Shadowland

The pistol jumped, but his right hand went with it and clung. The explosion rocked his head: his ears felt as though he had dropped fifty feet in a roller coaster. A bit of the blood-spattered ceiling shredded away. All of the room was covered in gore. Directly opposite him the blown-up photograph of a skull was dappled in blood; gouts and puddles of blood covered the bed and other furniture, blood ran and dripped from the ceiling, which had been covered with photographs of owls. 'Del!' Tom howled, and saw on the floor where he had been about to set his foot a partial upper plate from which a single white tooth protruded like a fencepost.

    'We are over here, Tom,' Collins' voice said from his right. 'I trust you want to save your friend's life.'

    He swung around toward the voice — he heard his breath hissing in his mouth. The gun felt like a barbell. Collins sat in plain view on the owl chair, and Del was on his lap. They too were dappled with red.

    'There's one bullet left,' Tom said, trying to steady the gun on the magician's amused face. Del stared at him without recognition. 'Del, get off his lap.'

    'He can't hear you. He won't, I should say. He's given up. He's gone inside and locked the door. Now, put down the gun.'

    Tom frantically tried to fit his left index finger into the trigger guard.

    'I could melt that gun in your hand in a second,' Collins said. 'Or I could kill you by making it explode when you fired. If you had a chance to do it that way, you've lost it. It's time for you to make a sacrifice, Tom. It's time for you to choose. As Speckle John had to choose. The repeat performance isn't over — in fact, it has hardly begun.' Behind him Tom gradually took in an­other blown-up photograph: Rose Armstrong dressed as a porcelain shepherdess, her high-browed face not a con­temporary, not an American face at all, but of another century and place.

    Tom lowered the gun.

    'To save my nephew's life, will you sacrifice the pistol? Del is in traumatic shock, I must point out. He might die anyhow. But if you do not sacrifice the gun, I will stop his heart. You ought to know that I can do that.'

    'Then why don't you just stop mine?'

    'Because then I would cheat myself out of the perfor­mance. But you have to decide.' He smiled again. 'I will give you yet another choice. The choice of giving up your song. Leave Del. Leave Rose — you will have to do that anyhow. And leave magic. Let me have your gifts. You could just walk out of Shadowland, and be precisely the boy you thought you were when you came here.' Collins spread and lifted his hands: simple. 'That is the best choice I can give you. Sacrifice your song, and use your legs to depart Shadowland for good.'

    'Del dies, and you keep Rose here. I leave unharmed, if I can believe you.'

    Del sagged on the magician's lap. His face was gray, and he scarcely seemed to be breathing.

    'And the other choice?'

    'You throw away the gun. Your song against mine. The performance continues until Shadowland has an undisputed master, the new king or the old. What do you say, boy?'

    Take my magic and let me out of here, Tom shouted inside himself. He heard movement behind him and snapped his head sideways. Rose stood in the open door. Knives. How often, how many nights, had she been in this room where the owls screamed down from the ceiling? She silently pleaded with him, but she could have been pleading for either choice.

    'Song,' Tom said, and flipped the pistol toward the smeared bed. From the side of his eye he saw Rose slipping back out the door. The pistol landed with a squishing sound far out of his reach, and Tom's viscera curled around a block of ice. I fooled you, I fooled you; Lonnie Donegan's mocking chant to the inspectors on the Rock Island line went through him like a spear, and he knew that he had been forced, had forced himself back into the magician's game.

    'Good. But of course you remember the salient point about wizards,' Collins said.

    I fooled you, I fooled you . . . got all pig iron!

'They get the house odds — they use their own decks. You should have walked, child.' Collins stood up, his eyes flashed, and the owl chair was empty.

    A dazed bird fluttered along the floor, its wing feathers painting the blood into delicate Japanese calligraphy.

21

Tom knew. Collins had carefully prepared him to know: he had foretold it, planted the seeds of this final betrayal in his mind. They once were birds, but were tricked by a great wizard, and now they are still trying to sing and still trying to fly. This dazed sparrow scrawling Japanese letters with Mr. Feet's blood on the polished wooden floor was trying to stand and move like a boy so that it could shutter up its mind again and be safe. The sparrow cheeped, and Tom knew that Del was screaming. In horror Tom watched as it fell on its side and fixed him with an eye like a madman's: a panicked black pebble.

    The fairy tales had blown into each other and got mixed up, so that the old king had a wolfs head under his crown, and the young prince in love with the maiden fluttered and gasped in a sparrow's body, and Little Red Riding Hood walked forever on knives and sword blades, and the wise magician who enters at the end to set everything right was only a fifteen-year-old boy kneeling on bloodied floorboards and reaching for the transformed body of his closest friend.

    'I can't change him back, Rose!' he wailed. The sparrow-heart beat, a thousand times faster than his own, against the tips of his fingers.

    'I don't know how to change him back!' He heard his voice as he had when the nails had gone in, sailing up high enough to freeze. The sparrow quivered in his hands. A wing feebly struck his thumb.

    'Then you'll have to make Mr. Collins change him back,' Rose said. She stood just inside the door, looking down at Tom with the stunned bird in his wrapped hands. 'Make him do it,' and her voice was fierce.

22

He came out of the bedroom holding Del as he had held the gun, and Coleman Collins was lounging against the top of the banister. 'Welcome to the Wood Green Empire,' the magician said. 'Front-row seats? Excel­lent.'

    'Change him back,' Tom said.

    'Sorry, no refunds, no exchanges. You'll have to take your seats now.'

    'That's not him,' Rose said at his shoulder. 'It's a shadow.'

    'Oh, you told on me,' the image said, and flickered away into dozens of dancing flames.

    'welcome to the wood green empire!' boomed the metallic voice. The bird trembled in Tom's hands, cheeping frantically, twisting its neck to look up into his face. The flames died before they fell, like fireworks, leaving them in darkness. Down the hall to Tom's side, moonlight cast panels of silver on the floor and folded halfway up the wall; otherwise Shadowland was as dark as the tunnels beneath the summerhouse.

    Del went utterly still in his hands, and Tom feared that he had died. Then he felt a high regular throb beneath his fingers, the sparrow's heart thrilling away, and he opened his shirt and tenderly put Del next to his skin. He buttoned his shirt up halfway. Feathers rustled against his chest.

    Outside, the fireworks began again with a thumping explosion that rattled the windows down the hall and sent shooting rays of red and blue across the silvery pane of windows. Soft against his skin, Del made almost a human cry.

    A beam of light at the bottom of the stairs: Herbie Butter outlined in light, dressed in his black tails, red wig, and white face; 'We have a volunteer, ladies and gentle­men — the brave Tommy Flanagan, all the way from sunny Arizona in the United States of America! Are you ready, Tommy? Can you sing for us?'

    'Change him back!' Tom shouted, and Herbie Butter rolled over in a backflip and landed on his feet, an index finger pointed to the sky.

    'Change? Easier said than done, boy — but that's magic for you.' He too dissolved into dancing, lilting flames.

    'THE OLD KING! THE ONLY KING!'

    Tom felt his way down the stairs in the dark.

    . . . Philly's wife looks a little peaked this summer, Nick . . .

    . . . what you get from being in two places at once . . .

Voices from the tunnels, come out to play in the dark.

    And voices from the other place that had been Shadowland.