Shadowland

    But during the following summer, this vision of his room had been overtaken by a vision even more com­ manding and dangerous. About this he rarely allowed himself to think at length, but the essential element burned in his mind every time he shut the door behind him.

    The room did not open inward, but out.

    It was not a mirror.

    The room was a window.

    It was a casement opening out onto the sky, and showing in fragmented, only gradually revealed form what actually lay outside. Lately the man in the dark coat, a man like the dark kings and wolves scheming at the door in Fitz-Hallan's fairy tales, had been appearing on his walls. When he found the right man (or when the right man found him?), the brim of his hat shading his face and his finger pointing, it would all lock together.

    Skeleton jumped out of bed and began to rustle through the heap of magazines beside his bed.

Tom said: 'You see, there was a mystery in our school, and the end of the mystery was the awful thing that happened when Del and I were doing our magic show. But that wasn't the answer to the mystery, just its conclusion. The answer was at Shadowland; or the answer was Shadowland.

    'Skeleton was having visions of a man in a long coat and hat — the man I had seen in a dream. Of course I didn't know about Skeleton's visions, and it wouldn't have done me any good if I had. You saw what happened that day in Fitz-Hallan's class, when my pencil got stuck somehow in midair — and I could see you decide immediately that your eyes had been fooled somehow. Despite what I had seen myself, I would have decided the same thing. After all, it's always best to look for the most rational explanations for irrational-seeming occurrences. Any magician would tell you that — look at how they universally discount people like Uri Getter.

    'But you saw me blush. Funny things had been happen­ing to me. I hardly had the vocabulary to express them. 'Nightmare' was one way, but that didn't get the at­mosphere. And is there such a thing as a 'daymare'? Anyhow, I never let anybody know about it, not even Del, but queer things were happening to me — some days, it was like I never woke up at all, but went through school and the rest of the day in some sort of dream, full of terrible hints and omens.

    'You want examples? For one thing, sometimes I imagined that birds were looking at me — observing me, keeping track of me. On the walk down to lunch, I'd see a flock of sparrows, and all of them would be looking straight at me. Every one, drilling into me with those quick little eyes. At home, I'd look out of the window in the living room, and a robin on our lawn would swivel its head and stare at me through the glass, just as if it had something to say to me. Now, that's pretty mild. It made me think I might be going nuts, but it was still mild.

    'Other things were less mild. I remember one day a week or two before our nine-week exams, when I went in the front door of the school and almost fainted. Because I didn't see what I knew was there — the steps going up, and the corridor and the library doors. For a second, maybe two or three seconds, I saw what looked like a jungle. The air was hot and very humid. There were more trees than I'd ever seen before in my life, crowded together, leaning this way and that, snaked around with vines. I had the sense of a tremendous energy — as if the whole crowded scene was humming and buzzing away. Then I saw an animal face peering at me through the leaves. I was so scared I almost fell over. And I came out of it. There were the steps, there were the library doors, there was Terry Peters pushing me in the back and ordering me to get a move on.

    'Things like that happened maybe once a month after I made friends with Del. Those were the 'daymares.' But then, my friend, there were the nightmares. I was way ahead of the rest of the school. Every night I had terrible dreams — I was lost in a forest, and animals were trying to hunt me down, or I was floating way up high in the air, knowing I was going to fall. . . but the oddest feeling I had in these dreams, no matter how bad they were, was that I was somehow seeing how things really were. It was like the world had split open, and I was seeing part of the engine of things — or not seeing as much as feeling it there. As scared as I was, there was this funny kind of satisfaction, the satisfaction of knowledge. As if without at all understand­ing it, I was at least seeing how the mystery worked. Suppose the skies opened and you saw a great wheel turning around, the wheel that turns us around the sun — that's the kind of feeling I had.

    'I didn't always have that feeling of mysterious insight, though. In some dreams I saw a black figure coming toward me — gliding toward me, like we were both sus­pended in the air. He held a knife. Or a sword. Something long and dangerous. He glided closer and closer, filling my vision. . . and then he cut off my hands. Or the pain in my hands was so great that it felt like he'd cut them off.'

    I looked at his hands on the bar, at the round pads of scar tissue.

    'We'll get to that,' he said.

20

Over the next few weeks, Skeleton Ridpath seemed to us to skulk backward into himself. His face grew odder, the flabby skin beneath his eyes darkening to a deeper gray. Once, on a Saturday in early November, he jumped out of his car at a stop sign, ran onto the sidewalk outside a candy store on Santa Rosa Boulevard, and slapped Dave Brick hard enough to make him stagger because he had neglected to wear his beanie. But the seniors' minds, like ours, were on other things. The nine-week examinations were coming soon, and these, designed to show students and masters how well we would likely do on the half-term exams in January, were notoriously tough. Also, just a week and a half before the examinations, the JV and varsity football teams were to play their homecoming games against Larch School, our traditional rival. On the evening after the homecoming games the first big dance of the year took place in the field house. In white jackets and beanies, six boys from the freshman class were to wait on the seniors. We were all aware that Skeleton was in danger of failing his exams; some of us vainly hoped that he would flunk out of the school. And all of us who were to serve as waiters at the dance hoped that there was no girl so desperate to attend the Carson homecoming dance that she would go out with Skeleton.

    All of us were united by our loathing for Skeleton Ridpath, and by our fear of him. We thought Tom Flanagan a hero for what he had done during the football game when Ridpath kicked him in the face. That more than anything else demonstrated how events could be magically right. Once during these two or three weeks while Skeleton's attention wandered off into other kinds of unpleasantness, Tom and Bobby Hollingsworth saw him standing in the anteroom to the headmaster's office. He jerked back and out of sight behind the arch, and they assumed he was waiting to be flayed by Lake the Snake; two days later, Tom saw him there again while he was bringing Mr. Weatherbee's attendance forms to the office. This time Skeleton did not jerk back behind the arch, but flapped one bony paw urgently, dictatorially — clear off. Tom turned away from lurking Skeleton in the shadowy arch, and nearly bumped into Bambi Whipple, who carried the mimeographed pile of his nine-weeks exams.

    Later that day we learned, that Bryce Beaver and Harlan Willow had been expelled for smoking in the field-house turrets, and the enigma of Skeleton Ridpath skulking outside of the offices was swallowed by the shocked excitement the expulsions caused. Laker Broome canceled after-school practices to hold a special school meeting; while Mr. Ridpath fumed in the back row at the loss of an hour and a half s preparation for the game, Broome dryly, meticulously said that he wanted to fore­stall gossip by explaining that a 'tragedy' had occurred in the life of the school, that two able boys had disgraced themselves. They might well have ruined their prospects. That this was a tragedy, no one would dispute. But he had no choice: they had given him no choice.

    In his face was no regret, only a tidy satisfaction. The entire school could hear Chester Ridpath loudly coughing from the back of the auditorium, but perhaps only we in the first two rows could see the long creases in Laker Broome's face deepen in self-congratulation.

21

Ridpath made our practices savage and grinding during the four days before the game, running through the same simple plays ten, then a dozen times; in his mind we had become the X's and O's of his diagrams, capable of unending and painless manipulation. Each session ended with three laps of the field, normally punishment for only the worst duffers. But this too was punishment — for the loss from the varsity team of Beaver and Willow, who had been on his first string. From these practices we limped home, bruised from blocking and tackling, nursing bloody noses, too tired even to do homework or watch Jackie Gleason and Art Carney in The Honeymooners.

On the day of the game the football field had been freshly limed, and the yard lines shone chalky white. Under an utterly cloudless sky, in air only beginning to carry autumn's snap, a crowd of parents in crew-neck sweaters and