by Peter Straub
One circumstance — really an image — suggests otherwise: after Del had been called from Thorpe's class in the usual manner, the first thing he saw in the artfully bookish office was the proposal he had typed six days before — it lay alone on the polished desk. Del immediately assumed that Broome wanted to talk to him about it, and most of his fear left him. After all, why would anyone think that he, of all the boys at Carson, would want to steal a glass bauble?
'So your interest in magic goes deeper than card tricks,' Broome said, smiling enigmatically.
'Much deeper, sir,' Del replied.
'Just how deep does it go?'
Del thought he was being honestly questioned, that Broome was interested in him. He said, 'It's what I care about most.'
'I see.' Broome leaned back in his chair and put the soles of his shoes on the edge of his desk — the model, in his striped shirt sleeves, horn-rims, and posture, of a concerned academic and administrator. Even the dozing dog beside the chair fitted this picture. 'It's what you care about most. Do you intend to pursue a career in that rather, uh, unusual field?'
'I'd really like to,' Del said. 'I'm pretty good already.'
'Yes, I bet you are.' Broome smiled. 'And what do you think about magic — about tricks and all that?'
'Oh, it's a lot more than just tricks,' Del answered happily. 'It's entertainment, and it's surprises, and . . . ' He hesitated. 'And it's about a whole way of looking at things.'
'I see that you are indeed serious,' Broome said. He took his feet off the edge of his desk and pushed the proposal a half-inch to one side. 'Have you been happy here, during this first semester?'
'Pretty happy,' Del said. 'Most of the time.'
'I gather that you've been given an unfortunate nickname.'
'Oh, well,' Del said. 'It's pretty bad, yes, sir.'
'I could think of better ones for you.'
This put Del off guard, and he asked, 'What are they, sir?'
'Thief. Sneak. Coward. Wasn't that clear?'
From this point the questioning proceeded in the familiar manner.
6
Economics Lesson
While his father cut his time at the office in half, and then to a third, Tom dreamed of the vulture again. By the time of the last dream, Hartley Flanagan had lost forty pounds, and even if he had felt like pretending to be a healthy man and going through his routine of legal work and workouts at the Athletic Club, he would have been embarrassed by the way the skin hung on his cheeks, his suits on his bones. Finally he had energy enough only for the hospital and home.
By now, we are in basketball season — one week into winter weather. Tom is not his usual energetic self in school these days, and his work has fallen off: he is afraid of failing his exams, afraid he is going crazy, of being kicked off the JV basketball team; mostly he is afraid of what is happening to his father. Death has never been so real to him as it is now, and when he thinks of a future without his father, without a father, he sees a black valley bristling with threats.
Yes, the vulture says to him. So now he can understand it.
Yes. That is so. A black valley full of threats. But, dear boy, what else did you expect. To be a child forever?
No, but . . .
You did.
I did.
The vulture, still in that hot sandy place where there are no shadows, nods intelligently.
And you know what happens when you go into that valley?
Tom cannot answer: a fear as large as himself has slithered into his skin.
Why, you die, boy. It's that simple. Without protection, you die.
His father's corpse swings around on a rope to face him.
I am your father now, boy. Me. I'm your old man now, me and everything else in the valley.
The fear inside him began to shake.
The vulture came toward him, looking him brightly and intelligently in the eye.
Foul thing. Carrion-eater. Maggot.
Enough, little bird. The vulture rustled its wings, stabbed its great yellow beak forward, and impaled his hand. His own screams woke him up.
