Shadowland

by Peter Straub

'A guilty mind and soul are dangerous to all about them — they corrupt. All of you boys have been touched by this disease.'

  Another mad, threatening step forward. 'You, Flanagan. Did you steal that owl?' 'Yes,' Tom said. For that was the final truth. The index finger stabbed at Del. 'You. Nightingale. Did you steal that owl?' 'Yes,' Del said.

  'You will report to my office immediately — we will rid ourselves of you, do you hear? You are to be expunged, a word meaning erased, omitted, cast away . . . Mala causa est quae requirit misercordiam.' His face seemed the size of a billboard. Rose, still, gripping Tom's arm, was whimpering. 'And I see you have brought a girl into this school. That too will be dealt with, boys. I very much fear that you will not be allowed to leave these premises alive. Theft, failure, smoking, indiscipline — and ingratitude! Ingratitude is a capital offense!'

  Tom felt the rough fieldstone flags under his feet, and Laker Broome looked with transparent eyes at a trans­parent watch and said, 'And now I believe we have some magic from two members of our first year.'

  Del goggled at him: the bruises were starting to come up from his face, purple across his temples and green on his cheeks and jaw. In a couple of hours he would look like a mandrill.

  Animal faces: he was suddenly aware of a cramped room about him, gloomily lacquered with photographs — a crazy quilt on the walls and ceiling, horrible faces leering at him as in the wizard's house in the dream, leering but stationary, fixed on the wall so they could never float away . . .

  ('To-o-o-o-m,' Del wailed.)

  . . . but what was floating was him, going up off a strange fetid bed straight toward the ceiling. Rose's arms held him back, then broke away, and he was going right toward those pictures, toward a dead man in his car with his brains all over the windows, some dripping car in an empty parking lot. Scene of the Murder. The former Miami lawyer was discovered at 7:10 yesterday morning. Miami resident Herbert Finkel, threatened by a loitering youth described as wearing blue shirt and tan trousers . . .

  toward a picture of Coleman Collins in his Burberry and a wide-brimmed hat, his face only a blank white oval . . .

  toward the Carson School, a black-and-white aerial photograph crayoned with red-crayon flames, drawn over the field house and auditorium, a red crayon smear obliterating the little tree in the court. Closer to it, closer, the crayon flames seeming to leap, seeming to warm his face.

  Rose's fingers grasped his right hand, torturing the wound, and he yelled just as the crayon flames grew up around him.

  They were back at Carson. Del and Rose were on either side of him, standing on the solid wooden floor of the auditorium, Mr. Broome at the podium, his face a lunatic's, mouthing gibberish. A hundred boys twisted and howled in their seats, many of them bleeding from the eyes and nose. Noise like a foul smoke rose from them, and Mr. Broome screamed, 'I want Steven Ridpath! Skeleton Ridpath! The only graduate of the class of '59. Come up here and get your diploma!' He held out a burning document, and Tom felt himself sailing up, his limbs spidery, all of his skin so tight it felt it might split open . . .

  down below him — a photograph? It moved. The dead boys twisted and howled. A teacher dressed in a Norfolk jacket moved across the blackening floor and took Del's arm, twisted it savagely around his back, and yanked him away. It had the quality of a photograph, a moment stopped in time so that you could look back and say, yes, that's when Uncle George ripped his pants on the bob-wire fence, that's when Lulu looked down the well, wasn't that funny, sorta like an omen cuz that's when things started to go bad and wrong and just see how happy we all were . . . but Del's face was turning purple and green and Rose was screaming and the man wasn't a teacher, he was Mr. Peet. . . he was still above them all, floating toward Laker Broome, who held out his burning hand and fastened it around Tom's wrist, scorching his flesh, grinning at him and saying, I said there'd be a little pain, didn't I? Should have taken my hand back in the tunnels, boy. Don't you agree things would have worked out a little nicer that way?

  The burning hand clamped harder on his wrist. Don't make the fool's mistake of thinking this ain't happening, kid. Even though it ain't. Tom felt his wrist frying in the devil's grasp. Mr. Collins has your pal. You chose your song. So sing it.

  Beneath the white of the magician's handkerchief, his wrist was blister red.

  'To-o-o-m!' Del cried again. His voice was getting smaller. 'Tom! Tom!'

