Shadowland (50 page)

 
   He saw himself standing there all night, bottling Skeleton up inside the bathroom.

 
   The fifth blow knocked him back off his feet — he went sprawling in the corridor, and the door banged open. The Collector stood on the threshold, arms dangling, his face swiveling avidly from side to side. He wore the ancient black suit of the mural, and it too shone a faint purple. He shuffled forward.

 
   Tom scuttled backward and got to his feet, making enough noise for the figure to focus directly on him. The Collector's face split open in a grin of empty radiance. 'Great play,' he whispered in a voice a shadow of Skeleton's.

 
   He stumbled forward. 'I told you to stay away from that piano. Take off that fairy shirt. I want to see some skin.'

 
   Tom ran.

 
   'Flanagini! Flanagini! FLAAAAANAGINNNIII!'

 
   Panting, Tom wheeled around the corner into the living room. Hide behind a couch? Behind a curtain? He could barely think: pictures of hiding places too small for himrattled through his mind. From Rose Armstrong to this . . . thing, as though a line were drawn between them.

 
   Why, sure, Tom thought with bright panic: Rose wanted out of Shadowland, Skeleton wanted out of the mirror. Simple.

 
   'I saw your owl, Vendouris,' whispered a voice behind him. 'You are mine.'

 
   Tom spun around and saw purple Skeleton skimming toward him. He uttered a squeak and dodged to the side. Skeleton snaked out an arm and dug his fingers into his shoulder. The thin fingers burned through Tom's shirt like ice. 'Dirty little Irish nigger!' Tom banged the side of his fist against Skeleton's unheeding head, twisted in frantic disgust to the side, and lost his balance. Skeleton lurched nearer, Tom swung and hit a rock-hard chest, and when Tom twisted again, he brought both of them down onto the flowered couch.

 
   'Great play,' the Collector whispered. 'I want to see some skin.' The icy hands found Tom's neck.

 
   Tom was looking up at the inhuman face — the pouches under the empty eyes were black. A foul, dusty, spider-webby smell soaked into him. Lying atop him, Skeleton felt like a bag of twigs, but his hands squeezed like a vise.

 
   'Dirty little . . . '

 
   Then sudden brightness stung his eyes; the frozen hands fell away from him. He scrambled to his feet, flailing out, and saw only the sliding doors and the lighted woods where Skeleton should have been. The emptiness before him momentarily felt as charged as a vacuum; then ordinariness rushed into it.

 
   Coleman Collins, in a dark blue dressing gown and paler blue pajamas, limped into the room. 'I pushed the button, little idiot,' said the magician. 'Do not begin things when you will get too flustered to remember how to finish them.' He turned to go, then faced Tom again. 'But you just proved your greatness as a magician, if you are interested. You made that happen. And one thing more. I saved your life-saved it from the consequences of your own abilities. Remember that.' He measured Tom with a glance, and was gone.

 
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Tom wobbled back out into the hall. Collins had vanished into one of the theaters or up the stairs to his bedroom. The house was silent again. Tom glanced in the direction of the hall bathroom, involuntarily trembled, and moved to the staircase. Up there he saw the dim pumpkin color — the single light that burned most of the night was still on. He went slowly up the stairs; near the top, he took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face. Then, so tired he thought he would collapse on the stairs, he forced himself to the landing.

 
   In a dark blue dressing gown like his uncle's, Del stood in the murky hall outside his bedroom door. He was looking rigidly out the window.

 
   
'Shhh!'
Del commanded. 'It's Rose.'

 
   Tom joined him, and Del moved a few inches away. When Tom looked down, his heart moved.

 
   Rose Armstrong stood in the nearest pool of light, so near the house she was almost on the beach. Dirty rags covered her body; her hair blazed in the light. Nailed to a tree, crucified, hung the pale gray head of a horse. Two masked figures hovered at the edge of the light: a barrel of a man wearing a pale aristocratic young man's face, and a small woman with the hooked, sneering mask of a witch. Golden robes shone around both of them. Mr. Peet and Elena? Tom at first thought the horse's head was stuffed or plaster of paris, but after a second he saw lines of blood and gore rivering down the bark. 'Oh, God,' he said. He remembered the faint image of a gray horse in the darkness as Collins turned into his domain on the first night; the gray horse that had plunged through the snow, bringing him toward a burning school. Insects had summoned themselves to the edges of the wound, lifting and settling in little clouds. Rose pleadingly lifted her joined hands. The light above her suddenly died, and the two boys were staring at their own images in the window.

