A Graveyard for Lunatics

A Graveyard for Lunatics Ray Douglas Bradbury One of Ray Bradbury’s classic novels, available in ebook for the first time.Halloween Night, 1954. A young, film-obsessed scriptwriter has just been hired at one of the great studios. An anonymous investigation leads from the giant Maximus Films backlot to an eerie graveyard separated from the studio by a single wall. There he makes a terrifying discovery that thrusts him into a maelstrom of intrigue and mystery – and into the dizzy exhilaration of the movie industry at the height of its glittering power. A GRAVEYARD FOR LUNATICS Another Tale of Two Cities RAY BRADBURY Copyright (#ulink_f5842bb3-4ba4-5554-9210-5eef4455f6e4) HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London, W6 8JB www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) Copyright © Ray Bradbury 1990 Cover design by Mike Topping. Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014 Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com First Perennial edition published 2001. Ray Bradbury asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books. HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication. Ebook Edition © APRIL 2013 ISBN: 9780007541768 Version: 2014–07–21 Dedication (#ulink_2f869ed7-e468-5af3-8c7c-79c3bad0790a) With love, to the living: SID STEBEL, who showed me how to solve my own mystery; ALEXANDRA, my daughter, who cleaned up after us. And to the dead: FEDERICO FELLINI, ROUBEN MAMOULIAN, GEORGE CUKOR, JOHN HUSTON, BILL SKALL, FRITZ LANG, JAMES WONG HOWE, and GEORGE BURNS, who told me that I was a writer when I was fourteen. And to RAY HARRYHAUSEN, for obvious reasons. Contents Cover (#u9934a037-6701-590e-b1ff-e6f47644ea35) Title Page (#u8435cb65-0a5b-5dc7-b58c-c9efc89f2a81) Copyright Dedication Chapter 1 (#ulink_06364173-2bce-547c-9fa4-4126873e4d0d) Chapter 2 (#ulink_d80c4237-1f32-524c-b66b-945b6f655898) Chapter 3 (#ulink_f46aa9ed-de7a-52fb-b3bf-4a96cdb5e2cb) Chapter 4 (#ulink_1220e908-ab95-5ebf-a12b-b2663ed94c87) Chapter 5 (#ulink_019e68f2-3fc0-5043-b329-74b5967fa512) Chapter 6 (#ulink_12a63c12-c167-53db-9356-0ed037af72ef) Chapter 7 (#ulink_8b089f95-8a78-5bf5-98fa-994a91cfed45) Chapter 8 (#ulink_713f4d33-b92c-5e8d-b74d-e4ff065e86eb) Chapter 9 (#ulink_b1d52e91-1aa6-5751-a8f4-d2206fb445ee) Chapter 10 (#ulink_cab8e6ad-5397-5fb5-9a33-2d193c4eb25b) Chapter 11 (#ulink_fcfbb230-401e-5b7e-860d-89a2a97da60b) Chapter 12 (#ulink_4dc209fc-09c1-504c-8b1c-e38c401c3306) Chapter 13 (#ulink_9beb1c9d-8dfc-5048-acf1-664bf2fb7794) Chapter 14 (#ulink_d4b93a88-94b3-5f1f-9236-3d22080a25cc) Chapter 15 (#ulink_f732e681-ff6e-573a-9d7b-7933e7d985f1) Chapter 16 (#ulink_a0db5cba-cced-5c5a-b15b-bfa81134f57a) Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 51 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 52 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 53 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 54 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 55 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 56 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 57 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 58 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 59 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 60 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 61 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 62 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 63 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 64 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 65 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 66 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 67 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 68 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 69 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 70 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 71 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 72 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 73 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 74 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 75 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 76 (#litres_trial_promo) Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) 1 (#ulink_ee175859-04f2-529d-bd5b-0900e887de0c) Once upon a time there were two cities within a city. One was light and one was dark. One moved restlessly all day while the other never stirred. One was warm and filled with ever-changing lights. One was cold and fixed in place by stones. And when the sun went down each afternoon on Maximus Films, the city of the living, it began to resemble Green Glades cemetery just across the way, which was the city of the dead. As the lights went out and the motions stopped and the wind that blew around the corners of the studio buildings cooled, an incredible melancholy seemed to sweep from the front gate of the living all the way along through twilight avenues toward that high brick wall that separated the two cities within a city. And suddenly the streets were filled with something one could speak of only as remembrance. For while the people had gone away, they left behind them architectures that were haunted by the ghosts of incredible happenings. For indeed it was the most outrageous city in the world, where anything could happen and always did. Ten thousand deaths had happened here, and when the deaths were done, the people got up, laughing, and strolled away. Whole tenement blocks were set afire and did not burn. Sirens shrieked and police cars careened around corners, only to have the officers peel off their blues, cold-cream their orange pancake makeup, and walk home to small bungalow court apartments out in that great and mostly boring world. Dinosaurs prowled here, one moment in miniature, and the next looming fifty feet tall above half-clad virgins who screamed on key. From here various Crusades departed to peg their armor and stash their spears at Western Costume down the road. From here Henry the Eighth let drop some heads. From here Dracula wandered as flesh to return as dust. Here also were the Stations of the Cross and a trail of ever-replenished blood as screenwriters groaned by to Calvary carrying a backbreaking load of revisions, pursued by directors with scourges and film cutters with razor-sharp knives. It was from these towers that the Muslim faithful were called to worship each day at sunset as the limousines whispered out with faceless powers behind each window, and peasants averted their gaze, fearing to be struck blind. This being true, all the more reason to believe that when the sun vanished the old haunts rose up, so that the warm city cooled and began to resemble the marbled orchardways across the wall. By midnight, in that strange peace caused by temperature and wind and the voice of some far church clock, the two cities were at last one. And the night watchman was the only motion prowling along from India to France to prairie Kansas to brownstone New York to Piccadilly