Authors: Peter Straub
'Can you find it in the dark?' she asked.
'Got to,' he said. He tried to remember where he had been when he had dropped it. Had it been before he had gone toward Pease and the ladder, or had he carried the gun for a while? He saw himself dropping the gun, saw itfire into the grass, flipping over with the force of the recoil.
'Stop, Rose,' he said. 'I was about here. I stood up somewhere around here. I never got very far from the stones.' He saw it all rolling on before him, Del with his bloody face, the knot of men going seriously about their business, Snail with his delicate look of worry walking forward right into the bullet. He looked down and did not see the gun, and panic started up in him again. He whispered, 'I don't see it! I don't see it!'
'Let's go ahead a little bit,' Rose said.
They went five feet forward.
'No, this is too far,' Tom said, seeing Snail's body lying slantwise on the grass. Snail looked like an exhibit in a wax museum. The other body, Thorn's, was a surprising way off.
'Did Snail get that close to you?' Rose asked.
'I don't think . . . I don't know.' Again he saw Snail calmly coming for him, keeping his almost kindly eyes on Tom, that little wrinkle dividing his forehead.
Tom stepped backward, remembering how they had stood. He moved a foot sideways and when he looked down he saw the gun black against the near — black of the grass. He went to his knees and collected it up with both hands. The barrel was still warm. He stood up and displayed it like an offering. 'Two bullets left,' he said. 'I'm going to shoot his eyes out.'
When he looked at Rose he saw only a fuzzy aureole of hair outlined by the patio lights. 'Help me,' he said. 'He's a fiend, and I'm going to shoot his eyes out.'
He still cradled the pistol in his joined palms. He would be able to lift it in the proper way only once, and manipulate the trigger with his left index finger. Then he would shoot the magician's eyes out.
Rose helped him toward the patio, then across it. They came into the living room, which was daubed here and there with Tom's blood. No rush of ecstatic air greeted him, as on the morning after his welcome. Shadowland was waiting, he realized. Shadowland was neutral. He pulled the gun toward his chest. It smelled like explosions and oil-it smelled like a burned trombone. Holding it closer like that helped the ache in his forearms.
'We just go up?' Rose asked. 'We just go up. Very quietly.'
They left the living room and went softly to the big staircase. It rose from gray darkness into dim light. Outside Collins' bedroom, the recessed lights tinted the top of the walls and the swinging doors.
Rose went onto the first step, looked back at him. Hugging the gun into his chest, he nodded, and she went noiselessly up another step. He could do this by himself. Tom put his feet where she had, trying to walk exactly where she had walked — sometime while he had been trying to get his fingers under the gun, Rose had removed her shoes, which she now carried in her left hand. As he set his feet where her bare feet had been, what he still thought of as his new senses sent him the impression of . . .
knives. Fire.
He looked up, startled, almost feeling sharp points and flames working in his feet, and saw Rose slowly and silently and slowly going up one step after another. Tom moved his foot two inches to the side: mute ordinary carpet. When he moved his foot back again, the impression was still there —
knives —
butfading. He went farther away from the railing and crept up after her.
She stood on the landing, waiting for him to climb the last tread. Again he had that sense of kinship, as strong as love but different from it, of something in her that was like the magician in him, hidden away.
He said I would never leave him.
Did he say you would always walk on knives, Rose?
'Oh, Rose,' he whispered.
She shook her head, either telling him to be quiet or that she could not answer the question she knew he was going to ask. Rose looked anxiously at the swinging doors set off the landing; back at him. Keep your mind on the job, Tom. He adjusted the gun in his hand and got it so that the barrel pointed out from his chest, his right hand on the grip, his left supporting it.
Rose gently pushed one half of the swinging doors, and it noiselessly opened. Tom slipped through into darkness, and saw light outlining Collins' bedroom door. It was chinked open, and all he had to do was burst in.
One final adjustment of his hands: he took the whole weight in his right hand, and wedged his finger into the trigger guard.
Just go in and shoot, he told himself. Don't even stop to think. Just push back the trigger. Then it's over.
He gathered himself, consciously made himself still. He raised the gun so he could sight down the barrel when he was in the room. His heartbeat surged and pounded. When he was ready, he stepped forward and kicked open the door and ran into the bedroom.
What he saw stopped him cold. A gigantic blood-smeared skull grinned at him, its mouth the size of a shark's.
'Del!'
he screamed, and the barrel of Collins' pistol went wavering blindly as his left index finger involuntarily jerked the trigger back.
