Something Wicked This Way Comes

“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 window 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.”

Charles imagines Jim and Will as they run home and describes each boy’s role in their relationship. Jim is more destructive and Will is more cautious, but they each push the other to be better. Jim holds back around Will, and Will tries to keep up with Jim. Charles uses a metaphor and describes friendship as pottery, with each friend “playing the potter.” In doing so, he claims that we are molded by the people we surround ourselves with.

“[Will] wanted to be near and not near [his parents], 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. Including me, Will thought.”

These lines reflect the changing relationship that adolescents have with parents as they come of age—they want to be near them, and they do not. Will’s concern for his parents’ safety also foreshadows the ominous arrival of the carnival, and he begins to worry about his own capacity for evil.

“[Jim’s] hair was a 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 of 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 centimeter 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.”

These lines highlight how Will and Jim are foils, highlighting each other’s traits through contrasting ones. Will embodies good, and Jim the temptation for evil. Not only do they look different, but their way of viewing the world is different. The shadow imagery represents Jim’s familiarity with his own darkness. Bradbury uses polysyndeton, where words are separated by the same conjunction, in this case “and” (bold my emphasis)—”[…] 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 […].”

“A carnival should be all growls, roars like the 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.”

When the carnival arrives, it is immediately proven to be no ordinary carnival. Bradbury personifies the ideal carnival, giving it qualities such as growls. He uses two similes in the above lines—these growls should be “roars like the timberlands stacked,” and zebras are “like cage trapped in cage.” Bradbury also uses internal rhymes: “jangling” and “shivering.”

“But three, now, Christ, three A.M.! Doctors say the body’s at low tide then. The soul is out. The blood moves slow. You’re the nearest to dead you’ll ever be save dying. Sleep is a patch of death […]”

The novel’s concern with Time, Mortality, and Regret is evident here. Charles’s late-night anxiety makes him restless. Will and Jim are also awake at this hour, though their anxiety is centered around the carnival. Three in the morning is colloquially known as the “devil’s hour” for its association with the supernatural. Bradbury slows down the pace by using short, declarative sentences: “The soul is out. The blood moves slow.”

“Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make the flesh that hold fast and binds eternity. They live inside the gift, know power, accept, and need not mention it. Why speak of Time when you are Time, and shape the universal moments as they pass, into warmth and action? How men envy and often hate these warm clocks, these wives, who know they will live forever.”

Charles’s thoughts are spotlighted as he ponders time. Time is capitalized, suggesting that it is a concrete entity. Women are dehumanized into clocks. They are immortal because they give birth to future generations, which men hate them for, as they themselves are mortal.

“‘You’ll always be with me, huh, Will?’ Jim simply breathed warm upon him and his blood stirred with the old, the familiar answers: yes, yes, you know it, yes, yes.”

This moment clearly shows Jim’s and Will’s reliance on each other. They have been so closely bonded since birth and have always looked out for each other even as Will notices Jim changing. Despite Jim’s self-reassurance that Will would never leave him, these lines also foreshadow Jim seeking out the carousel. Bradbury uses repetition—“yes, yes, you know it, yes, yes”— to create emphasis and urgency.

“Returned, the dog would live in innocence again, tread patterns of grace, for months, then vanish, and the whole thing start over. Now, walking here he thought he heard Jim whimper under his breath. He could feel the bristles stiffen all over Jim. He felt Jim’s ears flatten, saw him sniff the new dark.”

Will worries about Jim and their growing distance as he compares him to his childhood dog, Plato. Plato explored the world on his solo adventures, just like Jim gets lost and ends up in the Mirror Maze. He even sees Jim transforming into a dog—his “ears flatten[ing […] sniffing [ing] the new dark.” In comparing Jim to Plato, Will reveals his fear that Jim will eventually go off on his own again.

“Where the colored rain touched the floor, a pair of dusty small shoes poked out. Just beyond the downpour the evil boy loitered. Evil? Will blinked. Why evil? Because. ‘Because’ was reason enough. A boy, yes, and evil.”

Will decides that Mr. Cooger, transformed into a young boy and pretending to be Robert, must be evil. This underscores the novel’s exploration of The Nature of Good and Evil. Here evil, and the designation of someone as such, seem to be instinctual, beyond reason. Even before he witnesses the true horror of the carnival, Will believes Mr. Cooger is diabolical because of the creepy feeling he gets from looking into his eyes.

“Will was out the window, down the trellis, and over the hedge, before he thought: I’m alone. If I lose Jim, it’s the first ever I’ll be out alone at night, too. And where am I going? Wherever Jim goes.”

Here the reader sees Will’s fear come to life: Jim has left him behind like Plato the dog did. Jim seems to be exploring his growing need for freedom, which clashes with his childhood desire to remain with Will. Once again, Jim is pushing Will out of his comfort zone, forcing him to confront his desire to remain in the present.

“‘For being good is a fearful occupation; men strain at it and sometimes break in two.’”

Charles explains to Will that being good takes effort, while being bad is easier. This highlights the novel’s concern with The Nature of Good and Evil. For Charles, goodness is a conscious choice. These lines also emphasize the theme of Time, Mortality, and Regret: A long lifetime is made up of thousands of choices to be good.

