by Peter Straub
'I hate the tunnels,' Rose said.
'Better control next year,' the shadow promised, fading away. 'And more control over you, dear one. . . . '
16
'Hang on to him, Mr. Peet,' the magician said. 'Hold him tightly, and very soon we will know if we will need him to play his part. Need I say that your men did not play theirs very well?'
'If we're up here by ourselves, except for him' — Mr. Peet yanked savagely at Del's hair with his free hand — 'except for this little shit, that is, do you have to call me by that name?' Mr. Peet was actually a glasshouse marine named Floyd Inbush, who had earned a dishonorable discharge from Korea for removing the ears of a Korean: a South Korean. In his civilian life, Inbush had spent five years in Joliet state prison for assault with a deadly weapon. This 'Mr. Peet' business was getting on his nerves, like his employer's references to the failure of the men he had recruited.
'While you are in this house or on these grounds, you are Mr. Peet,' the magician said. 'You understood our terms when I hired you.'
'I understood, did I?' Inbush growled. 'I didn't understand a lot about this lousy job, and you know I didn't. Take a look at this kid. Is that what we're supposed to be guarding you against?' He jerked Del back and forth by the hair, and Del's limbs moved like a marionette's. His eyes were wide and glazed, his face a sickly gray color under the natural olive cast. Inbush had seen a dozen men go that toadstool color when they had realized that their lives were going to be taken.
'His friend acquitted himself very well against six adult men,' Collins said.
'He was armed,' Inbush shouted. 'Arm a baby, he's as good as a combat soldier. Goddammit, if he's armed he is a combat soldier.'
'I must conclude you are inadequate for the job I hired you to do.'.
'You calling me inadequate, you old juicer?' Inbush took a step toward Collins, who was sitting in the owl chair and regarding him in a detached but regretful manner.
'I must also conclude that you would be happier leaving my employ.'
'Damn right I would. Three of my men are dead — two of 'em ran off, the chickenhearted scum — and you want me to guard you against this little zombie?' Another savage shake for Del. 'I'm ready to go right now.'
'And so you will, Mr. Peet. You have definitely outlived your usefulness.'
'Hold on. You looked pretty good when we dug for that badger, I'll say that for you, you're in good shape for your age, but I can take you. I can take you good. I'm walking out of here.'
'You are an offense, Mr. Peet.' Collins sat up straight in the owl chair. 'You are going to leave my way. Watch this, nephew.'
Del whimpered as Inbush cast him away and began to move toward Collins.
'Watch carefully,' Collins said, and closed his eyes. A shadow line of black appeared around him, outlining him for a second. Inbush stopped moving. A line of red joined the black, and both lines became a single thick line of vibrant blue.
Inbush screamed.
Collins' aura blazed for a moment. Inbush's scream went up an octave in pitch, and the man's hands flew to his scalp. A smell like gunpowder invaded the room, and Floyd Inbush blew up as if there had been a bomb in his guts.
Both the old man and the boy were splashed with red. A wad of something that looked like pink dog food struck Del's chest with the force of a line drive and adhered wetly to his shirt. Del slowly looked down at it, and his mouth fell open and his eyes shuttered and his ears sealed. Del was safe: he stood in the bloody room and he heard nothing and he saw nothing.
17
Tom is looking into Skeleton's blank shining eyes. In part because of the mad babble coming from Skeleton's molten mind, in part because he can see Skeleton's history as clearly as if it were a movie playing in those dead eyes, he knows Skeleton thoroughly — knows him too well. He sees Chester Ridpath walloping young Skeleton, sees spittle flying from the coach's mouth, hears his curses. He sees Skeleton's hands as if they were his own, opening the lid of the Carson piano as the glass owl rattles itself against the wood; sees the pictures going up, one by one, onto the walls and ceiling.
Skeleton's thumbs are pushing into his windpipe; Skeleton is drooling and humming to himself.
I was in your room, Tom thinks, and the pressure of the thumbs miraculously eases a bit.
Skeleton, I was in your room: I saw the owl at the window: and he does see it, he hears it battering the glass, whapping its great wings. Then another picture takes hold of his mind, and he says to Skeleton: I rode those wings and heard the voice.