to the Spanish Steps, covering twenty thousand miles of territorial incredibility in twenty brief minutes. Even as his counterpart across the wall punched the time clocks around among the monuments, flashed his light on various Arctic angels, read names like credits on tombstones, and sat to have his midnight tea with all that was left of some Keystone Kop. At four in the morning, the watchmen asleep, the two cities, folded and kept, waited for the sun to rise over withered flowers, eroded tombs, and elephant India ripe for overpopulation should God the Director decree and Central Casting deliver. And so it was on All Hallows Eve, 1954. Halloween. My favorite night in all the year. If it hadn’t been, I would not have run off to start this new Tale of Two Cities. How could I resist when a cold chisel hammered out an invitation? How could I not kneel, take a deep breath, and blow away the marble dust? 2 (#ulink_07bb7a2b-6bcc-5276-a15e-91d303232fc8) The first to arrive … I had come into the studio at seven o’clock that Halloween morning. The last to leave … It was almost ten o’clock and I was making my final walkaround of the night, drinking in the simple but incredible fact that at last I worked in a place where everything was clearly defined. Here there were absolutely sharp beginnings, and ends that were neat and irreversible. Outside, beyond the stages, I did not much trust life with its dreadful surprises and ramshackle plots. Here, walking among the alleys just at dawn or twilight, I could imagine I opened the studio and shut it down. It belonged to me because I said it was so. So I paced out a territory that was half a mile wide and a mile deep, among fourteen sound stages and ten outdoor sets, a victim of my own romance and infatuated madness over films that controlled life when it ran out of control beyond the Spanish wrought-iron front gates. It was late, but a lot of films had fixed their schedules to end on All Hallows Eve, so that the wrap parties, the farewell binges, would coincide on various sets. From three sound stages, with their gigantic sliding doors thrown wide, came big-band music, laughter, explosions of champagne corks, and singing. Inside, mobs in film costumes greeted mobs from outside in Halloween garb. I entered nowhere, content to smile or laugh as I passed. After all, since I imagined the studio was mine, I could linger or leave as I wished. But even as I moved into the shadows again, I sensed a certain tremor in myself. My love of films had gone on too many years. It was like having an affair with Kong, who fell on me when I was thirteen; I had never escaped from beneath his heart-beating carcass. The studio fell on me the same way every morning when I arrived. It took hours to fight free of its spell, breathe normally, and get my work down. At twilight, the enchantment returned; my breathing suffered. I knew that someday soon I would have to get out, run free, go and never come back, or like Kong, always falling and always landing, it would one day kill me. I passed a final stage where a last burst of hilarity and percussive jazz shook the walls. One of the assistant camera operators biked by, his basket loaded with film on its way to an autopsy under the razor of a film editor who might save or bury it forever. Then into the theatres or banished to the shelves where dead films go, where only dust, not rot, collecteth them. A church clock, up in the Hollywood hills, struck ten. I turned and strolled back to my cell block in the writers’ building. The invitation to be a damned fool was waiting for me in my office. Not chiseled out on a marble slab, no, but neatly typed on high-quality note paper. Reading it, I sank down in my office chair, my face cold, my hand tempted to clench and wad the note and throw it aside. It said: GREEN GLADES PARK. Halloween. Midnight tonight. Center rear wall. P.S. A great revelation awaits you. Material for a best-selling novel or superb screenplay. Don’t miss it! Now, I am not a brave man. I have never learned to drive. I do not fly in planes. I feared women until I was twenty-five. I hate high places; the Empire State is pure terror for me. Elevators make me nervous. Escalators bite. I am picky with food. I ate my first steak only at age twenty-four, subsisting through childhood on hamburgers, ham-and-pickle sandwiches, eggs, and tomato soup. “Green Glades Park!” I said aloud. Jesus, I thought. Midnight? Me, the guy who was mobbed by bullies down the middle of adolescence? The boy who hid under his brother’s armpit the first time he saw The Phantom of the Opera? That one, yes. “Dumb!” I yelled. And went to the graveyard. At midnight. 3 (#ulink_337d683b-5cc9-52a8-a61d-96e8083a63fb) On the way out of the studio I veered toward the Men’s, not far from the Main Gate, then veered away. It was a place I had learned to stay away from, a subterranean grotto place, with the sound of secret waters running, and a scuttling sound like crayfish backing swiftly off if you touched and started to open the door. I had learned long ago to hesitate, clear my throat, and open the door slowly. For then various interior doors of the Men’s shut with thuds or very quietly or sometimes with a rifle bang, as the creatures that inhabited the grotto all day, and even now late because of the stage-set parties, panicked off in retreat, and you entered to the silence of cool porcelain and underground streams, tended to your plumbing as soon as possible and ran without washing your hands, only to hear, once outside, the sly slow reawakening of the crayfish, the doors whispering wide, and the emergence of the grotto creatures in various stages of fever and disarray. I veered off, as I said, yelled to see if it was clear, and ducked into the Women’s across the way, which was a cold, clean white ceramic place, no dark grotto, no scuttling critters, and was in and out of there in a jiffy, just in time to see a regiment of Prussian guards march by toward a Stage 10 party and their captain break ranks. A handsome man with Nordic hair and great innocent eyes, he strode unknowingly into the Men’s. He’ll never be seen again, I thought, and hurried through the almost midnight streets. My taxi, which I couldn’t afford, but I was damned if I’d go near the graveyard alone, pulled up in front of the cemetery gates at three minutes before the hour. I spent a long two minutes counting all those crypts and monuments where Green Glades Park employed some nine thousand dead folks, full time. They have been putting in their hours there for fifty years. Ever since the real-estate builders, Sam Green and Ralph Glade, were forced into bankruptcy and leveled their shingles and planted the tombstones. Sensing there was a great piece of luck in their names, the defaulted bungalow court builders became simply Green Glades Park, where all the skeletons in the studio closets across the way were buried. Film folks involved with their shady real-estate scam were believed to have put up so the two gentlemen would shut