Shadowland

burdock: it needed Brother Robert's talents.

    And here, finally, was the loop of a drive.

    I parked my car and walked down. It had once been paved. Now weeds and grass had pushed aside and broken the asphalt all the way to the gates. Someone, probably a party of teenagers, had broken them open, and they had rusted over the years. Vines trailed through the bars. The wall around Shadowland still stood, though, and other vines twisted happily through the brick, clumping and blossoming where the top layer had broken off. The barbed wire was long gone — I supposed some thrifty fanner had rolled it up and trucked it off.

    I walked down the broken drive, slipping a little on the loose stones, wondering when I would see the house. I left the treacherous drive and walked into tall grass. It was a lie, I saw — all of it a beautiful and whopping lie. There was no house. There never had been.

    Then my foot connected with a brick, and I realized with a great thumping shock that I was actually standing in the house. Mossy bricks lay scattered randomly through the grass; after a little more prowling, I came across the ruin of a brick fireplace tipped over on its side, its opening half-filled with dirt and rubble. O. Henry and Snickers wrappers; a beer bottle poking out through weeds; an old comic book gone to pulp. I was standing in Shadowland's basement, where everything had fallen. Now it was just a little dip in the land — it could have been a glacial hollow. I bent down and picked up a brick and brushed off ants. It was discolored: fire-blackened.

    But the bluff was still there, and so was the lake. I went through the tall grass, pursued by the eerie feeling that I was walking with Tom Flanagan and Rose Armstrong as they fled the burning house, and came up out of the hollow. The land fell away spectacularly for a hundred yards or more, dropping down a thickly overgrown cliff. The lake winked back sunlight. Tom's woods blanketed the sides. I'd had no idea of the scale, that it was all so large and the woods so extensive — they looked forbid­dingly thick — and the lake so long. It must have been nearly a mile across.

    Rose Armstrong, I thought, and then I saw a tiny strip of gold at the lake's far end and my heart stopped. I nearly fell down the bluff. At that moment I believed everything Tom had said to me.

    I could almost see them there, Tom and his Rose, curled together on the tiny strip of sand beside a book and a glass bird; could almost see her whispering whatever she had whispered into his ear before she . . . what? Slipped into the water and left all that was human behind her, welded into Tom Flanagan's memory?

    A warm wind came from nowhere: mustard flower; gin; cigar smoke. I could have told myself that I caught all those odors. The surface of the lake darkened and belled under the shadow of a cloud, and I turned back to walk across the ruins of Shadowland to my car.