Something Wicked This Way Comes: Chapter 8 Summary & Analysis

Will enters the house and shuts the door. He looks in and sees “the only theater he cares for now, the familiar stage” where Charles sits, usually holding a book. His parents look small in the big room and Will equally “wants to be near and not near them.” Will’s mother sits close to his father, “smelling like fresh milk” and looking “happy.” Will doesn’t understand how his mother can be “so happy” when his father is “so sad.” Will looks to Charles and sees a wadded-up piece of paper in his hand, which Charles quickly shoves deep into his chair. “Anything new, Dad?” he asks.

Charles tells Will that the stone lion on the library steps has blown away and is “prowling the town now, looking for Christians. Won’t find any,” he says. He has the only Christian “in captivity here, and she’s a good cook.” As Will’s mother laughs, Will climbs the stairs and hears the faint sound of Charles tossing fresh paper into the fire.

At night, Will likes to put his ear to the wall and listen to his parents talking in the next room. He listens to Charles’s faint voice, “the sound truth makes being said,” like a lesson “and the subject is life.” Tonight, Will can hear his father’s broken voice: “…Will…makes me feel so old…a man should play baseball with his son.” Will’s mother reassures him, and then Charles says: “Hell, I was forty when he was born! And you. Who’s your daughter? people say.”

Will hears Charles go on about a carnival, and Will’s mother remarks that it is too late in the year. Their chatter continues. “…most beautiful…woman…in the world,” Will hears. There must be a carnival, Will thinks. But it can’t be—it is simply too late for carnivals. He opens a library book and tries to read, but he has mixed his own books up with Jim’s. Late that night, Will hears his father slip out the front door and go back to the library, and he thinks about his mother “asleep, content, not knowing he has gone.”