Skeleton Ridpath, that same night, is dreaming of an anthill in which the ants have the faces of the freshmen — they are scurrying around on little plots and errands,
rushing through corridors and passageways, twittering to each other. He has a rake, and is about to shatter the anthill when he hears a loud booming noise, a crashing like huge waves. For an instant he sees a nondescript brown hat pulled down to shade a probing inhuman face, and terror fills him, and then he wakes up and the booming, crashing sound is all about him. He knows what it is, and is almost afraid to look at the window; but finally he does look, and tastes vomit backing into the chamber behind his tongue. An enormous white owl, weirdly bright against the black window, is opening its shoulders and battering the glass. He can see every feather of the big wings. The owl wants in, it demands to enter, and Skeleton knows perfectly well that if he opens the window it will tear him to pieces. Its head is almost the size of his own. Poor Skeleton shudders back against the wall, a primitive part of his mind afraid too that the eagle on his ceiling will come to life and swoop down to take his eyes. He covers his eyes with his fists and shoves his face into the pillow.
7
Two days before Christmas break, it was my turn to take the attendance sheet to the administrative office before chapel. Mrs. Olinger, dressed as always in her lumpy gray cardigan, was conducting one of those standoffish fights between the teachers and the staff common at any school. Her victim was Mr. Pethbridge, the French teacher. Pethbridge was languid and effete, with blond hair and a large handsome mouth. He always wore tweed suits slightly tucked at the waist — French, like his thin, elegant eyeglasses. Mrs. Olinger had little time for him, and she took so much grim delight in their dispute that she did not want to interrupt it for me.
'Well, I don't see why it has to be in a different place every time,' Mr. Pethbridge complained. He was carrying a big stack of his examination papers, and his physical attitude, chin lifted, belly thrown out, seemed to express one word: Women!
'You don't.'
'I'm afraid not, my dear.'
'This is a working office, Mr. Pethbridge. Our files are in constant use. Our files are growing. There is also a security aspect.'
'Oh, my dear.'
'Does it cause you any inconvenience, Mr. Pethbridge?'
'Yes, Mrs. Olinger. Instead of simply putting my exams in a file I can easily find, I have to wait for you to determine where they should go, using random-number theory, I am certain, which takes valuable time — '
'And when you do not wash your coffeecups, Mr. Pethbridge, it sets a bad example for the others and costs me valuable time.'
Skeleton Ridpath came up beside me, holding some change in his fist. He scowled at me from deep inside his bony, bruised-looking face, took a step to one side, and knocked a heap of textbooks to the floor.
As I stooped to pick them up, silently cursing both Mrs. Olinger and Skeleton, the school secretary began to rattle away in a calm, dogged, infuriated way about the relative merits of her lost time as compared to the French teacher's, and finally moved to the counter to take Skeleton's money and push a notebook toward him. Skeleton contemptuously took the textbooks from me and drifted off to the side. Mrs. Olinger accepted my list and said, 'Why will you boys insist on hanging around the office when you must have better things to do?'
When I left, Skeleton was still idling at the back of the corridor, pretending to adjust his watch.
Later that afternoon Mr. Broome passed word down through Mrs. Olinger and Mr. Weatherbee that he wanted Morris' Jazz Society and the Magic Circle to demonstrate their skills to the entire school in an hour-long program to be scheduled in April. Mr. Weatherbee read the memo to us at the end of the day: Morris looked nervous, Tom and Del were obviously excited.
8
Christmas break was the usual happy respite from school, except for one boy in our class.
We went to visit my grandparents in Los Angeles; Morris and his parents went for a skiing holiday in Aspen, and Morris used the long slopes to work out in his head which songs his trio might play least badly during their half-hour. Everyone else stayed home for the traditional Christmas. When my family returned from California, I took a bus to Tom Flanagan's house and was told that Tom was out. There was no tree, no Christmas decoration, merely an enormous random-looking pile of books and games on the living-room floor. His mother was very haggard. The evident worry on her face, the lack of seasonal decoration contrasted with the job lot of presents: desolation.
