by Peter Straub
Everything here is a lie.
He could not see his way out of it.
'Of course it was not Root who was enjoying my Rosa, but my partner, Speckle John. I merely wanted you boys to feel my shock and outrage — and I see that I have succeeded. Arnold Peet fled. I left on his heels. When I returned half an hour later, Rosa was still there, dressed now, feigning contrition. She pretended that it had been the first occasion, but I knew better. I let her lie to me, and thought of all the consoling Speckle John had done for my poor Rosa. She expected me to beat her — she wanted to be beaten, for that would have been forgiveness. I did not beat her. I did not shoot her, either, though I had my service revolver with me — I always carried it in those days. I just let her plead and weep. And when I met Speckle John the next day, neither one of us mentioned what I had seen on the floor of my sitting room. I began to plan my final performance.'
Collins stood. 'Tomorrow night you will see how I wrapped up all the strands; how I removed Arnold Peet, who had witnessed my humiliation, along with his trolls; how I revenged myself against those who had humiliated me; and how I gave the gaudiest performance of my life.' He looked down at the two stricken boys. 'And stay in your rooms tonight. This time I will overlook no disobedience.'
The magician tilted his head, looking as if he were enjoying himself, and put his hands in his pockets, his amused eyes finding Tom's; vanished.
To hell with you, to hell with you, Tom said to himself. He leaned down and helped Del to his feet. 'Will you do whatever I ask?'
'Whatever you ask,' Del said. He still looked semi-catatonic.
'Let's go back now. We'll get out of here as soon as we can tonight. I don't know how, but we'll do it. I'm through with this place.'
'I feel sick,' Del said.
'And listen. You were never going to be invited back anyhow. Get me? Shadowland was over for you anyhow. He told me. You weren't going to be chosen — he said this was your last summer here. It was over anyhow. So let's get out now.'
'Okay,' Del said. His lip trembled. 'As long as you're coming with me.' He wiped at his eyes. 'What about her? What about Rose?'
'I don't know about Rose,' Tom said. 'But we're getting out of here late tonight. And nobody's going to stop us.'
He led Del back through the wood to the edge of the lake.
'You were chosen,' Del said. The moonlight lay a white cap over his black hair. A frog croaked from the side of the lake. Whiteness hung over the surface of the lake like a veil, and ghostly wisps trailed from the edge of the lake. The iron staircase rose up out of a pocket of gray wool like a ladder set in a cloud. 'You were the one who was welcomed,' Del said. 'Weren't you?'
'But I didn't welcome them back.'
'I was sure it was going to be me. But inside, I knew it wasn't me.'
'I wish it was you.'
They trudged across the sand. Del put his hands on the flaking rungs of the ladder; went up six rungs, stopped. 'I think everybody lied to me,' he said, as if to himself.
'Tonight,' Tom said. 'Then it's all over.'
'I want it to be all over. But I almost wish this ladder would fall over again and kill both of us.'
As they went through the dark living room, Tom thought of something. 'Wait.' Del drifted out into the hall and stood like a man on a gallows. Tom went to the cabinet in the corner and opened the glass doors. The porcelain shepherdess had been broken in two — Collins had done it. It was a joke, or a warning, or like the last moralizing line in a Perrault fable. The broken halves lay separated on the wood, a little fine white powder between them. All the other figurines had been pushed to the back of the cabinet. They faced him. The boy with the books, the six drunken men, the Elizabethan. Their eyes were dead, their faces. Then Tom understood. It was they who had murdered the shepherdess. That was a message straight from Collins to him. He took his eyes from them and picked up a piece of the broken figurine and put it in his pocket. On an afterthought, he took the pistol too and stuck it inside his shirt.
He followed Del upstairs. They walked down the hallway past a black window. 'Look,' Del said, and pointed. Tom should have seen it for himself: all the lights in the woods had been extinguished. There were no more stages, no more theaters in the woods. They could see only their own faces against solid black.
Del vanished around his door.
Tom went into his own room. The pocket doors were shut. He sat on his bed, heard rustling. He patted the bed and heard the whispery crackle again. Tom put his hand under the coverlet and touched a sheet of paper. He did not want to see it.
