by Peter Straub
'He laughed out loud. 'Why, I want to be your teacher. I want to work with you,' he said. 'You don't even know who you are yet, Coleman Collins, and I want the privilege of helping to show you how to get there. You may be the most gifted natural the Order has uncovered — or who has uncovered himself — in the past decade.'
''What do you want me to do?' I asked.
''Tonight you will stay here. Yes, here. It will be all night. And if you are welcomed tonight — don't worry, you'll see what that means — if you are welcomed, soon you will be able to repeat what you did with Mr. Washford whenever you wish.' He laughed out loud again, and his wonderful voice rolled out over the mustard field like the hallooing of a French horn. 'Of course, I cannot recommend that you do it every day.'
' 'And after tonight?' I asked.
''We begin our studies. We begin your new life, Mr. Collins.'
'He stood up from his throne, and the sunlight died. Speckle John stood before me in a vast starry night, really only an outline in the darkness. I could not make out his features. 'You will be safe during the night, Doctor, safer than you would be in our part of Ste. Nazaire. Tomorrow we begin.'
'Then he was gone. I moved forward, reaching out, and my fingers touched the back of his chair. The night seemed immense. I could hear only a few isolated crickets. The stars seemed very intense, and I fancied that I was looking at them with eyes made new by Speckle John.
'Well, there I was, alone on a hill in the middle of the night — the actual night I suppose, for the earlier daylight must have been an illusion. I had not a notion of where I was, and only Speckle John's word that the next day would find me returned to Ste. Nazaire and my work. His chair stood before me, and I was too superstitious to sit in it, though I wanted to. Even then, I wanted that chair for my own. I knew what it represented.
'I stretched out on the mustard, which was not very comfortable at first. 'If you are welcomed,' he had said, and I could not rest for wondering what that meant. Once it even went through my mind that I was the Victim of a gigantic hoax, and that the Negro would leave me out in the wilderness. But I had the evidence of his extraordinary presence, and the care with which he had sought me out. And he had turned night to day and back again! What sort of 'welcome' could follow that?
'Even an excited man must sleep sometime, and so it was with me. I began to doze, and then to dream, and finally fell into a deep sleep.
'I was awakened by a fox. His pungent, musky odor; the sound of his breath; a jittery, quick, nervous presence near me. My eyes flew open, and his muzzle was a foot from my face. Terror made me jerk backward — I was afraid he'd take my face off. Mr. Collins, the fox said. I understood him! I said or thought 'Yes.'
'You need not fear me.
''No.'
'You belong to the Order.
''I belong to them.'
'The Order is your mother and father.
''They are.'
'And you will have no other loyalties.
''None.'
'You are welcomed.
'He trotted away, and I did not know if I had spoken to a fox or to a man in the form of a fox. For a long time I lay in the field consumed by wonder. The stars were dimming, and all I could see was blackness. I began to realize that I could float off the ground if I wanted to, but I dared not do anything to affect the mood of the night and myself as part of the night. That was floating enough. Finally I heard wingbeats. I could not see it, but I heard an enormous bird land some few feet away from me. I never saw it, but I thought, and I think now, that I knew what bird it was. Once again, I was terrified. Then it spoke, and I understood its voice as I had understood the fox's.
'Collins.
''Yes.'
'Have you worlds within you?
''I have worlds within me.'
'Do you want dominion?
''I want dominion.' And I did, you see — I wanted to tap that strength within me and to make the duller world know it.
'The knowledge is the treasure, and the treasure is its own dominion.
'I suppose I muttered the words 'knowledge . . . treasure.'
'See the history of your treasure, Collins,
'Then a scene played itself out before my eyes. I was a child, an infant in arms. My father was carrying me. We were in a theater in Boston, one which had been torn down during my adolescence. Vaughan's Oriental Theater, it was called. A colored man in evening dress was performing on stage, exhibiting a mechanical bird which sang requests called out by the audience. My father shouted out 'Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage,' and everybody laughed, and the metal bird began to warble the saccharine melody. I remembered being moved by the music, and astounded by the ornateness of the theater. 'See his name, Charlie,' my father said, pointing to the sign on the side of the stage. 'His name is Old King Cole. Isn't that funny?' I remembered staring openmouthed at the man on the stage, wanting to smile because my father said it was funny, but too overwhelmed to see the humor. Then I froze. The magician, Old King Cole, was staring directly at me.
