Shadowland

    Tom nodded. He heard the mistrust in his friend's voice.

3

War

'This is a true story,' the magician said, 'and its name is 'The Death of Love.' Ah, melodrama.'

    His thick white hair stirred in the light breeze. The three of them sat on the stony beach, Collins facing the sharp rise of land and the boys looking toward him and the glimmering deep blue lake behind him. To their right, the weather-beaten pier protruded out into the lake; beyond that the gray-boarded boathouse sat on concrete pilings. As Rose Armstrong had hinted, Collins showed none of his cold rage of the night before. He had placed a note on the boys' breakfast trays, asking them to meet him on the beach at ten in the morning. Each of them still turning over the encounter with Rose Armstrong in his mind, they had descended the shaky iron structure at a quarter to ten; Collins, a white sunhat on his head and a rolled blanket and a picnic basket under his arm, had come down the stairs twenty minutes later. He wore a long-sleeved blue shirt, gray lightweight slacks and san­dals. The shirt and slacks were slightly too large, as if he had recently lost weight. 'Good morning, apprentices,' he said. 'All parties have a good night's sleep after yesterday's exertions?'

    Collins unfurled the blanket on the beach, set the wicker basket on it. He removed the hat and set it on the basket. 'Sit down, boys. History lesson, if you are not too bedazzled by love to listen. Time for one of those stories I've been promising you. Face me, that's the way. If you get bored, you can always look at the water and daydream about Miss Armstrong.' He smiled. 'This is a true story.

'By now the two of you know more about the operations of true magic than ninety-nine percent of the population, including other magicians, and I want to take you back to a time when I was learning about these things myself — to the time when I first came into command of my own strengths. We are going forty years back, to just before the nineteen-twenties.

    'In fact, we are going back to 1917, the year America joined the Great War. My name then was still Charles Nightingale — Del's father, my brother, was twelve years younger than I, still a boy for all practical purposes, and a stranger to me. I had trained as a doctor, and had supported myself as a magician during medical school. I was a good mechanic and card-cranker. Manual dexterity. I intended to be a surgeon. Magic was only a hobby then, though I had always felt in it something beyond the simple tricks I had mastered, something vastly powerful. Medi­cine seemed the only thing in the practical world that could approach that realm of responsibility and awe to which I aspired — I mean that world (only dimly ap­prehended by me) where the ability to make fundamental changes is so great as to automatically inspire awe. If I had been conventionally religious, I suppose I might have gone into the clergy. But I was always too ambitious for that. In 1917 I qualified as a doctor and was immediately given a commission and sent to France on a troop ship. My assignment was to a dressing station at Cantigny. I brought only a few things with me, clothes and cards and some books by a Frenchman named Eliphas Levi, a magician who had died in 1875. The books were the two volumes of Le Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, rather wildly, verbosely written, but full of evocations of that power I was searching for. Levi helped me to understand that Good and Evil are earthbound distinctions — when you hear someone discriminate on that basis, he is invariably up to his ankles in mud. I also carried a book by Cornelius Agrippa, the Renaissance magician, who said when asked how man could possess magical powers — remember this, boys — 'No one has such power but he who has cohabited with the elements, vanquished nature, mounted higher than the heavens, elevating himself above the angels. . . . ' Vanquished nature. Doctors attempt that too, but with what clumsy weapons, scalpels and sutures!

'We landed in Brest on the Seattle and went immediately to the Pontanzen barracks for a few days of rest before being sent to the Gondrecourt area for some rudimentary training. We traveled as part of a section, with a motor truck, two ambulances, and a Packard car in which I and a few other young doctors rode. Our route was along the Beaumont-Mandres road. From Mandres we were meant to go to the Division HQ at Menil-la-Tour. It sounded easy, back in Boston, but back in Boston I had never seen a country torn to pieces by war. The only bodies I had seen were those on dissecting tables. And remember that my military training had been laughably brief. I don't even remember what I had expected to find: a tableau from a recruiting poster, I suppose, brave youthful soldiers brandishing German helmets like scalps. And They Said We Couldn't Fight!