  He shook his head, trying to clear out the fuzz — almost as if he had been Skeleton Ridpath, seeing what Skeleton had chosen to see, had wanted with all of his messed-up heart to see —

  'They moved us, they moved us,' Rose wailed, 'oh, Tom come back — you like died for a second.'

  He opened his eyes, and was looking up at Rose's scared face. She was not even pretty anymore. Her forehead was wrinkled like an old woman's, and for a second she looked like a witch bending over him and shaking his arms. 'Oh,' he said.

  She stopped shaking him. 'That man touched you and it was like you died. Mr. Peet came out and carried you in here and pulled Del along — and I just followed, I hit him on the back, but he never even blinked at me. He took Del away, Tom. What are you going to do?'

  'Dunno,' Tom said. He did not know where he was. Artificial stars, friendly lights, winked down at him. Wasn't there a color wheel? Wasn't there a band? ''Polka Dots and Moonbeams,'' he said. 'Fielding went off the wall over some saxophone player. Six cups of punch. Everybody went outside and looked at a satellite, but it was really just an airplane. Skeleton was there, and he looked really creepy. All in black.' Tom looked perplexedly up at the friendly lights. Where the color wheel should have been, only a spaghettilike pipe ran through the distance, joining another thin pipe at a T-junction.

  'What are you talking about?' Rose had her witch face again.

  'Carson. Our school. When Del and I . . . ' He shook his head. 'Mr. Peet? I saw him.'

  'He carried you here. And he took Del.'

  Tom groaned. 'Our headmaster was a devil,' he said. 'Do you suppose he actually could have been? And maybe he was the man on Mesa Lane last summer — it was only his first year, you know? The new kids never realized that. They thought he'd been there forever. No wonder we all had nightmares.'

  'Are you all right?' Rose asked.

  'He's a talent scout,' Tom said, smiling. 'Good old M.'

  'Tom.'

  'Oh, I'm okay.' He sat up. 'Where are we, anyhow? Oh. Should have known.' They were in the big theater; because of the removed wall, he could see into the smaller theater. The figures in the mural watched him with their varying expressions of pleasure, boredom, and amuse­ment. And of unearthly greed.

  'Collins is right, you know. He did give Skeleton what he wanted. Skeleton wanted exactly what happened. He even drew pictures of it.'

  'But now what?' Rose said. 'Tom, what do we do now? I don't even know what you're talking about.'

  'Do you know what I think, Rose? I think I still love you. Do you suppose Collins still loves his little shepherd­ess? Do you really have a grandmother in Hilly Vale, Rose?'

  The worry lines in her forehead puckered again.

  Tom got to his knees. The mural, a real audience, watched with sympathetic interest. 'For my next trick, and this has never before been attempted on the con­tinent, ladies and gentlemen . . . '

  'Are you crazy? Did that man do something to your mind?'

  'Be quiet, Rose.' The entire mural blazed at him: he could almost see their hands carrying food to their mouths, see them talking to each other: I'll miss old Herbie, say what you like, he was the bloody best. Turned a man's hand into a claw, now, didn't he? In Kensington it. was. The folks in the shilling seats, looking forward to having their brains turned inside-out at Mr. Butter's last show.

  In the mural, the Collector turned his head to beam his glee toward Tom Flanagan.

  I say, that girl's a smasher. French she is.

  'Stay quiet,' he said. 'Go somewhere — go hide on the stage. Find a corner and hide in it and stay quiet.'
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  'What. . . ?'

  He waved her off, hoping she would find the safest corner in all Shadowland. Now there was no reassuring button to push and turn the awful thing back into a joke.

  A loudspeaker crackled: 'ah, there you are, sir! YES, YOU — THE GENTLEMAN IN THE BLACK SUIT. LADIES AND GENTS, WE HAVE OUR SECOND VOLUNTEER. A GENEROUS HAND, PLEASE!'

  Ghostly clapping, applause from the year 1924, splashed from the walls.

  The Collector slid down from the wall, grinning blind and toothless at Tom.

  Now, Mary, don't carry on — that bloke's in on it, do you see? He's part of the show. He's what you call a stooge.

  The Collector was stumbling to the end of the aisle in the smaller room, still focused entirely on Tom. A face without any personality at all. Dr. Collector. It was what they all looked like, really: Skeleton, Laker Broome, the magician, Mr: Peet and the Wandering Boys, so warped by hate and greed that they would steal and kill, cheat and tyrannize anyone less powerful. Collins had even stripped a dead man's pockets. Yes. Dr. Collector. They offered their own kinds of salvation. Want to be a man? I'll make you a man. I am your father and your mother.

