Shadowland (28 page)

 
   'Right
there?
That's impossible.'

 
   'Well, it looked like them. I know it wasn't them, but . . . sometimes it was pieces of their movies. He has projectors all over the place. He can make it look like anything is happening. Every summer is like a different performance. I just wonder what it'll be this time.' He paused. 'Because it's always tied in with what's going onbefore you get there. That's all part of magic, he says — working with what's in your mind. Or on your mind. And with all the stuff that went on this year . . . ' Del looked decidedly worried for a moment.

 
   'You mean it might be about school?'

 
   'Well, it never has been. Uncle Cole hates schools. He says he's the only person he knows who should be allowed to run a school.'

 
   'But it might be Skeleton and our show and . . . '

 
   'The fire. Maybe.' Del brightened. 'Whatever it is, we'll learn something.'

 
   'I guess there are some things I'd rather not learn,' Tom said, making the only truly conservative statement of his life.

 
   'Just listen to whatever he says first. When he meets us at the station. That's the clue to everything.'

 
   Tom said, 'The Case of the Famous First Words.'

 
   Del looked uncomfortable again. 'Hey, breakfast is over, huh? Let's get out of here.' He rattled his fork against his plate, looked at the window. The filthy brick backs of office buildings and warehouses slid by, encrusted with fire escapes — some bleak Ohio city. He finally came out with what he had been planning to say. 'Listen, Tom. You have to know . . . I mean, I should have said before. My uncle — everything I said about him is true. Including that he's half-crazy. He drinks. He drinks one hell of a lot. But that's not the reason, I don't think. He just
is
half-crazy. Except for the summers, I think he's alone all the time. Magic is everything he's got. So sometimes he gets kind of wild . . . and if he's been drinking . . . '

 
   'That's what I thought,' Tom said.

 
   
Take care, Red.

 
   'Does Bud Copeland know him?' Tom asked.

 
   Del nodded. 'He met him once — once when he came to Vermont to get me. I, uh, I broke a leg. It was just an accident. But they met, yeah.' Tom did not have to ask the question. 'Bud wanted me never to go back. I had to talk him into it. He didn't like Uncle Cole. But he didn't understand, Tom. That was all.'

 
   'I get it,' Tom said.

 
   'He's not all crazy,' Del pleaded. 'But he just nevergot the recognition he should have, and he spends all that time alone. It's okay, really. It's not even half. That's just an expression.'

 
   'But you broke your leg because he got carried away.'

 
   'That's right. But people break their legs skiing all the time.' This had the air of something Del had said many times before — to Bud Copeland and the Hillmans. 'It was just a little break, a hairline break, the doctor called it. I was only in a cast about three weeks, and that's nothing.'

 
   'Did your uncle get the doctor?'

 
   Del colored. 'Bud did. My uncle said it would heal by itself. And he was right. It would have. Maybe not as fast, but it would have healed.'

 
   'And how did it happen?'

 
   'I fell down a sort of a cliff,' Del said. Now his face was very red. 'Don't worry. Nothing like that is ever going to happen again.'

 
5

 
They changed trains in Pennsylvania Station; during the two hours before the departure of the Vermont train, the boys put their bags in lockers and walked around the station.

 
   'Just a couple more hours,' Del said as they stood in a doorway and looked at people coming in and out of the Statler Hilton across the street. 'This is going to be what people call an adventure.'

 
   'I feel like I'm already having an adventure,' Tom answered. The musicians, Hawkins and the man wkh Tom's name and the other two, were hailing cabs, joking, already going in different directions.

 
   'Someday we'll be like them,' Del said. 'Free. Can't you see what that'll be like? Traveling, performing . . . going wherever we like. I love the thought of the future. I love the whole idea.'

 
   Suddenly Tom saw it as Del did: lone-wolfing around the world, carrying an airline ticket always in his pocket, living in taxis and hotels, performing in one club after another . . . A layer of self deep in his personalitytrembled, and for the first time he really said
yes
to a life so different from any his parents or Carson School would have chosen for him.

 
6

 
The afternoon saw them stalled north of Boston, far out in the green Massachusetts countryside. Brindled cows swung their heads and regarded them with liquid eyes; people strolled along the tracks, sat on the slope of the line and looked back at the cows. 'Will we be here much longer?' Tom asked the conductor.

 
   'Could be a couple more hours, way I hear it.'

