by Peter Straub
'No,' Bob Sherman said. 'Never. There'd be a million ways you could tell a princess from her servant. They wouldn't talk the same way. They wouldn't even wear the same clothes in the same way.'
'Lots of little social differentiations,' said Fitz-Hallan. 'Right. But the story says that identity can be stolen from you, and even though you're right, that goes deeper than class. In other stories, men's shadows replace their owners and make the men act like shadows. That's even more absurd, but also more terrifying. If identities can be stolen, someone, even some thing, can steal yours.' He paused to let this sink in. 'How does the beautiful princess become reinstated?'
Del said, 'The prince's father makes her tell her story to a stove and listens through the stovepipe. Then he finds out who she is.'
'Yes, but what has made him suspicious?'
'Falada,' Tom said.
'Falada. The horse her mother gave her.'
'It's magic — she's reinstated through magic,' Del said. He was smiling.
'You'll go far,' Fitz-Hallan said. 'Magic. The bad servant has Falada's head cut off and nailed to a wall, and Conrad, the goose boy, hears her talking to the horse's head and hears the head answer. Oh, poor princess in despair;/ If your dear mother knew,/ Her heart would break in two. The natural world of common sense and social differentiation is set aside, and magic takes charge of things. It speaks in poetry. It alters the world. Remember that first sentence? There was once . . . It doesn't matter what comes after that; when you hear words like that, you know the ordinary rules don't work — animals will talk, people will turn into animals, the world will turn topsy-turvy. But at the end . . . ' He raised his hand.
'It turns back again,' Del said. 'Magically right.' 'You do put things well sometimes, Nightingale,' Mr. Fitz-Hallan said.
The bell rang; the class ended; I was admiring Mr. Fitz-Hallan's timing when I witnessed something that at first seemed more a part of the world we had been discussing than it did of the world of school. Mr. Fitz-Hallan and the others were picking up their books. I was sitting next to Tom Flanagan, and I heard him utter a little grunt, more of displeasure than of astonishment: I looked, and saw his pencil floating in the air about a foot above his notebook. He grabbed at it and tore it out of its place. I saw (thought I saw) it momentarily resist, as if it were glued to the air. Flanagan blushed and jabbed the pencil in his shirt pocket. When he saw me gaping, he scowled and shrugged: What the hell's so funny? I decided that what I had seen had been a pointless but clever mime: he had thrown the pencil up, and I had looked just as it stopped rising and started to fall.
19
Two-thirty, that school night: suddenly and irrevocably awake, Skeleton Ridpath threw back his covers. The house was oppressively hot. Through the side wall he could hear his father snoring: a choked rattling inhalation followed by a long wheezing, grinding, somehow moist noise that made his skin shrink. He grimaced with loathing and switched on the light beside him.
And nearly shrieked, for directly above him, eight feet from his eyes, was the last image he had seen before being jolted awake — a large gray bird, opening its wings and spreading its talons. No, not quite the image. The bird whose image he had varnished onto his ceiling was an eagle, but the bird which had troubled his sleep was . . . He did not know, but not an eagle. It had been outside the window, battering at the frame with its wings. It had been trying to come in, ordering him to let it enter, and the terror of what was about to happen had jerked him from sleep. The savage bird outside had been making a noise-speaking to him, commanding him — which he now recognized came from his father's awful snoring.
Calming, letting that other bird diminish in his mind, he took in the comforting matter surrounding the eagle. Rifle barrels, many blood-streaked corpses, a baby hoisted aloft on a spear. These gradually faded into an area dominated by automobiles and household appliances and women's photographs from which he had removed the faces. In their place he had glued animals' masks, foxes' and apes'.
Different areas of his walls were different 'things,' now gradually melting into one comprehensive 'thing.' He had known it would turn that way — long ago, years ago, when he had given up all his other hobbies and begun putting pictures on his walls, Skeleton had foreseen a day when, guided by a powerful impulse, all the pictures would form a single epic statement.
