Then there are all the shadows, the cast of characters in the carnival’s Main Freak Tent: the Dust Witch, her lids sewn shut, her lips stitched together, who can cast a spell to do the same to you and Mr. A carnival arriving in the middle of the night in a rare season for such entertainment is no ordinary show, the two boys would soon learn.Ī Mirror Maze whose endless glass walls reflect your image distorted in time, showing you the way you were but also the way you would be as an adult - or as a 100-year-old a carousel that can stretch time in any direction like so much taffy and toss you off at a point of its choosing, returning you to a past or hurtling you into a future you while leaving you in the present. Which was where Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, who would be turning 14 a day apart before and after Halloween, heard the train arriving, its ancient engine chuffing, the calliope sighing in the night. It’s a bait dangled by Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, the mysterious carnival in Ray Bradbury’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes” that Stephen King called a “darkly poetic tale.” The show rolls in and sets up its ominous tents in a meadow outside Green Town, Illinois, in the dead of night a week before Halloween, arriving on a dark and silent train, a calliope playing mournful tunes that can be heard in town. The bait is hard to resist but if you bite, you’ll be trapped in a sinister nightmare you hadn’t bargained for and from which you may never wake.

Ray bradbury something wicked