up. A lot of gossip, rumor, guilt, and ramshackle crime was buried with their first interment. And now as I sat clenching my knees and gritting my teeth, I stared at the far wall beyond which I could count six safe, warm, beautiful sound stages where the last All Hallows revelries were ending, the last wrap parties wrapping up, the musics still and the right people drifting home with the wrong. Seeing the cars’ light beams shifting on the great sound-stage walls, imagining all the so-longs and goodnights, I suddenly wanted to be with them, wrong or right, going nowhere, but nowhere was better than this. Inside, a graveyard clock struck midnight. “Well?” someone said. I felt my eyes jerk away from the far studio wall and fix to my driver’s haircut. He stared in through the iron grille and sucked the flavor off his Chiclet-sized teeth. The gate rattled in the wind, as the echoes of the great clock died. “Who,” said the driver, “is going to open the gate?” “Me!?” I said, aghast. “You got it,” said the driver. After a long minute, I forced myself to grapple with the gates and was surprised to find them unlocked, and swung them wide. I led the taxi in, like an old man leading a very tired and very frightened horse. The taxi kept mumbling under its breath, which didn’t help, along with the driver whispering, “Damn, damn. If anything starts running toward us, don’t expect me to stay.” “No, don’t expect me to stay,” I said. “Come on!” There were a lot of white shapes on each side of the graveled path. I heard a ghost sigh somewhere, but it was only my own lungs pumping like a bellows, trying to light some sort of fire in my chest. A few drops of rain fell on my head. “God,” I whispered. “And no umbrella.” What, I thought, in hell am I doing here? Every time I had seen old horror movies, I had laughed at the guy who goes out late at night when he should stay in. Or the woman who does the same, blinking her big innocent eyes and wearing stiletto heels with which to trip over, running. Yet here I was, all because of a truly stupid promissory note. “Okay,” called the cab driver. “This is as far as I go!” “Coward!” I cried. “Yeah!” he said. “I’ll wait right here!” I was halfway to the back wall now and the rain fell in thin sheets that washed my face and dampened the curses in my throat. There was enough light from the taxi’s headlights to see a ladder propped up against the rear wall of the cemetery, leading over into the backlot of Maximus Films. At the bottom of the ladder I stared up through the cold drizzle. At the top of the ladder, a man appeared to be climbing to go over the wall. But he was frozen there as if a bolt of lightning had taken his picture and fixed him forever in blind-white-blue emulsion: His head was thrust forward like that of a track star in full flight, and his body bent as if he might hurl himself across and down into Maximus Films. Yet, like a grotesque statue, he remained frozen. I started to call up when I realized why his silence, why his lack of motion. The man up there was dying or dead. He had come here, pursued by darkness, climbed the ladder, and frozen at the sight of—what? Had something behind stunned him with fright? Or was there something beyond, in studio darkness, far worse? Rain showered the white tombstones. I gave the ladder a gentle shake. “My God!” I yelled. For the old man, on top of the ladder, toppled. I fell out of the way. He landed like a ten-ton lead meteor, between gravestones. I got to my feet and stood over him, not able to hear for the thunder in my chest, and the rain whispering on the stones and drenching him. I stared down into the dead man’s face. He stared back at me with oyster eyes. Why are you looking at me? he asked, silently. Because, I thought, I know you! His face was a white stone. James Charles Arbuthnot, former head of Maximus Films, I thought. Yes, he whispered. But, but, I cried silently, the last time I saw you, I was thirteen years old on my roller skates in front of Maximus Films, the week you were killed, twenty years ago, and for days there were dozens of photos of two cars slammed against a telephone pole, the terrible wreckage, the bloody pavement, the crumpled bodies, and for another two days hundreds of photos of the thousand mourners at your funeral and the million flowers and, weeping real tears, the New York studio heads, and the wet eyes behind two hundred sets of dark glasses as the actors came out, with no smiles. You were really missed. And some final pictures of the wrecked cars on Santa Monica Boulevard, and it took weeks for the newspapers to forget, and for the radios to stop their praise and forgive the king for being forever dead. All that, James Charles Arbuthnot, was you. Can’t be! Impossible, I almost yelled. You’re here tonight up on the wall? Who put you there? You can’t be killed all over again, can you? Lightning struck. Thunder fell like the slam of a great door. Rain showered the dead man’s face to make tears in his eyes. Water filled his gaping mouth. I spun, yelled, and fled. When I reached the taxi I knew I had left my heart back with the body. It ran after me now. It struck me like a rifle shot midriff, and knocked me against the cab. The driver stared at the gravel drive beyond me, pounded by rain. “Anyone there?!” I yelled. “No!” “Thank God. Get out of here!” The engine died. We both moaned with despair. The engine started again, obedient to fright. It is not easy to back up at sixty miles an hour. We did. 4 (#ulink_1e69cb85-3504-57fc-92c3-a1300d06da53) I sat up half the night looking around at my ordinary living room with ordinary furniture in a small safe bungalow house on a normal street in a quiet part of the city. I drank three cups of hot cocoa but stayed cold as I threw images on the walls, shivering. People can’t die twice! I thought. That couldn’t have been James Charles Arbuthnot on that ladder, clawing the night wind. Bodies decay. Bodies vanish. I remembered a day in 1934 when J. C. Arbuthnot had got out of his limousine in front of the studio as I skated up, tripped, and fell into his arms. Laughing, he had balanced me, signed my book, pinched my cheek, and gone inside. And, now, Sweet Jesus, that man, long lost in time, high in a cold rain, had fallen in the graveyard grass. I heard voices and saw headlines: J. C. ARBUTHNOT DEAD BUT RESURRECTED. “No!” I said to the white ceiling where the rain whispered, and the man fell. “It wasn’t him. It’s a lie!” Wait until dawn, a voice said. 5 (#ulink_8e13074d-3362-5fea-8d13-0cbe7585b42a) Dawn was no help. The radio and TV news found no dead bodies. The newspaper was full of car crashes and dope raids. But no J. C. Arbuthnot. I wandered out of my house, back to my garage, full of toys, old science and invention magazines, no automobile, and my secondhand bike. I biked halfway to the studio before I realized I could not recall any intersection I had blindly sailed through. Stunned, I fell off the bike, trembling. A fiery red open-top roadster burned rubber and