17

When he turned the corner back into the main hallway, Coleman Collins was standing before him in the semi-darkness, blocking his way. Tom felt an instant ungovernable surge of fright - he had broken one of the rules, and the magician knew it. He must have seen him turn out of the short corridor.

Collins' posture gave him no clues; he could not see his face, which was shadowed. The magician's hands were in his pockets. His shoulders slouched. The entire front of his body was a dark featureless pane in which a few vest burtons shone darkly: tiger's eyes.

'I went in that room,' Tom said.

Collins nodded. Still he kept his hands in his pockets and slouched.

'You knew I would.'

Collins nodded again.

Tom edged closer to the wall. But Collins was deliberately blocking his way. 'You knew I would, and you wanted me to.' He bravely moved a few inches nearer, but Collins made no movement. 'I can accept what I saw,' Tom said. He heard the note of insistence, of fear, in his voice.

Collins dropped his head. He drew one heel toward him along the carpet. Now Tom could see his face: pensive, withdrawn. The magician tilted his head and shot a cold glance directly into Tom's eyes.

There might have been some playacting in it; Tom could not tell. All he knew was that Collins was frightening him. Alone in the hallway, he was scarier than in the freezing sleigh. Collins was more authoritative than a dozen Mr. Thorpes. The expression which had jumped out of his eyes had nailed Tom to the wall.

'Isn't that what you said? Isn't that what you wanted?'

Collins exhaled, pursed his lips. Finally he spoke. 'Arrogant midget. Do you really think you know what I want?'

Tom's tongue froze in his mouth. Collins reared back and propped his head against the wall. Tom caught the sudden clear odor of alcohol. 'In two days you have betrayed me twice. I will not forget this.'

'But I thought - '

The magician's head snapped forward. Tom flinched, feared that Collins would strike him.

'You thought. You disobeyed me twice. That is what I think.' His eyes augered into Tom. 'Will you wander into my room next? Ransack my desk? I think that you need more than cartoons and amusements, little boy.'

'But you told me I could - '

'I told you you could not.'

Tom swallowed. 'Didn't you want me to see them?'

'See whom, traitor?'

'The two in there. Jakob and Wilhelm. Whoever they were.'

'That room is empty. For now. Get on your way, boy. I was going to give your friend a word of warning. You can do it for me. Scat. Get out of here. Now!'

'A warning about what?'

'He'll know. Didn't you hear me? Get out of here.' He stepped aside, and Tom slipped by him. 'I'm going to have fun with you,' the magician said to his back.

Tom went as quickly as he could to the front of the stairs without actually running. He realized that he was dripping with sweat - even his legs felt sweaty. He could hear Collins limping away down the hall in the direction of the theaters.

The next second brought a new astonishment.

When he looked up the stairs, he saw a nut-faced old woman in a black dress at their top, looking down at him in horror. She lifted her hands sharply and scurried away out of sight.

'Hey!' Tom said. He ran after her up the stairs. He could hear her moving frantically as a squirrel, trying to escape bun. When he reached the head of the stairs, he ran past the bedrooms and saw the hem of a black dress just vanishing around a corner at the end of the hall. To his side, through the glass and far away, lights burned deep in the forest and sent their reflections across the black lake.

He reached the far end of the hall and realized that he had never been there before. The old woman had opened an outside door, one Tom had never seen, and was starting to descend an exterior staircase that curved back in toward the patio and the house. Tom got through the door before it closed and clapped a hand on the old woman's shoulder.

She stopped as suddenly as a paralyzed hare. Then she looked up into his face with a compressed, dense mixture of expressions on her dry old face. A few white hairs grew from her upper lip. Her eyes were so brown as to look black, and her eyebrows were strongly, starkly black. He understood two things at once: she was foreign, and she was deeply ashamed that he had seen her.

'I'm sorry,' he said.

She jerked her shoulder away from his hand.

'I just wanted to talk to you.'

She shook her head. Her eyes were cold flat stones embedded in deep wrinkles.

'Do you work here?'

She made no movement at all, waiting for him to allow her to go.

'Why weren't we supposed to see you?' Nothing. 'Do you know Del?' He caught a glimmer of recognition at the name. 'What's going on around here? I mean, how does all this stuff work? Why aren't we supposed to know you're here? Do you do the cooking? Do you make the beds?'

