Shadowland

PETER STRAUB

Shadowland

For Benjamin Bitker Straub

Little Red Riding Hood was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss.

— Charles Dickens

The key to the treasure is the treasure.

— John Barth

The End of the Century Is in Sight

The two schools, old and new, are inventions of the author and should not be confused with any existing schools. Similarly, Shadowland, its location and inhabitants, are entirely fictional.

I owe many thanks to Hiram Strait and Barry Price for their advice and comments about magic and magicians, and to Corrie Crandall for introducing me to them and to the Magic Castle.

NOTE

Tom in the Zanzibar

More than twenty years ago, an underrated Arizona schoolboy named Tom Flanagan was asked by another boy to spend the Christmas vacation with him at the house of his uncle. Tom Flanagan's father was dying of cancer, though no one at the school knew of this, and the uncle's house was far away, such a distance that return would have been difficult. Tom refused. At the end of the year his friend repeated the invitation, and this time Tom Flanagan accepted. His father had been dead three months; following that, there had been a tragedy at the school; and just now moving from the well of his grief, Tom felt restless, bored, unhappy: ready for newness and surprise. He had one other reason for accepting, and though it seemed foolish, it was urgent — he thought he had to protect his friend. That seemed the most important task in his life.

When I first began to hear this story, Tom Flanagan was working in a nightclub on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, and he was still underrated. The Zanzibar was a shabby place suited to the flotsam of show business: it had the atmosphere of a forcing-ground for failure. It was terrible to see Tom Flanagan here, but the surroundings did not even begin to reach him. Either that, or he had been marked by rooms like the Zanzibar so long ago and so often that by now he scarcely noticed their shabbiness. In any case, Tom was working there only two weeks. He was just pausing between moves, as he had been doing ever since our days at school — pausing and then moving on, pausing and moving again.

Even in the daylit tawdriness of the Zanzibar, Tom looked much as he had for the past seven or eight years, when his reddish-blond curling hair had begun to recede. Despite his profession, there was little theatricality or staginess about him. He never had a professional name. The sign outside the Zanzibar said only 'Tom Flanagan Nightly.' He used a robe only during the warming — up, flapdoodling portion of his act, and then twirled it off almost eagerly when he got down to serious business — you could see in the hitch of his shoulders that he was happy to be rid of it. After the shedding of the robe, he was dressed either in a tuxedo or more or less as he was in the Zanzibar, waiting patiently to have a beer with a friend. A misty Harris tweed jacket; necktie drooping below the open collar button of a Brooks Brothers shirt; gray trousers which had been pressed by being stretched out seam to seam beneath a mattress. I know he washed his handkerchiefs in the sink and dried them by flattening them onto the tiles. In the morning he could peel them off like big white leaves, give them a shake, and fold one into his pocket.

'Ah, old pal,', he said, standing up, and the light reflected from the mirror behind the bar silvered the extra inches of skin above his forehead. I saw that he was still trim and muscular-looking, in spite of the permanent weariness which had etched the lines a little more deeply around his eyes. He held out a hand, and I felt as I shook it the thickness of scar tissue on his palm, which was always a rough surprise, encountered on a hand so smooth. 'Glad you called me,' he said.

'I heard you were in town. It's nice to see you again.'

'One gratifying thing about meeting you,' he said. 'You never ask 'How's tricks?'

He was the best magician I ever saw.

'With you, I don't have to ask,' I said.

'Oh, I keep my hand in,' he said, and pulled a pack of cards from his pocket. 'Do you feel like trying again?'

'Give me one more chance,' I said.

He shuffled the cards one-handed, then two-handed, cut them into three piles, and then reassembled the pack in a different order. 'Okay?'

'Okay,' I said, and he pushed the cards toward me . . .

I picked up two-thirds of the pack and turned the card now on top. It was the jack of clubs.

'Put it back.' Tom sipped at his beer, not looking.

I slid the card into a different place in the deck.

'Better watch closely.' Tom smiled at me. 'This is where the old hocus-pocus comes in.' He tapped the top of the deck hard enough to make a thudding noise. 'It's coming up. I can feel it.' He tapped again and winked at me. Then he lifted the top card off the deck and turned it to me without bothering to look at it himself.

'I can't figure out how you do that,' I said. If he had wanted to, he could have pulled it out of my pocket, his pocket, or from a sealed box in a locked briefcase: it was more effective when done simply.

'If you didn't see it then, you never will. Stick to writing novels.'

'But you couldn't have palmed it. You never even touched it.'

'It's a good trick. But no good on stage — not much good in a club. They can't get close enough. Paying customers think card tricks are dull anyhow.' Tom looked out over the rows of empty tables and then up at the stage, as if measuring the distance between them, and while he pondered the uselessness of skills it took a decade to perfect, I measured another distance: that between the present man and the boy he had been. No one who had known him then, when his red-blond head seemed to shoot off sparks and his whole young body communicated the vibrancy of the personality it encased, could have predicted Tom Flanagan's future.

Of course those of our teachers still alive thought of him as a baffling failure, and so did most of our class­mates. Flanagan was not our most tragic failure, that was Marcus Reilly, who had shot himself in his car while we were all in our early thirties; but he might easily have been the most puzzling. Others had taken wrong directions and failed so gently that you could still hear the sigh; one, a bank officer named Tom Pinfold, had gone down with a crash when auditors found hundreds of thousands of depositors' dollars missing from their accounts; only Tom Flanagan had seemed to turn his back deliberately and uncaringly on success.

Almost as if Tom could read my mind, he asked me if I had seen anyone from the school lately, and we talked for a moment about Hogan and Fielding and Sherman, friends of the present day and the passionate, witty fellow-sufferers of twenty years past. Then Tom asked me what I was working on.

'Well, actually,' I said, 'I was going to start a book about that summer you and Del spent together.'

Tom leaned back and looked at me with wholly feigned shock.

'Don't try that,' I warned. 'Nearly every time I've seen you the past five or six years, you've gone out of your way to tease me with that story. You asked enigmatic questions, dropped little hints — you wanted me to write about it.'

He smiled briefly, dazzlingly, and for a second was his boyhood self, pumping out energy. 'Okay. I thought it might be something you could use.''

'Just that?' I challenged him. 'Just something I could use?'

'After all this time you must realize that it's more or less in your line. And I've been thinking lately that it's about time I talked about it.'

'Well, I'm happy to listen,' I said.

'Good,' he said, seemingly satisfied. 'Have you thought about how you want to start it?'

'The book? With the house, I thought. Shadowland.'

He considered that for a moment, his chin still propped on his hand.

'No. You'll get there eventually anyhow. Start with an anecdote. Start with the king of the cats.' He thought about it a moment more and nodded, seeing it as a problem in structure, like his act. I had seen him improve it in a dozed ways, revising with a craftsman's zeal, always bending it more truly toward the last illusion, which should have made him famous. 'Yes. The king of the cats. And maybe you should really start it at the school — the story proper, I mean. If you look back there, you should find some interesting things.'

'Well, maybe.'

'If you look. I'll help you.' He smiled again, and for the space of the smile his thoughtful tough's face was that of a man who had looked, and I thought again that whatever his circumstances and surroundings, it was only a dead imagination that could call him a failure.

'It might be an idea,' I said. 'But what's all that about the king of the cats?'

'Oh, don't worry about that story. It'll turn up. It always does. Say, I ought to check over some of my equipment about now.'

'You're too good for a place like this.'

'Do you think so? No, I think we're pretty well suited to each other. The Zanzibar's not a bad old room.'

We said good-bye, and I turned away from the bar toward the hazy light rectangle of the open door. A car sped by, a blue-jeaned girl jiggled past in sunlight, and I realized that I was happy to be leaving the club. Tom said that he was suited to the club, but I didn't believe that, and to me it felt-suddenly-like a prison.

Then I turned around again and saw him sitting in the murk with his sleeves rolled up, and He looked like the ruler of that dark empty room. 'You're here two more weeks?'

'Ten days.'

'I'll only be in town another week myself. Let's get together again before I go.'

'That'll be nice,' Tom Flanagan said. 'Oh. By the way . . . '

I lifted my head.

'Jack of clubs.'

I laughed, and he saluted me with his beer glass. He had never once glanced at the card, not even when the trick was over. Casual little miracles like that had nailed him into his life.

The king of the cats?

I hadn't the faintest idea of what this 'story' was, but as Tom had promised, it turned up a few weeks later in a reference book. When I had read it, I knew immediately that Tom's instincts had been accurate.

When I set the story down here, I am going to put it in the context in which Tom first heard it.

Anecdote:

'Imagine a bird,' the magician said. 'Just now — flapping up, frightened, indeed tormented by fear, up out of this hat.'

He twitched the white scarf away from the tall silk hat, and a dove the shade of the scarf beat its wings on the brim and awkwardly fell to the table — a terrified, pan­icked bird, unable to fly, making a loud clatter of wings on the polished table.

'Pretty bird,' said the magician, and smiled at the two boys: 'Now imagine a cat.'

He whisked his scarf once again over the hat, and a white cat slipped over the brim. It came up out of the hat like a snake, flattening itself down onto the table, looking at nothing but the dove. With a slow predatory crawl, the cat went toward the dove.

The magician, who was dressed as a sinister clown in white-face and red wig above black tails, grinned at the boys and abruptly sprang over and backward, landing on his gloved hands. He held himself rigidly still for a second and then folded his legs down and his trunk up in what looked like one flawless motion. Now he was standing where he had been, and he dropped the white scarf over the elongated form of the cat.

When the magician passed his hand into the scarf, it fluttered down onto the flat surface of the table. Three inches away, the dove still worked its wings and made its terrible clattering noise of panic.

'And that's it, isn't it?' the magician said. 'Cat and bird. Bird and cat.' He was still grinning. 'And since our little friend is still so frightened, perhaps we'd better make her disappear too.' He snapped his fingers, twitched the scarf, and the bird was gone.

'Cats remind me of a true story,' he said to the mesmerized boys, speaking as if he were merely yarning, as if nothing but entertainment was on his mind. 'It's an old story, but the truest stories are very often the oldest ones. This was told by Sir Walter Scott to Washington Irving, and by Monk Lewis to the poet Shelley — and to me by a friend of mine who actually saw it happen.

'A traveler, in other words my friend, was journeying on foot to the house of a companion — not me — where he was going to spend the night. He had been walking all day, and even though it was already late and night was coming on, he was tired enough to rest his feet when he came to a ruined abbey. He sat down, took off his boots, leaned against an iron fence, and began to rub his feet. An odd series of noises made him turn around and peer through the bars of the fence.

'Down below him, on the grassy floor of the old abbey, he saw a procession of cats. They were formed into two long equal lines, and were marching forward very slowly. Now, of course he had never seen anything like that before, and he bent forward to look more closely. It was then that he saw that the cats at the head of the procession were carrying a little coffin on their backs, and were making for, were slowly approaching, a small open grave. When my friend had seen the grave, he looked horrified back at the coffin borne by the lead cats, and noticed that on it sat a crown. As he watched, the lead cats began to lower the coffin into the grave.

'After that he was so frightened that he could not stay in that place a moment longer, and he thrust his feet into his boots and rushed on to the house of his friend. During dinner, he found that he could not keep from telling his friend what he had witnessed.

'He had scarcely finished when his friend's cat, which had been dozing in front of the fire, leaped up and cried, 'Then I am the King of the Cats!' and disappeared in a flash up the chimney. It happened, my friends — yes, it happened, my charming little birds.'

The true beginning of this story is not 'More than twenty years ago, an underrated,' etc., but, Once upon a time . . . or, Long ago, when we all lived in the forest. . .

PART ONE

The School

Arise and sing the praises

Of the school upon the hill

School song

ONE

He Dreams Awake

The last day of summer vacation: high cloudless skies, dry intense heat; endings and beginnings, deaths and promises, hover regretfully in the air. Perhaps the regret is only the boy's — that boy who is lying on his stomach in the grass. He is staring at a dandelion, wondering if he should pull it up. But if he pulls that one up, shouldn't he also pull up the one growing three feet away, whose leonine head is lolling and babbling on a stalk too thin for it? Dandelions make your hands stink. On the last day of summer vacation, does he care if his hands smell like dandelions? He tugs at the big tough-looking dandelion nearest him; at least some of the roots pull up out of the ground. He thinks he hears the dandelion sigh, letting go of life, and tosses it aside. Then he slides over to the second weed. It is too vulnerable, with its huge head and thin neck: he lets it be. He rolls over and looks up into the sky.

Good-bye, good-bye, he says to himself. Good-bye, freedom. Yet a part of him looks forward to making the change to high school, to really beginning the process of growing up: he imagines that the biggest changes of his life are about to happen. For a moment, like all children on the point of change, he wishes he could foresee the future, somehow live through it in advance — test the water there.

A solitary bird wheels overhead, so high up it breathes a different air.

Then he must have fallen asleep: later, he thinks that what happened after he saw the bird must have been a dream.

It begins with the air changing color — becoming hazy, almost silvery. A cloud? But there are no clouds. He rolls over onto his stomach and idly looks sideways, where he can see over four backyards. The swing set in the Trumbulls' yard is so rusty it should not stand another year — the Trumbull children are older than he, but Mr. Trumbull is too lazy to dismantle the swings. Farther on, Cissy Harbinger is climbing out of her pool, stepping toward a lounge chair in such a way that you know the tiles are burning her feet. She gets to the chair and stretches out, trying to deepen her already walnut tan. Then there are two wider backyards, one with a plastic wading pool. Here, Collis Folk, the gardener the boy's parents have just let go, is riding a giant black lawn mower around the side of a white house. No dandelions there: Collis Folk is a ruthless executioner of dandelions.

Way down there, past the houses and the yards, a man is walking up Mesa Lane. In this old suburb, pedestrians are not as uncommon as they are in a lavish new development like Quantum Hills, but still they are rare enough to be interesting.

The boy still does not know that he is dreaming. The walking man pauses on Mesa Lane — probably he is a customer of Collis Folk's, and is waiting for the gardener to swing back toward him so that he can say hello. But no, it seems he is not waiting for the gardener: he is tilting his head back and looking at the boy. Or looking for him, the boy thinks. The man puts his hands on his hips. He must be three hundred yards away: he shimmers a little in the heat from the pavement. The boy has a sudden overwhelm­ing conviction that the little figure is trying to find him . . . and the boy does not want to be seen. He flattens out in the grass. Unexpected fear sparkles in the boy's chest.

This is an interesting dream, he thinks. Why am I afraid of him?

The air becomes darker, more silvery. The man, who may or may have not seen him, walks on. Collis Folk chugs into sight, appearing to be intent on mowing down the wading pool. Now the boy is blocked from the man's sight, and he can move.

I'm really scared, he thinks: why? The entire neighbor­hood has turned unpleasant, somehow tainted and threat­ening. Though he cannot see the little figure way down there on Mesa Lane, the man is somehow broadcasting chill and badness. . . .

(His face is made of ice.)

No, that's not it, but the boy scrambles to his feet, starts to run, and then fully realizes he is in a dream, for he sees a building at the end of his backyard which he knows is not there; nor are the thick trees which surround it. The house is only about twenty feet high and has a thatched roof. Two small windows flank a little brown door. This fairy-tale structure is inviting, not threatening — he knows he is supposed to enter it. It will save him from whatever is pacing up and down on Mesa Lane.

And he knows it is a wizard's house.

When he goes through the trees and opens the door, all of his neighborhood seems to sigh: the rusty swings and the wading pool, Cissy Harbinger and Collis Folk, each brown and green blade of grass, send up a wave of disappoint­ment and regret; and this real regret is from down there, from the man, who knows the boy is blocked from him.

'So here you are,' the wizard says. An old man with an extravagantly wrinkled face mostly concealed behind a foaming beard, dressed in threadbare robes, the wizard is leaning back in a chair, smiling at him. He is the oldest wizard in the world, the boy knows; and then knows that he himself is in the midst of a fairy tale, one never written. 'You are safe here,' the wizard says. 'I know.'

'I want you to remember that. It's not all like that. . . being out there.'

'This is a dream, isn't it?' the boy asks. 'Everything is a dream,' says the wizard. 'This world of yours — a flag in the breeze, a plaything full of meanings. Take my word for it. Meanings. But you're a good boy, you'll find out.' A pipe appeared in his hand, and he drew on it and breathed out thick gray smoke. 'Oh, yes. You'll find what you have to find. It'll be all right. You'll have to fight for your life, of course, you'll have tests to pass — tests you can't study for, hee hee — and there'll be a girl and a wolf, and all that, but you're no idiot.' 'Like Little Red Riding Hood? A girl and a wolf?' 'Oh, like all of them,' the wizard said vaguely. 'Tell me, how is your father doing?' 'He's okay. I guess.'

The wizard nodded, blew out another cloud of smoke. He appeared very feeble to the boy; an old old wizard, at the end of his powers, so tired he could barely lift his pipe. 'Oh, I could show you things,' the wizard said. 'But there's no use in it. I just wanted you to know . . . Guess I've said it all. This is a deep, deep wood. Wish I weren't so blamed old.'

He seemed to fall asleep for a moment. The pipe drooped in his mouth and his hands trembled in his lap. Then his watery eyes opened. 'No brothers or sisters, correct?'

The boy nodded.

The wizard smiled. 'You can leave, son. He's gone. Fight the good fight, now.'

The boy has been dismissed; the logic of the dream compels him outside; the wizard's eyes are closing again. But he does not wish to leave — he does not want to wake up just yet. He looks out the windows and sees forest, not his backyard. Thick cobwebs blanket several trees in dark grayness.

The wizard stirs, opens his eyes, and looks at the reluctant boy. 'Oh, you'll have your heart broken,' he says. 'Is that what you're waiting to hear? It'll be broken, all right. But you'll never get anything done if you walk around with an unchipped heart. That's the way of it, boy.'

'Thanks,' he says, and backs toward the door.

'That's the way, and there isn't any other way.'

'Okay.'

'Keep your eyes peeled for wolves, now.'

'Right,' the boy says, and goes outside. He thinks the wizard is already asleep. After he goes past the trees which are not there, he sees his own body asleep on the grass, lying on its side near a lolling dandelion.

1

For various reasons the Carson School is now no longer the school it was, and it has a new name. Carson was a boys' school, old-fashioned and quirky and sometimes so stern it could turn your bowels to ice water. Later we who had been students there understood that all of the rather menacing discipline was meant to disguise the fact that Carson was at best second-rate. Only a school of that kind would have hired Laker Broome as headmaster; perhaps only a third-rate school would have kept him.

Years ago, when John Kennedy was still a senator from Massachusetts and Steve McQueen was Josh Randall on television and McDonald's had sold only two million hamburgers and narrow ties and tab collars were coming in for the first time, Carson was Spartan and tweedy and a bit desperate and self-conscious about its status; now it is a place where rich boys and girls go if they have trouble in the public schools. Tuition was seven hundred and fifty dollars a year; now it is just under four thousand.

It has even changed sites. When I was there with Tom Flanagan and Del Nightingale and the others, the school was chiefly situated in an old Gothic mansion on the top of a hill, to which had been added a modern wing-steel beams and big plates of glass. The old section of the school somehow shrank the modern addition, subsumed it into itself, and all of it looked cold and haunting.

This original building, along with the vast old gym­nasium (the field house) behind it, was built mainly of wood. Parts of the original building — the headmaster's office, the library, the corridors and staircases — re­sembled the Garrick Club. Old wood polished and gleam­ing, oak bookshelves and handrails, beautiful slippery wooden floors. This part of the school always seduced prospective parents, who had the closet anglophilia of their class. Some of the rooms were jewel-box tiny, with mullioned windows, paneled walls, and ugly radiators that gave off little heat. If Carson had been the manor house some of its aspects suggested, it would have been not only haunting but also haunted.

