Shadowland (79 page)

 
   'That monkey music — I can't take .that monkey music,' William Bendix snarled, though all Tom heard was the chattering of dozens of voices and the whirring sound. Bendix wore a porkpie hat on the back of his head and was slamming a beer glass down on a bar.

 
   'Aw, leave him alone — poor bastard has a plate in his head,' Bogart said, tugging Tom deeper into the party. 'Iguess you never met Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale. They came here just to have the pleasure.'

 
   A man with a face like a run-over dog and a woman whose head was a charred stump were standing up from the flowered couch, holding but their hands and struggling to speak through mouths that had been seared shut. Tom gagged and stepped backward. Their clothes were smoking; curls of flame sprouted from the man's collar.

 
   
'Can that monkey music!'

 
   'Never mind them, kid,' and a hand spun Tom around. 'They're too fried to talk straight — you remember those other people I mentioned?'

 
   Snail and Thorn were standing beside the table, Tweedledum and Tweedledee all dressed up to go dancing (now he could hear the music, a trumpet lead over strings like a hundred make-out albums,
Jackie Gleason Plays for Lovers Only).

 
   'Can't stand it!' William Bendix hollered, smashing his beer glass against the bar.

 
   Snail and Thorn bled from holes in their foreheads, though that was not where he had shot them, and their faces were blameless and bland, washed of emotion . . .

 
   'Take a drink — aren't you a man?' Bogart sloshed something that smoked and bubbled from a decanter into a glass. He winked, and half his face jumped in a tic. 'Just get this down into you, it'll chase away the snakes.'

 
   Tom was looking for Rose, and Humphrey Bogart was putting the smoking glass into his hand, which was whole and unharmed. Rose had disappeared.

 
   Then a red-haired woman in a low-cut black dress leered at him —
she's
. . .
she's
. . . a face from a hundred movies, an uptilted nose and perfect mouth — and her face suddenly had needle teeth and a long red-furred snout —

 
   and all the well-dressed people at the party had animal faces, monkeys and apes and foxes and wolves, and they were leering at him, chattering now over 'Moonlight Becomes You.' Tiger eyes set in glowing tiger stripes blinked toward him.

 
   A creature with a pig's head was clamping his hand around a bubbling glass and forcing it to his lips, and Bobby Hackett was using his cornet to tell a girl that she certainly knew the right things to wear and across theroom a man named Creekmore was stumbling forward with half his face dangling like a flap over gleaming bone. Damp weeds dripped from his shoulder.

 
   'Rose!' Tom called, but the party noises screwed up loud enough to deafen him and a boar chuckled in his ear and Bobby Hackett's spring-water tone had turned coarse and blasting . . . something bitter and burning touched his lips.

 
   
AWAY!
he shouted with his mind.
GONE!
He closed his eyes and mouth, and something burningly spilled down his chin . . . and then silence, as if all power had died.

 
   Rose touched his face. 'You're scaring me.'

 
   'Did you see them?' They were alone in the darkened room. Moonlight pouring in through the glass doors showed silver furniture, immaculate and dead.

 
   'See what?'

 
   A trace of gin — juniper and alcohol — lingered in the air. Del's body thrummed against his skin.

 
   'What scared you, Rose?'

 
   She too was touched by the moonlight: her face hung as white as a sail before him. 'You were talking to yourself — you were acting funny.'

 
   His heart gradually slowed.

 
   A blast of fireworks turned the room and her face violently red: rose-red.

 
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'Ican't describe it,' Tom said. 'I think he almost got me. I think he damn near killed me just now. You didn't see anything?'

 
   'Just you.'

 
   'You didn't even see that actor — Creekmore?'

 
   She shook her head.

 
   'He's dead. It wasn't just bloodbags and a few scratches. He died like I was supposed to.' Another explosion outside rattled the windows and touched her face with pale blue. 'Rose, what did you think would happen when you brought us back here?'

 
   She shook her head. 'Nothing like this.' Her face worked: she was going to cry. 'I thought he'd put on a show. And I thought I could get you and Del out in the middle of it.' Now she was crying. 'I'm sorry, Tom.'

 
   'You thought you would get me and Del out? Not yourself too?'

