Authors: Peter Straub
Then just for an instant it seemed to Tom as if the shining blackness of the street was lapping at the cuffs of his trousers, the pale sky dark with witches. From a thin branch a starling screeched and fixed him with its black eyes. The world tilted.
This passed as quickly as it had come. The street subsided, the air cleared, the houses righted themselves. None of it could give a warning, because it represented a way of life in which warnings were obsolete. Tom realized that he was directly before the house Del's godparents had bought.
It was the classic Quantum Hills house, and the largest on the street, set far back on a rising treeless lawn. A wide asphalt drive curved up before it, marked by carriage lamps on tall dark poles. Where the drive met the two wide steps up to the entrance, the iron figure of a small black jockey held out a bright metal ring toward the rear bumper of a Jaguar. Modern, vaguely Moorish in design, the house sprawled behind these signs of a new Arizona prosperity.
Tom began to trudge up the drive, walked past the Hillmans' car and the sightless boy holding out his shining ring, mounted the steps. Something in his chest seemed to be trembling. He pushed the bell and jerked back his hand as if he had expected a shock.
The white door swung open, and Bud Copeland was looking down at him, smiling. 'Hello, son. You here to see Del? Come on in, I'll take you up. You don't exactly need a map, but the first time, you might need a guide.'
'Hello.' Tom said tonelessly.
'You get yourself in here, young man, you look like you need a friend. Come on, get yourself through this doorway.'
Tom moved through the doorway and into a wide entry which revealed half of an enormous living room, a stone fireplace nine feet high, furniture and boxes dumped here and there before a window the size of a wall. That it looked much as he had imagined it was reassuring — the odd unplaceable fear subsided.
'I heard about your father, son,' Bud's velvet voice said beside him. 'Terrible thing for a boy to lose his dad. If there's anything I can do to help, just ask.'
'Thanks,' Tom said, surprised and moved by the real sympathy in the man's face and voice. 'I will.'
'You do that. I'll do anything I can. Now. What do you think of our new quarters?'
'It's a big place,' Tom answered, and thought he saw buried amusement in Bud's civilized face.
'My mother always told me to be careful too, Tom Flanagan,' Bud said, and took him up a floating staircase at the side of the living room. 'You and Del should have your tricks all polished up by now for your performance. If you still plan on giving it.'
'Yeah, sure, but we still have to do some work,' Tom said, following Bud's enormous back down an eggshell-white hall. 'Oh, yeah, we're going to give it. You bet we are.'
'Happy to hear it, son.'
'Say, Bud,' he said, and the black man heard something in his voice and turned around to face him. 'You don't have to answer if you don't want to.'
'I'll remember that,' Bud said, smiling.
'Why do you stay here? Why do you do work like this?'
Bud's smile broadened, and he reached out to rasp Tom lightly on the top of the head. 'It's a job, Red. I don't mind it. If I was twenty years younger, I'd likely be doing something else, but this berth suits me fine, the way I am. And I think maybe I can do some good for your friend in there.' He nodded toward a door at the end of the hall. 'Maybe I can do some good for you sometime too. Reason enough?' He raised his eyebrows, and again there was that unsettling look of recognition, as if Bud knew all about the birds and the visions.
'I'm sorry for prying,' Tom said. His ears burned.
'I'd say you were interested, not prying. Don't look so embarrassed. You want a Coke or anything?'
Tom shook his head.
'Then I'll see you on your way out.' Bud smiled again and went past him back toward the floating staircase.
Tom hesitated a second, dreading the conversation about his father he would have to have with Del before they could get to work. He heard Bud moving swiftly down the stairs, from an open window heard a far-off splash as someone dived into the pool. He went the rest of the way down the hall and stopped at Del's door.
No noises, no sound at all came from behind it. Through the unseen window floated the drawling voice of Valeric Hillman. Del's room was so quiet Tom thought his friend must be asleep. Tom raised his fist, lowered it, then raised it again and knocked.
Del did not respond, and Tom thought at first that his friend must be out by the pool with his godmother. But Bud would have known that. 'Del?' he half-whispered, and knocked again.
Over or under a ripple of laughter from outside, he heard Del very quietly saying, 'Come in.' Del too was nearly whispering, but the quiet in his voice was that of effort — of concentration and force.
Tom turned the handle and gently pushed the door. The room was so dark as to be nearly black, and Tom . again had the sense of being drawn into that separate world which was Del's — of stepping from sunlight and Arizona directly into mystery.
'Del?'
'In.'
