6

Six lights: and there was the first, just ahead, near the place where Rose had enacted the scene from 'The Goose Girl.' After that Collins had simply dumped the horse's head into the water to rot. The magician would treat Del and Rose and himself the same way, Tom knew, if he had to. Now, if only he could make Del see that they had to escape before the climax Collins was planning for them. Tom knew in his bones that no matter what Collins said, he would not surrender his place in the magicians' world, whatever that was, to a fifteen-year-old boy. He would be more likely to do whatever he had done to Speckle John - and that, Tom knew in the same instinctive fashion, would not be told until the day of the performance.

Two. The second light, piercing a curtain of leaves. Daydreaming about Rose Armstrong, Tom parted the branches, stepped over a mulchy, rotting log; stopped. In the middle of the lighted clearing stood a huge man covered with fur. Oh his shoulders sat the giant head of a wolf. Tom stared at this hieratic figure in pure shock. He was not hypnotized, he was awake and his senses were all functioning. The man-wolf, more than anything else he had witnessed, seemed the embodiment of magic-magic personified, a guardian. Tom saw that the fur was sewn - together pelts. The man-wolf raised an arm and pointed deeper into the woods. Tom ran, plunging sideways into the trees until the man-wolf could not see him, and then slowly worked forward.

Three. Tom crept from tree to tree, trying to be noiseless. When he was close enough, he peered around a gigantic oak and looked over the marshy platform of earth beneath the light. Cautiously he stepped onto the spongy ground. The forest around him began to melt. 'No!' he shouted. And tried to jerk himself backward to escape the transformation. His back struck something metal. In an instant the air cleared: he was in a parking lot. A wide, low city lay around him in early morning, with soft humid air and a rising sun beginning to tint the buildings to his left. Was this where he was to be welcomed? None of the few cars in the lot looked familiar - though not new, they were newer than any cars he had ever seen.

'Where?' he said aloud - there were no landmarks. Then through the sun-tipped buildings to his right he saw a line of pale blue. An ocean. California? Florida?

He stepped up on one of the concrete dividers. The metal thing he had banged into was a parking meter. What could come to him here, in a city?

Then he noticed the battered green car before him. A series of drops hung at the bottom of the doorframe, filled, and splashed on the concrete. The drops were red. Tom looked at the driver's window, and saw a man's head propped against the glass. Curling blond hair flattened against the window. The red drops were the man's blood. Tom nearly threw up. He could not look at those drops gathering and falling. He jumped off the divider and walked fearfully around to face the front of the car. Florida plates. Was he supposed to see the man's face? Through the windshield he saw broad unknown features. It was the face of a man in middle age. Some stranger, some visitor. Where his parting should have been, his head was horrible. Then for an instant he thought lie knew the face - he felt small and helpless, turned away in moral anguish, rejecting the terrible half-familiarity of the dead man's features.

An old man in a Harry Truman shirt and a baseball cap was at the far end of the lot, walking toward him and the green car. 'Mister!' Tom shouted, and the old man peered up at him in fright. 'Hey… I need… '

The old man was waving his fists at him, and the revulsion and disgust and fear on the old man's face made Tom step backward. The old man screamed something at him, and Tom turned around and ran.

When he reached the end of the lot and was just about to pound along the sidewalk, he felt like he had fallen over a cliff: his legs went out from under him, the city whisked away, and he rolled over onto wet leaves. It was night again, and the air smelled different. He was back in the woods. When he picked himself up he saw that he was on the other side of the marshy clearing. He had to go on.

Not Marcus - that was not lazy, cheerful Marcus slumped in the green car. That man was too fat, too old. He shook his head, not believing it but knowing that the man had been Marcus. A moment later he turned away from the empty clearing.

A worn little path ted toward the fourth light; roots stubbed his feet, black arms reached toward him. The woods now were filled with gibbering and leering faces. A branch rustled, and an eye winked at him - Then fireflies, a series of little eyes, danced up and whirled around. Between these flickerings, darting observations, he saw the next light.

Four. Only two more to go.

