Shadowland

    'No, you won't. Follow a path behind the summer house. It leads to a wooden gate.'

    'Clever Rose.' He lay down beside her on the sand, put the book beside him, and set the glass bird on top of it. Then he turned to Rose and took the perfect girl, the magic that seemed no magic but earthly bounty, in his arms.

35

They did not make love. Tom was content to hold her, to feel the petal skin of her shoulders, the curve of her skull beneath his hands. He could have sung like Del, in his friend's last moments, of the perfection of such things. Radiant moonlight, warm sand along his side, Rose's quiet breathing swinging him toward sleep.

    In eternity they were married.

    'Rose?' he muttered, and she made an interrogatory mmm? 'He told me a story — he told a story he said was about you.'

    'Shhh,' she breathed, and put her fingers on his mouth, and he swung all the way into oblivion.

36

Did she say anything before she left? We do not know. She would have spoken to him, I think, whispered a message into his sleeper's ear, but that message would have joined his bloodstream like Del's final song and would have been impossible to reconstruct into ordinary flawed human speech. And again like Del's song, which was an expression of completion and the end of change, it would have spoken of, would have hymned a further and necessary and unforeseen transformation: it is like saying that the message would have been the heartbeat of magic. In his sleep, he heard her go; and heard the rippling of the water.

When he awakened it was to warm cloudless day, the sun already high. He saw that she was gone, and called her name. He called it again.

    Across the lake Shadowland, a smoking hole hi the landscape, fumed like an old pipe.

    'Rose?' he called again, and finally looked at his watch. It was eleven in the morning. 'Rose! Come back!' He stood up, looked into the trees and did not see her, and for a moment was sick with the thought that she had returned to the house.

    But that could not be: the house no longer existed. Rubble would have fallen into the entrance of the tunnel and blocked it off for good. A few boards jutted up, one chimney stood in a blackened column. Everything else was gone. Rose was freed from that.

    As was he. For the first tune he looked at his hands in daylight and saw the round pads of scar tissue.

    He sat down to wait for her. Even then, he knew that if he waited until his beard grew to his waist and men danced on the moon and stars, she would never come back. He waited anyhow. He could not leave.

    Tom waited for her all day. The minutes crawled — he was back, in common time, and no one could fold the hours together like a pack of cards. He watched the lake change color as the sun crossed, changing from deep blue to paler blue to light green and back to blue. In the late afternoon he gently moved the glass sparrow onto the sand and opened the leather-bound book. He read the first words: These are the secret teachings of Jesus the son of God, as told by him to his twin, Judas Thomas. He closed the book. He remembered what Rose had said to his frantic speculation that they might have to go back through the destroyed house. No you won't. Not: no we won't. She would not go down the path to the gate with him: she would not trek into the village, holding his hand, or stand at his side while they waited for a train.

    Tom waited until the brightness drained from the air. Shadowland still smoldered, and a few sparks drifted down the bluff, falling toward a thin layer of ash the rain would take in the fall. When the falling sparks glowed like tiger's eyes, he stood up.

    He walked toward the water, carrying the glass sparrow and the book. He went to his knees on the damp sand just before the edge of the water. He set down the sparrow and looked at it. At its center hung a deep blue light. He wanted to say something profound, but profundity was beyond him: he wanted to say something emotional, but the emotion itself held his tongue in a vise. 'Here you go,' was what came out of him. He gave the sparrow a push into the water. It glided an inch or so along the bottom, then a ripple passed over it on the surface of the lake and the sparrow seemed to move against the motion of the ripple, going deeper into the lake. The blue in the glass was identical to the blue of the water. Another unseen ripple took it with it, and the sparrow went — flew — so far ahead under the water he could not see it.

    Tom stood up, pushed the book into his belt, and walked back across the beach. Soon he was parting the delicate brush.

The End of the Century

is in Sight

The end of the century is in sight and Tom Flanagan's story was about events more than twenty years back in time. I listened to it here and there about the world, and wondered what sort of story it was and how much of it was invention. I also constantly wondered about what Tom had been reading. His imagination had surely concocted those radical illusions — the speeding of time, the transfor­mations and the sudden dislocations of space, also the people with animal faces, which were straight from the works of symbolist painters like Puvis de Chavannes — and I thought that he had been steeping himself in lurid and fantastic novels. He had wanted to give me good value.

    The idea that Laker Broome had been a minor devil was a ripe example of this. It was true that I, like all the new boys, had assumed he had been at Carson for years. Yet Broome had been the Carson headmaster for our freshman year only — when we returned in September a capable man named Philip Hagen had his job, and we assumed that Broome's breakdown and his conduct dur­ing the fire had blessedly got him out of the way.

    1 wrote to the Association of Secondary School Head­masters, and found that they had no information about Laker Broome. He was not in their files. One night, still trying to find what had become him, I called up Fitz- Hallan and asked him if he remembered what had happened to Broome. Fitz-Hallan thought he had man­aged to get a post at . . . He named a school as obscure as Carson. When I wrote to the school, I got back a letter saying that they had had the same headmaster from 1955 to 1970, and that no one named Laker Broome had ever been on their staff. However, a penciled note at the bottom said that a Carl Broome had come to them in 1959 as a Latin teacher and had stayed only one year; might I have the wrong name? Why was Carl Broome released after a year? I wrote back on a long shot, but was informed that such matters 'are a part of the confidence which any school of repute must retain with respect to former employees.' This was very fishy — didn't they give recommendations? — but it was clear that they did not wish to tell me what I wanted to know; and anyhow, I was fairly certain that Laker was not Carl Broome, so there was no point in continuing. Lake the Snake had lost his job and disappeared. That was all I knew about him.

    Tom's story had abandoned Steven Ridpath as he (presumably) crept out the front door and wriggled through the bars of the gate, and I imagined that a conversation with Ridpath would immediately tell me how much of Tom's story had been fiction. Here I had much more luck than with Laker Broome. Skeleton had gone to Clemson, and universities keep wonderful rec­ords. The Alumni Office told me that one Ridpath, Steven, had graduated near the bottom of his class in 1963. From there he had gone to a theological college in Kentucky.

    A theological college? A Kentucky Bible school?

    It seemed impossible, but it was true — the Headley Theological Institute in Frankfort told me that Mr. Ridpath had attended from 1963 to 1964, when he had converted to Catholicism and left them for a seminary in Lexington. The Lexington seminary, run by an order of monks, eventually wrote me that Steven Ridpath had become Brother Robert, and had been placed in a monastery near Coalville, Kentucky.

    I drove from Connecticut down to Coalville to see if he would talk to me.

    Coalville was a run — down hamlet — no other word would fit — of three hundred people. Unhappy buildings sat in an unhappier landscape. Wherever a stand of trees grew, behind it was a wasteland of slag heaps and abandoned mining buildings. There was a motel, but I was the only guest. I sent a note to the monastery. Would Brother Robert agree to discuss with me whatever had led him to this unlikely destination? I let the