Shadowland

White fluted pillars took shape as suddenly as if blown into being. The ground shifted, became harder, less resilient. With his next step forward, he whanged his leg against the metal back of a padded chair.

'Oh, my God,' he whispered. He was standing in a large vaultlike room with a curtained stage at one end. Tom himself was halfway up a pitched bank of seats, in the middle of a row. Misty green walls inset with white pillars led down to the stage. A few lights burned high above him.

He was in the big theater where Collins was going to teach them to fly.

'Oh, God,' he said. 'I wasn't even outside.'

Tom blindly went down the side of the rows of seats and let himself out into the hall. Here too a few lights burned. He was only five feet from the entry to the Little Theater. He clicked the door behind him and looked for its brass plate: Le Grand Theatre des Illusions. Beneath it was a white sheet of paper on which had been written: Go to bed, son.

He weaved down the hall and the lights clicked off behind him. All he wanted to do was to roll into sleep as fast and hard as he could: now he could not begin to puzzle out the hoops within hoops through which Collins had made him jump. And that is why frogs croak and why they hop. They were once birds, but were tricked by a great wizard, and now they are still trying to sing and still trying to fly.

12

'You answer my question first.'

'No, you answer mine. Tell me about Rose Arm­strong.'

'Not until you tell me what you did last night.'

'I can't.'

'Did Uncle Cole tell you not to?'

'No.'

'Then you can tell me. Did you go downstairs? Did you go outside?' Del pushed his spoon back and forth in a bowl of oatmeal. 'Did anyone see you?'

'All right. I went downstairs. Then I followed all those guys outside.' —

'You did what?' Del had completely lost his self-possession. He virtually goggled at Tom.

'I went out. I think I did. Then everything went funny. I wound up back in the big theater.' 'Oh.' Del relaxed. 'So you were supposed to go out.' 'You know that right off?'

'Sure,' Del said. They were eating breakfast in Del's

room. A tray had appeared outside the door at nine. 'I've

been through this about a million times, remember? He

did some magic on you. You can't even really tell me

what happened because it's all mixed up in your head.

That's normal. That's part of what we're here for. So now

I can relax. I thought you might get us both kicked out.'

'Well, now that you're relaxed, tell me about Rose

Armstrong.'

'What do you want to know about her?'

'Why does she do what your uncle wants her to do? I mean, why would she go out there and sit on a rock in the middle of the night? Doesn't she have better things to do?'

Del pushed his plate away. 'Well, I guess she wants to help Uncle Cole. Why else?'

'But why would she want to?'

'Because he's great.' Del looked at him as if he had confessed an inability to multiply six by two. 'She respects him. She likes working for him.'

'Does he pay her?'

'Look, I don't know, okay? I know that her parents are dead. She lives in town with her grandmother. You have to know that Uncle Cole is famous up here — he used to travel all around, a long time ago, and up here they still remember that. He's Hilly Vale's celebrity. They love him. Did you read his posters downstairs?'

'No,' Tom said. 'I want to look at them today.'

'Well, you'll see. He went everywhere. Then he decided he was wasting his talent, and he came here.'

'How old is she?'

'About our age. Maybe a year older.'

'Do you like her?'

'Sure I like her.'

'Do you like her a lot?'

'What do you mean, a lot?'

'You know what I mean.'

'Okay. I like her a lot.'

'Do you ever go out with her?'

'You don't understand,' Del said. 'It's not like that.'

'Well, is she ever around so you can just talk to her? Can she tell you what your uncle is up to?'

'Yes, she's around and you can talk to her. But she doesn't know the reasons for the things he asks her to do. It's like . . . a big puzzle. She's just one of the little pieces.'

'Well, do you kiss her and stuff like that?'

'That's my business,' Del said.

'Do you make out with her? She's a year older, huh? Does she let you make out with her?'

'I guess,' Del said. 'Sometimes.'

'Is she good-looking?'

'You can decide for yourself.'

'You're a real snake in the woodpile, Nightingale,' Tom said. He was delighted. 'All this time you never told me? She's your girlfriend? You spend all summer making out with a girl a year older than us? Wow.'

'We have to go downstairs,' Del said sternly. 'Didn't you ever make out with Jenny Oliver? Or with Diane Darling?' These were girls from Phipps-Burnwood Semi­nary; Tom had taken both of them to school dances.

'Sometimes,' Tom said. 'Sure, sometimes.'

'Okay,' Del said, and stood up.

'You old snake in the woodpile,' Tom said. He rose too, and they went out into the sunny hall. As they went down the stairs, he said, 'Tell me what she looks like. Is she a blond?'

'Yep.'

'Well?'

'She's a blond, she has two eyes and a nose and a mouth. She's about as tall as you are. Her face is . . . oh, how do you describe someone's face?'

'Try.'

They stopped together just outside the living room. It was immaculate, Tom saw, as if Mr. Feet's trolls had never been in the house.

'Well, she looks kind of . . . ' Del hesitated. 'Kind of . . . well, hurt.'

'Hurt?' This was far indeed from anything Tom had expected, and he laughed.

'I knew I couldn't explain it,' Del said. 'Let's go. He'll be waiting.'

Tom glanced over his shoulder at the series of posters on the wall, saw only that they were printed in a variety of old-fashioned typefaces and that none of the names immediately visible were familiar. Then he set off after Del. His mood had risen: full of breakfast, rested, and on a sunny morning he could see the fun of what Shadowland offered, a game more challenging than any he had ever played. He had not been threatened or injured the night before: he had merely been tricked, and tricked in a way only a great illusionist could have managed.

The handwritten sheet of paper was gone from the door. But had it been there at all? Tom wondered, and thought that now he was getting into the spirit of Shadowland.

'Have you ever heard the name Herbie — does it mean anything special to you?' he asked.

'Herbie? You'll see Herbie,' Del promised from ahead of him.

Inside the long theater, the walls hung misty and green between the fluted pillars, the seats stood like rows of open mouths; the lighting had been dialed low. Del, in his seat in the front row when Tom entered, laughed at whatever was on stage. Tom turned to see, and was startled by the spectacle of a department-store dummy propped stiffly on a tall chair. The arms jutted out, the legs stuck forward. The mannequin had been dressed in black evening clothes; its face had been powdered or painted white. A curly red wig sat on its crown.

'That's Herbie,' Del said as Tom slid into the seat next to him. 'Herbie Butter.'

'A doll?'

'Shh.'

One of the doll's hands jerked forty-five degrees up. The movement was a robot's, not human. The head swiveled, blank and perfect, first to one side, then the other. The other arm jerked up with the same robot's angular sudden­ness. Tom relaxed into his seat, enjoying this.

'The Amazing Mechanical Magician and Acrobat,' Del whispered.

One leg, then its fellow, bent; the robot-mannequin came out of the chair, and Tom could almost hear the working of gears. It began to slide ridiculously about the stage, at one moment almost tumbling off the edge, then walking with great dignity into the curtains and grinding away in place until the gears shifted again and spun it away.

'Is that your uncle?'

'Of course it is,' Del whispered.

'He's great.'

Del rolled his eyes. The greatness was beyond question.

For some minutes, Coleman Collins, Herbie Butter, moved — hilariously about the stage, always on the verge of destruction, or surely, it seemed, on the way to it. His eyes were perfectly round and blank, his movements those of a wound-up toy: the face, covered with powder, was sexlessly young — but for the male formal dress, the white face and red hair could have been those of a pretty young woman in her twenties.

Collins then demonstrated another of his capacities.

He strode jerkily to a halt in the middle of the stage, swiveled to face the boys, and remained stock-still for no longer than a second and a half.

'Get this,' Del said.

Before Del had finished, the robotlike figure was whipping up into the air: it turned over in midair and landed on its. hands. Then it ticked over to one side, spread its legs, and executed a series of flawless cart­wheels.

Landing on its hands again, the figure sprang over backward and came down on its feet; then over again, turning in the air, blindingly fast. Then Collins came out. of a crouch and fell face forward on the stage — a robot turned off by remote control. With what must have been a terrific effort of muscular skill, he seemed to bounce back upright, arms and legs never changing their position, so slowly it was like a fall in reverse slow motion.

'Boy,' Tom muttered.

Herbie Butter bowed and twinkled offstage; a second later he was back, pushing a magician's table on which rode a tall silk hat.

'Imagine a bird,' he said, and the voice was not Coleman Collins', but lighter, younger.

A pass of a white silken scarf, and a white dove came out of the hat.

'Imagine a cat'; a white cat slipped over the brim of the hat. The cat began immediately to stalk the terrified bird.

Herbie Butter did one of his astounding backflips, coming to rest on his fingertips, then flipped forward to land where he had been, and dropped the white scarf over the cat.

The scarf fluttered to the surface of the table.

'And that's it, isn't it? Cat and bird. Bird and cat.'

It was that first morning that he told Tom and Del the story which ended with the words 'Then I am the King of the Cats!'

'Can I ask you a question?' Tom said, his arm up as if he were back in Latin class.

'Of course.' The magician sat on a little table; the voice was still light and sexless.

'How can you do those things — those gymnastic things — when you limp?'

He felt Del's disapproval pouring from him, strong as a scent, but the magician was not ruffled.

'A good question, and too frank to be rude, nephew, so don't take offense. The real answer is 'because I have to,' but that won't be specific enough for you. I intend to tell you more completely, Tom, in a short while — because I will expect you to do something very similar. I promise you. You will know. Is that all?'

Tom nodded.

'Come on up and shake my hand. Please.'

Mystified, Tom stood and went toward the magician, who slipped off the table and went to the edge of the stage. Herbie Butter bent down to take his hand; but instead, his fingers closed about Tom's wrist. Tom jerked his head up and looked into the white anonymous face. He could see nothing of Coleman Collins in it.

'For your benefit.' The fingers tightened around his wrist. 'Everything you will see here, and you will see many odd things, comes from your own mind — from within you. From the reaction of your mind with mine. None of it exists elsewhere.'

Herbie Butter released Tom's wrist. 'For three months, for as long as you stay, this is the world for you. Which you will help to create.' He smiled. 'That is one of the meanings of the King of the Cats.'

Yes, Tom thought.

'Give yourself to it. I ask you because you are one of the rare ones who can.'

Yes I am, Tom thought. He was aware of Del giving him a sharp look.

'And you are alone this summer. Your mother goes to England tomorrow. Her cousin Julia is getting married to . . . a barrister, is it? And after the wedding, your mother will travel in England? Isn't that right?'

'But how . . . ?'

'So this is the summer of Tom Flanagan's growth as well as the summer of my unburdening. You are a very special boy, Tom. As you showed me last night.'

He would have been worried by the expression now on Del's face, which was dark and considering, but he was looking into the white asexual face and seeing Coleman Collins there — the robust Collins of the night before. 'Thank you,' he said.

13

'Shall we have some fun?' the magician said. 'It will be necessary to close your eyes.' '

Tom shut his eyes, still feeling the roughness of Collins' fingers about his wrist, still glowing from the praise, and heard the magician say, 'This is Level Two.'

He snapped his eyes open, remembering the wrecked train and angry with himself for being duped so easily: Del, he supposed, had opened his eyes too. He turned to see, but Del avoided his eyes.

They were still in the big theater. On the stage before them was not the single table, but a large complicated wooden construction like an illustration from a book — so foreign, it seemed to Tom. Some tinny happy music played over them: to two fifteen-year-olds in 1959, this peppy simple jazz was irresistibly like the soundtracks to the old cartoons they saw on television on Saturday mornings. The building was at once complicated and comfortable, full of odd angles and tiny windows. On the big front window had been painted in black: apothe­cary.

'Well, let's look inside,' Collins said; now he wore half-glasses and a striped apron. His face shone bare of powder — he looked like everybody's favorite old uncle.

The building swung open, turning itself inside out. The sides pulled back and revealed rows of bottles and jars, a serving counter, a high black register.

'You wouldn't happen to require any cough medicine, my young men?'

A row of jars labeled cough syrup coughed and bounced on their shelf. 'Sleeping pills?'

Another row of bottles snored loudly — almost sending up zzzz in white balloons. 'Reducing tonic?' Two bottles shrank to half their size. 'Rubber bands?'

A box of rubber bands on the counter stood up and played cheery music: the same tinny happy jazz that had begun as soon as, they had closed their eyes. Tom saw the bell of a trumpet, the slide of a trombone . . . 'Vanishing cream?'

A jar next to the rubber bands slowly disappeared. Del was giggling beside him; and he giggled too. 'Greeting cards?'

The corny joke fulfilled itself: A rack of cards be­fore the counter shouted 'Hi!' and 'Hey, how you doin'?' 'Hello, neighbor!' 'God be with you!' 'Get well soon!' 'Have a good trip!' 'Take it easy!' 'Bon-jour!' 'Shalom!'

'Come on up and take your seats for the boxing match,' the kindly old pharmacist called to them.

As they left their seats, the yelling cards and trumpet-playing rubber bands and coughing jars and snoring bottles swung outward. In the middle of the stage a roped-in boxing ring was occupied by a fat cartoon man with bristling jowls and a flat, malevolent head. Boos erupted from the persistent soundtrack. The man grimaced with cartoon ferocity, beat his chest, bulged his tattooed biceps.

'Bluto,' Del said in delight, and Tom answered, 'No, I think . . . ' He could not remember what he thought.

A bell rang with a clear commanding insistence, and the kindly old pharmacist, now wearing a flat tweed cap and a vibrant checked jacket, called out, 'Hurry and take your seats for the first round.' They scrambled up onto the stage and got into metal camp chairs placed just outside the ring.

'It's the big fight, you know, the dirty scoundrel's comeuppance,' said the boxing fan. He had a monocle and protruding teeth, and a voice faintly, ridiculously English. 'Now, our hero is somewhere about. . . ah, yes. Chap's a trifle late.'

A very familiar rabbit bounded into the ring and clasped his hands together over his head to the sound of mass cheering. The villain glowered. He spat on his gloves and smacked them together. The rabbit, who was nearly as tall as the man, darted toward the villain and clasped his arms around the obese waist. He bounced a couple of feet off the canvas, then rebounded once, and then took off so powerfully that he and the villain sailed straight into the air. Tom craned his neck: the pair of them were still going up. They were just a dot in the sky. Now they were plummeting down. They were going to crash. The rabbit produced a frilled parasol and floated back to the canvas; the villain splatted down and was as flat as a dime.

He rose up and shook out his two-dimensional body. His flesh miraculously plumped. He slavered with rage, with the brute need to punish. The rabbit circled round him, lightly dancing on his big rear paws, landing short but stinging blows. The tattooed villain cocked back a fist suddenly as large as a ham, and brought it around in a whooshing haymaker. All his upper body bulged with effort. The breeze flattened the rabbit's ears; and the wind from the punch tore at Tom's hair, tugged at his shirt.

More than the villain's upper body must have bulged.

The rear of his boxing shorts split with an awful rending sound, revealing polka-dot underpants. The man's face flashed bright red, red as a stop sign, and he bent forward and clasped his gloved hands over his outthrust bottom; he minced pigeon-toed around the ring, face flashing like a neon sign.

'Bit cheeky, what?' asked the boxing fan. 'But I fancy . . . '

Bugs, who had momentarily disappeared, now returned astride a bicycle. He wore a frock coat, a topper like the Mad Hatter's, and swung a bell in his hand. The bicycle bobbed from side to side in rhythm with the ringing of the bell. A sign around his neck read: Stychen Tyme, Instant Tailor.

Tyme. Tom thought. Now, who . . . ? He remembered. The Reverend Mr. Tyme, speaking pompous nonsense at his father's funeral. April; the brisk wind blowing sand over the graves, bobbling the flowers. His body went cold. He was aware, as if a great distance from his own feelings, that he was horrified. It could not have been an accidental reference.

Bugs wheeled around the tattooed man, weaving a large needle this way and that. Occasionally he touched his fingers before his face and nodded, just as the Reverend Dawson Tyme had done: Tom's outrage broke. As Bugs sewed up the villain in a cocoon of thread, he was giving a running parody of the minister's manner. He bobbed his head, shook his fuzzy jowls, looked chummy and superior and pontificating all at once — almost, Tom could smell the little minty puffs of breath.

When the tattooed Bluto (Snail?) was invisible, tied up like a wriggling worm, Bugs jumped from his bike and set to work on it with whirring, flying hands; in a second, it stood upright in a single column, the seat supporting an open book: a lectern. Bugs bowed, knitted his hands, preached a silent sermon over the bound body — his gestures were hilariously oily. Tom felt a vast and subversive relief, seeing the Reverend Mr. Tyme par­odied so deliriously.

'Awful old bore, isn't he?' asked the boxing fan.

'Yes. Yes,' Tom said. This is what magic can do, it came to him: magic existed in the teeth of all the

hypocrites and bores, in the teeth of all the proprieties too. He had scarcely ever felt so good.

Bugs's hands went a flurrying over the bicycle again: a hammer rang, nuts and bolts flew out. Sparks sprayed comically overhead. When he raised it up, he held a rifle. Bugs ripped off the frock coat, turned it inside out, and it was a military uniform. A bugle zipped from a side pocket, and Bugs blew taps. The rifle went to his shoulder, he sighted over the bicycle seat, and fired a salute. Then he jammed the rifle barrel-first into the ground, jerked it sharply toward him, and the wrapped body fell through a trapdoor.

The rabbit danced clog-footed for a moment, shook the rifle until it became a bicycle again, mounted and rode off until he was a speck in the misty green distance.

'Hope you enjoyed it,' Cole Collins said.

Tom turned euphorically toward the boxing fan and saw that now he was the magician again, in his striped suit. He looked tired and jovial: any elderly uncle showing nephew and nephew's friend a good time.

'I see you did,' Collins said. He extended his hand and set it carefully on Tom's head. 'You wonderful child.'

Tom's expression of joy turned rigid.

'Do you know what day it is?'

Tom shook his head, and the magician gently lifted his hand.

'It is Sunday. I would be very remiss if I did not include some religious instruction in this little show. On Sundays, it is always best to display a little piety.'

He clapped his hands, and the wing of the set before them began to revolve. The music which had buzzed cheerily about them altered; settled into a smoother, still pumping rhythm. Tom began to tap his foot, and the magician nodded approvingly.

The set revolved completely, showing a long refectory table with wine goblets and plates; the table sat before a window showing a long green Italian distance, a brilliant sunset. Thirteen robed men sat behind the table, their heads and bodies in attitudes as familiar as the rabbit, but not as immediately recognizable.

Del laughed out loud. Then Tom did recognize the scene and the postures — eleven men leaning or looking toward the tall bearded man in the middle, one self­consciously looking elsewhere.

'It's that painting,' he said. Collins smiled.

The music tightened up, became a fraction louder. A piano hit a rolling stride. The men at the table began moving their hands in unison, then rose, danced in front of the table and sang:

La ba la ba, la ba la ba!

La ba la ba, la ba la ba!

We got fish for suppah,

First one thing, then anothah,

We got fish for suppah,

First one thing, then anothah.

We ain't got no menu,

But our fish will send you.

We got fish for suppah,

First one thing, then anothah.

Last night we had bread and fish,

Tonight we got fish and bread.

Tomorrow night we gonna change the dish,

And have plain fish instead.

Ah!

We got fish for suppah,

But first one thing, then anothah,

We got fish for suppah,

First one thing an' anothah.

A saxophone slipped out from beneath a robe as easily as Bugs's bugle from his military jacket. The squat bearded man holding it breathed out a solo while others waved their hands and did a buck-and-wing. Another disciple produced a trumpet and blasted. Strutting and hand-waving from the disciples: after the chorus they all showed their teeth and shouted:

AH!

