Ray Bradbury - Something Wicked This Way Comes

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?’

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

‘Why do boys want their windows open wide?’

‘Warm blood.’

‘Warm blood.’ She stood alone. ‘That’s the story of all our sorrows. And don’t ask why.

The door shut.

Jim alone, raised the window, and leaned into the absolutely clear night.

Storm, he thought, you there?

Yes.

Feel. . .away to the west. . .a real humdinger, rushing along!

The shadow of the lightning-rod lay in the drive below.

He sucked in cold air, gave out a vast exhilaration of heat.

Why, he thought, why don’t I climb up, knock that lightning-rod loose, throw it away?

And then see what happens?

Yes.

And then see what happens!

Just after midnight.

Shuffling footsteps.

Along the empty street came the lightning-rod salesman, his leather valise swung almost empty in his baseball-mitt hand, his face at ease. He turned a corner and stopped.

Paper-soft white moths tapped at an empty store window, looking in.

And in the window, like a great coffin boat of star-coloured glass, beached on two sawhorses lay a chunk of Alaska Snow Company ice chopped to a size great enough to flash in a giant’s ring.

And sealed in this ice was the most beautiful woman in the world.

The lightning-rod salesman’s smile faded.

In the dreaming coldness of ice like someone fallen and slept in snow avalanches a thousand years, forever young, was this woman.

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. The lightning-rod salesman remembered to breathe.

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.

So from other years there jumped forth images which flowed and found new substance here within the ice.

What colour was her hair? It was blonde to whiteness and might take any colour, once set free of cold.

How tall was she?

The prism of the ice might well multiply her size or diminish her as you moved this way or that before the empty store, the window, the night-soft rap-tapping ever-fingering, gently probing moths.

Not important.

For above all—the lightning-rod salesman shivered—he knew the most extraordinary thing.

If by some miracle her eyelids should open within that sapphire and she should look at him, he knew what colour her eyes would be.

He knew what colour her eyes would be.

If one were to enter this lonely night shop -

If one were to put forth one’s hand, the warmth of that hand would. . .what?

Melt the ice.

The lightning-rod salesman stood there for a long moment, his eyes quickened shut.

He let his breath out.

It was warm as summer on his teeth.

His hand touched the shop door. It swung open. Cold arctic air blew out round him. He stepped in.

The door shut.

The white snowflake moths tapped at the window.

Midnight then and the town clocks chiming on toward one and two and then three in the deep morning and the peals of the great clocks shaking dust off old toys in attics and shedding silver off old mirrors in yet higher attics and s up dreams about docks in all beds where children slept.

Will heard it.

Muffled away in the prairie lands, the chuffing of an engine, the slow-slow-following dragon-glide of a train.

Will sat up in bed.

Across the way, like a mirror image, Jim sat up, too.

A calliope began to play oh so softly, grieving to itself, a million miles away.

In one single motion, Will leaned from his window, as did Jim. Without a word they gazed over the trembling surf of trees.

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!

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.

There, on the precipice of earth, a small steam feather uprose like the first of a storm cloud yet to come.

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.

The engine!

Both boys vanished, came back to life binoculars.

‘The engine!’

‘Civil War! No other stack like that since 1900!’

‘The rest of the train, all of it’s old’

‘The flags! The cages! It’s the carnival!’

They listened. At first Will thought he heard the air whistling fast in his nostrils. But no—it was the train, and the calliope sighing, weeping, on that train.

‘Sounds like church music!’

‘Hell. Why would a carnival play church music?’

‘Don’t say hell,’ hissed Will.

‘Hell.’ Jim ferociously leaned out. ‘I’ve saved up all day. Everyone’s asleep so—hell!’

The music drifted by their windows. Goose pimples rose bid as boils on Will’s arms.

‘That is church music. Changed.’

‘For cri-yi, I’m froze, let’s go watch them set up!’

‘At three a.m.?’

‘At three a.m.!’

Jim vanished.

For a moment, Will watched Jim dance around over there, shirt uplifted, pants going on, while off in night country, panting, churning was this funeral train, all black-plumed cars, licorice-coloured cages, and a sooty calliope clamouring, banging three different hymns mixed and lost, maybe not there at all.

‘Here goes nothing!’

Jim slid down the drainpipe on his house, toward the sleeping lawns.

‘Jim! Wait!’

Will thrashed into his clothes.

‘Jim, don’t go alone!’

And followed after.

Sometimes you see a kite so high, so wise it almost knows the wind. It travels, then chooses to land in one spot and no other and no matter how you yank, run this way or that, it will simply break its cord, seek its resting place and bring you, blood-mouthed, running.