27 August, 1924 5 страница

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

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

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

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

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

'God. '

Del actually giggled.

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

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

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

''Was that halfway? ' Del asked.

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

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

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

'Something wrong? ' Del asked.

'Tired. '

'I felt you jump. '

'You're imagining things. '

'Maybe you are, ' Del said slyly.

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

'Sure. '

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

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

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

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

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

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

'They knew where to look, ' he shouted.

'Just run! ' Rose shouted back.

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

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

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

Del sprinted away like a rabbit.

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

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

'Gotcha! '

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

abruptly soared up and out of the opening as he was

grabbed from above.

In the next instant, Del screamed.

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

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

Don't hate me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Why does it have to be like this? '

Del began to weep from terror.

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

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

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

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

Don't hate me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'What are they going to do to Del? '

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

'Is that what you did to Speckle John? '

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

'I know what it means. '

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wood Green Empire

27 August, 1924

Collins opened the door and Snail hauled Tom in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Good trick, ' said Thorn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Kiss my ass, ' Thorn said.

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

You're a magician, aren't you?

I never wanted to be.

But you are?

Yes.

Then use your mind to pull out the nails.

I can't.

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

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

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

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

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

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

'You tell me how, ' Thorn growled.

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

Tom sagged against the cinch.

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

Tom closed his eyes.

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

'Leave me alone, ' Tom said.

'It talks! ' Pease roared.

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

'Why? ' Tom asked.

'He wants to know why, ' Pease said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom passed out again.

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

'Tom, ' came a velvety voice he knew.

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

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

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

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

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

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

'What did he do to Rose? '

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

'I can't, ' Tom wailed.

'You got to. ' Tom screamed.

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

'Nooo! ' Tom screamed.

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

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

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

'Kill him, ' Tom said weakly,

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

'Just push. '

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

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

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

You're strong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gee, you monkeys are clumsy.

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

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

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

You had to admit they weren't liars.

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

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

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

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

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

'No repeat performances, ' Tom said.

'That's the way, son. '

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

Ka-whamp! went the fireworks outside. Whamp!

The prelude to the performance.

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

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

He crawled up the glass of the sliding doors.

Whamp!

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

Soon it would be night.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The trolls were looking at him with great concentration, moving out of their cluster.

An explosion turned the sky pale green.

Tom picked up the gun, twisted it so that it faced the men again. Snail was coming toward him, a small worry line carved between his eyebrows.

'Hey, ' Thorn yelled. 'Watch yourself. '

'He's got holes in his hands, he can't do nothin', ' Snail said. Still there was the look of almost delicate worry on his face.

Tom swung the gun to the center of his chest and held the grip with the fingers of his right hand while he prodded the trigger with the index of his left. Again the recoil tore the gun from his hand. His ears rang.

A spot of redness appeared in Snail's chest. It looked like a boutonniere. Snail's feet flew out from under him.

Tom picked up the gun again and stood. He was crying, not entirely from pain, but despite his fears and the agony of his hands and arms, he felt a great nervous concentration.

Ka-whamp! All the air turned yellow. He saw Del curled up on the grass. He awkwardly lifted the pistol and aimed it at Pease.

Pease broke away, running for the iron ladder to the beach.

Tom swung the gun back and shot at random into the men. This time he managed to keep the gun in his hands. Thorn jerked backward and fell down heavily. A bubbling sound came from his throat.

Del rolled over on his side and stared at Tom with dull eyes. Redness covered his face.

The others were already tearing into the woods, going for good, Tom knew. They were just employees. They weren't paid enough to be shot at. He swayed sideways and watched Pease reach the top of the ladder. He remembered the man bending back his fingers so that Collins could drive in the nail. He dropped the gun, and it fired and jumped when it hit, zinging a bullet harmlessly into dark air. He remembered Pease twisting in his seat, looking at him as if he were an inferior painting.

Ladder, he thought. Bolts. Loose bolts. He saw them: saw the rusty threads, the iron going into the clips. He began to trudge toward the ladder. He could hear Pease banging his way down. Two rungs, three, four. . .

A ground-shaking explosion. A red orchid bloomed in the sky.

He let his hatred of Pease bloom. Out. Out. In his mind the bolts were beginning to stir, crushing their threads, rattling free. . . he saw them flying out of the clips, tumbling down the bluff.

Pease screamed. In the silence between fireworks, a sudden popping noise of shattered metal stood out as sharply as a color. Tom made his legs go faster and reached the edge of the bluff in time to see Pease sailing far out and down, still clinging to the iron ladder. He seemed to fall dreamily for whole minutes, still trying to climb down the rungs. In time his feet fell out beneath him; then his hands let go, and he and the ladder were tipping back in tandem. There was a noise of splintering wood when Pease hit the pier. A hole instantly opened up

in the wood. A second later the ladder sliced it in half.

Pieces of the pier flew upward. Then water gouted up. Now there was only one way out.

He trudged back to Del and half-fell, half-sat on the grass beside him. Del was wiping the blood away from his face with his sleeve. They had hit him in the face before deciding to kick him to death.

'How do you feel? ' he asked.

Del's eyes swam up. The lids fluttered.

'Did they break anything? '

'I hurt all over. ' Red froth appeared on Del's lips. He looked dully at Thorn's body; at Snail's, facedown, closer to the house. Thorn was muttering something.

'What did they do to you? ' Del said. 'Did they beat you up too? '

'Sort of, ' Tom said.

The sky shook: after the thunder, an ice-blue fountain shimmered in the air..

'They're coming back! ' Del shrieked.

'No, ' Tom said. 'We're through with them. '

'Oh. ' Del closed his eyes and put his head down on the grass.

'Can you move? '

'I want to go home. '

'Who doesn't? '

The lights in the forest flicked on; the house blazed. Tom could see the red smears on the window wall. Then he heard a car starting, heard the tires whisper on the drive. Could Collins have given up so easily?

Thorn's breath rattled and chugged in his throat. Tom turned to him in horror. 'Ah, ' Thorn said, and died. No white bird lifted from his chest, but Tom knew that he had seen his life go.

'Car. . . ' Del said. 'He left, Tom. He left! We can go — we can get out. '

'I don't think so. You see all those lights? The show changed theaters, that's all. '

'Oh, my God, ' Del said. He was looking at Tom's hands. 'How did you. . . ? '

'I was lucky, ' Tom said. He looked up at the house. 'He's still there, Del. I think we really just started. '

'But we can't fight him. ' Del shrank back into himself.

'We'll do whatever we have to. ' It was not a strong statement, and Tom did not feel strong — he felt emptied of his resources, capable of doing nothing more than lying on the lawn and waiting in despair for Collins to produce his special effects.

Suddenly the sky was filled with fireworks, layer after layer of explosions in the night air. They would not have to wait long for the rest of it.

'WELCOME TO THE WOOD GREEN EMPIRE! ' The amplified voice echoed from the trees, from the side of the house: as if the trees and boards themselves were speaking. 'WE PRESENT AN EVENING OF SPECTACLE AND THRILLS UNPARALLELED ON ANY STAGE ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. THE FINAL PERFORMANCE, THE FINAL PROFESSIONAL APPEARANCE OF THE BELOVED HERBIE BUTTER. IS HE ONE OR IS HE MANY? DECIDE FOR YOURSELVES, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. THESE FEATS OF CONJURY AND PRESTIDIGITATION ARE FAR BEYOND THE POWERS OF ANY OTHER LIVING MAGICIAN.

'FOR YOUR OWN PROTECTION, DO NOT ATTEMPT AT ANY TIME TO LEAVE THE THEATER. '

Del was crying again, his wet face illuminated by the brilliant flashes of fireworks.

'PRESENTING. . . MR. HERBIE BUTTER! '

The explosions in the sky doubled: a roll of snare drums from the loudspeakers. Whole areas of the sky blasted into white, fitting themselves together like a puzzle around eyeholes and an open, grinning mouth. Ka-whamp! Glowing red lay atop the giant face, and Herbie Butter stretched across the sky, grinning down at them. It was like a cartoon face, sharply etched and two-dimensional.

'THE AMAZING MECHANICAL MAGICIAN AND ACROBAT! THE KING OF THE CATS! '

Collins seemed too powerful to Tom, too tricky and experienced. He watched the enormous cartoon sift down through the air, seeking them out. Then he looked back at the house. All those blazing windows: he remembered his first full day at Shadowland, Collins a figure with the face of a wolf, pointing across a gulf and showing him that he could have anything he wanted. . . then he felt as though Collins were nailing him to the air behind him, pounding a spike through his chest. Rose Armstrong was looking down at him from the window where he had seen her that day. It was his bedroom. Even on that first day, they had been taking part in the magician's repeat performance.

It has to be like this. This is not an easy school.

Rose looked down with a stricken face. She motioned for him to stay where he was: that she would come down. Stupidly, he shook his head. Rose turned away from the window. He looked up again: Herbie Butter still sifted down toward them.

Tom saw the gun, a black lump in dark green. He could not imagine how he had lifted it. Very little fresh blood came from his wounds, but both hands had swollen. They felt like gloves.

'Rose is coming, ' he said to Del. Fear had stolen the color from his friend's face.

'Oh, no, ' Del wailed.

'may we have two volunteers from the audience, please? '

'I think her part is done, ' Tom said. His heart was as numb as his hands.

'step up, step up smartly — we require the assistance OF YOU BRAVE YOUNG PEOPLE. '

Rose burst out of the living room onto the patio and started running toward them. The green dress shone in the light. Whiteness flickered in her right hand — she was carrying white rags.

'Leave us alone! ' Del screamed at her, and she stepped on the grass. She looked fearfully at the two bodies. 'Go back inside, you Judas! '

'I had to do it, ' she said. 'I didn't know what he'd. . . I thought it was just part of his show. . . . Tom, I'm so sorry. . . ' She held out her arms. 'He would have killed me otherwise, but I wish he had. . . . I brought some handkerchiefs for your hands, they're all I could find, please let me tie them on for you. Please, Tom. '

'Who was in the car? ' Tom asked.

Del screamed, 'Don't let her touch you! '

'Elena, ' Rose answered. 'She ran off. She saw the blood. . . she left him. I want to help you, Tom. Please. I have to. '

'Because he told her to! ' Del screamed. 'Get away! '

'He wanted me to wait in his room, ' Rose said. 'You weren't supposed to see me anymore. But I thought it was just going to be a performance, Tom. If I'd known. . . we could have hidden in the woods. . . I wouldn't have brought you back. '

'You liar! ' Del shouted.

'No, it's the truth, ' Tom said. 'She didn't know. She was tricked too. '

'Can I help your hands? '

'Come on, ' he said.

She stumbled forward.

'and we pause to remember our heroine of the crimean. . . the angel of the battlefield. . . florence nightingale! '

Ka-whamp! Rockets sailed up, making red tracers in the sky w& -whamp! — exploded into the British flag.

'He's going to get us, ' Del said. He wiped more of the blood from his face with his sleeve. 'There's no way. . . '

'Get it as tight as you can, ' Tom said.

Rose was folding the first handkerchief over his hand and twisting the ends together to knot them. 'Who's left, Rose? Who's left in the house? '

'Just Mr. Peet. They were both upstairs when we heard the shots. At first they thought they were rockets. Then they went downstairs. ' She began to fold the second handkerchief around Tom's right hand. 'And he said something about the ladder. '

'What happened to the ladder? ' Del asked. 'The ladder's gone! ' He was slipping into panic again. 'We can't get down! ' He turned his head toward the house and went quiet. Coleman Collins stood at every window they could see, far enough from the glass for the light to show him clearly.

Six, seven. . . ? It didn't matter how many, because it could be any number. Identical Coleman Collinses, caressing their identical upper lips with identical index fingers.

'We have to go in there, ' Del said, a little awe showing through his voice.

'That's what he said about the ladder. ' Rose tied the ends together. Red circles had already appeared in the centers of the two handkerchiefs. 'That you'd have to go in. And he said you'd want to go in. '

'But that's just a trick, ' Del pleaded. 'There's only two of them, really — and Mr. Feet will run like those men. '

'Maybe not, ' Tom said, trying to move his fingers. 'But there's someone else. He wanted two volunteers, remember? He had the other one all along. '

The images of the magician vanished from the windows.

'I'm on your side, Tom, ' Rose said. Her voice was desperate. 'I told you I didn't know what he was going to do — you know I'm telling you the truth. I left him. '

'I didn't mean you, ' Tom said with more calm than he felt. 'He still has Skeleton. '

'have we another volunteer? ' the speakers boomed. 'have we? have we? ah! the handsome GENTLEMAN IN THE BLACK SUIT! '

A shadowy figure appeared on the lawn behind them: or had it been there before, unnoticed? Rose grabbed Tom's arm. Del stepped backward. 'It's Skeleton, ' he said, his voice way above its usual register, high enough to be birdsong: but Tom saw that it was not Skeleton.

The figure stepped forward, and tortoiseshell eyeglass frames turned red in the light from the house.

'This school has been unwell, ' Laker Broome said, 'and now it is time to cut back the diseased branches. ' He moved closer to them. 'Pruning, gentlemen. . . pruning. Time to clean up our garden. ' Tom could see the lights down in the woods through his glen-plaid suit.

'We'll get you! We know who you are and we will get you! ' He raised a transparent fist, and Rose and the boys stepped back.

'We have had indiscipline, smoking, failures, and theft — and now we are cursed with something so sick, so ill, that in all my years as an educator I have never seen its like.

'NEVER! '

He stepped forward again, pushing them back to the flagstones and the light.

