Shadowland

'God, I don't just trust you,' Tom said. 'I — '

Rose was suddenly upon him. Her face came down over his, blotting out the sky and the brilliant stars. Her mouth swam over his, and her teeth took his lips. Rose's legs nestled his, her breasts plumped against his chest. Tom put his hand in her hair and gave himself over to the kiss. His surprised erection grew straight into the softness of her belly; he groaned into her mouth, smelling a faint perfume and the fragrance of clean hair, tasting what she was. She was the girl in the window: it was knowledge he had not permitted himself before, but now he held two Rose Armstrongs, the girl in the green dress and the unattainable staggering girl who had raised her arms and shown herself to a frightened boy freezing in a wintry sleigh.

'You're going to break my back,' Rose said into his mouth.

He put his hands again in her hair.

'We can't.'

'We can't what?' Tom mumbled.

'We can't make love. Not here.'

That nearly made him explode. Not here! He groaned again, jerked in an instant from a world in which he had feared he might be frightening or disgusting her with the evidence of his desire into one in which she could casually allude to its fulfillment. 'Where?' he said, his voice out of control.

'Don't growl, I'm just barely . . . If you knew . . . '

'Oh, Jesus, I know,' he said, and found her mouth again.

'It's not fair, is it?' She pulled her face away from his: in compensation, her hips tipped toward him. 'Oh, you're so beautiful.'

'Where?' he repeated.

'Nowhere. Not now. I have to go back and see him, Tom. And besides, I . . . '

She was a virgin. 'I am too,' he said. 'Oh, my God.' He pulled her tighter into him. 'I want you so much.'

'Pretty Tom.' She'grazed over his cheek, but she already felt distant. So much had happened to Tom, so many milestones had gone by in a blur, that he had no idea of what to do next. Despite what he had hinted to Del, Jenny Oliver and Diane Darling had stopped short even of French kissing. Rose's belly was somehow mirac­ulously accommodating and accepting his erection.

'Pretty Tom,' she repeated. 'I don't want to be unfair to you. I want you, too.' Her arms went around his neck, and he thought heaven had opened and taken him in. 'I'm just afraid . . . '

'It's okay,' Tom said. 'Oh, Rose.'

'The shadow of the boathouse,' Rose said, and pushed him back with her body. They stumbled awkwardly back a few steps.

'There aren't any shadows, it's night,' Tom said, and it seemed so funny to him that he laughed out loud.

'Dummy.' She pinned him against the coarse wood and opened him up with her mouth again. She muttered, 'Too bad I didn't drop you in the water, then you'd have to take off your clothes.'

She was a cloud blessedly made of flesh, softly pillowing every part of him. Sexual urgency blasted him.

'It's okay, Tom,' she whispered right against his ear. 'I know. It's okav. Go on.'

One of her hands left his head and lighted on his trousers. 'Oh, no,' he said. And she slipped her hand a layer closer to him. His whole body shook. Rose's fingers twined in, cupped and held — he felt a yard long. She said, 'Oh, Tom,' and he hugged her as close as he could and felt everything in him jump, an explosion seeming to happen in his spine and his head as well as where Rose was, and she pulled, and he thought he was turning inside-out. 'Dear Tom,' she said, and nuzzled his cheek, and he turned inside-out again. 'We really shouldn't have done this,' she said into his cheek, and he laughed until her hand left him. 'Now you're a real mess.'

'Thank God.'

'You must think I'm terrible. I just could feel you . . . and you were moaning like that . . . I don't want you to think I'm . . . '

'I think you're amazing. Beautiful. Astonishing. In­credible. Fantastic.' His heart was still thrumming. 'You're even generous. I hardly know what happened to me.'

'Well,' she said, and her expression made him laugh again.

'How are you?'

'Fine. I don't know. Fine.'

'Sometime . . . '

'Sometime. Yes. But don't start again.' She stepped back on the sand.

'I love you,' he said. 'I'm just absolutely in love with you.'

'Beautiful Tom.'

'Not grumpy Tom.'

'I hope not.' Rose lifted her hands, bobbed her head self-deprecatingly. 'I have to go. Really. I'm sorry.'

'So am I. I love you, Rose.' Tom was just beginning to return to earth. She blew him a kiss. Walked away down the beach, stopped to take off the high-heeled shoes, and blew him another kiss before she slipped into the woods bordering the lake.

'Hey!' he called out. 'We could go back together! I have to . . . ' But she was gone. Tom, still dazed, looked back at the boathouse and then followed her footprints toward the end of the beach. He remembered that he had to sleep in the woods that night, and wondered if he would ever find his way back to Del.

What could he say to Del? What Rose had done for him seemed an act of almost godlike charity.

When he reached the end of the beach, he took off his clothes and stepped into the cool water. 'I love Rose Armstrong,' he said to himself, and went in up to his neck. The moonlight made a path straight toward him, rippling when he moved. When he put his face in the water, he remembered what he had seen at the bottom of the boathouse, the severed head of a horse, tipping over slowly in murk.

Tom got out of the lake and dried himself hurriedly on his shirt. Then he brushed sand from his feet, got back into his trousers, pushed his feet into his loafers, and walked back into the woods, carrying his damp shirt under his arm.

6

Six lights: and there was the first, just ahead, near the place where Rose had enacted the scene from 'The Goose Girl.' After that Collins had simply dumped the horse's head into the water to rot. The magician would treat Del and Rose and himself the same way, Tom knew, if he had to. Now, if only he could make Del see that they had to escape before the climax Collins was planning for them. Tom knew in his bones that no matter what Collins said, he would not surrender his place in the magicians' world, whatever that was, to a fifteen-year-old boy. He would be more likely to do whatever he had done to Speckle John — and that, Tom knew in the same in­stinctive fashion, would not be told until the day of the performance.

Two. The second light, piercing a curtain of leaves. Daydreaming about Rose Armstrong, Tom parted the branches, stepped over a mulchy, rotting log; stopped. In the middle of the lighted clearing stood a huge man covered with fur. Oh his shoulders sat the giant head of a wolf. Tom stared at this hieratic figure in pure shock. He was not hypnotized, he was awake and his senses were all functioning. The man-wolf, more than anything else he had witnessed, seemed the embodiment of magic-magic personified, a guardian. Tom saw that the fur was sewn — together pelts. The man-wolf raised an arm and pointed deeper into the woods. Tom ran, plunging sideways into the trees until the man-wolf could not see him, and then slowly worked forward.

Three. Tom crept from tree to tree, trying to be noiseless. When he was close enough, he peered around a gigantic oak and looked over the marshy platform of earth beneath the light. Cautiously he stepped onto the spongy ground. The forest around him began to melt. 'No!' he shouted. And tried to jerk himself backward to escape the transformation. His back struck something metal. In an instant the air cleared: he was in a parking lot. A wide, low city lay around him in early morning, with soft humid air and a rising sun beginning to tint the buildings to his left. Was this where he was to be welcomed? None of the few cars in the lot looked familiar — though not new, they were newer than any cars he had ever seen.

'Where?' he said aloud — there were no landmarks. Then through the sun-tipped buildings to his right he saw a line of pale blue. An ocean. California? Florida?

He stepped up on one of the concrete dividers. The metal thing he had banged into was a parking meter. What could come to him here, in a city?

Then he noticed the battered green car before him. A series of drops hung at the bottom of the doorframe, filled, and splashed on the concrete. The drops were red. Tom looked at the driver's window, and saw a man's head propped against the glass. Curling blond hair flattened against the window. The red drops were the man's blood. Tom nearly threw up. He could not look at those drops gathering and falling. He jumped off the divider and walked fearfully around to face the front of the car. Florida plates. Was he supposed to see the man's face? Through the windshield he saw broad unknown features. It was the face of a man in middle age. Some stranger, some visitor. Where his parting should have been, his head was horrible. Then for an instant he thought lie knew the face — he felt small and helpless, turned away in moral anguish, rejecting the terrible half-familiarity of the dead man's features.

An old man in a Harry Truman shirt and a baseball cap was at the far end of the lot, walking toward him and the green car. 'Mister!' Tom shouted, and the old man peered up at him in fright. 'Hey . . . I need . . . '

The old man was waving his fists at him, and the revulsion and disgust and fear on the old man's face made Tom step backward. The old man screamed something at him, and Tom turned around and ran.

When he reached the end of the lot and was just about to pound along the sidewalk, he felt like he had fallen over a cliff: his legs went out from under him, the city whisked away, and he rolled over onto wet leaves. It was night again, and the air smelled different. He was back in the woods. When he picked himself up he saw that he was on the other side of the marshy clearing. He had to go on.

Not Marcus — that was not lazy, cheerful Marcus slumped in the green car. That man was too fat, too old. He shook his head, not believing it but knowing that the man had been Marcus. A moment later he turned away from the empty clearing.

A worn little path ted toward the fourth light; roots stubbed his feet, black arms reached toward him. The woods now were filled with gibbering and leering faces. A branch rustled, and an eye winked at him — Then fireflies, a series of little eyes, danced up and whirled around. Between these flickerings, darting observations, he saw the next light.

Four. Only two more to go.

Tom approached the light nearly on tiptoe. He remem­bered: The torch was hung over a wide fiat shelf of rock, the most stagelike of all the little arenas in the woods. Here it was where Rose had enacted the fable about the beginning of all stories on their first night in Shadowland.

Here too something waited for him.

He crept toward the rock shelf. Yes, someone waited for him — he caught a glimpse through the branches of a cannonball head. Snail; or Thorn, with his Halloween face. Tom edged sideways, trying to see the face. A red ear came into sight, pink flesh under a stubbly haircut. At last he saw the rest of the ponderous, studying face.

Oh, God.

He stepped on a stick, and it snapped as loudly as a bone. Dave Brick lifted his head and uncrossed his legs. He was sitting on a metal school chair. 'Tommy?' he said; his voice was plaintive and lost. 'Please, Tommy.'

Tom stepped out onto the rock. Brick sat facing him twelve feet away, wearing the old tweed jacket Tom had lent him. 'You left me, Tommy,' Dave Brick com­plained. 'You chose flight. You should go back and find me.'

'I wish,' Tom said. 'But it's too late now.'

'I'm still there, Tommy. I'm waiting. But you chose wings. Go back and find me. You saved a bass fiddle and some magic tricks. Now it's my turn.' Brick sounded forlorn and slightly peevish.

'It's too late,' Tom said. He thought he might be losing his mind; thought of his mind giving up and walking away.

'You can do magic. Save me. I want to be saved, Tommy. Something fell on me . . . and somebody hit me . . . and Mr. Broome told me not to move . . . ' Brick looked ready to cry; then he was crying.

'Oh, don't,' Tom said, 'I can't take it. I can't handle it. It's too much.'

'Del took the owl,' Brick said through his tears. 'I saw. He made everything happen. Ask him. After you go back and save me, Tommy. It's all his fault, Tommy. Because you're supposed to get the owl chair. Ask him.'

'You're not Dave Brick,' Tom said. There were wrinkles in the face; the hands were huge and powerful. He ran across the edge of the slab, and the thing in the chair began to howl. 'You can be saved, Tommy! He can save you! Like you can save me!'

Tom ran from the voice deep into the forest. He was crying himself now, whether from shock or outrage or horror he did not know. Was Coleman Collins telling Rose about this right now, chortling? Or had she known it was going to happen when she blew him a kiss? No — that could not be true. Running, he grazed a tree, staggered and stopped. Where was he? Dave Brick's look-alike howled far off to his left.

Tom struck out blindly through the moonlit forest, going in the direction where the trees were least dense. He still saw faces in the patterns of the branches, but now they looked at him in horror. Leaving Dave Brick behind, he had become a monster.

Five. There it was, just as he had known it would be. A flaring torch, not an electric light; not the same fifth light, but the one he was supposed to find. He felt like crying again. Then he had a premonition. He would see Rose standing on the dark grass, petting a wolf . . . Rose with her teeth sharpened . . .

All those nightmares, back at school, all those dreadful visions: they had come from him. Beginning in him, born in him, they had spread out to infect everyone he knew. Even back then, when he had thought magic was a few deft card tricks, he had been on his way here. The torch flared, visible between giant black growths. Tom shud­dered and stepped forward.

First he saw the dead wolf. The sword wound in its belly gaped. Tom suddenly smelled mustard flowers, smelled Rose's faint perfume lacing delicately through. The wound in the wolfs belly gaped because the wolf had been nailed to the tree by its paws, and gravity was trying to haul it earthward. It hung just below the torch. 'Rose . . . ' he said. 'Please . . . '

A man in black stepped out of the woods. Black cape, black hat shielding his face. He carried a bloodied sword and pointed it across twenty feet of open space at Tom's chest.

Have you worlds within you?

'No.' He did not want these worlds.

Do you want dominion?

'No.'

He saw the treasure within you, child.

'And he hated it.'

Honor the Book.

'I don't even know it.'

You belong to the Order.

'I don't belong to anything.' Tom feared that the man with the invisible face would run him through, but instead he said, You know what you are, child.

The sword burst into flame. The man swung it to one side and pointed the way he must go. The way led straight to the sixth light, now extinguished.

7

In the dark glade Del lay curled on the ground in his sleeping bag. His hands pillowed his head. When his own sleeping bag was unrolled and he had slipped in, Tom lay on the ground, feeling every hump and depression fail to fit his body. He heard a cricket's chirp-chirp, a sound of mechanical and idiot joy. Tom rolled on his back, adjusting his body to avoid the most prominent bumps, and looked up at a full moon. It looked damaged, a battered old hull. You know what you are. He turned his head, and his eyes found a tree split in half by lightning.

Del stirred and groaned.

Help me, Rose. Get me out of this.

8

An animal was breathing on him, bathing his face in warm foul air. He shuddered into wakefulness; the animal retreated. Tom could smell its fear of him. Now it was hours later: the moon was gone. He could see only the white oval of Del's face, ten feet away. But though he could see nothing, he felt around him the presence of a hundred alien lives — animal lives. In the invisible trees was a drumfire of wingbeats. 'No,' he whispered. He closed his eyes. 'Go away.' Something rustled toward him. No fear came from it, only a cold self-possession. In the invisible trees, the hundreds of birds moved.

You know what you are, boy.

Tom shook his head, clamped his eyes shut.

There are treasures within you.

He tried to stop his ears.

What is the first law of magic?

The snake waited patiently for him to answer. He would not.

We have no doubts about you, boy.

Tom shook his head so hard his neck hurt.

You will learn everything you need to know.

Then something else approached, some animal he could not identify. The snake-furled rapidly away, and Tom clamped his eyes shut even more firmly. He did not at all want to see it — the same searching, grasping feeling came from it as from the little figure down on Mesa Lane, back at the start of everything. This animal had about it an air of irredeemable wickedness; not cool and insinuating and impersonal like the snake, it was deeply evil. But it spoke in a thin and graceful voice which hid a hint of a chuckle. It was a mad voice, and the animal was no animal, but whatever the man with the sword had been pretending to be.

You will betray Del.

'No.'

You will stay here forever, and drive Del away.

'No.'

You are welcomed, boy.

At once all the birds left the trees. The noise was huge and rushing, almost oceanic. Tom covered his face: he thought of them falling on him, picking him to ribbons of flesh. Del sobbed in his sleep. Then the birds were gone.

Tom rocked himself down into his bag.

9

When he woke up, it was with a realization. If Rose had been right about the date, his mother must have had his letter for at least a few days. Very soon it would be time to run. He rolled over and saw Del sitting on the grass at the far side of the glade, leaning against a tree. 'Good morning,' Tom said.

'Morning. Where did you go last night? I want you to tell me.'

'I just walked around. I got lost for a while.'

'You didn't see my uncle.'

'No. I didn't. I told you.'

Del shifted and rubbed his hand over damp grass. 'I don't suppose anything happened to you last night. I mean . . . anything like he was telling us about?'

'Did it happen to you? Were you welcomed?'

'No,' Del said. 'I wasn't.'

'I wasn't either,' Tom said. 'It was probably the dullest night of my life.'

'Yeah, me too.' Del beamed back at him. 'But I thought I heard something — really late, it would have been. A big noise, like a billion birds taking off at once.' He looked shyly at Tom. 'So maybe I was welcomed? Maybe that was it?'

'Let's go brush our teeth,' Tom said. 'There'll be food back at the house.'

Tom put on his shirt, which was wrinkled as a relief map. They rolled up their sleeping bags and left them in the glade.

'You look different,' Del said.

'How?'

'Just different. Older, I guess.'

'I didn't get much sleep.'

They were walking through the woods, going beneath big high-crowned trees. In minutes they reached the clearing where the man with the sword had told him that he knew what he was.

'Maybe we'll see Rose today,' Del said.

'Maybe.' Tom walked straight through the clearing toward the barely visible path, no more than a few trampled weeds, which led to the rock shelf.

'Tom, I'm sorry I got so mad at you. I thought you were trying to ruin things — you know. That was nuts. I'm really sorry.'

'It's okay.' Tom pushed aside ferns and went back into deep woods.

After a while Del spoke again. 'You know, I think we've been here a lot longer than it seems. He did that once to me before.'

'Yeah, I think so too.'

'The sun's in a different position. Isn't that neat? It's like he can move the sun.'

'Del, I have a headache.'

'Oh, that's probably why you look different. Look, what did you think of Rose? I know you only met her once, but what did you think? I hope you liked her. I think you did.'

'I liked her,' Tom said. This was unbearable. He thought of a way to stop Del talking about Rose. He turned around on the narrow indistinct path. Now they were within sight of the rock shelf. Spangled pale light fell on them. Del looked up at him, purged of his doubts and friendly as a puppy. 'I want to ask you something,' Tom said.

'About Rose? You can be my bes.t man, if that's what you want.'

'That time you broke your leg. That was the time you were here longer than you thought?' *

'How did you guess that?' Del looked at him in amazement. 'Yes. You're right.'

'Can you remember anything about what happened? When Bud came for you?'

Del's amazement altered to perplexity. 'Well, it's like I

was asleep for a long time or something. Why do you want

to know about that? Sometimes I remember little pieces

of what happened — little things, like you remember

dreams.'

Tom waited.

'Well, like, I remember Bud arguing with Uncle Cole. That's mainly it.'

'Arguing about you?'

'Not really. Bud wanted me to come home right away, I remember that. And Bud won. I did go home with him. But I can remember Uncle Cole sort of taunting him. He said he hoped Bud wasn't waiting to be included in my will. I know that was a terrible thing to say, but he was mad, Tom. That's about it. Except . . . well, I can remember Bud sitting on one end of the living room and Uncle Cole sitting on the other end. I must have been lying on my side of the couch. They were just staring at each other. It was like they were fighting without words. Then my uncle said, 'All right. Take him, you old woman. But he'll be back. He loves me.' And Bud went upstairs to get my stuff. When he came back down, we all went out to the car, and Bud said, 'We don't want any repeat performances, Mr. Collins.' My uncle didn't say anything.'

''No repeat performances.''

'Right.' With the light falling on him in disks and shafts, Del seemed a part of the forest, camouflaged to blend in as easily as a squirrel. 'But that was silly. I was never going to break my leg again. I guess Bud was being extra careful.'

'Okay,' Tom said. He began to walk toward the rock ledge.

'I sure wonder if we'll see Rose today,' Del said behind him.

You will betray Del: that had already happened. The rest of it, Tom swore, never would.

TWO

Flight

1

Shadowland's windows reflected the sun. Milky soap bubbles between the flagstones picked up the brilliant light. Del pushed open the sliding windows, and the two boys walked into the living room. Grooves in the carpet were vacuum-cleaner tracks; a smell of air freshener and furniture polish lingered. The ashtrays sparkled. Tom felt immediately that they were alone in the house. It felt empty and up for sale, open for viewing.

'Isn't this a beautiful place?' Del said as they walked through to the hall. More furniture polish. The banister gleamed. 'I almost think . . . '

'What?'

