14

Then all blew away like dust, like'a dream, and it was night, much colder than before -

...and he was skimming, naked and wrapped in a fur blanket, along in a sleigh with Coleman Collins. Snow blew in a tempest about them, half-obscuring the horse ahead. They were following a track through dark trees, going up; plunging blindly on, the horse flickered gray against the surrounding white.

The magician turned his face to Tom, and the boy shrank back against the cold metal edge of the sleigh. The face was bone, hard and white as a skull. 'I have taken you aside,' were the words that came from this apparition. 'Everything is just as it was, but we have stepped aside for a moment. For a private word.' The face was no longer bone, but animal - the face of a white wolf. 'I forbid you nothing. Nothing,' uttered the awful face. 'You may go anywhere - you may open any door. But, little bird, remember that you must be prepared to accept whatever you find.' The long jaws spread in a smile filled with teeth.

The horse drove madly on through the buffeting wind and snow.

'What night is this?' Tom cried out.

'The same, the very same.'

'And did I fly?'

The wolf laughed,

You may open any door.

Uphill into deeper night and tearing cold; the horse working against the snow.

'It is the same night, but six months later,' said the wolf. 'It is the same night, but in another year,' and laughed. Tom's whole body suffered with the cold, tried to flee back into itself.

'Did I fly?'

Collins said through his wolfs face, 'You are mine. Nothing that is in magic will be unknown to you, boy. For you are no one else's but mine.'

The trees fell behind them, and they seemed to streak upward through an utter barrenness.

We got fish for suppah: Jesus doing a buck-and-wing.

The wolf said: 'Once I was you. Once I was Del.' He turned and grinned at the freezing boy wrapped in fur. 'But I learned from a great magician. The great magician became my partner, and together we toured Europe until he did an unspeakable thing. After he did the unspeakable thing, we could no longer remain together - we had become mortal enemies. But he had taught me all he knew, and I too was a great magician by then. So I came here, to my kingdom.'

'Your kingdom,' Tom said.

The wolf ignored him. 'He taught me to do one thing in particular. To put a hurtin' on things. His words. He spoke that way. And finally I put a hurtin' on him.' The long teeth glittered.

'Did you put a hurtin' on the train?' Tom asked.

The wolf lashed the horse: not a wolf, but a man with a wolfs head. 'No one but you will understand your future. You will be as the man who brings forth diamonds, and they say, is this pitch? You will be as he who brings forth wine, and they say, is this sand?' The long snout swiveled toward Tom. 'When that happens, boy, put a hurtin' on them.'

The horse reached the top of the rise and halted. It steamed in the frigid air, hanging its neck. Tom saw foam spring out on the horse's flanks.

'Look down,' the figure beside him commanded.

Tom looked over the steaming, foaming horse into a long white vista. The land dropped, the green firs resumed. At the bottom of the valley lay a frozen lake. Above it, on the far end, Shadowland sat on its cliff like a jeweled dtollhouse. Its windows gleamed.

'Pretend that is the world. It is the world. It can be yours. Everything in the world, every treasure, every satisfaction, is there.

'Look.'

Tom looked toward the shining house and saw a naked girl in an upper window. She raised her arms and stretched: he could not see her. anything like as clearly as he wished, but what he saw was like a finger laid against his heart. Shock and tenderness vibrated together in his chest. Seeing the girl was nothing like looking at nude photographs in a magazine - those acres of spongy flesh had only a fraction of the voltage this girl sent him.

'And look.'

At another window men gambled: one player raked in a huge pile of bills and coins. Tom looked back to see the girl, but where she had been was only incandescent brightness. Are you his too, Rose?

'And look,' the man with the wolfs face commanded.

Another window: a boy opening a tall door, hesitating for a moment, outlined in light, then suddenly engulfed in light. Tom understood that this boy - himself? - was undergoing an experience of such magnitude, such joy, that his imagination could only peer at its dimmest edge; swallowed by light, the boy, who might be himself, had found an incandescence and beauty greater than the girl's - so great that the girl must be a part of it.

'And now look,' he was commanded.

In the gleam of another window he saw only an empty bright room with green walls. The column of a pillar. The big theater.

Then he saw himself flow past the window, many feet above the ground. His body sailed past, must have turned in the air, floated before the window again and spun over as easily as a leaf.

'I did,' he breathed, not even feeling the cold now.

'Of course you did,' the magician said. 'Alis volat propriis.'

Laughter boomed from the magician, from the hillside, from the valley, from even the steaming horse and the frigid air.

'Don't wait to be a great man… ' came the magician's floating voice, and Tom lapsed back and fell through the fur and metal, falling through the hillside and the laughing horse and the wind.

'… be a great bird.'

He remembered.

In the big green room. Coleman Collins before himself and Del, saying, 'Sit on the floor. Close your eyes. Count backward with me from ten. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. You are at peace, totally relaxed. What we do here is physiologically impossible. So we must train the body to accept the impossible, and then it will become possible.

'We cannot breathe in water. We cannot fly. Not until we find the secret muscles that enable us to do so.

'Spread, your hands, boys. Spread your arms. I want you to see your shoulders in your minds. See those muscles, see those bones. Think of those shoulders opening, opening… think of them opening out.'

Tom remembered… saw what he had seen. His muscles flaring and widening, something new and reckless moving in his mind.

'When I say one, you will inhale; when I say two, you will exhale and think very calmly about rising an inch or two above the floor. One.'

Tom remembered filling his chest with air: the new sensation in his mind began to burn bright yellow.

