Shadowland (43 page)

 
   'Bobby thinks that's what he's got. The boat, the house, the two-hundred-dollar shoes. I helped him get a rock-bottom deal on a Jacuzzi. That's what he thinks it is. You probably think it's a good paragraph.'

 
   'At times,' I said. The Big Mac was gone, and the fries were following it.

 
   'Well, I think it's a crock. I've seen a lot of stuff, being with these guys. They . . . got a lot of strange beliefs.' The fries were gone, and Marcus was moving out of the restaurant, wiping his fingers on his trousers. 'They can make you go blind, make you deaf, make you see things, they think. Magic. I say, if it's magic, it can't be right. There's no such thing as good magic, that's what I learned.'

 
   'You know about Tom — '

 
   'Flanagan. Sure. I even went to see him once, down here. But . . . ' His face suddenly fell apart. It was like watching the collapse of an intricate public building. 'You see a bird over there?'

 
   I looked: a few peeling storefronts, the ubiquitous old men.

 
   'Forget it. Let's go for a ride.' He belched, and I smelled meat.

 
   I looked at my watch. I wished I had gone out on Bobby's boat and were sitting on wide seamless water, listening to Bobby gab about the toilet business. 'I really have to go,' I said.

 
   'No, you can't,' Marcus said, and looked stricken. 'Come on. I want to show you something.' He pulled me toward his car by the sheer force of his desperation.

 
   Back in the Gremlin, we drove aimlessly around upper Miami Beach for half an hour, Marcus talking the entire time. He took corners randomly, sometimes doublingback as if trying to lose someone, often cutting dangerously in front of other cars. 'See, there's the library . . . and see that bookstore? It's great. You'd like it. There's a lot of stuff in Miami Beach for a guy like you. I could introduce you to a lot of the right people, get you material like you never dreamed existed, man. You ever been to Haiti?'

 
   I had not.

 
   'You ought to go. Great hotels, beaches, good food . . . Here's a park. Beautiful park. You ever been to Key Biscayne? No? It's close, you want to go there?'

 
   'I can't, Marcus,' I said. I had long since suspected that whatever he wanted me to see did not exist. Or that he had decided I should not see it after all. Finally I persuaded him to drive me back to my hotel.

 
   When he dropped me off, he took one of my hands in both of his and looked at me with his leaky blue eyes. 'Had a hell of a good time, didn't we? Keep your eyes open, now, pal. You'll read about me in the papers.' He roared off, and I thought I saw him talking to himself as his battered car swung back out into Collins Avenue. I went upstairs, took a shower, ordered a drink from room service, and lay down on the bed and slept for three hours.

 
   Two months later I heard that Marcus had shot himself — he had named me as executor of his estate, but there was no estate except for a few clothes and the Gremlin, in which he had killed himself. The lawyer who rang me said that Marcus had put the bullet in his head around six in the morning, in a parking lot between a tennis court and the North Community Center. It was about three blocks from the McDonald's he had dragged me into.

 
   'Why would he name me as his executor?' I asked. 'I barely knew him.'

 
   'Really?' asked the lawyer. 'He left a note in his room that you were the only person who would understand what he was going to do. He wrote that he had shown you something — while you were visiting him here.'

 
   'Maybe he thought he did,' I said. I remembered him asking me if I had seen a bird as little tucks and dents appeared in his face, just as if someone were sewing him up from the inside.

 
2

 
Tom and Rose

 
The girl would not meet his eyes. She sat on Del's bed, looking at her feet as if he had embarrassed her. Tom saw that she thought he had been making fun of her — Del was staring at him in amazement — and he said, 'I'm sorry. That just popped out. I didn't mean anything by it.'

 
   'I know who you are,' she said. Then she lifted her face and gave him a look from her pale iridescent eyes which nearly blew him across the room. 'Everybody says you're going to be a great magician.'

 
   'Look, I'm a little sick of hearing that,' Tom said, speaking with more heat than he had intended. Rose Armstrong looked as though a strong word would melt her. The silk shimmered about her arms. 'Who is everybody, anyhow?'

