Authors: Peter Straub
'And I was not sure I welcomed that. The power I have spoken of to you marvelous boys was growing within me, but I had as yet no idea of its dimensions nor of its ultimate role in my life, and I had the impulse to nurture it in secret for a time. Even if I could have repeated my performance on Washford with some other poor devil, I do not think I would have — I wanted first to adjust to having done it once, and to refine my skills in situations where I was not under such intense observation. As you will see, I did not yet understand the nature of the gift, and I did not know how fiercely it would demand expression. And of course I thought I was alone. I was that ignorant. That there was a tradition, that there were many others, an entire society existing in the world's shadowy pockets and taught by one great hidden body of knowledge I had only barely skirted with my Levi andCornelius Agrippa, of all that I knew nothing. I was like a child who draws a map of the stars and thinks he has invented astronomy. When the Negroes who worked in the canteen and dispensary began to look at me in an odd, attentive way, what I felt was unease. I knew they had begun to talk. Maybe it was Washford himself — more likely it was the attendant in our operating theater — but however it had started, it was unwelcome.
'I have told you that the Negro Division had a life absolutely separate from ours — they fought nobly, many of them were heroic, but for most of us whites they were invisible. Unless one of us wandered into their off-hours clubs, where (or so I heard) it became evident that their off-duty lives were rather richer than ours. Many Frenchwomen were said to find the Negroes attractive — probably they just treated them like men, without regard to color. Some of those off-duty places were legendary, much as the Negro nightclubs became legendary in Paris right after the war. The difference was that a place like Bricktop's was heavily patronized by whites, while during the war, at least where I was, it was a rare white who dipped into the world of the Negro American soldier. The closest I ever got to it was one of my bookstore stops, when I browsed in a shop in an area where colored soldiers were billeted.
'I had been visiting this shop, Librairie Du Prey, for several weeks, and finally — after the Washford incident — I began to notice that another customer, a colored private, often appeared there when I did. I never saw him buy a book. Neither did I ever precisely catch him watching me, but I felt observed.
'A few days later, this same man appeared in the canteen. It took me a few moments to recognize him, since his uniform shirt was covered by a busboy's jacket, a garment which makes all men identical twins. He was picking trays up off the tables, and I tried to catch his eye, but he merely scowled at me.
'The next time I went to the Librairie Du Prey, another black soldier was browsing over the tables. He scrutinized me much more openly than the first man had, and when I had given him a good look in return, I was stopped dead in my tracks. He was a magician. I knew it. He was a noncom, a stranger, and foreign to me in a thousandways: but when I looked at him I knew he was my brother and he knew that I knew. I wish for you boys a moment in your lives as wild with excitement — as wild with
possibility —
as that moment was for me. The man turned away and left the shop, and I could barely keep myself from running out and following him.
'The next afternoon in the hospital canteen, one of the messboys slipped a note into my jacket as I walked out. I had been anticipating some such thing all day, I knew it was connected to the magician I had seen in the bookstore, and I took it out and read it as soon as I was out the door.
Be in front of the bookstore at nine tonight —
that was all it said, all I needed. I washed up and went back to the operating theater in a mood of feverish anticipation. It was coming, whatever it was, and I wanted to meet it head-on. If it was my destiny, I no longer dithered and fought. I wanted that door to open.
3
'At nine sharp I was in front of that bookstore. I felt very exposed — I was the only white man in sight. In a closed-up shop down the street, someone was playing the banjo. It made a hot, vibrant, electrical sound. The night was humid and warm. The Negro soldiers who walked by looked at me with a kind of aggressive, aimless curiosity, and I sensed that one or two of them only just decided not to make trouble for me because of my rank. If I had been a drunken private with a week's scrip in my pocket . . . I remember feeling the metaphoric aptness of my situation: surrounded by the unknown, on the point of really entering the unknown.
'At nine-fifteen a Negro soldier came striding past, looked at me and nodded, and kept walking. It took me a second to realize what I was supposed to do. He was nearly to the corner by the time I started to follow him. When I got to the corner, I saw him disappearing around another sharp corner ahead of me.
'He led me up and down, around and around — a few times I thought I had lost him, those streets were sonarrow and twisting, and all around me the sounds of dark voices, men singing or laughing or muttering to me as I passed, but I always managed to catch a glimpse of his boots at the last minute. Of course I was lost. I did not at all know that section of Ste. Nazaire, and I recognized none of the street names. He had led me into the colored red-light district, and even a lieutenant was not safe there after dark.
'Finally I rounded a corner, by now out of breath, and a huge colored man in uniform stepped in front of me and pushed me against the brick wall. 'You the doctor? You the Collector?' he said. His accent was very Southern.
'Thass him, thass him,' said another man I could not see. 'Inside.'
'The giant astonished me by giggling and saying something I could not decipher —
Heez gon gew haid sumphum.
