Shadowland

'Okay. Next boy. You, Teagarden. Was it you?'

And it went on until the last senior had said no. Mr. Broome stood at the end of the aisle with his back turned to the school. The cloth of his jacket shook. I was afraid that he would turn around and start all over again with the freshmen, and looked at my watch and saw that the whole first period had disappeared. Just then a bell rang in the hall. 'Okay,' Mr. Broome said. 'We're not finished yet. One of you has lied to me twice. I am not through with him. Dismissed.'

During the next class I looked through the windows onto the parking lot and saw Mr. Thorpe driving Mr. Broome out onto Santa Rosa Boulevard. An hour later Mr. Thorpe drove back in alone. Mr. Broome did not appear back at Carson for two days.

11

Hazing

After English class the next day we had a free period. Morris and his trio had permission to practice on the stage, and so did Del; the club performances were now only three weeks away. Morris immediately set off around the back of the school and down the stairs — we could see the two sophomores who struggled with bass and drums already swinging open the big door off the downstairs corridor. Del hung indecisively by his locker for a few minutes, wondering how he could work on his act without his partner. Tom had stayed home — gossip told us — because his father had been taken to the hospital 'for good.' Then Del muttered to the rest of us, 'Oh, well, it's better than study hall,' and wandered away after Morris.

'I think that guy's a homo,' Bobby Hollingsworth said. Sherman told him to shut his trap.

After five or ten minutes in the library, I realized that I had left one of the books I needed in my locker. Dave Brick was across the table from me, but he too had forgotten to bring the book — it took a long time to extract this information. Ever since Laker Broome's astonishing chapel performance, Brick had begun to look dopey and half-awake everywhere but in algebra class. 'Hey, I have to look at that too,' he whispered, surfacing out of his daze. 'You can have mine when I'm done,' I whispered back, and got permission to leave the library.

I found the book in the jumble at the bottom of my locker and turned around. The halls were empty. A lively conversational buzz came from Fitz-Hallan's room, a disgruntled roar from Whipple's. A door to the Senior Room at the end of the back corridor cracked open, and Skeleton Ridpath edged around it, still with that moony look on his face. Then he stiffened and turned toward the far corner; a second later he began to run down the empty hall. What the dickens? I thought. Through the thick­nesses of glass I saw him round the corner and race down the stairs. Finally I realized that he had heard the piano. 'Oh, no,' I said out loud, and began to go quickly down the corridor. I had just reached the Senior Room when I saw the top-left-hand corner of the door to the stage — all that was visible to me — swing out.

I ran down the stairs and opened the door again just in time nearly to be knocked down by Brown and Hanna, the sophomores working with Morris. 'Don't go in there,' Hanna said, and sprinted up the stairs. Brown was leaning his bass against the wall just inside the door and trying to get outside at the same time, and he just stared at me as if I were nuts. I could hear Ridpath's voice but not his words. Brown left the bass rattling from side to side like a heavy pendulum, and flashed around the door.

I went into the gloom. ' . . . and don't come back or I'll cut your balls off,' I heard Skeleton curse. 'Now for you two.'

The first thing I saw was Morris' pale face far off above the piano, looking both frightened and obstinate. Then I saw Del standing beside a table covered in black velvet. He had turned in my direction. He just looked frightened, and about ten years old. Skeleton's long back hovered before me, about ten feet away. From the way his head was turned, he was looking at Del.

'They have a right to be here,' I said, and was going to continue, but Skeleton whirled around and stopped the words in my throat. I had never seen anything like his face.

He looked like a minor devil, a devil consumed by the horror of his ambition — the shadowy light hollowed his cheeks, somehow made his lips disappear. His hair and his skin seemed the same dull color. He might have been a hundred years old, a skull floating above an empty suit. In the monochrome face, his eyes smoked. They were screaming before he did, so loudly and with such pain that I was silenced.

'Another one? Another one?' he yelled, and jerked himself forward toward me. The light shifted, and his face returned to normal. The purple badges below his eyes looked as though they itched. 'Damn you,' he said, and his eyes never altered, and before he hit me I had time to think that I had seen the real Steve Ridpath, the one his face and nickname concealed. He flailed out and clouted me in the ribs, and dreamily grabbed my lapels and twisted us both about and pushed me back between Del and Morris.

The blood pounded in my ears. I faintly heard the sound of wood on wood — Morris quietly closing the lid of the Baldwin. 'Now, wait a second,' came Fielding's voice.

'Wait? Wait? What the hell else have I . . . ' Skeleton raised his bony fists up to his head. 'Don't you tell me to wait,' he hissed. 'You don't belong here.' He was speaking to Morris, but looking at Del Nightingale. 'I warned you,' he said.

Then he swiveled his head toward Morris. 'Get away from that fucking piano.' He began to move spastically toward Morris, and Morris smartly separated himself from the bench. Nearly sobbing, Skeleton said, 'God­dammit, why can't you listen to me? Why can't you pay attention to what I say? Now, stay away from . . . Christ!' He pushed his fists into his eyes, and I thought perhaps that in fact he was sobbing. 'It's too late for that. Oh, Jesus. You crappy freshmen. Why do you have to hang around here?'

'To practice, you dope,' Morris said. 'What does it look like?'

'I'm not talking to you,' Skeleton said, and took his hands away from his eyes. His face was wet and gray.

Morris' mouth opened.

'You think you know everything,' Skeleton said quietly to Del.

'No,' Del said.

'You think you own him. You'd be surprised.'

'Nobody owns anybody,' Del said, rather startling me.

'You shitty little bastard,' Skeleton erupted. 'You don't even know what you're talking about. And you're the one who thinks I should wait. Damn. I know as much as you do, Florence. He helps me. He wants to know me.'

By now Morris and I were sure that Ridpath was literally insane, and what happened next only confirmed it.

As scared as he was, Del had the courage to shake his head.

This enraged Skeleton. He began to tremble even more than Laker Broome during the chapel interrogations the day before. 'I'll show you,' he shouted, and went for Del.

Skeleton slapped him twice, hard, and said, 'Take off your jacket and your shirt, goddamn you, I want to see some skin.'

'Hey, come on,' Morris said.

Skeleton whirled on us and froze us to the boards with his face. 'You're not in it anymore. Stay put. Or you're next.'

Then he jerked at the back of Del's dark jacket and pulled it off. Del hurriedly began to unbutton his shirt, which glimmered in the dim light. As if having something to do helped his fear, he seemed calm, despite his haste. His cheeks burned where Skeleton had slapped him.

Morris said, 'Don't do it, Del.'

Skeleton twisted toward us again. 'If you dare to say one more thing, either of you, I'll kill you, so help me God.'

We believed him. He was bigger and stronger, and he was crazy. I glanced at Morris and saw that he was as terrified, as incapable of helping Del, as I was.

'You fucking Florence,' Skeleton moaned. 'Why did you have to be here? I'm going to initiate you, all right.' His face constricted and blanched, then went a dull shade of red. 'With my belt. Bend over that piano bench.'

Morris groaned and looked as if he might faint or vomit.

Del dropped his glimmering shirt — it was silk, I real­ized — on the dusty floor and went to the piano bench. He knelt before it and leaned over, exposing his pale boy's back. Skeleton was already breathing oddly. He un­fastened his belt, drew it out through the loops, and doubled it.

For a moment he simply looked at Del, and I saw on his face that expression I had seen before, of a devil's desperation and need and distrust, of a hungry certainty all mixed up with fear. I too groaned then. Skeleton never paused. He moved slightly behind Del, to one side, and raised the doubled belt and sliced it down on Del's back.

'Oh, Jesus,' he said, but Del said nothing. An instant later, a red line appeared where the belt had struck.

Skeleton raised his belt again, tightening his face with effort.

'No!' Morris shouted.

The belt came whistling down and cracked against Del's skin. Del jerked backward a bit and closed his eyes. He was silently crying.

Skeleton repeated his odd, painful prayer — 'Oh, Jeesus' — and raised the belt and cut down with it again. Del gripped the legs of the piano bench. I saw tears dripping off his chin and breaking on the floor.

And that is the second 'image which stays with me most strongly from Carson. The three lines blistering in Del Nightingale's white back, Skeleton twisting over him in his agony, his face twisted too, the belt dangling from his hand. The first image, of Mr. Fitz-Hallan ironically proffering a ball-point pen to Dave Brick — that picture of the school's health — jumped alive in my mind, and I thought without thinking that the two were connected as two points on a single graph.

'You rich little freak,' Skeleton wailed. 'You have everything.' He broke away from Del, looked wildly at Fielding and me from out of his tortured face, broke toward us and we scrabbled backward toward the heavy curtains. Skeleton uttered a word, 'bird,' as one speaks without realizing it, broke direction again, and threw the belt at the curtains and began to lunge toward the door. We heard it slam; then heard a loud silence.

12

It felt as though a cymbal had been struck in that cavernous dark space, the shattering sound cutting us free from whatever had held us up, held us in place. Morris and I, already sitting, collapsed onto the boards. Del slipped off the piano bench and lay beside it.

I began to go toward him on all fours. Morris followed. Del's face was streaked with what looked like mud; finally I saw that it was the dust melting on his wet face. 'It doesn't matter,' Del said. 'Get my shirt.'

'Doesn't matter?' Morris said as he stood up and went for the discarded shirt. 'We can get him expelled now. He's done. And he hurt you. Look at your back.'

'I can't look at my back,' Del said. He raised himself up on his knees and put one hand on the piano bench. 'May I please have my shirt?'

Morris came up white-faced and handed it over. Del's face was red, but composed. The wet dust looked like thick warpaint. 'Do you need help standing up?' Morris asked.

'No.'

All three of us heard the door opening again, and Morris hissingly drew in his breath; Del and I probably did the same.

'You in here?' came a familiar voice. 'Hey, I can't find you.' Expecting Skeleton's return, none of us could identify the speaker.

'Hey, I was looking all over for you,' Dave Brick said, walking slowly toward us out of the gloom. 'You get that book? Holy cow.' This last because now he could see the way we were staring at him, Morris and I fearfully, Del with the warpaint on his face.

'Holy cow,' Brick repeated when he was close enough to see Del's back just before Del struggled into his shirt. 'What have you guys been doing?'

'Nothing,' Del said.

'Skeleton hit him with a belt,' Morris said, standing up and dusting off his knees. 'He's out of his mind.' ' . . . a belt . . . ?' Brick made as if to help Del put on his jacket, but Del waved him away.

'Really out of his mind. Are you okay, Del?'

Del nodded and turned away from us.

'Does it hurt?'

'No.'

'We can actually get rid of Skeleton now,' Morris hammered on.

Brick went ' . . . geez . . . ' and sat down on the piano bench. 'Right here?' he asked stupidly. 'In school?'

Morris was looking thoughtfully at the piano and the bench. 'You know what I think,' he said.

'Uh?' Brick said. Del, who was still facing the cur­tains, and I said nothing.

'I'm thinking that's the second time Skeleton went nuts when he saw me playing that piano.'

'No kidding,' Brick said, gazing in wonder at the piano.

'Why would he do that?' Morris inquired. 'Because he put something there he wants to keep hidden. Sound good?'

Brick and I looked at each other, finally understanding. 'My God,' I said. 'Get off that bench, Brick.' He jumped away from the piano bench, and he and I lifted the lid as Morris folded his arms and peered in.

Brick screamed. Something small and crystalline flew up out of the bench, a silvery mothlike thing that rattled like a beetle. Dave Brick's scream had jolted Del out of his trance, and he turned around and watched with the rest of us as the small silvery thing flew in a wide arc across the apron of the stage and fell with a soft thud into the pile of old curtains.

'What was that?' Morris asked.

Brick ran heavily, echoingly, across the stage to the pile of curtains. He bent to touch what lay there, but pulled back his hand. 'That owl. From Ventnor.'

'But it flew,' Morris said.

'It flew,' I repeated.

'Yes,' Del said. I glanced at him, and was startled by the shadowy smile I saw lurking in his face.

'You shook the bench,' Morris said. Brick leaned down and picked up the owl. 'That's what happened. You shook it.'

'No,' said Del, but no one paid any attention.

'Yeah,' Brick said. 'We both did, I guess.'

'Sure you did,' Morris said. 'Glass owls can't fly.' He leaned over again. 'Well, what else do we have here?' And pulled out copied exam after copied exam. 'Well, now I know why he used to sneak back up here all the time. He wanted to make sure it was all still where he put it. When we tell people about this, he won't last another five minutes at this school.'

'We've got him by the short hairs,' Brick said, suddenly stunned by joy.

Del looked at all of us and said, 'No.' He extended his right hand toward Dave Brick, and Brick came toward us and put the owl in his hand. 'Wait a second there,' Morris said, but Del was already raising his arm. He hurled the owl at the stage. It made a noise like a bomb and flew apart into a million shining pieces. Dave gawped at him in sheer dumb amazement for a moment, and — you have already guessed it — wept.

Del walked out after that, just before the bell rang for a new period. 'What do we do?' Brick asked, wiping his face on his sleeve. 'We go to our next class,' Morris said firmly. 'And after?' I asked. 'We find someone to tell all this to,' Morris said. 'I get a funny feeling about all this,' I said. 'Like maybe Del won't help us.' Morris shrugged, then looked uncomfortable. 'The owl,' Brick blubbed. The three of us looked at the fragments on the stage — nothing faintly owllike remained. 'We didn't shake the bench,' Brick said. 'You had to,' Morris said. 'No,' I said, and heard myself echoing Del — no was about the extent of what he had said ever since Skeleton had run out. I could still hear the rattling noise it had made as it flew. 'Darn,' Morris said. 'We have to go. Look.' He faced me, still believing that something reasonable could be extricated from a scene in which one student insanely beat another with a belt and glass owls flew thirty feet across stages. 'Fitz-Hallan likes you. He eats you up. Why don't you talk to him about this?' I nodded.

On the way to my next class, I passed the Senior Room. A student was laughing in there, and all of my insides tingled. I knew with a cave dweller's atavistic knowledge that it was Skeleton Ridpath, all alone. During a free period, I did go to see Fitz-Hallan, but he was no help; Carson closed ranks, denied the mystery.

13

Thorpe

'I have spoken to Mr. Fitz-Hallan,' he said, 'and last night I communicated with Nightingale and also with his godparents, Mr. and Mrs. Hillman. This morning I spoke privately to Morris Fielding. Now I must ask you, is there anything in your story you would care to change, in the light of its quite extraordinary nature?' Mr. Thorpe glared at me. He was controlling his anger very well, but I could still feel its heat. We were in the office Thorpe used as assistant headmaster, a bare cubicle on the other side of the corridor from the secretary's offices. Mr. Fitz-Hallan was sitting in a typing chair beside Mr. Thorpe; I stood before the metal desk. Mr. Weatherbee, my form adviser, stood beside me.

'No, sir,' I said. 'But may I ask you a question?'

He nodded.

'Did you also speak to Steve Ridpath?'

His eyes flickered. 'We shall come to that in time.' He arranged three pencils before him, the sharpened points toward me like a row of tiny stakes. 'Firstly, boy, whatever aim you may have in concocting a preposterous story like this is quite beyond me. I have told you that I spoke to young Nightingale. He completely denies that he was beaten with a belt. He did admit that Mr. Ridpath's son, a senior, found you in an area normally off limits to frosh, and rebuked you for being there.' He held up a hand to shut off my protest. 'It is true that two of you, Morris Fielding and young Nightingale, had permission to be on stage. Steven Ridpath of course had no way of knowing that. He may have acted imprudently, but he acted in the interest of discipline, which is in line with the general improvement in his work this year. I requested Mr. Hillman to inspect his godson's back, and Mr. Hillman reported to me that he found no indications of any such beating as you — and Fielding, regrettably — claim took place.'

'No indications,' I said, not believing.

'None whatsoever. How do you account for that?'

I shook my head. Those welts could not have disap­peared so soon.

'I can explain it to you, then. None took place. I believe Steven Ridpath when he says that he made young Nightingale do several push-ups and slapped his back, which was covered by shirt and jacket, when the push-ups were performed sloppily. Initiation is officially over, but in unusual circumstances the school has turned a blind eye to its continuance. When we felt that it was done to preserve order.'

'Order,' I said.

'Something it seems you know little about. To proceed. Of course we found no traces of the Ventnor owl backstage. Because it was never there. We did find written — out examinations in young Ridpath's handwriting, to be used by him as a study aid after the examinations took place.'

'That doesn't make sense. He used the exams as study aids when he'd already taken them?'

'Precisely. To keep his grasp of the older material. A very wise thing to do, I might add.'

'So he's going to get away with it,' I said, unable to keep from blurting it out.

'Quiet!' Mr. Thorpe banged the metal desk and made the pencils jump crazily. 'Consider, boy. We are going to be lenient with you. Because young Fielding's family has attended the Carson School for fifty years, and he thinks he saw what you also think you saw, Mr. Fitz-Hallan and I agree that perhaps you are not consciously trying to mislead us. But you leaped to conclusions and substituted your imagination for what you actually saw — a typical example of the irrationality which has been sweeping through this school, and which Mr. Broome has worked so hard to combat.' The thought of this seemed to deepen his rage. 'Such fantastification as we have had here in the past month is beyond my experience. Perhaps some of our English people should stick to factual texts in the future.' A burning sideways glance at Fitz-Hallan. 'A school is no place for fantasy. The world is no place for fantasy. I have already said this to Morris Fielding. Mr. Weatherbee . . . '

The adviser straightened up beside me. 'Perhaps you can keep a closer eye on incipient hysteria in the fresh­men. Teachers must do more than teach, here at Carson.'

When our class went to the locker room to undress for an intramural basketball game, I looked at Del Nightingale's back as he pulled off his shirt. It was unmarked. Morris Fielding noticed that at the same time I did. I remem­bered the glass owl flying or seeming to fly out of the bench, making a whirring beetlelike noise, and knew from Morris' expression that he remembered it too. And though I had planned to use the minutes before the intermural game to talk to Del, I backed away, as if from the uncanny.

Tom's father died at the end of March.

14

I Hear You

Chester Ridpath switched off Ernie Kovacs on the old twelve-inch Sears television in the living room and covertly looked at his son, who had eaten only half of his Swanson TV Chicken Dinner. The kid was starving himself — half of the time he forgot the food was there in front of him, and stared off into space like a zombie. Or like something from those movies he liked, something that only pretended to be normal and okay. . . . Chester immediately banished these thoughts and sent them into the limbo where he had consigned everything he had thought or imagined about the 'hazing' incident two weeks earlier. Old Billy Thorpe had stuck up for Stevie, but Ridpath could see that despite his loyalty to a colleague, Billy wasn't quite sure in his own mind that he had done the right thing — every now and then he looked like a quarterback fourteen points down. Of course they had all felt like that lately, with Laker Broome cracking up in chapel the way he had and nobody knowing from one minute to the next if the head would keep his job. What a terrible year it had turned out to be. . . . He picked up the TV dinner's aluminum pan from the footstool in front of him and on his way out of the room took Steve's half-eaten dinner too. The kid smiled faintly, as if half-thanking, half-mocking him.

Thank God Billy Thorpe had never seen Steve's room.

Because that was the problem. Any kid who wanted to surround himself with garbage like that was the kind who could use a belt on a freshman or cheat on his exams.

Hell, Steve didn't cheat.

Did he?

Ridpath balled up the two crinkly pans and dumped them into the bin. Waste. His own father would have belted him from here to kingdom come for throwing away food. Just look at him now. If a fly landed on his nose, he wouldn't brush it off.

So talk to him. You talk to kids all day long.

Talk at them.

Better than nothing.

No, nothing was better. He'd seen Steve's face some­times when he was in the middle of a story. Indifference. Blank as the face of a corpse. Even when he was just a short-pants kid, sometimes he'd crack him one and see that same expression on the little shit's mug . . . Jesus, he was glad Billy Thorpe had never seen that awful crap up in Steve's room. If that was the kind of stuff the kid had on his mind . . .