 
   'Del and Mr. Collins. Especially Mr. Collins.'

 
   'He talked to you about me?'

 
   'Sure. Now and then. Last winter.'

 
   Del smiled, and Tom looked at both of them, perplexed. 'But he didn't even know me last winter.'

 
   'He did know you.' And that, it seemed, would be that. The girl knitted her hands together and regarded him squarely. Despite what he had thought, she was relaxed. As slight and flowerlike as she was, she was a year older than both boys, and to Tom it was suddenly as if she were ten years older — she seemed massive and unknowable. But still her face with its full lips and high forehead broadcast vulnerability. The wet hair hugged her head. He realized that he envied Del, his closeness to Rose Armstrong. The girl seemed as perfect as a statue.

 
   
Living Statue.

 
   'He made me,' Rose said with an air of bravery.

 
   Now Tom's uneasiness increased.

 
   'I never had a thought in my head until I met Mr. Collins,' she said, and he relaxed. 'I was nothing.'
That
stabbing look of a wound deeply absorbed settled again in her face. 'I would forgive him anything.'

 
   'Do you have to forgive him very often?'

 
   'Well, he drinks a lot, and I don't like that. Sometimes he changes when he's had too much.'

 
   Tom nodded. He had seen the proof of that. He asked, 'Why did you go out on that rock dressed up like it was winter? And open that smoke bomb.'

 
   'He told me to. He gave me the clothes.'

 
   'And that's enough?'

 
   'Of course.'

 
   'Did you know that we were supposed to see you?'

 
   'I assumed someone was supposed to see me. It wouldn't make sense otherwise.'

 
   'Does he forgive you too?'

 
   'Why should he have to?'

 
   'Because when I was coming up here, I met him in the hall. He was drunk. He said he was going to give Del a warning, but that I could do it for him. I guess it was about your being here.'

 
   She flushed. 'I wondered . . . I guess I shouldn't be here. But tomorrow it'll probably be all right.'

 
   'You mean, when he's sober?'

 
   She nodded. 'But I shouldn't stay. Del, I . . . you know.'

 
   Tom felt the stab of envy or jealousy again. She had not once called him by his name.

 
   'I guess so,' Del said.

 
   Tom watched as she stood up, glanced at him as if he had struck her — but was that just a part of her face, like Bobby Hollingsworth's smile? She peeled the shirt off. He jumped into the awkward silence. 'Before you go, can I ask you something?'

 
   She nodded.

 
   'Are there some men staying here somewhere? Have you seen a bunch of men anywhere around?'

 
   'Yes.' She glanced at Del. 'They haven't been here for a year or two. They stay in a cabin on the other side of the lake. They're his friends.'

 
   'Okay,' Tom said.

 
   'They used to work with him,' she added. With another glance at Del, 'I don't like it when they're here. They're not like him.' She was holding the shirt up before her, shielding herself. 'They're dead.'

 
   This was totally unexpected. 'That's ridiculous.' He saw that it was something Collins had told her, and which she had accepted.

 
   'You may think it is. He told me about it. About how it happened.'

 
   'It's still ridiculous.' He heard the repetition, and thought he sounded nearly as stupid as the girl. 'Did he tell you to say that to us?'

 
   'No. I have to go.'

 
   Tom felt a burning impatience allied with an equally strong desire to. keep Rose Armstrong in the room. 'Where do you stay? In the house?'

 
   'I can't tell you. I'm not supposed to.' She dropped the shirt on the bed and smiled at Del. 'I can tell it's your friend's first time.'

 
   'Could you carry a letter out of here for me? Could you mail a letter for me?'

 
   'Nothing is supposed to leave here,' she said, and began to move delicately toward the hall door. 'But you could ask Elena.'

 
   'That woman? She doesn't speak English.'

 
   'I'm sure she understands the words 'post office.'' She gave her first smile. 'I hope you're in a better mood the next time I meet you.' Then she was at the door, sliding around it like a shadow. 'Good-bye, Del.' She turned the iridescent eyes toward Tom. 'Good-bye, grumpy Tom.' Then she was gone.

