Shadowland

sleep.'

    'Maybe we'll have some fun on the bus going home,' Tom suggested.

    'With Ridpath on the bus? Get serious.' Bobby jammed his hands in his pockets and ostentatiously surveyed the grounds. 'Can you believe this place? Have you ever seen anything more nouveau riche? It makes me sick.'

    'I think it's kind of pretty,' Del said.

    'Well, shit, Florence, why don't you buy it?' Bobby flamed out. 'Give it to somebody for Christmas.'

    'Don't jump down his throat,' Tom said. 'You're just mad because we lost again.'

    'I guess,' Bobby said. Of course he would not apolo­gize. 'I suppose you like losing. Lose a game, horse around on the bus. Right? Get your jollies. Why not get Florence to buy the bus, then we could kick Ridpath off. Jesus.'

Del had begun to look extremely uncomfortable, and said something about getting cold. He obviously intended that all of us start walking again and join the team in the reception room.

    From where we stood, backed by the big trees shielding the lake, we could see across all of the school's grounds to the gymnasium and the other buildings. Most of the varsity players had showered and changed and were walking in small slow-moving groups toward the admin­istration building. It was too dark and they were too far away for us to really see their faces, but we could identify them by their various gaits and postures. Miles Teagarden and Terry Peters slouched along between the two build­ings. Teagarden, who had fumbled, was bent over so far he appeared to be policing the grass. 'Ugh,' Tom said when Skeleton Ridpath lounged through the door of the gym — his was a figure no one could mistake. Skeleton ambled toward the rear door of the administration build­ing. Defeat held no embarrassment for him.

    Then I heard Del, already six or seven feet ahead of us, moan softly: just as if he'd been lightly punched in the gut. The man in the Foreign Intrigue costume was walking, very erect and unselfconsciously, down into one of the sculptured hollows between ourselves and the school. His back toward us, he was moving toward the grandstand and football field. Around him the darkening air was granular, pointillistic. The brim of his hat pulled down, the belt of his coat dangling, the ends swinging.

    'Let's move it, Del,' Tom said.

    But Del stood frozen in position, and so all of us watched the man receding into the hollow.

    'The janitor works late around here,' said Bobby Hollingsworth. 'I hope he breaks his neck.'

    Del held his bandaged hand chest-high, as if flashing a signal or warding off a blow.

    'I don't see the point of watching the janitor,' Morris Fielding said. 'I'm getting cold too.'

    'No, he's a Ventnor parent,' said Bob Sherman. 'Those coats cost about two hundred bucks.'

    'See you there,' Morris said, and resolutely turned his back and set off down the path.

    'Two hundred bucks for a coat,' Sherman mused.

    By now all of us were watching the retreating figure as if mesmerized. The ends of his wide belt swung, the tails of the coat billowed. The dark air glimmered around him and seemed to melt into his clothing. For the second time that day, I fantasized that I was seeing not an ordinary mortal but a figure from the world of Romance.

    He disappeared around the side of the grandstand.

    'Oh, let's move,' Tom said. 'Maybe we can catch up with Morris.'

    More than a hundred yards away, Skeleton Ridpath let out a wild shriek — a sound not of terror but of some terrible consummation. I looked over at him and saw his gaunt arms flung up above his head, his body twitching in a grotesque jig. He was positively dancing. Then I faintly heard the beating of wings, and glanced back over my shoulder to see a huge bird lifting itself up over the grandstand.

    'Yeah, let's go,' Del said in an utterly toneless voice. He yanked at Tom's arm and pulled him down the path in the direction Morris Fielding had gone.

One more event of that day must be recorded. When we joined the tea, the reception room was much more crowded than it had been during the mixer. Ventnor fathers leaned patronizingly toward men in wrinkled gabardine jackets who were surely Ventnor leathers, Ventnor mothers poured lemon tea from the Ventnor silver to other Ventnor mothers. They all looked under­standably smug. I was given a cup of the delicate tea by a woman with the elastic, self-aware beauty of a model and went to stand beside Dave Brick. He too had never left the bench. 'I just worked it out,' Brick said, flipping his slide rule into its holster. 'Two-point-three-six of our school would fit into what they've got here. I'm talking about land mass.' 'Terrific,' I said. Skeleton Ridpath drifted past holding a cup of tea in a swimming saucer. He looked crazy enough to levitate. Brick and I backed away, but Skeleton was not paying attention to us. He went a few paces toward one wall, then moonily shifted off at an angle. His mousy hair was still slicked down from the shower. I saw Ventnor parents stare at him, then look quickly away. Skeleton drifted up to the shelves of things where he had browsed before the games. Dave Brick and I, not believing, saw him lift a small glass object from a shelf and slide it in his pocket.

27

Tom's Room

Here there were no star charts, skulls, exotic fish; no photographs of magicians, only of Tom and his father on horseback, sitting in a rowboat with fishing poles, toting shotguns across a Montana field. The only other, picture was a reproduction of one of the Blue Period Picasso's sad-faced acrobats. One side of the room held a built-in desk and a rank of shelves: after returning from Ventnor, both boys had eaten dinner with Tom's parents and then gone into the bedroom to study.

    At ten-thirty Del said his eyes hurt and closed his books and flopped down onto the guest bed.

    'You're going to flunk, math.'

    'I don't care.' He burrowed deeper into the white pillowcase. 'I'm not like Dave Brick.'

    'Well, if you don't care, then I don't either. But the exams start on Wednesday.' Tom looked interrogatively over his shoulder, but his friend's small form still lay face down on the guest bed. Suffering seemed to come from him in waves; for a second this emotion pouring from his friend confused itself in Tom's mind with bereavement, and he thought that he would be unable to keep from crying. Hartley Flanagan had gone through dinner like a man concentrating on a mountain several miles off. There had been another long session with his doctor that afternoon. All Tom's instincts told him that soon his mother or his father would say that they had to have a long talk: after the talk, nothing would remain un­changed. Tom stared at the wall before him, almost seeing his own face looking back from the cream-painted plaster, a face about to record an alteration, a shock; he saw himself ten, twenty years hence, as isolated as Skeleton Ridpath.

    As isolated as Del — that suddenly came to him.

    He turned around, pushing his books back with his elbows. 'Don't you think you ought to talk about it?'

    Del relaxed slightly. 'I don't know.'

    'I damn near bit my tongue in half on the bus, but I knew you wouldn't want to talk there.'

    Del shook his head.

    'And we couldn't talk during dinner.'

    'No.' He rolled over and looked up at Tom.

    'Well, we've been sitting in here for three hours. You read some of those pages four times. You look terrible. I'm so tired I could drop off right here. Isn't it about time?'

    'Time for what?'

    'For you to tell me about that guy.'

    'I don't know anything about him, so I can't.'

    'Come off it. That can't be true.'

    'It is true. Why do you think I'd know anything about him?' Del brought up his knees and dropped his head onto them. To Tom he looked as though he were decreasing in size, knotting himself up into a disappearing bundle.

    'Because . . . ' Tom plunged on, now unsure of him­self. 'Because I think it was that guy you talk about all the time. Your uncle.'

    'Can't be.' Del was still huddling into himself.

    'You say.'