We got fish for suppah,

But first one thing, then anothah,

[the stage began to revolve again]

We got fish for suppah,

But first one thing an' anothah.

[men and table now out of sight]

The music had ended. They were looking at a flat black wall. 'Simple pyrotechnics,' Collins said. 'Now, would you like to advance to Level Three and fly?'

'Oh, yes,' both boys said at once.

14

Then all blew away like dust, like'a dream, and it was night, much colder than before —

and he was skimming, naked and wrapped in a fur blanket, along in a sleigh with Coleman Collins. Snow blew in a tempest about them, half-obscuring the horse ahead. They were following a track through dark trees, going up; plunging blindly on, the horse flickered gray against the surrounding white.

The magician turned his face to Tom, and the boy shrank back against the cold metal edge of the sleigh. The face was bone, hard and white as a skull. 'I have taken you aside,' were the words that came from this appari­tion. 'Everything is just as it was, but we have stepped aside for a moment. For a private word.' The face was no longer bone, but animal — the face of a white wolf. 'I forbid you nothing. Nothing,' uttered the awful face. 'You may go anywhere — you may open any door. But, little bird, remember that you must be prepared to accept whatever you find.' The long jaws spread in a smile filled with teeth.

The horse drove madly on through the buffeting wind and snow.

'What night is this?' Tom cried out.

'The same, the very same.'

'And did I fly?'

The wolf laughed,

You may open any door.

Uphill into deeper night and tearing cold; the horse working against the snow.

'It is the same night, but six months later,' said the wolf. 'It is the same night, but in another year,' and laughed. Tom's whole body suffered wkh the cold, tried to flee back into itself.

'Did I fly?'

Collins said through his wolfs face, 'You are mine. Nothing that is in magic will be unknown to you, boy. For you are no one else's but mine.'

The trees fell behind them, and they seemed to streak upward through an utter barrenness.

We got fish for suppah: Jesus doing a buck-and-wing.

The wolf said: 'Once I was you. Once I was Del.' He turned and grinned at the freezing boy wrapped in fur. 'But I learned from a great magician. The great magician became my partner, and together we toured Europe until he did an unspeakable thing. After he did the unspeak­able thing, we could no longer remain together — we had become mortal enemies. But he had taught me all he knew, and I too was a great magician by then. So I came here, to my kingdom.'

'Your kingdom,' Tom said.

The wolf ignored him. 'He taught me to do one thing in particular. To put a hurtin' on things. His words. He spoke that way. And finally I put a hurtin' on him.' The long teeth glittered.

'Did you put a hurtin' on the train?' Tom asked.

The wolf lashed the horse: not a wolf, but a man with a wolfs head. 'No one but you will understand your future. You will be as the man who brings forth diamonds, and they say, is this pitch? You will be as he who brings forth wine, and they say, is this sand?' The long snout swiveled toward Tom. 'When that happens, boy, put a hurtin' on them.'

The horse reached the top of the rise and halted. It steamed in the frigid air, hanging its neck. Tom saw foam spring out on the horse's flanks.

'Look down,' the figure beside him commanded.

Tom looked over the steaming, foaming horse into a long white vista. The land dropped, the green firs re­sumed. At the bottom of the valley lay a frozen lake. Above it, on the far end, Shadowland sat on its cliff like a jeweled dtollhouse. Its windows gleamed.

'Pretend that is the world. It is the world. It can be yours. Everything in the world, every treasure, every satisfaction, is there.

'Look.'

Tom looked toward the shining house and saw a naked girl in an upper window. She raised her arms and stretched: he could not see her. anything like as clearly as he wished, but what he saw was like a finger laid against his heart. Shock and tenderness vibrated together in his chest. Seeing the girl was nothing like looking at nude photographs in a magazine — those acres of spongy flesh had only a fraction of the voltage this girl sent him.

'And look.'

At another window men gambled: one player raked in a huge pile of bills and coins. Tom looked back to see the girl, but where she had been was only incandescent brightness. Are you his too, Rose?

'And look,' the man with the wolfs face commanded.

Another window: a boy opening a tall door, hesitating for a moment, outlined in light, then suddenly engulfed in light. Tom understood that this boy — himself? — was un­dergoing an experience of such magnitude,.such joy, that his imagination could only peer at its dimmest edge; swallowed by light, the boy, who might be himself, had found an incandescence and beauty greater than the girl's — so great that the girl must be a part of it.

'And now look,' he was commanded.

In the gleam of another window he saw only an empty bright room with green walls. The column of a pillar. The big theater.

Then he saw himself flow past the window, many feet above the ground. His body sailed past, must have turned in the air, floated before the window again and spun over as easily as a leaf.

'I did,' he breathed, not even feeling the cold now.

'Of course you did,' the magician said. 'Alis volat propriis.'

Laughter boomed from the magician, from the hillside, from the valley, from even the steaming horse and the frigid air.

'Don't wait to be a great man . . . ' came the magi­cian's floating voice, and Tom lapsed back and fell through the fur and metal, falling through the hillside and the laughing horse and the wind.

' . . . be a great bird.'

He remembered.

In the big green room. Coleman Collins before himself and Del, saying, 'Sit on the floor. Close your eyes. Count backward with me from ten. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. You are at peace, totally relaxed. What we do here is physiologically impossible. So we must train the body to accept the impossible, and then it will become possible.

'We cannot breathe in water. We cannot fly. Not until we find the secret muscles that enable us to do so.

'Spread, your hands, boys. Spread your arms. I want you to see your shoulders in your minds. See those muscles, see those bones. Think of those shoulders opening, opening . . . think of them opening out.'

Tom remembered . . . saw what he had seen. His muscles flaring and widening, something new and reckless moving in his mind.

'When I say one, you will inhale; when I say two, you will exhale and think very calmly about rising an inch or two above the floor. One.'

Tom remembered filling his chest with air: the new sensation in his mind began to burn bright yellow.

'Two.'

Within the memory of the theater, another memory bloomed: Laker Broome crazily sweeping through aisles of boys in chapel, jabbing his finger, shouting. Hatred filled him, and he pushed all the air from his lungs. The wooden floor had seemed to tremble beneath him.

'Just let your mind roam,' came the strong quiet voice.

He had seen himself floating up like a helium-filled balloon: then he had again seen. Laker Broome standing like an actor before the smoke-filled auditorium, giving him useless orders; seen the Reverend Mr. Tyme prancing at his father's funeral; seen Del, levitating in a dark bedroom. Then he had seen the most disturbing images of all, tanks and soldiers and bloody corpses and women with the heads of beasts all lacquered on a ceiling above him, images filled with such horror and disgust that they seemed to whirl about the image of a man in belted raincoat and wide-brimmed hat who made them dance. . . .

Why, yes, he had thought. Like that. And suddenly weightless, had rolled over on his back and not touched the ground. His mind felt like fire.

Then another image rammed into his mind, even more horrifying than the last: he saw the auditorium full of boys and masters, himself and Del onstage as Flanagini and Night. He was far above them all, and his eyes hurt, his head was bursting with pressure. His long spidery body felt as though needles had pierced it. He was seeing with Skeleton Ridpath's eyes, and his body was Skeleton's, just before the fire.

He had collapsed heavily onto the wooden floor. Blood burst from his nose.

'So now you see,' Collins had whispered to him.

'Don't you know now that you could breathe in water?' Collins said. Tom's whole body ached; the cold tore at him.

'The secret is hate,' Collins said mildly. 'Rather, the secret lies in hating well. You have the germ of quite a good hater in you.'

Tom tugged the fur robe more tightly about him. His ears were cold enough to drop from his head.

'I want to show you one thing more, little friend.'

'But I didn't really fly,' Tom said. 'I just went up . and I rolled over — '

'One thing more.'

The icy wind ripped at them, and pulled Collins' face back into the wolfs visage. He snapped his whip up into the air, hauled at the reins with his other hand, and cracked the whip down as the horse plunged around in the snow.

When the whip landed, the horse screamed and took off downhill like a cannonball. The wolf-face turned and grinned at him just as the wind blurred Tom's eyes, and the world turned as misty as the walls of the big theater. Tom pulled the fur robe up over his face and inhaled its cold, dusty, slightly gamy aroma until he felt the sleigh begin to slow down.

They were on level ground. A wide plain of snow lay in moonlight like a room without walls. In the center of the plain stood a tall burning building.

Tom stared at the blazing building as they drew nearer to it: burning, it seemed to diminish in size. They trotted ten feet nearer, close enough now to feel the heat pouring from the blaze.

'Do you recognize it?'

'Yes.'

'Get out of the sleigh,' the magician ordered. 'Walk closer to it.'

He did not move at first, and Collins clutched one of his elbows through the robe and yanked him across his body and dumped him out into the snow. The robe slithered, and Tom snatched at it to keep its warmth about him. He stood up; his burning feet barely cracked the snow's hard surface.

'Are we really here?' he asked.

'Go closer and really look.' His voice made a joke of the word.

Tom limped toward the edge of the fire. It was no taller than himself. There was Fitz-Hallan's room, there was Thorpe's. Metal beams curled in the midst of the flames. He could hear the glass panels cracking and shattering around the enclosed court. And would there be a dwarf lime tree, shriveling and blackening? The building tight­ened down into itself a notch. Was it just a film — a projection from somewhere? It warmed him like a fire.

He began to weep.

'What does it say to you?' Collins asked, and Tom whirled around to see him. He looked like a Russian nobleman in his fur-collared coat.

'It's too much,' Tom managed to get out, hating himself for crying.

'Of course it is. That's part of the point. Look again.'

Tom turned again and looked at the burning school.

'What does it say to you? Open your mind to it and let it speak.'

'It says . . . get out of here.'

'Does it really?' The magician laughed: he knew better.

'No.'

'No. It says, Live while you can. Get what you can when you can. You haven't been bad at that, you know.'

Tom began to shake. His feet were frozen, his face blazed like the fire. Coleman Collins seemed about to see straight inside him, and to cynically dismiss what he saw there. Like any young person, Tom was adept at intuiting other people's attitudes toward him, and for a moment it occurred to him that Coleman Collins hated both Del and himself. The secret lies in hating well. He was trembling so violently that the robe would have slipped from his shoulders if he had not gripped it with both hands. 'Please,' he said, asking for something so large he could not encompass it in words.

'It is night. You must go to bed.'

'Please.'

'This is your kingdom too, child. Insofar as I make it yours. And insofar as you can accept what you find in it.'

'Please . . . take me back.'

'Find your own way, little bird.' Collins cracked the whip, and the horse lunged forward. The magician swept past without another glance. Tom flailed out for the bar at the end of the sleigh, missed it, and fell. Cold leaked up his thighs, slithered down his chest. He pulled up his head to find the fire, but it too was gone. Collins' sleigh was just disappearing into the firs.

Tom got his knees under him and awkwardly stood up, gripping the robe. From the other side of the snowy plain a wind approached, made visible by the swirl of snow it lifted and spun. The trace of the wind arrowed straight toward him; he turned to take it on his back and saw flecks of green just before the wind knocked his legs out from under him and deposited him —

on nothing, on green air through which he fell without falling, spun without moving. He threw out his arms and caught the padded arm of a chair.

15

He was back in Le Grand Theatre des Illusions. One light burned gloomily down at him, revealing in semi-chiaroscuro his strewn clothing. Tom yanked his trousers on and shoved his feet into his shoes; he balled up his socks and underwear and thrust them into a pocket. Then he put on his shirt. All this he did mechanically, numbly, with a numb mind.

He looked at his watch. Nine o'clock. Nine or ten hours had vanished while Coleman Collins played tricks with him.

He went down the darkened hall. What had Del been doing all this time? The thought of Del revived him — he wanted to see him, to have his story matched by Del's. That morning, he had been almost joyful, being at Shadowland; now he again felt endangered. Warmth was just beginning to return to bis frozen toes.

Tom had reached the point in the hallway, just before it turned into the older part of the house, where the short corridor led to the forbidden door. Tom stood at the juncture of the two corridors looking at the cross-beamed door. He remembered Collins' words: This is your king­dom too, child. He thought: Well, let's see the worst.

And as he had said to Del the first night, wasn't the very commandment not to open it a disguised suggestion that he look behind the door?

'I'm going to do it,' he said, and realized that he had spoken out loud.

Before he could argue himself out of his mood of defiance, he moved down the short hallway and put his hand on the doorknob. The brass froze his hand. He thought back to the third thing Collins had shown him, back in the wintry sleigh: a boy opening a door and being engulfed by lyric, singing brightness.

Your wings, or your song?

He pulled open the forbidden door.

16

The Brothers

'Look, Jakob,' a man said, looking up from a desk. He smiled at Tom, and the man who sat at another desk facing him lifted his head from the papers before him and gave a similar quizzical, inviting smile. 'Do you see? A visitor. A young visitor.' His accent was German.

'I have eyes. I see,' said the other man.

Both were in late middle age, clean-shaven; glasses as old-fashioned and foreign as their dress modified their sturdy faces, made them scholarly. They sat at their desks in a little pool of light cast by candles; high bookshelves loomed behind them.

'Should we invite him in?' said the second man.

'I think we ought. Won't you come in, boy? Please do. Come in, child. That's the way. After all, we are working for you as much as for anyone else.'

'Our audience, Wilhelm,' said the second man, and beamed at Tom. He was stockier, deeper in the chest than the man with the kindly face. He stood and came forward, and Tom saw muddy boots and smelled a drifting curl of cigar smoke. 'Please sit. There will do.' He indicated a chesterfield sofa to the right of the desk.

As Tom advanced into the dark room, the crowded detail came clear: the walls covered with dim pictures and framed papers, a stuffed bird high up on a shelf, a glass bell protecting dried flowers.

'I know who you are. Who you're supposed to be,' he said. He sat on the springy chesterfield.

'We are what we are supposed to be,' said the one called Wilhelm. 'That is one of the great joys of our life. How many can claim such a thing? We discovered what we were supposed to be young, and have pursued it ever since.'

'We shared the same joy in collecting things,' said Jakob. 'Even as children. Our whole life has been an extension of that early joy.'

'Without my brother, I should have been lost,' said Wilhelm. 'If is a great thing, to have a brother. Do you have one, child?'

'In a way,' Tom said.

Both brothers laughed, so innocently and cheerfully that Tom joined them.

'And what are you doing here?' Tom asked.

They looked at each other, full of amusement which somehow embraced and included Tom.

'Why, we are writing down stories,' Jakob said.

'What for?'

'To amaze. To terrify. To delight.' .

'Why?'

'For the sake of the stories,' Jakob said. 'That must be clear. Why, our very lives have been storylike. Even the mistakes have been happy. Boy, did you know that in our original story it was a fur slipper which the poor orphan girl wore to the ball? What an inspired mistransla­tion made it glass!'

'Yes, yes. And you remember the strange dream I had about you, my brother: I stood in front of a cage, on top of a mountain . . . it snowed . . . you were in the cage, frozen . . . I had to peer through the bars of the cage — so much like one of our treasures . . . '

'Which we were determined to show the world the wonder we felt in discovering, yes. You were terrified — but it was a terror full of wonder.'

'These stories are not for every child — they do not suit every child. The terror is there, and it is real. But our best defense is nature, is it not?'

Tom said 'Yes' because he felt them waiting for an answer.

'So you see. You learn well, child.' Jakob set down the quill pen with which he had been toying. 'Wilhelm's dream — do you know that when Wilhelm was dying, he spoke quietly and cheerfully about his life?'

'You see, we embraced our treasures, and they gave us treasure back a thousandfold,' Wilhelm said. 'They were the country in which we lived best. If our father had not died so young — if our childhood had been allowed its normal span — perhaps we could never have found what it is to live in that country.'

'Do you hear what we are saying to you, boy?' Jakob asked. 'Do you understand Wilhelm?'

'I think so,' Tom said.

'The stories, our treasures, are for children, among others. But . . . '

Tom nodded: he saw. It was not the personal point.

'No child can go the whole way with them,' Wilhelm said.

'We gave our wings,' Jakob said. 'For our song was our life. But as for you . . . '

Both brothers looked at him indulgently.

'Do not idly throw away any of your gifts,' said Jakob. 'But when you are called . . . '

'We answered. We all must answer,' Wilhelm said. 'Oh, my, what are we saying to this boy? It is late. Do you mind stopping work until tomorrow, brother? It is time to join our wives.'

They turned large brown eyes toward him, clearly expecting him to leave.

'But what happens next?' Tom asked, almost believing that they were who they appeared to be and could tell him.

'All stories unfold,' Jakob said. 'But they take many turns before they reach their ends. Embrace the treasure, child. It is our best advice. Now we must depart.'

Tom stood up from the chesterfield, confused: so much of what happened here ended with a sudden departure! 'Where do you go? According to you, where are we?'

Wilhelm laughed. 'Why, Shadowland, boy. Shadowland is everything to us, as it may be to you. Shadowland is where we spent our busy lives. You may be within a wood . . . within a storied wood . . . '

'Or fur-wrapped in a sleigh in deep snow . . . '

'Or dying for love of a sleeping princess . . . '

'Or before a dwindling fire with your head full of pictures . . . '

'Or even asleep with a head full of cobwebs and dreams . . . '

'And still you will be in Shadowland.'

Both brothers laughed, and blew out the candles on their desks.

'I have another question,' Tom said into the lively blackness.

'Ask the stories, child,' said a departing voice.

A flurry of quiet rustling, then silence: Tom knew they were gone. 'But they never give the same answers,' he said to the black room.

He felt his way to the door.

17

When he turned the corner back into the main hallway, Coleman Collins was standing before him in the semi-darkness, blocking his way. Tom felt an instant ungovern­able surge of fright — he had broken one of the rules, and the magician knew it. He must have seen him turn out of the short corridor.

Collins' posture gave him no clues; he could not see his face, which was shadowed. The magician's hands were in his pockets. His shoulders slouched. The entire front of his body was a dark featureless pane in which a few vest burtons shone darkly: tiger's eyes.

'I went in that room,' Tom said.

Collins nodded. Still he kept his hands in his pockets and slouched.

'You knew I would.'

Collins nodded again.

Tom edged closer to the wall. But Collins was deliber­ately blocking his way. 'You knew I would, and you wanted me to.' He bravely moved a few inches nearer, but Collins made no movement. 'I can accept what I saw,' Tom said. He heard the note of insistence, of fear, in his voice.

Collins dropped his head. He drew one heel toward him along the carpet. Now Tom could see his face: pensive, withdrawn. The magician tilted his head and shot a cold glance directly into Tom's eyes.

There might have been some playacting in it; Tom could not tell. All he knew was that Collins was frighten­ing him. Alone in the hallway, he was scarier than in the freezing sleigh. Collins was more authoritative than a dozen Mr. Thorpes. The expression which had jumped out of his eyes had nailed Tom to the wall.

'Isn't that what you said? Isn't that what you wanted?'

Collins exhaled, pursed his lips. Finally he spoke. 'Arrogant midget. Do you really think you know what I want?'

Tom's tongue froze in his mouth. Collins reared back and propped his head against the wall. Tom caught the sudden clear odor of alcohol. 'In two days you have betrayed me twice. I will not forget this.'

'But I thought — '

The magician's head snapped forward. Tom flinched, feared that Collins would strike him.

'You thought. You disobeyed me twice. That is what I think.' His eyes augered into Tom. 'Will you wander into my room next? Ransack my desk? I think that you need more than cartoons and amusements, little boy.'

'But you told me I could — '

'I told you you could not.'

Tom swallowed. 'Didn't you want me to see them?'

'See whom, traitor?'

'The two in there. Jakob and Wilhelm. Whoever they were.'

'That room is empty. For now. Get on your way, boy. I was going to give your friend a word of warning. You can do it for me. Scat. Get out of here. Now!'

'A warning about what?'

