Shadowland

by Peter Straub

The fifth blow knocked him back off his feet — he went sprawling in the corridor, and the door banged open. The Collector stood on the threshold, arms dangling, his face swiveling avidly from side to side. He wore the ancient black suit of the mural, and it too shone a faint purple. He shuffled forward.

  Tom scuttled backward and got to his feet, making enough noise for the figure to focus directly on him. The Collector's face split open in a grin of empty radiance. 'Great play,' he whispered in a voice a shadow of Skeleton's.

  He stumbled forward. 'I told you to stay away from that piano. Take off that fairy shirt. I want to see some skin.'

  Tom ran.

  'Flanagini! Flanagini! FLAAAAANAGINNNIII!'

  Panting, Tom wheeled around the corner into the living room. Hide behind a couch? Behind a curtain? He could barely think: pictures of hiding places too small for him rattled through his mind. From Rose Armstrong to this . . . thing, as though a line were drawn between them.

  Why, sure, Tom thought with bright panic: Rose wanted out of Shadowland, Skeleton wanted out of the mirror. Simple.

  'I saw your owl, Vendouris,' whispered a voice behind him. 'You are mine.'

  Tom spun around and saw purple Skeleton skimming toward him. He uttered a squeak and dodged to the side. Skeleton snaked out an arm and dug his fingers into his shoulder. The thin fingers burned through Tom's shirt like ice. 'Dirty little Irish nigger!' Tom banged the side of his fist against Skeleton's unheeding head, twisted in frantic disgust to the side, and lost his balance. Skeleton lurched nearer, Tom swung and hit a rock-hard chest, and when Tom twisted again, he brought both of them down onto the flowered couch.

  'Great play,' the Collector whispered. 'I want to see some skin.' The icy hands found Tom's neck.

  Tom was looking up at the inhuman face — the pouches under the empty eyes were black. A foul, dusty, spider-webby smell soaked into him. Lying atop him, Skeleton felt like a bag of twigs, but his hands squeezed like a vise.

  'Dirty little . . . '

  Then sudden brightness stung his eyes; the frozen hands fell away from him. He scrambled to his feet, flailing out, and saw only the sliding doors and the lighted woods where Skeleton should have been. The emptiness before him momentarily felt as charged as a vacuum; then ordinariness rushed into it.

  Coleman Collins, in a dark blue dressing gown and paler blue pajamas, limped into the room. 'I pushed the button, little idiot,' said the magician. 'Do not begin things when you will get too flustered to remember how to finish them.' He turned to go, then faced Tom again. 'But you just proved your greatness as a magician, if you are interested. You made that happen. And one thing more. I saved your life-saved it from the consequences of your own abilities. Remember that.' He measured Tom with a glance, and was gone.

  12

  Tom wobbled back out into the hall. Collins had vanished into one of the theaters or up the stairs to his bedroom. The house was silent again. Tom glanced in the direction of the hall bathroom, involuntarily trembled, and moved to the staircase. Up there he saw the dim pumpkin color — the single light that burned most of the night was still on. He went slowly up the stairs; near the top, he took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face. Then, so tired he thought he would collapse on the stairs, he forced himself to the landing.

  In a dark blue dressing gown like his uncle's, Del stood in the murky hall outside his bedroom door. He was looking rigidly out the window.

  'Shhh!' Del commanded. 'It's Rose.'

  Tom joined him, and Del moved a few inches away. When Tom looked down, his heart moved.

  Rose Armstrong stood in the nearest pool of light, so near the house she was almost on the beach. Dirty rags covered her body; her hair blazed in the light. Nailed to a tree, crucified, hung the pale gray head of a horse. Two masked figures hovered at the edge of the light: a barrel of a man wearing a pale aristocratic young man's face, and a small woman with the hooked, sneering mask of a witch. Golden robes shone around both of them. Mr. Peet and Elena? Tom at first thought the horse's head was stuffed or plaster of paris, but after a second he saw lines of blood and gore rivering down the bark. 'Oh, God,' he said. He remembered the faint image of a gray horse in the darkness as Collins turned into his domain on the first night; the gray horse that had plunged through the snow, bringing him toward a burning school. Insects had sum­moned themselves to the edges of the wound, lifting and settling in little clouds. Rose pleadingly lifted her joined hands. The light above her suddenly died, and the two boys were staring at their own images in the window.

