Shadowland

by Peter Straub

  I had not.

  'You ought to go. Great hotels, beaches, good food . . . Here's a park. Beautiful park. You ever been to Key Biscayne? No? It's close, you want to go there?'

  'I can't, Marcus,' I said. I had long since suspected that whatever he wanted me to see did not exist. Or that he had decided I should not see it after all. Finally I persuaded him to drive me back to my hotel.

  When he dropped me off, he took one of my hands in both of his and looked at me with his leaky blue eyes. 'Had a hell of a good time, didn't we? Keep your eyes open, now, pal. You'll read about me in the papers.' He roared off, and I thought I saw him talking to himself as his battered car swung back out into Collins Avenue. I went upstairs, took a shower, ordered a drink from room service, and lay down on the bed and slept for three hours.

  Two months later I heard that Marcus had shot him­self — he had named me as executor of his estate, but there was no estate except for a few clothes and the Gremlin, in which he had killed himself. The lawyer who rang me said that Marcus had put the bullet in his head around six in the morning, in a parking lot between a tennis court and the North Community Center. It was about three blocks from the McDonald's he had dragged me into.

  'Why would he name me as his executor?' I asked. 'I barely knew him.'

  'Really?' asked the lawyer. 'He left a note in his room that you were the only person who would understand what he was going to do. He wrote that he had shown you something — while you were visiting him here.'

  'Maybe he thought he did,' I said. I remembered him asking me if I had seen a bird as little tucks and dents appeared in his face, just as if someone were sewing him up from the inside.

  2

  Tom and Rose

  The girl would not meet his eyes. She sat on Del's bed, looking at her feet as if he had embarrassed her. Tom saw that she thought he had been making fun of her — Del was staring at him in amazement — and he said, 'I'm sorry. That just popped out. I didn't mean anything by it.'

  'I know who you are,' she said. Then she lifted her face and gave him a look from her pale iridescent eyes which nearly blew him across the room. 'Everybody says you're going to be a great magician.'

  'Look, I'm a little sick of hearing that,' Tom said, speaking with more heat than he had intended. Rose Armstrong looked as though a strong word would melt her. The silk shimmered about her arms. 'Who is everybody, anyhow?'

  'Del and Mr. Collins. Especially Mr. Collins.'

  'He talked to you about me?'

  'Sure. Now and then. Last winter.'

  Del smiled, and Tom looked at both of them, per­plexed. 'But he didn't even know me last winter.'

  'He did know you.' And that, it seemed, would be that. The girl knitted her hands together and regarded him squarely. Despite what he had thought, she was relaxed. As slight and flowerlike as she was, she was a year older than both boys, and to Tom it was suddenly as if she were ten years older — she seemed massive and unknowable. But still her face with its full lips and high forehead broadcast vulnerability. The wet hair hugged her head. He realized that he envied Del, his closeness to Rose Armstrong. The girl seemed as perfect as a statue.

  Living Statue.

  'He made me,' Rose said with an air of bravery.

  Now Tom's uneasiness increased.

  'I never had a thought in my head until I met Mr. Collins,' she said, and he relaxed. 'I was nothing.' That stabbing look of a wound deeply absorbed settled again in her face. 'I would forgive him anything.'

  'Do you have to forgive him very often?'

  'Well, he drinks a lot, and I don't like that. Sometimes he changes when he's had too much.'

  Tom nodded. He had seen the proof of that. He asked, 'Why did you go out on that rock dressed up like it was winter? And open that smoke bomb.'

  'He told me to. He gave me the clothes.'

  'And that's enough?'

  'Of course.'

  'Did you know that we were supposed to see you?'

  'I assumed someone was supposed to see me. It wouldn't make sense otherwise.'

  'Does he forgive you too?'

  'Why should he have to?'

  'Because when I was coming up here, I met him in the hall. He was drunk. He said he was going to give Del a warning, but that I could do it for him. I guess it was about your being here.'

  She flushed. 'I wondered . . . I guess I shouldn't be here. But tomorrow it'll probably be all right.'

  'You mean, when he's sober?'

  She nodded. 'But I shouldn't stay. Del, I . . . you know.'