Once every two or three years when I go back and drive past the school's new Quantum Hills site, I see a long neo-Georgian facade of reddish brick, long green lawns, and a soccer field far off — all of it fresh green and warm brick, so like a campus, so generalized that it seems a mirage. This cozy imitation of a university seems distant, remote, sealed within its illusions about itself. I know looking at it that the lives of its students are less driven than ours were, softer. Is there, I wonder, a voice still in the school which whispers: I am your salvation, squirt: I am the way, the truth, and the light?

I am your salvation — the sound of evil, of that flabby jealous devil of the second-rate, proclaiming itself.

2

Registration Day: 1958

A dark corridor, a staircase with an abrupt line of light bisecting it at one end, desks with candles dripping wax into saucers lined along a wall. A fuse had blown or a wire had died, and the janitor did not come until the next morning, when the rest of the school registered. Twenty new freshmen milled directionlessly in the long corridor, even the exceptionally suntanned faces looking pale and frightened in the candlelight.

'Welcome to the school,' one of the four or five teachers present joked. They stood in a group at the entrance to the even darker corridor which led to the administration offices. 'It isn't always this inefficient. Sometimes it's a lot worse.'

Some of the boys laughed — they were new only to the Upper School, and had been at Carson, down the street in the mansard-roofed Junior School, all their lives.

'We can begin in a moment,' another, older teacher said flatly, cutting off the meek laughter. He was taller than the others, with a narrow head and a pursy snapping turtle's face moored by a long nose. His rimless spectacles shone as he whipped his narrow head back and forth in the murk to see who had laughed. He wore the center-parted curling hair of a caricatured eighteen-nineties bartender. 'Some of you boys are going to have to discover that the fun and games are over. This isn't the Junior School anymore. You're at the bottom of the pile now, you're the lowest of the low, but you'll be expected to act like men. Got that?'

None of the boys responded, and he gave a high-pitched whinnying snort down his long nose. This was obviously the characteristic sound of his anger. 'Got that? Don't you donkeys have ears?'

'Yes, sir.'

'That was you, Flanagan?' ' .

'Yes, sir.' The speaker was a wiry-looking boy whose red-blond hair was combed in the 'Princeton' manner, flat and loose over the skull. In the moving dim light from the candles, his face was attentive and friendly.

'You coming out for JV football this fall?'

'Yes, sir.'

All the new boys felt a fresh nervousness.

'Good. End?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Good. If you grow a foot, you'll be varsity material in two years. We could use a good end.' The teacher coughed into his hand, looked behind him down the black administration corridor, and grimaced. 'I should explain. This incredible . . . situation has come about because School Secretary can't find her key to this door.' He banged a heavy arched wooden door behind him with his knuckles. 'Tony could open it if he were here, but he doesn't report until tomorrow. Be that as it may. We can all function by candlelight, I suppose.' He surveyed us as if it were a challenge, and I noticed that his head was as narrow as the side of a plank. His eyes were so close together they all but touched.

'By the way, you'll all be on the junior-varsity football team,' he said. 'This is a small class-twenty. One of the smallest in the whole school. We need all of you out on the gridiron. Not all of you will make it through this . . . crucial year, but we have to try to make football players out of you somehow.'

Some of the other teachers began to look restive, but he ignored them. 'Now, I know some of you boys from the good work you did with Coach Ellinghausen in the eighth grade, but some of you are new. You.' He pointed at a tall fat boy near me. 'Your name.'

'Dave Brick.'

'Dave Brick, what?'

'Sir.'

'You look like a center to me.'

Brick showed consternation, but nodded his head.

'You.' He pointed at a small olive-skinned boy with dark liquid eyes.

The boy squeaked.

'Name.'

'Nightingale, sir.'

'We'll have to put some meat on you, won't we, Nightingale?'

Nightingale nodded, and I could see his legs trembling in his trousers.

'Speak in sentences, boy. Yes, sir. That is a sentence. A nod is not a sentence.'

'Yes, sir.'

'Tackle?'

'I guess so, sir.'

The teacher snorted, surveyed us all again. The waxy smell from the candles was beginning to build up, hot and greasy, in the corridor. Suddenly he snaked out one thick hand and grabbed Dave Brick's hair, which was combed into two small curling waves meeting in the center of his forehead. 'Brick! Cut that disgusting hair! Or I'll do it for you!'

Brick quailed and jerked back his head. His throat convulsed, and I thought he was choking back vomit.

The narrow-faced man snapped his hand back and wiped it on his baggy trousers. 'School Secretary is sorting out some papers you will need, forms for you to fill out and things like that, but since we . . . seem to have some time, I'll introduce you to the masters who are here today. I am Mr. Ridpath. My subject is world history. I am also the football coach. I will not have any of you in class for two years, but I will see you on the field. Now.' He took a step to the side and turned so that his face was in darkness. Oily tendrils of hair above his ears shone in the candlelight. 'These men are most of the masters you'll have this year. You will have the pleasure of meeting Mr. Thorpe, your Latin master, the day after tomorrow. Latin is a compulsory subject. Like football. Like English. Like Mathematics. Mr. Thorpe is as tough as I am. He is a great teacher. He was a pilot in World War One. It is an honor to be in Mr. Thorpe's Latin I. Now, here is Mr. Weatherbee — he will be your Mathe­matics I teacher, and he is your form tutor. You can go to him with your problems. He comes to us from Harvard, so he probably won't listen to them.'

A small man with horn-rimmed glasses and a rumpled jacket over shoulders set in a permanent slouch lifted his head and grinned at us.

'Next to Mr. Weatherbee is Mr. Fitz-Hallan. He teaches English. Amherst.' A rather languid-looking man with a handsome boyish face lifted a hand in a half-wave. He had made the joke about efficiency, and he looked bored enough to fall asleep standing up.

'Mr. Whipple, American history.' This was a rotund, bald, cherub-faced man in a stained blazer to which the school crest had been affixed with a safety pin. He put his hands together and shook them before his face. 'Univer­sity of New Hampshire.'

Mr. Ridpath glanced back down the black corridor now to his left, where a single dim light wavered behind flat glass. 'See if you can help her, hey?' Whipple/New Hampshire padded off into the dark. 'We'll have those papers in a minute. Okay. Talk among yourselves.'

Of course none of us did, but just jittered in the dark corridor until Mr. Ridpath thought of something else to say. 'Where are the two scholarship boys? Let's see some hands.'

Chip Hogan and I raised our hands. Chip was already standing with Tom Flanagan and the others from the Junior School. Everybody looked curiously at the two of us. Compared to us, all the others, even Dave Brick, looked rich.

'Good. Good. Call out your names.'

We did.

'You're the Hogan who ran seventy-five yards last year in the eighth-grade championship against St. Matthew's?'

'Yeah,' Hogan said, but Mr. Ridpath did not seem to mind.

'You two boys know the great opportunity you're getting?'

We said 'Yes, sir' in unison.

'All of you new boys?'

There was a general sibilant mutter.

'You'll have to work, you know. Work like you never have in your lives. We'll make you break your backs, and then we'll expect you to play harder than you ever have in your lives. And we'll make men out of you. Carson men. And that's something to be proud of.' He looked around scornfully. 'I don't think some of you are gonna cut the mustard. Wait till Mr. Thorpe gets his hands on you.'

A large old woman in a brown cardigan shuffled out of the corridor, followed by Mr. Whipple, who carried a flashlight. She too wore rimless glasses, and toted a large bundle of papers sorted so that they were stacked crosswise, in different sections. 'Behind the duplicator, wouldn't you know? Frenchy never washes his cups, either. He couldn't put these on the counter like anyone else.' While she spoke, she dumped the stack of papers on the first desk. 'Help me distribute these — different piles on different desks.'

The knot of teachers dissolved, each of the men picking up a separate stack of papers and moving to a different desk. Mr. Ridpath announced, 'Mrs. Olinger, school secretary,' in a parade-ground voice, and the old woman nodded, snatched her flashlight back from Mr. Whipple, and marched up the stairs into the light.

'Single file,' Ridpath ordered, and we clumsily jostled into each line and went down the desks, picking up sheets from each.

A boy behind me mumbled something, and Mr. Ridpath bellowed, 'No pencil? No pencil? First day of school and you don't have a pencil? What's your name again, boy?'

'Nightingale, sir.'

'Nightingale,' Ridpath said scornfully. 'Where are you from, anyway? What sort of school did you go to before you came here?'

'This sort of school, sir,' came Nightingale's girlish voice.

'What?'

'Andover, sir. I was at Andover last year.'

'I'll loan him a pen, sir,' said Tom Flanagan, and we passed down the line of desks without any more bellow­ing. At the far end of the corridor, we stood and waited in the darkness to be told what to do.

'Upstairs, single line, library,' Ridpath said wearily.

3

We went, like Mrs. Olinger, up the stairs into sunlight, which fell and sparkled through the mullioned glass set beside the high, thick scarred front door. The light was already dim and gray up here, but across the hall was the library, which had rows of big windows set between bookshelves on either side. If the library had not been so naturally dark, it would have shone. Cordovan-colored wood and unjacketed spines of books blotted up the available light, and on normal schooldays the big chan­deliers overhead burned whenever the library was in use. Without this light, the library was oddly tenebrous.

Two rows of long flat desks, also of the cordovan-colored wood, filled the center of the front main section of the room, and we took our papers to them. Across the room ahead of us was a waist-high shelf of reference books behind which sat the librarian's desk and file cabinets in a kind of well with clear sight lines to all the tables. Mrs. Olinger watched us file into the library and take our seats, standing beside a thin woman with tightly penned white hair and gold-rimmed glasses. She wore a black dress and a strand of pearls. The teachers came in last and sat all at one table behind us. They immediately began to mutter to each other.

'Masters?' Mrs. Olinger queried, and the teachers quietened. One of them drummed a pencil in a triplet pattern, and continued to do so as long as we were in the library.

'This is Mrs. Tute,' said Mrs. Olinger, and the thin woman wearing the pearls gave a nervous nod like a tremor of the head. 'Mrs. Tute is our librarian, and this is her domain. She will be present while you fill out the registration forms and digest some of the information on the other sheets, after which she will provide you with an orientation to the library. If you have any questions, raise your hand and one of the masters will help you.'

The pencil continued to rattle against the master's table.

When I had finished, I looked up and saw one or two other boys gazing idly around the murky room. Most of the others were still writing. Dave Brick's two curls had fallen over his forehead, and he looked red and sweaty and confused. He held up a hand, and Mr. Fitz-Hallan slowly lounged up toward his table.

'He's cool,' Bob Sherman whispered to me, and both of us watched Fitz-Hallan idly lean over Brick's paper, hands thrust in his pockets holding out at an elegant angle the bottom of his well-cut jacket. Fitz-Hallan was a stylish figure whose elegance seemed so deeply ingrained as to be unconscious, but it was not merely that to which Sherman had referred. He was one of the younger teachers, perhaps not quite thirty, and even his languor was youthful: it seemed detached and kindly at the same time, and separated him from the other teachers as surely as we were separated from them. Fitz-Hallan straightened up, strolled to the librarian's desk, and returned with a ball­point pen. This he presented to Brick with an abrupt gesture which somehow conveyed both sympathy and amusement. The perfection of this little charade myste­riously contained in it the information that Fitz-Hallan had once been a student at the school, and that he was a kind of living exhibit, a model of what we should try to become.

And that is the first of the three images I retain from the school, less remarkable than the two which followed but which in its way also led inexorably to all that happened. With hindsight I can see that here too was betrayal, delicately implied by the teacher's elegant clothing and manner, his amused sympathy: the way he thrust a cheap ball-point pen toward sweaty, doomed Dave Brick. We were so raw that we could be seduced by civility.

The half-dozen other sheets before the boys contained mimeographed data. The words to the school song (Arise and sing the praises/Of the school upon the hill) and the fight song (Green and gold, gold and green!), the school motto, Alis volat propriis. A translation thoughtfully followed: He flies by his own wings. 'He' may have been B. Thurman Banter, who had founded the school's first incarnation, the Lodestar Academy, in 1901; Carson began flying under its present name in 1914, under the headmastership of Thomas A. Rowan. 'Of Irish extrac­tion and English birth,' read the sheet. There followed a list of all headmasters from Rowan to the present, ending with Laker Broome; a list of present faculty, some thirty names, of which the last, Alexander Weatherbee, had been added in ink; the number of books in the library, twenty thousand; of pupils in the Upper School, one hundred and twelve; of football fields and baseball dia­monds, two. Another sheet gave the names of all the boys in the senior class, with stars by the names of the prefects. A commotion at the back of the library made me turn suddenly about. Mr. Ridpath was on his feet behind one of the tables, shouting, 'What? What?' His narrow face flamed. With his left hand he gripped Nightingale's collar; with his right he groped beneath the table, trying to capture something which panicked Nightingale was at­tempting to pass to his table-partner, Tom Flanagan. Both boys looked frightened, Flanagan slightly less so than Nightingale. Mr. Ridpath's question had deterio­rated into a series of animal grunts. When his right hand closed over the infuriating object, he withdrew it and held It up, giving his high-pitched snort. It was a pack of Bicycle playing cards. 'Cards? Cards?' The flap of the box was still open, suggesting that the cards within had been replaced only a moment before. The three other teachers seated behind Mr. Ridpath looked as startled as the boys, all of whom had by now turned around on their seats. Mr. Ridpath snorted down his nose again. His face was still very red. 'Who brought these here? Whose are they? Talk!'

'Mine,' Nightingale uttered. He looked like a drown­ing mouse in Ridpath's grip.

'Well, I'm . . . ' The teacher jerked harder on the boy's collar and looked around the room in angry dis­belief. 'I can't understand this. You. Flanagan. Explain.'

'He was going to show me a new card trick, sir.'

'A. New. Card. Trick.' He tightened his grip on the mouse's collar, twisting it so that Nightingale's necktie slid up toward his ear. 'A new card trick.' Then he released both the Bicycle cards and the boy. When the pack struck the table, he slammed his hand down over it. 'I'll dispose of these. Mrs. Olinger?'

She strode down between the tables, Ridpath lifted his hand, she walked back up to her desk. The metal wastebasket rang. She had never even glanced at the deck.

'You jokers,' Mr. Ridpath said. 'First day. You get away with it this time.' He was leaning on the table, glaring at each boy in turn. 'But no more. This is the last time we see cards in any room in this school. Hear me?' Nightingale and Flanagan nodded. 'Jokers. You'd better stop wasting your time and start memorizing what's on those sheets. You'll need to know it, or you'll be doing card tricks, all right.' He had one final threat. 'Your Upper School career is getting off to a bad start, Flanagan.' He returned to the teacher's table and pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets.

'Pass the registration forms to the ends of your rows, boys,' said Mr. Fitz-Hallan. I saw that little olive-skinned Nightingale's face was gray with shock.

A few minutes later we were snaking down the dark hall toward a small wooden staircase, on our way to our first glimpse of Laker Broome. The headmaster's office was at the bottom of the original manor, at the heart of the old building. Mrs. Olinger went before, illuminating her way down the black staircase with her big flashlight. She was mumbling to herself. The other teachers followed her, followed in turn by Mr. Whipple with a wavering candle for the boys' benefit. Whipple's candle was momentarily paled by the light from a window in a door on a small square landing. The light endured until another right-angled bend in the staircase, and after that we followed Whipple's bobbing candle down into an antechamber.

Not a true antechamber, it was formed by the end of the black corridor housing the school offices, from which Mrs. Olinger had first appeared. At that end, a curved wooden arch created the illusion that we were in a room. An oriental carpet lay on the floor. An antique table held a library lamp and a Persian bowl. Opposite the arch was a vast wooden door like the entrance to a medieval church, cross-braced with long iron flanges.

We stood silent in the flickering light of the candle. Mr. Fitz-Hallan knocked once at the big door. Mrs. Olinger said, 'Farewell, boys,' and took off down the corridor with her characteristic air of irritated urgency, lighting her way with the flashlight. Fitz-Hallan swung open the door, and we jostled into Mr. Broome's office.

Sudden brightness and the smell of wax: on every surface sat at least two candles. The sense of being in a church was much stronger. The headmaster sat behind his desk, his coat off and his hands laced together behind his head. His elbows were sharply pointed triangular wings. He was smiling. 'Well,' he said. 'Step forward, boys. Let me get a good look at you.'

When we were ranked in two rough rows before the desk, he lowered his arms and stood up. 'Whatever you do, don't knock over a candle. They're pretty, but dangerous.' He laughed, a short thin man with gray hair cut down to a bristly cap. Deep grooves beside his mouth cut into the flesh. 'Even when school is not in session, the headmaster must slave away at his desk. This means that you will almost always find me here. My name is Mr. Broome. Don't be shy. If you have a problem you want to discuss with me, just make an appointment with Mrs. Olinger.' He stepped backward and leaned against a dark wooden bookshelf, his arms crossed over his chest. The headmaster wore horn-rimmed glasses the color of a marmalade cat. His shirt was very crisp. I see now that he was perfect — the 'final detail in his whole paneled, orien­tal-carpeted, book-filled office, the detail around which the delicate, deliberate, old-fashioned good taste of the office cohered.

'Of course,' he said, 'it is rather more likely that your visits here will be in the service of a less pleasant function.'

His mouth twitched.

'But that should concern only a small portion of you. Our boys are generally worked pretty hard, and they don't have the time to find trouble. One word of warning. Those who do find it don't last long here. If you want to enjoy the benefits of being a student at this school, work hard, be obedient and respectful, and play hard. Consid­ering the advantages, it is not too much to ask.' Again, his taut, measured replica of a smile. 'Just what we have the right, not to mention the duty, to ask of you, I should say. It is my intention, it is the school's intention, to leave our mark upon you. Wherever you go in later life, people will be able to say, 'There is a Carson man.' Well.'

He looked over our heads at the teachers; most of us too swiveled our heads to look back. Mr. Whipple was leafing through the forms we had filled out. Mr. Ridpath stood at a sort of soldierly ease, his feet spread and his hands behind his back. The other two stared at the floor, as if putting themselves at a private distance from the headmaster.

'You have them, Mr. Whipple? Then please bring them here.'

Whipple moved quickly around us to the desk and laid the pile of forms immediately before the headmaster's leather chair. 'The two on top, sir,' he muttered, and vanished backward..

'Ah? Yes, I see.' He uncoiled, the frames of his glasses glowed red for a moment as he passed before a stand of candles, and he lifted the top two forms. 'Messrs. Nightingale and Sherman will stay behind a moment. The rest of you may return to the library to pick up your textbooks and schedule cards. Lead them away, Mr. Ridpath.'

Fifteen minutes later Nightingale and Sherman appeared in the door of the library and moved aimlessly toward the now book-covered tables. Sherman's cheekbones were very red.

'Well,' I whispered to him, 'What'd he say?' Sherman tried to grin. 'He's a frosty old shit, isn't he?' We compared our schedule cards before our lockers in the second-floor front corridor of the modern addition, where the inner walls were tall panes of glass looking out onto a gravel-filled court with a single lime tree.

I heard weeks later from Tom Flanagan why Bob Sher­man and Del Nightingale had been kept behind by Mr. Broome. Nightingale had not filled in the blanks for parents' names. He had not done so because his parents were dead. Nightingale lived with his godparents, who had just moved from Boston into a house on Sunset Lane, four or five long blocks from the school. Sherman had been dressed down.

4

New York, August, 1969: Bob Sherman

'Why am I here?' Sherman asked. 'Can you answer that? What the fuck am I doing here when I could be out on the Island sipping a Coors and looking at the ocean?' We were in his office, and he was speaking loudly to be heard over the rock music pumping put of the stereo system. The office was a suite of rooms in the old German embassy, and all of the rooms had twelve-foot ceilings decorated with plaster molding. Leather couches sat before his long desk and against the wall. A big green Boston fern beside the Bose speakers looked as though it had just taken a vitamin pill. Records were stacked carelessly on the floor, flattening out the deep pile of the carpet.

