Shadowland

by Peter Straub

  This is an interesting dream, he thinks. Why am I afraid of him?

  The air becomes darker, more silvery. The man, who may or may have not seen him, walks on. Collis Folk chugs into sight, appearing to be intent on mowing down the wading pool. Now the boy is blocked from the man's sight, and he can move.

  I'm really scared, he thinks: why? The entire neighbor­hood has turned unpleasant, somehow tainted and threat­ening. Though he cannot see the little figure way down there on Mesa Lane, the man is somehow broadcasting chill and badness. . . .

  (His face is made of ice.)

  No, that's not it, but the boy scrambles to his feet, starts to run, and then fully realizes he is in a dream, for he sees a building at the end of his backyard which he knows is not there; nor are the thick trees which surround it. The house is only about twenty feet high and has a thatched roof. Two small windows flank a little brown door. This fairy-tale structure is inviting, not threatening — he knows he is supposed to enter it. It will save him from whatever is pacing up and down on Mesa Lane.

  And he knows it is a wizard's house.

  When he goes through the trees and opens the door, all of his neighborhood seems to sigh: the rusty swings and the wading pool, Cissy Harbinger and Collis Folk, each brown and green blade of grass, send up a wave of disappoint­ment and regret; and this real regret is from down there, from the man, who knows the boy is blocked from him.

  'So here you are,' the wizard says. An old man with an extravagantly wrinkled face mostly concealed behind a foaming beard, dressed in threadbare robes, the wizard is leaning back in a chair, smiling at him. He is the oldest wizard in the world, the boy knows; and then knows that he himself is in the midst of a fairy tale, one never written. 'You are safe here,' the wizard says. 'I know.'

  'I want you to remember that. It's not all like that. . . being out there.'

  'This is a dream, isn't it?' the boy asks. 'Everything is a dream,' says the wizard. 'This world of yours — a flag in the breeze, a plaything full of meanings. Take my word for it. Meanings. But you're a good boy, you'll find out.' A pipe appeared in his hand, and he drew on it and breathed out thick gray smoke. 'Oh, yes. You'll find what you have to find. It'll be all right. You'll have to fight for your life, of course, you'll have tests to pass — tests you can't study for, hee hee — and there'll be a girl and a wolf, and all that, but you're no idiot.' 'Like Little Red Riding Hood? A girl and a wolf?' 'Oh, like all of them,' the wizard said vaguely. 'Tell me, how is your father doing?' 'He's okay. I guess.'

  The wizard nodded, blew out another cloud of smoke. He appeared very feeble to the boy; an old old wizard, at the end of his powers, so tired he could barely lift his pipe. 'Oh, I could show you things,' the wizard said. 'But there's no use in it. I just wanted you to know . . . Guess I've said it all. This is a deep, deep wood. Wish I weren't so blamed old.'

  He seemed to fall asleep for a moment. The pipe drooped in his mouth and his hands trembled in his lap. Then his watery eyes opened. 'No brothers or sisters, correct?'

  The boy nodded.

  The wizard smiled. 'You can leave, son. He's gone. Fight the good fight, now.'

  The boy has been dismissed; the logic of the dream compels him outside; the wizard's eyes are closing again. But he does not wish to leave — he does not want to wake up just yet. He looks out the windows and sees forest, not his backyard. Thick cobwebs blanket several trees in dark grayness.

  The wizard stirs, opens his eyes, and looks at the reluctant boy. 'Oh, you'll have your heart broken,' he says. 'Is that what you're waiting to hear? It'll be broken, all right. But you'll never get anything done if you walk around with an unchipped heart. That's the way of it, boy.'

  'Thanks,' he says, and backs toward the door.

  'That's the way, and there isn't any other way.'

  'Okay.'

  'Keep your eyes peeled for wolves, now.'

  'Right,' the boy says, and goes outside. He thinks the wizard is already asleep. After he goes past the trees which are not there, he sees his own body asleep on the grass, lying on its side near a lolling dandelion.