No: he did want to see it. He wanted with his whole damaged heart to see it. When he pulled it out and allowed himself to read it, it said: If you love me, come to the little beach.
So she too wanted to escape tonight. Tom saw Coleman Collins as a huge white owl swooping savagely toward them all, gathering and crushing them in his talons. He saw Rose squeezed in those claws. He folded the note and put it between the revolver and his skin. Then he touched the broken figurine in his pocket. 'Okay,' he said. 'Okay, Rose.'
Tom went to the doors and pushed them aside. Del lay on his bed in the dark. His shoulder twitched, one hand stirred babyishly. 'What?' he asked.
'We're going now,' Tom said, 'and we're going to meet Rose.'
The porcelain figures, lined up at the back of the cabinet, staring out with dead faces at their handiwork. Rosa Forte had been murdered by the Wandering Boys, and Collins wanted him to know it.
'I just want to get out,' Del said. 'I can't stand it here anymore. Please, Tom. Where do we go first?'
Tom led the way down the stairs, through the living room, and out onto the flagstones in the cool air. 'We're going back through the woods,' he said. 'All the way this time.'
'Whatever you say, master.'
FOUR
Shadow Play
1
Tom took the gun out of his shirt and put it in his waistband at the small of his back. 'What's that?' Del asked. 'That's a gun. What do you need a gun for?'
'Probably we won't even need it,' Tom said. 'I took it out of the cabinet. I'm just being careful, Del.'
'Careful. If we were careful, we'd still be in our rooms.'
'If we were careful, we'd never have come here in the first place. Let's find Rose.' He started down the rickety iron ladder. It moved away from the bluff a half-inch. Tom swallowed. The ladder had felt wobbly every time he had climbed it. 'Anything wrong?' Del called out. Tom answered by going down the ladder as fast as he could. He started to walk across the beach in the darkness. He could hear Del's feet hitting the sand as he ran to catch up.
'He wanted to keep you here, didn't he? Forever.'
'He was going to do worse to Rose,' Tom said. 'We have to get to that beach on the other side of the lake. That's where she'll be.'
'And then what?'
'She'll tell us.'
'But what'll we say to her, Tom? I can't even stand . . . '
Tom could not stand it either. 'Do you want to try to swim across or walk through the woods?'
'Let's walk,' Del said. 'But don't lose me. Don't lose me, Tom.'
'I'm not going to. Not losing you was the real reason I came here,' Tom said. Curls of fog still leaked from the woods. He slid between two trees and started toward the first platform.
'Maybe we could bring her back to Arizona with us,' Del said.
'Maybe.'
'Hold my hand,' Del said. 'Please.' Tom took his outstretched hand.
Rose was waiting for them on the little beach. They saw her before she noticed them — a slender girl in a green dress, high-heeled shoes dangling from her hand. They padded toward her, and she turned jerkily to face them — frightened. 'I'm sorry,' she said. She glanced at Del, but her eyes probed Tom. 'I didn't know if you'd come.'
'Well, I saw this,' he said, and took the broken shepherdess from his pocket.
'What is it? Let me see.' Tentatively, as if she were afraid to stand too near him, she came a few
steps closer. 'It does look like me. That's funny.' Rose probed his face again: gave him a taut, bitter half-smile. 'Don't you think that's funny?' Because he did not smile back, her eyes moved again to the broken shepherdess. Something in her posture told him that she wanted to step away. Then he understood. She was afraid that he would hit her.
'You don't think it's funny,' she said. 'Oh, well.' 'Hey, I'm here too,' Del said.
Instantly more at ease, Rose altered the set of her shoulders and turned to him. 'I know you are, darling Del. Thank you for coming.' Her eyes flicked at Tom. 'I wasn't sure if . . . '
'You had to, right?' Del said. His voice trembled. 'He's crazy, that's all. Not half-crazy, all crazy.'
'Everything here is a lie,' Rose said. 'Just because you saw it doesn't mean it really happened.'
Tom nodded. He was curiously reluctant to take up this hope she offered. If he reached out, it might bite his hand. Del, however, had not only reached out, but embraced it. His face was glowing. 'Well, we're here, anyhow. Now, where do we go?'