'Hey, Steve,' he said, and went back to the kitchen door. 'Isn't that Kovacs kind of strange? Bet those cigars cost . . . ' He stopped the sad attempt at conversation. Steve's chair was empty. He had gone back up to do whatever the hell it was he did in that room.

Should go in there and rip out all that evil junk — just rip it out. Then tell him why — tell him why it's for his own good. Should have done it long ago.

No: first tell him why, then rip it out.

But of course it was too late for that. How long had it been since he and Steve had really talked? Four years? More?

Chester finished wiping the silverware dry and crossed the untidy living room and stood at the bottom of the stairs. At least that savage music wasn't on; like his good grades, it could be a sign that Steve was growing up, and getting old enough to know that all you had to do was burn the damn ball back, just forget the pain and return the fire. Wasn't that what a father had to teach his son? If you don't land the first punch, be goddamned sure you land the second.

'You busy, Steve?' he called up the stairs. There was no answer. 'How about a talk?' And surprised himself — his heart beat a little faster.

Steve was not listening: he was pacing around the bedroom, his feet going bang bang on the linoleum. Praying to the pictures, or whatever he did when he wasn't varnishing.

'Steve?' Bang, bang, went the footsteps, echoed by his heart. Ridpath went halfway up the stairs and reached the step from which he could see his son's door, which was closed. Through the crack at the bottom of the door, with his eyes right at the level of the floor and looking through the posts of the railing, Ridpath could see the bottoms of Steve's loafers, pacing past. Bang, bang, bang, bang. Steve was patrolling from one end of the room to the other, metronomically, wheeling around when he reached a wall and marching back in a straight line. Marching, he was mumbling something to himself: it sounded like I hear you, I hear you to Chester. I bang hear bang you bang I bang hear . . .

'Okay, you hear me,' he said. 'How about coming out and having a beer with the old man?' His throat was dry — hell, you'd almost think he was afraid of Steve. 'A beer sound good?' he asked, and was pathetic even to himself.

I bang hear bang you bang I bang hear bang you bang I bang . . . The black bottoms of the shoes appeared in the crack at the bottom of the door, one, two, hayfoot, strawfoot, came back in five or six seconds, vanished. 'Beer?' Chester muttered, realizing that whatever Steve was hearing, it was not his father.

Sometimes Steve acted like he was tuned in to another world, somewhere out in space where all you heard was the far — off metallic voices on a lost radio beam.

'Aaah,' Steve uttered, a single private moan of plea­sure or insight, and his feet went by the door again — it was as if someone had just finished explaining something to him.

Then Ridpath, his face glued to the newel posts of the half-railing on the second floor, remembered a terrible dream, what must have been a dream, from the winter before — a huge bird fighting against Steve's window, breaking the glass, whapping its big wings against the side of the house and tearing with its talons. . . . 'Oh, my God,' he whispered.

Steve was going aaah now, but Ridpath could not see the black bottoms of the loafers as he went past the door.

Beating, beating, thundering at the house, whipping that awful beak from side to side . . . Ridpath had a sudden irrational notion that now that nightmare bird was upstairs in Steve's room . . .

bang, went one foot on the left side of the room, where the window was, and then bang, bang, both feet on the right-hand side of the bedroom.

Bang. Just as if he had touched down back on the window side of the room — just as if that nightmare bird was ferrying him back and forth, the joy of flight causing aaah aah to bubble out of his throat couldn't be, he wasn't hearing right, there was some reason why he could no longer see Steve's loafers move past the door . . . some reason . . . those damn kids and their endless talk about bad dreams. I was up in the air and no one could get me down. Ridpath felt his whole body go cold. Whisper, went Steve's loafer on the right side of the room, and — an instant later — whisper, on the left.

'Come talk when you're ready,' Ridpath said, but only to himself.

That was on a Friday night. Chester Ridpath fled into the basement and uncorked a bottle of Four Roses he kept hidden under his workbench.

15

Two Saturdays after that, Tom Flanagan left his mother's side for the first time since the funeral. From the morning of Hartley Flanagan's death, his son and wife had been as if welded together: they had gone together to the funeral director and made the burial arrangements, had eaten every meal together, lingered together in the living room at night, talking. Mr. Bowdoin, the insurance man, had explained to both of them that Hartley Flanagan had left enough to pay all the bills for years to come. Together they had conferred with the Reverend Dawson Tyme, planned the funeral — Tom sat beside Rachel while she made all the telephone calls. He sat beside her while she cried, sat beside her and said nothing when she said, 'It's better he's gone, he was in so much pain.' Sat across the room in an uncomfortable Victorian chair when the fat Reverend Mr. Tyme returned and crowded beside his mother on the couch and blew out little minty breaths and said, 'Every tragedy has its place in his plan.' Saw that she, like himself, doubted the plan and mistrusted any man who would invoke it. Shopped with her; with her opened the front door to their visitors; stood beside her in the crowded funeral parlor during what the director called 'the visitation'; stood beside her finally at the grave on a wanning Sunday and realized that it was April first — April Fool's Day. And watched the crowd of Hartley's fellow lawyers and their wives and Hartley's friends and cousins and saw grief on some faces, restlessness on others, even embarrassment on others; there was no time to talk to any of the mourners, not even Del. They had to get back to the house and serve the food keeping warm in the oven. Chin yourself up out of that grave, he said to his father, just get out of there and be like yourself again, but the dry sun came down on them, the Reverend Mr. Tyme talked too much and pretended that he had been a friend of his father's, an April wind blew sand onto the graves and stirred the flowers. The grass looked sharp enough to inflict wounds. When it was over, he too cried and did not want to leave the grave. He looked at fat, minty Dawson Tyme and the lawyers — all of them were sleek, well — fed beasts, carnivores. A wall had crumbled, an anchor had snapped; he was without protection. The vulture had won and now it was Tom's turn to begin the walk into that long valley.

'You don't have to go to school for a while, do you?' asked his mother once they were back in the spiritless house. No. He did not.

After the fourth day his mother said, 'Don't you want to get out of the house, Tom?' and he said no. After the fifth day she repeated her question and said that they had to think about his going back to school and making up his lost work: again he said no. Resuming his normal life seemed a betrayal of his loss. When Rachel Flanagan repeated, her question after the sixth day, he recognized that he was now no longer a temporary adult. 'You haven't seen your handsome little friend Del since the funeral,' she said. 'Don't you want to practice for your show? And anyhow, it'll do you good to get away for a while.' 'He lives in Quantum Hills now,' he said. 'The Hillmans finally bought a house. It has a pool and a tennis court.'

'Quantum Hills.' Her voice was faintly ironic. 'Isn't that nice? And the suburban bus line goes right to the shopping center.'

'Yeah,' he said. 'Maybe I'll go out there.'

She embraced him.

Once out of the shopping center, he walked for half an hour along a street so black it shone. Enormous houses, some on landscaped hills and others in landscaped valleys, hovered like dream palaces far back on endless lawns. Whipping sprinklers whirred and sprayed, making rain­bows which kept the grass green. Striped awnings shaded the vast windows. It was a suburb where no one ever walked. What was Del doing here, in the city's most artificial and dream-struck setting, this place of pools and tennis dresses? It suited the Hillmans, but it could not possibly be what Del wanted for himself. But — this came to him as he turned into the curving banked street — it was what Carson wanted for them: already many of their classmates lived here. Howie Stern and Marcus Reilly, Tom Pinfold and Pete Bayliss, six sophomores, took the bus the school sent out to Quantum Hills. All the stringency of life at Carson was meant to lead them to a place like this. If he had not met Del, if his father had not died, he would never have seen its absolute remoteness from him. He would have (he imagined) slid toward Quantum Hills as if on greased rails. He could not, now. He could only invent his future as Del was doing; he had been shaken from his frame.

Then just for an instant it seemed to Tom as if the shining blackness of the street was lapping at the cuffs of his trousers, the pale sky dark with witches. From a thin branch a starling screeched and fixed him with its black eyes. The world tilted.

This passed as quickly as it had come. The street subsided, the air cleared, the houses righted themselves. None of it could give a warning, because it represented a way of life in which warnings were obsolete. Tom realized that he was directly before the house Del's godparents had bought.

It was the classic Quantum Hills house, and the largest on the street, set far back on a rising treeless lawn. A wide asphalt drive curved up before it, marked by carriage lamps on tall dark poles. Where the drive met the two wide steps up to the entrance, the iron figure of a small black jockey held out a bright metal ring toward the rear bumper of a Jaguar. Modern, vaguely Moorish in design, the house sprawled behind these signs of a new Arizona prosperity.

Tom began to trudge up the drive, walked past the Hillmans' car and the sightless boy holding out his shining ring, mounted the steps. Something in his chest seemed to be trembling. He pushed the bell and jerked back his hand as if he had expected a shock.

The white door swung open, and Bud Copeland was looking down at him, smiling. 'Hello, son. You here to see Del? Come on in, I'll take you up. You don't exactly need a map, but the first time, you might need a guide.'

'Hello.' Tom said tonelessly.

'You get yourself in here, young man, you look like you need a friend. Come on, get yourself through this doorway.'

Tom moved through the doorway and into a wide entry which revealed half of an enormous living room, a stone fireplace nine feet high, furniture and boxes dumped here and there before a window the size of a wall. That it looked much as he had imagined it was reassuring — the odd unplaceable fear subsided.

'I heard about your father, son,' Bud's velvet voice said beside him. 'Terrible thing for a boy to lose his dad. If there's anything I can do to help, just ask.'

'Thanks,' Tom said, surprised and moved by the real sympathy in the man's face and voice. 'I will.'

'You do that. I'll do anything I can. Now. What do you think of our new quarters?'

'It's a big place,' Tom answered, and thought he saw buried amusement in Bud's civilized face.

'My mother always told me to be careful too, Tom Flanagan,' Bud said, and took him up a floating staircase at the side of the living room. 'You and Del should have your tricks all polished up by now for your performance. If you still plan on giving it.'

'Yeah, sure, but we still have to do some work,' Tom said, following Bud's enormous back down an eggshell-white hall. 'Oh, yeah, we're going to give it. You bet we are.'

'Happy to hear it, son.'

'Say, Bud,' he said, and the black man heard some­thing in his voice and turned around to face him. 'You don't have to answer if you don't want to.'

'I'll remember that,' Bud said, smiling.

'Why do you stay here? Why do you do work like this?'

Bud's smile broadened, and he reached out to rasp Tom lightly on the top of the head. 'It's a job, Red. I don't mind it. If I was twenty years younger, I'd likely be doing something else, but this berth suits me fine, the way I am. And I think maybe I can do some good for your friend in there.' He nodded toward a door at the end of the hall. 'Maybe I can do some good for you sometime too. Reason enough?' He raised his eyebrows, and again there was that unsettling look of recognition, as if Bud knew all about the birds and the visions.

'I'm sorry for prying,' Tom said. His ears burned.

'I'd say you were interested, not prying. Don't look so embarrassed. You want a Coke or anything?'

Tom shook his head.

'Then I'll see you on your way out.' Bud smiled again and went past him back toward the floating staircase.

Tom hesitated a second, dreading the conversation about his father he would have to have with Del before they could get to work. He heard Bud moving swiftly down the stairs, from an open window heard a far-off splash as someone dived into the pool. He went the rest of the way down the hall and stopped at Del's door.

No noises, no sound at all came from behind it. Through the unseen window floated the drawling voice of Valeric Hillman. Del's room was so quiet Tom thought his friend must be asleep. Tom raised his fist, lowered it, then raised it again and knocked.

Del did not respond, and Tom thought at first that his friend must be out by the pool with his godmother. But Bud would have known that. 'Del?' he half-whispered, and knocked again.

Over or under a ripple of laughter from outside, he heard Del very quietly saying, 'Come in.' Del too was nearly whispering, but the quiet in his voice was that of effort — of concentration and force.

Tom turned the handle and gently pushed the door. The room was so dark as to be nearly black, and Tom . again had the sense of being drawn into that separate world which was Del's — of stepping from sunlight and Arizona directly into mystery.

'Del?'

'In.'

Tom walked slowly into the darkness. His first glance around the room showed him only the big fish tank before drawn curtains, the looming faces of the magicians up on a shadowy wall. He saw that it was nearly twice the size of Del's old room; looking to the right, he saw a jumble of boxes and wooden things that must have been the kit. He turned his head to the left and saw shadowy space.

'Look,' Del commanded from the center of the shadows.

'Hey,' Tom said, for at first he could see only the outline of a bed.

Then he could not say anything, for he had suddenly seen Del's rigid body, and it was suspended in the empty air four feet above the bed. Del snapped his head sideways. He was grinning like a shark.

Tom could not imagine what expression his own face wore, but it sent Del off into gleeful laughter. Laughing, he descended, first falling nearly a foot and stopping sharply, as if he had hit a ledge, then slipping down more slowly another eighteen inches. Tom held out a hand as if to catch him, but was not capable of moving nearer. Del's laughter bubbled up again; his feet dropped onto the bed, and the rest of his body followed.

Tom watched, so scared he thought he might faint or vomit, as Del's face drew back into itself and his body lifted up off the bed again and hovered a handbreadth above it.

'Now, that's how we end our magic show,' Del managed to say, and this time could stay up while he laughed.

16

The next day was Sunday,' Tom said to me in the Zanzibar, the third time I went there to talk to him, 'and I was still dazed. What had really struck me was the utter wrongness of it. Because I knew it was real. That little son of a bitch was actually levitating. It was real magic, and it seemed like the moment everything, all the craziness, had been leading to, the birds and the weird visions and everything else. I felt sick to my stomach. I was being frog­marched into magic, and I scarcely knew what was true and what was false anymore.

'I went outside. Sparky, my dog, woke up and started dancing around, asking me to throw his disgusting old tennis ball. I picked up the soggy ball and pegged it toward the fence. Sparky tore after it. Just then, before Sparky got to the ball, the air started to go funny — dark and grainy, like an old photograph. Sparky spun around and looked around; he whimpered. He started to race back toward the kitchen door. His ears were all flattened out — I remember seeing that, and I remember being relieved: I wasn't crazy, it was actually happening.

'That fairy-tale house was in front of me, where the fence should have been, that house with the little brown door and the trees all around it and the thatched roof. Through one of the little windows beside the door I could see the old man looking at me, running his hands through his beard. I went up the path. Now, now, now, I thought — now I can, find out. I don't know what I thought I was going to discover, but I had that feeling. The old man, the wizard, if that's what he was, was going to clear everything up for me. When I reached his door, I looked through the window again, and got a shock. He looked terrible — as sick and scared as I had been that morning. On his face these feelings looked frighteningly out of place — you expected a face like that to be incapable of showing such things. He backed away from the window. I pushed the door open.

'The house was completely black. In midair, a candle was burning — it must have been on the mantel, but it didn't illuminate anything around it, just shone out. Like a cat's eye.

'The door banged shut behind me. I turned around to get out, pretty badly scared, but I couldn't see the door. Then I heard something coming toward me, and I turned back around to face it.

'And then I almost dropped dead of fright. I realized that it wasn't just one thing, it was a lot of things, and they were sick somehow, sick and wrong. . . it could have been four or five, it could have been a hundred. I couldn't tell. But I knew they were from him, that man I had seen or dreamed of seeing on Mesa Lane on the day before school started. It was like that whole world I had sensed before, in the house, the magic world, had been warped into evil.

'A face flickered in front of me, grinning like a devil, and then other faces jumped into life around it — cackling and grinning, the ugliest faces I had ever seen. They were there only for a moment; then they disappeared.

'Behind the candle there was now a spot of brightness. In the circle of light I saw the shadow of a pair of hands making a dog's head. The ears lifted. The tongue lolled. Shadow play, that's called: making pictures with your hands' shadows. I'd seen it before, of course, but never done as well — those fingers seemed almost triple-jointed — and never so that it seemed sinister. The dog's face turned toward me. Now, that's impossible in shadow play, you know. But I could see the ears sticking up, and the neck. Then the fingers parted to let the eyes shine through. That was as bad as the faces. The eyes were just empty light, and they looked completely malevolent. It wasn't a dog, I knew. It was a wolfs head.

'Then the eyes widened out, the hands fluttered and folded and melted together into a bird. A bird with huge wings and a tearing beak.

'It flew straight toward me, still in its circle of light, claws out — not hands, a shadow-bird. I ducked down, and heard laughter from all over the room.

'The shadow-bird disappeared into the blackness. I heard it beating away, and turned my head to follow it, and saw another sort of shadow play. A gang of men was kicking a boy, killing him by kicking him to death. They were in a ring around him — I heard them grunting, I heard their feet landing. One of them kicked the boy's head, and I saw blood flying, spattering out. This was taking place in the circle of light, but no fingers could have been making it. The men kicked the boy's body aside, fluttered apart just as if they were hands after all, and reformed as a word: SHADOW. Then another series of letters flew together. LAND. Shadowland. The laughter built up around me, nasty and knowing, and I didn't know if all those twisted faces watching me were laughing because they were warn­ing me away from Shadowland, or because they knew I would identify the dead boy with Del and would know I had to go there.'

'Had to?' I asked.

'Had to,' Tom said.

17

On the morning of the day we were to have the club performances, I arrived at school an hour early: my father, who drove me in, had a seven-thirty appointment in the center of town. He dropped me off across the street from the Upper School and I crossed the street and went up the steps. The front door was locked. I peered in through the leaded glass and saw an empty, murky entry, stairs ascending to the library in darkness.

For a short time I sat on the steps in the early sun, waiting for the janitor or one of the teachers to arrive and let me in. Then I got bored and went back down the steps to the sidewalk. When I looked back, the school had changed; seeing it empty, I saw it anew. Carson looked peaceful, well-ordered, and at one remove from the rest of the world, like a monastery. It looked beautiful. Under the slanting light, Carson was a place where nothing could ever go wrong.

Down the street, I slipped through the bars of the gate across the headmaster's private entrance. I moved up the private drive and then stepped onto the grass. From this side I could see only the original old buildings of the Carson School. This view too seemed mysteriously touched by magic. For a second my heart moved, I forgot all the bad things that had happened, and I loved the place.

Then, after I had moved farther around toward the rear of the building and gone through a gap in the thick hedges, I saw a form lying facedown in the grass beside a briefcase, and knew I was not alone. Cropped head, meaty back straining the fabric of a jacket: it was Dave Brick. My euphoria drained off on the spot. Brick was stretched out disconsolately on the grassy slope where Mr. Robbin had summoned us all to look for the satellite. The ludicrously tight jacket was Tom Flanagan's. Brick had borrowed it because he had absentmindedly left his own at home two days before, and Flanagan was the only boy who had a spare in his locker. Brick was tearing up handfuls of grass slowly and methodically. When he saw me he began to rip out grass at a faster pace.

'You're early,' he said. 'Eager beaver.'

'My father had an early appointment downtown.'

'Oh. I always get here early. Get more time to study. Janitor's late this morning.' He sighed and finally stopped pulling up grass. Instead he rolled his face into it. 'It's going to start all over again.'

'What is?'

'The questions. The Gestapo stuff. With us.'

'How do you know?'

'I heard Broome talking with Mrs. Olinger last night when I left school. He wanted me to hear.'

'Oh, God,' I said, as much with impatience as with apprehension.

'Yeah. I almost stayed away this morning.' Then he lifted himself up onto his forearms. I feared for Tom's jacket. 'But I couldn't, because then he'd know why, and he'd come at me harder when I finally came back.'

'Maybe he'll leave you out this time,' I said.

'Maybe. But if he calls for me, I'm going to tell him this time. I can't take that anymore. And now it'll be worse.'

'I already told Thorpe, and it didn't do any good.'

'Because you didn't tell him I saw Skeleton too. That was nice. I'm, you know . . . grateful. But I don't care about Skeleton anymore. If Broome calls me out of Latin, I'm telling.'

'I don't think he'll believe you.'

'He will,' Brick said simply. 'I know he will. I'll make him believe me. I don't care if the whole school blows up.'

