Will doesn’t believe it-carnivals don’t typically come to town after Labor Day-but Jim is hardly able to contain his excitement. Then, an advertisement for a traveling carnival, Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, blows through the air and wraps around Jim’s leg, and it is supposed to arrive the next day. At fifty-four, Charles is old enough to be Will’s grandfather, and each time Will runs into him at the library it is a “surprise-that old man, his work, his name.” After checking out their books, Will and Jim run home through the center of town, and they are confronted by the faint sounds of carnival music and the smell of cotton candy. The boys then make their weekly run to Green Town’s local library, where Will’s father, Charles, works as the janitor. Fury is quickly on his way, but Will and Jim are left anticipating a natural disaster, and they immediately nail the metal contraption to Jim’s roof. Fury has sold over one hundred thousand lightning rods to “God-fearing” customers, and he gives Jim one free of charge and instructs the boy to nail it high on his roof, or else he’ll be “dead come dawn.” Mr. It is one week before Halloween when thirteen-year-old Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade are approached by a traveling lightning-rod salesman named Tom Fury who predicts an epic storm.
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