'You usually have an answer. Why am I in this shithole? You're here because I'm here, but why am I here? It's just another one of those eternal questions. Do you want to take that record off? I'm sick of it.'

His telephone rang for the sixth time since I had been in his office. He said, 'Christ,' picked up the phone, and said 'Yeah,' and motioned me to put the new record on the turntable.

I tuned out and relaxed into the couch. Sherman ranted. He was a very skillful ranter. He had a law degree. Also he had an ulcer, the nerves of a neurotic cat, and what I assumed was the highest income of anyone from our class. In these days his wardrobe was always very studied, and today he wore a tan bush jacket, aviator glasses tinted yellow, and soft knee-high yellow boots. He clamped the phone under his chin, crossed his arms over his chest, leaned against the window, and gave me a sour grin.

'I'll tell you something,' he said when he had put the phone down. 'Fielding should bless his soul that he never decided to go into the music business. And he had more talent than most of these bozos we manage. Is he still trying to get his Ph.D.?'

I nodded. 'This will sound funny, but when you were leaning against the window like that just now, you reminded me of Lake the Snake.'

'Now I really wish I was out on the Island. Lake the Snake.' He laughed out loud. 'Laker Broome. I better clean up my act. What made you think of that?'

'Just the way you were standing.'

He sat down and put his boots on the long desk. 'That guy should have been locked up. He's not still there, is he?'

'He retired years ago — forced out, really. I wouldn't have worked for him.' I had just quit the school myself, after three years of teaching English there. 'I never asked you this before, or if I did, I forgot the answer. What did Lake the Snake say to you, that first day? When he kept you and Nightingale in his office.'

'The day we registered?' He grinned at me. 'I told you, but you forgot, you asshole. That's one of my favorite party bits. Ask me again after dinner on Saturday night, if you're still coming.'

Then I did remember — we had been in his father's 'den' one warm day in late fall, drinking iced tea from tall glasses with Party Time! embossed on their sides. 'I'd come just to hear it,' I said. I was in New York on my way to Europe, and Sherman and Fielding were the only people there I cared to visit. And Sherman was a good cook whose dinner parties had a bachelor's haphazard lavishness.

'Great, great.' He was already a little distant, and I thought he was thinking again of the grievances given him by his twenty-year-old geniuses. 'I saw Tom Flanagan on the street the other day,' he said. 'He looked really strange. He looked about forty years old. That guy's nuts. It doesn't make any sense, what he's doing. He's working some toilet over in Brooklyn called the Red Hat Lounge. Magic is going to come back when Glenn Miller climbs out of the Channel. When Miss America has . . . '

'Bad teeth?'

'A mastectomy,' Sherman said.

On Saturday night there was as much of a lull in the after-dinner conversation as Sherman ever permitted in the days before he moved to Los Angeles. The famous folksinger seated to my left had wiped food from his beard and described a million-dollar drug deal just concluded by two other famous folk singers; the woman with Bob, a blond with the English country-house good looks to which he was always attracted, had opened a bottle of cognac; Sherman was leaning on one elbow, picking bits of bacon out of what was left of the salad.

'My friend across the table wants to hear a story,' he said.

'Great,' said the folksinger.

'He wants to be reminded of the famous Lake the Snake, and how he welcomed me to his school. On our first day we had to fill in registration forms, and when it asked for my favorite subject, I put down 'Finance.'' The girl and the singer laughed: Sherman had always been good at telling stories. 'Lake the Snake was the headmaster, and when a fat little shit named Whipple who taught history showed him my form, he kept me back in his office after he made his welcome-to-the-school speech. Another little kid was kept behind with me, and he sent him out into the hall. I was practically shitting my pants. Lake the Snake looked like an Ivy League undertaker. Or a high-class hired killer. He was sitting at his desk just smiling at me. It was the kind of smile you'd give somebody just before you cut his balls off.

''Well,' he said. 'I see you are a comedian, Sherman. I don't really think that will do. No, it won't do at all. But I'll give you a chance. Make me laugh. Say something funny.' He braced his hands behind his head. I couldn't think of a single word. 'What a pathetic little boy you are, Mr. Sherman,' he said. 'What is the motto of this school? No answer? Alis volai propriis. He flies by his own wings. I presume that now and again he touches ground too. But he does fly, the kind of boy we want here. He doesn't look for cheap laughs and gutter satisfactions. Since you are too much of a coward to speak up, I'll tell you something. It's a story about a boy. Listen carefully.

''Once, a long time ago, this certain boy, who was, let me see, fourteen years old, left his warm cozy little house and went out into the wide world. He thought he was a funny little boy, but in reality he was a simpleton and a coward, and sooner or later he was bound to meet a bad end. He went through a city, and he made little comments that made people laugh. He thought they were laughing at his little comments, but in fact they were laughing at his presumption.

''It so happened that the king of that country was proceeding through the city, and the boy saw his golden carriage. This was a splendid affair, made by the king's craftsmen, and it was of solid gold, drawn by six magnifi­cent black chargers. When the carriage passed the boy, he turned to the good citizen beside him and said, 'Who's the old fool in the fancy wagon? He must weigh as much as all six horses. I bet he got rich by stealing from people like you and me, brother.' You see, he was interested in finance. He expected his neighbor to laugh, but the neighbor was horrified — all citizens in that country loved and feared their king.

' 'The king had heard the boy's remark. He stopped the carriage and immediately bade one of his men to dis­mount and take the boy by force back to his palace. The men dismounted and grabbed the boy by the arm and dragged him yelling through the streets all the way to the palace.

' 'The servant pulled the boy through the halls of the palace until they reached the throne room. The king sat on his throne glaring at the boy as the servant pulled him forward. Two savage dogs with chains on their necks snapped and snarled at the boy, but kept guard by the sides of the throne. The boy nearly fainted in terror. The dogs, he saw, were not only savage, but starved down nearly to madness.

'''So, little comedian,' the king said. 'You will make me laugh or you will die.' The witless boy could only tremble. 'One more chance,' said the king. 'Make me laugh.' Again, the boy could not speak. 'Go free, Skuller,' snapped the king. The dog on the right flew forward toward the boy. In a second he held the boy's right hand between his teeth. The king told the boy to make a joke now. The boy turned white. 'Go free, Ghost,' the king said, and the dog on the left flew forward and bit down on the boy's left hand.

'' 'You see where tasteless remarks get you,' said the king. 'Begin to eat, my dogs.'

' 'Begin to eat, my dogs,'' Sherman repeated, shaking his head. 'I practically fell on the floor and puked. Lake the Snake just kept looking at me. 'Get out of here,' he said. 'Don't ever come back here again for a stupid reason. like this.' I sort of wobbled toward the door. Then I heard something growling, and I looked back and a great goddamned Doberman was getting to its feet beside his chair. 'Get out!' Lake the Snake shouted at me, and I ran out of that office like fiends were after me.'

'Holy shit,' mumbled the folksinger. Shennan's girlfriend was staring at him limpidly, waiting for the punch line, and I knew he had told this story, which by now I remembered perfectly, many times before.

Sherman was grinning at me. 'I see it's all come back to you. When I was nearly at the door, that sadist behind the desk said 'Alis volat propriis, Mr. Sherman.' I saw a sign on the wall next to his door, where you'd see it every time you left his office. It said, 'Don't wait to be a great man. Be a great boy.''

'Be a fuckin' son-of-a-bitch bastard,' the folksinger said, and then looked up confused because Sherman and I were both laughing. The country-house blond was laugh­ing too: Sherman could always make women laugh. I had learned a long time before that this ability was a large part of his undoubted sexual success.

5

Tom Flanagan and Del Nightingale had picked up their freshman beanies like the rest of us from the carton just inside the library doors, and at the end of Registration Day they stood for a moment together at the entrance to the school, trying them on. 'I think they're one-size-fits-none,' Tom said. Both boys' beanies were a quarter-size too large and swam on their heads. 'Don't worry, we can swap them tomorrow,' Tom said. 'There were a lot left over in that box. Do you know how to wear these, by the way? This little bill is supposed to be two fingers above the bridge of your nose.' Using the first two fingers of his right hand to demonstrate, he adjusted the cap with his right. Nightingale imitated him, and brought the brim down to the level of his topmost finger.

'Well, it's only for the first semester,' Tom said. But then, at the beginning, they shared a secret pleasure in wearing the absurd caps: Tom because it meant that he was in the Upper School — the entrance to adulthood. If Tom thought of the Upper School as the realm of beings who were almost men — the seniors did look alarmingly like real adults — for Del it was something simpler and more comprehensive. He thought of it, without being quite aware of the thought, as a place which might become home. Tom at least was at home in it.

At that moment, he wanted Tom Flanagan to befriend him more than anything else in the world.

Of course I am ascribing to the fourteen-year-old Del Nightingale emotions which I cannot be sure he possessed. Yet he must have been very lonely in these first weeks at Carson; and I have Tom's later statement to me that 'Del Nightingale needed a friend more than anyone else I'd ever met. I didn't even know, this is how innocent I was, that anyone could need a friend as badly as that. And you know how schools are: if you want something, security or affection, very badly, it means that you're not going to get it. I didn't see why that should always be true.' The statement shows that Tom was more sensitive than his appearance ever indicated. With his gingery hair, his short wiry athletic body, his good clothes a little scuffed and rumpled, he looked chiefly as though he wished he held a baseball in his hand. But another thing you thought you saw when you looked at Tom Flanagan was an essential steadiness: you thought you saw that he was incapable of affectation, because he would never see the need for it.

I think Del Nightingale looked at him bringing the school beanie down to the level of two fingers balanced on his nose, and adopted him on the spot.

'That trick you were showing me isn't in my book,' Tom said. 'Sometime I'd like to see how it goes.'

'I brought a lot of card books with me,' Del said. He dared not say anymore.

'Let's go have a look at them. I can call my mother from your place. She was going to pick me up after registration, but we didn't know when it would be over. How do we get to your house? Do you have a ride?'

'It's close enough to walk,' Del said. 'It's not really my house. My godparents are just renting it.'

Tom shrugged, and they went down the front steps, crossed Santa Rosa Boulevard, and began to walk up sunlit Peace Lane. Carson was in a suburb old enough to have imposing elms and oaks lining the sidewalks. The houses they passed were the sort of houses Tom had seen all his life, most of them long and of two stories, either of white stone or white board. One or two houses on every block were bordered by screened-in porches. Concrete slabs gray with age and' crossed by a jigsaw puzzle of cracks made up the slightly irregular sidewalk. Tough, coarse grass thrust up between the slabs of pavement. For Del, who had been raised in cities and in boarding schools thousands of miles away, all of this was so unreal as to be dreamlike. For a moment he was not certain where he was or where he was going.

'Don't worry about Ridpath,' Tom said beside him. 'He's always hollering. He's a pretty good coach. But I'll tell you who's in trouble already.'

'Who?' Del asked, beginning to quake already. He knew that Tom meant him.

'That Brick. He'll never last. I bet he doesn't get through this year.'

'Why do you say that?'

'I don't know exactly. He looks kind of hopeless, doesn't he? Kind of dumb. And Ridpath is already shitting hot nickels over his hair. If his father was on the board, or something like that — or if his family had always gone here . . . you know.' Flanagan was walking with what Del would later see as the characteristic Carson gait, which slightly rolled the shoulders from side to side and wagged neckties like metronomes. This was, as Del immediately recognized, finally 'preppy.' Amidst all the Western strangeness, the strolling, necktie-swinging gait was familiar enough to be comfortable.

'I guess I do know,' he said.

'Oh, sure. Wait till you see Harrison — he's a junior. Harrison has hair just like Brick's, but his father is a big shot. Last year his father donated fifteen thousand dollars to the school for new lab equipment. Where is this house, anyhow?'

Del had been dreaming along under the ninety-degree sun, self-consciousness about the beanie melting together with his sense of unreality and his pleasure in Tom's company to make him forget that they had a destination. 'Oh. Next street.'

They reached the corner and turned into the street. It seemed impossible to Del that he actually lived there. He would not have been wholly surprised to see Ricky and David Nelson playing catch on one of the lawns. 'Mr. Broome wanted to talk to you,' Tom said. 'Um-hum.'

'I suppose your father is an ambassador or something like that.'

'My father is dead. So is my mother.'

Tom quickly said, 'Geez, I'm sorry,' and changed the subject. His own father had recently begun a mysterious siege of X rays and over-night stays in St. Mary's Hospital. Hartley Flanagan was a corporation lawyer who could chin himself a dozen times and had been a varsity fullback at Stanford. He smoked three packs a day. 'Mr. Ridpath isn't too bad, he's just not very subtle' — both boys grinned — 'but you ought to watch out for his son. Steve Ridpath. I remember him from the Junior School.'

'He's worse than his father?'

'Well, he was a lot worse then. Maybe he's nicer now.' Tom's mouth twitched in a pained, adult manner, and Del saw that his new friend doubted his last remark. 'He beat the crap out of me once because he didn't like my face. He was in the eighth grade. I was in the fifth grade. A teacher saw him do it, and he still didn't get expelled. I just sort of made sure I never got near him after that.'

'This is the house,' Del said, still unable to refer to it as his. 'What does this guy look like?'

Tom took off his beanie and folded it into a hip pocket. 'Steve Ridpath? His nickname is Skeleton. But don't ever say it in front of him. In fact, if you can help it, don't ever say anything to him. Are we going to go in, or what?'

The door opened and a uniformed black man said, 'Saw you and your friend coming, Del.'

6

Inside

'Skeleton . . . ' Del said, shaking his head, but Tom Flanagan was looking at the tall bald black man who had let them in. He was too surprised not to stare. A few families in this affluent suburb had live-in maids, but he had never seen a butler before. The first impression that the man wore a uniform gradually dissipated as Tom realized that the butler was dressed in a dark gray suit with a white shirt and a silk tie the same charcoal shade as the suit. He was smiling down at Tom, clearly enjoying the boy's startled inspection. His broad face looked young, but the short wiry hair above his ears was silver. 'I see young Del is going to get on well at that school if he made such an alert friend already.'

Tom blushed.

'This is Bud Copeland,' Del said. 'He works for my godparents. Bud, this is Tom Flanagan. He's in my class. Are they in?'

'Mr. and Mrs. Hillman are out looking at a house,' the butler said. 'If you tell me where you'll be, I'll bring you whatever you want. Coke? Iced tea?'

'Thanks,' Del said. Tom was still wondering if he ought to shake hands with the butler, and while Del said 'Coke,' realized that the moment for it had passed. But by then his hand was out, and he said, 'Coke please, Mr. Copeland. I'm pleased to meet you.'

The butler shook his hand, smiling even more widely. 'My pleasure too, Tom. Two Cokes.'

'We'll be in my room, Bud,' Del said, and began to lead Tom deeper into the house. Cartons and boxes crowded what was obviously the living room. As they passed the dining room, Tom saw that it was nearly filled with a huge rectangular mahogany table.

'If you just moved in, why are they out looking at houses?' he asked.

'They're looking for a bigger place to buy. They want more land around them, maybe a pool. . . . They say this neighborhood is too suburban for them, so they're going to move somewhere even more suburban.' They were going upstairs; lighter squares on the wallpaper showed where pictures had hung. 'I don't even think they want to unpack. They hate this house.'

'It's okay.'

'You should see what they had in Boston. I used to live with them most of the time. In the summers . . . ' He looked over his shoulder at Tom and gave him an expression so guarded that Tom could not tell if it signified suspicion, fear of being questioned, or the desire to be questioned.

'In the summers?' , 'I went somewhere else. But their place in Boston was really huge. Bud worked for them there too. He was always really nice to me. Ah, here's my room.' Del had been walking down a corridor, his black-haired head proceeding along at about the level of Tom's eyes with more assurance than his behavior at the school had indicated that he had in him, and now he paused outside a door and turned around. This time Tom had no trouble reading the expression on his face. He was glowing with anticipation. 'If I was really corny, I'd say something like, 'Welcome to my universe.' Come on in.'

Tom Flanagan walked rather nervously into what at first appeared to be a totally black room. A dim light went on behind him. 'I guess you can see what I mean,' came Del's high-pitched voice. He sounded a shade less con­fident.

7

Ridpath at Home

Chester Ridpath parked his black Studebaker in his driveway and reached across the seat to lift his briefcase. Like the upholstery of his car, it had been several times repaired with black masking tape, and graying old ends of the tape played out beneath the gummy top layers. The handle adhered to his fingers. He wrestled the heavy satchel onto his lap-it was crammed with mimeographed football plays, starting lineups which went back nearly to the year when he had purchased the car, textbooks, lesson plans, and memos from the headmaster. Laker Broome spoke chiefly through memos. He liked to rule from a distance, even at faculty meetings, where he sat at a separate table from the staff: most of his administrative and disciplinary decisions were filtered down through Billy Thorpe, who had been assistant head as well as Latin master under three different headmasters. Sometimes Chester Ridpath imagined that Billy Thorpe was the only man in the. world who he really respected. Billy could not ever conceivably have had a son like Steve.

He exhaled, wiped sweat from his forehead back into his hair, temporarily flattening half a dozen fussy curls, and left the car. The sun burned through his clothes. The briefcase seemed to be filled with stones.

Ridpath found his bundle of keys in his deep pocket, shook them until his house key surfaced, and let himself into his house. Raucous music-music for beasts-bat­tered the air. He supposed many parents came home to this din, but was it so loud in other houses? Steve had carried his phonograph home from the store, twisted the volume control all the way to the right, and left it there. Once in his room, he walled himself up inside this savagery. Ridpath could not communicate through a barrier so repellent to him; he suspected, in fact he knew, that Steve was uninterested in anything he might wish to communicate anyhow.

'Home,' he shouted, and banged the door shut — if Steve couldn't hear the shout, at least he would feel the vibration.

The house had been in disarray so long that Ridpath no longer noticed the pile of soiled shirts and sweaters on the stairs, the dark smudges of grease on the carpet. He and Margaret had bought the living-room carpet, a florid Wilton, on a layaway plan just after they had mortgaged his salary for twenty years to buy the house. During the fifteen years since his wife had left him, Ridpath had taken an unconscious pleasure in the gradual darkening and wearing away of the nap. There were places — before his chair, in front of the slat-backed couch — where the awful flower-spray pattern was nearly invisible.

Overlaying the piles of dirty clothing were the magazine clippings and pages of comic books which Steve used to make his 'things.' They had no other name. Steve's 'things' were varnished to his bedroom walls. Korea had supplied a surplus of the images Steve preferred in his 'things,' and by now the room was a palimpsest of screaming infants, wrecked jeeps, bloated dead in kapok jackets. Tanks rolled over muddy hills toward classrooms of dutiful Russian children (courtesy of Life). Mossy monsters from horror comics embraced starlets with death's-heads. Ridpath never entered his son's room anymore.

He dropped the briefcase beside his chair and sat heavily, wrenching his tie over his head without bothering to undo the knot. After he had dropped his jacket on the floor beside it, he reached for the telephone set on an otherwise empty shelf. Ridpath shouted, 'Turn it down, goddammit,' and waited a second. Then he shouted again, louder. 'For God's sake, turn it down!' The music diminished by an almost undetectable portion. He dialed the Thorpe number.

'Billy? Chester. Just got home. Thought maybe you should get the poop on the new boys. Look pretty good on the whole, but there are a few items I thought you'd want to know about. Sort of coordinate ourselves here. Okay? First off, we got one good, one real good football prospect, the Hogan kid. He might take a little watching in the classroom . . . No, nothing definite, just the im­pression I had. I don't want to prejudice you against the kid, Billy. Just keep him on a tight rein. He could be a real leader. Now for the bad news. We got one real lulu in the new intake. A kid named Brick, Dave Brick. Hair like a goddamned Zulu, more grease on it than I got in my car. You know what kind of attitude that means. I think we want to crack down on this kind of thing right away, or one bad apple like that could spoil the whole school. Plus that, there's a wiseacre named Sherman. The kid already lipped off, fooled around with his registration form . . . You getting these names?'