  1

  For various reasons the Carson School is now no longer the school it was, and it has a new name. Carson was a boys' school, old-fashioned and quirky and sometimes so stern it could turn your bowels to ice water. Later we who had been students there understood that all of the rather menacing discipline was meant to disguise the fact that Carson was at best second-rate. Only a school of that kind would have hired Laker Broome as headmaster; perhaps only a third-rate school would have kept him.

  Years ago, when John Kennedy was still a senator from Massachusetts and Steve McQueen was Josh Randall on television and McDonald's had sold only two million hamburgers and narrow ties and tab collars were coming in for the first time, Carson was Spartan and tweedy and a bit desperate and self-conscious about its status; now it is a place where rich boys and girls go if they have trouble in the public schools. Tuition was seven hundred and fifty dollars a year; now it is just under four thousand.

  It has even changed sites. When I was there with Tom Flanagan and Del Nightingale and the others, the school was chiefly situated in an old Gothic mansion on the top of a hill, to which had been added a modern wing-steel beams and big plates of glass. The old section of the school somehow shrank the modern addition, subsumed it into itself, and all of it looked cold and haunting.

  This original building, along with the vast old gym­nasium (the field house) behind it, was built mainly of wood. Parts of the original building — the headmaster's office, the library, the corridors and staircases — re­sembled the Garrick Club. Old wood polished and gleam­ing, oak bookshelves and handrails, beautiful slippery wooden floors. This part of the school always seduced prospective parents, who had the closet anglophilia of their class. Some of the rooms were jewel-box tiny, with mullioned windows, paneled walls, and ugly radiators that gave off little heat. If Carson had been the manor house some of its aspects suggested, it would have been not only haunting but also haunted.

  Once every two or three years when I go back and drive past the school's new Quantum Hills site, I see a long neo-Georgian facade of reddish brick, long green lawns, and a soccer field far off — all of it fresh green and warm brick, so like a campus, so generalized that it seems a mirage. This cozy imitation of a university seems distant, remote, sealed within its illusions about itself. I know looking at it that the lives of its students are less driven than ours were, softer. Is there, I wonder, a voice still in the school which whispers: I am your salvation, squirt: I am the way, the truth, and the light?

  I am your salvation — the sound of evil, of that flabby jealous devil of the second-rate, proclaiming itself.

  2

  Registration Day: 1958

  A dark corridor, a staircase with an abrupt line of light bisecting it at one end, desks with candles dripping wax into saucers lined along a wall. A fuse had blown or a wire had died, and the janitor did not come until the next morning, when the rest of the school registered. Twenty new freshmen milled directionlessly in the long corridor, even the exceptionally suntanned faces looking pale and frightened in the candlelight.

  'Welcome to the school,' one of the four or five teachers present joked. They stood in a group at the entrance to the even darker corridor which led to the administration offices. 'It isn't always this inefficient. Sometimes it's a lot worse.'

  Some of the boys laughed — they were new only to the Upper School, and had been at Carson, down the street in the mansard-roofed Junior School, all their lives.

  'We can begin in a moment,' another, older teacher said flatly, cutting off the meek laughter. He was taller than the others, with a narrow head and a pursy snapping turtle's face moored by a long nose. His rimless spectacles shone as he whipped his narrow head back and forth in the murk to see who had laughed. He wore the center-parted curling hair of a caricatured eighteen-nineties bartender. 'Some of you boys are going to have to discover that the fun
and games are over. This isn't the Junior School anymore. You're at the bottom of the pile now, you're the lowest of the low, but you'll be expected to act like men. Got that?'

  None of the boys responded, and he gave a high-pitched whinnying snort down his long nose. This was obviously the characteristic sound of his anger. 'Got that? Don't you donkeys have ears?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'That was you, Flanagan?' ' .

  'Yes, sir.' The speaker was a wiry-looking boy whose red-blond hair was combed in the 'Princeton' manner, flat and loose over the skull. In the moving dim light from the candles, his face was attentive and friendly.

  'You coming out for JV football this fall?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  All the new boys felt a fresh nervousness.

