by Peter Straub
It sounded like Broome wanted to stage a full-scale spectacular after school, with limbs lopped off in public and Christians thrown to lions. He wanted to answer the student performances with his own. That devil who had shone from his eyes was a devil of ambition and jealousy, who could not accept being upstaged. Tom and Del quietly left their seats and walked past Mr. Broome to go up the steps to the stage.
Broome drifted off to the side and leaned against the far wall beside one of the big doors, crossing his arms over his chest. He was smiling to himself. Tom and Del pulled the curtains shut, and for several moments we could dimly hear footsteps and the shifting of equipment. The piano, on casters, rolled back with a rumbling like a truck's. For some time we heard the rustling of material. Then the curtain twitched and pulled smoothly back, revealing a painted sign on a stand.
FLANAG1NI AND NIGHT
ILLUSIONISTS
Most of the students seated below the stage began to laugh.
White smoke poured across the stage, billowed and hung, then began to drift up toward the beams and lights, and we could see that the sign had gone. In its place stood Tom Flanagan, dressed in what looked like an Indian bedspread and a turban of the same material. Beside him was the high table draped in black velvet, and on the other side of the table stood Del. He wore black evening dress and a cape. Deep laughter erupted again, and the two boys bowed in unison. When they straightened up, the smoke now entirely gone, their faces revealed their nervousness.
'We are Flanagini and Night,' Tom intoned, sticking to his script in spite of the laughter. 'We are magicians. We come to amaze and entertain, to terrify and delight.' He flicked the velvet cover off the table, and something that looked like a fiery ball or shooting star lifted off from beneath and burned up six feet above their heads and winked out. Laker Broome watched it as if it were as ordinary as a horsefly. 'And to amuse, perhaps.' Del twitched the cape from his shoulders, twirled it over the table, and a four-foot-high stuffed white rabbit bounded off, so lifelike and grotesque that a few boys gasped. We were all in shock for a second, and then Del grasped it by one tall ear, bounced it off his foot, and threw it over his shoulder into the blackness behind him. There was an instinctive professional grace in his movements, and that (and the realization that the rabbit was a stuffed toy) made us all laugh, with them now, not against them.
They did several clever card tricks using boys from the audience; a series of tricks using scarves and ropes, including one in which Night proved that he could escape in three minutes from a rope knotted by two football players; they produced a dozen sprays of real flowers from the air.
Then Flanagini put Night into a cabinet and pierced it with swords, and when Night emerged whole, he pushed forward another cabinet — this one black and covered with Chinese patterns — and put Flanagini inside it. 'The speaking head, or Falada,' Night announced, banging the cabinet on all sides to demonstrate that it was solid. He shut a lacquered panel and hid Flanagini's body. The turbaned head looked out impassively. 'Are you ready?' Night asked, and the head nodded. The top panel was shut. Night produced a long sword, took an orange from some pocket of the table, tossed the orange in the air, and swung the sword around to slice it in half. 'A well-honed samurai sword,' he said, and flexed it. 'A deadly fighting instrument.' He whistled it through the air again, and then slotted it sideways into the seam where the two panels met. He wrapped both his hands in black handkerchieves and pushed the flat sword deeply into the notch, where it seemed to meet an obstruction. Night paused to wrap the handkerchieves more tightly around his palms, put his hands again on the sword, and pushed. He grunted, and pushed again. The sword slid through to the other side of the cabinet, and Night yanked it out and wiped it with one of the handkerchieves. Then he pushed the bottom section of the cabinet away so that it no longer supported the top portion. He opened the panel of the bottom section to show Flanagini's body from the neck down. 'The dance of death,' he said, and rapped the side of the cabinet with the flat of the sword. For a moment the body in the Indian garment convulsed and trembled. 'The speaking head.' He moved to the left of the top section and opened the panel. Flanagini's head stared out from beneath the turban. 'What is the first law of magic?' Night asked, and the floating head answered, 'As above, so below.' 'And what is the second law of magic?' Night asked. 'The physical world is a bauble.' 'And what is the third law of magic?' 'Reality is extremity.' 'And how many books are in the library?' 'I don't remember,' came the indisputable voice of Tom Flanagan, and laughter jolted us as if we had been in a spell. Night closed both panels and moved the lower portion of the cabinet back beneath the upper section. When he swung open the panels, Tom stepped out, intact.