He wiped his face again and grimaced toward the stairs, How could a boy listen to that stuff all day long? 'One more. You remember our transfer from Andover, the orphan kid with the trust fund? Nightingale. He might of been a big mistake. I mean, Billy, maybe Andover was glad to get rid of him, that's what I mean. First of all, he looks wrong — like a little Greek. This Nightingale kid looks sneaky. . . . Well, hell, Billy, I can't help the way I see things, can I? And I was right, too. I caught him with a pack of cards — yeah, he had the cards out. In the library. Can you beat that? Said he was showing Flanagan a card trick. . . . Yeah, a card trick. Man. I confiscated the cards PDQ. I think the kid's some kind of future beatnik or something. . . . Well, I know you can't always tell that kind of thing, Billy. . . . Well, he did have those cards in his fist, big as you please, gave me a little tussle, too. . . . Well, I'd put him in the special file along with Brick, that's what I'm saying, Billy. . . . '

He listened to the telephone a moment, his face contracting into a tight, unwilling grimace. 'Sure, Steve'll be okay this year. You'll see a big change in him, now that he's a senior. They grow up pretty fast at that age.'

He hung up gratefully. 'Grow up' — was that what Steve had done? He did not want to talk to Billy Thorpe, who had two good-looking successful boys, about Steve. The less Thorpe thought about Steve Ridpath, the better.

Skeleton. God.

Ridpath shoved himself to his feet, knocking over the easeful of football plays, took a few aimless steps toward the stairs, then turned around and picked up the case, deciding to go down to his desk in the basement. He had to do some more thinking about the JV team before their first practice. When he walked out of the living room, he glanced into the kitchen and unexpectedly saw the gaunt, looming form of his son leaning over the sink. Steve was pressing his nose and lips against the window, smearing the glass. So he had somehow flickered down the stairs.

8

Universe

'I've only been here three days,' Del was saying, now positively sounding nervous, 'but I didn't want to just live out of suitcases, the way they're doing. I wanted to get my stuff set up.' There came a sound of scuffing feet. 'Well, what do you think?'

'Wow,' Tom said, not quite sure what he thought, except that wonder played a large part in it. In the dim light, he could not even see all of Del's things. On the wall behind the bed hung a huge star chart. The opposite wall was a frieze of faces — framed photographs. He recognized John Scarne from the photo on a book he owned, and Houdini, but the others were strangers to him. They were men with serious, considering, summing-up kinds of faces in which their theatricality appeared as an afterthought. Magicians. A skull grinned from a shelf at waist level beneath the photographs, and Del hopped around him to light a little candle within it. Then Tom saw all the books held upright by the skull. The middle of the room and the desk were crowded with the paraphernalia of magic tricks. He saw a glass ball on a length of velvet, a miniature guillotine, a top hat, various cabinets filigreed and lacquered with Chinese designs, a black silver-topped cane. Before the long windows, entirely covering them, a big green tank sent up streams of bubbles through a skittering population of fish. 'I don't believe it,' Tom breathed. 'I don't know where to start. Is all this stuff really yours?'

'Well, I didn't get it all at once,' Del said. 'Some of this stuff has been around for years — since I was about ten. That's when I got involved. Now I'm really involved. I think it's what I want to be.'

'A magician?' Tom asked, surprised.

'Yeah. Do you too?'

'I never thought about that. But I'll tell you one thing I just thought right now.'

Del lifted his head like a frightened doe.

'I think school is going to be a lot more interesting this year.'

Del beamed at him.

Bud Copeland brought them Cokes in tall frosted glasses with a lemon slice bumping the ice cubes, and for an hour the two boys prowled through Del's collection. In his eager, piping voice, the smaller boy explained to Tom the inner workings of tricks which had puzzled him for as long as he had been interested in magic. 'All these illusions are the flashy stuff, and no one will ever see how they work, but I really prefer close-up magic,' Del said. 'If you can do close-up card work, you can do anything. That's what my Uncle Cole says.' Del held up a finger, still in the dramatic persona he had put on with his top hat at the beginning of the tour. 'No. Not quite. He said you could do almost everything. He can do things you wouldn't believe, and he won't explain them to me. He says certain things are art, not just illusion, and because they're art they're real magic. And you can't explain them.' Del brought his finger down, having caught himself in a public mood at a private moment. 'Well, that's what he says, anyway. It's like he's full of secrets and information no one else knows about. He's kind of funny, and sometimes he can scare the crap out of you, but he's the best there is. Or I think so, anyway.' His face was that of a dark little dervish.

'Is he a magician?'

'The best. But he doesn't work like the others — in clubs and theaters and that.'

'Then where does he work?'

'At home. He does private shows. Well, they're not really shows. They're mainly for himself. It's hard to explain. Maybe someday you could meet him. Then you'd see.' Del sat on his bed, looking to Tom as if he were almost sorry he had said so much. Pride in his uncle seemed to be battling with other forces.

Then Tom had it. The insight which had given him knowledge of the other boy's loneliness now sent him a fact so positive that it demanded to be spoken. 'He doesn't want you to talk about him. About what he does.'

Del nodded slowly. 'Yeah. Because of Tim and Valerie.'

'Your godparents?'

'Yeah. They don't understand him. They couldn't. And to tell you the truth, he really is sort of half-crazy.' Del leaned back on stiffened arms and said, 'Let's see what you can do. Do you have any cards, or should we use mine?'

Years later, Tom Flanagan described to me how Del had then quietly, modestly, almost graciously humiliated him. 'I thought I was pretty good with cards when I was fourteen. After my father got sick, I sort of more or less threw myself into the work. I wanted to get my mind off what was happening. I had my card books damn near memorized after a month.' We were in the Red Hat Lounge, where Sherman had told me Tom was working — it was not the 'toilet' Sherman had called it, but it was only a step above that. 'I knew that Del was very accomplished after he had shown me all of the stuff in his room. He had the basis of a professional kit, and he knew it. But I thought I could hold my own in card tricks — the close-up work he especially liked. I found out I couldn't get a thing by him. He knew what I was going to do before I did it, and he could do it better. He didn't like any of the obvious stuff, either — misdirection and forcing. Del had a fantastic memory and great observation, and those fac­ulties have more to do with great card work than you'd believe. He wiped me off the board . . . he blew me away. He must have been the slickest thing.I'd ever seen.' Tom laughed. 'Of course he was the slickest thing I'd ever seen. I hadn't seen much before I met Del.'

Del revolved the head of the dim light so that it faced the wall, and darkened the room. Now, with the big tank blocking most of the light from outside, his bedroom was the same tenebrous cloudy gray that the library had been that noon.

'I ought to call my mother,' Tom said. 'She'll be wondering what happened to me.'

'Do you have to leave right away?' Del asked.

'I could tell her to come over in an hour or so.'

'If you'd like. I mean, I'd like that.'

'Me too,'

'Great. There's a phone in the next bedroom. You could use that.'

Tom let himself out into the hall and went into the next bedroom. It was obviously the bedroom used by Del's godparents; expensive leather suitcases, laden with loose and tumbled clothes lay open on the unmade bed, labeled boxes were stacked on a chair. The phone was on one of the bedside tables. Ths telephone book sat beside it, its green cover bearing the graffiti of real-estate agents' names and telephone numbers.

Tom dialed his own number, spoke to his mother, and hung up just as he heard a car coming into the driveway. He walked over to the window and saw a boatlike gray Jaguar stopping before the garage doors.

Two people in bad humor got out of the car. Either they had just been quarreling or their bad temper was a moment's paring from a lifelong and steady quarrel. The man was large, blond, and florid; he wore a vibrant madras jacket the gaiety of which was out of key with the petulance and irritation suffused through his neat, puggish features. The woman, also blond, wore a filmy blue dress; as her husband's features had blurred, hers had hardened. Her face, as irritated as his, could never be petulant.

In the hall, their voices rose. Bud Copeland's last name was uttered in a flat Boston accent. In anyone else's house, Morris Fielding's or Howie Stern's, this would be the time for Tom to go to the staircase, announce himself, and speak a couple of sentences about who he was and what he was doing. But Del would never take him down to meet those two irritated people; and the two irritated people would be surprised if he did. Instead Tom went to the door of Del's room — Del's 'universe' — and slipped around it, and doing so, helped to shape the character of his own universe.

When his mother arrived, Tom followed Bud Copeland down the stairs to the front door. Tim and Valerie Hillman were standing with drinks in their hands in the box-filled living room, but they did not even turn their heads to watch him leave. Bud Copeland opened the door and leaned out after him. 'Be a good friend to our Del, now,' he said softly. Tom nodded, then by reflex held out his hand. Bud Copeland shook it warmly, smiling down. An odd look of recognition, disturbing to Tom, momen­tarily passed over the butler's face. 'I see the Arizona Flanagans are gentlemen,' he said, gripping the boy's hand. 'Take care, Red.'

In the car, his mother said, 'I didn't know that the house had been sold to a Negro family.'

Take care, Red.

9

Tom by Night

In his dream, which was somehow connected to Bud Copeland, he was being looked at by a vulture, not looking himself, but averting his eyes to the scrubby sandy ground — he had seen vultures from time to time, gro­tesque birds, on the roofs of desert towns on trips with his parents. The vulture was gazing at him with a horrid patient acceptance, knowing all about him. Nothing surprised the vulture, neither heat nor cold, not life or death. The vulture accepted all as it accepted him. It waited for the world to roll its way, and the world always did.

This was a vulture in vulture middle age. Its feathers were greasy, its bill darkened.

First it had eaten his father, and now it would devour him. Nothing could stop it. The world rolled its way, and then it ate what it was given. The vulture was a lesson in economics.

So was his father, for his father was dead — that was real economics. His father was a skeleton hanging from a tree, having been converted into vulture fuel. The loathsome bird hopped forward on its claws and scrutinized him. Yes, it accepted what it saw.

And accepting, spoke to him: as would a snake or a weasel or a bat, in tones too fast and subtle for his understanding. It was crucial that he know what the vulture was saying, but he would have to hear the fast voiceless voice many times before he could begin to decipher its message. He hoped he would never hear it again.

Uncaring, as if Tom were now no more significant than sagebrush or a yucca tree, the vulture craned its neck and turned around and began to walk away into the desert.

Heat shimmered around him.

Then, with the suddenness of dreams, he was no longer in the desert but in a lush green valley. The air was gray and full of moisture, the valley crowded with ferns and rocks and fallen trees. Far below him a man in a long coat continued the vulture's measured indifferent walk. He went away from the boy, indifferent to him. He became vague in the gray air. The man disappeared behind a boulder, emerged again, and vanished.

Where he had been, a large colorless bird flapped noiselessly away into the dark air.

Tom woke up, sure that his father was dead. His father was lying beside his mother in their bedroom, dead.

Tom's heart urged him forward, beat in pain and desola­tion against his ribs, his throat, made him throw off the sheet and walk across his dark room to the door. He groaned, felt that he was doomed to cry or scream. The darkness was hostile, enveloping. He slipped out of his room and went down the hall to his parents' room.

Trembling, he touched the knob. The scream lodged behind his tongue and tried to escape. Tom closed his eyes and gently pushed the door open. Then he opened his eyes and stepped into his parents' room.

He gasped, loudly enough to wake his mother. She was alone in the big double bed. On his father's side, the sheet lay as smoothly on the bed as upon an amputation.

'Tom?' she said.

'Dad.'

'Oh, Tommy, he's in the hospital. For tests. Don't you remember? He'll be back tomorrow. Don't worry, Tommy. It'll be all right.'

'Had a nightmare,' he said thickly, excused himself, and stumbled back to his own bed.

10

Poetry

Before lunch the next day, while Rachel Flanagan drove to St? Mary's to pick up Hartley, Tom sat at his desk and wrote the first and last poem of his life. He did not know why he suddenly wanted to write poetry — he never read it, barely knew what it looked like, thought of it as the sententious verse he had been made to learn in the Junior School. 'Breathes there the man, with soul so dead/Who never to himself hath said,/This is mine own, my native land!' His own little terrace of lines seemed so unlike real poetry to him that he did not bother to title it. This is what he wrote:

Man in the air, do you fly by your own wings?

Animals and birds speak to you

and you in the air understand them,

Football, magic, dreams trouble

my mind, cards tackle other cards

and scatter in a valley.

Man in the air, were you that bird?

Who magicked himself away in dark?

Man in the air, father me back. Now,

while you and I and he have time.

Two years later, when he struggled to produce an as­signed poem for Mr. Fitz-Hallan's junior English class, he found that he was unable, even if he tried to follow Fitz-Hallan's advice. ('You could begin every line with the same word. Or name a color in every line. Or end every line with the name of a different country.') He pulled the old poem from his desk and in despair handed it in. The poem came back with an A and the comment in Fitz-Hallan's cursive hand that This poem is sensitive and mature, and must have been difficult for you to write. Don't you have a title? I'd like to put it in the school magazine, with your permission.

Under the title 'When We All Lived in the Forest,' it appeared in the winter issue of the school magazine for that year.

11

Frosty the Snowman

In the big auditorium down the hall from our homeroom, we filed into the first two rows of seats for our first chapel. Mr. Broome, Mrs. Olinger, and a tall gray-haired man with a long severe face who looked like a bank president were seated on fan-back wooden chairs before us. To the right of them stood a lectern made of champagne-colored wood.

When I looked around I saw Mr. Weatherbee join the rank of teachers leaning against the rear wall. Between the lounging teachers and ourselves the rest of the school was taking its seats: sophomores directly behind us, then the juniors, and the seniors in the last rows. Nearly every boy, I noticed, wore a blue button-down shirt and neatly striped tie under his jacket; many of the boys were wearing suits. Collectively, the juniors and seniors had a raffish look. Privilege encased them, surrounded them like armor. In the cast of their faces was the assumption that they would never have to take anything very se­riously. For the first time in my life I saw the truth in the old proposition that the rich were better-looking.

Mr. Broome stood up and went to the lectern. He raked us in the first rows with his eyes, and then his face adjusted to a brisk, dry administrative mask. 'Boys. Let us begin with a prayer.'

A noise of shuffling, of activity, as a hundred boys bent over their knees.

'Give us the wisdom to know what is right, and the understanding to know what is good. Let us partake of knowledge, and use it to become better men. Let us all spend this new school year with hope, with diligence and discipline, and with ever-renewed application. Amen.'

He looked up. 'Now. We begin a new year. What does this mean? It means that you boys will be asked to do some demanding things. You will be asked to work as hard as you ever have, and to stretch your minds. College is a bit closer for all of you, and college is not for loafers. Therefore, we do not permit slackers and loafers here. Pay attention to this especially, seniors — you have many hurdles to get over this year. But our school does not attempt to educate the intellect at the expense of the spirit. And I am certain that spirit is shown first and foremost in school spirit. Some of you will not last out the year, and that will not always be due to stupidity. You can, indeed you must, demonstrate your school spirit in your bearing, in your classroom and athletic work, in your relations with one another. In honesty. In dedication. We will test all of these. I assure you, freshmen and seniors and all in between, that we do not hesitate to weed out our failures. Other schools have plenty of room for them. But we will not tolerate them. For it is the boy who fails, not the school. We give you the world, gentlemen, but you must show yourselves worthy of it. That is all. Seniors first, please, on the way out.'

'Frosty the Snowman,' Sherman muttered to me as we stood. 'Wait till you hear the one about the dogs.'

12

The tall gray-haired bankerlike man beside Mr. Broome was Mr. Thorpe, and he was already at his desk when we entered his room. This was one of the tiny paneled rooms in the old part of the school, so laden with atmospherics that it seemed to crowd in all around us. A boy with very thick blond hair and black glasses stood beside the teacher. They had obviously been talking, and fell silent as we took our seats.

Mr. Thorpe said, 'This is Miles Teagarden, a senior. He will take a few minutes of our time to explain freshman initiation. Listen to him. He is a prefect, one of the leaders of this school. Begin, Mr. Teagarden.' Thorpe leaned back in his chair and gazed benignly out at us.

'Thank you, Mr. Thorpe,' the senior said. 'Freshman initiation is nothing to be afraid of. If you know your stuff and learn the ropes, you'll do fine. You have your beanies and your lists. Wear your beanies at all times when not in class and between school and home. Wear the beanie at all athletic functions and all social functions. Address all seniors as Mister. Learn our names. That is essential. And so is learning the songs and the other information on the sheets. If a senior drops his books on the floor, pick them up for him. Carry them where he tells you to carry them. If a senior is standing in front of a door, address him by his name and open the door. If a senior tells you to tie his shoelaces, tie his shoelaces and thank him. Do anything a senior tells you to do. On the spot. Even if you think it's ridiculous. Got that? And if a senior asks you a question, address him by name and answer him. Follow the rules and you'll get off to a good start.'

'Is that all?' asked Mr. Thorpe. 'If so, you may go.'

Teagarden picked up a pile of books from Thorpe's desk and hurriedly left the little classroom. Thorpe continued to gaze at us, but the benignity had left him.

'Why is all of this important?' He paused, but no one tried to answer. 'What did Mr. Broome particularly stress in chapel this morning? Well?'

A boy I did not know raised his hand and said, 'School spirit, sir.'

'Good. You are . . . Hollingsworth? — Good, Hollingsworth. You listened. Your ears were open. The rest of you must have been asleep. And what is school spirit? It is putting the school first. Putting yourself second to the school. You don't know how to do that yet. Miles Teagarden does know how to do that. That is why he is a prefect.'

He stood up and leaned against the chalk tray behind him. He looked immensely tall. 'But now we come to your own unfortunate case. Just look at you. Just . . . look . . . at . . . you. Most of you look as though you couldn't find your way home at night. Some of you probably can't even see through the filthy hair on your foreheads. You look slack, boys. Slack. That is offensive. It is an insult. If you insult the seniors by looking slack in front of them, I assure you that they will let you know. This is not an easy school. Not!' He positively shouted the last word, jolting us upright in our seats. 'Not! Not an easy school. We have to reshape you boys, mold you. Turn you into our kind of boy. Or you will be doomed, boys, doomed, an adjective meaning consigned to misfor­tune or destruction. Destruction, a noun meaning that which pulls down, demolishes, undoes, kills, annihilates. You will be doomed to destruction, doomed to destruc­tion, if you do not learn the moral lessons of this school.'

Thorpe inhaled noisily, ran a palm across his smooth gray hair. He was a furnace of emotions, this Thorpe, and such terrifying performances were standard with him.

13

Teachers

As the first weeks went by, the personalities of our teachers became as fixed as stars and as dependable in their eccentricities as the postures of marble statues. Mr. Thorpe shouted and bullied; Mr. Fitz-Hallan charmed; Mr. Whipple, incapable of inspiring either terror or love, wavered between trying to inspire both and so was despised. Mr. Weatherbee revealed himself to be a natural teacher, and led us in masterful fashion through the first steps of algebra. (Dave Brick surprisingly turned out to be a mathematical whiz, and took to wearing an ostentatious slide rule in a leather holster clipped to his belt.) Thorpe could freeze your stomach and your mind; Fitz-Hallan, whose family was wealthy, turned his salary back to the school, and doing so, earned the privilege of teaching 'what he liked — the Grimms' Household Tales, the Odyssey, Great Expectations and Huckleberry Finn, and E. B. White for style; Whipple was so lazy that he took great chunks of class time to read aloud from the textbook. His only real interest was in sports, where he functioned as Ridpath's assistant.

Their lives out of the school were unimaginable to us; at dances, we saw wives, but could never truly believe in them. Their houses likewise were mysterious, as if they, like us, had not spouses but parents, and so much homework that their true homes were the old building, the modern addition, and the field house.

