28

'You have front-row seats,' three Herbie Butters said from three owl chairs. 'Please take them.'

Tom looked at them, scarcely bothering with the audience that had transfixed Rose. People from another age stared at the three magicians, peeled oranges, stuffed candies into their mouths, smoked. Unlike their painted images, which were visible at the rear of the Little Theater, they moved in the seats, raised their arms, applauded, and called out inaudible comments in X general din.

'You see, they like my little illusions,' three Herbie Butters said in unison. 'And now my volunteers will attempt to distinguish reality from its shadow. Failure to do so will bring a penalty, ladies and gentlemen.'

Cheers: catcalls.

'Change Del back,' Tom said, pitching his voice to go under the uproar behind him.

'Ah! The boy wants me to work magic on his pet - a sparrow, ladies and gentlemen! Our volunteer is very droll.' He held up his palm. 'But he is more than that, my friends. The young man is an apprentice magician. He thinks he could entertain you as well as I.'

More cheers; derisory shouts. Tom looked over his shoulder, saw Rose just turning away from the audience with a stricken, horrified expression. In her face was the conviction that they could not win. Up in the middle of the twentieth row, Del's parents, with their smashed heads and burning clothes, were politely applauding. Around them, visible behind Rose, men and women with animal faces screamed down at them and the stage.

'You see what audiences are, my little volunteer,' said the three Herbie Butters in unison. 'All audiences are the same. They want symbolic blood - they want results. You cannot trifle with an audience. Are you ready to make your choice?'

Zoo noises erupted from the thrashing audience. Tom glanced back and saw that everyone, even Del's parents, wore the heads of beasts. Dave Brick writhed there too, stuffed into Tom's old jacket, with a sheep's head on his shoulders.

'You see, you must never… ' said the Herbie Butter on the left.

'… make the fatal mistake of thinking… ' said the Herbie Butter in the center.

'… that any audience is friendly,' said the Herbie Butter on the right. 'Are you ready to make your choice? You will be severely penalized if you choose wrong. I promise you that!' he shouted to the audience, who screamed back in a thousand animal voices.

Tom looked up. Their messenger of spirit was circling in the vastness overhead, frantically trying to find its way out, like any bird.

Is there any Del left in you? Tom thought: his mind was fraying apart, shredding under the onslaught of noise from the audience of beasts. Or are you lost, just a sparrow now?

The sparrow came to rest on a pipe and was almost invisible, far up above him. He saw its head twitching from side to side.

'We're waiting,' said three voices.

Find him, Tom thought. Find Collins.

'If you do not make your choice, you will be sent back,' said three voices. 'You will be part of the audience forever. For they are each important, and each adds to the whole.'

Find Collins.

'Your pet is not a bird in a story,' said the Herbie Butter on the left.

'He is only a pestilential sparrow,' said the Herbie Butter in the middle.

And that would be right, Tom knew. No angels were looking after him and Del. The messenger of spirit was no longer a messenger of anything. Del's mind had guttered out in the frantic, restless little body.

'Del!' he shouted.

'One of a hundred lost pets,' said one of the magicians.

The sparrow left the pipe and swooped down over the audience, causing an uproar of shouts and curses.

Find him. Find him. Whatever you are now.

The sparrow curved in flight, and went for the stage. Tom's heart paused: his blood slowed in his veins. The sparrow flew in a straight line over the three figures on the stage, circled back and flew over them again. It came down suddenly, and as it went toward the lap of the magician on the left, Tom screamed, 'That's enough! Leave him! He's going to - '

The sparrow came to rest on the knee of the magician on the left.

'The young man is a magician, ladies and gentlemen,' Collins said through the mask of Herbie Butter. 'This part of the performance is concluded.' He tenderly reached forward and closed his fingers about the sparrow's body, and his companions faded into dark pools cast on the stage by opposed spotlights. 'My friends in the audience, this young man's pet has given his life so that his master may advance another stage.'

He's what you call a stooge, someone whispered behind Tom. You'll see. It's all part of the act.

Collins stood up from the owl chair, gripping the sparrow in his right hand and holding it out, brandishing it. 'You see before you a real bird,' he caressingly intoned. 'You have seen it fly. What is it? A boy's pet, a winged rodent, or a messenger of spirit? You have heard how magical birds aid their masters in quests and divinations, you know how they roam widely and freely in the world, bringing rumors of goodness here and there, soaring above what holds us to our earthly existences - ladies and gentlemen, aren't birds our very image of the magical?' He thrust forward the bird, and it - Del - poured out a cascade of melody unknown to any sparrow, as though its whole body had been filled with leaping song.

Oh, Del. That's you. And you're not afraid.

'You see - a special bird. does it not deserve a place in the eternal?'

Still the heartbreaking cascade of melody erupted from the captured sparrow.

'Do I need my fiddlers three?'

'NO!' bellowed the audience of beasts.

'Do I need my pipe and my bowl?'

'NO!'

'No. You have it, ladies and gentlemen. You comprehend. The singing bird is magic itself. It is indeed the messenger of spirit. And it could sing, I assure you, any melody you called out - but it has already surpassed such vulgar tricks. So I propose to give this living spirit messenger, with your permission, ladies and gentlemen of the perfect audience, its final form. Its ultimate form.'

'No!' Tom shouted, echoing the roars of the audience.

'Yes.' Collins smiled down at him and released the bird. The song cascaded fully out, spearing Tom with what Del was bringing forth from his trapped soul, the liquid and overflowing song which was Del's only speech. Del ascended an inch above the magician's hand and

no no no no-please -

froze, shooting out a spray of refracted colors, was silent, the miraculous song cut off in the middle of an ascending note; the ghost of the note sailed into the ceiling; and a glass bird fell back into the magician's hands.

Del.

'You are in Shadowland, boy,' Collins said. 'You are part of the performance. You cannot leave.' He bent forward, and Tom stepped up to stand before him, afraid that he would drop what Del had become as Del had deliberately shattered the Ventnor owl. The audience ceased its roaring. Tom vaguely saw Rose coming toward him with an expression of total dismay - We can't do it, Tom, I thought we could but I was wrong, we'll always be here - and tremblingly took the glass sparrow from Collins' hands.

'Now for your own conclusion,' Collins said. 'You know it's over, don't you? Look. Our audience has gone home.'

Tom did not have to look. He knew the seats were empty now, waiting for the next repeat performance and the next after that.

'Rose is already mine,' Collins said. 'And so are you, but you don't know it yet.'

The lights snapped off. Collins' fingers brushed his own, and the glass sparrow was filled with glowing many-colored light.