'Good. But of course you remember the salient point about wizards,' Collins said.
I fooled you, I fooled you . . . got all pig iron!
'They get the house odds — they use their own decks. You should have walked, child.' Collins stood up, his eyes flashed, and the owl chair was empty.
A dazed bird fluttered along the floor, its wing feathers painting the blood into delicate Japanese calligraphy.
21
Tom knew. Collins had carefully prepared him to know: he had foretold it, planted the seeds of this final betrayal in his mind. They once were birds, but were tricked by a great wizard, and now they are still trying to sing and still trying to fly. This dazed sparrow scrawling Japanese letters with Mr. Feet's blood on the polished wooden floor was trying to stand and move like a boy so that it could shutter up its mind again and be safe. The sparrow cheeped, and Tom knew that Del was screaming. In horror Tom watched as it fell on its side and fixed him with an eye like a madman's: a panicked black pebble.
The fairy tales had blown into each other and got mixed up, so that the old king had a wolfs head under his crown, and the young prince in love with the maiden fluttered and gasped in a sparrow's body, and Little Red Riding Hood walked forever on knives and sword blades, and the wise magician who enters at the end to set everything right was only a fifteen-year-old boy kneeling on bloodied floorboards and reaching for the transformed body of his closest friend.
'I can't change him back, Rose!' he wailed. The sparrow-heart beat, a thousand times faster than his own, against the tips of his fingers.
'I don't know how to change him back!' He heard his voice as he had when the nails had gone in, sailing up high enough to freeze. The sparrow quivered in his hands. A wing feebly struck his thumb.
'Then you'll have to make Mr. Collins change him back,' Rose said. She stood just inside the door, looking down at Tom with the stunned bird in his wrapped hands. 'Make him do it,' and her voice was fierce.
22
He came out of the bedroom holding Del as he had held the gun, and Coleman Collins was lounging against the top of the banister. 'Welcome to the Wood Green Empire,' the magician said. 'Front-row seats? Excellent.'
'Change him back,' Tom said.
'Sorry, no refunds, no exchanges. You'll have to take your seats now.'
'That's not him,' Rose said at his shoulder. 'It's a shadow.'
'Oh, you told on me,' the image said, and flickered away into dozens of dancing flames.
'welcome to the wood green empire!' boomed the metallic voice. The bird trembled in Tom's hands, cheeping frantically, twisting its neck to look up into his face. The flames died before they fell, like fireworks, leaving them in darkness. Down the hall to Tom's side, moonlight cast panels of silver on the floor and folded halfway up the wall; otherwise Shadowland was as dark as the tunnels beneath the summerhouse.
Del went utterly still in his hands, and Tom feared that he had died. Then he felt a high regular throb beneath his fingers, the sparrow's heart thrilling away, and he opened his shirt and tenderly put Del next to his skin. He buttoned his shirt up halfway. Feathers rustled against his chest.
Outside, the fireworks began again with a thumping explosion that rattled the windows down the hall and sent shooting rays of red and blue across the silvery pane of windows. Soft against his skin, Del made almost a human cry.
A beam of light at the bottom of the stairs: Herbie Butter outlined in light, dressed in his black tails, red wig, and white face; 'We have a volunteer, ladies and gentlemen — the brave Tommy Flanagan, all the way from sunny Arizona in the United States of America! Are you ready, Tommy? Can you sing for us?'
'Change him back!' Tom shouted, and Herbie Butter rolled over in a backflip and landed on his feet, an index finger pointed to the sky.
'Change? Easier said than done, boy — but that's magic for you.' He too dissolved into dancing, lilting flames.
'THE OLD KING! THE ONLY KING!'
Tom felt his way down the stairs in the dark.
. . . Philly's wife looks a little peaked this summer, Nick . . .
. . . what you get from being in two places at once . . .
Voices from the tunnels, come out to play in the dark.
And voices from the other place that had been Shadowland.
. . . if a senior drops his books on the floor, pick them up. Carry them where he tells you to carry them. Do anything a senior tells you to do . . .
He came down from the last step and nearly stumbled, expecting another.
. . . got that? You will be doomed to destruction, DOOMED TO DESTRUCTION, if you do not learn the moral lessons of this school. . . .
He smelled the biting aroma of gin.
'Change him back!' he shouted: felt the crippling hysteria bubbling in him and knew that too could destroy him.
'You have to find the real one,' Rose said. 'He wants you to find him, Tom.'
Tom cupped his hands around Del's shivering body. The sparrow had drawn up his feet and clamped up his wings, and was small and warm inside his shirt: small and warm and terrified enough to die of shock. That terror made his own insignificant. He looked down at the pregnant little bulge in his shirt, and saw two circles of blood where his palms had rested. His hysteria, something he could not afford, eased. 'I want it too,' he said.
23
They turned back into the main body of the house. Sudden light stabbed his eyes, and Coleman Collins was standing in a column of flame beside the row of theatrical posters. Orange light danced on the opposite wall, on the ceiling. 'That was your shortcoming, you know,' the shadow said. 'You simply were not capable of learning the moral lessons. The Book would have been useless to you. It never did Speckle John much good, either, as far as I could see.'
'You perverted the Book,' Tom said. 'You perverted magic. Speckle John should have left you to die on that hillside. The fox should have torn out your throat.'
The elegant figure in the flame chuckled. 'Now you sound like Ouspensky.' He mimed yawning and then grinned. 'You know, they were afraid of me, Ouspensky and Gurdjieff. That is why they carried on so. Afraid of me, like that ranter Crowley.' The flame had begun to consume itself from the bottom up.
Outside, fireworks battered in the sky.
The flame was a teardrop hanging in the air; only Collins' head was visible in it. 'And he was stronger than you, dear boy. . . . ' The flame and the head vanished together.
He stood in the dark with Rose, feeling Del palpitating against his belly. 'You know, he's right. I can't do any of those things he does. He's bound to beat me, and he knows it.' He felt shock radiating out from her and he said, still with that fatalistic clarity, 'It doesn't mean I'm not going to try, but I can't do those things. I just can't.'
'Have you ever tried?' came her voice.
'No — not projecting myself like that.'
'Then try it.'
'Right now?'
'Sure.'
'I don't even know how to start.'
'But haven't you been getting better — haven't you been learning?'
'I guess.'
'Then just start. Try it. Now. For the sake of your confidence.'
It would not do his confidence much good if he failed, he reflected, but tried anyhow. It had to be like all the rest, he thought. It had to be a place in his own mind and all he had to do was find it. Suppose there were a mirror in front of you, Tom. Suppose you could see yourself. Suppose the mirror Tom could speak.