Do you hear me in there, Skeleton?
Beneath the lunatic flood of gibberish, there is a small voice which says: Yes. The Collector's hands hang loosely on Tom's neck now; the Collector's torched — down elemental face is frozen like paint on & wall.
I stole the owl, Tom thinks into Skeleton's rushing brain. I set fire to the field house. I was the one you wanted, Skeleton. Not him. Not Del. Tom Flanagan.
'Flanagini fire,' the Collector whispered.
Flanagini fire — you tied into my battery, Skeleton, before I even knew I had it. Tom hates these thoughts, they violate everything he once had known about himself, everything he had wished to be. My fire, my room, Skeleton: I wasn't just in your room, I was your room.
I was your room. This is the worst thought of all, worse even than the certainty that he alone had seen Skeleton hanging like a spider from the auditorium ceiling because at that moment Skeleton was a broken-away and unwanted piece of himself: that Skeleton's cave of horrors, lovingly clipped from magazines, was a depiction of some boarded-off area of his mind, the area to which Coleman Collins had thrown open the gates in his own soul in the early 1920's.
I am your room, he sends into Skeleton's mind, talcing responsibility for it all. His mind and Skeleton's are nearly one — your room is me — and Tom knows with true and certain finality that in saying this he has finally become a magician: not just a low-grade psychic, but a magician, the black figure with a sword. He has welcomed himself.
After that, after he has sickened himself, he knows how to free Skeleton Ridpath from the Collector. He looks into the grotesque parody of magic before him and sees a high-school boy way down there, with wax Dracula teeth in his mouth and a frightwig on his close-cut hair; a high-school boy who had wanted in the most pathetic way to be scary; and he reaches for him. Come on out, Skeleton, he says. You can come out now. Get out of the Jar. There is a little tug at his mind, a tug like a headache: it will work.
Tom reaches inside, extending a long probe, and this time Skeleton twines around it. OUT! Tom pulls back, and it is like trying to pull a swordfish out of the ocean; gravity tries to drag him down in there with Skeleton, he feels he is bench-pressing twice his own weight. OUT!! He nearly blacks out with the effort of pulling.
The snap of release knocks him backward, and a hot wind blasts him against the wall. A limp thing like an upright sack is before him; beside it stands a tall thin boy with purple-black eyes. The sack flutters down, and a moment later the thin boy collapses.
Tom goes to his knees. He glances at the Collector just to see what it is when it is empty. A rubbery face, a thing of cloth and wire. Beside it, Skeleton is moving his fingers like an infant, his face drenched with sweat. His eyes are shut. Skeleton groans. 'Flanagini. Uh. Fire,' he says.
'That's all over,' Tom says, bending over. The odors of an unwashed and unhealthy body are very strong. Skeleton is wearing filthy jeans and a T-shirt which is oddly scorched. 'Do you understand me, Ridpath? It's over. You're free.'
'Um,' Skeleton says into the carpet.
'Can you move?'
Skeleton opens his bloodshot eyes. 'Flanagan?'
'Yeah.'
Skeleton's face scrunches up. 'I met him,' he says. 'I did. I finally met him.'
'Can you move? You're going to have to get out of this house.'
'What house?' Skeleton asks, and his eyes look normal for the first time — eyes the color of thin mud in a roadside ditch. Tom
does not want to touch him.
So he forces himself to touch him. He shakes a shoulder that feels like putty covered with grease. 'It's not important for you anymore. Just get up and get out. You'll find the door. Go up the driveway, slide through the bars, and turn left. We're in Vermont. A town called Hilly Vale is about an hour's walk away.'
'You're like him, aren't you?' Skeleton is trying to get up on his hands and knees, and he is wobbly as a colt, but he makes it. 'You don't have to answer. I know.'
Tom looks at the bruised hateful face and sees — this is a shock! — repugnance equal to his own. Skeleton spits at him. Yellow phlegm slides across Tom's jaw. 'You're like him,' Skeleton says.