'A guilty mind and soul are dangerous to all about them — they corrupt. All of you boys have been touched by this disease. '

Another mad, threatening step forward. 'You, Flanagan. Did you steal that owl? ' 'Yes, ' Tom said. For that was the final truth. The index finger stabbed at Del. 'You. Nightingale. Did you steal that owl? ' 'Yes, ' Del said.

'You will report to my office immediately — we will rid ourselves of you, do you hear? You are to be expunged, a word meaning erased, omitted, cast away. . . Mala causa est quae requirit misercordiam. ' His face seemed the size of a billboard. Rose, still, gripping Tom's arm, was whimpering. 'And I see you have brought a girl into this school. That too will be dealt with, boys. I very much fear that you will not be allowed to leave these premises alive. Theft, failure, smoking, indiscipline — and ingratitude! Ingratitude is a capital offense! '

Tom felt the rough fieldstone flags under his feet, and Laker Broome looked with transparent eyes at a transparent watch and said, 'And now I believe we have some magic from two members of our first year. '

Del goggled at him: the bruises were starting to come up from his face, purple across his temples and green on his cheeks and jaw. In a couple of hours he would look like a mandrill.

Animal faces: he was suddenly aware of a cramped room about him, gloomily lacquered with photographs — a crazy quilt on the walls and ceiling, horrible faces leering at him as in the wizard's house in the dream, leering but stationary, fixed on the wall so they could never float away. . .

('To-o-o-o-m, ' Del wailed. )

. . . but what was floating was him, going up off a strange fetid bed straight toward the ceiling. Rose's arms held him back, then broke away, and he was going right toward those pictures, toward a dead man in his car with his brains all over the windows, some dripping car in an empty parking lot. Scene of the Murder. The former Miami lawyer was discovered at 7: 10 yesterday morning. Miami resident Herbert Finkel, threatened by a loitering youth described as wearing blue shirt and tan trousers. . .

toward a picture of Coleman Collins in his Burberry and a wide-brimmed hat, his face only a blank white oval. . .

toward the Carson School, a black-and-white aerial photograph crayoned with red-crayon flames, drawn over the field house and auditorium, a red crayon smear obliterating the little tree in the court. Closer to it, closer, the crayon flames seeming to leap, seeming to warm his face.

Rose's fingers grasped his right hand, torturing the wound, and he yelled just as the crayon flames grew up around him.

They were back at Carson. Del and Rose were on either side of him, standing on the solid wooden floor of the auditorium, Mr. Broome at the podium, his face a lunatic's, mouthing gibberish. A hundred boys twisted and howled in their seats, many of them bleeding from the eyes and nose. Noise like a foul smoke rose from them, and Mr. Broome screamed, 'I want Steven Ridpath! Skeleton Ridpath! The only graduate of the class of '59. Come up here and get your diploma! ' He held out a burning document, and Tom felt himself sailing up, his limbs spidery, all of his skin so tight it felt it might split open. . .

down below him — a photograph? It moved. The dead boys twisted and howled. A teacher dressed in a Norfolk jacket moved across the blackening floor and took Del's arm, twisted it savagely around his back, and yanked him away. It had the quality of a photograph, a moment stopped in time so that you could look back and say, yes, that's when Uncle George ripped his pants on the bob-wire fence, that's when Lulu looked down the well, wasn't that funny, sorta like an omen cuz that's when things started to go bad and wrong and just see how happy we all were. . . but Del's face was turning purple and green and Rose was screaming and the man wasn't a teacher, he was Mr. Peet. . . he was still above them all, floating toward Laker Broome, who held out his burning hand and fastened it around Tom's wrist, scorching his flesh, grinning at him and saying, I said there'd be a little pain, didn't I? Should have taken my hand back in the tunnels, boy. Don't you agree things would have worked out a little nicer that way?

The burning hand clamped harder on his wrist. Don't make the fool's mistake of thinking this ain't happening, kid. Even though it ain't. Tom felt his wrist frying in the devil's grasp. Mr. Collins has your pal. You chose your song. So sing it.

Beneath the white of the magician's handkerchief, his wrist was blister red.

'To-o-o-m! ' Del cried again. His voice was getting smaller. 'Tom! Tom! '

He shook his head, trying to clear out the fuzz — almost as if he had been Skeleton Ridpath, seeing what Skeleton had chosen to see, had wanted with all of his messed-up heart to see —

'They moved us, they moved us, ' Rose wailed, 'oh, Tom come back — you like died for a second. '

He opened his eyes, and was looking up at Rose's scared face. She was not even pretty anymore. Her forehead was wrinkled like an old woman's, and for a second she looked like a witch bending over him and shaking his arms. 'Oh, ' he said.

She stopped shaking him. 'That man touched you and it was like you died. Mr. Peet came out and carried you in here and pulled Del along — and I just followed, I hit him on the back, but he never even blinked at me. He took Del away, Tom. What are you going to do? '

'Dunno, ' Tom said. He did not know where he was. Artificial stars, friendly lights, winked down at him. Wasn't there a color wheel? Wasn't there a band? ''Polka Dots and Moonbeams, '' he said. 'Fielding went off the wall over some saxophone player. Six cups of punch. Everybody went outside and looked at a satellite, but it was really just an airplane. Skeleton was there, and he looked really creepy. All in black. ' Tom looked perplexedly up at the friendly lights. Where the color wheel should have been, only a spaghettilike pipe ran through the distance, joining another thin pipe at a T-junction.

'What are you talking about? ' Rose had her witch face again.

'Carson. Our school. When Del and I. . . ' He shook his head. 'Mr. Peet? I saw him. '

'He carried you here. And he took Del. '

Tom groaned. 'Our headmaster was a devil, ' he said. 'Do you suppose he actually could have been? And maybe he was the man on Mesa Lane last summer — it was only his first year, you know? The new kids never realized that. They thought he'd been there forever. No wonder we all had nightmares. '

'Are you all right? ' Rose asked.

'He's a talent scout, ' Tom said, smiling. 'Good old M. '

'Tom. '

'Oh, I'm okay. ' He sat up. 'Where are we, anyhow? Oh. Should have known. ' They were in the big theater; because of the removed wall, he could see into the smaller theater. The figures in the mural watched him with their varying expressions of pleasure, boredom, and amusement. And of unearthly greed.

'Collins is right, you know. He did give Skeleton what he wanted. Skeleton wanted exactly what happened. He even drew pictures of it. '

'But now what? ' Rose said. 'Tom, what do we do now? I don't even know what you're talking about. '

'Do you know what I think, Rose? I think I still love you. Do you suppose Collins still loves his little shepherdess? Do you really have a grandmother in Hilly Vale, Rose? '

The worry lines in her forehead puckered again.

Tom got to his knees. The mural, a real audience, watched with sympathetic interest. 'For my next trick, and this has never before been attempted on the continent, ladies and gentlemen. . . '

'Are you crazy? Did that man do something to your mind? '

'Be quiet, Rose. ' The entire mural blazed at him: he could almost see their hands carrying food to their mouths, see them talking to each other: I'll miss old Herbie, say what you like, he was the bloody best. Turned a man's hand into a claw, now, didn't he? In Kensington it. was. The folks in the shilling seats, looking forward to having their brains turned inside-out at Mr. Butter's last show.

In the mural, the Collector turned his head to beam his glee toward Tom Flanagan.

I say, that girl's a smasher. French she is.

'Stay quiet, ' he said. 'Go somewhere — go hide on the stage. Find a corner and hide in it and stay quiet. '

'What. . . ? '

He waved her off, hoping she would find the safest corner in all Shadowland. Now there was no reassuring button to push and turn the awful thing back into a joke.

A loudspeaker crackled: 'ah, there you are, sir! YES, YOU — THE GENTLEMAN IN THE BLACK SUIT. LADIES AND GENTS, WE HAVE OUR SECOND VOLUNTEER. A GENEROUS HAND, PLEASE! '

Ghostly clapping, applause from the year 1924, splashed from the walls.

The Collector slid down from the wall, grinning blind and toothless at Tom.

Now, Mary, don't carry on — that bloke's in on it, do you see? He's part of the show. He's what you call a stooge.

The Collector was stumbling to the end of the aisle in the smaller room, still focused entirely on Tom. A face without any personality at all. Dr. Collector. It was what they all looked like, really: Skeleton, Laker Broome, the magician, Mr: Peet and the Wandering Boys, so warped by hate and greed that they would steal and kill, cheat and tyrannize anyone less powerful. Collins had even stripped a dead man's pockets. Yes. Dr. Collector. They offered their own kinds of salvation. Want to be a man? I'll make you a man. I am your father and your mother.

'Here I am, Skeleton, ' he said. Disgust, loathing, flooded through him. He stood up. His hands felt like molten lead weights, held together only by the knotted handkerchiefs.

'Come on, Skeleton, ' he said.

The Collector lurched eagerly down the stairs.

The truth is, Tom does not have any idea of how he is to fight the Collector. As he hears Rose's high heels clattering into the wings of the stage, he remembers the scene in which the actor Creekmore impersonated Withers, and the impulse which led him to face this dreadful representation of Skeleton Ridpath begins to look like a fatal mistake. The Collector was the magician's best bodyguard — he had said that himself. It suddenly seems very likely to Tom that he is going to die — die none too pleasantly — in the Grand Theatre des Illusions, just as Withers had died in an alley outside a stage door.

'Vendpuris! ' the Collector calls. 'I saw your owl, Vendouris. '

Tom edges away as silently as he can, wondering even now if he can get out of the theater and somehow snatch Del from Collins. . . leave the Collector wandering and calling inside the theater —

but the Collector is a magic trick.

'I want to see some skin, ' the Collector whispers. 'Where are you, Vendouris? '

He is a magic trick, and Tom is a magician. In the hallucinatory scene which had played out when Laker Broome had touched him, there had been the flicker of a clue, the smell of an answer strong enough to make some part of him know that the Collector could be made harmless.

'Some skin, ' the Collector says, opening his mouth to show purple blackness. His empty eyes shine with delight. He is stumbling over the little theater's stage, going by a blind man's radar to the Grand Theatre.

Tom moves quietly down the front of the big stage, backing away. What is the clue, the answer? He can remember the auditorium filled with dead boys, himself floating over it in Skeleton's body.

It is there somewhere, the answer. He has to think. But how could you think, with your mind turning to jelly? It's just magic, that's all, he says to himself, getting as far as the wall and straightening his back against it and watching the Collector step off the little theater's stage. Two more steps would bring him into the larger room. The Collector is drooling, reaching out, and Tom remembers how it was to be inside Skeleton, feeling all that hate which was love knocked on its head, Skeleton's helpless, dumbstruck love for Collins and what he could do.

'I'm not Vendouris, ' Tom says, still feeling his loathing for Skeleton lying like a weight in his chest.

'Aaah, ' Skeleton moans, and focuses his ecstatic head toward Tom. He is shuddering with pleasure. He begins to stumble into a row of seats.

'Your name is Steve Ridpath, ' Tom says. 'And you cheated on your exams. You're the unhappiest boy in the whole school. You're supposed to go to Clemson in the fall. Your father is a football coach. '

'Burn that ball back, ' whispers Skeleton.

'Stay away from me, ' Tom says.

'Burn that ball back! '

'You set a fire in the field house, ' Tom says, searching frantically for the key which will find whatever remains of Skeleton inside the Collector. 'You wanted to see everybody die. '

'Get away from that fucking piano, ' the Collector whispers. He is now at Tom's end of a row of seats, and about a dozen steps up toward the back of the big theater. Behind him and to the left, Tom can see the X of the wooden brace, irregularly stained with red.

But why was I Skeleton? Tom wonders. The awful toy is coming down the steps, brightly scanning for a sign of motion. 'Stay away, ' he says, half-pleading.

The Collector descends another two steps: Tom is by now really almost too scared to move; and he knows that if he tries to run, Skeleton will gain on him effortlessly, and bring him down as happily as a lion brings down a zebra.

'Oh, Flanagini, ' the Collector whispers, only four steps up from Tom. 'Not to hurt Mr. Collins, Flanagini — not to hurt Mr. Collins. '

'I will hurt him, ' Tom says, and raises his useless hands.

'I can fly, Flanagini, ' Skeleton whispers, and is nearly on him.

'You're a joke, Skeleton, ' Tom whispers too, for he is unable to make his voice louder. Then his mind twists and he sees the interior of that room again, the gloom and the lacquered pictures. It is as if they paper the interior of his skull.

He's what you call a stooge.

Skeleton howls in pain or joy, lurches off the last step, and his hands find Tom's throat. The empty eyes glow before Tom, shine directly into his brain, and while the hands tighten about his throat, Tom can hear a mad babble of voices. Owl Dr. Collector see some skin skin owl out to stay now pictures window knew he was there FIRE! owl owlfire takes this life too, you too, Vendouris, coming from where? joy foxhead OWLFIRE FLANAGINIFIRE wolfhead baby on a spear light shining through blood glass thing moving in my pocket. . . an unending spool of gibberish which is Skeleton's soul and mind and is more purely frightening than even the hands around his throat.

Then Tom's mind twists again, and he raises his useless hands, defending himself from the pictures and knowledge there: Flanagini fire, Skeleton's melted consciousness sings to him, and the crushing hands continue to do their work.

Rose had scrambled through the strange assortment of props in the wings of the stage, knocking over tables and spilling loose packs of cards. One deck flattened out on the floor beside her, and she saw that it contained only aces of hearts and twos of spades. From the center of the spilled deck a joker who was a devil popped out of a box and grinned, raising a red pitchfork. Her only thought was to get out. She had seen Tom die once, when the transparent man jabbed his finger forward and touched him, and now she knew he was going to die again. She brushed against a tall structure that looked like a gate or a stanchion, and a shiny slanting blade came hissing down to thwack against the bottom of the frame.

