by Peter Straub
'I asked, what the hell are you doing?' Thorn said. 'You don't go out there. Nobody goes out there.' His jack-o'-lantern face, Tom saw, was the result of surgery. Welts of scar surrounded the eyes and mouth.
'I wasn't going out. I wasn't doing anything,' Tom said. The two men came up to the edge of the drive and stopped. Snail put his hands on his hips. The gray sweatshirt bulged across his chest and belly.
'La-di-da,' Thorn said. Snail tittered. 'You're the one saw us before,' Thorn said. The ugly sewn — together face bit down on itself. Tom felt aimless, stupid violence boiling off both men — mad dogs who had found themselves in temporary possession of the kennel.
'Maybe he's looking for his girlfriend,' Snail said, grinning.
'You looking for your pretty little girl, sonny boy? Think she came up for air?'
Snail tittered again.
''I wasn't looking for anybody,' Tom said. 'I was just walking around.'
They looked at each other with a quick, practiced surreptitious movement of the eyes, Prison, Tom thought, they've been in —
They were coming toward him. 'You can't get out of here,' Thorn was saying. Snail was grinning, holding one fist with the other and pumping up his arm muscles.
'Maybe he's looking for that badger yet.'
'Maybe he's the badger,' Snail said.
Tom backed up into the bars of the gate, too scared to think.
'Ain't he somethin'?' Thorn said. 'Gonna shit your pants before we get there, or after?'
Do not begin things when you will get too flustered to remember how to finish them. Tom smelled coarse, dirty, smelly skin, stale beer. He closed his eyes and thought of his shoulders opening and opening. His mind flared yellow, and he saw Laker Broome shouting orders from the smoky stage: just before they got to him, he saw a ceiling where a huge bird screamed down at him. Yes. He floated three feet off the ground, straight up. The bars scraped against his shirt. God, yes. He went up another three feet and opened his eyes. He laughed crazily.
Thorn and Snail were gawping up at him, already backing away.
'Uhh,' Tom grunted, unable to speak, and pointed toward a twenty-foot birch growing near the wall where they had come from. The veins in his head felt ready to burst. Now, damn you. A crack flew across the ground: snapping sounds like gunfire came from the trees. The birch heeled over to the left, and a root broke off with a thunderous crack.
'Freak!' Snail screamed.
Tom moaned. The birch swung up out of its hole, trailing a four-foot-long ball of crowded roots and packed earth. It hung in the air, parallel to him, and Tom almost heard the birch howling in pain and shock. He dropped it as he would a dying mouse or rabbit, some small life he had injured; self-loathing filled him. Not knowing why, he mentally saw an uprooted dandelion, and imagined blood pouring across his hands.
Thorn and Snail were disappearing back into the woods when he fell to the asphalt. That's what Skeleton wanted, he thought. He wobbled, his spine taking the shock, and then rolled over onto elbows and knees. Wet asphalt dug into his cheek. That sickness. If the dwarfs had come back, they could have kicked him senseless.
4
Eventually Tom picked himself up and tottered back down the sloping grass. Shadowland gleamed at him, burnished by the strong light. The house looked utterly new. The brick steps beckoned, the doorknob pleaded to be touched. Tom's head pounded.
An unmistakable rush of welcome warm air and fragrance washed over him.
Tom went down the hall, took the short side corridor, and threw open the door to the forbidden room. No wise, spectacled face looked up at him; the room was neither a crowded study nor an underground staff room. It was bare. Silvery-gray walls; glossy white trim around the windows, a dark gray carpet. Empty of life, the room called him in.
Everything you will see here comes from the interaction of your mind with mine.
An invisible scene hovered between those walls, waiting for him to enter so that it could spring into life.
Tom backed away from the invisible scene — he could almost hear the room exhale its disappointment. Or something in the room . . . some frustrated giant, turning away . . . Tom closed the door.
