27 August, 1924 19 страница

'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.

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. . . .

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.

'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.

'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. '

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.