Page 1 of 154
RAY BRADBURY
Something Wicked
This Way Comes
GRANADA
London Toronto Sydney New York
Published by Granada Publishing Limited 1977
Reprinted 1983
ISBN 0 586 04357 8
First published in Great Britain by
Hart-Davis, MacGibbon 1963
Copyright (c) Ray Bradbury 1963
Made and printed in Great Britain by
Collins, Glasgow
This book is sold subject to the condition that it
shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated
without the publisher's prior consent in any
form of binding or cover than that in
which it is published and without a similar
condition including this condition being imposed
on the subsequent purchaser
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Page 2 of 154
Granada (r)
Granada Publishing (r)
WITH GRATITUDE TO
JENET JOHNSON
who taught me how to write the short story
AND TO
SNOW LONGLEY HOUSH
who taught me poetry at Los Angeles High School
a long time ago
AND TO
JACKGUSS
who helped with this novel not so long ago
Contents
PROLOGUE
I. ARRIVALS
II. PURSUITS
III. DEPARTURES
Man is in love, and loves what vanishes.
W.B. YEATS
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
I know not all that may be coming, but be it what
it will, I'll go to it laughing.
STUBB in Moby Dick
PROLOGUE
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Page 3 of 154
First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys. Not that all months
aren't rare. But there be bad abd good, as the pirates say. Take
September, a bad month: schoool begins. Consider August, a good
month: school hasn't begun yet. July, well, July's really fine: there's
no chance in the world for school. June, no doubting it, June's best of
all, for the school doors spring wide and September's a billion years
away.
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.
But one strange wild dark long year, Hallowe'en came early.
One year Hallowe'en came on October 24, three hours after
midnight.
At that time, James Nightshade of 97 Oak Street was thirteen years,
eleven months, twenty-three days old. Next door, William Halloway
was thirteen years, eleven months and twenty-four days old. Both
touched toward fourteen; it almost trembled in their hands.
And that was the October week when they grew up overnight, and
were never so young any more. . .
I
Arrivals
1
The seller of lightning-rods arrived just ahead of the storm. He came
along the street of Green Town, Illinois, in the late cloudy October
day, sneaking glances over his shoulder. Somewhere not so far back,
vast lightnings stomped the earth. Somewhere, a storm like a great
beast with terrible teeth could not be denied.
So the salesman jangled and clanged his huge leather kit in which
oversized puzzles of ironmongery lay unseen but which his tongue
conjured from door to door until he came at last to a lawn which was
cut all wrong.
No, not the grass. The salesman lifted his gaze. 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.
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