14

We had just come out of Fitz-Hallan's classroom, and a small number of seniors were leaving a French lesson in the next room. Bobby Hollingsworth had identified most of the older boys to those of us who were new to the school, and I knew most of their names. They began to look purposeful and superior when they noticed us gettmg books from our lockers. They sauntered over as soon as Fitz-Hallan had disappeared into his office. Steve Ridpath positioned himself directly in front of me. I had to look up to see his face. I was dimly aware of a prefect named Terry Peters standing before Del Nightingale, and of another senior named Hollis Wax lifting Dave Brick's beanie off his head. The other three or four seniors glanced at us, smiled at Hollis Wax — he was no taller than Dave Brick — and continued down the hallway.

'What's my name?' Steve Ridpath said.

I told him.

'And what's yours, insect?' I told him my name.

'Pick up my books.' He was carrying four heavy textbooks and a sheaf of papers under one arm, and let it all fall to the floor. 'Hurry up, jerk. I have a class next period.'

'Yes, Mr. Ridpath,' I said, and bent over. He was so near that I had to back into my locker to get his books. When I straightened up, he had bent down to stare directly into my face. 'You scummy little turd,' he said. The reason for his nickname was even more apparent than before. Exceptionally skinny, Skeleton Ridpath from a distance looked like a clothed assemblage of sticks; cuffs drowned his wrists, collars swam on his thin neck. Close up, his face was so taut on his skull that the skin shone whitely; a slight flabbiness under the eyes was the only visible loose flesh. Above these gray-white pouches, his eyes were very pale, almost white, like old blue jeans. His eyebrows were only faint tracings of silvery brown. A strong odor of Old Spice hung between us, though his skin appeared too stingy and tight for whiskers: as though it would begrudge them the room. 'You messed up my report,' he said, and shoved a bent sheet of paper under my nose. 'Five push-ups, right now.' —

'Oh, hell, Steve,' said Hollis Wax. I glanced over and saw that he bad 'braced' Dave Brick, who was now stiffly at attention, his forearms stuck out at right angles before him and piled with Wax's books. 'Shut up. Five. Right now.'

I stepped around Ridpath and did five push-ups in the corridor.

'Who was the first headmaster, jerk?' 'B. Thurman Banter.'

'When did he found the school and what was its name then?'

'He founded the Lodestar Academy in 1894.' I stood up.

'You zit,' he hissed at me, his face twisting; then as he turned away, he reached out a simian arm and smacked the back of my head with his fist — just hard enough to hurt. His knuckles felt like needles. The blow did not surprise me: I had seen a witless hatred in his eyes. He swiveled his bony head on his neck and looked at me gleefully. 'Come on. I have to make a class.'

But we stopped after only a few steps. 'Who's this fat creep, Waxy?'

'Brick,' Wax said. Dave Brick was sweating, and his. beanie had been pulled down over his eyes.

'Brick. Jesus. Look at him.' Ridpath took the fold of skin beneath Brick's chin and twisted it between two long fingers. 'How many books are there in the library, Brick? What's my name, Brick?' He jabbed one of his bony fingers into Brick's cheeks and pressed it hard against the teeth. 'You don't know, do you, fatso?'

'No, sir,' Brick half-sobbed.

'Mr. Ridpath. That's my name, dumbo. Remember it, Brick. Brick the Prick. You'd better cut your disgusting Zulu hair, Brick the Prick. There's more grease in it than most guys have in their cars.'.

Standing beside him with his books, I saw Tom Flanagan and Bobby Hollingsworth coming toward us. They stopped just down the hall.

'And who's this little greaseball?' Ridpath asked Terry Peters.

'Nightingale.' Peters smirked.

'Oh! Nightingale,' Ridpath crooned. 'I should have known. You look like a goddamned little Greek, don't you, Nightingale? Little cardsharp, aren't you, Night­ingale? I'll have to take care of you later, Birdy. That's a good name for you. I heard you chirp.' He seemed very excited. He turned his ghastly face to me again. 'Come on, jerk. Ah, shit. Just give me the books.' He and Peters and Wax ran down the hall in the direction of the old section.

'I'm afraid it looks like you've got nicknames,' Tom Flanagan said.

15

Dave Brick was doomed to carry the obscene name Skeleton Ridpath had given him, but Del Nightingale's was altered for the worse during football practice on the Friday evening of the first week of October. White Del and Morris Fielding and Bob Sherman and I sat on the bench with several others — freshmen and sophomores — our JV team had lost our first game the previous week. Chip Hogan had made our only touchdown. The final score had been 21-7, and Mr. Whipple and Mr. Ridpath had spent the four practices since the game frenziedly pushing us through exercises and play patterns. Sherman and I hated football, and already were looking forward to our junior year, when we could quit it for soccer; Morris Fielding had little aptitude for it, but suffered it gamely and performed as second-string center with a dogged persistence Ridpath admired; Del, who weighed little more than ninety pounds, was entirely hopeless. In the padded uniform which made the rest of us look swollen, Del resembled a mosquito weighted down with sandbags. All of the exercising tired him, and after we had run through tires and done fifty squat-jumps, Del could scarcely make his legs move through the rest of the practice.

After the squat-jumps, Ridpath lined us up before the tackling dummy. This was a heavy metal frame like a sledge on runners, with the front poles padded to the size of punching bags. We were in two long lines, and in pairs rushed at the padding and tried to move the dummy. Chip Hogan and three or four other boys could make it turn in a circle by themselves. Morris Fielding and I jolted it back a foot or two. When Tom Flanagan and Del hit it, Tom's side moved abruptly and Del's not at all. Both boys fell in the dust.

'Straighten it out and do it over,' shouted Mr. Rid­path. 'Push it back — we need blocking in the line.'

Flanagan and Nightingale pulled the cumbersome dummy back where it had been. They rushed the step and a half forward and grunted into the padding. Again Tom's charge pushed it in a jerky sideswiped movement and Del collapsed.

'What the hell are you, Florence Nightingale?' Rid­path screamed.

Florence. That absurdly Victorian name: Ridpath laugh­ed at his own invention, and all of us laughed too: Del had been christened. At that moment Whipple appeared, cherubic and red-faced in his satiny coaching jacket, and Mr. Ridpath ran across to the field where the varsity team was just now beginning to do calisthenics; but the change of coaches had come too late for Del.

'Stand on my shoulders, Florence — I'll move it for you,' shouted a muscular, amiable boy named Pete Bayliss. And that sealed the name for Del.

For the rest of the hour we desultorily ran through plays.

We shared a locker room with the older boys, and after practice, when the pads and sweatshirts had been put away and we had just returned from the showers, the varsity boys came noisily into that sweat-smelling, echoing place. Skeleton Ridpath was among them, covered in dirt and with a bruise on his left cheek — he played only because his father made him, and in the last quarter of the varsity game which had followed ours, he had committed two fouls.

The seniors and juniors began throwing their helmets into their lockers, shouting back and forth. Skeleton Ridpath undressed more slowly than the others, and was just untying his pads when most of the other varsity players were already in the shower across the hall. I saw him looking across the room at us, smiling to himself. When he had stripped down to his jockstrap, he stood up, stepped across the bench, and walked halfway over to us.. 'I guess this is a coed school now,' he said, his hands on the bones of his hips.

'He looks like a graveyard,' Sherman whispered in my ear. Ridpath glanced at us, irritated that he had missed Sherman's comment, but too inflamed by his hostility to be distracted.

'We take girls now, I guess,' he said, staring at Del Nightingale. Del had tucked his chin down and was wriggling into his trousers.

'Hey, Florence. Do you know what happens to girls when they're caught in locker rooms? Huh?'

'Shut up,' Tom Flanagan said.

Ridpath raised a hand as if to slap Flanagan — he was at least seven feet away. 'You little creep. I'm talking to your date. Is that what you are, Florence? His date?' He stepped forward: he was almost half again as tall as Del, and he looked like an elongated bony white worm. He also looked crazy, caught up in some spiraling private hatred: it was obvious that his remarks were not just casual school insults, and the dozen of us left in the room froze, really unable to imagine what he might force himself to do. For a second he seemed a demented, furious giant.

His bruised face twisted, and he said, 'Why don't you suck — '

Tom Flanagan catapulted himself off the bench and rushed toward him.

Skeleton put out a startled fist and jabbed Tom in the chest. Then saliva flew from his mouth, his face worked in fury and bafflement, and he knocked Tom backward into our bench.

Bryce Beaver, one of two juniors who would later be expelled for smoking, came in from the shower naked, with a green school towel around his neck. 'Hey, Skel­eton, what the shit are you doing?' he asked, amazed. 'Your old man'll be here in a second.'

'I hate these little farts,' Skeleton said, his bruised dirty face still a mask of loathing, and turned away. From the back he looked skinned and fragile.

The outside door opened and clanked shut. Mr. Whippie's voice carried to us, saying, ' . . . work on all the Y plays, get Hogan to find those receivers . . . ' Bryce Beaver shook his head and began toweling his legs.

Mr. Ridpath and Mr. Whipple came into the locker room, carrying with them a scent of fresh air, which lingered only a moment. I saw Mr. Ridpath struggle to keep his smile as he glanced at his son.

16

Two weeks later, when the JV team played the varsity scrubs in a practice game, I saw Tom Flanagan repeatedly bringing down Skeleton Ridpath, bowling him off his feet even when the play was on the other side of the field. The third time it happened, Skeleton waited until Whipple looked away and kicked Tom in the face. On the next play, Tom Flanagan tackled and wrenched him to the ground so savagely that I could hear the noise from the bench,

'Great play! Great play!' shouted Mr. Ridpath. 'That's spirit!'

17

Midnight, Saturday: Two Bedrooms

In Del's room, the boys lay on their separate beds, talking in the dark. Tim and Valerie Hillman were making too much noise for them to sleep: Tom could hear Tim Hillman shouting Bitch! Bitch! at intervals. Both Hillmans had been drunk at dinner, Tim more so than Valerie. Bud Copeland had served the boys at a table in the kitchen, and clearing up, had said, 'Trouble tonight. You fellas jump into bed early and close up your ears.'

But that was not possible. Tim's shouts and Valerie's abrupt rejoinders winged through the house.

'Uncle Cole says Tim drinks so much to make himself into another person,' Del said in the darkness. 'If he's drunk, he's another person. One he'd rather be.'

'He'd rather be that?'

'I guess so.'

'Boy.'

'Well, Uncle Cole is always right. I mean it. He's never wrong about things. Do you want to know what he says about magic?'

'Sure.'

'It's like what he said about Tim. He says a magician must be apart from ordinary life — he has to make himself new, because he has a special project. To do magic, to do great magic, he has to know himself as a piece of the universe.'

'A piece of the universe?'

'A little piece that has all the rest of it in it. Everything outside him is also inside him. You see that?'

'I guess.'

'Well, if you do, then you can see why I want to be a magician. Science is all head, right? Sports is all body. A magician uses all of himself. Uncle Cole says a magician is in synthesis. Synthesis. He says you're part music and part blood, part thinker and part killer. And if you can find all that in you and control it, then you deserve to be set apart.' 'So it's about control. About power.'

'Sure it is. It's about being God.'

Tom knew that Del was waiting for him to respond, but he could not. Though he was not religious and had not entered a church since the previous Christmas, Del's last remark had upset him profoundly.

Across the room, he could hear Del's smile. 'I saw what you did to Skeleton, you know. You're a killer too.'

The subject of these last sentences, who was sure that he was a killer, lay like the two younger boys in a bed in a darkened room. What was going through his mind was surprisingly similar — the similarity would certainly have surprised Del Nightingale — to the content of the boys' conversation. Music, not shouts, filled the air about him — a Bo Diddley record. Strong: music so dense and pound­ing that it seemed to push itself into his skin, force itself between himself and the bed and pick his laden body up and make it float.

. Skeleton knew that he was a piece of the universe, and that the hatred which was the strongest and best part of him ran through the universe like a bar of steel. Skeleton too had seen desert vultures, and violent bands of color in the desert sky; and he had seen the sand far out of town turn purple and red when night came on. Even in his baffled and empty childhood, he had known that such things were in his key, that they struck the same note as the deep well of black feelings within himself. Other people were blinkered, self-deluded rabbits: they looked at the desert and saw what they called 'beauty,' walling themselves off from it. Other people were afraid of the truth in themselves, which was also the truth at the world's heart. Every man was a killer — that was what Skeleton knew. Every, leaf, every grain of sand, had a killer in it. If you touched a tree, you could feel a wave of blackness pumping through it, drawn up from the ground and breathed out through the bark.

And lately, as he worked more and more on his 'things,' as he varnished images of pain and fear onto his walls, he had come closer and closer to that truth. Skeleton had begun to have new ideas about his 'things,' ideas he could scarcely bear to peep at. They were a unity, they were the unity which was Skeleton Ridpath, but there was something more.

And lately . . .

lately . . .

he had, peeping at his new ideas, seen glimpses of their power. A man was showing him how right he was, and how little he still knew. It was as if the man had stepped off his walls, walked out of the 'things' and lifted his broad-brimmed hat from his head to show the face of a beast. The man, who was everywhere and nowhere, in his dreams and hovering just out of sight as he prowled from one room to another, was animal, tree, desert, bird . . . he wore a long belted coat, his hat shaded his face — he was what was real. He spoke to Skeleton when Skeleton thought about him: and what he said was: I have come to save your life. He wanted something of poor Skeleton, his will drove out at poor Skeleton, and poor Skeleton would have cut off all the fingers of one hand for him. He had power to make a king's look feeble. He was like the music at the heart of the music, what the musicians would play if they were twelve feet tall and made of thunder, and rain.

He is me, Skeleton thought. Me. He grinned up in the darkness at a picture of a giant bird.

18

'Goose Girl'

''There was once an old queen, whose husband had long been dead, and she had a beautiful daughter,'' Mr. Fitz-Hallan read. 'First sentence of the story 'Goose Girl.' What does that tell you the story is going to be about?'

'The beautiful daughter,' Bobby Hollingsworth said, his arm up in the air.

'Right. Old queen, dead king, young and beautiful daughter. Shortly to be all alone in the world, we suspect. After all, she's half an orphan already. If this story is typical, soon she's going to be off on some sort of quest — and there it is, in the second sentence. She's sent to marry a prince, far away. What happens to her?'

'She has a wicked servant who terrorizes her and makes her take her place,' Howie Stern said.

'Exactly. Remember when we were talking about identity in these stories? Here we are again. The servant girl steals the heroine's identity. The magic talisman, the cloth with three drops of blood, is lost, and the wicked servant gains power over the princess. She takes her clothing and makes, the princess dress in her rags. Clothing can masquerade as identity — it's how we signal who we are. So the servant marries the prince, and the true princess is sent off to work with Conrad, who takes care of the geese. Could this ever really happen?'

'No,' Bob Sherman said. 'Never. There'd be a million ways you could tell a princess from her servant. They wouldn't talk the same way. They wouldn't even wear the same clothes in the same way.'

'Lots of little social differentiations,' said Fitz-Hallan. 'Right. But the story says that identity can be stolen from you, and even though you're right, that goes deeper than class. In other stories, men's shadows replace their owners and make the men act like shadows. That's even more absurd, but also more terrifying. If identities can be stolen, someone, even some thing, can steal yours.' He paused to let this sink in. 'How does the beautiful princess become reinstated?'

Del said, 'The prince's father makes her tell her story to a stove and listens through the stovepipe. Then he finds out who she is.'

'Yes, but what has made him suspicious?'

'Falada,' Tom said.

'Falada. The horse her mother gave her.'

'It's magic — she's reinstated through magic,' Del said. He was smiling.

'You'll go far,' Fitz-Hallan said. 'Magic. The bad servant has Falada's head cut off and nailed to a wall, and Conrad, the goose boy, hears her talking to the horse's head and hears the head answer. Oh, poor princess in despair;/ If your dear mother knew,/ Her heart would break in two. The natural world of common sense and social differentiation is set aside, and magic takes charge of things. It speaks in poetry. It alters the world. Remember that first sentence? There was once . . . It doesn't matter what comes after that; when you hear words like that, you know the ordinary rules don't work — animals will talk, people will turn into animals, the world will turn topsy-turvy. But at the end . . . ' He raised his hand.

'It turns back again,' Del said. 'Magically right.' 'You do put things well sometimes, Nightingale,' Mr. Fitz-Hallan said.

The bell rang; the class ended; I was admiring Mr. Fitz-Hallan's timing when I witnessed something that at first seemed more a part of the world we had been discussing than it did of the world of school. Mr. Fitz-Hallan and the others were picking up their books. I was sitting next to Tom Flanagan, and I heard him utter a little grunt, more of displeasure than of astonishment: I looked, and saw his pencil floating in the air about a foot above his notebook. He grabbed at it and tore it out of its place. I saw (thought I saw) it momentarily resist, as if it were glued to the air. Flanagan blushed and jabbed the pencil in his shirt pocket. When he saw me gaping, he scowled and shrug­ged: What the hell's so funny? I decided that what I had seen had been a pointless but clever mime: he had thrown the pencil up, and I had looked just as it stopped rising and started to fall.

19

Two-thirty, that school night: suddenly and irrevocably awake, Skeleton Ridpath threw back his covers. The house was oppressively hot. Through the side wall he could hear his father snoring: a choked rattling inhalation followed by a long wheezing, grinding, somehow moist noise that made his skin shrink. He grimaced with loathing and switched on the light beside him.

And nearly shrieked, for directly above him, eight feet from his eyes, was the last image he had seen before being jolted awake — a large gray bird, opening its wings and spreading its talons. No, not quite the image. The bird whose image he had varnished onto his ceiling was an eagle, but the bird which had troubled his sleep was . . . He did not know, but not an eagle. It had been outside the window, battering at the frame with its wings. It had been trying to come in, ordering him to let it enter, and the terror of what was about to happen had jerked him from sleep. The savage bird outside had been making a noise-speaking to him, commanding him — which he now recognized came from his father's awful snoring.

Calming, letting that other bird diminish in his mind, he took in the comforting matter surrounding the eagle. Rifle barrels, many blood-streaked corpses, a baby hoisted aloft on a spear. These gradually faded into an area dominated by automobiles and household appliances and women's photographs from which he had removed the faces. In their place he had glued animals' masks, foxes' and apes'.

Different areas of his walls were different 'things,' now gradually melting into one comprehensive 'thing.' He had known it would turn that way — long ago, years ago, when he had given up all his other hobbies and begun putting pictures on his walls, Skeleton had foreseen a day when, guided by a powerful impulse, all the pictures would form a single epic statement.

He had begun by selecting pictures of the objects he hated, things that represented the Carson way of life: new cars and grotesquely large refrigerators piled with food; manor houses, well-dressed suburban women, football players. Because he hated these things, because his father and his father's colleagues accepted them as values, because they were elements of a world he wished would blow to pieces, they gave him a perverse thrill: hating them, he liked looking at them. Now he cut out every grotesque picture he saw, and welded horrors onto the representations of the suburban life he detested. In some places, four separate layers of photographs had been fixed to the waff. From the old, Bidder 'things' had crawled forth his true imagery. Skeleton knew he was getting better.

A year ago, he had been delighted by the notion that what he was doing was surrounding his room with himself: so that he stood within it as he stood and revolved within his own mind. When he had come to this thought — eating tasteless meatloaf and averting his head from his father's perpetual monologue about sports — he had twitched so violently that he had knocked his Coke off the table.

But during the following summer, this vision of his room had been overtaken by a vision even more com­manding and dangerous. About this he rarely allowed himself to think at length, but the essential element burned in his mind every time he shut the door behind him.

The room did not open inward, but out.

It was not a mirror.

The room was a window.

It was a casement opening out onto the sky, and showing in fragmented, only gradually revealed form what actually lay outside. Lately the man in the dark coat, a man like the dark kings and wolves scheming at the door in Fitz-Hallan's fairy tales, had been appearing on his walls. When he found the right man (or when the right man found him?), the brim of his hat shading his face and his finger pointing, it would all lock together.

Skeleton jumped out of bed and began to rustle through the heap of magazines beside his bed.

