Shadowland (30 page)

 
   'Stupendous. I'll see you there at . . . ' He looked at his watch. 'Shall we say eleven?'

 
   Del nodded.

 
   'Fine. Tom, there will not be much of a view of the lake at this hour, but tomorrow you should be able to see it. A very tempting vista.' Again there was a suggestion of mockery and unstated meanings in his voice. He nodded and began to mount the stairs. Halfway up, he wobbled backward, and the boys stood nailed to the floor, fearing that he was about to topple down, but he righted himself with a hand against the wall, said, 'Oops,' and continued upward.

 
   Del shook his head in relief. 'Let's go wash our hands.'

 
   He led Tom to a small bathroom just off the entry. While Del lathered his hands in the sink, Tom waited in the doorway. 'Are the woods always lighted up like that?'

 
   'First time. But those candles! I was right.'

 
   'About it being like school this time.'

 
   'We'll see,' Del said. 'Your turn.'

 
   'Well, I hope it isn't like school.' Tom edged around Del in the little bathroom.

 
   'Hey, did you know this was a haunted house?' Del asked playfully.

 
   'Come on, Florence.'

 
   Del pushed a button beneath the light switch, and the radiance in the bathroom abruptly turned purple. In the sink, Tom's hands shone a lighter, more vibrant purple. He looked in the mirror — Del was laughing — and saw his face, the same shade of purple, disappearing under a hideous mask which seemed to stretch forward from the glass. The effect was half-comic, half-frightening. The face, with distorted rubbery lips and dead skin, the very face of greed, of acquisitiveness sucked down into pure hunger, looked at him with his own eyes. It pushed forward slowly, slowly, and became the only thing in the room. Tom finally jerked backward, unable to face the ugly thing down, and banged into Del. The face hung vibrating in the air.

 
   'I know.' Del laughed. 'But it just comes up close and then melts back down into the mirror. It's a great trick. The first time I saw it, I howled like hell.' He pushed the button, and Tom was again standing in an ordinary wallpapered half-bath. His face was itself, familiar but pale.

 
   'Uncle Cole calls it the Collector,' Del said. 'Don't ask me how it works. Let's go up and eat.'

 
   'The Collector,' Tom echoed, now really shaken. That was just how it had looked.

 
Their rooms, in the left wing of the house, were window — less, bright, incongruously modern and 'Scandinavian': they could have been rooms in an expensive motel. Creamy off — white walls hung with colorful but bland abstract paintings, neat single beds covered in blue corduroy, thick white carpets that showed their footprints. White louvered doors swung open onto deep closets where their clothes had already been hung or folded, their suitcases packed away at the back. White desks with lamps stood against the walls. In Del's room, connected to Tom's by sliding wooden pocket doors, a table had been set for two. A crystal decanter half-filledwith red wine stood beside covered dishes and a salad bowl.

 
   'Boy,' Tom said, smelling the steaks.

 
   Del marched to the table and sat down, snapping his napkin onto his lap. He poured from the decanter into Tom's glass and his own.

 
   'He lets you drink wine?'

 
   'Of course he does. He can hardly be puritanical about drink, can he? And besides that, he really believes dinner isn't complete without wine.' Del sipped, and smiled. 'He used to put water in it when I was younger. There isn't any water in this.'

 
   'Well, this isn't much like school,' Tom said.

 
   The steaks were still warm, bloodred in the center and delicately charred on the outside. Other covered dishes concealed a little hill of spinach, mounded mushrooms, trench fries. Tom lifted his glass and sipped: a dusty, stony, slightly grapy flavor, intensely pleasing — the more it sat in his mouth, the more taste it gave him. 'So that's what good wine is like,' he said.

 
   'That's what Margaux is like anyhow,' said Del, busily chewing. 'He's giving us something good because this is our first night.' A moment later he said, 'He
knew.
He knew about the candles. I couldn't be sure before. But he knows everything that happened.'

 
   'Anyhow, your Rose Armstrong will be around,' Tom said, and Del's face flushed with an increase of pleasure. 'This is going to be the perfect summer,' he said.

 
When they left Del's room to go downstairs, they paused a minute to look out one of the big windows in the hallway. These gave a view of a long expanse of wood; the spotlights or torches illuminated a congregation of branches or slabs of boulder, holes into the wood. Where the wood ended, a black non — thing that must have been the lake began. Tom saw iron railings dripping down a cliff behind the house. Far off in the woods bordering the other side of the lake, similar lights burned — fuzzy as Japanese lanterns. 'Time to get downstairs,' Del said, and moved away from the window. To Tom it looked like the setting for a party yet to begin, full of promises and anticipations. 'Come on,' said Del, eager to be downstairs, and Tom gave it one last look and saw the party's first guest. A wolf, or what looked like a wolf. It came into one of the circles of light, tongue lolling, and stared toward the house. Far off, centered in the light, the wolf seemed staged, posed as for a picture. It seemed like a signpost, a hint. 'Hey!' Tom said.

