Shadowland

flew nearly all the way to Root.

    Half an hour later, the four men digging had opened up a pit almost five feet deep and four feet long. Root sullenly jerked at the dogs' chains whenever he inexpertly tossed more wood on the fire. Tom watched all this, now and then nearly dozing, mystified. What was it the dogs were to be tried out on? What was the long trench for? It looked uncomfortably like a grave.

    Finally the magician said, 'Let's get them stirred up. Seed, you and Rock go to work on the set for a while.'

    'Yeah,' said one of the diggers, a fat bearded man who resembled a depraved Burl Ives. He grinned, showing a hockey player's gap where his front teeth should have been.

    Seed sprang up out of the trench, followed by another man. They carried their shovels to the mound and immediately began pitching earth from it.

    'Faster, faster,' ordered Mr. Peet. 'We want them to know you're there.'

    'Shit, they hear us okay,' said Seed, displaying the gap in his teeth.

    'You know how many there are, Herbie?' asked Rock.

    'One is enough,' Collins answered. 'Look, let's get that other man out of the pit. Snail, you go over to the other side.'

    Snail, Seed, Rock, Pease, Thorn, Root: were those names?

    The one called Snail crawled from the pit, went to the mound, hefted his shovel and slammed the flat of the blade down onto the earth. 'Shake 'em up good,' he said, and began to pitch dirt as earnestly as Seed and Rock.

    They resembled three monstrous dwarfs, these heavy-set men. Snail and Rock had vast tattooed biceps; and when Snail pulled off his shirt, Tom saw that tattoos blanketed his chest: a white skull with black eyeholes housed the tail of a glittering, scaly dragon with eagle's wings.

    'Mr. Snail, move those wings for me,' ordered Cole Collins, and the tattooed man laughed and dug more ferociously.

    'A goddamned hole,' Snail shouted. 'Here's one of the goddamned holes.'

Thorn jumped out of the pit, bellowing like a lunatic, and charged toward Snail; instead of attacking him, as Tom feared, jolted fully awake by the man's din, Thorn jabbed his shovel in the earth next to Snail and began to peel back the earth over the entrance to the burrow.

    'Get that little one in there, Root,' said Mr. Peet.

    'Wish we had a bull,' Thorn said from his jack-o'-lantern face. Root pulled the smaller dog up, untied its chain, and pointed it to the uncovered hole. 'Get in there, mutt,' Root said, but the dog needed no com­mand: it streaked into the hole.

    'Now, get the other one ready,' said Mr. Peet. 'I'll bet anybody twenty it comes out in under a minute.' He looked at his watch, and Thorn said, 'Twenty.'

    Snail's tattoos widened and trembled in the firelight. The effect was so distracting that it was a moment before Tom realized that he was laughing. 'Ground-pounder.'

    'A minute,' Thorn said, shrugging his shoulders.

    Yelps, growls, barks came from the hole. Then the sound of screaming that Tom had heard in the bedroom.

    'Watch your tail, boy,' said Mr. Peet, and a second later the dog came boiling out of the hole. Bright red lines bisected its head.

    'Twenty from Thorn,' said Mr. Peet. 'Send in the other one,' and Root positioned the second quivering dog. Pease and Seed, the fat one like Burl Ives, began scrabbling with their shovels on the top of the mound.

    For hours it seemed — Tom lay at the base of the red maple, dozing off and waking to some new horror — the dogs nipped into the tunnels Pease and Seed uncovered in the 'set,' emerged whining and bleeding, were sent back in. Money flowed among the eight men, most of it going to Root, Mr. Peet, and Collins. During one of his spells of wakefulness Tom saw Collins grab a shovel from tattooed Snail and attack the 'set' as fiercely as any of the younger men. He realized that Collins was not limping, and was so tired he thought only that in front of these men he would not limp either. 'Paydirt! Paydirt!' the one called Rock kept screaming.