Tom said: 'You see, there was a mystery in our school, and the end of the mystery was the awful thing that happened when Del and I were doing our magic show. But that wasn't the answer to the mystery, just its conclusion. The answer was at Shadowland; or the answer was Shadowland.

'Skeleton was having visions of a man in a long coat and hat — the man I had seen in a dream. Of course I didn't know about Skeleton's visions, and it wouldn't have done me any good if I had. You saw what happened that day in Fitz-Hallan's class, when my pencil got stuck somehow in midair — and I could see you decide immediately that your eyes had been fooled somehow. Despite what I had seen myself, I would have decided the same thing. After all, it's always best to look for the most rational explanations for irrational-seeming occurrences. Any magician would tell you that — look at how they universally discount people like Uri Getter.

'But you saw me blush. Funny things had been happen­ing to me. I hardly had the vocabulary to express them. 'Nightmare' was one way, but that didn't get the at­mosphere. And is there such a thing as a 'daymare'? Anyhow, I never let anybody know about it, not even Del, but queer things were happening to me — some days, it was like I never woke up at all, but went through school and the rest of the day in some sort of dream, full of terrible hints and omens.

'You want examples? For one thing, sometimes I imagined that birds were looking at me — observing me, keeping track of me. On the walk down to lunch, I'd see a flock of sparrows, and all of them would be looking straight at me. Every one, drilling into me with those quick little eyes. At home, I'd look out of the window in the living room, and a robin on our lawn would swivel its head and stare at me through the glass, just as if it had something to say to me. Now, that's pretty mild. It made me think I might be going nuts, but it was still mild.

'Other things were less mild. I remember one day a week or two before our nine-week exams, when I went in the front door of the school and almost fainted. Because I didn't see what I knew was there — the steps going up, and the corridor and the library doors. For a second, maybe two or three seconds, I saw what looked like a jungle. The air was hot and very humid. There were more trees than I'd ever seen before in my life, crowded together, leaning this way and that, snaked around with vines. I had the sense of a tremendous energy — as if the whole crowded scene was humming and buzzing away. Then I saw an animal face peering at me through the leaves. I was so scared I almost fell over. And I came out of it. There were the steps, there were the library doors, there was Terry Peters pushing me in the back and ordering me to get a move on.

'Things like that happened maybe once a month after I made friends with Del. Those were the 'daymares.' But then, my friend, there were the nightmares. I was way ahead of the rest of the school. Every night I had terrible dreams — I was lost in a forest, and animals were trying to hunt me down, or I was floating way up high in the air, knowing I was going to fall. . . but the oddest feeling I had in these dreams, no matter how bad they were, was that I was somehow seeing how things really were. It was like the world had split open, and I was seeing part of the engine of things — or not seeing as much as feeling it there. As scared as I was, there was this funny kind of satisfaction, the satisfaction of knowledge. As if without at all understand­ing it, I was at least seeing how the mystery worked. Suppose the skies opened and you saw a great wheel turning around, the wheel that turns us around the sun — that's the kind of feeling I had.

'I didn't always have that feeling of mysterious insight, though. In some dreams I saw a black figure coming toward me — gliding toward me, like we were both sus­pended in the air. He held a knife. Or a sword. Something long and dangerous. He glided closer and closer, filling my vision. . . and then he cut off my hands. Or the pain in my hands was so great that it felt like he'd cut them off.'

I looked at his hands on the bar, at the round pads of scar tissue.

'We'll get to that,' he said.

20

Over the next few weeks, Skeleton Ridpath seemed to us to skulk backward into himself. His face grew odder, the flabby skin beneath his eyes darkening to a deeper gray. Once, on a Saturday in early November, he jumped out of his car at a stop sign, ran onto the sidewalk outside a candy store on Santa Rosa Boulevard, and slapped Dave Brick hard enough to make him stagger because he had neglected to wear his beanie. But the seniors' minds, like ours, were on other things. The nine-week examinations were coming soon, and these, designed to show students and masters how well we would likely do on the half-term exams in January, were notoriously tough. Also, just a week and a half before the examinations, the JV and varsity football teams were to play their homecoming games against Larch School, our traditional rival. On the evening after the homecoming games the first big dance of the year took place in the field house. In white jackets and beanies, six boys from the freshman class were to wait on the seniors. We were all aware that Skeleton was in danger of failing his exams; some of us vainly hoped that he would flunk out of the school. And all of us who were to serve as waiters at the dance hoped that there was no girl so desperate to attend the Carson homecoming dance that she would go out with Skeleton.

All of us were united by our loathing for Skeleton Ridpath, and by our fear of him. We thought Tom Flanagan a hero for what he had done during the football game when Ridpath kicked him in the face. That more than anything else demonstrated how events could be magically right. Once during these two or three weeks while Skeleton's attention wandered off into other kinds of unpleasantness, Tom and Bobby Hollingsworth saw him standing in the anteroom to the headmaster's office. He jerked back and out of sight behind the arch, and they assumed he was waiting to be flayed by Lake the Snake; two days later, Tom saw him there again while he was bringing Mr. Weatherbee's attendance forms to the office. This time Skeleton did not jerk back behind the arch, but flapped one bony paw urgently, dictatorially — clear off. Tom turned away from lurking Skeleton in the shadowy arch, and nearly bumped into Bambi Whipple, who carried the mimeographed pile of his nine-weeks exams.

Later that day we learned, that Bryce Beaver and Harlan Willow had been expelled for smoking in the field-house turrets, and the enigma of Skeleton Ridpath skulking outside of the offices was swallowed by the shocked excitement the expulsions caused. Laker Broome canceled after-school practices to hold a special school meeting; while Mr. Ridpath fumed in the back row at the loss of an hour and a half s preparation for the game, Broome dryly, meticulously said that he wanted to fore­stall gossip by explaining that a 'tragedy' had occurred in the life of the school, that two able boys had disgraced themselves. They might well have ruined their prospects. That this was a tragedy, no one would dispute. But he had no choice: they had given him no choice.

In his face was no regret, only a tidy satisfaction. The entire school could hear Chester Ridpath loudly coughing from the back of the auditorium, but perhaps only we in the first two rows could see the long creases in Laker Broome's face deepen in self-congratulation.

21

Ridpath made our practices savage and grinding during the four days before the game, running through the same simple plays ten, then a dozen times; in his mind we had become the X's and O's of his diagrams, capable of unending and painless manipulation. Each session ended with three laps of the field, normally punishment for only the worst duffers. But this too was punishment — for the loss from the varsity team of Beaver and Willow, who had been on his first string. From these practices we limped home, bruised from blocking and tackling, nursing bloody noses, too tired even to do homework or watch Jackie Gleason and Art Carney in The Honeymooners.

On the day of the game the football field had been freshly limed, and the yard lines shone chalky white. Under an utterly cloudless sky, in air only beginning to carry autumn's snap, a crowd of parents in crew-neck sweaters and chino pants, plaid skirts and blazers, streamed from the visitors' parking lot toward the bleachers. It was obvious that most of these casual fathers in their blue sweaters and brown Weejuns had been Carson students; none of them had the weathered, experienced faces I thought of as typically 'Arizona.' They had grown up here, but they could have come from anywhere urban and knowing.

While Sherman and Howie Stern and Morris Fielding and I sat on the bench, our junior-varsity team lost by three touchdowns. We had managed only a single field goal. The varsity team ran out to cheers and school yells — most of the parents had flasks — and cheerleaders from a nearby girls' school flounced and cartwheeled and spelled out the school's name. The Larch School made two touchdowns in the first half, one more in the second. We made none. Ridpath had committed an elementary error and worn us out.

22

I saw something anomalous during the varsity game. Most of our JV team was seated in the last row of the stands, and from there we could look across the field to the grassy rise on its opposite side. When the visitors' lot outside Laker Broome's private entrance had filled, the parents had driven past it over the grass and parked their cars all along the yellow-green length of lawn which we often took as our way down to the Junior School for lunch. The snouts of Buicks and Lincolns and a few MG's pointed across and above the field toward the stands. Toward the end of the first half of the varsity game, I looked up at the row of grilles and bumpers facing us from the rise and saw a man standing between two of the cars.

He did not look like a Carson School parent. No chinos, no lamb's-wool Paul Stuart sweater, no Weejuns. The man was dressed in a long belted raincoat and an old-fashioned brown fedora hat pulled down low on his forehead. His hands were deep in his pockets. At first he reminded me of Sheldon Leonard in the television series Foreign Intrigue — in the fifties, way out there in the dry West, belted trench coats carried a whiff of glamour; they stood for spies, travel, Europe. Nothing about this exotic character suggested an interest in prep-school athletics.

Then I saw Del Nightingale's reaction to the man. Del was sitting beside Tom Flanagan three rows beneath me, and he looked up toward the rise a moment after I did. The effect on Del of the man dressed like Sheldon Leonard was startling: he froze like a bird before a snake, and I was sure that if you touched him you'd feel him quiver. He uttered a wordless noise — almost like an electronic beep. It was purely the sound of astonishment.

Skeleton Ridpath, seated on the bench in uniform, also appeared to be affected by the man's appearance on the rise. I thought he nearly fell off the bench. The man retreated backward between the cars and disappeared. Skeleton turned around and glared back at the stands. His head looked fleshless, the size of a grape above his shoulderpads.

23

'Sometimes I'm Happy'

Streamers hung from the auditorium ceiling, tied up around the dim colored spots; in place of the metal chairs was a vast — empty space for dancing, ringed by tables covered by dark blue cloths. At ten minutes to eight the only people in the room were the freshman waiters and the chaperons, Mr. and Mrs. Robbin. Mr. Robbin taught physics and chemistry, and was slight and gray-haired, with thick inquisitive glasses. His wife was taller than he, and her own hair was screwed up into a bun. The Robbins were seated together along the outside wall and looked dated and 'scientific,' like Dr. and Madame Curie; flecks of brilliant yellow and cadmium blue, then of orange and red, revolved over them, cast by the color wheel hung in the middle distance.

When the Robbins had entered, they had nodded vaguely to us — he taught only upperclassmen. Then Mr. Robbin had turned his radium-seeking gaze on Del and said, 'You're Nightingale, aren't you? New boy? Getting on all right?' Gossip had informed all of the school that Del Nightingale was a fabulously wealthy orphan, one of whose legal guardians was a bank he in fact owned. Robbin sat beside his wife and held up an arm; With the other hand he indicated his wrist watch. 'Satellite tonight. Five to ten. An artificial star. A miracle.'

Besides Tom, Del, and myself, the waiters were Bobby Hollingsworth, Tom Pinfold — still grouchy about the game — and Morris Fielding. Morris, who played piano, had volunteered on the chance that the band might be worth hearing.

Shortly after eight the musicians arrived, carrying their instrument cases. Several carloads of sophomores and juniors followed them into the auditorium. The ones with dates went for paper cups of punch, the ones without leaned against the wall and watched the musicians setting up on the cavernous stage.

Dwarfed on the immense apron of the stage, the eleven men in the band sat down in their chairs and began riffling through sheet music. Morris and I had great hopes for one of the tenor saxophone players, who wore dark glasses. They put their horns in their mouths and began to play 'There's a Small Hotel.'

Hollis Wax and a prefect named Paul Derringer came in with their dates just after eight-thirty; seeing that no one had yet begun to dance, they moved to the senior tables and began looking around for our white coats. 'This is going to be a great homecoming dance,' Wax said to his date as I approached. 'After a fiasco like today.' Then to me: 'Gin and tonic. For all of us.' He tilted his head to look at the band. 'Look at those guys. Bunch of oompah shoe salesmen. One of 'em's blind.' I went off to get the punch. 'Bring us the Everly Brothers too, while you're up,' Wax called out.

Within the next twenty minutes most of the seniors arrived, dressed as their fathers had been at the game; at most of the dances, the school relaxed its rule about ties and jackets. The first brave couples went out into the big empty space and began to dance. Mr. and Mrs. Robbin got up wearily from their table and meandered around the dance floor. Bobby Hollingsworth and I made up another batch of punch by pouring grape juice, sparkling water, and root beer into a cut-glass bowl. The band began on 'Polka Dots and Moonbeams,' and Mr. Robbin's head twisted back and forth as he computed distances between the couples nearest him. Like Dave Brick, he generally wore a slide rule slung from his belt, and he looked as though he missed it. The tenor player in the sunglasses stood up to solo, and proved that he had been worth waiting for. Bobby Hollingsworth turned smiling to me as we ladled out the terrible punch, and nodded toward Terry Peters, who was standing near one of the large doors on the outside wall. Beside him was a stunning girl. Peters was unscrewing the cap off a silvery flask and making sure that Mr. Robbin was looking the other way. He poured from the flask into his date's cup and his own.

Morris Fielding rushed up to me carrying a tray and said, 'Six cups. Isn't he great? He really blows! Who do you think influenced him, Bill Perkins or Zoot Sims?'

Just as Morris was leaving with his six cups of punch, Terry Peters wheeled his date out the door, moving so quickly that almost no one saw him go. Bobby Holingsworth started laughing, and then abruptly stopped. I too stopped what I was doing. Skeleton Ridpath, in a black sweater and black trousers, slipped in through the closing door and eased it shut behind him. His awful fleshless face was exalted. He crept along behind the tables, going toward the stage. Our tenor player was emoting on the chord changes of 'Sometimes I'm Happy,' but I barely heard him. I watched Skeleton lift a cup of punch from an unattended table and move closer to Del Nightingale, finally drawing near enough to reach out and touch his shoulder. Instead he poured the awful stuff down Del's collar.

Del jumped and uttered a noise like the squeal of a month-old puppy. He whirled around and saw Skeleton before him and promptly backed into a table. 'Gee, I'm sorry, Florence,' Skeleton said, showing the palms of his hands in a false gesture of sympathy. I could barely hear his words, but I took in straight and clear the taunting mock-humility in which they were encased. The two boys, the small one in the white jacket and the one like a black worm, circled around, each walking backward. Only Bobby Hollingsworth and I saw this, apart from two or three amused seniors at a nearby table. When Skeleton and Del had circled completely around, Skeleton opened his mouth and I saw his lips move: Catch you later, hey, Florence? Del started backpedaling away, butted up against the same table, then turned his back on Ridpath and went for the side door into the hallway. Skeleton slumped into one of the camp chairs near the steps. He ran a bony hand over his face and grinned up at nothing in particular. On his face was still that look of abstract, unearthly good cheer.

When the band took an intermission I watched Skel­eton climb up the steps and disappear behind the instru­ment stands.

Mr. Robbin kept checking his watch after the band's return, and when he was satisfied the satellite was visible, he stood, cupped his hands to his mouth, and said, 'Anybody wants to see a miracle, come out now.' His wife dutifully stood up beside him, but no one else paid any attention. He shouted, 'Come on! This is more important than dancing.' Finally he waved the band to a sputtering halt. 'You guys too,' he said. 'Take a break. Get some fresh air.'

'Shit, man,' said the bass player, inspiring some laughter from the students on the dance floor. Two of the trumpet players immediately plugged cigarettes into their mouths. Most of the other musicians shrugged and set down their horns.

24

Tom Said Later

When the rest of the school and the band filed out into the cold air — Tom said later — Skeleton stole away from whatever he had been doing at the back of the stage and took a chair fifteen feet from the hall door, to one side of the refectory table. He was leaning back smiling at them when Tom and Del returned from the bathroom. 'Cleaned up now?' he asked. 'Must have been pretty uncomfortable, all that crap going down your shirt.'

'Leave him alone,' Tom said. Both boys skirted Ridpath and went to the far side of the long table.

'Shut up, stupid. You think I'm talking to you?' Ridpath twisted his chair so that he was looking directly at them again. A few musicians smoked on an otherwise empty stage; a few couples bent toward each other at the far end of the auditorium. 'You're afraid of me, aren't you, Florence?'

The question was devastatingly simple.

'Yes,' Del answered.

'Yes, what?'

'Yes, Mr. Ridpath.'

'Yeah. That's good. Because you'll do anything I tell you to, just the way you're supposed to. I get sick looking at you, you know that. You look like a little bug, Florence, a shitty little cockroach. . . . ' Ridpath stood up, and Tom saw flecks of white at the edges of his mouth. He had somehow strolled up to the front of the table without their seeing him move: he threw out a stabbing punch, and Del jumped backward to avoid it.

Tom opened his mouth, and Skeleton whispered fierce­ly: 'Keep out of this, Flanagan, or I'll tear you apart.' He turned his shining gaze toward Del again.

'You saw him too.'

Del shook his head.

'I know you did. I saw you. Who is he? Come on, runt. Who is he? He wants me to do something, doesn't he?'

'You're crazy,' Del said.

'Oh no I'm not oh no I'm not oh no I'm not,' Skeleton said softly, all in a rush, leaning over the table toward Del. 'See, nobody's watching. We might as well be all alone here.' He snatched at Del's hand and clamped his fingers around the wrist. 'Who was he?'

Del shook his head.

'You saw him. You know him.'

Del's whole being constricted with revulsion, and he tried to wrench himself away. Skeleton changed his grip with a wrestler's quickness and began to squeeze Del's hand in his. 'Little girl,' he muttered. 'Trying to hide from me, aren't you, little girl?' Ridpath did his best to break the bones in Del's hand.

Tom lunged at Skeleton's wrist.

Skeleton jerked his hand aloft, nearly lifting Del off the floor. Then he looked at Tom in fury and despair and still with that sick gladness and swung his arm down hard into the side of the punch bowl. At the last second he released his fingers and used his palm to smack Del's hand against the heavy bowl.

Del screamed. The bowl shattered, and purple-brownish liquid gouted into the air. The two boys were instantly soaked, Skeleton less so because he had jumped back immediately after the impact; Del half-fell into the mess on the table.

'I want to know,' Skeleton said, and ran out through the hall door.

When the rest of us came back into the auditorium, after seeing a red speck drift far above Over the field house, Tom and Del were mopping the floor. Del's hand, not broken, bled in a straight line across his knuckles: his face stricken, he wielded the mop with one hand while awkwardly holding his torn hand out from his side, letting it bleed into a bucket.

'Jeez, you monkeys are clumsy,' Mr. Robbin said, and ordered his wife to get cotton and tape from the first-aid box in the office.

25

Night

'But why not tell me? I'm your best friend.'

'There's nothing to tell.'

'But I bet I know who it is already.'

'Dandy.'

'What's the big mystery?'

'Don't ask me, ask Skeleton. I don't even know what he's talking about.'

26

Alis Volat

The next weekend we had an away game at Ventnor Prep, which was just over a hundred miles to the north, in a suburb even more affluent than our own, and was indisputably a first-rate school: unlike Carson, Ventnor was known all over the Southwest. It was the only school for three states around with a crew team. They also had a fencing squad and a rugby team. We thought of Ventnor as a school for intolerable snobs. It owned a famous collection of antique porcelain and glassware which was supposed to exert a refining influence on the students there.

The bus ride took two and a half hours, and when we arrived we were soon given refreshment — presumably we needed Cokes and watercress sandwiches to toughen us up for the game. Members of the Ventnor Mothers' Committee served the waferlike sandwiches in a reception room that appeared to have been modeled on Laker Broome's office. This was a 'pregame mixer,' to be followed by a 'postgame tea,' but there was no mixing. The Ventnor boys clustered on one side of the reception room, we on the other.

Skeleton Ridpath spoke to no one on the way down and in the reception room drank five or six glasses of Coke and prowled around looking at the ornaments on the shelves. These were a display of some of the famous antiques, but Skeleton remained unrefined. He grinned whenever he looked at Del. He looked ghastly, ready for a hospital bed.

Del's hand was still bandaged, and the white gauze flashed like a lamp against his olive skin. He wore a tailored blue blazer, a white shirt, a blue-and-red-striped tie. In this sober outfit he somehow appeared prematurely sophisticated. The dazzling whiteness of new gauze against his skin was dashing as a medal — romantic as an eyepatch. He suddenly appeared to already — novelizing me in the role of one destined to be famous.