20
The pistol jumped, but his right hand went with it and clung. The explosion rocked his head: his ears felt as though he had dropped fifty feet in a roller coaster. A bit of the blood-spattered ceiling shredded away. All of the room was covered in gore. Directly opposite him the blown-up photograph of a skull was dappled in blood; gouts and puddles of blood covered the bed and other furniture, blood ran and dripped from the ceiling, which had been covered with photographs of owls.
'Del!'
Tom howled, and saw on the floor where he had been about to set his foot a partial upper plate from which a single white tooth protruded like a fencepost.
'We are over here, Tom,' Collins' voice said from his right. 'I trust you want to save your friend's life.'
He swung around toward the voice — he heard his breath hissing in his mouth. The gun felt like a barbell. Collins sat in plain view on the owl chair, and Del was on his lap. They too were dappled with red.
'There's one bullet left,' Tom said, trying to steady the gun on the magician's amused face. Del stared at him without recognition. 'Del, get off his lap.'
'He can't hear you. He won't, I should say. He's given up. He's gone inside and locked the door. Now, put down the gun.'
Tom frantically tried to fit his left index finger into the trigger guard.
'I could melt that gun in your hand in a second,' Collins said. 'Or I could kill you by making it explode when you fired. If you had a chance to do it that way, you've lost it. It's time for you to make a sacrifice, Tom. It's time for you to choose. As Speckle John had to choose. The repeat performance isn't over — in fact, it has hardly begun.' Behind him Tom gradually took in another blown-up photograph: Rose Armstrong dressed as a porcelain shepherdess, her high-browed face not a contemporary, not an American face at all, but of another century and place.
Tom lowered the gun.
'To save my nephew's life, will you sacrifice the pistol? Del is in traumatic shock, I must point out. He might die anyhow. But if you do not sacrifice the gun, I will stop his heart. You ought to know that I can do that.'
'Then why don't you just stop mine?'
'Because then I would cheat myself out of the performance. But you have to decide.' He smiled again. 'I will give you yet another choice. The choice of giving up your song. Leave Del. Leave Rose — you will have to do that anyhow. And leave magic. Let me have your gifts. You could just walk out of Shadowland, and be precisely the boy you thought you were when you came here.' Collins spread and lifted his hands: simple. 'That is the best choice I can give you. Sacrifice your song, and use your legs to depart Shadowland for good.'
'Del dies, and you keep Rose here. I leave unharmed, if I can believe you.'
Del sagged on the magician's lap. His face was gray, and he scarcely seemed to be breathing.
'And the other choice?'
'You throw away the gun. Your song against mine. The performance continues until Shadowland has an undisputed master, the new king or the old. What do you say, boy?'
Take my magic and let me out of here,
Tom shouted inside himself. He heard movement behind him and snapped his head sideways. Rose stood in the open door.
Knives.
How often, how many nights, had she been in this room where the owls screamed down from the ceiling? She silently pleaded with him, but she could have been pleading for either choice.
'Song,' Tom said, and flipped the pistol toward the smeared bed. From the side of his eye he saw Rose slipping back out the door. The pistol landed with a squishing sound far out of his reach, and Tom's viscera curled around a block of ice.
Ifooled you, I fooled you;
Lonnie Donegan's mocking chant to the inspectors on the Rock Island line went through him like a spear, and he knew that he had been forced, had forced himself back into the magician's game.
'Good. But of course you remember the salient point about wizards,' Collins said.
I fooled you, I fooled you . . . got all pig iron!
'They get the house odds — they use their own decks. You should have walked, child.' Collins stood up, his eyes flashed, and the owl chair was empty.
A dazed bird fluttered along the floor, its wing feathers painting the blood into delicate Japanese calligraphy.
21
Tom knew. Collins had carefully prepared him to know: he had foretold it, planted the seeds of this final betrayal in his mind.
They once were birds, but were tricked by a great wizard, and now they are still trying to sing and still trying to fly.
This dazed sparrow scrawling Japanese letters with Mr. Feet's blood on the polished wooden floor was trying to stand and move like a boy so that it could shutter up its mind again and be safe. The sparrow cheeped, and Tom knew that Del was screaming. In horror Tom watched as it fell on its side and fixed him with an eye like a madman's: a panicked black pebble.
The fairy tales had blown into each other and got mixed up, so that the old king had a wolfs head under his crown, and the young prince in love with the maiden fluttered and gasped in a sparrow's body, and Little Red Riding Hood walked forever on knives and sword blades, and the wise magician who enters at the end to set everything right was only a fifteen-year-old boy kneeling on bloodied floorboards and reaching for the transformed body of his closest friend.