'That I'd be happy here. That I could live here. Like him. And just work on magic. Go into it deeper and deeper. Never perform, just get it perfect. It's really pure.'

'I see what you mean,' Tom said. 'You think break­fast is in the dining room?'

'Let's see, master.'

Del chirpily crossed the hall and opened the door to the dining room. Two places had been laid on a vast ma­hogany table. A senes of covered serving dishes sat on a sideboard. There and on the table, brilliant freesias lolled in vases.

'It sure is,' Del said. 'Wow. Let's see what we have here.' He raised one cover after another. 'Ah, eggs. Bacon and sausages. Toast in the toast rack. Kidneys. Chicken livers. Hash-browns. I guess you could call that breakfast.'

'I guess you could call it six breakfasts.'

They piled food on their plates and sat, on Tom's part a little self-consciously, at the immense table. 'This is wonderful,' Del said, beginning to attack his food. 'Some coffee?'

'No, thanks.'

'It's like being a king, but better. You don't have to go out and tax the masses, or whatever kings do. But I guess he is a king, isn't he — from what he was saying yester­day?'

'Yeah.'

'You really don't want it, do you?' Del asked shyly.

'No, I don't. You're welcome to it.'

'And I wouldn't be alone, like he is. I mean, I wouldn't have to be alone.'

'I have a headache,' Tom interrupted. 'The kidneys seem to be making it worse.'

'Oh, I'm sorry,' Del blurted. 'Tom, I feel like I have so much to apologize for. I guess I got a little crazy. I know there was no reason to be jealous, but he was spending so much time with you. But that just means that you'll be a fantastic magician, doesn't it? I'll always want your help, Tom. I know he chose me, and all that, but . . . well, I was thinking you could have a wing of this house all your own, and we could do tours together, just like he did with Speckle John.'

'That would be good,' Tom said. He pushed his plate away. 'Del, just be careful. Everything isn't settled yet.' He could not talk to Del about escape while Del was mentally crowning him kinglet.

'We'll have to pick new names. Have you thought about that yet?'

'Del, we don't know what's going to happen yet.' Del looked sulky for a moment. 'All I'm saying is, take it slow. There's a lot we have to find out yet.'

'Well, that's true,' Del said, and went back to work on his eggs.

Tom plunged in deeper. 'I never asked you this before. How did your parents die?'

Del looked up, startled. 'How? Plane crash. It was a company plane. My father was flying it — he had a pilot's license. Something happened.' Del set down his fork. 'They couldn't even have a funeral because the crash was a kind of explosion — there wasn't anything left. Just some burned — up parts of the plane. And my father put in his will that there wasn't to be any kind of memorial service. They were just. . . gone. Just gone.' He rattled the fork against his plate.

'Where were you? How old were you?'

'I was nine. I was here. It was during the summer. I was in a boarding school in New Hampshire then, and it was a rotten hole. I knew I was going to flunk out after that. And I did. If Uncle Cole hadn't been so good to me, I probably would have . . . dropped dead. I don't know.' He looked uncertainly up at Tom, who had his chin propped in his hands. 'Uncle Cole kept me together that summer.'

'Why didn't you live with him after that?'

'I wanted to, but my father's will said I had to live with the Hillmans. My father didn't know Uncle Cole very well. I guess he didn't trust him. You can imagine what bankers think about magicians. Sometimes I had to really beg my father to let me come here in the summer. In the end, he always let me, though. He always gave me what I wanted.'

'Yeah,' Tom said. 'Mine did too.'

After a time Tom said, 'I think I'll go lie down or something. Or take a walk by myself.' 'I'm really tired too. And I want to take a bath.' 'Good idea,' Tom said, and both boys left the table.

Del went upstairs, and Tom went back into the living room. He sat on the couch; then he lay down and deliberately put his feet on it. A water pipe rattled in the wall. The big house, so flawlessly cleaned and polished, seemed vacated; waiting. If he dropped a match and burned the carpet, would the carpet instantly restore itself? It felt like that — alive. His feet would never dirty the fabric of the couch. And Del wanted to live here; in his imagination, he already ruled Shadowland.

Tom jumped off the couch and ran up the stairs. The bed had been folded down for a nap. He threw his clothes on it and went into the bathroom to shower.

The cold sparkling tub said: You can't.

The fresh towel said: We will beat you.

A new tube of toothpaste on the sink said: You will be ours:

After he dressed in fresh clothes, Tom dropped his stiff underpants into the wastebasket and covered them with balled-up sheets of paper from the desk. This minimal act of defiance cheered him. At least a few inches of the house were less immaculate. He left the room. Through the big windows in the hall he looked down at the boat house: Rose in her green dress and high heels. If he looked different, it was because of the astonishing thing that had happened there, not because of the magical hoops he had been put through on his way back to the clearing.

He could feel the house around him like a skin. Without hearing a single noise, he knew that Del was already in his bed, nearly asleep, a dot of warmth in the cold polished perfection. If Rose Armstrong were in the house, he would feel her like a fire.

Tom left the window and went downstairs. It seemed to him that he could visualize every inch of the house, every curve of the stair posts, every watermark in the kitchen sink.

He would not stay in this house a day longer than he had to.

He could see it bare of furniture, stripped to walls and floors, gleaming with new paint: awaiting its new owner. And he thought that Shadowland, an ugly name for a house, was anywhere secretive and mean, anywhere that deserved shadows because the people there hated light. Shadowland implied dispossession. And Coleman CoUins seemed a man lost within his own powers, a shadow in a shadow world, insubstantial. An old king who knew he would have to suffer at the hands of his successor.

2

At least that is what the thirty-six-year-old Tom Flanagan told me — he would not have used those phrases at fifteen, and I am more or less improvising on his words as it is, but the fifteen-year-old boy who stood at the bottom of the staircase and felt the house claiming him experienced the despair and pity that the adult man described to me. For he knew that he had been elected, though he had refused it; he knew that he was to be the new King of the Cats, though he would refuse that too, if he were able. And the adult Tom told me that at fifteen he had known that the Florida parking lot in which he had seen a battered car containing a dead man was the truest image of Shadowland. He could not get that picture out of his head.

3

So he left the bottom of the stairs and aimlessly went down the hall toward the front door. It was not locked. In a dazzle of sunlight, Tom let himself out onto the top step. The bricks shone like freshly polished cordovans. Squinting, Tom went down to the asphalt. Water lay in slanting streaks on the drive.

What would happen if he were to walk up the drive and take a look at the gate? A grown man couldn't get through the bars, but he and Del and Rose could do it easily. From there they could walk to Hilly Vale in less than an hour, through the woods and fields if they had to. Maybe the physical act of leaving Shadowland would be the simplest aspect of their escape; persuading Del would be the hardest. But Rose could do that, he realized. Hot sun warmed his shoulders, the top of his head. Del would listen to Rose.

The drive curved up around the bank of the hill. Halfway up, he could see the tops of the gateposts.

Why do you light up the forest like that?

So I can see what's coming and what's going. And what big eyes you have, Grandmother.

Through trees he could see the brick wall fanning out from the gateposts. They might even be able to get over that, if he hoisted Del on his shoulders. He walked closer, and saw that the bars in the gate were about nine inches apart. It would be easy to squeeze through an opening like that. And if men were chasing them, they would have to stop to punch the code to open the gates.

He went up to the gates. The spikes on top of each bar looked more than ornamental. And the brick wall, he could now see, was topped with thick jagged pieces of glass embedded in concrete. Barbed wire snaked over the glass. So it had to be the gate. He looked through it at the narrow brown dirt road which would lead them down to Hilly Vale.

Whenever you're ready, Rose, he thought, and put his arm experimentally through the bars.

'What do you think you're doing?' a thick voice shouted behind him.

Tom jumped — he thought he must have gone a foot into the air — and turned around, unsuccessfully trying not to look scared. Thorn and Snail came lounging out of the trees. They looked more than ever like dwarfs. Thorn wore a dark blue hooded sweatshirt covered with stains. He drained the last of a beer bottle and tossed it into the woods behind. Snail wore an ordinary gray sweatshirt. The sleeves had been cut off, and his tattoos showed on the thick pasty arms like brilliant medals.

'I asked, what the hell are you doing?' Thorn said. 'You don't go out there. Nobody goes out there.' His jack-o'-lantern face, Tom saw, was the result of surgery. Welts of scar surrounded the eyes and mouth.

'I wasn't going out. I wasn't doing anything,' Tom said. The two men came up to the edge of the drive and stopped. Snail put his hands on his hips. The gray sweatshirt bulged across his chest and belly.

'La-di-da,' Thorn said. Snail tittered. 'You're the one saw us before,' Thorn said. The ugly sewn — together face bit down on itself. Tom felt aimless, stupid violence boiling off both men — mad dogs who had found them­selves in temporary possession of the kennel.

'Maybe he's looking for his girlfriend,' Snail said, grinning.

'You looking for your pretty little girl, sonny boy? Think she came up for air?'

Snail tittered again.

''I wasn't looking for anybody,' Tom said. 'I was just walking around.'

They looked at each other with a quick, practiced surreptitious movement of the eyes, Prison, Tom thought, they've been in —

They were coming toward him. 'You can't get out of here,' Thorn was saying. Snail was grinning, holding one fist with the other and pumping up his arm muscles.

'Maybe he's looking for that badger yet.'

'Maybe he's the badger,' Snail said.

Tom backed up into the bars of the gate, too scared to think.

'Ain't he somethin'?' Thorn said. 'Gonna shit your pants before we get there, or after?'

Do not begin things when you will get too flustered to remember how to finish them. Tom smelled coarse, dirty, smelly skin, stale beer. He closed his eyes and thought of his shoulders opening and opening. His mind flared yellow, and he saw Laker Broome shouting orders from the smoky stage: just before they got to him, he saw a ceiling where a huge bird screamed down at him. Yes. He floated three feet off the ground, straight up. The bars scraped against his shirt. God, yes. He went up another three feet and opened his eyes. He laughed crazily.

Thorn and Snail were gawping up at him, already backing away.

'Uhh,' Tom grunted, unable to speak, and pointed toward a twenty-foot birch growing near the wall where they had come from. The veins in his head felt ready to burst. Now, damn you. A crack flew across the ground: snapping sounds like gunfire came from the trees. The birch heeled over to the left, and a root broke off with a thunderous crack.

'Freak!' Snail screamed.

Tom moaned. The birch swung up out of its hole, trailing a four-foot-long ball of crowded roots and packed earth. It hung in the air, parallel to him, and Tom almost heard the birch howling in pain and shock. He dropped it as he would a dying mouse or rabbit, some small life he had injured; self-loathing filled him. Not knowing why, he mentally saw an uprooted dandelion, and imagined blood pouring across his hands.

Thorn and Snail were disappearing back into the woods when he fell to the asphalt. That's what Skeleton wanted, he thought. He wobbled, his spine taking the shock, and then rolled over onto elbows and knees. Wet asphalt dug into his cheek. That sickness. If the dwarfs had come back, they could have kicked him senseless.

4

Eventually Tom picked himself up and tottered back down the sloping grass. Shadowland gleamed at him, burnished by the strong light. The house looked utterly new. The brick steps beckoned, the doorknob pleaded to be touched. Tom's head pounded.

An unmistakable rush of welcome warm air and fra­grance washed over him.

Tom went down the hall, took the short side corridor, and threw open the door to the forbidden room. No wise, spectacled face looked up at him; the room was neither a crowded study nor an underground staff room. It was bare. Silvery-gray walls; glossy white trim around the windows, a dark gray carpet. Empty of life, the room called him in.

Everything you will see here comes from the interaction of your mind with mine.

An invisible scene hovered between those walls, wait­ing for him to enter so that it could spring into life.

Tom backed away from the invisible scene — he could almost hear the room exhale its disappointment. Or something in the room . . . some frustrated giant, turning away . . . Tom closed the door.

And continued down the hall to the Little Theater. The brass plate on the door was no longer blank: now three words and a date had been engraved on it:

Wood Green Empire

27 August, 1924

Tom cracked the door open, and the audience in the mural stared down at him with their varying expressions of pleasure, amusement, cynicism, and greed. Of course. Just inside the door, he was so close to the stage as to be nearly on it. He backed out.

He went a few steps down the hall and let himself into the big theater. It too shone; even the banked seats were lustrous. Tom walked deeper into the theater. The curtains had been pulled back from the stage. Polished wood led to a blank white wall. Ropes dangled at varying heights above the wood.

Tom went halfway up an aisle and sat in one of the padded seats. He wished he could lead Rose and Del out of Shadowland that afternoon: he did not want to see anything of Collins' farewell performance. That would contain more than one farewell, he knew. He knew that the way he knew his own senses.

These too seemed to have taken part in the general change within him. It was as if his senses had been tuned and burnished. All day, he had seen and heard with great clarity. Since he and Del had returned to the house, this intensity of perception had increased. Ordinary, almost inaudible sounds needled into him, full of substance. Oddest of all had been his awareness of Del, sleeping in his bed: that dot of warmth. He was still conscious of it. Del shone for him.

Then Tom felt some shift in the house, a movement of mass and air as if a door had been opened. The house had rearranged itself to admit a newcomer. Tom could half-hear the blood surging through the newcomer's body; his muscles began to tense. He knew it was Coleman Collins. The magician was waiting for him. He was somewhere in the theater, though nowhere he could be found by ordinary search.

Tom left the chair and walked down the aisle toward the empty stage. What was it Collins had said about wizards, in the story about the sparrows? They gave you what you asked for, but they made you pay for it.

He crossed the wide area before the stage and went toward the farthest aisle. Tom remembered seeing those green walls forming around him, flying together tike pieces of clouds. The white columns reminded him of the bars of the gate — solid uprights between open spaces. Then he knew where the magician was.

Feeling foolish but knowing he was right, Tom pressed his palm to the wall. For an instant he felt solid plaster, slightly cooler than his hand. Then it was as if the molecules of the plaster loosened and began to drift apart. The wall grew wanner; for a millisecond the plaster seemed wet. Then only the color was there, solid-looking, but nothing but color. His hand had gone inward up to the wrist. On the other side of the wall of color, his fingers were dimly, greenly visible. Tom followed his hand through the wall.

5

He was in an immense white space, his heart leaping. Coleman Collins sat in the owl chair regarding him with an affectionate sharpness. He wore a soft gray flannel suit and shining black shoes. A glass half-filled with neat whiskey sat on the arm of the chair beside his right elbow. 'I knew when I first heard your name,' Collins said, propping his chin on laced fingers, 'and I was certain when I first saw you. Congratulations. You must be feeling very proud of yourself.'

'I'm not.'

Collins smiled. 'You should be. You are the best for centuries, probably. When your studies have ended, you should be able to do and to have anything you want. In the meantime, I want to answer whatever questions you may have.' Collins lowered his hand and found the glass without looking at it. He sipped. 'Surely even an unwill­ing bridegroom has a query or two.'

'Del thinks he was chosen,' Tom said.

'That's of no consequence to you.' Collins tipped his head and looked purely charming. It was like looking at Laker Broome trying to be charming; Tom read the magician's tension and excitement, half-heard the drum­ming of his pulse. 'In fact, I suggest that you can no longer afford to worry about matters like that. One of the perils of altitude, little bird — you can't see the lesser birds still trying to find their way out of the clouds.'

'But what's going to happen to Del when he finds out? I don't want him to find out.'

The magician shrugged, sipped again at the whiskey. 'I can tell you one thing. This is Del's last summer at Shadowland. It will not be yours. You will be here often, and stay long. That is how it must be, child. Neither of us has a choice.' He smiled again at Tom, and took a familiar envelope from a jacket pocket. 'Which brings me to this. Elena gave it to me, as you should have known she would. I couldn't let it go out, you know. I am still considering the insult to my hospitality.'

It was the letter to his mother, and Tom looked at it with dread. Collins was still smiling at him, holding the letter upright between two fingers. 'Let's dispose of it, shall we?'

A flame appeared at the envelope's topmost corner.

Collins held it until the growing flame was a quarter of an

inch from his fingers, then tossed the black burning thing

upward; it vanished into the flame, and then the flame

itself vanished, disappearing from the bottom up.

'Now that is no longer between us,' Collins said. 'And there shall be nothing like it in the future. Understand?'

'I understand.' Tom had gone very pale — somehow the letter had been proof to him that he would escape Shadowland.

'This is far more important to you than your schooling, boy. This is your real schooling. And in fact I want to show you something you are bound to ask me about sooner or later.' He bent down and retrieved a slim leather-bound book from beneath the chair. There was no title on cover or spine. 'This is the Book. Our book. The book we are pledged to honor.'

The magician's excitement was almost palpable. Be­neath his cool exterior, Collins was seething.

'Speckle John gave it to me. In time it will be yours — you will have read it a hundred times by then. The original was lost for centuries, and may have ended its existence on an Arab's fire — the mother of the man who discovered a cache of unknown gospels used them for fuel before they discovered their black-market value. But we have had our copy for centuries, passed from hand to hand. A watered-down version, known as The Gospel of Thomas, has been known to scholars for something like thirty years. But that weak document does not reveal our secrets. What is the first law of magic?'

'As above, so below,' Tom said.

'Do you know the meaning of that?' Collins waited; Tom felt the gravitational pull of his tension. 'It means that gods are only men with superior understanding. Magicians. Who have found and released the divine within themselves. Jesus shared this knowledge with only a few, and the knowledge became our secret tradition.' He ran his fingers lovingly over the leather binding. 'The Book will be in the room I forbade you to enter. After my performance, go there and read it. Read it as I read it forty years ago. Learn the real history of your world.'

'Does it talk about evil?' Tom said, remembering the final creature that had approached him in the night.

'God, in the orthodox view, causes famine, plague, and flood. Was God evil? Evil is a convenient fiction.'

Tom looked into the magician's powerful old face. What he saw blazed so fiercely he had to look away.

'You avoid examining what you saw last night. So I will not force you, boy — it will come. But you must know that every boy at your school was touched by our magic, some beneficially, some not. It could not have been otherwise, given that you and Del were there.'

'I knew the nightmares were from me,' Tom said out of the full awareness of his guilt.

'Of course. From what was hidden in you, from what you were too stupid to know you had. From your treasure.'

'My treasure.'

'Any treasure locked away in a dark room will begin to fester and push its way out. An untreated body in a coffin will do that. It is in the Book: If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.'

'Is that what happened to Skeleton Ridpath?' Tom asked.

'He did not thrust the power away from him, like another in your class, but begged for it — for its crudest aspects — when he was unready for them. That boy wanted me to come for him, and so I did come for him. With Speckle John, I had already invented the Collector. He was originally a thing of cloth and rubber, a toy to frighten an audience. I saw that he could be a vessel. There are many candidates for collection. There are many volunteers.'

Collins' hands were trembling. 'I gave him what he asked for.' He looked up at Tom with a look of wild challenge. 'Come with me. You'll see what I mean.'

He began striding away from the chair. Afraid to be left alone, Tom hurried after him. The magician's tall gray-suited form was already deep in white mist. It gathered around Tom as he got nearer to Collins, and for a moment was thick enough — a freezing cloud — to hide Collins altogether. Then Tom saw broad gray shoulders ahead, and rushed forward.

He walked out of the mist onto dry sandy grass. They were in Arizona again, he recognized before he recog­nized anything else. Cars stood in rows about them. In the distance, a tinny cheer went Up. 'Hurry,' Collins said, and Tom gasped: the magician was wrapped within a long trench coat, his face shadowed by a wide-brimmed hat.

Tom drew near and saw where they were.

At their feet the land fell away to a flat limed plane — the football field. Across it, the stands were crowded with parents and boys. Two football teams clashed and grunted on the field. Collins said, 'Two things called me here. That disturbed boy on the bench who is looking at me this very minute — and you. Look.'

