Something Wicked This Way Comes

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

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

First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys. Not that all months aren’t rare. But there be bad and good, as the pirates say. Take September, a bad month: school 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…