    There was another thing, Tom told himself, something else you would not think to notice unless you looked at these men for a long time: they were all very white. Their skin looked compressed, like cheap unhealthy meat, smudgy; they were strong, but they were indoor men.

    Indoors, late-night men toiling outside, the ferocity of their labor and their shouts, the guttering torches and the leaping fire, the yells and the exchanges of bills and the bloody dogs — this phantasmagoric scene unrolling before Tom sometimes seemed so unreal he thought he was back in his bed in the windowless room . . . then he was truly asleep, and dreamed that Del was lying on the little hill beside him, explaining things. 'Mr. Snail is the treasurer of a big corporation in Boston, Mr. Seed and Mr. Thorn are both lawyers, Mr. Pease and Mr. Root are major stockholders in U.S. Steel and race in the America's Cup every year — Mr. Peet is the United States Secretary of Commerce.'

    'Get those tongs ready!' someone was shouting. 'Get hold of those goddamned tongs!'

Tom groaned and rolled over, brushing the bottom branches of the maple with his elbow; then he remem­ bered where he was, and compressed himself down as small as he could and went back on his belly. His neck hurt, his knees ached, his head sparkled with pain; but as he looked down at the men, the dream stuck to him, and so he saw the Secretary of Commerce gripping the handles of the metal tongs, swearing at the corporation treasurer to back away. One of the major stockholders in U.S. Steel held a dog at the ready over the pit. A pumpkin-faced lawyer in an army jacket was yelling 'Gid 'im! Gid 'im!' Another lawyer waved a fistful of folded bills: deep in the mound, the second dog wailed like a soul tormented in hell.

    'Soon,' said the Secretary, and the Boston treasurer crouched over, grinning tensely like an ape.

    Then two shocking things happened, so close together they were nearly simultaneous. Spouting blood, a tor­tured dog windmilled out of the mound; a lawyer whose body was covered with a glittering, moving dragon tattoo took one look at it and raised his shovel over his head. Tom saw one front leg hanging by a bloody thread, ribs opened up to shine like painted matchsticks, and then the lawyer brought down the shovel and crushed the dog's head. The lawyer kicked the dog's body into the trees.

    The second shocking thing, like the first, was a succes­sion of images so brightly colored they might have been a series of slides. A furry, stubby head wet with blood poked into visibility for a second; the Secretary of Commerce jabbed with the metal tongs, and all the financiers howled gleefully; the Secretary jerked his arms powerfully upward like a man making a home run in another language, and the metal bands of the tongs clasped the belly of a squalling, crazed, bleeding badger and carried it in a wide arc through the firelit air. The Secretary pivoted, whirling the heavy body in the tongs, and dropped the animal into the pit. The U.S. Steel stockholder loosed the foaming dog and it too went headfirst into the pit. Instantly the financiers began shouting out bets.

    The bets, Tom suddenly knew, were on how long the badger would live.

    The shouting men closed around the pit, passing money back and forth, and Tom could not see what was happening inside it. But he could imagine it, which was worse. At times, when a spray of blood flew up, one or another of the financiers backed away, cursing, and Tom saw rolling hair. The dragon bled on its iridescent scales; a florid rose bled on a bicep; miraculous blood appeared on a yellow T-shirt, dazzling and unexpected as stigmata.

    After twenty minutes one man raised his arms and crowed. Money came to him in loud waves. Then there was only the sound of breathing, the ragged breathing of hard-worked men and the punctured, frothy breathing of a badly wounded dog. The Secretary of Commerce took a pistol from his pocket and fired it once into the pit.

    Tom shuddered back, rustling along the ground like a leaf. 'All right. You've had your blood,' said Coleman Collins; but it was too late, because the magician was looking up the hill right into his eyes, and saying, 'There's another one for the pit. Go to sleep, boy.'

    A thick, slobbering man spun around and ran toward him; and Tom passed out.

8

Go to sleep, boy. Tom found himself back on the train going north from Boston. Coleman Collins, not Del, sat beside him, saying, 'Of course, this isn't your train. This is Level One.'