When the janitor appeared, I followed Brick inside with the feeling of walking into a maze where a deranged beast with the head of a bull crouched and waited.

Five minutes after the start of Latin class, Mrs. Olinger appeared with a folded note in her hands. Dave Brick looked at me with flat panic in his eyes. Mr. Thorpe groaned, restrained himself from bellowing, and tore the note from Mrs. Olinger's hands. He unfolded and read it and wiped a hand over his face. His reluctance was as loud as a shout. 'Brick,' he said. 'Headmaster's office. On the double.'

Brick was trembling so uncontrollably that he dropped his books twice trying to ram them into his case. Finally he stood up and blundered through the center of the classroom. He looked at me with a white face and raisin eyes. Flanagan's jacket made him look like Oliver Hardy.

Then I again had that sense of a secret life running through the school, beating away out of sight, humming like an engine. After Latin class, Mrs. Olinger was waiting outside the room. She looked uneasy, like all messengers with bad news. Mrs. Olinger touched Mr. Thorpe's elbow and whispered a few words in his ear. 'Blast,' Mr. Thorpe said. 'All right, I'm on my way,' and sped down to the headmaster's staircase. We went to Mr. Fitz-Hallan's room and found a note chalked on the board telling us that class was canceled and that we should use the free time to read two chapters in Great Expecta­tions.

'What's up?' Bobby Holhingsworth asked me as we settled down and opened our books. 'I can't explain it,' I said. 'I bet they're finally getting around to throwing out Brick the Prick,' Bobby said happily.

I finished the chapters and went out to my locker for another book. On the way I passed the Senior Room and heard a voice I thought was Terry Peters' uttering a sentence with the word 'Skeleton' in it. I stopped and tried to hear what he was saying, but the door was too thick.

After I got the book from my locker, I looked down across the glassed — in court and saw Mr. Weatherbee rush out of his room and tear down the hall, moving in a kind of agitated scuttle. Mrs. Olinger moved after him.

Mr. Fitz-Hallan, Mr. Weatherbee, Mr. Thorpe — it was the cast that had heard my original accusations.

Out in the hall, a few older boys ran past, lockers slammed, bells went off at irregular intervals.

18

The air of a general but unacknowledged disruption was still present as we trooped into the auditorium. Below the stage on which a piano faced a drum kit and a recumbent bass, the students were standing up in the aisles, moving into little talkative groups, breaking up again, calling to each other. Many of the morning's classes had gone teacherless. Morris saw Hanna and Brown standing to­gether on the far side of the auditorium, and went around to join them in waiting for an announcement. I saw Mr. Thorpe shake his head at Mr. Ridpath, then curtly turn away. His eyes snagged mine, and he pointed at a spot beside the door. Mr. Ridpath too glared at me, but Mr. Thorpe seemed far angrier.

He reached the door before me and expressionlessly watched me come toward him. He looked like a gray-haired icicle — the Mount Rushmore of icicles. He waited a few seconds, making me sweat, before he spoke. 'Be in my office at three-fifteen sharp.' That was all he had intended to say, but he could not keep from releasing some of bis rage. 'You caused more trouble than you will ever know.' When I could not reply, he made a disgusted puffing sound with his lips and said, 'Get out of my sight until three-fifteen.'

He was going to expel me, I knew. I went weakly to the first row of seats and sat down beside Bob Sherman. Most of the school was still standing and talking.

'Boys,' shouted Mrs. Olinger. 'Be seated, please.' She had to repeat herself several times before anybody took any notice. Gradually the buzz of conversation died out, and was replaced by the sound of chairs scraping the floor. Then a few voices picked up again.

'Quiet,' shouted Mr. Thorpe. And then there was silence. Morris, standing on the side of the room with the other members of his trio, looked crippled with stage fright.

Only then did I think to look for Skeleton Ridpath: if he was in the audience, it would mean that he too would be in Thorpe's office at three-fifteen. I turned around and saw that he was not in the seniors' two rows. So perhaps Broome had already expelled him.

From the podium before the stage, Mrs. Olinger was saying, 'We are privileged this morning to witness the first performances by our two clubs. To begin with, please give your full attention to the Morris Fielding Trio, with Phil Hanna playing drums and Derek Brown accompany­ing on the bull fiddle.'

Morris smiled at her because of the old-fashioned term and I knew that he at least was going to be all right. The three of them filed up the stairs to the stage. Brown picked up his bass, Morris said, 'One . . . one . . . one . . . one,' and they began playing 'Somebody Loves Me.' It sounded like sunlight and gold and fast mountain springs, and I switched off everything else and just listened to the music.

During Morris' last number I heard a startled buzzing and whispering. I turned around to see what had caused it. Laker Broome had just come into the audjtorium. He had one hand clamped on Dave Brick's shoulder. Brick was white-faced, and his eyes were swollen. Morris also turned his head to see what was happening, and then went determinedly back to his piano. I heard him insert a quote from 'Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here' into his solo.

He was having, under trying circumstances, the best time he could, which is one definition of heroism; but looking at Laker Broome's rigid posture and assassin's face, I thought that the bomb I had been expecting all morning had just been tossed into the auditorium.

19

The headmaster applauded with everyone else when Morris nodded and stood up from the bench. Dave Brick had been parked on an empty chair far at the back of the room, apart from the rest of the students. Mr. Ridpath stared at him with loathing for a moment, then began to sidle toward Mr. Broome, hoping for one last word, but Mr. Broome looked straight into the center of his narrow vain face, and Mr. Ridpath froze solid to the floor. 'Attention, boys,' Mr. Broome called out.

When we were all turned around in our seats to face him, he began speaking and walking up the side of the auditorium to the bottom of the stage, and we swiveled to watch him — it was a display of power. 'I hate to interrupt these interesting proceedings, but I want you to bear with me and share a fascinating story. I promise that this will only take a moment of your time, and then we can enjoy the second part of this excellent show. Gentlemen, we have finally been given the answer to the single greatest problem this school has faced since its founding, and I want all of you personally to witness the final act of that problem.' He smiled. By now he was at the podium, and with mock casualness, he leaned one elbow on the blond wood: he was tense as a whippet. 'Some of us will be meeting at three-fifteen in the assistant headmaster's office. That will be a private meeting. At four-fifteen I want the entire school reassembled here just as you are now. This school has been unwell, and it is time to cut back the diseased branches.' He gave that taut, creased smile again, and I saw in him the same devil who had burned in Skeleton Ridpath's face just before he had beaten Del. 'And now I believe we have some magic from two members of the first year.'

It sounded like Broome wanted to stage a full-scale spectacular after school, with limbs lopped off in public and Christians thrown to lions. He wanted to answer the student performances with his own. That devil who had shone from his eyes was a devil of ambition and jealousy, who could not accept being upstaged. Tom and Del quietly left their seats and walked past Mr. Broome to go up the steps to the stage.

Broome drifted off to the side and leaned against the far wall beside one of the big doors, crossing his arms over his chest. He was smiling to himself. Tom and Del pulled the curtains shut, and for several moments we could dimly hear footsteps and the shifting of equipment. The piano, on casters, rolled back with a rumbling like a truck's. For some time we heard the rustling of material. Then the curtain twitched and pulled smoothly back, revealing a painted sign on a stand.

FLANAG1NI AND NIGHT

ILLUSIONISTS

Most of the students seated below the stage began to laugh.

White smoke poured across the stage, billowed and hung, then began to drift up toward the beams and lights, and we could see that the sign had gone. In its place stood Tom Flanagan, dressed in what looked like an Indian bedspread and a turban of the same material. Beside him was the high table draped in black velvet, and on the other side of the table stood Del. He wore black evening dress and a cape. Deep laughter erupted again, and the two boys bowed in unison. When they straightened up, the smoke now entirely gone, their faces revealed their nervousness.

'We are Flanagini and Night,' Tom intoned, sticking to his script in spite of the laughter. 'We are magicians. We come to amaze and entertain, to terrify and delight.' He flicked the velvet cover off the table, and something that looked like a fiery ball or shooting star lifted off from beneath and burned up six feet above their heads and winked out. Laker Broome watched it as if it were as ordinary as a horsefly. 'And to amuse, perhaps.' Del twitched the cape from his shoulders, twirled it over the table, and a four-foot-high stuffed white rabbit bounded off, so lifelike and grotesque that a few boys gasped. We were all in shock for a second, and then Del grasped it by one tall ear, bounced it off his foot, and threw it over his shoulder into the blackness behind him. There was an instinctive professional grace in his movements, and that (and the realization that the rabbit was a stuffed toy) made us all laugh, with them now, not against them.

They did several clever card tricks using boys from the audience; a series of tricks using scarves and ropes, including one in which Night proved that he could escape in three minutes from a rope knotted by two football players; they produced a dozen sprays of real flowers from the air.

Then Flanagini put Night into a cabinet and pierced it with swords, and when Night emerged whole, he pushed forward another cabinet — this one black and covered with Chinese patterns — and put Flanagini inside it. 'The speaking head, or Falada,' Night announced, banging the cabinet on all sides to demonstrate that it was solid. He shut a lacquered panel and hid Flanagini's body. The turbaned head looked out impassively. 'Are you ready?' Night asked, and the head nodded. The top panel was shut. Night produced a long sword, took an orange from some pocket of the table, tossed the orange in the air, and swung the sword around to slice it in half. 'A well-honed samurai sword,' he said, and flexed it. 'A deadly fighting instrument.' He whistled it through the air again, and then slotted it sideways into the seam where the two panels met. He wrapped both his hands in black handkerchieves and pushed the flat sword deeply into the notch, where it seemed to meet an obstruction. Night paused to wrap the handkerchieves more tightly around his palms, put his hands again on the sword, and pushed. He grunted, and pushed again. The sword slid through to the other side of the cabinet, and Night yanked it out and wiped it with one of the handkerchieves. Then he pushed the bottom section of the cabinet away so that it no longer supported the top portion. He opened the panel of the bottom section to show Flanagini's body from the neck down. 'The dance of death,' he said, and rapped the side of the cabinet with the flat of the sword. For a moment the body in the Indian garment convulsed and trembled. 'The speaking head.' He moved to the left of the top section and opened the panel. Flanagini's head stared out from beneath the turban. 'What is the first law of magic?' Night asked, and the floating head answered, 'As above, so below.' 'And what is the second law of magic?' Night asked. 'The physical world is a bauble.' 'And what is the third law of magic?' 'Reality is extremity.' 'And how many books are in the library?' 'I don't remember,' came the indisputable voice of Tom Flanagan, and laughter jolted us as if we had been in a spell. Night closed both panels and moved the lower portion of the cabinet back beneath the upper section. When he swung open the panels, Tom stepped out, intact.

Wild applause.

'An illusion only,' Night said, 'a titillation, an amuse­ment.'

(A few sniggers, provoked by the syllable 'tit.')

Night drew himself up and was black and serious as a crow's wing.

'But what is illusory can be true, which is magic's fourth law, like lightning here and then gone, like the smile of a wizard.'

(White smoke began to billow across the stage again.)

'And man's dreams and deepest fantasies, these truth­ful illusions, are magic's truest country. Like the dream of — '

(The big doors on the side of the auditorium suddenly clicked open and swung wide. One of the boys in the back, several rows behind me, shouted.)

' — opening the doors of the mind.'

(He spread his arms wide.)

'The mind opens, the shoulders open, the body opens. And we can . . . '

Smoke, not white but yellow and greasy, puffed in through the doors.

Del stopped intoning his magical gibberish and looked at the doors. His face went rubbery. The pose of professional mumbo-jumbo fell away, and he was a confused fourteen-year-old boy. In the second just before the auditorium went crazy, I had time to see that Tom, Flanagini, was also looking at something, and that he too was stricken. But he was not looking at the open doors: he was staring straight back up at the rear of the au­ditorium — so high up that he must have been nearly looking at the ceiling back there.

Mr. Broome took a step across the opening of the doors, saw what there was to see, and then turned around and pointed at the small, now insignificant pair on stage. He screamed, 'You did this!'

'You're right,' Tom said to me at the Zanzibar. 'I never even saw what was outside until a couple of seconds later. I was standing there, waiting for Del to say that last word.

'Fly.' He'd said the whole speech except for that, and then he was going to float up and amaze everybody. We'd worked out a way to get those doors open weeks before, and if Del could make it, he was going to try to get as far as the first door and then just walk out, and that would be the end of the show. I kept waiting to hear that last word, 'fly,' and I was scared stiff — but then I looked back at that end of the auditorium and I saw two things that scared me a hell of a lot worse. One of them was Skeleton Ridpath. He was terrible. He was grinning. He looked like a big bat, or a huge spider — something awful. And the other thing I saw jumped into being a fraction of a second later, as if Ridpath and I had jointly summoned it up. It was a boy engulfed in flames — swallowed up in fire, fire that couldn't be there, fire that just seemed to stream out of him. I looked at him with my mouth open, and the burning boy disappeared. I don't know how I stayed on my feet. When Laker Broome started shouting at us, I looked down and saw what Del saw, the whole Field House blazing away. All that smoke pouring out, and the fire jumping and jumping. I looked back toward Skeleton, but he was already gone — maybe he was never there in the first place. Then the whole place went nuts.

20

Laker Broome's scream paralyzed everybody, magicians and audience alike, for a second, even the boy who had shouted a moment earlier. And then this second of silence broke — during it we had heard that awful whooshing, snapping noise of a monstrous fire. Everybody stood and ran toward the two doors, throwing chairs aside. Laker Broome was shouting: 'Everybody out! Everybody out!' Maybe five boys got out the doors before Mr. Thorpe yelled, 'Stop in your tracks!' Already, the doors were a pandemonium: all of us crowding and shoving to get out, and the boys who had left screaming to get back in. 'Back away,' Mr. Thorpe yelled, and started to throw boys bodily back into the auditorium. Then we could feel the heat, and the crowd surged back, knocking down the smaller boys at the rear.

When the doors were cleared, we saw that the flames were leaping within six or seven feet of the auditorium — the outside looked like a solid world of fire. The old wooden field house was completely blanketed in flames. One of the stocky little turrets was leaning sideways, poised over the huge body of the fire like a diver.

The boys who had got outside and then forced their way back in stood beside the doors looking dazed and flushed and scared. I saw with amazement that one of them, a sophomore named Wheland, no longer had eyebrows — his face was a pink peeled egg.

'You fool,' Thorpe hissed at the headmaster. 'Didn't you see? You almost got all of them killed.'

Broome just stared at him ferociously, then grabbed the sophomore's shoulder. 'What did you see out there, Wheland?'

'Just fire, sir. We have to get out in front.'

Mr. Thorpe was sending Mrs. Olinger to the office to call the fire department — 'Move it!'.'

'Couldn't you get down the side?'

'The bushes are burning. On both sides. You can't get out that way.'

At Wheland's words, everybody broke and ran toward the hall door. This was much narrower than the au­ditorium's side doors, and in seconds it was buried under a crowd of brawling boys. I saw Terry Peters knock down a sophomore named Johnny Day, and then throw Derek Brown down on top of him. 'My bass!' squalled Brown. He ran straight into a line of tall upperclassmen, trying to get to the stage. Many boys were screaming. Mrs. Olinger, I saw with horror, was stuck in the middle of the battling crowd, unable to get to the telephone.

Then I realized that the auditorium was filling with smoke.

'We have to close those doors,' Tom called from the stage. He unwound himself from the Indian garments and jumped down. Mr. Thorpe ran up to help him.

Mr. Ridpath was shouting useless orders. The other teachers ran up, seeing what Tom and Mr. Thorpe were doing. A senior was clubbing boys with a metal chair, trying to hack his way to the doors, and I ducked around him to try to help them close the doors.

The smoke was already very thick on that side of the auditorium. I brushed against Mr. Thorpe, who said, 'Grab this and pull.' It was the metal bar on the door, and it was uncomfortably hot. 'Ropes,' Mr. Fitz-Hallan muttered, and Tom said, 'We used them . . . so we could pull from backstage: they come in the window in back — '

'Blast,' muttered Mr. Thorpe, and for a time we searched on the ground immediately outside the door and pulled lengths of rope inside. All of us were having trouble breathing: the smoke got in our eyes and throats and burned like acid. 'That's all of them,' Tom said. Through the boiling smoke we could see the wall of fire that once had been the field house: both turrets were gone now, and a column of blacker smoke rose directly up from the center of the burning mass. We slammed the doors shut on a row of advancing flame.

I turned and stumbled into Del, who was reeling through a thicket of upturned chairs. 'Can't see,' he said. Boys in the blocked doorway continued to scream. Del collapsed over the raised legs of a chair.

Then Tom was miraculously beside me, lifting Del. 'No one's going to make it through the door,' he shouted in my ear. 'They can get out by going over the stage.'

'The equipment,' Del said. 'We have to get it out.'

'We will,' Tom said. 'Here, you get up there — you'll be able to see better. The smoke won't be so bad.' He half-carried Del to the stage and hoisted him up. Del scrambled forward and groped around until he found whatever it was he wanted to save.

'Where's Skeleton?' Tom said close to my face. His own face was greasy and strained, and his eyes looked white.

'Not here.'

'We have to get them away from that door,' he shouted. Mr. Broome and Mr. Ridpath were yelling on the other side of the auditorium, peeling boys off the pile around the door. Mr. Fitz-Hallan loomed up out of the smoke beside me, carrying a boy in his arms. 'Stage door,' he said. 'Some of them are passing out. A few of them are hurt.' Mrs. Olinger was clutching the flap of his jacket. 'I'll be back,' Fitz-Hallan said, and crawled up onto the boards. He set down the boy and uncer­emoniously yanked Mrs. Olinger up.

Hollis Wax was running screaming across the au­ditorium. I saw Derek Brown picking himself out of a tangle of chairs, weeping. Wax caromed into the doors Flanagan and the teachers had managed to close and banged his fists against them. 'They're hot!' he screamed. 'They're going to burn!'

Tom ran toward him, seeing in the smoke like a bat, and Wax immediately broke for the stage. Then I dimly saw Tom picking up Brown and dragging him across the floor toward me.

'Get him onto the stage,' he ordered, and I got my arms under Brown and pulled his shoulders onto the stage. Then I lifted his legs and sprawled him onto the wood. 'Carry him out,' Tom yelled from somewhere. I could see Mr. Fitz-Hallan coming toward me with another boy: a crocodile of sobbing students clung on behind him, as Mrs. Olinger had. I got up on the stage beside the English teacher and hauled Brown out and through the door to the hall. Even out there, wisps and trails of smoke drifted in the sunny corridor. 'Bass,' Brown sighed, straightening up and grinding at his eyes. Hollis Wax hovered far down the corridor, looking back. Tom and Fitz-Hallan came out beside me, and Wax saw us and turned and sprinted as soon as Fitz-Hallan waved at him. 'All of you,' Fitz-Hallan called, 'follow Wax outside and wait in the parking lot.'

Doubled up, Mr. Ridpath lurched out into the hall just as we were going back inside. A little crowd of coughing boys and teachers burst out after him. 'Can't . . . ' Ridpath uttered, and then bent over further, coughing. 'Outside,' Fitz-Hallan ordered. Tom was already back through — I saw him slipping across the dark stage. Brown took Mr. Ridpath's hand and began to move as quickly as he could down the corridor Wax had taken. The boy who had tried to hack his way out with a chair jumped through the door just as Tom disappeared off the apron of the stage back into the smoky chaos of the auditorium.

I walked slowly across the stage, not breathing. My eyes burned with smoke. The bass, I thought, and then noticed that the stage was empty of everything except the piano. The field house was making an end-of-the-world rushing roar. Mr. Broome vaulted up onto the stage beside me. 'You,' he said. 'I order you to leave this building immediately.'