Wild applause.
'An illusion only,' Night said, 'a titillation, an amusement.'
(A few sniggers, provoked by the syllable 'tit.')
Night drew himself up and was black and serious as a crow's wing.
'But what is illusory can be true, which is magic's fourth law, like lightning here and then gone, like the smile of a wizard.'
(White smoke began to billow across the stage again.)
'And man's dreams and deepest fantasies, these truthful illusions, are magic's truest country. Like the dream of — '
(The big doors on the side of the auditorium suddenly clicked open and swung wide. One of the boys in the back, several rows behind me, shouted.)
' — opening the doors of the mind.'
(He spread his arms wide.)
'The mind opens, the shoulders open, the body opens. And we can . . . '
Smoke, not white but yellow and greasy, puffed in through the doors.
Del stopped intoning his magical gibberish and looked at the doors. His face went rubbery. The pose of professional mumbo-jumbo fell away, and he was a confused fourteen-year-old boy. In the second just before the auditorium went crazy, I had time to see that Tom, Flanagini, was also looking at something, and that he too was stricken. But he was not looking at the open doors: he was staring straight back up at the rear of the auditorium — so high up that he must have been nearly looking at the ceiling back there.
Mr. Broome took a step across the opening of the doors, saw what there was to see, and then turned around and pointed at the small, now insignificant pair on stage. He screamed, 'You did this!'
'You're right,' Tom said to me at the Zanzibar. 'I never even saw what was outside until a couple of seconds later. I was standing there, waiting for Del to say that last word.
'Fly.' He'd said the whole speech except for that, and then he was going to float up and amaze everybody. We'd worked out a way to get those doors open weeks before, and if Del could make it, he was going to try to get as far as the first door and then just walk out, and that would be the end of the show. I kept waiting to hear that last word, 'fly,' and I was scared stiff — but then I looked back at that end of the auditorium and I saw two things that scared me a hell of a lot worse. One of them was Skeleton Ridpath. He was terrible. He was grinning. He looked like a big bat, or a huge spider — something awful. And the other thing I saw jumped into being a fraction of a second later, as if Ridpath and I had jointly summoned it up. It was a boy engulfed in flames — swallowed up in fire, fire that couldn't be there, fire that just seemed to stream out of him. I looked at him with my mouth open, and the burning boy disappeared. I don't know how I stayed on my feet. When Laker Broome started shouting at us, I looked down and saw what Del saw, the whole Field House blazing away. All that smoke pouring out, and the fire jumping and jumping. I looked back toward Skeleton, but he was already gone — maybe he was never there in the first place. Then the whole place went nuts.
20
Laker Broome's scream paralyzed everybody, magicians and audience alike, for a second, even the boy who had shouted a moment earlier. And then this second of silence broke — during it we had heard that awful whooshing, snapping noise of a monstrous fire. Everybody stood and ran toward the two doors, throwing chairs aside. Laker B
roome was shouting: 'Everybody out! Everybody out!' Maybe five boys got out the doors before Mr. Thorpe yelled, 'Stop in your tracks!' Already, the doors were a pandemonium: all of us crowding and shoving to get out, and the boys who had left screaming to get back in. 'Back away,' Mr. Thorpe yelled, and started to throw boys bodily back into the auditorium. Then we could feel the heat, and the crowd surged back, knocking down the smaller boys at the rear.
When the doors were cleared, we saw that the flames were leaping within six or seven feet of the auditorium — the outside looked like a solid world of fire. The old wooden field house was completely blanketed in flames. One of the stocky little turrets was leaning sideways, poised over the huge body of the fire like a diver.
The boys who had got outside and then forced their way back in stood beside the doors looking dazed and flushed and scared. I saw with amazement that one of them, a sophomore named Wheland, no longer had eyebrows — his face was a pink peeled egg.
'You fool,' Thorpe hissed at the headmaster. 'Didn't you see? You almost got all of them killed.'
