Enjoy Bradbury’s 1962 dark fantasy novel for children – and children at heart –  in audio format. It may skip a chapter here and there, (a YouTube user seems to have issues with chapters 3, 8, 10 and 12), but what do you expect for free?  Don’t bother searching for the 1983 screenplay produced by Disney – you’ll pull false flicks.

Fact: Bradbury chose the title of his novel from: Act IV of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “By the pricking of my thumbs / Something wicked this way comes.”

‘Boy, ‘ he said. ‘What’s your name?’

And the first boy, with hair as blond-white as milk thistle, shut up one eye, tilted his head, and looked at the salesman with a single eye as open, bright and clear as a drop of summer rain.

‘Will,’ he said. ‘William Halloway.’

The storm gentleman turned. ‘And you?’

The second boy did not move, but lay stomach down on the autumn grass, debating as if he might make up a name. His hair was wild, thick, and the glossy colour of waxed chestnuts. His eyes, fixed to some distant point within himself, were mint rock-crystal green. At last he put a blade of dry grass in his casual mouth.

‘Jim Nightshade,’ he said.

The storm salesman nodded as if he had known it all along.

‘Nightshade. That’s quite a name.’

‘And only fitting,’ said Will Halloway. ‘I was born one minute before midnight, October thirtieth, Jim was born one minute after midnight, which makes it October thirty-first.’

‘Hallowe’en,’ said Jim.

By their voices, the boys had told the tale all their lives, proud of their mothers, living house next to house, running for the hospital together, bringing sons into the world seconds apart; one light, one dark. There was a history of mutual celebration behind them. Each year Will lit the candles on a single cake at one minute to midnight. Jim, at one minute after, with the last day of the month begun, blew them out.

This clip might give hint to what happened to the missing chapters beginning at 1:57.

– altered by Hystoria