Tom saw Skeleton's face go rapturous and unhinged over the padded frail chest and shoulders. With his newly burnished senses, he could feel what was happening inside Skeleton, a sick thrilled wave of passion. Then he heard a noise of love mingled with fear, and saw Skeleton's head snap around to look up into the stands. And there was Del, trying to get on his feet in the last row, staring with wild eyes straight at him. The feelings which surged from Del were too dense for him to fully take them in, love and terror and the horror of betrayal and confusion wretched in its magnitude. He saw himself, with an uncomprehend­ing and innocent face, hauling Del back down into his seat.

'Enough,' Collins said. He whirled around and marched back through the rows of cars.

The grass had become springier and the cars were gone. Collins strode on beside him, going into the green vale. It was Ventnor. The disastrous football games were over. 'An interesting thing is happening today,' Collins was saying. 'I want you to see it.'

As they walked along, Tom glanced over his shoulder and looked at a wandering path on which stood a handful of boys, himself among them. Del raised his bandaged arm as if to ward off a blow. A second, almost subdued shock wave of betrayal. He was visible to no one else — he was merely Collins' shadow. 'Of course this is the day of the famous theft,' the magician said.

They were proceeding down a long green distance, and Tom remembered seeing this in a dream, long ago — he knew that Skeleton Ridpath was standing rigid with joy near the Ventnor gym.

'When we all lived in the forest,' Collins said, 'we could turn into birds at will.' They vanished around an edge of concrete — Tom was sweating, on the edge of collapse — and the magician rose off the ground, beating great gray wings. He was an owl.

Tom beat his own wings; he too had become a bird. Below and behind him, Skeleton howled. The transforma­tion had been instant and painless; putting on feathers was easier than putting on a shirt. Inside the small bird he was, he was still Tom Flanagan; and when he looked at the owl, he could see Coleman Collins within it. The magician smiled, his hair flattening against his head. The owl wheeled overhead and sailed back toward the Ventnor buildings. Tom turned beneath him and followed. From what he could see of himself, he was a falcon.

'A peregrine falcon,' Collins said. 'I see you are curious.' There was laughter in his voice.

Tom looked out over the landscape, and for a moment was transfixed by its beauty and strangeness — trees and a glinting lake and long stretches of green. It looked like Eden, a place shining with newness and promise. Beyond it lay a network of curving roads and straight roads, a cluster of houses, desert. Miles away, mountains reared and buckled. Geologic tensions and muscles underlay it all, churning with life. Small things scurried in grass and sand. He was seeing through falcon's eyes.

Collins interrupted his reverie. 'Child.'

Tom looked down and saw the magician sitting on a roof by a wide tilting pane of glass. He reluctantly descended. When he landed on the roof, he was just Tom again, and that miraculous insightful vision was gone. He walked toward Collins, leaning against the pitch of the roof.

'You see, it's not all bad,' the magician said. 'Could a simple-minded morality give you anything like that?' He looked down through the skylight. 'But here comes our moment. Watch.'

Tom saw himself and Del in a sea of heads, alone in a crowd near a woman pouring tea. Then Marcus Reilly approached, dogged by Tom Pinfold, and Tom saw himself turn away to speak to them. He stared at the wheaten top of Marcus' head as if he could see into it and find whatever wayward germ had put his friend into the bloody car.

'You're wasting your time,' the magician said with brutal suddenness. 'Look across the room.'

Tom shifted his glance. Skeleton was mooning along the far wall. His face foreshortened but visible, Skeleton looked like a robot on automatic pilot. Tom looked back down again and saw that Del had moved a few feet away from the Tom Flanagan down there: Del was standing by himself, and his nose was pointing directly at Skeleton.

'My nephew is weaker than Speckle John,' the magi­cian said. 'You see, he feels threatened, he doesn't know if he can trust his eyes, but they seem to tell him that his best friend is in secret complicity with his idol. He cannot ignore or reject his best friend. But he must strike out somewhere. And he has begun to admit that the person he fears and hates most in the world might also have a secret relationship with said idol.'

Del was rigid with concentration. The air around him seemed to darken. Tom saw or felt Del's strain with his lingering bird senses.

'Don't want to be a great man,' said the magician, 'be a great donkey.'

On the other side of the room, Skeleton drifted near the shelves. He let his hand float over the glass objects. The hand dipped and closed. He slipped something into his pocket and grinned blankly.

Below Tom, Del relaxed. That was proof of a kind. Tom grieved for Del, for Dave Brick (who was gripping his slide rule and gaping at Skeleton), for himself too: so much misery, so much turmoil, from jealousy.

'That was your strength he used,' Collins said.

'And the levitation . . . '

'Again your strength.' Collins stood up, and Tom stood too, blinking. 'Come.'

The huge gray owl lifted itself out over the skylight and the roof, making for the clouds; Tom staggered, raised his arms and found they were wings. Again that in­stantaneous translation. White clouds gathered around him, the owl was gone; he found himself on hands and knees crawling toward a pane of green.

When his mind cleared, he was sprawled out before the first row of seats in the big theater.

6

Tom crept into bed and tried to rest. He could not sleep. Whenever he closed his eyes, he was either flying or falling.

Eventually he got up and went downstairs, to find lunch set for one in the dining room. Cold sliced ham and beef, a wedge of Stilton, sauerkraut. An icy glass of milk. Tom ate as unreflectively as an animal, then returned his dishes to the kitchen and deposited them in the sink.

For some time Tom coasted through the living room and looked at the paintings. Then he drifted to a cabinet with glass doors. On the topmost shelf an ancient revolver lay on velvet in an open leather case. Beneath it was a porcelain shepherdess with a crook. Other porcelain figurines stood a little distance from it, a boy with a satchel of schoolbooks, a fat Elizabethan gripping a beer mug, a cluster of drunken men with misshapen faces holding songsheets. He looked again at the shepherdess, and saw that she had Rose's face — high vulnerable fore­head, full lips, widely spaced eyes. She looked embar­rassed to be thrust forward from the others. Tom's hand went to the catch on the glass door; stopped when it touched the metal. He had a superstitious fear of touching the porcelain figure. Finally he turned away.

He confronted Del that evening, after he had taken a long nap.

The pocket doors had been pushed halfway back into the walls, opening an arch between his room and Del's. Tom went through the opening and heard water drumming in the bathroom. He sat on the bed.

In a little while Del emerged from the bathroom, a towel around his neck like a cape, his glossy wet hair skimmed close to his head. Then Tom realized that Del looked like a child to him, frail as a nine-year-old. 'I feel great! I must have slept all day!' Del beamed at him.

'I did too,' Tom said.

'If we keep this up, we'll be on magician's hours before long-up all night, asleep all day. But that's neat. I like night, don't you?' Del began rubbing his hair with a towel, completely unselfconscious about his nakedness.

'I prefer daylight.'

Del peeped out from under a fringe of towel. 'You in a bad mood?'

Tom shook his head, and Del's face vanished beneath the towel. 'You feel like working with some cards after I get dressed?'

'Sure.'

'We have to practice more — I haven't touched a pack of cards in weeks. You have to keep up with it or you get rusty. I could even show you that shuffle I was reading about.'

'Sure.'

Del pulled the towel off his head and wiped his legs. His hair fluffed at his temples, still clung damply behind his ears. He dropped the towel and began to dress in clean white underwear. 'Pretty soon, maybe tomorrow, we'll hear the rest of my uncle's story.'

'I guess so.'

Buttoning a yellow Gant shirt, Del looked up almost shyly at Tom. 'I hope that both of us can spend the summers here from now on. We could learn together. Right?'

Del paid no attention to his silence, but went to his desk and got a fresh pack of cards and slit the cellophane seal. 'Here, pull a chair up to the desk,' Del said, fanning the cards in his hands. He manipulated them in some complicated fashion Tom could not see, involving much palming and ending in a two-handed riffle. 'Okay. Look.' He spread them out in a fan on the desk. The four twos were together, the threes, and so on up to the aces. 'Pretty good, wouldn't you say? You can do just about anything with that triple shuffle. In a couple of months I'll be able to do it so well that — '

'Del,' Tom interrupted, 'tell me about the Ventnor owl.'

His friend looked up at him with big alarmed eyes. He scooped the cards together and shuffled them again. 'There's nothing to tell.'

'I know better than that.'

Del looked down at his hands. 'The funny thing is that everybody thinks that speed is what counts, and they're so wrong. Nobody's hand is quicker than the eye. It has a lot more to do with feel — with finesse. Speed hardly counts.'

'Tell me about it, Del.'

Del fanned out the cards: two red kings glared from a sea of black. 'I wanted to hurt Skeleton,' he mumbled. 'I wanted to get him kicked out.' He glanced at Tom in agony. 'How'd you know, anyhow? How'd you find out?'

'Your uncle told me.'

Del's face whitened. He tipped the cards into a stack, cut them, did a conventional shuffle, and cut them again. He lifted the top four cards: four aces. He shuffled the pack again and lifted the top four: kings.

'You're stalling,' Tom said.

Del tried the trick again: three queens and a seven lay face up on the desk. 'But it was because of him . . . ' He stopped — he was trying not to cry. 'Even Skeleton seemed like he was stealing Uncle Cole away from . . . ' Del wiped at his eyes. 'I wanted to get him into trouble.' He looked down at the botched trick. 'I was looking at him, and I was thinking about him — and you started talking to Marcus Reilty — I was feeling so terrible about what Bobby Hollingsworth had said after the game — and right after that I saw you with him, Tom, I did see you, and you looked right at me, but nobody else could see you — and it was like that day I broke my leg — I hated everything, and I couldn't talk to you . . . ' Del put his hand before his eyes. 'So I thought, I'll get rid of Skeleton. I thought Mr. Broome and everybody would know right away it was him, I never thought it would go all crazy like it did. . . . ' He snuffled, looked up at Tom. 'So I made him take it. I did magic on him. I never did anything like that before, but all of a sudden I knew I could do it. I concentrated so hard I thought I'd blow up. And I made him do it.' He glanced down, then again at Tom. 'So I guess I caused all that trouble afterward. The fire, and Dave Brick, and . . . everything.'

'No, you didn't,' Tom said. 'He did.'

'Skeleton?'

'Your uncle.'

'Why would he?'

'Look, Del,' he said. 'The things he does are like . . . ' He laid a hand on the cards. 'Like this. He shuffles them .around, forces one, palms one, shows you a deuce when you expect an ace — see? A fire, a life, they're just two more cards to him. He doesn't believe that he can commit wrong. He doesn't believe in evil or good.'

'But I made Skeleton do it,' Del protested.

'And you just told me why.'

'You're talking this way because you're not a good enough magician,' Del said, beginning to turn resentful again.

'I'm not going to argue about that with you.' He stared angrily at his friend. 'Del, Rose thinks we should leave Shadowland. She thinks that your uncle is losing control. She is afraid for us. For herself, top.'

That reached him. 'Rose is afraid?'

'Afraid enough to want to leave. And to take us with her.'

'Well, maybe I'll talk to her about it. If you're telling me the truth.'

On they talked — it was talk that progressed to no conclusion, so we may leave them here, but Tom was grateful that Del was willing to go as far as he had without demanding that their discussion end. In fact, they stayed up talking until dawn, and at one point Del got up to get a candle; he put a match to the wick and turned the lights off, and the two of them sat three feet apart over the little desk, at first with wariness on one's part and guilt on the other's, later with an unspoken recognition of the impor­tance of their friendship in their lives, talking within the warm envelope of candlelight, talking about magicians and cards and school. And about Rose. Despite the undercurrents on both sides, it was the last, best night of their friendship, at least the last night when they would be able to talk in the warm rambling manner of an old friendship, and both of them understood that this was so.

7

A week passed, the week before Tom became ill and met the devil, and it was an odd limbo in which they met chiefly at the lavish breakfasts and at dinner. Breakfast-time moved from eight to ten to nearly noon, and replaced lunch. Both boys stayed up until one or two every night, but they talked little, as if the all-night conversation had dried their tongues. Del often went into the big theater to practice with the props crated in the wings. When the call came, his friend saw, Del wanted to be ready.

While Del shuffled and manipulated cards, Tom swam in the lake, floating on his back with his ears under water and the sun beating down on him. He found he could swim across the lake if he relaxed and sidestroked for long periods. At the far end of the lake was a beach only five feet wide. The first time, he stretched out naked on the sand and fell asleep. When he woke it was with the feeling that Mr. Feet's trolls had come upon him and left without waking him. Then he saw that the sand around him was full of footprints.

The next day he walked through the forest in the early afternoon. At the clearing by the funnellike narrowing avenue of trees, Tom came upon Del sitting on a white stump. 'Oh . . . hi,' said startled Del. 'I'm just. . . ahh . . . sitting. Took a walk.' 'Me too,' Tom said. 'Guess I'll go on a little farther.' Each knew that the other was hoping to see Rose Armstrong. Tom waved and faded backward into the trees. On Del's face he saw that he was an intrusion.

The ground dropped at a gentle grade, and half an hour later it was flat, at the level of the water. He kept seeing blue from time to time, shining between the trees; then he saw a golden strip of sand.

Because he was curious, he walked through brush to get there. When he emerged out onto the little bright tan rug of beach, he saw the pier pointing across the water like a finger toward him, the boathouse like an open mouth; Shadowland high up on the bluff threw back light from all its windows. It too seemed living. Glare swallowed up the rows of windows of fiery yellow: the eyes of a god too self-absorbed to attend to earthly matters.

The footprints still marked the sand.

Tom scuffed over them to walk away from Shadowland, went through feathery tall grass, and soon found himself in a parklike area of sparse poplars and mown grass. Ahead of him, winding gently to the left, was an over­grown little road.

A minute later he saw a frame building with a ripped, bulging screen tacked over a sagging porch. A summer-house: it looked as though it had stood vacant for years. Trees arched over it. Tom went slowly, cautiously toward the ramshackle building. He peered in through a rip in the screen. Two battered chairs sat on the porch, one of them with an overflowing ashtray on its arm. Splayed open on the boards of the porch was a magazine with a cover of a naked woman raising thick legs into the air. He listened: no noises came from the house.

Tom opened the screen door and went onto the porch. He glanced into a window. A bed with a sleeping bag and pillow, an open closet where shirts hung on wire hangers. Pictures of naked women had been tacked to the walls. He left the window and went to the half-open door.

Tom stepped just inside. The living room was filled with broken furniture and the stink of cigars. Doors at the sides of the room must have led to the kitchen, smaller bedrooms. Empty beer bottles lay on the floor, as did bottles of other kinds. White ticking foamed from a rip in an armchair.

Then he heard a door close, and footsteps came toward him. He froze for an instant, too frightened to run, and then backed toward the front door.

Rose Armstrong, wearing rolled-up jeans and a blue sweatshirt, walked through an arch. When she saw him, she dropped the towel she was carrying. 'What are you doing here?' Her mouth remained open.

'Looking around.' He watched her pick up the towel. 'Is this yours — where you live?'

'Of course not. Let's get out of here.' She walked toward him through the mess. 'I don't have a bathtub, so I have to come over here to use theirs when they're out. Come on. Being here gives me the creeps.'

'You could take a bath in the lake.'

'And have them all watch? Ugh.' Rose took his hand and led him out of the house, across the porch, and out onto the grass.

Rose's face was shiny and pale: she looked younger and smaller than she had the last time he had seen her. She also looked tougher. Her rather ethereal face was an­chored by taut little lines at the sides of her mouth. He realized that this was the first time he had seen her in daylight. 'Over here,' she said, and led him across the overgrown road into the shelter of a group of poplars. 'Okay. It's nice to see you, but you have to go back. You can't stay here. They'll tear you to pieces if they catch you snooping. I mean it.'

'I love you,' he said.

The little lines tucked into the corners of her mouth. 'I love you too, sweetness. But we hardly have any time . . . and I'm kind of embarrassed about. . . you know.'

'Don't be,' Tom said. 'I could never think anything bad about you.'

'You don't know me very well yet,' Rose said. He could not read her face. 'Well, I was going to try to get across the lake pretty soon. I would have come today, but I felt so dirty.'

'Where do you stay?'

She pointed deep into the 'park,' to the right of the overgrown road. 'That direction. We can't go there. What I wanted to tell you is that everybody is waiting for some things to arrive — fireworks and some other things for his show. The men are cutting firewood and stuff like that. Sometimes they go into Hilly Vale and drink at the tavern. That's where they are now. But they could come back any minute. I took the fastest shower on earth.'

'Do you know any more from Collins about what he's going to do during the performance?'

She shook her head.

'But you still think we should go.'

Rose said, 'Tell me something. Would you still try to get out if you had never met me?'

'Yes. Now I have to get out. And I have to get Del out too.'

She raised her eyebrows. 'Okay.' 'But you'll have to talk to Del. He's even thinking about living here someday.' 'Oh, God,' Rose said. 'Sometimes I hate magic.' 'Why don't you just get out by yourself? What's over there?' He pointed away from the lake.

'A big wall. With glass on top. I couldn't get over. I need your help.'

'Well, I need you,' Tom said. 'I think about you all the time. I really love you, Rose.' He felt imbecilic, uttering these banal words: the vocabulary of love was so tired.

'And I really love you, beautiful Tom,' Rose said, beginning to back away and giving sidelong glances over her shoulder at the trolls' house. 'I should be able to come over in a couple of nights. That's when I'll talk to Del.' She stopped momentarily and looked at him in a shaft of light. 'You won't ever hate me, will you?'

'Hate you?'

'I still have some work to do for him.'

He shook his head, and she blew him a kiss and faded back through the cluster of poplars. Tom waited a few minutes, aching for her and puzzled by her, and then went back through the empty forest to the beach.

Dinners, during this period of waiting, were at eight. Elena never appeared; when Collins came downstairs, the three of them went into the dining room and uncovered the chafing dishes. Beside Collins' place was a decanter of whiskey and another of wine; he was already drunk when he sat, and proceeded to get drunker. Del got a glass of the wine, which made his cheeks flush. The rest went to the magician. While they ate, Collins stared fixedly at each of them in turn, saying little. Apparently Del was used to this, but Tom looked forward to dinners with dread.

Del asked questions. Tom squirmed in his seat and tried to ignore Collins' glassy stare.

'Did you ever do any more healing by magic in the army, Uncle Cole?'

'Once.' The glassy eyes on Tom. 'Once I did five in a row. Didn't give a damn if anyone saw. Knew I was going to leave soon — go to Paris to meet Speckle John.'

'Five?'

'Ordered the nurses to look away. Impatient as a blister. My mind on fire. Little Irish pudding damn near lost her lunch. I could have done a hundred. Lightning.'

'Are you going to work with us some more?'

'Any day now.'

That was two days after Tom met Rose in the run-down summerhouse. The next morning he swam across the lake and stood on the beach in dripping undershorts, thinking that Rose would materialize out of the air and water. Hours later, when a man shouted something deep in the woods, Tom waded back into the warm water and swam toward the pier.

He put on his dry clothes over the wet undershorts and went up to the house. Del was nowhere in sight. Tom went into the living room — it was to be another afternoon of dullness, another terrifying dinner. He felt as though the tension would make him ill. Whenever Collins fixed his devouring eyes on his at dinner, he thought that the magician knew all about him and Rose. Then he did feel ill: his whole body grew hot. It passed; came back in a giddy rush — he might have been standing in front of a blast furnace. His head swam. Again the illness receded for a moment, and Tom, suddenly aware of the sensations of his body, felt a burning at the back of his throat, a stuffiness in his head; his stomach sent a signal of burning distress.