She heard faint applause echo from behind the curtains, out there where Tom was. Applause? It was true, what she had said to Tom long ago. Mr. Collins had been out of control all summer, drinking even more than usual and screaming in his sleep, so that she knew his mind was in that other time, the time which was mythical to her, with Speckle John and Rosa Forte and the original Wandering Boys — Tom Flanagan was the cause of that. . . .

Rose too was in pain. Rose is always in pain, and only Mr. Collins knows this. For as long as she has walked, she had walked on swords, broken glass, burning coals; the ground stabs her feet. Only Mr. Collins knows how when she walks on her high heels, nails jab into her soles, making every step a crucifixion like Tom's. . . .

She wished she were on a train with him, her feet on the seat before her, going away and away and away. Tom would be stunned by the joy she could bring him, and the reflection of that joy would stun her too.

Her hand found the edge of the stage door. Behind her on the other side of the curtains, the Collector howled, and she knew there would be no train, no sweet Tom beside her in a sleeper — only Mr. Collins knew how to get inside the Collector and talk to the twisted boy who lived there.

Rose groped for the knob. It moved under her hand, and the door swung open onto the dark corridor.

'Dear Rose, ' Mr. Collins said, and she gasped. He was standing in the hall, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest.

'Please, ' she said. Then she saw — it was not Mr. Collins, but one of his shadows, one of those that had appeared in the window just before that satanic creature in the eyeglasses had come shouting and pointing his finger. She could always tell the shadows from the real thing, thought it was one of hisl best tricks. Del, who had seen it many times, could sometimes tell too.

'Where do you think you're going, dear one? ' the image asked.

'Nowhere, ' she said sullenly.

'That's true, isn't it? You are not going anywhere. You cannot go anywhere. You remember that, don't you, Rose? '

'I remember, ' she said.

'Thinking about running away with him? Did your little playacting make you wish it could be real? '

She just looked at the shadow, which smiled back at her.

'Did you talk to him about Hilly Vale? ' it taunted her. 'Oh, I'm being mean to our pretty little Vermont Rose. I mustn't be mean to someone who has helped me so much. '

'No, don't be mean, ' she said. She was nearly in tears.

'If your boyfriend escapes from my toy in there, which is really very unlikely, we will have to lead him a dance, won't we? We'll make him choose again. And he will make the wrong choice. Because he will think it is the only choice he can make. And then you will help me, won't you, Rose? '

'I won't, ' she said.

'Defiance — from someone I have aided so often? Are you telling me that you would like to go back home, little Rose? '

He was so calm. She knew he would win. Mr. Collins always won. But she shook her head anyhow.

'Of course, it is an academic question, ' the shadow said. 'Because you will always live here with me and be my queen. The darling boy will be found at the bottom of the cliff, along with my nephew, and next summer perhaps there will be another adorable boy. Next summer or in five summers — a boy with strange stirrings in him, a boy who does not know who he is. A few more voices in the tunnels? I shall be in better control next year, I promise you. '

'I hate the tunnels, ' Rose said.

'Better control next year, ' the shadow promised, fading away. 'And more control over you, dear one. . . . '

'Hang on to him, Mr. Peet, ' the magician said. 'Hold him tightly, and very soon we will know if we will need him to play his part. Need I say that your men did not play theirs very well? '

'If we're up here by ourselves, except for him' — Mr. Peet yanked savagely at Del's hair with his free hand — 'except for this little shit, that is, do you have to call me by that name? ' Mr. Peet was actually a glasshouse marine named Floyd Inbush, who had earned a dishonorable discharge from Korea for removing the ears of a Korean: a South Korean. In his civilian life, Inbush had spent five years in Joliet state prison for assault with a deadly weapon. This 'Mr. Peet' business was getting on his nerves, like his employer's references to the failure of the men he had recruited.

'While you are in this house or on these grounds, you are Mr. Peet, ' the magician said. 'You understood our terms when I hired you. '

'I understood, did I? ' Inbush growled. 'I didn't understand a lot about this lousy job, and you know I didn't. Take a look at this kid. Is that what we're supposed to be guarding you against? ' He jerked Del back and forth by the hair, and Del's limbs moved like a marionette's. His eyes were wide and glazed, his face a sickly gray color under the natural olive cast. Inbush had seen a dozen men go that toadstool color when they had realized that their lives were going to be taken.

'His friend acquitted himself very well against six adult men, ' Collins said.

'He was armed, ' Inbush shouted. 'Arm a baby, he's as good as a combat soldier. Goddammit, if he's armed he is a combat soldier. '

'I must conclude you are inadequate for the job I hired you to do. '.

'You calling me inadequate, you old juicer? ' Inbush took a step toward Collins, who was sitting in the owl chair and regarding him in a detached but regretful manner.

'I must also conclude that you would be happier leaving my employ. '

'Damn right I would. Three of my men are dead — two of 'em ran off, the chickenhearted scum — and you want me to guard you against this little zombie? ' Another savage shake for Del. 'I'm ready to go right now. '

'And so you will, Mr. Peet. You have definitely outlived your usefulness. '

'Hold on. You looked pretty good when we dug for that badger, I'll say that for you, you're in good shape for your age, but I can take you. I can take you good. I'm walking out of here. '

'You are an offense, Mr. Peet. ' Collins sat up straight in the owl chair. 'You are going to leave my way. Watch this, nephew. '

Del whimpered as Inbush cast him away and began to move toward Collins.

'Watch carefully, ' Collins said, and closed his eyes. A shadow line of black appeared around him, outlining him for a second. Inbush stopped moving. A line of red joined the black, and both lines became a single thick line of vibrant blue.

Inbush screamed.

Collins' aura blazed for a moment. Inbush's scream went up an octave in pitch, and the man's hands flew to his scalp. A smell like gunpowder invaded the room, and Floyd Inbush blew up as if there had been a bomb in his guts.

Both the old man and the boy were splashed with red. A wad of something that looked like pink dog food struck Del's chest with the force of a line drive and adhered wetly to his shirt. Del slowly looked down at it, and his mouth fell open and his eyes shuttered and his ears sealed. Del was safe: he stood in the bloody room and he heard nothing and he saw nothing.

Tom is looking into Skeleton's blank shining eyes. In part because of the mad babble coming from Skeleton's molten mind, in part because he can see Skeleton's history as clearly as if it were a movie playing in those dead eyes, he knows Skeleton thoroughly — knows him too well. He sees Chester Ridpath walloping young Skeleton, sees spittle flying from the coach's mouth, hears his curses. He sees Skeleton's hands as if they were his own, opening the lid of the Carson piano as the glass owl rattles itself against the wood; sees the pictures going up, one by one, onto the walls and ceiling.

Skeleton's thumbs are pushing into his windpipe; Skeleton is drooling and humming to himself.

I was in your room, Tom thinks, and the pressure of the thumbs miraculously eases a bit.

Skeleton, I was in your room: I saw the owl at the window: and he does see it, he hears it battering the glass, whapping its great wings. Then another picture takes hold of his mind, and he says to Skeleton: I rode those wings and heard the voice.

Do you hear me in there, Skeleton?

Beneath the lunatic flood of gibberish, there is a small voice which says: Yes. The Collector's hands hang loosely on Tom's neck now; the Collector's torched — down elemental face is frozen like paint on & wall.

I stole the owl, Tom thinks into Skeleton's rushing brain. I set fire to the field house. I was the one you wanted, Skeleton. Not him. Not Del. Tom Flanagan.

'Flanagini fire, ' the Collector whispered.

Flanagini fire — you tied into my battery, Skeleton, before I even knew I had it. Tom hates these thoughts, they violate everything he once had known about himself, everything he had wished to be. My fire, my room, Skeleton: I wasn't just in your room, I was your room.

I was your room. This is the worst thought of all, worse even than the certainty that he alone had seen Skeleton hanging like a spider from the auditorium ceiling because at that moment Skeleton was a broken-away and unwanted piece of himself: that Skeleton's cave of horrors, lovingly clipped from magazines, was a depiction of some boarded-off area of his mind, the area to which Coleman Collins had thrown open the gates in his own soul in the early 1920's.

I am your room, he sends into Skeleton's mind, talcing responsibility for it all. His mind and Skeleton's are nearly one — your room is me — and Tom knows with true and certain finality that in saying this he has finally become a magician: not just a low-grade psychic, but a magician, the black figure with a sword. He has welcomed himself.

After that, after he has sickened himself, he knows how to free Skeleton Ridpath from the Collector. He looks into the grotesque parody of magic before him and sees a high-school boy way down there, with wax Dracula teeth in his mouth and a frightwig on his close-cut hair; a high-school boy who had wanted in the most pathetic way to be scary; and he reaches for him. Come on out, Skeleton, he says. You can come out now. Get out of the Jar. There is a little tug at his mind, a tug like a headache: it will work.

Tom reaches inside, extending a long probe, and this time Skeleton twines around it. OUT! Tom pulls back, and it is like trying to pull a swordfish out of the ocean; gravity tries to drag him down in there with Skeleton, he feels he is bench-pressing twice his own weight. OUT!! He nearly blacks out with the effort of pulling.

The snap of release knocks him backward, and a hot wind blasts him against the wall. A limp thing like an upright sack is before him; beside it stands a tall thin boy with purple-black eyes. The sack flutters down, and a moment later the thin boy collapses.

Tom goes to his knees. He glances at the Collector just to see what it is when it is empty. A rubbery face, a thing of cloth and wire. Beside it, Skeleton is moving his fingers like an infant, his face drenched with sweat. His eyes are shut. Skeleton groans. 'Flanagini. Uh. Fire, ' he says.

'That's all over, ' Tom says, bending over. The odors of an unwashed and unhealthy body are very strong. Skeleton is wearing filthy jeans and a T-shirt which is oddly scorched. 'Do you understand me, Ridpath? It's over. You're free. '

'Um, ' Skeleton says into the carpet.

'Can you move? '

Skeleton opens his bloodshot eyes. 'Flanagan? '

'Yeah. '

Skeleton's face scrunches up. 'I met him, ' he says. 'I did. I finally met him. '

'Can you move? You're going to have to get out of this house. '

'What house? ' Skeleton asks, and his eyes look normal for the first time — eyes the color of thin mud in a roadside ditch. Tom does not want to touch him.

So he forces himself to touch him. He shakes a shoulder that feels like putty covered with grease. 'It's not important for you anymore. Just get up and get out. You'll find the door. Go up the driveway, slide through the bars, and turn left. We're in Vermont. A town called Hilly Vale is about an hour's walk away. '

'You're like him, aren't you? ' Skeleton is trying to get up on his hands and knees, and he is wobbly as a colt, but he makes it. 'You don't have to answer. I know. '

Tom looks at the bruised hateful face and sees — this is a shock! — repugnance equal to his own. Skeleton spits at him. Yellow phlegm slides across Tom's jaw. 'You're like him, ' Skeleton says.

Tom flicks the wet gobbet off his chin. 'Get out, Skeleton. Otherwise he'll kill you. ' A crazy voice in his own mind, wholly his, is clamoring that he use his powers to pick Skeleton up and throw him against the wall, break his bones, grind him to dust. . . he sees the aerial photograph of Carson School crayoned over with red childish flames.

Skeleton looks into Tom's face and shudders backward, banging into the first row of seats. 'Get out, ' Tom says, and Skeleton goes unsteadily toward the door. Tom's hands are burning weights.

Applause, gentlemen? But the figures in the mural had frozen into place again. Even the Collector was back on the wall of the little theater, staring toward Tom as if still hungry for him. No need for that anymore: you've eaten me already. Tom felt again the terrible gravitational pull inside the Collector. If he had been a shade weaker, he would be in there now, sharing eternity with Skeleton Ridpath, their minds a couple of hundred-watt bulbs.

He went to the stage, and did not have the strength to pull himself up onto it. 'Rose? ' She did not answer. 'Rose? ' Tom walked as quickly as he could to the side of the stage and trudged up the little flight of steps. Behind the curtain he was in an underwater world. Dim rosy light: heaps of things like banks of coral, shining from inexplicable edges and corners, as if fireflies nested on them. A fanned-out deck of cards on the floor showed a devil popping up and grinning at him. Do you like the low road, my boy? One of the undersea fireflies was light glinting from the top of a guillotine blade. 'Rose. ' A table had been knocked on its side and lay with its legs straight out like a dead animal. He moved past and saw the stage door.

She was in the dark corridor, leaning against the wall. Tom came quietly out of the stage door and saw her for a long moment before she noticed him: she was forlorn in her outdated green dress, like a little girl abandoned at a birthday party, and for an instant it seemed to him that she too had come up against what she was, some Skeleton's room of her own. Then she recorded that someone else was in the corridor, and she jerked around to face him. Her face instantly recorded disbelieving joy. 'You did it, ' she said quietly, but her voice rang like a bell.

Tom nodded. 'Are you all right? '

'I'm fine now, ' Rose answered. 'As long as I can see you, I'm fine. ' There it was again — that flicker of kinship, of brotherhood in unhappy self-knowledge.

'Why are you looking at me like that? ' she asked. It occurred to Tom that he could probe her mind as he had the Collector's — just send a little question mark into her and see what that kinship was.

He almost did it: started to do it, in fact, but something made him stop as soon as he had begun. Not just the certainty that to do so was like raiding a friend's desk to read his mail; but the uncanny feeling even the delicate, feathery first touch had given him, a sense of airlessness, of suffocation, of being in an alien place. His mind made a sudden shocked withdrawal, having touched for the briefest moment a world in which it knows no landmarks and is queerly cold and lost.