  'Falada,' Del said. 'The Goose Girl. Remember?'

  Oh, poor princess in despair,

  if your dear mother knew,

  her heart would break in two.

  'Magic, Tom. This is what I live for. I'm on the side of that — I'm on the side of what we saw out there. I don't care what you get up to when you go slinking around at night, because I'm not on your side anymore. Remember that.'

  'We're all on the same side,' Tom said quietly. Del gave him an impatient, disgusted look and went back into his room.

  PART THREE

  'When We All Lived in the Forest. . . '

  'Man is made in the image of God' and it has often been sardonically observed that'God is made in the image of man.' Both statements are accepted as true in magic.

  Richard Cavendish, The Black Arts

  ONE

  The Welcome

  The next day, if it was the next day, Del treated me like the Enemy, Satan himself come to destroy all his earthly arrangements. He began by eating alone in his room — I supposed he had gotten the same note I did on my tray, asking me to be at a certain point in the woods at nine in the morning. And sure enough, when I showed up, there he was. He wouldn't say hello; he couldn't even look at me any more than to let me know that our friendship was over. I felt struck by lightning, half-dead with guilt. Somehow Rose had managed to slip a second sheet of paper under my plate, asking me to be on the beach at ten that night. . . .

  1

  The designated spot was about half a mile from the house, near the hollow where Tom had seen Mr. Peet and the Wandering Boys at work on the first night. His directions had told him to start at the left of the beach and go straight ahead to the sixth light. The journey was much easier by day than it had been at night. When he reached the light he sat down on the grass and waited for whatever was going to happen. The note from Rose Armstrong, folded next to his skin inside his shirt, rustled and scratched — he was grateful every time he felt it dig at him. He could not have destroyed Rose's note: he wanted to pull it out and read it over again every few minutes. Dear One: Beach near boat house, ten tonight. Love, R. Dear One! Love! He wished he could obliterate all the time between morning and night, and see Rose slipping out of the water to meet him. He wanted to ask her about the previous night's scene; he had a lot of questions about that: but far more than asking her questions, he wanted to put his arms around her.

  Del came slouching into the little clearing five minutes later, in a starched blue shirt and jeans pressed to a sharp crease. Elena's work. A few burs clung to his cuffs, and after Del had glanced at Tom and dismissed him, he sat down to pick them off.

  'How are you?' Tom asked.

  Del lowered his head and twisted a cuff around to find a bur. He looked rested but tense: as though even the seams of his underwear were aligned. Comb marks furrowed his thick black hair.

  'We have to talk to each other,' Tom said.

  Del tossed away the last bur, brushed at his cuffs with both hands, looked back toward the house.

  'Aren't you even going to look at me?'

  Without turning his head, Del said, 'I think there's a dead rat somewhere around here.'

  'Well, I have to talk to you.'.

  'I think the dead rat should just go home if he doesn't like it here.'

  That shut Tom up — it was too close to what he had been intending to say. They sat there in silence and heat, neither looking at the other. Coleman Collin
s startled them both by limping noiselessly into the clearing from deeper in the woods. He wore a slim black suit, a red shirt, gleaming black pumps, and looked as if he had just left the stage after a particularly brilliant performance.

  'Gather round, children. Today we learn many things. Today we have a son et lumiere. This is the second part of the story known as 'The Death of Love' — and I will require your close attention.'

  He smiled at them, but Tom could not smile back. The magician tilted his head, winked, and somehow produced a high black stool from the air; he sat. 'Do I sense a little tension in the atmosphere? That is not inappropriate. If the first part of my unburdening could be subtitled 'The Healer Healed,' this part might be called 'The Undoing of the King of the Cats.''

  Collins propped his leg on a rung of the stool, looked up at a hawk cruising overhead, and said, 'Rumors about my unorthodox surgical techniques on Corporal Washford had begun to circulate among the Negro soldiers.

