Shadowland (78 page)

 
   'I can't change him back, Rose!' he wailed. Thesparrow-heart beat, a thousand times faster than his own, against the tips of his fingers.

 
   'I don't know how to change him back!' He heard his voice as he had when the nails had gone in, sailing up high enough to freeze. The sparrow quivered in his hands. A wing feebly struck his thumb.

 
   'Then you'll have to make Mr. Collins change him back,' Rose said. She stood just inside the door, looking down at Tom with the stunned bird in his wrapped hands.
'Make
him do it,' and her voice was fierce.

 
22

 
He came out of the bedroom holding Del as he had held the gun, and Coleman Collins was lounging against the top of the banister. 'Welcome to the Wood Green Empire,' the magician said. 'Front-row seats? Excellent.'

 
   'Change him back,' Tom said.

 
   'Sorry, no refunds, no exchanges. You'll have to take your seats now.'

 
   'That's not him,' Rose said at his shoulder. 'It's a shadow.'

 
   'Oh, you told on me,' the image said, and flickered away into dozens of dancing flames.

 
   'welcome to the wood green empire!' boomed the metallic voice. The bird trembled in Tom's hands, cheeping frantically, twisting its neck to look up into his face. The flames died before they fell, like fireworks, leaving them in darkness. Down the hall to Tom's side, moonlight cast panels of silver on the floor and folded halfway up the wall; otherwise Shadowland was as dark as the tunnels beneath the summerhouse.

 
   Del went utterly still in his hands, and Tom feared that he had died. Then he felt a high regular throb beneath his fingers, the sparrow's heart thrilling away, and he opened his shirt and tenderly put Del next to his skin. He buttoned his shirt up halfway. Feathers rustled against his chest.

 
   Outside, the fireworks began again with a thumpingexplosion that rattled the windows down the hall and sent shooting rays of red and blue across the silvery pane of windows. Soft against his skin, Del made almost a human cry.

 
   A beam of light at the bottom of the stairs: Herbie Butter outlined in light, dressed in his black tails, red wig, and white face; 'We have a volunteer, ladies and gentlemen — the brave Tommy Flanagan, all the way from sunny Arizona in the United States of America! Are you ready, Tommy? Can you sing for us?'

 
   'Change him back!' Tom shouted, and Herbie Butter rolled over in a backflip and landed on his feet, an index finger pointed to the sky.

 
   'Change? Easier said than done, boy — but that's magic for you.' He too dissolved into dancing, lilting flames.

 
   'THE OLD KING! THE ONLY KING!'

 
   Tom felt his way down the stairs in the dark.

 
   . . .
Philly's wife looks a little peaked this summer, Nick
. . .

 
   . . .
what you get from being in two places at once . . .

 
   Voices from the tunnels, come out to play in the dark.

 
   And voices from the other place that had been Shadowland.

 
   . . .
if a senior drops his books on the floor, pick them up. Carry them where he tells you to carry them. Do anything a senior tells you to do . . .

 
   He came down from the last step and nearly stumbled, expecting another.

 
   . . .
got that? You will be doomed to destruction, DOOMED TO DESTRUCTION, if you do not learn the moral lessons of this school.
. . .

 
   He smelled the biting aroma of gin.

 
   'Change him back!' he shouted: felt the crippling hysteria bubbling in him and knew that too could destroy him.

 
   'You have to find the real one,' Rose said. 'He wants you to find him, Tom.'

 
   Tom cupped his hands around Del's shivering body. The sparrow had drawn up his feet and clamped up his wings, and was small and warm inside his shirt: small and warm and terrified enough to die of shock. That terror made his own insignificant. He looked down at thepregnant little bulge in his shirt, and saw two circles of blood where his palms had rested. His hysteria, something he could not afford, eased. 'I want it too,' he said.

 
23

 
They turned back into the main body of the house. Sudden light stabbed his eyes, and Coleman Collins was standing in a column of flame beside the row of theatrical posters. Orange light danced on the opposite wall, on the ceiling. 'That was your shortcoming, you know,' the shadow said. 'You simply were not capable of learning the moral lessons. The Book would have been useless to you. It never did Speckle John much good, either, as far as I could see.'

 
   'You perverted the Book,' Tom said. 'You perverted magic. Speckle John should have left you to die on that hillside. The fox should have torn out your throat.'

