Authors: Peter Straub
Good-bye, good-bye, he says to himself. Good-bye, freedom. Yet a part of him looks forward to making the change to high school, to really beginning the process of growing up: he imagines that the biggest changes of his life are about to happen. For a moment, like all children on the point of change, he wishes he could foresee the future, somehow live through it in advance — test the water there.
A solitary bird wheels overhead, so high up it breathes a different air.
Then he must have fallen asleep: later, he thinks that what happened after he saw the bird must have been a dream.
It begins with the air changing color — becoming hazy, almost silvery. A cloud? But there are no clouds. He rolls over onto his stomach and idly looks sideways, where he can see over four backyards. The swing set in the Trumbulls' yard is so rusty it should not stand another year — the Trumbull children are older than he, but Mr. Trumbull is too lazy to dismantle the swings. Farther on, Cissy Harbinger is climbing out of her pool, stepping toward a lounge chair in such a way that you know the tiles are burning her feet. She gets to the chair and stretches out, trying to deepen her already walnut tan. Then there are two wider backyards, one with a plastic wading pool. Here, Collis Folk, the gardener the boy's parents have just let go, is riding a giant black lawn mower around the side of a white house. No dandelions there: Collis Folk is a ruthless executioner of dandelions.
Way down there, past the houses and the yards, a man is walking up Mesa Lane. In this old suburb, pedestrians are not as uncommon as they are in a lavish new development like Quantum Hills, but still they are rare enough to be interesting.
The boy still does not know that he is dreaming. The walking man pauses on Mesa Lane — probably he is a customer of Collis Folk's, and is waiting for the gardenerto swing back toward him so that he can say hello. But no, it seems he is not waiting for the gardener: he is tilting his head back and looking at the boy. Or looking for him, the boy thinks. The man puts his hands on his hips. He must be three hundred yards away: he shimmers a little in the heat from the pavement. The boy has a sudden overwhelming conviction that the little figure is trying to find him . . . and the boy does not want to be seen. He flattens out in the grass. Unexpected fear sparkles in the boy's chest.
This is an interesting dream, he thinks. Why am I afraid of him?
The air becomes darker, more silvery. The man, who may or may have not seen him, walks on. Collis Folk chugs into sight, appearing to be intent on mowing down the wading pool. Now the boy is blocked from the man's sight, and he can move.
I'm really scared, he thinks: why? The entire neighborhood has turned unpleasant, somehow tainted and threatening. Though he cannot see the little figure way down there on Mesa Lane, the man is somehow broadcasting chill and badness. . . .
(His face is made of ice.)
No, that's not it, but the boy scrambles to his feet, starts to run, and then fully realizes he is in a dream, for he sees a building at the end of his backyard which he knows is not there; nor are the thick trees which surround it. The house is only about twenty feet high and has a thatched roof. Two small windows flank a little brown door. This fairy-tale structure is inviting, not threatening — he knows he is supposed to enter it. It will save him from whatever is pacing up and down on Mesa Lane.
And he knows it is a wizard's house.
When he goes through the trees and opens the door, all of his neighborhood seems to sigh: the rusty swings and the wading pool, Cissy Harbinger and Collis Folk, each brown and green blade of grass, send up a wave of disappointment and regret; and this real regret is from down there, from the man, who knows the boy is blocked from him.
'So here you are,' the wizard says. An old man with an extravagantly wrinkled face mostly concealed behind a foaming beard, dressed in threadbare robes, the wizard is leaning back in a chair, smiling at him. He is the oldestwizard in the world, the boy knows; and then knows that he himself is in the midst of a fairy tale, one never written. 'You are safe here,' the wizard says. 'I know.'
'I want you to remember that. It's not all like that. . .being
out there.'
'This is a dream, isn't it?' the boy asks. 'Everything is a dream,' says the wizard. 'This world of yours — a flag in the breeze, a plaything full of meanings. Take my word for it.Meanings.
But you're a good boy, you'll find out.' A pipe appeared in his hand, and he drew on it and breathed out thick gray smoke. 'Oh, yes. You'll find what you have to find. It'll be all right. You'll have to fight for your life, of course, you'll have tests to pass — tests you can't study for, hee hee — and there'll be a girl and a wolf, and all that, but you're no idiot.' 'Like Little Red Riding Hood? A girl and a wolf?' 'Oh, like all of them,' the wizard said vaguely. 'Tell me, how is your father doing?' 'He's okay. I guess.'
The wizard nodded, blew out another cloud of smoke. He appeared very feeble to the boy; an old old wizard, at the end of his powers, so tired he could barely lift his pipe. 'Oh, I could show you things,' the wizard said. 'But there's no use in it. I just wanted you to know . . . Guess I've said it all. This is a deep, deep wood. Wish I weren't so blamed old.'
