17

Midnight, Saturday: Two Bedrooms

In Del's room, the boys lay on their separate beds, talking in the dark. Tim and Valerie Hillman were making too much noise for them to sleep: Tom could hear Tim Hillman shouting Bitch! Bitch! at intervals. Both Hillmans had been drunk at dinner, Tim more so than Valerie. Bud Copeland had served the boys at a table in the kitchen, and clearing up, had said, 'Trouble tonight. You fellas jump into bed early and close up your ears.'

But that was not possible. Tim's shouts and Valerie's abrupt rejoinders winged through the house.

'Uncle Cole says Tim drinks so much to make himself into another person,' Del said in the darkness. 'If he's drunk, he's another person. One he'd rather be.'

'He'd rather be that?'

'I guess so.'

'Boy.'

'Well, Uncle Cole is always right. I mean it. He's never wrong about things. Do you want to know what he says about magic?'

'Sure.'

'It's like what he said about Tim. He says a magician must be apart from ordinary life - he has to make himself new, because he has a special project. To do magic, to do great magic, he has to know himself as a piece of the universe.'

'A piece of the universe?'

'A little piece that has all the rest of it in it. Everything outside him is also inside him. You see that?'

'I guess.'

'Well, if you do, then you can see why I want to be a magician. Science is all head, right? Sports is all body. A magician uses all of himself. Uncle Cole says a magician is in synthesis. Synthesis. He says you're part music and part blood, part thinker and part killer. And if you can find all that in you and control it, then you deserve to be set apart.' 'So it's about control. About power.'

'Sure it is. It's about being God.'

Tom knew that Del was waiting for him to respond, but he could not. Though he was not religious and had not entered a church since the previous Christmas, Del's last remark had upset him profoundly.

Across the room, he could hear Del's smile. 'I saw what you did to Skeleton, you know. You're a killer too.'

The subject of these last sentences, who was sure that he was a killer, lay like the two younger boys in a bed in a darkened room. What was going through his mind was surprisingly similar - the similarity would certainly have surprised Del Nightingale - to the content of the boys' conversation. Music, not shouts, filled the air about him - a Bo Diddley record. Strong: music so dense and pounding that it seemed to push itself into his skin, force itself between himself and the bed and pick his laden body up and make it float.

. Skeleton knew that he was a piece of the universe, and that the hatred which was the strongest and best part of him ran through the universe like a bar of steel. Skeleton too had seen desert vultures, and violent bands of color in the desert sky; and he had seen the sand far out of town turn purple and red when night came on. Even in his baffled and empty childhood, he had known that such things were in his key, that they struck the same note as the deep well of black feelings within himself. Other people were blinkered, self-deluded rabbits: they looked at the desert and saw what they called 'beauty,' walling themselves off from it. Other people were afraid of the truth in themselves, which was also the truth at the world's heart. Every man was a killer - that was what Skeleton knew. Every, leaf, every grain of sand, had a killer in it. If you touched a tree, you could feel a wave of blackness pumping through it, drawn up from the ground and breathed out through the bark.

And lately, as he worked more and more on his 'things,' as he varnished images of pain and fear onto his walls, he had come closer and closer to that truth. Skeleton had begun to have new ideas about his 'things,' ideas he could scarcely bear to peep at. They were a unity, they were the unity which was Skeleton Ridpath, but there was something more.

And lately…

lately…

he had, peeping at his new ideas, seen glimpses of their power. A man was showing him how right he was, and how little he still knew. It was as if the man had stepped off his walls, walked out of the 'things' and lifted his broad-brimmed hat from his head to show the face of a beast. The man, who was everywhere and nowhere, in his dreams and hovering just out of sight as he prowled from one room to another, was animal, tree, desert, bird… he wore a long belted coat, his hat shaded his face - he was what was real. He spoke to Skeleton when Skeleton thought about him: and what he said was: I have come to save your life. He wanted something of poor Skeleton, his will drove out at poor Skeleton, and poor Skeleton would have cut off all the fingers of one hand for him. He had power to make a king's look feeble. He was like the music at the heart of the music, what the musicians would play if they were twelve feet tall and made of thunder, and rain.

He is me, Skeleton thought. Me. He grinned up in the darkness at a picture of a giant bird.