Shadowland

    Over or under a ripple of laughter from outside, he heard Del very quietly saying, 'Come in.' Del too was nearly whispering, but the quiet in his voice was that of effort — of concentration and force.

    Tom turned the handle and gently pushed the door. The room was so dark as to be nearly black, and Tom . again had the sense of being drawn into that separate world which was Del's — of stepping from sunlight and Arizona directly into mystery.

    'Del?'

    'In.'

Tom walked slowly into the darkness. His first glance around the room showed him only the big fish tank before drawn curtains, the looming faces of the magicians up on a shadowy wall. He saw that it was nearly twice the size of Del's old room; looking to the right, he saw a jumble of boxes and wooden things that must have been the kit. He turned his head to the left and saw shadowy space.

    'Look,' Del commanded from the center of the shadows.

    'Hey,' Tom said, for at first he could see only the outline of a bed.

    Then he could not say anything, for he had suddenly seen Del's rigid body, and it was suspended in the empty air four feet above the bed. Del snapped his head sideways. He was grinning like a shark.

    Tom could not imagine what expression his own face wore, but it sent Del off into gleeful laughter. Laughing, he descended, first falling nearly a foot and stopping sharply, as if he had hit a ledge, then slipping down more slowly another eighteen inches. Tom held out a hand as if to catch him, but was not capable of moving nearer. Del's laughter bubbled up again; his feet dropped onto the bed, and the rest of his body followed.

    Tom watched, so scared he thought he might faint or vomit, as Del's face drew back into itself and his body lifted up off the bed again and hovered a handbreadth above it.

    'Now, that's how we end our magic show,' Del managed to say, and this time could stay up while he laughed.

16

The next day was Sunday,' Tom said to me in the Zanzibar, the third time I went there to talk to him, 'and I was still dazed. What had really struck me was the utter wrongness of it. Because I knew it was real. That little son of a bitch was actually levitating. It was real magic, and it seemed like the moment everything, all the craziness, had been leading to, the birds and the weird visions and everything else. I felt sick to my stomach. I was being frog­marched into magic, and I scarcely knew what was true and what was false anymore.

    'I went outside. Sparky, my dog, woke up and started dancing around, asking me to throw his disgusting old tennis ball. I picked up the soggy ball and pegged it toward the fence. Sparky tore after it. Just then, before Sparky got to the ball, the air started to go funny — dark and grainy, like an old photograph. Sparky spun around and looked around; he whimpered. He started to race back toward the kitchen door. His ears were all flattened out — I remember seeing that, and I remember being relieved: I wasn't crazy, it was actually happening.

    'That fairy-tale house was in front of me, where the fence should have been, that house with the little brown door and the trees all around it and the thatched roof. Through one of the little windows beside the door I could see the old man looking at me, running his hands through his beard. I went up the path. Now, now, now, I thought — now I can, find out. I don't know what I thought I was going to discover, but I had that feeling. The old man, the wizard, if that's what he was, was going to clear everything up for me. When I reached his door, I looked through the window again, and got a shock. He looked terrible — as sick and scared as I had been that morning. On his face these feelings looked frighteningly out of place — you expected a face like that to be incapable of showing such things. He backed away from the window. I pushed the door open.

    'The house was completely black. In midair, a candle was burning — it must have been on the mantel, but it didn't illuminate anything around it, just shone out. Like a cat's eye.

    'The door banged shut behind me. I turned around to get out, pretty badly scared, but I couldn't see the door. Then I heard something coming toward me, and I turned back around to face it.

    'And then I almost dropped dead of fright. I realized that it wasn't just one thing, it was a lot of things, and they were sick somehow, sick and wrong. . . it could have been four or five, it could have been a hundred. I couldn't tell. But I knew they were from him, that man I had seen or dreamed of seeing on Mesa Lane on the day before school started. It was like that whole world I had sensed before, in the house, the magic world, had been warped into evil.

    'A face flickered in front of me, grinning like a devil, and then other faces jumped into life around it — cackling and grinning, the ugliest faces I had ever seen. They were there only for a moment; then they disappeared.

    'Behind the candle there was now a spot of brightness. In the circle of light I saw the shadow of a pair of hands making a dog's head. The ears lifted. The tongue lolled. Shadow play, that's called: making pictures with your hands' shadows. I'd seen it before, of course, but never done as well — those fingers seemed almost triple-jointed — and never so that it seemed sinister. The dog's face turned toward me. Now, that's impossible in shadow play, you know. But I could see the ears sticking up, and the neck. Then the fingers parted to let the eyes shine through. That was as bad as the faces. The eyes were just empty light, and they looked completely malevolent. It wasn't a dog, I knew. It was a wolfs head.

    'Then the eyes widened out, the hands fluttered and folded and melted together into a bird. A bird with huge wings and a tearing beak.

    'It flew straight toward me, still in its circle of light, claws out — not hands, a shadow-bird. I ducked down, and heard laughter from all over the room.

    'The shadow-bird disappeared into the blackness. I heard it beating away, and turned my head to follow it, and saw another sort of shadow play. A gang of men was kicking a boy, killing him by kicking him to death. They were in a ring around him — I heard them grunting, I heard their feet landing. One of them kicked the boy's head, and I saw blood flying, spattering out. This was taking place in the circle of light, but no fingers could have been making it. The men kicked the boy's body aside, fluttered apart just as if they were hands after all, and reformed as a word: SHADOW. Then another series of letters flew together. LAND. Shadowland. The laughter built up around me, nasty and knowing, and I didn't know if all those twisted faces watching me were laughing because they were warn­ing me away from Shadowland, or because they knew I would identify the dead boy with Del and would know I had to go there.'

    'Had to?' I asked.

    'Had to,' Tom said.

17

On the morning of the day we were to have the club performances, I arrived at school an hour early: my father, who drove me in, had a seven-thirty appointment in the center of town. He dropped me off across the street from the Upper School and I crossed the street and went up the steps. The front door was locked. I peered in through the leaded glass and saw an empty, murky entry, stairs ascending to the library in darkness.

    For a short time I sat on the steps in the early sun, waiting for the janitor or one of the teachers to arrive and let me in. Then I got bored and went back down the steps to the sidewalk. When I looked back, the school had changed; seeing it empty, I saw it anew. Carson looked peaceful, well-ordered, and at one remove from the rest of the world, like a monastery. It looked beautiful. Under the slanting light, Carson was a place where nothing could ever go wrong.

    Down the street, I slipped through the bars of the gate across the headmaster's private entrance. I moved up the private drive and then stepped onto the grass. From this side I could see only the original old buildings of the Carson School. This view too seemed mysteriously touched by magic. For a second my heart moved, I forgot all the bad things that had happened, and I loved the place.

    Then, after I had moved farther around toward the rear of the building and gone through a gap in the thick hedges, I saw a form lying facedown in the grass beside a briefcase, and knew I was not alone. Cropped head, meaty back straining the fabric of a jacket: it was Dave Brick. My euphoria drained off on the spot. Brick was stretched out disconsolately on the grassy slope where Mr. Robbin had summoned us all to look for the satellite.