by Peter Straub
'My nephew is weaker than Speckle John,' the magician said. 'You see, he feels threatened, he doesn't know if he can trust his eyes, but they seem to tell him that his best friend is in secret complicity with his idol. He cannot ignore or reject his best friend. But he must strike out somewhere. And he has begun to admit that the person he fears and hates most in the world might also have a secret relationship with said idol.'
Del was rigid with concentration. The air around him seemed to darken. Tom saw or felt Del's strain with his lingering bird senses.
'Don't want to be a great man,' said the magician, 'be a great donkey.'
On the other side of the room, Skeleton drifted near the shelves. He let his hand float over the glass objects. The hand dipped and closed. He slipped something into his pocket and grinned blankly.
Below Tom, Del relaxed. That was proof of a kind. Tom grieved for Del, for Dave Brick (who was gripping his slide rule and gaping at Skeleton), for himself too: so much misery, so much turmoil, from jealousy.
'That was your strength he used,' Collins said.
'And the levitation . . . '
'Again your strength.' Collins stood up, and Tom stood too, blinking. 'Come.'
The huge gray owl lifted itself out over the skylight and the roof, making for the clouds; Tom staggered, raised his arms and found they were wings. Again that instantaneous translation. White clouds gathered around him, the owl was gone; he found himself on hands and knees crawling toward a pane of green.
When his mind cleared, he was sprawled out before the first row of seats in the big theater.
6
Tom crept into bed and tried to rest. He could not sleep. Whenever he closed his eyes, he was either flying or falling.
Eventually he got up and went downstairs, to find lunch set for one in the dining room. Cold sliced ham and beef, a wedge of Stilton, sauerkraut. An icy glass of milk. Tom ate as unreflectively as an animal, then returned his dishes to the kitchen and deposited them in the sink.
For some time Tom coasted through the living room and looked at the paintings. Then he drifted to a cabinet with glass doors. On the topmost shelf an ancient revolver lay on velvet in an open leather case. Beneath it was a porcelain shepherdess with a crook. Other porcelain figurines stood a little distance from it, a boy with a satchel of schoolbooks, a fat Elizabethan gripping a beer mug, a cluster of drunken men with misshapen faces holding songsheets. He looked again at the shepherdess, and saw that she had Rose's face — high vulnerable forehead, full lips, widely spaced eyes. She looked embarrassed to be thrust forward from the others. Tom's hand went to the catch on the glass door; stopped when it touched the metal. He had a superstitious fear of touching the porcelain figure. Finally he turned away.
He confronted Del that evening, after he had taken a long nap.
The pocket doors had been pushed halfway back into the walls, opening an arch between his room and Del's. Tom went through the opening and heard water drumming in the bathroom. He sat on the bed.
In a little while Del emerged from the bathroom, a towel around his neck like a cape, his glossy wet hair skimmed close to his head. Then Tom realized that Del looked like a child to him, frail as a nine-year-old. 'I feel great! I must have slept all day!' Del beamed at him.
'I did too,' Tom said.
'If we keep this up, we'll be on magician's hours before long-up all night, asleep all day. But that's neat. I like night, don't you?' Del began rubbing his hair with a towel, completely unselfconscious about his nakedness.
'I prefer daylight.'
Del peeped out from under a fringe of towel. 'You in a bad mood?'
Tom shook his head, and Del's face vanished beneath the towel. 'You feel like working with some cards after I get dressed?'
'Sure.'
'We have to practice more — I haven't touched a pack of cards in weeks. You have to keep up with it or you get rusty. I could even show you that shuffle I was reading about.'
'Sure.'
Del pulled the towel off his head and wiped his legs. His hair fluffed at his temples, still clung damply behind his ears. He dropped the towel and began to dress in clean white underwear. 'Pretty soon, maybe tomorrow, we'll hear the rest of my uncle's story.'
'I guess so.'
Buttoning a yellow Gant shirt, Del looked up almost shyly at Tom. 'I hope that both of us can spend the summers here from now on. We could learn together. Right?'
