Shadowland

forehead was wrinkled like an old woman's, and for a second she looked like a witch bending over him and shaking his arms. 'Oh,' he said.

    She stopped shaking him. 'That man touched you and it was like you died. Mr. Peet came out and carried you in here and pulled Del along — and I just followed, I hit him on the back, but he never even blinked at me. He took Del away, Tom. What are you going to do?'

    'Dunno,' Tom said. He did not know where he was. Artificial stars, friendly lights, winked down at him. Wasn't there a color wheel? Wasn't there a band? ''Polka Dots and Moonbeams,'' he said. 'Fielding went off the wall over some saxophone player. Six cups of punch. Everybody went outside and looked at a satellite, but it was really just an airplane. Skeleton was there, and he looked really creepy. All in black.' Tom looked perplexedly up at the friendly lights. Where the color wheel should have been, only a spaghettilike pipe ran through the distance, joining another thin pipe at a T-junction.

    'What are you talking about?' Rose had her witch face again.

    'Carson. Our school. When Del and I . . . ' He shook his head. 'Mr. Peet? I saw him.'

    'He carried you here. And he took Del.'

    Tom groaned. 'Our headmaster was a devil,' he said. 'Do you suppose he actually could have been? And maybe he was the man on Mesa Lane last summer — it was only his first year, you know? The new kids never realized that. They thought he'd been there forever. No wonder we all had nightmares.'

    'Are you all right?' Rose asked.

    'He's a talent scout,' Tom said, smiling. 'Good old M.'

    'Tom.'

'Oh, I'm okay.' He sat up. 'Where are we, anyhow? Oh. Should have known.' They were in the big theater; because of the removed wall, he could see into the smaller theater. The figures in the mural watched him with their varying expressions of pleasure, boredom, and amuse­ment. And of unearthly greed.

    'Collins is right, you know. He did give Skeleton what he wanted. Skeleton wanted exactly what happened. He even drew pictures of it.'

    'But now what?' Rose said. 'Tom, what do we do now? I don't even know what you're talking about.'

    'Do you know what I think, Rose? I think I still love you. Do you suppose Collins still loves his little shepherd­ess? Do you really have a grandmother in Hilly Vale, Rose?'

    The worry lines in her forehead puckered again.

    Tom got to his knees. The mural, a real audience, watched with sympathetic interest. 'For my next trick, and this has never before been attempted on the con­tinent, ladies and gentlemen . . . '

    'Are you crazy? Did that man do something to your mind?'

    'Be quiet, Rose.' The entire mural blazed at him: he could almost see their hands carrying food to their mouths, see them talking to each other: I'll miss old Herbie, say what you like, he was the bloody best. Turned a man's hand into a claw, now, didn't he? In Kensington it. was. The folks in the shilling seats, looking forward to having their brains turned inside-out at Mr. Butter's last show.

    In the mural, the Collector turned his head to beam his glee toward Tom Flanagan.

    I say, that girl's a smasher. French she is.

'Stay quiet,' he said. 'Go somewhere — go hide on the stage. Find a corner and hide in it and stay quiet.'

    'What. . . ?'

    He waved her off, hoping she would find the safest corner in all Shadowland. Now there was no reassuring button to push and turn the awful thing back into a joke.

    A loudspeaker crackled: 'ah, there you are, sir! YES, YOU — THE GENTLEMAN IN THE BLACK SUIT. LADIES AND GENTS, WE HAVE OUR SECOND VOLUNTEER. A GENEROUS HAND, PLEASE!'

    Ghostly clapping, applause from the year 1924, splashed from the walls.

    The Collector slid down from the wall, grinning blind and toothless at Tom.

    Now, Mary, don't carry on — that bloke's in on it, do you see? He's part of the show. He's what you call a stooge.

The Collector was stumbling to the end of the aisle in the smaller room, still focused entirely on Tom. A face without any personality at all. Dr. Collector. It was what they all looked like, really: Skeleton, Laker Broome, the magician, Mr: Peet and the Wandering Boys, so warped by hate and greed that they would steal and kill, cheat and tyrannize anyone less powerful. Collins had even stripped a dead man's pockets. Yes. Dr. Collector. They offered their own kinds of salvation. Want to be a man? I'll make you a man. I am your father and your mother.

'Here I am, Skeleton,' he said. Disgust, loathing, flooded through him. He stood up. His hands felt like molten lead weights, held together only by the knotted handkerchiefs.

    'Come on, Skeleton,' he said.

    The Collector lurched eagerly down the stairs.

14

The truth is, Tom does not have any idea of how he is to fight the Collector. As he hears Rose's high heels clatter­ing into the wings of the stage, he remembers the scene in which the actor Creekmore impersonated Withers, and the impulse which led him to face this dreadful represen­tation of Skeleton Ridpath begins to look like a fatal mistake. The Collector was the magician's best body­guard — he had said that himself. It suddenly seems very likely to Tom that he is going to die — die none too pleasantly — in the Grand Theatre des Illusions, just as Withers had died in an alley outside a stage door.

    'Vendpuris!' the Collector calls. 'I saw your owl, Vendouris.'

    Tom edges away as silently as he can, wondering even now if he can get out of the theater and somehow snatch Del from Collins . . . leave the Collector wandering and calling inside the theater —

    but the Collector is a magic trick.

    'I want to see some skin,' the Collector whispers. 'Where are you, Vendouris?'

    He is a magic trick, and Tom is a magician. In the hallucinatory scene which had played out when Laker Broome had touched him, there had been the flicker of a clue, the smell of an answer strong enough to make some part of him know that the Collector could be made harmless.

    'Some skin,' the Collector says, opening his mouth to show purple blackness. His empty eyes shine with delight. He is stumbling over the little theater's stage, going by a blind man's radar to the Grand Theatre.

    Tom moves quietly down the front of the big stage, backing away. What is the clue, the answer? He can remember the auditorium filled with dead boys, himself floating over it in Skeleton's body.

    It is there somewhere, the answer. He has to think. But how could you think, with your mind turning to jelly? It's just magic, that's all, he says to himself, getting as far as the wall and straightening his back against it and watching the Collector step off the little theater's stage. Two more steps would bring him into the larger room. The Collector is drooling, reaching out, and Tom remembers how it was to be inside Skeleton, feeling all that hate which was love knocked on its head, Skeleton's helpless, dumbstruck love for Collins and what he could do.

    'I'm not Vendouris,' Tom says, still feeling his loath­ing for Skeleton lying like a weight in his chest.

    'Aaah,' Skeleton moans, and focuses his ecstatic head toward Tom. He is shuddering with pleasure. He begins to stumble into a row of seats.

    'Your name is Steve Ridpath,' Tom says. 'And you cheated on your exams. You're the unhappiest boy in the whole school. You're supposed to go to Clemson in the fall. Your father is a football coach.'

    'Burn that ball back,' whispers Skeleton.

    'Stay away from me,' Tom says.

    'Burn that ball back!'

    'You set a fire in the field house,' Tom says, searching frantically for the key which will find whatever remains of Skeleton inside the Collector. 'You wanted to see every­body die.'

    'Get away from that fucking piano,' the Collector whispers. He is now at Tom's end of a row of seats, and about a dozen steps up toward the back of the big theater. Behind him and to the left, Tom can see the X of the wooden brace, irregularly stained with red.

    But why was I Skeleton? Tom wonders. The awful toy is coming down the steps, brightly scanning for a sign of motion. 'Stay away,' he says, half-pleading.

    The Collector descends another two steps: Tom is by now really almost too scared to move; and he knows