'Two.'

Within the memory of the theater, another memory bloomed: Laker Broome crazily sweeping through aisles of boys in chapel, jabbing his finger, shouting. Hatred filled him, and he pushed all the air from his lungs. The wooden floor had seemed to tremble beneath him.

'Just let your mind roam,' came the strong quiet voice.

He had seen himself floating up like a helium-filled balloon: then he had again seen. Laker Broome standing like an actor before the smoke-filled auditorium, giving him useless orders; seen the Reverend Mr. Tyme prancing at his father's funeral; seen Del, levitating in a dark bedroom. Then he had seen the most disturbing images of all, tanks and soldiers and bloody corpses and women with the heads of beasts all lacquered on a ceiling above him, images filled with such horror and disgust that they seemed to whirl about the image of a man in belted raincoat and wide-brimmed hat who made them dance…

Why, yes, he had thought. Like that. And suddenly weightless, had rolled over on his back and not touched the ground. His mind felt like fire.

Then another image rammed into his mind, even more horrifying than the last: he saw the auditorium full of boys and masters, himself and Del onstage as Flanagini and Night. He was far above them all, and his eyes hurt, his head was bursting with pressure. His long spidery body felt as though needles had pierced it. He was seeing with Skeleton Ridpath's eyes, and his body was Skeleton's, just before the fire.

He had collapsed heavily onto the wooden floor. Blood burst from his nose.

'So now you see,' Collins had whispered to him.

'Don't you know now that you could breathe in water?' Collins said. Tom's whole body ached; the cold tore at him.

'The secret is hate,' Collins said mildly. 'Rather, the secret lies in hating well. You have the germ of quite a good hater in you.'

Tom tugged the fur robe more tightly about him. His ears were cold enough to drop from his head.

'I want to show you one thing more, little friend.'

'But I didn't really fly,' Tom said. 'I just went up. and I rolled over - '

'One thing more.'

The icy wind ripped at them, and pulled Collins' face back into the wolfs visage. He snapped his whip up into the air, hauled at the reins with his other hand, and cracked the whip down as the horse plunged around in the snow.

When the whip landed, the horse screamed and took off downhill like a cannonball. The wolf-face turned and grinned at him just as the wind blurred Tom's eyes, and the world turned as misty as the walls of the big theater. Tom pulled the fur robe up over his face and inhaled its cold, dusty, slightly gamy aroma until he felt the sleigh begin to slow down.

They were on level ground. A wide plain of snow lay in moonlight like a room without walls. In the center of the plain stood a tall burning building.

Tom stared at the blazing building as they drew nearer to it: burning, it seemed to diminish in size. They trotted ten feet nearer, close enough now to feel the heat pouring from the blaze.

'Do you recognize it?'

'Yes.'

'Get out of the sleigh,' the magician ordered. 'Walk closer to it.'

He did not move at first, and Collins clutched one of his elbows through the robe and yanked him across his body and dumped him out into the snow. The robe slithered, and Tom snatched at it to keep its warmth about him. He stood up; his burning feet barely cracked the snow's hard surface.

'Are we really here?' he asked.

'Go closer and really look.' His voice made a joke of the word.

Tom limped toward the edge of the fire. It was no taller than himself. There was Fitz-Hallan's room, there was Thorpe's. Metal beams curled in the midst of the flames. He could hear the glass panels cracking and shattering around the enclosed court. And would there be a dwarf lime tree, shriveling and blackening? The building tightened down into itself a notch. Was it just a film - a projection from somewhere? It warmed him like a fire.

He began to weep.

'What does it say to you?' Collins asked, and Tom whirled around to see him. He looked like a Russian nobleman in his fur-collared coat.

'It's too much,' Tom managed to get out, hating himself for crying.

'Of course it is. That's part of the point. Look again.'

Tom turned again and looked at the burning school.

'What does it say to you? Open your mind to it and let it speak.'

'It says… get out of here.'

'D-s it really?' The magician laughed: he knew better.

'No.'

'No. It says, Live while you can. Get what you can when you can. You haven't been bad at that, you know.'

Tom began to shake. His feet were frozen, his face blazed like the fire. Coleman Collins seemed about to see straight inside him, and to cynically dismiss what he saw there. Like any young person, Tom was adept at intuiting other people's attitudes toward him, and for a moment it occurred to him that Coleman Collins hated both Del and himself. The secret lies in hating well. He was trembling so violently that the robe would have slipped from his shoulders if he had not gripped it with both hands. 'Please,' he said, asking for something so large he could not encompass it in words.

'It is night. You must go to bed.'

'Please.'

'This is your kingdom too, child. Insofar as I make it yours. And insofar as you can accept what you find in it.'

'Please… take me back.'

'Find your own way, little bird.' Collins cracked the whip, and the horse lunged forward. The magician swept past without another glance. Tom flailed out for the bar at the end of the sleigh, missed it, and fell. Cold leaked up his thighs, slithered down his chest. He pulled up his head to find the fire, but it too was gone. Collins' sleigh was just disappearing into the firs.

Tom got his knees under him and awkwardly stood up, gripping the robe. From the other side of the snowy plain a wind approached, made visible by the swirl of snow it lifted and spun. The trace of the wind arrowed straight toward him; he turned to take it on his back and saw flecks of green just before the wind knocked his legs out from under him and deposited him -

on nothing, on green air through which he fell without falling, spun without moving. He threw out his arms and caught the padded arm of a chair.