9
The semester examinations, held over four days in the drafty field house beneath ancient photographs of football players with their arms about each other's shoulders, the uniforms, stances, and even the faces dated, were difficult but fair, proving that what the school appeared to be and what it was could occasionally mesh. Long, staggered rows of boys wearing crew-neck sweaters scribbled, blew their noses and sucked at lozenges, scratched their heads and gazed at the dead youthful football players. Mr. Fitz-Hallan and Mr. Ridpath, reading The Far Side of Paradise and Quarterbacking respectively, sat at a long table at the head of the rows. For Tom Flanagan the long exams in the field house seemed like hours entirely out of time, perhaps out of space as well — the world beyond the rows of desks and sneezing boys could have changed seasons, been taken by hurricane to Oz, or gone dark at midday and turned to ice. The results, in most cases similar to those of the previous examinations, contained a few surprises. When we thronged around the notice boards outside the library two weeks later, Tom saw that he had managed one B, but otherwise had his usual C's; Del had failed nothing, had in fact done astonishingly well — a row of B's. And when Tom and Del risked a glance at the seniors' list, they saw that Skeleton Ridpath had five A's.
10
Fads
Things returned to superficial normality when the half-dozen suspected juniors and seniors, none of them Skeleton Ridpath, had been quizzed; school narrowed down into a tunnel of work. A few minor sartorial fads swept through the school in February and March. After a few seniors began wearing their cowboy boots to school, everyone appeared in them until Mr. Fitz-Hallan started addressing students as 'Hoss' and 'Pecos' and 'Hoot'; one week, everybody wore the collars of their jackets turned up, as if they had just stepped in out of a strong wind.
Closer to the bone was the wave of sick jokes: these were some sort of release from what I now see was the hysterical illness at work in the school's unconscious. What did Joey's mother say when he wouldn't stop picking his nose? Joey, I'm going to saw the fingers off your wooden hand. What did Dracula say to his children? Quick, kiddies, eat your soup before it clots. What did the mother say when she had her period? Same thing. We actually laughed at these awful jokes.
Even closer to the bone was the 'nightmare' fad which took over the school in the hiatus between the quizzing of the last senior and Laker Broome's outburst in chapel at the end of March. Much more than grisly so-called jokes, this demonstrated that something ill was growing at the school's heart, and fattening on us all — that what was happening secretly to Tom Flanagan was not exclusive to him.
Bambi Whipple released this fad in the course of his free-association chapel talk. Each of the teachers took one chapel a year. Mr. Thorpe's had been the week before Bambi's, and that too may have contributed, being overheated and inflated with Thorpeish emotions. Thorpe's speech began with references to a mysterious 'practice' which undermined boys' strength and unmanned those who gave in to it. Thorpe grew more vehement, just as he did during class. Saliva flew. He raked his hair with his fingers; he referred to Jesus and the Virgin Mary and President Eisenhower's boyhood in Kansas. Finally he mentioned a boy who had attended Carson, 'a boy I knew, a fine boy, but a boy troubled by these desires and who sometimes gave in to them!' He paused, drew in a noisy breath, and bellowed, 'Prayer! That's what saved this fine boy. One night, alone in his room, the desire to give in grew on him so fiercely that he feared lest he commit that sin again, and he went on his knees and prayed and prayed, and made a vow to himself and to God . . . ' Thorpe reared back at the podium. 'And to have a permanent reminder of his vow, he took a knife from his pocket . . . 'At this point Thorpe actually removed a pocketknife from his own pants pocket and brandished it. ' . . . and he opened the knife and gritted his teeth and put the blade to the palm of his hand. Boys, this fine young fellow carved a cross in the palm of his right hand! So the scar would always remind him of his vow! And he never . . . ' And so on. With gestures.
Bambi Whipple's effort on the following week was considerably less forceful. As in the classroom, he spoke with little preparation; the effect of Whipple's rambling monologue may have been as much due to Thorpe's horror story as to what he himself said. But in the course of his ramble, something reminded him of dreams, and he said, 'Gee, dreams can take you to funny places. Why, I remember dreaming last week that I had committed a terrible crime, and the police were looking for me and eventually I holed up in a kind of big warehouse or something, and suddenly I realized that I didn't have anywhere else to go, that was it, they were going to get me and I was going to spend the rest of my life in jail. . . . Boys, that was a terrible feeling. Really terrible.'