No sign of anything but impatience to get away from him. He pantomimed breaking an egg into a pan, frying the egg. She nodded curtly. Inspired, he asked, 'Do you speak English?'

No: a flat, denying movement of the head. She stabbed him with another black glance, and turned abruptly away and flew down the stairs.

Tom lingered on the little balcony for a moment. From the bottom of the long hill, girdled by woods, the lake shone enigmatically up at him. He tried to find the spot where Coleman Collins had taken him in the sleigh, but could find no peak high enough - had all that really taken place only in his head? Far off in the distance he heard a man crying out in the woods.

His room had been prepared for the night. The bed was turned down, the bedside lamp shone on the Rex Stout paperback. That, and the clear-cut puzzles it contained, seemed very remote to him - he could not remember anything he had read the night before. The sliding doors between his room and Del's were shut.

He went to the doors and gently knocked; no response. Where was Del? Probably he was out exploring - imitating Tom's actions of the night before. Probably that was what the 'warning' was about. Tom sighed. For the first time since getting on the train with Del, he thought of Jenny Oliver and Diane Darling, the two girls from the neighboring school; maybe it was Archie Goodwin and his strings of women that brought them to mind, but he wished he could talk to them, either of them. It had been a long time since he had talked to a girl: he remembered the girl in the window the magician had shown him - shown him as coolly as a grocer displays a shelf of canned beans.

His room was barren and lonely. Its cleanliness, its straight angles and simple colors, excluded him. He hated being alone in it, he realized; but now he did not feel that he could go anywhere else. Loneliness assailed him. He missed Arizona and his mother. For a moment Tom felt utterly bereft: orphaned. He sat on the hard bed and thought he was in jail. All of Vermont felt like a prison.

Tom stood up and began to pace the room. Because he was fifteen and healthy, simple movement made him feel better. At that moment, in one of those peculiarly adult mental gestures which 1 see as characteristic of the young Tom Flanagan, he arrived at both a recognition and a decision. Shadowland, as much as he knew of it, was a test harder and more important than any he had ever taken at Carson; and he could not let Shadowland defeat him. He would use Collins' own maxim against him, if he had to, and discover how to do the impossible.

He nodded, knowing that he was arming for a fight, and realized that he had lost the desire to cry which had come over him a moment before. Then he heard a noise from behind the sliding doors. It was a light, bubbling sound of laughter, muted, as if hidden behind a hand. Tom knocked again on the doors.

The sound came again, even more clearly.

'Del… you there?'

'For God's sake, be quiet,' came Del's whisper.

'What's going on?'

'Keep your voice down. I'll be right there.'

A moment later the left half of the door slid an inch back, and Del was scowling out at him. 'Where were you all day?' Del asked.

'I want to talk to you. He made me think it was whiter - '

'Hallucinatory terrain,' Del said. 'He's spending a lot of time with you, letting me knock around by myself… '

'And I remember flying.' Tom felt his face assume some expression absolutely new to him, uttering this statement. He half - expected Del to deny it.

'Okay,' Del said. 'You're having a whale of a time. I'm glad.'

'And I met an old woman. She doesn't speak English. I had to practically tackle her to get her to stop running away. And your uncle… '

His voice stopped. A girl had just walked into the tiny area of Del's room he could see. She wore one of Del's shirts over a black bathing suit. Her hair was wet and she had moth-colored eyes.

Del glanced over his shoulder and then looked irritatedly back at Tom. 'Okay, now you've seen her. She was swimming in the lake just after dinner, and I asked her up here. I guess you might as well come in.'

The girl backed away toward the slightly mussed bed, stepping like a faun on her bare legs. It was impossible for Tom riot to stare at her. He had no more idea then if she were beautiful than he did if the moon were rock or powder: she looked nothing at all like the popular girls at Phipps-Burnwood. But he could not stop looking at her. The girl's eyes went down to her tanned bare legs, then back to him. She tugged Del's shirt close about her.

'You probably guess already, but this is Rose Armstrong,' Del said.

The girl sat down on the bed.

'I'm Tom Armstrong,' he said. 'Oh, Jesus. Flanagan, I mean.'