I looked out into the auditorium and saw that the doors were burning. It was hotter than a steam room. A deadweight of maybe twenty boys lay in a heap before the hall exit: Mr. Weatherbee was bent over in the smoke, dragging two boys toward me. I jumped down and helped get them onto the stage. 'Can't stay in here anymore,' he croaked, and rolled onto the platform and grabbed the boys' wrists and went for the back door. He was crawling by the time he reached it.

Tom and Mr. Fitz-Hallan were pulling unconscious boys from the pile. I jumped down, and the outside doors gave way at the same instant. Fire streamed in as though shot from a flamethrower. Black spreading scars instantly appeared on the auditorium floor.

'Get up off the floor, Whipple,' Mr. Broome sang out. I looked up, surprised to see him poised on the edge of the stage hike a ham actor. 'You'll burn like bacon. Get up off the floor.'

Over the noise of the fire I heard the wailing of sirens.

Mr. Broome shouted, 'Everybody out! This instant! All out!' Mr. Whipple was too heavy to lift. I inhaled a gulp of burning smoke; my knees turned inside out and I fell over his jellylike stomach. Tom appeared beside me, carrying one of the unconscious boys.

'Out! Out! Out!' screamed Mr. Broome.

Fire caught the curtains of the stage, and lying on the ground I saw them crackle up and disappear like tissue paper. Mr. Fitz-Hallan went on his knees twenty feet away. Mr. Whipple's stomach roared and he rolled over and threw up a yard from my head. I could see Tom holding an arm over his mouth .and hear him wheezing as he pulled at Mr. Fitz-Hallan's arm. Then an enormous form in black shiny clothing leaned over and picked me up. He smelled like smoke.

21

The Making of a Hero

The fireman carried me out into the parking lot, where four trucks sprayed ares of water on the shell of the field house and into the side of the auditorium. He put me on the grass beside one of the trucks, and I crawled half-upright. Mr. Fitz-Hallan was being led out of the parking-lot exit, hauling Tom behind him. Both of them looked like mad scientists in a comic book, their faces smeared with black, their clothing smoking. Behind them came a line of firemen carrying the last of the boys: not twenty any longer, only five or six. One red-faced fireman staggered beneath Mr. Whipple.

An ambulance squealed down the rise into the lot and pulled up short by the side door. The attendants jumped out and opened the rear doors to pull out stretchers. I managed to stand up. Morris, Sherman, Bobby Hollingsworth, and the others were bunched together on the grass below the parking lot, watching the arcs of water disappear into the field house. I could see lines of red on Morris' face — someone had hit him with something and cut his scalp. He looked gallant and unperturbed with blood all over his face, and the shock hit me and I started to cry.

'It's okay,' Tom said. Once again he was miraculously beside me. 'I just looked around, and I think everybody's okay. Did you see Skeleton Ridpath?'

I wiped my eyes. 'I don't think he's here.'

'Well, I think he is,' Tom said. He turned away and went toward the teachers, who were in a group at the back of the parking lot, clustered around Mr. Broome. The headmaster looked as though he had been in the au­ditorium longer than anyone — his face was nearly black. Ashy smudges blotted his seersucker jacket. He looked straight through Tom and continued to harangue Mr. Thorpe. His Doberman lay beside him, exhausted and also matted with ash. The dog reeked of smoke and burning wood and twisting metal — I caught it from where I stood — and I realized that I probably did too. You can't tell me a boy wasn't smoking,' Mr. Broome was saying. 'It started in one of the turrets. I saw it clearly. What else have we been warning these boys about day after day?' He wobbled a bit, and Mr. Thorpe grabbed his elbow to keep him upright. 'I want a list of every boy in the auditorium. That way we'll find our guilty man. Get a list, tick them off — '

'Mr. Broome,' Tom said.

One fireman rushed by, then another.

'Men are working here,' Mr. Broome said. 'Stay out of their way.'

'Was Steve Ridpath in school this morning?' Tom asked.

'Sent him home.'

'He's at home,' Mr. Ridpath coughed out. 'He took the car. Thank God.'

'Were you going to kick Del out of school?' Tom asked.

'Don't be an ass,' Broome said. 'We have work to do. Now, leave us alone.'

A big man in a suit like a policeman's came across the gravel and stood beside Tom and me. A badge on his shoulder read Chief. 'Who is the principal here?' he asked.

Mr. Broome stiffened. 'I am the headmaster.'

'Can I see you for a second?'

'Any assistance,' Mr. Broome said, and followed the chief out into the center of the lot.

'Where's Del?' Tom asked. 'Did you see Del?'

'A deceased?' Broome said loudly, as if he had never heard the word.

The two firemen who had rushed past us earlier were coming out of the side door carrying a body on a stretcher.

'The label in his jacket says Flanagan,' the fire chief said.

'Flanagan is not deceased,' Mr. Broome said airily. 'Flanagan is very much with us. I helped him out of the auditorium myself.'

'Oh, no,' Tom said, but not in contradiction to the headmaster's lie. Mr. Fitz-Hallan and Mrs. Olinger, closely followed by Mr. Thorpe, were already at the ambulance door. Four boys who had passed out in the smoke groaned from bunk-bed-like stretchers in the white metal interior. I heard a crash as the last of the field house collapsed. The boys watching yelled as they would at fireworks. Mr. Fitz-Hallan leaned over and gently lifted the top of the blanket. I could not hear the two or three soft words he uttered.

'Let these men get on with their work, Flanagan,' Mr. Broome shouted.

As they lifted the covered body into the ambulance, the slide rule in its charred leather holster slipped over the edge of the cot and bounced against the white steel.

Which is the last of the three images that stay with me from the first year at Carson — a composite image, really. Dave Brick's slide rule banging against the bottom of the ambulance doors, the boys cheering at the last gasp of the field house, Mr. Broome yelling impatiently: that was what all the ironic civility had come down to. A dead boy, a few shouts, a madman's yell.

Tom and I found Del sitting on the lawn at the front of the school. He was guarding the magic equipment, the bass, and Phil Hanna's drums, all of which he had managed to get out while Tom had been saving lives. He had watched the arrival of the fire trucks and the ambulance, but had not come down into the lot himself because he had been afraid that someone might steal Brown's bass. 'It seemed awfully important to him,' he said. 'And anyhow, I could hear everybody coughing and yelling, so I knew they were all right.' He looked at Tom's face, then mine. 'They are all right, aren't they?'

Tom sat down beside him.

22

Graduation

Four teachers, including Mr. Fitz-Hallan and Mr. Thorpe, stayed overnight in the hospital because of smoke inhala­tion; so did twenty-four boys. The morning edition of the city's biggest paper bore the headline 'society school HEADMASTER LEADS 100 BOYS TO SAFETY.' 'Freshman Lost,' was the subhead. Nobody ever mentioned expul­sion or theft again, as if the fire had solved that question. In any case, there was no one to whom to mention it: the rest of the year's classes were canceled, and teachers made up their final grades by averaging all the work up to the day of the fire. Many boys half-believed Laker Broome's story of saving most of the school single-handedly because the newspapers made a chaotic event seem clearer than it had been to any of those involved. But they remembered what Tom Flanagan had done; only the board of directors and most of the parents assumed that the newspapers were absolutely correct. They wanted to believe that the school's administration had behaved in a crisis the way they themselves would like to.

A news photographer snapped Mr. Broome's picture at the reception on the lawn after commencement. When we looked up the hill toward the Upper School we could see the enormous hole in the landscape where the Field House had been. Parents and students moved around on the grass, taking sandwiches from the long tables attended by the dining-room maids. I had just left my parents, who stood in a little group with Morris and Howie Stern and their parents near the impromptu stage where a member of President Eisenhower's last Cabinet had implored us to work hard and build a better America. I happened to be beside Mr. Broome when the photographer took his picture, and when the man walked off, Broome looked indulgently down at me. 'What do you think of our school?' he asked. 'You'll be a sophomore in a few months. That entails more responsibility.'

We looked at each other for a moment.

'You will all be great men. All of you.' Even the long creases in his face were different, less defined. Many years later I realized that he had been heavily tranquilized.

I said good-bye to him and went back to my friends and parents. Tom and his mother walked past, accompanied by Del and the Hillmans. In the middle of the crowd, even with a parent and godparents beside them, Tom and Del looked alone. Laker Broome stared straight through them and smiled at a tray of sandwiches.

'Remember?' Tom said in the Zanzibar. 'Of course I remember what we were talking about. We were working out the arrangements for me to go with Del to Shadowland. My mother didn't want me to fly, so we were going to take the train. It sounded like fun — getting on a train in Phoenix and taking it all across the country.'

'Why did you want to go?' I asked.

'Only one reason,' Tom said. 'I wanted to protect Del. 1 had to do it.'

He swiveled around on his bar stool and surveyed the empty room. Light from the windows fell like a spotlight on the stage at the far end. He did not want to look at me while he said the rest of it.

'I knew I couldn't keep him from going, so I had to go with him.'

He sighed, still watching the yellow ray of light on the vacant stage as if he expected to see a vision there.

'There was one thing I really didn't know. But should have. The school was Shadowland too.'

And for months, for nearly two years, in other bars or in hotel rooms, other cities, other countries, wherever we caught up with each other: Let me tell you what happened then.

PART TWO

Shadowland

We are back at the foot of the great narrative tree, where stories can go . . . anywhere.

Roger Sale, Fairy Tales and After

ONE

The Birds Have Come Home

Del was quiet the whole first day of the trip. . . .

1

Del was quiet for the first day of their journey, and Tom eventually gave up trying to make him talk. Whenever he commented on the vast, empty scenery rolling past the train's windows, Del merely grunted and buried himself deeper in a two-hundred-page mimeographed manuscript which Coleman Collins had mailed him. This was about something called the Triple Transverse Shuffle. Apart from grunts, his only remark about the desert landscape was, 'Looks like a million cowboy hats.'

During this time Tom read a paperback Rex Stout mystery, walked through the cars looking at the other passengers — a lot of old people and young women with babies around whom buzzed talkative soldiers with drawl­ing, suntanned accents. He inspected the bar and dining car. He sat in the observation bubble. There the desert seemed to engulf everything, changing colors as the day and the train advanced. It moved through yellow and orange to gold and red, and in the instant before twilight threw blue and gray over the long distances, flamed — dyed itself a brilliant rose-pink and burst thunderously into brilliance. This endured only a heart-stopping sec­ond, but it was a second in which the whole world seemed ablaze. When Tom came hungry back to their seats, Del looked up from a page full of diagrams and said, 'Poor Dave Brick.' So he had seen it too.

Night came down around them, and the windows gave them back their faces, blurred into generalities.

'Booger,' Tom muttered, almost in tears: the complex of feelings lodged in his chest was too dense to sort out. He had somehow missed Dave Brick in the smoky pandemonium of the auditorium, must have gone right past him half a dozen times and left him back there, behind them, in the country they were leaving a little more with each click of the wheels. The sensation of moving forward, of being propelled onward, was as strong as the sense of threat outside Del's house that noon before Del had risen into the air — it was the sense of being mailed like a parcel to a destination utterly un­known. He met his mild blurred eyes in the dirty window and saw darkness rocking past him in the form of a telegraph pole's gloomy exclamation point.

'You did a lot,' Del said.

'Sure,' Tom growled, and Del went back to his pages of diagrams.

After twenty more minutes in which Del fondled cards and Tom held tightly to his feelings, fearing that they would break and spill, Del looked up and said, 'Hey, it must be way past dinnertime. Is there anywhere to eat on this train?'

'There's a dining car up ahead,' Tom said. He looked at his watch and was startled to see that it was nine o'clock: they had been rocked past time, while they had been busy leaving behind and back there.

'Great,' Del said, and stood up. 'I want to show you something. You can read it when we're eating.'

'I don't get any of that stuff you're looking at,' Tom said as they started walking down the aisle toward the front of the car.

Del grinned at him over his shoulder. 'Well, you might not get this either. It's something else,' leaving Tom to wonder.

Any stranger looking at them would have known that they went to the same school. They must have looked touchingly young, in their blue Gant shirts and fresh haircuts; they were unlike anyone else on the train. Cowboys with dusty clothes and broken hats and cardboard suitcases had climbed on at every stop. With names like Gila Bend and Edgar and Redemption, these were just brown-board shacks in the desert.

In the dining car Tom first realized how odd he and Del appeared, here on this train. As soon as they walked in, he felt exposed. The women with their children, the soldiers, the cowboys, stared at them. Tom wished for a uniform, for ten more years on his body. A few people smiled: being cute was hateful. He promised himself that for the rest of the trip he would at least wear a shirt a different color from Del's.

Del commandeered a small side table, snapped the napkin off his plate, and accepted the menu without looking at the waiter. Intent on some private matter, he had never noticed the stares. 'Ah, eggs Benedict,' he said. 'Wonderful. Will you have them too?'

'I don't even know what they are,' Tom said.

'Then try them. They're great. Practically my favorite meal.'

When the waiter returned, they both ordered eggs Benedict. 'And coffee,' Del said, negligently proffering the menu to the waiter, who was a glum elderly black man.

'You want milk,' the waiter said. 'Coffee stunt your growth.'

'Coffee. Black.' He was looking Tom straight in the eye.

'You, son?' The waiter turned his tired face to Tom.

'Milk, I guess.' Del rolled his eyes. Tom asked, 'Do you drink coffee?'

'In Vermont, I do.'

'And the princes and the ravens bring it in gold cups every morning.'

'Sometimes. Sometimes Rose Armstrong brings it,' Del smiled.

'Rose Armstrong?'

'The Rose Armstrong. Just wait. Maybe she'll be there, maybe she won't. I hope she is.'

'Yeah?' Now it was Tom who smiled.

'Yeah. If you're lucky, you'll see what I mean.' Del adjusted the cloth on his lap, looked around as if to make sure no one was eavesdropping, and then looked across the table and said, 'Before you get your first taste of paradise, maybe you ought to see what he sent me.'

'If you think I'm old enough.'

Del plucked a folded sheet of typing paper from his shirt pocket and passed it to Tom. He was positively smirking.

Tom unfolded the sheet.

'Don't ask any questions until you read all of it,' Del said.

Typed on the sheet was:

SPELLS, IMAGES & ILLUSIONS

(For the Perusal of My Two Apprentices)

Know What You Are Getting Into!

Level 1 Level 2 Level 3

Trance Theatrics Flight

Voice Rise Transparence

Silence Altered Landscape

Level 4 Level 5 Level 6

Window of Flame Collector Ghostly Presence

Window of Ice Mind Over Matter Living Statue

Tree Lift Mind Control Fish Breathing

Level 7 Level 8 Level 9

Altered Time Put A Hurting Wood Green Empire

Created Landscape Conjure Minor Devils

Desired Fireworks

Tom looked up when he had read it.

'Read it again.'

Tom glanced down the lists again. 'I don't get it.'

'Sure you do.' Del's whole being was alight.

'Do you get one of these every summer?'

Del shook his head. 'This is the first time. But when I saw him at Christmas, he said that if I came back with you, he'd send me a description.'

'Of what? Everything he can do?'

'He can do a lot more than that. But I guess what he means is a description of what a magician ought to be able to do.'

'He can turn statues into people? He can . . . ?' Tom searched the list. 'Alter the landscape?'

'I guess so.' Del laughed. 'I've seen a lot of that stuff. Not all of it, but a lot.'

'So if Rose Armstrong brings you coffee, she might come in upside down? With upside-down coffee in an upside-down cup?'

Del shook his head, still laughing.

'I don't like that business about 'Know What You Are Getting Into.''

'I told you he was scary sometimes.'

'But it's like a threat.' And then his mind gave him an image he had a month ago decided was false: that of Skeleton Ridpath hovering two inches below the ceiling of the auditorium, hanging like a spider, exulting in the coming destruction.

'It's not really a threat,' Del explained. 'Sometimes up there, everything is normal, and at other times . . . ' He waved at the paper. 'Other times, you learn things. Oh, great, here comes dinner.'

Tom gingerly cut into one of the eggs on his plate, saw yolk flood out into the paler yellow of the sauce, and lifted a dripping fork to his mouth. 'Wow,' he said, when he swallowed. 'How long has this been going on?'

'The hollandaise comes out of a bottle,' Del said. 'But you get the general idea.'

2

As they ate, the train slowed into a station — Tom could see only a metal water tower and a peeling shed. The usual men in curling hats waited to get on.

Del said, 'With these levels, I guess you can sometimes do something on a higher one without being able to do everything on the lower ones. Like I can rise, you know, but Uncle Cole says everybody can learn to do that, if they concentrate the right way. But I'm really Level One — I can't even do voice, throw my voice yet. I'm still trying to learn. 'Trance' is just like hypnotism. An idiot can do it. Theatrics, now . . . '

Tom watched the lonely cowboys filing past. They looked thirsty. Nobody ever saw cowboys off, nobody ever greeted them.

' . . . it's just the ordinary stage stuff, all you have to know is how to do it, how the mechanics work . . . '

They were like spacemen, so loosely tied to earth, but where they orbited was towns like this, the name of which was Lone Birch.

Then he saw a face that violently took his mind off cowboys. All the pleasure in him went black and cold.

'Theatrics, see, he thinks it's all junk, just the word shows it.' Del looked at him curiously. 'You lose your appetite all of a sudden?'

'Don't know,' Tom said. He craned over the table, trying desperately to see the bruised face among the half-dozen men waiting outside.

'You think you saw a friend? In Lone Birch?'

'Not a friend. I thought I saw Skeleton out there. Waiting to get on the train.'

Del laid down his knife and fork. 'Oh. I just lost my appetite too.' He looked perfectly composed. 'What do we do?'

'I don't want to do anything.'

'I think we ought to take a look. That way we'll know. How sure are you?'

'Pretty sure. But I just saw him for a second — just a glimpse.'

The train began to snick-snick out of the station.

'But a face like that . . . '

'It's pretty hard to miss,' Tom said. 'Yeah.'

'Let's go.' Del pushed himself away from the table. 'I'll pay the waiter. I'll go forward, and you go back. We're about halfway in the train.' Del took a deep breath and swayed a little with the tram's motion. 'If it's him . . . I don't mean to give you orders — and he could be sitting facing the way you come in — but maybe he's just traveling . . . '

'And maybe I'm wrong,' Tom said. Part of him was happy that Del's nervousness had emerged. 'And maybe if I see him, I'll kick him off the train.' Now that Del had shown his own fear, his could turn to anger. 'I guess we'd better start.'

'That's what I said,' Del reminded him over his shoulder, and held out a folded ten-dollar bill to the waiter.

Tom entered the next car and looked over the passengers. Many slept — babies sprawled over their mothers sprawled over two seats. Soldiers slept with caps pulled over their eyes, snoring like a yard full of pigs. A few wakeful ones glanced at him over the tops of magazines. Skeleton Ridpath was not there.

He went quickly down the aisle, pushed aside the heavy door, and for a moment stood in the rocking space between cars and peered through the gritty window. This was their car — Tom felt an angry certainty that if Skeleton were on the train, he would be sitting near them. The thought made his bowels liquefy. But the seat behind theirs was empty; the people he could see from the window were those to whom he had spoken or nodded. He pushed the door aside and went in.

One of the sleepy mothers smiled at him. The long car felt warm and comfortable. Tom imagined that if Skel­eton were actually seated there, his nerves would have screamed, alarms howled.

Three cars remained. Since Skeleton had got on Tom's half of the train, there was a thirty-three-percent chance he was in the next car. Tom left his own carriage and pushed open the door to the next.

Here all the lights were off. Tom closed the door behind him. His eyes adjusted slowly. This car is almost empty, which is why the few in it were able to enforce their unanimous opinion that nights on trains were for sleeping. One of the men, mustached and blue-jeaned, grunts in his sleep and digs his face deeper into the untender material of the seat. Tom has seen at once that none of them is Skeleton. He wishes that he could curl up like this, grind his face into a seat, and be somewhere else, safe — and then he feels that he is walking straight through their dreams, trespassing in them.

This man who lifts a shoulder before him, is he dreaming of the snake that circles the world and rests with its pointed tail in its mouth?