'Where you were before,' Rose said. 'This way.' She led them back into the woods. 'Where he was before?' Del asked. 'Where's that?' 'An old summerhouse,' Rose said, walking through fog and night but needing no light to see her way. 'The men were living there, but they're gone now.'
'Wait a second,' Tom said, stopping short. 'That house? What's the point of going there?'
'The point is the tunnel, grumpy Tom,' she said. 'And the point of the tunnel is that it takes us out of here. I spent the whole day getting this ready — you'll see.'
'A tunnel,' Tom said; and Del repeated, 'A tunnel,' as if now they were truly on the way home.
'I've never gone all the way through it,' Rose said, still moving ahead through the fog, 'but I know it's there. I think it goes almost to Hilly Vale. We can stay in it all night. Then in the morning we can get out, walk to the station, and get on a train. There's an early train to Boston. I checked. They won't even miss you until late in the morning, and by then we'll be out of Vermont.' 'What about your grandmother?' Tom said. 'I'll call her from wherever we get to.' Her eyes rested questioningly on him for a moment.
2
Like wary animals, or like the ghosts of animals half-visible in the fog, they stepped away from the last of the woods. When Del saw the parklike area with its manicured lawns and artfully placed trees — here too the cold fog floated and accumulated in the hollows — he said, 'I never even knew this was here!'
Rose said, 'I think other people used to live here, a long time ago, but Mr. Collins made them leave.'
Tom nodded: the huge shining owl had driven them away.
'I think it used to be a resort,' Rose said. 'And I think the big house used to be a sort of nightclub and casino.'
'But why did they need a tunnel?' Tom asked.
'I guess it had something to do with bootlegging,' Rose told him.
'Sure,' Del said, suddenly knowledgeable. 'This side must be close to a little road. It wouldn't all have been walled in then. If they heard of a raid, they could hide the booze and wheels and stuff in the tunnel.'
'Only if the runnel went back to Shadowland,' Tom pointed out.
Rose said, 'Del's right. There is more than one tunnel. You'll see in a minute.' The shabby house was even more run-down in the fog. The rip in the porch screen gaped like a hungry mouth.
The three of them went toward the house. Tom kept seeing it in the past Rose and Del had drawn for him, in a postwar summer, surrounded by a few other houses like it — now fallen in — inhabited by men in blazers and boaters, women in dresses like the one Rose wore. There would be canoes, a man somewhere would be practicing the banjo, and ice cubes would chime in martini pitchers.
Good stuff. Prewar. Came in from Canada.
Nick, why don't we cross the lake and go up to the lodge tonight?
Good idea, sport. I want another fling at that wheel.
Say, you haven't heard anything about that owl Philly claims he saw last night?
No — that would have been later. 'Sweet Sue' was what the banjo was playing, ringing out chinga-chink-chink, chinga-chink-chink through the summer air.
Yes, let's try our hand at the lodge tonight. I feel lucky. Waft some gin this way, sport, if you'll be so kind.
'You daydreaming?' Rose called out. 'Or are you just afraid to come in?'
Tom went up on the porch with the other two. Rose led them into the house and switched on a single lamp. The old building looked as though no one had been in it since the magician's winged emissary had sent them all packing. Dust lay on all the ripped chairs, on the blurry carpet.
'Those men are set to go after tomorrow night,' Rose said. 'All their things are either thrown away or back at the house. Or maybe in one of the other tunnels.'
'Wait a second,' Del said. 'How many are there?'
'Three. Don't worry, I can find the right one.' She smiled at Tom. 'I put some sandwiches and a thermos and some blankets down there. We'll be all right tonight.'
'So where is this tunnel?' Del asked. 'Hey, if there are rats down there, you can shoot them.'
'I didn't see any rats,' Rose said, and gave Tom a speculative look.
'Well, I brought his gun,' Tom admitted. 'It's about a hundred years old. I don't know how to shoot it, anyhow.'
'The tunnel's this way.' Rose moved a dusty wicker table and pushed back the rug. A trapdoor lay flush against the wood. She bent down, put her finger through the ring, and swung the door up. 'Used to be how you got to the little cellar.' Wide concrete steps led down into blackness. 'They made the tunnels later.'
