Ray Bradbury - Something Wicked This Way Comes

Among the wax figures of murdered, gunshot, guillotined, garroted men and women the two boys sat like Egyptian cats, unblinked, untwitched, unswallowing.

Some late visitors passed through, laughing. They commented on all the wax figures.

They did not notice the thin line of saliva crept from the comer of one ‘wax’ boy’s mouth.

They did not see how bright was the second ‘wax’ boy’s stare, which suddenly brimmed and ran clear water down his cheek.

Outside, the Witch limped in through back alleys of rope and peg between the tents.

‘Ladies and gentlemen!’

The last crowd of the night, three or four hundred strong, turned as a body.

The Illustrated Man, stripped to the waist, all nightmare viper, sabertooth, libidinous ape, clotted vulture, all salmon-sulphur sky rose up with annunciations:

‘The last free event this evening! Come one! Come all!’

The crowd surged toward the main platform outside the freak tent, where stood Dwarf, Skeleton, and Mr. Dark.

‘The Most Amazingly Dangerous, ofttimes Fatal—World Famous BULLET TRICK!’

The crowd gasped with pleasure.

‘The rifles, if you please!’

The Thin One cracked wide a racked display of bright artillery.

The Witch, hurrying up, froze when Mr. Dark cried: ‘And here, our death-defier, the bullet-catcher who will stake her life-Mademoiselle Tarot!’

The Witch shook her head, bleated, but Dark’s hand swept down to swing her like a child to the platform, still protesting, which gave Dark pause, but, in front of everyone now, he went on:

‘A volunteer, please, to fire the rifle!’

The crowd rumbled softly, daring itself to speak up.

Mr. Dark’s mouth barely moved. Under his breath he asked, ‘Is the clock stopped?’

‘Not,’ she whined, ‘stopped.’

‘No?’ he almost burst out.

He burnt her with his eyes, then turned to the audience and let his mouth finish the spiel, his fingers rapping over the rifles.

‘Volunteers, please!’

‘Stop the act,’ the Witch cried softly, wringing, her hands.

‘It goes on, damn you, worse than double—damn you’ he whispered, whistled fiercely.

Secretly, Dark gathered a pinch of flesh on his wrist, the illustration of a black-nun blind woman, which he bit with his fingernails.

The Witch spasmed, seized her breast, groaned, ground her teeth. ‘Mercy!’ she hissed, half aloud.

Silence from the crowd.

Mr. Dark nodded swiftly.

‘Since there are no volunteers—’ He scraped his illustrated wrist. The Witch shuddered. ‘We will cancel our last act and—’

‘Here! A volunteer!’

The crowd turned.

Mr. Dark recoiled., then asked: ‘Where?’

‘Here.’

Far out at the edge of the crowd, a hand lifted, a path opened.

Mr. Dark could see very clearly the man standing there, alone.

Charles Halloway, citizen, father, introspective husband, night-wanderer, and janitor of the town library.

The crowd’s appreciative clamor faded.

Charles Halloway did not move.

He let the path grow leading down to the platform.

He could not see the expression on the faces of the freaks standing up there. His eyes swept the crowd and found the Mirror Maze, the empty oblivion which beckoned with ten times a thousand million light years of reflections, counterreflections,, reversed and double-reversed, plunging deep to nothing, face-falling to nothing, stomach-dropping away to yet more sickening plummets of nothing.

And yet, wasn’t there an echo of two boys in the powdered silver at the back of each glass? Did or did he not perceive, with the tremulous tip of eyelash if not the eye, their passage through, their wait beyond, warm wax amongst cold, waiting to be key-wound by terrors, run free in panics?

No. thought Charles Halloway, don’t think. Get on with this!

‘Coming!’ he shouted.

‘Go get ‘em, Pop!’ a man said.

‘Yes,’ said Charles Halloway. ‘I will.’

And he walked down through the crowd.

The Witch spun slowly, magnetized at the night-wandering volunteer’s approach. Her eyelids jerked at their sewn black-wax threads behind dark glasses.

Mr. Dark, the illustration-drenched, superinfested civilization of souls, leaned from the platform, gladly whetting his lips. Thoughts spun fiery Catherine wheels in his eyes, quick, quick, what, what, what!

And the aging janitor, fixing a smile to his face like a white celluloid set of teeth from a Cracker Jack box, strode on, and the crowd opened as the sea before Moses and closed behind, and him wondering what to do? why was he here? but on the move, steadily, nevertheless.

Charles Halloway’s foot touched the first step of the platform.

The Witch trembled secretly.

Mr. Dark felt this secret, glanced sharply. Swiftly he put his hand out to grab for the good right hand of this fifty-four-year-old man.

But the fifty-four-year-old man shook his head, would not give his hand to be held, touched, or helped up.

‘Thanks, no.’

On the platform, Charles Halloway waved to the crowd.

The people set off a few firecrackers of applause.

‘But—’ Mr. Dark was amazed ‘your left hand, sir, you can’t hold and fire a rifle if you have only the use of one hand!’

Charles Halloway paled.

‘I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘With one hand.’

‘Hoorah!’ cried a boy, below.

‘Go it, Charlie!’ a man called, out beyond.

Mr. Dark flushed as the crowd laughed and applauded even louder now. He lifted his hands to ward off the wave of refreshing sound, like rain that washed in from the people.

‘All right, all right! Let’s see if he can do it!’

Brutally, the Illustrated Man snapped a rifle from its locks, hurled it through the air.

The crowd gasped.

Charles Halloway ducked. He put up his right hand. The rifle slapped his palm. He grabbed. It did not fall. He had it good.

The audience hooted, said things against Mr. Dark’s bad manners which made him turn away for a moment, damning himself, silently.

Will’s father lifted the rifle, beaming.

The crowd roared.

And while the wave of applause came in, crashed, and went back down the shore, he looked again to the maze, where the sensed but unseen shadow-shapes of Will and Jim were filed among titanic razor blades of revelation and illusion, then back to the Medusa gaze of Mr. Dark, swiftly reckoned with, and on to the stitched and jittering sightless nun of midnight, sidling back still more. Now she was as far as she could sidle, at the far end of the platform, almost pressed to the whorled red-black rifle bull’s-eye target.

‘Boy!’ shouted Charles Halloway.

Mr. Dark stiffened.

‘I need a boy volunteer to help me hold the rifle!’ shouted Charles Halloway.

‘Someone! Anyone!’ he shouted.

A few boys in the crowd shifted around on their toes.

‘Boy!’ shouted Charles Halloway. ‘Hold on. My son’s out there. He’ll volunteer, won’t you, Will?’

The Witch flung one band up to feel the shape of this audacity which came off the fifty-four-year-old man like a fever. Mr. Dark was spun round as if hit by a fast-traveling gunshot.

‘Will!’ called his father.

In the Wax Museum, Will sat motionless.

‘Will!’ called his father. ‘Come on, boy!’

The crowd looked left, looked right, looked back.

No answer.

Will sat in the Wax Museum.

Mr. Dark observed all of this with some respect, some degree of admiration, some concern; he seemed to be waiting, just as was Will’s father.

‘Will, come help your old man!’ Mr. Halloway cried, jovially.

Will sat in the Wax Museum.

Mr. Dark smiled.

‘Will! Willy! Come here!’