27 August, 1924 9 страница

Wild applause.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

' — opening the doors of the mind. '

(He spread his arms wide. )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Couldn't you get down the side? '

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

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

Then I realized that the auditorium was filling with smoke.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Not here. '

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Making of a Hero

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

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

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

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

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

'Mr. Broome, ' Tom said.

One fireman rushed by, then another.

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

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

'Sent him home. '

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

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

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

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

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

'Can I see you for a second? '

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom sat down beside him.

Graduation

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

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

We looked at each other for a moment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PART TWO

Shadowland

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

Roger Sale, Fairy Tales and After

ONE

The Birds Have Come Home

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

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

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

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

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

'You did a lot, ' Del said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'In Vermont, I do. '

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

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

'Rose Armstrong? '

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

'Yeah? ' Now it was Tom who smiled.

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

'If you think I'm old enough. '

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

Tom unfolded the sheet.

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

Typed on the sheet was:

SPELLS, IMAGES & ILLUSIONS

(For the Perusal of My Two Apprentices)

Know What You Are Getting Into!

Level 1 Level 2 Level 3

Trance Theatrics Flight

Voice Rise Transparence

Silence Altered Landscape