Shadowland

by Peter Straub

  At eleven o'clock the king stood by the lake. By eleven-thirty his bones were aching and he sat on the wizard's hollow log, burning with hope and impatience. Fifteen minutes later he saw a great bubble burst on the surface of the lake. He stood up in the moonlight and went to the very shoreline. He rubbed his aching hands together. He sucked his teeth. He felt years younger already.

  At midnight something broke the surface of the water in the center of the lake. Terrified, the old king stepped backward just as the head of a beautiful young woman appeared. Her shoulders lifted from the water, then her whole upper body, as well as the neck and head of a horse. The old king backed up until he felt bushes pressing against him. The woman emerged entirely from the lake, dressed in a long white gown and astride a magnificent white charger. Her hair was golden-red; her face was beautiful as beautiful, and the king saw that she could indeed enchant armies. 'Come, my husband,' she said, and reached down to him a hand which, when he touched it, was as cold as if no blood ran there. With the strength of a giant, she pulled him up onto the saddle with her, and they went on the white horse to his castle. And that night, with the horse stabled outside, the king knew the delights of the marriage bed as thoroughly as any twenty-year-old prince.

  The next day they went north to Halvor's land, and met his army, which was going to kill them until the soldiers looked into the face of the queen. Instantly the soldiers dropped their weapons and swore their allegiance to the old king. Then they proceeded to Halvor's castle and found that Halvor had already escaped and fled farther north, to where only reindeer and wolves lived.

  That night, the old king knew again the joys of love. Though his bride was fish-cold to the touch, she had beauty to break his heart and swore she loved him. And the king again felt his youth restored as half his kingdom had been restored.

  On the second day, he and his bride and Halvor's army went south, where Bruno's soldiers fell to the ground and wept, welcoming them. Bruno himself fled farther south, to the land where alligators and giant lizards crawled over black rocks and slipped into stinking rivers.

  The king rode back to his palace dazed with happiness. In two days he had recaptured all his old kingdom and more, and he had an army to take any land he wished. Lester the Ambitious would fall in a day. His new bride gave him glances sweeter than maple sugar, and he knew that the wizard was mistaken about her ability to love.

  When the king and his wife and the joined armies had reached the palace, the king saw the wizard sitting on a broken pediment by the gates. 'Hail, great king,' said the wizard. 'Are you satisfied with your bargain?'

  'I am satisfied with everything, friend,' said the king, feeling very grand astride the great white horse. He and his nobles went inside to feast on beef and roast pig and gallons of ale; and during the feast the king saw with pride how his nobles, the bravest and strongest men in three lands, paid court to his queen; and saw how like a queen she treated the nobles, giving a word to this one and a smile to that one, but reserving the best of herself for him, so that all knew that her heart was his alone.

  When the king and queen left their guests to go to the royal bedroom, the king locked the door behind him and advanced toward his bride.

  'Hold a moment, your Majesty,' said the wizard, who was seated in a window casement.

  The king swore, and made to push the trespasser out of the window, but the wizard held up his hand and said, 'Since you are satisfied that I have kept my word, now I will ask you to keep yours.'

  'Take my hair . . . give me my beard . . . but leave!' bellowed the king. The queen, who had begun to disrobe, continued to do so.

  'It is done,' said the wizard, snapping his fingers, and a great agony overtook the king, an agony greater than any he had known, pain that threatened to split him apart and burn his eyes from his skull. He fell howling to his knees.

  Before the queen, who concluded her undressing as if nothing of any importance were happening, and before the wizard, who merely smiled as coldly as had Lester the Ambitious when the last of his relatives had been poi­soned, the old king was transformed into a goat. The hairs of his head became coarse stubbly goat fur, and long goat whiskers sprouted from his chin. He bleated and kicked, but could not bleat and kick himself back into human form. The wizard joined the queen in the bed, the goat was sent down to the kitchen, and the entranced nobles continued their feast. Thus the wizard ended his many days with a beautiful wife, a great army, and the posses­sion of kingdoms.

  12

  'And what's the point of that?' Tom asked, shivering on the pier.

  The magician smiled at him: smiled as coldly as the wizard in his story. 'Need I really say? Rose can never leave Shadowland. Kiss her all you want, Tom, but don't believe a word she says, for she has no idea of the truth.'

