Shadowland by Peter Straub Read Free Book Online Page B

assurance than his behavior at the school had indicated that he had in him, and now he paused outside a door and turned around. This time Tom had no trouble reading the expression on his face. He was glowing with anticipation. 'If I was really corny, I'd say something like, 'Welcome to my universe.' Come on in.'
     
         Tom Flanagan walked rather nervously into what at first appeared to be a totally black room. A dim light went on behind him. 'I guess you can see what I mean,' came Del's high-pitched voice. He sounded a shade less confident.
     
       
     
       
     
      7
     
       
     
      Ridpath at Home
     
          
     
      Chester Ridpath parked his black Studebaker in his driveway and reached across the seat to lift his briefcase. Like the upholstery of his car, it had been several times repaired with black masking tape, and graying old ends of the tape played out beneath the gummy top layers. The handle adhered to his fingers. He wrestled the heavy satchel onto his lap-it was crammed with mimeographed football plays, starting lineups which went back nearly to the year when he had purchased the car, textbooks, lesson plans, and memos from the headmaster. Laker Broome spoke chiefly through memos. He liked to rule from a distance, even at faculty meetings, where he sat at a separate table from the staff: most of his administrative and disciplinary decisions were filtered down through Billy Thorpe, who had been assistant head as well as Latin master under three different headmasters. Sometimes Chester Ridpath imagined that Billy Thorpe was the only man in the. world who he really respected. Billy could not ever conceivably have had a son like Steve.
     
         He exhaled, wiped sweat from his forehead back into his hair, temporarily flattening half a dozen fussy curls, and left the car. The sun burned through his clothes. The briefcase seemed to be filled with stones.
     
         Ridpath found his bundle of keys in his deep pocket, shook them until his house key surfaced, and let himself into his house. Raucous music-music for beasts-battered the air. He supposed many parents came home to this din, but was it so loud in other houses? Steve had carried his phonograph home from the store, twisted the volume control all the way to the right, and left it there. Once in his room, he walled himself up inside this savagery. Ridpath could not communicate through a barrier so repellent to him; he suspected, in fact he knew, that Steve was uninterested in anything he might wish to communicate anyhow.
     
         'Home,' he shouted, and banged the door shut — if Steve couldn't hear the shout, at least he would feel the vibration.
     
         The house had been in disarray so long that Ridpath no longer noticed the pile of soiled shirts and sweaters on the stairs, the dark smudges of grease on the carpet. He and Margaret had bought the living-room carpet, a florid Wilton, on a layaway plan just after they had mortgaged his salary for twenty years to buy the house. During the fifteen years since his wife had left him, Ridpath had taken an unconscious pleasure in the gradual darkening and wearing away of the nap. There were places — before his chair, in front of the slat-backed couch — where the awful flower-spray pattern was nearly invisible.
     
         Overlaying the piles of dirty clothing were the magazine clippings and pages of comic books which Steve used to make his 'things.' They had no other name. Steve's 'things' were varnished to his bedroom walls. Korea had supplied a surplus of the images Steve preferred in his 'things,' and by now the room was a palimpsest of screaming infants, wrecked jeeps, bloated dead in kapok jackets. Tanks rolled over muddy hills toward classrooms of dutiful Russian children (courtesy of Life). Mossy monsters from horror comics embraced starlets with death's-heads. Ridpath never entered his son's room anymore.
     
         He dropped the briefcase beside his chair and sat