stopped parallel to me. The man at the wheel, wearing a cap put backward, gunned the throttle. He stared through the windshield, one eye bright blue and uncovered, the other masked by a monocle that had been hammered in place and gave off bursts of sun fire. “Hello, you stupid goddamn son of a bitch,” he cried, with a voice that lingered over German vowels. My bike almost fell from my grip. I had seen that profile stamped on some old coins when I was twelve. The man was either a resurrected Caesar or the German high pontiff of the Holy Roman Empire. My heart banged all of the air out of my lungs. “What?” shouted the driver. “Speak up!” “Hello,” I heard myself say, “you stupid goddamn son of a bitch you. You’re Fritz Wong, aren’t you? Born in Shanghai of a Chinese father and an Austrian mother, raised in Hong Kong, Bombay, London, and a dozen towns in Germany. Errand boy, then cutter then writer then cinematographer at UFA then director across the world. Fritz Wong, the magnificent director who made the great silent film The Cavalcanti Incantation. The guy who ruled Hollywood films from 1925 to 1927 and got thrown out for a scene in a film where you directed yourself as a Prussian general inhaling Gerta Froelich’s underwear. The international director who ran back to and then got out of Berlin ahead of Hitler, the director of Mad Love, Delirium, To the Moon and Back—” With each pronouncement, his head had turned a quarter of an inch, at the same time as his mouth had creased into a Punch-and-Judy smile. His monocle flashed a Morse code. Behind the monocle was the faintest lurking of an Orient eye. I imagined the left eye was Peking, the right Berlin, but no. It was the monocle’s magnification that focused the Orient. His brow and cheeks were a fortress of Teutonic arrogance, built to last two thousand years or until his contract was canceled. “What did you call me?” he asked, with immense politeness. “What you called me,” I said, faintly. “A stupid,” I whispered, “goddamn son of a bitch.” He nodded. He smiled. He banged the car door wide. “Get in!” “But you don’t—” “—know you? Do you think I run around giving lifts to just any dumb-ass bike rider? You think I haven’t seen you ducking around corners at the studio, pretending to be the White Rabbit at the commissary. You’re that”—he snapped his fingers—“bastard son of Edgar Rice Burroughs and The Warlord of Mars—the illegitimate offspring of H. G. Wells, out of Jules Verne. Stow your bike. We’re late!” I tossed my bike in the back and was in the car only in time as it revved up to fifty. “Who can say?” shouted Fritz Wong, above the exhaust. “We are both insane, working where we work. But you are lucky, you still love it.” “Don’t you?” I asked. “Christ help me,” he muttered. “Yes!” I could not take my eyes off Fritz Wong as he leaned over the steering wheel to let the wind plow his face. “You are the stupidest goddamn thing I ever saw!” he cried. “You want to get yourself killed? What’s wrong, you never learned to drive a car? What kind of bike is that? Is this your first screen job? How come you write that crap? Why not read Thomas Mann, Goethe!” “Thomas Mann and Goethe,” I said, quietly, “couldn’t write a screenplay worth a damn. Death in Venice, sure. Faust? you betcha. But a good screenplay? or a short story like one of mine, landing on the Moon and making you believe it? Hell, no. How come you drive with that monocle?” “None of your damn business! It’s better to be blind. If you look too closely at the driver ahead, you want to ram his ass! Let me see your face. You approve of me?” “I think you’re funny!” “Jesus! You are supposed to take everything that Wong the magnificent says as gospel. How come you don’t drive?” We were both yelling against the wind that battered our eyes and mouths. “Writers can’t afford cars! And I saw five people killed, torn apart, when I was fifteen. A car hit a telephone pole.” Fritz glanced over at my pale look of remembrance. “It was like a war, yes? You’re not so dumb. I hear you’ve been given a new project with Roy Holdstrom? Special effects? Brilliant. I hate to admit.” “We’ve been friends since high school. I used to watch him build his miniature dinosaurs in his garage. We promised to grow old and make monsters together.” “No,” shouted Fritz Wong against the wind, “you are working for monsters. Manny Leiber? The Gila monster’s dream of a spider. Watch out! There’s the menagerie!” He nodded at the autograph collectors on the sidewalk across the street from the studio gates. I glanced over. Instantly, my soul flashed out of my body and ran back. It was 1934 and I was mulched in among the ravening crowd, waving pads and pens, rushing about at premi?re nights under the klieg lights or pursuing Marlene Dietrich into her hairdresser’s or running after Cary Grant at the Friday-night Legion Stadium boxing matches, waiting outside restaurants for Jean Harlow to have one more three-hour lunch or Claudette Colbert to come laughing out at midnight. My eyes touched over the crazy mob there and I saw once again the bulldog, Pekingese, pale, myopic faces of nameless friends lost in the past, waiting outside the great Spanish Prado Museum facade of Maximus where the thirty-foot-high intricately scrolled iron gates opened and clanged shut on the impossibly famous. I saw myself lost in that nest of gape-mouthed hungry birds waiting to be fed on brief encounters, flash photographs, ink-signed pads. And as the sun vanished and the moon rose in memory, I saw myself roller-skating nine miles home on the empty sidewalks, dreaming I would someday be the world’s greatest author or a hack writer at Fly by Night Pictures. “The menagerie?” I murmured. “Is that what you call them?” “And here,” said Fritz Wong, “is their zoo!” And we jounced in the studio entrance down alleys full of arriving people, extras and executives. Fritz Wong rammed his car into a NO PARKING zone. I got out and said, “What’s the difference between a menagerie and a zoo?” “In here, the zoo, we are kept behind bars by money. Out there, those menagerie goofs are locked in silly dreams.” “I was one of them once, and dreamed of coming over the studio wall.” “Stupid. Now you’ll never escape.” “Yes, I will. I’ve finished another book of stories, and a play. My name will be remembered!” Fritz’s monocle glinted. “You shouldn’t tell this to me. I might lose my contempt.” “If I know Fritz Wong, it’ll be back in about thirty seconds.” Fritz watched as I lifted my bike from the car. “You are almost German, I think.” I climbed on my bike. “I’m insulted.” “Do you speak to all people this way?” “No, only to Frederick the Great, whose manners I deplore but whose films I love.” Fritz Wong unscrewed the monocle from his eye and dropped it in his shirt pocket. It was as if he had let a coin fall to start some inner machine. “I’ve been watching you for some days,” he intoned. “In fits of insanity, I read your stories. You are not lacking talent, which I could polish. I am working, God help me, on a hopeless