He went to the nearest tall surface to lean against it, put his hands on the glass of the cabinet. He looked in. The figurines were moving. He saw the porcelain boy sprawled on the polished wood of the shelf, the drunken men with misshapen faces kicking him again and again. The bearded Elizabethan holding a beer mug looked on and smiled. They were killing the boy, kicking in his ribs and head. The boy rolled over, exposing the pulp that had been his face. Blood pooled on the wood. 'Oh, yes,' Tom said. 'Oh, yes. Shadowland.' The blast of heat returned with triple force, and he staggered out toward the hall bathroom.

8

He was feverishly ill for three or four days: he did not know how long. His body felt as though it would crack and fissure like a salt flat — so dried out — and even the softest sheet chafed and burned against his skin. People appeared and talked incomprehensibly, like mirages, disappeared. Del moved in front of him, looking very worried. 'Don't fret,' Tom wanted to say. 'I'm just being punished, that's all.' But when he said it, he was speaking to Rose, who held his hand. 'No, you're just sick,' Rose said. 'You're wrong,' he said to Elena. She scowled at him and pushed soup into his mouth. Then: 'You didn't mail my letter.' Old King Cole gazed down at him with false sympathy. 'Of course I didn't,' he said. 'I burned it in front of you. Like this.' He held up his right hand, and flames coursed along his index finger. 'Make me better,' Tom pleaded, but he was talking to startled Del and glum Elena. His only coherent con­versation during the illness was with the devil.

'I know who you are,' he said, and was troubled by a recollection: hadn't he said the same thing to someone else, when he was still new to Shadowland?

The devil sat on the edge of his bed and smiled at him. He was a short ginger-haired man with a thin, intelligent face — the face of a nightclub comedian. 'Of course you do,' the devil said. He was dressed like a prep-school teacher, in a light brown tweed jacket and gray wool slacks. When he drew up one foot to cock it on his knee, Tom saw that he wore Bass Weejuns. 'After all, we've met before.'

'I remember.'

'I'd introduce myself, but you would never remember my name. If you like, you can call me by my initial, which is M.'

'Was it you who made me get sick?'

'It was really the only way I could speak to you directly. And I wanted to get a better look at you than I could the other night. You fret too much about things, you know. You fight against the natural course of events. You'll just wear yourself out. If I hadn't made you ill, you would have done it to yourself quite soon. In short, Tom, I worry about you.'

'I wish you wouldn't,' Tom said.

'But it's my job.' M. brought his hand to the area of the tweed jacket that represented his heart. 'My job is to care about you. To care for you, if you like.' The hands opened like a sunburst. 'There is so much we could do for each other. All you have to do is stop fretting. You have a large and remarkable talent, after all. And I must point out, my boy, that you and your talent are at a crossroads. I'd hate to see you waste yourself. So would your mentor.'

'He's not my mentor,' Tom said, and saw the devil's face shine forth his frustrated greed.

'Well, you see, there are only two ways to go,' said the devil. 'You could take the high road, which I definitely recommend. That way, you become the master of Shadowland — or not, as you choose. But the option is open to you. You become stronger and stronger as a magician. Your life is full, varied, and satisfying. Everything you could want comes to you on a high tide of blessings. Or you could take the low road. Not advisable. You run into trouble almost immediately. You endanger your happi­ness. Whatever happens, I can offer you very little help. I really think that's the way it is, Tom. You see why I had to talk to you. I want you to spare yourself a considerable amount of nastiness.'

'I'll have to think about it,' Tom said. The devil's conversation was making him very thirsty.

'Now you're being reasonable,' M. said. 'I know you'll make the right decision.'

Was it because he not only dressed like a teacher but also talked like one? Why would that make him thirsty?

M. winked at him.

'Did you make those porcelain things come alive?' Tom said. But M. was gone. He groaned and lay back against the pillows, and when he opened his eyes, Del was before him.

'You look a lot better today,' Del said. 'But I still don't understand what you're talking about.'

'Could I please have some water?' Tom asked.

Del went into the bathroom and returned with a brim­ming glass. 'Rose was here a lot,' he said, giving Tom the glass. The water had the ripest roundest most satisfy­ing taste Tom had ever known — it was astonishing that something so delicious came out of a tap.

'I could see that she likes you, Tom.'

'Yes. I like her, too.'

'She saw how worried I was about you. I couldn't figure out what happened — you got sick so fast.'

'It was . . . ' Tom began, and did not finish. 'It was because I got tired. I picked up some bug while I was swimming.'

'I guess so. Anyhow, I talked to Rose.' He said no more, but his mood rang like a clarion.

'That's good.'

'I guess we do have to get her out of here. And I was thinking — I bet if I come back and explain everything to Uncle Cole, he'll let me keep on working with him. He'll understand. Are you well enough for me to be telling you this?'

Tom smiled. Del was so impatient to tell him that trying to stop him would have been like holding up a hand before a tidal wave. 'I feel better already,' he said.

'Well, see, he's my uncle. He'll be mad at me, but it'll work out. He's my uncle.'

'We're going to take the low road,' Tom said, grin­ning. 'You fret about things too much.'

'Is there a low road?'

'Never mind. I have to sleep, Del.' He closed his eyes and heard Del tiptoeing away.

9

As soon as Tom was able to get out of bed, he went to the cabinet in the living room. The china figures stood in their old places, the girl with the crook, the boy, the Eliz­abethan, the revelers. The boy's face was undamaged: that horrific vision had been inspired by his fever, a hallucination forced on him by the same tension which had made him ill. Tom's legs felt like those of a baby, unused to carrying his weight. Muscles he had never noticed before grumped and ached.

At dinner that night the magician complimented him on his recovery. 'I feared we might lose you, my boy. What do you think it was? Touch of the flu?'

'Something like that,' Tom said. And shied from the magician's glowing eyes.

'Would have been a terrible irony if you died, don't you think?'

'I can't see it that objectively.'

Collins smiled and sipped at his wine. 'At any rate, you look splendid now. Don't you think he looks splendid, Del?'

Del mumbled assent.

'Simply splendid. Has a look of the young Houdini about him, wouldn't you agree? Bursting with strength and health and craft. Unassailable. Do you feel unassail­able, Tom?'

'I feel pretty good,' Tom said, hating that Collins could make him feel like a fool.

'Superb. Wonderful.' The last of the wine went past his lips. 'Since you have been resurrected to us, tomor­row you shall have the penultimate episode of my life story. Do you feel up to it, little bird?'

'Sure,' Tom said.

'Tomorrow, then. Not at the regular time. Ten at night, I think. By the sixth light. I'll look for you there.'

10

Tom tested and strengthened his muscles by swimming; besides the exercise, which he needed, it gave him solitude. Collins was nearing the end of his unburdening. As the story neared its end, so did their time at Shadowland. Tom hoped every hour for a message from Rose. He prayed that she would not actually delay their escape until the day of the final performance. Now that Del was at least theoretically prepared to desert his uncle, the sooner they left, the better.

The weather was still warm, but the moisture in the air had concentrated and darkened. Fog hung over the middle of the lake and stole out of the forest. The air seemed to melt indivisibly into cloud. Against his skin, the water was almost bath-warm.

Sounds of hammering came to him: tock-tock-tock: each blow of the hammer threatened to nail him into Shadowland.

Knowing it was in vain, he hoped that Rose would get word to them this afternoon.

Instead of that, he saw her. She came alone out of the woods in a curl of fog, unbuttoned a plaid shirt which engulfed her like a serape, and in the black bathing suit waded into the water like a doe.

He swam toward her, his heart half-sick with love.

Rose heard him splashing — emotion made his swim­ming even less expert — and retreated into water shallow enough for her to stand. Tom plowed toward her through heavy warm water. Only her head and neck were visible above the surface.

'Thanks for coming to visit me,' he said. 'I remember seeing you there a couple of times.'

'Well, I would have been there all the time, but I didn't want to upset Mr. Collins.' Rose was looking directly into his eyes with a quiet, deadly frankness.

Tom pushed his way through the water closer to her. 'It's so good to see you,' he said, and her face tightened down into itself again. She said, 'Me too.'

'Can't we get out of here soon? Today, maybe? He's going to tell us some more of his story tonight — it kind of makes me nervous.'

'They'd catch us today,' she said. 'Those men are all over the place. It's too early. Anyhow, you're okay until the big performance. Just be patient. I'm doing what I can.'

'I trust you, Rose,' he said. 'It's just that I'm getting . . . I don't know. This waiting is driving me crazy. I think that's why I got sick.'

Her hands, warmed by the water, lifted and rested on his shoulders. She linked her hands behind his neck. 'You won't be foolish when you see me tonight, will you?'

'Tonight?'

'During his story. I'm supposed to do some work then.'

'Oh. One of those scenes.'

'Sort of. But don't . . . you know. Say anything.'

'I won't,' he said. He was trembling.

Her face swam closer; the touch of her mouth ex­tinguished his words. Then she spoke again. 'Tom, don't listen to anything he says about me. I think he knows I love you. You can't hide anything from him. But if he talks about me, it'll all be lies. Everything here is a lie.'

Rose hugged him tightly, and then gave him a comradely little pat on the back. 'Be patient,' she said. 'I have to go now.' Her head went under water, her body jackknifed, and she executed a smooth strong stroke which carried her away from him.

Tom turned around, his heart full, and saw a tall lean figure standing on the pier looking straight toward him. Coleman Collins. He glanced back to find Rose, but she was still under water. Tom felt a sudden unreasonable terror, as if the tiny figure on the dock had overheard what he and Rose had said. Collins was beckoning to him. He began to sidestroke back to Shadowland through the warm water.

Collins motioned him toward the pier, chopping with his hand. When Tom was only a few feet from the pier, he looked up at the magician's steely face. 'So you know our little Rose better than any of us realized,' Collins said. 'Come up here.'

'I just met her by accident,' Tom said. 'Get on the pier.'

Tom dog-paddled nearer, and Collins bent and reached down. Tom raised his own hand, and the magician lifted him onto the pier as if he weighed nothing. Dripping and frightened, Tom stood before him.

'I cannot recommend any distractions for you at this time,' Collins said.

It took Tom a moment to understand what he meant. 'In fact, excessive distraction from your task could prove dangerous, Tom. Do you understand? I will need your entire concentration.' 'Yes, sir.'

''Yes, sir.' Like a little schoolboy. Is it possible that you still do not understand the seriousness of what you are involved in?'

'I think I understand,' Tom said. The magician ap­peared sober but very angry.

'You think you do. I hope you know that you cannot put any credence in any word Rose utters. She is not — repeat — not — to be trusted. If you allow yourself to be led astray by that girl, you will be ruined. Is that clear?' Tom nodded. 'I see you still do not understand. So I will tell you one of my secrets. That delightful child you were embracing in the water has never seen the town of Hilly Vale. She has no grandmother, and she never had parents. She is my creation. She has no notion of morality, and less of love.'

Tom looked at him sullenly, hating him.

'Oh, dear me. I see I better tell you a story,' the magician said. 'Sit down and listen.'

11

'The Mermaid'

Many years ago, when we all lived in the forest and nobody lived anywhere else, a lonely old king lived by the side of a lake in a drafty castle which had seen better days. Once it had been the most beautiful castle, and he the most powerful king, in the entire forest, which covered half the continent. Once tapestries had glowed from the walls, gold plates had shone from the table, and all of the castle had seemed to sparkle with a light which was the image of the great king's glory. But the queen had died, and the princesses had married princes from lands far away, other kings in the forest had taken territory in battles, and the old king lived alone and bitter, without glory or affections. His army had died of old age or been taken from him or simply faded into the forest, and so he could not increase his treasury by conquest. Only a few woodsmen and hunters remained to pay his taxes, and they paid chiefly out of loyalty to what had once been.

One of the old king's few pleasures was to walk at evening along the shore of the lake near the castle. The water was deep and blue, and from time to time he could see a bass jump, disturbing the gloomy quiet with a splash loud as cannon fire and causing ripples to spread all the way to the shore. At such times, the king would mourn, remembering when his own power was such that its rumors and effects rippled and widened a hundred miles in every direction. The old times of love and power — how he ached for them!

One night, taking his melancholy walk beside the lake, he saw a mighty bass leap out of the water, and was so moved by longing that he mumbled quietly to himself, 'Oh, I do wish . . . '

Then he heard a voice as ancient and cracked as his own. 'Do wish for what, your Majesty?'

The king whirled about and saw a wrinkled old man with a crafty face and a threadbare robe seated on a fallen log half — concealed by overgrown vegetation. He did not immediately recognize the old man, for he had not seen him since the days he had just been mourning.

'Oh, it's you, wizard,' the king said. 'I thought you were dead.'

'I die fresh every morning,' said the wizard. 'Cough­ing brings me back.'

'Tricks and confusion, that's all I ever had from you,' said the king, turning away from the lake in irritation. In truth he was pleased to see the wizard again, despite the accuracy of what he had just said.

'Halvor is very important now in the north,' said the wizard, as if to himself, 'and Bruno has made a name for himself in the south, and Lester the Ambitious in the west, and — '

'Shut up,' grumped the king. 'I know all that. I suppose you sold yourself to them, like everyone else. I suppose you work your evil tricks for reptiles like Lester, who gained power by poisoning most of his relatives.' The great bass rose out of the water again, smacked back down with a silvery thrash of his tail, and the king's heart folded with loss.

'They have their own wizards — upstarts who think only of money. If I worked for them, wouldn't I at least have new robes?'

'Umph,' the king said. 'You do look rather seedy, wizard.'

'No more than I feel. But didn't I hear you wishing a moment ago? For old times' sake, I'd be pleased to help you.'

'And bamboozle me the way you did everyone else you aided.'

'Wizards must be paid, like everyone else,' said the ancient creature on the log. 'What were you wishing for? A vast army? A treasury full of gold?' Then he gave the king an extremely shrewd look, and all his wrinkles seemed to smooth out for a moment. 'Or was it a beautiful young wife to warm your bones? A young wife, perhaps, with the power to restore your kingdom and return to you all that you have lost?'

The king's face darkened.

'I think I could find a wife for you,' mused the wizard, 'who could bewitch the armies of Halvor and Bruno so that you could subjugate the territories that were once yours, then raise enough treasure to invade the province of Lester the Ambitious — and who, though incapable of giving you children, would give you the illusion of love.'

'Only the illusion,' said the disappointed king.

'Look at it from my point of view,' said the wizard. 'All love is illusion to a wizard. And to possess this great blessing from which the others would flow, you need only tell me that you would sacrifice your gray hair and wear a beard instead. It is a better bargain than I gave the sparrows. It is a bitter truth, your Majesty, that you have less to surrender than they.'

Though old, the king was still vain, and he hated the thought of baldness. 'Will it be a full beard?' he asked.

'A very noble beard,' the wizard said. 'Need I point out that you do not require your hair to enjoy the fruits of love? And the wife I shall give you will make you a young man again.'

'Where will you get her from?' asked the king. 'Some foul contraption of wax and bear grease?'

'Not at all.' The wizard smiled. 'I will get her from there.' He nodded to the lake, and on the instant the great bass again broke the surface. 'She will be as beautiful as beautiful, with the power to enchant armies, but she will have the cold heart of a fish. Yet as long as you are king, you will believe in her love.'

'A strong back and firm flesh,' said the king. 'And the power to enchant armies.' He trembled on the edge of his decision for a moment, fearing that he was about to make a great mistake, but then thought of a woman as beautiful as beautiful, with the power to turn the armies of Halvor and Bruno against them, and his blood stirred, and he whispered, 'I take your bargain, wizard.'

'You must be on this spot at midnight,' said the wizard, all his wrinkles deepening as he grinned and disappeared.

At eleven o'clock the king stood by the lake. By eleven-thirty his bones were aching and he sat on the wizard's hollow log, burning with hope and impatience. Fifteen minutes later he saw a great bubble burst on the surface of the lake. He stood up in the moonlight and went to the very shoreline. He rubbed his aching hands together. He sucked his teeth. He felt years younger already.

At midnight something broke the surface of the water in the center of the lake. Terrified, the old king stepped backward just as the head of a beautiful young woman appeared. Her shoulders lifted from the water, then her whole upper body, as well as the neck and head of a horse. The old king backed up until he felt bushes pressing against him. The woman emerged entirely from the lake, dressed in a long white gown and astride a magnificent white charger. Her hair was golden-red; her face was beautiful as beautiful, and the king saw that she could indeed enchant armies. 'Come, my husband,' she said, and reached down to him a hand which, when he touched it, was as cold as if no blood ran there. With the strength of a giant, she pulled him up onto the saddle with her, and they went on the white horse to his castle. And that night, with the horse stabled outside, the king knew the delights of the marriage bed as thoroughly as any twenty-year-old prince.

The next day they went north to Halvor's land, and met his army, which was going to kill them until the soldiers looked into the face of the queen. Instantly the soldiers dropped their weapons and swore their allegiance to the old king. Then they proceeded to Halvor's castle and found that Halvor had already escaped and fled farther north, to where only reindeer and wolves lived.

That night, the old king knew again the joys of love. Though his bride was fish-cold to the touch, she had beauty to break his heart and swore she loved him. And the king again felt his youth restored as half his kingdom had been restored.

On the second day, he and his bride and Halvor's army went south, where Bruno's soldiers fell to the ground and wept, welcoming them. Bruno himself fled farther south, to the land where alligators and giant lizards crawled over black rocks and slipped into stinking rivers.

The king rode back to his palace dazed with happiness. In two days he had recaptured all his old kingdom and more, and he had an army to take any land he wished. Lester the Ambitious would fall in a day. His new bride gave him glances sweeter than maple sugar, and he knew that the wizard was mistaken about her ability to love.

When the king and his wife and the joined armies had reached the palace, the king saw the wizard sitting on a broken pediment by the gates. 'Hail, great king,' said the wizard. 'Are you satisfied with your bargain?'

'I am satisfied with everything, friend,' said the king, feeling very grand astride the great white horse. He and his nobles went inside to feast on beef and roast pig and gallons of ale; and during the feast the king saw with pride how his nobles, the bravest and strongest men in three lands, paid court to his queen; and saw how like a queen she treated the nobles, giving a word to this one and a smile to that one, but reserving the best of herself for him, so that all knew that her heart was his alone.

When the king and queen left their guests to go to the royal bedroom, the king locked the door behind him and advanced toward his bride.

'Hold a moment, your Majesty,' said the wizard, who was seated in a window casement.

The king swore, and made to push the trespasser out of the window, but the wizard held up his hand and said, 'Since you are satisfied that I have kept my word, now I will ask you to keep yours.'

'Take my hair . . . give me my beard . . . but leave!' bellowed the king. The queen, who had begun to disrobe, continued to do so.

'It is done,' said the wizard, snapping his fingers, and a great agony overtook the king, an agony greater than any he had known, pain that threatened to split him apart and burn his eyes from his skull. He fell howling to his knees.

Before the queen, who concluded her undressing as if nothing of any importance were happening, and before the wizard, who merely smiled as coldly as had Lester the Ambitious when the last of his relatives had been poi­soned, the old king was transformed into a goat. The hairs of his head became coarse stubbly goat fur, and long goat whiskers sprouted from his chin. He bleated and kicked, but could not bleat and kick himself back into human form. The wizard joined the queen in the bed, the goat was sent down to the kitchen, and the entranced nobles continued their feast. Thus the wizard ended his many days with a beautiful wife, a great army, and the posses­sion of kingdoms.

12

'And what's the point of that?' Tom asked, shivering on the pier.

The magician smiled at him: smiled as coldly as the wizard in his story. 'Need I really say? Rose can never leave Shadowland. Kiss her all you want, Tom, but don't believe a word she says, for she has no idea of the truth.'

'That's a terrible . . . ridiculous . . . lie.' Tom began to walk away from Collins down the pier.

'I don't blame you for being angry with me,' the magician called out into the fog between them, 'but whatever you do, don't forget my warning. Don't take her too seriously.' Tom was now at the iron ladder. As he set his feet on the first rung, he heard the magician call, 'Our lives take many different turnings, Tom, and today's king is tomorrow's goat. Don't be fool enough to think it cannot happen to you.'