'We had gone only a short way up the Beaumont-Mandres road when we passed an old battlefield. Great zigzagging rips torn through the ground, barbed wire looping over it all, and somehow a terrifying, claus­trophobic feeling of death being all around — pressing its face toward us and blowing on us with its breath. The German trenches had been occupied since 1914 and ran parallel to the Flirey-Bouconville road. We could hear artillery going off in the distance. I had never seen anything remotely like it before — never seen anything like that destroyed snowy field, nor like the scale of death that it implied. To me, right then, what I saw looked like nothing so much as the shocking litter and mess you find at the bottom of a fireplace. Charred heaps of things, filthy little piles here and there, nothing orderly, nothing even recognizable except by an effort of the imagination. That was probably the last civilian image I would be privileged to have for two years. War refers only to itself — war is self-enclosed. It takes only the smallest exposure to make you know that.

    'My first real exposure came in that five-passenger Packard. Our convoy was shelled, and shelled very heavily. This of course was colossal bad luck, but the Beaumont-Mandres road was shelled day and night, and our superiors must have decided that it was a risk they had to take. If they had known that precisely one man of the entire convoy would survive, I suppose they might have decided otherwise.

    'I could hear soldiers in the supply truck singing 'Glor-ree-us, Glor-ree-us! One keg of beer for the four of us!' That was a favorite, along with 'Snowy Breasted Pearl' and 'Say Au Revoir, But Not Good-bye.' Then over the singing I heard a whistling in the air. I knew immediately what that meant.

    'Our driver muttered, 'She said there would be days like this,' and just then the truck in front of us blew up. 'Jee-sus!' the driver yelled, and cramped the wheel. I saw a body sailing upward, as if a man had taken flight; the undercarriage of the truck rolled over, gouting fire, and metal pieces — scattered all over the road. We fell into an old shellhole — everybody in the Packard was yelling something. Explosions went off all around us, deafeningly loud. I was vaguely aware of an ambulance bouncing into the air like a child's toy. Men were screaming and sobbing. An arm clad in heavy wool thunked down onto the hood of the Packard. All of us fought our way out of the car, and another shell landed very near.

    'I came to in the field. My face and hands were burned, and I ached mightily all over and my head felt like it had been split apart, but otherwise I was all right. I had been fantastically lucky, and from that moment forth I knew that I had been saved for some great purpose. The shells were landing all over the road, and nothing rational, nothing sensible, was left of our convoy; in a few seconds, it had been altered into a scene from hell. The am­ bulances were destroyed. Dead men lay all over the road. A motorcycle wheel dragged a shredded litter into the wreckage of the truck. The rest .of the motorcycle, which had been riding outboard of the convoy, was not even visible. The rear end of the Packard, jutting out of the shellhole, looked like an enormous gray cheese. I reached out and picked up my little satchel of books from a heap of snow. At first I thought I was the only man left alive in the convoy. Almost unbelievable devastation lay before me. Bodies and parts of bodies protruded from shellholes, from the burning vehicles — and shells continued to fall for some time, battering the broken ambulances and flinging the dead about. It must have been one of the most freakish accidents of the war, that routine shelling like that destroyed an entire medical section. Then I saw someone move, a man in the ditch between the road and the field. I knew him.

    'He had been in the Packard with me. His name was Lieutenant William Vendouris, and he was a new field doctor like myself. His guts had been opened up by shrapnel, by a jagged piece of the truck — I don't know. I saw hun lying in the ditch in a lake of his own blood. He was holding in his intestines with his hands. They flopped like thick purplish ropes.

    ' 'Give me something, for God's sake,' he hissed at me.

    'I had nothing. Nothing except Eliphas Levi and a pack of cards and Cornelius Agrippa. The supplies in the truck had been blown to bits.

    ''Jesus, help me,' Vendouris screamed. I knelt beside him and felt around his wound, although I knew he could not be helped. By all rights he should have been uncon­scious, but it had not taken hun that way. I could feel his blood beating against my hands. 'Settle down, old man,' I said. 'There are no supplies. It all went up with the truck.'