Shadowland

nightingale!'

    Ka-whamp! Rockets sailed up, making red tracers in the sky w&-whamp! — exploded into the British flag.

    'He's going to get us,' Del said. He wiped more of the blood from his face with his sleeve. 'There's no way . . . '

    'Get it as tight as you can,' Tom said.

    Rose was folding the first handkerchief over his hand and twisting the ends together to knot them. 'Who's left, Rose? Who's left in the house?'

    'Just Mr. Peet. They were both upstairs when we heard the shots. At first they thought they were rockets. Then they went downstairs.' She began to fold the second handkerchief around Tom's right hand. 'And he said something about the ladder.'

    'What happened to the ladder?' Del asked. 'The ladder's gone!' He was slipping into panic again. 'We can't get down!' He turned his head toward the house and went quiet. Coleman Collins stood at every window they could see, far enough from the glass for the light to show him clearly.

    Six, seven. . . ? It didn't matter how many, because it could be any number. Identical Coleman Collinses, ca­ressing their identical upper lips with identical index fingers.

    'We have to go in there,' Del said, a little awe showing through his voice.

    'That's what he said about the ladder.' Rose tied the ends together. Red circles had already appeared in the centers of the two handkerchiefs. 'That you'd have to go in. And he said you'd want to go in.'

    'But that's just a trick,' Del pleaded. 'There's only two of them, really — and Mr. Feet will run like those men.'

    'Maybe not,' Tom said, trying to move his fingers. 'But there's someone else. He wanted two volunteers, remember? He had the other one all along.'

    The images of the magician vanished from the win­dows.

    'I'm on your side, Tom,' Rose said. Her voice was desperate. 'I told you I didn't know what he was going to do — you know I'm telling you the truth. I left him.'

    'I didn't mean you,' Tom said with more calm than he felt. 'He still has Skeleton.'

    'have we another volunteer?' the speakers boomed. 'have we? have we? ah! the handsome GENTLEMAN IN THE BLACK SUIT!'

13

A shadowy figure appeared on the lawn behind them: or had it been there before, unnoticed? Rose grabbed Tom's arm. Del stepped backward. 'It's Skeleton,' he said, his voice way above its usual register, high enough to be birdsong: but Tom saw that it was not Skeleton.

    The figure stepped forward, and tortoiseshell eyeglass frames turned red in the light from the house.

    'This school has been unwell,' Laker Broome said, 'and now it is time to cut back the diseased branches.' He moved closer to them. 'Pruning, gentlemen . . . pruning. Time to clean up our garden.' Tom could see the lights down in the woods through his glen-plaid suit.

    'We'll get you! We know who you are and we will get you!' He raised a transparent fist, and Rose and the boys stepped back.

    'We have had indiscipline, smoking, failures, and theft — and now we are cursed with something so sick, so ill, that in all my years as an educator I have never seen its like.

    'NEVER!'

    He stepped forward again, pushing them back to the flagstones and the light.

    'A guilty mind and soul are dangerous to all about them — they corrupt. All of you boys have been touched by this disease.'

    Another mad, threatening step forward. 'You, Flanagan. Did you steal that owl?' 'Yes,' Tom said. For that was the final truth. The index finger stabbed at Del. 'You. Nightingale. Did you steal that owl?' 'Yes,' Del said.

    'You will report to my office immediately — we will rid ourselves of you, do you hear? You are to be expunged, a word meaning erased, omitted, cast away . . . Mala causa est quae requirit misercordiam.' His face seemed the size of a billboard. Rose, still, gripping Tom's arm, was whimpering. 'And I see you have brought a girl into this school. That too will be dealt with, boys. I very much fear that you will not be allowed to leave these premises alive. Theft, failure, smoking, indiscipline — and ingratitude! Ingratitude is a capital offense!'

    Tom felt the rough fieldstone flags under his feet, and Laker Broome looked with transparent eyes at a trans­parent watch and said, 'And now I believe we have some magic from two members of our first year.'

    Del goggled at him: the bruises were starting to come up from his face, purple across his temples and green on his cheeks and jaw. In a couple of hours he would look like a mandrill.

    Animal faces: he was suddenly aware of a cramped room about him, gloomily lacquered with photographs — a crazy quilt on the walls and ceiling, horrible faces leering at him as in the wizard's house in the dream, leering but stationary, fixed on the wall so they could never float away . . .

    ('To-o-o-o-m,' Del wailed.)

    . . . but what was floating was him, going up off a strange fetid bed straight toward the ceiling. Rose's arms held him back, then broke away, and he was going right toward those pictures, toward a dead man in his car with his brains all over the windows, some dripping car in an empty parking lot. Scene of the Murder. The former Miami lawyer was discovered at 7:10 yesterday morning. Miami resident Herbert Finkel, threatened by a loitering youth described as wearing blue shirt and tan trousers . . .

toward a picture of Coleman Collins in his Burberry and a wide-brimmed hat, his face only a blank white oval . . .

    toward the Carson School, a black-and-white aerial photograph crayoned with red-crayon flames, drawn over the field house and auditorium, a red crayon smear obliterating the little tree in the court. Closer to it, closer, the crayon flames seeming to leap, seeming to warm his face.

    Rose's fingers grasped his right hand, torturing the wound, and he yelled just as the crayon flames grew up around him.

They were back at Carson. Del and Rose were on either side of him, standing on the solid wooden floor of the auditorium, Mr. Broome at the podium, his face a lunatic's, mouthing gibberish. A hundred boys twisted and howled in their seats, many of them bleeding from the eyes and nose. Noise like a foul smoke rose from them, and Mr. Broome screamed, 'I want Steven Ridpath! Skeleton Ridpath! The only graduate of the class of '59. Come up here and get your diploma!' He held out a burning document, and Tom felt himself sailing up, his limbs spidery, all of his skin so tight it felt it might split open . . .

    down below him — a photograph? It moved. The dead boys twisted and howled. A teacher dressed in a Norfolk jacket moved across the blackening floor and took Del's arm, twisted it savagely around his back, and yanked him away. It had the quality of a photograph, a moment stopped in time so that you could look back and say, yes, that's when Uncle George ripped his pants on the bob-wire fence, that's when Lulu looked down the well, wasn't that funny, sorta like an omen cuz that's when things started to go bad and wrong and just see how happy we all were . . . but Del's face was turning purple and green and Rose was screaming and the man wasn't a teacher, he was Mr. Peet. . . he was still above them all, floating toward Laker Broome, who held out his burning hand and fastened it around Tom's wrist, scorching his flesh, grinning at him and saying, I said there'd be a little pain, didn't I? Should have taken my hand back in the tunnels, boy. Don't you agree things would have worked out a little nicer that way?

The burning hand clamped harder on his wrist. Don't make the fool's mistake of thinking this ain't happening, kid. Even though it ain't. Tom felt his wrist frying in the devil's grasp. Mr. Collins has your pal. You chose your song. So sing it.

Beneath the white of the magician's handkerchief, his wrist was blister red.

    'To-o-o-m!' Del cried again. His voice was getting smaller. 'Tom! Tom!'

    He shook his head, trying to clear out the fuzz — almost as if he had been Skeleton Ridpath, seeing what Skeleton had chosen to see, had wanted with all of his messed-up heart to see —

    'They moved us, they moved us,' Rose wailed, 'oh, Tom come back — you like died for a second.'

    He opened his eyes, and was looking up at Rose's scared face. She was not even pretty anymore. Her