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.
14
The truth is, Tom does not have any idea of how he is to fight the Collector. As he hears Rose's high heels clattering into the wings of the stage, he remembers the scene in which the actor Creekmore impersonated Withers, and the impulse which led him to face this dreadful representation of Skeleton Ridpath begins to look like a fatal mistake. The Collector was the magician's best bodyguard — he had said that himself. It suddenly seems very likely to Tom that he is going to die — die none too pleasantly — in the Grand Theatre des Illusions, just as Withers had died in an alley outside a stage door.
'Vendpuris!' the Collector calls. 'I saw your owl, Vendouris.'
Tom edges away as silently as he can, wondering even now if he can get out of the theater and somehow snatch Del from Collins . . . leave the Collector wandering and calling inside the theater —
but the Collector is a magic trick.
'I want to see some skin,' the Collector whispers. 'Where are you, Vendouris?'
He is a magic trick, and Tom is a magician. In the hallucinatory scene which had played out when Laker Broome had touched him, there had been the flicker of a clue, the smell of an answer strong enough to make some part of him know that the Collector could be made harmless.