'He'll know. Didn't you hear me? Get out of here.' He stepped aside, and Tom slipped by him. 'I'm going to have fun with you,' the magician said to his back.

Tom went as quickly as he could to the front of the stairs without actually running. He realized that he was dripping with sweat — even his legs felt sweaty. He could hear Collins limping away down the hall in the direction of the theaters.

The next second brought a new astonishment.

When he looked up the stairs, he saw a nut-faced old woman in a black dress at their top, looking down at him in horror. She lifted her hands sharply and scurried away out of sight.

'Hey!' Tom said. He ran after her up the stairs. He could hear her moving frantically as a squirrel, trying to escape bun. When he reached the head of the stairs, he ran past the bedrooms and saw the hem of a black dress just vanishing around a corner at the end of the hall. To his side, through the glass and far away, lights burned deep in the forest and sent their reflections across the black lake.

He reached the far end of the hall and realized that he had never been there before. The old woman had opened an outside door, one Tom had never seen, and was starting to descend an exterior staircase that curved back in toward the patio and the house. Tom got through the door before it closed and clapped a hand on the old woman's shoulder.

She stopped as suddenly as a paralyzed hare. Then she looked up into his face with a compressed, dense mixture of expressions on her dry old face. A few white hairs grew from her upper lip. Her eyes were so brown as to look black, and her eyebrows were strongly, starkly black. He understood two things at once: she was foreign, and she was deeply ashamed that he had seen her.

'I'm sorry,' he said.

She jerked her shoulder away from his hand.

'I just wanted to talk to you.'

She shook her head. Her eyes were cold flat stones embedded in deep wrinkles.

'Do you work here?'

She made no movement at all, waiting for him to allow her to go.

'Why weren't we supposed to see you?' Nothing. 'Do you know Del?' He caught a glimmer of recognition at the name. 'What's going on around here? I mean, how does all this stuff work? Why aren't we supposed to know you're here? Do you do the cooking? Do you make the beds?'

No sign of anything but impatience to get away from him. He pantomimed breaking an egg into a pan, frying the egg. She nodded curtly. Inspired, he asked, 'Do you speak English?'

No: a flat, denying movement of the head. She stabbed him with another black glance, and turned abruptly away and flew down the stairs.

Tom lingered on the little balcony for a moment. From the bottom of the long hill, girdled by woods, the lake shone enigmatically up at him. He tried to find the spot where Coleman Collins had taken him in the sleigh, but could find no peak high enough — had all that really taken place only in his head? Far off in the distance he heard a man crying out in the woods.

His room had been prepared for the night. The bed was turned down, the bedside lamp shone on the Rex Stout paperback. That, and the clear-cut puzzles it contained, seemed very remote to him — he could not remember anything he had read the night before. The sliding doors between his room and Del's were shut.

He went to the doors and gently knocked; no response. Where was Del? Probably he was out exploring — imitat­ing Tom's actions of the night before. Probably that was what the 'warning' was about. Tom sighed. For the first time since getting on the train with Del, he thought of Jenny Oliver and Diane Darling, the two girls from the neighboring school; maybe it was Archie Goodwin and his strings of women that brought them to mind, but he wished he could talk to them, either of them. It had been a long time since he had talked to a girl: he remembered the girl in the window the magician had shown him — shown him as coolly as a grocer displays a shelf of canned beans.

His room was barren and lonely. Its cleanliness, its straight angles and simple colors, excluded him. He hated being alone in it, he realized; but now he did not feel that he could go anywhere else. Loneliness assailed him. He missed Arizona and his mother. For a moment Tom felt utterly bereft: orphaned. He sat on the hard bed.and thought he was in jail. All of Vermont felt like a prison.

Tom stood up and began to pace the room. Because he was fifteen and healthy, simple movement made him feel better. At that moment, in one of those peculiarly adult mental gestures which 1 see as characteristic of the young Tom Flanagan, he arrived at both a recognition and a decision. Shadowland, as much as he knew of it, was a test harder and more important than any he had ever taken at Carson; and he could not let Shadowland defeat him. He would use Collins' own maxim against him, if he had to, and discover how to do the impossible.

He nodded, knowing that he was arming for a fight, and realized that he had lost the desire to cry which had come over him a moment before. Then he heard a noise from behind the sliding doors. It was a light, bubbling sound of laughter, muted, as if hidden behind a hand. Tom knocked again on the doors.

The sound came again, even more clearly.

'Del. . . you there?'

'For God's sake, be quiet,' came Del's whisper.

'What's going on?'

'Keep your voice down. I'll be right there.'

A moment later the left half of the door slid an inch back, and Del was scowling out at him. 'Where were you all day?' Del asked.

'I want to talk to you. He made me think it was whiter — '

'Hallucinatory terrain,' Del said. 'He's spending a lot of time with you, letting me knock around by myself . . . '

'And I remember flying.' Tom felt his face assume some expression absolutely new to him, uttering this statement. He half — expected Del to deny it.

'Okay,' Del said. 'You're having a whale of a time. I'm glad.'

'And I met an old woman. She doesn't speak English. I had to practically tackle her to get her to stop running away. And your uncle . . . '

His voice stopped. A girl had just walked into the tiny area of Del's room he could see. She wore one of Del's shirts over a black bathing suit. Her hair was wet and she had moth-colored eyes.

Del glanced over his shoulder and then looked irritatedly back at Tom. 'Okay, now you've seen her. She was swimming in the lake just after dinner, and I asked her up here. I guess you might as well come in.'

The girl backed away toward the slightly mussed bed, stepping like a faun on her bare legs. It was impossible for Tom riot to stare at her. He had no more idea then if she were beautiful than he did if the moon were rock or powder: she looked nothing at all like the popular girls at Phipps-Burnwood. But he could not stop looking at her. The girl's eyes went down to her tanned bare legs, then back to him. She tugged Del's shirt close about her.

'You probably guess already, but this is Rose Arm­strong,' Del said.

The girl sat down on the bed.

'I'm Tom Armstrong,' he said. 'Oh, Jesus. Flanagan, I mean.'

THREE

The Goose Girl

Just looking at her had me so rattled — I saw right away what Del had meant about her looking 'hurt.' You couldn't miss it. That face looked like it had absorbed about a thousand insults and recovered from each one separately. But if she'd ever had them, she was recovering, all right. Honestly, I couldn't believe that Del had been seeing this amazing girl every summer; and watching her sit down on Del's bed with her knees together, I knew, knew, knew, that my whole relationship with Del had just changed.

1

Miami Beach, 1975

But before we can really look at Rose Armstrong through Tom Flanagan's eyes and travel with these three young people through their final convulsive months at Shadowland, I must introduce a seeming digression. Up to this point, this story has been haunted by two ghosts: of course one is Rose Armstrong, who in a black bathing suit and a boy's shirt has just now sat down on Del's sug­gestively mussed-up bed, badly 'rattling' Tom Flanagan. The other ghost is far more peripheral; certainly the reader has forgotten him by now. I mean Marcus Reilly, who was mentioned less than half a dozen times in the first part of this story — and perhaps Marcus Reilly is a persistent 'ghost' only to me. Yet suicide, especially at an early age, makes its perpetrator stick in the mind. It is also true that when I last saw Marcus Reilly, a few months before he killed himself, he said some things that later seemed to me to have a bearing on the story of Del Nightingale and Tom Flanagan; but this may be mere self-justification.

At the beginning ot this story, I said that Reilly was the most baffling of my class's failures. As a Carson student, he had a great success, though not academically. He was a good athlete, and his closest friends were Pete Bayliss and Chip Hogan and Bobby Hollingsworth, who was on the same terms with everyone. A burly blond boy with a passing resemblance to the young Arnold Palmer, Marcus was bright but not reflective. His chief characteristic was that he took things as they came. His parents were rich — their house in Quantum Hills was more lavish than the Hillmans'. He could have been taken as one kind of model of the Carson student: someone who, though clearly he would never become a teacher, could be expected to have some slight trace of Fitz-Hallan about him always.

After our odd, limping graduation, Reilly went off to a private college in the Southeast; I cannot remember which one. What I do remember is his delight in finding a place where suntans and a social life were taken to be as critical as grades. After college he went to a law school in the same state. I am sure that he graduated in the dead center of his class. In 1971 Chip Hogan told me that Reilly had taken a job in a Miami law firm, and I felt that small, almost aesthetic smack of satisfaction one gets when an expectation is fulfilled. It seemed the perfect job and place for him.

Four years later a New York magazine commissioned me to do an article on a famous expatriate novelist wintering in Miami Beach. The famous novelist, with whom I spent two tedious days, was a self-important bore, turning out of his hotel onto sunny Collins Avenue in a flannel suit and trilby hat, with furled umbrella. He had consciously given two months of his life to Miami Beach in order to fuel his disdain for all things American. He pretended an ignorance of the American system of coinage. 'Is this one really called a quarter? Dear me, how unimaginative.' When I had sufficient notes for the article, I put the whole project into a mental locker and decided to look up Bobby Hollingsworth. I had not seen Bobby in at least ten years. He was living in Miami Beach, I knew from the alumni magazine, and owned a company that made plumbing fixtures. Once, in an Atlanta airport men's room, I had looked down into the bowl and seen stamped there 'hollingsworth vitreous.' I wanted to see what had become of him, and when I called him up he promptly invited me to his house.

His house was a huge Spanish mansion facing Indian Creek and the row of hotels across it. Moored at his dock was a forty-foot boat that looked like it could make a pond of the Atlantic.

'This is really the place,' Bobby said during dinner. 'You got the greatest weather in the world, you got the water, you got business opportunities up the old wazoo. No shit, this place is paradise. I wouldn't go back to Arizona if you paid me. As for living up North-wow.' He shook his head. Bobby at thirty-two was pudgy, soft as a sponge. A diamond as big as a knuckle rode on one sausagy hand. He still had his perpetual smile, which was not a smile but the way his mouth sat on his face. He wore a yellow terry-cloth shirt and matching shorts. He was enjoying his wealth, and I enjoyed his pleasure in it. I gathered that his wife's family had given him his start in the business, and that he had rather surprised them by his success. Monica, his wife, said little during the meal, but jumped up every few minutes to supervise the cook. 'She treats me like a king,' Bobby said during one of Monica's excursions to the kitchen. 'When I get home, I'm royalty. She lives for that boat — I gave it to her for Christmas last year. Squealed like a puppy. What do I know from boats? But it makes her happy. Say, if you play golf we could go out to the club tomorrow. I got an extra set of clubs.'

'I'm sorry, but I don't play,' I said.

'Don't play golf?' For a moment Bobby seemed totally perplexed. He had taken me into his world so completely that he had forgotten that I was not a permanent resident there. 'Well, hell, why don't we go out in the boat? Laze around, have a few drinks? Monica would love that.'

I said that I might be able to do that.

'Great, kiddo. You know, this is what that school of ours was all about, wasn't it?'

'What do you mean, Bobby?'

His wife came back to the table and Bobby turned to her. 'He's coming out on the boat with us tomorrow. Let's toss some lines overboard, catch dinner, hey?'

Monica gave a wan smile.

'Sure. It'll be great. Now, this is what I'm saying — our old school had one goal, right? To get us to where I am now. And to know how to live once we get here. That's the way I see it. To make us into the kind of people who could fit in anywhere. I want to write in to the alumni magazine and say that you can travel all over the Southeast and see my name whenever you stop to take a leak. And that's almost true.'

Monica looked away and turned over a lettuce leaf on her salad plate to peer at its underside.

'Do you ever see Marcus Reilly?' I asked. 'I under­stand he lives here.'

'Saw him once,' Bobby said. 'Mistake. Marcus got involved in some bad shit — got disbarred. Stay away from him. He's a downer.' 'Really?' I was surprised.

'Oh, he was a big deal for a little while. Then I guess he got weird. Take my advice . . . I'll give you his phone number if you like, but stay away from him. He's a failure. He has to stick his nose above water to suck air.' The next morning I called the number Bobby had given me. A man at the other end of the line said, 'Wentworth.' 'Marcus?' 'Who?'

'Marcus Reilly? Is he there?' 'Oh, yeah. Just a second.'

Another telephone rang. It was lifted, but the person at the other end said nothing. 'Marcus? Is that you?' I gave my name. 'Hey, great,' came the breezy, husky voice of Marcus Reilly. 'You in town? How about we get together?' 'Can I take you to lunch today?' 'Hell, lunch is on me. I'm at the Wentworth Hotel on Collins Avenue, just up on the right side from Seventy-third Street. Tell you what, I'll meet you outside. Okay? Twelve o'clock?'

I called Bobby Hollingsworth to say that I would not be able to go out on his boat. 'That's fine,' Bobby said. 'Come back next time, and we'll go out with a couple of girls I know. We got a date?'

'Sure,' I said. I could see him lolling back on a deck chair, propping a drink on his yellow-terry-cloth belly, telling a good-looking whore that whenever you took a leak in the Southeast, you could read his name just by looking down.

There was nothing splendid about Collins Avenue up where Marcus Reilly lived. Old men in canvas hats and plaid trousers below protruding bellies, old women in baggy dresses and sunglasses crawled beneath the side­walk awnings of little shops. Discount stores, bars, cut-rate novelty shops where everything would be an inch deep in dust. At the Wentworth Hotel, the motto Where Life Is a Treat was painted on the yellow plaster. The lobby seemed to be outside, in a sort of alcove set off the sidewalk.

At five past twelve Marcus came bustling out, wearing a glen-plaid suit, walking quickly past the rows of old people sitting in aluminum-and-plastic chairs as if he were afraid one of them would stop him.

'Great to see you, great to see you,' he said, pumping my hand. He no longer resembled the young Arnold Palmer. His cheeks had puffed out, and his eyes seemed narrower. The moisture in the air screwed his hair up into curls. Like the expatriate novelist's, his suit was much too warm for the climate, but he had none of the novelist's internal air conditioning. Marcus snapped his fingers, smacked his palms together, and looked up and down the street. I could smell violence on him, as you sometimes can on a dog. 'Jesus, hey, here we are. What is it, fifteen years?'

'About that,' I said.

'Let's move, man. Let's see some sights. You been here long?'

'Just a couple of days.'

Marcus rolled away from me and began bustling down the street. 'Too bad. Where you staying?'

I named my hotel.

'A dump. A dump, believe me.' We rounded the corner and Marcus opened the door to a green Gremlin with a big rusting dent on its right-rear fender. 'A word I could use to describe this whole town.' We got into the Gremlin. 'Just toss that stuff into the back.' I removed a stack of old Miami Heralds and a ball of dirty shirts. 'You want lunch first, or a drink?'

'A drink would be fine, Marcus.'

'Beautiful.' He raced the motor and sped away from the curb. 'There's a good joint a couple of blocks away.' We raced around the corner, Marcus talking like a man possessed the entire time. 'I mean, it's got its good points, and I'm not counted out yet, but a dump is what you'd call a place full of ingrates, right? Am I right? And that's what we got here — wall to wall. People I brought along, got started right, did everything for . . . you know I was disbarred, don't you? You must have got my number from Bobby?'

'Yes,' I said.

'The shit king. 'In six states, you can take a dump on my name,' right? Bobby's so goddamned cute these days. And I helped him when he first came to Miami.' Marcus was sweating, moving the car as if it were heavy as a truck. His curls tightened up a notch. 'You don't get contracts like he got, no matter what kind of rich dope-fiend gash you married, without help from people who know people. Not in Miami. Not anywhere. And now he treats me like scum. Ah, screw Bobby. The way he puts on flab, he'll drop dead when he's forty. Here we are.'

Marcus banged the Gremlin against the curb and rocketed out of the seat. He half-ran into a bar called the Hurricane Pub. It was so open to the street it seemed to be missing a wall.

'Counselor!' the bartender shouted.

'Jerry! Give us a couple beers here!' Reilly bounced onto a stool, lit a cigarette, and started talking again. 'Jerry, this guy here's an old friend of mine.'

'Real nice,' Jerry said, and put the beers down before us.

Marcus drained half his glass. 'In this town, you see, it helps to know everybody. That way you know where the bodies are buried. I'm not through yet. I got deals cooking like you wouldn't believe. Hell, I'm still a young guy.' I knew his age because it was mine. He looked at least ten years older. 'And I got the right mental attitude — you're not counted out until you count yourself out. And believe it or not, I get a bang out of being here — I even get a bang out of the Wentworth. Collins Avenue addresses are gold in this town. Two, three years, I'll have my license back. You'll see. And what do you bet friend Bobby will come around looking for a favor? I know everybody, everybody. I can get things done. And that's one thing people in this town respect, a guy who can deliver.' The rest of his beer was gone. 'How about something to eat?' He slapped two dollars down on the bar and we rushed back out onto the street.

A few blocks down, he opened the door of Uncle Ernie's Ice Cream Shop. 'You get great sandwiches here.' We sat at a table in the rear and ordered our sandwiches. 'That school we went to — that place — boy, I can't get it out of my mind. For one thing, Hollingsworth's always talking about it — like it was Eton or something.' Even sitting and eating, Marcus was a congeries of small agitated movements. He worked his elbows, drummed his fingers, unscrewed his hair, rubbed his cheeks. 'You remember Lake the Snake and that chapel?'

'I remember.'

'Stone crazy. Wacko. And Fitz-Hallan and his fairy tales. Man, I could tell him a few fairy tales. Last year, when I still had my license, I got involved with these people — heavy people, you know? These were serious people. Maybe I wasn't too swift, who knows, but people like that always need lawyers. And if I want somebody to get hurt, he'll get hurt, you know what I'm saying. And at the same time, through connections of these serious people, I got next to some folks from Haiti. This city is full of Haitians, illegals most of them, but these people were different. Are different. You done with your sand­wich yet?'

'Not quite yet.' Marcus had vanished as if he had taken it in one gulp.

'Don't worry. I want to show you something. It's in your line — I know your work, remember. I want to show you this. It's connected to these people from Haiti.'

I finished off my sandwich and Marcus jumped up from his seat and tossed money on the table. Out on the sunlit, shabby street, Marcus' big florid face came up an inch away from my own. 'I'm in tight with them right now, these guys. Disbarred, who cares if you're a Haitian? They got a flexible notion of the law. We're going to do big things. You know anything about Venezuela?'

'Not much.'

'We're into buying an island off the coast — big old island, classified as a national park. One of these guys knows the regime, we can get it reclassified in a minute. That's one of the things we're talking about. Also a lot of odd stuff, you know, odd?' He took my elbow and hauled me across the street. 'Mind if we stop at McDonald's? I'm still hungry.'

I shook my head, and Marcus led me into the bright restaurant. We had been standing directly in front of it.

'Big Mac, fries,' he told the girl. 'Next time you're here, we'll go to Joe's Stone Crab. Fantastic place.' He took his order to the window and began to bolt the food standing up. 'Okay, let's talk. What do you think about that stuff Fitz-Hallan used to say?'

'What stuff?'

'About things being magically right? What does that mean?'

'You tell me.'

'Bobby thinks that's what he's got. The boat, the house, the two-hundred-dollar shoes. I helped him get a rock-bottom deal on a Jacuzzi. That's what he thinks it is. You probably think it's a good paragraph.'

'At times,' I said. The Big Mac was gone, and the fries were following it.

'Well, I think it's a crock. I've seen a lot of stuff, being with these guys. They . . . got a lot of strange beliefs.' The fries were gone, and Marcus was moving out of the restaurant, wiping his fingers on his trousers. 'They can make you go blind, make you deaf, make you see things, they think. Magic. I say, if it's magic, it can't be right. There's no such thing as good magic, that's what I learned.'

'You know about Tom — '

'Flanagan. Sure. I even went to see him once, down here. But . . . ' His face suddenly fell apart. It was like watching the collapse of an intricate public building. 'You see a bird over there?'

