Shadowland

— that was what Skeleton knew. Every, leaf, every grain of sand, had a killer in it. If you touched a tree, you could feel a wave of blackness pumping through it, drawn up from the ground and breathed out through the bark.

    And lately, as he worked more and more on his 'things,' as he varnished images of pain and fear onto his walls, he had come closer and closer to that truth. Skeleton had begun to have new ideas about his 'things,' ideas he could scarcely bear to peep at. They were a unity, they were the unity which was Skeleton Ridpath, but there was something more.

    And lately . . .

    lately . . .

    he had, peeping at his new ideas, seen glimpses of their power. A man was showing him how right he was, and how little he still knew. It was as if the man had stepped off his walls, walked out of the 'things' and lifted his broad-brimmed hat from his head to show the face of a beast. The man, who was everywhere and nowhere, in his dreams and hovering just out of sight as he prowled from one room to another, was animal, tree, desert, bird . . . he wore a long belted coat, his hat shaded his face — he was what was real. He spoke to Skeleton when Skeleton thought about him: and what he said was: I have come to save your life. He wanted something of poor Skeleton, his will drove out at poor Skeleton, and poor Skeleton would have cut off all the fingers of one hand for him. He had power to make a king's look feeble. He was like the music at the heart of the music, what the musicians would play if they were twelve feet tall and made of thunder, and rain.

    He is me, Skeleton thought. Me. He grinned up in the darkness at a picture of a giant bird.

18

'Goose Girl'

''There was once an old queen, whose husband had long been dead, and she had a beautiful daughter,'' Mr. Fitz-Hallan read. 'First sentence of the story 'Goose Girl.' What does that tell you the story is going to be about?'

    'The beautiful daughter,' Bobby Hollingsworth said, his arm up in the air.

    'Right. Old queen, dead king, young and beautiful daughter. Shortly to be all alone in the world, we suspect. After all, she's half an orphan already. If this story is typical, soon she's going to be off on some sort of quest — and there it is, in the second sentence. She's sent to marry a prince, far away. What happens to her?'

    'She has a wicked servant who terrorizes her and makes her take her place,' Howie Stern said.

    'Exactly. Remember when we were talking about identity in these stories? Here we are again. The servant girl steals the heroine's identity. The magic talisman, the cloth with three drops of blood, is lost, and the wicked servant gains power over the princess. She takes her clothing and makes, the princess dress in her rags. Clothing can masquerade as identity — it's how we signal who we are. So the servant marries the prince, and the true princess is sent off to work with Conrad, who takes care of the geese. Could this ever really happen?'

    'No,' Bob Sherman said. 'Never. There'd be a million ways you could tell a princess from her servant. They wouldn't talk the same way. They wouldn't even wear the same clothes in the same way.'

    'Lots of little social differentiations,' said Fitz-Hallan. 'Right. But the story says that identity can be stolen from you, and even though you're right, that goes deeper than class. In other stories, men's shadows replace their owners and make the men act like shadows. That's even more absurd, but also more terrifying. If identities can be stolen, someone, even some thing, can steal yours.' He paused to let this sink in. 'How does the beautiful princess become reinstated?'

    Del said, 'The prince's father makes her tell her story to a stove and listens through the stovepipe. Then he finds out who she is.'

    'Yes, but what has made him suspicious?'

    'Falada,' Tom said.

    'Falada. The horse her mother gave her.'

    'It's magic — she's reinstated through magic,' Del said. He was smiling.

    'You'll go far,' Fitz-Hallan said. 'Magic. The bad servant has Falada's head cut off and nailed to a wall, and Conrad, the goose boy, hears her talking to the horse's head and hears the head answer. Oh, poor princess in despair;/ If your dear mother knew,/ Her heart would break in two. The natural world of common sense and social differentiation is set aside, and magic takes charge of things. It speaks in poetry. It alters the world. Remember that first sentence? There was once . . . It doesn't matter what comes after that; when you hear words like that, you know the ordinary rules don't work — animals will talk, people will turn into animals, the world will turn topsy-turvy. But at the end . . . ' He raised his hand.

    'It turns back again,' Del said. 'Magically right.' 'You do put things well sometimes, Nightingale,' Mr. Fitz- Hallan said.

The bell rang; the class ended; I was admiring Mr. Fitz-Hallan's timing when I witnessed something that at first seemed more a part of the world we had been discussing than it did of the world of school. Mr. Fitz-Hallan and the others were picking up their books. I was sitting next to Tom Flanagan, and I heard him utter a little grunt, more of displeasure than of astonishment: I looked, and saw his pencil floating in the air about a foot above his notebook. He grabbed at it and tore it out of its place. I saw (thought I saw) it momentarily resist, as if it were glued to the air. Flanagan blushed and jabbed the pencil in his shirt pocket. When he saw me gaping, he scowled and shrug­ged: What the hell's so funny? I decided that what I had seen had been a pointless but clever mime: he had thrown the pencil up, and I had looked just as it stopped rising and started to fall.

19

Two-thirty, that school night: suddenly and irrevocably awake, Skeleton Ridpath threw back his covers. The house was oppressively hot. Through the side wall he could hear his father snoring: a choked rattling inhalation followed by a long wheezing, grinding, somehow moist noise that made his skin shrink. He grimaced with loathing and switched on the light beside him.

    And nearly shrieked, for directly above him, eight feet from his eyes, was the last image he had seen before being jolted awake — a large gray bird, opening its wings and spreading its talons. No, not quite the image. The bird whose image he had varnished onto his ceiling was an eagle, but the bird which had troubled his sleep was . . . He did not know, but not an eagle. It had been outside the window, battering at the frame with its wings. It had been trying to come in, ordering him to let it enter, and the terror of what was about to happen had jerked him from sleep. The savage bird outside had been making a noise-speaking to him, commanding him — which he now recognized came from his father's awful snoring.

    Calming, letting that other bird diminish in his mind, he took in the comforting matter surrounding the eagle. Rifle barrels, many blood-streaked corpses, a baby hoisted aloft on a spear. These gradually faded into an area dominated by automobiles and household appliances and women's photographs from which he had removed the faces. In their place he had glued animals' masks, foxes' and apes'.

    Different areas of his walls were different 'things,' now gradually melting into one comprehensive 'thing.' He had known it would turn that way — long ago, years ago, when he had given up all his other hobbies and begun putting pictures on his walls, Skeleton had foreseen a day when, guided by a powerful impulse, all the pictures would form a single epic statement.

    He had begun by selecting pictures of the objects he hated, things that represented the Carson way of life: new cars and grotesquely large refrigerators piled with food; manor houses, well-dressed suburban women, football players. Because he hated these things, because his father and his father's colleagues accepted them as values, because they were elements of a world he wished would blow to pieces, they gave him a perverse thrill: hating them, he liked looking at them. Now he cut out every grotesque picture he saw, and welded horrors onto the representations of the suburban life he detested. In some places, four separate layers of photographs had been fixed to the waff. From the old, Bidder 'things' had crawled forth his true imagery. Skeleton knew he was getting better.

    A year ago, he had been delighted by the notion that what he was doing was surrounding his room with himself: so that he stood within it as he stood and revolved within his own mind. When he had come to this thought — eating tasteless meatloaf and averting his head from his father's perpetual monologue about sports — he had twitched so violently that he had knocked his Coke off the table.