  'Here I am, Skeleton,' he said. Disgust, loathing, flooded through him. He stood up. His hands felt like molten lead weights, held together only by the knotted handkerchiefs.

  'Come on, Skeleton,' he said.

  The Collector lurched eagerly down the stairs.

  14

  The truth is, Tom does not have any idea of how he is to fight the Collector. As he hears Rose's high heels clatter­ing into the wings of the stage, he remembers the scene in which the actor Creekmore impersonated Withers, and the impulse which led him to face this dreadful represen­tation of Skeleton Ridpath begins to look like a fatal mistake. The Collector was the magician's best body­guard — he had said that himself. It suddenly seems very likely to Tom that he is going to die — die none too pleasantly — in the Grand Theatre des Illusions, just as Withers had died in an alley outside a stage door.

  'Vendpuris!' the Collector calls. 'I saw your owl, Vendouris.'

  Tom edges away as silently as he can, wondering even now if he can get out of the theater and somehow snatch Del from Collins . . . leave the Collector wandering and calling inside the theater —

  but the Collector is a magic trick.

  'I want to see some skin,' the Collector whispers. 'Where are you, Vendouris?'

  He is a magic trick, and Tom is a magician. In the hallucinatory scene which had played out when Laker Broome had touched him, there had been the flicker of a clue, the smell of an answer strong enough to make some part of him know that the Collector could be made harmless.

  'Some skin,' the Collector says, opening his mouth to show purple blackness. His empty eyes shine with delight. He is stumbling over the little theater's stage, going by a blind man's radar to the Grand Theatre.

  Tom moves quietly down the front of the big stage, backing away. What is the clue, the answer? He can remember the auditorium filled with dead boys, himself floating over it in Skeleton's body.

  It is there somewhere, the answer. He has to think. But how could you think, with your mind turning to jelly? It's just magic, that's all, he says to himself, getting as far as the wall and straightening his back against it and watching the Collector step off the little theater's stage. Two more steps would bring him into the larger room. The Collector is drooling, reaching out, and Tom remembers how it was to be inside Skeleton, feeling all that hate which was love knocked on its head, Skeleton's helpless, dumbstruck love for Collins and what he could do.

  'I'm not Vendouris,' Tom says, still feeling his loath­ing for Skeleton lying like a weight in his chest.

  'Aaah,' Skeleton moans, and focuses his ecstatic head toward Tom. He is shuddering with pleasure. He begins to stumble into a row of seats.

  'Your name is Steve Ridpath,' Tom says. 'And you cheated on your exams. You're the unhappiest boy in the whole school. You're supposed to go to Clemson in the fall. Your father is a football coach.'

  'Burn that ball back,' whispers Skeleton.

  'Stay away from me,' Tom says.

  'Burn that ball back!'

  'You set a fire in the field house,' Tom says, searching frantically for the key which will find whatever remains of Skeleton inside the Collector. 'You wanted to see every­body die.'

  'Get away from that fucking piano,' the Collector whispers. He is now at Tom's end of a row of seats, and about a dozen steps up toward the back of the big theater. Behind him and to the left, Tom can see the X of the wooden brace, irregularly stained with red.

  But why was I Skeleton? Tom wonders. The awful toy is coming down the steps, brightly scanning for a sign of motion. 'Stay away,' he says, half-pleading.

  The Collector descends another two steps: Tom is by now really almost too scared to move; and he knows that if he tries to run, Skeleton will gain on him effortlessly, and bring him down as happily as a lion brings down a zebra.

  'Oh, Flanagini,' the Collector whispers, only four steps up from Tom. 'Not to hurt Mr. Collins, Flanagini — not to hurt Mr. Collins.'

  'I will hurt him,' Tom says, and raises his useless hands.

  'I can fly, Flanagini,' Skeleton whispers, and is nearly on him.

  'You're a joke, Skeleton,' Tom whispers too, for he is unable to make his voice louder. Then his mind twists and he sees the interior of that room again, the gloom and the lacquered pictures. It is as if they paper the interior of his skull.

  He's what you call a stooge.