I looked: a few peeling storefronts, the ubiquitous old men.

'Forget it. Let's go for a ride.' He belched, and I smelled meat.

I looked at my watch. I wished I had gone out on Bobby's boat and were sitting on wide seamless water, listening to Bobby gab about the toilet business. 'I really have to go,' I said.

'No, you can't,' Marcus said, and looked stricken. 'Come on. I want to show you something.' He pulled me toward his car by the sheer force of his desperation.

Back in the Gremlin, we drove aimlessly around upper Miami Beach for half an hour, Marcus talking the entire time. He took corners randomly, sometimes doubling back as if trying to lose someone, often cutting dan­gerously in front of other cars. 'See, there's the library . . . and see that bookstore? It's great. You'd like it. There's a lot of stuff in Miami Beach for a guy like you. I could introduce you to a lot of the right people, get you material like you never dreamed existed, man. You ever been to Haiti?'

I had not.

'You ought to go. Great hotels, beaches, good food . . . Here's a park. Beautiful park. You ever been to Key Biscayne? No? It's close, you want to go there?'

'I can't, Marcus,' I said. I had long since suspected that whatever he wanted me to see did not exist. Or that he had decided I should not see it after all. Finally I persuaded him to drive me back to my hotel.

When he dropped me off, he took one of my hands in both of his and looked at me with his leaky blue eyes. 'Had a hell of a good time, didn't we? Keep your eyes open, now, pal. You'll read about me in the papers.' He roared off, and I thought I saw him talking to himself as his battered car swung back out into Collins Avenue. I went upstairs, took a shower, ordered a drink from room service, and lay down on the bed and slept for three hours.

Two months later I heard that Marcus had shot him­self — he had named me as executor of his estate, but there was no estate except for a few clothes and the Gremlin, in which he had killed himself. The lawyer who rang me said that Marcus had put the bullet in his head around six in the morning, in a parking lot between a tennis court and the North Community Center. It was about three blocks from the McDonald's he had dragged me into.

'Why would he name me as his executor?' I asked. 'I barely knew him.'

'Really?' asked the lawyer. 'He left a note in his room that you were the only person who would understand what he was going to do. He wrote that he had shown you something — while you were visiting him here.'

'Maybe he thought he did,' I said. I remembered him asking me if I had seen a bird as little tucks and dents appeared in his face, just as if someone were sewing him up from the inside.

2

Tom and Rose

The girl would not meet his eyes. She sat on Del's bed, looking at her feet as if he had embarrassed her. Tom saw that she thought he had been making fun of her — Del was staring at him in amazement — and he said, 'I'm sorry. That just popped out. I didn't mean anything by it.'

'I know who you are,' she said. Then she lifted her face and gave him a look from her pale iridescent eyes which nearly blew him across the room. 'Everybody says you're going to be a great magician.'

'Look, I'm a little sick of hearing that,' Tom said, speaking with more heat than he had intended. Rose Armstrong looked as though a strong word would melt her. The silk shimmered about her arms. 'Who is everybody, anyhow?'

'Del and Mr. Collins. Especially Mr. Collins.'

'He talked to you about me?'

'Sure. Now and then. Last winter.'

Del smiled, and Tom looked at both of them, per­plexed. 'But he didn't even know me last winter.'

'He did know you.' And that, it seemed, would be that. The girl knitted her hands together and regarded him squarely. Despite what he had thought, she was relaxed. As slight and flowerlike as she was, she was a year older than both boys, and to Tom it was suddenly as if she were ten years older — she seemed massive and unknowable. But still her face with its full lips and high forehead broadcast vulnerability. The wet hair hugged her head. He realized that he envied Del, his closeness to Rose Armstrong. The girl seemed as perfect as a statue.

Living Statue.

'He made me,' Rose said with an air of bravery.

Now Tom's uneasiness increased.

'I never had a thought in my head until I met Mr. Collins,' she said, and he relaxed. 'I was nothing.' That stabbing look of a wound deeply absorbed settled again in her face. 'I would forgive him anything.'

'Do you have to forgive him very often?'

'Well, he drinks a lot, and I don't like that. Sometimes he changes when he's had too much.'

Tom nodded. He had seen the proof of that. He asked, 'Why did you go out on that rock dressed up like it was winter? And open that smoke bomb.'

'He told me to. He gave me the clothes.'

'And that's enough?'

'Of course.'

'Did you know that we were supposed to see you?'

'I assumed someone was supposed to see me. It wouldn't make sense otherwise.'

'Does he forgive you too?'

'Why should he have to?'

'Because when I was coming up here, I met him in the hall. He was drunk. He said he was going to give Del a warning, but that I could do it for him. I guess it was about your being here.'

She flushed. 'I wondered . . . I guess I shouldn't be here. But tomorrow it'll probably be all right.'

'You mean, when he's sober?'

She nodded. 'But I shouldn't stay. Del, I . . . you know.'

Tom felt the stab of envy or jealousy again. She had not once called him by his name.

'I guess so,' Del said.

Tom watched as she stood up, glanced at him as if he had struck her — but was that just a part of her face, like Bobby Hollingsworth's smile? She peeled the shirt off. He jumped into the awkward silence. 'Before you go, can I ask you something?'

She nodded.

'Are there some men staying here somewhere? Have you seen a bunch of men anywhere around?'

'Yes.' She glanced at Del. 'They haven't been here for a year or two. They stay in a cabin on the other side of the lake. They're his friends.'

'Okay,' Tom said.

'They used to work with him,' she added. With another glance at Del, 'I don't like it when they're here. They're not like him.' She was holding the shirt up before her, shielding herself. 'They're dead.'

This was totally unexpected. 'That's ridiculous.' He saw that it was something Collins had told her, and which she had accepted.

'You may think it is. He told me about it. About how it happened.'

'It's still ridiculous.' He heard the repetition, and thought he sounded nearly as stupid as the girl. 'Did he tell you to say that to us?'

'No. I have to go.'

Tom felt a burning impatience allied with an equally strong desire to. keep Rose Armstrong in the room. 'Where do you stay? In the house?'

'I can't tell you. I'm not supposed to.' She dropped the shirt on the bed and smiled at Del. 'I can tell it's your friend's first time.'

'Could you carry a letter out of here for me? Could you mail a letter for me?'

'Nothing is supposed to leave here,' she said, and began to move delicately toward the hall door. 'But you could ask Elena.'

'That woman? She doesn't speak English.'

'I'm sure she understands the words 'post office.'' She gave her first smile. 'I hope you're in a better mood the next time I meet you.' Then she was at the door, sliding around it like a shadow. 'Good-bye, Del.' She turned the iridescent eyes toward Tom. 'Good-bye, grumpy Tom.' Then she was gone.

Del's face was rapturous. Tom heard the pad of bare feet moving down the hall in the direction he had chased the woman called Elena. Then the soft opening of a door.

Tom turned to the still-transfixed Del. 'I saw the Brothers Grimm downstairs,' he said. 'I guess they're dead, too.' Del simply smiled at him. 'What is she, hypnotized or something?' Del did not speak or move. Tom walked away from him and went out the door. The hall was dark and quiet. In the woods, the lights burned like beacons. He went up to the glass and put his hands to his face to blot out his reflection. Rose Armstrong was padding over the flagstones; she began to descend the iron ladder.

He stood in the hall until the shaft of moonlight on the water illuminated a silvery, lifting arm; froth where her feet kicked.

'Now you know,' Del said behind him.

Tom nodded. He heard the mistrust in his friend's voice.

3

War

'This is a true story,' the magician said, 'and its name is 'The Death of Love.' Ah, melodrama.'

His thick white hair stirred in the light breeze. The three of them sat on the stony beach, Collins facing the sharp rise of land and the boys looking toward him and the glimmering deep blue lake behind him. To their right, the weather-beaten pier protruded out into the lake; beyond that the gray-boarded boathouse sat on concrete pilings. As Rose Armstrong had hinted, Collins showed none of his cold rage of the night before. He had placed a note on the boys' breakfast trays, asking them to meet him on the beach at ten in the morning. Each of them still turning over the encounter with Rose Armstrong in his mind, they had descended the shaky iron structure at a quarter to ten; Collins, a white sunhat on his head and a rolled blanket and a picnic basket under his arm, had come down the stairs twenty minutes later. He wore a long-sleeved blue shirt, gray lightweight slacks and san­dals. The shirt and slacks were slightly too large, as if he had recently lost weight. 'Good morning, apprentices,' he said. 'All parties have a good night's sleep after yesterday's exertions?'

Collins unfurled the blanket on the beach, set the wicker basket on it. He removed the hat and set it on the basket. 'Sit down, boys. History lesson, if you are not too bedazzled by love to listen. Time for one of those stories I've been promising you. Face me, that's the way. If you get bored, you can always look at the water and daydream about Miss Armstrong.' He smiled. 'This is a true story.

'By now the two of you know more about the operations of true magic than ninety-nine percent of the population, including other magicians, and I want to take you back to a time when I was learning about these things myself — to the time when I first came into command of my own strengths. We are going forty years back, to just before the nineteen-twenties.

'In fact, we are going back to 1917, the year America joined the Great War. My name then was still Charles Nightingale — Del's father, my brother, was twelve years younger than I, still a boy for all practical purposes, and a stranger to me. I had trained as a doctor, and had supported myself as a magician during medical school. I was a good mechanic and card-cranker. Manual dexterity. I intended to be a surgeon. Magic was only a hobby then, though I had always felt in it something beyond the simple tricks I had mastered, something vastly powerful. Medi­cine seemed the only thing in the practical world that could approach that realm of responsibility and awe to which I aspired — I mean that world (only dimly ap­prehended by me) where the ability to make fundamental changes is so great as to automatically inspire awe. If I had been conventionally religious, I suppose I might have gone into the clergy. But I was always too ambitious for that. In 1917 I qualified as a doctor and was immediately given a commission and sent to France on a troop ship. My assignment was to a dressing station at Cantigny. I brought only a few things with me, clothes and cards and some books by a Frenchman named Eliphas Levi, a magician who had died in 1875. The books were the two volumes of Le Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, rather wildly, verbosely written, but full of evocations of that power I was searching for. Levi helped me to understand that Good and Evil are earthbound distinctions — when you hear someone discriminate on that basis, he is invariably up to his ankles in mud. I also carried a book by Cornelius Agrippa, the Renaissance magician, who said when asked how man could possess magical powers — remember this, boys — 'No one has such power but he who has cohabited with the elements, vanquished nature, mounted higher than the heavens, elevating himself above the angels. . . . ' Vanquished nature. Doctors attempt that too, but with what clumsy weapons, scalpels and sutures!

'We landed in Brest on the Seattle and went immediately to the Pontanzen barracks for a few days of rest before being sent to the Gondrecourt area for some rudimentary training. We traveled as part of a section, with a motor truck, two ambulances, and a Packard car in which I and a few other young doctors rode. Our route was along the Beaumont-Mandres road. From Mandres we were meant to go to the Division HQ at Menil-la-Tour. It sounded easy, back in Boston, but back in Boston I had never seen a country torn to pieces by war. The only bodies I had seen were those on dissecting tables. And remember that my military training had been laughably brief. I don't even remember what I had expected to find: a tableau from a recruiting poster, I suppose, brave youthful soldiers brandishing German helmets like scalps. And They Said We Couldn't Fight!

'We had gone only a short way up the Beaumont-Mandres road when we passed an old battlefield. Great zigzagging rips torn through the ground, barbed wire looping over it all, and somehow a terrifying, claus­trophobic feeling of death being all around — pressing its face toward us and blowing on us with its breath. The German trenches had been occupied since 1914 and ran parallel to the Flirey-Bouconville road. We could hear artillery going off in the distance. I had never seen anything remotely like it before — never seen anything like that destroyed snowy field, nor like the scale of death that it implied. To me, right then, what I saw looked like nothing so much as the shocking litter and mess you find at the bottom of a fireplace. Charred heaps of things, filthy little piles here and there, nothing orderly, nothing even recognizable except by an effort of the imagination. That was probably the last civilian image I would be privileged to have for two years. War refers only to itself — war is self-enclosed. It takes only the smallest exposure to make you know that.

'My first real exposure came in that five-passenger Packard. Our convoy was shelled, and shelled very heavily. This of course was colossal bad luck, but the Beaumont-Mandres road was shelled day and night, and our superiors must have decided that it was a risk they had to take. If they had known that precisely one man of the entire convoy would survive, I suppose they might have decided otherwise.

'I could hear soldiers in the supply truck singing 'Glor-ree-us, Glor-ree-us! One keg of beer for the four of us!' That was a favorite, along with 'Snowy Breasted Pearl' and 'Say Au Revoir, But Not Good-bye.' Then over the singing I heard a whistling in the air. I knew immediately what that meant.

'Our driver muttered, 'She said there would be days like this,' and just then the truck in front of us blew up. 'Jee-sus!' the driver yelled, and cramped the wheel. I saw a body sailing upward, as if a man had taken flight; the undercarriage of the truck rolled over, gouting fire, and metal pieces — scattered all over the road. We fell into an old shellhole — everybody in the Packard was yelling something. Explosions went off all around us, deafeningly loud. I was vaguely aware of an ambulance bouncing into the air like a child's toy. Men were screaming and sobbing. An arm clad in heavy wool thunked down onto the hood of the Packard. All of us fought our way out of the car, and another shell landed very near.

'I came to in the field. My face and hands were burned, and I ached mightily all over and my head felt like it had been split apart, but otherwise I was all right. I had been fantastically lucky, and from that moment forth I knew that I had been saved for some great purpose. The shells were landing all over the road, and nothing rational, nothing sensible, was left of our convoy; in a few seconds, it had been altered into a scene from hell. The am­bulances were destroyed. Dead men lay all over the road. A motorcycle wheel dragged a shredded litter into the wreckage of the truck. The rest .of the motorcycle, which had been riding outboard of the convoy, was not even visible. The rear end of the Packard, jutting out of the shellhole, looked like an enormous gray cheese. I reached out and picked up my little satchel of books from a heap of snow. At first I thought I was the only man left alive in the convoy. Almost unbelievable devastation lay before me. Bodies and parts of bodies protruded from shellholes, from the burning vehicles — and shells continued to fall for some time, battering the broken ambulances and flinging the dead about. It must have been one of the most freakish accidents of the war, that routine shelling like that destroyed an entire medical section. Then I saw someone move, a man in the ditch between the road and the field. I knew him.

'He had been in the Packard with me. His name was Lieutenant William Vendouris, and he was a new field doctor like myself. His guts had been opened up by shrapnel, by a jagged piece of the truck — I don't know. I saw hun lying in the ditch in a lake of his own blood. He was holding in his intestines with his hands. They flopped like thick purplish ropes.

' 'Give me something, for God's sake,' he hissed at me.

'I had nothing. Nothing except Eliphas Levi and a pack of cards and Cornelius Agrippa. The supplies in the truck had been blown to bits.

''Jesus, help me,' Vendouris screamed. I knelt beside him and felt around his wound, although I knew he could not be helped. By all rights he should have been uncon­scious, but it had not taken hun that way. I could feel his blood beating against my hands. 'Settle down, old man,' I said. 'There are no supplies. It all went up with the truck.'

''Carry me to the HQ,' he pleaded. His eyes rolled, and the whites were so red that they looked about to explode. 'It's only another three miles. God. Carry me there.'

''I can't,' I said. 'You'd die if I moved you. You're three-fourths dead now.'

''I'm falling out!' he screeched. His intestines were slipping out of his hands, bulging nearly to the frozen ground. He almost passed out, and I wished that he had. I recall that he had perfect, very white teeth which seemed already to belong to someone else — those teeth should have adorned another body.

'A piece of the snowy field shifted, and I jumped about a foot — I was in shock, and I thought a dead man was standing up out there in that terrible mess. Then it shifted again, and I saw that it was a great white bird. A huge white owl. I was to see it once more, in France during the war, but then I thought I was hallucinating. The owl beat its wings — four feet from tip to tip, it looked — and came toward us over the landscape of broken men.

'Vendouris saw it too, and began to rave. 'It's my soul, it's my soul,' he screamed. Blood boiled out of him. The huge bird sat on a coil of wire and looked crazily at both of us. What with my shock and Vendouris' ravings, I almost thought I could hear it speak.

'Shoot him, it was saying. It is the only way.

'I touched the revolver in its holster on my hip.

'Vendouris understood the gesture. 'Oh, God, God, God, please, no,' he pleaded. So I put my hands under his shoulders and tried to lift him.

'He screeched more horribly than any sound I had ever heard in my life, and in the field I thought I heard the owl screech too, just as if it really were his soul. 'If I lift you up,' I said, 'half of you is going to stay here. It's not possible.'

''Then get someone.' His head fell back, but he was still alive. Those perfect teeth which should have graced a tooth-powder advertisement shone in his gray face. 'You can't shoot me. I haven't even been here a month.'

'That weird rationality, an excuse like that of a third-grader. I could feel the presence of that perhaps halluci­natory bird behind me, and it was all of a piece with the stink of burned flesh I could suddenly catch from my own face, the smell of shit and intestinal gas coming from Vendouris — all of this was thrown into an odd relief by Vendouris' strange childish plea. Something in my mind moved: I was in the war, and the war referred only to itself.

''It's not possible,' Vendouris said, and I knew he meant that it was not possible that this had happened to him. He was still a civilian mentally.

'Now, think of my choices. I could pick him up, as he wished, and kill him — give him an agonizing death. I could stay by him and let him die. He may have had another half-hour, or however long it took him to really understand his condition. In that half-hour he would have suffered every agony possible for man to know. Killing him by lifting him would have been more merciful. His pain was already burrowing through his shock. I could have left him, gone the three miles to the hospital, and left him to die alone.

'He began to breathe in sharp little pants, like an overheated dog.

'There was really only one solution. I took my revolver out of the holster. He saw me do it and his eyes widened, and for a second he was sane again. He tried to crawl back, and most of his insides cascaded out of him.

'Maybe he died then. But I do not think so. I think what killed him was the bullet I put into his forehead.

'A sink of odors surrounded me: my own burned flesh and sweat; Vendouris' horrible stinks of dying, blood; cordite. I picked up my things and walked along the edge of the road in the direction of the artillery fire. I should have been afraid. I should have felt like running back to the port and stowing away in the next ship for America. But instead I felt as though I were walking toward my destiny, for which poor William Vendouris and four other men had already given their lives.

'Now we move ahead a couple of months. The Field Hospital was desperately understaffed, the more so that Vendouris was dead, and two other doctors and I slept three hours out of every twelve, taking shifts on a camp bed in a little tent a few yards from the larger tent which was our operating theater. Which is to say that we breathed war, drank war and slept war every day. Our work was packing wounds, closing aspirating chest wounds, and controlling hemorrhages on soldiers brought in from the battlefields and trenches by the Norton-Harjes and Red Cross ambulances. When we had taken off a leg or put a Thomas splint on a fracture, the wounded were sent off to hospitals for more extensive treatment. The loss of the truck I had been on meant not only the absence of another doctor but also of three months' worth of morphia and other supplies due for the hospital — so most of our operations were done with little or no anesthetic. Often we worked under torches just like those you see in the woods out there, moving with the comings and going of the war in Les Islettes, Cheppy and Verennes. The troops we worked with were mainly men from New York, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut, boys of nineteen and twenty who'd wake up on the table and reach for their groins with the first movement of consciousness, just to make sure everything was there. It had not been a week before all of the medical staff and many of the troops knew about what happened to Vendouris. The other doctors, a tall red-headed Georgian named Withers and a smart, haggard, bald New Yorker named Leach, seemed to approve of what I had done, and so did most of the troops.