'Del is upstairs. With him, ' Rose said.

For a moment a sick, scared worry passed between them, perfectly shared, as if they each knew what the other was.

'Something happened to you — while I was in there, ' Tom suddenly knew; and knew he should have seen it from the first. 'What was it? '

'Mr. Collins was here — not really him, one of his shadows. Like we saw in the windows. He talked to me. ' Rose tilted her head bravely back. 'He said I could never leave him. '

'Is he going, to hurt Del? '

Rose blinked. 'Not until you make him. '

'I'm getting that gun I dropped, ' Tom said, and began to go down the corridor. 'I'm not going to give him a chance to hurt Del. '

He had gone only a short way down the dark corridor when she came up beside him and wedged a supporting hand under his arm.

The patio lights limned two vague heaps out on the side lawn, and Tom let Rose guide him in that direction. The night had deepened while they had been in the house, and stars filled the sky, gleaming like smaller, colder reflections of the myriad lights blazing again in the forest on either side of the lake.

'Can you find it in the dark? ' she asked.

'Got to, ' he said. He tried to remember where he had been when he had dropped it. Had it been before he had gone toward Pease and the ladder, or had he carried the gun for a while? He saw himself dropping the gun, saw it fire into the grass, flipping over with the force of the recoil.

'Stop, Rose, ' he said. 'I was about here. I stood up somewhere around here. I never got very far from the stones. ' He saw it all rolling on before him, Del with his bloody face, the knot of men going seriously about their business, Snail with his delicate look of worry walking forward right into the bullet. He looked down and did not see the gun, and panic started up in him again. He whispered, 'I don't see it! I don't see it! '

'Let's go ahead a little bit, ' Rose said.

They went five feet forward.

'No, this is too far, ' Tom said, seeing Snail's body lying slantwise on the grass. Snail looked like an exhibit in a wax museum. The other body, Thorn's, was a surprising way off.

'Did Snail get that close to you? ' Rose asked.

'I don't think. . . I don't know. ' Again he saw Snail calmly coming for him, keeping his almost kindly eyes on Tom, that little wrinkle dividing his forehead.

Tom stepped backward, remembering how they had stood. He moved a foot sideways and when he looked down he saw the gun black against the near — black of the grass. He went to his knees and collected it up with both hands. The barrel was still warm. He stood up and displayed it like an offering. 'Two bullets left, ' he said. 'I'm going to shoot his eyes out. '

When he looked at Rose he saw only a fuzzy aureole of hair outlined by the patio lights. 'Help me, ' he said. 'He's a fiend, and I'm going to shoot his eyes out. '

He still cradled the pistol in his joined palms. He would be able to lift it in the proper way only once, and manipulate the trigger with his left index finger. Then he would shoot the magician's eyes out.

Rose helped him toward the patio, then across it. They came into the living room, which was daubed here and there with Tom's blood. No rush of ecstatic air greeted him, as on the morning after his welcome. Shadowland was waiting, he realized. Shadowland was neutral. He pulled the gun toward his chest. It smelled like explosions and oil-it smelled like a burned trombone. Holding it closer like that helped the ache in his forearms.

'We just go up? ' Rose asked. 'We just go up. Very quietly. '

They left the living room and went softly to the big staircase. It rose from gray darkness into dim light. Outside Collins' bedroom, the recessed lights tinted the top of the walls and the swinging doors.

Rose went onto the first step, looked back at him. Hugging the gun into his chest, he nodded, and she went noiselessly up another step. He could do this by himself. Tom put his feet where she had, trying to walk exactly where she had walked — sometime while he had been trying to get his fingers under the gun, Rose had removed her shoes, which she now carried in her left hand. As he set his feet where her bare feet had been, what he still thought of as his new senses sent him the impression of. . . knives. Fire. He looked up, startled, almost feeling sharp points and flames working in his feet, and saw Rose slowly and silently and slowly going up one step after another. Tom moved his foot two inches to the side: mute ordinary carpet. When he moved his foot back again, the impression was still there — knives — but fading. He went farther away from the railing and crept up after her.

She stood on the landing, waiting for him to climb the last tread. Again he had that sense of kinship, as strong as love but different from it, of something in her that was like the magician in him, hidden away. He said I would never leave him. Did he say you would always walk on knives, Rose?

'Oh, Rose, ' he whispered.

She shook her head, either telling him to be quiet or that she could not answer the question she knew he was going to ask. Rose looked anxiously at the swinging doors set off the landing; back at him. Keep your mind on the job, Tom. He adjusted the gun in his hand and got it so that the barrel pointed out from his chest, his right hand on the grip, his left supporting it.

Rose gently pushed one half of the swinging doors, and it noiselessly opened. Tom slipped through into darkness, and saw light outlining Collins' bedroom door. It was chinked open, and all he had to do was burst in.

One final adjustment of his hands: he took the whole weight in his right hand, and wedged his finger into the trigger guard.

Just go in and shoot, he told himself. Don't even stop to think. Just push back the trigger. Then it's over.

He gathered himself, consciously made himself still. He raised the gun so he could sight down the barrel when he was in the room. His heartbeat surged and pounded. When he was ready, he stepped forward and kicked open the door and ran into the bedroom.

What he saw stopped him cold. A gigantic blood-smeared skull grinned at him, its mouth the size of a shark's. 'Del! ' he screamed, and the barrel of Collins' pistol went wavering blindly as his left index finger involuntarily jerked the trigger back.

The pistol jumped, but his right hand went with it and clung. The explosion rocked his head: his ears felt as though he had dropped fifty feet in a roller coaster. A bit of the blood-spattered ceiling shredded away. All of the room was covered in gore. Directly opposite him the blown-up photograph of a skull was dappled in blood; gouts and puddles of blood covered the bed and other furniture, blood ran and dripped from the ceiling, which had been covered with photographs of owls. 'Del! ' Tom howled, and saw on the floor where he had been about to set his foot a partial upper plate from which a single white tooth protruded like a fencepost.

'We are over here, Tom, ' Collins' voice said from his right. 'I trust you want to save your friend's life. '

He swung around toward the voice — he heard his breath hissing in his mouth. The gun felt like a barbell. Collins sat in plain view on the owl chair, and Del was on his lap. They too were dappled with red.

'There's one bullet left, ' Tom said, trying to steady the gun on the magician's amused face. Del stared at him without recognition. 'Del, get off his lap. '

'He can't hear you. He won't, I should say. He's given up. He's gone inside and locked the door. Now, put down the gun. '

Tom frantically tried to fit his left index finger into the trigger guard.

'I could melt that gun in your hand in a second, ' Collins said. 'Or I could kill you by making it explode when you fired. If you had a chance to do it that way, you've lost it. It's time for you to make a sacrifice, Tom. It's time for you to choose. As Speckle John had to choose. The repeat performance isn't over — in fact, it has hardly begun. ' Behind him Tom gradually took in another blown-up photograph: Rose Armstrong dressed as a porcelain shepherdess, her high-browed face not a contemporary, not an American face at all, but of another century and place.

Tom lowered the gun.

'To save my nephew's life, will you sacrifice the pistol? Del is in traumatic shock, I must point out. He might die anyhow. But if you do not sacrifice the gun, I will stop his heart. You ought to know that I can do that. '

'Then why don't you just stop mine? '

'Because then I would cheat myself out of the performance. But you have to decide. ' He smiled again. 'I will give you yet another choice. The choice of giving up your song. Leave Del. Leave Rose — you will have to do that anyhow. And leave magic. Let me have your gifts. You could just walk out of Shadowland, and be precisely the boy you thought you were when you came here. ' Collins spread and lifted his hands: simple. 'That is the best choice I can give you. Sacrifice your song, and use your legs to depart Shadowland for good. '

'Del dies, and you keep Rose here. I leave unharmed, if I can believe you. '

Del sagged on the magician's lap. His face was gray, and he scarcely seemed to be breathing.

'And the other choice? '

'You throw away the gun. Your song against mine. The performance continues until Shadowland has an undisputed master, the new king or the old. What do you say, boy? '

Take my magic and let me out of here, Tom shouted inside himself. He heard movement behind him and snapped his head sideways. Rose stood in the open door. Knives. How often, how many nights, had she been in this room where the owls screamed down from the ceiling? She silently pleaded with him, but she could have been pleading for either choice.

'Song, ' Tom said, and flipped the pistol toward the smeared bed. From the side of his eye he saw Rose slipping back out the door. The pistol landed with a squishing sound far out of his reach, and Tom's viscera curled around a block of ice. I fooled you, I fooled you; Lonnie Donegan's mocking chant to the inspectors on the Rock Island line went through him like a spear, and he knew that he had been forced, had forced himself back into the magician's game.

'Good. But of course you remember the salient point about wizards, ' Collins said.

I fooled you, I fooled you. . . got all pig iron!

'They get the house odds — they use their own decks. You should have walked, child. ' Collins stood up, his eyes flashed, and the owl chair was empty.

A dazed bird fluttered along the floor, its wing feathers painting the blood into delicate Japanese calligraphy.

Tom knew. Collins had carefully prepared him to know: he had foretold it, planted the seeds of this final betrayal in his mind. They once were birds, but were tricked by a great wizard, and now they are still trying to sing and still trying to fly. This dazed sparrow scrawling Japanese letters with Mr. Feet's blood on the polished wooden floor was trying to stand and move like a boy so that it could shutter up its mind again and be safe. The sparrow cheeped, and Tom knew that Del was screaming. In horror Tom watched as it fell on its side and fixed him with an eye like a madman's: a panicked black pebble.

The fairy tales had blown into each other and got mixed up, so that the old king had a wolfs head under his crown, and the young prince in love with the maiden fluttered and gasped in a sparrow's body, and Little Red Riding Hood walked forever on knives and sword blades, and the wise magician who enters at the end to set everything right was only a fifteen-year-old boy kneeling on bloodied floorboards and reaching for the transformed body of his closest friend.

'I can't change him back, Rose! ' he wailed. The sparrow-heart beat, a thousand times faster than his own, against the tips of his fingers.

'I don't know how to change him back! ' He heard his voice as he had when the nails had gone in, sailing up high enough to freeze. The sparrow quivered in his hands. A wing feebly struck his thumb.

'Then you'll have to make Mr. Collins change him back, ' Rose said. She stood just inside the door, looking down at Tom with the stunned bird in his wrapped hands. 'Make him do it, ' and her voice was fierce.

He came out of the bedroom holding Del as he had held the gun, and Coleman Collins was lounging against the top of the banister. 'Welcome to the Wood Green Empire, ' the magician said. 'Front-row seats? Excellent. '

'Change him back, ' Tom said.

'Sorry, no refunds, no exchanges. You'll have to take your seats now. '

'That's not him, ' Rose said at his shoulder. 'It's a shadow. '

'Oh, you told on me, ' the image said, and flickered away into dozens of dancing flames.

'welcome to the wood green empire! ' boomed the metallic voice. The bird trembled in Tom's hands, cheeping frantically, twisting its neck to look up into his face. The flames died before they fell, like fireworks, leaving them in darkness. Down the hall to Tom's side, moonlight cast panels of silver on the floor and folded halfway up the wall; otherwise Shadowland was as dark as the tunnels beneath the summerhouse.

Del went utterly still in his hands, and Tom feared that he had died. Then he felt a high regular throb beneath his fingers, the sparrow's heart thrilling away, and he opened his shirt and tenderly put Del next to his skin. He buttoned his shirt up halfway. Feathers rustled against his chest.

Outside, the fireworks began again with a thumping explosion that rattled the windows down the hall and sent shooting rays of red and blue across the silvery pane of windows. Soft against his skin, Del made almost a human cry.

A beam of light at the bottom of the stairs: Herbie Butter outlined in light, dressed in his black tails, red wig, and white face; 'We have a volunteer, ladies and gentlemen — the brave Tommy Flanagan, all the way from sunny Arizona in the United States of America! Are you ready, Tommy? Can you sing for us? '

'Change him back! ' Tom shouted, and Herbie Butter rolled over in a backflip and landed on his feet, an index finger pointed to the sky.

'Change? Easier said than done, boy — but that's magic for you. ' He too dissolved into dancing, lilting flames.

'THE OLD KING! THE ONLY KING! '

Tom felt his way down the stairs in the dark.

. . . Philly's wife looks a little peaked this summer, Nick. . .

. . . what you get from being in two places at once. . .

Voices from the tunnels, come out to play in the dark.

And voices from the other place that had been Shadowland.

. . . if a senior drops his books on the floor, pick them up. Carry them where he tells you to carry them. Do anything a senior tells you to do. . .

He came down from the last step and nearly stumbled, expecting another.

. . . got that? You will be doomed to destruction, DOOMED TO DESTRUCTION, if you do not learn the moral lessons of this school. . . .

He smelled the biting aroma of gin.

'Change him back! ' he shouted: felt the crippling hysteria bubbling in him and knew that too could destroy him.

'You have to find the real one, ' Rose said. 'He wants you to find him, Tom. '

Tom cupped his hands around Del's shivering body. The sparrow had drawn up his feet and clamped up his wings, and was small and warm inside his shirt: small and warm and terrified enough to die of shock. That terror made his own insignificant. He looked down at the pregnant little bulge in his shirt, and saw two circles of blood where his palms had rested. His hysteria, something he could not afford, eased. 'I want it too, ' he said.