That afternoon a sheet of paper appeared on the notice board outside the library which read: Last week I dreamed that a fat bore from New Hampshire was beating me to death with a pillowcase. That was terrible. Really terrible. Mrs. Olinger tore it down, and another appeared: / dreamed about rats moving all over my bed and crawling up and down my body. When Mrs. Tute emerged from the library and shredded that note, the board was clear only until the next morning, when someone put up the sign: I was looking into a snake's eyes. The snake opened his mouth wider and wider until I fell in.
That was how the fad began. The notice board became an array of such notes; as soon as Mrs. Tute or Mrs. Olinger ripped them down, dozens more appeared, opening the door to what lay behind all of those well-fed suburban faces.
. . . wolves were ripping at me, and I knew I was dying . . . all alone in the middle of icebergs and huge mountains of ice . . . a girl with long snaky hair and blood on her fingers . . . I was up in the air and no one could get me down and I knew I was going to blow away and be lost. . . something like a man but with no face was chasing me and he was never going to get tired . . . and directly inspired by William Thorpe, a man was cutting at my hand with a knife, swearing at me, and he wouldn't listen to what I was screaming at him . . .
There must have been faculty meetings about it. Poor Bambi Whipple appeared one day looking very cautious and chagrined. Mr. Thorpe thundered on in his usual way — no one would have dared to rebuke him. Mr. Fitz-Hallan quietly led us into a discussion of nightmares, and spent fifty minutes relating them to the Grimms' stories we had read.
But the real sign that the faculty was distressed by the 'nightmare' fad was Mr. Broome's chapel.
He was a surprise substitution for Mrs. Tute, and when we saw him twitching at the podium instead of the librarian, the entire school knew that whatever was going to happen would be explosive. Laker Broome resembled a wrapped package full of serpents. After his short peremptory order to God ('Lord. Make us honest and good. And lead us to righteousness. Amen'), he whipped off his glasses and started twirling them by one bow.
The shouting began in the second sentence.
'Boys, this has been a bad year for the school. A terrible year! We have had indiscipline, smoking, failures, and theft — and now we are cursed with something so sick, so ill, that in all my years as an educator I have never seen its like.
'NEVER!
'There is a poison running through the veins of this school, and you all know what it is. Some of you, perhaps led on by a certain ill-considered remark from this podium' — here a freezing glance at Whipple — 'have been indulging morbid fantasies, giving rein to that poison, exactly in the way that Mr. Thorpe preached against a
month ago.
'Now, I know what causes this. Its cause is nothing more or less than guilt. Nightmares are caused by guilt. Caused by a guilty mind and soul. And a guilty mind and soul are dangerous to all about them — they corrupt. All of you have been touched by this disease.
'First of all, I am going to order you to stop this sick indulgence in a corrupt practice.'
Behind me, in the second freshman row, I heard Tom Pinfold whisper to Marcus Reilly, 'Does he mean beating off?' Reilly snickered.
'There will be no more — no more — talk of nightmares in this school. If some of you continue to be troubled in this way, I suggest that you see our school psychologist. If anyone continues to trouble us by bragging about bad dreams or by putting accounts of them up in a public place, that boy will be expelled. That is that. Finis. No more.'
The glasses went on again, and his face settled into a grim, lined hunter's mask.
'Secondly. I am going to root out the corruption in our midst and expose it here and now. The boy at the bottom of this perverse craze does not deserve to stay among us a minute longer. We are going to rid ourselves of him during this chapel, gentlemen, we are going to expose him. The boy who stole from Ventnor School will be cleaning out his locker by the end of the hour.'
I risked a glance back at the seniors' rows, and saw the face of Skeleton Ridpath, tilted back, moony and empty.
Mr. Broome darted forward from the podium and pointed at Morris Fielding, who was seated at the right-hand end of the first row. 'You. Fielding did you steal that owl?'
