13

A shadowy figure appeared on the lawn behind them: or had it been there before, unnoticed? Rose grabbed Tom's arm. Del stepped backward. 'It's Skeleton,' he said, his voice way above its usual register, high enough to be birdsong: but Tom saw that it was not Skeleton.

The figure stepped forward, and tortoiseshell eyeglass frames turned red in the light from the house.

'This school has been unwell,' Laker Broome said, 'and now it is time to cut back the diseased branches.' He moved closer to them. 'Pruning, gentlemen… pruning. Time to clean up our garden.' Tom could see the lights down in the woods through his glen-plaid suit.

'We'll get you! We know who you are and we will get you!' He raised a transparent fist, and Rose and the boys stepped back.

'We have had indiscipline, smoking, failures, and theft - and now we are cursed with something so sick, so ill, that in all my years as an educator I have never seen its like.

'NEVER!'

He stepped forward again, pushing them back to the flagstones and the light.

'A guilty mind and soul are dangerous to all about them - they corrupt. All of you boys have been touched by this disease.'

Another mad, threatening step forward. 'You, Flanagan. Did you steal that owl?' 'Yes,' Tom said. For that was the final truth. The index finger stabbed at Del. 'You. Nightingale. Did you steal that owl?' 'Yes,' Del said.

'You will report to my office immediately - we will rid ourselves of you, do you hear? You are to be expunged, a word meaning erased, omitted, cast away… Mala causa est quae requirit misercordiam.' His face seemed the size of a billboard. Rose, still, gripping Tom's arm, was whimpering. 'And I see you have brought a girl into this school. That too will be dealt with, boys. I very much fear that you will not be allowed to leave these premises alive. Theft, failure, smoking, indiscipline - and ingratitude! Ingratitude is a capital offense!'

Tom felt the rough fieldstone flags under his feet, and Laker Broome looked with transparent eyes at a transparent watch and said, 'And now I believe we have some magic from two members of our first year.'

Del goggled at him: the bruises were starting to come up from his face, purple across his temples and green on his cheeks and jaw. In a couple of hours he would look like a mandrill.

Animal faces: he was suddenly aware of a cramped room about him, gloomily lacquered with photographs - a crazy quilt on the walls and ceiling, horrible faces leering at him as in the wizard's house in the dream, leering but stationary, fixed on the wall so they could never float away…

('To-o-o-o-m,' Del wailed.)

… but what was floating was him, going up off a strange fetid bed straight toward the ceiling. Rose's arms held him back, then broke away, and he was going right toward those pictures, toward a dead man in his car with his brains all over the windows, some dripping car in an empty parking lot. Scene of the Murder. The former Miami lawyer was discovered at 7:10 yesterday morning. Miami resident Herbert Finkel, threatened by a loitering youth described as wearing blue shirt and tan trousers…

toward a picture of Coleman Collins in his Burberry and a wide-brimmed hat, his face only a blank white oval…

toward the Carson School, a black-and-white aerial photograph crayoned with red-crayon flames, drawn over the field house and auditorium, a red crayon smear obliterating the little tree in the court. Closer to it, closer, the crayon flames seeming to leap, seeming to warm his face.

Rose's fingers grasped his right hand, torturing the wound, and he yelled just as the crayon flames grew up around him.

They were back at Carson. Del and Rose were on either side of him, standing on the solid wooden floor of the auditorium, Mr. Broome at the podium, his face a lunatic's, mouthing gibberish. A hundred boys twisted and howled in their seats, many of them bleeding from the eyes and nose. Noise like a foul smoke rose from them, and Mr. Broome screamed, 'I want Steven Ridpath! Skeleton Ridpath! The only graduate of the class of '59. Come up here and get your diploma!' He held out a burning document, and Tom felt himself sailing up, his limbs spidery, all of his skin so tight it felt it might split open…

down below him - a photograph? It moved. The dead boys twisted and howled. A teacher dressed in a Norfolk jacket moved across the blackening floor and took Del's arm, twisted it savagely around his back, and yanked him away. It had the quality of a photograph, a moment stopped in time so that you could look back and say, yes, that's when Uncle George ripped his pants on the bob-wire fence, that's when Lulu looked down the well, wasn't that funny, sorta like an omen cuz that's when things started to go bad and wrong and just see how happy we all were… but Del's face was turning purple and green and Rose was screaming and the man wasn't a teacher, he was Mr. Peet… he was still above them all, floating toward Laker Broome, who held out his burning hand and fastened it around Tom's wrist, scorching his flesh, grinning at him and saying, I said there'd be a little pain, didn't I? Should have taken my hand back in the tunnels, boy. Don't you agree things would have worked out a little nicer that way?

The burning hand clamped harder on his wrist. Don't make the fool's mistake of thinking this ain't happening, kid. Even though it ain't. Tom felt his wrist frying in the devil's grasp. Mr. Collins has your pal. You chose your song. So sing it.