They turned back into the main body of the house. Sudden light stabbed his eyes, and Coleman Collins was standing in a column of flame beside the row of theatrical posters. Orange light danced on the opposite wall, on the ceiling. 'That was your shortcoming, you know, ' the shadow said. 'You simply were not capable of learning the moral lessons. The Book would have been useless to you. It never did Speckle John much good, either, as far as I could see. '

'You perverted the Book, ' Tom said. 'You perverted magic. Speckle John should have left you to die on that hillside. The fox should have torn out your throat. '

The elegant figure in the flame chuckled. 'Now you sound like Ouspensky. ' He mimed yawning and then grinned. 'You know, they were afraid of me, Ouspensky and Gurdjieff. That is why they carried on so. Afraid of me, like that ranter Crowley. ' The flame had begun to consume itself from the bottom up.

Outside, fireworks battered in the sky.

The flame was a teardrop hanging in the air; only Collins' head was visible in it. 'And he was stronger than you, dear boy. . . . ' The flame and the head vanished together.

He stood in the dark with Rose, feeling Del palpitating against his belly. 'You know, he's right. I can't do any of those things he does. He's bound to beat me, and he knows it. ' He felt shock radiating out from her and he said, still with that fatalistic clarity, 'It doesn't mean I'm not going to try, but I can't do those things. I just can't. '

'Have you ever tried? ' came her voice.

'No — not projecting myself like that. '

'Then try it. '

'Right now? '

'Sure. '

'I don't even know how to start. '

'But haven't you been getting better — haven't you been learning? '

'I guess. '

'Then just start. Try it. Now. For the sake of your confidence. '

It would not do his confidence much good if he failed, he reflected, but tried anyhow. It had to be like all the rest, he thought. It had to be a place in his own mind and all he had to do was find it. Suppose there were a mirror in front of you, Tom. Suppose you could see yourself. Suppose the mirror Tom could speak.

'You're better than he is, Tom, ' Rose whispered.

Del tucked himself together even more compactly against Tom's skin, and Tom remembered flowing down into Skeleton's mind, how that had felt. . . that feeling of gaining and losing control simultaneously, of flowing out. . . his eyes fluttered, and a key turned within him as he thought of Skeleton's gibberish unreeling out toward him, and a ball of light momentarily flickered in the corridor.

'Oh, do it, do it now, ' Rose pleaded.

Tom released it.

The Collector stood down there moving toward him with frustrated eyes and a foolish mouth —

KA-WHAMP! A rocket exploded over the house, big enough to send darts of light shooting in the window above the front door.

His mind jolted, and the Collector fell over. 'Sorry, ' he said. He even laughed. 'But did you see? It was harmless that time. There was nobody inside it. '

'Put Tom down there, ' Rose insisted.

Tom reached toward the key again, and imagined not a mirror but himself on the day he had met Del, and felt the flowing, the letting go, and another Tom Flanagan took shape in a ball of light down the hall. He was pulling a beanie down to two fingers balanced on his nose. He smiled, opened his mouth, and a paralytic croak issued from him. He disappeared.

'You see? ' Rose said.

Then light poured out from the entrance of the living room and showed them the collapsed rubbery bundle which was the Collector, and Tom knew that he had moved it from the big theater just by thinking about Skeleton. He heard a whirring noise, as if machinery had been switched into life.

A second later, Humphrey Bogart walked into the hall from the living room.

'You goint to do some tricks for us, kid? ' Bogart asked. He wore a slim black tuxedo, and a cigarette smoked in his fingers. 'Little more of the old razzle-dazzle before the curtain comes down? '

'Del told me about some summer when he was twelve — the whole thing was like a movie. . . ' Tom muttered these not very coherent remarks to Rose as he watched the actor impatiently toying with his cigarette. Tom looked sideways, but Rose had gone somewhere into the darkness behind him.

'Come on, we got some people who are interested in you, ' the actor said, and snapped his fingers. 'Yeah, this way. Come on in and join the party. '

Tom went toward the entrance of the living room.

All the lights burned. A gathering of men in tuxedos, of women in dresses, filled the living room. The smell of gin invaded his nostrils again. 'Hey, sonny, ' a bluff-faced man Tom recognized as William Bendix shouted, 'how you doing! '

'Oooo, Tom, ' crooned a platinum-blond woman with very red lips and a playful face that made a delicious, sensual joke of its own beauty. . . .

'Bird lover, are you? ' Bogart said, and made to strike Del cushioned in Tom's shirt. 'Got a couple little dogs myself. '

'That monkey music — I can't take. that monkey music, ' William Bendix snarled, though all Tom heard was the chattering of dozens of voices and the whirring sound. Bendix wore a porkpie hat on the back of his head and was slamming a beer glass down on a bar.

'Aw, leave him alone — poor bastard has a plate in his head, ' Bogart said, tugging Tom deeper into the party. 'I guess you never met Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale. They came here just to have the pleasure. '

A man with a face like a run-over dog and a woman whose head was a charred stump were standing up from the flowered couch, holding but their hands and struggling to speak through mouths that had been seared shut. Tom gagged and stepped backward. Their clothes were smoking; curls of flame sprouted from the man's collar.

'Can that monkey music! '

'Never mind them, kid, ' and a hand spun Tom around. 'They're too fried to talk straight — you remember those other people I mentioned? '

Snail and Thorn were standing beside the table, Tweedledum and Tweedledee all dressed up to go dancing (now he could hear the music, a trumpet lead over strings like a hundred make-out albums, Jackie Gleason Plays for Lovers Only).

'Can't stand it! ' William Bendix hollered, smashing his beer glass against the bar.

Snail and Thorn bled from holes in their foreheads, though that was not where he had shot them, and their faces were blameless and bland, washed of emotion. . .

'Take a drink — aren't you a man? ' Bogart sloshed something that smoked and bubbled from a decanter into a glass. He winked, and half his face jumped in a tic. 'Just get this down into you, it'll chase away the snakes. '

Tom was looking for Rose, and Humphrey Bogart was putting the smoking glass into his hand, which was whole and unharmed. Rose had disappeared.

Then a red-haired woman in a low-cut black dress leered at him — she's. . . she's. . . a face from a hundred movies, an uptilted nose and perfect mouth — and her face suddenly had needle teeth and a long red-furred snout —

and all the well-dressed people at the party had animal faces, monkeys and apes and foxes and wolves, and they were leering at him, chattering now over 'Moonlight Becomes You. ' Tiger eyes set in glowing tiger stripes blinked toward him.

A creature with a pig's head was clamping his hand around a bubbling glass and forcing it to his lips, and Bobby Hackett was using his cornet to tell a girl that she certainly knew the right things to wear and across the room a man named Creekmore was stumbling forward with half his face dangling like a flap over gleaming bone. Damp weeds dripped from his shoulder.

'Rose! ' Tom called, but the party noises screwed up loud enough to deafen him and a boar chuckled in his ear and Bobby Hackett's spring-water tone had turned coarse and blasting. . . something bitter and burning touched his lips.

AWAY! he shouted with his mind. GONE! He closed his eyes and mouth, and something burningly spilled down his chin. . . and then silence, as if all power had died.

Rose touched his face. 'You're scaring me. '

'Did you see them? ' They were alone in the darkened room. Moonlight pouring in through the glass doors showed silver furniture, immaculate and dead.

'See what? '

A trace of gin — juniper and alcohol — lingered in the air. Del's body thrummed against his skin.

'What scared you, Rose? '

She too was touched by the moonlight: her face hung as white as a sail before him. 'You were talking to yourself — you were acting funny. '

His heart gradually slowed.

A blast of fireworks turned the room and her face violently red: rose-red.

'I can't describe it, ' Tom said. 'I think he almost got me. I think he damn near killed me just now. You didn't see anything? '

'Just you. '

'You didn't even see that actor — Creekmore? '

She shook her head.

'He's dead. It wasn't just bloodbags and a few scratches. He died like I was supposed to. ' Another explosion outside rattled the windows and touched her face with pale blue. 'Rose, what did you think would happen when you brought us back here? '

She shook her head. 'Nothing like this. ' Her face worked: she was going to cry. 'I thought he'd put on a show. And I thought I could get you and Del out in the middle of it. ' Now she was crying. 'I'm sorry, Tom. '

'You thought you would get me and Del out? Not yourself too? '

Whitened by the moonlight, her face altered and the tears stopped. She wiped her eyes. 'Of course. Of course myself too. '

'But we have something in common, don't we? '

Rose turned away from him and began to go back toward the hall.

'Why did he say you couldn't leave? '

Rose looked over his shoulder at him, slipped into the blackness beyond the doorway.

'Why does it. . . ? ' Why does it hurt you so to walk? He gingerly put his right hand a few inches into his pocket and touched one of the sections of the broken shepherdess. He tweezed it out. The top half of a girl.

The top half of a girl.

Like. . .

Tom went toward the door and out into the corridor, following her. 'Rose? ' He threw the broken thing aside.

A thunderous noise from outside — WHAMP! WHAMP! — as if, yes, just as if a gigantic bird, a bird larger than the house, were battering it down with its wings.

'Rose! '

'and now, ladies and gentlemen, the famous window of flame! '

A blast of heat rocked him backward, and he shouted her name again. A second later, the point at which the corridor entered the other wing of the house flared into bright flame. Rose was running back toward him, covering her face with her hands. Inside the solid flame, something was writhing and turning, twisting into itself like a hundred snakes.

Rose ran until she careered into him, and then she put her arms around his chest. Black stains spread along the ceiling; the glass on one. of the framed posters shattered with a loud cracking noise.

'It is snakes, ' Tom said, watching the writhing forms within the solid flame.

'No. It's me, ' Rose said into his shirt.

He saw. Vines curled and twisted, the heads of roses flailed, impaling themselves on the thorns, stabbing themselves so they bled. . . the glass over another poster exploded.

BANG! Another gigantic wing beat from outside. Inside Tom's shirt, Del quivered and tried to flatten himself into nothing.

The blood was petals, dropping away and being consumed. But the whole flowers would not be consumed, they would twist in agony until the flowers died or disappeared.

'and the window of ice! '

As the heat had preceded fire, an intense chill poured through the corridor a moment before the fire froze into place, turned gray-white and monumental.

The orange light disappeared with the fire, and a single white spot glowed down from the ceiling on a version of Coleman Collins. He was leaning against the glacial wall in an open-collared chambray shirt. 'You could have gone that way, you know, but that would have been too easy — especially since you escaped your drink in the living room. I rather expected you to work your way out of that one, you know. Congratulations! '

'Change Del back, ' Tom said.

'For that, you'll have to speak to the original, ' the shadow said) 'He's still waiting. He wants to see the end of the performance, too. It's been a long time, you know. Over thirty years. ' The shadow smiled. 'In the meantime, did you enjoy the picture of little Rose's plight? '

Behind him, the impaled and twisted blossoms hung half-visible in the ice.

'The rose that wounds itself, ' the shadow mused. 'Poignant, isn't it? But not half so poignant if you know she wanted it. Prayed for it. Begged for it. Perhaps not unlike how your old friend Mr. Ridpath begged to be fitted into that contraption. ' He nodded at the collapsed and singed Collector, which lay heaped against the wall.

Another gigantic wingbeat pounded at the house, and this one was followed by the unmistakable noise of the glass doors in the living room shattering beneath the blow.

'We are all getting impatient with you, Mr. Flanagan, ' the shadow said. 'Why don't you locate the old king and settle the issue? '

'I'm trying to do that, ' Tom said. 'Damn you. '

The shadow clapped his hands, and the wall of ice slid out of existence, becoming so transparent that the frozen roses blazed out a moment before they too faded into transparency. 'Your friend should be able to help you distinguish the real from the false. Or don't you remember your old stories? '

Then he too was gone, leaving behind him the impression of a smile and the smells of singed carpet and blistered paint.

'What old stories, Rose? ' He turned on her. 'Tell me. What stories did he mean? If you knew all along. . . '

She stepped backward, alarmed. 'Not me, ' she said. 'He didn't mean me. He couldn't have. '

Tom could have screamed with frustration. 'There isn't anyone else. He did mean you. '

'I think he meant Del, ' Rose said.

'Think, ' Rose said. 'You know, and he knows you know. Remember it, Tom. '

'Del? ' It was an almost fantastically cruel joke. 'It can't be. ' He fumbled with two shirt buttons, working them with thumb and index finger until the flat white disks found the holes. Del flopped out onto his palm; the wings feebly stretched. 'Oh, my God. Oh, Del. '

'Think about what he said, ' Rose pleaded.

Another pane of the glass door exploded into the living room.

'We read stories in English class, ' Tom said, frantically trying to remember. . . a sparrow? 'We read 'The Goose Girl. ' We read 'Brother and Sister. ' We read. . . shit. It's no use. 'The Fisherman and His Wife. ' 'The Two Brothers. ' It's no good. ' What he remembered was how birds had plagued him: how a robin on the lawn had looked in through a window and drilled him with its eyes; a starling in a Quantum Heights tree quizzing him as the world revolved and witches filled the sky.

'It's no good, ' Tom said. 'Our teacher said. . . ah, in 'Cinderella, ' he said a bird was the messenger of the spirit. A bird gave her pretty clothes. Another bird took out the stepsisters' eyes. Oh, wait. Wait. It's 'Cinderella. '' He held Del out from his body. 'Birds tell the prince that the stepsisters are not to be his bride. They make him find Cinderella. The birds make him find the right bride. ' ,

In the darkness Rose was looking up at him with gleaming eyes. Del stirred on his bandaged palm.

'Find him, ' Tom whispered, feeling half-exalted, half-sick with the impossibility of both his task and Del's. 'Find him. '

Del's head lifted; his wings unfurled. And Tom's heart loosened too, and overflowed. On his bloody, aching hands the bird opened its wings and beat them down. Once. Twice. Go, little bird. Go, Del. A third time the wings opened and beat down, and the sparrow lifted off Tom's hands.

The messenger of spirit swooped into the air. Find him. For us, for you. Find him.

