Shadowland

by Peter Straub

  'For God's sake, be quiet,' came Del's whisper.

  'What's going on?'

  'Keep your voice down. I'll be right there.'

  A moment later the left half of the door slid an inch back, and Del was scowling out at him. 'Where were you all day?' Del asked.

  'I want to talk to you. He made me think it was whiter — '

  'Hallucinatory terrain,' Del said. 'He's spending a lot of time with you, letting me knock around by myself . . . '

  'And I remember flying.' Tom felt his face assume some expression absolutely new to him, uttering this statement. He half — expected Del to deny it.

  'Okay,' Del said. 'You're having a whale of a time. I'm glad.'

  'And I met an old woman. She doesn't speak English. I had to practically tackle her to get her to stop running away. And your uncle . . . '

  His voice stopped. A girl had just walked into the tiny area of Del's room he could see. She wore one of Del's shirts over a black bathing suit. Her hair was wet and she had moth-colored eyes.

  Del glanced over his shoulder and then looked irritatedly back at Tom. 'Okay, now you've seen her. She was swimming in the lake just after dinner, and I asked her up here. I guess you might as well come in.'

  The girl backed away toward the slightly mussed bed, stepping like a faun on her bare legs. It was impossible for Tom riot to stare at her. He had no more idea then if she were beautiful than he did if the moon were rock or powder: she looked nothing at all like the popular girls at Phipps-Burnwood. But he could not stop looking at her. The girl's eyes went down to her tanned bare legs, then back to him. She tugged Del's shirt close about her.

  'You probably guess already, but this is Rose Arm­strong,' Del said.

  The girl sat down on the bed.

  'I'm Tom Armstrong,' he said. 'Oh, Jesus. Flanagan, I mean.'

  THREE

  The Goose Girl

  Just looking at her had me so rattled — I saw right away what Del had meant about her looking 'hurt.' You couldn't miss it. That face looked like it had absorbed about a thousand insults and recovered from each one separately. But if she'd ever had them, she was recovering, all right. Honestly, I couldn't believe that Del had been seeing this amazing girl every summer; and watching her sit down on Del's bed with her knees together, I knew, knew, knew, that my whole relationship with Del had just changed.

  1

  Miami Beach, 1975

  But before we can really look at Rose Armstrong through Tom Flanagan's eyes and travel with these three young people through their final convulsive months at Shadowland, I must introduce a seeming digression. Up to this point, this story has been haunted by two ghosts: of course one is Rose Armstrong, who in a black bathing suit and a boy's shirt has just now sat down on Del's sug­gestively mussed-up bed, badly 'rattling' Tom Flanagan. The other ghost is far more peripheral; certainly the reader has forgotten him by now. I mean Marcus Reilly, who was mentioned less than half a dozen times in the first part of this story — and perhaps Marcus Reilly is a persistent 'ghost' only to me. Yet suicide, especially at an early age, makes its perpetrator stick in the mind. It is also true that when I last saw Marcus Reilly, a few months before he killed himself, he said some things that later seemed to me to have a bearing on the story of Del Nightingale and Tom Flanagan; but this may be mere self-justification.

  At the beginning ot this story, I said that Reilly was the most baffling of my class's failures. As a Carson student, he had a great success, though not academically. He was a good athlete, and his closest friends were Pete Bayliss and Chip Hogan and Bobby Hollingsworth, who was on the same terms with everyone. A burly blond boy with a passing resemblance to the young Arnold Palmer, Marcus was bright but not reflective. His chief characteristic was that he took things as they came. His parents were rich — their house in Quantum Hills was more lavish than the Hillmans'. He could have been taken as one kind of model of the Carson student: someone who, though clearly he would never become a teacher, could be expected to have some slight trace of Fitz-Hallan about him always.

  After our odd, limping graduation, Reilly went off to a private college in the Southeast; I cannot remember which one. What I do remember is his delight in finding a place where suntans and a social life were taken to be as critical as grades. After college he went to a law school in the same state. I am sure that he graduated in the dead center of his class. In 1971 Chip Hogan told me that Reilly had taken a job in a Miami law firm, and I felt that small, almost aesthetic smack of satisfaction one gets when an expectation is fulfilled. It seemed the perfect job and place for him.

