Shadowland

by Peter Straub

  20

  The pistol jumped, but his right hand went with it and clung. The explosion rocked his head: his ears felt as though he had dropped fifty feet in a roller coaster. A bit of the blood-spattered ceiling shredded away. All of the room was covered in gore. Directly opposite him the blown-up photograph of a skull was dappled in blood; gouts and puddles of blood covered the bed and other furniture, blood ran and dripped from the ceiling, which had been covered with photographs of owls. 'Del!' Tom howled, and saw on the floor where he had been about to set his foot a partial upper plate from which a single white tooth protruded like a fencepost.

  'We are over here, Tom,' Collins' voice said from his right. 'I trust you want to save your friend's life.'

  He swung around toward the voice — he heard his breath hissing in his mouth. The gun felt like a barbell. Collins sat in plain view on the owl chair, and Del was on his lap. They too were dappled with red.

  'There's one bullet left,' Tom said, trying to steady the gun on the magician's amused face. Del stared at him without recognition. 'Del, get off his lap.'

  'He can't hear you. He won't, I should say. He's given up. He's gone inside and locked the door. Now, put down the gun.'

  Tom frantically tried to fit his left index finger into the trigger guard.

  'I could melt that gun in your hand in a second,' Collins said. 'Or I could kill you by making it explode when you fired. If you had a chance to do it that way, you've lost it. It's time for you to make a sacrifice, Tom. It's time for you to choose. As Speckle John had to choose. The repeat performance isn't over — in fact, it has hardly begun.' Behind him Tom gradually took in an­other blown-up photograph: Rose Armstrong dressed as a porcelain shepherdess, her high-browed face not a con­temporary, not an American face at all, but of another century and place.

  Tom lowered the gun.

  'To save my nephew's life, will you sacrifice the pistol? Del is in traumatic shock, I must point out. He might die anyhow. But if you do not sacrifice the gun, I will stop his heart. You ought to know that I can do that.'

  'Then why don't you just stop mine?'

  'Because then I would cheat myself out of the perfor­mance. But you have to decide.' He smiled again. 'I will give you yet another choice. The choice of giving up your song. Leave Del. Leave Rose — you will have to do that anyhow. And leave magic. Let me have your gifts. You could just walk out of Shadowland, and be precisely the boy you thought you were when you came here.' Collins spread and lifted his hands: simple. 'That is the best choice I can give you. Sacrifice your song, and use your legs to depart Shadowland for good.'

  'Del dies, and you keep Rose here. I leave unharmed, if I can believe you.'

  Del sagged on the magician's lap. His face was gray, and he scarcely seemed to be breathing.

  'And the other choice?'

  'You throw away the gun. Your song against mine. The performance continues until Shadowland has an undisputed master, the new king or the old. What do you say, boy?'

  Take my magic and let me out of here, Tom shouted inside himself. He heard movement behind him and snapped his head sideways. Rose stood in the open door. Knives. How often, how many nights, had she been in this room where the owls screamed down from the ceiling? She silently pleaded with him, but she could have been pleading for either choice.

  'Song,' Tom said, and flipped the pistol toward the smeared bed. From the side of his eye he saw Rose slipping back out the door. The pistol landed with a squishing sound far out of his reach, and Tom's viscera curled around a block of ice. I fooled you, I fooled you; Lonnie Donegan's mocking chant to the inspectors on the Rock Island line went through him like a spear, and he knew that he had been forced, had forced himself back into the magician's game.

  'Good. But of course you remember the salient point about wizards,' Collins said.

  I fooled you, I fooled you . . . got all pig iron!

  'They get the house odds — they use their own decks. You should have walked, child.' Collins stood up, his eyes flashed, and the owl chair was empty.

  A dazed bird fluttered along the floor, its wing feathers painting the blood into delicate Japanese calligraphy.

  21

  Tom knew. Collins had carefully prepared him to know: he had foretold it, planted the seeds of this final betrayal in his mind. They once were birds, but were tricked by a great wizard, and now they are still trying to sing and still trying to fly. This dazed sparrow scrawling Japanese letters with Mr. Feet's blood on the polished wooden floor was trying to stand and move like a boy so that it could shutter up its mind again and be safe. The sparrow cheeped, and Tom knew that Del was screaming. In horror Tom watched as it fell on its side and fixed him with an eye like a madman's: a panicked black pebble.

