by Peter Straub
Something moved into the fuzzy light down in the trees. 'From what I've said already, you know that I had grown careless about spending time in England. By 1921, we traveled freely back and forth across England, playing theaters in towns from Edinburgh to Penzance, though most of our work was in London, especially at the Wood Green Empire. I thought the world had forgotten the mysterious Dr. Nightingale. But one person had not, and I met him one summer night after a performance. He was waiting by the stage door of the Empire, and I saw his red hair and knew who he was before I saw his face.'
A light in the trees showed a flight of «teps, a brick wall, a suggestion of a narrow alley. The figure in the Burberry and hat came down the stairs. Tom saw Rose hovering behind him. The magician lifted his bottle as if toasting his former self, but did not drink. With the magician's next sentence, Tom knew that it was not himself he was toasting.
'There she is, Rosa Forte, my porcelain shepherdess, my enchanted fish. I was glad she was there — I wanted her to see what I could do. I wanted her to know that nothing in her code or Speckle John's could hinder me for a moment. And I want you boys to know that too. I will not be hindered.'
The little scene down in the trees was obscurely, inexplicably sinister: Collins' surrogate in hat and long coat, the fragile girl behind him on the stairs. Savagery seemed to flicker about them — a hopeless violence curled in the fog.
Another man stepped out of the fog; red hair shone.
' 'I knew it was you,' Withers said to me. 'I should have known you'd wind up like this — a worthless parasite.' Except that he said it wuthless pa'site. 'Call yourself Coleman Collins now, do you, murderer? Well, you put on a pretty good show, I'll say that for you. I hope they'll let you perform in the stockade.' Puff-oahm. He stood there, beaming hate at me, hate and satisfaction, because he thought he had me. This little racist Southern doctor, traveling through Europe on undervalued American dollars, piling up anecdotes to wow them with back in Macon or Atlanta.
'I asked, 'Are you threatening me, Withers?'
''That I am,' Withers said: he was simply gloating. 'You went AWOL. Somewhere, somebody's still looking for you. I'm going to see that you're found.'
'So I called up Halmar Haraldson and sicked him on Withers.'
The Collector lurched into the fuzzy light, his face glowing with moronic glee. The red-haired man backed up. On the stairs behind Collins' surrogate, Rose could not see why the man playing Withers was frightened. She stared at the man, confused and beginning to be alarmed.
'Hey!' the red-haired man shouted. 'Hey, Mr. Collins?'
Tom's stomach tightened: this was not just a scene. The Collector stumbled forward. Rose saw him and screeched.
''No, you are found, Withers,' I said. And now observe how well your friend Mr. Ridpath fulfills his role.'
'Oh, my God,' Del said, and began to stand up. Rose screamed again, and Collins' stand-in gripped her arm.
The Collector flew at the red-haired man, who shouted, 'Stop him! Stop him!' The Collector knocked him down.
'Collins! Help me!' A red furry thing flopped from the man's head, and Tom saw that he was the man on the train, the aged Skeleton Ridpath. The Collector had him pinned to the ground and was battering his face. 'Found you! Found you!' he keened.
Del was on his feet, screaming; Rose, unable to move, screamed too.
'Shut up!' Collins ordered, and Del silenced.
One blow; another; the monster's bony fists smashed away again and again into the man's head. Rose turned away and shielded her face against the brick of the staircase.
'Yes, as I did, you're going to see it happen,' Collins said calmly. 'You have to see it. The poor devil didn't know it, of course, but that was the only reason he was here. To be Withers' stand-in.'
Skeleton was humming tunelessly, battering in the old man's head.
'An entirely expendable character — a failed actor named Creekmore, no better than a skid-row bum.' Collins gave a snort of amusement. 'He answered an advertisement, can you believe it? He sought me out. So did Withers. Withers knew I'd stolen Vendouris' money — as if taking the money of the dead were a crime.' Collins lifted the bottle and drank.
Down in the fog, Skeleton was doing something vile to the actor. Blood gushed from the head — Tom saw the skin leaving the bone, and stood up and turned away.
'Don't even think of running,' Collins said from his throne. 'Your friend would catch you in seconds. And then all this would be real.'
Tom looked back down to where the awful scene had taken place. The Collector was gliding back into the fog. The body was gone; Snail and Thorn and Pease stood beside the staircase with their arms locked over their chests.
'It wasn't real?' Tom said.
'Not now, child. Withers was no more. Don't worry about Creekmore. He has a few scratches, no more. I'll pay him tomorrow and send him off. He will think of me with gratitude, I assure you.'
Del gradually ceased quivering. 'That was Skeleton,' he mumbled. 'I saw him ripping . . . that man's face . . . all that blood.'
'A few bloodbags concealed in the mouth. Creekmore is already in the summerhouse washing his face and wondering where to find his next bottle.'
On the staircase in the fog, Rose slowly lifted her head.
Collins waved the bottle, and the scene went black. 'For me, the horror was still to come.' Shivering, the boys sat back down on the damp grass.