 
   Del's face was rapturous. Tom heard the pad of bare feet moving down the hall in the direction he had chased the woman called Elena. Then the soft opening of a door.

 
   Tom turned to the still-transfixed Del. 'I saw the Brothers Grimm downstairs,' he said. 'I guess they're dead, too.' Del simply smiled at him. 'What is she, hypnotized or something?' Del did not speak or move. Tom walked away from him and went out the door. The hall was dark and quiet. In the woods, the lights burned like beacons. He went up to the glass and put his hands to his face to blot out his reflection. Rose Armstrong was padding over the flagstones; she began to descend the iron ladder.

 
   He stood in the hall until the shaft of moonlight on the water illuminated a silvery, lifting arm; froth where her feet kicked.

 
   'Now you know,' Del said behind him.

 
   Tom nodded. He heard the mistrust in his friend's voice.

 
3

 
War

 
'This is a true story,' the magician said, 'and its name is 'The Death of Love.' Ah, melodrama.'

 
   His thick white hair stirred in the light breeze. The three of them sat on the stony beach, Collins facing the sharp rise of land and the boys looking toward him and the glimmering deep blue lake behind him. To their right, the weather-beaten pier protruded out into the lake; beyond that the gray-boarded boathouse sat on concrete pilings. As Rose Armstrong had hinted, Collins showed none of his cold rage of the night before. He had placed a note on the boys' breakfast trays, asking them to meet him on the beach at ten in the morning. Each of them still turning over the encounter with Rose Armstrong in his mind, they had descended the shaky iron structure at a quarter to ten; Collins, a white sunhat on his head and a rolled blanket and a picnic basket under his arm, had come down the stairs twenty minutes later. He wore a long-sleeved blue shirt, gray lightweight slacks and sandals. The shirt and slacks were slightly too large, as if he had recently lost weight. 'Good morning, apprentices,' he said. 'All parties have a good night's sleep after yesterday's exertions?'

 
   Collins unfurled the blanket on the beach, set the wicker basket on it. He removed the hat and set it on the basket. 'Sit down, boys. History lesson, if you are not too bedazzled by love to listen. Time for one of those stories I've been promising you. Face me, that's the way. If you get bored, you can always look at the water and daydream about Miss Armstrong.' He smiled. 'This is a true story.

 
'By now the two of you know more about the operations of true magic than ninety-nine percent of the population, including other magicians, and I want to take you back to a time when I was learning about these things myself — to the time when I first came into command of my own strengths. We are going forty years back, to just before the nineteen-twenties.

 
   'In fact, we are going back to 1917, the year America joined the Great War. My name then was still Charles Nightingale — Del's father, my brother, was twelve years younger than I, still a boy for all practical purposes, and a stranger to me. I had trained as a doctor, and had supported myself as a magician during medical school. I was a good mechanic and card-cranker. Manual dexterity. I intended to be a surgeon. Magic was only a hobby then, though I had always felt in it something beyond the simple tricks I had mastered, something vastly powerful. Medicine seemed the only thing in the practical world that could approach that realm of responsibility and awe to which I aspired — I mean that world (only dimly apprehended by me) where the ability to make fundamental changes is so great as to automatically inspire awe. If I had been conventionally religious, I suppose I might have gone into the clergy. But I was always too ambitious for that. In 1917 I qualified as a doctor and was immediately given a commission and sent to France on a troop ship. My assignment was to a dressing station at Cantigny. I brought only a few things with me, clothes and cards and some books by a Frenchman named Eliphas Levi, a magician who had died in 1875. The books were the two volumes of
Le Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie,
rather wildly, verbosely written, but full of evocations of that power I was searching for. Levi helped me to understand that Good and Evil are earthbound distinctions — when you hear someone discriminate on that basis, he is invariably up to his ankles in mud. I also carried a book by Cornelius Agrippa, the Renaissance magician, who said when asked how man could possess magical powers — remember this, boys — 'No one has such power but he who has cohabited with the elements, vanquished nature, mounted higher than the heavens, elevating himself abovethe angels. . . . ' Vanquished nature. Doctors attempt that too, but with what clumsy weapons, scalpels and sutures!