Tom approached the light nearly on tipt—. He remembered: The torch was hung over a wide fiat shelf of rock, the most stagelike of all the little arenas in the woods. Here it was where Rose had enacted the fable about the beginning of all stories on their first night in Shadowland.

Here too something waited for him.

He crept toward the rock shelf. Yes, someone waited for him - he caught a glimpse through the branches of a cannonball head. Snail; or Thorn, with his Halloween face. Tom edged sideways, trying to see the face. A red ear came into sight, pink flesh under a stubbly haircut. At last he saw the rest of the ponderous, studying face.

Oh, God.

He stepped on a stick, and it snapped as loudly as a bone. Dave Brick lifted his head and uncrossed his legs. He was sitting on a metal school chair. 'Tommy?' he said; his voice was plaintive and lost. 'Please, Tommy.'

Tom stepped out onto the rock. Brick sat facing him twelve feet away, wearing the old tweed jacket Tom had lent him. 'You left me, Tommy,' Dave Brick complained. 'You chose flight. You should go back and find me.'

'I wish,' Tom said. 'But it's too late now.'

'I'm still there, Tommy. I'm waiting. But you chose wings. Go back and find me. You saved a bass fiddle and some magic tricks. Now it's my turn.' Brick sounded forlorn and slightly peevish.

'It's too late,' Tom said. He thought he might be losing his mind; thought of his mind giving up and walking away.

'You can do magic. Save me. I want to be saved, Tommy. Something fell on me… and somebody hit me… and Mr. Broome told me not to move… ' Brick looked ready to cry; then he was crying.

'Oh, don't,' Tom said, 'I can't take it. I can't handle it. It's too much.'

'Del took the owl,' Brick said through his tears. 'I saw. He made everything happen. Ask him. After you go back and save me, Tommy. It's all his fault, Tommy. Because you're supposed to get the owl chair. Ask him.'

'You're not Dave Brick,' Tom said. There were wrinkles in the face; the hands were huge and powerful. He ran across the edge of the slab, and the thing in the chair began to howl. 'You can be saved, Tommy! He can save you! Like you can save me!'

Tom ran from the voice deep into the forest. He was crying himself now, whether from shock or outrage or horror he did not know. Was Coleman Collins telling Rose about this right now, chortling? Or had she known it was going to happen when she blew him a kiss? No - that could not be true. Running, he grazed a tree, staggered and stopped. Where was he? Dave Brick's look-alike howled far off to his left.

Tom struck out blindly through the moonlit forest, going in the direction where the trees were least dense. He still saw faces in the patterns of the branches, but now they looked at him in horror. Leaving Dave Brick behind, he had become a monster.

Five. There it was, just as he had known it would be. A flaring torch, not an electric light; not the same fifth light, but the one he was supposed to find. He felt like crying again. Then he had a premonition. He would see Rose standing on the dark grass, petting a wolf… Rose with her teeth sharpened…

All those nightmares, back at school, all those dreadful visions: they had come from him. Beginning in him, born in him, they had spread out to infect everyone he knew. Even back then, when he had thought magic was a few deft card tricks, he had been on his way here. The torch flared, visible between giant black growths. Tom shuddered and stepped forward.

First he saw the dead wolf. The sword wound in its belly gaped. Tom suddenly smelled mustard flowers, smelled Rose's faint perfume lacing delicately through. The wound in the wolfs belly gaped because the wolf had been nailed to the tree by its paws, and gravity was trying to haul it earthward. It hung just below the torch. 'Rose… ' he said. 'Please… '

A man in black stepped out of the woods. Black cape, black hat shielding his face. He carried a bloodied sword and pointed it across twenty feet of open space at Tom's chest.

Have you worlds within you?

'No.' He did not want these worlds.

Do you want dominion?

'No.'

He saw the treasure within you, child.

'And he hated it.'

Honor the Book.

'I don't even know it.'

You belong to the Order.

'I don't belong to anything.' Tom feared that the man with the invisible face would run him through, but instead he said, You know what you are, child.

The sword burst into flame. The man swung it to one side and pointed the way he must go. The way led straight to the sixth light, now extinguished.