film about Christ, Herod Antipas, and all those knucklehead saints. The film started nine million dollars back with a dipso director who couldn’t handle kindergarten traffic. I have been elected to bury the corpse. What kind of Christian are you?” “Fallen away.” “Good! Don’t be surprised if I get you fired from your dumb dinosaur epic. If you could help me embalm this Christ horror film, it’s a step up for you. The Lazarus principle! If you work on a dead turkey and pry it out of the film vaults, you earn points. Let me watch and read you a few more days. Appear at the commissary at one sharp today. Eat what I eat, speak when spoken to, yes? you talented little bastard.” “Yes, Unterseeboot Kapit?n, you big bastard, sir.” As I biked off, he gave me a shove. But it was not a shove to hurt, only the quietest old philosopher’s push, to help me go. I did not look back. I feared to see him looking back. 6 (#ulink_709c666b-51dc-54f4-a0e3-f4405f2da10c) “Good God!” I said. “He made me forget!” Last night. The cold rain. The high wall. The body. I parked my bike outside Stage 13. A studio policeman, passing, said, “You got a permit to park there? That’s Sam Shoenbroder’s slot. Call the front office.” “Permit!” I yelled. “Holy Jumping Jesus! For a bike?” I slammed the bike through the big double airlock door into darkness. “Roy?!” I shouted. Silence. I looked around in the fine darkness at Roy Holdstrom’s toy junkyard. I had one just like it, smaller, in my garage. Strewn across Stage 13 were toys from Roy’s third year, books from his fifth, magic sets from when he was eight, electrical experiment chemistry sets from when he was nine and ten, comic collections from Sunday cartoon strips when he was eleven, and duplicate models of Kong when he turned thirteen in 1933 and saw the great ape fifty times in two weeks. My paws itched. Here were dime-store magnetos, gyroscopes, tin trains, magic sets that caused kids to grind their teeth and dream of shoplifting. My own face lay there, a life mask cast when Roy Vaselined my face and smothered me with plaster of paris. And all about, a dozen castings of Roy’s own great hawk profile, plus skulls and full-dress skeletons tossed in corners or seated in lawn chairs; anything to make Roy feel at home in a stage so big you could have shoved the Titanic through the spaceport doors with room left over for Old Ironsides. Across one entire wall Roy had pasted billboard-sized ads and posters from The Lost World, Kong, and Son of Kong, as well as Dracula and Frankenstein. In orange crates at the center of this Woolworth dime-store garage sale were sculptures of Karloff and Lugosi. On his desk were three original ball-and-socket dinosaurs, given as gifts by the makers of The Lost World, the rubber flesh of the ancient beasts long melted to drop off the metal bones. Stage 13 was, then, a toy shop, a magic chest, a sorcerer’s trunk, a trick manufactory, and an aerial hangar of dreams at the center of which Roy stood each day, waving his long piano fingers at mythic beasts to stir them, whispering, in their ten-billion-year slumbers. It was into this junkyard, this trash heap of mechanical avarice, greed for toys, and love for great ravening monsters, guillotined heads, and unraveled tarbaby King Tut bodies, that I picked my way. Everywhere were vast low-lying tents of plastic covering creations that only in time would Roy reveal. I didn’t dare look. Out in the middle of it all a barebone skeleton held a note, frozen, on the air. It read: CARL DENHAM! That was the name of the producer of King Kong. THE CITIES OF THE WORLD, FRESHLY CREATED, LIE HERE UNDER TARPAULINS WAITING TO BE DISCOVERED. DO NOT TOUCH. COME FIND ME. THOMAS WOLFE WAS WRONG. YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN. TURN LEFT AT CARPENTERS’ SHEDS, SECOND OUTDOOR SET ON THE RIGHT. YOUR GRANDPARENTS ARE WAITING THERE! COME SEE! ROY. I looked around at the tarpaulins. The unveiling! Yes! I ran, thinking: What does he mean? My grandparents? Waiting? I slowed down. I began to breathe deeply of a fresh air that smelled of oaks and elms and maples. For Roy was right. You can go home again. A sign at the front of outdoor set number two read: FOREST PLAINS, but it was Green Town, where I was born and raised on bread that yeasted behind the potbellied stove all winter, and wine that fermented in the same place in late summer, and clinkers that fell in that same stove, like iron teeth, long before spring. I did not walk on the sidewalks, I walked the lawns, glad for a friend like Roy who knew my old dream and called me to see. I passed three white houses where my friends had lived in 1931, turned a corner, and stopped in shock. My dad’s old 1929 Buick was parked in the dust on the brick street, waiting to head west in 1933. It stood, rusting quietly, its headlights dented, its radiator cap flaked, its radiator honeycomb-papered over with trapped moths and blue and yellow butterfly wings, a mosaic caught from a flow of lost summers. I leaned in to stroke my hand, trembling, over the prickly nap of the back-seat cushions, where my brother and I had knocked elbows and yelled at each other as we traveled across Missouri and Kansas and Oklahoma and… It wasn’t my dad’s car. But it was. I let my eyes drift up to find the ninth greatest wonder of the world: My grandma and grandpa’s house, with its porch and its porch swing and geraniums in pink pots along the rail, and ferns like green sprinkler founts all around, and a vast lawn like the fur of a green cat, with clover and dandelions studding it in such profusion that you longed to tear off your shoes and run the whole damned tapestry barefoot. And— A high cupola window where I had slept to wake and look out over a green land and a green world. In the summer porch swing, sailing back and forth, gently, his long-fingered hands in his lap, was my dearest friend … Roy Holdstrom. He glided quietly, lost as I was lost in some midsummer a long time back. Roy saw me and lifted his long cranelike arms to gesture right and left, to the lawn, the trees, to himself, to me. “My God,” he called, “aren’t we—lucky?” 7 (#ulink_b037cd50-5e21-5e3b-8d60-52d23f0375fe) Roy Holdstrom had built dinosaurs in his garage since he was twelve. The dinosaurs chased his father around the yard, on 8-millimeter film, and ate him up. Later, when Roy was twenty, he moved his dinosaurs into small fly-by-night studios and began to make on-the-cheap lost-world films that made him famous. His dinosaurs so much filled his life that his friends worried and tried to find him a nice girl who would put up with his Beasts. They were still searching. I walked up the porch steps remembering one special night when Roy had taken me to a performance of Siegfried at the Shrine Auditorium. “Who’s singing?” I had asked. “To hell with singing!” cried Roy. “We go for the Dragon!” Well, the music was a triumph. But the Dragon? Kill the tenor. Douse the lights. Our seats were so far over that—oh God!