"Shadowland" - читать интересную книгу автора (Straub Peter)

published and without a similar condition
including this condition being imposed
on the subsequent purchaser

For Benjamin Bitker Straub

Little Red Riding Hood was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss.

- Charles Dickens

The key to the treasure is the treasure.

- John Barth

CONTENTS



NOTE: Tom in the Zanibar

PART ONE: The School
He Dreams Awake
The Magic Show

PART TWO: Shadowland
The Birds Have Come Home
The Erl King
The Goose Girl

PART THREE: "When We All Lived in the Forest . . ."
The Welcome
Flight
Two Betrayals
Shadow Play

The End of the Century Is in Sight

The two schools, old and new, are inventions of the author and should not be confused with any existing schools. Similarly, Shadowland, its location and inhabitants, are entirely fictional.

I owe many thanks to Hiram Strait and Barry Price for their advice and comments about magic and magicians, and to Corrie Crandall for introducing me to them and to the Magic Castle.

NOTE

Tom in the Zanzibar




More than twenty years ago, an underrated Arizona schoolboy named Tom Flanagan was asked by another boy to spend the Christmas vacation with him at the house of his uncle. Tom Flanagan's father was dying of cancer, though no one at the school knew of this, and the uncle's house was far away, such a distance that return would have been difficult. Tom refused. At the end of the year his friend repeated the invitation, and this time Tom Flanagan accepted. His father had been dead three months; following that, there had been a tragedy at the school; and just now moving from the well of his grief, Tom felt restless, bored, unhappy: ready for newness and surprise. He had one other reason for accepting, and though it seemed foolish, it was urgent - he thought he had to protect his friend. That seemed the most important task in his life.
When I first began to hear this story, Tom Flanagan was working in a nightclub on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, and he was still underrated. The Zanzibar was a shabby place suited to the flotsam of show business: it had the atmosphere of a forcing-ground for failure. It was terrible to see Tom Flanagan here, but the surroundings did not even begin to reach him. Either that, or he had been marked by rooms like the Zanzibar so long ago and so often that by now he scarcely noticed their shabbiness. In any case, Tom was working there only two weeks. He was just pausing between moves, as he had been doing ever since our days at school - pausing and then moving on, pausing and moving again.