Tom flicks the wet gobbet off his chin. 'Get out, Skeleton. Otherwise he'll kill you.' A crazy voice in his own mind, wholly his, is clamoring that he use his powers to pick Skeleton up and throw him against the wall, break his bones, grind him to dust . . . he sees the aerial photograph of Carson School crayoned over with red childish flames.
Skeleton looks into Tom's face and shudders backward, banging into the first row of seats. 'Get out,' Tom says, and Skeleton goes unsteadily toward the door. Tom's hands are burning weights.
18
Applause, gentlemen? But the figures in the mural had frozen into place again. Even the Collector was back on the wall of the little theater, staring toward Tom as if still hungry for him. No need for that anymore: you've eaten me already. Tom felt again the terrible gravitational pull inside the Collector. If he had been a shade weaker, he would be in there now, sharing eternity with Skeleton Ridpath, their minds a couple of hundred-watt bulbs.
He went to the stage, and did not have the strength to pull himself up onto it. 'Rose?' She did not answer. 'Rose?' Tom walked as quickly as he could to the side of the stage and trudged up the little flight of steps. Behind the curtain he was in an underwater world. Dim rosy light: heaps of things like banks of coral, shining from inexplicable edges and corners, as if fireflies nested on them. A fanned-out deck of cards on the floor showed a devil popping up and grinning at him. Do you like the low road, my boy? One of the undersea fireflies was light glinting from the top of a guillotine blade. 'Rose.' A table had been knocked on its side and lay with its legs straight out like a dead animal. He moved past and saw the stage door.
She was in the dark corridor, leaning against the wall. Tom came quietly out of the stage door and saw her for a long moment before she noticed him: she was forlorn in her outdated green dress, like a little girl abandoned at a birthday party, and for an instant it seemed to him that she too had come up against what she was, some Skeleton's room of her own. Then she recorded that someone else was in the corridor, and she jerked around to face him. Her face instantly recorded disbelieving joy. 'You did it,' she said quietly, but her voice rang like a bell.
Tom nodded. 'Are you all right?'
'I'm fine now,' Rose answered. 'As long as I can see you, I'm fine.' There it was again — that flicker of kinship, of brotherhood in unhappy self-knowledge.
'Why are you looking at me like that?' she asked. It occurred to Tom that he could probe her mind as he had the Collector's — just send a little question mark into her and see what that kinship was.
He almost did it: started to do it, in fact, but something made him stop as soon as he had begun. Not just the certainty that to do so was like raiding a friend's desk to read his mail; but the uncanny feeling even the delicate, feathery first touch had given him, a sense of airlessness, of suffocation, of being in an alien place. His mind made a sudden shocked withdrawal, having touched for the briefest moment a world in which it knows no landmarks and is queerly cold and lost.
'Del is upstairs. With him,' Rose said.
For a moment a sick, scared worry passed between them, perfectly shared, as if they each knew what the other was.
'Something happened to you — while I was in there,' Tom suddenly knew; and knew he should have seen it from the first. 'What was it?'
'Mr. Collins was here — not really him, one of his shadows. Like we saw in the windows. He talked to me.' Rose tilted her head bravely back. 'He said I could never leave him.'
'Is he going, to hurt Del?'
Rose blinked. 'Not until you make him.'
'I'm getting that gun I dropped,' Tom said, and began to go down the corridor. 'I'm not going to give him a chance to hurt Del.'
He had gone only a short way down the dark corridor when she came up beside him and wedged a supporting hand under his arm.
19
The patio lights limned two vague heaps out on the side lawn, and Tom let Rose guide him in that direction. The night had deepened while they had been in the house, and stars filled the sky, gleaming like smaller, colder reflections of the myriad lights blazing again in the forest on either side of the lake.
'Can you find it in the dark?' she asked.
'Got to,' he said. He tried to remember where he had been when he had dropped it. Had it been before he had gone toward Pease and the ladder, or had he carried the gun for a while? He saw himself dropping the gun, saw it fire into the grass, flipping over with the force of the recoil.