 
   'Come
on,'
Del said from the staircase. 'We have to get to the Little Theater.'

 
   'Coming,' Tom said. The wolf was gone. But had it been there at all? A wolf, in Vermont?

 
   Going back down, he noticed that the house was more complicated than it looked. At the top of the staircase an old-fashioned swinging door barred them from a large black space in which Tom made out the shape of a tall door. 'What's back there?'

 
   'Oh, my uncle's room. We have to get down.'

 
   They rattled down the stairs and turned back into the body of the original house. They passed a living room where a lamp burned on a table between two couches covered in an unexpectedly feminine fabric, passed the entrance to a galleylike kitchen. Del pushed open another door which Tom had assumed led outside; but it took them into another 'motel' corridor, carpeted dark brown, its ceiling illuminated by indirect lighting. At the beginning of this corridor, another hall jutted off to the rear and ended at a crossbarred wooden door as impressive as Laker Broome's. 'And what's back there?'

 
   'I don't know. He never lets me go in there.'

 
   Del bustled down the corridor until he came to a black door set in a recess lighted by a single downspot. A brass plate had been screwed into the door just above the boys' heads, but it was blank. Del quickly checked his watch. 'God. A whole minute to spare.'

 
   Now what? Tom wondered. An office like Lake the Snake's? A concrete-block classroom overlooking Santa Rosa Boulevard?

 
   But what he saw when Del opened the door was at first a steeply banked jewel-box theater with perhaps fifty seats. Though empty, it still seemed full of life, and a half-second later Tom saw that the walls had been painted with ranks of people in chairs — people with rapt faces, one of them drinking from a cup through a straw, one pawing a box of chocolates. Then there was something grotesque intheir midst. . . But Del was pushing him into the first row and turning him around.

 
   'This is wild,' he said. They faced a tiny stage. A polished table and a Shaker chair stood before brown velvet curtains. He looked quickly over his shoulder to find what had briefly caught his eye, and saw it immediately. It was the Collector, black-suited, a few rows back and to the side of the man drinking through a straw: pushing his rapt, greedy face forward, wishing to devour whatever he saw on the tiny stage; a grotesque joke. Then Tom was startled by the thought that the grotesque figure resembled Skeleton Ridpath.

 
   His eye caught another surprise just as he heard the clicking of a door behind the velvet curtains: a few seats away from the Collector, a group of men with outdated but elegant clothing and neat beards, cigars stuck in their mouths, a group of raffish bucks out on the town . . . Del jabbed him in the ribs, and he snapped his head back just as Cole Collins parted the curtains and sat in the Shaker chair. His handsome, slightly hooded blue eyes were glazed, but his face was pink. Instead of the suit, the magician wore a dark green pullover from the top of which frothed a green-and-red scarf, beautifully fitted to his neck. He smiled, taking in the whole room, and Tom felt the presence of the painted men behind him. The back of his neck prickled.

 
   'The magician and his audience,' Del's uncle said with the air of one who opens a treasure chest. 'A subject you should consider. What is their relationship? That of an actor and those he seeks to move, to entertain? That of an athlete and those before whom he demonstrates his skill? Not quite, though it has elements of both.' His smile had never left his face. 'An audience always fights a magician, boys. It is never truly on his side. It feels hostility toward him: because it knows that it is being fooled.'

 
   No, it can't be, Tom thought. They left the train in New York, they are part of some other story. And that awful joke can't have anything to do with Skeleton.

 
   'The magician must make them relish it. He is the storyteller whose only story is himself, and every man jack in the audience, every drunk, every dolt, every clever skeptic, every doubter, is looking for the chink in his story that he can use to destroy him.'

 
   Tom forced himself to look straight ahead: he had tokeep his neck rigid by willpower. He felt as though Mr. Peet and the others were moving in their seats.

 
   'The magician is a general with an army full of deserters and traitors. To keep their loyalty, he must inspire and entertain, frighten and cajole, baffle and command. And when he has done that, he can lead them.'

 
   In the midst of his tension, Tom felt a growing area of tiredness, and realized that the wine and Collins' tirade were making him sleepy.

 
   The smile was taut now, and directed straight at Tom. 'I am saying that the practice of magic is the courting of self-destruction — that is one of its great secrets. The closer you allow yourself to come to that truth, the greater you may become. Listen: magic is used only to inspire fear and to grant wishes — even those you do not wish to have. In itself it is not important. Enough.'

 
   He gave Tom that smile like a glare. 'Do you want to learn to fly? Would you like to leave the earth behind, boy?'

 
   'You called us birds,' Tom said. And thought for the first time in months of the Ventnor owl. Collins nodded. 'Are you afraid?' 'Yes,' Tom said. He had a terrible urge to yawn, and felt his lips stretching.

 
   'You don't have the
beginning
of an idea what magic is,' Collins hissed.

 
   Tom thought: I can't spend all summer with this crazyman.