  'That's a terrible . . . ridiculous . . . lie.' Tom began to walk away from Collins down the pier.

  'I don't blame you for being angry with me,' the magician called out into the fog between them, 'but whatever you do, don't forget my warning. Don't take her too seriously.' Tom was now at the iron ladder. As he set his feet on the first rung, he heard the magician call, 'Our lives take many different turnings, Tom, and today's king is tomorrow's goat. Don't be fool enough to think it cannot happen to you.'

  THREE

  Two Betrayals

  1

  At night the fog still hung over the lake and in the forest swirled around the trees. The lights above the clearings were glowing yellowish disks. 'Let's not get separated,' Del said, and took his hand as they slowly made their way through the trees.

  When they came into the clearing of the sixth light, Coleman Collins was waiting for them. He sat in the owl chair, his legs crossed at the ankles.

  Tom swallowed, knowing that he would see Rose down in the funnel of trees before this part of the story was done.

  'The sorcerer's apprentices,' Collins said, turning his head to greet them. His voice was blurred. Both boys had seen the bottle clamped between his thighs. 'Just in time, yes, and wandering lone through the mists like orphans. Sit down in your accustomed places, boys, and attend. We have reached the next-to-last chapter of my unburdening, and the weather is appropriate.

  2

  'First of all, it was a foggy day when I deserted the armed forces of the United States. It was the first week of December, and the war had been over for three weeks. I was in England, waiting for my discharge papers. Speckle John had been discharged a week earlier, and was already in Paris. I could see no reason why I should not leave immediately, but for the strict interpretation the govern­ment puts on such things as premature departure from its service. At the time, I was not serving anyone, in fact. I was waiting out the period before my papers came in a country house which had been turned into a hospital and convalescent home — Surrey, this was — and I was more or less being kept out of sight. The patients there had been on what was called Blighty Leave, a term I suppose you boys are too young to understand. Nobody knew when the papers would come through. Some of the men had heard rumors that they might not be discharged, or demobbed, as the English soldiers said, for a year. Don't think these were idle rumors, either; some men were still in France eight months later.

  'I don't suppose you boys know Surrey? Physically, it is quite a beautiful county. Before the war and for the well-off, it must have been a sort of paradise. But the weather, at least while I was there, was miserable, cold and misty — the most expressive weather I've ever known, somehow speaking of blasted hopes and dead expectations. The English had lost nearly an entire generation of men, and in those villages in Surrey I think they felt the loss especially keenly. When Speckle John's letter came, I felt I simply had to get out.

  'So in the first week of December I just left, carrying only a hand valise with a few books and my razor and toothbrush. I walked two miles into the village, waited a couple of hours at the station, and caught the Charing Cross train. From the moment I walked through the gates of that house, I was a criminal an
d a fugitive, traveling on forged papers I'd had the foresight to buy on the black market just before we left France. The next day I took the boat train to Paris. The name on my false papers was Coleman Collins. I let the hunt for Lieutenant Charles Nightingale go on without me.

  'For there was a hunt, and that was the reason I had been sequestered away in Surrey. At dinner I told you boys about that day I did five magical cures in a row. Reckless, even stupid-certainly arrogant. I was on fire with impatience. Austria-Hungary had just surrendered after the Italian victory at Vittorio Veneto. Everybody knew that Germany was exhausted. Finished. I wanted out. So I let rip, boys, I let rip. Five in a row. Spuds-and-Guinness, the Irish nurse, thought the devil had ap­peared. Of course my display caused an uproar. Withers saw what I was doing, and after finishing up his own work, tore out faster than any Georgian has ever traveled before or since. To see the colonel, I was sure. I did not give a damn. Anyhow, to make a long story short, before I got to England, there were new rumors about me. Not just among a handful of Negro soldiers, but among the general public. Reports had begun to appear in the English and French papers. Miracle on the Battlefield. That sort of thing. First in one place, then in another. By the time I left Yorkshire, the English papers were conducting their own search for the 'miracle doctor.' If I had wanted that sort of thing, I could have had it in a minute, boys — if I had wanted to be a performing monkey the rest of my life. But what I wanted was in Paris, working on our act and looking for theater bookings. What I wanted had secrets and knowledge to make a faith healer look like a dogcatcher.