And continued down the hall to the Little Theater. The brass plate on the door was no longer blank: now three words and a date had been engraved on it:
Wood Green Empire
27 August, 1924
Tom cracked the door open, and the audience in the mural stared down at him with their varying expressions of pleasure, amusement, cynicism, and greed. Of course. Just inside the door, he was so close to the stage as to be nearly on it. He backed out.
He went a few steps down the hall and let himself into the big theater. It too shone; even the banked seats were lustrous. Tom walked deeper into the theater. The curtains had been pulled back from the stage. Polished wood led to a blank white wall. Ropes dangled at varying heights above the wood.
Tom went halfway up an aisle and sat in one of the padded seats. He wished he could lead Rose and Del out of Shadowland that afternoon: he did not want to see anything of Collins' farewell performance. That would contain more than one farewell, he knew. He knew that the way he knew his own senses.
These too seemed to have taken part in the general change within him. It was as if his senses had been tuned and burnished. All day, he had seen and heard with great clarity. Since he and Del had returned to the house, this intensity of perception had increased. Ordinary, almost inaudible sounds needled into him, full of substance. Oddest of all had been his awareness of Del, sleeping in his bed: that dot of warmth. He was still conscious of it. Del shone for him.
Then Tom felt some shift in the house, a movement of mass and air as if a door had been opened. The house had rearranged itself to admit a newcomer. Tom could half-hear the blood surging through the newcomer's body; his muscles began to tense. He knew it was Coleman Collins. The magician was waiting for him. He was somewhere in the theater, though nowhere he could be found by ordinary search.
Tom left the chair and walked down the aisle toward the empty stage. What was it Collins had said about wizards, in the story about the sparrows? They gave you what you asked for, but they made you pay for it.
He crossed the wide area before the stage and went toward the farthest aisle. Tom remembered seeing those green walls forming around him, flying together tike pieces of clouds. The white columns reminded him of the bars of the gate — solid uprights between open spaces. Then he knew where the magician was.
Feeling foolish but knowing he was right, Tom pressed his palm to the wall. For an instant he felt solid plaster, slightly cooler than his hand. Then it was as if the molecules of the plaster loosened and began to drift apart. The wall grew wanner; for a millisecond the plaster seemed wet. Then only the color was there, solid-looking, but nothing but color. His hand had gone inward up to the wrist. On the other side of the wall of color, his fingers were dimly, greenly visible. Tom followed his hand through the wall.
5
He was in an immense white space, his heart leaping. Coleman Collins sat in the owl chair regarding him with an affectionate sharpness. He wore a soft gray flannel suit and shining black shoes. A glass half-filled with neat whiskey sat on the arm of the chair beside his right elbow. 'I knew when I first heard your name,' Collins said, propping his chin on laced fingers, 'and I was certain when I first saw you. Congratulations. You must be feeling very proud of yourself.'
'I'm not.'
Collins smiled. 'You should be. You are the best for centuries, probably. When your studies have ended, you should be able to do and to have anything you want. In the meantime, I want to answer whatever questions you may have.' Collins lowered his hand and found the glass without looking at it. He sipped. 'Surely even an unwilling bridegroom has a query or two.'
'Del thinks he was chosen,' Tom said.
'That's of no consequence to you.' Collins tipped his head and looked purely charming. It was like looking at Laker Broome trying to be c
harming; Tom read the magician's tension and excitement, half-heard the drumming of his pulse. 'In fact, I suggest that you can no longer afford to worry about matters like that. One of the perils of altitude, little bird — you can't see the lesser birds still trying to find their way out of the clouds.'
'But what's going to happen to Del when he finds out? I don't want him to find out.'
The magician shrugged, sipped again at the whiskey. 'I can tell you one thing. This is Del's last summer at Shadowland. It will not be yours. You will be here often, and stay long. That is how it must be, child. Neither of us has a choice.' He smiled again at Tom, and took a familiar envelope from a jacket pocket. 'Which brings me to this. Elena gave it to me, as you should have known she would. I couldn't let it go out, you know. I am still considering the insult to my hospitality.'