And the man two rows back who sleeps like a child, his head thrown back and knees asplay, does he dream of some Rose Armstrong, some perfect girl who haunts him? Or of a flame-girdled toad with a jewel in its forehead and a key in its mouth?

And does this one dream of being a hunter in a starry wood — Orion with his drawn bow?

Or of a man become a hunting bird?

Then he feels that he does not trespass through their dreams, but is them; that he is a dream being dreamed. His feet do not quite touch the ground. Their snores and stirrings carry him to the end of the dark carriage, and the door floats to the side under the pressure of his hand. He sweats, his head full of cobwebs . . . hunting birds . . . blazing toads . . .

He was sweating, that is, sweating and dizzy on the swaying platform between carriages, and it seemed to Tom that his mind was floating out of his control, prey to any fancy that came along. He has been someplace he has never been before. Being dreamed? Him, steady Tom Flanagan? The thought of Skeleton was somehow the cause of that. And as he put his hand on the door to the next carriage, he realized that by his earlier reckoning, there was a fifty-percent chance of seeing Skeleton in this car.

He marched up the aisle, looking rapidly from side to side, checking the faces even though he was sure that if his enemy were present, he'd be so visible as to be fluores­cent. Two ten-year-old girls flouncing up the aisle in identical calico dresses separated to let him pass.

Tom pushed his way out into the breeze again. By his reckoning, the odds were a hundred percent that Skeleton was in this last car.

He had to pee — it was like pre-exam panic. He swal­lowed, and hoped that Del was already safe in his seat, thinking that Skeleton was out of their lives for good. Tom grasped the handle and pushed the door. He knew Skeleton was there.

But there it was again, that shock, even though he had thought he was prepared. For down at the end of the carriage, the very back of Skeleton's head met him, narrow and matted with mouse hair.

He has no power now, Tom told himself; he can't do anything to us. There was no reason to fear him. In that case, maybe Del was right. Don't let him see you, just make sure and go away and hope he gets off the train at the next station.

Tom almost did it. What stopped him was the thought of going back to Del and saying, yes, he is here, and then spending the next two days and nights in fear. He imagined himself and Del in their sleeping car, heeding every sudden noise. He would not allow himself to be so childish.

He took a step nearer the hated head.

Tom closed his mouth on a breath, took a quick step around Skeleton's side, and dropped himself into the facing seat. Adrenaline blasted his good intentions, and he blurted out, 'What are you doing here, anyway?'

Then crumbled — another shock. The face was Skel­eton's at fifty, not Skeleton's now. It was the same skinned, reptilian visage with smudgy pouches beneath the same colorless eyes, but with a lot of extra years on it. 'I got a right to be here,' the man said. Then the stingy flesh colored. 'Who the hell are you, anyway? Get outta here.' The man's thin, hand trembled against the side of his face, went to his tie. 'Geez, get this kid.' He appealed to empty seats for witness. 'Get lost, kid. Lemme alone.'

This moment was truly like being trapped in a dream — the man was eerily like Skeleton, was, if anything, even more hideous than Skeleton. But he was certainly not Skeleton. He looked one step elevated from trampdom.

'You're tryna mess with me, ain't ya, kid? Just get outta here before I cut you to pieces.' The man was like an angry, bewildered dog.

Tom was already up out of the seat, stuttering apolo­gies. He saw a conductor down at the other end of the car, and fled.

From movies he knew that little balconies rode at the end of trains, and he darted out through the rear door. Yet here was another puzzle. Another car swayed before him. He was not at the end of the train. What the . . . ? The car had not been on the train when they boarded that morning. He and Del had entered the fourth car from the end: he remembered that absolutely. This car had some­how been magicked onto the end of the train.

Tom reeled.

'Get this kid,' the man said to the conductor.

The door heaved to one side, and he slipped through, ignoring the conductor's shout.

But the next car — now here was real disorientation. He had gone fifty years back in time. Gas lamps flickered on flocked walls, a thick patterned carpet glowed. Hunting prints shone down from the walls. A knot of men dressed in old-fashioned checked and belted suits regarded him. Most were bearded, some smoked long cigars. He could smell the whiskey in their glasses.

'You have made a mistake,' a tall burly man with a stand-up collar and a Vandyke said quietly. 'Please leave.' He looked stonily at Tom through a thin gold pince-nez:

The conductor banged the door open and fastened a rough hand on Tom's upper arm. 'I couldn't stop him in time, Mr. Peet.'

'All right, yes, understood. Remove him.'

The conductor hauled Tom out into the next carriage. The old defeated Skeleton Ridpath turned on his seat in a grotesque parody of snobbery and faced the window.

'Don't ever go back there again,' the conductor said in Tom's ear. He did not sound angry. 'They might look crazy, but that's their business.'

'What is that, anyway?'

The conductor released Tom's arm. 'Private party — own their own car. Food? Liquor? You never seen anything like it. You gotta be rich to live that good. They hooked up a couple stations back, going all the way to New York. Just leave 'em alone, son. You got plenty of train to walk around in.'

When Tom got back to his seat, he sat down beside Del, who stared. 'Is he there?'

'Just an old guy who looks like him.'

'Aaaah.' Del slumped back into his seat, sighing. 'Thank God.' He smoothed his glossy hair, looked at Tom, grinned. 'You know, we were both scared shitless. But what could he do to us, really? Even if he was on the train?'

'Maybe he's the Ghostly Presence,' Tom said, and Del tried to smile.

That night, rolling through Illinois on his upper bunk, Tom dreamed of lying by a campfire in a deep wood. The moon was a huge eye. A snake whispered up to him and spoke.

3

A morning of French toast dripping maple syrup, hard little sausages that tasted of hickory smoke, tomato juice: Ohio just ending outside the dining-car windows, an epic of grain-filled plains separated by dark smoky cities. By now nearly everybody who had joined their train in Arizona was gone, and churchy, singing Midwestern voices had replaced the sunburnt drawls. The most important new passengers were four middle-aged black men dressed in conspicuously handsome suits — they had supervised the loading, late at night in Chicago, of a trove of instrument cases into the baggage car and were supposed to be famous musicians. The conductors treated them like heroes, like kings, and they looked like kings: they had an extra charge of authority and no need of anyone else. Morris Fielding would have known their names.

'One of them's called Coleman Hawkins,' Del said. 'The conductor told me. And you'll never guess the name of the quiet one without any hair.'

'You're right. I can't guess.'

'Tommy Flanagan. He plays piano, and the conductor says he's fantastic.'

'Tommy Flanagan?' Tom put down his silverware and looked at every table in the dining car.

'I don't think they get up this early,' Del said wryly. 'Don't look that way. If someone has to have your name, it might as well be a fantastic piano player.'

'Yeah, it's sort of neat. . . but I'd rather have him be a fantastic third baseman,' Tom said. For a second he had felt that the man, as modest and civilized as an Anglican priest, had stolen his name from him.

4

'I wonder what he's going to do this time,' Del said.

'Play the piano somewhere, dummy.'

'Not your namesake, Jell-O Brains. Uncle Cole. I wonder what it'll be this summer.'

'Is it always different?'

'Sure it is. One summer it was like a circus-clowns and acrobats all over the place. That was when I was a little kid. Another summer, it was like movies. Cowboy movies and cop movies. That was a year I went to movies all the time — I was twelve. Saw a double feature every Saturday. And when I got to Shadowland, every day was like a different movie. I never knew what was going to happen. There was Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe and William Bendix and Randolph Scott — '

'Right there? That's impossible.'

'Well, it looked like them. I know it wasn't them, but . . . sometimes it was pieces of their movies. He has projectors all over the place. He can make it look like anything is happening. Every summer is like a different performance. I just wonder what it'll be this time.' He paused. 'Because it's always tied in with what's going on before you get there. That's all part of magic, he says — working with what's in your mind. Or on your mind. And with all the stuff that went on this year . . . ' Del looked decidedly worried for a moment.

'You mean it might be about school?'

'Well, it never has been. Uncle Cole hates schools. He says he's the only person he knows who should be allowed to run a school.'

'But it might be Skeleton and our show and . . . '

'The fire. Maybe.' Del brightened. 'Whatever it is, we'll learn something.'

'I guess there are some things I'd rather not learn,' Tom said, making the only truly conservative statement of his life.

'Just listen to whatever he says first. When he meets us at the station. That's the clue to everything.'

Tom said, 'The Case of the Famous First Words.'

Del looked uncomfortable again. 'Hey, breakfast is over, huh? Let's get out of here.' He rattled his fork against his plate, looked at the window. The filthy brick backs of office buildings and warehouses slid by, en­crusted with fire escapes — some bleak Ohio city. He finally came out with what he had been planning to say. 'Listen, Tom. You have to know . . . I mean, I should have said before. My uncle — everything I said about him is true. Including that he's half-crazy. He drinks. He drinks one hell of a lot. But that's not the reason, I don't think. He just is half-crazy. Except for the summers, I think he's alone all the time. Magic is everything he's got. So sometimes he gets kind of wild . . . and if he's been drinking . . . '

'That's what I thought,' Tom said.

Take care, Red.

'Does Bud Copeland know him?' Tom asked.

Del nodded. 'He met him once — once when he came to Vermont to get me. I, uh, I broke a leg. It was just an accident. But they met, yeah.' Tom did not have to ask the question. 'Bud wanted me never to go back. I had to talk him into it. He didn't like Uncle Cole. But he didn't understand, Tom. That was all.'

'I get it,' Tom said.

'He's not all crazy,' Del pleaded. 'But he just never got the recognition he should have, and he spends all that time alone. It's okay, really. It's not even half. That's just an expression.'

'But you broke your leg because he got carried away.'

'That's right. But people break their legs skiing all the time.' This had the air of something Del had said many times before — to Bud Copeland and the Hillmans. 'It was just a little break, a hairline break, the doctor called it. I was only in a cast about three weeks, and that's nothing.'

'Did your uncle get the doctor?'

Del colored. 'Bud did. My uncle said it would heal by itself. And he was right. It would have. Maybe not as fast, but it would have healed.'

'And how did it happen?'

'I fell down a sort of a cliff,' Del said. Now his face was very red. 'Don't worry. Nothing like that is ever going to happen again.'

5

They changed trains in Pennsylvania Station; during the two hours before the departure of the Vermont train, the boys put their bags in lockers and walked around the station.

'Just a couple more hours,' Del said as they stood in a doorway and looked at people coming in and out of the Statler Hilton across the street. 'This is going to be what people call an adventure.'

'I feel like I'm already having an adventure,' Tom answered. The musicians, Hawkins and the man wkh Tom's name and the other two, were hailing cabs, joking, already going in different directions.

'Someday we'll be like them,' Del said. 'Free. Can't you see what that'll be like? Traveling, performing . . . going wherever we like. I love the thought of the future. I love the whole idea.'

Suddenly Tom saw it as Del did: lone-wolfing around the world, carrying an airline ticket always in his pocket, living in taxis and hotels, performing in one club after another . . . A layer of self deep in his personality trembled, and for the first time he really said yes to a life so different from any his parents or Carson School would have chosen for him.

6

The afternoon saw them stalled north of Boston, far out in the green Massachusetts countryside. Brindled cows swung their heads and regarded them with liquid eyes; people strolled along the tracks, sat on the slope of the line and looked back at the cows. 'Will we be here much longer?' Tom asked the conductor.

'Could be a couple more hours, way I hear it.'

'That long?'

'You boys jus' got lucky.'

At intervals a bored, half-audible voice broadcast over the loudspeakers: 'We regret the inconvenience of this delay, but . . . We anticipate resumption of service in a short. . . ' Lively rumors traveled through the train.

'Big mess — up at the next junction,' their porter finally told the boys. 'First thing like it in a lot of years. A train clear over on her side, people all bust up — terrible day for the railroad.'

'What can we do?' Del asked, almost frantic. 'Some­one's waiting for us at a station in Vermont.'

'Wait is all you can do,' said the porter. 'Nobody goes anywhere till the line's clear. If your daddy's waiting for you in Vermont, he'll know all about this — they got TV in Vermont too.'

'Not in that house,' Del said in despair.

Tom looked outside and saw a few men in suits and ties passionately hurling rocks at cows.

As the hours went by, Tom felt his energy flicker like a dying candle. His eyes were heavy enough to drop from their sockets. All the colors in the train seemed lurid. Twice he went to the toilet and in a stink so concentrated that it was nearly visible allowed his stomach to erupt and leave him weightless. 'I've got to get some sleep,' he said when he had staggered back after the second time, and saw that Dei was already there, folded up into himself like an exhausted bird.

When they finally moved again, the jolt of the carriage snapped Tom into wakefulness. Del still slept, curled in stationary flight.

The junction where the wreck had occurred was twenty miles down the track. For a moment the boys' carriage, the entire train, silenced: passengers crowded in the aisle to look out the windows but did not speak. A train the size of their own lay sprawled like a broken snake on the left side of the tracks. A gout of sparks blew into the air and died before the brilliant dots could fall on the few who still lay, covered up to the neck with blankets, on the sloping ground. One of the toppled carriages had been folded as neatly as paper; others were battered. Over the half-dozen policemen standing about, heavy gray smoke shifted in the humid air. Tom thought he could smell the wreck: oil and metal, the smell of heat and the smell of blood. The screams too. That was a smell like a taste in his own mouth, familiar and rancid.

7

Hilly Vale

Late that evening they reached a town called Springville, and Del said, 'It's the next stop.' He stood and pulled their suitcases off the luggage rack and arranged them in the aisle — he was being very businesslike and concen­trated. Del sat up straight in his seat for fifteen minutes, not speaking, and for the last ten minutes stood by the door, looking straight ahead. 'Hey, what. . . ' Tom said, but Del did not even blink.

'Hilly Vale,' the metallic voice said. 'Hilly Vale. Please watch your step while leaving the train.'

Del shot him a glance, but Tom was already hauling his suitcase toward him.

They went down into hot, humid night. For a second Tom heard insect noises, a drumming and creaking and scratching and singing as loud as if they stood in the midst of jungle, and then the train started up and the insect noises disappeared. The station was so small it looked like a cartoon; yolky yellow light from overhead bulbs hugged it close. The train sailed into blackness and became a red dot vanishing around an invisible bend. Insects scratched and banged and whistled.

'Well?' Tom said. He felt as if he had been put down by the side of the road in Alaska or Peru.

Then the cacophony of insect sounds increased: drills, hammers, wrenches on pipes, musical saws, penny whis­tles, piano strings, whole boxes of tools dropped from a great height, doorbells, breaking bottles, miniature ka­mikaze aircraft, blows against flesh.

Del shushed him. For a second the two boys stood embraced by the yellow light in what should have been silence.

Mr. Thorpe stepped out of the blackness.

8

But no, it was not Mr. Thorpe, any more than the man on the train had been Skeleton Ridpath. He was tall, white-haired, dressed in a dark blue suit with wide chalky pin stripes. He had the sort of slight, elegant limp that makes limping look desirable. His nose was long and curved: the whole long squared — off face was powerful. Coleman Collins looked like an ambassador or an aged actor become so grand that he was offered no parts but those of financial pirates, grand dukes, and rascally Nazi generals. He smoothed down the longish white hair at the side of his head, and Tom thought that if you saw him playing a Latin teacher in a movie, you would know that his students would begin dying of a mysterious ailment late in the first reel. The limp became a definite waver, and Tom saw that the man was drunk. 'So the birds have come home,' the magician said.

TWO

The Erl King

Del just picked up his bag and went straight for the car, the biggest, blackest Lincoln you ever saw. . . .

1

Wordlessly Del picked up his suitcase and began to walk toward the steps down into the station parking lot. In confusion so great it was almost like pain, Tom watched the smaller boy advancing away from him, and then looked back at the magician. Coleman Collins' icy face flickered a smile at him. I didn't think he'd be so old, Tom thought. He's even older than Mr. Thorpe.

'Say hello to your uncle,' Collins said. Even slightly slurred by alcohol, his voice was resonant and cultured. 'He has waited long enough to hear it.'

Del stopped moving. In the instant of silence after he dropped his case, the insects began their symphony again. 'I know. I'm sorry.' Del half-turned to look at his uncle. 'I am sorry. There was a big accident — a train went off the track . . . ' Del turned savagely away again, and Tom recognized with astonishment that his friend was either in tears or on the verge of them.

'A big accident. A big big big accident, was it? Not just a teeny-weeny little one? Not just a little spilled coffee, a little bump on the tracks, a little messy commotion? Didn't stain your clothes, all that coffee flying about?'

'It wasn't our train,' Tom said.

The magician focused his icy eyes on Tom — who was relieved to see, way down under all the layers of real and assumed anger, a layer of amusement. 'Ah. The mystery deepens.' He lolled back against the railing. 'Surely one of you two boys can explain why an unrelated accident, all that coffee flying about on some other train, led to my sitting here for most of the day. Is that in your power, Del?'

Del turned and explained. Haltingly, badly, with what looked almost like stage fright — but he was explaining, he was talking to his uncle, and Tom felt the strange tension about them wilting from the air.

When Del was done, his uncle said, 'And did you not see the spot, child? Didn't you sight the site? No visions of blood, or wrecked carriages, of dazed and crippled survivors, eager-beaver reporters, hard-eyed Polizei?' He startled both the boys by laughing. 'No corpses, no — '

'Uncle Cole,' Del said.

The magician glittered at him. 'Yes, dear one?'

'Is Rose Armstrong here this summer?'

Collins pretended to consider the question. 'Rose. Rose Armstrong. Now, I think I heard . . . was it a sick cousin in Missoula, Montana? Or was that some other Armstrong? Yess. Some dreary Armstrong person, not our little Vermont Rose. Yes, I do think that the girl should be taking part in our exercises. If we can ever get them begun, that is.'

'She is here.'

'She is. The real Rose.'

'Uncle Cole,' Del said. 'I'm sorry we were so late.'

'So it's come to that,' Collins said. 'Oh, dear. Let's have a look at something.' He held out one palm, and a silver dollar appeared between his first and second fingers. He revolved his hand, and the coin had moved to the space between the next two fingers. When he turned the palm back to the boys, the coin had vanished. He showed the back of his hand: not there. But then it was in the other hand, moving itself so quickly between his fingers it seemed to have a life of its own. He tossed the coin in the air and caught it. 'Can you do that yet?'

'Not as fast as you,' Del said.

'Let's get home,' said Coleman Collins.

2

The magician's car was the only one in the lot: a black Lincoln without a mark on it, long as a bank, and all the more impressive for being at least ten years old. Their bags went in the enormous trunk, the boys in the front seat beside Del's uncle. The interior of the Lincoln smelled of whiskey and cigarettes and, less strongly, of leather. Collins looked over Del's head at Tom as he rolled out of the lot. 'So you are the Tom Flanagan.'

'I'm Tom Flanagan, anyhow. The Tom Flanagan plays the piano.'

'And modest and good — and very good at the work, I gather. Welcome to Vermont. I hope we'll give you a summer to remember.'

'Yes.'

They were gliding into an area of dark little shops, vacant gas stations. The magician seemed to be grinning at him. 'I live for these summers, you know. It could have been different — Del might have told you something about me. But I had only one ambition. Can you guess? To be the best magician in the world. And to stay the best magician in the world. Which is what I have done. Letters — I get mail from all over the world, asking for my advice. Can they meet me? Can they study with me? No, no, no, no. I have only one pupil. Two, now. That, and the knowledge — it's enough.'

'The knowledge?'

'Oh, yes, the knowledge. You'll see. You'll experience. And that is all I will say at present.'

Now they were on a wide main road, cutting through the center of the small darkened town; soon they swerved off onto a narrow road which led directly into deep wood. Collins held a bottle between his thighs, and lifted it now and then to sip. Before long the trees blotted out the stars.

3

The narrow road twisted through the forest, and when it began to ascend, split into two forks. Collins took the left fork — this was unpaved, and rose sharply. After a few minutes, Tom was dimly aware of a field on his side of the road: a gray horse, nearly invisible in the murk, drifted up to a fence, followed by two black shapes that must have been horses also. Then the trees closed in again.

