Shadowland

Voice                                Rise                                          Transparence

Silence                              Altered Landscape

Level 4                             Level 5                                                Level 6

Window of Flame  Collector                                  Ghostly Presence

Window of Ice                  Mind Over Matter                    Living Statue

Tree Lift                            Mind Control                            Fish Breathing

Level 7                             Level 8                                                Level 9

Altered Time                     Put A Hurting                           Wood Green Empire

Created Landscape           Conjure Minor Devils

Desired Fireworks

    Tom looked up when he had read it.

    'Read it again.'

    Tom glanced down the lists again. 'I don't get it.'

    'Sure you do.' Del's whole being was alight.

    'Do you get one of these every summer?'

    Del shook his head. 'This is the first time. But when I saw him at Christmas, he said that if I came back with you, he'd send me a description.'

    'Of what? Everything he can do?'

    'He can do a lot more than that. But I guess what he means is a description of what a magician ought to be able to do.'

    'He can turn statues into people? He can . . . ?' Tom searched the list. 'Alter the landscape?'

    'I guess so.' Del laughed. 'I've seen a lot of that stuff. Not all of it, but a lot.'

    'So if Rose Armstrong brings you coffee, she might come in upside down? With upside-down coffee in an upside-down cup?'

    Del shook his head, still laughing.

    'I don't like that business about 'Know What You Are Getting Into.''

    'I told you he was scary sometimes.'

    'But it's like a threat.' And then his mind gave him an image he had a month ago decided was false: that of Skeleton Ridpath hovering two inches below the ceiling of the auditorium, hanging like a spider, exulting in the coming destruction.

    'It's not really a threat,' Del explained. 'Sometimes up there, everything is normal, and at other times . . . ' He waved at the paper. 'Other times, you learn things. Oh, great, here comes dinner.'

    Tom gingerly cut into one of the eggs on his plate, saw yolk flood out into the paler yellow of the sauce, and lifted a dripping fork to his mouth. 'Wow,' he said, when he swallowed. 'How long has this been going on?'

    'The hollandaise comes out of a bottle,' Del said. 'But you get the general idea.'

2

As they ate, the train slowed into a station — Tom could see only a metal water tower and a peeling shed. The usual men in curling hats waited to get on.

    Del said, 'With these levels, I guess you can sometimes do something on a higher one without being able to do everything on the lower ones. Like I can rise, you know, but Uncle Cole says everybody can learn to do that, if they concentrate the right way. But I'm really Level One — I can't even do voice, throw my voice yet. I'm still trying to learn. 'Trance' is just like hypnotism. An idiot can do it. Theatrics, now . . . '

    Tom watched the lonely cowboys filing past. They looked thirsty. Nobody ever saw cowboys off, nobody ever greeted them.

    ' . . . it's just the ordinary stage stuff, all you have to know is how to do it, how the mechanics work . . . '

    They were like spacemen, so loosely tied to earth, but where they orbited was towns like this, the name of which was Lone Birch.

    Then he saw a face that violently took his mind off cowboys. All the pleasure in him went black and cold.

    'Theatrics, see, he thinks it's all junk, just the word shows it.' Del looked at him curiously. 'You lose your appetite all of a sudden?'

    'Don't know,' Tom said. He craned over the table, trying desperately to see the bruised face among the half-dozen men waiting outside.

    'You think you saw a friend? In Lone Birch?'

    'Not a friend. I thought I saw Skeleton out there. Waiting to get on the train.'

    Del laid down his knife and fork. 'Oh. I just lost my appetite too.' He looked perfectly composed. 'What do we do?'

    'I don't want to do anything.'

    'I think we ought to take a look. That way we'll know. How sure are you?'

    'Pretty sure. But I just saw him for a second — just a glimpse.'

    The train began to snick-snick out of the station.

    'But a face like that . . . '

    'It's pretty hard to miss,' Tom said. 'Yeah.'

    'Let's go.' Del pushed himself away from the table. 'I'll pay the waiter. I'll go forward, and you go back. We're about halfway in the train.' Del took a deep breath and swayed a little with the tram's motion. 'If it's him . . . I don't mean to give you orders — and he could be sitting facing the way you come in — but maybe he's just traveling . . . '

    'And maybe I'm wrong,' Tom said. Part of him was happy that Del's nervousness had emerged. 'And maybe if I see him, I'll kick him off the train.' Now that Del had shown his own fear, his could turn to anger. 'I guess we'd better start.'

    'That's what I said,' Del reminded him over his shoulder, and held out a folded ten-dollar bill to the waiter.

Tom entered the next car and looked over the passengers. Many slept — babies sprawled over their mothers sprawled over two seats. Soldiers slept with caps pulled over their eyes, snoring like a yard full of pigs. A few wakeful ones glanced at him over the tops of magazines. Skeleton Ridpath was not there.

    He went quickly down the aisle, pushed aside the heavy door, and for a moment stood in the rocking space between cars and peered through the gritty window. This was their car — Tom felt an angry certainty that if Skeleton were on the train, he would be sitting near them. The thought made his bowels liquefy. But the seat behind theirs was empty; the people he could see from the window were those to whom he had spoken or nodded. He pushed the door aside and went in.

    One of the sleepy mothers smiled at him. The long car felt warm and comfortable. Tom imagined that if Skeleton were actually seated there, his nerves would have screamed, alarms howled.

    Three cars remained. Since Skeleton had got on Tom's half of the train, there was a thirty-three-percent chance he was in the next car. Tom left his own carriage and pushed open the door to the next.

    Here all the lights were off. Tom closed the door behind him. His eyes adjusted slowly. This car is almost empty, which is why the few in it were able to enforce their unanimous opinion that nights on trains were for sleeping. One of the men, mustached and blue-jeaned, grunts in his sleep and digs his face deeper into the untender material of the seat. Tom has seen at once that none of them is Skeleton. He wishes that he could curl up like this, grind his face into a seat, and be somewhere else, safe — and then he feels that he is walking straight through their dreams, trespassing in them.

    This man who lifts a shoulder before him, is he dreaming of the snake that circles the world and rests with its pointed tail in its mouth?