—I could see only the Dragon Fafner’s left nostril! Roy saw nothing but the great flame-thrown smokes that jetted from the unseen beast’s nose to scorch Siegfried. “Damn!” whispered Roy. And Fafner was dead, the magic sword deep in his heart. Siegfried yelled in triumph. Roy leaped to his feet, cursing the stage, and ran out. I found him in the lobby muttering to himself. “Some Fafner! Christ! My God! Did you see?!” As we stormed out into the night, Siegfried was still screaming about life, love, and butchery. “Poor bastards, that audience,” said Roy. “Trapped for two more hours with no Fafner!” And here he was now, swinging quietly in a glider swing on a front porch lost in time but brought back up through the years. “Hey!” he called, happily. “What’d I tell you? My grandparents’ house!” “No, mine!” “Both!” Roy laughed, truly happy, and held out a big fat copy of You Can’t Go Home Again. “He was wrong,” said Roy, quietly. “Yes,” I said, “here we are, by God!” I stopped. For just beyond this meadowland of sets, I saw the high graveyard/studio wall. The ghost of a body on a ladder was there, but I wasn’t ready to mention it yet. Instead, I said: “How you doing with your Beast? You found him yet?” “Heck, where’s your Beast?” That’s the way it had been for many days now. Roy and I had been called in to blueprint and build beasts, to make meteors fall from outer space and humanoid critters rise from dark lagoons, dripping clich?s of tar from dime-store teeth. They had hired Roy first, because he was technically advanced. His pterodactyls truly flew across the primordial skies. His brontosaurs were mountains on their way to Mahomet. And then someone had read twenty or thirty of my Weird Tales, stories I had been writing since I was twelve and selling to the pulp magazines since I was twenty-one, and hired me to “write up a drama” for Roy’s beasts, all of which hyperventilated me, for I had paid my way or snuck into some nine thousand movies and had been waiting half a lifetime for someone to fire a starter’s gun to run me amok in film. “I want something never seen before!” said Manny Leiber that first day. “In three dimensions we fire something down to Earth. A meteor drops—” “Out near Meteor Crater in Arizona—” I put in. “Been there a million years. What a place for a new meteor to strike and …” “Out comes our new horror,” cried Manny. “Do we actually see it?” I asked. “Whatta you mean? We got to see it!” “Sure, but look at a film like The Leopard Man! The scare comes from night shadows, things unseen. How about Isle of the Dead when the dead woman, a catatonic, wakes to find herself trapped in a tomb?” “Radio shows!!” cried Manny Leiber. “Dammit, people want to see what scares them—” “I don’t want to argue—” “Don’t!” Manny glared. “Give me ten pages to scare me gutless! You—” pointing at Roy—“whatever he writes you glue together with dinosaur droppings! Now, scram! Go make faces in the mirror at three in the morning!” “Sir!” we cried. The door slammed. Outside in the sunlight, Roy and I blinked at each other. “Another fine mess you got us in, Stanley!” Still yelling with laughter, we went to work. I wrote ten pages, leaving room for monsters. Roy slapped thirty pounds of wet clay on a table and danced around it, hitting and shaping, hoping for the monster to rise up like a bubble in a prehistoric pool to collapse in a hiss of sulfurous steam and let the true horror out. Roy read my pages. “Where’s your Beast?” he cried. I glanced at his hands, empty but covered with blood-red clay. “Where’s yours?” I said. And now here it was, three weeks later. “Hey,” said Roy, “how come you’re just standing down there looking at me? Come grab a doughnut, sit, speak.” I went up, took the doughnut he offered me, and sat in the porch swing, moving alternately forward into the future and back into the past. Forward—rockets and Mars. Backward—dinosaurs and tarpits. And faceless Beasts all around. “For someone who usually talks ninety miles a minute,” said Roy Holdstrom, “you are extraordinarily quiet.” “I’m scared,” I said, at last. “Well, heck.” Roy stopped our time machine. “Speak, oh mighty one.” I spoke. I built the wall and carried the ladder and lifted the body and brought on the cold rain and then struck with the lightning to make the body fall. When I finished and the rain had dried on my forehead, I handed Roy the typed All Hallows invitation. Roy scanned it, then threw it on the porch floor and put his foot on it. “Somebody’s got to be kidding!” “Sure. But … I had to go home and burn my underwear.” Roy picked it up and read it again, and then stared toward the graveyard wall. “Why would anyone send this?” “Yeah. Since most of the studio people don’t even know I’m here!” “But, hell, last night was Halloween. Still, what an elaborate joke, hoisting a body up a ladder. Wait, what if they told you to come at midnight, but other people, at eight, nine, ten, and eleven? Scare ’em one by one! That would make sense!” “Only if you had planned it!” Roy turned sharply. “You don’t really think—?” “No. Yes. No.” “Which is it?” “Remember that Halloween when we were nineteen and went to the Paramount Theatre to see Bob Hope in The Cat and the Canary and the girl in front of us screamed and I glanced around and there you sat, with a rubber ghoul mask on your face?” “Yeah.” Roy laughed. “Remember that time when you called and said old Ralph Courtney, our best friend, was dead and for me to come over, you had him laid out in your house, but it was all a joke, you planned to get Ralph to put white powder all over his face and lay himself out and pretend to be dead and rise up when I came in. Remember?” “Yep.” Roy laughed again. “But I met Ralph in the street and it spoiled your joke?” “Sure.” Roy shook his head at his own pranks. “Well, then. No wonder I think maybe you put the damn body up on the wall and sent me the letter.” “Only one thing wrong with that,” said Roy. “You’ve rarely mentioned Arbuthnot to me. If I made the body, how would I figure you’d recognize the poor s.o.b.? It would have to be someone who really knew that you had seen Arbuthnot years ago, right?” “Well …” “Doesn’t make sense, a body in the rain, if you don’t know what in hell you’re looking at. You’ve told me about a lot of other people you met when you were a kid, hanging around the studios. If I’d made a body, it would be Rudolph Valentino or Lon Chaney, to be sure you’d recognize ’em. Correct?” “Correct,” I said lamely. I studied Roy’s face and looked quickly away. “Sorry. But, hell, it was Arbuthnot. I saw him two dozen times over the years, back in the thirties. At previews. Out front at the studio, here. Him and his sports cars, a dozen different ones, and limousines, three of those. And women, a few dozen, always laughing, and when he signed autographs, slipping a quarter in the autograph book before he handed it back to you. A quarter! In 1934! A quarter bought you a malted milk, a candy bar, and a ticket to a movie.” “That’s the kind of guy he was, was he? No wonder you remember him. How much’d he give