Del paid no attention to his silence, but went to his desk and got a fresh pack of cards and slit the cellophane seal. 'Here, pull a chair up to the desk,' Del said, fanning the cards in his hands. He manipulated them in some complicated fashion Tom could not see, involving much palming and ending in a two-handed riffle. 'Okay. Look.' He spread them out in a fan on the desk. The four twos were together, the threes, and so on up to the aces. 'Pretty good, wouldn't you say? You can do just about anything with that triple shuffle. In a couple of months I'll be able to do it so well that — '
'Del,' Tom interrupted, 'tell me about the Ventnor owl.'
His friend looked up at him with big alarmed eyes. He scooped the cards together and shuffled them again. 'There's nothing to tell.'
'I know better than that.'
Del looked down at his hands. 'The funny thing is that everybody thinks that speed is what counts, and they're so wrong. Nobody's hand is quicker than the eye. It has a lot more to do with feel — with finesse. Speed hardly counts.'
'Tell me about it, Del.'
Del fanned out the cards: two red kings glared from a sea of black. 'I wanted to hurt Skeleton,' he mumbled. 'I wanted to get him kicked out.' He glanced at Tom in agony. 'How'd you know, anyhow? How'd you find out?'
'Your uncle told me.'
Del's face whitened. He tipped the cards into a stack, cut them, did a conventional shuffle, and cut them again. He lifted the top four cards: four aces. He shuffled the pack again and lifted the top four: kings.
'You're stalling,' Tom said.
Del tried the trick again: three queens and a seven lay face up on the desk. 'But it was because of him . . . ' He stopped — he was trying not to cry. 'Even Skeleton seemed like he was stealing Uncle Cole away from . . . ' Del wiped at his eyes. 'I wanted to get him into trouble.' He looked down at the botched trick. 'I was looking at him, and I was thinking about him — and you started talking to Marcus Reilty — I was feeling so terrible about what Bobby Hollingsworth had said after the game — and right after that I saw you with him, Tom, I did see you, and you looked right at me, but nobody else could see you — and it was like that day I broke my leg — I hated everything, and I couldn't talk to you . . . ' Del put his hand before his eyes. 'So I thought, I'll get rid of Skeleton. I thought Mr. Broome and everybody would know right away it was him, I never thought it would go all crazy like it did. . . . ' He snuffled, looked up at Tom. 'So I made him take it. I did magic on him. I never did anything like that before, but all of a sudden I knew I could do it. I concentrated so hard I thought I'd blow up. And I made him do it.' He glanced down, then again at Tom. 'So I guess I caused all that trouble afterward. The fire, and Dave Brick, and . . . everything.'
'No, you didn't,' Tom said. 'He did.'
'Skeleton?'
'Your uncle.'
'Why would he?'
'Look, Del,' he said. 'The things he does are like . . . ' He laid a hand on the cards. 'Like this. He shuffles them .around, forces one, palms one, shows you a deuce when you expect an ace — see? A fire, a life, they're just two more cards to him. He doesn't believe that he can commit wrong. He doesn't believe in evil or good.'
'But I made Skeleton do it,' Del protested.
'And you just told me why.'
'You're talking this way because you're not a good enough magician,' Del said, beginning to turn resentful again.
'I'm not going to argue about that with you.' He stared angrily at his friend. 'Del, Rose thinks we should leave Shadowland. She thinks that your uncle is losing control. She is afraid for us.
For herself, top.'
That reached him. 'Rose is afraid?'
'Afraid enough to want to leave. And to take us with her.'
'Well, maybe I'll talk to her about it. If you're telling me the truth.'
On they talked — it was talk that progressed to no conclusion, so we may leave them here, but Tom was grateful that Del was willing to go as far as he had without demanding that their discussion end. In fact, they stayed up talking until dawn, and at one point Del got up to get a candle; he put a match to the wick and turned the lights off, and the two of them sat three feet apart over the little desk, at first with wariness on one's part and guilt on the other's, later with an unspoken recognition of the importance of their friendship in their lives, talking within the warm envelope of candlelight, talking about magicians and cards and school. And about Rose. Despite the undercurrents on both sides, it was the last, best night of their friendship, at least the last night when they would be able to talk in the warm rambling manner of an old friendship, and both of them understood that this was so.