  'I set foot again on French soil on December 5, 1918, hung-over, unshaven, in a cold rain. My phony papers had never been questioned, not even looked at twice. I did see, after a few weeks in Paris, that a newspaper had managed to identify the 'miracle doctor' as one Lieuten­ant Charles Nightingale, who had unreasonably vanished from an English village shortly before his release from the army and was now AWOL. But by then the doings of Lieutenant Nightingale were no more important to me than those of General Pershing.

  'Speckle John was living in rooms in rue Vaugirard, and I took a room directly below him. You entered the building through huge wooden doors on the street and came into an open court surrounded on all sides by high gray brick walls. Smaller doors let onto staircases. To your right was the concierge's office; straight ahead, the stairs to Speckle John's rooms. This building was so run­down it was moldy, but to me it looked beautiful. Now I can almost see it before me. And so, I think, can you.'

  The boys looked down the funnel of trees and saw the suggestion of high gray walls in the fog. Dark windows stared down at a tall figure in a hat and Burberry. Then a black figure, his face in shadow, emerged from a door in the brick.

  'My mentor, my guide, and my rival was waiting for me.'

  The man in the hat and long Burberry walked through the swirling fog toward the black figure. Then another door opened, and a slender girl hurried past both men. Rose.

  'On that first day, I saw a girl walking past us but did not look closely at her. Later I found that she was named Rosa Forte, that she was a singer, and that her rooms were on the ground floor just below mine.'

  Rose had disappeared into the trees; the two men had vanished too; the scene at the end of the tunnel of trees went black.

  'At first I thought that she was the most enchanting girl I'd ever known, brave and intelligent, with a face that delighted me more than any painting. Within weeks I had fallen in love with her. Once I saw a shepherdess that had her face in a provincial antique shop, and because I had no money to buy it, I stole it — slipped it into my pocket and took it home. When Speckle John and I toured, I took it with me. Stared at it; stared into it, as if it knew mysteries Speckle John did not.'

  Down in the narrow space between the trees, Rose Armstrong appeared, dressed in a long white garment of indeterminate period. She held a shepherd's crook, froze like a statue, and looked at Tom with unfocused eyes.

  'Mysteries, yes. Mystery is always duplicitous, and once you know its secret, it is twice banal. In time I came to think that Rosa Forte was like some maiden in a fable, blank to herself for all her surface charm, the property of anybody who listened to her tale.' Collins lifted his bottle, and Rose Armstrong disappeared backward into fog and trees.

  'Ah. Speckle John and I began working almost imme­diately. We booked ourselves into theaters and halls all over France. I was afraid to stay long periods in England because of the 'miracle-doctor' business, but we did cross England several times to perform in Ireland. We pro­ceeded to invent an entirely new kind of performance, using the skills we had, and eventually worked our way up toward the top of the bill. What we were after was extravagance, and we could twist an audience around so that they could not be sure by the end of the performance exactly what had happened to them. When they saw us, they knew no other magician could come near us. One of our most famous illusions was the Collector, which began almost as a joke of mine. It was not until eighteen months later that I decided that I had the necessary power to use a real person as the Collector.'

  Del gasped, and the magician raised his eyebrows at him. 'You have a moral objection? So did Speckle John — he wanted to stick with the less successful toy I'd invented earlier. But once it had occurred to me that I could fill up my toy, so to speak, with a real being, the toy began to look inadequate. The first Collector was a gentleman named Halmar Haraldson, a Swede who came upon us in Paris and wanted nothing more than to be a magician. He saw it as an avenue of revenge against a world which had not welcomed his abilities; and Halmar saw in us something more powerful than the usual run of stage magicians. What he saw, quite rightly, in magic was that it was antisocial, subversive, and he hated the world so badly that he hungered and thirsted for our power. Haraldson dressed always in cheap anonymous black suits above which his bony Scandinavian peanut-shaped head floated like a skull; he took narcotic drugs; he was the most extreme exponent of the postwar nihilism that I knew. Consciously or not, he resembled one of those apparitions in Edvard Munch's paintings. So I met him one night and collected him, and thereafter my toy glowed with a new life. Halmar lurked inside it like a genie.'