'But they gave me a nickname. Can you guess? They called me the Collector. That act of mercy toward a fatally injured man set me apart, even in conditions as cramped and abnormal as prevailed in Field Hospital 84. Sometimes when I walked into the mess, I could hear men whispering the name. And once when I was operating on a poor little rifleman from the Pennsylvania detachment, trying to put his stomach back in place, he opened his eyes — two orderlies were holding him down — and looked at me and gasped, 'The Col. . . ' and died.

'Leach told me, 'Don't worry about it. If I'm ever in that spot, I hope you'll do me the same favor Most of the boys are so addled by war they no longer think right.'

'There was another reason for the name. For a time I made quite a bit of money playing cards with the line officers and other doctors. I assure you, I did not cheat. I just knew much more about the behavior of cards than they. But after a time I was no longer welcome in the games — I suppose I had won about a quarter of the regiment's money, most of it from Withers, who was a rich man. Withers had come to dislike and distrust me: after initially taking my side in the Vendouris business, he had begun to think that there was something fishy in it. By the time they had got around to bringing in the bodies, there was no money in Vendouris' pockets. And of course, being what he was, Withers distrusted all North­erners on principle. He hated Negroes the same way. And it is true that the work and the hours and the almost constant shelling had affected me too. I had lost forty pounds. When I was not on duty, I drank to put myself to sleep. And while I was still welcomed in card games, I played feverishly, recklessly — often I took large sums from Withers on the strength of a bluff.

'But after three or four months of those terrible conditions, I gave in to the strain. I began to imagine that I was poor William Vendouris. My destiny, which had seemed mysteriously near on the day I walked toward the front, had vanished with an equal mysteriousness. Unless Vendouris was my destiny. One day I saw him lying on a stretcher just taken from one of the Norton-Harjes ambulances — grinning in pain with his perfect teeth, holding in his purple guts with both hands. He looked toward me and said, 'My soul, Collector, my soul.' I staggered, and Leach saw me do it and took over my job.

'The next day it was clear to me: I was Vendouris. I had simply been given the wrong papers. I explained this to Leach and to Withers, and they sat me down and got the colonel. I explained to him too that my name was not Nightingale but Vendouris, and that Nightingale had been killed on his first day in France. When I looked into the mirror, I saw William Vendouris' face. When I dressed, I put on Vendouris' clothes. I asked the colonel if he could get me the address back home of my wife and family, because the war had driven it out of my mind.

'The colonel arranged for me to be sent to the Neurological Hospital at Tours, and after a week there I was evacuated to Base Hospital 117 at La Fauche, where I wasted my time with carpentry and woodcarving — they could have sent me home or sent me back to work, and they sent me back to work. To Ste. Nazaire.

'It was in Ste. Nazaire that my destiny and I finally came face to face. And it was my destiny that sent me there, for the day after I left, Field Hospital 84 got a direct hit from a German shell, and Dr. Leach and all the men there but one were killed on the spot. Only Withers, who was in the camp bed jn the separate tent and who hated me, survived. And he was a part of my destiny too.'

4

'I was quartered in a factory taken over by the army,' Collins said, and Tom looked up to see that the air was darkening. The sun was a red ball above the trees on the other side of the lake. His watch said it was just past ten-thirty. It's a trick, he told himself. Relax and enjoy it.

'Of course there was not much left to show what it had been before the war — I think the Germans had used it before we did. The lines had been dismantled and rows of cots for the enlisted men filled three-fourths of the enormous floor. Officers like myself had little cubicles with doors you could lock. On the factory's second floor were some staff offices — medical personnel also had the use of a large gaslit basement filled with sprung couches and exhausted chairs. The hospital was across the street from the factory, and at most hours of day or night you could find unshaven young doctors asleep on the couches, breathing in clouds of third-hand pipe smoke. The idea was, I guess, that I had suffered a temporary lapse and could come to my senses away from the front, in a more or less medical atmosphere. And if I did not — well, as long as I was steady enough to operate jn a week, it did not matter what I thought my name was. We were short of doctors, and nobody ever suggested sending me home. 'The orderly who showed me to my cubicle called me Lieutenant Nightingale, and I said, 'That is an error. My name is Lieutenant William Vendouris. Please try to remember that, Private.' He gave me a rather frightened look and faded out the door.

'I slept for about two days straight, and woke up starved. I straightened my uniform, laced up my puttees, and went across the street to the hospital canteen.

'Black attendants were dishing up the food and pouring coffee, and I got in line, thinking that now things were going to work out. Then I heard a drawling Southern voice coming from one of the tables, saying, 'Waaall, the Collector's here. The coin collector.' I turned around. Dr. Withers was staring at me, exuding hatred from every bristling orange hair on his head. He too had been transferred to Ste. Nazaire. He leaned across the table and began to whisper to the doctor eating with him. It suddenly seemed that everyone in the canteen was look­ing at me. I put down my tray and left. Out on the street I bought a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a bottle of wine and went back to my cubicle. Later I went out for more wine. I felt absolutely flat and useless. I knew Withers would be spreading terrible stories about me. I wanted to get back to work in order to prove myself, but my orders did not begin for another five days. Until then, I did not exist except as a name — the wrong name — on a cubicle door.

'Drink is a sacrament, you know. Any drink is a sacrament, and alcohol loosens the ropes tying down the god within. I reread some pages of Le Dogme et Rituel, and saw more in them than I ever had before. Then I ripped off a long piece of paper, lettered 'Vendouris' on it and tacked it over 'Lt. Nightingale' on my door. After that I rooted around in my case for my cards and did lifts and passes and shuffles for a couple of hours. If I did not exist in the Army's eyes, that was the perfect place for magic to flourish — an official limbo. And for five days I drank wine and ate cheese and bread and soaked myself in the practice of magic. It was a rededication — was I not a man risen from the dead? A man with secret power in his fingers? It was perhaps the most intense period of my life, and by the time it was over I knew that medicine was only a byroad for me, and that magic was the highway. I must have read Levi's book three times straight through, turning the pages with Vendouris' fingers, reading the type with Vendouris' eyes.

'On the sixth day I showered and changed my clothes and reported to the hospital. The major in charge of the administration admitted me and looked me over, knowing that I was crazy. He hated to be stuck with a mental case, if that was what I was, but no one had told him that I couldn't doctor with the best man on his staff. He said, 'I understand that you no longer acknowledge the name Charles Nightingale, Lieutenant.' All he wanted was for me to get out of his office and get to work, where my craziness would not be flaunted in his face. I said, 'That is correct, Major. But to avoid trouble until this matter is corrected, I have no objections if the staff want to address me as Dr. Collector.' He blinked. 'This is a nickname,' I explained. Of course by then he had heard it from Withers. 'Call yourself what you like, Lieutenant. Your performance records are excellent. I just don't want any trouble.'

'I could see his aura as I spoke to him. It was dirty, inflamed. He was a coward, an unhealthy man. Not like you two boys. You have wonderful healthy auras. Can you see mine?'

The red sun split into a brilliant haze behind the magician's head: Tom could look at Collins only by squinting. Glowing redness swam about him. 'Yes,' Del said beside him. Spears of blackness shot through the red.

'A month later, I met a remarkable man, whose aura was rainbowlike and seemed to blaze.' Collins let this picture hang in the air before them a moment, then continued his story.

'There was a great deal of initial suspicion about me, but my behavior in the operating theater gradually put it to rest. It was a slightly more relaxed version of Hospital 84 — most of the time we had morphia, and we did not actually have to tie up the wounds with bootlaces and fishing wire. But it was working nine or ten hours all day in the stink of blood, with the screams of the poor injured devils all about us. I knew that I was stronger than I had ever been in my life; I felt the beginnings of that power which I had always known would be within me, as fixed and steely as the light from a star. On the one morning a week I had off, I went through the bookstores which had survived the shelling and found French translations of the writings of Fludd and Campanella, the famous sixteenth-century magicians, and Mather's translation of The Key of Solomon. Even in the midst of the bloody, harried work of patching up soldiers so they could return to the trenches to be killed, I felt the strength of my other craft. I liked being called Dr. Collector. Eventually only With­ers distrusted me — he still imagined that I had stolen his money at the card table, and he refused to work next to me or to eat at the same bench.

'Of course I had eventually begun to remember my own past, including the moment when I had shot Vendouris. To that extent the colonel's therapy had been successful. But I was the Collector: I had collected Vendouris, or he had collected me, and I kept his name on the door of my cubicle. It seemed to me that a portion of his soul had entered mine, and was a part of that which gave me strength.

'And the day after I remembered putting my merciful buliet into my dying fellow doctor and felt my repressed personality returning to me, I was sewing up a private named Tayler from Fall Ridge, Arkansas, after removing a bullet from his lung. To work on the lungs, you cut the ribs away from the breastbone and peel them back like a door to the chest cavity. I had the bullet out, along with a third of Tayler's lung, which had become nearly gan­grenous with infection. I thought he had a fair chance for survival — these days, it would be a very good chance. It was in no way an exceptional operation, in fact I think it was my third like it of the week. But Tayler died while I was suturing him up. I felt his life stopping: as though I'd heard the sudden cessation of an unobtrusive noise, heard the absence of a sound. Then, though I had paid no attention to his aura before, since I never did when I was operating, I saw his go black and murky. Just then a great white bird flapped up out of his chest: a great white bird like the one I had seen in the field of dead men. It flew up without making a sound; the others looked but did not see. The owl sailed out through the closed window, and I knew it was going toward the man who had aimed the bullet at little Tayler.

'The day after that, I healed a man with my fingers alone.

'He was a black man, an American Negro named Washford. Negroes served in the 92nd Division, under their own officers; they were rigidly segregated. In the normal course of things, the only ones we saw were working as valets or kitchen help or orderlies in the hospital. They had their own meeting places, their own girls, their own social life, which was closed off to the rest of us. Well, Washford had caught a round in his ribs, and the bullet had traveled around inside him for a while, generally messing up his giblets.

'When the attendant wheeled him in, Withers had just finished with his last patient, and the man took Washford to his table. Withers turned away without looking, bathed his hands in the sink, and then came back to the table. He froze. 'I won't work on this man,' he said. 'I am not a veterinarian.' He was from Georgia, remember, and this was 1917 — it does not excuse him, but it helps to explain him. His nurses looked at me, and the other doctors momentarily stopped their work. Washford was in danger of bleeding to death through his bandages while we decided how to handle Withers' defection. 'I'll exchange patients with you,' I finally said, and Withers stepped away from his table and came toward mine.

''I don't care if you kill that one, Collector,' he said. 'But you'll be disappointed — he has no pockets.'

'I ignored him and went to Washford and pulled away the soaked bandages. The nurse put the ether pad over his nose and mouth. I cut into him and began to look around. I removed the bullet and began repairing the damage. Then I felt a change come over my whole body: I felt as light as if I had taken the ether. My mind began to buzz. My hands tingled. I trembled, knowing what I could do, and the nurse saw my hands shake and looked at me as if she thought I was drunk. My drinking was well known, but really all of us drank all the time. But it was not alcohol, it was the smack of knowledge hitting me like a truck: I could heal him. I put down the instruments and ran my fingers along the torn blood vessels. Radiance — invisible radiance — streamed from me. The mess the bullet had caused as it plunged from lung to liver to spleen closed itself — all of that torn flesh and damaged tissue; it grew pink and restored, virginal, as you might call it. The nurse backed away, making little noises under her mask. I was on fire. My mind was leaping. I jerked out the retractors and ran my first two fingers over the incision and zipped him up, welded his skin together in a smooth pinkish-brown line. Withers' nurse ripped off her mask and ran out of the theater.

''Take him out,' I said to the astonished attendant, who had been half-dozing at the back of the room: he had seen the nurse run out, but nothing of the operation. Washford went one way, I went another — I was floating. I came out into the big tiled hallway outside the theater. The nurse saw me and backed away. I started to laugh, and realized I was still wearing my mask. I removed it and sat on a bench. 'Don't be afraid,' I said to the nurse.

''Holy mother of Jesus,' she said. She was Irish.

'That miraculous power was ebbing from me. I held my hands up before my face. They looked skinned, in the tight surgical gloves.

''Holy mother of Jesus,' the nurse repeated. Her face was turning from white to lobster pink.

''Forget about it,' I said. 'Forget what you saw.'

'She scampered back inside the theater. I still could not comprehend what had just happened to me. It was as though I had been raised up to a great eminence and been shown all the things of this world and been told: 'You may have what you like.' For a second I felt my blood pressure charge upward, and my head swam.

'Then everything gradually returned to normal. I could stand. I went back inside the theater, where Withers was just finishing with the boy on my table. He looked at me in disgust, finished his sutures, and returned to his own table. I did five more operations that day, and never felt the approach of that power which had healed Washford.'

The magician looked up. 'Night.' Tom, surprised, saw the lamps burning in the woods; lights on the beach pushed his shadow toward the lake. 'Time to go to bed. Tomorrow I will tell you about my meeting with Speckle John and what happened after the war.'

'Bedtime?' Del said. 'What happened to . . . ?'

Both boys simultaneously saw the crushed sandwich wrappers, the paper plates laden with crumbs.

'Oh, yes, you have eaten,' Collins said. His face was serene and tired.

'We've only been here . . . ' Tom looked at his watch, which said eleven o'clock. 'An hour.'

'You have been here all day. I will see you here tomorrow at the same time.' He stood up, and they dazedly imitated him. 'But know this. William Vendouris, whose name I had taken for a time, put a hurtin' on me. Without Vendouris, perhaps I would have re­mained an amateur magician, locked out and away from everything I wished most to find.'

5

Tom and Del climbed the rickety steps by themselves. Their minds and bodies told them it was late morning, but the world said it was night: the thick foliage on the bank melted together into a single vibrant breathing mass. They reached the top and stood in the pale, yellowish electrical light, looking down. Coleman Collins was stand­ing on the beach, looking out at the lake.

'Did you know he used to be a doctor?' Tom asked.

'No. But it explains why he didn't send for one when I broke my leg that time. The whole story explains that.' Del put his hands in his pockets and grinned. 'If I started to heal wrong or anything, he would have fixed me like he did with that colored man.'

'I guess,' Tom said moodily. 'Yeah, I guess so.' He was watching Collins: the magician had extended one arm into the air, as if signaling to someone on the other side of the lake. After a moment the arm went down and Collins began to stroll along the beach in the direction of the boathouse. 'Could we really have been down there all day?'

Del nodded. 'I was sort of hoping I'd see her today. But the whole day vanished.'

'Well, that's just it,' Tom said. 'It vanished. It was ten in the morning, about an hour went by, and now it's eleven at night. He stole thirteen hours away from us.'

Del looked at him, uncertain as a puppy.

'What I mean is, what's to stop him from taking a week away from us? Or a month? What does he do, put us to sleep?'

'I don't think so,' Del said. 'I think everything just sort of speeds up around us.'

'That doesn't make sense.'

'It doesn't make sense to say that you met the Brothers Grimm, either.' Del's tone was wistful, but his face momentarily turned bitter, 'I should have.'

'Well, I never met Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe.'

'Uncle Cole said I had to watch out for your jealousy,' Del blurted out. 'I mean . . . he just said that once when we were alone. He said that one day it would hit you, and you would want Shadowland for yourself.'

Tom fought down the impulse to tell exactly what Collins had said about his nephew. 'That's crazy. He wants to break up our friendship.'

'No, he doesn't.' Del was adamant. 'He just said — '

'That I'd be jealous. Okay.' Tom was reflecting that Collins had after all been right: though it was not Shadowland that made him jealous, but Rose Armstrong. 'Tell you what. Do you really want to meet the Brothers Grimm?'

'Right now?' Del was suspicious.

'Right now.'

'Are you sure it's all right?'

'I'm not sure of anything. Maybe they're not even there.'

'Where?'

'You'll see.'

Del shrugged. 'Sure. I'd like to,'

'Come on, then.'

Del gave a worried look down at the beach: Collins had disappeared into the boat house. Then he followed Tom through the sliding doors into the living room.

'I guess we really ought to be in bed,' Del said a little nervously.

'You can go to bed if you want to.' Then he felt sorry for being so abrupt. 'Are you tired?'

'Not really.'

'Me neither. I think it's eleven-ten in the morning.'

This was said in defiance of all the physical evidence. All Shadowland seemed put to bed, even if the principal occupants were still out of theirs. One lamp burned beside a couch; the carpet showed the tracks of a vacuum cleaner. On the end tables, the ashtrays sparkled. Tom marched through the dim, quiet room, almost hoping to see Elena silently buffing the furniture.

'Upstairs?' Del asked.

'Nope.' Tom turned into the hall. One of the recessed lights gave a pumpkin-colored illumination.

'In the Little Theater?'

'Nope.' Tom stopped where the short hallway inter­sected the main hall to the theaters.

'Oh, no,' Del said. 'We can't.'

'I already did.'

'And he saw you?'

'He was waiting for me when I came out.'

'Was he mad?'

'I guess so. But nothing happened. You saw how he was today. Maybe he even forgot it. He was pretty drunk.

He wants us to see them, Del. That's why they're there.' 'Do they just sit there? Or can you talk to them?' 'They'll talk your ears off,' Tom said. 'Come on. I

want to ask them some questions.' He turned into the

short hallway and pulled open the heavy door.

6

'Our young visitor again, Jakob,' said the one with the seasoned, kindly face.

'And behind him, is there not another little Geist?' 'He has never been curious before, that one.' 'He has never had his brave brother's help before.' Both of them laid down their pens and looked in­quisitively at Tom, but Tom did nbt move forward. He was aware of Del stretching on tiptoe behind him, trying to see over his shoulder. Instead of the cluttered, cozy workroom in which he had seen them earlier, the two men in the frock coats and elaborate neckwear were sur­rounded by a more barren and purposeful but equally cluttered room. The walls were earthen, crumbling here and there; nails had been driven into the packed earth, and from the nails hung khaki jackets, peaked hats, and tin helmets. Complicated green-and-white maps hung on a wide board. A clumsy box with a crank and a headpiece sat on a trestle table which also supported rolled maps, bundles of paper tied with shoelaces, more military headgear, a fleece-lined jacket, and a kerosene lamp. Stark wooden chairs surrounded it. In this curious setting, the two men sat at their ornate desks. A soldier's room, was all that Tom could make of this. Staff room?

'Yes, little one,' said Wilhelm. 'They let us work here.'

'For our work goes on,' said Jakob, standing up and beckoning the two boys into the room.

Tom stepped forward and smelled the close loamy odor of earth; the trace of cigars. Del came alongside him. From far off, what could have been miles away, came the booming of big guns.

'And on and on. For the stories' sake.'

'Where are you supposed to be now?' asked Tom.

'Shadowland,' both brothers answered. 'It is always Shadowland.'

'I mean, France? Germany?'

'Things are getting dark,' said Jakob. 'We may have to move again, and take our work and our families with us. But still the stories continue.'

'Even though Europe is dying, brother.'

'The sparrows have given up their voices.'

'Their choice.'

Del was looking at the brothers with a rapt face. 'Are you always here?'

Wilhelm nodded. 'Always. We know you, boy.'

'I want to ask you something,' Tom said, and the brothers turned their faces, kindly and businesslike, to him. Outside, the shelling continued, far off and reso­nant.

'That is why you have found us,' said Jakob.

Tom hesitated. 'Do you know the expression 'put a hurtin' on' something?'

'It is not one of our expressions, but we know it,' said Jakob. His expression said: Follow this line, boy.

'Okay. Did Del's uncle put a hurtin' on that train? Did he make it crash?'

'Of course,' said Jakob. 'Aren't you a bright boy? He put a hurtin' on it — he made it crash. For the sake of the story in which you find yourself.'