Then opened a door in the brick and bundled me inside.
'It was a barren, sweat-smelling room. The magician I had seen in the bookstore was standing before one of the gray walls, wearing a battered uniform bearing his corporal stripes but no other identification. A man I thought was the messboy peeked in, looked at me with huge eyes, and slammed the door. The magician said, 'Lieutenant Nightingale? Known as the Collector?'
''I know what you are,' I said.
''You think you do,' he said. 'You operated on a soldier named Washford?'
''I wouldn't call it operating,' I said.
' 'Another doctor refused to attend to him because of his race, and you volunteered to do the job?'
'To do the job —
he was not a country boy like the others, he had city stamped all over him, someplace tough, someplace like Chicago.
'I agreed.
''Tell me how you healed Washford,' he said. And I could see the iron in him again.
'I held up my hands for answer. I said, 'You fellows have been eyeing me ever since it happened.'
' 'You have never heard of the Order? Never heard tell of the Book?'
''What I know is in these hands,' I said.
''Wait here,' he said, and slipped out through the door. A moment later he reappeared, and nodded at me to follow him. I did. And I walked straight into Shadowland, which had been there all along, right under the surface of things, dogging me ever since I had set foot in Europe.
'The corporal gave me a glittering professional smile just as I was passing through the door, and it startled me, because it was the smile you give a target just before you pull the ace of spades out of his ear.
'I was going through an interior door, and expected to go into another room, but when I stepped through, I was in a sunny field — a mustard field. I turned around, and the house was gone. All of Ste. Nazaire was gone. I was out in the country, in the middle of a mustard field, those yellow blossoms under my feet, on a gentle hill.
'I whirled around, and before me a man was seated in a high, hand-carved wooden chair with carved owls' heads on the armrests and talons carved into its feet. He was colored, handsome, younger than I, with a smooth, regular face. He looked like a king in that Chair, which was the general idea. He had just appeared out of nowhere. He wore an old uniform with no markings on it at all. This man who had conjured me out of the slum in Ste. Nazaire and conjured himself out of nowhere knit his fingers together and looked at me in a kindly, intense, questioning way. I could feel his power: and then I saw his aura. That is, he allowed me to see it. It nearly blinded me — colors shot out and glowed, each of them brighter than the mustard flowers. I almost fell on my knees. For I knew what he was, and what he could do for me. I was twenty-seven and he may have been nineteen or twenty, but he was the king. Of magicians. Of shadows. The King of the Cats. He was my Answer. And all the others, the ones who had watched me and taken me to him, were only his lackeys.
''Welcome to the Order,' he said. 'My name is Speckle John.'
' 'And I am . . . ' I started to say, but he held up a hand and violent color seemed to play around it.
''Charles Nightingale. William Vendouris. Dr. Collector, but none of those now. You will take a new name, one known to the Order. You will be Coleman Collins.Only to us at first, but when this war finishes and we may go where we please, to the world.'
'I knew without his telling me that it was a colored name — the name of a colored magician who had died. It was as if I had heard the name before, but I could not remember ever having heard it. I wanted to deserve that name. At that second I became Coleman Collins in my heart, and wore the name I had been born with as a disguise. 'What do you want with me?' I asked.
'He laughed out loud. 'Why, I want to be your teacher. I want to work with you,' he said. 'You don't even know who you are yet, Coleman Collins, and I want the privilege of helping to show you how to get there. You may be the most gifted natural the Order has uncovered — or who has uncovered himself — in the past decade.'
''What do you want me to do?' I asked.
''Tonight you will stay here. Yes, here. It will be all night. And if you are welcomed tonight — don't worry, you'll see what that means — if you are welcomed, soon you will be able to repeat what you did with Mr. Washford whenever you wish.' He laughed out loud again, and his wonderful voice rolled out over the mustard field like the hallooing of a French horn. 'Of course, I cannot recommend that you do it every day.'
' 'And after tonight?' I asked.
''We begin our studies. We begin your new life, Mr. Collins.'
'He stood up from his throne, and the sunlight died. Speckle John stood before me in a vast starry night, really only an outline in the darkness. I could not make out his features. 'You will be safe during the night, Doctor, safer than you would be in our part of Ste. Nazaire. Tomorrow we begin.'
'Then he was gone. I moved forward, reaching out, and my fingers touched the back of his chair. The night seemed immense. I could hear only a few isolated crickets. The stars seemed very intense, and I fancied that I was looking at them with eyes made new by Speckle John.
'Well, there I was, alone on a hill in the middle of the night — the actual night I suppose, for the earlier daylight must have been an illusion. I had not a notion of where Iwas, and only Speckle John's word that the next day would find me returned to Ste. Nazaire and my work. His chair stood before me, and I was too superstitious to sit in it, though I wanted to. Even then, I wanted that chair for my own. I knew what it represented.