'So there it was — a buried memory, maybe the central memory of my life, and one that I think had guided me throughout my life even though I had consciously forgotten it. The man onstage was the original Coleman Collins. Or was there another Coleman Collins before him? And I knew that someday that would be me on the stage, though I would require a different professional name.
'You saw.
''I saw.'
'And you know that the magician saw you.
'I remembered Old King Cole looking down from the stage, finding me there in my father's arms, a child perhaps of eighteen or twenty months, and . . . recognizing me?
''I know.'
'I have doubts about you, the owl said.
' 'But he saw me!' I said, now reliving the wonder of those few seconds as if they had happened only five minutes ago. 'He chose me!'
'He saw the treasure within, the invisible bird sighed. Be worthy of it. Honor the Book. You are welcomed.
'The huge wings beat, my interrogator flew off, and I was alone. Either I had been asleep all along or I slept again: I remember everything blurring about me, a feeling of wandering, drowsy bliss invading my every cell, and I slept solidly for hours. When I woke up, I was leaning against a wall back in Ste. Nazaire, only a block from the hospital. Withers was just walking past, taking an early — morning constitutional at a loafing Southern pace, and he saw me and snarled, 'Too drunk to get home last night, Dr. Nightingale?' 'You're welcome,' I said, and laughed in his face.
'Thereafter, I saw Speckle John almost every day. I received a note, usually from a messboy, waited outside the bookstore, and was led through the maze of slum streets until we came to that shabby, foul-smelling tenement which was more school to me than any university. I was taken back to that time when we all lived in the forest: I entered that realm which was mine by right since infancy. For a year Speckle John taught me, and we began to plan working together after the war. But I knew that the day would arrive when my growing strength would confront his. I was never content with the second chair.
'Open your eyes, boys. Watch carefully. This is to be your own night in the open. We are in the Wood Green Empire, London, in August of 1924.'
4
The boys, unaware that they had closed their eyes, opened them. It was night, hot and vaporous. For a moment Tom caught the odor of mustard flowers: he felt drowsy and heavy-limbed, and his legs ached. Collins sat in the circle of light, but on a tall wooden chair, not the stool he had made to appear that morning. Over the black suit was a black cape fastened at the throat with a gold clasp. Tom tried to move his legs, and smelled mustard flowers again. 'Oh . . . no . . . ' Del said, looking into the woods, and Tom snapped his head sideways to see.
Dark trees funneled toward a lighted open space. A boy and a tall man in a belted raincoat were striding down the funnel. The boy, Tom sickeningly realized, was himself. He looked at Collins, and found him leaning back in the owl chair, legs crossed, smiling
maliciously back. The magician pointed back to the scene: Now!
When he looked back, the man and boy were gone. The open space at the end of the funnel of trees was a theater. A crowd rustled on its chairs, fanned itself with programs. Plum-colored curtains swung open, and there they were, he and Del, Flanagini and Night. Very clearly, Tom saw Dave Brick sitting fat and ignored and alone at the back of the theater.
'Yes,' Collins said. And a curtain of flame sprang up before the scene. Wall of flame, Tom thought: he heard the panicky, rushed sounds of many bodies moving, muffled shouts and commands.
Everybody out! Everybody out!
Stop in your tracks!
My bass!
They're hot! They're going to burn!
Get up off the floor, Whipple.
Just as Tom had been yanked back more than forty years while Collins had described his earlier life, just as he had seen Speckle John and Withers and the corporal with the professional smile, now he saw these moments again — the boys piling up first at the big outside doors, then at the door to the hall, screaming, clubbing each other, Brown yelling for his precious instrument, Del stumbling blind through piling smoke . . .
a young man in immaculate formal dress, white-face, and a red wig stood on the altered stage. The fire had whisked away like fog.