Tom realized that he was trembling; two shells ex­ploded very near, and dust drifted off the earthen walls.

'I have one more question,' Tom said.

'Of course you do, child,' said Jakob. 'You want to know about the Collector.'

'That's right,' Tom said. 'Is the Collector Skeleton Ridpath?' He saw the other one, Wilhelm, suppress a smile.

'For the sake of your story,' said Jakob. 'For the sake of your story, he is.'

'Wait a second,' Del said. 'I don't understand. The Collector is Skeleton Ridpath? It's just a kind of a toy — kind of a joke — it's been here for years.'

'Anybody can be collected at any time,' said Wilhelm.

'But it's just a joke,' Del insisted. 'And I don't believe that my uncle caused that train to wreck. He wouldn't do a thing like that.'

Wilhelm asked, 'Do you know our story 'The Boy Who Could Not Shiver'? It too is a kind of a joke. But it is full of the most frightening things ever encountered. Many frightening things conceal jokes, and many jokes have ice in their hearts.'

Tom suddenly felt afraid. The men were so large, and most of the friendliness had faded from their faces.

'As for your second remark,' said Jakob, 'do the two of you know the mouse's song to the rabbit?'

They shook their heads.

'Listen.' The brothers moved together in front of their desks, crouched slightly at the knees, tilted back their heads and sang:

Way way way way down in the dump

I found a tin can and I found a sugar lump.

I ate the one and I kicked the other,

And I had a real good time.

Way way way way down in the dump . . .

The lights suddenly died: a half-second later came the boom of an enormous explosion. Tom felt dirt showering down on his head. The whole room shook, and he momentarily lost his balance. A pair of rough hands shoved at his chest, knocking him back into Del.

He smelled sausage, smoke, sour breath beneath brandy: someone was whispering in his ear. 'Did the mouse put a hurtin' on the sugar lump, boyo? Or did the mouse put a hurtin' on the rabbit?' The hands pressed him back. Del, stumbling behind him, kicked his shins. Rattling and banging: things were falling off the walls, the hails shredding out of the dirt. The hands, Jakob's or Wilhelm's, continued to push him back. The man's face must have been only inches from Tom's. 'Way way way way down in the dump, I found a little boy . . . and nobody ever saw either one of us again.'

Vacancy felt more than seen opened up before him: he heard a confusion of retreating footsteps.

'I'm getting out of here,' Del said, sounding panicky.

Then the door was open and he was backing through it. Tom reached for the knob, but Del caught his elbow: the door slammed shut.

'You crazy?' Del said. His face was as green as an army blanket.

'I wanted to see,' Tom said. 'That's what this is all about. For once, I wanted to see more than he wanted us to.'

'You can't fight him,' Del said. 'You're not supposed to.'

'Oh, Del.'

'Well, I don't want him to see us out here.'

Tom thought that he too did not want Collins to see him outside the door. Del already was lost: fright glinted in his eyes. 'All right. Let's go upstairs.'

'I don't need your permission.'

7

In the corridor outside their rooms, they looked out the big windows to see Coleman Collins just now reaching the top of the iron staircase. The lights pulled a long shadow out behind him on the flagstones.

'At least he was down there all the time,' Del said.

'He knew where we were. He set off the sound effects, didn't he?'

'Then it was a mistake to go into that room. And I'm sorry I did.' Del looked ferociously up at him, and Tom mentally braced himself for an attack. 'You used to be my best friend, but I think he was right about you. You're jealous. You want to get me in trouble with him.'

'No . . . ' Tom started to utter some general shocked denial, but his dismay was overwhelming. Coming so soon after the threat from one of the 'Brothers Grimm,' Del's assault left him wordless. 'Not now,' was all he managed to get out.

Del spun away from him. 'You sound like a girl.' When he reached the door, Del turned to glare at him again. 'And you act like you own this place. I should be showing you things, not the other way around.'

'Del,' Tom pleaded, and the smaller boy grimaced as if he had struck him.

'You want to know something, pal? Something I never told you? I guess you remember those times my uncle showed up in Arizona — at the football game and at Ventnor. Well, you wanted to know why I never talked about it with you.'

'Because he confused you,' Tom said, happy to be back on ground more or less solid. 'Because I didn't ask about him enough. And he was here, not there, and — '

'Shut up. Just shut up. I saw you with him, dummy. You were right next to him — you were walking along with him, like something that was going to happen. I saw you, damn you. Now I know why. You always wanted him for your own. And he was trying to show me what you're really like.' Del shook his balled fists at him, tears leaking out of the corners of his eyes, and disappeared inside his door. A second later Tom heard the slam of the sliding doors.

Glumly Tom went into his own room.

8

His dreams were instant, vivid, and worse than any that had appeared on the Carson School notice board. He was operating on a dead man in an impromptu theater, knowing that the man was dead but unable to admit it to the others around the table; he was supposed to be a surgeon, but he had no idea of what had killed the man or how to proceed. The instruments in his hands were impassively foreign. Way way way way down in his guts, whispered a nurse with blond hair and passive eyes. . . . Collected. Wasn't he? Wasn't he? Something stirred be­neath his bloody hands, and the head of a vulture popped up like a toy, clean and bald, from within the open chest cavity. Great wings stirred in the mire. 'I want to see,' Tom wailed to the nurse, knowing that above all, he did not want to see. . . .

Coleman Collins, wearing a red velvet smoking jacket, bent toward him. 'Come with me, my little boy, come along, come along . . . ' and Skeleton Ridpath, no age at all, leaned forward in a chair and watched with a vacant avid face. He held a glass owl in his hands and bled from the eyes . . .

and a black man with a square, serious, elegant magician's face was standing in a corridor of light, holding out a real owl with both hands. The owl's eyes beamed brilliantly toward him. Let him in, said the magician; let me in, commanded the owl. . . .

He stirred, finally aware that a voice at his door was saying, 'Let me in. Let me in.' He remembered, in an unhappy flash of memory, that the man holding the owl had been Bud Copeland.

'Please,' said the voice at the door.

'All right, all right,' Tom said. 'Who is it?'

'Please.'

Tom switched on his bedside light, stepped into his jeans, and pulled a shirt over his arms. He padded to the door and opened it.

Rose Armstrong was standing in the dark hall. 'I wanted to see you,' she said. 'This place is no good for you.'

'You're telling me,' Tom said, aware of his rumpled hair and bared chest. His face felt numb with sleep. Rose stepped around him and went into his room.

'Poor grumpy Tom,' she said. 'I want to get out of here, and I want you and Del to help me.'

9

Now Tom was fully awake: his nightmares blew away like fluff, and he was aware only of this pretty girl with her half-adult face standing before him in a yellow blouse and green skirt. The Carson colors, he dimly noted. 'I don't mean right away, because we couldn't,' she explained. 'But soon. As soon as we could. Would you help?'

'Would Del?' he asked. He knew the strongest reason for Del's refusal. 'I don't know much about Coleman Collins, but I bet if Del sneaked out of here, he'd never be able to come back:'

'Maybe he shouldn't ever want to come back. May I sit down?'

'Uh, yeah, sorry.' He watched her go to the chair and neatly sit, looking at him all the while: she was relieved, he saw — or was that just her face again, meaninglessly recording the expectation of rejection? Having this girl in his room made him nervous; she seemed far more poised than he. And she had spoken the idea which should have been his, which he had been too anchored in Shadowland to have — the simple idea of escape.

'I thought you said you owed Collins everything,' he said. He sat on the floor because there was nowhere else to sit but the bed.

'That's true, but he's changing too much. Everything's different this year. Because you're here, I think.'

'How is it different?'

She looked at her small hands. 'It used to be fun before. He wasn't drunk so often. He wasn't so angry and so . . . worked up. Now it's sort of like he lost control. He scares me. This summer, everything is so wild. It feels like a machine that's spinning around faster and faster, shoot­ing off sparks, smoking away — ready to blow up. At least that's how I feel.'

'What could I have to do with that?' He looked up at her as if she were an oracle: her shining knees, her glowing hair falling back from her high forehead. Even the way she spoke was full of little shocks for him, the clipped, slightly twangy Vermont accent. Suddenly his own voice seemed odd in his mouth, too slow and somehow dusty.

'I think he's jealous of you. He sees something in, you — something he says you're too young to see yourself. You could be better than he is. He wants to own you. He wants you to stay here forever. From the time Del first mentioned you, he started talking about you. I heard him talking about you lots of times last winter and spring. He was going on about you and Del all the time.'

She gave him a flat, unmeasured look that slid deeply within him, and he saw himself lifting a log with his mind alone, making it spin crazily, sickly, in midair. 'Really, I think you should get out of here. I'm not saying that just because I want you to help me.'

'Why do you need help?'

'Oh, because . . . ' She looked into his heart again, then tucked her hair back behind her ears. 'Do you think you could get off that ridiculous floor and sit here?' She looked toward the bed; back at him.

He moved as if ordered.

When he sat on the edge of the bed, her startling face was only a foot from him. Her eyes, permanently wide and flecked with pale blue and gold and green, drew him in. 'I need help because I'm scared. It's those men — you mentioned them that first time, in Del's room.'

'Are they bothering you?'

'They might. They could. They wouldn't mind a bit. You know what they're like. They're animals. Mr. Collins used to watch them, but this summer they sort of run free. They have work to do — for him, you know — but I'm afraid that when they have a couple of days free . . . ' She nervously tucked back her hair again. 'They know where I'm staying. They drink a lot, too, and Mr. Collins didn't used to let them do that. I never liked them. But before, I was little. I was a little girl.' She let the implication state itself.

'Why don't you just go?'

'I think someone always knows where I am. I can just sneak out sometimes and swim across the lake. They don't mind if I swim. Today I had to buy some things in town, so they let me go. They know I talk to Del sometimes. They don't mind that either. They laugh about it.' Her face went smooth and hard and inward for a moment. 'I hate them. I really do hate them. If Mr. Collins was the way he usually is, it would be okay, but . . . ' The sentence died. 'And I wanted to tell you what I was thinking. Do you want to leave here?'

'I'd have to trust you,' Tom said.

'Why? Oh. You mean, maybe it's a trick?'

Tom nodded. 'Everything's a trick, here.'

'Well, do you trust me? What can I say to make you feel that . . . ?' She blushed. 'Tom, I'm all alone. I like you. I want to know you better. I'm happy you came this summer. I just think that we can help each other.'

'I guess I can trust you,' Tom said. In truth, it was not possible for him not to trust her.

She smiled. 'It would be terrible if you didn't. I want to help, Tom. I want to help us.'

Us. The word seemed to fall toward his heart, along with the darting half-bold, half-sly glances into his eyes.

'Del thinks a lot of you,' he said.

'I think a lot of Del.' The sentence put Del at a cliche's distance from her.

'I mean, he cares about you.'

'Del is really a little boy,' Rose said, looking straight at him, and Tom felt the moral universe shift about him, expanding too quickly for him to keep track of it. 'Physically he is a little boy. Mentally he has a lot of sophistication because of the way he was brought up, but actually you are a lot older than Del is. That was the first thing. I noticed when I met you. Besides that, you were so grumpy.'

'Grumpy? I was nervous as a puppy!'

She laughed; then, with her face turned fully toward him, she took his hand and leaned forward. She was blushing. 'Tom, my life has been so funny. . . . I'm asking you to rescue me, I guess — and that sounds so dumb, like a princess in a story. I hardly even know you, but I feel like we're close already. . . . You're going to have to talk Del into leaving his uncle, and it'll break his heart. . . . ' She leaned an inch closer, and in front of Tom her face filled the room, large and enigmatic and beautiful as a model's face on a billboard. When their lips met, Tom's whole being seemed concentrated in the few centimeters of skin that touched her mouth. By instinct but awkwardly he put his arms around her.

She pulled back. 'You won't believe me, but the first time I saw you, I wanted to kiss you.'

'I thought you and Del — '

'Del is a little boy,' she repeated, and they kissed again. 'We can meet outside sometimes. I'll tell you how. I'll arrange it. And I already know when we can escape. Mr. Collins is planning some big show — some big thing — in a little while. If you and Del will help, we can all get away then.'

'But where can we go?'

'Into the village. From there, we can go anywhere. But we'd be safe in Hilly Vale.'

'I have to get a letter out.'

'Give it to Elena. She's the only one who goes to the village regularly. I think she'll mail it for you.' Rose stood up and smoothed out her skirt. She looked tense and slightly drawn. 'But be careful. And don't pay attention to anything you see me doing — I'm only doing it because I have to. Because he's making me do it. Just wait until you hear from me. Promise?'

'Promise.'

'And do you trust me?'

'Yes. I do.'

'We have to trust each other from now on.'

Tom nodded, and she flickered a tentative smile at him and slipped away out the door.

A minute later he stood on the balcony outside in the warm fragrant air. He watched her disappearing into the woods down beside the lake, and stayed on the balcony until he saw her entering one of the circles of light. She turned and waved; he waved back at her slight, deter­mined-looking figure.

10

After that he could not fall asleep again. He kept remembering her face swimming up before him, becom­ing more certain and beautiful the closer it came. That she had allowed him to kiss her was a blessing: it had not at all been like kissing Jenny Oliver or Diane Darling. Rose Armstrong was beyond his experience in a thousand incalculable ways. The unknown surrounded her, cast all of her words and gestures into relief — that yearning brooding uncertain beautiful face looming up before him, claiming him, not as much asking for trust as demanding it, had in some way been the essence of Shadowland. Certainly it was as unexpected as everything at Shadowland; as dreamlike, too, in its suddenness. And Rose Armstrong was much better at kissing than his earlier girlfriends. That, the sharp responsive physicality of her mouth, was anything but dreamlike. He lay in his narrow bed, wondering. What was she promising him? Del is just a little boy. He could not bear to think of Rose Armstrong in the company of Mr. Peet's brutes, but his mind perversely would not leave these pictures be: as soon as he closed his eyes, he saw Seed or Thorn pushing toward her, all belly and beard. Then he saw her as he had with Del, pulsing through the dark water.

After half an hour he threw back his sheets and got up. He felt impatient, constrained by the room. With nothing else to do, he decided to write to his mother. Sheets of paper and envelopes were just under the flap of the desk. Still in his underwear, he sat and wrote.

Dear Mom,

I miss you lots. I miss Dad too, just like he was still alive and pretty soon I could go home and see him again. I guess I'll feel like that for a long time.

Del and I arrived safely, but the train before ours had a bad wreck. This is the strangest place anybody could be. Del's uncle is such a good magician that he can really mess up your mind. He keeps saying that I could be a good magician too, but I don't want to be like him.

I want to come home. It's not just homesickness. Honest. If I can get us out of this place, could you arrange to be back home? I guess I won't be able to get a letter back from you for about two weeks, but could you please . . .

That was no good. He balled it up and threw it in the wastebasket.

Dear Mom,

I'll explain later, but Del and I have to get out of this house. Can you possibly cut your trip short and come back sooner than you planned? Send me a telegram. This is urgent. I'm not joking, and I'm not just homesick.

Love,

Tom

This he folded into an envelope, wrote the address of the London hotel where Rachel Flanagan was staying, printed 'airmail' and 'please forward' on it just in case, and put the envelope on top of the desk. He stared at it, knowing that it committed him to trying to get Del to leave Shadowland. Now he was truly the traitor the magician had said he was.

But he could be a magician without Coleman Collins, and so could Del. You didn't have to lock yourself up in a fortress and apprentice yourself to an alcoholic mad­man. . . . These thoughts bounced against an area in himself which he did not wish to acknowledge, but which was there all the same; part of him was fascinated by Shadowland, and intrigued by the powers Coleman Col­lins might be able to find in him. You are exactly the right age. . . . Two and a half months isn't long enough. This was still tempting: after seeing Collins at work, any career but that of magician seemed flat to him.

Tom dressed, knowing that he could not sleep. He put the envelope in his wallet, the wallet back in his hip pocket. For a time he paced around the austere room, knowing that there was something he had intended to do, something suggested by a comment made before Rose Armstrong had sent everything but herself out of his mind, but not remembering what it was.

He had wanted to look at something . . . That was as far as he got.

Tom flopped down in the chair — the chair where she had sat — and picked up his book. He willed himself into Nero Wolfe's round of the orchid room, the kitchen, and office, but read only ten pages before he gave up. That orderly, talkative adult world was not his. His stomach growled. He decided to go downstairs and see what was in the refrigerator. Collins had not forbidden him that.

He closed the door behind him and slipped down the hall. The magician's room was dark — what was it like in there, behind the swinging doors? As bleak as Tom's own room? Or would it look like Del's room at home, crowded with photographs and the apparatus of magic? He did not want to find out.

Down the stairs, around the corner in darkness into the long hall. Scattered ceiling lights dimly shone. This time he remembered to stop before the posters.

He was looking at one from the Gaiety Theater,' Dublin. A night of spectacle and enchantment, it said in ornate type. Halfway down the list of names Tom found herbie butter, the Amazing Mechanical Magician and Acrobat. Beneath that but in type of the same size was this line: Assisted by speckle john, master of black mystery. Beneath this, in slightly larger type: THRILL TO THEIR WIZARDRY, GASP AT THEIR OCCULT SKILLS. Far down the list of mainly Irish names Tom found' The Astounding Mr. Peet and the Wandering Boys-Music and Madness. Tom searched the ornate poster for a date and saw it near the top: 21 July, 1921.

The poster beside it was in French, and featured a drawing of a black-hatted magician emerging from a puff of smoke. Was that where Del had got the idea for the beginning of their own performance? monsieur herbie butter, l'orioinal. avec speckle john. This was dated 15 Mai, 1921.

Other posters were from London, Rome, Paris again, Bern, Florence. In some, Speckle John's name preceded Herbie Butter's. Mr. Peet and the Wandering Boys appeared on most of them. The dates of the performances spanned from 1919 to 1924. The last poster, from the Wood Green Empire in London, announced The Last Appearance on any Stage, by the Beloved Herbie Butter. Farewell Performance. Thrills, Surprises, and Frights Guaranteed. Here the illustration was of a smooth-faced young man in tails floating above an astonished audience, his arms out before him, his legs together like a man in the middle of a dive. Beneath the illustration was a line stating that Mr. Peet and the Wandering Boys would assist. With an appearance by the Collector. Feats of mentalism. Defiance of gravity. Fire. Ice. The astounding Collector! Invisibility! Wizardry Unparalleled-Feats never before attempted on the English Stage. A Magical Extravaganza. The date on the poster was 27 August, 1924.

Then someone was moving, a shape was coming from the living room out into the hall. Tom gasped and whirled around to face it.

The old woman, Elena, was glowering at him. In a flash, she had disappeared back into the living room.

'Elena!' Tom called. 'Please!' He ran down the hall and into the room. The woman was hovering by a couch, knotting her hands together before her. She looked very uneasy. Tom stopped running and held up his hands, palm out. 'Please,' he said. Her black eyes burrowed into him. 'Letter? Post office?'

She dropped her hands, but her face did not change. Tom pulled out his wallet and showed her the letter. 'Post office? Will you mail it for me?'

She glowered. Looked at the letter in his hands. 'Post office?'

'Si. Da. Yes. Please.'

Elena stabbed her forefinger toward the letter. 'Momma? You momma?'

He nodded. 'Please, Elena. Help me.'

'Is okay. Post office.' She snatched the envelope out of his hands and buried it somewhere in her apron. Then she went past him without another word.

So now it was settled. He had two weeks at the most before he and Del and Rose would have to leave Shadowland.

