Shadowland

    'Well, this isn't much like school,' Tom said.

    The steaks were still warm, bloodred in the center and delicately charred on the outside. Other covered dishes concealed a little hill of spinach, mounded mushrooms, trench fries. Tom lifted his glass and sipped: a dusty, stony, slightly grapy flavor, intensely pleasing — the more it sat in his mouth, the more taste it gave him. 'So that's what good wine is like,' he said.

    'That's what Margaux is like anyhow,' said Del, busily chewing. 'He's giving us something good because this is our first night.' A moment later he said, 'He knew. He knew about the candles. I couldn't be sure before. But he knows everything that happened.'

    'Anyhow, your Rose Armstrong will be around,' Tom said, and Del's face flushed with an increase of pleasure. 'This is going to be the perfect summer,' he said.

When they left Del's room to go downstairs, they paused a minute to look out one of the big windows in the hallway. These gave a view of a long expanse of wood; the spotlights or torches illuminated a congregation of branches or slabs of boulder, holes into the wood. Where the wood ended, a black non — thing that must have been the lake began. Tom saw iron railings dripping down a cliff behind the house. Far off in the woods bordering the other side of the lake, similar lights burned — fuzzy as Japanese lanterns. 'Time to get downstairs,' Del said, and moved away from the window. To Tom it looked like the setting for a party yet to begin, full of promises and anticipations. 'Come on,' said Del, eager to be downstairs, and Tom gave it one last look and saw the party's first guest. A wolf, or what looked like a wolf. It came into one of the circles of light, tongue lolling, and stared toward the house. Far off, centered in the light, the wolf seemed staged, posed as for a picture. It seemed like a signpost, a hint. 'Hey!' Tom said.

    'Come on,' Del said from the staircase. 'We have to get to the Little Theater.'

    'Coming,' Tom said. The wolf was gone. But had it been there at all? A wolf, in Vermont?

    Going back down, he noticed that the house was more complicated than it looked. At the top of the staircase an old-fashioned swinging door barred them from a large black space in which Tom made out the shape of a tall door. 'What's back there?'

    'Oh, my uncle's room. We have to get down.'

    They rattled down the stairs and turned back into the body of the original house. They passed a living room where a lamp burned on a table between two couches covered in an unexpectedly feminine fabric, passed the entrance to a galleylike kitchen. Del pushed open another door which Tom had assumed led outside; but it took them into another 'motel' corridor, carpeted dark brown, its ceiling illuminated by indirect lighting. At the beginning of this corridor, another hall jutted off to the rear and ended at a crossbarred wooden door as impres­sive as Laker Broome's. 'And what's back there?'

    'I don't know. He never lets me go in there.'

    Del bustled down the corridor until he came to a black door set in a recess lighted by a single downspot. A brass plate had been screwed into the door just above the boys' heads, but it was blank. Del quickly checked his watch. 'God. A whole minute to spare.'

    Now what? Tom wondered. An office like Lake the Snake's? A concrete-block classroom overlooking Santa Rosa Boulevard?

    But what he saw when Del opened the door was at first a steeply banked jewel-box theater with perhaps fifty seats. Though empty, it still seemed full of life, and a half-second later Tom saw that the walls had been painted with ranks of people in chairs — people with rapt faces, one of them drinking from a cup through a straw, one pawing a box of chocolates. Then there was something grotesque in their midst. . . But Del was pushing him into the first row and turning him around.

    'This is wild,' he said. They faced a tiny stage. A polished table and a Shaker chair stood before brown velvet curtains. He looked quickly over his shoulder to find what had briefly caught his eye, and saw it imme­diately. It was the Collector, black-suited, a few rows back and to the side of the man drinking through a straw: pushing his rapt, greedy face forward, wishing to devour whatever he saw on the tiny stage; a grotesque joke. Then Tom was startled by the thought that the grotesque figure resembled Skeleton Ridpath.

    His eye caught another surprise just as he heard the clicking of a door behind the velvet curtains: a few seats away from the Collector, a group of men with outdated but elegant clothing and neat beards, cigars stuck in their mouths, a group of raffish bucks out on the town . . . Del jabbed him in the ribs, and he snapped his head back just as Cole Collins parted the curtains and sat in the Shaker chair. His handsome, slightly hooded blue eyes were glazed, but his face was pink. Instead of the suit, the magician wore a dark green pullover from the top of which frothed a green-and-red scarf, beautifully fitted to his neck. He smiled, taking in the whole room, and Tom felt the presence of the painted men behind him. The back of his neck prickled.

    'The magician and his audience,' Del's uncle said with the air of one who opens a treasure chest. 'A subject you should consider. What is their relationship? That of an actor and those he seeks to move, to entertain? That of an athlete and those before whom he demonstrates his skill? Not quite, though it has elements of both.' His smile had never left his face. 'An audience always fights a magician, boys. It is never truly on his side. It feels hostility toward him: because it knows that it is being fooled.'

    No, it can't be, Tom thought. They left the train in New York, they are part of some other story. And that awful joke can't have anything to do with Skeleton.

    'The magician must make them relish it. He is the storyteller whose only story is himself, and every man jack in the audience, every drunk, every dolt, every clever skeptic, every doubter, is looking for the chink in his story that he can use to destroy him.'

    Tom forced himself to look straight ahead: he had to keep his neck rigid by willpower. He felt as though Mr. Peet and the others were moving in their seats.

    'The magician is a general with an army full of deserters and traitors. To keep their loyalty, he must inspire and entertain, frighten and cajole, baffle and command. And when he has done that, he can lead them.'

    In the midst of his tension, Tom felt a growing area of tiredness, and realized that the wine and Collins' tirade were making him sleepy.

    The smile was taut now, and directed straight at Tom. 'I am saying that the practice of magic is the courting of self-destruction — that is one of its great secrets. The closer you allow yourself to come to that truth, the greater you may become. Listen: magic is used only to inspire fear and to grant wishes — even those you do not wish to have. In itself it is not important. Enough.'

    He gave Tom that smile like a glare. 'Do you want to learn to fly? Would you like to leave the earth behind, boy?'

    'You called us birds,' Tom said. And thought for the first time in months of the Ventnor owl. Collins nodded. 'Are you afraid?' 'Yes,' Tom said. He had a terrible urge to yawn, and felt his lips stretching.

    'You don't have the beginning of an idea what magic is,' Collins hissed.

    Tom thought: I can't spend all summer with this crazyman.

    'But you will learn. You are a unique boy, Tom Flanagan. I knew it when I first heard about you. Shadowland will give you every gift it has, because you will be able to accept them. And you are exactly the right age. Exactly!'

He looked from Tom to Del, back again, his eyes like marbles. 'What experiences you two have before you. I envy, you — I would chop my hands off to have what you take for granted. Now. A few, ah, ground rules. Do you remember everything I have said so far? Do you under­stand what I said?' They nodded simultaneously. 'The magician is a general in charge of what?'

    'Traitors,' Del said.

    His eyes full of triumph and the windy spaces of drunkenness, the magician looked at Tom alone. 'Ground rules. The rules you obey, in this house. Did you see the wooden door set back in a little half-hallway on the way to this theater?'

    Tom nodded.

    'You are forbidden to open that door. You are free to wander where you like, except for that room and my room. Which is in back of the swinging doors at the top of the stairs. Understood?'

    Tom nodded again, felt Del beside him nod his head.

    'That is number one, then. In this theater we practice cards and coins, the close-up work. Tomorrow we will see Le Grand Theatre des Illusions, and that is where you will learn to fly. If, that is, you give yourself entirely