He had begun by selecting pictures of the objects he hated, things that represented the Carson way of life: new cars and grotesquely large refrigerators piled with food; manor houses, well-dressed suburban women, football players. Because he hated these things, because his father and his father's colleagues accepted them as values, because they were elements of a world he wished would blow to pieces, they gave him a perverse thrill: hating them, he liked looking at them. Now he cut out every grotesque picture he saw, and welded horrors onto the representations of the suburban life he detested. In some places, four separate layers of photographs had been fixed to the waff. From the old, Bidder 'things' had crawled forth his true imagery. Skeleton knew he was getting better.
A year ago, he had been delighted by the notion that what he was doing was surrounding his room with himself: so that he stood within it as he stood and revolved within his own mind. When he had come to this thought — eating tasteless meatloaf and averting his head from his father's perpetual monologue about sports — he had twitched so violently that he had knocked his Coke off the table.
But during the following summer, this vision of his room had been overtaken by a vision even more commanding and dangerous. About this he rarely allowed himself to think at length, but the essential element burned in his mind every time he shut the door behind him.
The room did not open inward, but out.
It was not a mirror.
The room was a window.
It was a casement opening out onto the sky, and showing in fragmented, only gradually revealed form what actually lay outside. Lately the man in the dark coat, a man like the dark kings and wolves scheming at the door in Fitz-Hallan's fairy tales, had been appearing on his walls. When he found the right man (or when the right man found him?), the brim of his hat shading his face and his finger pointing, it would all lock together.
Skeleton jumped out of bed and began to rustle through the heap of magazines beside his bed.
Tom said: 'You see, there was a mystery in our school, and the end of the mystery was the awful thing that happened when Del and I were doing our magic show. But that wasn't the answer to the mystery, just its conclusion. The answer was at Shadowland; or the answer was Shadowland.
'Skeleton was having visions of a man in a long coat and hat — the man I had seen in a dream. Of course I didn't know about Skeleton's visions, and it wouldn't have done me any good if I had. You saw what happened that day in Fitz-Hallan's class, when my pencil got stuck somehow in midair — and I could see you decide immediately that your eyes had been fooled somehow. Despite what I had seen myself, I would have decided the same thing. After all, it's always best to look for the most rational explanations for irrational-seeming occurrences. Any magician would tell you that — look at how they universally discount people like Uri Getter.
'But you saw me blush. Funny things had been happening to me. I hardly had the vocabulary to express them. 'Nightmare' was one way, but that didn't get the atmosphere. And is there such a thing as a 'daymare'? Anyhow, I never let anybody know about it, not even Del, but queer things were happening to me — some days, it was like I never woke up at all, but went through school and the rest of the day in some sort of dream, full of terrible hints and omens.
'You want examples? For one thing, sometimes I imagined that birds were looking at me — observing me, keeping track of me. On the walk down to lunch, I'd see a flock of sparrows, and all of them would be looking straight at me. Every one, drilling into me with those quick little eyes. At home, I'd look out of the window in the living room, and a robin on our lawn would swivel its head and stare at me through the glass, just as if it had som
ething to say to me. Now, that's pretty mild. It made me think I might be going nuts, but it was still mild.
'Other things were less mild. I remember one day a week or two before our nine-week exams, when I went in the front door of the school and almost fainted. Because I didn't see what I knew was there — the steps going up, and the corridor and the library doors. For a second, maybe two or three seconds, I saw what looked like a jungle. The air was hot and very humid. There were more trees than I'd ever seen before in my life, crowded together, leaning this way and that, snaked around with vines. I had the sense of a tremendous energy — as if the whole crowded scene was humming and buzzing away. Then I saw an animal face peering at me through the leaves. I was so scared I almost fell over. And I came out of it. There were the steps, there were the library doors, there was Terry Peters pushing me in the back and ordering me to get a move on.