Mr. Ridpath coughed into his hand, said, 'Well, boys,' and began to herd us toward the locker room.

Once again, both games ended in disaster. The JV's lost by three touchdowns; the varsity made a touchdown in the first quarter, but the Ventnor quarterback snapped off two passes which brought them ahead, and in the second half a fullback named Creech recovered a fumble and ran thirty yards. After that our defense fell to bits. Ventnor simply marched down the field every time they had the ball. 'This place is so rich they buy athletes,' Chip Hogan told me as we filed out of the stands to walk across several hundred yards of manicured field to return to the recep­tion room and the tea. 'Did you see those two huge guys in the line . . . and that enormous fullback? I know those guys from the city. They get scholarships and living allowances, and uniform allowances. They even get a training table at meals. Nobody stuffs them full of veal birds.' He gritted his teeth. 'See you at the shitty tea,' he said, and began to run because he could not bear to move more slowly.

At the bottom of the stands, I could go either the way Chip was running, directly across the football field and over a hill to the main building, or along a path which followed the landscaped contours of the grounds and trailed up and down the little rises past the artificial lake. About half my class was visible on this path, too embar­rassed by our failure to want to appear at the tea before they had to. I turned away from the school buildings and went down the path toward my friends.

'Jesus, I don't want any of their tea,' Bobby Hollingsworth said after I had caught up with them.

'We don't have any choice, really,' said Morris. 'But to tell you the truth, I'd rather lie down here and go to sleep.'

'Maybe we'll have some fun on the bus going home,' Tom suggested.

'With Ridpath on the bus? Get serious.' Bobby jammed his hands in his pockets and ostentatiously surveyed the grounds. 'Can you believe this place? Have you ever seen anything more nouveau riche? It makes me sick.'

'I think it's kind of pretty,' Del said.

'Well, shit, Florence, why don't you buy it?' Bobby flamed out. 'Give it to somebody for Christmas.'

'Don't jump down his throat,' Tom said. 'You're just mad because we lost again.'

'I guess,' Bobby said. Of course he would not apolo­gize. 'I suppose you like losing. Lose a game, horse around on the bus. Right? Get your jollies. Why not get Florence to buy the bus, then we could kick Ridpath off. Jesus.'

Del had begun to look extremely uncomfortable, and said something about getting cold. He obviously intended that all of us start walking again and join the team in the reception room.

From where we stood, backed by the big trees shielding the lake, we could see across all of the school's grounds to the gymnasium and the other buildings. Most of the varsity players had showered and changed and were walking in small slow-moving groups toward the admin­istration building. It was too dark and they were too far away for us to really see their faces, but we could identify them by their various gaits and postures. Miles Teagarden and Terry Peters slouched along between the two build­ings. Teagarden, who had fumbled, was bent over so far he appeared to be policing the grass. 'Ugh,' Tom said when Skeleton Ridpath lounged through the door of the gym — his was a figure no one could mistake. Skeleton ambled toward the rear door of the administration build­ing. Defeat held no embarrassment for him.

Then I heard Del, already six or seven feet ahead of us, moan softly: just as if he'd been lightly punched in the gut. The man in the Foreign Intrigue costume was walking, very erect and unselfconsciously, down into one of the sculptured hollows between ourselves and the school. His back toward us, he was moving toward the grandstand and football field. Around him the darkening air was granular, pointillistic. The brim of his hat pulled down, the belt of his coat dangling, the ends swinging.

'Let's move it, Del,' Tom said.

But Del stood frozen in position, and so all of us watched the man receding into the hollow.

'The janitor works late around here,' said Bobby Hollingsworth. 'I hope he breaks his neck.'

Del held his bandaged hand chest-high, as if flashing a signal or warding off a blow.

'I don't see the point of watching the janitor,' Morris Fielding said. 'I'm getting cold too.'

'No, he's a Ventnor parent,' said Bob Sherman. 'Those coats cost about two hundred bucks.'

'See you there,' Morris said, and resolutely turned his back and set off down the path.

'Two hundred bucks for a coat,' Sherman mused.

By now all of us were watching the retreating figure as if mesmerized. The ends of his wide belt swung, the tails of the coat billowed. The dark air glimmered around him and seemed to melt into his clothing. For the second time that day, I fantasized that I was seeing not an ordinary mortal but a figure from the world of Romance.

He disappeared around the side of the grandstand.

'Oh, let's move,' Tom said. 'Maybe we can catch up with Morris.'

More than a hundred yards away, Skeleton Ridpath let out a wild shriek — a sound not of terror but of some terrible consummation. I looked over at him and saw his gaunt arms flung up above his head, his body twitching in a grotesque jig. He was positively dancing. Then I faintly heard the beating of wings, and glanced back over my shoulder to see a huge bird lifting itself up over the grandstand.

'Yeah, let's go,' Del said in an utterly toneless voice. He yanked at Tom's arm and pulled him down the path in the direction Morris Fielding had gone.

One more event of that day must be recorded. When we joined the tea, the reception room was much more crowded than it had been during the mixer. Ventnor fathers leaned patronizingly toward men in wrinkled gabardine jackets who were surely Ventnor leathers, Ventnor mothers poured lemon tea from the Ventnor silver to other Ventnor mothers. They all looked under­standably smug. I was given a cup of the delicate tea by a woman with the elastic, self-aware beauty of a model and went to stand beside Dave Brick. He too had never left the bench. 'I just worked it out,' Brick said, flipping his slide rule into its holster. 'Two-point-three-six of our school would fit into what they've got here. I'm talking about land mass.' 'Terrific,' I said. Skeleton Ridpath drifted past holding a cup of tea in a swimming saucer. He looked crazy enough to levitate. Brick and I backed away, but Skeleton was not paying attention to us. He went a few paces toward one wall, then moonily shifted off at an angle. His mousy hair was still slicked down from the shower. I saw Ventnor parents stare at him, then look quickly away. Skeleton drifted up to the shelves of things where he had browsed before the games. Dave Brick and I, not believing, saw him lift a small glass object from a shelf and slide it in his pocket.

27

Tom's Room

Here there were no star charts, skulls, exotic fish; no photographs of magicians, only of Tom and his father on horseback, sitting in a rowboat with fishing poles, toting shotguns across a Montana field. The only other, picture was a reproduction of one of the Blue Period Picasso's sad-faced acrobats. One side of the room held a built-in desk and a rank of shelves: after returning from Ventnor, both boys had eaten dinner with Tom's parents and then gone into the bedroom to study.

At ten-thirty Del said his eyes hurt and closed his books and flopped down onto the guest bed.

'You're going to flunk, math.'

'I don't care.' He burrowed deeper into the white pillowcase. 'I'm not like Dave Brick.'

'Well, if you don't care, then I don't either. But the exams start on Wednesday.' Tom looked interrogatively over his shoulder, but his friend's small form still lay face down on the guest bed. Suffering seemed to come from him in waves; for a second this emotion pouring from his friend confused itself in Tom's mind with bereavement, and he thought that he would be unable to keep from crying. Hartley Flanagan had gone through dinner like a man concentrating on a mountain several miles off. There had been another long session with his doctor that afternoon. All Tom's instincts told him that soon his mother or his father would say that they had to have a long talk: after the talk, nothing would remain un­changed. Tom stared at the wall before him, almost seeing his own face looking back from the cream-painted plaster, a face about to record an alteration, a shock; he saw himself ten, twenty years hence, as isolated as Skeleton Ridpath.

As isolated as Del — that suddenly came to him.

He turned around, pushing his books back with his elbows. 'Don't you think you ought to talk about it?'

Del relaxed slightly. 'I don't know.'

'I damn near bit my tongue in half on the bus, but I knew you wouldn't want to talk there.'

Del shook his head.

'And we couldn't talk during dinner.'

'No.' He rolled over and looked up at Tom.

'Well, we've been sitting in here for three hours. You read some of those pages four times. You look terrible. I'm so tired I could drop off right here. Isn't it about time?'

'Time for what?'

'For you to tell me about that guy.'

'I don't know anything about him, so I can't.'

'Come off it. That can't be true.'

'It is true. Why do you think I'd know anything about him?' Del brought up his knees and dropped his head onto them. To Tom he looked as though he were decreasing in size, knotting himself up into a disappearing bundle.

'Because . . . ' Tom plunged on, now unsure of him­self. 'Because I think it was that guy you talk about all the time. Your uncle.'

'Can't be.' Del was still huddling into himself.

'You say.'

Del looked up. 'You want to talk about my Uncle Cole? Okay. He's in New England. I know he's in New England. He's studying.'

'Studying magic?'

'Sure. Why not? That's what he does. And that's where he is. Why didn't you know? Because you never asked. Because you never seemed that interested before.' His face trembled.

'Hey, Del . . . ' Now Tom was in a morass. 'I didn't . . . I didn't know what . . . ' I didn't know what you would tell me. And from that first day, heard Bud Copeland's warning: Take care, Red. 'Well, sure, I was interested,' he lamely said.

'Yeah, you and Skeleton.' Del dropped his head onto his knees again. 'Everything's changing,' he said in a muffled voice.

'Well. . . ?'

'Just changing. I think everything should always be the same. Then you'd always know . . . '

Where you were. What was going to happen.

Del lowered his legs and sat absolutely upright on the bed. 'I get this feeling,' he said. He was as rigid as an Indian on a bed of nails. 'Did you ever read Frankenstein or The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym? No? I get this feeling I'm headed toward something like the end of those books — ice all around, everything all white, freezing or boiling, it doesn't matter, no . . . towers of ice. No way out — nothing. Just towers of ice. And something real bad coming. . . . '

'Sure,' Tom said. 'And then a prince will come along and say the magic words and three ravens will give you the magic tokens and a fish will carry you on his back.' He tried to smile.

'No. Like what Mr. Thorpe says if someone can't answer a question. Hic vigilans somniat. He dreams awake. That's how I am. Like I'm dreaming, not living. I don't believe anything that's happening to me. How would you like to try living with Tim and Valerie Hillman?'

'I didn't think . . . '

'You're right. That's not what we were talking about.'

'Okay. So let's go back to the towers of ice and the prince and the three ravens and the magic fish.'

'By all means, let us leave the Hillmans behind. I have an idea.'

'It's about time.'

'You were talking about rescue. Prince — ravens — that stuff.'

'I guess. Sure. I guess.'

'Why don't you come to visit Cole Collins with me over Christmas? I'm supposed to go see him. Come with me. Then you could meet him.'

Tom felt an extraordinary mix of emotions, fear and pleasure and dread and anticipation, protectiveness and weakness: He looked at Del, and wanted to embrace him. He saw Del all alone in an Arctic landscape. Then he thought of his father and said, 'I can't. I just can't. I'm sorry.'

It took him a second to realize that Del was crying.

'Sometime I will. I will, Del. Jesus, stop that. Let's do some card tricks or something — that shuffle you were showing me.'

'I don't have to be awake to shuffle cards,' Del said. 'Whatever you want, Master.'

TWO

The Magic Show

1

On the Monday before the nine-week exams, Laker Broome announced frigidly in chapel that an eighteenth-century glass owl had been stolen from the refectory room at Ventnor School, and that the Ventnor headmaster had told him that the theft must have occurred during the afternoon of our football game. 'Mr. Dunmoore is a tactful man, and he did riot directly accuse our school of harboring the thief, but there are certain inescapable facts. The Ventnor collection is regularly dusted. Last Saturday the pieces on open shelves were dusted by the school housekeeper at eleven-fifteen, shortly before our arrival at the school. They were doing their best to give us a good impression of Ventnor, gentlemen. After our departure it was noticed that the piece was missing, and the matter was immediately reported to Mr. Dunmoore. It represents a serious loss, not only because the piece in question is valued at something like twelve hundred dollars, but because its theft renders the collection in­complete. Therefore, the value of the entire Ventnor collection is affected. And that is a matter of several hundred thousand dollars.'

Mr. Broome whipped his glasses from his head and took a step back from the lectern. 'It is also a matter of the honor of this school, which is beyond any value. I do not wish to believe that any of our boys would do anything so disgraceful, but I am forced to believe it. It is abhorrent to me, but I must accept that looking at me this moment is the boy who stole that owl. Ventnor is a boarding school. Over the weekend, extensive searches were undertaken in the quarters of both students and staff — not a single person at the school failed to cooper­ate. So you see where that puts us, gentlemen.'

The glasses went back on the taut face. 'We have only a few boys at this school capable of such a disgusting act, , and we know who they are. We believe we know the identity of the thief. I want him to come forward. I want the boy to identify himself to me personally sometime during the school day. Things will go much easier for him if he voluntarily accepts the responsibilities for his ac­tions. If the boy has the courage to confess his deed, we will be able to limit his punishment to expulsion. Other­wise, more serious measures will be called for.'

Mr. Broome inclined his head to look directly at us in the first two rows. He stared almost pugnaciously at Dave Brick, then at Bob Sherman, then at Del Nightingale. 'I promise you,' he said, 'that the culprit will be found out. Dismissed.'

As we filed out, Dave Brick bulked up beside me. He grabbed my elbow. 'He thinks I did it!'

'Quiet,' I said.

'What do we do?'

I knew what he meant. We both turned to look for Skeleton Ridpath, and saw him slouching out of the seniors' row, hands in pockets, smiling faintly. We were both too afraid of him to report what we had seen. We went up the stairs in silence.

'But they must know,' Dave moaned. 'He's the only one who . . . '

We had reached the door of Thorpe's classroom, and Dave Brick exhaled loudly, a sound of pure despair. His skin had suddenly gone white and oily — terror made him look like a thief.

Inside, Mr. Thorpe began to shout almost at once. Of the tirade I can remember only a few words, one of the Latin tags which peppered his classroom rejoinders. Mala causa est quae requirit misercordiam. It is a bad cause which asks for mercy. Ostensibly he was speaking of the exams in two days, but all of us knew that he meant the theft as well. Several times he used the word 'vermin.' It was a harrowing session, and it left all of us shaken.

As we left Thorpe's classroom to go to our lockers, I looked down across the glassed-in court and saw Skeleton sneaking out through the big doors at the back of the stage. Damn you, I thought, damn you, damn you, damn you. Do us all a favor and flunk out.

2

One the Monday the exam grades were posted outside the library, I shoved my way up to the board with the freshman list. I read down it to find my name, and saw that I had more or less the same grades as my rivals. We could hear the seniors shouting and groaning before their own board.

Mrs. Tute struggled through us to get to the library door, muttering, 'Heavens! Heavens!' Her palsied head looked pained and angry — all of the staff had looked irritated since the theft at Ventnor.

Back at the Upper School after lunch, I saw that only Hollis Wax was standing before the seniors' grade list, and I crossed the hall and stood beside him. 'You never gave me those gin-and-tonics,' he said. 'Freshman labor is unreliable this year.' 'Yes, sir,' I answered, and searched out Ridpath, S., hoping for a row of F's. When I found his name I was amazed to see that he had three A's and two B's. Hollis Wax had nothing better than a C. 'Nosy maggot,' he said, and dropped his books on the floor. I picked them up and did ten push-ups and tied his shoes.

3

Dave Brick had been summoned to Laker Broome's office. The note was delivered to Mr. Thorpe's class in the hands of Mrs. Olinger, who looked as bruising and chill as an iceberg: even Mr. Thorpe submitted quietly to her presence. He unfolded the note, looked both stern and pleased, and said, 'Brick, see the headmaster.' Poor Brick the Prick shuffled his books into his briefcase and trembled toward the door. He'd had a particularly brutal haircut just before the exams, and on his cannonball head all the visible flesh turned bright pink. After that he was not seen for the rest of the morning. His frightened ghost seemed to wail from his empty desks during the two remaining classes before lunch.

'Actually, it's neat,' Sherman told me. 'This way, Snake proves that he runs a taut ship, and everybody else is off the hook.'

Brick's absence from classes and later from his table at lunch affected the teachers much as it did Sherman. They were more relaxed; and most of us, seeing their new ease, realized with a little shock that the staff had also decided that Brick was the thief. I decided that if Brick had been expelled, I would see Mr. Fitz-Hallan privately and tell him what I knew.

But Brick was sitting on the stone back steps of the Upper School as we came up from lunch, and he saw us and stopped tapping his slide-rule case against the con­crete. The five or six of us walking together stalled for a moment, unsure of how to treat him. But then we realized that he would not still be at the school if Broome had expelled him during the first period, and we surged forward, full of questions.

He did not want to answer most of them. 'Hey, guys, all he wanted was just to talk to me — honest. That's all he wanted.' Close up, it was obvious that he had been crying, but he said nothing about it and we were too embarrassed to ask; though I saw Bobby Hollingsworth revving himself up to say something truly vile, he had the sense to check it before someone punched him. Dave Brick had been given the complete Lake-the-Snake treat­ment, and he had not deserved it and he had come through it well; at that moment he had more goodwill than he'd ever known at Carson.

4

After the next class we had a free period, and Brick sat next to me in the library. 'Let's go down to the stage,' he whispered. 'Too many people here.' We got permission to leave from Mrs. Tute, picked up our books and walked around the perimeter of the school, down the wide stairs, and went through the big doors to the shadowy cavern behind the dark curtains.

Morris Fielding was working something out on the piano, but he was concentrating so hard that he scarcely nodded at us. Brick drew me over to the other side, where it was even darker.

I could hear the clip on his slide-rule case rattling against the metal ring. 'I didn't tell him anything. Honest. I didn't. He kept at me and at me — he's so scary, I thought . . . ' He began to snuffle, but cut it off, afraid that Morris would hear. Big and pudgy, with his Hol­lywood hairdo shorn down to a black fuzz, he looked like an enormous infant, and I realized how brave he must have been not to tell everything to Broome. 'I just kept telling myself that I didn't do it, I didn't do it — and I couldn't tell him about Skeleton, could I?'

'So he just let you go?' I asked.

'Finally. He said he believed me. He said he hoped I knew how necessary it was to find whoever was guilty. Then he gave me something to give to Mrs. Olinger and Mr. Weatherbee.' He took two identical papers from his jacket pocket. His fingers had left damp stains on them. 'It's some kind of announcement.'

'Well, you have to hand it to that guy,' I said. 'At least he apologizes.'

But when we looked at the papers, we saw that Mr. Broome was simply using Dave Brick to pass out an announcement that students would be able to form clubs in the second semester. 'That's all?' Brick said. 'That's it?' His legs wobbled, and he sat down heavily on a heap of curtain material, relief and disappointment clanging together violently in him. After what he had been through, I think he could not believe that Broome had simply dispatched him as an errand boy.

'It's okay,' I yelled. 'He's just relieved.'

'So he's relieved,' someone purred from the dark area inside the door, and all three of us snapped our heads around to see who it was.

Skeleton Ridpath walked forward into the dim light: he had come around the door so softly he might as well have come through the keyhole, like a ghost or a wisp of smoke.

'So Brick the Prick is relieved, huh? Get out of here, you freshman creeps. Don't ever come back here again.' He swiveled on one hip and bent toward Morris. 'Field­ing. You leave that goddamned piano alone.'

'I have a right to play it,' Morris said quietly.

'A right? You have a right? Shit.' Skeleton shook himself like a wet dog, sudden rage making his nerves twitch, and darted across the stage to the piano. He closed his bony hands around Morris' neck and started to pull him off the bench. 'What I say, you do, you hear that, you twerp? Keep your filthy hands off that piano.' Morris resisted at first, but then decided that broken pride was better than a broken neck. Skeleton heaved him off the bench and onto the floor. 'None of you little shits come back here in the future, hear me? Keep off. Stay away. This is out of bounds.' He rubbed a long hand over his hideous face. 'What are you gawping at?' he asked Brick.

Brick was still clumsily seated on the pile of curtain material. 'Gah,' he said.

'I said, what are you gawping at?'

'I hate you,' Brick said. 'And you . . . ' The first sentence had come out in one thoughtless passionate rush; the second expired.

