Something Wicked This Way Comes Read Online Free PDF

years of staring.
        Jim knew every centimetre 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.
        'Jim? You awake?'
        'Hi, Mom.'
        A door opened and now shut. He felt her weight on the bed.
        'Why, Jim, your hands are ice. You shouldn't have the window so high. Mind your health.'
        'Sure.'
        'Don't say "sure" that way. You don't know until you've had three children and lost all but one.'
        'Never going to have any,' said Jim.
        'You just say that.'
        'I know it. I know everything.'
        She waited a moment. 'What do you know?'
        'No use making more People. People die.'
        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!

10
    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