  The fairy tales had blown into each other and got mixed up, so that the old king had a wolfs head under his crown, and the young prince in love with the maiden fluttered and gasped in a sparrow's body, and Little Red Riding Hood walked forever on knives and sword blades, and the wise magician who enters at the end to set everything right was only a fifteen-year-old boy kneeling on bloodied floorboards and reaching for the transformed body of his closest friend.

  'I can't change him back, Rose!' he wailed. The sparrow-heart beat, a thousand times faster than his own, against the tips of his fingers.

  'I don't know how to change him back!' He heard his voice as he had when the nails had gone in, sailing up high enough to freeze. The sparrow quivered in his hands. A wing feebly struck his thumb.

  'Then you'll have to make Mr. Collins change him back,' Rose said. She stood just inside the door, looking down at Tom with the stunned bird in his wrapped hands. 'Make him do it,' and her voice was fierce.

  22

  He came out of the bedroom holding Del as he had held the gun, and Coleman Collins was lounging against the top of the banister. 'Welcome to the Wood Green Empire,' the magician said. 'Front-row seats? Excel­lent.'

  'Change him back,' Tom said.

  'Sorry, no refunds, no exchanges. You'll have to take your seats now.'

  'That's not him,' Rose said at his shoulder. 'It's a shadow.'

  'Oh, you told on me,' the image said, and flickered away into dozens of dancing flames.

  'welcome to the wood green empire!' boomed the metallic voice. The bird trembled in Tom's hands, cheeping frantically, twisting its neck to look up into his face. The flames died before they fell, like fireworks, leaving them in darkness. Down the hall to Tom's side, moonlight cast panels of silver on the floor and folded halfway up the wall; otherwise Shadowland was as dark as the tunnels beneath the summerhouse.

  Del went utterly still in his hands, and Tom feared that he had died. Then he felt a high regular throb beneath his fingers, the sparrow's heart thrilling away, and he opened his shirt and tenderly put Del next to his skin. He buttoned his shirt up halfway. Feathers rustled against his chest.

  Outside, the fireworks began again with a thumping explosion that rattled the windows down the hall and sent shooting rays of red and blue across the silvery pane of windows. Soft against his skin, Del made almost a human cry.

  A beam of light at the bottom of the stairs: Herbie Butter outlined in light, dressed in his black tails, red wig, and white face; 'We have a volunteer, ladies and gentle­men — the brave Tommy Flanagan, all the way from sunny Arizona in the United States of America! Are you ready, Tommy? Can you sing for us?'

  'Change him back!' Tom shouted, and Herbie Butter rolled over in a backflip and landed on his feet, an index finger pointed to the sky.

  'Change? Easier said than done, boy — but that's magic for you.' He too dissolved into dancing, lilting flames.

  'THE OLD KING! THE ONLY KING!'

  Tom felt his way down the stairs in the dark.

  . . . Philly's wife looks a little peaked this summer, Nick . . .

  . . . what you get from being in two places at once . . .

  Voices from the tunnels, come out to play in the dark.

 
And voices from the other place that had been Shadowland.

  . . . if a senior drops his books on the floor, pick them up. Carry them where he tells you to carry them. Do anything a senior tells you to do . . .

  He came down from the last step and nearly stumbled, expecting another.

  . . . got that? You will be doomed to destruction, DOOMED TO DESTRUCTION, if you do not learn the moral lessons of this school. . . .

  He smelled the biting aroma of gin.

  'Change him back!' he shouted: felt the crippling hysteria bubbling in him and knew that too could destroy him.

  'You have to find the real one,' Rose said. 'He wants you to find him, Tom.'

  Tom cupped his hands around Del's shivering body. The sparrow had drawn up his feet and clamped up his wings, and was small and warm inside his shirt: small and warm and terrified enough to die of shock. That terror made his own insignificant. He looked down at the pregnant little bulge in his shirt, and saw two circles of blood where his palms had rested. His hysteria, some­thing he could not afford, eased. 'I want it too,' he said.