'Stop, Rose,' he said. 'I was about here. I stood up somewhere around here. I never got very far from the stones.' He saw it all rolling on before him, Del with his bloody face, the knot of men going seriously about their business, Snail with his delicate look of worry walking forward right into the bullet. He looked down and did not see the gun, and panic started up in him again. He whispered, 'I don't see it! I don't see it!'
'Let's go ahead a little bit,' Rose said.
They went five feet forward.
'No, this is too far,' Tom said, seeing Snail's body lying slantwise on the grass. Snail looked like an exhibit in a wax museum. The other body, Thorn's, was a surprising way off.
'Did Snail get that close to you?' Rose asked.
'I don't think . . . I don't know.' Again he saw Snail calmly coming for him, keeping his almost kindly eyes on Tom, that little wrinkle dividing his forehead.
Tom stepped backward, remembering how they had stood. He moved a foot sideways and when he looked down he saw the gun black against the near — black of the grass. He went to his knees and collected it up with both hands. The barrel was still warm. He stood up and displayed it like an offering. 'Two bullets left,' he said. 'I'm going to shoot his eyes out.'
When he looked at Rose he saw only a fuzzy aureole of hair outlined by the patio lights. 'Help me,' he said. 'He's a fiend, and I'm going to shoot his eyes out.'
He still cradled the pistol in his joined palms. He would be able to lift it in the proper way only once, and manipulate the trigger with his left index finger. Then he would shoot the magician's eyes out.
Rose helped him toward the patio, then across it. They came into the living room, which was daubed here and there with Tom's blood. No rush of ecstatic air greeted him, as on the morning after his welcome. Shadowland was waiting, he realized. Shadowland was neutral. He pulled the gun toward his chest. It smelled like explosions and oil-it smelled like a burned trombone. Holding it closer like that helped the ache in his forearms.
'We just go up?' Rose asked. 'We just go up. Very quietly.'
They left the living room and went softly to the big staircase. It rose from gray darkness into dim light. Outside Collins' bedroom, the recessed lights tinted the top of the walls and the swinging doors.
Rose went onto the first step, looked back at him. Hugging the gun into his chest, he nodded, and she went noiselessly up another step. He could do this by himself. Tom put his feet where she had, trying to walk exactly where she had walked — sometime while he had been trying to get his fingers under the gun, Rose had removed her shoes, which she now carried in her left hand. As he set his feet where her bare feet had been, what he still thought of as his new senses sent him the impression of . . . knives. Fire. He looked up, startled, almost feeling sharp points and flames working in his feet, and saw Rose slowly and silently and slowly g
oing up one step after another. Tom moved his foot two inches to the side: mute ordinary carpet. When he moved his foot back again, the impression was still there — knives — but fading. He went farther away from the railing and crept up after her.
She stood on the landing, waiting for him to climb the last tread. Again he had that sense of kinship, as strong as love but different from it, of something in her that was like the magician in him, hidden away. He said I would never leave him. Did he say you would always walk on knives, Rose?
'Oh, Rose,' he whispered.
She shook her head, either telling him to be quiet or that she could not answer the question she knew he was going to ask. Rose looked anxiously at the swinging doors set off the landing; back at him. Keep your mind on the job, Tom. He adjusted the gun in his hand and got it so that the barrel pointed out from his chest, his right hand on the grip, his left supporting it.
Rose gently pushed one half of the swinging doors, and it noiselessly opened. Tom slipped through into darkness, and saw light outlining Collins' bedroom door. It was chinked open, and all he had to do was burst in.
One final adjustment of his hands: he took the whole weight in his right hand, and wedged his finger into the trigger guard.
Just go in and shoot, he told himself. Don't even stop to think. Just push back the trigger. Then it's over.
He gathered himself, consciously made himself still. He raised the gun so he could sight down the barrel when he was in the room. His heartbeat surged and pounded. When he was ready, he stepped forward and kicked open the door and ran into the bedroom.
What he saw stopped him cold. A gigantic blood-smeared skull grinned at him, its mouth the size of a shark's. 'Del!' he screamed, and the barrel of Collins' pistol went wavering blindly as his left index finger involuntarily jerked the trigger back.