'Things like that happened maybe once a month after I made friends with Del. Those were the 'daymares.' But then, my friend, there were the nightmares. I was way ahead of the rest of the school. Every night I had terrible dreams — I was lost in a forest, and animals were trying to hunt me down, or I was floating way up high in the air, knowing I was going to fall. . . but the oddest feeling I had in these dreams, no matter how bad they were, was that I was somehow seeing how things really were. It was like the world had split open, and I was seeing part of the engine of things — or not seeing as much as feeling it there. As scared as I was, there was this funny kind of satisfaction, the satisfaction of knowledge. As if without at all understanding it, I was at least seeing how the mystery worked. Suppose the skies opened and you saw a great wheel turning around, the wheel that turns us around the sun — that's the kind of feeling I had.
'I didn't always have that feeling of mysterious insight, though. In some dreams I saw a black figure coming toward me — gliding toward me, like we were both suspended in the air. He held a knife. Or a sword. Something long and dangerous. He glided closer and closer, filling my vision. . . and then he cut off my hands. Or the pain in my hands was so great that it felt like he'd cut them off.'
I looked at his hands on the bar, at the round pads of scar tissue.
'We'll get to that,' he said.
20
Over the next few weeks, Skeleton Ridpath seemed to us to skulk backward into himself. His face grew odder, the flabby skin beneath his eyes darkening to a deeper gray. Once, on a Saturday in early November, he jumped out of his car at a stop sign, ran onto the sidewalk outside a candy store on Santa Rosa Boulevard, and slapped Dave Brick hard enough to make him stagger because he had neglected to wear his beanie. But the seniors' minds, like ours, were on other things. The nine-week examinations were coming soon, and these, designed to show students and masters how well we would likely do on the half-term exams in January, were notoriously tough. Also, just a week and a half before the examinations, the JV and varsity football teams were to play their homecoming games against Larch School, our traditional rival. On the evening after the homecoming games the first big dance of the year took place in the field house. In white jackets and beanies, six boys from the freshman class were to wait on the seniors. We were all aware that Skeleton was in danger of failing his exams; some of us vainly hoped that he would flunk out of the school. And all of us who were to serve as waiters at the dance hoped that there was no girl so desperate to attend the Carson homecoming dance that she would go out with Skeleton.
All of us were united by our loathing for Skeleton Ridpath, and by our fear of him. We thought Tom Flanagan a hero for what he had done during the football game when Ridpath kicked him in the face. That more than anything else demonstrated how events could be magically right. Once during these two or three weeks while Skeleton's attention wandered off into other kinds of unpleasantness, Tom and Bobby Hollingsworth saw him standing in the anteroom to the headmaster's office. He jerked back and out of sight behind the arch, and they assumed he was waiting to be flayed by Lake the Snake; two days later, Tom saw him there again while he was bringing Mr. Weatherbee's attendance forms to the office. This time Skeleton did not jerk back behind the arch, but flapped one bony paw urgently, dictatorially — clear off. Tom turned away from lurking Skeleton in the shadowy arch, and nearly bumped into Bambi Whipple, who carried the mimeographed pile of his nine-weeks exams.
Later that day we learned, that Bryce Beaver and Harlan Willow had been expelled for smoking in the field-house turrets, and the enigma of Skeleton Ridpath skulking outside of the offices was swallowed by the shocked excitement the expulsions caused. Laker Broome canceled after-school practices to hold a special school meeting; while Mr. Ridpath fumed in the back row at the loss of an hour and a half s preparation for the game, Broome dryly, meticulously said that he wanted to forestall gossip by explaining that a 'tragedy' had occurred in the life of the school, that two able boys had disgraced themselves. They might well have ruined their prospects. That this was a tragedy, no one would dispute. But he had no choice: they had given him no choice.
In his face was no regret, only a tidy satisfaction. The entire school could hear Chester Ridpath loudly coughing from the back of the auditorium, but perhaps only we in the first two rows could see the long creases in Laker Broome's face deepen in self-congratulation.