'Boy,' Del said. 'As simple as that.'
'You waiting for something?' Rose asked, and Del looked at both of them, uttered 'Oh' in a squeaking voice, and began to go slowly down the steps. 'There's a flashlight on the bottom step.'
'Found it. Come on, you guys.'
3
The tunnel was high enough to stand in. Packed earth made the floor and walls; timbers shored up the roof. When Rose shone the flashlight down its length, they could see it going deeper into the earth at a slight pitch, falling and falling. Where the light began to die — a long way off — it seemed to turn a corner.
'Well, you said you were going to take the low road,' Del said. 'This is really cool. Look how big it is! I thought we'd be crawling on our hands and knees.'
'Not a chance,' Rose said. 'Would I do that to you?' She gestured with the light as they walked along. The air changed, became colder and drier in the total blackness around the spreading beam.
At the juncture of the tunnel's three branches the flashlight picked out a little heap of things. The juncture was a circular cavern slightly taller than the tunnels themselves. The ceiling was rounded and intricately buttressed by a lattice of two-by-fours. 'Here's our bedroom,' Rose said. 'And blankets and food and stuff like that.' She knelt and lifted the blanket off the magician's wicker basket. 'I didn't think he'd miss this. Is anybody hungry?'
Tension had made the boys ravenous. Rose stood the flashlight on end in the center of the vaulted cavern and handed them ham sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. Collins' ham; Collins' wax paper, too, probably. Each of them ate leaning against a different wall, so they were only half-visible to each other. Enough of the light filtered out and down to dimly touch their faces.
Del asked, 'Which one of these tunnels do we take, Rose?'
'The one next to Tom.' Tom leaned over and turned to peer down it. A wave of cold air washed toward him from out of impenetrable dark. 'One of these used to connect to another summerhouse.' From the cold darkness of the tunnel Tom heard:
chinga-chink-chink, chinga-chink-chink of the banjo
and an amateurish but sweet voice singing There's a moon a-bove Dum da dum-dum Sweet Sue, just you.
'I think we ought to try to go to sleep,' he said. 'Toss me one of those blankets, please, Rose.' Her face blazed into color as she bent forward, throwing a plaid blanket toward him. 'Good idea,' she said. For a time they arra
nged the blankets on the hard floor.
'I don't suppose the rest of you hear anything,' Tom said.
'Hear anything?': Del. 'Just my imagination.'
Rose came forward into the center, her head and trunk floating in the light like the top of the woman, sawed in half in the old trick. She gave him a liquid, molten message from her pale eyes — Forgive me? Then the beam of the flashlight dipped like a flare along the curving walls and momentarily dazzled Tom, shining directly into his eyes. His shadow spread gigantically up the wall behind him. The beam swung away, and he saw Rose's body outlined against it — a wraith from the twenties in her green dress, wandering down here on whatever errands brought the resort people below ground. Who was that lady I saw you with? Nicholas? Just a lady who can be in two places at once. Those captured voices.
The beam found Rose's blanket already spread. Her shoes dropped gently to the packed ground. 'Good night, my loves.'
'Good night,' they said.
The flashlight clicked off, and seamless black covered them.
'Like floating,' Del said. 'Like being blind.' 'Yes,' Rose breathed. Tom's heart went out to both of them.
He sprawled out on his blanket and covered himself against the chill. Like being blind. When he heard those captured voices drifting in the tunnels, he knew that nothing would be as easy as Del thought — that nothing had ever been that easy — and fear kept his eyes open, though he too was blind.
(splash of water: canoe paddle lifted and dripping, the gleam catching your eye from clear across the lake)
Two places at once, very handy, Nick.
Summers are for dalliance, dear boy.
Wife sick again, is she?
Something in the water, she says. Foolishness. Something in the gin, more likely.
Or something in the air. Philly saw that owl again last night.
There is no owl, dear boy. Trust me.
Don't trust him, Tom said to himself; there is, there is an owl.
Philly's darling wife is the only reason we tolerate him, after all. . . .
Then voices from later in the summer: he could hear the coming chill, the promise of dead leaves and gray freezing water.