3
'Even I was surprised by Haraldson's savagery. What you boys saw was a little pig's blood and the hint of something grotesque — what I saw was a man being slowly dismembered and kept alive in absolute agony until the last possible second. I had been thinking of the Collector as a sort of toy, as it had been when I had invented it. Of course, the power was mine, not Haraldson's. He was only a tool, a doll filled with my own imagery. And because Haraldson was now a liability, I realized that he could be replaced by any number of our hangers-on — even with one of the Wandering Boys if necessary. I released Haraldson from the Collector as quickly as possible, after I was sure Withers was dead. The police found him almost immediately: the Swede was in such a daze that he was put away in a mental home and convicted but never executed for Withers' murder. There was a little stir in the papers for a bit; then it died away, and we were far out in the country, working the provinces; no one connected Withers or Haraldson to myself.
'The other thing I had realized while the Collector gathered in poor Withers was that I had no real need of the Wandering Boys anymore. The Collector was bodyguard enough. This was just a seed in my mind, understand. I thought about it while I gave the Wandering Boys their one amusement, badger-baiting. Whenever we were out in the countryside, they arranged for a couple of dogs, and we went out in the middle of the night with our shovels and tongs and put paid to a couple of badgers. The night after Withers had been dispatched, we were in the countryside west of York, and I looked at those six trolls and their ringmaster working for the moment when they could witness the slaughter of a few animals, and I thought: Are they really necessary? I filed the thought away: there was a great deal on my mind at the time.
'Rosa Forte, for one. She had become distant and sulky, and this infuriated me. I often beat her when I was drunk. I could not tell if she loved or hated me, her manner was so contradictory. Speckle John, who by 1922 was definitely my second fiddle, used to try to advise me about her, and his advice was an old woman's. Be nicer to her, treat her better, listen to her, that sort of thing. She would go to him and weep. I despised both of them. Money was also on my mind. Though we were as successful as any magicians were in those days, I constantly felt pinched for extra money. Even with what I made reading fortunes and doing prognostications for the wealthy, I wasn't satisfied. I wanted to live well, I wanted a lavish act; even then, I think I had the germ of my farewell performance in my mind. A good climax is important to any performance, and I knew that when I tired of touring — of dragging nine other people around the world with me — I would w
ant my final show to be the most spectacular performance ever seen.
'That would be very expensive; and indeed my own tastes had become costly. We were already charging as much as we could ask. So I adopted other means, and here the Wandering Boys were useful to me.
'I went unannounced to that rich fool in Kensington, Robert Chalfont, late one night. When he opened the door to me, I saw on his big-jawed public-school face that he was both flattered and unsettled, even a little frightened. That was perfect. He knew what I had done to Crowley in his garden earlier that summer. Chalfont invited me in and offered me a drink. I took some malt whiskey and sat down in the library while he paced up and down. He had invited me for dinner several times and I had not come; now that I was there, he was nervous. 'Nice of you to drop in,' he said.
''I want money,' I said unceremoniously. 'A lot of it.'
' 'Well, look here, Collins,' he said. 'I'm afraid I can't just give you money on demand, you know — there are ways of doing things.'
''And this is my way,' I told him. 'I want three thousand pounds a year from you. And I want you to sign a paper stating that you give it voluntarily, in recognition of my work.'
''Well, dammit, man, no one respects your work more than I do,' he said, 'but what you're asking is preposterous.'
''No, you are preposterous,' I told him. 'You wish the privilege of associating with great magicians. You want intimacy with their secrets; you want to witness displays of their power. Now it is time to pay for the privilege.' And I reminded him of what I could do to him if he refused me.
'He asked me for time to think. I gave him two days — I could see on that stupid well-brought-up face that he wished he'd stuck to shooting and fishing.
'The following day I sent Mr. Peet and his trolls around to his house, and they did some damage there. Chalfont came straightaway to my hotel suite and agreed to what I'd demanded. But by then I had decided I wanted more — all of it, in fact. And he gave it to me, everything he had.'
'He just gave you all his money?' Tom asked. 'Just like that?'
'Not exactly.' The magician smiled. 'I invited Chalfont to participate in our act.'
'You collected him,' Tom said, horrified.
'Of course. Once he'd had a sample of that, he signed everything over to me. I kept the trolls with him every day while he made the arrangements. And when I had his name on the papers and his money in my account, I collected him again. As he should have had the sense to expect. He gave a new dimension to the Collector, a sort of poignance. In fact, I began to think it was a pity I'd never put Crowley in the Collector. Imagine what a Collector he would have made! But we made do with Chalfont for as long as we stayed together. And I had no other Collector until I heard the pleas of your school-friend and saw how helpful he would be to us this summer.'
Down in the trees, a faint light began to glow, teasing the fog that moved slowly across it.
'But pay attention now', boys. We are coming to the next turning point in my life — one of those great reversals, like the death of Vendouris or my first meeting with Speckle John.