“They swung in and sat upon the sill, same size, same weight, colored same by the stars, and sat embraced once more with grand fine exhaustion, gasping on huge ingulped laughs which swept their bones together […]”

After climbing the ladder into his room, Will feels they are more connected. The ladder is a symbol of childhood. Charles tells Will that adults do not sneak around anymore, and that Will will tire of the ladder when he is older. By encouraging Charles to climb, Will helps his father feel young again, making them the “same.”

“But now, in the doorway, in the cold rain, there was time to think of Miss Foley afraid of mirror mazes, Miss Foley alone not so long ago at the carnival, and maybe screaming when they did what they finally did to her, around and around, around and around […]”

The carousel ages Miss Foley in reverse, which she instantly regrets because she is made too young. The repetition of “around” mirrors the vertigo of the ride itself. The mirror provides a simultaneous vision of the future and past. Miss Foley saw her younger self in the mirror maze, and now she has become her.

“Later—how much later?—the picture would be developed by the wild, the tiny, the forgetful, the wandering and lost lightning rod mind. What lay under the grille would then be really seen. And after that? Revelation! Revenge! Destruction! Click-snap-tick.”

The “Dwarf,” formerly the lightning rod salesman, embodies a camera. His robotic thoughts and movements, are reflected using onomatopoeia, where words sound like what they mean: “Click-snap-tick.” His mind processes “pictures” of reality very slowly. Will and Jim lose their identity and individuality by becoming photo subjects: They are only targets for Mr. Dark and the carnival workers.

“Charles Halloway took his time removing the cellophane, waiting for some hint, some move on the part of the universe to show him where he was going, why he had come back this way for a cigar he did not really want […] It lit at the feet of Will Halloway, his son.”

This moment questions the supernatural and The Power of Family and Friendship: Is it fate or the universe that leads Charles to drop his cigar in the grate and find Will? Or is it a magnetic pull that a father feels toward his son? The passage implies that it could be both. The use of Will and Charles’s shared last name signals their family connection.

“The Illustrated Man’s hands shook, held out to view, asking for the gift of names, making Jim’s face on the flesh, Will’s face on the flesh, Jim’s face hidden beneath the street, Will’s face hidden beneath the street, tremble, writhe, pinch.”

The power Mr. Dark wields from names is apparent. Will and Jim’s true names are connected to their faces on Mr. Dark’s tattooed skin, allowing him to inflict pain on the boys by squeezing his hands. Bradbury uses repetition to create drama and tension, repeating “face on the flesh,” “Will’s face,” “Jim’s face.” He also uses asyndeton, or a lack of conjunctions between words: “tremble, writhe, pinch.” This slows the pacing.

“What could he say that might make sense to them? Could he say love was, above all, common cause, shared experiences?”

Charles is trying to tell Will and Jim why love is powerful. These lines highlight The Power of Family and Friendship. Charles and the boys survive the novel’s events because of their “shared experience” and “common cause.” Unlike the tattoos that give Mr. Dark a supernatural and painful connection to his victims, Charles, Will, and Jim share a loving bond.

“‘But the carnival doesn’t care if it stinks by moonlight instead of sun, so long as it gorges on fear and pain.”

The carnival is personified with diabolical qualities, “gorg[ing] on fear and pain.” Here, Bradbury presents the trope that will later be seen in other horror novels, such as Stephen King’s The Dead Zone, where the carnival is a sinister place of fear.

“Need, want, desire, we burn for those in our fluids, oxidize those in our souls[…]”

Desire is a powerful motivator in the novel, often leading to disastrous consequences. According to Charles, the choice to act on base desires is what decides if someone is good or evil. The carnival thrives on the souls of people who make the wrong choices.

“Somehow, irresistibly, the prime thing was: nothing mattered.”

When the witch is trying to stop his heart and he believes he is going to die, Charles is finally able to laugh in the face of death—literally. He learns that the grand meaning we ascribe to life makes it seem more daunting and profound than it has to be, which can make living life exhausting.

“For while it was dark he knew those million old men might march, hustle, rush, leap, smash Dad with what they were! In this shut-up night, with just four seconds to think of them, they might do anything to Dad!”

Charles sees his older selves, nearing death in each reflection. He is deeply affected after just one glance, and even in darkness, Will worries his father’s anxieties about aging will consume him. The final scene in the Mirror Maze shatters the mirrors and the dreaded future they portray.

“All because he accepted everything, at last, accepted the carnival, the hills beyond, the people in the hills, Jim, Will, and above all himself and all of life, and, accepting, threw back his head for the second time tonight and showed his acceptance with sound.”

Charles’s laughter shatters the mirrors in the maze, just as his laughter saved him from the witch. By breaking the mirrors, Charles overcomes his fears about death and aging. Will has always worried about his father’s unhappiness, but here, Charles is finally accepting joy. Bradbury uses repetition—”accepted,” “accepting,” “acceptance”—to underscore Charles’s transformation: He began the novel fighting the idea of death, and now embraces “everything”—both death and life.

“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…finally you wind up owner of the carousel, keeper of the freaks […].”

Charles warns Will and Jim that just because the carnival is gone does not mean evil is gone forever. He suggests that all humans have the capacity for evil in the choices they make. Even good people like Charles, Will, or Jim could become like Mr. Dark if they give in to their lustful desires.