It was the letter to his mother, and Tom looked at it with dread. Collins was still smiling at him, holding the letter upright between two fingers. 'Let's dispose of it, shall we?'
A flame appeared at the envelope's topmost corner.
Collins held it until the growing flame was a quarter of an
inch from his fingers, then tossed the black burning thing
upward; it vanished into the flame, and then the flame
itself vanished, disappearing from the bottom up.
'Now that is no longer between us,' Collins said. 'And there shall be nothing like it in the future. Understand?'
'I understand.' Tom had gone very pale — somehow the letter had been proof to him that he would escape Shadowland.
'This is far more important to you than your schooling, boy. This is your real schooling. And in fact I want to show you something you are bound to ask me about sooner or later.' He bent down and retrieved a slim leather-bound book from beneath the chair. There was no title on cover or spine. 'This is the Book. Our book. The book we are pledged to honor.'
The magician's excitement was almost palpable. Beneath his cool exterior, Collins was seething.
'Speckle John gave it to me. In time it will be yours — you will have read it a hundred times by then. The original was lost for centuries, and may have ended its existence on an Arab's fire — the mother of the man who discovered a cache of unknown gospels used them for fuel before they discovered their black-market value. But we have had our copy for centuries, passed from hand to hand. A watered-down version, known as The Gospel of Thomas, has been known to scholars for something like thirty years. But that weak document does not reveal our secrets. What is the first law of magic?'
'As above, so below,' Tom said.
'Do you know the meaning of that?' Collins waited; Tom felt the gravitational pull of his tension. 'It means that gods are only men with superior understanding. Magicians. Who have found and released the divine within themselves. Jesus shared this knowledge with only a few, and the knowledge became our secret tradition.' He ran his fingers lovingly over the leather binding. 'The Book will be in the room I forbade you to enter. After my performance, go there and read it. Read it as I read it forty years ago. Learn the real history of your world.'
'Does it talk about evil?' Tom said, remembering the final creature that had approached him in the night.
'God, in the orthodox view, causes famine, plague, and flood. Was God evil? Evil is a convenient fiction.'
Tom looked into the magician's powerful old face. What he saw blazed so fiercely he had to look away.
'You avoid examining what you saw last night. So I will not force you, boy — it will come. But you must know that every boy at your school was touched by our magic, some beneficially, some not. It could not have been otherwise, given that you and Del were there.'
'I knew the nightmares were from me,' Tom said out of the full awareness of his guilt.
'Of course. From what was hidden in you, from what you were too stupid to know you had. From your treasure.'
'My treasure.'
'Any treasure locked away in a dark room will begin to fester and push its way out. An untreated body in a coffin will do that. It is in the Book: If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.'
'Is that what happened to Skeleton Ridpath?' Tom asked.
'He did not thrust the power away from him, like another in your class, but begged for it — for its crudest aspects — when he was unready for them. That boy wanted me to come for him, and so I did come for him. With Speckle John, I had already invented the Collector. He was originally a thing of cloth and rubber, a toy to frighten an audience. I saw that he could be a vessel. There are many candidates for collection. There are many volunteers.'
Collins' hands were trembling. 'I gave him what he asked for.' He looked up at Tom with a look of wild challenge. 'Come with me. You'll see what I mean.'
He began striding away from the chair. Afraid to be left alone, Tom hurried after him. The magician's tall gray-suited form was already deep in white mist. It gathered around Tom as he got nearer to Collins, and for a moment was thick enough — a freezing cloud — to hide Collins altogether. Then Tom saw broad gray shoulders ahead, and rushed forward.
He walked out of the mist onto dry sandy grass. They were in Arizona again, he recognized before he recognized anything else. Cars stood in rows about them. In the distance, a tinny cheer went Up. 'Hurry,' Collins said, and Tom gasped: the magician was wrapped within a long trench coat, his face shadowed by a wide-brimmed hat.
Tom drew near and saw where they were.
