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

'Imagine a bird,' the magician said. 'Just now - flapping up, frightened, indeed tormented by fear, up out of this hat.'
He twitched the white scarf away from the tall silk hat, and a dove the shade of the scarf beat its wings on the brim and awkwardly fell to the table - a terrified, panicked bird, unable to fly, making a loud clatter of wings on the polished table.
'Pretty bird,' said the magician, and smiled at the two boys: 'Now imagine a cat.'
He whisked his scarf once again over the hat, and a white cat slipped over the brim. It came up out of the hat like a snake, flattening itself down onto the table, looking at nothing but the dove. With a slow predatory crawl, the cat went toward the dove.
The magician, who was dressed as a sinister clown in white-face and red wig above black tails, grinned at the boys and abruptly sprang over and backward, landing on his gloved hands. He held himself rigidly still for a second and then folded his legs down and his trunk up in what looked like one flawless motion. Now he was standing where he had been, and he dropped the white scarf over the elongated form of the cat.
When the magician passed his hand into the scarf, it fluttered down onto the flat surface of the table. Three inches away, the dove still worked its wings and made its terrible clattering noise of panic.
'And that's it, isn't it?' the magician said. 'Cat and bird. Bird and cat.' He was still grinning. 'And since our little friend is still so frightened, perhaps we'd better make her disappear too.' He snapped his fingers, twitched the scarf, and the bird was gone.
'Cats remind me of a true story,' he said to the mesmerized boys, speaking as if he were merely yarning, as if nothing but entertainment was on his mind. 'It's an old story, but the truest stories are very often the oldest ones. This was told by Sir Walter Scott to Washington Irving, and by Monk Lewis to the poet Shelley - and to me by a friend of mine who actually saw it happen.
'A traveler, in other words my friend, was journeying on foot to the house of a companion - not me - where he was going to spend the night. He had been walking all day, and even though it was already late and night was coming on, he was tired enough to rest his feet when he came to a ruined abbey. He sat down, took off his boots, leaned against an iron fence, and began to rub his feet. An odd series of noises made him turn around and peer through the bars of the fence.
'Down below him, on the grassy floor of the old abbey, he saw a procession of cats. They were formed into two long equal lines, and were marching forward very slowly. Now, of course he had never seen anything like that before, and he bent forward to look more closely. It was then that he saw that the cats at the head of the procession were carrying a little coffin on their backs, and were making for, were slowly approaching, a small open grave. When my friend had seen the grave, he looked horrified back at the coffin borne by the lead cats, and noticed that on it sat a crown. As he watched, the lead cats began to lower the coffin into the grave.
'After that he was so frightened that he could not stay in that place a moment longer, and he thrust his feet into his boots and rushed on to the house of his friend. During dinner, he found that he could not keep from telling his friend what he had witnessed.
'He had scarcely finished when his friend's cat, which had been dozing in front of the fire, leaped up and cried, 'Then I am the King of the Cats!' and disappeared in a flash up the chimney. It happened, my friends - yes, it happened, my charming little birds.'

The true beginning of this story is not 'More than twenty years ago, an underrated,' etc., but, Once upon a time . . . or, Long ago, when we all lived in the forest. . .