'What's it like here in the winter?'

'Snowed in, little bird. Very beautiful.'

They continued to rise on the narrow bumpy road.

Tom asked, 'Do you have neighbors?'

'All of my neighbors are in my head,' Collins said, and laughed again. He glanced at Del. 'And is it good to be back, accidents and upsets notwithstanding?'

'Oh, yes,' Del breathed.

'Ah.'

After perhaps twenty minutes, Collins turned the car into a paved drive which looped back and then made a wide descending curve interrupted by big iron gates set into high brick gateposts. From the posts, a wall fanned into the trees on either side.

'You'll excuse my precautions, Thomas,' Cole Collins said, gently stopping the car. 'I am an old man, all alone in these woods. Of course vandals can still come across the lake in the winter, to get at the summer houses.' He propped the bottle on the seat and got out to punch a series of numbered buttons on one of the posts. The gates slid open.

The car moved forward, rounded a bend, and they could see the house. It looked like a Victorian summer house which had been added on to by generations of owners: a three-story frame building with gables and corbels and pointed windows, flanked by more modern wings. It took Tom a moment to see why these were odd — the lines of white board were unbroken by win­dows. Lights hung on the wood illuminated bright circles on the windowless facades; lights hung in the trees on either side of the house. It looked faintly like a com­pound — faintly like something else.

'The school,' Tom said. 'I mean . . . it sort of reminds me of our school.'

Del looked at him in surprise.

'Lucky boy,' Collins murmured. He opened the door. 'Leave your things in the car. Someone will bring them in later.' He staggered a bit, getting out of the car, but tucked the half-empty bottle under his arm with an almost soldierly snap. 'Step lively, step lightly, but step inside. We can't hang around outside all night.'

Tom got out and saw Collins' tall figure outlined against the vast house. Strings of lights shone from widely separated trees deep in the woods; others were so close together as to remind him of the circles of light through which Jimmy Durante walked at the end of his show, just after saying, 'Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.' There were many more lights than he had seen from the car.

'Why do you light up the forest like that?' he asked.

'Why? So I can see what's coming and what's going,' Collins said. 'And what big eyes you have, Grandmother. Ready?'

Collins opened the front door and stood to one side to let them enter. Del walked in before Tom, and when Tom went through into the dim interior, his friend faced him with a shining, exalted face. Then he saw why. Candles blazed all over the entry: candles burned on the little table stacked with newspapers, candles burned on the shelf where Coleman Collins dropped his car keys.

'The fuse for this part of the building blew, I suppose,' Collins said. 'Someone's probably fixing it now. Nice of them to get out these candles for us. They give a welcoming glow, don't you think? Or do you think they look too much like Halloween?'

'You knew,' Del said. 'Just like Registration Day — like Tom said, at school. You knew.'

'I don't know what you are talking about,' Collins said. 'I must take a bath and lie down for a bit. There will be some food in your rooms.' He leaned against the wall of the entry, supporting his shoulders on the shelf, and crossed his arms over his chest. Tom got another shining glance from Del. 'Wash up in the bathroom down here. Then go up. Tom's room is right next to yours, Del. He will be in the connecting room. When you have eaten, come downstairs and I will see you in the Little Theater. Can you still find it?'

'Sure I can.'

'Stupendous. I'll see you there at . . . ' He looked at his watch. 'Shall we say eleven?'

Del nodded.

'Fine. Tom, there will not be much of a view of the lake at this hour, but tomorrow you should be able to see it. A very tempting vista.' Again there was a suggestion of mockery and unstated meanings in his voice. He nodded and began to mount the stairs. Halfway up, he wobbled backward, and the boys stood nailed to the floor, fearing that he was about to topple down, but he righted himself with a hand against the wall, said, 'Oops,' and continued upward.

Del shook his head in relief. 'Let's go wash our hands.'

He led Tom to a small bathroom just off the entry. While Del lathered his hands in the sink, Tom waited in the doorway. 'Are the woods always lighted up like that?'

'First time. But those candles! I was right.'

'About it being like school this time.'

'We'll see,' Del said. 'Your turn.'

'Well, I hope it isn't like school.' Tom edged around Del in the little bathroom.

'Hey, did you know this was a haunted house?' Del asked playfully.

'Come on, Florence.'

Del pushed a button beneath the light switch, and the radiance in the bathroom abruptly turned purple. In the sink, Tom's hands shone a lighter, more vibrant purple. He looked in the mirror — Del was laughing — and saw his face, the same shade of purple, disappearing under a hideous mask which seemed to stretch forward from the glass. The effect was half-comic, half-frightening. The face, with distorted rubbery lips and dead skin, the very face of greed, of acquisitiveness sucked down into pure hunger, looked at him with his own eyes. It pushed forward slowly, slowly, and became the only thing in the room. Tom finally jerked backward, unable to face the ugly thing down, and banged into Del. The face hung vibrating in the air.

'I know.' Del laughed. 'But it just comes up close and then melts back down into the mirror. It's a great trick. The first time I saw it, I howled like hell.' He pushed the button, and Tom was again standing in an ordinary wallpapered half-bath. His face was itself, familiar but pale.

'Uncle Cole calls it the Collector,' Del said. 'Don't ask me how it works. Let's go up and eat.'

'The Collector,' Tom echoed, now really shaken. That was just how it had looked.

Their rooms, in the left wing of the house, were window — less, bright, incongruously modern and 'Scandinavian': they could have been rooms in an expensive motel. Creamy off — white walls hung with colorful but bland abstract paintings, neat single beds covered in blue corduroy, thick white carpets that showed their footprints. White louvered doors swung open onto deep closets where their clothes had already been hung or folded, their suitcases packed away at the back. White desks with lamps stood against the walls. In Del's room, connected to Tom's by sliding wooden pocket doors, a table had been set for two. A crystal decanter half-filled with red wine stood beside covered dishes and a salad bowl.

'Boy,' Tom said, smelling the steaks.

Del marched to the table and sat down, snapping his napkin onto his lap. He poured from the decanter into Tom's glass and his own.

'He lets you drink wine?'

'Of course he does. He can hardly be puritanical about drink, can he? And besides that, he really believes dinner isn't complete without wine.' Del sipped, and smiled. 'He used to put water in it when I was younger. There isn't any water in this.'

'Well, this isn't much like school,' Tom said.

The steaks were still warm, bloodred in the center and delicately charred on the outside. Other covered dishes concealed a little hill of spinach, mounded mushrooms, trench fries. Tom lifted his glass and sipped: a dusty, stony, slightly grapy flavor, intensely pleasing — the more it sat in his mouth, the more taste it gave him. 'So that's what good wine is like,' he said.

'That's what Margaux is like anyhow,' said Del, busily chewing. 'He's giving us something good because this is our first night.' A moment later he said, 'He knew. He knew about the candles. I couldn't be sure before. But he knows everything that happened.'

'Anyhow, your Rose Armstrong will be around,' Tom said, and Del's face flushed with an increase of pleasure. 'This is going to be the perfect summer,' he said.

When they left Del's room to go downstairs, they paused a minute to look out one of the big windows in the hallway. These gave a view of a long expanse of wood; the spotlights or torches illuminated a congregation of branches or slabs of boulder, holes into the wood. Where the wood ended, a black non — thing that must have been the lake began. Tom saw iron railings dripping down a cliff behind the house. Far off in the woods bordering the other side of the lake, similar lights burned — fuzzy as Japanese lanterns. 'Time to get downstairs,' Del said, and moved away from the window. To Tom it looked like the setting for a party yet to begin, full of promises and anticipations. 'Come on,' said Del, eager to be downstairs, and Tom gave it one last look and saw the party's first guest. A wolf, or what looked like a wolf. It came into one of the circles of light, tongue lolling, and stared toward the house. Far off, centered in the light, the wolf seemed staged, posed as for a picture. It seemed like a signpost, a hint. 'Hey!' Tom said.

'Come on,' Del said from the staircase. 'We have to get to the Little Theater.'

'Coming,' Tom said. The wolf was gone. But had it been there at all? A wolf, in Vermont?

Going back down, he noticed that the house was more complicated than it looked. At the top of the staircase an old-fashioned swinging door barred them from a large black space in which Tom made out the shape of a tall door. 'What's back there?'

'Oh, my uncle's room. We have to get down.'

They rattled down the stairs and turned back into the body of the original house. They passed a living room where a lamp burned on a table between two couches covered in an unexpectedly feminine fabric, passed the entrance to a galleylike kitchen. Del pushed open another door which Tom had assumed led outside; but it took them into another 'motel' corridor, carpeted dark brown, its ceiling illuminated by indirect lighting. At the beginning of this corridor, another hall jutted off to the rear and ended at a crossbarred wooden door as impres­sive as Laker Broome's. 'And what's back there?'

'I don't know. He never lets me go in there.'

Del bustled down the corridor until he came to a black door set in a recess lighted by a single downspot. A brass plate had been screwed into the door just above the boys' heads, but it was blank. Del quickly checked his watch. 'God. A whole minute to spare.'

Now what? Tom wondered. An office like Lake the Snake's? A concrete-block classroom overlooking Santa Rosa Boulevard?

But what he saw when Del opened the door was at first a steeply banked jewel-box theater with perhaps fifty seats. Though empty, it still seemed full of life, and a half-second later Tom saw that the walls had been painted with ranks of people in chairs — people with rapt faces, one of them drinking from a cup through a straw, one pawing a box of chocolates. Then there was something grotesque in their midst. . . But Del was pushing him into the first row and turning him around.

'This is wild,' he said. They faced a tiny stage. A polished table and a Shaker chair stood before brown velvet curtains. He looked quickly over his shoulder to find what had briefly caught his eye, and saw it imme­diately. It was the Collector, black-suited, a few rows back and to the side of the man drinking through a straw: pushing his rapt, greedy face forward, wishing to devour whatever he saw on the tiny stage; a grotesque joke. Then Tom was startled by the thought that the grotesque figure resembled Skeleton Ridpath.

His eye caught another surprise just as he heard the clicking of a door behind the velvet curtains: a few seats away from the Collector, a group of men with outdated but elegant clothing and neat beards, cigars stuck in their mouths, a group of raffish bucks out on the town . . . Del jabbed him in the ribs, and he snapped his head back just as Cole Collins parted the curtains and sat in the Shaker chair. His handsome, slightly hooded blue eyes were glazed, but his face was pink. Instead of the suit, the magician wore a dark green pullover from the top of which frothed a green-and-red scarf, beautifully fitted to his neck. He smiled, taking in the whole room, and Tom felt the presence of the painted men behind him. The back of his neck prickled.

'The magician and his audience,' Del's uncle said with the air of one who opens a treasure chest. 'A subject you should consider. What is their relationship? That of an actor and those he seeks to move, to entertain? That of an athlete and those before whom he demonstrates his skill? Not quite, though it has elements of both.' His smile had never left his face. 'An audience always fights a magician, boys. It is never truly on his side. It feels hostility toward him: because it knows that it is being fooled.'

No, it can't be, Tom thought. They left the train in New York, they are part of some other story. And that awful joke can't have anything to do with Skeleton.

'The magician must make them relish it. He is the storyteller whose only story is himself, and every man jack in the audience, every drunk, every dolt, every clever skeptic, every doubter, is looking for the chink in his story that he can use to destroy him.'

Tom forced himself to look straight ahead: he had to keep his neck rigid by willpower. He felt as though Mr. Peet and the others were moving in their seats.

'The magician is a general with an army full of deserters and traitors. To keep their loyalty, he must inspire and entertain, frighten and cajole, baffle and command. And when he has done that, he can lead them.'

In the midst of his tension, Tom felt a growing area of tiredness, and realized that the wine and Collins' tirade were making him sleepy.

The smile was taut now, and directed straight at Tom. 'I am saying that the practice of magic is the courting of self-destruction — that is one of its great secrets. The closer you allow yourself to come to that truth, the greater you may become. Listen: magic is used only to inspire fear and to grant wishes — even those you do not wish to have. In itself it is not important. Enough.'

He gave Tom that smile like a glare. 'Do you want to learn to fly? Would you like to leave the earth behind, boy?'

'You called us birds,' Tom said. And thought for the first time in months of the Ventnor owl. Collins nodded. 'Are you afraid?' 'Yes,' Tom said. He had a terrible urge to yawn, and felt his lips stretching.

'You don't have the beginning of an idea what magic is,' Collins hissed.

Tom thought: I can't spend all summer with this crazyman.

'But you will learn. You are a unique boy, Tom Flanagan. I knew it when I first heard about you. Shadowland will give you every gift it has, because you will be able to accept them. And you are exactly the right age. Exactly!'

He looked from Tom to Del, back again, his eyes like marbles. 'What experiences you two have before you. I envy, you — I would chop my hands off to have what you take for granted. Now. A few, ah, ground rules. Do you remember everything I have said so far? Do you under­stand what I said?' They nodded simultaneously. 'The magician is a general in charge of what?'

'Traitors,' Del said.

His eyes full of triumph and the windy spaces of drunkenness, the magician looked at Tom alone. 'Ground rules. The rules you obey, in this house. Did you see the wooden door set back in a little half-hallway on the way to this theater?'

Tom nodded.

'You are forbidden to open that door. You are free to wander where you like, except for that room and my room. Which is in back of the swinging doors at the top of the stairs. Understood?'

Tom nodded again, felt Del beside him nod his head.

'That is number one, then. In this theater we practice cards and coins, the close-up work. Tomorrow we will see Le Grand Theatre des Illusions, and that is where you will learn to fly. If, that is, you give yourself entirely to me.' Then, abruptly: 'Your father is dead?'

'Yes,' Tom whispered.

'Then for the summer I am your father. That is number two. In this house I am the law. When I say you cannot go outside, you stay in. And when I tell you to stay in your rooms, you will obey me. There will always be a reason, I assure you. Okay. Questions?'

Del sat as silent as a stone; Tom asked, 'Are there any wolves in Vermont? Have you ever seen one?'

Collins tilted his head. 'Of course not,' and gave an equivocal, playful glance. Then he relaxed back into his chair. 'Did you ever hear the story about how all stories began?'

Both boys shook their heads. In Tom, there was a sudden, strong resistance to all about him. This man was not his father. His stories would be lies: there was nothing about him that was not dangerous.

'This story,' Collins said, plucking delicately at a fold of the scarf and exposing another quarter-inch of its pattern above the green velour, 'is — might be, rather — yes, might be about treachery. And it might be about coming close to the destructiveness of magic. You de­cide.'

4

'The Box and the Key'

'A long, long time ago, in a northern country where snow fell eight months of the year, a boy lived alone with his mother in a little wooden house at the foot of a steep hill. There they lived a decent, purposeful, hardworking life. Chores always demanded to be done, provisions to be salted away, cords of wood to be cut and stacked. There was endless work, little of what boys today would call fun, but much joy. The boy's entire world was the snug wooden house with its wood fires and waxed floors, the animals he cared for, his work and his mother and the land they inhabited. The life made a perfect circle, a perfect orb, in which every action and every emotion was useful, in tune with itself and each other action and emotion.

'One day the boy's mother told him to go out and play in the snow while she did her baking. I imagine that she did not want him dodging around her skirts, pestering her for a taste of what she was mixing. She dressed him warmly, in heavy sweaters and thick socks and boots and a big blue coat and a woolen cap and said, 'Go out now and play for an hour.'

'The boy asked, 'May I climb the hill?'

' 'You may go all the way to the top if you like,' said his mother. 'But give me an hour to do my baking.'

'So out he went — he loved to climb the hill, though sometimes his mother decided that marauding animals made it dangerous. From the top he could see his little house, its chimney and windows, and the entire little valley where it sat, that cozy little house in a deep northern valley where dark firs grew straight out of the snow.

'It took him half an hour, but finally he had struggled up to the top of the hill. Looking one way, he could see hill after hill stretching away into a cold northern infinity. And when he looked the other direction, he saw right down into his own valley. There, now looking like a (tollhouse, was his home. Smoke puffed from its chimney, drifted and blew, and his mother crossed and recrossed the kitchen window, carrying mixing bowls and trays for the oven. It looked so warm, that little house with its busy woman and its drifting, blowing column of smoke.

'The boy alone on the snowy hill decided to dig. Perhaps he thought he would build a fort under the snow. He scooped out a handful of snow, then another, and all the — time he was conscious of what lay down in the valley — the warm house, his mother moving back and forth across the kitchen window.

'He dug for a time, looking back and forth from his hole in the snow to his house and his mother, and soon realized that he had little time left in which to play. He looked back down at his house and his mother in the window, and dug a few more cold wet handfuls out.

'It was time to begin going back. He watched a curl of smoke lift from the chimney.

'Then he heard a voice in his mind saying: Dig out another handful.

'He looked back at his warm house, and he put his hand deep into, the snow.

'His fingers touched something hard and smooth and colder than ice. He looked'back at the house, where his mother was taking hot cakes from the tray with a long-handled baker's spatula; and then he looked back into the hole he had made, and dug quickly around, feeling for the sides and edges of whatever he had found.

'It was a box — a silver box, so cold it burned his hands right through his gloves. That voice in his mind, which was his own voice, said: Where there is a box, there is a key.

'So he looked back at the house and knew its warmth . . . saw the smoke lazing from the chimney . . . saw his mother glance toward the window. And he took one hand and just delicately scraped his fingers across the bottom of the hole.

'His fingers turned over a little silver key.

'Where there is a key, there is a lock, his own voice said within its head.

'He revolved the cold silver box in his hands and saw how the lock was set into a complicated pattern of scrollwork just before the lip of the top. He looked back once more at the warm house, his mother wiping her hands on her apron before the window. And he put the little key into the lock.

'The box clicked.

'Then for the last time he looked back at his warm house and his mother, at all he had known, and he raised the lid of the box.'

Coleman Collins lifted his hands, palms facing about a foot apart, and suddenly swooped them upward. 'Every story in the world, every story ever told, blew up out of the box. Princes and princesses, wizards, foxes and trolls and witches and wolves and woodsmen and kings and elves and dwarves and a beautiful girl in a red cape, and for a second the boy saw them all perfectly, spinning silently in the air. Then the wind caught them and sent them blowing away, some this way and some that.'

He put his hands back on the table, smiling; he looked drunk as an owl to Tom, but the resonant voice coiled in the sleepy spaces of his mind, echoing even when Collins was not talking. 'But I wonder if some of those stories might not have blown into other stories. Maybe the wind tumbled those stories all together, and switched the trolls with the kings and put foxes' heads on the princes and mixed up the witch with the beautiful girl in the red cape. I often wonder if that happened.'

He pushed himself away from the table and stood up. 'That was your bedtime story. Go up to your rooms and go to bed. I don't want you to leave your rooms until tomorrow morning. Run along.' He winked, and disap­peared through the curtains, leaving them momentarily alone in the empty theater.

Then he poked his disembodied — looking head through the join of the curtains. 'I mean now. Upstairs. Lead the way, Mr. Nightingale.' The head jerked back through the curtains.

A moment later it reappeared, thrust forward like a jack-in-the-box. 'Wolves, and those who see them, are shot on sight. Unless it is a lupus in fabula, who appears when spoken of.' The head opened its mouth in a soundless laugh, showing two rows of slightly stained and irregular teeth, and popped back through the curtain.

'Lupus in fabula?' Del said, turning to Tom.

'Mr. Thorpe used to say it sometimes. The wolf in the story.'

'Who appears when . . . '

'Spoken of,' Tom said miserably. 'It doesn't mean real wolves, it means . . . Oh, forget it.'

5

The Wolf in the Story

'This isn't like any other summer,' Del said as they passed the short hall which ended at the crossbarred door. 'He never told me a story before. I liked it. Didn't you?'

'Sure, I guess,' Tom said, pausing. 'Weren't you ever curious about what was behind that thing?'

Del shrugged, looked uneasy. 'You mean, I should have looked just because he told me not to?'

