Chap­ter 37 opens with the sound of a town clock strik­ing, sig­nal­ing the pas­sage of time as Charles Hal­loway sits at a table in the library. Under the soft glow of a green-shad­ed lamp, he hunch­es over the books he has spread out in front of him, care­ful­ly arrang­ing them with a sense of urgency. His move­ments are delib­er­ate, and his whis­pers to him­self echo through the silent library, as if the act of orga­niz­ing the books is a way of cop­ing with the storm of thoughts rush­ing through his mind. Through­out the day, Charles had felt an increas­ing unease—his time spent among the car­ni­val crowds had left him feel­ing deeply unset­tled. He had been forced to evade the dark fig­ures lurk­ing in the cor­ners of his world, all while his thoughts kept return­ing to Jim and Will, two boys he feared were already entan­gled in the sin­is­ter forces of the car­ni­val. His mind races with a gnaw­ing sense of dread, aware that what­ev­er path the boys are walk­ing, it leads them deep­er into a web of dan­ger and uncer­tain­ty.

As he immers­es him­self in the library’s qui­et, Hal­loway finds solace in the sanc­tu­ary it pro­vides, though it feels more like a tem­po­rary escape from the chaos out­side. The library, with its tow­er­ing shelves of ancient books, offers a com­fort­ing sense of con­trol, a place where he can men­tal­ly process the fright­en­ing real­i­ty that sur­rounds him. Each book he arranges on the table rep­re­sents a dif­fer­ent facet of the fear and temp­ta­tion he per­ceives in the world around him. Works like Dr. Faus­tus and The Tor­ments of the Damned stand as sym­bols of the dark­ness that Hal­loway believes may con­sume the lives of the boys. These books act as metaphors for the sin­is­ter choic­es the boys face, with each one rep­re­sent­ing a path that could lead to either sal­va­tion or damna­tion. Hal­loway is remind­ed of the frag­ile nature of the human con­di­tion, where temp­ta­tion can eas­i­ly steer indi­vid­u­als away from their true moral com­pass. As he con­tem­plates the books, the library becomes more than just a qui­et place to read—it becomes a reflec­tion of the spir­i­tu­al and psy­cho­log­i­cal bat­tles rag­ing with­in him.

While flip­ping through a book on phys­iog­no­my, Hal­loway finds him­self ques­tion­ing the nature of Jim and Will’s souls. Are they tru­ly inno­cent, or have they already glimpsed the hor­rors that lie beyond the veil of inno­cence? He is con­front­ed by the trou­bling idea that the carnival’s grotesque inhab­i­tants are not so much mon­sters as they are reflec­tions of human­i­ty’s dark­er side, dis­tort­ed ver­sions of the same weak­ness­es and vices that exist in every­one. Hal­loway wres­tles with the idea that appear­ances can be deceiv­ing, and that per­haps judg­ment should not be based sole­ly on exter­nal char­ac­ter­is­tics. If he were to judge the carnival’s inhab­i­tants sole­ly on their out­ward appear­ance, he real­izes that even they might be no dif­fer­ent from the count­less oth­ers in soci­ety who hide their dark­er ten­den­cies beneath a facade of nor­mal­i­ty. This inter­nal con­flict leaves him in a state of moral con­fu­sion, grap­pling with the com­plex­i­ties of good and evil. The more he reflects, the more he under­stands that the lines between the two are not as clear as they might seem, and that every­one, even the carnival’s most mon­strous fig­ures, has a sto­ry that can­not be eas­i­ly under­stood at face val­ue.

Charles’s feel­ings of dread inten­si­fy as he recalls a line from Shake­speare: “By the prick­ing of my thumbs, some­thing wicked this way comes.” This phrase res­onates deeply with him, as it per­fect­ly encap­su­lates the weight of his fears. He under­stands that the evil that has descend­ed upon the town is no mere illusion—it is real, and it is draw­ing clos­er. The car­ni­val, with all its strange and ter­ri­fy­ing won­ders, is not just a fleet­ing threat but an embod­i­ment of a deep­er dark­ness that preys on human souls. Halloway’s mind becomes con­sumed with the thought that he can­not escape this loom­ing dan­ger; it is a pres­ence that will not be ignored. The real­iza­tion that he must con­front this evil head-on in order to pro­tect Jim and Will fills him with a pro­found sense of respon­si­bil­i­ty. He longs for their return, but at the same time, he fears that they may already be lost to the forces that seek to con­sume them. The weight of the sit­u­a­tion leaves him feel­ing help­less, as he gazes out into the night, unsure of how to pro­ceed in the face of such over­whelm­ing dark­ness.

This chap­ter brings into focus the cen­tral themes of fear, judg­ment, and the com­plex­i­ties of moral­i­ty. Halloway’s inter­nal strug­gle reflects the larg­er con­flict that runs through­out the story—the bat­tle between light and dark, good and evil, and the choic­es that define one’s char­ac­ter. The library, as a place of con­tem­pla­tion, becomes a metaphor for the choic­es that must be made and the con­se­quences of those choic­es. The deep­er Hal­loway delves into the books, the more he real­izes that his role is not sim­ply to pro­tect the boys phys­i­cal­ly but also to help them nav­i­gate the com­plex moral ter­rain they are about to face. The car­ni­val is not just an exter­nal threat, but a mir­ror of the inter­nal bat­tles every­one must confront—fears, regrets, and the ever-present temp­ta­tion to stray from the path of right­eous­ness. This real­iza­tion strength­ens Halloway’s resolve, as he rec­og­nizes that the only way to save the boys is to con­front the dark­ness, not only out­side them but with­in their own hearts as well.