  2

  'And I was not sure I welcomed that. The power I have spoken of to you marvelous boys was growing within me, but I had as yet no idea of its dimensions nor of its ultimate role in my life, and I had the impulse to nurture it in secret for a time. Even if I could have repeated my performance on Washford with some other poor devil, I do not think I would have — I wanted first to adjust to having done it once, and to refine my skills in situations where I was not under such intense observation. As you will see, I did not yet understand the nature of the gift, and I did not know how fiercely it would demand expression. And of course I thought I was alone. I was that ignorant. That there was a tradition, that there were many others, an entire society existing in the world's shadowy pockets and taught by one great hidden body of knowledge I had only barely skirted with my Levi and Cornelius Agrippa, of all that I knew nothing. I was like a child who draws a map of the stars and thinks he has invented astronomy. When the Negroes who worked in the canteen and dispensary began to look at me in an odd, attentive way, what I felt was unease. I knew they had begun to talk. Maybe it was Washford himself — more likely it was the attendant in our operating theater — but however it had started, it was unwelcome.

  'I have told you that the Negro Division had a life absolutely separate from ours — they fought nobly, many of them were heroic, but for most of us whites they were invisible. Unless one of us wandered into their off-hours clubs, where (or so I heard) it became evident that their off-duty lives were rather richer than ours. Many French­women were said to find the Negroes attractive — probably they just treated them like men, without regard to color. Some of those off-duty places were legendary, much as the Negro nightclubs became legendary in Paris right after the war. The difference was that a place like Bricktop's was heavily patronized by whites, while during the war, at least where I was, it was a rare white who dipped into the world of the Negro American soldier. The closest I ever got to it was one of my bookstore stops, when I browsed in a shop in an area where colored soldiers were billeted.

  'I had been visiting this shop, Librairie Du Prey, for several weeks, and finally — after the Washford incident — I began to notice that another customer, a colored private, often appeared there when I did. I never saw him buy a book. Neither did I ever precisely catch him watching me, but I felt observed.

  'A few days later, this same man appeared in the canteen. It took me a few moments to recognize him, since his uniform shirt was covered by a busboy's jacket, a garment which makes all men identical twins. He was picking trays up off the tables, and I tried to catch his eye, but he merely scowled at me.

  'The next time I went to the Librairie Du Prey, another black soldier was browsing over the tables. He scrutinized me much more openly than the first man had, and when I had given him a good look in return, I was stopped dead in my tracks. He was a magician. I knew it. He was a noncom, a stranger, and foreign to me in a thousand ways: but when I looked at him I knew he was my brother and he knew that I knew. I wish for you boys a moment in your lives as wild with excitement — as wild with possibility — as that moment was for me. The man turned away and left the shop, and I could barely keep myself from running out and following him.

  'The next afternoon in the hospital canteen, one of the messboys slipped a note into my jacket as I walked out. I had been anticipating some such thing all day, I knew it was connected to the magician I had seen in the book­store, and I took it out and read it as soon as I was out the door. Be in front of the bookstore at nine tonight — that was all it said, all I needed. I washed up and went back to the operating theater in a mood of feverish anticipation. It was coming, whatever it was, and I wanted to meet it head-on. If it was my destiny, I no longer dithered and fought. I wanted that door to open.

  3

  'At nine sharp I was in front of that bookstore. I felt very exposed — I was the only white man in sight. In a closed-up shop down the street, someone was playing the banjo. It made a hot, vibrant, electrical sound. The night was humid and warm. The Negro soldiers who walked by looked at me with a kind of aggressive, aimless curiosity, and I sensed that one or two of them only just decided not to make trouble for me because of my rank. If I had been a drunken private with a week's scrip in my pocket . . . I remember feeling the metaphoric aptness of my situation: surrounded by the unknown, on the point of really entering the unknown.

  'At nine-fifteen a Negro soldier came striding past, looked at me and nodded, and kept walking. It took me a second to realize what I was supposed to do. He was nearly to the corner by the time I started to follow him. When I got to the corner, I saw him disappearing around another sharp corner ahead of me.