7
A week passed, the week before Tom became ill and met the devil, and it was an odd limbo in which they met chiefly at the lavish breakfasts and at dinner. Breakfast-time moved from eight to ten to nearly noon, and replaced lunch. Both boys stayed up until one or two every night, but they talked little, as if the all-night conversation had dried their tongues. Del often went into the big theater to practice with the props crated in the wings. When the call came, his friend saw, Del wanted to be ready.
While Del shuffled and manipulated cards, Tom swam in the lake, floating on his back with his ears under water and the sun beating down on him. He found he could swim across the lake if he relaxed and sidestroked for long periods. At the far end of the lake was a beach only five feet wide. The first time, he stretched out naked on the sand and fell asleep. When he woke it was with the feeling that Mr. Feet's trolls had come upon him and left without waking him. Then he saw that the sand around him was full of footprints.
The next day he walked through the forest in the early afternoon. At the clearing by the funnellike narrowing avenue of trees, Tom came upon Del sitting on a white stump. 'Oh . . . hi,' said startled Del. 'I'm just. . . ahh . . . sitting. Took a walk.' 'Me too,' Tom said. 'Guess I'll go on a little farther.' Each knew that the other was hoping to see Rose Armstrong. Tom waved and faded backward into the trees. On Del's face he saw that he was an intrusion.
The ground dropped at a gentle grade, and half an hour later it was flat, at the level of the water. He kept seeing blue from time to time, shining between the trees; then he saw a golden strip of sand.
Because he was curious, he walked through brush to get there. When he emerged out onto the little bright tan rug of beach, he saw the pier pointing across the water like a finger toward him, the boathouse like an open mouth; Shadowland high up on the bluff threw back light from all its windows. It too seemed living. Glare swallowed up the rows of windows of fiery yellow: the eyes of a god too self-absorbed to attend to earthly matters.
The footprints still marked the sand.
Tom scuffed over them to walk away from Shadowland, went through feathery tall grass, and soon found himself in a parklike area of sparse poplars and mown grass. Ahead of him, winding gently to the left, was an overgrown little road.
A minute later he saw a frame building with a ripped, bulging screen tacked over a sagging porch. A summer-house: it looked as though it had stood vacant for years. Trees arched over it. Tom went slowly, cautiously toward the ramshackle building. He peered in through a rip in the screen. Two battered chairs sat on the porch, one of them with an overflowing ashtray on its arm. Splayed open on the boards of the porch was a magazine with a cover of a naked woman raising thick legs into the air. He listened: no noises came from the house.
Tom opened the screen door and went onto the porch. He glanced into a window. A bed with a sleeping bag and pillow, an open closet where shirts hung on wire hangers. Pictures of naked women had been tacked to the walls. He left the window and went to the half-open door.
Tom stepped just inside. The living room was filled with broken furniture and the stink of cigars. Doors at the sides of the room must have led to the kitchen, smaller bedrooms. Empty beer bottles lay on the floor, as did bottles of other kinds. White ticking foamed from a rip in an armchair.
Then he heard a door close, and footsteps came toward him. He froze for an instant, too frightened to run, and then backed toward the front door.
Rose Armstrong, wearing rolled-up jeans and a blue sweatshirt, walked through an arch. When she saw him, she dropped the towel she was carrying. 'What are you doing here?' Her mouth remained open.
'Looking around.' He watched her pick up the towel. 'Is this yours — where you live?'
'Of course not. Let's get out of here.' She walked toward him through the mess. 'I don't have a bathtub, so I have to come over here to use theirs when they're out. Come on. Being here gives me the creeps.'
'You could take a bath in the lake.'
'And have them all watch? Ugh.' Rose took his hand and led him out of the house, across the porch, and out onto the grass.
Rose's face was shiny and pale: she looked younger and smaller than she had the last time he had seen her. She also looked tougher. Her rather ethereal face was anchored by taut little lines at the sides of her mouth. He realized that this was the first time he had seen her in daylight. 'Over here,' she said, and led him across the overgrown road into the shelter of a group of poplars. 'Okay. It's nice to see you, but you have to go back. You can't stay here. They'll tear you to pieces if they catch you snooping. I mean it.'