  'What happens to the person you use?' Tom asked. 'What happened to Halmar?'

  'I released him eventually, when he became a liability. You will hear, child. Speckle John would have insisted on abandoning the Collector altogether, but I had gained control of the act. After all, I was his successor, and my powers were soon the equal of his. He could not insist with me, though I could see him growing unhappier and unhappier as we toured together. I am talking about something that happened over a period of years.

  'It's a commonplace irony, I imagine. Partners work together and achieve success, but fall out personally. He began to make it clear that he thought I was a mistake — that I should never have been chosen. Speckle John, to my disappointment, was not large-minded. His ambitions were small, his conception of magic was small. 'The test of a mature magician is that he does not use his powers in ordinary life,' he said; and I said, 'The test of a true magician is that he has no ordinary life.'

  'Rosa joined our act after a time. Her singing had never led to anything, and she needed a job. Speckle liked her, and because she had performed, stage fright did not cripple her. We taught her all the standard tricks; she was adept at them, and her gamine quality was effective with audiences. My partner took a paternal attitude toward her, which I thought ridiculous. Rosa was mine, to do with as I wished; but I did not object to their having talks together, for it helped reconcile her to her position. The other reason I did not object was that my partner's care with the girl proved to me that it was he, not I, who had been the mistake. My little shepherdess was porcelain through and through, beautiful to look at, but only a reflector of borrowed light.'

  Wind pushed at the fog, swirled it. A deeper chill entered the clearing.

  'When you travel as we did, you begin to know a community of all the others who play t
he same theaters. Jimmy Nervo and Teddy Knox, Maidie Scott, Vanny Chard, Liane D'Eve . . . One group interested me, Mr. Peet and the Wandering Boys. There were six 'Boys,' tumblers and strongmen, rough characters. I think they had all been in prison for violent crimes at one time or another — rape and robbery, assault. Other performers left them alone. In fact, their tumbling was only adequate, not nearly good enough for them to be headliners, and they broke it up with comic songs and staged fights. From time to time they let the fighting wander offstage. I know of a couple of occasions when they beat men nearly to death in drunken brawls. They were rather like an unevolved form of life. I wanted to hire them, and when I approached their leader, Arnold Peet, he immediately agreed — better to be second stringer in a successful act than to wither on your own. And he agreed also that his 'boys' would work as my bodyguards when we were not performing. Eventually they feared me — they depended on me for their bread — they knew I could kill them with a glance and they did anything I wanted them to do. Our act immediately became stronger, too, wilder and more theatrical, because it took its direction from me.

  'For a time, boys, we were the most famous magicians in Europe, and titled and well-known people everywhere sought us out, gave parties for us, came for advice. I met all the surrealists, all the painters and poets; I met the American writers in Paris; I met dukes and counts, and spent many afternoons telling fortunes to those who wanted the help of magic in planning their lives. Ernest Hemingway bought me a drink in a Montparnasse bar but would not come to my table because he thought I was a charlatan. I heard that he had referred to me as 'that dime-a-dance Rasputin,' a description I did not mind a bit. The real tinpot Rasputin was an Englishman who fancied himself a demon. I met Aleister Crowley in England, and knew at once that he was a sick, deluded fraud — a blubbery ranter whose greatest talent was for mumbo jumbo.

  'Crowley and I met in the garden of a house in Kensington belonging to a rich and foolish fancier of the occult who supported both of us and wanted to know what would happen if we met. I was already in the garden when Crowley oozed through the scullery door. He was sluglike, thoroughly repulsive; wore a black caftan; dirty bare feet; shaven head. His face was crazy and am­bitious — there was a kind of crude magnetism to him. Crowley looked me in the eye, trying to frighten me. 'Hello, Aleister,' I said. 'Begone, fiend!' he shouted, and pointed a fat digit at my face. I turned his hand into a bird's claw, and he nearly fainted on the spot. 'Begone yourself,' I said, and he shoved the claw under the caftan and exited with great haste. Later I understand he displayed the claw to a female admirer as proof of his satanic abilities, and worked over spells for months before he was able to change it back.'