11

Tom turned on the kitchen lights. Both the stove and the refrigerator were outsize and made of stainless steel — restaurant equipment. And when he swung open the refrigerator's double doors, he saw piles of steaks, cooked hams, heads of lettuce, bags of tomatoes and cucumbers, gallon jars of mayonnaise, rolled roasts of beef — as much food as he had ever seen in one place. All this, for one man and his housekeeper? And a restaurant range to cook it on? Of course — it was for Mr. Peet and the Wandering Boys as well as Collins and Elena. Tom searched the drawers for a knife, found a long bone-handled carving blade, and cut a section of ham away from the bone.

Chewing, he remembered what he had wanted to do, and the thought nearly made the ham stick in his throat. Because of what the 'Brothers Grimm' had said, he had decided to take another look at the Collector in the bathroom mirror.

For the sake of your story, he is.

Del had said the face just came forward until it was near your own, and then retreated. It was a grisly joke, a Shadowland joke. All he wanted to do was to see how closely the horrible face actually resembled Skeleton Ridpath's. That was all he wanted, but it still scared him.

Tom left the kitchen and walked slowly back down the hall to the bathroom door. He jittered there a moment, now thinking that the idea of inspecting Coleman Collins' macabre joke was silly.

Not really, he thought. Because it would be better to find that the Collector did not look any more like Skeleton Ridpath than Snail or Root did — that way, he could get rid of the feeling that he and Del were still in some awful way linked to Skeleton Ridpath: that gradua­tion had not taken Skeleton out of their lives.

But of course it did, he thought, putting his hand on the doorknob. He's gone for good. Then Tom remembered the day, years before, when an eighth-grade Skeleton had knocked him down in the Junior School playground; and knocked him down again; and then flurried his sharp fists and shredded his lip. Dirty little Irish nigger, dirty little Irish nigger: spitting that out mindlessly, his eyes showing that his brain had switched off absolutely. Skeleton had struck his face and slobbered with glee, and struck his face again, making his nose bleed. Tom had fought back, but Skeleton was three years older; he had never got close enough to land a blow, and Skeleton kept chipping away at his face. It might have gone on until the end of recess if one of the teachers had not pulled Skeleton away and sent him home.

The humiliation had been worse than the pain. The pain went away, but Skeleton Ridpath returned to school and the playground, a spindly, snaky eighth-grader who had only to look at Tom to tyrannize him. Long before Del's arrival at Carson, Tom had felt hounded by the coach's son. Tackling him, bringing him down hard again and again in the practice game between the varsity and the junior varsity, had helped him face down Skeleton during all the trouble with Del.

All right. He swallowed, reminded himself that it was just a joke and that Del had seen it a hundred times, and opened the door. He flicked the lights. His own face looked worriedly back at him from the mirror. The button, the one that brought the Collector, was just beside the light switch. It just comes up close and then melts back down into the mirror. He took a breath and pushed the button.

The yellow light instantly turned purple. That other face swam up from the mirror like something hidden hi his own face. For a second, his own features obscured it. He knew in his stomach that he had made a mistake.

Then the avid, greedy face jumped into life. Purple, with distorted mouth and dead skin and flabby smudges under its eyes. Tom groaned, all but quailed back against the wall. It was Skeleton Ridpath's face, and no other: Skeleton blowtorched down to painful essence, skinned of whatever was human and pitying in him. Skeleton grinned at him and crawled forward.

Tom's knees turned to rubber. The figure was lifting its hands. Mirror image, Tom thought with weird rationality. Now the entire trunk was protruding out of the mirror, leaning toward him.

Tom backed away, in his panic forgetting all about the button. Skeleton's face was alight. He was holding himself up on the edge of the mirror, taking his weight on his arms in order to get his knee on the silver frame.

'Go back,' Tom whispered.

Skeleton's knee appeared on the lip of the mirror. He opened his mouth in a wordless shout of rapture, and pushed his leg through the mirror.

'No,' said Tom, barely able to get the word out.

The awful face homed in on the sound of his voice; the distorted mouth began to drool. The Collector was blind. He grinned, showing purplish blackness instead of teeth. Balanced on the sink, he soundlessly dropped his feet to the floor.

Tom bumped into the door, moving sideways, then realized what the door meant. He opened it a crack, the Collector's face scanning brightly toward him, and jumped through the opening. He slammed the door shut and heard Skeleton's feet shuffle on the floor.

Bracing himself, Tom pushed in with all his strength: in an instant, the world had flipped inside-out and turned his mind to jelly. He felt a gentle push from the inside, then a harder push that nearly moved him. Tom laid his cheek against the wood and got his shoulder to the door. He heard himself making little whistling noises in his throat. Keeping the door closed was all he could think of. The next push wobbled him, but his feet held. When Skeleton came back for another attempt to escape the bathroom, he battered the door open an inch and a half before Tom was able to jam it shut again.

He saw himself standing there all night, bottling Skel­eton up inside the bathroom.

The fifth blow knocked him back off his feet — he went sprawling in the corridor, and the door banged open. The Collector stood on the threshold, arms dangling, his face swiveling avidly from side to side. He wore the ancient black suit of the mural, and it too shone a faint purple. He shuffled forward.

Tom scuttled backward and got to his feet, making enough noise for the figure to focus directly on him. The Collector's face split open in a grin of empty radiance. 'Great play,' he whispered in a voice a shadow of Skeleton's.

He stumbled forward. 'I told you to stay away from that piano. Take off that fairy shirt. I want to see some skin.'

Tom ran.

'Flanagini! Flanagini! FLAAAAANAGINNNIII!'

Panting, Tom wheeled around the corner into the living room. Hide behind a couch? Behind a curtain? He could barely think: pictures of hiding places too small for him rattled through his mind. From Rose Armstrong to this . . . thing, as though a line were drawn between them.

Why, sure, Tom thought with bright panic: Rose wanted out of Shadowland, Skeleton wanted out of the mirror. Simple.

'I saw your owl, Vendouris,' whispered a voice behind him. 'You are mine.'

Tom spun around and saw purple Skeleton skimming toward him. He uttered a squeak and dodged to the side. Skeleton snaked out an arm and dug his fingers into his shoulder. The thin fingers burned through Tom's shirt like ice. 'Dirty little Irish nigger!' Tom banged the side of his fist against Skeleton's unheeding head, twisted in frantic disgust to the side, and lost his balance. Skeleton lurched nearer, Tom swung and hit a rock-hard chest, and when Tom twisted again, he brought both of them down onto the flowered couch.

'Great play,' the Collector whispered. 'I want to see some skin.' The icy hands found Tom's neck.

Tom was looking up at the inhuman face — the pouches under the empty eyes were black. A foul, dusty, spider-webby smell soaked into him. Lying atop him, Skeleton felt like a bag of twigs, but his hands squeezed like a vise.

'Dirty little . . . '

Then sudden brightness stung his eyes; the frozen hands fell away from him. He scrambled to his feet, flailing out, and saw only the sliding doors and the lighted woods where Skeleton should have been. The emptiness before him momentarily felt as charged as a vacuum; then ordinariness rushed into it.

Coleman Collins, in a dark blue dressing gown and paler blue pajamas, limped into the room. 'I pushed the button, little idiot,' said the magician. 'Do not begin things when you will get too flustered to remember how to finish them.' He turned to go, then faced Tom again. 'But you just proved your greatness as a magician, if you are interested. You made that happen. And one thing more. I saved your life-saved it from the consequences of your own abilities. Remember that.' He measured Tom with a glance, and was gone.

12

Tom wobbled back out into the hall. Collins had vanished into one of the theaters or up the stairs to his bedroom. The house was silent again. Tom glanced in the direction of the hall bathroom, involuntarily trembled, and moved to the staircase. Up there he saw the dim pumpkin color — the single light that burned most of the night was still on. He went slowly up the stairs; near the top, he took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face. Then, so tired he thought he would collapse on the stairs, he forced himself to the landing.

In a dark blue dressing gown like his uncle's, Del stood in the murky hall outside his bedroom door. He was looking rigidly out the window.

'Shhh!' Del commanded. 'It's Rose.'

Tom joined him, and Del moved a few inches away. When Tom looked down, his heart moved.

Rose Armstrong stood in the nearest pool of light, so near the house she was almost on the beach. Dirty rags covered her body; her hair blazed in the light. Nailed to a tree, crucified, hung the pale gray head of a horse. Two masked figures hovered at the edge of the light: a barrel of a man wearing a pale aristocratic young man's face, and a small woman with the hooked, sneering mask of a witch. Golden robes shone around both of them. Mr. Peet and Elena? Tom at first thought the horse's head was stuffed or plaster of paris, but after a second he saw lines of blood and gore rivering down the bark. 'Oh, God,' he said. He remembered the faint image of a gray horse in the darkness as Collins turned into his domain on the first night; the gray horse that had plunged through the snow, bringing him toward a burning school. Insects had sum­moned themselves to the edges of the wound, lifting and settling in little clouds. Rose pleadingly lifted her joined hands. The light above her suddenly died, and the two boys were staring at their own images in the window.

'Falada,' Del said. 'The Goose Girl. Remember?'

Oh, poor princess in despair,

if your dear mother knew,

her heart would break in two.

'Magic, Tom. This is what I live for. I'm on the side of that — I'm on the side of what we saw out there. I don't care what you get up to when you go slinking around at night, because I'm not on your side anymore. Remember that.'

'We're all on the same side,' Tom said quietly. Del gave him an impatient, disgusted look and went back into his room.

PART THREE

'When We All Lived in the Forest. . . '

'Man is made in the image of God' and it has often been sardonically observed that'God is made in the image of man.' Both statements are accepted as true in magic.

Richard Cavendish, The Black Arts

ONE

The Welcome

The next day, if it was the next day, Del treated me like the Enemy, Satan himself come to destroy all his earthly arrangements. He began by eating alone in his room — I supposed he had gotten the same note I did on my tray, asking me to be at a certain point in the woods at nine in the morning. And sure enough, when I showed up, there he was. He wouldn't say hello; he couldn't even look at me any more than to let me know that our friendship was over. I felt struck by lightning, half-dead with guilt. Somehow Rose had managed to slip a second sheet of paper under my plate, asking me to be on the beach at ten that night. . . .

1

The designated spot was about half a mile from the house, near the hollow where Tom had seen Mr. Peet and the Wandering Boys at work on the first night. His directions had told him to start at the left of the beach and go straight ahead to the sixth light. The journey was much easier by day than it had been at night. When he reached the light he sat down on the grass and waited for whatever was going to happen. The note from Rose Armstrong, folded next to his skin inside his shirt, rustled and scratched — he was grateful every time he felt it dig at him. He could not have destroyed Rose's note: he wanted to pull it out and read it over again every few minutes. Dear One: Beach near boat house, ten tonight. Love, R. Dear One! Love! He wished he could obliterate all the time between morning and night, and see Rose slipping out of the water to meet him. He wanted to ask her about the previous night's scene; he had a lot of questions about that: but far more than asking her questions, he wanted to put his arms around her.

Del came slouching into the little clearing five minutes later, in a starched blue shirt and jeans pressed to a sharp crease. Elena's work. A few burs clung to his cuffs, and after Del had glanced at Tom and dismissed him, he sat down to pick them off.

'How are you?' Tom asked.

Del lowered his head and twisted a cuff around to find a bur. He looked rested but tense: as though even the seams of his underwear were aligned. Comb marks furrowed his thick black hair.

'We have to talk to each other,' Tom said.

Del tossed away the last bur, brushed at his cuffs with both hands, looked back toward the house.

'Aren't you even going to look at me?'

Without turning his head, Del said, 'I think there's a dead rat somewhere around here.'

'Well, I have to talk to you.'.

'I think the dead rat should just go home if he doesn't like it here.'

That shut Tom up — it was too close to what he had been intending to say. They sat there in silence and heat, neither looking at the other. Coleman Collins startled them both by limping noiselessly into the clearing from deeper in the woods. He wore a slim black suit, a red shirt, gleaming black pumps, and looked as if he had just left the stage after a particularly brilliant performance.

'Gather round, children. Today we learn many things. Today we have a son et lumiere. This is the second part of the story known as 'The Death of Love' — and I will require your close attention.'

He smiled at them, but Tom could not smile back. The magician tilted his head, winked, and somehow produced a high black stool from the air; he sat. 'Do I sense a little tension in the atmosphere? That is not inappropriate. If the first part of my unburdening could be subtitled 'The Healer Healed,' this part might be called 'The Undoing of the King of the Cats.''

Collins propped his leg on a rung of the stool, looked up at a hawk cruising overhead, and said, 'Rumors about my unorthodox surgical techniques on Corporal Washford had begun to circulate among the Negro soldiers.

2

'And I was not sure I welcomed that. The power I have spoken of to you marvelous boys was growing within me, but I had as yet no idea of its dimensions nor of its ultimate role in my life, and I had the impulse to nurture it in secret for a time. Even if I could have repeated my performance on Washford with some other poor devil, I do not think I would have — I wanted first to adjust to having done it once, and to refine my skills in situations where I was not under such intense observation. As you will see, I did not yet understand the nature of the gift, and I did not know how fiercely it would demand expression. And of course I thought I was alone. I was that ignorant. That there was a tradition, that there were many others, an entire society existing in the world's shadowy pockets and taught by one great hidden body of knowledge I had only barely skirted with my Levi and Cornelius Agrippa, of all that I knew nothing. I was like a child who draws a map of the stars and thinks he has invented astronomy. When the Negroes who worked in the canteen and dispensary began to look at me in an odd, attentive way, what I felt was unease. I knew they had begun to talk. Maybe it was Washford himself — more likely it was the attendant in our operating theater — but however it had started, it was unwelcome.

'I have told you that the Negro Division had a life absolutely separate from ours — they fought nobly, many of them were heroic, but for most of us whites they were invisible. Unless one of us wandered into their off-hours clubs, where (or so I heard) it became evident that their off-duty lives were rather richer than ours. Many French­women were said to find the Negroes attractive — probably they just treated them like men, without regard to color. Some of those off-duty places were legendary, much as the Negro nightclubs became legendary in Paris right after the war. The difference was that a place like Bricktop's was heavily patronized by whites, while during the war, at least where I was, it was a rare white who dipped into the world of the Negro American soldier. The closest I ever got to it was one of my bookstore stops, when I browsed in a shop in an area where colored soldiers were billeted.

'I had been visiting this shop, Librairie Du Prey, for several weeks, and finally — after the Washford incident — I began to notice that another customer, a colored private, often appeared there when I did. I never saw him buy a book. Neither did I ever precisely catch him watching me, but I felt observed.

'A few days later, this same man appeared in the canteen. It took me a few moments to recognize him, since his uniform shirt was covered by a busboy's jacket, a garment which makes all men identical twins. He was picking trays up off the tables, and I tried to catch his eye, but he merely scowled at me.

'The next time I went to the Librairie Du Prey, another black soldier was browsing over the tables. He scrutinized me much more openly than the first man had, and when I had given him a good look in return, I was stopped dead in my tracks. He was a magician. I knew it. He was a noncom, a stranger, and foreign to me in a thousand ways: but when I looked at him I knew he was my brother and he knew that I knew. I wish for you boys a moment in your lives as wild with excitement — as wild with possibility — as that moment was for me. The man turned away and left the shop, and I could barely keep myself from running out and following him.

'The next afternoon in the hospital canteen, one of the messboys slipped a note into my jacket as I walked out. I had been anticipating some such thing all day, I knew it was connected to the magician I had seen in the book­store, and I took it out and read it as soon as I was out the door. Be in front of the bookstore at nine tonight — that was all it said, all I needed. I washed up and went back to the operating theater in a mood of feverish anticipation. It was coming, whatever it was, and I wanted to meet it head-on. If it was my destiny, I no longer dithered and fought. I wanted that door to open.

3

'At nine sharp I was in front of that bookstore. I felt very exposed — I was the only white man in sight. In a closed-up shop down the street, someone was playing the banjo. It made a hot, vibrant, electrical sound. The night was humid and warm. The Negro soldiers who walked by looked at me with a kind of aggressive, aimless curiosity, and I sensed that one or two of them only just decided not to make trouble for me because of my rank. If I had been a drunken private with a week's scrip in my pocket . . . I remember feeling the metaphoric aptness of my situation: surrounded by the unknown, on the point of really entering the unknown.

'At nine-fifteen a Negro soldier came striding past, looked at me and nodded, and kept walking. It took me a second to realize what I was supposed to do. He was nearly to the corner by the time I started to follow him. When I got to the corner, I saw him disappearing around another sharp corner ahead of me.

'He led me up and down, around and around — a few times I thought I had lost him, those streets were so narrow and twisting, and all around me the sounds of dark voices, men singing or laughing or muttering to me as I passed, but I always managed to catch a glimpse of his boots at the last minute. Of course I was lost. I did not at all know that section of Ste. Nazaire, and I recognized none of the street names. He had led me into the colored red-light district, and even a lieutenant was not safe there after dark.

'Finally I rounded a corner, by now out of breath, and a huge colored man in uniform stepped in front of me and pushed me against the brick wall. 'You the doctor? You the Collector?' he said. His accent was very Southern.

'Thass him, thass him,' said another man I could not see. 'Inside.'

'The giant astonished me by giggling and saying some­thing I could not decipher — Heez gon gew haid sumphum. Then opened a door in the brick and bundled me inside.

'It was a barren, sweat-smelling room. The magician I had seen in the bookstore was standing before one of the gray walls, wearing a battered uniform bearing his corpo­ral stripes but no other identification. A man I thought was the messboy peeked in, looked at me with huge eyes, and slammed the door. The magician said, 'Lieutenant Nightingale? Known as the Collector?'

''I know what you are,' I said.

''You think you do,' he said. 'You operated on a soldier named Washford?'

''I wouldn't call it operating,' I said.

' 'Another doctor refused to attend to him because of his race, and you volunteered to do the job?'

'To do the job — he was not a country boy like the others, he had city stamped all over him, someplace tough, someplace like Chicago.

'I agreed.

''Tell me how you healed Washford,' he said. And I could see the iron in him again.

'I held up my hands for answer. I said, 'You fellows have been eyeing me ever since it happened.'

' 'You have never heard of the Order? Never heard tell of the Book?'

''What I know is in these hands,' I said.

''Wait here,' he said, and slipped out through the door. A moment later he reappeared, and nodded at me to follow him. I did. And I walked straight into Shadowland, which had been there all along, right under the surface of things, dogging me ever since I had set foot in Europe.

'The corporal gave me a glittering professional smile just as I was passing through the door, and it startled me, because it was the smile you give a target just before you pull the ace of spades out of his ear.

'I was going through an interior door, and expected to go into another room, but when I stepped through, I was in a sunny field — a mustard field. I turned around, and the house was gone. All of Ste. Nazaire was gone. I was out in the country, in the middle of a mustard field, those yellow blossoms under my feet, on a gentle hill.

'I whirled around, and before me a man was seated in a high, hand-carved wooden chair with carved owls' heads on the armrests and talons carved into its feet. He was colored, handsome, younger than I, with a smooth, regular face. He looked like a king in that Chair, which was the general idea. He had just appeared out of nowhere. He wore an old uniform with no markings on it at all. This man who had conjured me out of the slum in Ste. Nazaire and conjured himself out of nowhere knit his fingers together and looked at me in a kindly, intense, questioning way. I could feel his power: and then I saw his aura. That is, he allowed me to see it. It nearly blinded me — colors shot out and glowed, each of them brighter than the mustard flowers. I almost fell on my knees. For I knew what he was, and what he could do for me. I was twenty-seven and he may have been nineteen or twenty, but he was the king. Of magicians. Of shadows. The King of the Cats. He was my Answer. And all the others, the ones who had watched me and taken me to him, were only his lackeys.

''Welcome to the Order,' he said. 'My name is Speckle John.'