  Tom felt the stab of envy or jealousy again. She had not once called him by his name.

  'I guess so,' Del said.

  Tom watched as she stood up, glanced at him as if he had struck her — but was that just a part of her face, like Bobby Hollingsworth's smile? She peeled the shirt off. He jumped into the awkward silence. 'Before you go, can I ask you something?'

  She nodded.

  'Are there some men staying here somewhere? Have you seen a bunch of men anywhere around?'

  'Yes.' She glanced at Del. 'They haven't been here for a year or two. They stay in a cabin on the other side of the lake. They're his friends.'

  'Okay,' Tom said.

  'They used to work with him,' she added. With another glance at Del, 'I don't like it when they're here. They're not like him.' She was holding the shirt up before her, shielding herself. 'They're dead.'

  This was totally unexpected. 'That's ridiculous.' He saw that it was something Collins had told her, and which she had accepted.

  'You may think it is. He told me about it. About how it happened.'

  'It's still ridiculous.' He heard the repetition, and thought he sounded nearly as stupid as the girl. 'Did he tell you to say that to us?'

  'No. I have to go.'

  Tom felt a burning impatience allied with an equally strong desire to. keep Rose Armstrong in the room. 'Where do you stay? In the house?'

  'I can't tell you. I'm not supposed to.' She dropped the shirt on the bed and smiled at Del. 'I can tell it's your friend's first time.'

  'Could you carry a letter out of here for me? Could you mail a letter for me?'

  'Nothing is supposed to leave here,' she said, and began to move delicately toward the hall door. 'But you could ask Elena.'

  'That woman? She doesn't speak English.'

  'I'm sure she understands the words 'post office.'' She gave her first smile. 'I hope you're in a better mood the next time I meet you.' Then she was at the door, sliding around it like a shadow. 'Good-bye, Del.' She turned the iridescent eyes toward Tom. 'Good-bye, grumpy Tom.' Then she was gone.

  Del's face was rapturous. Tom heard the pad of bare feet moving down the hall in the direction he had chased the woman called Elena. Then the soft opening of a door.

  Tom turned to the still-transfixed Del. 'I saw the Brothers Grimm downstairs,' he said. 'I guess they're dead, too.' Del simply smiled at him. 'What is she, hypnotized or something?' Del did not speak or move. Tom walked away from him and went out the door. The hall was dark and quiet. In the woods, the lights burned like beacons. He went up to the glass and put his hands to his face to blot out his reflection. Rose Armstrong was padding over the flagstones; she began to descend the iron ladder.

  He stood in the hall until the shaft of moonlight on the water illuminated a silvery, lifting arm; froth where her feet kicked.

  'Now you know,' Del said behind him.

  Tom nodded. He heard the mistrust in his friend's voice.

  3

  War

  'This is a true story,' the magician said, 'and its name is 'The Death of Love.' Ah, melodrama.'

  His thick white hair stirred in the light breeze. The three of them sat on the stony beach, Collins facing the sharp rise of land and the boys looking toward him and the glimmering deep blue lake behind him. To their right, the weather-beaten pier protruded out into the lake; beyond that the gray-boarded boathouse sat on concrete pilings. As Rose Armstrong had hinted, Colli
ns showed none of his cold rage of the night before. He had placed a note on the boys' breakfast trays, asking them to meet him on the beach at ten in the morning. Each of them still turning over the encounter with Rose Armstrong in his mind, they had descended the shaky iron structure at a quarter to ten; Collins, a white sunhat on his head and a rolled blanket and a picnic basket under his arm, had come down the stairs twenty minutes later. He wore a long-sleeved blue shirt, gray lightweight slacks and san­dals. The shirt and slacks were slightly too large, as if he had recently lost weight. 'Good morning, apprentices,' he said. 'All parties have a good night's sleep after yesterday's exertions?'

  Collins unfurled the blanket on the beach, set the wicker basket on it. He removed the hat and set it on the basket. 'Sit down, boys. History lesson, if you are not too bedazzled by love to listen. Time for one of those stories I've been promising you. Face me, that's the way. If you get bored, you can always look at the water and daydream about Miss Armstrong.' He smiled. 'This is a true story.