'No!' Tom shouted.
Herbie Butter waved his hands, and the light momentarily died, flickered red with a suggestion of flame, and returned to show a wooden hut deep in a painted wood. Up a trailing path came a young girl in a red cloak, carrying a wicker basket from which poked the heads of half a dozen blackbirds. . . .
The lights died and the stage disappeared into the funnel of trees.
'And one more,' Collins said.
From one side of the narrow avenue before them a man in black cape and black slouch hat stepped out from between the trees. A moment later, a wolf came out to face him from between the trees on the other side. The wolf bristled, crouched. It looked starved and crazy, unwilling to do what it had to do. The man braced his feet; the wolf snarled. Finally it sprang. The man in the cape drew a sword from his side — he must have been holding it ready all along beneath the cape — and thrust it forward, impaling the wolf. With terrific strength, the caped man lifted the sword and held it straight in the air. The wolf's paws dangled over his hat. He stepped back into the cover of the line of trees.
Wolves, and those who see them, are shot on sight, Tom remembered.
'I put a hurtin' on Speckle John,' Collins said. 'I held him wriggling on my sword. Ha hah! He is still on my sword, children. In that sense, my farewell performance at the Wood Green Empire has not ended yet. But we will get to that in time. I want you to sleep outside tonight. A welcome may come, or it may not. You will find sleeping bags behind the second tree on the left side of the clearing.'
He stood up and pulled the cape about him as if he were cold. 'I must tell you that only one of you will prevail. Two cannot sit in the owl chair. But this is not a contest, and he who is not welcomed will lose only what he never had.
'But listen to me, little birds: the one who prevails will have Shadowland, the owl chair, the world. There will be a new king, whether it be King Flanagini or King Night.'
For a second he was outlined in black, etched against the wood; then he was gone. Tom saw four square flattened patches of grass where the chair had been.
'It won't be you,' Del said. 'You don't deserve it.'
'I don't even want it,' Tom answered angrily. 'Del, don't you understand? I don't want to take anything away from you. I only came here because I wanted to help you. Do you want to live like that — like him?'
Del hesitated a moment, then turned away to look for his sleeping bag. 'You wouldn't have to. You could live any way you wanted.'
A hard and certain thought occurred to Tom. 'If he'd let you. Why would he want to give up now? He's old, but he's still healthy.'
Del was lifting something out of the leaves behind the tree Collins had indicated. 'Because he chose me. That's why. You're just along for the ride. You never even wanted to be a magician before you met me.'
'Aren't you my friend anymore?' Tom asked in despair.
Del would not reply.
'I'm still your friend.'
'You're trying to trick me.'
'How can I? You're better than I am.'
Carrying his sleeping bag back to the clearing, Del at last looked at him. Pure triumph shone in his eyes.
'But, Del, no matter what happens, I don't think he's going to . . . I think it's all a trick. On us.'
'Get lost.'
'Oh . . . ' the letter from Rose, which Tom had forgotten, scratched him beneath a rib. He looked at his watch. It was ten-thirty. Half an hour late! He looked back in agony at Del, and saw that he was trying to get into his sleeping bag. His eyes were clamped shut and he was crying. One of his heels had snagged on the zipper and he could not free it without opening his eyes.
Tom went over to him and grasped Del's foot. He moved it over the zipper and into the bag. 'Del, you're my best friend,' he said.
'You're my only friend,' Del said, almost blubbing. 'But he's my uncle. This is where I come. You're only here once.'
'I have to go away for a little while,' Tom said, kneeling by Del's side. 'When I come back, let's talk, okay?'
Del's teary eyes flew open. 'Are you going to see him?'
'No.'
'Promise?'
'I promise.'
'Okay.' His face hardened for a moment. 'You wouldn't even let me in to see the Grimm Brothers.'
'I was just surprised — the room was different.'
'But you saw. You saw you and him. Like I said.'