The messenger circled in the dark air above them, then settled once on Tom's shoulder — a gesture like a pat on the head, a gesture of love — and took off down the corridor.

They followed it, stumbling past the abandoned Collector in the dark, past the entrance to the forbidden room, past the door to the Little Theater. Del flew in rapid, excited circles before the Grand Theatre des Illusions, darting again and again at the door.

Rose reached the door before Tom.

Another gigantic wingbeat rattled the entire back of the house. Tom heard the case in the living room toppling over, breaking the glass doors and splintering the wood. Inside it, the porcelain figures would be smashed and crumbled into each other.

'What is that outside? ' Rose asked.

'An owl. Another messenger. '

'It's not him? '

'No. It means someone is going to die, ' Tom said. 'It means someone should have died already. The performance was supposed to end a little while after they. . . ' He almost swooned, remembering precisely how Collins had held the glowing nails and used them to rape his hands. 'Stay out here, ' he said.

'I'm coming with you, ' she said, and pushed open the door. She took two steps in and halted.

The sparrow sailed inside, into light and noise. A crowd filled the seats.

'You have front-row seats, ' three Herbie Butters said from three owl chairs. 'Please take them. '

Tom looked at them, scarcely bothering with the audience that had transfixed Rose. People from another age stared at the three magicians, peeled oranges, stuffed candies into their mouths, smoked. Unlike their painted images, which were visible at the rear of the Little Theater, they moved in the seats, raised their arms, applauded, and called out inaudible comments in X general din.

'You see, they like my little illusions, ' three Herbie Butters said in unison. 'And now my volunteers will attempt to distinguish reality from its shadow. Failure to do so will bring a penalty, ladies and gentlemen. '

Cheers: catcalls.

'Change Del back, ' Tom said, pitching his voice to go under the uproar behind him.

'Ah! The boy wants me to work magic on his pet — a sparrow, ladies and gentlemen! Our volunteer is very droll. ' He held up his palm. 'But he is more than that, my friends. The young man is an apprentice magician. He thinks he could entertain you as well as I. '

More cheers; derisory shouts. Tom looked over his shoulder, saw Rose just turning away from the audience with a stricken, horrified expression. In her face was the conviction that they could not win. Up in the middle of the twentieth row, Del's parents, with their smashed heads and burning clothes, were politely applauding. Around them, visible behind Rose, men and women with animal faces screamed down at them and the stage.

'You see what audiences are, my little volunteer, ' said the three Herbie Butters in unison. 'All audiences are the same. They want symbolic blood — they want results. You cannot trifle with an audience. Are you ready to make your choice? '

Zoo noises erupted from the thrashing audience. Tom glanced back and saw that everyone, even Del's parents, wore the heads of beasts. Dave Brick writhed there too, stuffed into Tom's old jacket, with a sheep's head on his shoulders.

'You see, you must never. . . ' said the Herbie Butter on the left.

'. . . make the fatal mistake of thinking. . . ' said the Herbie Butter in the center.

'. . . that any audience is friendly, ' said the Herbie Butter on the right. 'Are you ready to make your choice? You will be severely penalized if you choose wrong. I promise you that! ' he shouted to the audience, who screamed back in a thousand animal voices.

Tom looked up. Their messenger of spirit was circling in the vastness overhead, frantically trying to find its way out, like any bird.

Is there any Del left in you? Tom thought: his mind was fraying apart, shredding under the onslaught of noise from the audience of beasts. Or are you lost, just a sparrow now?

The sparrow came to rest on a pipe and was almost invisible, far up above him. He saw its head twitching from side to side.

'We're waiting, ' said three voices.

Find him, Tom thought. Find Collins.

'If you do not make your choice, you will be sent back, ' said three voices. 'You will be part of the audience forever. For they are each important, and each adds to the whole. '

Find Collins.

'Your pet is not a bird in a story, ' said the Herbie Butter on the left.

'He is only a pestilential sparrow, ' said the Herbie Butter in the middle.

And that would be right, Tom knew. No angels were looking after him and Del. The messenger of spirit was no longer a messenger of anything. Del's mind had guttered out in the frantic, restless little body.

'Del! ' he shouted.

'One of a hundred lost pets, ' said one of the magicians.

The sparrow left the pipe and swooped down over the audience, causing an uproar of shouts and curses.

Find him. Find him. Whatever you are now.

The sparrow curved in flight, and went for the stage. Tom's heart paused: his blood slowed in his veins. The sparrow flew in a straight line over the three figures on the stage, circled back and flew over them again. It came down suddenly, and as it went toward the lap of the magician on the left, Tom screamed, 'That's enough! Leave him! He's going to — '

The sparrow came to rest on the knee of the magician on the left.

'The young man is a magician, ladies and gentlemen, ' Collins said through the mask of Herbie Butter. 'This part of the performance is concluded. ' He tenderly reached forward and closed his fingers about. the sparrow's body, and his companions faded into dark pools cast on the stage by opposed spotlights. 'My friends in the audience, this young man's pet has given his life so that his master may advance another stage. '

He's what you call a stooge, someone whispered behind Tom. You'll see. It's all part of the act.

Collins stood up from the owl chair, gripping the sparrow in his right hand and holding it out, brandishing it. 'You see before you a real bird, ' he caressingly intoned. 'You have seen it fly. What is it? A boy's pet, a winged rodent, or a messenger of spirit? You have heard how magical birds aid their masters in quests and divinations, you know how they roam widely and freely in the world, bringing rumors of goodness here and there, soaring above what holds us to our earthly existences — ladies and gentlemen, aren't birds our very image of the magical? ' He thrust forward the bird, and it — Del — poured out a cascade of melody unknown to any sparrow, as though its whole body had been filled with leaping song.

Oh, Del. That's you. And you're not afraid.

'You see — a special bird. Does it not deserve a place in the eternal? '

Still the heartbreaking cascade of melody erupted from the captured sparrow.

'Do I need my fiddlers three? '

'NO! ' bellowed the audience of beasts.

'Do I need my pipe and my bowl? '

'NO! '

'No. You have it, ladies and gentlemen. You comprehend. The singing bird is magic itself. It is indeed the messenger of spirit. And it could sing, I assure you, any melody you called out — but it has already surpassed such vulgar tricks. So I propose to give this living spirit messenger, with your permission, ladies and gentlemen of the perfect audience, its final form. Its ultimate form. '

'No! ' Tom shouted, echoing the roars of the audience.

'Yes. ' Collins smiled down at him and released the bird. The song cascaded fully out, spearing Tom with what Del was bringing forth from his trapped soul, the liquid and overflowing song which was Del's only speech. Del ascended an inch above the magician's hand and

no no no no-please —

froze, shooting out a spray of refracted colors, was silent, the miraculous song cut off in the middle of an ascending note; the ghost of the note sailed into the ceiling; and a glass bird fell back into the magician's hands.

Del.

'You are in Shadowland, boy, ' Collins said. 'You are part of the performance. You cannot leave. ' He bent forward, and Tom stepped up to stand before him, afraid that he would drop what Del had become as Del had deliberately shattered the Ventnor owl. The audience ceased its roaring. Tom vaguely saw Rose coming toward him with an expression of total dismay — We can't do it, Tom, I thought we could but I was wrong, we'll always be here — and tremblingly took the glass sparrow from Collins' hands.

'Now for your own conclusion, ' Collins said. 'You know it's over, don't you? Look. Our audience has gone home. '

Tom did not have to look. He knew the seats were empty now, waiting for the next repeat performance and the next after that.

'Rose is already mine, ' Collins said. 'And so are you, but you don't know it yet. '

The lights snapped off. Collins' fingers brushed his own, and the glass sparrow was filled with glowing many-colored light.

Tom stepped backward in the punctured darkness, aware after a moment of blinding pain that the magician had healed his wounds. In the moment of pain, the glass sparrow had jumped out of his hand and landed safely on the carpet before the stage, where its inner light darkened and died.

The handkerchieves fell from his hands.

'Tom? '

'Wait, ' he said, and picked up the glass sparrow. No light was left in it.

'Now it is your time, apprentice, ' Collins whispered.

'Why did you heal me? ' Rose found his waist, her arm circled him, and they both backed in lockstep into the first row of seats.

'I want you as you came, ' Collins said. 'Aura. I don't want you to have the aura of a wounded fawn. I want the original Tom Flanagan, complete in every aspect — the shining boy. '

Tom pushed Rose sideways, toward where he remembered the door was placed.

'You can see me, can't you? ' Collins whispered. 'Even in the dark, boy? I can see you perfectly well. '

And he could see the magician, for he was wrapped in a dazzling, rippling band of color.

'Del was not enough. The other messenger demands you. '

'Or you, ' Tom said. He held up his right hand. It was in darkness, but ribbons of light ran about it. Rose sucked in her breath, terrified.

'You've frightened our dear little Rose. She's never seen you in full dress before. Never seen your choir robes. But then, you haven't either, have you? '

'I'm as good as you are, ' Tom said, knowing he was not.

The magician ripped off the wig and sent it sailing toward the stage, where first it glimmered and then dimmed like a cheap lightbulb.

'Speckle John thought so too. '

CRASH! Another deafening, destroying wingbeat.

'The owl wants to be fed. '

Tom made sure of his grip on the glass sparrow with one hand; clamped Rose's wrist with the other and gave a signaling tug; and ran.

Behind him in the empty theater Collins started to laugh, and Rose went only a few steps before she said, 'I can't. I can't run. You go. I'm his anyway. '

'You won't stay. ' He yanked her along behind him and pulled her through the open door.

'We can't get away. '

He looked past Rose and saw a flickering outline coming calmly, inexorably toward the door.

My little girl is right. Collins was feeling inside his mind as he had felt inside Skeleton's. You cannot. Look at me.

The outline blazed like a tightningbolt, so strongly that purple and red. radiance flashed through the door and made the wall opposite momentarily gleam like a neon sign.

You will be at home in Shadowland, Tom. I am your father and mother now.

'Just come on, ' he said, and dragged her down the hall. She had begun to cry: not from fear, he knew. From pain. 'Hurry, ' he commanded.

They had exactly one chance, Tom thought. An impossible chance, but their only one. If Collins could send a fishing line into his mind, he could send one back. Burn that ball back — Skeleton had said it, dredging up what must have been some miserable childhood memory. Okay, I'll burn that ball back. I'll take off his head with it.

Rose sobbed with every step.

'Only a little more. Only a few more feet. ' He felt for the light switch on the wall outside the kitchen, and his fingers ran over ribbed plastic. 'There. ' Yellow light fell on them. '

The curled posters, the shattered glass. The carpet had been singed into black popcorn. Big oval blisters bulged from the walls, surrounded by meteor showers of smaller, round blisters.

No need for shadows now.

Rose jerked in pain or surprise beside him, and he thought it was because of Collins. But she was looking in the wrong direction for that — behind him, in the direction of the living room and front door.

'You're going to need a little help, Red, ' came a velvety voice. In the same moment, Tom whirled around and the scarred receptacle from which he had pulled Skeleton Ridpath shuddered to its feet.

Climb in, boy? Or do I have to push you?

'Just remember you got a great big battery, ' Bud Copeland said. 'You found out a lot of things about yourself today, but you got to forget about that now. You have to think about the job, son. '

The Collector dangled, in the hall, knocking itself against the blistered and discolored walls. Its empty head swiveled toward Tom; toward Rose; back to Tom.

Bud moved up beside them, and there was the shock of seeing right through him again, to the blisters on the wall. They looked like stains on the fabric of his suit.

'I'll give you a big, big shove. You'll have a real good time. Way way way way down in the dump. '

Tom's mind felt a sudden wrench, followed by an enormous flaring pain.

'Remember what you heard, Red. Anybody can be collected at any time. '

Collins went fishing in his mind again, and the hook snagged on the picture he had of himself and Skeleton down in there, trapped inside the Collector. He stepped back, more afraid of that picture than he'd been of anything at Shadowland; more afraid of that than death.

'You don't want to run, do you, Red? You want to stay near where you got to stay. '

Yes, he thought. Where I got to stay. He felt Collins jerking him like a fish, and he blasted, Out!

'I'm what you know, Red, ' Bud told him. 'That's all I am now. You brought me here — so I could tell you. I'm just your shadow. That's your battery working, Red. Crank it up as high as it can get. '

But I don't know how to crank it up, Tom thought despairingly: sometimes things just come.

'Like you did on the wall with nails through your hands, ' Bud's voice whispered. Or was that his own voice? 'It's not going to be any easier than that. But I helped him long enough — now I'm going to help you. ' He vanished, and Tom felt suddenly abandoned.

Collins appeared at the corner of the hallway, surrounded by a prismatic light.

If I made you come, Tom said inside himself, then come back. I need you. Now.

'Now, ' Collins echoed, and the force of his mind jerked Tom forward to him. 'Now, little bird. '

It was like being caught in a typhoon. Invisible wind pushed him, tore all but his helplessness from his thoughts — he forgot Bud and Rose as he struggled to stay on his feet. He fought to stay away from Collins and the Collector, but the typhoon swung him irresistibly forward. The wind whipped him sideways, and his head cracked against the wall. Smell of burning: the smell of Carson warping toward destruction. Strong hands were inside his head, a hook was in his brain, tugging and tugging.

Strong little bird, aren't you?

The glass sparrow in his hand turned glowing red. No! his mind shouted, and the pull of the hands weakened. The typhoon dropped him.

Collins' face hovered a foot from his own — the sneering mouth, the powerful nose. The Herbie Butter makeup was dripping down his cheeks, streaking away, as if being burned off from within.

It's work for him too, Tom realized.

