patted a horse's shoulders.
The great machine softly tilted in the tides of night.
Just three times around, ahead, thought Will. Hey.
Just four times around, ahead, thought Jim. Boy.
Just ten times around, back, thought Charles Halloway. Lord.
Each read the thoughts in the other's eyes.
How easy, thought Will.
Just this once, thought Jim.
But then, thought Charles Halloway, once you start, you'd always come back. One more ride and one more ride. And, after awhile, you'd offer rides to friends, and more friends until finally ...
The thought hit them all in the same quiet moment.
... finally you wind up owner of the carousel, keeper of the freaks ... proprietor for some small part of eternity of the traveling dark carnival shows ...
Maybe, said their eyes, they're already here.
Charles Halloway stepped back into the machinery of the merry-go-round, found a wrench, and knocked the flywheels and cogs to pieces. Then he took the boys out and he hit the control box one or two times until it broke and scattered fitful lightnings.
"Maybe this isn't necessary," said Charles Halloway. "Maybe it wouldn't run anyway, without the freaks to give it power. But--" He hit the box a last time and threw down the wrench.
"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.
"Last one to the railroad semaphore at Green Crossing is an old lady!"
The boys fired themselves off like pistols.
The father hesitated only a moment. He felt the vague pain in his chest. If I run, he thought, what will happen? Is Death important? No. Everything that happens before Death is what counts. And we've done fine tonight. Even Death can't spoil it. So, there went the boys ... and why not ... follow?
He did just that.
And Lord! it was fine printing their life in the dew on the cool fields that new dark suddenly-like-Christmas morning. The boys ran as tandem ponies, knowing that someday one would touch base first, and the other second or not at all, but now this first minute of the new morning was not the minute or the day or morning of ultimate loss. Now was not the time to study faces to see if one was older and the other too much younger. Today was just another day in October in a year suddenly better than anyone supposed it could ever be just a short hour ago, with the moon and the stars moving in a grand rotation toward inevitable dawn, and them loping, and the last of this night's weeping done, and Will laughing and singing and Jim giving answer line by line, as they breasted the waves of dry stubble toward a town where they might live another few years across from each other.
And behind them jogged a middle-aged man with his own now solemn, now amiable, thoughts.
Perhaps the boys slowed. They never knew. Perhaps Charles Halloway quickened his pace. He could not say.
But, running even with the boys, the middle-aged man reached out.
Will slapped, Jim slapped, Dad slapped the semaphore signal base at the same instant.
Exultant, they banged a trio of shouts down the wind.
Then, as the moon watched, the three of them together left the wilderness behind and walked into the town.
A Brief Afterword
IT MAY seem peculiar to some to find Gene Kelly's name on the dedication page of this book. But his films and his friendship were a catalyst that caused this novel to be born.
Not long after I published The Martian Chronicles in 1950, my friend Sy Gomberg took me and my wife, Maggie, over to Gene Kelly's home one evening, and on many evenings after that, when Gene and his friends often performed songs from their films and Broadway musicals with composers like Harold Arlen and Yip Harberg in attendance. Most importantly, during that period. Gene danced and sang in what I consider to be the finest musical in film history, Singin' in the Rain. On top of which, it was a science-fiction musical!
How so? you quickly ask.
Well now, didn't it describe how silent films reinvented themselves as a technology of sound? Dreaming a concept and then birthing it? It did! It started with a fiction and ended with a science.
All the more reason then for Gene Kelly to become a friend and inventor in my work.
In 1955, Gene invited Maggie and myself over to MGM Studios for a private screening of his Invitation to the Dance, a collection of musical dance numbers with no connecting plotline, ending with Gene and Jerry, the cartoon-animation mouse, out-dancing one another.
Maggie and I walked home from the screening (we still did not own an automobile that year) and on the way I kept saying over and over again how I would give half an arm and part of my soul to work with Gene Kelly.
"Well," Maggie said, "why don't you go through your files; you have dozens of ideas stashed away. Find som
ething that strikes you as absolutely right, do a screenplay-treatment, and send it over to Gene."