  Four years later a New York magazine commissioned me to do an article on a famous expatriate novelist wintering in Miami Beach. The famous novelist, with whom I spent two tedious days, was a self-important bore, turning out of his hotel onto sunny Collins Avenue in a flannel suit and trilby hat, with furled umbrella. He had consciously given two months of his life to Miami Beach in order to fuel his disdain for all things American. He pretended an ignorance of the American system of coinage. 'Is this one really called a quarter? Dear me, how unimaginative.' When I had sufficient notes for the article, I put the whole project into a mental locker and decided to look up Bobby Hollingsworth. I had not seen Bobby in at least ten years. He was living in Miami Beach, I knew from the alumni magazine, and owned a company that made plumbing fixtures. Once, in an Atlanta airport men's room, I had looked down into the bowl and seen stamped there 'hollingsworth vitreous.' I wanted to see what had become of him, and when I called him up he promptly invited me to his house.

  His house was a huge Spanish mansion facing Indian Creek and the row of hotels across it. Moored at his dock was a forty-foot boat that looked like it could make a pond of the Atlantic.

  'This is really the place,' Bobby said during dinner. 'You got the greatest weather in the world, you got the water, you got business opportunities up the old wazoo. No shit, this place is paradise. I wouldn't go back to Arizona if you paid me. As for living up North-wow.' He shook his head. Bobby at thirty-two was pudgy, soft as a sponge. A diamond as big as a knuckle rode on one sausagy hand. He still had his perpetual smile, which was not a smile but the way his mouth sat on his face. He wore a yellow terry-cloth shirt and matching shorts. He was enjoying his wealth, and I enjoyed his pleasure in it. I gathered that his wife's family had given him his start in the business, and that he had rather surprised them by his success. Monica, his wife, said little during the meal, but jumped up every few minutes to supervise the cook. 'She treats me like a king,' Bobby said during one of Monica's excursions to the kitchen. 'When I get home, I'm royalty. She lives for that boat — I gave it to her for Christmas last year. Squealed like a puppy. What do I know from boats? But it makes her happy. Say, if you play golf we could go out to the club tomorrow. I got an extra set of clubs.'

  'I'm sorry, but I don't play,' I said.

  'Don't play golf?' For a moment Bobby seemed totally perplexed. He had taken me into his world so completely that he had forgotten that I was not a permanent resident there. 'Well, hell, why don't we go out in the boat? Laze around, have a few drinks? Monica would love that.'

  I said that I might be able to do that.

  'Great, kiddo. You know, this is what that school of ours was all about, wasn't it?'

  'What do you mean, Bobby?'

  His wife came back to the table and Bobby turned to her. 'He's coming out on the boat with us tomorrow. Let's toss some lines overboard, catch dinner, hey?'

  Monica gave a wan smile.

  'Sure. It'll be great. Now, this is what I'm saying — our old school had one goal, right? To get us to where I am now. And to know how to live once we get here. That's the way I see it. To make us into the kind of people who could fit in anywhere. I want to write in to the alumni magazine and say that you can travel all over the Southeast and see my name whenever you stop to take a leak. And that's almost true.'

  Monica looked away and turned over a lettuce leaf on her salad plate to peer
at its underside.

  'Do you ever see Marcus Reilly?' I asked. 'I under­stand he lives here.'

  'Saw him once,' Bobby said. 'Mistake. Marcus got involved in some bad shit — got disbarred. Stay away from him. He's a downer.' 'Really?' I was surprised.

  'Oh, he was a big deal for a little while. Then I guess he got weird. Take my advice . . . I'll give you his phone number if you like, but stay away from him. He's a failure. He has to stick his nose above water to suck air.' The next morning I called the number Bobby had given me. A man at the other end of the line said, 'Wentworth.' 'Marcus?' 'Who?'

  'Marcus Reilly? Is he there?' 'Oh, yeah. Just a second.'

  Another telephone rang. It was lifted, but the person at the other end said nothing. 'Marcus? Is that you?' I gave my name. 'Hey, great,' came the breezy, husky voice of Marcus Reilly. 'You in town? How about we get together?' 'Can I take you to lunch today?' 'Hell, lunch is on me. I'm at the Wentworth Hotel on Collins Avenue, just up on the right side from Seventy-third Street. Tell you what, I'll meet you outside. Okay? Twelve o'clock?'