THREE

Two Betrayals

1

At night the fog still hung over the lake and in the forest swirled around the trees. The lights above the clearings were glowing yellowish disks. 'Let's not get separated,' Del said, and took his hand as they slowly made their way through the trees.

When they came into the clearing of the sixth light, Coleman Collins was waiting for them. He sat in the owl chair, his legs crossed at the ankles.

Tom swallowed, knowing that he would see Rose down in the funnel of trees before this part of the story was done.

'The sorcerer's apprentices,' Collins said, turning his head to greet them. His voice was blurred. Both boys had seen the bottle clamped between his thighs. 'Just in time, yes, and wandering lone through the mists like orphans. Sit down in your accustomed places, boys, and attend. We have reached the next-to-last chapter of my unburdening, and the weather is appropriate.

2

'First of all, it was a foggy day when I deserted the armed forces of the United States. It was the first week of December, and the war had been over for three weeks. I was in England, waiting for my discharge papers. Speckle John had been discharged a week earlier, and was already in Paris. I could see no reason why I should not leave immediately, but for the strict interpretation the govern­ment puts on such things as premature departure from its service. At the time, I was not serving anyone, in fact. I was waiting out the period before my papers came in a country house which had been turned into a hospital and convalescent home — Surrey, this was — and I was more or less being kept out of sight. The patients there had been on what was called Blighty Leave, a term I suppose you boys are too young to understand. Nobody knew when the papers would come through. Some of the men had heard rumors that they might not be discharged, or demobbed, as the English soldiers said, for a year. Don't think these were idle rumors, either; some men were still in France eight months later.

'I don't suppose you boys know Surrey? Physically, it is quite a beautiful county. Before the war and for the well-off, it must have been a sort of paradise. But the weather, at least while I was there, was miserable, cold and misty — the most expressive weather I've ever known, somehow speaking of blasted hopes and dead expectations. The English had lost nearly an entire generation of men, and in those villages in Surrey I think they felt the loss especially keenly. When Speckle John's letter came, I felt I simply had to get out.

'So in the first week of December I just left, carrying only a hand valise with a few books and my razor and toothbrush. I walked two miles into the village, waited a couple of hours at the station, and caught the Charing Cross train. From the moment I walked through the gates of that house, I was a criminal and a fugitive, traveling on forged papers I'd had the foresight to buy on the black market just before we left France. The next day I took the boat train to Paris. The name on my false papers was Coleman Collins. I let the hunt for Lieutenant Charles Nightingale go on without me.

'For there was a hunt, and that was the reason I had been sequestered away in Surrey. At dinner I told you boys about that day I did five magical cures in a row. Reckless, even stupid-certainly arrogant. I was on fire with impatience. Austria-Hungary had just surrendered after the Italian victory at Vittorio Veneto. Everybody knew that Germany was exhausted. Finished. I wanted out. So I let rip, boys, I let rip. Five in a row. Spuds-and-Guinness, the Irish nurse, thought the devil had ap­peared. Of course my display caused an uproar. Withers saw what I was doing, and after finishing up his own work, tore out faster than any Georgian has ever traveled before or since. To see the colonel, I was sure. I did not give a damn. Anyhow, to make a long story short, before I got to England, there were new rumors about me. Not just among a handful of Negro soldiers, but among the general public. Reports had begun to appear in the English and French papers. Miracle on the Battlefield. That sort of thing. First in one place, then in another. By the time I left Yorkshire, the English papers were conducting their own search for the 'miracle doctor.' If I had wanted that sort of thing, I could have had it in a minute, boys — if I had wanted to be a performing monkey the rest of my life. But what I wanted was in Paris, working on our act and looking for theater bookings. What I wanted had secrets and knowledge to make a faith healer look like a dogcatcher.

'I set foot again on French soil on December 5, 1918, hung-over, unshaven, in a cold rain. My phony papers had never been questioned, not even looked at twice. I did see, after a few weeks in Paris, that a newspaper had managed to identify the 'miracle doctor' as one Lieuten­ant Charles Nightingale, who had unreasonably vanished from an English village shortly before his release from the army and was now AWOL. But by then the doings of Lieutenant Nightingale were no more important to me than those of General Pershing.

'Speckle John was living in rooms in rue Vaugirard, and I took a room directly below him. You entered the building through huge wooden doors on the street and came into an open court surrounded on all sides by high gray brick walls. Smaller doors let onto staircases. To your right was the concierge's office; straight ahead, the stairs to Speckle John's rooms. This building was so run­down it was moldy, but to me it looked beautiful. Now I can almost see it before me. And so, I think, can you.'

The boys looked down the funnel of trees and saw the suggestion of high gray walls in the fog. Dark windows stared down at a tall figure in a hat and Burberry. Then a black figure, his face in shadow, emerged from a door in the brick.

'My mentor, my guide, and my rival was waiting for me.'

The man in the hat and long Burberry walked through the swirling fog toward the black figure. Then another door opened, and a slender girl hurried past both men. Rose.

'On that first day, I saw a girl walking past us but did not look closely at her. Later I found that she was named Rosa Forte, that she was a singer, and that her rooms were on the ground floor just below mine.'

Rose had disappeared into the trees; the two men had vanished too; the scene at the end of the tunnel of trees went black.

'At first I thought that she was the most enchanting girl I'd ever known, brave and intelligent, with a face that delighted me more than any painting. Within weeks I had fallen in love with her. Once I saw a shepherdess that had her face in a provincial antique shop, and because I had no money to buy it, I stole it — slipped it into my pocket and took it home. When Speckle John and I toured, I took it with me. Stared at it; stared into it, as if it knew mysteries Speckle John did not.'

Down in the narrow space between the trees, Rose Armstrong appeared, dressed in a long white garment of indeterminate period. She held a shepherd's crook, froze like a statue, and looked at Tom with unfocused eyes.

'Mysteries, yes. Mystery is always duplicitous, and once you know its secret, it is twice banal. In time I came to think that Rosa Forte was like some maiden in a fable, blank to herself for all her surface charm, the property of anybody who listened to her tale.' Collins lifted his bottle, and Rose Armstrong disappeared backward into fog and trees.

'Ah. Speckle John and I began working almost imme­diately. We booked ourselves into theaters and halls all over France. I was afraid to stay long periods in England because of the 'miracle-doctor' business, but we did cross England several times to perform in Ireland. We pro­ceeded to invent an entirely new kind of performance, using the skills we had, and eventually worked our way up toward the top of the bill. What we were after was extravagance, and we could twist an audience around so that they could not be sure by the end of the performance exactly what had happened to them. When they saw us, they knew no other magician could come near us. One of our most famous illusions was the Collector, which began almost as a joke of mine. It was not until eighteen months later that I decided that I had the necessary power to use a real person as the Collector.'

Del gasped, and the magician raised his eyebrows at him. 'You have a moral objection? So did Speckle John — he wanted to stick with the less successful toy I'd invented earlier. But once it had occurred to me that I could fill up my toy, so to speak, with a real being, the toy began to look inadequate. The first Collector was a gentleman named Halmar Haraldson, a Swede who came upon us in Paris and wanted nothing more than to be a magician. He saw it as an avenue of revenge against a world which had not welcomed his abilities; and Halmar saw in us something more powerful than the usual run of stage magicians. What he saw, quite rightly, in magic was that it was antisocial, subversive, and he hated the world so badly that he hungered and thirsted for our power. Haraldson dressed always in cheap anonymous black suits above which his bony Scandinavian peanut-shaped head floated like a skull; he took narcotic drugs; he was the most extreme exponent of the postwar nihilism that I knew. Consciously or not, he resembled one of those apparitions in Edvard Munch's paintings. So I met him one night and collected him, and thereafter my toy glowed with a new life. Halmar lurked inside it like a genie.'

'What happens to the person you use?' Tom asked. 'What happened to Halmar?'

'I released him eventually, when he became a liability. You will hear, child. Speckle John would have insisted on abandoning the Collector altogether, but I had gained control of the act. After all, I was his successor, and my powers were soon the equal of his. He could not insist with me, though I could see him growing unhappier and unhappier as we toured together. I am talking about something that happened over a period of years.

'It's a commonplace irony, I imagine. Partners work together and achieve success, but fall out personally. He began to make it clear that he thought I was a mistake — that I should never have been chosen. Speckle John, to my disappointment, was not large-minded. His ambitions were small, his conception of magic was small. 'The test of a mature magician is that he does not use his powers in ordinary life,' he said; and I said, 'The test of a true magician is that he has no ordinary life.'

'Rosa joined our act after a time. Her singing had never led to anything, and she needed a job. Speckle liked her, and because she had performed, stage fright did not cripple her. We taught her all the standard tricks; she was adept at them, and her gamine quality was effective with audiences. My partner took a paternal attitude toward her, which I thought ridiculous. Rosa was mine, to do with as I wished; but I did not object to their having talks together, for it helped reconcile her to her position. The other reason I did not object was that my partner's care with the girl proved to me that it was he, not I, who had been the mistake. My little shepherdess was porcelain through and through, beautiful to look at, but only a reflector of borrowed light.'

Wind pushed at the fog, swirled it. A deeper chill entered the clearing.

'When you travel as we did, you begin to know a community of all the others who play the same theaters. Jimmy Nervo and Teddy Knox, Maidie Scott, Vanny Chard, Liane D'Eve . . . One group interested me, Mr. Peet and the Wandering Boys. There were six 'Boys,' tumblers and strongmen, rough characters. I think they had all been in prison for violent crimes at one time or another — rape and robbery, assault. Other performers left them alone. In fact, their tumbling was only adequate, not nearly good enough for them to be headliners, and they broke it up with comic songs and staged fights. From time to time they let the fighting wander offstage. I know of a couple of occasions when they beat men nearly to death in drunken brawls. They were rather like an unevolved form of life. I wanted to hire them, and when I approached their leader, Arnold Peet, he immediately agreed — better to be second stringer in a successful act than to wither on your own. And he agreed also that his 'boys' would work as my bodyguards when we were not performing. Eventually they feared me — they depended on me for their bread — they knew I could kill them with a glance and they did anything I wanted them to do. Our act immediately became stronger, too, wilder and more theatrical, because it took its direction from me.

'For a time, boys, we were the most famous magicians in Europe, and titled and well-known people everywhere sought us out, gave parties for us, came for advice. I met all the surrealists, all the painters and poets; I met the American writers in Paris; I met dukes and counts, and spent many afternoons telling fortunes to those who wanted the help of magic in planning their lives. Ernest Hemingway bought me a drink in a Montparnasse bar but would not come to my table because he thought I was a charlatan. I heard that he had referred to me as 'that dime-a-dance Rasputin,' a description I did not mind a bit. The real tinpot Rasputin was an Englishman who fancied himself a demon. I met Aleister Crowley in England, and knew at once that he was a sick, deluded fraud — a blubbery ranter whose greatest talent was for mumbo jumbo.

'Crowley and I met in the garden of a house in Kensington belonging to a rich and foolish fancier of the occult who supported both of us and wanted to know what would happen if we met. I was already in the garden when Crowley oozed through the scullery door. He was sluglike, thoroughly repulsive; wore a black caftan; dirty bare feet; shaven head. His face was crazy and am­bitious — there was a kind of crude magnetism to him. Crowley looked me in the eye, trying to frighten me. 'Hello, Aleister,' I said. 'Begone, fiend!' he shouted, and pointed a fat digit at my face. I turned his hand into a bird's claw, and he nearly fainted on the spot. 'Begone yourself,' I said, and he shoved the claw under the caftan and exited with great haste. Later I understand he displayed the claw to a female admirer as proof of his satanic abilities, and worked over spells for months before he was able to change it back.'

Something moved into the fuzzy light down in the trees. 'From what I've said already, you know that I had grown careless about spending time in England. By 1921, we traveled freely back and forth across England, playing theaters in towns from Edinburgh to Penzance, though most of our work was in London, especially at the Wood Green Empire. I thought the world had for­gotten the mysterious Dr. Nightingale. But one person had not, and I met him one summer night after a performance. He was waiting by the stage door of the Empire, and I saw his red hair and knew who he was before I saw his face.'

A light in the trees showed a flight of «teps, a brick wall, a suggestion of a narrow alley. The figure in the Burberry and hat came down the stairs. Tom saw Rose hovering behind him. The magician lifted his bottle as if toasting his former self, but did not drink. With the magician's next sentence, Tom knew that it was not himself he was toasting.

'There she is, Rosa Forte, my porcelain shepherdess, my enchanted fish. I was glad she was there — I wanted her to see what I could do. I wanted her to know that nothing in her code or Speckle John's could hinder me for a moment. And I want you boys to know that too. I will not be hindered.'

The little scene down in the trees was obscurely, inexplicably sinister: Collins' surrogate in hat and long coat, the fragile girl behind him on the stairs. Savagery seemed to flicker about them — a hopeless violence curled in the fog.

Another man stepped out of the fog; red hair shone.

' 'I knew it was you,' Withers said to me. 'I should have known you'd wind up like this — a worthless parasite.' Except that he said it wuthless pa'site. 'Call yourself Coleman Collins now, do you, murderer? Well, you put on a pretty good show, I'll say that for you. I hope they'll let you perform in the stockade.' Puff-oahm. He stood there, beaming hate at me, hate and satisfaction, because he thought he had me. This little racist Southern doctor, traveling through Europe on undervalued American dol­lars, piling up anecdotes to wow them with back in Macon or Atlanta.

'I asked, 'Are you threatening me, Withers?'

''That I am,' Withers said: he was simply gloating. 'You went AWOL. Somewhere, somebody's still looking for you. I'm going to see that you're found.'

'So I called up Halmar Haraldson and sicked him on Withers.'

The Collector lurched into the fuzzy light, his face glowing with moronic glee. The red-haired man backed up. On the stairs behind Collins' surrogate, Rose could not see why the man playing Withers was frightened. She stared at the man, confused and beginning to be alarmed.

'Hey!' the red-haired man shouted. 'Hey, Mr. Col­lins?'

Tom's stomach tightened: this was not just a scene. The Collector stumbled forward. Rose saw him and screeched.

''No, you are found, Withers,' I said. And now observe how well your friend Mr. Ridpath fulfills his role.'

'Oh, my God,' Del said, and began to stand up. Rose screamed again, and Collins' stand-in gripped her arm.

The Collector flew at the red-haired man, who shouted, 'Stop him! Stop him!' The Collector knocked him down.

'Collins! Help me!' A red furry thing flopped from the man's head, and Tom saw that he was the man on the train, the aged Skeleton Ridpath. The Collector had him pinned to the ground and was battering his face. 'Found you! Found you!' he keened.

Del was on his feet, screaming; Rose, unable to move, screamed too.

'Shut up!' Collins ordered, and Del silenced.

One blow; another; the monster's bony fists smashed away again and again into the man's head. Rose turned away and shielded her face against the brick of the staircase.

'Yes, as I did, you're going to see it happen,' Collins said calmly. 'You have to see it. The poor devil didn't know it, of course, but that was the only reason he was here. To be Withers' stand-in.'

Skeleton was humming tunelessly, battering in the old man's head.

'An entirely expendable character — a failed actor named Creekmore, no better than a skid-row bum.' Collins gave a snort of amusement. 'He answered an advertisement, can you believe it? He sought me out. So did Withers. Withers knew I'd stolen Vendouris' money — as if taking the money of the dead were a crime.' Collins lifted the bottle and drank.

Down in the fog, Skeleton was doing something vile to the actor. Blood gushed from the head — Tom saw the skin leaving the bone, and stood up and turned away.

'Don't even think of running,' Collins said from his throne. 'Your friend would catch you in seconds. And then all this would be real.'

Tom looked back down to where the awful scene had taken place. The Collector was gliding back into the fog. The body was gone; Snail and Thorn and Pease stood beside the staircase with their arms locked over their chests.

'It wasn't real?' Tom said.

'Not now, child. Withers was no more. Don't worry about Creekmore. He has a few scratches, no more. I'll pay him tomorrow and send him off. He will think of me with gratitude, I assure you.'

Del gradually ceased quivering. 'That was Skeleton,' he mumbled. 'I saw him ripping . . . that man's face . . . all that blood.'

'A few bloodbags concealed in the mouth. Creekmore is already in the summerhouse washing his face and wondering where to find his next bottle.'

On the staircase in the fog, Rose slowly lifted her head.

Collins waved the bottle, and the scene went black. 'For me, the horror was still to come.' Shivering, the boys sat back down on the damp grass.

3

'Even I was surprised by Haraldson's savagery. What you boys saw was a little pig's blood and the hint of something grotesque — what I saw was a man being slowly dismem­bered and kept alive in absolute agony until the last possible second. I had been thinking of the Collector as a sort of toy, as it had been when I had invented it. Of course, the power was mine, not Haraldson's. He was only a tool, a doll filled with my own imagery. And because Haraldson was now a liability, I realized that he could be replaced by any number of our hangers-on — even with one of the Wandering Boys if necessary. I released Haraldson from the Collector as quickly as possible, after I was sure Withers was dead. The police found him almost immediately: the Swede was in such a daze that he was put away in a mental home and convicted but never executed for Withers' murder. There was a little stir in the papers for a bit; then it died away, and we were far out in the country, working the provinces; no one connected Withers or Haraldson to myself.

'The other thing I had realized while the Collector gathered in poor Withers was that I had no real need of the Wandering Boys anymore. The Collector was bodyguard enough. This was just a seed in my mind, understand. I thought about it while I gave the Wandering Boys their one amusement, badger-baiting. Whenever we were out in the countryside, they arranged for a couple of dogs, and we went out in the middle of the night with our shovels and tongs and put paid to a couple of badgers. The night after Withers had been dispatched, we were in the countryside west of York, and I looked at those six trolls and their ringmaster working for the moment when they could witness the slaughter of a few animals, and I thought: Are they really necessary? I filed the thought away: there was a great deal on my mind at the time.

'Rosa Forte, for one. She had become distant and sulky, and this infuriated me. I often beat her when I was drunk. I could not tell if she loved or hated me, her manner was so contradictory. Speckle John, who by 1922 was definitely my second fiddle, used to try to advise me about her, and his advice was an old woman's. Be nicer to her, treat her better, listen to her, that sort of thing. She would go to him and weep. I despised both of them. Money was also on my mind. Though we were as successful as any magicians were in those days, I constantly felt pinched for extra money. Even with what I made reading fortunes and doing prognostications for the wealthy, I wasn't satisfied. I wanted to live well, I wanted a lavish act; even then, I think I had the germ of my farewell performance in my mind. A good climax is important to any performance, and I knew that when I tired of touring — of dragging nine other people around the world with me — I would want my final show to be the most spectacular performance ever seen.

'That would be very expensive; and indeed my own tastes had become costly. We were already charging as much as we could ask. So I adopted other means, and here the Wandering Boys were useful to me.

'I went unannounced to that rich fool in Kensington, Robert Chalfont, late one night. When he opened the door to me, I saw on his big-jawed public-school face that he was both flattered and unsettled, even a little fright­ened. That was perfect. He knew what I had done to Crowley in his garden earlier that summer. Chalfont invited me in and offered me a drink. I took some malt whiskey and sat down in the library while he paced up and down. He had invited me for dinner several times and I had not come; now that I was there, he was nervous. 'Nice of you to drop in,' he said.

''I want money,' I said unceremoniously. 'A lot of it.'

' 'Well, look here, Collins,' he said. 'I'm afraid I can't just give you money on demand, you know — there are ways of doing things.'

''And this is my way,' I told him. 'I want three thousand pounds a year from you. And I want you to sign a paper stating that you give it voluntarily, in recognition of my work.'

''Well, dammit, man, no one respects your work more than I do,' he said, 'but what you're asking is pre­posterous.'