 
   The elegant figure in the flame chuckled. 'Now you sound like Ouspensky.' He mimed yawning and then grinned. 'You know, they were afraid of me, Ouspensky and Gurdjieff. That is why they carried on so. Afraid of me, like that ranter Crowley.' The flame had begun to consume itself from the bottom up.

 
   Outside, fireworks battered in the sky.

 
   The flame was a teardrop hanging in the air; only Collins' head was visible in it. 'And he was stronger than you, dear boy. . . . ' The flame and the head vanished together.

 
   He stood in the dark with Rose, feeling Del palpitating against his belly. 'You know, he's right. I can't do any of those things he does. He's bound to beat me, and he knows it.' He felt shock radiating out from her and he said, still with that fatalistic clarity, 'It doesn't mean I'm not going to try, but I can't do those things. I just can't.'

 
   'Have you ever tried?' came her voice.

 
   'No — not projecting myself like that.'

 
   'Then try it.'

 
   'Right now?'

 
   'Sure.'

 
   'I don't even know how to start.'

 
   'But haven't you been getting better — haven't you been learning?'

 
   'I guess.'

 
   'Then just start. Try it. Now. For the sake of your confidence.'

 
   It would not do his confidence much good if he failed, he reflected, but tried anyhow. It had to be like all the rest, he thought. It had to be a place in his own mind and all he had to do was find it. Suppose there were a mirror in front of you, Tom. Suppose you could see yourself. Suppose the mirror Tom could speak.

 
   'You're better than he is, Tom,' Rose whispered.

 
   Del tucked himself together even more compactly against Tom's skin, and Tom remembered flowing down into Skeleton's mind, how that had felt. . . that feeling of gaining and losing control simultaneously, of flowing out . . . his eyes fluttered, and a key turned within him as he thought of Skeleton's gibberish unreeling out toward him, and a ball of light momentarily flickered in the corridor.

 
   'Oh, do it, do it now,' Rose pleaded.

 
   Tom released it.

 
   The Collector stood down there moving toward him with frustrated eyes and a foolish mouth —

 
   
KA-WHAMP!
A rocket exploded over the house, big enough to send darts of light shooting in the window above the front door.

 
   His mind jolted, and the Collector fell over. 'Sorry,' he said. He even laughed. 'But did you see? It was harmless that time. There was nobody inside it.'

 
   'Put Tom down there,' Rose insisted.

 
   Tom reached toward the key again, and imagined not a mirror but himself on the day he had met Del, and felt the flowing, the letting go, and another Tom Flanagan took shape in a ball of light down the hall. He was pulling a beanie down to two fingers balanced on his nose. He smiled, opened his mouth, and a paralytic croak issued from him. He disappeared.

 
   'You see?' Rose said.

 
   Then light poured out from the entrance of the living room and showed them the collapsed rubbery bundle which was the Collector, and Tom knew that he hadmoved it from the big theater just by thinking about Skeleton. He heard a whirring noise, as if machinery had been switched into life.

 
   A second later, Humphrey Bogart walked into the hall from the living room.

 
24

 
'You goint to do some tricks for us, kid?' Bogart asked. He wore a slim black tuxedo, and a cigarette smoked in his fingers. 'Little more of the old razzle-dazzle before the curtain comes down?'

 
   'Del told me about some summer when he was twelve — the whole thing was like a movie . . . ' Tom muttered these not very coherent remarks to Rose as he watched the actor impatiently toying with his cigarette. Tom looked sideways, but Rose had gone somewhere into the darkness behind him.

 
   'Come on, we got some people who are interested in you,' the actor said, and snapped his fingers. 'Yeah, this way. Come on in and join the party.'

 
   Tom went toward the entrance of the living room.

 
   All the lights burned. A gathering of men in tuxedos, of women in dresses, filled the living room. The smell of gin invaded his nostrils again. 'Hey, sonny,' a bluff-faced man Tom recognized as William Bendix shouted, 'how you doing!'

 
   
'Oooo, Tom,'
crooned a platinum-blond woman with very red lips and a playful face that made a delicious, sensual joke of its own beauty. . . .

 
   'Bird lover, are you?' Bogart said, and made to strike Del cushioned in Tom's shirt. 'Got a couple little dogs myself.'