Authors: Peter Straub
'Enough,' Collins said. He whirled around and marched back through the rows of cars.
The grass had become springier and the cars were gone. Collins strode on beside him, going into the green vale. It was Ventnor. The disastrous football games were over. 'An interesting thing is happening today,' Collins was saying. 'I want you to see it.'
As they walked along, Tom glanced over his shoulder and looked at a wandering path on which stood a handful of boys, himself among them. Del raised his bandaged arm as if to ward off a blow. A second, almost subdued shock wave of betrayal. He was visible to no one else — he was merely Collins' shadow. 'Of course this is the day of the famous theft,' the magician said.
They were proceeding down a long green distance, and Tom remembered seeing this in a dream, long ago — he knew that Skeleton Ridpath was standing rigid with joy near the Ventnor gym.
'When we all lived in the forest,' Collins said, 'we could turn into birds at will.' They vanished around an edge of concrete — Tom was sweating, on the edge ofcollapse — and the magician rose off the ground, beating great gray wings. He was an owl.
Tom beat his own wings; he too had become a bird. Below and behind him, Skeleton howled. The transformation had been instant and painless; putting on feathers was easier than putting on a shirt. Inside the small bird he was, he was still Tom Flanagan; and when he looked at the owl, he could see Coleman Collins within it. The magician smiled, his hair flattening against his head. The owl wheeled overhead and sailed back toward the Ventnor buildings. Tom turned beneath him and followed. From what he could see of himself, he was a falcon.
'A peregrine falcon,' Collins said. 'I see you are curious.' There was laughter in his voice.
Tom looked out over the landscape, and for a moment was transfixed by its beauty and strangeness — trees and a glinting lake and long stretches of green. It looked like Eden, a place shining with newness and promise. Beyond it lay a network of curving roads and straight roads, a cluster of houses, desert. Miles away, mountains reared and buckled. Geologic tensions and muscles underlay it all, churning with life. Small things scurried in grass and sand. He was seeing through falcon's eyes.
Collins interrupted his reverie. 'Child.'
Tom looked down and saw the magician sitting on a roof by a wide tilting pane of glass. He reluctantly descended. When he landed on the roof, he was just Tom again, and that miraculous insightful vision was gone. He walked toward Collins, leaning against the pitch of the roof.
'You see, it's not all bad,' the magician said. 'Could a simple-minded morality give you anything like that?' He looked down through the skylight. 'But here comes our moment. Watch.'
Tom saw himself and Del in a sea of heads, alone in a crowd near a woman pouring tea. Then Marcus Reilly approached, dogged by Tom Pinfold, and Tom saw himself turn away to speak to them. He stared at the wheaten top of Marcus' head as if he could see into it and find whatever wayward germ had put his friend into the bloody car.
'You're wasting your time,' the magician said with brutal suddenness. 'Look across the room.'
Tom shifted his glance. Skeleton was mooning along the far wall. His face foreshortened but visible, Skeleton looked like a robot on automatic pilot. Tom looked back down again and saw that Del had moved a few feet away from the Tom Flanagan down there: Del was standing by himself, and his nose was pointing directly at Skeleton.
'My nephew is weaker than Speckle John,' the magician said. 'You see, he feels threatened, he doesn't know if he can trust his eyes, but they seem to tell him that his best friend is in secret complicity with his idol. He cannot ignore or reject his best friend. But he must strike out somewhere. And he has begun to admit that the person he fears and hates most in the world might also have a secret relationship with said idol.'
Del was rigid with concentration. The air around him seemed to darken. Tom saw or felt Del's strain with his lingering bird senses.
'Don't want to be a great man,' said the magician, 'be a great donkey.'
On the other side of the room, Skeleton drifted near the shelves. He let his hand float over the glass objects. The hand dipped and closed. He slipped something into his pocket and grinned blankly.
Below Tom, Del relaxed. That was proof of a kind. Tom grieved for Del, for Dave Brick (who was gripping his slide rule and gaping at Skeleton), for himself too: so much misery, so much turmoil, from jealousy.
'That was your strength he used,' Collins said.
'And the levitation . . . '
'Again your strength.' Collins stood up, and Tom stood too, blinking. 'Come.'
The huge gray owl lifted itself out over the skylight and the roof, making for the clouds; Tom staggered, raised his arms and found they were wings. Again that instantaneous translation. White clouds gathered around him, the owl was gone; he found himself on hands and knees crawling toward a pane of green.
When his mind cleared, he was sprawled out before the first row of seats in the big theater.
6
Tom crept into bed and tried to rest. He could not sleep. Whenever he closed his eyes, he was either flying or falling.
Eventually he got up and went downstairs, to find lunch set for one in the dining room. Cold sliced ham and beef, a wedge of Stilton, sauerkraut. An icy glass of milk. Tom ate as unreflectively as an animal, then returned his dishes to the kitchen and deposited them in the sink.