  'He led me up and down, around and around — a few times I thought I had lost him, those streets were so narrow and twisting, and all around me the sounds of dark voices, men singing or laughing or muttering to me as I passed, but I always managed to catch a glimpse of his boots at the last minute. Of course I was lost. I did not at all know that section of Ste. Nazaire, and I recognized none of the street names. He had led me into the colored red-light district, and even a lieutenant was not safe there after dark.

  'Finally I rounded a corner, by now out of breath, and a huge colored man in uniform stepped in front of me and pushed me against the brick wall. 'You the doctor? You the Collector?' he said. His accent was very Southern.

  'Thass him, thass him,' said another man I could not see. 'Inside.'

  'The giant astonished me by giggling and saying some­thing I could not decipher — Heez gon gew haid sumphum. Then opened a door in the brick and bundled me inside.

  'It was a barren, sweat-smelling room. The magician I had seen in the bookstore was standing before one of the gray walls, wearing a battered uniform bearing his corpo­ral stripes but no other identification. A man I thought was the messboy peeked in, looked at me with huge eyes, and slammed the door. The magician said, 'Lieutenant Nightingale? Known as the Collector?'

  ''I know what you are,' I said.

  ''You think you do,' he said. 'You operated on a soldier named Washford?'

  ''I wouldn't call it operating,' I said.

  ' 'Another doctor refused to attend to him because of his race, and you volunteered to do the job?'

  'To do the job — he was not a country boy like the others, he had city stamped all over him, someplace tough, someplace like Chicago.

  'I agreed.

  ''Tell me how you healed Washford,' he said. And I could see the iron in him again.

  'I held up my hands for answer. I said, 'You fellows have been eyeing me ever since it happened.'

  ' 'You have never heard of the Order? Never heard tell of the Book?'

  ''What I know is in these hands,' I said.

  ''Wait here,' he said, and slipped out through the door. A moment later he reappeared, and nodded at me to follow him. I did. And I walked straight into Shadowland, which had been there all along, right under the surface of things, dogging me ever since I had set foot in Europe.

  'The corporal gave me
a glittering professional smile just as I was passing through the door, and it startled me, because it was the smile you give a target just before you pull the ace of spades out of his ear.

  'I was going through an interior door, and expected to go into another room, but when I stepped through, I was in a sunny field — a mustard field. I turned around, and the house was gone. All of Ste. Nazaire was gone. I was out in the country, in the middle of a mustard field, those yellow blossoms under my feet, on a gentle hill.

  'I whirled around, and before me a man was seated in a high, hand-carved wooden chair with carved owls' heads on the armrests and talons carved into its feet. He was colored, handsome, younger than I, with a smooth, regular face. He looked like a king in that Chair, which was the general idea. He had just appeared out of nowhere. He wore an old uniform with no markings on it at all. This man who had conjured me out of the slum in Ste. Nazaire and conjured himself out of nowhere knit his fingers together and looked at me in a kindly, intense, questioning way. I could feel his power: and then I saw his aura. That is, he allowed me to see it. It nearly blinded me — colors shot out and glowed, each of them brighter than the mustard flowers. I almost fell on my knees. For I knew what he was, and what he could do for me. I was twenty-seven and he may have been nineteen or twenty, but he was the king. Of magicians. Of shadows. The King of the Cats. He was my Answer. And all the others, the ones who had watched me and taken me to him, were only his lackeys.

  ''Welcome to the Order,' he said. 'My name is Speckle John.'

  ' 'And I am . . . ' I started to say, but he held up a hand and violent color seemed to play around it.

  ''Charles Nightingale. William Vendouris. Dr. Collec­tor, but none of those now. You will take a new name, one known to the Order. You will be Coleman Collins. Only to us at first, but when this war finishes and we may go where we please, to the world.'

  'I knew without his telling me that it was a colored name — the name of a colored magician who had died. It was as if I had heard the name before, but I could not remember ever having heard it. I wanted to deserve that name. At that second I became Coleman Collins in my heart, and wore the name I had been born with as a disguise. 'What do you want with me?' I asked.