  I called Bobby Hollingsworth to say that I would not be able to go out on his boat. 'That's fine,' Bobby said. 'Come back next time, and we'll go out with a couple of girls I know. We got a date?'

  'Sure,' I said. I could see him lolling back on a deck chair, propping a drink on his yellow-terry-cloth belly, telling a good-looking whore that whenever you took a leak in the Southeast, you could read his name just by looking down.

  There was nothing splendid about Collins Avenue up where Marcus Reilly lived. Old men in canvas hats and plaid trousers below protruding bellies, old women in baggy dresses and sunglasses crawled beneath the side­walk awnings of little shops. Discount stores, bars, cut-rate novelty shops where everything would be an inch deep in dust. At the Wentworth Hotel, the motto Where Life Is a Treat was painted on the yellow plaster. The lobby seemed to be outside, in a sort of alcove set off the sidewalk.

  At five past twelve Marcus came bustling out, wearing a glen-plaid suit, walking quickly past the rows of old people sitting in aluminum-and-plastic chairs as if he were afraid one of them would stop him.

  'Great to see you, great to see you,' he said, pumping my hand. He no longer resembled the young Arnold Palmer. His cheeks had puffed out, and his eyes seemed narrower. The moisture in the air screwed his hair up into curls. Like the expatriate novelist's, his suit was much too warm for the climate, but he had none of the novelist's internal air conditioning. Marcus snapped his fingers, smacked his palms together, and looked up and down the street. I could smell violence on him, as you sometimes can on a dog. 'Jesus, hey, here we are. What is it, fifteen years?'

  'About that,' I said.

  'Let's move, man. Let's see some sights. You been here long?'

  'Just a couple of days.'

  Marcus rolled away from me and began bustling down the street. 'Too bad. Where you staying?'

  I named my hotel.

  'A dump. A dump, believe me.' We rounded the corner and Marcus opened the door to a green Gremlin with a big rusting dent on its right-rear fender. 'A word I could use to describe this whole town.' We got into the Gremlin. 'Just toss that stuff into the back.' I removed a stack of old Miami Heralds and a ball of dirty shirts. 'You want lunch first, or a drink?'

  'A drink would be fine, Marcus.'

  'Beautiful.' He raced the motor and sped away from the curb. 'There's a good joint a couple of blocks away.' We raced around the corner, Marcus talking like a man possessed the entire time. 'I mean, it's got its good points, and I'm not counted out yet, but a dump is what you'd call a place full of ingrates, right? Am I right? And that's what we got here — wall to wall. People I brought along, got started right, did everything for . . . you know I was disbarred, don't you? You must have got my number from Bobby?'

  'Yes,' I said.

  'The shit king. 'In six states, you can take a dump on my name,' right? Bobby's so goddamned cute these days. And I helped him when he first came to Miami.' Marcus was sweating, moving the car as if it were heavy as a truck. His curls tightened up a notch. 'You don't get contracts like he got, no matter what kind of rich dope-fiend gash you married, without help from people who know people. Not in Miami. Not anywhere. And now he treats me like scum. Ah, screw Bobby. The way he puts on flab, he'll drop dead when he's forty. Here we are.'

  Marcus banged the Gremlin against the curb and rocketed out of the seat. He half-ran into a bar called the Hurricane Pub. It was so open to the street it seemed to be missing a wall.

  'Counselor!' the bartender shouted.

  'Jerry! Give us a couple beers here!' Reilly bounced onto a stool, lit a cigarette, and started talking again. 'Jerry, this guy here's an old friend of mine.'

  'Real nice,' Jerry said, and put the beers down before us.

  Marcus drained half his glass. 'In this town, you see, it helps to know everybody. That way you know where the bodies are buried. I'm not through yet. I got deals cooking like you wouldn't believe. Hell, I'm still a young guy.' I knew his age because it was mine. He looked at least ten years older. 'And I got the right mental attitude — you're not counted out until you count yourself out. And believe it or not, I get a bang out of being here — I even get a bang out of the Wentworth. Collins Avenue addresses are gold in this town. Two, three years, I'll have my license back. You'll see. And what do you bet friend Bobby will come around looking for a favor? I know everybody, everybody. I can get things done. And that's one thing people in this town respect, a guy who can deliver.' The rest of his beer was gone. 'How about something to eat?' He slapped two dollars down on the bar and we rushed back out onto the street.