' 'And I am . . . ' I started to say, but he held up a hand and violent color seemed to play around it.

''Charles Nightingale. William Vendouris. Dr. Collec­tor, but none of those now. You will take a new name, one known to the Order. You will be Coleman Collins. Only to us at first, but when this war finishes and we may go where we please, to the world.'

'I knew without his telling me that it was a colored name — the name of a colored magician who had died. It was as if I had heard the name before, but I could not remember ever having heard it. I wanted to deserve that name. At that second I became Coleman Collins in my heart, and wore the name I had been born with as a disguise. 'What do you want with me?' I asked.

'He laughed out loud. 'Why, I want to be your teacher. I want to work with you,' he said. 'You don't even know who you are yet, Coleman Collins, and I want the privilege of helping to show you how to get there. You may be the most gifted natural the Order has uncovered — or who has uncovered himself — in the past decade.'

''What do you want me to do?' I asked.

''Tonight you will stay here. Yes, here. It will be all night. And if you are welcomed tonight — don't worry, you'll see what that means — if you are welcomed, soon you will be able to repeat what you did with Mr. Washford whenever you wish.' He laughed out loud again, and his wonderful voice rolled out over the mustard field like the hallooing of a French horn. 'Of course, I cannot recommend that you do it every day.'

' 'And after tonight?' I asked.

''We begin our studies. We begin your new life, Mr. Collins.'

'He stood up from his throne, and the sunlight died. Speckle John stood before me in a vast starry night, really only an outline in the darkness. I could not make out his features. 'You will be safe during the night, Doctor, safer than you would be in our part of Ste. Nazaire. Tomorrow we begin.'

'Then he was gone. I moved forward, reaching out, and my fingers touched the back of his chair. The night seemed immense. I could hear only a few isolated crickets. The stars seemed very intense, and I fancied that I was looking at them with eyes made new by Speckle John.

'Well, there I was, alone on a hill in the middle of the night — the actual night I suppose, for the earlier daylight must have been an illusion. I had not a notion of where I was, and only Speckle John's word that the next day would find me returned to Ste. Nazaire and my work. His chair stood before me, and I was too superstitious to sit in it, though I wanted to. Even then, I wanted that chair for my own. I knew what it represented.

'I stretched out on the mustard, which was not very comfortable at first. 'If you are welcomed,' he had said, and I could not rest for wondering what that meant. Once it even went through my mind that I was the Victim of a gigantic hoax, and that the Negro would leave me out in the wilderness. But I had the evidence of his extraordi­nary presence, and the care with which he had sought me out. And he had turned night to day and back again! What sort of 'welcome' could follow that?

'Even an excited man must sleep sometime, and so it was with me. I began to doze, and then to dream, and finally fell into a deep sleep.

'I was awakened by a fox. His pungent, musky odor; the sound of his breath; a jittery, quick, nervous presence near me. My eyes flew open, and his muzzle was a foot from my face. Terror made me jerk backward — I was afraid he'd take my face off. Mr. Collins, the fox said. I understood him! I said or thought 'Yes.'

'You need not fear me.

''No.'

'You belong to the Order.

''I belong to them.'

'The Order is your mother and father.

''They are.'

'And you will have no other loyalties.

''None.'

'You are welcomed.

'He trotted away, and I did not know if I had spoken to a fox or to a man in the form of a fox. For a long time I lay in the field consumed by wonder. The stars were dim­ming, and all I could see was blackness. I began to realize that I could float off the ground if I wanted to, but I dared not do anything to affect the mood of the night and myself as part of the night. That was floating enough. Finally I heard wingbeats. I could not see it, but I heard an enormous bird land some few feet away from me. I never saw it, but I thought, and I think now, that I knew what bird it was. Once again, I was terrified. Then it spoke, and I understood its voice as I had understood the fox's.

'Collins.

''Yes.'

'Have you worlds within you?

''I have worlds within me.'

'Do you want dominion?

''I want dominion.' And I did, you see — I wanted to tap that strength within me and to make the duller world know it.

'The knowledge is the treasure, and the treasure is its own dominion.

'I suppose I muttered the words 'knowledge . . . treasure.'

'See the history of your treasure, Collins,

'Then a scene played itself out before my eyes. I was a child, an infant in arms. My father was carrying me. We were in a theater in Boston, one which had been torn down during my adolescence. Vaughan's Oriental The­ater, it was called. A colored man in evening dress was performing on stage, exhibiting a mechanical bird which sang requests called out by the audience. My father shouted out 'Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage,' and every­body laughed, and the metal bird began to warble the saccharine melody. I remembered being moved by the music, and astounded by the ornateness of the theater. 'See his name, Charlie,' my father said, pointing to the sign on the side of the stage. 'His name is Old King Cole. Isn't that funny?' I remembered staring openmouthed at the man on the stage, wanting to smile because my father said it was funny, but too overwhelmed to see the humor. Then I froze. The magician, Old King Cole, was staring directly at me.

'So there it was — a buried memory, maybe the central memory of my life, and one that I think had guided me throughout my life even though I had consciously forgot­ten it. The man onstage was the original Coleman Collins. Or was there another Coleman Collins before him? And I knew that someday that would be me on the stage, though I would require a different professional name.

'You saw.

''I saw.'

'And you know that the magician saw you.

'I remembered Old King Cole looking down from the stage, finding me there in my father's arms, a child perhaps of eighteen or twenty months, and . . . recogniz­ing me?

''I know.'

'I have doubts about you, the owl said.

' 'But he saw me!' I said, now reliving the wonder of those few seconds as if they had happened only five minutes ago. 'He chose me!'

'He saw the treasure within, the invisible bird sighed. Be worthy of it. Honor the Book. You are welcomed.

'The huge wings beat, my interrogator flew off, and I was alone. Either I had been asleep all along or I slept again: I remember everything blurring about me, a feeling of wandering, drowsy bliss invading my every cell, and I slept solidly for hours. When I woke up, I was leaning against a wall back in Ste. Nazaire, only a block from the hospital. Withers was just walking past, taking an early — morning constitutional at a loafing Southern pace, and he saw me and snarled, 'Too drunk to get home last night, Dr. Nightingale?' 'You're welcome,' I said, and laughed in his face.

'Thereafter, I saw Speckle John almost every day. I received a note, usually from a messboy, waited outside the bookstore, and was led through the maze of slum streets until we came to that shabby, foul-smelling tene­ment which was more school to me than any university. I was taken back to that time when we all lived in the forest: I entered that realm which was mine by right since infancy. For a year Speckle John taught me, and we began to plan working together after the war. But I knew that the day would arrive when my growing strength would confront his. I was never content with the second chair.

'Open your eyes, boys. Watch carefully. This is to be your own night in the open. We are in the Wood Green Empire, London, in August of 1924.'

4

The boys, unaware that they had closed their eyes, opened them. It was night, hot and vaporous. For a moment Tom caught the odor of mustard flowers: he felt drowsy and heavy-limbed, and his legs ached. Collins sat in the circle of light, but on a tall wooden chair, not the stool he had made to appear that morning. Over the black suit was a black cape fastened at the throat with a gold clasp. Tom tried to move his legs, and smelled mustard flowers again. 'Oh . . . no . . . ' Del said, looking into the woods, and Tom snapped his head sideways to see.

Dark trees funneled toward a lighted open space. A boy and a tall man in a belted raincoat were striding down the funnel. The boy, Tom sickeningly realized, was himself. He looked at Collins, and found him leaning back in the owl chair, legs crossed, smiling maliciously back. The magician pointed back to the scene: Now!

When he looked back, the man and boy were gone. The open space at the end of the funnel of trees was a theater. A crowd rustled on its chairs, fanned itself with programs. Plum-colored curtains swung open, and there they were, he and Del, Flanagini and Night. Very clearly, Tom saw Dave Brick sitting fat and ignored and alone at the back of the theater.

'Yes,' Collins said. And a curtain of flame sprang up before the scene. Wall of flame, Tom thought: he heard the panicky, rushed sounds of many bodies moving, muffled shouts and commands.

Everybody out! Everybody out!

Stop in your tracks!

My bass!

They're hot! They're going to burn!

Get up off the floor, Whipple.

Just as Tom had been yanked back more than forty years while Collins had described his earlier life, just as he had seen Speckle John and Withers and the corporal with the professional smile, now he saw these moments again — the boys piling up first at the big outside doors, then at the door to the hall, screaming, clubbing each other, Brown yelling for his precious instrument, Del stumbling blind through piling smoke . . .

a young man in immaculate formal dress, white-face, and a red wig stood on the altered stage. The fire had whisked away like fog.

'No!' Tom shouted.

Herbie Butter waved his hands, and the light momen­tarily died, flickered red with a suggestion of flame, and returned to show a wooden hut deep in a painted wood. Up a trailing path came a young girl in a red cloak, carrying a wicker basket from which poked the heads of half a dozen blackbirds. . . .

The lights died and the stage disappeared into the funnel of trees.

'And one more,' Collins said.

From one side of the narrow avenue before them a man in black cape and black slouch hat stepped out from between the trees. A moment later, a wolf came out to face him from between the trees on the other side. The wolf bristled, crouched. It looked starved and crazy, unwilling to do what it had to do. The man braced his feet; the wolf snarled. Finally it sprang. The man in the cape drew a sword from his side — he must have been holding it ready all along beneath the cape — and thrust it forward, impaling the wolf. With terrific strength, the caped man lifted the sword and held it straight in the air. The wolf's paws dangled over his hat. He stepped back into the cover of the line of trees.

Wolves, and those who see them, are shot on sight, Tom remembered.

'I put a hurtin' on Speckle John,' Collins said. 'I held him wriggling on my sword. Ha hah! He is still on my sword, children. In that sense, my farewell performance at the Wood Green Empire has not ended yet. But we will get to that in time. I want you to sleep outside tonight. A welcome may come, or it may not. You will find sleeping bags behind the second tree on the left side of the clearing.'

He stood up and pulled the cape about him as if he were cold. 'I must tell you that only one of you will prevail. Two cannot sit in the owl chair. But this is not a contest, and he who is not welcomed will lose only what he never had.

'But listen to me, little birds: the one who prevails will have Shadowland, the owl chair, the world. There will be a new king, whether it be King Flanagini or King Night.'

For a second he was outlined in black, etched against the wood; then he was gone. Tom saw four square flattened patches of grass where the chair had been.

'It won't be you,' Del said. 'You don't deserve it.'

'I don't even want it,' Tom answered angrily. 'Del, don't you understand? I don't want to take anything away from you. I only came here because I wanted to help you. Do you want to live like that — like him?'

Del hesitated a moment, then turned away to look for his sleeping bag. 'You wouldn't have to. You could live any way you wanted.'

A hard and certain thought occurred to Tom. 'If he'd let you. Why would he want to give up now? He's old, but he's still healthy.'

Del was lifting something out of the leaves behind the tree Collins had indicated. 'Because he chose me. That's why. You're just along for the ride. You never even wanted to be a magician before you met me.'

'Aren't you my friend anymore?' Tom asked in despair.

Del would not reply.

'I'm still your friend.'

'You're trying to trick me.'

'How can I? You're better than I am.'

Carrying his sleeping bag back to the clearing, Del at last looked at him. Pure triumph shone in his eyes.

'But, Del, no matter what happens, I don't think he's going to . . . I think it's all a trick. On us.'

'Get lost.'

'Oh . . . ' the letter from Rose, which Tom had forgot­ten, scratched him beneath a rib. He looked at his watch. It was ten-thirty. Half an hour late! He looked back in agony at Del, and saw that he was trying to get into his sleeping bag. His eyes were clamped shut and he was crying. One of his heels had snagged on the zipper and he could not free it without opening his eyes.

Tom went over to him and grasped Del's foot. He moved it over the zipper and into the bag. 'Del, you're my best friend,' he said.

'You're my only friend,' Del said, almost blubbing. 'But he's my uncle. This is where I come. You're only here once.'

'I have to go away for a little while,' Tom said, kneeling by Del's side. 'When I come back, let's talk, okay?'

Del's teary eyes flew open. 'Are you going to see him?'

'No.'

'Promise?'

'I promise.'

'Okay.' His face hardened for a moment. 'You wouldn't even let me in to see the Grimm Brothers.'

'I was just surprised — the room was different.'

'But you saw. You saw you and him. Like I said.'

'It's some kind of game. I was never with him. I would have told you.'

'I was feeling so alone,' Del said.

'When I get back,' Tom said, and turned to run across the clearing. Hey, where are you going? he heard Del wail; he did not answer.

5

He came pounding out of the edge of the woods and out of breath, stopped running. Sand moved under his feet. For a moment he wanted to remove his shoes. Far up the cliff, the house shone from a dozen windows. He could see Rose nowhere on the beach, which was a silvery mushroom gray beside the black smooth water. He checked his watch again and saw that it was now ten-fifty. She had gone.

Tom trudged forward through the sand. Here was a surprise: a substantial part of him was relieved that Rose had given up and gone back across the lake. Now he could return to Del.

But maybe just ahead, on the other side of the boathouse? He saw the slavering wolf pouncing toward her. If Collins had seen her waiting on the beach . . .

Now his mood had swung, and he desperately wanted to know if Rose Armstrong were safe. His mind was a jumble of images: the' wolf, held up with unbelievable strength, impaled on a sword; the badger being swung in a great arc toward the pit; Dave Brick sitting on a metal chair, waiting to be roasted. He banged open the door of the boathouse. He walked in, and nearly fell twenty feet into black shallow water.

Tom jerked himself back just in time. Inside the dilapidated shell, the boathouse was chiefly water and open space. A three-foot apron of concrete ran around a wide hole open at the lake end. Most of this entire side of the boathouse was open. Only six or seven feet down from the top had been boarded across.

The door slammed shut behind him, and his heart too slammed in his chest. Tom heard a metal bar sliding into a brace. He hit the door with his shoulder. It rattled, but would not open. He banged it again, beginning to settle down from his original terror into ordinary fright. Who was it? Collins? The Collector turned loose to get him? One of the Wandering Boys? He would have to jump into the water. He looked down, saw greasy-looking black­ness, and then saw something else.

Then he heard giggles from behind the door: Rose.

'Let me out!'

'You stood me up three nights straight. Why should I?'

'Three nights?' Tom's stomach fell away.

'I got your note this morning.'

'No, you didn't, boyo. That was three days ago.'

'Oh, God.' He leaned against the creaky doors of the boathouse wall.

'You didn't know?'

'I thought it was this morning.'

'Likely story, but I'll let you out.'

The bolt slid across. The door opened, and Rose stood before him in a green 1920's dress. She was smiling teasingly, and on her face it looked brave. She was the best thing he had ever seen. The green dress made her look more sophisticated than any girl he had ever known.

'I almost had heart failure in there,' he said, 'but I'm so happy to see you, I guess I wouldn't mind dying.'

She pouted, took a step back. 'You almost had more than heart failure. You know what I almost did to you? I was so mad.'

'Did to me?'

'Take a look at this and tell me about three days.'

Rose stepped gracefully around him, and he saw that she was wealing high heels. 'You were standing on the other side of the door, right? Okay.' She bent down and tugged at a bar set in the sand beside the door. Bang! Iron rang against concrete. The apron he had been standing on had fallen in on a hinge. 'It's like a kind of trapdoor. A long time ago, there was a boat, and a sort of winch fit in here . . . anyhow, I almost dropped you in the drink. The water's deep enough. You'd just have to swim out. I could have strangled you, boyo-three nights? I'm getting muscles from swimming across that lake!'

'You didn't swim tonight,' Tom pointed out.

She turned away. 'Of course not. I ruined my stock­ings. And this dress is full of gunk.' She lifted the hem and brushed at dust and twigs. 'I came all the way through the woods. Then I sat out on the pier. You walked by without even looking at me.'

'I'll look at you now,' he said, and made to embrace her. She looked as if she were going to back away, but stiffly submitted. 'What's wrong?'

'This.'

'Oh. I'm sorry.' Chagrined, he dropped his arms. He could not read her face — she looked grown up in the green dress, far beyond his reach. 'Really. The note came this morning. At least I thought it was this morning. That scene in the woods, that was just now, wasn't it? About half an hour ago?'

'Sure. Look, what day — ?'

'I want to show you something. Something I want to look at again too.'

'Oh?'

'In here.' He pulled open the boathouse door and knelt. 'Push that lever again.' Rose stepped aside and tugged the rod back. The iron plate swung up on its hinge, clicked into place. Tom crawled out on it and peered down at the water.

'I was going to ask you what day you thought it was.'

'I don't see it now. What day? I'm not sure anymore. Tuesday or Wednesday.'

'It's Saturday,'

'Saturday?' He looked up at her, standing just outside the boathouse on the sand. She looked very tall, very feminine. Though slim, her body curved.

'What month do you think this is? What week?'

'I'm trying to find something,' he said. 'Something I saw before.' He looked down at the murky water. 'Oh.'

'Did you find it?'

'No.' He scuttled backward.

'You did.'

'What week is it, anyhow?' He stood up. 'What month is it?'

'What do you think it is?'

'Early June. About the sixth or the seventh. Maybe as late as the tenth.'

She rubbed her nose. 'So you think it's the tenth of June. Poor Tom.' Rose touched his cheek with the tips of her fingers. Tom felt as though new nerves had grown where her fingers had rested. 'What did you see down there?'

'Tell me what day it is, Rose.'

Her brave smile flickered in the moonlight. 'I'm not sure, but it's at least the first of July. Or the second.'

'It's July? We've been here a month?'

Rose nodded; her face searched his, sent out such sympathy that he wanted again to embrace her. 'How can he do that?'

'He just can. One summer he made Del think that six or seven weeks went by in a day. It was the time Del broke his leg.'

'And Bud Copeland came.'

Her eyebrows lifted. 'You know about that? Oh . . . Del told you. Yes, that summer. He didn't want Del to . . . I can't say.'

'What happened?'

'The iron staircase. It broke away from the cliff.'

'What can't you say?'

Now the smile was firmer. 'Ask Del. Maybe he'll be able to remember by now. I can't, Tom.'

She walked a little way up the beach and turned to him . again. He saw that it was impossible: this was a secret that she would not give up. 'I can't stay much longer, Tom,' she said softly.

'I want to kiss you,' he said. That she would keep her secret had made her even more desirable. 'I want to hold you.'

'I told you. It's wrong now. I have something to tell you and I don't want to get all confused, and I don't have much time. He'll want to see me again.'

'Tonight?' He walked toward her over the gray sand.

She nodded. At least she did hot walk away.

'What for?'

'To talk. He likes to talk to me. He says I help him think out loud.'

'But that's great. Then you can tell me and Del . . . '

'Right. That's why I gave you that note. I found out something. But now, after tonight, you probably know it anyhow.'

'I don't know anything,' Tom complained. And she reached out and took his hand.

'He wants to give his farewell performance over again. With you and Del in it. If we're going to get out, I think it has to be right before, when all they'll be thinking about is what they have to do.'

Pleasurable impulses and sensations had been going all the way up his arm, and now she gripped him harder. 'The important thing is that he's planning something big for this performance. Something dangerous. He said you'd have to choose between your wings and your song. Do you know what that means?'

Tom shook his head. 'He said it to me once before. I don't know what it means.'

'He said Speckle John chose his song, and he took his song away from him. So he didn't have anything left. I think we have to make sure we're out of here before . . . '

'Before I find out what it means,' Tom said a little fearfully.

'That's what I think.' Rose dropped his hand. Tom leaned forward and took hers and raised it to his mouth. He was trembling. He saw a girl in a red cloak carrying a wicker basket up a wooded path.

Rose said, 'Tom, I feel so terrible-like I'm drawing you in deeper. But I have to do what he says, or he'll know something's wrong. Just trust me.'