'Of course it is. That's part of the point. Look again.'
Tom turned again and looked at the burning school.
'What does it say to you? Open your mind to it and let it speak.'
'It says . . . get out of here.'
'Does it really?' The magician laughed: he knew better.
'No.'
'No. It says, Live while you can. Get what you can when you can. You haven't been bad at that, you know.'
Tom began to shake. His feet were frozen, his face blazed like the fire. Coleman Collins seemed about to see straight inside him, and to cynically dismiss what he saw there. Like any young person, Tom was adept at intuiting other people's attitudes toward him, and for a moment it occurred to him that Coleman Collins hated both Del and himself. The secret lies in hating well. He was trembling so violently that the robe would have slipped from his shoulders if he had not gripped it with both hands. 'Please,' he said, asking for something so large he could not encompass it in words.
'It is night. You must go to bed.'
'Please.'
'This is your kingdom too, child. Insofar as I make it yours. And insofar as you can accept what you find in it.'
'Please . . . take me back.'
'Find your own way, little bird.' Collins cracked the whip, and the horse lunged forward. The magician swept past without another glance. Tom flailed out for the bar at the end of the sleigh, missed it, and fell. Cold leaked up his thighs, slithered down his chest. He pulled up his head to find the fire, but it too was gone. Collins' sleigh was just disappearing into the firs.
Tom got his knees under him and awkwardly stood up, gripping the robe. From the other side of the snowy plain a wind approached, made visible by the swirl of snow it lifted and spun. The trace of the wind arrowed straight toward him; he turned to take it on his back and saw flecks of green just before the wind knocked his legs out from under him and deposited him —
on nothing, on green air through which he fell without falling, spun without moving. He threw out his arms and caught the padded arm of a chair.
15
He was back in Le Grand Theatre des Illusions. One light burned gloomily down at him, revealing in semi-chiaroscuro his strewn clothing. Tom yanked his trousers on and shoved his feet into his shoes; he balled up his socks and underwear and thrust them into a pocket. Then he put on his shirt. All this he did mechanically, numbly, with a numb mind.
He looked at his watch. Nine o'clock. Nine or ten hours had vanished while Coleman Collins played tricks with him.
He went down the darkened hall. What had Del been doing all this time? The thought of Del revived him — he wanted to see him, to have his story matched by Del's. That morning, he had been almost joyful, being at Shadowland; now he again felt endangered. Warmth was just beginning to return to bis frozen toes.
Tom had reached the point in the hallway, just before it turned into the older part of the house, where the short corridor led to the forbidden door. Tom stood at the juncture of the two corridors looking at the cross-beamed door. He remembered Collins' words: This is your kingdom too, child. He thought: Well, let's see the worst.
And as he had said to Del the first night, wasn't the very commandment not to open it a disguised suggestion that he look behind the door?
'I'm going to do it,' he said, and realized that he had spoken out loud.
Before he could argue himself out of his mood of defiance, he moved down the short hallway and put his hand on the doorknob. The brass froze his hand. He thought back to the third thing Collins had shown him, back in the wintry sleigh: a boy opening a door and being engulfed by lyric, singing brightness.
Your wings, or your song?
He pulled open the forbidden door.
16
The Brothers
'Look, Jakob,' a man said, looking up from a desk. He smiled at Tom, and the man who sat at another desk facing him lifted his head from the papers before him and gave a similar quizzical, inviting smile. 'Do you see? A visitor. A young visitor.' His accent was German.
'I have eyes. I see,' said the other man.
Both were in late middle age, clean-shaven; glasses as old-fashioned and foreign as their dress modified their sturdy faces, made them scholarly. They sat at their desks in a little pool of light cast by candles; high bookshelves loomed behind them.
'Should we invite him in?' said the second man.
'I think we ought. Won't you come in, boy? Please do. Come in, child. That's the way. After all, we are working for you as much as for anyone else.'
'Our audience, Wilhelm,' said the second man, and beamed at Tom. He was stockier, deeper in the chest than the man with the kindly face. He stood and came forward, and Tom saw muddy boots and smelled a drifting curl of cigar smoke. 'Please sit. There will do.' He indicated a chesterfield sofa to the right of the desk.
As Tom advanced into the dark room, the crowded detail came clear: the walls covered with dim pictures and framed papers, a stuffed bird high up on a shelf, a glass bell protecting dried flowers.
'I know who you are. Who you're supposed to be,' he said. He sat on the springy chesterfield.
'We are what we are supposed to be,' said the one called Wilhelm. 'That is one of the great joys of our life. How many can claim such a thing? We discovered what we were supposed to be young, and have pursued it ever since.'
'We shared the same joy in collecting things,' said Jakob. 'Even as children. Our whole life has been an extension of that early joy.'
'Without my brother, I should have been lost,' said Wilhelm. 'If is a great thing, to have a brother. Do you have one, child?'
'In a way,' Tom said.
Both brothers laughed, so innocently and cheerfully that Tom joined them.
'And what are you doing here?' Tom asked.
They looked at each other, full of amusement which somehow embraced and included Tom.
'Why, we are writing down stories,' Jakob said.
'What for?'
'To amaze. To terrify. To delight.' .
'Why?'
'For the sake of the stories,' Jakob said. 'That must be clear. Why, our very lives have been storylike. Even the mistakes have been happy. Boy, did you know that in our original story it was a fur slipper which the poor orphan girl wore to the ball? What an inspired mistranslation made it glass!'
'Yes, yes. And you remember the strange dream I had about you, my brother: I stood in front of a cage, on top of a mountain . . . it snowed . . . you were in the cage, frozen . . . I had to peer through the bars of the cage — so much like one of our treasures . . . '
'Which we were determined to show the world the wonder we felt in discovering, yes. You were terrified — but it was a terror full of wonder.'
'These stories are not for every child — they do not suit every child. The terror is there, and it is real. But our best defense is nature, is it not?'
Tom said 'Yes' because he felt them waiting for an answer.
'So you see. You learn well, child.' Jakob set down the quill pen with which he had been toying. 'Wilhelm's dream — do you know that when Wilhelm was dying, he spoke quietly and cheerfully about his life?'
'You see, we embraced our treasures, and they gave us treasure back a thousandfold,' Wilhelm said. 'They were the country in which we lived best. If our father had not died so young — if our childhood had been allowed its normal span — perhaps we could never have found what it is to live in that country.'