Shadowland (64 page)

 
   The boys looked down the funnel of trees and saw the suggestion of high gray walls in the fog. Dark windows stared down at a tall figure in a hat and Burberry. Then a black figure, his face in shadow, emerged from a door in the brick.

 
   'My mentor, my guide, and my rival was waiting for me.'

 
   The man in the hat and long Burberry walked through the swirling fog toward the black figure. Then another door opened, and a slender girl hurried past both men. Rose.

 
   'On that first day, I saw a girl walking past us but did not look closely at her. Later I found that she was named Rosa Forte, that she was a singer, and that her rooms were on the ground floor just below mine.'

 
   Rose had disappeared into the trees; the two men had vanished too; the scene at the end of the tunnel of trees went black.

 
   'At first I thought that she was the most enchanting girl I'd ever known, brave and intelligent, with a face that delighted me more than any painting. Within weeks I had fallen in love with her. Once I saw a shepherdess that had her face in a provincial antique shop, and because I had no money to buy it, I stole it — slipped it into my pocket and took it home. When Speckle John and I toured, I took it with me. Stared at it; stared
into
it, as if it knew mysteries Speckle John did not.'

 
   Down in the narrow space between the trees, Rose Armstrong appeared, dressed in a long white garment of indeterminate period. She held a shepherd's crook, froze like a statue, and looked at Tom with unfocused eyes.

 
   'Mysteries, yes. Mystery is always duplicitous, and once you know its secret, it is twice banal. In time I came to think that Rosa Forte was like some maiden in a fable, blank to herself for all her surface charm, the property of anybody who listened to her tale.' Collins lifted his bottle, and Rose Armstrong disappeared backward into fog and trees.

 
   'Ah. Speckle John and I began working almost immediately. We booked ourselves into theaters and halls all over France. I was afraid to stay long periods in England because of the 'miracle-doctor' business, but we did cross England several times to perform in Ireland. We proceeded to invent an entirely new kind of performance, using the skills we had, and eventually worked our way up toward the top of the bill. What we were after was extravagance, and we could twist an audience around so that they could not be sure by the end of the performance exactly what had happened to them. When they saw us, they knew no other magician could come near us. One of our most famous illusions was the Collector, which began almost as a joke of mine. It was not until eighteen months later that I decided that I had the necessary power to use a real person as the Collector.'

 
   Del gasped, and the magician raised his eyebrows at him. 'You have a moral objection? So did Speckle John — he wanted to stick with the less successful toy I'd invented earlier. But once it had occurred to me that I could fill up my toy, so to speak, with a real being, the toy began to look inadequate. The first Collector was a gentleman named Halmar Haraldson, a Swede who came upon us in Paris and wanted nothing more than to be a magician. He saw it as an avenue of revenge against a world which had not welcomed his abilities; and Halmar saw in us something more powerful than the usual run of stage magicians. What he saw, quite rightly, in magic was that it was antisocial, subversive, and he hated the world so badly that he hungered and thirsted for our power. Haraldson dressed always in cheap anonymous black suits above which his bony Scandinavian peanut-shaped headfloated like a skull; he took narcotic drugs; he was the most extreme exponent of the postwar nihilism that I knew. Consciously or not, he resembled one of those apparitions in Edvard Munch's paintings. So I met him one night and collected him, and thereafter my toy glowed with a new life. Halmar lurked inside it like a genie.'

 
   'What happens to the person you use?' Tom asked. 'What happened to Halmar?'

 
   'I released him eventually, when he became a liability. You will hear, child. Speckle John would have insisted on abandoning the Collector altogether, but I had gained control of the act. After all, I was his successor, and my powers were soon the equal of his. He could not insist with me, though I could see him growing unhappier and unhappier as we toured together. I am talking about something that happened over a period of years.

 
   'It's a commonplace irony, I imagine. Partners work together and achieve success, but fall out personally. He began to make it clear that he thought I was a mistake — that I should never have been chosen. Speckle John, to my disappointment, was not large-minded. His ambitions were small, his conception of magic was small. 'The test of a mature magician is that he does not use his powers in ordinary life,' he said; and I said, 'The test of a true magician is that he has no ordinary life.'

 
   'Rosa joined our act after a time. Her singing had never led to anything, and she needed a job. Speckle liked her, and because she had performed, stage fright did not cripple her. We taught her all the standard tricks; she was adept at them, and her
gamine
quality was effective with audiences. My partner took a paternal attitude toward her, which I thought ridiculous. Rosa was mine, to do with as I wished; but I did not object to their having talks together, for it helped reconcile her to her position. The other reason I did not object was that my partner's care with the girl proved to me that it was he, not I, who had been the mistake. My little shepherdess was porcelain through and through, beautiful to look at, but only a reflector of borrowed light.'

 
   Wind pushed at the fog, swirled it. A deeper chill entered the clearing.