'It's some kind of game. I was never with him. I would have told you.'
'I was feeling so alone,' Del said.
'When I get back,' Tom said, and turned to run across the clearing. Hey, where are you going? he heard Del wail; he did not answer.
5
He came pounding out of the edge of the woods and out of breath, stopped running. Sand moved under his feet. For a moment he wanted to remove his shoes. Far up the cliff, the house shone from a dozen windows. He could see Rose nowhere on the beach, which was a silvery mushroom gray beside the black smooth water. He checked his watch again and saw that it was now ten-fifty. She had gone.
Tom trudged forward through the sand. Here was a surprise: a substantial part of him was relieved that Rose had given up and gone back across the lake. Now he could return to Del.
But maybe just ahead, on the other side of the boathouse? He saw the slavering wolf pouncing toward her. If Collins had seen her waiting on the beach . . .
Now his mood had swung, and he desperately wanted to know if Rose Armstrong were safe. His mind was a jumble of images: the' wolf, held up with unbelievable strength, impaled on a sword; the badger being swung in a great arc toward the pit; Dave Brick sitting on a metal chair, waiting to be roasted. He banged open the door of the boathouse. He walked in, and nearly fell twenty feet into black shallow water.
Tom jerked himself back just in time. Inside the dilapidated shell, the boathouse was chiefly water and open space. A three-foot apron of concrete ran around a wide hole open at the lake end. Most of this entire side of the boathouse was open. Only six or seven feet down from the top had been boarded across.
The door slammed shut behind him, and his heart too slammed in his chest. Tom heard a metal bar sliding into a brace. He hit the door with his shoulder. It rattled, but would not open. He banged it again, beginning to settle down from his original terror into ordinary fright. Who was it? Collins? The Collector turned loose to get him? One of the Wandering Boys? He would have to jump into the water. He looked down, saw greasy-looking blackness, and then saw something else.
Then he heard giggles from behind the door: Rose.
'Let me out!'
'You stood me up three nights straight. Why should I?'
'Three nights?' Tom's stomach fell aw
ay.
'I got your note this morning.'
'No, you didn't, boyo. That was three days ago.'
'Oh, God.' He leaned against the creaky doors of the boathouse wall.
'You didn't know?'
'I thought it was this morning.'
'Likely story, but I'll let you out.'
The bolt slid across. The door opened, and Rose stood before him in a green 1920's dress. She was smiling teasingly, and on her face it looked brave. She was the best thing he had ever seen. The green dress made her look more sophisticated than any girl he had ever known.
'I almost had heart failure in there,' he said, 'but I'm so happy to see you, I guess I wouldn't mind dying.'
She pouted, took a step back. 'You almost had more than heart failure. You know what I almost did to you? I was so mad.'
'Did to me?'
'Take a look at this and tell me about three days.'
Rose stepped gracefully around him, and he saw that she was wealing high heels. 'You were standing on the other side of the door, right? Okay.' She bent down and tugged at a bar set in the sand beside the door. Bang! Iron rang against concrete. The apron he had been standing on had fallen in on a hinge. 'It's like a kind of trapdoor. A long time ago, there was a boat, and a sort of winch fit in here . . . anyhow, I almost dropped you in the drink. The water's deep enough. You'd just have to swim out. I could have strangled you, boyo-three nights? I'm getting muscles from swimming across that lake!'
'You didn't swim tonight,' Tom pointed out.
She turned away. 'Of course not. I ruined my stockings. And this dress is full of gunk.' She lifted the hem and brushed at dust and twigs. 'I came all the way through the woods. Then I sat out on the pier. You walked by without even looking at me.'
'I'll look at you now,' he said, and made to embrace her. She looked as if she were going to back away, but stiffly submitted. 'What's wrong?'
'This.'
'Oh. I'm sorry.' Chagrined, he dropped his arms. He could not read her face — she looked grown up in the green dress, far beyond his reach. 'Really. The note came this morning. At least I thought it was this morning. That scene in the woods, that was just now, wasn't it? About half an hour ago?'