  23

  They turned back into the main body of the house. Sudden light stabbed his eyes, and Coleman Collins was standing in a column of flame beside the row of theatrical posters. Orange light danced on the opposite wall, on the ceiling. 'That was your shortcoming, you know,' the shadow said. 'You simply were not capable of learning the moral lessons. The Book would have been useless to you. It never did Speckle John much good, either, as far as I could see.'

  'You perverted the Book,' Tom said. 'You perverted magic. Speckle John should have left you to die on that hillside. The fox should have torn out your throat.'

  The elegant figure in the flame chuckled. 'Now you sound like Ouspensky.' He mimed yawning and then grinned. 'You know, they were afraid of me, Ouspensky and Gurdjieff. That is why they carried on so. Afraid of me, like that ranter Crowley.' The flame had begun to consume itself from the bottom up.

  Outside, fireworks battered in the sky.

  The flame was a teardrop hanging in the air; only Collins' head was visible in it. 'And he was stronger than you, dear boy. . . . ' The flame and the head vanished together.

  He stood in the dark with Rose, feeling Del palpitating against his belly. 'You know, he's right. I can't do any of those things he does. He's bound to beat me, and he knows it.' He felt shock radiating out from her and he said, still with that fatalistic clarity, 'It doesn't mean I'm not going to try, but I can't do those things. I just can't.'

  'Have you ever tried?' came her voice.

  'No — not projecting myself like that.'

  'Then try it.'

  'Right now?'

  'Sure.'

  'I don't even know how to start.'

  'But haven't you been getting better — haven't you been learning?'

  'I guess.'

  'Then just start. Try it. Now. For the sake of your confidence.'

  It would not do his confidence much good if he failed, he reflected, but tried anyhow. It had to be like all the rest, he thought. It had to be a place in his own mind and all he had to do was find it. Suppose there were a mirror in front of you, Tom. Suppose you could see yourself. Suppose the mirror Tom could speak.

  'You're better than he is, Tom,' Rose whispered.

  Del tucked himself together even more compactly against Tom's skin, and Tom remembered flowing down into Skeleton's mind, how that had felt. . . that feeling of gaining and losing control simultaneously, of flowing out . . . his eyes fluttered, and a key turned within him as he thought of Skeleton's gibberish unreeling out toward him, and a ball of light momentarily flickered in the corridor.

  'Oh, do it, do it now,' Rose pleaded.

  Tom released it.

  The Collector stood down there moving toward him with frustrated eyes and a foolish mouth —

  KA-WHAMP! A rocket exploded over the house, big enough to send darts of light shooting in the window above the front door.

  His mind jolted, and the Collector fell over. 'Sorry,' he said. He even laughed. 'But did you see? It was harmless that time. There was nobody inside it.'

  'Put Tom down there,' Rose insisted.

  Tom reached toward the key again, and imagined not a mirror but himself on the day he had met Del, and felt the flowing, the letting go, and another Tom Flanagan took shape in a ball of light down the hall. He was pulling a beanie down to two fingers balanced on his nose. He smiled, opened his mouth, and a paralytic croak issued from him. He disappeared.

  'You see?' Rose said.

  Then light poured out from the entrance of the living room and showed them the collapsed rubbery bundle which was the Collector, and Tom knew that he had moved it from the big theater just by thinking about Skeleton. He heard a whirring noise, as if machinery had been switched into life.

  A second later, Humphrey Bogart walked into the hall from the living room.

  24

  'You goint to do some tricks for us, kid?' Bogart asked. He wore a slim black tuxedo, and a cigarette smoked in his fingers. 'Little more of the old razzle-dazzle before the curtain comes down?'

  'Del told me about some summer when he was twelve — the whole thing was like a movie . . . ' Tom muttered these not very coherent remarks to Rose as he watched the actor impatiently toying with his cigarette. Tom looked sideways, but Rose had gone somewhere into the darkness behind him.

  'Come on, we got some people who are interested in you,' the actor said, and snapped his fingers. 'Yeah, this way. Come on in and join the party.'

  Tom went toward the entrance of the living room.

