19

Two-thirty, that school night: suddenly and irrevocably awake, Skeleton Ridpath threw back his covers. The house was oppressively hot. Through the side wall he could hear his father snoring: a choked rattling inhalation followed by a long wheezing, grinding, somehow moist noise that made his skin shrink. He grimaced with loathing and switched on the light beside him.

And nearly shrieked, for directly above him, eight feet from his eyes, was the last image he had seen before being jolted awake - a large gray bird, opening its wings and spreading its talons. No, not quite the image. The bird whose image he had varnished onto his ceiling was an eagle, but the bird which had troubled his sleep was… He did not know, but not an eagle. It had been outside the window, battering at the frame with its wings. It had been trying to come in, ordering him to let it enter, and the terror of what was about to happen had jerked him from sleep. The savage bird outside had been making a noise-speaking to him, commanding him - which he now recognized came from his father's awful snoring.

Calming, letting that other bird diminish in his mind, he took in the comforting matter surrounding the eagle. Rifle barrels, many blood-streaked corpses, a baby hoisted aloft on a spear. These gradually faded into an area dominated by automobiles and household appliances and women's photographs from which he had removed the faces. In their place he had glued animals' masks, foxes' and apes'.

Different areas of his walls were different 'things,' now gradually melting into one comprehensive 'thing.' He had known it would turn that way - long ago, years ago, when he had given up all his other hobbies and begun putting pictures on his walls, Skeleton had foreseen a day when, guided by a powerful impulse, all the pictures would form a single epic statement.

He had begun by selecting pictures of the objects he hated, things that represented the Carson way of life: new cars and grotesquely large refrigerators piled with food; manor houses, well-dressed suburban women, football players. Because he hated these things, because his father and his father's colleagues accepted them as values, because they were elements of a world he wished would blow to pieces, they gave him a perverse thrill: hating them, he liked looking at them. Now he cut out every grotesque picture he saw, and welded horrors onto the representations of the suburban life he detested. In some places, four separate layers of photographs had been fixed to the waff. From the old, Bidder 'things' had crawled forth his true imagery. Skeleton knew he was getting better.

A year ago, he had been delighted by the notion that what he was doing was surrounding his room with himself: so that he stood within it as he stood and revolved within his own mind. When he had come to this thought - eating tasteless meatloaf and averting his head from his father's perpetual monologue about sports - he had twitched so violently that he had knocked his Coke off the table.

But during the following summer, this vision of his room had been overtaken by a vision even more commanding and dangerous. About this he rarely allowed himself to think at length, but the essential element burned in his mind every time he shut the door behind him.

The room did not open inward, but out.

It was not a mirror.

The room was a window.

It was a casement opening out onto the sky, and showing in fragmented, only gradually revealed form what actually lay outside. Lately the man in the dark coat, a man like the dark kings and wolves scheming at the door in Fitz-Hallan's fairy tales, had been appearing on his walls. When he found the right man (or when the right man found him?), the brim of his hat shading his face and his finger pointing, it would all lock together.

Skeleton jumped out of bed and began to rustle through the heap of magazines beside his bed.

Tom said: 'You see, there was a mystery in our school, and the end of the mystery was the awful thing that happened when Del and I were doing our magic show. But that wasn't the answer to the mystery, just its conclusion. The answer was at Shadowland; or the answer was Shadowland.

'Skeleton was having visions of a man in a long coat and hat - the man I had seen in a dream. Of course I didn't know about Skeleton's visions, and it wouldn't have done me any good if I had. You saw what happened that day in Fitz-Hallan's class, when my pencil got stuck somehow in midair - and I could see you decide immediately that your eyes had been fooled somehow. Despite what I had seen myself, I would have decided the same thing. After all, it's always best to look for the most rational explanations for irrational-seeming occurrences. Any magician would tell you that - look at how they universally discount people like Uri Getter.

'But you saw me blush. Funny things had been happening to me. I hardly had the vocabulary to express them. 'Nightmare' was one way, but that didn't get the atmosphere. And is there such a thing as a 'daymare'? Anyhow, I never let anybody know about it, not even Del, but queer things were happening to me - some days, it was like I never woke up at all, but went through school and the rest of the day in some sort of dream, full of terrible hints and omens.

'You want examples? For one thing, sometimes I imagined that birds were looking at me - observing me, keeping track of me. On the walk down to lunch, I'd see a flock of sparrows, and all of them would be looking straight at me. Every one, drilling into me with those quick little eyes. At home, I'd look out of the window in the living room, and a robin on our lawn would swivel its head and stare at me through the glass, just as if it had something to say to me. Now, that's pretty mild. It made me think I might be going nuts, but it was still mild.

'Other things were less mild. I remember one day a week or two before our nine-week exams, when I went in the front door of the school and almost fainted. Because I didn't see what I knew was there - the steps going up, and the corridor and the library doors. For a second, maybe two or three seconds, I saw what looked like a jungle. The air was hot and very humid. There were more trees than I'd ever seen before in my life, crowded together, leaning this way and that, snaked around with vines. I had the sense of a tremendous energy - as if the whole crowded scene was humming and buzzing away. Then I saw an animal face peering at me through the leaves. I was so scared I almost fell over. And I came out of it. There were the steps, there were the library doors, there was Terry Peters pushing me in the back and ordering me to get a move on.

'Things like that happened maybe once a month after I made friends with Del. Those were the 'daymares.' But then, my friend, there were the nightmares. I was way ahead of the rest of the school. Every night I had terrible dreams - I was lost in a forest, and animals were trying to hunt me down, or I was floating way up high in the air, knowing I was going to fall… but the oddest feeling I had in these dreams, no matter how bad they were, was that I was somehow seeing how things really were. It was like the world had split open, and I was seeing part of the engine of things - or not seeing as much as feeling it there. As scared as I was, there was this funny kind of satisfaction, the satisfaction of knowledge. As if without at all understanding it, I was at least seeing how the mystery worked. Suppose the skies opened and you saw a great wheel turning around, the wheel that turns us around the sun - that's the kind of feeling I had.

'I didn't always have that feeling of mysterious insight, though. In some dreams I saw a black figure coming toward me - gliding toward me, like we were both suspended in the air. He held a knife. Or a sword. Something long and dangerous. He glided closer and closer, filling my vision… and then he cut off my hands. Or the pain in my hands was so great that it felt like he'd cut them off.'

I looked at his hands on the bar, at the round pads of scar tissue.

'We'll get to that,' he said.