11

'Well, that's your second bedtime story,' the magician said. 'Now I am afraid I must leave you. You'll be able to find your way back to bed soon enough, I'm sure.' He began to stand up on the matted grass, but the expression on Tom's face stopped him. 'What are you thinking, Tom?'

'On Registration Day in our school,' Tom began, his face flushed angrily, 'the headmaster kept Del and another boy in his office. He told each of them a kind of fairy tale. You knew about that.'

The magician stood, put his hands in the small of his back, and stretched from the balls of his feet. 'Think about one thing, Tom. What would you give to save a life? Your wings, or your song? Would you be a sparrow… or a frog?'

He grinned dazzlingly at the boy, lifted both arms in the air, and vanished.

'No!' Tom yelled, and jumped forward - on hands and knees, he scrabbled to the spot where Collins had been standing, and felt only grass and earth. He looked wildly around, expecting to see Collins running through the forest, but saw only the dying fire and the trees. Far off in the woods he saw one of the lights burning over an impromptu stage. There was no sign of Collins. Tom let himself down on the coarse grass, groaning: his mind spun. A dead Rose, sparrows into frogs, the old wizard, what he had done with the log… While you are here I am your parent.

Tom picked himself up off the grass; he supposed he could stumble back to the house. But with the first step he took, the forest around him seemed to melt.

At first he thought he was going to lose consciousness again, and find himself in the wrecked train with screams and the rending of metal thick and palpable in the air about him -

and the coffee scorching his back -

(Didn't stain your clothes, all that coffee flying about?)

and he realized that the magician had known at the Hilly Vale station that he was going to put him on the wrecked train (Not just a little spilled coffee, a little bump on the tracks, a little messy commotion?), and in the second before the forest disappeared as finally as Coleman Collins, Tom had time to think that Collins had somehow caused that wreck in order to put him inside it six hours later.

This is Level One. Any good magician knows when to break the rules.

He could have screamed as loudly as any poor soul on the train, but his fear pinned his screams to his tongue. The trees had blurred like watercolors held under a tap; everything slid and dissolved into a pane of meltingly pale green. Green mist enveloped him, abstract and cool, and he felt as though he were falling from an airplane.

White fluted pillars took shape as suddenly as if blown into being. The ground shifted, became harder, less resilient. With his next step forward, he whanged his leg against the metal back of a padded chair.

'Oh, my God,' he whispered. He was standing in a large vaultlike room with a curtained stage at one end. Tom himself was halfway up a pitched bank of seats, in the middle of a row. Misty green walls inset with white pillars led down to the stage. A few lights burned high above him.

He was in the big theater where Collins was going to teach them to fly.

'Oh, God,' he said. 'I wasn't even outside.'

Tom blindly went down the side of the rows of seats and let himself out into the hall. Here too a few lights burned. He was only five feet from the entry to the Little Theater. He clicked the door behind him and looked for its brass plate: Le Grand Theatre des Illusions. Beneath it was a white sheet of paper on which had been written: Go to bed, son.

He weaved down the hall and the lights clicked off behind him. All he wanted to do was to roll into sleep as fast and hard as he could: now he could not begin to puzzle out the hoops within hoops through which Collins had made him jump. And that is why frogs croak and why they hop. They were once birds, but were tricked by a great wizard, and now they are still trying to sing and still trying to fly.