21
Ridpath made our practices savage and grinding during the four days before the game, running through the same simple plays ten, then a dozen times; in his mind we had become the X's and O's of his diagrams, capable of unending and painless manipulation. Each session ended with three laps of the field, normally punishment for only the worst duffers. But this too was punishment — for the loss from the varsity team of Beaver and Willow, who had been on his first string. From these practices we limped home, bruised from blocking and tackling, nursing bloody noses, too tired even to do homework or watch Jackie Gleason and Art Carney in The Honeymooners.
On the day of the game the football field had been freshly limed, and the yard lines shone chalky white. Under an utterly cloudless sky, in air only beginning to carry autumn's snap, a crowd of parents in crew-neck sweaters and chino pants, plaid skirts and blazers, streamed from the visitors' parking lot toward the bleachers. It was obvious that most of these casual fathers in their blue sweaters and brown Weejuns had been Carson students; none of them had the weathered, experienced faces I thought of as typically 'Arizona.' They had grown up here, but they could have come from anywhere urban and knowing.
While Sherman and Howie Stern and Morris Fielding and I sat on the bench, our junior-varsity team lost by three touchdowns. We had managed only a single field goal. The varsity team ran out to cheers and school yells — most of the parents had flasks — and cheerleaders from a nearby girls' school flounced and cartwheeled and spelled out the school's name. The Larch School made two touchdowns in the first half, one more in the second. We made none. Ridpath had committed an elementary error and worn us out.
22
I saw something anomalous during the varsity game. Most of our JV team was seated in the last row of the stands, and from there we could look across the field to the grassy rise on its opposite side. When the visitors' lot outside Laker Broome's private entrance had filled, the parents had driven past it over the grass and parked their cars all along the yellow-green length of lawn which we often took as our way down to the Junior School for lunch. The snouts of Buicks and Lincolns and a few MG's pointed across and above the field toward the stands. Toward the end of the first half of the varsity game, I looked up at the row of grilles and bumpers facing us from the rise and saw a man standing between two of the cars.
He did not look like a Carson School parent. No chinos, no lamb's-wool Paul Stuart sweater, no Weejuns. The man was dressed in a long belted raincoat and an old-fashioned brown fedora hat pulled down low on his forehead. His hands were deep in his pockets. At first he reminded me of Sheldon Leonard in the television series Foreign Intrigue — in the fifties, way out there in the dry West, belted t
rench coats carried a whiff of glamour; they stood for spies, travel, Europe. Nothing about this exotic character suggested an interest in prep-school athletics.
Then I saw Del Nightingale's reaction to the man. Del was sitting beside Tom Flanagan three rows beneath me, and he looked up toward the rise a moment after I did. The effect on Del of the man dressed like Sheldon Leonard was startling: he froze like a bird before a snake, and I was sure that if you touched him you'd feel him quiver. He uttered a wordless noise — almost like an electronic beep. It was purely the sound of astonishment.
Skeleton Ridpath, seated on the bench in uniform, also appeared to be affected by the man's appearance on the rise. I thought he nearly fell off the bench. The man retreated backward between the cars and disappeared. Skeleton turned around and glared back at the stands. His head looked fleshless, the size of a grape above his shoulderpads.
23
'Sometimes I'm Happy'
Streamers hung from the auditorium ceiling, tied up around the dim colored spots; in place of the metal chairs was a vast — empty space for dancing, ringed by tables covered by dark blue cloths. At ten minutes to eight the only people in the room were the freshman waiters and the chaperons, Mr. and Mrs. Robbin. Mr. Robbin taught physics and chemistry, and was slight and gray-haired, with thick inquisitive glasses. His wife was taller than he, and her own hair was screwed up into a bun. The Robbins were seated together along the outside wall and looked dated and 'scientific,' like Dr. and Madame Curie; flecks of brilliant yellow and cadmium blue, then of orange and red, revolved over them, cast by the color wheel hung in the middle distance.