Authors: Peter Straub
'Think,' Rose said. 'You know, and he knows you know. Remember it, Tom.'
'Del?' It was an almost fantastically cruel joke. 'It can't be.' He fumbled with two shirt buttons, working them with thumb and index finger until the flat white disks found the holes. Del flopped out onto his palm; the wings feebly stretched. 'Oh, my God. Oh, Del.'
'Think about what he said,' Rose pleaded.
Another pane of the glass door exploded into the living room.
'We read stories in English class,' Tom said, frantically trying to remember . . . a sparrow? 'We read 'The Goose Girl.' We read 'Brother and Sister.' We read . . .
shit.
It's no use. 'The Fisherman and His Wife.' 'The Two Brothers.' It's no good.' What he remembered was howbirds had plagued him: how a robin on the lawn had looked in through a window and drilled him with its eyes; a starling in a Quantum Heights tree quizzing him as the world revolved and witches filled the sky.
'It's no good,' Tom said. 'Our teacher said . . . ah, in 'Cinderella,' he said a bird was the messenger of the spirit. A bird gave her pretty clothes. Another bird took out the stepsisters' eyes. Oh, wait. Wait. It's 'Cinderella.'' He held Del out from his body. 'Birds tell the prince that the stepsisters are not to be his bride. They make him find Cinderella. The birds make him find the right bride.'
,
In the darkness Rose was looking up at him with gleaming eyes. Del stirred on his bandaged palm.
'Find him,' Tom whispered, feeling half-exalted, half-sick with the impossibility of both his task and Del's.
'Find
him.'
Del's head lifted; his wings unfurled. And Tom's heart loosened too, and overflowed. On his bloody, aching hands the bird opened its wings and beat them down. Once. Twice.
Go, little bird. Go, Del. A
third time the wings opened and beat down, and the sparrow lifted off Tom's hands.
The messenger of spirit swooped into the air.
Find him. For us, for you. Find him.
The messenger circled in the dark air above them, then settled once on Tom's shoulder — a gesture like a pat on the head, a gesture of love — and took off down the corridor.
27
They followed it, stumbling past the abandoned Collector in the dark, past the entrance to the forbidden room, past the door to the Little Theater. Del flew in rapid, excited circles before the Grand Theatre des Illusions, darting again and again at the door.
Rose reached the door before Tom.
Another gigantic wingbeat rattled the entire back of the house. Tom heard the case in the living room topplingover, breaking the glass doors and splintering the wood. Inside it, the porcelain figures would be smashed and crumbled into each other.
'What is that outside?' Rose asked.
'An owl. Another messenger.'
'It's not him?'
'No. It means someone is going to die,' Tom said. 'It means someone should have died already. The performance was supposed to end a little while after they . . . ' He almost swooned, remembering precisely how Collins had held the glowing nails and used them to rape his hands. 'Stay out here,' he said.
'I'm coming with you,' she said, and pushed open the door. She took two steps in and halted.
The sparrow sailed inside, into light and noise. A crowd filled the seats.
28
'You have front-row seats,' three Herbie Butters said from three owl chairs. 'Please take them.'
Tom looked at them, scarcely bothering with the audience that had transfixed Rose. People from another age stared at the three magicians, peeled oranges, stuffed candies into their mouths, smoked. Unlike their painted images, which were visible at the rear of the Little Theater, they moved in the seats, raised their arms, applauded, and called out inaudible comments in X general din.
'You see, they like my little illusions,' three Herbie Butters said in unison. 'And now my volunteers will attempt to distinguish reality from its shadow. Failure to do so will bring a penalty, ladies and gentlemen.'
Cheers: catcalls.
'Change Del back,' Tom said, pitching his voice to go under the uproar behind him.
'Ah! The boy wants me to work magic on his pet — a sparrow, ladies and gentlemen! Our volunteer is very droll.' He held up his palm. 'But he is more than that, my friends. The young man is an apprentice magician. He thinks he could entertain you as well as I.'
More cheers; derisory shouts. Tom looked over his shoulder, saw Rose just turning away from the audience with a stricken, horrified expression. In her face was the conviction that they could not win. Up in the middle of the twentieth row, Del's parents, with their smashed heads and burning clothes, were politely applauding. Around them, visible behind Rose, men and women with animal faces screamed down at them and the stage.