He shot an impulse from his own mind straight into Collins' eyes, aware of Rose screaming back there by the living room — she had been screaming since he had been torn away from her. Collins reared back, and he tried to follow his impulse into the magician's head.

Revulsion checked him: not the blind, lost feeling when he had probed Rose's mind, but the instinctive holding back of touching something repugnant, a cancer. . . . Collins' mind slammed against his like a crossed sword.

Not that way, brat. It's your bedtime.

Collins pushed into his mind with terrific force, and he reeled among images of lacquered birds, steaming bodies, one great bird swooping down to carry him off. Circuits in his brain smoked and flamed. . . locked in that room for good, boy, that's where you'll be. . . .

In his hands, the glass sparrow turned black.

Hands, fishhooks, metal clamps like those that had held the squalling badger — all this poured into Tom and grasped something that seemed like a white bird.

Bedtime, child.

Collins started to haul him out. The whites of the magician's eyes burned red.

Tom summoned up Bud Copeland with the last of his nickering energy. Come back, Bud, now. . . now. . .

'You again, ' he heard Collins say, and the cruel machinery opened and loosened within him; and for Tom there was a drift of a thought — You betrayed me, bird. . .

'You are the traitor, ' he heard Bud say. 'Not the boy. Let him go, Doctor. '

'You lost! Leave me! ' Collins shouted. 'I sent you into insignificance! '

Tom looked sideways, falling back out of Collins' grasp. The glass sparrow flashed yellow light, and the warmth of it went through his hand, burning a little on the fresh scar tissue.

'You told the boy everything here came from the meeting of your mind with his, ' Bud said. 'And that's all I am. Guess you gave him a weapon, Doctor, without knowing you were doing it. '

And then a sidling, sly, sidestepping voice in his own mind and nowhere else: a voice he knew was his own, though it came wrapped in Bud's gorgeous rumble. You waitin' for the next train, child?

'NO! ' Collins screamed. 'You helped him! Traitor! '

The wings shook the entire house, reminding Tom of the vastness of the powers just under his tongue and just behind his eyes. 'Look at me, killer, ' he said. 'I'm going to feed the owl. '

He knew the glass bird was gold and red, knew that he was broadcasting an aura to fill the entire house.

'TRAITOR! ' Collins screamed, and his eyes locked into Tom's: but Tom was already pouring in, grasping Collins as he had grasped Skeleton Ridpath, going past pictures of dead men with their faces ripped apart and exploding airplanes, going into the swamp of Collins' being, where nothing could hold him now, going as invincibly as if he wore white armor and feeling Collins melt beneath him. A bolt like lightning shivered him, but he grabbed and held, gripped the stuff of Collins' being and ripped backward. Get those fingers back. The secret did lie in hating well.

'The pain won't be as bad as you anticipate, ' he whispered. He pulled with everything in him, feeling the power blossom out and engulf Collins, feeling it wrapping about a squirming, wriggling, finally helpless force; and broke it; broke free.

Something invisible and screaming was held suspended in the air: something treacherous and furious, something that would have been pure if it had not been so fouled by misuse.

Tom groaned, and stuffed it deep down inside the Collector. 'Slam dunk, ' he muttered.

Rose tottered back, mumbling in fright, not knowing what had happened. In front of Tom, Collins' body lay in the corridor in what appeared to be deep coma. Beside it, the Collector, a threat again, whirled toward him with its unappeasable hunger.

'This time I can remember how to finish it, ' he said. Tom stepped to his side, the Collector tracking him brightly, and reached inside the bathroom and slammed the button home.

The whole purple body, damaged by the earlier flames, flowed past Tom, howling wordless sounds of disbelieving shock, and was pulled through the door. It grasped the frame with its fingers. The melted eyes found Tom, and the boy saw what he had not wanted to see: Collins far down inside, scrambling for release, still enough himself to think he could escape and trying to fight his way out of that awful room with its pressing horrors, the very grease of human misery. You made it, Tom thought. It's yours. The fingers weakened, and the Collector flowed out of sight.

Tom stepped into the bathroom. He turned on the light. The mirror showed a roiling, smoky confusion. He switched the light off and tottered out.

'You did it, ' Rose breathed. 'I was hardly. . . I didn't think that anybody. . . '

'Yeah, ' Tom said. He sat down. Bud was gone; but Bud had never been there. 'Fine. Got one more thing to do. '

Rose hovered in the dim light. 'One more. . . ? '

'Ladies and gentlemen, ' he pronounced, almost enjoying the sight of Rose's tremulous uncertainty. 'Come over this way, Rose. I don't want you to get hurt. Ladies and gentlemen. . . the amazing Wall of Fire. '

He had strength enough to reach down inside himself and find the key that had to be there. Fire, he thought, and a feeble little row of flames sprang up along the carpet directly before him. Rose stepped nearer to him. 'Not much of a wall, ' he said, and giggled with exhaustion. 'More of a picket fence. Let's improve it. '

And through his headache thought it into being. The row of flames mounted the wall and began to lick at the ceiling. Tom sat slumped in the hall and watched the fire grow. It ate the frame of the bathroom door, and looked as beautiful as a rose garden to him. He heard it spreading down the hall, feeding on the carpet, going toward the living room. It would love the staircase. Get it all, he thought, swallow every inch of it, and did not have to reach for more of his strength because the fire would swallow everything anyhow.

He dully watched it spring up along the frames of the posters. Through the opening between the burning carpet and the fire spreading across the ceiling, he saw the flames speed into the living room.

He giggled again. 'Forgot to think about a way out, Rose. Sit down and enjoy the pretty fire. ' He picked up the glass sparrow and cradled it on his lap. 'Did you hear him singing, Rose? Did you hear that? That was the most beautiful thing. . . it sounded like he was so happy. It sounded better than that. ' The fire moved toward his shoes. 'I'm sorry there isn't a way to get out, Rose. '

'Of course there's a way to get out, ' she said.

'As a barbecue. Sit down and let's be barbecued together. I don't know what you are, but I love you anyhow. '

She reached for him, and he raised his hand. The heat was starting to cook him now, and he imagined that there might be a minute or two of pain, only a little worse than the pain he had already suffered. But instead of sitting beside him and holding his hand, she pulled. 'I can't, ' he said, and she pulled again, and he staggered up.

'The tunnels, you dummy, ' she said. 'We can go back under the lake. '

She pulled up the trapdoor, and he looked around for a last time at the forbidden room. 'You know, ' he said, 'he really was a great magician. Del was right about that. And at the beginning, it's hard to believe now, but at the beginning it was even fun in a way. I kept trying to figure out what it was all about. '

Rose looked at him with cautious but ahnost maternal curiosity.

'There's something in this room, ' he remembered. 'Rose, I can't leave until I find it. '

'There's nothing here, ' she said. And that seemed true.

'Something he said he was going to leave here for me — when he thought I might stay with him. I have to find it. '

'We don't have any time. '

'I don't think it'll take any time. '

He woozily looked over the silvery gray walls. There had been a moment, the day after his 'welcome, ' when he had paused at the door and sensed the presence in here of some invisible scene: Shadowland had wanted him to read the Book.

'Hurry! ' Rose said. The noises of the fire were advancing down the hall.

'It's here, ' he said dreamily. He turned about, still amazed that he could stand. He was looking at the wall opposite the door. Tom walked past the entrance to the tunnels and ran his hands over the wall. It was already warm. He gently moved his hand over the silvery paint.

A panel swung open onto a little recess. The Book lay on a wooden stand, opened in the middle and surrounded by plush. If he had perverted the Book, Collins had at least kept it reverentially. Tom reached in and took the leather-bound volume off the stand. He reached behind his back and slid it under his belt where he had kept the old pistol. 'All right, ' he said. 'I'm ready now. '

Rose led the way down into the tunnel.

The way back, as it always is, was easier than the way forward. Tom heard no voices, no Twenties Nick sang 'Sweet Sue' and wafted himself another pull of prewar gin; the only noise they heard, and it followed them for half an hour, was the whooshing of the fire that consumed Shadowland: as if that were all Twenties Nick needed to hear before he could go back to his long sleep. The owl had been fed.

'I'm so tired, ' Tom said. Rose moved steadily on before him, playing the flashlight on the wooden supports and flaking walls.

Soon he saw then' sleeping bags unrolled in the vaulted cavern. 'Please. I'm going to fall down. '

'The house is only about ten minutes away, ' Rose said. 'I have a better idea. You can sleep on the beach. In fresh air. ' He followed her back to the summer house.

Rubbing his eyes, he came up into the dark living room. The sparrow weighed like a heavy suitcase in his right hand. Rose glimmered before him in the green dress: he realized that she had come barefoot all the way from the house. 'You must want to lie down too, ' he said. 'Aren't there beds here? I just have to. . . I could take a nap. ' His eyes were burning.

'Whose bed do you want, ' Rose said. 'Thorn's or Snail's? '

'Oh, my God. ' He could not sleep in those beds. 'But why the beach? '

She put her arm around him. 'It's so close, darling Tom. Just a few steps more. '

She took him out of the room and onto the porch. The moon made all bright with a magical silvery light which transformed all it touched. The world was a place of wonders. The edge of the sky before them burned a faint orange-red.

'I like that little beach, ' Tom said. 'I used to look for you there sometimes. The week before I got sick. '

'I was always looking for you, ' Rose told him. 'I was looking for you long before you came here. '

'Come back to Arizona with me. Could you do that, Rose? ' She was leading him down the steps. The grass was that leaning ocean, breathed upon by moonlight, he had seen once before. 'Del wanted that. He said it to me. once. We could find you somewhere to live. I guess we could. '

'Of course we could, ' she said.

'We could get married when I'm eighteen. I'll work. I could always work, Rose. '

'Of course you could, ' she said.

They were walking down the overgrown roadway. Each leaf on the trees about him shone with silvery light. The trunks were made of silver and pitchy onyx. 'So you'll marry me? ' he said.

'In eternity we are married. '

'In eternity we're married now, ' Tom said! That seemed overwhelmingly delightful and overwhelmingly true. 'It's just a little way now, isn't it? '

'Just a little way. '

They came through delicate brush onto the beach, also silvered by kindly moonlight. Across the water Shadowland gouted flame. The smoke pouring from the burning roof was darker than the sky. They stood on the sand a moment, watching it engulf itself. Tom saw flames moving behind the upper windows where Collins' temptations had been arrayed before him. 'The funny thing is, he was great, ' Tom said. 'He was just what he said he was. '

'Lie down, ' Rose said. 'I don't want to look at that anymore. You need to sleep. ' She stretched out on the pewter sand. 'Please lie down next to me. '

'Hey. . . how do we get out? The wall. . . the barbed wire. . . we'll have to go back — '

'No, you won't. Follow a path behind the summer house. It leads to a wooden gate. '

'Clever Rose. ' He lay down beside her on the sand, put the book beside him, and set the glass bird on top of it. Then he turned to Rose and took the perfect girl, the magic that seemed no magic but earthly bounty, in his arms.

They did not make love. Tom was content to hold her, to feel the petal skin of her shoulders, the curve of her skull beneath his hands. He could have sung like Del, in his friend's last moments, of the perfection of such things. Radiant moonlight, warm sand along his side, Rose's quiet breathing swinging him toward sleep.

In eternity they were married.

'Rose? ' he muttered, and she made an interrogatory mmm? 'He told me a story — he told a story he said was about you. '

'Shhh, ' she breathed, and put her fingers on his mouth, and he swung all the way into oblivion.

Did she say anything before she left? We do not know. She would have spoken to him, I think, whispered a message into his sleeper's ear, but that message would have joined his bloodstream like Del's final song and would have been impossible to reconstruct into ordinary flawed human speech. And again like Del's song, which was an expression of completion and the end of change, it would have spoken of, would have hymned a further and necessary and unforeseen transformation: it is like saying that the message would have been the heartbeat of magic. In his sleep, he heard her go; and heard the rippling of the water.

When he awakened it was to warm cloudless day, the sun already high. He saw that she was gone, and called her name. He called it again.

Across the lake Shadowland, a smoking hole hi the landscape, fumed like an old pipe.

'Rose? ' he called again, and finally looked at his watch. It was eleven in the morning. 'Rose! Come back! ' He stood up, looked into the trees and did not see her, and for a moment was sick with the thought that she had returned to the house.

But that could not be: the house no longer existed. Rubble would have fallen into the entrance of the tunnel and blocked it off for good. A few boards jutted up, one chimney stood in a blackened column. Everything else was gone. Rose was freed from that.

As was he. For the first tune he looked at his hands in daylight and saw the round pads of scar tissue.

He sat down to wait for her. Even then, he knew that if he waited until his beard grew to his waist and men danced on the moon and stars, she would never come back. He waited anyhow. He could not leave.

Tom waited for her all day. The minutes crawled — he was back, in common time, and no one could fold the hours together like a pack of cards. He watched the lake change color as the sun crossed, changing from deep blue to paler blue to light green and back to blue. In the late afternoon he gently moved the glass sparrow onto the sand and opened the leather-bound book. He read the first words: These are the secret teachings of Jesus the son of God, as told by him to his twin, Judas Thomas. He closed the book. He remembered what Rose had said to his frantic speculation that they might have to go back through the destroyed house. No you won't. Not: no we won't. She would not go down the path to the gate with him: she would not trek into the village, holding his hand, or stand at his side while they waited for a train.

Tom waited until the brightness drained from the air. Shadowland still smoldered, and a few sparks drifted down the bluff, falling toward a thin layer of ash the rain would take in the fall. When the falling sparks glowed like tiger's eyes, he stood up.

