Shadowland (58 page)

 
   Tom backed away from the invisible scene — he could almost hear the room exhale its disappointment. Or something in the room . . . some frustrated giant, turning away . . . Tom closed the door.

 
   And continued down the hall to the Little Theater. The brass plate on the door was no longer blank: now three words and a date had been engraved on it:

 
Wood Green Empire

 
27 August, 1924

 
Tom cracked the door open, and the audience in the mural stared down at him with their varying expressions of pleasure, amusement, cynicism, and greed. Of course. Just inside the door, he was so close to the stage as to be nearly on it. He backed out.

 
   He went a few steps down the hall and let himself into the big theater. It too shone; even the banked seats were lustrous. Tom walked deeper into the theater. The curtains had been pulled back from the stage. Polished wood led to a blank white wall. Ropes dangled at varying heights above the wood.

 
   Tom went halfway up an aisle and sat in one of the padded seats. He wished he could lead Rose and Del out of Shadowland that afternoon: he did not want to see anything of Collins' farewell performance. That would contain more than one farewell, he knew. He knew that the way he knew his own senses.

 
   These too seemed to have taken part in the general change within him. It was as if his senses had been tuned and burnished. All day, he had seen and heard with great clarity. Since he and Del had returned to the house, this intensity of perception had increased. Ordinary, almost inaudible sounds needled into him, full of substance. Oddest of all had been his awareness of Del, sleeping in his bed: that dot of warmth. He was still conscious of it. Del shone for him.

 
   Then Tom felt some shift in the house, a movement of mass and air as if a door had been opened. The house had rearranged itself to admit a newcomer. Tom could half-hear the blood surging through the newcomer's body; his muscles began to tense. He knew it was Coleman Collins. The magician was waiting for him. He was somewhere in the theater, though nowhere he could be found by ordinary search.

 
   Tom left the chair and walked down the aisle toward the empty stage. What was it Collins had said about wizards, in the story about the sparrows? They gave you what you asked for, but they made you pay for it.

 
   He crossed the wide area before the stage and went toward the farthest aisle. Tom remembered seeing those green walls forming around him, flying together tike pieces of clouds. The white columns reminded him of the bars of the gate — solid uprights between open spaces. Then he knew where the magician was.

 
   Feeling foolish but knowing he was right, Tom pressed his palm to the wall. For an instant he felt solid plaster, slightly cooler than his hand. Then it was as if the molecules of the plaster loosened and began to drift apart. The wall grew wanner; for a millisecond the plaster seemed wet. Then only the color was there, solid-looking, but nothing but color. His hand had gone inward up to the wrist. On the other side of the wall of color, his fingers were dimly, greenly visible. Tom followed his hand through the wall.

 
5

 
He was in an immense white space, his heart leaping. Coleman Collins sat in the owl chair regarding him with an affectionate sharpness. He wore a soft gray flannel suit and shining black shoes. A glass half-filled with neat whiskey sat on the arm of the chair beside his right elbow. 'I knew when I first heard your name,' Collins said, propping his chin on laced fingers, 'and I was certainwhen I first saw you. Congratulations. You must be feeling very proud of yourself.'

 
   'I'm not.'

 
   Collins smiled. 'You should be. You are the best for centuries, probably. When your studies have ended, you should be able to do and to have anything you want. In the meantime, I want to answer whatever questions you may have.' Collins lowered his hand and found the glass without looking at it. He sipped. 'Surely even an unwilling bridegroom has a query or two.'

 
   'Del thinks he was chosen,' Tom said.

 
   'That's of no consequence to you.' Collins tipped his head and looked purely charming. It was like looking at Laker Broome trying to be charming; Tom read the magician's tension and excitement, half-heard the drumming of his pulse. 'In fact, I suggest that you can no longer afford to worry about matters like that. One of the perils of altitude, little bird — you can't see the lesser birds still trying to find their way out of the clouds.'

 
   'But what's going to happen to Del when he finds out? I don't want him to find out.'

 
   The magician shrugged, sipped again at the whiskey. 'I can tell you one thing. This is Del's last summer at Shadowland. It will not be yours. You will be here often, and stay long. That is how it must be, child. Neither of us has a choice.' He smiled again at Tom, and took a familiar envelope from a jacket pocket. 'Which brings me to this. Elena gave it to me, as you should have known she would. I couldn't let it go out, you know. I am still considering the insult to my hospitality.'

 
   It was the letter to his mother, and Tom looked at it with dread. Collins was still smiling at him, holding the letter upright between two fingers. 'Let's dispose of it, shall we?'

 
   A flame appeared at the envelope's topmost corner.