  'By now the two of you know more about the operations of true magic than ninety-nine percent of the population, including other magicians, and I want to take you back to a time when I was learning about these things myself — to the time when I first came into command of my own strengths. We are going forty years back, to just before the nineteen-twenties.

  'In fact, we are going back to 1917, the year America joined the Great War. My name then was still Charles Nightingale — Del's father, my brother, was twelve years younger than I, still a boy for all practical purposes, and a stranger to me. I had trained as a doctor, and had supported myself as a magician during medical school. I was a good mechanic and card-cranker. Manual dexterity. I intended to be a surgeon. Magic was only a hobby then, though I had always felt in it something beyond the simple tricks I had mastered, something vastly powerful. Medi­cine seemed the only thing in the practical world that could approach that realm of responsibility and awe to which I aspired — I mean that world (only dimly ap­prehended by me) where the ability to make fundamental changes is so great as to automatically inspire awe. If I had been conventionally religious, I suppose I might have gone into the clergy. But I was always too ambitious for that. In 1917 I qualified as a doctor and was immediately given a commission and sent to France on a troop ship. My assignment was to a dressing station at Cantigny. I brought only a few things with me, clothes and cards and some books by a Frenchman named Eliphas Levi, a magician who had died in 1875. The books were the two volumes of Le Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, rather wildly, verbosely written, but full of evocations of that power I was searching for. Levi helped me to understand that Good and Evil are earthbound distinctions — when you hear someone discriminate on that basis, he is invariably up to his ankles in mud. I also carried a book by Cornelius Agrippa, the Renaissance magician, who said when asked how man could possess magical powers — remember this, boys — 'No one has such power but he who has cohabited with the elements, vanquished nature, mounted higher than the heavens, elevating himself above the angels. . . . ' Vanquished nature. Doctors attempt that too, but with what clumsy weapons, scalpels and sutures!

  'We landed in Brest on the Seattle and went immediately to the Pontanzen barracks for a few days of rest before being sent to the Gondrecourt area for some rudimentary training. We traveled as part of a section, with a motor truck, two ambulances, and a Packard car in which I and a few other young doctors rode. Our route was along the Beaumont-Mandres road. From Mandres we were meant to go to the Division HQ at Menil-la-Tour. It sounded easy, back in Boston, but back in Boston I had never seen a country torn to pieces by war. The only bodies I had seen were those on dissecting tables. And remember that my military training had been laughably brief. I don't even remember what I had expected to find: a tableau from a recruiting poster, I suppose, brave youthful soldiers brandishing German helmets like scalps. And They Said We Couldn't Fight!

  'We had gone only a short way up the Beaumont-Mandres road when we passed an old battlefield. Great zigzagging rips torn through the ground, barbed wire looping over it all, and somehow a terrifying, claus­trophobic feeling of death being all around — pressing its face toward us and blowing on us with its breath. The German trenches had been occupied since 1914 and ran parallel to the Flirey-Bouconville road. We could hear artillery going off in the distance. I had never seen anything remotely like it before — never seen anything like that destroyed snowy field, nor like the scale of death that it implied. To me, right then, what I saw looked like nothing so much as the shocking litter and mess you find at the bottom of a fireplace. Charred heaps of things, filthy little piles here and there, nothing orderly, nothing even recognizable except by an effort of the imagination. That was probably the last civilian image I would be privileged to have for two years. War refers only to itself — war is self-enclosed. It takes only the smallest exposure to make you know that.

  'My first real exposure came in that five-passenger Packard. Our convoy was shelled, and shelled very heavily. This of course was colossal bad luck, but the Beaumont-Mandres road was shelled day and night, and our superiors must have decided that it was a risk they had to take. If they had known that precisely one man of the entire convoy would survive, I suppose they might have decided otherwise.

  'I could hear soldiers in the supply truck singing 'Glor-ree-us, Glor-ree-us! One keg of beer for the four of us!' That was a favorite, along with 'Snowy Breasted Pearl' and 'Say Au Revoir, But Not Good-bye.' Then over the singing I heard a whistling in the air. I knew immediately what that meant.