 
   'When you travel as we did, you begin to know a community of all the others who play the same theaters. Jimmy Nervo and Teddy Knox, Maidie Scott, Vanny Chard, Liane D'Eve . . . One group interested me, Mr. Peet and the Wandering Boys. There were six 'Boys,' tumblers and strongmen, rough characters. I think they had all been in prison for violent crimes at one time or another — rape and robbery, assault. Other performers left them alone. In fact, their tumbling was only adequate, not nearly good enough for them to be headliners, and they broke it up with comic songs and staged fights. From time to time they let the fighting wander offstage. I know of a couple of occasions when they beat men nearly to death in drunken brawls. They were rather like an unevolved form of life. I wanted to hire them, and when I approached their leader, Arnold Peet, he immediately agreed — better to be second stringer in a successful act than to wither on your own. And he agreed also that his 'boys' would work as my bodyguards when we were not performing. Eventually they feared me — they depended on me for their bread — they knew I could kill them with a glance and they did anything I wanted them to do. Our act immediately became stronger, too, wilder and more theatrical, because it took its direction from me.

 
   'For a time, boys, we were the most famous magicians in Europe, and titled and well-known people everywhere sought us out, gave parties for us, came for advice. I met all the surrealists, all the painters and poets; I met the American writers in Paris; I met dukes and counts, and spent many afternoons telling fortunes to those who wanted the help of magic in planning their lives. Ernest Hemingway bought me a drink in a Montparnasse bar but would not come to my table because he thought I was a charlatan. I heard that he had referred to me as 'that dime-a-dance Rasputin,' a description I did not mind a bit. The real tinpot Rasputin was an Englishman who fancied himself a demon. I met Aleister Crowley in England, and knew at once that he was a sick, deluded fraud — a blubbery ranter whose greatest talent was for mumbo jumbo.

 
   'Crowley and I met in the garden of a house in Kensington belonging to a rich and foolish fancier of the occult who supported both of us and wanted to know what would happen if we met. I was already in the garden when Crowley oozed through the scullery door. He was sluglike, thoroughly repulsive; wore a black caftan; dirty bare feet; shaven head. His face was crazy and ambitious — there was a kind of crude magnetism to him. Crowley looked me in the eye, trying to frighten me. 'Hello, Aleister,' I said. 'Begone, fiend!' he shouted, and pointed a fat digit at my face. I turned his hand into a bird's claw, and he nearly fainted on the spot. 'Begone yourself,' I said, and he shoved the claw under the caftan and exited with great haste. Later I understand he displayed the claw to a female admirer as proof of his satanic abilities, and worked over spells for months before he was able to change it back.'

 
   Something moved into the fuzzy light down in the trees. 'From what I've said already, you know that I had grown careless about spending time in England. By 1921, we traveled freely back and forth across England, playing theaters in towns from Edinburgh to Penzance, though most of our work was in London, especially at the Wood Green Empire. I thought the world had forgotten the mysterious Dr. Nightingale. But one person had not, and I met him one summer night after a performance. He was waiting by the stage door of the Empire, and I saw his red hair and knew who he was before I saw his face.'

 
   A light in the trees showed a flight of «teps, a brick wall, a suggestion of a narrow alley. The figure in the Burberry and hat came down the stairs. Tom saw Rose hovering behind him. The magician lifted his bottle as if toasting his former self, but did not drink. With the magician's next sentence, Tom knew that it was not himself he was toasting.

 
   'There she is, Rosa Forte, my porcelain shepherdess, my enchanted fish. I was glad she was there — I wanted her to see what I could do. I wanted her to know that nothing in her code or Speckle John's could hinder me for a moment. And I want you boys to know that too. I will not be hindered.'

 
   The little scene down in the trees was obscurely, inexplicably sinister: Collins' surrogate in hat and long coat, the fragile girl behind him on the stairs. Savageryseemed to flicker about them — a hopeless violence curled in the fog.

 
   Another man stepped out of the fog; red hair shone.

 
   ' 'I knew it was you,' Withers said to me. 'I should have known you'd wind up like this — a worthless parasite.' Except that he said it
wuthless pa'site.
'Call yourself Coleman Collins now, do you, murderer? Well, you put on a pretty good show, I'll say that for you. I hope they'll let you perform in the stockade.'
Puff-oahm.
He stood there, beaming hate at me, hate and satisfaction, because he thought he had me. This little racist Southern doctor, traveling through Europe on undervalued American dollars, piling up anecdotes to wow them with back in Macon or Atlanta.

 
   'I asked, 'Are you threatening me, Withers?'

 
   ''That I am,' Withers said: he was simply gloating. 'You went AWOL. Somewhere, somebody's still looking for you. I'm going to see that you're found.'

 
   'So I called up Halmar Haraldson and sicked him on Withers.'

 
   The Collector lurched into the fuzzy light, his face glowing with moronic glee. The red-haired man backed up. On the stairs behind Collins' surrogate, Rose could not see why the man playing Withers was frightened. She stared at the man, confused and beginning to be alarmed.

 
   'Hey!' the red-haired man shouted. 'Hey, Mr. Collins?'

 
   Tom's stomach tightened: this was not just a scene. The Collector stumbled forward. Rose saw him and screeched.

 
   ''No,
you
are found, Withers,' I said. And now observe how well your friend Mr. Ridpath fulfills his role.'

 
   'Oh, my God,' Del said, and began to stand up. Rose screamed again, and Collins' stand-in gripped her arm.

 
   The Collector flew at the red-haired man, who shouted,
'Stop him! Stop him!'
The Collector knocked him down.

 
   'Collins! Help me!' A red furry thing flopped from the man's head, and Tom saw that he was the man on the train, the aged Skeleton Ridpath. The Collector had him pinned to the ground and was battering his face. 'Found you! Found you!' he keened.