Shadowland

welcomed,' Del said. 'Weren't you?'

    'But I didn't welcome them back.'

    'I was sure it was going to be me. But inside, I knew it wasn't me.'

    'I wish it was you.'

    They trudged across the sand. Del put his hands on the flaking rungs of the ladder; went up six rungs, stopped. 'I think everybody lied to me,' he said, as if to himself.

    'Tonight,' Tom said. 'Then it's all over.'

    'I want it to be all over. But I almost wish this ladder would fall over again and kill both of us.'

As they went through the dark living room, Tom thought of something. 'Wait.' Del drifted out into the hall and stood like a man on a gallows. Tom went to the cabinet in the corner and opened the glass doors. The porcelain shepherdess had been broken in two — Collins had done it. It was a joke, or a warning, or like the last moralizing line in a Perrault fable. The broken halves lay separated on the wood, a little fine white powder between them. All the other figurines had been pushed to the back of the cabinet. They faced him. The boy with the books, the six drunken men, the Elizabethan. Their eyes were dead, their faces. Then Tom understood. It was they who had murdered the shepherdess. That was a message straight from Collins to him. He took his eyes from them and picked up a piece of the broken figurine and put it in his pocket. On an afterthought, he took the pistol too and stuck it inside his shirt.

He followed Del upstairs. They walked down the hallway past a black window. 'Look,' Del said, and pointed. Tom should have seen it for himself: all the lights in the woods had been extinguished. There were no more stages, no more theaters in the woods. They could see only their own faces against solid black.

    Del vanished around his door.

    Tom went into his own room. The pocket doors were shut. He sat on his bed, heard rustling. He patted the bed and heard the whispery crackle again. Tom put his hand under the coverlet and touched a sheet of paper. He did not want to see it.

    No: he did want to see it. He wanted with his whole damaged heart to see it. When he pulled it out and allowed himself to read it, it said: If you love me, come to the little beach.

So she too wanted to escape tonight. Tom saw Coleman Collins as a huge white owl swooping savagely toward them all, gathering and crushing them in his talons. He saw Rose squeezed in those claws. He folded the note and put it between the revolver and his skin. Then he touched the broken figurine in his pocket. 'Okay,' he said. 'Okay, Rose.'

    Tom went to the doors and pushed them aside. Del lay on his bed in the dark. His shoulder twitched, one hand stirred babyishly. 'What?' he asked.

    'We're going now,' Tom said, 'and we're going to meet Rose.'

    The porcelain figures, lined up at the back of the cabinet, staring out with dead faces at their handiwork. Rosa Forte had been murdered by the Wandering Boys, and Collins wanted him to know it.

    'I just want to get out,' Del said. 'I can't stand it here anymore. Please, Tom. Where do we go first?'

    Tom led the way down the stairs, through the living room, and out onto the flagstones in the cool air. 'We're going back through the woods,' he said. 'All the way this time.'

    'Whatever you say, master.'

FOUR

Shadow Play

1

Tom took the gun out of his shirt and put it in his waistband at the small of his back. 'What's that?' Del asked. 'That's a gun. What do you need a gun for?'

    'Probably we won't even need it,' Tom said. 'I took it out of the cabinet. I'm just being careful, Del.'

    'Careful. If we were careful, we'd still be in our rooms.'

    'If we were careful, we'd never have come here in the first place. Let's find Rose.' He started down the rickety iron ladder. It moved away from the bluff a half-inch. Tom swallowed. The ladder had felt wobbly every time he had climbed it. 'Anything wrong?' Del called out. Tom answered by going down the ladder as fast as he could. He started to walk across the beach in the darkness. He could hear Del's feet hitting the sand as he ran to catch up.

    'He wanted to keep you here, didn't he? Forever.'

    'He was going to do worse to Rose,' Tom said. 'We have to get to that beach on the other side of the lake. That's where she'll be.'

    'And then what?'

    'She'll tell us.'

    'But what'll we say to her, Tom? I can't even stand . . . '

    Tom could not stand it either. 'Do you want to try to swim across or walk through the woods?'

    'Let's walk,' Del said. 'But don't lose me. Don't lose me, Tom.'

    'I'm not going to. Not losing you was the real reason I came here,' Tom said. Curls of fog still leaked from the woods. He slid between two trees and started toward the first platform.

    'Maybe we could bring her back to Arizona with us,' Del said.

    'Maybe.'

    'Hold my hand,' Del said. 'Please.' Tom took his outstretched hand.

Rose was waiting for them on the little beach. They saw her before she noticed them — a slender girl in a green dress, high-heeled shoes dangling from her hand. They padded toward her, and she turned jerkily to face them — frightened. 'I'm sorry,' she said. She glanced at Del, but her eyes probed Tom. 'I didn't know if you'd come.'

    'Well, I saw this,' he said, and took the broken shepherdess from his pocket.

    'What is it? Let me see.' Tentatively, as if she were afraid to stand too near him, she came a few steps closer. 'It does look like me. That's funny.' Rose probed his face again: gave him a taut, bitter half-smile. 'Don't you think that's funny?' Because he did not smile back, her eyes moved again to the broken shepherdess. Something in her posture told him that she wanted to step away. Then he understood. She was afraid that he would hit her.

    'You don't think it's funny,' she said. 'Oh, well.' 'Hey, I'm here too,' Del said.

    Instantly more at ease, Rose altered the set of her shoulders and turned to him. 'I know you are, darling Del. Thank you for coming.' Her eyes flicked at Tom. 'I wasn't sure if . . . '

    'You had to, right?' Del said. His voice trembled. 'He's crazy, that's all. Not half-crazy, all crazy.'

    'Everything here is a lie,' Rose said. 'Just because you saw it doesn't mean it really happened.'

    Tom nodded. He was curiously reluctant to take up this hope she offered. If he reached out, it might bite his hand. Del, however, had not only reached out, but embraced it. His face was glowing. 'Well, we're here, anyhow. Now, where do we go?'

    'Where you were before,' Rose said. 'This way.' She led them back into the woods. 'Where he was before?' Del asked. 'Where's that?' 'An old summerhouse,' Rose said, walking through fog and night but needing no light to see her way. 'The men were living there, but they're gone now.'

    'Wait a second,' Tom said, stopping short. 'That house? What's the point of going there?'

    'The point is the tunnel, grumpy Tom,' she said. 'And the point of the tunnel is that it takes us out of here. I spent the whole day getting this ready — you'll see.'

    'A tunnel,' Tom said; and Del repeated, 'A tunnel,' as if now they were truly on the way home.

    'I've never gone all the way through it,' Rose said, still moving ahead through the fog, 'but I know it's there. I think it goes almost to Hilly Vale. We can stay in it all night. Then in the morning we can get out, walk to the station, and get on a train. There's an early train to Boston. I checked. They won't even miss you until late in the morning, and by then we'll be out of Vermont.' 'What about your grandmother?' Tom said. 'I'll call her from wherever we get to.' Her eyes rested questioningly on him for a moment.

2

Like wary animals, or like the ghosts of animals half-visible in the fog, they stepped away from the last of the woods. When Del saw the parklike area with its man­icured lawns and artfully placed trees — here too the cold fog