  Skeleton howls in pain or joy, lurches off the last step, and his hands find Tom's throat. The empty eyes glow before Tom, shine directly into his brain, and while the hands tighten about his throat, Tom can hear a mad babble of voices. Owl Dr. Collector see some skin skin owl out to stay now pictures window knew he was there FIRE! owl owlfire takes this life too, you too, Vendouris, coming from where? joy foxhead OWLFIRE FLANAGINIFIRE wolfhead baby on a spear light shining through blood glass thing moving in my pocket . . . an unending spool of gibberish which is Skeleton's soul and mind and is more purely frightening than even the hands around his throat.

  Then Tom's mind twists again, and he raises his useless hands, defending himself from the pictures and knowl­edge there: Flanagini fire, Skeleton's melted con­sciousness sings to him, and the crushing hands continue to do their work.

  15

  Rose had scrambled through the strange assortment of props in the wings of the stage, knocking over tables and spilling loose packs of cards. One deck flattened out on the floor beside her, and she saw that it contained only aces of hearts and twos of spades. From the center of the spilled deck a joker who was a devil popped out of a box and grinned, raising a red pitchfork. Her only thought was to get out. She had seen Tom die once, when the transparent man jabbed his finger forward and touched him, and now she knew he was going to die again. She brushed against a tall structure that looked like a gate or a stanchion, and a shiny slanting blade came hissing down to thwack against the bottom of the frame.

  She heard faint applause echo from behind the curtains, out there where Tom was. Applause? It was true, what she had said to Tom long ago. Mr. Collins had been out of control all summer, drinking even more than usual and screaming in his sleep, so that she knew his mind was in that other time, the time which was mythical to her, with Speckle John and Rosa Forte and the original Wandering Boys — Tom Flanagan was the cause of that. . . .

  Rose too was in pain. Rose is always in pain, and only Mr. Collins knows this. For as long as she has walked, she had walked on swords, broken glass, burning coals; the ground stabs her feet. Only Mr. Collins knows how when she walks on her high heels, nails jab into her soles, making every step a crucifixion like Tom's. . . .

  She wished she were on a train with him, her feet on the seat before her, going away and away and away. Tom would be stunned by the joy she could bring him, and the reflection of that joy would stun her too.

  Her hand found the edge
of the stage door. Behind her on the other side of the curtains, the Collector howled, and she knew there would be no train, no sweet Tom beside her in a sleeper — only Mr. Collins knew how to get inside the Collector and talk to the twisted boy who lived there.

  Rose groped for the knob. It moved under her hand, and the door swung open onto the dark corridor.

  'Dear Rose,' Mr. Collins said, and she gasped. He was standing in the hall, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest.

  'Please,' she said. Then she saw — it was not Mr. Collins, but one of his shadows, one of those that had appeared in the window just before that satanic creature in the eyeglasses had come shouting and pointing his finger. She could always tell the shadows from the real thing, thought it was one of hisl best tricks. Del, who had seen it many times, could sometimes tell too.

  'Where do you think you're going, dear one?' the image asked.

  'Nowhere,' she said sullenly.

  'That's true, isn't it? You are not going anywhere. You cannot go anywhere. You remember that, don't you, Rose?'

  'I remember,' she said.

  'Thinking about running away with him? Did your little playacting make you wish it could be real?'

  She just looked at the shadow, which smiled back at her.

  'Did you talk to him about Hilly Vale?' it taunted her. 'Oh, I'm being mean to our pretty little Vermont Rose. I mustn't be mean to someone who has helped me so much.'

  'No, don't be mean,' she said. She was nearly in tears.

  'If your boyfriend escapes from my toy in there, which is really very unlikely, we will have to lead him a dance, won't we? We'll make him choose again. And he will make the wrong choice. Because he will think it is the only choice he can make. And then you will help me, won't you, Rose?'

  'I won't,' she said.

  'Defiance — from someone I have aided so often? Are you telling me that you would like to go back home, little Rose?'

  He was so calm. She knew he would win. Mr. Collins always won. But she shook her head anyhow.

  'Of course, it is an academic question,' the shadow said. 'Because you will always live here with me and be my queen. The darling boy will be found at the bottom of the cliff, along with my nephew, and next summer perhaps there will be another adorable boy. Next summer or in five summers — a boy with strange stirrings in him, a boy who does not know who he is. A few more voices in the tunnels? I shall be in better control next year, I promise you.'