  'Good. End?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'Good. If you grow a foot, you'll be varsity material in two years. We could use a good end.' The teacher coughed into his hand, looked behind him down the black administration corridor, and grimaced. 'I should explain. This incredible . . . situation has come about because School Secretary can't find her key to this door.' He banged a heavy arched wooden door behind him with his knuckles. 'Tony could open it if he were here, but he doesn't report until tomorrow. Be that as it may. We can all function by candlelight, I suppose.' He surveyed us as if it were a challenge, and I noticed that his head was as narrow as the side of a plank. His eyes were so close together they all but touched.

  'By the way, you'll all be on the junior-varsity football team,' he said. 'This is a small class-twenty. One of the smallest in the whole school. We need all of you out on the gridiron. Not all of you will make it through this . . . crucial year, but we have to try to make football players out of you somehow.'

  Some of the other teachers began to look restive, but he ignored them. 'Now, I know some of you boys from the good work you did with Coach Ellinghausen in the eighth grade, but some of you are new. You.' He pointed at a tall fat boy near me. 'Your name.'

  'Dave Brick.'

  'Dave Brick, what?'

  'Sir.'

  'You look like a center to me.'

  Brick showed consternation, but nodded his head.

  'You.' He pointed at a small olive-skinned boy with dark liquid eyes.

  The boy squeaked.

  'Name.'

  'Nightingale, sir.'

  'We'll have to put some meat on you, won't we, Nightingale?'

  Nightingale nodded, and I could see his legs trembling in his trousers.

  'Speak in sentences, boy. Yes, sir. That is a sentence. A nod is not a sentence.'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'Tackle?'

  'I guess so, sir.'

  The teacher snorted, surveyed us all again. The waxy smell from the candles was beginning to build up, hot and greasy, in the corridor. Suddenly he snaked out one thick hand and grabbed Dave Brick's hair, which was combed into two small curling waves meeting in the center of his forehead. 'Brick! Cut that disgusting hair! Or I'll do it for you!'

  Brick quailed and jerked back his head. His throat convulsed, and I thought he was choking back vomit.

  The narrow-faced man snapped his hand back and wiped it on his baggy trousers. 'School Secretary is sorting out some papers you will need, forms for you to fill out and things like that, but since we . . . seem to have some time, I'll introduce you to the masters who are here today. I am Mr. Ridpath. My subject is world history. I am also the football coach. I will not have any of you in class for two years, but I will see you on the field. Now.' He took a step to the side and turned so that his face was in darkness. Oily tendrils of hair above his ears shone in the candlelight. 'These men are most of the masters you'll have this year. You will have the pleasure of meeting Mr. Thorpe, your Latin master, the day after tomorrow. Latin is a compulsory subject. Like football. Like English. Like Mathematics. Mr. Thorpe is as tough as I am. He is a great teacher. He was a pilot in World War One. It is an honor to be in Mr. Thorpe's Latin I. Now, here is Mr. Weatherbee — he will be your Mathe­matics I teacher, and he is your form tutor. You can go to him with your problems. He comes to us from Harvard, so he probably won't listen to them.'

  A small man with horn-rimmed glasses and a rumpled jacket over shoulders set in a permanent slouch lifted his head and grinned at us.

  'Next to Mr. Weatherbee is Mr. Fitz-Hallan. He teaches English. Amherst.' A rather languid-looking man with a handsome boyish face lifted a hand in a half-wave. He had made the joke about efficiency, and he looked bored enough to fall asleep standing up.

  'Mr. Whipple, American history.' This was a rotund, bald, cherub-faced man in a stained blazer to which the school crest had been affixed with a safety pin. He put his hands together and shook them before his face. 'Univer­sity of New Hampshire.'

  Mr. Ridpath glanced back down the black corridor now to his left, where a single dim light wavered behind flat glass. 'See if you can help her, hey?' Whipple/New Hampshire padded off into the dark. 'We'll have those papers in a minute. Okay. Talk among yourselves.'

  Of course none of us did, but just jittered in the dark corridor until Mr. Ridpath thought of something else to say. 'Where are the two scholarship boys? Let's see some hands.'