He walked toward the water, carrying the glass sparrow and the book. He went to his knees on the damp sand just before the edge of the water. He set down the sparrow and looked at it. At its center hung a deep blue light. He wanted to say something profound, but profundity was beyond him: he wanted to say something emotional, but the emotion itself held his tongue in a vise. 'Here you go, ' was what came out of him. He gave the sparrow a push into the water. It glided an inch or so along the bottom, then a ripple passed over it on the surface of the lake and the sparrow seemed to move against the motion of the ripple, going deeper into the lake. The blue in the glass was identical to the blue of the water. Another unseen ripple took it with it, and the sparrow went — flew — so far ahead under the water he could not see it.

Tom stood up, pushed the book into his belt, and walked back across the beach. Soon he was parting the delicate brush.

The End of the Century

is in Sight

The end of the century is in sight and Tom Flanagan's story was about events more than twenty years back in time. I listened to it here and there about the world, and wondered what sort of story it was and how much of it was invention. I also constantly wondered about what Tom had been reading. His imagination had surely concocted those radical illusions — the speeding of time, the transformations and the sudden dislocations of space, also the people with animal faces, which were straight from the works of symbolist painters like Puvis de Chavannes — and I thought that he had been steeping himself in lurid and fantastic novels. He had wanted to give me good value.

The idea that Laker Broome had been a minor devil was a ripe example of this. It was true that I, like all the new boys, had assumed he had been at Carson for years. Yet Broome had been the Carson headmaster for our freshman year only — when we returned in September a capable man named Philip Hagen had his job, and we assumed that Broome's breakdown and his conduct during the fire had blessedly got him out of the way.

1 wrote to the Association of Secondary School Headmasters, and found that they had no information about Laker Broome. He was not in their files. One night, still trying to find what had become him, I called up Fitz-Hallan and asked him if he remembered what had happened to Broome. Fitz-Hallan thought he had managed to get a post at. . . He named a school as obscure as Carson. When I wrote to the school, I got back a letter saying that they had had the same headmaster from 1955 to 1970, and that no one named Laker Broome had ever been on their staff. However, a penciled note at the bottom said that a Carl Broome had come to them in 1959 as a Latin teacher and had stayed only one year; might I have the wrong name? Why was Carl Broome released after a year? I wrote back on a long shot, but was informed that such matters 'are a part of the confidence which any school of repute must retain with respect to former employees. ' This was very fishy — didn't they give recommendations? — but it was clear that they did not wish to tell me what I wanted to know; and anyhow, I was fairly certain that Laker was not Carl Broome, so there was no point in continuing. Lake the Snake had lost his job and disappeared. That was all I knew about him.

Tom's story had abandoned Steven Ridpath as he (presumably) crept out the front door and wriggled through the bars of the gate, and I imagined that a conversation with Ridpath would immediately tell me how much of Tom's story had been fiction. Here I had much more luck than with Laker Broome. Skeleton had gone to Clemson, and universities keep wonderful records. The Alumni Office told me that one Ridpath, Steven, had graduated near the bottom of his class in 1963. From there he had gone to a theological college in Kentucky.

A theological college? A Kentucky Bible school?

It seemed impossible, but it was true — the Headley Theological Institute in Frankfort told me that Mr. Ridpath had attended from 1963 to 1964, when he had converted to Catholicism and left them for a seminary in Lexington. The Lexington seminary, run by an order of monks, eventually wrote me that Steven Ridpath had become Brother Robert, and had been placed in a monastery near Coalville, Kentucky.

I drove from Connecticut down to Coalville to see if he would talk to me.

Coalville was a run — down hamlet — no other word would fit — of three hundred people. Unhappy buildings sat in an unhappier landscape. Wherever a stand of trees grew, behind it was a wasteland of slag heaps and abandoned mining buildings. There was a motel, but I was the only guest. I sent a note to the monastery. Would Brother Robert agree to discuss with me whatever had led him to this unlikely destination? I let the assumption stand that I was doing an article or a book about the decision to enter the church.

Come if you must, came a note by return mail. I expect you have made a useless journey.

I appeared at the monastery gates at the time he had named. It was still early enough for roosters to be crowing within the grounds — there was a farm there, and the brothers raised their own food. I swung the clapper in the big bell and waited and shivered in the early chill.

Eventually a monk pulled open the gates. He wore a coarse brown robe and the hood shaded his face. 'Brother Robert? ' I said, startled by this apparition.

'Brother Theo, ' he said. 'Brother Robert is waiting for you in the garden. ' He turned about without another word and preceded me up a stony path.

We went around the side of a red brick dormitory. 'Our farm, ' Brother Theo said, and gestured with a flap of his sleeves. I looked to the left and saw a red barn disgorging cows after their morning milking. It still seemed impossible that Skeleton Ridpath was in such a place. 'The chicken coop, ' said Brother Theo. 'We have sixty-eight hens! Good sound layers. '

At last we came to another gate. Over a brick fence I could see massed rosebushes. The brothers would soon have to begin pruning, for the roses were crowded together, fulsome and blowsy. My guide opened the gate. A gravel path led between banks of roses. 'Follow the path, ' he said. 'In fifteen minutes I shall see you out. '

'Fifteen minutes? ' I asked. 'Can't I have a little more time? '

'The time was specified by Brother Robert. ' He turned away.

I set off down the path. It led me around a comer, and when I turned into the garden proper, I nearly gasped. It was set out like a medieval garden, parceled into small plots where varying herbs and flowers grew, and it was a place of great order and serenity, much larger than I had expected. A monk sat on an iron bench before another bank of the overgrown roses. Beside him on the bench something glinted in the early sun: secateurs. When he heard my footsteps on the gravel, he looked up and swept the hood off his head.

It was Skeleton: no one could have mistaken him for anyone else. His hair had been cropped down to graying bristle, and a little wire-brush beard filled out his cheeks, but he still was Skeleton Ridpath. 'Do you like our garden? ' he asked.

'Very much, ' I said. 'It's beautiful, in fact. Do you tend it? '

He ignored the question. 'I must get occupied with the roses. They are in a sorry state. ' He picked up the secateurs and nodded gloomily, indicated that I could be seated. 'I can give you fifteen minutes, ' he said, 'but I must tell you now that you are wasting your time. '

'I'd better decide that, ' I said, 'but in any case, I'd better also plunge right in, if you don't mind. Why did you decide to attend Headley Theological Institute after Clemson? It can hardly be what you had in mind when you started college. ' I took out a pen and notebook.

'You would not understand, ' he said, and clicked the secateurs shut.

'Since you've given me fifteen minutes, why not test me? ' I asked. 'Otherwise your time is wasted too. I understand at least that you are a talented gardener. '

He scowled at me, refusing the compliment.

'Was there a crisis — a spiritual crisis of some kind? '

'There was a crisis, ' he said. 'You might call it spiritual. '

'Could you describe it in any way? '

He sighed: he was really itching to get back at the roses.

'You could do some of your work while you talk to me, ' I said.

He promptly left the bench, mumbling 'Thank you, ' and began on the roses. Snick-snick: a thick brown rope laden with heavy blossoms collapsed, and petals showered on the bench.

'In my second year at college, ' he said, and for some reason my chest tightened, 'I nearly dropped out. I had a disturbing vision. One that subsequently was shown to be prophetic. '

'And what was that? ' I asked.

'The vision was of one of our classmates. ' He turned to glare at me. 'I had a vision of Marcus Reilly. I saw his death. Not once, but many times. ' I think I stopped breathing. 'He was in his car. He removed a pistol from his pocket. He placed the pistol beside his ear. Do I have to go on? '

'No, ' I breathed. 'I know how Marcus died. '

Snick: another cluster of roses flopped. More petals drifted to the bench.

'That is what I have to tell you. You would not understand the rest. I'm sure the rest was all conventional anyhow. I accepted Christ first, and later I accepted the Church. It is unusual only in that I am a converted Catholic. '

'You gave up your wings, didn't you? ' I asked. 'I will never leave this place. And I will never want to. If that is what you mean. '

He suddenly seemed very agitated.

'Brother Robert, what happened in Vermont? ' I dared to ask; unwisely.

'I'm sure our time is up, ' he said, not looking at me. 'I am sorry lever agreed to speak to you. ' Now the roses were tumbling all over the bench, lolling over and rolling onto the path.

'If I brought Tom Flanagan here, would you agree to meet him? ' That suddenly seemed to me a brilliant solution.

Brother Robert stopped pruning the roses. He stood stock-still for a second', with his arm frozen where it had been when I had uttered Tom's name. 'Under no circumstances whatsoever. Also, I will never see you again, under any circumstances whatsoever. Is that clear? ' He lopped off another tangle of roses, and our interview was ended. He would not let me see his face.

'Thank you for what you've told me, ' I said, and went back to the gate, where Brother Theo waited. He had the air of a man who wished he had been eavesdropping; he asked me if I had enjoyed my visit.

Later that year I visited friends in Putney, Vermont, and before I left them I looked up Hilly Vale on an old Sunoco map and made a hundred-and-ten-mile detour on my way home.

The town was much as Tom had described it. Few changes had happened to Hilly Vale in twenty years. I parked on Main Street and went into a health-food shop — it must have been one of the changes. A young man with shoulder-length hair and a striped apron stood behind the counter eating a carob bar. He put the final touches to my theory about change in Hilly Vale. 'I'm looking for the site of the old Collins place, ' I said. 'Can you help me? '

He grinned at me. 'Been here only a year and a half, ' he said. 'Maybe Mrs. Brewster knows it. ' He nodded to a fiftyish woman in a down jacket lingering over a display of purses in plastic bags.

'Mrs. Brewster! ' he called. 'This guy here wants. . . ? ' he raised his eyebrows at me.

'The old Collins place, Mrs. Brewster, ' I said. 'Where they had the big fire. In 1959, it would have been. At the end of the summer. '

'Why, sure, ' she said, and again I felt that tightening of the chest. 'Nobody even knew about it until the whole place was gone. We didn't even know for weeks after. Terrible thing. Mr. Collins died there. He was a famous magician once, you know. ' She gave me a sly look. 'You wouldn't be Mr. Flanagan, now, would you? '

'Why, no, ' I said, startled. 'Why do you ask? '

'Thought you'd know. That's the Flanagan place now. 'Course, it isn't a place, not that way. And that's a shame, too. Valuable land sitting like that — some folks here would like to buy some of that land. You're not from the real-estate people, are you? '

'No, ' I said. 'I'm just a friend of Mr. Flanagan's. But I didn't know he owned it. '

'All of it, ' she said. 'Right clear around the lake. He never comes here. Probably thinks he's too good for the likes of us. He's a magician too — oh, you know that. But he's not the equal of Mr. Collins. He's not like Mr. Collins. Lived here from 1925 on, 'Mr. Collins did. And he kept to himself. ' She nodded firmly.

'No, I gather he's not like Mr. Collins, ' I said.

'Couldn't hold a candle to him, in my opinion. '

'Did you actually see Collins perform? ' I asked her, barely able to credit it.

'Never even met him, ' she said. 'But I can tell you how to get to the place, since you're so curious. '

I followed her directions out of town, and soon found myself in the peculiar position of being in a landscape I had written about without ever having seen. Here was the fork in the road; here was the ascending unpaved track through the trees; and here was the pasture where Tom had seen the horses. It was overgrown with chicory and burdock: it needed Brother Robert's talents.

And here, finally, was the loop of a drive.

I parked my car and walked down. It had once been paved. Now weeds and grass had pushed aside and broken the asphalt all the way to the gates. Someone, probably a party of teenagers, had broken them open, and they had rusted over the years. Vines trailed through the bars. The wall around Shadowland still stood, though, and other vines twisted happily through the brick, clumping and blossoming where the top layer had broken off. The barbed wire was long gone — I supposed some thrifty fanner had rolled it up and trucked it off.

I walked down the broken drive, slipping a little on the loose stones, wondering when I would see the house. I left the treacherous drive and walked into tall grass. It was a lie, I saw — all of it a beautiful and whopping lie. There was no house. There never had been.

Then my foot connected with a brick, and I realized with a great thumping shock that I was actually standing in the house. Mossy bricks lay scattered randomly through the grass; after a little more prowling, I came across the ruin of a brick fireplace tipped over on its side, its opening half-filled with dirt and rubble. O. Henry and Snickers wrappers; a beer bottle poking out through weeds; an old comic book gone to pulp. I was standing in Shadowland's basement, where everything had fallen. Now it was just a little dip in the land — it could have been a glacial hollow. I bent down and picked up a brick and brushed off ants. It was discolored: fire-blackened.

But the bluff was still there, and so was the lake. I went through the tall grass, pursued by the eerie feeling that I was walking with Tom Flanagan and Rose Armstrong as they fled the burning house, and came up out of the hollow. The land fell away spectacularly for a hundred yards or more, dropping down a thickly overgrown cliff. The lake winked back sunlight. Tom's woods blanketed the sides. I'd had no idea of the scale, that it was all so large and the woods so extensive — they looked forbiddingly thick — and the lake so long. It must have been nearly a mile across.

Rose Armstrong, I thought, and then I saw a tiny strip of gold at the lake's far end and my heart stopped. I nearly fell down the bluff. At that moment I believed everything Tom had said to me.

I could almost see them there, Tom and his Rose, curled together on the tiny strip of sand beside a book and a glass bird; could almost see her whispering whatever she had whispered into his ear before she. . . what? Slipped into the water and left all that was human behind her, welded into Tom Flanagan's memory?

A warm wind came from nowhere: mustard flower; gin; cigar smoke. I could have told myself that I caught all those odors. The surface of the lake darkened and belled under the shadow of a cloud, and I turned back to walk across the ruins of Shadowland to my car.