Shadowland

    'Aren't you even going to look at me?'

    Without turning his head, Del said, 'I think there's a dead rat somewhere around here.'

    'Well, I have to talk to you.'.

'I think the dead rat should just go home if he doesn't like it here.'

    That shut Tom up — it was too close to what he had been intending to say. They sat there in silence and heat, neither looking at the other. Coleman Collins startled them both by limping noiselessly into the clearing from deeper in the woods. He wore a slim black suit, a red shirt, gleaming black pumps, and looked as if he had just left the stage after a particularly brilliant performance.

    'Gather round, children. Today we learn many things. Today we have a son et lumiere. This is the second part of the story known as 'The Death of Love' — and I will require your close attention.'

    He smiled at them, but Tom could not smile back. The magician tilted his head, winked, and somehow produced a high black stool from the air; he sat. 'Do I sense a little tension in the atmosphere? That is not inappropriate. If the first part of my unburdening could be subtitled 'The Healer Healed,' this part might be called 'The Undoing of the King of the Cats.''

    Collins propped his leg on a rung of the stool, looked up at a hawk cruising overhead, and said, 'Rumors about my unorthodox surgical techniques on Corporal Washford had begun to circulate among the Negro soldiers.

2

'And I was not sure I welcomed that. The power I have spoken of to you marvelous boys was growing within me, but I had as yet no idea of its dimensions nor of its ultimate role in my life, and I had the impulse to nurture it in secret for a time. Even if I could have repeated my performance on Washford with some other poor devil, I do not think I would have — I wanted first to adjust to having done it once, and to refine my skills in situations where I was not under such intense observation. As you will see, I did not yet understand the nature of the gift, and I did not know how fiercely it would demand expression. And of course I thought I was alone. I was that ignorant. That there was a tradition, that there were many others, an entire society existing in the world's shadowy pockets and taught by one great hidden body of knowledge I had only barely skirted with my Levi and Cornelius Agrippa, of all that I knew nothing. I was like a child who draws a map of the stars and thinks he has invented astronomy. When the Negroes who worked in the canteen and dispensary began to look at me in an odd, attentive way, what I felt was unease. I knew they had begun to talk. Maybe it was Washford himself — more likely it was the attendant in our operating theater — but however it had started, it was unwelcome.

    'I have told you that the Negro Division had a life absolutely separate from ours — they fought nobly, many of them were heroic, but for most of us whites they were invisible. Unless one of us wandered into their off-hours clubs, where (or so I heard) it became evident that their off-duty lives were rather richer than ours. Many French­ women were said to find the Negroes attractive — probably they just treated them like men, without regard to color. Some of those off-duty places were legendary, much as the Negro nightclubs became legendary in Paris right after the war. The difference was that a place like Bricktop's was heavily patronized by whites, while during the war, at least where I was, it was a rare white who dipped into the world of the Negro American soldier. The closest I ever got to it was one of my bookstore stops, when I browsed in a shop in an area where colored soldiers were billeted.

    'I had been visiting this shop, Librairie Du Prey, for several weeks, and finally — after the Washford incident — I began to notice that another customer, a colored private, often appeared there when I did. I never saw him buy a book. Neither did I ever precisely catch him watching me, but I felt observed.

    'A few days later, this same man appeared in the canteen. It took me a few moments to recognize him, since his uniform shirt was covered by a busboy's jacket, a garment which makes all men identical twins. He was picking trays up off the tables, and I tried to catch his eye, but he merely scowled at me.

    'The next time I went to the Librairie Du Prey, another black soldier was browsing over the tables. He scrutinized me much more openly than the first man had, and when I had given him a good look in return, I was stopped dead in my tracks. He was a magician. I knew it. He was a noncom, a stranger, and foreign to me in a thousand ways: but when I looked at him I knew he was my brother and he knew that I knew. I wish for you boys a moment in your lives as wild with excitement — as wild with possibility — as that moment was for me. The man turned away and left the shop, and I could barely keep myself from running out and following him.

    'The next afternoon in the hospital canteen, one of the messboys slipped a note into my jacket as I walked out. I had been anticipating some such thing all day, I knew it was connected to the magician I had seen in the book­store, and I took it out and read it as soon as I was out the door. Be in front of the bookstore at nine tonight — that was all it said, all I needed. I washed up and went back to the operating theater in a mood of feverish anticipation. It was coming, whatever it was, and I wanted to meet it head-on. If it was my destiny, I no longer dithered and fought. I wanted that door to open.

3

'At nine sharp I was in front of that bookstore. I felt very exposed — I was the only white man in sight. In a closed-up shop down the street, someone was playing the banjo. It made a hot, vibrant, electrical sound. The night was humid and warm. The Negro soldiers who walked by looked at me with a kind of aggressive, aimless curiosity, and I sensed that one or two of them only just decided not to make trouble for me because of my rank. If I had been a drunken private with a week's scrip in my pocket . . . I remember feeling the metaphoric aptness of my situation: surrounded by the unknown, on the point of really entering the unknown.

    'At nine-fifteen a Negro soldier came striding past, looked at me and nodded, and kept walking. It took me a second to realize what I was supposed to do. He was nearly to the corner by the time I started to follow him. When I got to the corner, I saw him disappearing around another sharp corner ahead of me.

    'He led me up and down, around and around — a few times I thought I had lost him, those streets were so narrow and twisting, and all around me the sounds of dark voices, men singing or laughing or muttering to me as I passed, but I always managed to catch a glimpse of his boots at the last minute. Of course I was lost. I did not at all know that section of Ste. Nazaire, and I recognized none of the street names. He had led me into the colored red-light district, and even a lieutenant was not safe there after dark.

    'Finally I rounded a corner, by now out of breath, and a huge colored man in uniform stepped in front of me and pushed me against the brick wall. 'You the doctor? You the Collector?' he said. His accent was very Southern.

    'Thass him, thass him,' said another man I could not see. 'Inside.'

    'The giant astonished me by giggling and saying some­thing I could not decipher — Heez gon gew haid sumphum. Then opened a door in the brick and bundled me inside.

'It was a barren, sweat-smelling room. The magician I had seen in the bookstore was standing before one of the gray walls, wearing a battered uniform bearing his corpo­ral stripes but no other identification. A man I thought was the messboy peeked in, looked at me with huge eyes, and slammed the door. The magician said, 'Lieutenant Nightingale? Known as the Collector?'

    ''I know what you are,' I said.

    ''You think you do,' he said. 'You operated on a soldier named Washford?'

    ''I wouldn't call it operating,' I said.

    ' 'Another doctor refused to attend to him because of his race, and you volunteered to do the job?'

    'To do the job — he was not a country boy like the others, he had city stamped all over him, someplace tough, someplace like Chicago.

    'I agreed.

    ''Tell me how you healed Washford,' he said. And I could see the iron in him again.

    'I held up my hands for answer. I said, 'You fellows have been eyeing me ever since it happened.'

    ' 'You have never heard of the Order? Never heard tell of the Book?'

    ''What I know is in these hands,' I said.

    ''Wait here,' he said, and slipped out through the door. A moment later he reappeared, and nodded at me to follow him. I did. And I walked straight into Shadowland, which had been there all along, right under the surface of things, dogging me ever since I had set foot in Europe.

    'The corporal gave me a glittering professional smile just as I was passing through the door, and it startled