  'Our driver muttered, 'She said there would be days like this,' and just then the truck in front of us blew up. 'Jee-sus!' the driver yelled, and cramped the wheel. I saw a body sailing upward, as if a man had taken flight; the undercarriage of the truck rolled over, gouting fire, and metal pieces — scattered all over the road. We fell into an old shellhole — everybody in the Packard was yelling something. Explosions went off all around us, deafeningly loud. I was vaguely aware of an ambulance bouncing into the air like a child's toy. Men were screaming and sobbing. An arm clad in heavy wool thunked down onto the hood of the Packard. All of us fought our way out of the car, and another shell landed very near.

  'I came to in the field. My face and hands were burned, and I ached mightily all over and my head felt like it had been split apart, but otherwise I was all right. I had been fantastically lucky, and from that moment forth I knew that I had been saved for some great purpose. The shells were landing all over the road, and nothing rational, nothing sensible, was left of our convoy; in a few seconds, it had been altered into a scene from hell. The am­bulances were destroyed. Dead men lay all over the road. A motorcycle wheel dragged a shredded litter into the wreckage of the truck. The rest .of the motorcycle, which had been riding outboard of the convoy, was not even visible. The rear end of the Packard, jutting out of the shellhole, looked like an enormous gray cheese. I reached out and picked up my little satchel of books from a heap of snow. At first I thought I was the only man left alive in the convoy. Almost unbelievable devastation lay before me. Bodies and parts of bodies protruded from shellholes, from the burning vehicles — and shells continued to fall for some time, battering the broken ambulances and flinging the dead about. It must have been one of the most freakish accidents of the war, that routine shelling like that destroyed an entire medical section. Then I saw someone move, a man in the ditch between the road and the field. I knew him.

  'He had been in the Packard with me. His name was Lieutenant William Vendouris, and he was a new field doctor like myself. His guts had been opened up by shrapnel, by a jagged piece of the truck — I don't know. I saw hun lying in the ditch in a lake of his own blood. He was holding in his intestines with his hands. They flopped like thick purplish ropes.

  ' 'Give me something, for God's sake,' he hissed at me.

  'I had nothing. Nothing except Eliphas Levi and a pack of cards and Cornelius Agrippa. The supplies in the truck had been blown to bits.


  ''Jesus, help me,' Vendouris screamed. I knelt beside him and felt around his wound, although I knew he could not be helped. By all rights he should have been uncon­scious, but it had not taken hun that way. I could feel his blood beating against my hands. 'Settle down, old man,' I said. 'There are no supplies. It all went up with the truck.'

  ''Carry me to the HQ,' he pleaded. His eyes rolled, and the whites were so red that they looked about to explode. 'It's only another three miles. God. Carry me there.'

  ''I can't,' I said. 'You'd die if I moved you. You're three-fourths dead now.'

  ''I'm falling out!' he screeched. His intestines were slipping out of his hands, bulging nearly to the frozen ground. He almost passed out, and I wished that he had. I recall that he had perfect, very white teeth which seemed already to belong to someone else — those teeth should have adorned another body.

  'A piece of the snowy field shifted, and I jumped about a foot — I was in shock, and I thought a dead man was standing up out there in that terrible mess. Then it shifted again, and I saw that it was a great white bird. A huge white owl. I was to see it once more, in France during the war, but then I thought I was hallucinating. The owl beat its wings — four feet from tip to tip, it looked — and came toward us over the landscape of broken men.

  'Vendouris saw it too, and began to rave. 'It's my soul, it's my soul,' he screamed. Blood boiled out of him. The huge bird sat on a coil of wire and looked crazily at both of us. What with my shock and Vendouris' ravings, I almost thought I could hear it speak.

  'Shoot him, it was saying. It is the only way.

  'I touched the revolver in its holster on my hip.

  'Vendouris understood the gesture. 'Oh, God, God, God, please, no,' he pleaded. So I put my hands under his shoulders and tried to lift him.

  'He screeched more horribly than any sound I had ever heard in my life, and in the field I thought I heard the owl screech too, just as if it really were his soul. 'If I lift you up,' I said, 'half of you is going to stay here. It's not possible.'