Beneath the white of the magician's handkerchief, his wrist was blister red.

'To-o-o-m!' Del cried again. His voice was getting smaller. 'Tom! Tom!'

He shook his head, trying to clear out the fuzz - almost as if he had been Skeleton Ridpath, seeing what Skeleton had chosen to see, had wanted with all of his messed-up heart to see -

'They moved us, they moved us,' Rose wailed, 'oh, Tom come back - you like died for a second.'

He opened his eyes, and was looking up at Rose's scared face. She was not even pretty anymore. Her forehead was wrinkled like an old woman's, and for a second she looked like a witch bending over him and shaking his arms. 'Oh,' he said.

She stopped shaking him. 'That man touched you and it was like you died. Mr. Peet came out and carried you in here and pulled Del along - and I just followed, I hit him on the back, but he never even blinked at me. He took Del away, Tom. What are you going to do?'

'Dunno,' Tom said. He did not know where he was. Artificial stars, friendly lights, winked down at him. Wasn't there a color wheel? Wasn't there a band? ''Polka Dots and Moonbeams,'' he said. 'Fielding went off the wall over some saxophone player. Six cups of punch. Everybody went outside and looked at a satellite, but it was really just an airplane. Skeleton was there, and he looked really creepy. All in black.' Tom looked perplexedly up at the friendly lights. Where the color wheel should have been, only a spaghettilike pipe ran through the distance, joining another thin pipe at a T-junction.

'What are you talking about?' Rose had her witch face again.

'Carson. Our school. When Del and I… ' He shook his head. 'Mr. Peet? I saw him.'

'He carried you here. And he took Del.'

Tom groaned. 'Our headmaster was a devil,' he said. 'Do you suppose he actually could have been? And maybe he was the man on Mesa Lane last summer - it was only his first year, you know? The new kids never realized that. They thought he'd been there forever. No wonder we all had nightmares.'

'Are you all right?' Rose asked.

'He's a talent scout,' Tom said, smiling. 'Good old M.'

'Tom.'

'Oh, I'm okay.' He sat up. 'Where are we, anyhow? Oh. Should have known.' They were in the big theater; because of the removed wall, he could see into the smaller theater. The figures in the mural watched him with their varying expressions of pleasure, boredom, and amusement. And of unearthly greed.

'Collins is right, you know. He did give Skeleton what he wanted. Skeleton wanted exactly what happened. He even drew pictures of it.'

'But now what?' Rose said. 'Tom, what do we do now? I don't even know what you're talking about.'

'Do you know what I think, Rose? I think I still love you. Do you suppose Collins still loves his little shepherdess? Do you really have a grandmother in Hilly Vale, Rose?'

The worry lines in her forehead puckered again.

Tom got to his knees. The mural, a real audience, watched with sympathetic interest. 'For my next trick, and this has never before been attempted on the continent, ladies and gentlemen… '

'Are you crazy? Did that man do something to your mind?'

'Be quiet, Rose.' The entire mural blazed at him: he could almost see their hands carrying food to their mouths, see them talking to each other: I'll miss old Herbie, say what you like, he was the bloody best. Turned a man's hand into a claw, now, didn't he? In Kensington it. was. The folks in the shilling seats, looking forward to having their brains turned inside-out at Mr. Butter's last show.

In the mural, the Collector turned his head to beam his glee toward Tom Flanagan.

I say, that girl's a smasher. French she is.

'Stay quiet,' he said. 'Go somewhere - go hide on the stage. Find a corner and hide in it and stay quiet.'

'What…?'

He waved her off, hoping she would find the safest corner in all Shadowland. Now there was no reassuring button to push and turn the awful thing back into a joke.

A loudspeaker crackled: 'ah, there you are, sir! YES, YOU - THE GENTLEMAN IN THE BLACK SUIT. LADIES AND GENTS, WE HAVE OUR SECOND VOLUNTEER. A GENEROUS HAND, PLEASE!'

Ghostly clapping, applause from the year 1924, splashed from the walls.

The Collector slid down from the wall, grinning blind and toothless at Tom.

Now, Mary, don't carry on - that bloke's in on it, do you see? He's part of the show. He's what you call a stooge.

The Collector was stumbling to the end of the aisle in the smaller room, still focused entirely on Tom. A face without any personality at all. Dr. Collector. It was what they all looked like, really: Skeleton, Laker Broome, the magician, Mr: Peet and the Wandering Boys, so warped by hate and greed that they would steal and kill, cheat and tyrannize anyone less powerful. Collins had even stripped a dead man's pockets. Yes. Dr. Collector. They offered their own kinds of salvation. Want to be a man? I'll make you a man. I am your father and your mother.

'Here I am, Skeleton,' he said. Disgust, loathing, flooded through him. He stood up. His hands felt like molten lead weights, held together only by the knotted handkerchiefs.

'Come on, Skeleton,' he said.

The Collector lurched eagerly down the stairs.