For some time Tom coasted through the living room and looked at the paintings. Then he drifted to a cabinet with glass doors. On the topmost shelf an ancient revolver lay on velvet in an open leather case. Beneath it was a porcelain shepherdess with a crook. Other porcelain figurines stood a little distance from it, a boy with a satchel of schoolbooks, a fat Elizabethan gripping a beer mug, a cluster of drunken men with misshapen faces holding songsheets. He looked again at the shepherdess, and saw that she had Rose's face — high vulnerable forehead, full lips, widely spaced eyes. She looked embarrassed to be thrust forward from the others. Tom's hand went to the catch on the glass door; stopped when it touched the metal. He had a superstitious fear of touching the porcelain figure. Finally he turned away.
He confronted Del that evening, after he had taken a long nap.
The pocket doors had been pushed halfway back into the walls, opening an arch between his room and Del's. Tom went through the opening and heard water drumming in the bathroom. He sat on the bed.
In a little while Del emerged from the bathroom, a towel around his neck like a cape, his glossy wet hair skimmed close to his head. Then Tom realized that Del looked like a child to him, frail as a nine-year-old. 'I feel great! I must have slept all day!' Del beamed at him.
'I did too,' Tom said.
'If we keep this up, we'll be on magician's hours before long-up all night, asleep all day. But that's neat. I like night, don't you?' Del began rubbing his hair with atowel, completely unselfconscious about his nakedness.
'I prefer daylight.'
Del peeped out from under a fringe of towel. 'You in a bad mood?'
Tom shook his head, and Del's face vanished beneath the towel. 'You feel like working with some cards after I get dressed?'
'Sure.'
'We have to practice more — I haven't touched a pack of cards in weeks. You have to keep up with it or you get rusty. I could even show you that shuffle I was reading about.'
'Sure.'
Del pulled the towel off his head and wiped his legs. His hair fluffed at his temples, still clung damply behind his ears. He dropped the towel and began to dress in clean white underwear. 'Pretty soon, maybe tomorrow, we'll hear the rest of my uncle's story.'
'I guess so.'
Buttoning a yellow Gant shirt, Del looked up almost shyly at Tom. 'I hope that both of us can spend the summers here from now on. We could learn together. Right?'
Del paid no attention to his silence, but went to his desk and got a fresh pack of cards and slit the cellophane seal. 'Here, pull a chair up to the desk,' Del said, fanning the cards in his hands. He manipulated them in some complicated fashion Tom could not see, involving much palming and ending in a two-handed riffle. 'Okay. Look.' He spread them out in a fan on the desk. The four twos were together, the threes, and so on up to the aces. 'Pretty good, wouldn't you say? You can do just about anything with that triple shuffle. In a couple of months I'll be able to do it so well that — '
'Del,' Tom interrupted, 'tell me about the Ventnor owl.'
His friend looked up at him with big alarmed eyes. He scooped the cards together and shuffled them again. 'There's nothing to tell.'
'I know better than that.'
Del looked down at his hands. 'The funny thing is that everybody thinks that speed is what counts, and they're sowrong. Nobody's hand is quicker than the eye. It has a lot more to do with feel — with finesse. Speed hardly counts.'
'Tell me about it, Del.'
Del fanned out the cards: two red kings glared from a sea of black. 'I wanted to hurt Skeleton,' he mumbled. 'I wanted to get him kicked out.' He glanced at Tom in agony. 'How'd you know, anyhow? How'd you find out?'
'Your uncle told me.'
Del's face whitened. He tipped the cards into a stack, cut them, did a conventional shuffle, and cut them again. He lifted the top four cards: four aces. He shuffled the pack again and lifted the top four: kings.
'You're stalling,' Tom said.
Del tried the trick again: three queens and a seven lay face up on the desk. 'But it was because of him . . . ' He stopped — he was trying not to cry. 'Even
Skeleton
seemed like he was stealing Uncle Cole away from . . . ' Del wiped at his eyes. 'I wanted to get him into trouble.' He looked down at the botched trick. 'I was looking at him, and I was thinking about him — and you started talking to Marcus Reilty — I was feeling so terrible about what Bobby Hollingsworth had said after the game — and right after that I saw you with him, Tom, I did see you, and you looked right at me, but nobody else could see you — and it was like that day I broke my leg — I hated everything, and I couldn't talk to you . . . ' Del put his hand before his eyes. 'So I thought, I'll get
rid
of Skeleton. I thought Mr. Broome and everybody would know right away it was him, I never thought it would go all crazy like it did. . . . ' He snuffled, looked up at Tom. 'So I made him take it. I did magic on him. I never did anything like that before, but all of a sudden I knew I could do it. I concentrated so hard I thought I'd blow up. And I made him do it.' He glanced down, then again at Tom. 'So I guess I caused all that trouble afterward. The fire, and Dave Brick, and . . . everything.'