Broome just stared at him ferociously, then grabbed the sophomore's shoulder. 'What did you see out there, Wheland?'
'Just fire, sir. We have to get out in front.'
Mr. Thorpe was sending Mrs. Olinger to the office to call the fire department — 'Move it!'.'
'Couldn't you get down the side?'
'The bushes are burning. On both sides. You can't get out that way.'
At Wheland's words, everybody broke and ran toward the hall door. This was much narrower than the auditorium's side doors, and in seconds it was buried under a crowd of brawling boys. I saw Terry Peters knock down a sophomore named Johnny Day, and then throw Derek Brown down on top of him. 'My bass!' squalled Brown. He ran straight into a line of tall upperclassmen, trying to get to the stage. Many boys were screaming. Mrs. Olinger, I saw with horror, was stuck in the middle of the battling crowd, unable to get to the telephone.
Then I realized that the auditorium was filling with smoke.
'We have to close those doors,' Tom called from the stage. He unwound himself from the Indian garments and jumped down. Mr. Thorpe ran up to help him.
Mr. Ridpath was shouting useless orders. The other teachers ran up, seeing what Tom and Mr. Thorpe were doing. A senior was clubbing boys with a metal chair, trying to hack his way to the doors, and I ducked around him to try to help them close the doors.
The smoke was already very thick on that side of the auditorium. I brushed against Mr. Thorpe, who said, 'Grab this and pull.' It was the metal bar on the door, and it was uncomfortably hot. 'Ropes,' Mr. Fitz-Hallan muttered, and Tom said, 'We used them . . . so we could pull from backstage: they come in the window in back — '
'Blast,' muttered Mr. Thorpe, and for a time we searched on the ground immediately outside the door and pulled lengths of rope inside. All of us were having trouble breathing: the smoke got in our eyes and throats and burned like acid. 'That's all of them,' Tom said. Through the boiling smoke we could see the wall of fire that once had been the field house: both turrets were gone now, and a column of blacker smoke rose directly up from the center of the burning mass. We slammed the doors shut on a row of advancing flame.
I turned and stumbled into Del, who was reeling through a thicket of upturned chairs. 'Can't see,' he said. Boys in the blocked doorway continued to scream. Del collapsed over the raised legs of a chair.
Then Tom was miraculously beside me, lifting Del. 'No one's going to make it through the door,' he shouted in my ear. 'They can get out by going over the stage.'
'The equipment,' Del said. 'We have to get it out.'
'We will,' Tom said. 'Here, you get up there — you'll be able to see better. The smoke won't be so bad.' He half-carried Del to the stage and hoisted him up. Del scrambled forward and groped around until he found whatever it was he wanted to save.
'Where's Skeleton?' Tom said close to my face. His own face was greasy and strained, and his eyes looked white.
'Not here.'
'We have to get them away from that door,' he shouted. Mr. Broome and Mr. Ridpath were yelling on the other side of the auditorium, peeling boys off the pile around the door. Mr. Fitz-Hallan loomed up out of the smoke beside me, carrying a boy in his arms. 'Stage door,' he said. 'Some of them are passing out. A few of them are hurt.' Mrs. Olinger was clutching the flap of his jacket. 'I'll be back,' Fitz-Hallan said, and crawled up onto the boards. He set down the boy and unceremoniously yanked Mrs. Olinger up.
Hollis Wax was running screaming across the auditorium. I saw Derek Brown picking himself out of a tangle of chairs, weeping. Wax caromed into the doors Flanagan and the teachers had managed to close and banged his fists against them. 'They're hot!' he screamed. 'They're going to burn!'
Tom ran toward him, seeing in the smoke like a bat, and Wax immediately broke for the stage. Then I dimly saw Tom picking up Brown and dragging him across the floor toward me.
