Shadowland

    'Hold on. You looked pretty good when we dug for that badger, I'll say that for you, you're in good shape for your age, but I can take you. I can take you good. I'm walking out of here.'

    'You are an offense, Mr. Peet.' Collins sat up straight in the owl chair. 'You are going to leave my way. Watch this, nephew.'

    Del whimpered as Inbush cast him away and began to move toward Collins.

    'Watch carefully,' Collins said, and closed his eyes. A shadow line of black appeared around him, outlining him for a second. Inbush stopped moving. A line of red joined the black, and both lines became a single thick line of vibrant blue.

    Inbush screamed.

    Collins' aura blazed for a moment. Inbush's scream went up an octave in pitch, and the man's hands flew to his scalp. A smell like gunpowder invaded the room, and Floyd Inbush blew up as if there had been a bomb in his guts.

    Both the old man and the boy were splashed with red. A wad of something that looked like pink dog food struck Del's chest with the force of a line drive and adhered wetly to his shirt. Del slowly looked down at it, and his mouth fell open and his eyes shuttered and his ears sealed. Del was safe: he stood in the bloody room and he heard nothing and he saw nothing.

17

Tom is looking into Skeleton's blank shining eyes. In part because of the mad babble coming from Skeleton's molten mind, in part because he can see Skeleton's history as clearly as if it were a movie playing in those dead eyes, he knows Skeleton thoroughly — knows him too well. He sees Chester Ridpath walloping young Skeleton, sees spittle flying from the coach's mouth, hears his curses. He sees Skeleton's hands as if they were his own, opening the lid of the Carson piano as the glass owl rattles itself against the wood; sees the pictures going up, one by one, onto the walls and ceiling.

    Skeleton's thumbs are pushing into his windpipe; Skel­eton is drooling and humming to himself.

    I was in your room, Tom thinks, and the pressure of the thumbs miraculously eases a bit.

    Skeleton, I was in your room: I saw the owl at the window: and he does see it, he hears it battering the glass, whapping its great wings. Then another picture takes hold of his mind, and he says to Skeleton: I rode those wings and heard the voice.

    Do you hear me in there, Skeleton?

Beneath the lunatic flood of gibberish, there is a small voice which says: Yes. The Collector's hands hang loosely on Tom's neck now; the Collector's torched — down ele­mental face is frozen like paint on & wall.

    I stole the owl, Tom thinks into Skeleton's rushing brain. I set fire to the field house. I was the one you wanted, Skeleton. Not him. Not Del. Tom Flanagan.

'Flanagini fire,' the Collector whispered.

    Flanagini fire — you tied into my battery, Skeleton, before I even knew I had it. Tom hates these thoughts, they violate everything he once had known about himself, everything he had wished to be. My fire, my room, Skeleton: I wasn't just in your room, I was your room.

    I was your room. This is the worst thought of all, worse even than the certainty that he alone had seen Skeleton hanging like a spider from the auditorium ceiling because at that moment Skeleton was a broken-away and un­wanted piece of himself: that Skeleton's cave of horrors, lovingly clipped from magazines, was a depiction of some boarded-off area of his mind, the area to which Coleman Collins had thrown open the gates in his own soul in the early 1920's.

    I am your room, he sends into Skeleton's mind, talcing responsibility for it all. His mind and Skeleton's are nearly one — your room is me — and Tom knows with true and certain finality that in saying this he has finally become a magician: not just a low-grade psychic, but a magician, the black figure with a sword. He has welcomed himself.

    After that, after he has sickened himself, he knows how to free Skeleton Ridpath from the Collector. He looks into the grotesque parody of magic before him and sees a high-school boy way down there, with wax Dracula teeth in his mouth and a frightwig on his close-cut hair; a high-school boy who had wanted in the most pathetic way to be scary; and he reaches for him. Come on out, Skeleton, he says. You can come out now. Get out of the Jar. There is a little tug at his mind, a tug like a headache: it will work.

    Tom reaches inside, extending a long probe, and this time Skeleton twines around it. OUT! Tom pulls back, and it is like trying to pull a swordfish out of the ocean; gravity tries to drag him down in there with Skeleton, he feels he is bench-pressing twice his own weight. OUT!! He nearly blacks out with the effort of pulling.

    The snap of release knocks him backward, and a hot wind blasts him against the wall. A limp thing like an upright sack is before him; beside it stands a tall thin boy with purple-black eyes. The sack flutters down, and a moment later the thin boy collapses.

    Tom goes to his knees. He glances at the Collector just to see what it is when it is empty. A rubbery face, a thing of cloth and wire. Beside it, Skeleton is moving his fingers like an infant, his face drenched with sweat. His eyes are shut. Skeleton groans. 'Flanagini. Uh. Fire,' he says.

    'That's all over,' Tom says, bending over. The odors of an unwashed and unhealthy body are very strong. Skeleton is wearing filthy jeans and a T-shirt which is oddly scorched. 'Do you understand me, Ridpath? It's over. You're free.'

    'Um,' Skeleton says into the carpet.

    'Can you move?'

    Skeleton opens his bloodshot eyes. 'Flanagan?'

    'Yeah.'

    Skeleton's face scrunches up. 'I met him,' he says. 'I did. I finally met him.'

    'Can you move? You're going to have to get out of this house.'

    'What house?' Skeleton asks, and his eyes look normal for the first time — eyes the color of thin mud in a roadside ditch. Tom does not want to touch him.

    So he forces himself to touch him. He shakes a shoulder that feels like putty covered with grease. 'It's not important for you anymore. Just get up and get out. You'll find the door. Go up the driveway, slide through the bars, and turn left. We're in Vermont. A town called Hilly Vale is about an hour's walk away.'

    'You're like him, aren't you?' Skeleton is trying to get up on his hands and knees, and he is wobbly as a colt, but he makes it. 'You don't have to answer. I know.'

    Tom looks at the bruised hateful face and sees — this is a shock! — repugnance equal to his own. Skeleton spits at him. Yellow phlegm slides across Tom's jaw. 'You're like him,' Skeleton says.

    Tom flicks the wet gobbet off his chin. 'Get out, Skeleton. Otherwise he'll kill you.' A crazy voice in his own mind, wholly his, is clamoring that he use his powers to pick Skeleton up and throw him against the wall, break his bones, grind him to dust . . . he sees the aerial photograph of Carson School crayoned over with red childish flames.

    Skeleton looks into Tom's face and shudders backward, banging into the first row of seats. 'Get out,' Tom says, and Skeleton goes unsteadily toward the door. Tom's hands are burning weights.

18

Applause, gentlemen? But the figures in the mural had frozen into place again. Even the Collector was back on the wall of the little theater, staring toward Tom as if still hungry for him. No need for that anymore: you've eaten me already. Tom felt again the terrible gravitational pull inside the Collector. If he had been a shade weaker, he would be in there now, sharing eternity with Skeleton Ridpath, their minds a couple of hundred-watt bulbs.

    He went to the stage, and did not have the strength to pull himself up onto it. 'Rose?' She did not answer. 'Rose?' Tom walked as quickly as he could to the side of the stage and trudged up the little flight of steps. Behind the curtain he was in an underwater world. Dim rosy light: heaps of things like banks of coral, shining from inexplicable edges and corners, as if fireflies nested on them. A fanned-out deck of cards on the