Which is exactly what I did. Searching some forty or fifty stories or ideas for stories, I found The Black Ferris, no more than ten typewritten pages, the tale of a strange carnival and two small boys and a night with no dawn in sight. I spent the next four or five weeks turning it into an eighty page outline treatment-script and brought it directly to Gene Kelly.
He telephoned me the next day and said, "This is it. This must be the next picture I direct. Do I have your permission to take it to Paris and London next week to try to arrange financing?"
"Take it!" I said.
Gene came back from overseas a month later with the bad news. No one wanted to finance my script.
"I'm sorry," Gene said.
"Sorry?!" I replied. "Good Lord, I'm proud that you even tried!"
I took a long look at the semi-screenplay, which had, at the time, the tide Dark Carnival, sat down, and spent the next five years turning it into a novel, published in 1962 as Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Fifteen years later, the novel turned itself back into a series of screenplays for various producers and directors at Paramount and 20th Century Fox, each time being passed over and forgotten. At one time Sam Peckinpah signed on as director.
"How will you do it, Sam?" I asked.
"Rip the pages out of your book and stuff them in the camera," he replied.
"Correct," I said. For, as you read this novel you can witness the scenes. It cries out to be photographed.
And it finally was, with Jack Clayton directing and Disney producing, almost thirty years after Gene Kelly's Invitation to the Dance.
Without his invitation to that screening, this book might never have been born. When it was published in 1962, Gene Kelly got copy Number One.
About the Author
RAY BRADBURY is the author of more than thirty books. Among his best known works are The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, The Illustrated Man, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. He has written for the theater and cinema--including the screenplay for John Huston's classic adaptation of Moby Dick--and has been nominated for an Academy Award. He adapted sixty-five of his stories for television's Ray Bradbury Theater and won an Emmy for his teleplay of The Halloween Tree. In 1964, Mr. Bradbury was creative consultant on the United States Pavilion at the New York World's Fair, and in 1982 he created the interior metaphors for Space Ship Earth at Disney World's Epcot Center. Mr. Bradbury lives with his wife in Los Angeles, California, and is currently working on a new novel entitled From the Dust Returned.
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Ray Bradbury
"A master storyteller"
Fresno Bee
"Ray Bradbury can evoke nostalgia for a mythic, golden past or raise goosebumps with tales of horror ...
He is very good at what he does."
Chicago Tribune
"In literary circles, Ray Bradbury can validly be called a living legend ... Since he was eight years old, he wanted to become a magician. And that's what he is."
Nashville Tennessean
"Bradbury crosses over the lines that divide various genres ... His true vocation is that of spinning yarns, some fanciful, others morbid, and yet others laced with an undeniable sense of hope."
Flint Journal
"We owe a special debt of gratitude to Ray Bradbury ...
He works magic."
Anniston Star
"Ray Bradbury can still stir and stretch the imagination ...
Time has not dimmed his eloquent and elegant voice or his lively imagination that asks 'what if' and then answers."
San Antonio Express-News
SOMETHING WICKED
THIS WAY COMES
Books by Ray Bradbury
Bradbury Speaks
The Cat's Pajamas * Bradbury Stones
Dandelion Wine * Dark Carnival
Death Is a Lonely Business * Driving Blind
Fahrenheit 451 * The Farewell Summer
From the Dust Returned * The Golden Apples of the Sun
A Graveyard for Lunatics * Green Shadows, White Whale
The Halloween Tree * I Sing the Body Electric!
The Illustrated Man * Journey to Far Metaphor
Kaleidoscope * Let's All Kill Constance
Long After Midnight
The Martian Chronicles * The Machineries of Joy
A Medicine for Melancholy * The October Country
One More for the Road * One Timeless Spring
Quicker Than the Eye
R Is for Rocket * The Stories of Ray Bradbury
S Is for Space * The Toynbee Convector
When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed
Yestermorrow * Zen in the Art of Writing
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright (c) 1962, 1997 by Ray Bradbury
ISBN: 0-380-72940-7
Epub Edition (c) May 2013 ISBN: 9780062242174
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First Avon Books printing: March 1998
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Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
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