'Not exactly. But what's so important that we aren't even allowed to see it? I just wondered if you were curious.'

'I never had time to be curious,' Del said. 'He said upstairs. We're supposed to stay in our rooms.'

'Does he do that a lot, order you to stay in your room all night?'

'Sometimes.' Del firmly pushed open the door to the older part of the house and began to march past the kitchen and living room.

'But wouldn't you anyway? I mean, why make it an order? Why would we get out of bed in the middle of the night, go wandering in the dark? . . . If he makes it an order, he's just making us think about doing it. See what I mean?'

'Well, I'm going to sleep,' Del said, going up the stairs.

'And what if you want a glass of water? What if you have to take a leak?'

'There's a bathroom attached to your room.'

'What if you want to look outside? We don't have any windows?'

'Look, aren't you tired?' Del said furiously. 'I'm going to sleep. I'm not going to parade around and look at stuff I'm not supposed to see, I'm not going to look at the stars, I'm just going to bed. You do what you want to.'

'Don't get so angry.'

'I am angry, damn you,' Del said, and moved away from Tom to open his door and disappear inside.

Tom went to his door. Del was tearing his shirt off over his head, not bothering to unbutton it. Their beds had been turned down. 'So why are you so all — fired hot all of a sudden?'

'I'm going to bed.'

'Del.'

His friend softened. 'Look. I'm tired enough to drop. It's our first night.' Del sat on his bed and kicked off his shoes. He undid his belt, stood up, and pushed his pants down. 'And I'm going to close these doors so I don't have to know if you're going to get into trouble.'

'But Del, he wants us to think about — '

'You're tired, aren't you?' Del said, tugging one of the pocket doors out of the stub wall.

'Yes.'

'Then go to bed and forget it.' He went to the other stub wall and pushed its door across, cutting off his room from Tom's.

'Del?' Tom said to the door.

'I'll see you in the morning. I'm too tired to think about anything.'

Tom turned away. His own room glowed: bed so neat it appeared to have been opened by can opener, soft lights. The second Rex Stout book he had brought in his suitcase lay on the bedside table. He touched the switch beside the door, and the overhead lights darkened. The light beside the book made that end of the room, the book and the bed and the lamp, as inviting as a cave. He undressed quickly to his underpants and slipped into bed. Tom picked up the Rex Stout book and turned to the first page. After a few minutes the print swam, and then seemed to make unrelated but pointed comments about some other story. He realized that he was dreaming about reading. Tom turned off the light and rolled into his cool pillow.

An indeterminate length of time later the barking of dogs brought him back up to consciousness. First one dog, then two. Sounds of a fight followed. A door slammed somewhere, men cursed, one dog screamed in rage or pain. A man shouted 'Bastard!' and the dog's sound of agony turned into a yelp. Tom sat up in bed. His hand was asleep, and he rubbed it until it throbbed. Downstairs, men were moving with heavy footsteps across the floor, going in and out. A glass broke, the other dog began to growl. 'Del?' Tom said. Several loud male voices raised at once.

Tom went to the pocket doors and pushed one a few inches back into the wall. Del lay face down in the dark, breathing deeply. Tom slid the door to again and groped across the room to the hall door, expecting that it would be locked.

But it was not: he opened it a crack. The lights in the hall dimly glowed. Now he could hear the voices and the dogs more clearly. The men sounded as brutish as the animals. Tom opened the door wide and saw himself reflected in the big window opposite. The lights in the woods shone through his body. He stepped out into the hall. Downstairs, at the back of the house, a man shouted, 'Get that mutt over — god damn — shake that damn . . . ' It was not the voice of Coleman Collins.

A pool of light suddenly appeared on the flagstone terrace beneath his window, outlining a man's tall shadow. Tom stepped back from the window. A burly man in an army jacket stepped into view, hauling a large black dog on a chain. The dog turned to snarl at him and the man jumped forward and cuffed its mouth. 'Jesus!' the man bawled. Protruding from one of the pockets of the green army jacket was the neck of a bottle. He dropped the chain, vanished back under the window for a moment, and reappeared with a shovel. He feinted at the dog with it, set it down, and vanished into the house again. When he came back he carried a set of long-handled tongs with metal-banded clamps at the end. This too clattered down onto the flagstones, and the man swaggered back toward the house, shouting something. He had a short bristly brown beard. One of the men from the train: Tom's heart nearly stopped, and his eyes jumped up to the illuminated woods.

Oh, no.

On a flat boulder directly under a light, so far away Tom could not see details of face or clothing, a slight figure in a long blue wrap and red cap set on blond hair was holding up a small glittering box. The little figure wonderingly turned the box over in its hands. Then the head turned and looked directly at him. He backed away in panic, and the boy's head looked aimlessly away, first to one side, then to the other. 'Del,' Tom whispered. He looked back at the boy on the rock. 'Del!' The boy was still turning the box over and over in his hands. Tom sidled over to Del's door and rapped his knuckles against it twice. 'Get out here,' he said, only just not whisper­ing. He knocked again — the noise downstairs was so loud they would not hear him if he took a hammer to the door. The blond boy set the box down on the slab and dreamily brushed his fingers along the rock. 'You have to see this,' Tom said, speaking almost normally.

The door opened a crack. 'Go away. Go in your room.'

'Look,' Tom said.

Now the boy held up an object that must have been a silver key.

'Oh,' Del said, and opened his door all the way and came a step out into the hall. The men downstairs roared.

On his little stage of rock, the boy held the key to the box.

'He wanted us to see it,' Tom whispered. In his pajamas, Del hugged himself beside him. One of the black dogs screeched again — had the bearded man struck it with the tongs? He did not want to get close enough to the window to find out.

The boy in the blue coat put the box to his ear and then held it out at arm's length. He must have used his thumbs to pop open the lid.

Evil black smoke gouted from the box. They were able to see the figure on the rock dropping it, then the smoke obliterated the entire scene in a coiling, billowing mass.

'Like our show,'_Tom murmured. 'When the smoke blows away, no boy.'

'That wasn't a boy,' Del said, going back into his room.

'It was a girl?' Tom asked.

'That was Rose Armstrong. Now go to bed.' Del turned around and closed his door.

Tom glanced back at the light: the last vestiges of black smoke drifted over a deserted rock. The leaves around it shook. Down below the windows, the dogs continued their argument.

A man's loud voice rose: 'Get that fucking . . . '

Another answered: 'Goddamn soon. Okay with you?'

'Oh, everything's dandy with me.'

Coleman Collins, very clear: 'Are you finally ready?'

The downstairs door slammed open and shadows sprang across the flags, immediately followed by a crowd of men, most of them carrying shovels, two of them pulling the chained dogs. Coleman Collins came behind, now wearing a bright plaid shut, wash pants, and laced boots; a lumberjack. 'Give me that bottle,' he ordered. The man in the army jacket pulled the bottle from his pocket. Collins tilted it over his mouth and handed it back. 'Okay. I'll be back after I . . . ' Check on my guests? Tom hurried back into his bedroom.

He jumped into bed, pulled the sheets over himself, and waited. I might even go to sleep, he told himself, and not have to do anything else. But his heart drummed, his nerves simmered. He heard the sounds of men moving randomly around on the flags, then the sound of boots coming up the stairs.

Tom stiffened. The boots came along the hall to Del's door and paused. Del's door opened. A second's silence; Del's door closed and the boots moved along to his own door. It opened, and light filtered into his room. 'Keep your head under your wing,' Collins said softly: it sounded almost tender. The door closed, and the room was black again. Tom heard Collins moving back down the hall, down the stairs.

He waited only a second, then jumped out of bed and groped for his shirt and pants. His feet found his loafers. When he opened the door and went on his knees to the window, he saw the men and the dogs heading out across the flagstones to the woods. Some of the men held flaming torches. Behind them, Collins strode along, carrying a knobbly walking stick. As soon as they had left the flagstones, he trotted to the staircase and began to descend.

6

In the entry the candles still burned, now only inches from their holders. When he turned back toward the body of the house, he saw weak light spilling from the living room into the hall. He saw that he was passing a row of tall posters in frames — a series of theatrical bills behind glass, like time capsules. They loomed beside him, the glass reflecting a little of the dim light from the living room, a little more of Tom's own outline. In the silence, he felt observed.

Chairs in the living room had been shoved here and there, cigars still burned in ashtrays, glasses stood empty on the wooden tables beside the couches and on the coffee table.

The glass doors at the far side of the living room were open onto the flagstone patio. Across the clutter of the wide room, Tom saw the lights of the men's torches winding through the woods. He stepped onto soft thick carpet. Cigar smoke drifted through the air.

Would he keep his head under his wing? He dodged furniture, going toward the open glass doors, and caught beneath the cigar smoke the odors of trees, earth, and night. Head under your wing, Tom?

'Nuts to that,' he whispered, and stepped through the open glass doors onto the flagstones.

7

The torches bobbed through the woods a hundred yards ahead, appearing and disappearing as the men who held them skirted trees. Tom could hear their loud voices melting into the snarling of the dogs, and sensed their anticipation without hearing their words. They were going off to the left side of the lake, along the curve of the hill where he and Del had seen Rose Armstrong.

He left the flags, wondering if they were looking for her. On his right a long rickety iron staircase cut straight down the hill to where the moon laid a silvery path across the lake. Tom descended as the men had, his heart stopping when the iron ladder shook and trembled, to a small beach. A building that must have been a boathouse hovered black against the dark water; a few feet from the shape of the boathouse, a white pier thrust out into the lake. No, that scene on the illuminated stage of rock had been public: whatever Mr. Peet and the others were doing now was not.

Still, he wondered what men like that would do if they caught a girl. Then he wondered what they would do if they caught him.

Fortunately, he could follow the torches and keep far enough behind so that they would never see him. He looked back as soon as he got into the woods and saw that the lights of the house gave him a clear beacon for his return.

Twice he walked straight into trees, scraping his fore­head and nearly knocking himself down. The moon, sometimes so bright that he could see the blades of rough grass as silvery individual waves in a leaning, breathed — upon ocean, at times abruptly receded behind tall black trees and left him wandering in a black vastness punctu­ated only by the weaving torches up ahead.

Like Hansel, he kept looking back, seeing the house retreat into a dense, dreamy integument of branches and bushy leaves. Before long the house was less a beacon than a half-dozen scattered points of light chinking the forest.

This was nature of a kind he had met only in books — nature fighting for its own breath, crowded and tangled, populated with a hundred thrusting and bending shapes. Every step brought him near fingers and arms of wood reaching out for him; his loafers slipped on wet moss. The third tune he walked into a tree, the moon having temporarily departed, the tree did knock him down.

Then the lights of torches disappeared. Tom stood absolutely still, afraid to. turn around — if he lost his direction, he would be lost indeed. He thought: Insects. Since leaving the house, he had not heard one; just hours ago, at the station, their noises had crowded the darkness.

From over the rise where the men had disappeared with the dogs and torches, indistinguishable shouts erupted.

Very slowly he went forward, his hands out before his face. Something, an animal or bird, chattered at him from far up: he bent back his neck, and furry needles brushed his forehead. The thought that it was a spider sent him vaulting forward. His foot snagged a root immovable as an anvil, and Tom went sprawling face and elbows first into mushy loam.

He was conscious of a thudding heart, a muddy face, and a drenched shirt. He rubbed his hands over his face and crawled the rest of the way forward.

Finally the voices were very near. He was on his belly, inching up the little slope behind which the torches had vanished. A man said, 'Buster's ready.' The dogs grum­bled; some of the men laughed. Coleman Collins said in a sharp voice, 'Take care with that fire, Root. You want to be able to see.'

'Umz plug whuzza right place?' asked someone in a thick voice — presumably Root, for Collins answered, 'I said it was, didn't I? Just watch your tinder. Be careful where you squirt that stuff! We want a blaze, not a conflagration.'

Crawling forward, so scared of being seen that his breath froze in his throat, Tom could now see the lights of the torches — or of Root's conflagration — reddening the trees before him.

'Herbie, you sure this is the set?' asked Mr. Peet.

'Of course this is it,' Collins said.

Herbie?

Tom crawled to the top of the rise and peeked around the trunk of a red maple set glowing by the fire.

Mr. Peet and Coleman Collins stood together beside a leaping fire tended by a thick-bodied man in a yellow T-shirt and baggy carpenter's pants — Root. His head was shaved nearly down to the skull. The others had jabbed their torches into the soft ground and were furiously digging. Dirt flew. 'There's your set right there,' said Collins, pointing to a grassy mound on the other side of the fire. In his lumberjack shut, his face ruddied by the fire, the magician looked extravagantly healthy, muscular as Mr. Peet. 'Where'd you get the dogs this time, Thorn?' he asked.

The man in the army jacket came from the other side of the mound, holding both black dogs by the chains around then — necks. 'Same old shit. Paid 'im fifty-five apiece — claims they're the strongest he had. Couldn't get no bulls.' Thorn's face had been battered into a Halloween jack-o'-lantern. 'Bulls is best, for this.'

'Bulldogs or terriers,' Collins said.

'Bulls is best,' Thorn repeated.

'Thorn, you're an idiot. Give me that bottle again.' Thorn sulkily fetched the whiskey from his pocket. Collins drank and passed the bottle to Mr. Peet. 'Those two will work out fine. I'm pleased. Now, give the chains to Root and help with the pit.'

'Yeah,' Thorn said. He swaggered away to do as he was told.

'Hey, let's send the little one in,' Root called.

'Jesus Christ,' one of the men shoveling dirt said. 'Why not give us a break, huh? Or come over here and shovel for yourself, shithead.'

'Now, . . . ' Mr. Peet said warningly but too late.

Root had wrapped the chains around a tree and was charging the man who held a shovel. The others stopped digging and watched the man plant his feet and swipe at Root with the flat of the shovel. Hit in the side, Root went down. 'Shithead,' the man said.

'Okay, Pease,' Mr. Peet said calmly. 'Root, just hold the dogs. It's too early to try them out. Keep that fire stoked up.'

'Fucking animal asshole,' muttered the one called Pease, taking up his shovel and digging so hard that dirt flew nearly all the way to Root.

Half an hour later, the four men digging had opened up a pit almost five feet deep and four feet long. Root sullenly jerked at the dogs' chains whenever he inexpertly tossed more wood on the fire. Tom watched all this, now and then nearly dozing, mystified. What was it the dogs were to be tried out on? What was the long trench for? It looked uncomfortably like a grave.

Finally the magician said, 'Let's get them stirred up. Seed, you and Rock go to work on the set for a while.'

'Yeah,' said one of the diggers, a fat bearded man who resembled a depraved Burl Ives. He grinned, showing a hockey player's gap where his front teeth should have been.

Seed sprang up out of the trench, followed by another man. They carried their shovels to the mound and immediately began pitching earth from it.

'Faster, faster,' ordered Mr. Peet. 'We want them to know you're there.'

'Shit, they hear us okay,' said Seed, displaying the gap in his teeth.

'You know how many there are, Herbie?' asked Rock.

'One is enough,' Collins answered. 'Look, let's get that other man out of the pit. Snail, you go over to the other side.'

Snail, Seed, Rock, Pease, Thorn, Root: were those names?

The one called Snail crawled from the pit, went to the mound, hefted his shovel and slammed the flat of the blade down onto the earth. 'Shake 'em up good,' he said, and began to pitch dirt as earnestly as Seed and Rock.

They resembled three monstrous dwarfs, these heavy-set men. Snail and Rock had vast tattooed biceps; and when Snail pulled off his shirt, Tom saw that tattoos blanketed his chest: a white skull with black eyeholes housed the tail of a glittering, scaly dragon with eagle's wings.

'Mr. Snail, move those wings for me,' ordered Cole Collins, and the tattooed man laughed and dug more ferociously.

'A goddamned hole,' Snail shouted. 'Here's one of the goddamned holes.'

Thorn jumped out of the pit, bellowing like a lunatic, and charged toward Snail; instead of attacking him, as Tom feared, jolted fully awake by the man's din, Thorn jabbed his shovel in the earth next to Snail and began to peel back the earth over the entrance to the burrow.

'Get that little one in there, Root,' said Mr. Peet.

'Wish we had a bull,' Thorn said from his jack-o'-lantern face. Root pulled the smaller dog up, untied its chain, and pointed it to the uncovered hole. 'Get in there, mutt,' Root said, but the dog needed no com­mand: it streaked into the hole.

'Now, get the other one ready,' said Mr. Peet. 'I'll bet anybody twenty it comes out in under a minute.' He looked at his watch, and Thorn said, 'Twenty.'

Snail's tattoos widened and trembled in the firelight. The effect was so distracting that it was a moment before Tom realized that he was laughing. 'Ground-pounder.'

'A minute,' Thorn said, shrugging his shoulders.

Yelps, growls, barks came from the hole. Then the sound of screaming that Tom had heard in the bedroom.

'Watch your tail, boy,' said Mr. Peet, and a second later the dog came boiling out of the hole. Bright red lines bisected its head.

'Twenty from Thorn,' said Mr. Peet. 'Send in the other one,' and Root positioned the second quivering dog. Pease and Seed, the fat one like Burl Ives, began scrabbling with their shovels on the top of the mound.

For hours it seemed — Tom lay at the base of the red maple, dozing off and waking to some new horror — the dogs nipped into the tunnels Pease and Seed uncovered in the 'set,' emerged whining and bleeding, were sent back in. Money flowed among the eight men, most of it going to Root, Mr. Peet, and Collins. During one of his spells of wakefulness Tom saw Collins grab a shovel from tattooed Snail and attack the 'set' as fiercely as any of the younger men. He realized that Collins was not limping, and was so tired he thought only that in front of these men he would not limp either. 'Paydirt! Paydirt!' the one called Rock kept screaming.

There was another thing, Tom told himself, something else you would not think to notice unless you looked at these men for a long time: they were all very white. Their skin looked compressed, like cheap unhealthy meat, smudgy; they were strong, but they were indoor men.

Indoors, late-night men toiling outside, the ferocity of their labor and their shouts, the guttering torches and the leaping fire, the yells and the exchanges of bills and the bloody dogs — this phantasmagoric scene unrolling before Tom sometimes seemed so unreal he thought he was back in his bed in the windowless room . . . then he was truly asleep, and dreamed that Del was lying on the little hill beside him, explaining things. 'Mr. Snail is the treasurer of a big corporation in Boston, Mr. Seed and Mr. Thorn are both lawyers, Mr. Pease and Mr. Root are major stockholders in U.S. Steel and race in the America's Cup every year — Mr. Peet is the United States Secretary of Commerce.'

'Get those tongs ready!' someone was shouting. 'Get hold of those goddamned tongs!'

Tom groaned and rolled over, brushing the bottom branches of the maple with his elbow; then he remem­bered where he was, and compressed himself down as small as he could and went back on his belly. His neck hurt, his knees ached, his head sparkled with pain; but as he looked down at the men, the dream stuck to him, and so he saw the Secretary of Commerce gripping the handles of the metal tongs, swearing at the corporation treasurer to back away. One of the major stockholders in U.S. Steel held a dog at the ready over the pit. A pumpkin-faced lawyer in an army jacket was yelling 'Gid 'im! Gid 'im!' Another lawyer waved a fistful of folded bills: deep in the mound, the second dog wailed like a soul tormented in hell.

'Soon,' said the Secretary, and the Boston treasurer crouched over, grinning tensely like an ape.

Then two shocking things happened, so close together they were nearly simultaneous. Spouting blood, a tor­tured dog windmilled out of the mound; a lawyer whose body was covered with a glittering, moving dragon tattoo took one look at it and raised his shovel over his head. Tom saw one front leg hanging by a bloody thread, ribs opened up to shine like painted matchsticks, and then the lawyer brought down the shovel and crushed the dog's head. The lawyer kicked the dog's body into the trees.