He seemed to fall asleep for a moment. The pipe drooped in his mouth and his hands trembled in his lap. Then his watery eyes opened. 'No brothers or sisters, correct?'
The boy nodded.
The wizard smiled. 'You can leave, son. He's gone. Fight the good fight, now.'
The boy has been dismissed; the logic of the dream compels him outside; the wizard's eyes are closing again. But he does not wish to leave — he does not want to wake up just yet. He looks out the windows and sees forest, not his backyard. Thick cobwebs blanket several trees in dark grayness.
The wizard stirs, opens his eyes, and looks at the reluctant boy. 'Oh, you'll have your heart broken,' hesays. 'Is that what you're waiting to hear? It'll be broken, all right. But you'll never get anything done if you walk around with an unchipped heart. That's the way of it, boy.'
'Thanks,' he says, and backs toward the door.
'That's the way, and there isn't any other way.'
'Okay.'
'Keep your eyes peeled for wolves, now.'
'Right,' the boy says, and goes outside. He thinks the wizard is already asleep. After he goes past the trees which are not there, he sees his own body asleep on the grass, lying on its side near a lolling dandelion.
1
For various reasons the Carson School is now no longer the school it was, and it has a new name. Carson was a boys' school, old-fashioned and quirky and sometimes so stern it could turn your bowels to ice water. Later we who had been students there understood that all of the rather menacing discipline was meant to disguise the fact that Carson was at best second-rate. Only a school of that kind would have hired Laker Broome as headmaster; perhaps only a third-rate school would have kept him.
Years ago, when John Kennedy was still a senator from Massachusetts and Steve McQueen was Josh Randall on television and McDonald's had sold only two million hamburgers and narrow ties and tab collars were coming in for the first time, Carson was Spartan and tweedy and a bit desperate and self-conscious about its status; now it is a place where rich boys and girls go if they have trouble in the public schools. Tuition was seven hundred and fifty dollars a year; now it is just under four thousand.
It has even changed sites. When I was there with Tom Flanagan and Del Nightingale and the others, the school was chiefly situated in an old Gothic mansion on the top of a hill, to which had been added a modern wing-steel beams and big plates of glass. The old section of the school somehow shrank the modern addition, subsumed it into itself, and all of it looked cold and haunting.
This original building, along with the vast old gymnasium (the field house) behind it, was built mainly of wood. Parts of the original building — the headmaster's office, the library, the corridors and staircases — resembled the Garrick Club. Old wood polished and gleaming, oak bookshelves and handrails, beautiful slippery wooden floors. This part of the school always seduced prospective parents, who had the closet anglophilia of their class. Some of the rooms were jewel-box tiny, with mullioned windows, paneled walls, and ugly radiators that gave off little heat. If Carson had been the manor house some of its aspects suggested, it would have been not only haunting but also haunted.
Once every two or three years when I go back and drive past the school's new Quantum Hills site, I see a long neo-Georgian facade of reddish brick, long green lawns, and a soccer field far off — all of it fresh green and warm brick, so like a campus, so
generalized
that it seems a mirage. This cozy imitation of a university seems distant, remote, sealed within its illusions about itself. I know looking at it that the lives of its students are less driven than ours were, softer. Is there, I wonder, a voice still in the school which whispers:
Iam your salvation, squirt: I am the way, the truth, and the light?
I am your salvation —the sound of evil, of that flabby jealous devil of the second-rate, proclaiming itself.
2
Registration Day: 1958
A dark corridor, a staircase with an abrupt line of light bisecting it at one end, desks with candles dripping wax into saucers lined along a wall. A fuse had blown or a wire had died, and the janitor did not come until the next morning, when the rest of the school registered. Twenty new freshmen milled directionlessly in the long corridor, even the exceptionally suntanned faces looking pale and frightened in the candlelight.
'Welcome to the school,' one of the four or five teachers present joked. They stood in a group at the entrance to the even darker corridor which led to the administration offices. 'It isn't always this inefficient. Sometimes it's a lot worse.'
Some of the boys laughed — they were new only to the Upper School, and had been at Carson, down the street in the mansard-roofed Junior School, all their lives.
'We can begin in a moment,' another, older teacher said flatly, cutting off the meek laughter. He was taller than the others, with a narrow head and a pursy snapping turtle's face moored by a long nose. His rimless spectacles shone as he whipped his narrow head back and forth in the murk to see who had laughed. He wore the center-parted curling hair of a caricatured eighteen-nineties bartender. 'Some of you boys are going to have to discover that the fun and games are over. This isn't the Junior School anymore. You're at the bottom of the pile now, you're the lowest of the low, but you'll be expected to act like men. Got that?'