you?” “He gave me a buck twenty-five, one month. I was rich. And now he’s buried over that wall where I was last night, isn’t he? Why would someone try to scare me into thinking he’d been dug up and propped on a ladder? Why all the bother? The body landed like an iron safe. Take at least two men, maybe, to handle that. Why?” Roy took a bite out of another doughnut. “Yeah, why? Unless someone is using you to tell the world. You were going to tell someone else, yes?” “I might—” “Don’t. You look scared right now.” “But why should I be? Except I got this feeling it’s more than a joke, it has some other meaning.” Roy stared at the wall, chewing quietly. “Hell,” Roy said at last. “You been back over to the graveyard this morning to see if the body is still on the ground? Why not go see?” “No!” “It’s broad daylight. You chicken?” “No, but …” “Hey!” cried an indignant voice. “What you two saps doing up there!?” Roy and I looked down off the porch. Manny Leiber stood there in the middle of the lawn. His Rolls-Royce was pulled up, its motor running silent and deep, and not a tremble in the frame. “Well?” shouted Manny. “We’re having a conference!” Roy said easily. “We want to move in here!” “You what?” Manny eyed the old Victorian house. “Great place to work,” Roy said, quickly. “Office for us up front, the sunporch, put in a card table, typewriter.” “You got an office!” “Offices don’t inspire. This—” I nodded around, taking the ball from Roy—“inspires. You should move all the writers out of the Writers’ Building! Put Steve Longstreet over in that New Orleans mansion to write his Civil War film. And that French bakery just beyond? Great place for Marcel Dementhon to finish his revolution, yes? Down the way, Piccadilly, heck, put all those new English writers there!” Manny came slowly up on the porch, his face a confused red. He looked around at the studio, his Rolls, and then at the two of us, as if he had caught us naked and smoking behind the barn. “Christ, not enough everything’s gone to hell at breakfast. I got two fruitcakes who want to turn Lydia Pinkham’s shack into a writers’ cathedral!” “Right!” said Roy. “On this very porch I conceived the scariest miniature film set in history!” “Cut the hyperbole.” Manny backed off. “Show me the stuff !” “May we use your Rolls?” said Roy. We used the Rolls. On the way to Stage 13, Manny Leiber stared straight ahead and said, “I’m trying to run a madhouse and you guys sit around on porches shooting wind. Where in hell is my Beast!? Three weeks I’ve waited—” “Hell,” I said reasonably, “it takes time, waiting for something really new to step out of the night. Give us breathing space, time for the old secret self to coax itself out. Don’t worry. Roy here will be working in clay. Things will rise out of that. For now, we keep the Monster in the shadows, see—” “Excuses!” said Manny, glaring ahead. “I don’t see. I’ll give you three more days! I want to see the Monster!” “What if,” I blurted suddenly, “the Monster sees you! My God! What if we do it all from the Monster’s viewpoint, looking out!? The camera moves and is the Monster, and people get scared of the Camera and—” Manny blinked at me, shut one eye, and muttered: “Not bad. The Camera, huh?” “Yeah! The Camera crawls out of the meteor. The Camera, as the Monster, blows across the desert, scaring Gila monsters, snakes, vultures, stirring the dust—” “I’ll be damned.” Manny Leiber gazed off at the imaginary desert. “I’ll be damned,” cried Roy, delighted. “We put an oiled lens on the Camera,” I hurried on, “add steam, spooky music, shadows, and the Hero staring into the Camera and—” “Then what?” “If I talk it I won’t write it.” “Write it, write it!” We stopped at Stage 13. I jumped out, babbling. “Oh, yeah. I think I should do two versions of the script. One for you. One for me.” “Two?” yelled Manny. “Why?” “At the end of a week I hand in both. You get to choose which is right.” Manny eyed me suspiciously, still half in, half out of the Rolls. “Crap! You’ll do your best work on your idea!” “No. I’ll do my damnedest for you. But also my damnedest for me. Shake?” “Two Monsters for the price of one? Do it! C’mon!” Outside the door Roy stopped dramatically. “You ready for this? Prepare your minds and souls.” He held up both beautiful artists’ hands, like a priest. “I’m prepared, dammit. Open!” Roy flung open the outside and then the inside door and we stepped into total darkness. “Lights, dammit!” said Manny. “Hold on—” whispered Roy. We heard Roy move in the dark, stepping carefully over unseen objects. Manny twitched nervously. “Almost ready,” intoned Roy across a night territory. “Now …” Roy turned on a wind machine, low. First there was a whisper like a giant storm, which brought with it weather from the Andes, snow murmuring off the shelves of the Himalayas, rain over Sumatra, a jungle wind headed for Kilimanjaro, the rustle of skirts of tide along the Azores, a cry of primitive birds, a flourish of bat wings, all blended to lift your gooseflesh and drop your mind down trapdoors toward— “Light!” cried Roy. And now the light was rising on Roy Holdstrom’s landscapes, on vistas so alien and beautiful it broke your heart and mended your terror and then shook you again as shadows in great lemming mobs rushed over the microscopic dunes, tiny hills, and miniature mountains, fleeing a doom already promised but not yet arrived. I looked around with delight. Roy had read my mind again. The bright and dark stuff I threw on the midnight screens inside my camera obscura head he had stolen and blueprinted and built even before I had let them free with my mouth. Now, turnabout, I would use his miniature realities to flesh out my most peculiar odd script. My hero could hardly wait to sprint through this tiny land. Manny Leiber stared, flabbergasted. Roy’s dinosaur land was a country of phantoms revealed in an ancient and artificial dawn. Enclosing this lost world were huge glass plates on which Roy had painted primordial junglescapes, tar swamps in which his creatures sank beneath skies as fiery and bitter as Martian sunsets, burning with a thousand shades of red. I felt the same thrill I had felt when, in high school, Roy had taken me home and I had gasped as he swung his garage doors wide on, not automobiles, but creatures driven by ancient needs to rise, claw, chew, fly, shriek, and die through all our childhood nights. And here, now, on Stage 13, Roy’s face burned above a whole miniature continent that Manny and I were stranded on. I tiptoed across it, fearful of destroying any tiny thing. I reached a single covered sculpture platform and waited. Surely this must be his greatest Beast, the thing he had set himself to rear when, in our twenties, we had visited the primal corridors of our local natural history museum. Surely somewhere in the world this Beast had hidden in dusts, treading char, lost in God’s coal mines under our very tread! Hear! oh hear that subway sound, his primitive heart, and volcanic lungs shrieking to be set free! And had Roy