PART ONE

The School


Arise and sing the praises
Of the school upon the hill

School song

ONE

He Dreams Awake


The last day of summer vacation: high cloudless skies, dry intense heat; endings and beginnings, deaths and promises, hover regretfully in the air. Perhaps the regret is only the boy's - that boy who is lying on his stomach in the grass. He is staring at a dandelion, wondering if he should pull it up. But if he pulls that one up, shouldn't he also pull up the one growing three feet away, whose leonine head is lolling and babbling on a stalk too thin for it? Dandelions make your hands stink. On the last day of summer vacation, does he care if his hands smell like dandelions? He tugs at the big tough-looking dandelion nearest him; at least some of the roots pull up out of the ground. He thinks he hears the dandelion sigh, letting go of life, and tosses it aside. Then he slides over to the second weed. It is too vulnerable, with its huge head and thin neck: he lets it be. He rolls over and looks up into the sky.
Good-bye, good-bye, he says to himself. Good-bye, freedom. Yet a part of him looks forward to making the change to high school, to really beginning the process of growing up: he imagines that the biggest changes of his life are about to happen. For a moment, like all children on the point of change, he wishes he could foresee the future, somehow live through it in advance - test the water there.
A solitary bird wheels overhead, so high up it breathes a different air.
Then he must have fallen asleep: later, he thinks that what happened after he saw the bird must have been a dream.
It begins with the air changing color - becoming hazy, almost silvery. A cloud? But there are no clouds. He rolls over onto his stomach and idly looks sideways, where he can see over four backyards. The swing set in the Trumbulls' yard is so rusty it should not stand another year - the Trumbull children are older than he, but Mr. Trumbull is too lazy to dismantle the swings. Farther on, Cissy Harbinger is climbing out of her pool, stepping toward a lounge chair in such a way that you know the tiles are burning her feet. She gets to the chair and stretches out, trying to deepen her already walnut tan. Then there are two wider backyards, one with a plastic wading pool. Here, Collis Folk, the gardener the boy's parents have just let go, is riding a giant black lawn mower around the side of a white house. No dandelions there: Collis Folk is a ruthless executioner of dandelions.
Way down there, past the houses and the yards, a man is walking up Mesa Lane. In this old suburb, pedestrians are not as uncommon as they are in a lavish new development like Quantum Hills, but still they are rare enough to be interesting.
The boy still does not know that he is dreaming. The walking man pauses on Mesa Lane - probably he is a customer of Collis Folk's, and is waiting for the gardener to swing back toward him so that he can say hello. But no, it seems he is not waiting for the gardener: he is tilting his head back and looking at the boy. Or looking for him, the boy thinks. The man puts his hands on his hips. He must be three hundred yards away: he shimmers a little in the heat from the pavement. The boy has a sudden overwhelming conviction that the little figure is trying to find him . . . and the boy does not want to be seen. He flattens out in the grass. Unexpected fear sparkles in the boy's chest.
This is an interesting dream, he thinks. Why am I afraid of him?
The air becomes darker, more silvery. The man, who may or may have not seen him, walks on. Collis Folk chugs into sight, appearing to be intent on mowing down the wading pool. Now the boy is blocked from the man's sight, and he can move.
I'm really scared, he thinks: why? The entire neighborhood has turned unpleasant, somehow tainted and threatening. Though he cannot see the little figure way down there on Mesa Lane, the man is somehow broadcasting chill and badness. . . .
(His face is made of ice.)
No, that's not it, but the boy scrambles to his feet, starts to run, and then fully realizes he is in a dream, for he sees a building at the end of his backyard which he knows is not there; nor are the thick trees which surround it. The house is only about twenty feet high and has a thatched roof. Two small windows flank a little brown door. This fairy-tale structure is inviting, not threatening - he knows he is supposed to enter it. It will save him from whatever is pacing up and down on Mesa Lane.
And he knows it is a wizard's house.
When he goes through the trees and opens the door, all of his neighborhood seems to sigh: the rusty swings and the wading pool, Cissy Harbinger and Collis Folk, each brown and green blade of grass, send up a wave of disappointment and regret; and this real regret is from down there, from the man, who knows the boy is blocked from him.
'So here you are,' the wizard says. An old man with an extravagantly wrinkled face mostly concealed behind a foaming beard, dressed in threadbare robes, the wizard is leaning back in a chair, smiling at him. He is the oldest wizard in the world, the boy knows; and then knows that he himself is in the midst of a fairy tale, one never written. 'You are safe here,' the wizard says. 'I know.'
'I want you to remember that. It's not all like that. . . being out there.'
'This is a dream, isn't it?' the boy asks. 'Everything is a dream,' says the wizard. 'This world of yours - a flag in the breeze, a plaything full of meanings. Take my word for it. Meanings. But you're a good boy, you'll find out.' A pipe appeared in his hand, and he drew on it and breathed out thick gray smoke. 'Oh, yes. You'll find what you have to find. It'll be all right. You'll have to fight for your life, of course, you'll have tests to pass - tests you can't study for, hee hee - and there'll be a girl and a wolf, and all that, but you're no idiot.' 'Like Little Red Riding Hood? A girl and a wolf?' 'Oh, like all of them,' the wizard said vaguely. 'Tell me, how is your father doing?' 'He's okay. I guess.'
The wizard nodded, blew out another cloud of smoke. He appeared very feeble to the boy; an old old wizard, at the end of his powers, so tired he could barely lift his pipe. 'Oh, I could show you things,' the wizard said. 'But there's no use in it. I just wanted you to know . . . Guess I've said it all. This is a deep, deep wood. Wish I weren't so blamed old.'
He seemed to fall asleep for a moment. The pipe drooped in his mouth and his hands trembled in his lap. Then his watery eyes opened. 'No brothers or sisters, correct?'