Tom walked slowly into the darkness. His first glance around the room showed him only the big fish tank before drawn curtains, the looming faces of the magicians up on a shadowy wall. He saw that it was nearly twice the size of Del's old room; looking to the right, he saw a jumble of boxes and wooden things that must have been the kit. He turned his head to the left and saw shadowy space.
'Look,'
Del commanded from the center of the shadows.
'Hey,' Tom said, for at first he could see only the outline of a bed.
Then he could not say anything, for he had suddenly seen Del's rigid body, and it was suspended in the empty air four feet above the bed. Del snapped his head sideways. He was grinning like a shark.
Tom could not imagine what expression his own face wore, but it sent Del off into gleeful laughter. Laughing, he descended, first falling nearly a foot and stopping sharply, as if he had hit a ledge, then slipping down more slowly another eighteen inches. Tom held out a hand as if to catch him, but was not capable of moving nearer. Del's laughter bubbled up again; his feet dropped onto the bed, and the rest of his body followed.
Tom watched, so scared he thought he might faint or vomit, as Del's face drew back into itself and his body lifted up off the bed again and hovered a handbreadth above it.
'Now, that's how we end our magic show,' Del managed to say, and this time could stay up while he laughed.
16
The next day was Sunday,' Tom said to me in the Zanzibar, the third time I went there to talk to him, 'and I was still dazed. What had really struck me was the utter wrongness of it. Because I knew it was real. That little son of a bitch was actually levitating. It was real magic, and it seemed like the moment everything, all the craziness, had been leading to, the birds and the weird visions and everything else. I felt sick to my stomach. I was being frogmarched into magic, and I scarcely knew what was true and what was false anymore.
'I went outside. Sparky, my dog, woke up and started dancing around, asking me to throw his disgusting old tennis ball. I picked up the soggy ball and pegged it toward the fence. Sparky tore after it. Just then, before Sparky got to the ball, the air started to go funny — dark and grainy, like an old photograph. Sparky spun around and looked around; he whimpered. He started to race back toward the kitchen door. His ears were all flattened out — I remember seeing that, and I remember being relieved: I wasn't crazy, it was actually happening.
'That fairy-tale house was in front of me, where the fence should have been, that house with the little brown door and the trees all around it and the thatched roof. Through one of the little windows beside the door I could see the old man looking at me, running his hands through his beard. I went up the path. Now, now, now, I thought — now I can, find out. I don't know what I thought I was going to discover, but I had that feeling. The old man, the wizard, if that's what he was, was going to clear everything up for me. When I reached his door, I looked through the window again, and got a shock. He looked terrible — as sick and scared as I had been that morning. On his face these feelings looked frighteningly out of place — you expected a face like that to be incapable of showing such things. He backed away from the window. I pushed the door open.
'The house was completely black. In midair, a candle was burning — it must have been on the mantel, but it didn'tilluminate anything around it, just shone out. Like a cat's eye.
'The door banged shut behind me. I turned around to get out, pretty badly scared, but I couldn't see the door. Then I heard something coming toward me, and I turned back around to face it.
'And then I almost dropped dead of fright. I realized that it wasn't just one thing, it was a lot of things, and they were sick somehow, sick and wrong. . . it could have been four or five, it could have been a hundred. I couldn't tell. But I knew they were from him, that man I had seen or dreamed of seeing on Mesa Lane on the day before school started. It was like that whole world I had sensed before, in the house, the magic world, had been warped into evil.
'A face flickered in front of me, grinning like a devil, and then other faces jumped into life around it — cackling and grinning, the ugliest faces I had ever seen. They were there only for a moment; then they disappeared.
'Behind the candle there was now a spot of brightness. In the circle of light I saw the shadow of a pair of hands making a dog's head. The ears lifted. The tongue lolled. Shadow play, that's called: making pictures with your hands' shadows. I'd seen it before, of course, but never done as well — those fingers seemed almost triple-jointed — and never so that it seemed sinister. The dog's face turned toward me. Now, that's impossible in shadow play, you know. But I could see the ears sticking up, and the neck. Then the fingers parted to let the eyes shine through. That was as bad as the faces. The eyes were just empty light, and they looked completely malevolent. It wasn't a dog, I knew. It was a wolfs head.
'Then the eyes widened out, the hands fluttered and folded and melted together into a bird. A bird with huge wings and a tearing beak.
'It flew straight toward me, still in its circle of light, claws out — not hands, a shadow-bird. I ducked down, and heard laughter from all over the room.