 
   Collins held it until the growing flame was a quarter of an

 
   inch from his fingers, then tossed the black burning thing

 
   upward; it vanished into the flame, and then the flame

 
   itself vanished, disappearing from the bottom up.

 
   'Now that is no longer between us,' Collins said. 'And there shall be nothing like it in the future. Understand?'

 
   'I understand.' Tom had gone very pale — somehowthe letter had been proof to him that he would escape Shadowland.

 
   'This is far more important to you than your schooling, boy. This is your real schooling. And in fact I want to show you something you are bound to ask me about sooner or later.' He bent down and retrieved a slim leather-bound book from beneath the chair. There was no title on cover or spine. 'This is the Book.
Our
book. The book we are pledged to honor.'

 
   The magician's excitement was almost palpable. Beneath his cool exterior, Collins was seething.

 
   'Speckle John gave it to me. In time it will be yours — you will have read it a hundred times by then. The original was lost for centuries, and may have ended its existence on an Arab's fire — the mother of the man who discovered a cache of unknown gospels used them for fuel before they discovered their black-market value. But we have had our copy for centuries, passed from hand to hand. A watered-down version, known as
The Gospel of Thomas,
has been known to scholars for something like thirty years. But that weak document does not reveal our secrets. What is the first law of magic?'

 
   'As above, so below,' Tom said.

 
   'Do you know the meaning of that?' Collins waited; Tom felt the gravitational pull of his tension. 'It means that gods are only men with superior understanding.
Magicians.
Who have found and released the divine within themselves. Jesus shared this knowledge with only a few, and the knowledge became our secret tradition.' He ran his fingers lovingly over the leather binding. 'The Book will be in the room I forbade you to enter. After my performance, go there and read it. Read it as I read it forty years ago. Learn the real history of your world.'

 
   'Does it talk about evil?' Tom said, remembering the final creature that had approached him in the night.

 
   'God, in the orthodox view, causes famine, plague, and flood. Was God evil? Evil is a convenient fiction.'

 
   Tom looked into the magician's powerful old face. What he saw blazed so fiercely he had to look away.

 
   'You avoid examining what you saw last night. So I will not force you, boy — it will come. But you must know that every boy at your school was touched by our magic, somebeneficially, some not. It could not have been otherwise, given that you and Del were there.'

 
   'I knew the nightmares were from me,' Tom said out of the full awareness of his guilt.

 
   'Of course. From what was hidden in you, from what you were too stupid to know you had. From your treasure.'

 
   'My treasure.'

 
   'Any treasure locked away in a dark room will begin to fester and push its way out. An untreated body in a coffin will do that. It is in the Book:
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.'

 
   'Is that what happened to Skeleton Ridpath?' Tom asked.

 
   'He did not thrust the power away from him, like another in your class, but begged for it — for its crudest aspects — when he was unready for them. That boy wanted me to come for him, and so I did come for him. With Speckle John, I had already invented the Collector. He was originally a thing of cloth and rubber, a toy to frighten an audience. I saw that he could be a vessel. There are many candidates for collection. There are many volunteers.'

 
   Collins' hands were trembling. 'I gave him what he asked for.' He looked up at Tom with a look of wild challenge. 'Come with me. You'll see what I mean.'

 
He began striding away from the chair. Afraid to be left alone, Tom hurried after him. The magician's tall gray-suited form was already deep in white mist. It gathered around Tom as he got nearer to Collins, and for a moment was thick enough — a freezing cloud — to hide Collins altogether. Then Tom saw broad gray shoulders ahead, and rushed forward.

 
   He walked out of the mist onto dry sandy grass. They were in Arizona again, he recognized before he recognized anything else. Cars stood in rows about them. In the distance, a tinny cheer went Up. 'Hurry,' Collins said, and Tom gasped: the magician was wrapped within a long trench coat, his face shadowed by a wide-brimmed hat.

 
   Tom drew near and saw where they were.

 
   At their feet the land fell away to a flat limed plane — the football field. Across it, the stands were crowded with parents and boys. Two football teams clashed and grunted on the field. Collins said, 'Two things called me here. That disturbed boy on the bench who is looking at me this very minute — and you. Look.'

 
   Tom saw Skeleton's face go rapturous and unhinged over the padded frail chest and shoulders. With his newly burnished senses, he could feel what was happening inside Skeleton, a sick thrilled wave of passion. Then he heard a noise of love mingled with fear, and saw Skeleton's head snap around to look up into the stands. And there was Del, trying to get on his feet in the last row, staring with wild eyes straight at him. The feelings which surged from Del were too dense for him to fully take them in, love and terror and the horror of betrayal and confusion wretched in its magnitude. He saw himself, with an uncomprehending and innocent face, hauling Del back down into his seat.