'The money question had been solved, for many of my wealthy admirers had half-suspected the kind of thing that had happened to Chalfont, and gave over large sums whenever I wanted them. But I was growing tired of Europe. Europe was dead. I sensed new life in America — life that did not stink of corpses. Europe was really a graveyard, and in America my family had enough money to keep me for the rest of my life. I took a month off, sailed to the States, and looked for a suitable place to set up my compound. For that was how I thought of it: a guarded place, remote from any city, where I could extend magic as far as it could go; without the third-party trappings of an audience. I found this place and bought it and hired workmen to make the improvements I had in mind. The price was too high originally, but I persuaded the owners to let it go reasonably. And my methods ensured that no one would come prowling around in my absence.'
There was an immense, terrifying beating of wings: a huge white owl came to life in the dim light. Both boys froze. The owl looked predatory, more purely savage than the Collector; it beat its wings once more, then blew apart like smoke, becoming part of the fog.
Still the light glowed, promising visions to come.
'I landed again in France in the autumn of 1923. It had been only five years since my first landing, but imagine the difference! Now I knew who and what I was: Coleman Collins had found and developed the power which Charles Nightingale had only dared to dream existed within him. I was rich enough to do anything I wished, and I was famous enough to draw large audiences wherever we appeared. Now I owned a house and extensive grounds in New England. And beyond all else, of course, I was King of the Cats, famous throughout the occult world. This was a position I intended to hold as long as I could — at least until I sensed the arrival of a magician whose powers were as much greater than mine as mine were than Speckle John's. Then, I thought, we'd see what we would see.'
The white owl flickered again down the funnel of trees; its eyes blazed. The great wings rustled the leaves. Then it was gone again.
'We drove, Mr. Peet and I, he actually driving the Daimler and I relaxing in the backseat, down through western France toward Paris. I looked forward to seeing Rosa Forte and Speckle John — most especially, Rosa Forte. I thought of bringing her back to America with me — she could not survive without me, I knew, and she would have her uses in my new life. As yet, all of that was only a vague dream. I wondered what new bookings Speckle John had managed to get for us; I wondered how long the trolls would go before they required another badger-baiting; I wondered what invitations had come, which women would be waiting for me with their palms extended and their checkbooks out; I wondered too if Rosa would be as amorous in her greetings as she usually was when I returned from long trips. So down we drove, going at the dazzling speed of perhaps thirty miles an hour through village after village, each with its obelisk inscribed with the names of those who had died in the war. The light was heavy, and the chestnut trees were turning red and orange; the dust rose up from the road; I thought of all the blood in those fields, which were just ripening into harvest time. I remembered what I had done to that poor ranter Crowley, and laughed out loud — also I thought about the attacks recently made against me by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, names important in the occult field at the time but now utterly forgotten. That heavy light . . . the orange, blood-soaked fields . . . Rosa waiting with her porcelain skin and open thighs . . . that feeling of time itself dying with a beautiful melancholy about me . . .
'Ten kilometers outside Paris I saw a peasant smile at my car with white flawless teeth, and I thought of Vendouris screaming in the frozen muck — thought of him for the first time in years, and it seemed to me that it really was time to get out when all of a beautiful European autumn seemed epitomized to me by the gleam of a dying man's teeth.
'We entered Paris from the northwest, throwing up plumes of dust behind us, and crossed the Seine at the Pont de Courbevoie and worked our way through the streets to the Ranelagh Gardens, where we lived in a splendid building on Avenue Prud'hon. We drew up before the splendid building. I could hear children's voices in the heavy air. The trees in the Ranelagh Gardens were brilliant gold, I remember, and the grass a very powerful dark green. Still the beautiful melancholy. I invited Peet to join me for a drink in my sitting room, which eventually cost him his life. We mounted the stairs, me carrying a small bag and Peet the two large suitcases from the Daimler's trunk. The interior of the building smelled of sandalwood. I opened the door of my apartment and let Peet enter. He went in a few steps and dropped the bags — they made a particularly loud thump. I followed and saw his face, which was both embarrassed and terrified. Then I saw them. Saw what any schoolboy would have suspected long before.'
The light blazed up in the trees, and Tom saw Rose lying naked on what looked like an oriental carpet. About her was the suggestion of a large room with oyster-colored walls. Rose's unmistakable
body was sideways to him, her blond head turned away. A thick naked man with heavy arms and thighs lay atop her; his face was buried in her shoulder. Tom went rigid with shock. Beside him, Del gasped. The heavy hands kneaded her breasts, the brutal body thrust and thrust, moving itself blindly toward climax; and Rose clung to his hips, accommodating and moving with him. Shock spread so definitively throughout Tom that he could feel its progress, freezing him as it went. He could not even think of how Del was responding to this sight. You won't be foolish when you see me tonight, will you? That was what she had said, linking her hands behind his neck as they stood in chest-high water. And before that, You won't hate me, will you? I still have some work to do for him. This is what she had meant.
Everything here is a lie.
He seized at that straw until the girl tilted her face toward the sky and he saw the wide high brow, the mouth that had said she loved him. He felt as though he had been blowtorched. The man quickened, trembled, clutched at her. Rose's arms and legs clamped on the plunging man. Then the light died again, and they were alone with the magician. Del's eyes were dull. He was breathing heavily, almost panting.
You won't be foolish when you see me tonight, will you?