'Get those tongs ready!' someone was shouting. 'Get hold of those goddamned tongs!'
Tom groaned and rolled over, brushing the bottom branches of the maple with his elbow; then he remembered where he was, and compressed himself down as small as he could and went back on his belly. His neck hurt, his knees ached, his head sparkled with pain; but as he looked down at the men, the dream stuck to him, and so he saw the Secretary of Commerce gripping the handles of the metal tongs, swearing at the corporation treasurer to back away. One of the major stockholders in U.S. Steel held a dog at the ready over the pit. A pumpkin-faced lawyer in an army jacket was yelling 'Gid 'im! Gid 'im!' Another lawyer waved a fistful of folded bills: deep in the mound, the second dog wailed like a soul tormented in hell.
'Soon,' said the Secretary, and the Boston treasurer crouched over, grinning tensely like an ape.
Then two shocking things happened, so close together they were nearly simultaneous. Spouting blood, a tortured dog windmilled out of the mound; a lawyer whose body was covered with a glittering, moving dragon tattoo took one look at it and raised his shovel over his head. Tom saw one front leg hanging by a bloody thread, ribs opened up to shine like painted matchsticks, and then the lawyer brought down the shovel and crushed the dog's head. The lawyer kicked the dog's body into the trees.
The second shocking thing, like the first, was a succession of images so brightly colored they might have been a series of slides. A furry, stubby head wet with blood poked into visibility for a second; the Secretary of Commerce jabbed with the metal tongs, and all the financiers howled gleefully; the Secretary jerked his arms powerfully upward like a man making a home run in another language, and the metal bands of the tongs clasped the belly of a squalling, crazed, bleeding badger and carried it in a wide arc through the firelit air. The Secretary pivoted, whirling the heavy body in the tongs, and dropped the animal into the pit. The U.S. Steel stockholder loosed the foaming dog and it too went headfirst into the pit. Instantly the financiers began shouting out bets.
The bets, Tom suddenly knew, were on how long the badger would live.
The shouting men closed around the pit, passing money back and forth, and Tom could not see what was happening inside it. But he could imagine it, which was worse. At times, when a spray of blood flew up, one or another of the financiers backed away, cursing, and Tom saw rolling hair. The dragon bled on its iridescent scales; a florid rose bled on a bicep; miraculous blood appeared on a yellow T-shirt, dazzling and unexpected as stigmata.
After twenty minutes one man raised his arms and crowed. Money came to him in loud waves. Then there was only the sound of breathing, the ragged breathing of hard-worked men and the punctured, frothy breathing of a badly wounded dog. The Secretary of Commerce took a pistol from his pocket and fired it once into the pit.
Tom shuddered back, rustling along the ground like a leaf. 'All right. You've had your blood,' said Coleman Collins; but it was too late, because the magician was looking up the hill right into his eyes, and saying, 'There's another one for the pit. Go to sleep, boy.'
A thick, slobbering man spun around and ran toward him; and Tom passed out.
8
Go to sleep, boy. Tom found himself back on the train going north from Boston. Coleman Collins, not Del, sat beside him, saying, 'Of course, this isn't your train. This is Level One.'
'Trance,' Tom said. 'Voice.'
'That's right. Wonderful memory. While we're here, I want to thank you for all you've done for Del. He's needed someone like you for a long time.'
A wave of sick feeling, disguised as friendliness, flowed from the magician, and Tom knew he was in deeper trouble than any the troll-like men could have caused him.
'Would you like to see Ventriloquism? That's fun. I always enjoy Ventriloquism.' He smiled down at the boy as they swayed along in the crowded train. 'This is all very elementary, of course. I hope you'll stay long enough for me to show you some of the more difficult things. It's all within your power, I assure you.' 'We'll be with you all summer.' 'Two and a half months is not long enough, little bird. Not nearly. Now. Where should that voice come from? Up there, I fancy.' He lifted his distinguished face and nodded at a grille set in the car's ceiling.
Instantly a hysterical voice crackled out: 'EMERGENCY! EMERGENCY! BRACE YOURSELVES AGAINST THE SEAT IN FRONT OF YOU! BRACE YOURSELVES. . . '
The magician was gone. A fat woman in the aisle beside Tom's seat shrieked; she had been holding a paper carton containing several cups of coffee. As she shrieked, the coffee sailed upward, spinning into the air.
Now many were shrieking. Tom folded his head down between his knees and felt hot coffee spattering his back. The jolt knocked him off the seat entirely, and the noise of the wreck was a nail driven into his eardrums. He could see the woman staggering backward down the aisle, her face caught in an expression between terror and dismay. The railroad car lifted its nose into the air and began to tilt sideways. 'They broke my leg!' a man yelled. 'Jeeesus!' His yell was the last thing Tom heard before the sound of an explosion going off loud as a bomb a short distance down the track. 'Light,' came the voice of the magician. A shattering burst of whiteness, caused by another explosion, flashed through the car. Inches from Tom's head, a Dixie cup shot up into flame. Tom batted it away, but could not see where it went. 'Jeesus!' screeched the man with the broken leg. The uptilted car swayed far over to the right and began to topple.
All about Tom, who was now lying faceup in the aisle, the burns on his back singing like an open wound, people groaned and screamed: the car sounded like a burning zoo.
He gripped one of the seat supports and thought: I'm going to die here. Didn't a lot of people die?
When the car struck the ground, the screams intensified, became almost exalted.
9
Tom opened his eyes. He was lying in the hollow where Pease and Thorn and the others had labored over their badger-baiting. Coleman Collins, looking ruddy and healthy and ten years younger in his outdoorsy clothes, took a pull off a bottle and winked at him from where he sat beside the shredded mound.
'That wasn't just magic,' Tom said.
'What is 'just magic'?' The magician smiled at him. 'I'm sure there is no such thing. But you went to sleep. I imagine that you were dreaming.' He lifted a knee and extended an arm along it. He looked like a scoutmaster having a chat around the fire with a favored boy.
'I was up there — ' Tom pointed. 'You said, 'All right. You've had your blood.' Then you saw me. And you said, 'There's another one to throw in the pit. Go to sleep, boy.''
'Now I know you are tired,' Collins said, leaning against what was left of the mound. 'You have had a very long day. I promise you, I never said any of those things.'
'Where are all the others?' Tom sat up and looked around the clearing. Firelight showed a mound of earth where the pit had been.