The second shocking thing, like the first, was a succes­sion of images so brightly colored they might have been a series of slides. A furry, stubby head wet with blood poked into visibility for a second; the Secretary of Commerce jabbed with the metal tongs, and all the financiers howled gleefully; the Secretary jerked his arms powerfully upward like a man making a home run in another language, and the metal bands of the tongs clasped the belly of a squalling, crazed, bleeding badger and carried it in a wide arc through the firelit air. The Secretary pivoted, whirling the heavy body in the tongs, and dropped the animal into the pit. The U.S. Steel stockholder loosed the foaming dog and it too went headfirst into the pit. Instantly the financiers began shouting out bets.

The bets, Tom suddenly knew, were on how long the badger would live.

The shouting men closed around the pit, passing money back and forth, and Tom could not see what was happening inside it. But he could imagine it, which was worse. At times, when a spray of blood flew up, one or another of the financiers backed away, cursing, and Tom saw rolling hair. The dragon bled on its iridescent scales; a florid rose bled on a bicep; miraculous blood appeared on a yellow T-shirt, dazzling and unexpected as stigmata.

After twenty minutes one man raised his arms and crowed. Money came to him in loud waves. Then there was only the sound of breathing, the ragged breathing of hard-worked men and the punctured, frothy breathing of a badly wounded dog. The Secretary of Commerce took a pistol from his pocket and fired it once into the pit.

Tom shuddered back, rustling along the ground like a leaf. 'All right. You've had your blood,' said Coleman Collins; but it was too late, because the magician was looking up the hill right into his eyes, and saying, 'There's another one for the pit. Go to sleep, boy.'

A thick, slobbering man spun around and ran toward him; and Tom passed out.

8

Go to sleep, boy. Tom found himself back on the train going north from Boston. Coleman Collins, not Del, sat beside him, saying, 'Of course, this isn't your train. This is Level One.'

'Trance,' Tom said. 'Voice.'

'That's right. Wonderful memory. While we're here, I want to thank you for all you've done for Del. He's needed someone like you for a long time.'

A wave of sick feeling, disguised as friendliness, flowed from the magician, and Tom knew he was in deeper trouble than any the troll-like men could have caused him.

'Would you like to see Ventriloquism? That's fun. I always enjoy Ventriloquism.' He smiled down at the boy as they swayed along in the crowded train. 'This is all very elementary, of course. I hope you'll stay long enough for me to show you some of the more difficult things. It's all within your power, I assure you.' 'We'll be with you all summer.' 'Two and a half months is not long enough, little bird. Not nearly. Now. Where should that voice come from? Up there, I fancy.' He lifted his distinguished face and nodded at a grille set in the car's ceiling.

Instantly a hysterical voice crackled out: 'EMER­GENCY! EMERGENCY! BRACE YOURSELVES AGAINST THE SEAT IN FRONT OF YOU! BRACE YOURSELVES. . . '

The magician was gone. A fat woman in the aisle beside Tom's seat shrieked; she had been holding a paper carton containing several cups of coffee. As she shrieked, the coffee sailed upward, spinning into the air.

Now many were shrieking. Tom folded his head down between his knees and felt hot coffee spattering his back. The jolt knocked him off the seat entirely, and the noise of the wreck was a nail driven into his eardrums. He could see the woman staggering backward down the aisle, her face caught in an expression between terror and dismay. The railroad car lifted its nose into the air and began to tilt sideways. 'They broke my leg!' a man yelled. 'Jeeesus!' His yell was the last thing Tom heard before the sound of an explosion going off loud as a bomb a short distance down the track. 'Light,' came the voice of the magician. A shattering burst of whiteness, caused by another explosion, flashed through the car. Inches from Tom's head, a Dixie cup shot up into flame. Tom batted it away, but could not see where it went. 'Jeesus!' screeched the man with the broken leg. The uptilted car swayed far over to the right and began to topple.

All about Tom, who was now lying faceup in the aisle, the burns on his back singing like an open wound, people groaned and screamed: the car sounded like a burning zoo.

He gripped one of the seat supports and thought: I'm going to die here. Didn't a lot of people die?

When the car struck the ground, the screams inten­sified, became almost exalted.

9

Tom opened his eyes. He was lying in the hollow where Pease and Thorn and the others had labored over their badger-baiting. Coleman Collins, looking ruddy and healthy and ten years younger in his outdoorsy clothes, took a pull off a bottle and winked at him from where he sat beside the shredded mound.

'That wasn't just magic,' Tom said.

'What is 'just magic'?' The magician smiled at him. 'I'm sure there is no such thing. But you went to sleep. I imagine that you were dreaming.' He lifted a knee and extended an arm along it. He looked like a scoutmaster having a chat around the fire with a favored boy.

'I was up there — ' Tom pointed. 'You said, 'All right. You've had your blood.' Then you saw me. And you said, 'There's another one to throw in the pit. Go to sleep, boy.''

'Now I know you are tired,' Collins said, leaning against what was left of the mound. 'You have had a very long day. I promise you, I never said any of those things.'

'Where are all the others?' Tom sat up and looked around the clearing. Firelight showed a mound of earth where the pit had been.

'There are no others. There is just you and me. Which is, I assume, what you wanted.'

'Mr. Peet,' Tom insisted. 'He was here. And a lot of others — with funny names, like a bunch of trolls. Thorn and Snail and Rock and Seed . . . You were all trying to get a badger to come out of its house. There were two dogs — Mr. Peet shot one of them.'

'Did he, now?' The magician shifted his position against the mound and looked indulgently toward Tom.

'I assumed that you followed me because you wanted to talk. You disobeyed me, that is true. But any good magician knows when to break the rules. And in doing so you demonstrated courage and intelligence, I thought — you were curious, you wanted to see what the terrain was like.'

Terrain meant more than the land they sat on. Tom nodded.

'I think also you must have read some of my posters — relics of my public career. Isn't that right?'

'I noticed them,' Tom admitted. He thought he trusted Coleman Collins less than anyone else on earth.

'You will hear all about it — this is to be the summer of my unburdening.' Collins drew up his knees and looked soberly at Tom over their tops, where he had knit his hands together. Suddenly he reminded Tom of Laker Broome. 'As for now, I want to say something about Del. Then there is a story I want you — only you — to hear. Then it will finally be your bedtime.

'My nephew has had an unsettled life. He was on the verge of flunking out of Andover when the Hillmans moved. Now, you may not think much of the Hillmans — you see, I am being very frank with you — but for all their faults, they want to protect Del. And he does need protection. Without a good anchor, without a Tom Flanagan, he will pound himself against the rocks. He needs all my help, all your help too. Watch out for him. But also watch him.'

'Watch him?'

'To make sure he does not go off the deep end. Del does not have your healthy relationship with the world.' He drew his knees in tighter. 'Del stole that owl from Ventnor School. Had you guessed?'

'No,' Tom said.

'I heard about the theft from the Hillmans. They know he took it, too. But they did not want him expelled from yet another school.'

'Another boy took it. Some kids saw him do it.'

'Del wanted another boy to take it. Del is a magician too: a better one than he knows, though nothing like the magician you could be. Del stole that owl, no matter whose hands were around it. Watch out for Del. I know my nephew.'

'That's plain crazy,' Tom said, though a tiny area of doubt had just opened up within him. 'And here's something else that's crazy — all that stuff about my being better than Del. Del is better than I'll ever be. Magic is all he really cares about.'

'He is better at things you will learn very quickly. But you have within you powers you know nothing of, my bird.' He looked at Tom with a kind of fatherly omni­science. 'You are not convinced. Would you like proof, before your story? You would?' He turned his head. 'There is a fallen log over there — see it? I want you to pick it up.' When Tom began to stand, he said, 'Stay where you are. Pick it up with your mind. I will help you. Go on. Try it.'

Tom saw the edge of the log just protruding into the clearing. It was one that Thorn had not thrown on the fire, perhaps three feet long, dry and gnarled. He thought of a pencil on his desk, jerking itself upward, at the end of one of Mr. Fitz-Hallan's classes.

'Are you afraid to try?' Collins asked. 'Humor me. Inside yourself, say, Log, go up. And then imagine it lifting. Please try. Prove me wrong.'

Tom wanted to say, I won't, but realized how childish it would sound. He closed his eyes and said to himself, Log, go up. He peeked: the log reassuringly sat on the grass.

'I didn't know you were a coward,' said the magician.

Tom kept his eyes open and thought about the end of the log rising. Still it did not move. Log, go up, he said to himself. Log, go up! The end of the log twitched, and he stared at Collins' amused face. 'A mouse?' said the magician. Up! Tom thought, suddenly full of rage, and knowing that it would not move. UP!

But the log obediently stood on end, as if someone had pulled a wire. UP! It rose and wavered in the air; then Tom felt a wave of helpless blackness invading his mind like nausea, and the log began to spin over and over, accelerating until it blurred. No. Enough, Tom said in his mind, and the log thumped back down on the grass. He looked at it in dumb shock. His eyes hurt; his stomach felt as though he had eaten spiders. He wanted to run — he feared that he would be sick. He heard handclaps, and saw that Collins was applauding. 'You did that,' Collins said, and Tom's mouth tasted black.

'I just gave you the tiniest nudge, remarkable boy. Now, listen to the story. One day in a forest, a sparrow joined another sparrow on a branch. They discussed sparrow matters for a time, brightly, inconsequentially, as sparrows do, and then the second sparrow said, 'Do you know why frogs jump and why they croak?' 'No. And I don't care,' said the first sparrow. 'After you know, you'll care,' his companion promised. And this is what he told him. But I shall tell it my way, not the sparrow's.'

Tom saw the log whirling wildly, sickly, in midair.

10

'The Dead Princess'

A long time ago, when we all lived in the forest and none of us lived anywhere else, a group of sparrows was flying across the deepest and darkest part of the wood, aimlessly flying far from their normal haunts until they began their search for food.

As sparrows do, they paid little attention to anything, and were content to wrangle and chatter with each other, zipping here and darting there, commenting. 'It's quiet,' said one sparrow, and another answered, 'Yes, but it was much quieter yesterday,' and another promptly dis­agreed — and soon they were all agreeing or disagreeing.

Finally they circled through the air above the trees, listening to see how quiet things really were, in order to argue about it more accurately. The sparrows were now, as they had not properly realized before, almost over the palace of the king who ruled all that part of the forest. And there was no noise at all.

Which was odd indeed. For if the forest was normally full of noises the sparrows had known all their lives, the palace was a virtual beehive — horses trampling in their stables, the dogs woofing in the courtyards, the servants gossiping in the open spaces. Not to mention the pots rattling in the kitchen, the banging from the palace workshops, the bing bing bing of the blacksmith . . . Instead of all these sounds the sparrows should have heard, only silence met their ears.

Now, sparrows are as curious as cats, so naturally they all flew down to have a look — they had forgotten all about their argument. Down they came, and down, and down, and still they heard no noise. 'Let's get away,' said one of the younger sparrows. 'Something terrible has hap­pened here, and if we get too close, it may happen to us as well.'

Of course no one paid any attention. Down they came, down, down, until they were within the walls of the palace. Some sat on the windowsills, some on the cob­blestones, some on the rain gutters, some on the stable doors; and the only sounds they heard were those they made themselves.

Then they saw why. Everything else in the palace was asleep. The horses slept in the stables, the servants slept leaning against walls, the dogs slept in the courtyards. Even the flies on the doorknobs slept.

'A curse, a curse!' shouted the young sparrow. 'Let us go, let us go now, or we shall be just like them.'

'Stop that, now,' said one of the oldest sparrows, for he had finally heard something. This was the faint sound of a human voice, and not just anybody's, but the king's. Woe is me, woe is me — that was what the king was saying to himself far up in one of the turrets, so despairingly that all of the sparrows immediately felt sad in sympathy.

Then another, very brave sparrow heard another sound. Someone was pacing up and down in the long building beside them. He slipped around the door to see who besides the king was left awake. The sparrow saw a long dusty room with an enormous table right in its center. Beams of light filtered down from the ranks of high windows, each falling in turn upon the back of a woman in a long rich gown who was slowly moving away from him. When she reached the rear of the dining room, for that was what the brave sparrow had entered, she turned about all unseeing and came back toward him. She wrung her hands together; she worked and knotted her brows. The sparrow's whole little heart went out to her, and he thought that if he could help this distraught beautiful lady in any way, he would do it on the spot. Of course, he knew that she was the queen — sparrows are intensely conscious of rank. When she saw him standing before the door, he cocked his head and looked at her with a glance so intelligent and kindly that she stopped in her tracks.

'Oh, little sparrow,' the queen said, 'if you only understood me.' The sparrow cocked his head even farther. 'If you understood me, I would tell you of how our daughter, Princess Rose, sickened and died. And of how her death took all the life from the palace — from our kingdom too, little sparrow. I would tell you of how all the animals first fell asleep, so soundly that we could not awaken them, and then of how all the people but the king and I succumbed to the same illness and fell asleep where they stood. And most of all, little sparrow, I would tell you of how the death of my daughter is causing the death of the kingdom, for as you see us now, we are surely all dying, every one, in palace and in forest, king and commoner, wolf and bear, horse and dog. Ah, I almost think you understand me,' she said, and turned her back on the sparrow and continued her sad pacing. The sparrow nipped around the heavy oaken door and joined his fellows. He whistled to them all to be quiet, and then told them exactly what the queen had said. When he had finished, one of the older sparrows said, 'We must do something to help.'

'Us? Us? Help?' the younger sparrows all began to twitter, hopping about in agitation. For it was one thing to witness interesting and entertainingly tragic events, an­other to try to do something about them.

'Of course we must help,' said the oldest sparrow.

'Help? Us?' the youngest sparrows twittered. 'What can we do?'

'There is only one thing we can do,' said the oldest sparrow. 'We must go to the wizard.'

Now, that really pitched them into consternation, and there was a lot of hopping about and quarreling. Even the youngest sparrows had heard of the wizard, but they had certainly never seen him. Besides that, the very mention of him frightened them. One thing everybody knew about the wizard was that while he was fair, he always made you pay for any favor he did you.

'It is the only thing,' said the oldest sparrow.

Where does he live? Is it far? Can we find him? Does he still live? Will we get lost? A thousand chirping questions.

'I once saw where he lived,' said the oldest sparrow. 'And I believe that I can find it again. But it is a long way away, clear across the forest and on the other side.'

'Then let us follow you now,' said the brave sparrow, and they all lifted up and circled away from the dreadful quiet of the palace.

For hours they flew over the thick trees and wide meadows of the forest, over foaming rivers and wandering valleys. Over the caves of bears and the dens of foxes, over hollow logs where ants dozed, over packs of wild ponies asleep on rock cliffs.

Finally they saw a little curl of smoke coming up through the heads of the trees, and the oldest sparrow said, 'That is the wizard's house.' And they began to circle down, down, down through the trees. And finally saw a nondescript little wooden house with two little windows set beside the front porch.

One by one the sparrows landed on a branch outside one of the windows; when the branch was so full of sparrows it bent, they landed on the next higher; and so on, until sparrows filled the entire tree. Then they all began to sing at once.

The door of the little wooden cottage opened, and the wizard stepped out into the light. He was an old, old man, with skin the color of milk. The dark robes he wore were covered with the moon and stars; once they had been impressive, but now the robes were so threadbare you could see the fabric right through the stars. He looked up at the tree with his clear old eyes and said, 'I see that the sparrows have come to visit. What do they want, I wonder?'

Then the oldest sparrow looked at the brave sparrow, and this fellow spoke up — his voice may have trembled, because the wizard frightened him, and now that they were actually here he wished they were somewhere else, but he told the wizard the entire story, just as the queen had told it to him.

'I see,' the wizard said. 'And you wish me to give life back to Princess Rose?'

'That is right,' said the sparrows.

'It is not difficult,' said the wizard, 'but you must agree to sacrifice something before I will do it.'

Then all the sparrows began to chirp and protest.

'Would you give up your wings?'

Another loud wave of twittering. 'No, that is impossi­ble,' said the oldest sparrow. 'Without our wings we could not fly.'

'Would you give up your feathers?'

The sparrows' noises were even louder after this ques­tion. 'No, we cannot,' said the oldest sparrow. 'Without our feathers, we would freeze to death in the winter.'

'Would you give up your song?'

The sparrows were quiet for a moment, and then burst out louder than before. 'Yes,' the sparrows said. 'That will be our sacrifice.'

'It is done,' said the wizard. 'Return to the palace.'

As one bird, their nervousness giving them added speed, they lifted off the tree and wheeled about over the wizard's cottage and began the long flight across the forest.

Hours later, when they reached the palace, all was as it had been — all the inhabitants of the palace save the queen and king still slept. The sparrows looked at each other uneasily, wondering if the wizard would take their sacri­fice but give nothing in return.

Then, from down under the palace, they heard a dusty little voice calling: Momee! Daddee! Momee! Daddee!

And a great wooden door set right down into the ground opened up, and a little girl wandered out, rubbing her eyes.

So the horses woke up in the stables, the dogs woke up in the courtyards, the flies spun awake off the doorknobs, the servants stirred and yawned; and in the deep forest, foxes too yawned and stretched, bears shook their mas­sive heads, wolves stirred beneath trees. At that instant every sparrow in the palace began to feel a transformation within himself: just as if a cold hand had thrust itself down in their innards and were moving bits and pieces about. Their minds grew fuzzy; their bodies plumped out, altered in substance, their beaks softened and spread, their feet grew.

And instead of birds, now there were frogs on the windowsills, frogs on the railings, frogs hopping on the stones.

Fortunately the king witnessed this transformation and understood what had happened. He raised his arms in thanksgiving and said that from that day forth all frogs in his kingdom would be protected, for once they had been sparrows who had gone to the wizard to return the life of his daughter.

''And that is why frogs croak, and why they hop,' said one sparrow to another on a branch in the wood. 'They were once birds, but were tricked by a great wizard, and now they are still trying to sing and still trying to fly. But they can only croak and hop.''

11

'Well, that's your second bedtime story,' the magician said. 'Now I am afraid I must leave you. You'll be able to find your way back to bed soon enough, I'm sure.' He began to stand up on the matted grass, but the expression on Tom's face stopped him. 'What are you thinking, Tom?'

'On Registration Day in our school,' Tom began, his face flushed angrily, 'the headmaster kept Del and another boy in his office. He told each of them a kind of fairy tale. You knew about that.'

The magician stood, put his hands in the small of his back, and stretched from the balls of his feet. 'Think about one thing, Tom. What would you give to save a life? Your wings, or your song? Would you be a sparrow . . . or a frog?'

He grinned dazzlingly at the boy, lifted both arms in the air, and vanished.

'No!' Tom yelled, and jumped forward — on hands and knees, he scrabbled to the spot where Collins had been standing, and felt only grass and earth. He looked wildly around, expecting to see Collins running through the forest, but saw only the dying fire and the trees. Far off in the woods he saw one of the lights burning over an impromptu stage. There was no sign of Collins. Tom let himself down on the coarse grass, groaning: his mind spun. A dead Rose, sparrows into frogs, the old wizard, what he had done with the log . . . While you are here I am your parent.

Tom picked himself up off the grass; he supposed he could stumble back to the house. But with the first step he took, the forest around him seemed to melt.

At first he thought he was going to lose consciousness again, and find himself in the wrecked train with screams and the rending of metal thick and palpable in the air about him —

and the coffee scorching his back —

(Didn't stain your clothes, all that coffee flying about?)

and he realized that the magician had known at the Hilly Vale station that he was going to put him on the wrecked train (Not just a little spilled coffee, a little bump on the tracks, a little messy commotion?), and in the second before the forest disappeared as finally as Coleman Collins, Tom had time to think that Collins had somehow caused that wreck in order to put him inside it six hours later.

This is Level One. Any good magician knows when to break the rules.

He could have screamed as loudly as any poor soul on the train, but his fear pinned his screams to his tongue. The trees had blurred like watercolors held under a tap; everything slid and dissolved into a pane of meltingly pale green. Green mist enveloped him, abstract and cool, and he felt as though he were falling from an airplane.