 
   Whitened by the moonlight, her face altered and the tears stopped. She wiped her eyes. 'Of course. Of course myself too.'

 
   'But we have something in common, don't we?'

 
   Rose turned away from him and began to go back toward the hall.

 
   'Why did he say you couldn't leave?'

 
   Rose looked over his shoulder at him, slipped into the blackness beyond the doorway.

 
   'Why does it. . . ?'
Why does it hurt you so to walk?
He gingerly put his right hand a few inches into his pocket and touched one of the sections of the broken shepherdess. He tweezed it out. The top half of a girl.

 
   The top half of a girl.

 
   Like . . .

 
   Tom went toward the door and out into the corridor, following her. 'Rose?' He threw the broken thing aside.

 
   A thunderous noise from outside —
WHAMP! WHAMP! —
as if, yes, just as if a gigantic bird, a bird larger than the house, were battering it down with its wings.

 
   'Rose!'

 
   'and now, ladies and gentlemen, the famous window of flame!'

 
   A blast of heat rocked him backward, and he shouted her name again. A second later, the point at which the corridor entered the other wing of the house flared into bright flame. Rose was running back toward him, covering her face with her hands. Inside the solid flame, something was writhing and turning, twisting into itself like a hundred snakes.

 
   Rose ran until she careered into him, and then she put her arms around his chest. Black stains spread along the ceiling; the glass on one. of the framed posters shattered with a loud cracking noise.

 
   'It
is
snakes,' Tom said, watching the writhing forms within the solid flame.

 
   'No. It's me,' Rose said into his shirt.

 
   He saw. Vines curled and twisted, the heads of roses flailed, impaling themselves on the thorns, stabbing themselves so they bled . . . the glass over another poster exploded.

 
   
BANG!
Another gigantic wing beat from outside. Inside Tom's shirt, Del quivered and tried to flatten himself into nothing.

 
   The blood was petals, dropping away and being consumed. But the whole flowers would not be consumed, they would twist in agony until the flowers died or disappeared.

 
   'and the window of ice!'

 
   As the heat had preceded fire, an intense chill poured through the corridor a moment before the fire froze into place, turned gray-white and monumental.

 
   The orange light disappeared with the fire, and a single white spot glowed down from the ceiling on a version of Coleman Collins. He was leaning against the glacial wall in an open-collared chambray shirt. 'You could have gone that way, you know, but that would have been too easy — especially since you escaped your drink in the living room. I rather expected you to work your way out of that one, you know. Congratulations!'

 
   'Change Del back,' Tom said.

 
   'For that, you'll have to speak to the original,' the shadow said) 'He's still waiting. He wants to see the end of the performance, too. It's been a long time, you know. Over thirty years.' The shadow smiled. 'In the meantime, did you enjoy the picture of little Rose's plight?'

 
   Behind him, the impaled and twisted blossoms hung half-visible in the ice.

 
   'The rose that wounds itself,' the shadow mused. 'Poignant, isn't it? But not half so poignant if you know she wanted it. Prayed for it. Begged for it. Perhaps not unlike how your old friend Mr. Ridpath begged to be fitted into that contraption.' He nodded at the collapsed and singed Collector, which lay heaped against the wall.

 
   Another gigantic wingbeat pounded at the house, and this one was followed by the unmistakable noise of theglass doors in the living room shattering beneath the blow.

 
   'We are all getting impatient with you, Mr. Flanagan,' the shadow said. 'Why don't you locate the old king and settle the issue?'

 
   'I'm trying to do that,' Tom said.
'Damn
you.'

 
   The shadow clapped his hands, and the wall of ice slid out of existence, becoming so transparent that the frozen roses blazed out a moment before they too faded into transparency. 'Your friend should be able to help you distinguish the real from the false. Or don't you remember your old stories?'

 
   Then he too was gone, leaving behind him the impression of a smile and the smells of singed carpet and blistered paint.

 
   'What old stories, Rose?' He turned on her. 'Tell me. What stories did he mean? If you knew all along . . . '

 
   She stepped backward, alarmed. 'Not me,' she said. 'He didn't mean me. He couldn't have.'

 
   Tom could have screamed with frustration. 'There isn't anyone else. He did mean you.'

 
   'I think he meant Del,' Rose said.

 
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