'You see what audiences are, my little volunteer,' said the three Herbie Butters in unison. 'All audiences are the same. They want symbolic blood — they want
results.
You cannot trifle with an audience. Are you ready to make your choice?'
Zoo noises erupted from the thrashing audience. Tom glanced back and saw that everyone, even Del's parents, wore the heads of beasts. Dave Brick writhed there too, stuffed into Tom's old jacket, with a sheep's head on his shoulders.
'You see, you must never . . . ' said the Herbie Butter on the left.
' . . . make the fatal mistake of thinking . . . ' said the Herbie Butter in the center.
' . . . that any audience is friendly,' said the Herbie Butter on the right. 'Are you ready to make your choice? You will be severely penalized if you choose wrong. I promise you that!' he shouted to the audience, who screamed back in a thousand animal voices.
Tom looked up. Their messenger of spirit was circling in the vastness overhead, frantically trying to find its way out, like any bird.
Is there any Del left in you?
Tom thought: his mind was fraying apart, shredding under the onslaught of noise from the audience of beasts.
Or are you lost, just a sparrow now?
The sparrow came to rest on a pipe and was almost invisible, far up above him. He saw its head twitching from side to side.
'We're waiting,' said three voices.
Find him,
Tom thought.
Find Collins.
'If you do not make your choice, you will be sent back,' said three voices. 'You will be part of the audience forever. For they are each important, and each adds to the whole.'
Find Collins.
'Your pet is not a bird in a story,' said the Herbie Butter on the left.
'He is only a pestilential sparrow,' said the Herbie Butter in the middle.
And that would be right, Tom knew. No angels were looking after him and Del. The messenger of spirit was no longer a messenger of anything. Del's mind had guttered out in the frantic, restless little body.
'Del!' he shouted.
'One of a hundred lost pets,' said one of the magicians.
The sparrow left the pipe and swooped down over the audience, causing an uproar of shouts and curses.
Find him. Find him. Whatever you are now.
The sparrow curved in flight, and went for the stage. Tom's heart paused: his blood slowed in his veins. The sparrow flew in a straight line over the three figures on the stage, circled back and flew over them again. It came down suddenly, and as it went toward the lap of the magician on the left, Tom screamed, 'That's enough! Leave him! He's going to — '
The sparrow came to rest on the knee of the magician on the left.
'The young man
is
a magician, ladies and gentlemen,' Collins said through the mask of Herbie Butter. 'This part of the performance is concluded.' He tenderly reached forward and closed his fingers about.the sparrow's body, and his companions faded into dark pools cast on the stage by opposed spotlights. 'My friends in the audience, this young man's pet has given his life so that his master may advance another stage.'
He's what you call a stooge,
someone whispered behind Tom.
You'll see. It's all part of the act.
Collins stood up from the owl chair, gripping the sparrow in his right hand and holding it out, brandishing it. 'You see before you a real bird,' he caressingly intoned. 'You have seen it fly. What is it? A boy's pet, a winged rodent, or a messenger of spirit? You have heard how magical birds aid their masters in quests and divinations, you know how they roam widely and freely in the world, bringing rumors of goodness here and there, soaring above what holds us to our earthly existences — ladies and gentlemen, aren't birds our very image of the magical?' He thrust forward the bird, and it — Del — poured out a cascade of melody unknown to any sparrow, as though its whole body had been filled with leaping song.
Oh, Del. That's you. And you're not afraid.
'You see — a special bird. Does it not deserve a place in the eternal?'
Still the heartbreaking cascade of melody erupted from the captured sparrow.
'Do I need my fiddlers three?'
'NO!' bellowed the audience of beasts.
'Do I need my pipe and my bowl?'
'NO!'
'No. You have it, ladies and gentlemen. You comprehend. The singing bird is magic itself. It is indeed the messenger of spirit. And it could sing, I assure you, any melody you called out — but it has already surpassed such vulgar tricks. So I propose to give this living spirit messenger, with your permission, ladies and gentlemen of the perfect audience, its final form. Its ultimate form.'