 
   'Falada,' Del said. 'The Goose Girl. Remember?'

 
Oh, poor princess in despair,

 
if your dear mother knew,

 
her heart would break in two.

 
'Magic, Tom. This is what I live for. I'm on the side of
that —
I'm on the side of what we saw out there. I don't care what you get up to when you go slinking around at night, because I'm not on your side anymore. Remember that.'

 
   'We're all on the same side,' Tom said quietly. Del gave him an impatient, disgusted look and went back into his room.

 
PART THREE

 
'When We All Lived in the Forest. . . '

 
'Man is made in the image of God' and it has often been sardonically observed that'God is made in the image of man.' Both statements are accepted as true in magic.

 
Richard Cavendish,
The Black Arts

 
ONE

 
The Welcome

 
The next day, if it was the next day, Del treated me like the Enemy, Satan himself come to destroy all his earthly arrangements. He began by eating alone in his room — I supposed he had gotten the same note I did on my tray, asking me to be at a certain point in the woods at nine in the morning. And sure enough, when I showed up, there he was. He wouldn't say hello; he couldn't even look at me any more than to let me know that our friendship was over. I felt struck by lightning, half-dead with guilt. Somehow Rose had managed to slip a second sheet of paper under my plate, asking me to be on the beach at ten that night.. . .

 
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The designated spot was about half a mile from the house, near the hollow where Tom had seen Mr. Peet and the Wandering Boys at work on the first night. His directions had told him to start at the left of the beach and go straight ahead to the sixth light. The journey was much easier by day than it had been at night. When he reached the light he sat down on the grass and waited for whatever was going to happen. The note from Rose Armstrong, folded next to his skin inside his shirt, rustled and scratched — he was grateful every time he felt it dig at him. He could not have destroyed Rose's note: he wanted to pull it out and read it over again every few minutes.
Dear One: Beach near boat house, ten tonight. Love, R.
Dear One! Love! He wished he could obliterate all the time between morning and night, and see Rose slipping out of the water to meet him. He wanted to ask her about the previous night's scene; he had a lot of questions about that: but far more than asking her questions, he wanted to put his arms around her.

 
   Del came slouching into the little clearing five minutes later, in a starched blue shirt and jeans pressed to a sharp crease. Elena's work. A few burs clung to his cuffs, and after Del had glanced at Tom and dismissed him, he sat down to pick them off.

 
   'How are you?' Tom asked.

 
   Del lowered his head and twisted a cuff around to find a bur. He looked rested but tense: as though even the seams of his underwear were aligned. Comb marks furrowed his thick black hair.

 
   'We have to talk to each other,' Tom said.

 
   Del tossed away the last bur, brushed at his cuffs with both hands, looked back toward the house.

 
   'Aren't you even going to look at me?'

 
   Without turning his head, Del said, 'I think there's a dead rat somewhere around here.'

 
   'Well, I have to talk to
you.'.

 
   'I think the dead rat should just go home if he doesn't like it here.'

 
   That shut Tom up — it was too close to what he hadbeen intending to say. They sat there in silence and heat, neither looking at the other. Coleman Collins startled them both by limping noiselessly into the clearing from deeper in the woods. He wore a slim black suit, a red shirt, gleaming black pumps, and looked as if he had just left the stage after a particularly brilliant performance.

 
   'Gather round, children. Today we learn many things. Today we have a
son et lumiere.
This is the second part of the story known as 'The Death of Love' — and I will require your close attention.'

 
   He smiled at them, but Tom could not smile back. The magician tilted his head, winked, and somehow produced a high black stool from the air; he sat. 'Do I sense a little tension in the atmosphere? That is not inappropriate. If the first part of my unburdening could be subtitled 'The Healer Healed,' this part might be called 'The Undoing of the King of the Cats.''

 
   Collins propped his leg on a rung of the stool, looked up at a hawk cruising overhead, and said, 'Rumors about my unorthodox surgical techniques on Corporal Washford had begun to circulate among the Negro soldiers.

 
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