'Get him onto the stage,' he ordered, and I got my arms under Brown and pulled his shoulders onto the stage. Then I lifted his legs and sprawled him onto the wood. 'Carry him out,' Tom yelled from somewhere. I could see Mr. Fitz-Hallan coming toward me with another boy: a crocodile of sobbing students clung on behind him, as Mrs. Olinger had. I got up on the stage beside the English teacher and hauled Brown out and through the door to the hall. Even out there, wisps and trails of smoke drifted in the sunny corridor. 'Bass,' Brown sighed, straightening up and grinding at his eyes. Hollis Wax hovered far down the corridor, looking back. Tom and Fitz-Hallan came out beside me, and Wax saw us and turned and sprinted as soon as Fitz-Hallan waved at him. 'All of you,' Fitz-Hallan called, 'follow Wax outside and wait in the parking lot.'
Doubled up, Mr. Ridpath lurched out into the hall just as we were going back inside. A little crowd of coughing boys and teachers burst out after him. 'Can't . . . ' Ridpath uttered, and then bent over further, coughing. 'Outside,' Fitz-Hallan ordered. Tom was already back through — I saw him slipping across the dark stage. Brown took Mr. Ridpath's hand and began to move as quickly as he could down the corridor Wax had taken. The boy who had tried to hack his way out with a chair jumped through the door just as Tom disappeared off the apron of the stage back into the smoky chaos of the auditorium.
I walked slowly across the stage, not breathing. My eyes burned with smoke. The bass, I thought, and then noticed that the stage was empty of everything except the piano. The field house was making an end-of-the-world rushing roar. Mr. Broome vaulted up onto the stage beside me. 'You,' he said. 'I order you to leave this building immediately.'
I looked out into the auditorium and saw that the doors were burning. It was hotter than a steam room. A deadweight of maybe twenty boys lay in a heap before the hall exit: Mr. Weatherbee was bent over in the smoke, dragging two boys toward me. I jumped down and helped get them onto the stage. 'Can't stay in here anymore,' he croaked, and rolled onto the platform and grabbed the boys' wrists and went for the back door. He was crawling by the time he reached it.
Tom and Mr. Fitz-Hallan were pulling unconscious boys from the pile. I jumped down, and the outside doors gave way at the same instant. Fire streamed in as though shot from a flamethrower. Black spreading scars instantly appeared on the auditorium floor.
'Get up off the floor, Whipple,' Mr. Broome sang out. I looked up, surprised to see him poised on the edge of the stage hike a ham actor. 'You'll burn like bacon. Get up off the floor.'
Over the noise of the fire I heard the wailing of sirens.
Mr. Broome shouted, 'Everybody out! This instant! All out!' Mr. Whipple was too heavy to lift. I inhaled a gulp of burning smoke; my knees turned inside out and I fell over his jellylike stomach. Tom appeared beside me, carrying one of the unconscious boys.
'Out! Out! Out!' screamed Mr. Broome.
Fire caught the curtains of the stage, and lying on the ground I saw them crackle up and disappear like tissue paper. Mr. Fitz-Hallan went on his knees twenty feet away. Mr. Whipp
le's stomach roared and he rolled over and threw up a yard from my head. I could see Tom holding an arm over his mouth .and hear him wheezing as he pulled at Mr. Fitz-Hallan's arm. Then an enormous form in black shiny clothing leaned over and picked me up. He smelled like smoke.
21
The Making of a Hero
The fireman carried me out into the parking lot, where four trucks sprayed ares of water on the shell of the field house and into the side of the auditorium. He put me on the grass beside one of the trucks, and I crawled half-upright. Mr. Fitz-Hallan was being led out of the parking-lot exit, hauling Tom behind him. Both of them looked like mad scientists in a comic book, their faces smeared with black, their clothing smoking. Behind them came a line of firemen carrying the last of the boys: not twenty any longer, only five or six. One red-faced fireman staggered beneath Mr. Whipple.
An ambulance squealed down the rise into the lot and pulled up short by the side door. The attendants jumped out and opened the rear doors to pull out stretchers. I managed to stand up. Morris, Sherman, Bobby Hollingsworth, and the others were bunched together on the grass below the parking lot, watching the arcs of water disappear into the field house. I could see lines of red on Morris' face — someone had hit him with something and cut his scalp. He looked gallant and unperturbed with blood all over his face, and the shock hit me and I started to cry.