''No, you are preposterous,' I told him. 'You wish the privilege of associating with great magicians. You want intimacy with their secrets; you want to witness displays of their power. Now it is time to pay for the privilege.' And I reminded him of what I could do to him if he refused me.

'He asked me for time to think. I gave him two days — I could see on that stupid well-brought-up face that he wished he'd stuck to shooting and fishing.

'The following day I sent Mr. Peet and his trolls around to his house, and they did some damage there. Chalfont came straightaway to my hotel suite and agreed to what I'd demanded. But by then I had decided I wanted more — all of it, in fact. And he gave it to me, everything he had.'

'He just gave you all his money?' Tom asked. 'Just like that?'

'Not exactly.' The magician smiled. 'I invited Chal­font to participate in our act.'

'You collected him,' Tom said, horrified.

'Of course. Once he'd had a sample of that, he signed everything over to me. I kept the trolls with him every day while he made the arrangements. And when I had his name on the papers and his money in my account, I collected him again. As he should have had the sense to expect. He gave a new dimension to the Collector, a sort of poignance. In fact, I began to think it was a pity I'd never put Crowley in the Collector. Imagine what a Collector he would have made! But we made do with Chalfont for as long as we stayed together. And I had no other Collector until I heard the pleas of your school-friend and saw how helpful he would be to us this summer.'

Down in the trees, a faint light began to glow, teasing the fog that moved slowly across it.

'But pay attention now', boys. We are coming to the next turning point in my life — one of those great reversals, like the death of Vendouris or my first meeting with Speckle John.

'The money question had been solved, for many of my wealthy admirers had half-suspected the kind of thing that had happened to Chalfont, and gave over large sums whenever I wanted them. But I was growing tired of Europe. Europe was dead. I sensed new life in America — life that did not stink of corpses. Europe was really a graveyard, and in America my family had enough money to keep me for the rest of my life. I took a month off, sailed to the States, and looked for a suitable place to set up my compound. For that was how I thought of it: a guarded place, remote from any city, where I could extend magic as far as it could go; without the third-party trappings of an audience. I found this place and bought it and hired workmen to make the improvements I had in mind. The price was too high originally, but I persuaded the owners to let it go reasonably. And my methods ensured that no one would come prowling around in my absence.'

There was an immense, terrifying beating of wings: a huge white owl came to life in the dim light. Both boys froze. The owl looked predatory, more purely savage than the Collector; it beat its wings once more, then blew apart like smoke, becoming part of the fog.

Still the light glowed, promising visions to come.

'I landed again in France in the autumn of 1923. It had been only five years since my first landing, but imagine the difference! Now I knew who and what I was: Coleman Collins had found and developed the power which Charles Nightingale had only dared to dream existed within him. I was rich enough to do anything I wished, and I was famous enough to draw large audiences wherever we appeared. Now I owned a house and extensive grounds in New England. And beyond all else, of course, I was King of the Cats, famous throughout the occult world. This was a position I intended to hold as long as I could — at least until I sensed the arrival of a magician whose powers were as much greater than mine as mine were than Speckle John's. Then, I thought, we'd see what we would see.'

The white owl flickered again down the funnel of trees; its eyes blazed. The great wings rustled the leaves. Then it was gone again.

'We drove, Mr. Peet and I, he actually driving the Daimler and I relaxing in the backseat, down through western France toward Paris. I looked forward to seeing Rosa Forte and Speckle John — most especially, Rosa Forte. I thought of bringing her back to America with me — she could not survive without me, I knew, and she would have her uses in my new life. As yet, all of that was only a vague dream. I wondered what new bookings Speckle John had managed to get for us; I wondered how long the trolls would go before they required another badger-baiting; I wondered what invitations had come, which women would be waiting for me with their palms extended and their checkbooks out; I wondered too if Rosa would be as amorous in her greetings as she usually was when I returned from long trips. So down we drove, going at the dazzling speed of perhaps thirty miles an hour through village after village, each with its obelisk in­scribed with the names of those who had died in the war. The light was heavy, and the chestnut trees were turning red and orange; the dust rose up from the road; I thought of all the blood in those fields, which were just ripening into harvest time. I remembered what I had done to that poor ranter Crowley, and laughed out loud — also I thought about the attacks recently made against me by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, names important in the occult field at the time but now utterly forgotten. That heavy light . . . the orange, blood-soaked fields . . . Rosa waiting with her porcelain skin and open thighs . . . that feeling of time itself dying with a beautiful melancholy about me . . .

'Ten kilometers outside Paris I saw a peasant smile at my car with white flawless teeth, and I thought of Vendouris screaming in the frozen muck — thought of him for the first time in years, and it seemed to me that it really was time to get out when all of a beautiful European autumn seemed epitomized to me by the gleam of a dying man's teeth.

'We entered Paris from the northwest, throwing up plumes of dust behind us, and crossed the Seine at the Pont de Courbevoie and worked our way through the streets to the Ranelagh Gardens, where we lived in a splendid building on Avenue Prud'hon. We drew up before the splendid building. I could hear children's voices in the heavy air. The trees in the Ranelagh Gardens were brilliant gold, I remember, and the grass a very powerful dark green. Still the beautiful melancholy. I invited Peet to join me for a drink in my sitting room, which eventually cost him his life. We mounted the stairs, me carrying a small bag and Peet the two large suitcases from the Daimler's trunk. The interior of the building smelled of sandalwood. I opened the door of my apart­ment and let Peet enter. He went in a few steps and dropped the bags — they made a particularly loud thump. I followed and saw his face, which was both embarrassed and terrified. Then I saw them. Saw what any schoolboy would have suspected long before.'

The light blazed up in the trees, and Tom saw Rose lying naked on what looked like an oriental carpet. About her was the suggestion of a large room with oyster-colored walls. Rose's unmistakable body was sideways to him, her blond head turned away. A thick naked man with heavy arms and thighs lay atop her; his face was buried in her shoulder. Tom went rigid with shock. Beside him, Del gasped. The heavy hands kneaded her breasts, the brutal body thrust and thrust, moving itself blindly toward climax; and Rose clung to his hips, accommodating and moving with him. Shock spread so definitively throughout Tom that he could feel its progress, freezing him as it went. He could not even think of how Del was responding to this sight. You won't be foolish when you see me tonight, will you? That was what she had said, linking her hands behind his neck as they stood in chest-high water. And before that, You won't hate me, will you? I still have some work to do for him. This is what she had meant.

Everything here is a lie.

He seized at that straw until the girl tilted her face toward the sky and he saw the wide high brow, the mouth that had said she loved him. He felt as though he had been blowtorched. The man quickened, trembled, clutched at her. Rose's arms and legs clamped on the plunging man. Then the light died again, and they were alone with the magician. Del's eyes were dull. He was breathing heavily, almost panting.

You won't be foolish when you see me tonight, will you?

Everything here is a lie.

He could not see his way out of it.

'Of course it was not Root who was enjoying my Rosa, but my partner, Speckle John. I merely wanted you boys to feel my shock and outrage — and I see that I have succeeded. Arnold Peet fled. I left on his heels. When I returned half an hour later, Rosa was still there, dressed now, feigning contrition. She pretended that it had been the first occasion, but I knew better. I let her lie to me, and thought of all the consoling Speckle John had done for my poor Rosa. She expected me to beat her — she wanted to be beaten, for that would have been forgive­ness. I did not beat her. I did not shoot her, either, though I had my service revolver with me — I always carried it in those days. I just let her plead and weep. And when I met Speckle John the next day, neither one of us mentioned what I had seen on the floor of my sitting room. I began to plan my final performance.'

Collins stood. 'Tomorrow night you will see how I wrapped up all the strands; how I removed Arnold Peet, who had witnessed my humiliation, along with his trolls; how I revenged myself against those who had humiliated me; and how I gave the gaudiest performance of my life.' He looked down at the two stricken boys. 'And stay in your rooms tonight. This time I will overlook no disobe­dience.'

The magician tilted his head, looking as if he were enjoying himself, and put his hands in his pockets, his amused eyes finding Tom's; vanished.

To hell with you, to hell with you, Tom said to himself. He leaned down and helped Del to his feet. 'Will you do whatever I ask?'

'Whatever you ask,' Del said. He still looked semi-catatonic.

'Let's go back now. We'll get out of here as soon as we can tonight. I don't know how, but we'll do it. I'm through with this place.'

'I feel sick,' Del said.

'And listen. You were never going to be invited back anyhow. Get me? Shadowland was over for you anyhow. He told me. You weren't going to be chosen — he said this was your last summer here. It was over anyhow. So let's get out now.'

'Okay,' Del said. His lip trembled. 'As long as you're coming with me.' He wiped at his eyes. 'What about her? What about Rose?'

'I don't know about Rose,' Tom said. 'But we're getting out of here late tonight. And nobody's going to stop us.'

He led Del back through the wood to the edge of the lake.

'You were chosen,' Del said. The moonlight lay a white cap over his black hair. A frog croaked from the side of the lake. Whiteness hung over the surface of the lake like a veil, and ghostly wisps trailed from the edge of the lake. The iron staircase rose up out of a pocket of gray wool like a ladder set in a cloud. 'You were the one who was welcomed,' Del said. 'Weren't you?'

'But I didn't welcome them back.'

'I was sure it was going to be me. But inside, I knew it wasn't me.'

'I wish it was you.'

They trudged across the sand. Del put his hands on the flaking rungs of the ladder; went up six rungs, stopped. 'I think everybody lied to me,' he said, as if to himself.

'Tonight,' Tom said. 'Then it's all over.'

'I want it to be all over. But I almost wish this ladder would fall over again and kill both of us.'

As they went through the dark living room, Tom thought of something. 'Wait.' Del drifted out into the hall and stood like a man on a gallows. Tom went to the cabinet in the corner and opened the glass doors. The porcelain shepherdess had been broken in two — Collins had done it. It was a joke, or a warning, or like the last moralizing line in a Perrault fable. The broken halves lay separated on the wood, a little fine white powder between them. All the other figurines had been pushed to the back of the cabinet. They faced him. The boy with the books, the six drunken men, the Elizabethan. Their eyes were dead, their faces. Then Tom understood. It was they who had murdered the shepherdess. That was a message straight from Collins to him. He took his eyes from them and picked up a piece of the broken figurine and put it in his pocket. On an afterthought, he took the pistol too and stuck it inside his shirt.

He followed Del upstairs. They walked down the hallway past a black window. 'Look,' Del said, and pointed. Tom should have seen it for himself: all the lights in the woods had been extinguished. There were no more stages, no more theaters in the woods. They could see only their own faces against solid black.

Del vanished around his door.

Tom went into his own room. The pocket doors were shut. He sat on his bed, heard rustling. He patted the bed and heard the whispery crackle again. Tom put his hand under the coverlet and touched a sheet of paper. He did not want to see it.

No: he did want to see it. He wanted with his whole damaged heart to see it. When he pulled it out and allowed himself to read it, it said: If you love me, come to the little beach.

So she too wanted to escape tonight. Tom saw Coleman Collins as a huge white owl swooping savagely toward them all, gathering and crushing them in his talons. He saw Rose squeezed in those claws. He folded the note and put it between the revolver and his skin. Then he touched the broken figurine in his pocket. 'Okay,' he said. 'Okay, Rose.'

Tom went to the doors and pushed them aside. Del lay on his bed in the dark. His shoulder twitched, one hand stirred babyishly. 'What?' he asked.

'We're going now,' Tom said, 'and we're going to meet Rose.'

The porcelain figures, lined up at the back of the cabinet, staring out with dead faces at their handiwork. Rosa Forte had been murdered by the Wandering Boys, and Collins wanted him to know it.

'I just want to get out,' Del said. 'I can't stand it here anymore. Please, Tom. Where do we go first?'

Tom led the way down the stairs, through the living room, and out onto the flagstones in the cool air. 'We're going back through the woods,' he said. 'All the way this time.'

'Whatever you say, master.'

FOUR

Shadow Play

1

Tom took the gun out of his shirt and put it in his waistband at the small of his back. 'What's that?' Del asked. 'That's a gun. What do you need a gun for?'

'Probably we won't even need it,' Tom said. 'I took it out of the cabinet. I'm just being careful, Del.'

'Careful. If we were careful, we'd still be in our rooms.'

'If we were careful, we'd never have come here in the first place. Let's find Rose.' He started down the rickety iron ladder. It moved away from the bluff a half-inch. Tom swallowed. The ladder had felt wobbly every time he had climbed it. 'Anything wrong?' Del called out. Tom answered by going down the ladder as fast as he could. He started to walk across the beach in the darkness. He could hear Del's feet hitting the sand as he ran to catch up.

'He wanted to keep you here, didn't he? Forever.'

'He was going to do worse to Rose,' Tom said. 'We have to get to that beach on the other side of the lake. That's where she'll be.'

'And then what?'

'She'll tell us.'

'But what'll we say to her, Tom? I can't even stand . . . '

Tom could not stand it either. 'Do you want to try to swim across or walk through the woods?'

'Let's walk,' Del said. 'But don't lose me. Don't lose me, Tom.'

'I'm not going to. Not losing you was the real reason I came here,' Tom said. Curls of fog still leaked from the woods. He slid between two trees and started toward the first platform.

'Maybe we could bring her back to Arizona with us,' Del said.

'Maybe.'

'Hold my hand,' Del said. 'Please.' Tom took his outstretched hand.

Rose was waiting for them on the little beach. They saw her before she noticed them — a slender girl in a green dress, high-heeled shoes dangling from her hand. They padded toward her, and she turned jerkily to face them — frightened. 'I'm sorry,' she said. She glanced at Del, but her eyes probed Tom. 'I didn't know if you'd come.'

'Well, I saw this,' he said, and took the broken shepherdess from his pocket.

'What is it? Let me see.' Tentatively, as if she were afraid to stand too near him, she came a few steps closer. 'It does look like me. That's funny.' Rose probed his face again: gave him a taut, bitter half-smile. 'Don't you think that's funny?' Because he did not smile back, her eyes moved again to the broken shepherdess. Something in her posture told him that she wanted to step away. Then he understood. She was afraid that he would hit her.

'You don't think it's funny,' she said. 'Oh, well.' 'Hey, I'm here too,' Del said.

Instantly more at ease, Rose altered the set of her shoulders and turned to him. 'I know you are, darling Del. Thank you for coming.' Her eyes flicked at Tom. 'I wasn't sure if . . . '

'You had to, right?' Del said. His voice trembled. 'He's crazy, that's all. Not half-crazy, all crazy.'

'Everything here is a lie,' Rose said. 'Just because you saw it doesn't mean it really happened.'

Tom nodded. He was curiously reluctant to take up this hope she offered. If he reached out, it might bite his hand. Del, however, had not only reached out, but embraced it. His face was glowing. 'Well, we're here, anyhow. Now, where do we go?'

'Where you were before,' Rose said. 'This way.' She led them back into the woods. 'Where he was before?' Del asked. 'Where's that?' 'An old summerhouse,' Rose said, walking through fog and night but needing no light to see her way. 'The men were living there, but they're gone now.'

'Wait a second,' Tom said, stopping short. 'That house? What's the point of going there?'

'The point is the tunnel, grumpy Tom,' she said. 'And the point of the tunnel is that it takes us out of here. I spent the whole day getting this ready — you'll see.'

'A tunnel,' Tom said; and Del repeated, 'A tunnel,' as if now they were truly on the way home.

'I've never gone all the way through it,' Rose said, still moving ahead through the fog, 'but I know it's there. I think it goes almost to Hilly Vale. We can stay in it all night. Then in the morning we can get out, walk to the station, and get on a train. There's an early train to Boston. I checked. They won't even miss you until late in the morning, and by then we'll be out of Vermont.' 'What about your grandmother?' Tom said. 'I'll call her from wherever we get to.' Her eyes rested questioningly on him for a moment.

2

Like wary animals, or like the ghosts of animals half-visible in the fog, they stepped away from the last of the woods. When Del saw the parklike area with its man­icured lawns and artfully placed trees — here too the cold fog floated and accumulated in the hollows — he said, 'I never even knew this was here!'

Rose said, 'I think other people used to live here, a long time ago, but Mr. Collins made them leave.'

Tom nodded: the huge shining owl had driven them away.

'I think it used to be a resort,' Rose said. 'And I think the big house used to be a sort of nightclub and casino.'

'But why did they need a tunnel?' Tom asked.

'I guess it had something to do with bootlegging,' Rose told him.

'Sure,' Del said, suddenly knowledgeable. 'This side must be close to a little road. It wouldn't all have been walled in then. If they heard of a raid, they could hide the booze and wheels and stuff in the tunnel.'

'Only if the runnel went back to Shadowland,' Tom pointed out.

Rose said, 'Del's right. There is more than one tunnel. You'll see in a minute.' The shabby house was even more run-down in the fog. The rip in the porch screen gaped like a hungry mouth.

The three of them went toward the house. Tom kept seeing it in the past Rose and Del had drawn for him, in a postwar summer, surrounded by a few other houses like it — now fallen in — inhabited by men in blazers and boaters, women in dresses like the one Rose wore. There would be canoes, a man somewhere would be practicing the banjo, and ice cubes would chime in martini pitchers.

Good stuff. Prewar. Came in from Canada.

Nick, why don't we cross the lake and go up to the lodge tonight?

Good idea, sport. I want another fling at that wheel.

Say, you haven't heard anything about that owl Philly claims he saw last night?

No — that would have been later. 'Sweet Sue' was what the banjo was playing, ringing out chinga-chink-chink, chinga-chink-chink through the summer air.

Yes, let's try our hand at the lodge tonight. I feel lucky. Waft some gin this way, sport, if you'll be so kind.

'You daydreaming?' Rose called out. 'Or are you just afraid to come in?'

Tom went up on the porch with the other two. Rose led them into the house and switched on a single lamp. The old building looked as though no one had been in it since the magician's winged emissary had sent them all packing. Dust lay on all the ripped chairs, on the blurry carpet.

'Those men are set to go after tomorrow night,' Rose said. 'All their things are either thrown away or back at the house. Or maybe in one of the other tunnels.'

'Wait a second,' Del said. 'How many are there?'

'Three. Don't worry, I can find the right one.' She smiled at Tom. 'I put some sandwiches and a thermos and some blankets down there. We'll be all right tonight.'

'So where is this tunnel?' Del asked. 'Hey, if there are rats down there, you can shoot them.'

'I didn't see any rats,' Rose said, and gave Tom a speculative look.

'Well, I brought his gun,' Tom admitted. 'It's about a hundred years old. I don't know how to shoot it, anyhow.'

'The tunnel's this way.' Rose moved a dusty wicker table and pushed back the rug. A trapdoor lay flush against the wood. She bent down, put her finger through the ring, and swung the door up. 'Used to be how you got to the little cellar.' Wide concrete steps led down into blackness. 'They made the tunnels later.'

'Boy,' Del said. 'As simple as that.'

'You waiting for something?' Rose asked, and Del looked at both of them, uttered 'Oh' in a squeaking voice, and began to go slowly down the steps. 'There's a flashlight on the bottom step.'

'Found it. Come on, you guys.'

3

The tunnel was high enough to stand in. Packed earth made the floor and walls; timbers shored up the roof. When Rose shone the flashlight down its length, they could see it going deeper into the earth at a slight pitch, falling and falling. Where the light began to die — a long way off — it seemed to turn a corner.

'Well, you said you were going to take the low road,' Del said. 'This is really cool. Look how big it is! I thought we'd be crawling on our hands and knees.'

'Not a chance,' Rose said. 'Would I do that to you?' She gestured with the light as they walked along. The air changed, became colder and drier in the total blackness around the spreading beam.

At the juncture of the tunnel's three branches the flashlight picked out a little heap of things. The juncture was a circular cavern slightly taller than the tunnels themselves. The ceiling was rounded and intricately buttressed by a lattice of two-by-fours. 'Here's our bedroom,' Rose said. 'And blankets and food and stuff like that.' She knelt and lifted the blanket off the magician's wicker basket. 'I didn't think he'd miss this. Is anybody hungry?'