  Chip Hogan and I raised our hands. Chip was already standing with Tom Flanagan and the others from the Junior School. Everybody looked curiously at the two of us. Compared to us, all the others, even Dave Brick, looked rich.

  'Good. Good. Call out your names.'

  We did.

  'You're the Hogan who ran seventy-five yards last year in the eighth-grade championship against St. Matthew's?'

  'Yeah,' Hogan said, but Mr. Ridpath did not seem to mind.

  'You two boys know the great opportunity you're getting?'

  We said 'Yes, sir' in unison.

  'All of you new boys?'

  There was a general sibilant mutter.

  'You'll have to work, you know. Work like you never have in your lives. We'll make you break your backs, and then we'll expect you to play harder than you ever have in your lives. And we'll make men out of you. Carson men. And that's something to be proud of.' He looked around scornfully. 'I don't think some of you are gonna cut the mustard. Wait till Mr. Thorpe gets his hands on you.'

  A large old woman in a brown cardigan shuffled out of the corridor, followed by Mr. Whipple, who carried a flashlight. She too wore rimless glasses, and toted a large bundle of papers sorted so that they were stacked crosswise, in different sections. 'Behind the duplicator, wouldn't you know? Frenchy never washes his cups, either. He couldn't put these on the counter like anyone else.' While she spoke, she dumped the stack of papers on the first desk. 'Help me distribute these — different piles on different desks.'

  The knot of teachers dissolved, each of the men picking up a separate stack of papers and moving to a different desk. Mr. Ridpath announced, 'Mrs. Olinger, school secretary,' in a parade-ground voice, and the old woman nodded, snatched her flashlight back from Mr. Whipple, and marched up the stairs into the light.

  'Single file,' Ridpath ordered, and we clumsily jostled into each line and went down the desks, picking up sheets from each.

  A boy behind me mumbled something, and Mr. Ridpath bellowed, 'No pencil? No pencil? First day of school and you don't have a pencil? What's your name again, boy?'

  'Nightingale, sir.'

  'Nightingale,' Ridpath said scornfully. 'Where are you from, anyway? What sort of school did you go to before you came here?'

  'This sort of school, sir,' came Nightingale's girlish voice.

  'What?'

  'Andover, sir. I was at Andover last year.'

  'I'll loan him a pen, sir,' said Tom Flanagan, and we passed down the line of desks without any more bellow­ing. At the far end of the corridor, we stood and waited in the darkness to be told what to do.

  'Upstairs, single line, library,' Ridpath said wearily.

  3

  We went, like Mrs. Olinger, up the stairs into sunlight, which fell and sparkled
through the mullioned glass set beside the high, thick scarred front door. The light was already dim and gray up here, but across the hall was the library, which had rows of big windows set between bookshelves on either side. If the library had not been so naturally dark, it would have shone. Cordovan-colored wood and unjacketed spines of books blotted up the available light, and on normal schooldays the big chan­deliers overhead burned whenever the library was in use. Without this light, the library was oddly tenebrous.

  Two rows of long flat desks, also of the cordovan-colored wood, filled the center of the front main section of the room, and we took our papers to them. Across the room ahead of us was a waist-high shelf of reference books behind which sat the librarian's desk and file cabinets in a kind of well with clear sight lines to all the tables. Mrs. Olinger watched us file into the library and take our seats, standing beside a thin woman with tightly penned white hair and gold-rimmed glasses. She wore a black dress and a strand of pearls. The teachers came in last and sat all at one table behind us. They immediately began to mutter to each other.

  'Masters?' Mrs. Olinger queried, and the teachers quietened. One of them drummed a pencil in a triplet pattern, and continued to do so as long as we were in the library.

  'This is Mrs. Tute,' said Mrs. Olinger, and the thin woman wearing the pearls gave a nervous nod like a tremor of the head. 'Mrs. Tute is our librarian, and this is her domain. She will be present while you fill out the registration forms and digest some of the information on the other sheets, after which she will provide you with an orientation to the library. If you have any questions, raise your hand and one of the masters will help you.'