Something Wicked This Way Comes

Summary

Chapters 33–36

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Summary Chapters 33–36

The evil members of the carnival have special abilities that no one else has, but they can still be defeated. The Witch, hypersensitive to smells and sounds, is on the verge of finding the boys when a simple puff of cigar smoke from Will's father sends her coughing and wheezing away. Because they have destroyed Mr. Fury to make the Dwarf, the carnival is not able to get Will and Jim. In some sense their evil defeated itself, because in order to make the man into a freak they had to destroy his humanity, and along with his humanity went everything that made him useful and capable. By the time the Dwarf was able to put together what he saw, the boys were long gone. The Witch is more capable than the Dwarf, but Charles Halloway found a weakness of hers, and so each of the freaks, including Mr. Dark himself, must have some sort of weakness that everyone who is still fully human can exploit. There is a price to be paid for evil, and the price is a part of what makes us all human. The novel suggests that just as no person is purely good, no person is purely evil, either.

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