Tension had made the boys ravenous. Rose stood the flashlight on end in the center of the vaulted cavern and handed them ham sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. Collins' ham; Collins' wax paper, too, probably. Each of them ate leaning against a different wall, so they were only half-visible to each other. Enough of the light filtered out and down to dimly touch their faces.

Del asked, 'Which one of these tunnels do we take, Rose?'

'The one next to Tom.' Tom leaned over and turned to peer down it. A wave of cold air washed toward him from out of impenetrable dark. 'One of these used to connect to another summerhouse.' From the cold dark­ness of the tunnel Tom heard:

chinga-chink-chink, chinga-chink-chink of the banjo

and an amateurish but sweet voice singing There's a moon a-bove Dum da dum-dum Sweet Sue, just you.

'I think we ought to try to go to sleep,' he said. 'Toss me one of those blankets, please, Rose.' Her face blazed into color as she bent forward, throwing a plaid blanket toward him. 'Good idea,' she said. For a time they arranged the blankets on the hard floor.

'I don't suppose the rest of you hear anything,' Tom said.

'Hear anything?': Del. 'Just my imagination.'

Rose came forward into the center, her head and trunk floating in the light like the top of the woman, sawed in half in the old trick. She gave him a liquid, molten message from her pale eyes — Forgive me? Then the beam of the flashlight dipped like a flare along the curving walls and momentarily dazzled Tom, shining directly into his eyes. His shadow spread gigantically up the wall behind him. The beam swung away, and he saw Rose's body outlined against it — a wraith from the twenties in her green dress, wandering down here on whatever errands brought the resort people below ground. Who was that lady I saw you with? Nicholas? Just a lady who can be in two places at once. Those captured voices.

The beam found Rose's blanket already spread. Her shoes dropped gently to the packed ground. 'Good night, my loves.'

'Good night,' they said.

The flashlight clicked off, and seamless black covered them.

'Like floating,' Del said. 'Like being blind.' 'Yes,' Rose breathed. Tom's heart went out to both of them.

He sprawled out on his blanket and covered himself against the chill. Like being blind. When he heard those captured voices drifting in the tunnels, he knew that nothing would be as easy as Del thought — that nothing had ever been that easy — and fear kept his eyes open, though he too was blind.

(splash of water: canoe paddle lifted and dripping, the gleam catching your eye from clear across the lake)

Two places at once, very handy, Nick.

Summers are for dalliance, dear boy.

Wife sick again, is she?

Something in the water, she says. Foolishness. Some­thing in the gin, more likely.

Or something in the air. Philly saw that owl again last night.

There is no owl, dear boy. Trust me.

Don't trust him, Tom said to himself; there is, there is an owl.

Philly's darling wife is the only reason we tolerate him, after all. . . .

Then voices from later in the summer: he could hear the coming chill, the promise of dead leaves and gray freezing water.

Joan can't be moved. Can't figure it out — doctors can't either. Going crazy with this thing.

And I saw the owl over your cabin, Nick . . .

Can't get her out, can't stay . . .

And Philly's wife dead — something in the air or some­thing in the water. . .

Heard they sold the whole place. The devil must have bought it.

Waft the gin this way, Nick. Keep having these terrible nightmares.

The other two slept in the perfect blackness. Tom lay rigid in his blanket, listening to their even breathing as the captured voices lilted from the tunnels, moving and changing until there was only one voice left.

Good-bye, all, good-bye. . . All alone. Just me, chicken inspector number 23. Better waft myself some more of this gin and keep the boogies away . . . all alone, all alone . . . with the moon a-bove, da da dum dum . . .

He knew that if he looked deeply enough into one or another of the tunnels, he'd find a skeleton. Twenties Nick, with a supply of prewar gin and something going with Philly's wife while his own wife sickened and died and while a plausible but sinister young expatriate bought up the resorts where he had come for a pleasant summer of gambling and lovemaking. Twenties Nick, who had stayed on until it was too late and now was never going to leave . . . Crooning 'Sweet Sue' in the tunnel that had allowed him and his mistress to be in two places at once.

Collins had killed them off, the ones that couldn't be scared away. Then he had taken the old resort and perfected himself, toying with Del Nightingale in the summers when he thought that Del might be his suc­cessor: later, just sharpening his skills, waiting for the successor to come, fending off anyone who tried to invite himself, knowing that in time the only person in the world who meant danger to him would appear.

And when his extorted money had run out, he had killed Del's parents. Brought their plane out of the air and claimed his share of the inheritance and bided his time, keeping his ears open — knowing that sooner or later he would hear about some young fellow who still didn't know what he was.

Waft myself some more of that good stuff, sport.

Plenty of wafting went on over the years. Here's to you, Nick.

And to you, Sweet Sue.

He heard it as though someone had spoken from the very mouth of the tunnel nearest him. Tom turned over inside his blanket — or was this too a dream? — and felt a chill breeze advancing toward him.

The devil, M., emerged wrapped in the breeze from the mouth of the tunnel. He shone palely, as if lit by moonlight. M. was no longer dressed in the uniform of a private-school teacher, but in a blazer and high stiff collar. Above the collar his face still radiated sympathy and intense but misdirected intelligence. He knelt down before Tom.

'So you took the low road after all, and here you are.'

'Leave me alone,' Tom said.

'Now, now. I'm offering you a second chance. You don't want to end up like our friend back there, do you? Salted away like a herring? That's not for you.'

'No,' Tom said. 'It's not.'

'But, dear child, can't you see that this is hopeless? I'm giving you your last chance. Stand up and get out. Leave them — they're of no use to you. Take my hand. I'll put you back in your room.' He held out his hand, which was black and smoking. 'Oh, there'll be a little pain. Nothing you won't get over. At least you'll save your life.'

Tom shuddered back from the awful hand.

'Reconsider. I promise you, that creature you think you've in love with is going to sell you out. Take my hand. I know it's not very pretty, but you have to take it.' White curls of smoke hovered over the extended hand. 'Mr. Collins has explained it all to you. She's not your way out, boy.'

Tom saw the inevitability of it: a final betrayal, like Rosa Forte's. 'Even so . . . 'he said.

M. retracted his hand, which was now pink and smooth. 'I wonder where you will end up. Down here? In the lake? Nailed to a tree to be eaten by birds? I'll come back and remind you that I tried to help.'

'Do that,' Tom said: I told you so must have been one of the devil's favorite sentences.

M. sneered and flickered away.

'Not like that,' Tom said to himself.

4

'What time is it now?' Del asked several hours later.

The flashlight flared out light: illuminated Rose's wrist and bare arm. 'Twenty minutes later than the last time you asked. Six-fifty-one. Is everybody awake?'

'Yeah,' Tom said, jolted out of deep sleep. Rose played the light around the vaulted chamber, shining it in his face, then in Del's. Finally she turned it on herself. She was sitting against the wall, and unlike Del and himself, did not look disheveled. Her hair was in place; Tom saw with astonishment that she was even wearing lipstick. 'There's still coffee in the thermos, and I've got some hardboiled eggs. We can have breakfast before we start.'

'I have to pee,' Del said, sounding embarrassed. 'So do I,' Tom said.

In pitch darkness they stumbled into the first tunnel and splashed the walls; came back guided by the light to eat the hardboiled eggs.

'Now, which tunnel do we take?' Del asked.

'That one.' Rose stabbed the light toward a gaping hole in the curving wall. She walked to the entrance of the tunnel and played the light on a white chalk line. 'I made this when I brought everything down. This is the one.'

'Didn't you say the one next to me?' Tom said.

'This was the one next to you,' Rose said. 'You got mixed up walking back here. This is the one I marked.'

'How far does it go?' Del asked.

'Long way,' Rose said. 'We'll have to be in it about half an hour.'

'You're sure this is the right one?' Tom asked.

'I marked it. I'm sure.'

. . . sell you out. Just an unhappy dream: but had it not been from this tunnel that he had heard the lost and captured voices spinning through their eternal and terrible summer? 'Shine the light on your face,' Tom said. 'Humor me.'

Rose lifted the flash and pointed at her face. She squinted in the glare, but her hand was steady. That creature you think you love. She was the girl in the window; she was the girl in the red cape carrying a basket down the wooded, path. He wrapped his fingers around the broken figure in his pocket.

Farewell, Nick.

Come back anytime, Sweet Sue.

In the lake? Nailed to a tree to be eaten by birds?

'Let's get started,' Tom said.

5

The light bobbed before them, touching timber after timber. Their feet hushed on the dirt. An unrecognized image, almost a sense of deja vu, troubled Tom. But it was not deja vu, because he knew he had never been in this place before. Still, the sense of a parallel experience hung in his mind — something that had led to . . . what? A taste of unpleasantness, a hint of wrongness, of things being not what they seemed.

'What did you think you heard back there?' Del asked quietly.

'I guess I was just nervous.'

'So was I,' Del confessed.

Down they went, feeling as much as seeing their way. The air in the tunnel grew damper and colder. Rose's flashlight picked out beads of moisture on the wall.

'Did you really come here this summer to . . . you know. Protect me?' Del could ask this because of the darkness which hid his face.

'I guess I did.' Tom's voice, like Del's, went out into pure blackness.

'But how did you know I'd need it?' Del's piping voice seemed to hang in the air, surrounded by charged space. How could he answer it? Well, I had this vision about a wizard and an evil man, and then later I saw that the evil man had overtaken the wizard. Bad things were coming for you, and I had to put myself in their way. It was the truth, but it could not be spoken: he could not send out his own voice into the waiting blackness if it were going to say those things.

'I guess it was that 'towers-of-ice' night — remember?'

'When I didn't know if you were taking Uncle Cole away from me or not,' Del said.

'God.'

Del actually giggled.

Then he had it, the memory: Registration Day: walking down the headmaster's stairs after filling out forms in the library, following Mrs. Olinger's flashlight and fat Bambi Whipple's candle. Going toward their first sight of Laker Broome.

For a long time they walked in silence as well as darkness, going always down, down, as if the tunnel led to the center of the earth instead of Hilly Vale.

6

A long time later, Tom felt the ground changing. The drag forward which had tired his legs had become a drag backward. They were going uphill now: muscles on the tops of his thighs twanged like rubber bands.

''Was that halfway?' Del asked.

'More,' Rose said. 'Pretty soon we get out.'

Thank God, Tom said silently: the constant darkness had begun to prey on him.

A face sewn together like Thorn's, a jigsaw of flesh and scars, floated up through the air and winked.

'Something wrong?' Del asked.

'Tired.'

'I felt you jump.'

'You're imagining things.'

'Maybe you are,' Del said slyly.

'Remember when you said you heard something?' Rose asked.

'Sure.'

'Well, now I think I do. Stop talking and listen.'

That surge of fear again: unavoidable. The flashlight clicked off, and for a moment its afterimage burned in Tom's eyes.

'I don't . . . ' Del began. He stopped: he, and Tom beside him, had heard it too — a complicated, rushing, pounding noise.

'Oh, God,' Del breathed. 'They're after us.'

'Hurry, hurry, hurry,' Rose pleaded. The light went on, blindingly bright, and searched past them. The long tunnel snaked down and away, empty behind them as far as they could see. 'Please.'

Carrying the light, Rose started to run. Tom heard the pack behind them — it could have been two men, or four, or five, and they sounded a good way off — and then he too ran after Del and Rose. He heard Del sobbing in panic, making a trapped witless noise in his chest and throat. The flashlight bobbed crazily ahead.

'They knew where to look,' he shouted.

'Just run!' Rose shouted back.

He ran. His shoulders knocked painfully against a wooden support. He almost fell, pain shooting all the way down his arm; scraped his hand against a rock protruding from the wall and righted himself.

As soon as he got back into his stride he ran straight into Del. Del was still making a sound of utter panic.

'Get up and run,' Tom said. 'Here — here's my hand.' Del caught at him and pulled himself up. Rose was twenty feet away, jerking the flashlight impatiently, shining it in their eyes.

Del sprinted away like a rabbit.

'Gotcha!' a man yelled from far back in the tunnel.

Dogs and badgers; the bloody greasy pit. Had Collins known even then that they would end like this? Tom pushed himself forward.

'Gotcha!'

'The stairs!' Del screamed. 'I found the stairs!'

A huge bubble of relief broke in Tom's chest. They could still escape; there was still a chance. He pounded on, panting harshly. Over all the other noises he could hear Del scrambling up the steps to the outside.

'Tom.' Rose touched his arm and stopped him.

'We can make it,' he panted. 'They're far enough back — we can do it.'

'I love you,' she said. 'Remember that.' Her arms caught his chest and her mouth covered his. Sudden light flooded into the tunnel.

'Rose,' he pleaded, and stepped toward the light, half-carrying her. Her face was wild. He twisted her around to see the steps, the open door.

Something wrong. Some detail . . . His heart boomed.

A huge roulette wheel, so dusty that red and black were

both gray, tilted against the side of the steps. Del's legs

abruptly soared up and out of the opening as he was

grabbed from above.

In the next instant, Del screamed.

'What. . . ?' He still could not believe what was hap­pening. Del screamed again. 'Rose. . . ?' She was out of his arms and walking toward the broad concrete stairs. 'You'd better come,' she said. 'It has to be like this.'

He was numb; he watched her mount the first of the steps and turn to face him. Straight in her green dress and high heels, walking away from him; her job done.

Don't hate me.

'You brought us back,' he said. His lips and fingers had lost all feeling. 'What are you?'

'It has to be like this, Tom,' Rose said. 'I can't say anymore now.'

Del's screams had broken down into ragged animallike groans. Tom turned his head to look back down the tunnel. Root and Thorn, not running, came dimly into sight. They paused at the very edge of the penumbra of brightness from the open trapdoor, waited for him to act. He looked back at Rose, who also waited, her face expressionless. Thorn and Root were a wall of crossed arms and spread legs. Rose mounted another step, and he went toward her.

Coleman Collins gaily sang, 'Come out, come out, wherever you are,' and before Tom got to the steps, a sudden fearful clarity visited him and he thought to tug his shirt out of his trousers, hiding the gun.

As soon as he reached the steps, he looked up and recognized the ending of the tunnel: it was the forbidden room. Then he knew how the 'Brothers Grimm' had come and gone.

'So the birds have come home once again,' Collins said.

7

Tom came up into the crowded room. Rose was standing next to Coleman Collins, and the magician was gazing at him with a gleeful, deranged impishness, gently massaging his upper lip with an index finger. The other four Wandering Boys stood off to one side, dogs on the leash. 'Dear me, what a face,' Collins said. 'Can't have that sort of thing, not for our stirring finish — not for the farewell performance. Tears, perhaps, but never scowls.'

Just behind Collins, Mr. Peet was gripping Del by the bicep, squeezing hard enough to hurt. Del's face was gray and rubbery with shock. Mr. Peet, dressed in the old-fashioned clothes from the train, grinned maliciously and shook Del — jerked him like a doll.

'Why does it have to be like this, Rose?' Tom asked. She looked back at him as from a great distance. Collins smiled, stopped caressing his lip, and took the girl's hand.

'Why does it have to be like this?'

Del began to weep from terror.

'I'll answer, if you don't mind,' Collins said. He was still smiling, 'It has to be like this because you are unfit to be my successor. As you have just proven. I am afraid that the world will just have to wait for another gifted child to appear — there's no hope left for you, Tom. You have just been sent back to the ranks. Spectator — partici­pant. Good, here are the others.'

First Root, then Thorn, emerged from the trapdoor. Thorn was breathing hard: the run had tired him. Their shoulders nearly filled the opening.

'I could have been your salvation,' Collins mused. 'And how I tried. But even the best potter cannot work with inferior clay.' He shrugged, but his eyes were still dancing. 'Now, let us check our scheduled.' He raised both his hand and Rose's and looked at his watch. 'We have several hours before the final act.' He bent down and brushed Rose's hand with his lips. When he gently let go of Rose's hand he turned to the lounging men. 'Thorn, Pease, and Snail. You'll bring this boy along to the big theater. Rose, darling, I want you to wait in my bedroom. You others, take my nephew outside and play with him for a couple of hours. If he whimpers, punish him. He is of no use anymore.'

She was his girlfriend, Tom thought. His mistress. Betrayal upon betrayal sank into him like lead. Two of the trolls roughly grabbed his arms. He looked into Rose's eyes.

Don't hate me.

'Get along, Rose,' the magician said. But she hung by his side for a moment, answering Tom's gaze. Don't hate me for what I had to do. 'I said go.' Rose turned and walked away. Collins' mad eyes snagged and held him.

'Do you understand?' the magician said. 'I had to see if you'd really try to leave. You don't deserve your talent — but that is academic now, for you won't have it much longer. When it came down to it, you chose your wings.'

'You killed all those people,' Tom said. 'You killed Nick. And Philly's wife. All those people from the summer cabin.'

'And Nick's wife, for that matter,' Collins said.

'You killed Del's parents too,' Tom said. 'For your share of their money.' He saw Del reel back, be brought sharply upright by Mr. Peet.

'I thought I'd get Del's share too, you know.' Collins smiled. 'At one time I thought he might be my successor. It would have been better if he had been. I could control my nephew. But there you were, shining away like the biggest diamond in the golden west.'

As Del began to wail, Tom again caught the re­semblance to Laker Broome. Collins was smiling, pre­tending calm, but his nerves were on fire — he was burning with anger and crazy glee. 'Stay behind, Mr. Peet. You others, take that squalling boy outside. I don't care what you do with him.'

Root, Seed, and Rock moved toward Del. Seed was grinning like a bear. He clamped his paw on Del's elbow and tore him away from Mr. Peet. 'You needn't worry about bringing him back,' Collins said. Seed began hauling Del toward the door, Root and Pease crowding after. 'Mr. Peet, I want you to open the wall between the two theaters. We'll want all the space we can get.'

Mr. Peet nodded and followed the others through the door.

Now only the three trolls — Thorn, Pease, and Snail — the magician and the boy were left in the room. The trolls too wore the four-button suits and Norfolk jackets from the train, and looked balloonlike, stuffed into the hot tight clothes. Thorn's sewn-together face was dripping. The three moved in closer to Tom.

'What are they going to do to Del?'

'Oh, it won't be as interesting as what happens to you,' the magician said. 'You're going to be crucified.'

'Is that what you did to Speckle John?'

'Why, no. I gave him a lifelong punishment, didn't I tell you that? I made him a servant. He was a son of Hagar, after all, or is that too biblical for you?'

'I know what it means.'

The magician smiled and glanced at the sweating trolls. 'Take him now.'

Snail put hands the size of footballs on Tom's shoul­ders. With those hands he could have broken both of Tom's arms; and Tom felt an intention like this in the man's touch, which was more than brutal. It was utterly without human feeling. They were going to hurt him, and they would enjoy it, the more so because he had humili­ated them earlier. Snail lifted him off the ground, gripping hard enough to bruise, and carried him out of the room. The other two laughed — hoarse braying barnyard laugh­ter.

She never told him about the gun, he realized. She knew but she didn't tell him. It kept him from passing out.

8

Snail's fingers were steel bars thrust into his muscles. As the man carried him like a weightless doll down the corridor to the theaters, he bent his head forward and whispered into Tom's ear. 'My daddy used to whup me — my daddy used to near take the skin off my back — oh, how my daddy whupped me — ' he made a coarse oily noise Tom realized a second later was a chuckle. Then he put his lips on Tom's ear. ' — and I didn't have skin near as white as yours.' He bellowed with laughter.

Tom kicked backward and hit Snail's legs with his heels. The troll responded by shaking him hard enough to break his neck.

'Play pretty, now,' Snail said, setting him down outside the door to the little theater. The brass plaque still read:

Wood Green Empire

27 August, 1924

Collins opened the door and Snail hauled Tom in.