  A few blocks down, he opened the door of Uncle Ernie's Ice Cream Shop. 'You get great sandwiches here.' We sat at a table in the rear and ordered our sandwiches. 'That school we went to — that place — boy, I can't get it out of my mind. For one thing, Hollingsworth's always talking about it — like it was Eton or something.' Even sitting and eating, Marcus was a congeries of small agitated movements. He worked his elbows, drummed his fingers, unscrewed his hair, rubbed his cheeks. 'You remember Lake the Snake and that chapel?'

  'I remember.'

  'Stone crazy. Wacko. And Fitz-Hallan and his fairy tales. Man, I could tell him a few fairy tales. Last year, when I still had my license, I got involved with these people — heavy people, you know? These were serious people. Maybe I wasn't too swift, who knows, but people like that always need lawyers. And if I want somebody to get hurt, he'll get hurt, you know what I'm saying. And at the same time, through connections of these serious people, I got next to some folks from Haiti. This city is full of Haitians, illegals most of them, but these people were different. Are different. You done with your sand­wich yet?'

  'Not quite yet.' Marcus had vanished as if he had taken it in one gulp.

  'Don't worry. I want to show you something. It's in your line — I know your work, remember. I want to show you this. It's connected to these people from Haiti.'

  I finished off my sandwich and Marcus jumped up from his seat and tossed money on the table. Out on the sunlit, shabby street, Marcus' big florid face came up an inch away from my own. 'I'm in tight with them right now, these guys. Disbarred, who cares if you're a Haitian? They got a flexible notion of the law. We're going to do big things. You know anything about Venezuela?'

  'Not much.'

  'We're into buying an island off the coast — big old island, classified as a national park. One of these guys knows the regime, we can get it reclassified in a minute. That's one of the things we're talking about. Also a lot of odd stuff, you know, odd?' He took my elbow and hauled me across the street. 'Mind if we stop at McDonald's? I'm still hungry.'

  I shook my head, and Marcus led me into the bright restaurant. We had been standing directly in front of it.

  'Big Mac, fries,' he told the girl. 'Next time you're here, we'll go to Joe's Stone Crab. Fantastic place.' He took his order to the window and began to bolt the food standing up. 'Oka
y, let's talk. What do you think about that stuff Fitz-Hallan used to say?'

  'What stuff?'

  'About things being magically right? What does that mean?'

  'You tell me.'

  'Bobby thinks that's what he's got. The boat, the house, the two-hundred-dollar shoes. I helped him get a rock-bottom deal on a Jacuzzi. That's what he thinks it is. You probably think it's a good paragraph.'

  'At times,' I said. The Big Mac was gone, and the fries were following it.

  'Well, I think it's a crock. I've seen a lot of stuff, being with these guys. They . . . got a lot of strange beliefs.' The fries were gone, and Marcus was moving out of the restaurant, wiping his fingers on his trousers. 'They can make you go blind, make you deaf, make you see things, they think. Magic. I say, if it's magic, it can't be right. There's no such thing as good magic, that's what I learned.'

  'You know about Tom — '

  'Flanagan. Sure. I even went to see him once, down here. But . . . ' His face suddenly fell apart. It was like watching the collapse of an intricate public building. 'You see a bird over there?'

  I looked: a few peeling storefronts, the ubiquitous old men.

  'Forget it. Let's go for a ride.' He belched, and I smelled meat.

  I looked at my watch. I wished I had gone out on Bobby's boat and were sitting on wide seamless water, listening to Bobby gab about the toilet business. 'I really have to go,' I said.

  'No, you can't,' Marcus said, and looked stricken. 'Come on. I want to show you something.' He pulled me toward his car by the sheer force of his desperation.

  Back in the Gremlin, we drove aimlessly around upper Miami Beach for half an hour, Marcus talking the entire time. He took corners randomly, sometimes doubling back as if trying to lose someone, often cutting dan­gerously in front of other cars. 'See, there's the library . . . and see that bookstore? It's great. You'd like it. There's a lot of stuff in Miami Beach for a guy like you. I could introduce you to a lot of the right people, get you material like you never dreamed existed, man. You ever been to Haiti?'