At their feet the land fell away to a flat limed plane — the football field. Across it, the stands were crowded with parents and boys. Two football teams clashed and grunted on the field. Collins said, 'Two things called me here. That disturbed boy on the bench who is looking at me this very minute — and you. Look.'
Tom saw Skeleton's face go rapturous and unhinged over the padded frail chest and shoulders. With his newly burnished senses, he could feel what was happening inside Skeleton, a sick thrilled wave of passion. Then he heard a noise of love mingled with fear, and saw Skeleton's head snap around to look up into the stands. And there was Del, trying to get on his feet in the last row, staring with wild eyes straight at him. The feelings which surged from Del were too dense for him to fully take them in, love and terror and the horror of betrayal and confusion wretched in its magnitude. He saw himself, with an uncomprehending and innocent face, hauling Del back down into his seat.
'Enough,' Collins said. He whirled around and marched back through the rows of cars.
The grass had become springier and the cars were gone. Collins strode on beside him, going into the green vale. It was Ventnor. The disastrous football games were over. 'An interesting thing is happening today,' Collins was saying. 'I want you to see it.'
As they walked along, Tom glanced over his shoulder and looked at a wandering path on which stood a handful of boys, himself among them. Del raised his bandaged arm as if to ward off a blow. A second, almost subdued shock wave of betrayal. He was visible to no one else — he was merely Collins' shadow. 'Of course this is the day of the famous theft,' the magician said.
They were proceeding down a long green distance, and Tom remembered seeing this in a dream, long ago — he knew that Skeleton Ridpath was standing rigid with joy near the Ventnor gym.
'When we all lived in the forest,' Collins said, 'we could turn into birds at will.' They vanished around an edge of concrete — Tom was sweating, on the edge of collapse — and the magician rose off the ground, beating great gray wings. He was an owl.
Tom beat his own wings; he too had become a bird. Below and behind him, Skeleton howled. The transformation had been instant and painless; putting on feathers was easier than putting on a shirt. Inside the small bird he was, he was still Tom Flanagan; and when he looked at the owl, he could see Coleman Collins within it. The magician smiled, his hair flattening against his head. The owl wheeled overhead and sailed back toward
the Ventnor buildings. Tom turned beneath him and followed. From what he could see of himself, he was a falcon.
'A peregrine falcon,' Collins said. 'I see you are curious.' There was laughter in his voice.
Tom looked out over the landscape, and for a moment was transfixed by its beauty and strangeness — trees and a glinting lake and long stretches of green. It looked like Eden, a place shining with newness and promise. Beyond it lay a network of curving roads and straight roads, a cluster of houses, desert. Miles away, mountains reared and buckled. Geologic tensions and muscles underlay it all, churning with life. Small things scurried in grass and sand. He was seeing through falcon's eyes.
Collins interrupted his reverie. 'Child.'
Tom looked down and saw the magician sitting on a roof by a wide tilting pane of glass. He reluctantly descended. When he landed on the roof, he was just Tom again, and that miraculous insightful vision was gone. He walked toward Collins, leaning against the pitch of the roof.
'You see, it's not all bad,' the magician said. 'Could a simple-minded morality give you anything like that?' He looked down through the skylight. 'But here comes our moment. Watch.'
Tom saw himself and Del in a sea of heads, alone in a crowd near a woman pouring tea. Then Marcus Reilly approached, dogged by Tom Pinfold, and Tom saw himself turn away to speak to them. He stared at the wheaten top of Marcus' head as if he could see into it and find whatever wayward germ had put his friend into the bloody car.
'You're wasting your time,' the magician said with brutal suddenness. 'Look across the room.'
Tom shifted his glance. Skeleton was mooning along the far wall. His face foreshortened but visible, Skeleton looked like a robot on automatic pilot. Tom looked back down again and saw that Del had moved a few feet away from the Tom Flanagan down there: Del was standing by himself, and his nose was pointing directly at Skeleton.