  All the lights burned. A gathering of men in tuxedos, of women in dresses, filled the living room. The smell of gin invaded his nostrils again. 'Hey, sonny,' a bluff-faced man Tom recognized as William Bendix shouted, 'how you doing!'

  'Oooo, Tom,' crooned a platinum-blond woman with very red lips and a playful face that made a delicious, sensual joke of its own beauty. . . .

  'Bird lover, are you?' Bogart said, and made to strike Del cushioned in Tom's shirt. 'Got a couple little dogs myself.'

  'That monkey music — I can't take .that monkey mu­sic,' William Bendix snarled, though all Tom heard was the chattering of dozens of voices and the whirring sound. Bendix wore a porkpie hat on the back of his head and was slamming a beer glass down on a bar.

  'Aw, leave him alone — poor bastard has a plate in his head,' Bogart said, tugging Tom deeper into the party. 'I guess you never met Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale. They came here just to have the pleasure.'

  A man with a face like a run-over dog and a woman whose head was a charred stump were standing up from the flowered couch, holding but their hands and struggling to speak through mouths that had been seared shut. Tom gagged and stepped backward. Their clothes were smok­ing; curls of flame sprouted from the man's collar.

  'Can that monkey music!'

  'Never mind them, kid,' and a hand spun Tom around. 'They're too fried to talk straight — you remem­ber those other people I mentioned?'

  Snail and Thorn were standing beside the table, Tweedledum and Tweedledee all dressed up to go dancing (now he could hear the music, a trumpet lead over strings like a hundred make-out albums, Jackie Gleason Plays for Lovers Only).

  'Can't stand it!' William Bendix hollered, smashing his beer glass against the bar.

  Snail and Thorn bled from holes in their foreheads, though that was not where he had shot them, and their faces were blameless and bland, washed of emotion . . .

  'Take a drink — aren't you a man?' Bogart sloshed something that smoked and bubbled from a decanter into a glass. He winked, and half his face jumped in a tic. 'Just get this down into you, it'll chase away the snakes.'

  Tom was looking for Rose, and Humphrey Bogart was putting the smoking glass into his hand, which was whole and unharmed. Rose had disappeared.

  Then a red-haired woman in a low-cut black dress leered at him — she's . . . she's . . . a face from a hundred movies, an uptilted nose and perfec
t mouth — and her face suddenly had needle teeth and a long red-furred snout —

  and all the well-dressed people at the party had animal faces, monkeys and apes and foxes and wolves, and they were leering at him, chattering now over 'Moonlight Becomes You.' Tiger eyes set in glowing tiger stripes blinked toward him.

  A creature with a pig's head was clamping his hand around a bubbling glass and forcing it to his lips, and Bobby Hackett was using his cornet to tell a girl that she certainly knew the right things to wear and across the room a man named Creekmore was stumbling forward with half his face dangling like a flap over gleaming bone. Damp weeds dripped from his shoulder.

  'Rose!' Tom called, but the party noises screwed up loud enough to deafen him and a boar chuckled in his ear and Bobby Hackett's spring-water tone had turned coarse and blasting . . . something bitter and burning touched his lips.

  AWAY! he shouted with his mind. GONE! He closed his eyes and mouth, and something burningly spilled down his chin . . . and then silence, as if all power had died.

  Rose touched his face. 'You're scaring me.'

  'Did you see them?' They were alone in the darkened room. Moonlight pouring in through the glass doors showed silver furniture, immaculate and dead.

  'See what?'

  A trace of gin — juniper and alcohol — lingered in the air. Del's body thrummed against his skin.

  'What scared you, Rose?'

  She too was touched by the moonlight: her face hung as white as a sail before him. 'You were talking to your­self — you were acting funny.'

  His heart gradually slowed.

  A blast of fireworks turned the room and her face violently red: rose-red.

  25

  'I can't describe it,' Tom said. 'I think he almost got me. I think he damn near killed me just now. You didn't see anything?'

  'Just you.'

  'You didn't even see that actor — Creekmore?'

  She shook her head.

  'He's dead. It wasn't just bloodbags and a few scratches. He died like I was supposed to.' Another explosion outside rattled the windows and touched her face with pale blue. 'Rose, what did you think would happen when you brought us back here?'