'And I what?' Skeleton floated up toward us again.

'Nothing.'

'Nothing.' Skeleton looked around, appealing to an invisible audience. His arm went out like a striking snake, and he drove his fingers into Brick's neck. 'You get out now,' he ordered. 'Right fast. And stay out.'

We left. Dave Brick rubbed his neck; he croaked rather than talked during the next two lessons, but his voice was nearly back to normal by the time we went home after practice. 'If he does that once more, I'll tell on him,' he swore to me as we went toward the locker room. 'Then he can kill me. I don't care.'

5

During the weeks leading up to Christmas break and the semester examinations which shortly followed it, two minor, almost secretive currents ran through the school — certainly through the freshman class. The first of these was Laker Broome's private search for the thief of the glass owl. The week after Dave Brick had been interro­gated for three hours, Bob Sherman was summoned away from Latin class just as Brick had been. This time there were none of the immediate assumptions that had been made about the unfortunate Brick; only a few boys, Pete Bayliss and Tom Pinfold and Marcus Reilly among them, assumed that now the theft had been cleared up and could be forgotten. They were athletes and could not stand Sherman, who did not even pretend to respect Paul Hornung and Johnny Unitas.

As Brick had been, Bob was sitting in the cold outside the rear entrance to the Upper School when the rest of us came back from lunch. He looked tough and cynical and tired, and a little abashed to play the role of celebrity.

'Congratulations,' I said.

'He needs his head examined,' Bob said. 'If I wanted to grab something valuable, I'd kidnap Florence and never have to think about money again.'

Two days before Del was called into Broome's office for his own three-hour session, the applications were due for club proposals. That was the second underground stream which went through our class in the weeks before Christ­mas break. Most of the school treated the idea of clubs as a joke, and proposed a Gourmet Club (which would eat in restaurants instead of the dining room), a Loafers' Club, a Playboy Club, a Hardy Boys Club (devoted to discussion of the works of F. W. Dixon), an Elvis Presley Club (more or less the same thing). The frivolous applications were weeded out by Mr. Weatherbee and the other form advisers, and I think only a handful reached Mr. Broome. He gave his approval to three, and one of these, a J. D. Salinger Society, never met — the two seniors who pro­posed it identified too closely with Holden Caulfield to submit to meetings. Morris Fielding's Jazz Society was passed, and in time a drummer and a bassist with more enthusiasm than skill were discovered in the sophomore class. Broome undoubtedly saw in the club a cheap source of entertainment for school dances. Tom thought that Broome approved the Magic Circle because it sounded like a harmless diversion, even after Del told him about his interrogation in Broome's office.

One circumstance — really an image — suggests other­wise: after Del had been called from Thorpe's class in the usual manner, the first thing he saw in the artfully bookish office was the proposal he had typed six days before — it lay alone on the polished desk. Del immediately assumed that Broome wanted to talk to him about it, and most of his fear left him. After all, why would anyone think that he, of all the boys at Carson, would want to steal a glass bauble?

'So your interest in magic goes deeper than card tricks,' Broome said, smiling enigmatically.

'Much deeper, sir,' Del replied.

'Just how deep does it go?'

Del thought he was being honestly questioned, that Broome was interested in him. He said, 'It's what I care about most.'

'I see.' Broome leaned back in his chair and put the soles of his shoes on the edge of his desk — the model, in his striped shirt sleeves, horn-rims, and posture, of a concerned academic and administrator. Even the dozing dog beside the chair fitted this picture. 'It's what you care about most. Do you intend to pursue a career in that rather, uh, unusual field?'

'I'd really like to,' Del said. 'I'm pretty good al­ready.'

'Yes, I bet you are.' Broome smiled. 'And what do you think about magic — about tricks and all that?'

'Oh, it's a lot more than just tricks,' Del answered happily. 'It's entertainment, and it's surprises, and . . . ' He hesitated. 'And it's about a whole way of looking at things.'

'I see that you are indeed serious,' Broome said. He took his feet off the edge of his desk and pushed the proposal a half-inch to one side. 'Have you been happy here, during this first semester?'

'Pretty happy,' Del said. 'Most of the time.'

'I gather that you've been given an unfortunate nick­name.'

'Oh, well,' Del said. 'It's pretty bad, yes, sir.'

'I could think of better ones for you.'

This put Del off guard, and he asked, 'What are they, sir?'

'Thief. Sneak. Coward. Wasn't that clear?'

From this point the questioning proceeded in the familiar manner.

6

Economics Lesson

While his father cut his time at the office in half, and then to a third, Tom dreamed of the vulture again. By the time of the last dream, Hartley Flanagan had lost forty pounds, and even if he had felt like pretending to be a healthy man and going through his routine of legal work and workouts at the Athletic Club, he would have been embarrassed by the way the skin hung on his cheeks, his suits on his bones. Finally he had energy enough only for the hospital and home.

By now, we are in basketball season — one week into winter weather. Tom is not his usual energetic self in school these days, and his work has fallen off: he is afraid of failing his exams, afraid he is going crazy, of being kicked off the JV basketball team; mostly he is afraid of what is happening to his father. Death has never been so real to him as it is now, and when he thinks of a future without his father, without a father, he sees a black valley bristling with threats.

Yes, the vulture says to him. So now he can understand it.

Yes. That is so. A black valley full of threats. But, dear boy, what else did you expect. To be a child forever?

No, but . . .

You did.

I did.

The vulture, still in that hot sandy place where there are no shadows, nods intelligently.

And you know what happens when you go into that valley?

Tom cannot answer: a fear as large as himself has slithered into his skin.

Why, you die, boy. It's that simple. Without protection, you die.

His father's corpse swings around on a rope to face him.

I am your father now, boy. Me. I'm your old man now, me and everything else in the valley.

The fear inside him began to shake.

The vulture came toward him, looking him brightly and intelligently in the eye.

Foul thing. Carrion-eater. Maggot.

Enough, little bird. The vulture rustled its wings, stabbed its great yellow beak forward, and impaled his hand. His own screams woke him up.

Skeleton Ridpath, that same night, is dreaming of an anthill in which the ants have the faces of the freshmen — they are scurrying around on little plots and errands,

rushing through corridors and passageways, twittering to each other. He has a rake, and is about to shatter the anthill when he hears a loud booming noise, a crashing like huge waves. For an instant he sees a nondescript brown hat pulled down to shade a probing inhuman face, and terror fills him, and then he wakes up and the booming, crashing sound is all about him. He knows what it is, and is almost afraid to look at the window; but finally he does look, and tastes vomit backing into the chamber behind his tongue. An enormous white owl, weirdly bright against the black window, is opening its shoulders and battering the glass. He can see every feather of the big wings. The owl wants in, it demands to enter, and Skeleton knows perfectly well that if he opens the window it will tear him to pieces. Its head is almost the size of his own. Poor Skeleton shudders back against the wall, a primitive part of his mind afraid too that the eagle on his ceiling will come to life and swoop down to take his eyes. He covers his eyes with his fists and shoves his face into the pillow.

7

Two days before Christmas break, it was my turn to take the attendance sheet to the administrative office before chapel. Mrs. Olinger, dressed as always in her lumpy gray cardigan, was conducting one of those standoffish fights between the teachers and the staff common at any school. Her victim was Mr. Pethbridge, the French teacher. Pethbridge was languid and effete, with blond hair and a large handsome mouth. He always wore tweed suits slightly tucked at the waist — French, like his thin, elegant eyeglasses. Mrs. Olinger had little time for him, and she took so much grim delight in their dispute that she did not want to interrupt it for me.

'Well, I don't see why it has to be in a different place every time,' Mr. Pethbridge complained. He was carrying a big stack of his examination papers, and his physical attitude, chin lifted, belly thrown out, seemed to express one word: Women!

'You don't.'

'I'm afraid not, my dear.'

'This is a working office, Mr. Pethbridge. Our files are in constant use. Our files are growing. There is also a security aspect.'

'Oh, my dear.'

'Does it cause you any inconvenience, Mr. Peth­bridge?'

'Yes, Mrs. Olinger. Instead of simply putting my exams in a file I can easily find, I have to wait for you to determine where they should go, using random-number theory, I am certain, which takes valuable time — '

'And when you do not wash your coffeecups, Mr. Pethbridge, it sets a bad example for the others and costs me valuable time.'

Skeleton Ridpath came up beside me, holding some change in his fist. He scowled at me from deep inside his bony, bruised-looking face, took a step to one side, and knocked a heap of textbooks to the floor.

As I stooped to pick them up, silently cursing both Mrs. Olinger and Skeleton, the school secretary began to rattle away in a calm, dogged, infuriated way about the relative merits of her lost time as compared to the French teacher's, and finally moved to the counter to take Skeleton's money and push a notebook toward him. Skeleton contemptuously took the textbooks from me and drifted off to the side. Mrs. Olinger accepted my list and said, 'Why will you boys insist on hanging around the office when you must have better things to do?'

When I left, Skeleton was still idling at the back of the corridor, pretending to adjust his watch.

Later that afternoon Mr. Broome passed word down through Mrs. Olinger and Mr. Weatherbee that he wanted Morris' Jazz Society and the Magic Circle to demonstrate their skills to the entire school in an hour-long program to be scheduled in April. Mr. Weatherbee read the memo to us at the end of the day: Morris looked nervous, Tom and Del were obviously excited.

8

Christmas break was the usual happy respite from school, except for one boy in our class. We went to visit my grandparents in Los Angeles; Morris and his parents went for a skiing holiday in Aspen, and Morris used the long slopes to work out in his head which songs his trio might play least badly during their half-hour. Everyone else stayed home for the traditional Christmas. When my family returned from California, I took a bus to Tom Flanagan's house and was told that Tom was out. There was no tree, no Christmas decoration, merely an enor­mous random-looking pile of books and games on the living-room floor. His mother was very haggard. The evident worry on her face, the lack of seasonal decoration contrasted with the job lot of presents: desolation.

9

The semester examinations, held over four days in the drafty field house beneath ancient photographs of football players with their arms about each other's shoulders, the uniforms, stances, and even the faces dated, were difficult but fair, proving that what the school appeared to be and what it was could occasionally mesh. Long, staggered rows of boys wearing crew-neck sweaters scribbled, blew their noses and sucked at lozenges, scratched their heads and gazed at the dead youthful football players. Mr. Fitz-Hallan and Mr. Ridpath, reading The Far Side of Paradise and Quarterbacking respectively, sat at a long table at the head of the rows. For Tom Flanagan the long exams in the field house seemed like hours entirely out of time, perhaps out of space as well — the world beyond the rows of desks and sneezing boys could have changed seasons, been taken by hurricane to Oz, or gone dark at midday and turned to ice. The results, in most cases similar to those of the previous examinations, contained a few surprises. When we thronged around the notice boards outside the library two weeks later, Tom saw that he had managed one B, but otherwise had his usual C's; Del had failed nothing, had in fact done astonishingly well — a row of B's. And when Tom and Del risked a glance at the seniors' list, they saw that Skeleton Ridpath had five A's.

10

Fads

Things returned to superficial normality when the half-dozen suspected juniors and seniors, none of them Skel­eton Ridpath, had been quizzed; school narrowed down into a tunnel of work. A few minor sartorial fads swept through the school in February and March. After a few seniors began wearing their cowboy boots to school, everyone appeared in them until Mr. Fitz-Hallan started addressing students as 'Hoss' and 'Pecos' and 'Hoot'; one week, everybody wore the collars of their jackets turned up, as if they had just stepped in out of a strong wind.

Closer to the bone was the wave of sick jokes: these were some sort of release from what I now see was the hysterical illness at work in the school's unconscious. What did Joey's mother say when he wouldn't stop picking his nose? Joey, I'm going to saw the fingers off your wooden hand. What did Dracula say to his children? Quick, kiddies, eat your soup before it clots. What did the mother say when she had her period? Same thing. We actually laughed at these awful jokes.

Even closer to the bone was the 'nightmare' fad which took over the school in the hiatus between the quizzing of the last senior and Laker Broome's outburst in chapel at the end of March. Much more than grisly so-called jokes, this demonstrated that something ill was growing at the school's heart, and fattening on us all — that what was happening secretly to Tom Flanagan was not exclusive to him.

Bambi Whipple released this fad in the course of his free-association chapel talk. Each of the teachers took one chapel a year. Mr. Thorpe's had been the week before Bambi's, and that too may have contributed, being overheated and inflated with Thorpeish emotions. Thorpe's speech began with references to a mysterious 'practice' which undermined boys' strength and un­manned those who gave in to it. Thorpe grew more vehement, just as he did during class. Saliva flew. He raked his hair with his fingers; he referred to Jesus and the Virgin Mary and President Eisenhower's boyhood in Kansas. Finally he mentioned a boy who had attended Carson, 'a boy I knew, a fine boy, but a boy troubled by these desires and who sometimes gave in to them!' He paused, drew in a noisy breath, and bellowed, 'Prayer! That's what saved this fine boy. One night, alone in his room, the desire to give in grew on him so fiercely that he feared lest he commit that sin again, and he went on his knees and prayed and prayed, and made a vow to himself and to God . . . ' Thorpe reared back at the podium. 'And to have a permanent reminder of his vow, he took a knife from his pocket . . . 'At this point Thorpe actually removed a pocketknife from his own pants pocket and brandished it. ' . . . and he opened the knife and gritted his teeth and put the blade to the palm of his hand. Boys, this fine young fellow carved a cross in the palm of his right hand! So the scar would always remind him of his vow! And he never . . . ' And so on. With gestures.

Bambi Whipple's effort on the following week was considerably less forceful. As in the classroom, he spoke with little preparation; the effect of Whipple's rambling monologue may have been as much due to Thorpe's horror story as to what he himself said. But in the course of his ramble, something reminded him of dreams, and he said, 'Gee, dreams can take you to funny places. Why, I remember dreaming last week that I had committed a terrible crime, and the police were looking for me and eventually I holed up in a kind of big warehouse or something, and suddenly I realized that I didn't have anywhere else to go, that was it, they were going to get me and I was going to spend the rest of my life in jail. . . . Boys, that was a terrible feeling. Really terrible.'

That afternoon a sheet of paper appeared on the notice board outside the library which read: Last week I dreamed that a fat bore from New Hampshire was beating me to death with a pillowcase. That was terrible. Really terrible. Mrs. Olinger tore it down, and another appeared: / dreamed about rats moving all over my bed and crawling up and down my body. When Mrs. Tute emerged from the library and shredded that note, the board was clear only until the next morning, when someone put up the sign: I was looking into a snake's eyes. The snake opened his mouth wider and wider until I fell in.

That was how the fad began. The notice board became an array of such notes; as soon as Mrs. Tute or Mrs. Olinger ripped them down, dozens more appeared, open­ing the door to what lay behind all of those well-fed suburban faces.

. . . wolves were ripping at me, and I knew I was dying . . . all alone in the middle of icebergs and huge mountains of ice . . . a girl with long snaky hair and blood on her fingers . . . I was up in the air and no one could get me down and I knew I was going to blow away and be lost. . . something like a man but with no face was chasing me and he was never going to get tired . . . and directly inspired by William Thorpe, a man was cutting at my hand with a knife, swearing at me, and he wouldn't listen to what I was screaming at him . . .

There must have been faculty meetings about it. Poor Bambi Whipple appeared one day looking very cautious and chagrined. Mr. Thorpe thundered on in his usual way — no one would have dared to rebuke him. Mr. Fitz-Hallan quietly led us into a discussion of nightmares, and spent fifty minutes relating them to the Grimms' stories we had read.

But the real sign that the faculty was distressed by the 'nightmare' fad was Mr. Broome's chapel.

He was a surprise substitution for Mrs. Tute, and when we saw him twitching at the podium instead of the librarian, the entire school knew that whatever was going to happen would be explosive. Laker Broome resembled a wrapped package full of serpents. After his short peremptory order to God ('Lord. Make us honest and good. And lead us to righteousness. Amen'), he whipped off his glasses and started twirling them by one bow.

The shouting began in the second sentence.

'Boys, this has been a bad year for the school. A terrible year! We have had indiscipline, smoking, failures, and theft — and now we are cursed with some­thing so sick, so ill, that in all my years as an educator I have never seen its like.

'NEVER!

'There is a poison running through the veins of this school, and you all know what it is. Some of you, perhaps led on by a certain ill-considered remark from this podium' — here a freezing glance at Whipple — 'have been indulging morbid fantasies, giving rein to that poison, exactly in the way that Mr. Thorpe preached against a month ago.

'Now, I know what causes this. Its cause is nothing more or less than guilt. Nightmares are caused by guilt. Caused by a guilty mind and soul. And a guilty mind and soul are dangerous to all about them — they corrupt. All of you have been touched by this disease.

'First of all, I am going to order you to stop this sick indulgence in a corrupt practice.'

Behind me, in the second freshman row, I heard Tom Pinfold whisper to Marcus Reilly, 'Does he mean beating off?' Reilly snickered.

'There will be no more — no more — talk of nightmares in this school. If some of you continue to be troubled in this way, I suggest that you see our school psychologist. If anyone continues to trouble us by bragging about bad dreams or by putting accounts of them up in a public place, that boy will be expelled. That is that. Finis. No more.'

The glasses went on again, and his face settled into a grim, lined hunter's mask.

'Secondly. I am going to root out the corruption in our midst and expose it here and now. The boy at the bottom of this perverse craze does not deserve to stay among us a minute longer. We are going to rid ourselves of him during this chapel, gentlemen, we are going to expose him. The boy who stole from Ventnor School will be cleaning out his locker by the end of the hour.'

I risked a glance back at the seniors' rows, and saw the face of Skeleton Ridpath, tilted back, moony and empty.

Mr. Broome darted forward from the podium and pointed at Morris Fielding, who was seated at the right-hand end of the first row. 'You. Fielding did you steal that owl?'

'No, sir,' Morris got out.

'You.' The finger moved to Bobby Hollingsworth.

Astonished, by the time he had passed me and reached the second row of freshmen, I realized that he was going to question every one of the hundred boys in chapel.

He finished with the freshmen and moved on to the sophomores. The rows were close together, and as he swept through the aisles, he bumped against the backs of seats in front and sometimes cracked against them so hard as to jolt them sideways; he took no notice. Our class had turned around on its seats to watch. Each time, the jabbing finger, the accusing shout.

'You. Shreck. Did you steal it?'

I could see his shoulders tremble beneath the fabric of his blue worsted suit.

Mr. Thorpe, who had been sitting at the front in the second wooden chair, stood and walked quickly down the side of the auditorium to confer with Mrs. Olinger. As with the boys whose chairs he had knocked aside, Mr. Broome took no notice. The other teachers clustered around the Latin teacher and Mrs. Olinger.

'You. King. Admit that you stole it. . . . You. Hamilton. You're guilty. Admit it.'

Finally he got to the seniors, leaving a maze of twisted chairs to show where he had been. The trembling in his shoulders was more pronounced, and his voice was ragged from all the shouting.

'You. Wax. Wax! Look at me! Did you?'

''No, sir.'

'Peters! You, Peters. Was it you?'

'Uh-uh, sir, No.'

I watched with dread as he approached Skeleton, half-hoping, half-fearing that Skeleton would begin to shriek. As Broome worked down the aisle toward him, Ridpath never looked his way but kept his dazed, empty face pointed toward the ceiling, fixing it on the spot where the color wheel had revolved during the homecoming dance. Then Broome was there. 'You. Ridpath! Ridpath! Look at me! Did you steal it?'

'ANSWER ME!'

' . . . ' Still that weird silence.

'DID YOU?'

Then we all heard Skeleton's drawling answer. 'Not me, Mr. Broome. I forgot all about it.'

'AAAAH!' Mr. Broome raised his fists in the air and wailed. The teachers at the back of the auditorium leaned forward, afraid to move — all except Mr. Thorpe, who took a brisk two steps toward the headmaster. Broome waved him back.