One whole wall was gone. The two theaters were joined into a single massive space. Mr. Peet was up at the back of the pitched seats, looking at his picture in the mural.

'Hey, this is pretty good,' he called down to Collins. 'That guy looks just like me.' He sounded almost childishly, egotistically pleased.

'Are you an idiot?' Collins barked. 'Get away from there.'

Mr. Peet looked surly and insulted, then lounged down the bank of steps.

'Take him up to the back,' Collins said. 'Once we get started, I want him to be able to see. And turn the lights off.'

'Hey, you're not really — ?' Tom began, but Snail slapped him, stinging a whole side of his face. 'Used to whup me real good,' he said, grinning. 'Damn near ventilated me.' Like Seed, he too was missing some teeth. He jerked Tom across the smaller stage and into the larger space. The overhead spots died, and only faint amber light from the stage showed Tom the rows of empty seats. Snail pulled him forward and up.

'What's going to happen to me?' Tom asked.

'I just work here,' Snail said. 'But what do you think Root's doing to your buddy?' Tom hesitated, and Snail said, 'Don't try any of that crazy stuff. You do, and I pull your legs off.'

That crazy stuff-Snail meant levitating. But that area in him was lost anyhow. He was too frightened to find that key. They reached the last row of seats. Crucified? He remembered the dream from long ago, the vulture hop­ping forward and rending his hands with its yellow beak.

A wooden frame in the shape of a large X had beeq screwed to the wall. It had a temporary, provisional look, the look of something thrown up in a hurry, easily dismantled after it had been used. From the center of the X hung a leather cinch. On the carpet beneath it lay two long nails and a wooden mallet.

'He can't really do that,' Tom said.

'As long as he don't do it to me, he can,' Snail said.

'Stop talking and pick him up,' Collins ordered. 'He'll fight, so get a good grip.'

Tom jumped sideways and tried to run back down the stairs, but Thorn put an arm around his chest and yanked him backwards. He kicked, and Thorn hit him on the top of his head with his knuckles.

'Get a grip on him, I said.' Collins bent over to pick up the nails. When he touched them, they shimmered on the carpet, and when they were in his hands, they glowed a pale silver, as if lit from within.

Pease grabbed a leg with each doughy hand. Snail took his wrists, and he could not move: Tom strained against their touch, but Thorn increased the pressure on his chest and drove all the breath out of him. Mr. Peet wandered off and sat down on the aisle seat, where he twisted around to watch. Thorn's sour breath washed directly over Tom's face.

'Observe the nails,' Collins said. Now he held the mallet in his right hand. The long nails had turned a molten golden-red, and seemed to pulse in the magician's hand.

'Good trick,' said Thorn.

'You stink,' Tom said, and Thorn rapped him on the head again; a sharp jarring pain. With only half his strength, Thorn could break his skull.

'This boy is a magician. We need something extra to hold him.' Collins held the nails in front of Tom's eyes. 'Understand? You'll never coax these out of the boards. I think you'll be content to wait for the performance.' He turned to Pease and Snail. 'Hoist him up.'

The three trolls carried Tom to the frame, Thorn walking backward. 'Keep a hold on those arms,' Thorn said, and freed his arms so that he could grip Tom's waist with both hands. 'Come along with me — I'll belt him in.' He lifted Tom, and pinned him with one hand stuck hard into his belly while he worked the cinch. Tom wriggled, but Thorn's hand pushed his stomach against his spine.

The belt closed around his belly. The men sprang away. He was firmly held and four feet above the ground. The clasp bit at his skin; the old pistol chewed the small of his back.

Collins held the nails up again. They shone out bands of color, like prisms. 'All right. We will proceed. Thorn, kneel down and hold his feet against the wall.' Thorn bent down and rammed Tom's heels against the green.

'Snail, you hold the right arm. Pease, you take the left. Palm out against the brace.'

They seized his arms and pulled them out, stretching them until his elbows threatened to turn inside out. Tom howled, 'You can't! You can't!'

'That is your opinion,' Collins said, and approached, one shining nail between thumb and forefinger, the mallet already lifted in his right hand.

'NOOO!' Tom bellowed. Pease flattened his fingers back, exposing the palm.

'The pain won't be as bad as you anticipate,' Collins said, and pressed the point of the first nail into Tom's left palm.

Tom clamped his eyes shut and fought against every­thing — the men holding him spread-eagled, the buckle sawing at his skin.

Collins hammered the mallet against the head of the nail. There was a grunt immediately before the impact: and then incredible pain, as if not just the nail but the mallet itself had thrust itself through his palm. He screamed, and heard the scream in a disembodied, hallucinatory way: it was as visible as a flag.

'You ain't paying us enough,' he heard Pease say.

'Now you, Snail. Get those fingers back.'

Tom's right fingers uncurled by themselves. My hands, he thought. Will I ever. . . ?

The pinprick of the nail's point: the muffled grunt of effort of concentration; the rape of his right hand.

My hands! They seemed the size of his whole body, and burning. He saw his own screams rippling away from him.

'Not too much blood,' Collins said with satisfaction.

Tom went out of his body and floated among the bright screams.

9

Sometime later the pain in his enormous hands brought him back. Sweat dripped down his nose, itching like a dozen ants. His throat had been sand-blasted. His muscles screeched; his ears pounded. At intervals a loud crump! from the outside rattled the frame on which he was suspended, and he deliriously thought that bombs were falling, that Shadowland was being shelled, and then realized that the explosions were fireworks. One after the other, single explosions, double and triple explosions, like wordless sentences commanding and insisting and insist­ing again. Ka-bang! Ka-bang whamp!

He was afraid to look at his hands. The three trolls lay across the seats in the last row, now and then looking at him without curiosity, as if he were a picture they found wanting. One of the nails kept a bone from being where it wanted to be, and the pressure, which faded in and out, made all the other pains increase. He tried to push his hands flatter against the wood, and for as long as he could hold them there — not a long time — the agony lessened.

When his hands sagged, the fire returned. Pease and Snail glanced up at him with real interest. 'Sings good,' Pease said, and Thorn snickered.

'The kid's right,' Pease said. 'You do stink.'

'Kiss my ass,' Thorn said.

Tom risked a peek at his left hand, and was relieved that he could see no farther than its heel. A little drying blood crusted the strap of his watch.

You're a magician, aren't you?

I never wanted to be.

But you are?

Yes.

Then use your mind to pull out the nails.

I can't.

That's what you thought when he told you to raise the log. Just try.

He tried. He saw the nails slipping out of the wood, gently easing from his hands, sliding out easy and slow . . .

and it felt like wires had been suddenly thrust into the wounds; he could see the nails glowing, turning gold and blue and green . . . he uttered a high floating falsetto wail, and saw that too, a thin rag ascending to the ceiling.

'Kid sounds like a female alcoholic,' Pease said.

See the odd things you learn? If you hadn't tried that, you'd never have known that Pease is the trolls' wit.

'We ain't gettin paid enough for this,' Pease said, as he had before. 'Badgers is one thing, this is something else.'

'You tell me how,' Thorn growled.

'Blow your mouth some other way when you talk at me.'

Tom sagged against the cinch.

When he looked up, M. was sitting beneath him, his knees drawn up, his back resting on Thorn's seat. He was back in the prep-school costume. 'Did I call it, or did I call it? Give me a little credit.'

Tom closed his eyes.

'I can't save you from this, obviously, but I can save you from the rest,' M. said. 'Open your eyes. Aren't you at least prepared to admit that you've been had?'

'Leave me alone,' Tom said.

'It talks!' Pease roared.

'I can still do you a lot of good,' M. went on calmly. 'Those nails, now — I could slip those out for you. Wouldn't you like that?'

'Why?' Tom asked.

'He wants to know why,' Pease said.

'Because I'd hate to see you wasted. Simple as that. Your mentor has done us a fair amount of good over the years, but you — you'd be extraordinary. Should I try those nails? It's a simple matter, I assure you.'

'Go away,' Tom sobbed. 'Get out of here. I turn my face away from you. I revile you. I can't stand the smell of you — you are these nails.' His voice broke down. Sweat burst from every pore of his body. He was freezing to death. M. disappeared, still smiling up.

'Kid gets on my fuckin' nerves,' Thorn said.

'Give him a break,' Pease said, 'he's in a tough spot. Ain't you, kid? Let's go farther down.'

'What the hell, he's crazy,' Snail said. 'He's out of his gourd.' He stood up. The three of them loafed down the stairs to the first row. Tom closed his eyes and let his head loll back against the wall.

'Look, we can even go outside, hey?' he heard Thorn say. 'Who's to say we can't?'

Tom passed out again.

When he came around again, he thought it was night. He was alone in the vast dark theater. A plum-colored glow emanated from the curtains. He was soaked in sweat, he was ice-cold, and his hands were soaring and sobbing. The bone fought the pressure of the nail, lost, and bounced in his hand. Hundreds of nerves sang.

'Tom,' came a velvety voice he knew.

'No more,' Tom said, and rolled his head back to look down the aisle in the direction of the voice. Bud Copeland was standing like a deeper shadow in the dark aisle. 'That's not really you,' he said.

'No, not really. I can't really do anything but talk to you.'

'I guess you're Speckle John,' Tom said. 'I should have known.'

'I used to be Speckle John. But he took my magic away. He thought that was worse than death.' Bud drew nearer. Tom realized that he could see through him, see the line of seat backs and the dark wall at the end of the aisle through Bud's snowy shirt and gray suit. 'But I had enough left to hear Del when the little boy was born. Just like I had enough to know you when I saw you for the first time. And to hear you now.'

'Am I going to die?' Tom said; wept a few stinging tears.

'If you don't get down,' Bud's shade told him. 'But you're strong, boy. You don't know yet how strong you are. That's why they make all this fuss about you, you know. You're strong as an elephant — strong enough to fetch me here. Only wish I could do more than talk.' Bud shifted uncomfortably, and his transparency grew cloudy. 'He did the Wandering Boys just like he did you — in the cellars of the Wood Green Empire. Mr. Peet and all . . . all those stupid men who thought they'd get a free ride for life off him. Oh, he gave a show: he gave a real show, boy. He's still proud of it. Made a scandal big enough to drive him out of Europe.'

'What did he do to Rose?'

'Rosa? Don't bother with that, boy. Just get yourself off that brace. Outside, they're fooling with Del. They're liable to kill him if you don't get down.'

'I can't,' Tom wailed.

'You got to.' Tom screamed.

'That's not the way. There's only one way, boy. You got to use that strength. You got to pull your hands off. That's the way it works.'

'Nooo!' Tom screamed.

'You do it with one hand, the other one will come easier. You got to choose your song — you got to choose your skills. You already tried wings, and that didn't work. You can't run from him.'

Tom leaned his head back against the wall and looked at Bud through red eyes; asked a silent question.

'I tried song, Tom. But he was stronger than me. After that the most I could do was try to keep Del safe from him. I knew he wanted that boy — until he heard about you, he wanted him anyhow. Now it's your turn. And you have to do more than save Del. You know what you have to do.'

'Kill him,' Tom said weakly,

'Unless you want him to kill you. Do what I say, now. Push your left hand forward. Just keep on pushing. It's going to hurt like blazes, but. . . shit, son, doesn't it hurt already? When you get that one free, push with your right hand. Those nails can't stop that. They can only stop you doing it the easy way.'

'Just push.'

'Push with all you got, son. If you don't, worse than that is going to happen to you. And there won't be enough of Del left to worry about. Hear that? You hear him?'

Then Tom did hear Del: heard a piping, anguished eeee, like a sound he had made himself not long before.

He concentrated on his left hand; and pushed. A hundred mallets hit a hundred nails, and he nearly fainted again.

You're strong.

He pushed as hard as he could, and his hand flew free of the nail in a spray of blood.

'Sweet Jesus, son, you did it! Now, push the other one . . .please God, boy, push that other one . . . push the hell out of it. . . don't even think about it, just slam it out of there.'

Tom filled his chest with air, unable to think about the agony in his left hand, opened his mouth with the full force of his lungs, arched his back as the yell began, and jerked his right hand forward.

It flew. Blood spurted out over the row of seats before him.

. . . now you know why I took that job, boy . . . Bud's voice faded; the rest of him was already gone.

Sobbing, Tom slumped over the cinch. The buckle: the buckle worked on a catch. It was trying to saw him in half. And 'for my next trick, ladies and gentlemen . . . He raised his left hand and pushed the base of the thumb against the catch. Blood smeared on his shirt, soaked through to his belly. My next trick is the never-before-attempted the Falling Boy. He urged the base of his thumb around the catch. His hand pounded, but his thumb rested against the catch. He shoved, blood gouted from his hand, and he tumbled out of the strap and fell like a sack to the carpet.

10

Del. That was where he had to go. Del was outside, being killed by the trolls. Tom crawled toward the steps, using elbows and knees, ignoring the blood streaking down his arms. Could he flex his fingers? When he reached the top of the stairs, he tried the left hand, and the pain made his eyes mist, but the fingers twitched. How about you, right hand? Mr. Thorpe: chapel on a sunny morning: raising his right hand: boys, that brave young man took out his pocketknife and carved a cross in the palm of his right hand! Bet he did too, the jerk. Tom clenched his teeth and made his fingers move.

And for my next trick . . . the Amazing Falling Boy will now attempt to go down a flight of stairs.

Tom crawled to the edge of the steps. Facefirst? He saw himself falling, knocking his head against the metal sides of seats, rolling on his hands . . . he turned over, sat up, put his legs over the edge and went down like a one-year-old, on the seat of his pants.

Now do something really difficult, Tom, old boy. Walk. His feet were on the floor, his bottom on the second step. Well, don't rush into it — stand up first, do it the easy way. He flailed out with his dripping arms, his back knotted and ached, and he was on his feet. Immediately his head went fuzzy, and he leaned his shoulder against the wall for support. Funny how much pain your body, can hold — it can be just like a bucket filled up with pain. You'd think you'd spill some of it along the way, but the bucket just gets bigger.

Come outside now, boys, we are going to witness a miracle. Skeleton hiding at the back of the stage, waiting for the piano player to leave so he could check his stolen exams, take a look at the Ventnor owl and see if it had anything special to say to him today. , . . It just broke, Mr. Robbin. Yassuh, just up and broke on us.

Gee, you monkeys are clumsy.

That's us, sir, clumsy all over today, all we can do just to stand up . . .

He made himself go forward, pushing the door open with his shoulder. Yeah, the old bucket just keeps on getting bigger. Tom staggered out into the darkened corridor, knocked into the opposite wall with his shoul­der, and paused to rest.

This is not an easy school. Not! Not an easy school!

You had to admit they weren't liars.

He leaned forward, and his feet followed him down the corridor. As long as he rested his right shoulder on the wall, he could keep moving and stay upright. Blood dripped steadily down his fingers and onto the brown carpet. Past the forbidden room, past the kitchen.

He heard Del screaming again — repeated, hopeless screams, the screams of someone who knows he is lost.

Tom wobbled into the living room. He mentally charted his path to the glass doors. Chair to table to couch, then a long unsupported walk.

No princes and no ravens. Del's despairing, injured cries floating upward. Tom put his left hand delicately on the back of a chair and hobbled forward: two steps to the coffee table.

Bud Copeland was sitting on the couch, and Tom could see the delicate green-and-blue pattern through his suit. 'You made it this far, Tom, you're going to make it all the way. Remember there's a safety catch on the gun, you'll hang yourself if you forget that.'

'No repeat performances,' Tom said.

'That's the way, son.'

By instinct, Tom turned his head to look at the glass-fronted cabinet in the corner. His stomach flipped over. Blood splashed and spattered on the inside of the glass — spattered again, obscuring the entire shelf behind a screen of red.

Ka-whamp! went the fireworks outside. Whamp!

The prelude to the performance.

'You gonna make it all the way,' Bud said.

Tom listed over to the left, put a bloody palm print on the coffee table, sucked in air because of the pain, and reeled toward the glass doors, still bent over and unable to straighten up.

He crawled up the glass of the sliding doors.

Whamp!

Through the mist of blood his hands left on the doors he saw the sky: an orange flower drooping and dying, going blue at its edges . . . Whamp! A red column grew through its center and spread throughout the gray air.

Soon it would be night.

Ka-whamp! Whamp! Whamp! Beside the spreading column of red, an owl made of white light was drifting down, its wings wide and awesome, burning down out of the darkening sky.

'Get that door open — you got to,' came Bud's voice.

Tom pushed his slippery hands along the glass. Del shrieked somewhere off to his left, and Tom used his forearms to move the glass sideways.

The aluminum riser caught his foot, and he fell forward onto the flagstones. Shock vibrated up to his shoulders from his elbows; his hands flamed. He groaned. Rolled onto his back and swung his legs out. His heart almost stopped in terror. The fireworks owl; silvery light in the gray sky, dropped toward him with its claws out, sailing down to get him.

Tom closed his eyes. All right. I can't beat that. Carry me away, do what you want. Just get it over with.

Another explosion took place above him. He looked up and saw that the owl was dying, turning to cinders and shredding apart, becoming something meaningless. Tom got to his feet.

Then went back to his knees again, because he had a glimpse of them, just around the side of the house. The Wandering Boys were on the sloping lawn about thirty yards away, just before the start of the woods and the bluff. He had seen Snail and Root, who were looking upward for a moment, watching the last seconds of the owl before they went back to their work. Del whimpered.

All right, get the gun out. You think you're a hotshot? Then get the gun out of your pants. He went prone on the flagstones, face down, and tried to reach behind his back. The index finger of his right hand brushed the lump of metal under his shirt; the same miraculous finger twitched up the tail of his shirt. Little more, there, Buck Rogers. Another twitch. Now the grip of the pistol was exposed. He forced his hand back and touched what he thought was the trigger guard. Sweating again, he hooked the index finger around it and tugged.

Whamp! Spreading brightness about him, but with his face pressed into the rough flagstones, he could not see what figure the fireworks were making. He tugged again at the trigger guard, and his hand yelled at him.

He heard the sweetest sound, the pistol clunking on the stone, then heard himself sob with relief.

Tom twisted on his side and scooped the pistol toward him with both hands. The grip and trigger guard were bright red. Safety. He did not know what it looked like, and turned the gun over in his fingers, looking for anything that might be the catch. Finally he saw a little knurled button, pushed it forward.

Walking on his knees, he came around the side of the house and off the flagstones and onto lush grass. The six men stood in a circle at what seemed an impossible distance away. Root and Snail were joking — he saw Snail's mouth open in a gap-toothed grin. Thorn was wiping his broken face on his sleeve. Seed, whose shirt was bubbling out between his pants and vest, was prod­ding something with his foot. Del squeaked, nearly invisible in their midst. Tom flattened out in the grass and tried to take aim. But it was no good. The pistol trembled in his fingers. If he were to shoot, the bullet would go off into the woods; into the lake; dig itself into the ground.

'Stop it,' he said. But his voice was only a whisper. The gun fell out of his hands. He hooked his index finger through the trigger guard again and crawled forward several yards. It seemed he was going with unreal, impossible slowness. A cricket sang. The saw teeth on the side of a blade of grass jumped into focus directly before him. He inched forward.

'See what you can do to his ribs,' Snail said. 'Ten bucks you can get him that way.'

'Stop it,' Tom said. He sat up on the grass. 'Stop. I said stop.' Seed, who was facing him, looked up in puzzlement. Tom fumbled for the pistol and pointed it vaguely at the men. He saw Snail grinning at him, Thorn rubbing his chest. He wondered if the old pistol would actually work.

Here goes nothing. Trying to hold the gun level, he pulled the trigger.

At first he thought his whole arm had been blown off. The sound was much louder than he had anticipated, deafening him for a moment. The pistol had dropped from his fingers again. Both of his hands were balloon size.