 
   'That long?'

 
   'You boys jus' got lucky.'

 
   At intervals a bored, half-audible voice broadcast over the loudspeakers:
'We regret the inconvenience of this delay, but . . . We anticipate resumption of service in a short
. . . ' Lively rumors traveled through the train.

 
   'Big mess — up at the next junction,' their porter finally told the boys. 'First thing like it in a lot of years. A train clear over on her side, people all bust up — terrible day for the railroad.'

 
   'What can we do?' Del asked, almost frantic. 'Someone's waiting for us at a station in Vermont.'

 
   'Wait is all you can do,' said the porter. 'Nobody goes anywhere till the line's clear. If your daddy's waiting for you in Vermont, he'll know all about this — they got TV in Vermont too.'

 
   'Not in that house,' Del said in despair.

 
   Tom looked outside and saw a few men in suits and ties passionately hurling rocks at cows.

 
As the hours went by, Tom felt his energy flicker like a dying candle. His eyes were heavy enough to drop from their sockets. All the colors in the train seemed lurid. Twice he went to the toilet and in a stink so concentrated that it was nearly visible allowed his stomach to erupt and leave him weightless. 'I've got to get some sleep,' he said when he had staggered back after the second time, andsaw that Dei was already there, folded up into himself like an exhausted bird.

 
   When they finally moved again, the jolt of the carriage snapped Tom into wakefulness. Del still slept, curled in stationary flight.

 
   The junction where the wreck had occurred was twenty miles down the track. For a moment the boys' carriage, the entire train, silenced: passengers crowded in the aisle to look out the windows but did not speak. A train the size of their own lay sprawled like a broken snake on the left side of the tracks. A gout of sparks blew into the air and died before the brilliant dots could fall on the few who still lay, covered up to the neck with blankets, on the sloping ground. One of the toppled carriages had been folded as neatly as paper; others were battered. Over the half-dozen policemen standing about, heavy gray smoke shifted in the humid air. Tom thought he could
smell
the wreck: oil and metal, the smell of heat and the smell of blood. The screams too. That was a smell like a taste in his own mouth, familiar and rancid.

 
7

 
Hilly Vale

 
Late that evening they reached a town called Springville, and Del said, 'It's the next stop.' He stood and pulled their suitcases off the luggage rack and arranged them in the aisle — he was being very businesslike and concentrated. Del sat up straight in his seat for fifteen minutes, not speaking, and for the last ten minutes stood by the door, looking straight ahead. 'Hey, what. . . ' Tom said, but Del did not even blink.

 
'Hilly Vale,'the metallic voice said.
'Hilly Vale. Please watch your step while leaving the train.'

 
   Del shot him a glance, but Tom was already hauling his suitcase toward him.

 
   They went down into hot, humid night. For a second Tom heard insect noises, a drumming and creaking andscratching and singing as loud as if they stood in the midst of jungle, and then the train started up and the insect noises disappeared. The station was so small it looked like a cartoon; yolky yellow light from overhead bulbs hugged it close. The train sailed into blackness and became a red dot vanishing around an invisible bend. Insects scratched and banged and whistled.

 
   'Well?' Tom said. He felt as if he had been put down by the side of the road in Alaska or Peru.

 
   Then the cacophony of insect sounds increased: drills, hammers, wrenches on pipes, musical saws, penny whistles, piano strings, whole boxes of tools dropped from a great height, doorbells, breaking bottles, miniature kamikaze aircraft, blows against flesh.

 
   Del
shushed
him. For a second the two boys stood embraced by the yellow light in what should have been silence.

 
   Mr. Thorpe stepped out of the blackness.

 
8

 
But no, it was not Mr. Thorpe, any more than the man on the train had been Skeleton Ridpath. He was tall, white-haired, dressed in a dark blue suit with wide chalky pin stripes. He had the sort of slight, elegant limp that makes limping look desirable. His nose was long and curved: the whole long squared — off face was powerful. Coleman Collins looked like an ambassador or an aged actor become so grand that he was offered no parts but those of financial pirates, grand dukes, and rascally Nazi generals. He smoothed down the longish white hair at the side of his head, and Tom thought that if you saw him playing a Latin teacher in a movie, you would know that his students would begin dying of a mysterious ailment late in the first reel. The limp became a definite waver, and Tom saw that the man was drunk. 'So the birds have come home,' the magician said.