'I love you,' he said.
The little lines tucked into the corners of her mouth. 'I love you too, sweetness. But we hardly have any time . . . and I'm kind of embarrassed about. . . you know.'
'Don't be,' Tom said. 'I could never think anything bad about you.'
'You don't know me very well yet,' Rose said. He could not read her face. 'Well, I was going to try to get across the lake pretty soon. I would have come today, but I felt so dirty.'
'Where do you stay?'
She pointed deep into the 'park,' to the right of the overgrown road. 'That direction. We can't go there. What I wanted to tell you is that everybody is waiting for some things to arrive — fireworks and some other things for his show. The men are cutting firewood and stuff like that. Sometimes they go into Hilly Vale and drink at the tavern. That's where they are now. But they could come back any minute. I took the fastest shower on earth.'
'Do you know any more from Collins about what he's going to do during the performance?'
She shook her head.
'But you still think we should go.'
Rose said, 'Tell me something. Would you still try to get out if you had never met me?'
'Yes. Now I have to get out. And I have to get Del out too.'
She raised her eyebrows. 'Okay.' 'But you'll have to talk to Del. He's even thinking about living here someday.' 'Oh, God,' Rose said. 'Sometimes I hate magic.' 'Why don't you just get out by yourself? What's over there?' He pointed away from the lake.
'A big wall. With glass on top. I couldn't get over. I need your help.'
'Well, I need you,' Tom said. 'I think about you all the time. I really love you, Rose.' He felt imbecilic, uttering these banal words: the vocabulary of love was so tired.
'And I really love you, beautiful Tom,' Rose said, beginning to back away and giving sidelong glances over her shoulder at the trolls' house. 'I should be able to come over in a couple of nights. That's when I'll talk to Del.' She stopped momentarily and looked at him in a shaft of light. 'You won't ever hate me, will you?'
'Hate you?'
'I still have some work to do for him.'
He shook his head, and she blew him a kiss and faded back through the cluster of poplars. Tom waited a few minutes, aching for her and puzzled by her, and then went back through the empty forest to the beach.<
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Dinners, during this period of waiting, were at eight. Elena never appeared; when Collins came downstairs, the three of them went into the dining room and uncovered the chafing dishes. Beside Collins' place was a decanter of whiskey and another of wine; he was already drunk when he sat, and proceeded to get drunker. Del got a glass of the wine, which made his cheeks flush. The rest went to the magician. While they ate, Collins stared fixedly at each of them in turn, saying little. Apparently Del was used to this, but Tom looked forward to dinners with dread.
Del asked questions. Tom squirmed in his seat and tried to ignore Collins' glassy stare.
'Did you ever do any more healing by magic in the army, Uncle Cole?'
'Once.' The glassy eyes on Tom. 'Once I did five in a row. Didn't give a damn if anyone saw. Knew I was going to leave soon — go to Paris to meet Speckle John.'
'Five?'
'Ordered the nurses to look away. Impatient as a blister. My mind on fire. Little Irish pudding damn near lost her lunch. I could have done a hundred. Lightning.'
'Are you going to work with us some more?'
'Any day now.'
That was two days after Tom met Rose in the run-down summerhouse. The next morning he swam across the lake and stood on the beach in dripping undershorts, thinking that Rose would materialize out of the air and water. Hours later, when a man shouted something deep in the woods, Tom waded back into the warm water and swam toward the pier.
He put on his dry clothes over the wet undershorts and went up to the house. Del was nowhere in sight. Tom went into the living room — it was to be another afternoon of dullness, another terrifying dinner. He felt as though the tension would make him ill. Whenever Collins fixed his devouring eyes on his at dinner, he thought that the magician knew all about him and Rose. Then he did feel ill: his whole body grew hot. It passed; came back in a giddy rush — he might have been standing in front of a blast furnace. His head swam. Again the illness receded for a moment, and Tom, suddenly aware of the sensations of his body, felt a burning at the back of his throat, a stuffiness in his head; his stomach sent a signal of burning distress.