set him free? “I’ll be goddamned.” Manny Leiber leaned toward the hidden monster. “Do we see it now?” “Yes,” Roy said, “that’s it.” Manny touched the cover. “Wait,” said Roy. “I need one more day.” “Liar!” said Manny. “I don’t believe you got one goddamn bastard thing under that rag!” Manny took two steps. Roy jumped three. At which instant, the Stage 13 set phone rang. Before I could move, Manny grabbed it. “Well?” he cried. His face changed. Perhaps it got pale, perhaps not, but it changed. “I know that.” He took a breath. “I know that, too.” Another breath; his face was getting red now. “I knew that half an hour ago! Say, god damn it to hell, who is this!?” A wasp buzzed at the far end of the line. The phone had been hung up. “Son of a bitch!” Manny hurled the phone and I caught it. “Wrap me in a wet sheet, someone, this is a madhouse! Where was I? You!” He pointed at both of us. “Two days, not three. You damn well get the Beast out of the catbox and into the light or—” At which point the outer door opened. A runt of a guy in a black suit, one of the studio chauffeurs, stood in a glare of light. “Now what?” Manny shouted. “We got it here but the motor died. We just got it fixed.” “Move out, then, for Christ’s sake!” Manny charged at him with one fist raised, but the door slammed, the runt was gone, so Manny had to turn and direct his explosion at us. “I’m having your final checks made up, ready for Friday afternoon. Deliver, or you’ll never work again, either of you.” Roy said quietly, “Do we get to keep it? Our Green Town, Illinois, offices? Now that you see these results you got from us fruitcakes?” Manny paused long enough to look back at the strange lost country like a kid in a fireworks factory. “Christ,” he breathed, forgetting his problems for a moment, “I got to admit you really did it.” He stopped, angry at his own praise, and shifted gears. “Now cut the cackle and move your buns!” And—bum! He was gone, too. Standing in the midst of our ancient landscape, lost in time, Roy and I stared at one another. “Curiouser and curiouser,” said Roy. Then, “You really going to do it? Write two versions of the script? One for him, one for us?” “Yep! Sure.” “How can you do that?” “Heck,” I said, “I been in training for fifteen years, wrote one hundred pulp stories, one a week, in one hundred weeks, two script outlines in two days? Both brilliant? Trust me.” “Okay, I do, I do.” There was a long pause, then he said, “Do we go look?” “Look? At what?” “That funeral you saw. In the rain. Last night. Over the wall. Wait.” Roy walked over to the big airlock door. I followed. He opened the door. We looked out. An ornately carved black hearse with crystal windows was just pulling away down the studio alley, making a big racket with a bad engine. “I bet I know where it’s going,” said Roy. 8 (#ulink_7edfd8cc-81de-5732-b5a3-6bb3c6f313dd) We drove around on Gower Street in Roy’s old beat-up 1927 tin lizzie. We didn’t see the black funeral hearse go into the graveyard, but as we pulled up out front and parked, the hearse came rolling out among the stones. It passed us, carrying a casket into the full sunlight of the street. We turned to watch the black limousine whisper out the gate with no more sound than a polar exhalation from off the northern floes. “That’s the first time I ever saw a casket in a funeral car go out of a cemetery. We’re too late!” I spun about to see the last of the limo heading east, back toward the studio. “Too late for what?” “Your dead man, dummy! Come on!” We were almost to the cemetery back wall when Roy stopped. “Well, by God, there’s his tomb.” I looked at what Roy was looking at, about ten feet above us, in marble: J. C. ARBUTHNOT, 1884–1934 R.I.P. It was one of those Greek-temple huts in which they bury fabulous people, with an iron lattice gate locked over a heavy wood-and-bronze inner door. “He couldn’t have come out of there, could he?” “No, but something got on that ladder and I knew his face. And someone else knew I would recognize that face so I was invited to come see.” “Shut up. Come on.” We advanced along the path. “Watch it. We don’t want to be seen playing this stupid game.” We arrived at the wall. There was nothing there, of course. “Like I said, if the body was ever here, we’re too late.” Roy exhaled and glanced. “No, look. There.” I pointed at the top of the wall. There were the marks, two of them, of some object that had leaned against the upper rim. “The ladder?” “And down here.” The grass at the base of the wall, about five feet out, a proper angle, had two half-inch ladder indentations in it. “And here. See?” I showed him a long depression where the grass had been crushed by something falling. “Well, well,” murmured Roy. “Looks like Halloween’s starting over.” Roy knelt on the grass and put his long bony fingers out to trace the print of the heavy flesh that had lain there in the cold rain only twelve hours ago. I knelt with Roy staring down at the long indentation, and shivered. “I—” I said, and stopped. For a shadow moved between us. “Morning!” The graveyard day watchman stood over us. I glanced at Roy, quickly. “Is this the right gravestone? It’s been years. Is—” The next flat tombstone was covered with leaves. I scrabbled the dust away. There was a half-seen name beneath. SMYTHE. BORN 1875—DIED 1928. “Sure! Old grandpa!” cried Roy. “Poor guy. Died of pneumonia.” Roy helped me brush away the dust. “I sure loved him. He—” “Where’re your flowers?” said the heavy voice, above us. Roy and I stiffened. “Ma’s bringing ’em,” said Roy. “We came ahead, to find the stone.” Roy glanced over his shoulder. “She’s out there now.” The graveyard day watchman, a man long in years and deep in suspicion, with a face not unlike a weathered tombstone, glanced toward the gate. A woman, bearing flowers, was coming up the road, far out, near Santa Monica Boulevard. Thank God, I thought. The watchman snorted, chewed his gums, wheeled about, and strode off among the graves. Just in time, for the woman had stopped and headed off, away from us. We jumped up. Roy grabbed some flowers off a nearby mound. “Don’t!” “Like hell!” Roy stashed the flowers on Grandpa Smythe’s stone. “Just in case that guy comes back and wonders why there’re no flowers after all our gab. Come on!” We moved out about fifty yards and waited, pretending to talk, but saying little. Finally, Roy touched my elbow. “Careful,” he whispered. “Side glances. Don’t look straight on. He’s back.” And indeed the old watchman had arrived at the place near the wall where the long impressions of the fallen body still remained. He looked up and saw us. Quickly, I put my arm around Roy’s shoulder to ease his sadness. Now the old man bent. With raking fingers, he combed the grass. Soon there was no trace of anything heavy that might have fallen from the sky last night, in a terrible rain. “You believe now?” I said. “I wonder,” said Roy, “where that hearse went to.” 9 (#ulink_e59ba15f-8e73-5d06-8fd0-3cd9a2d719ef) As we were driving back in through the main gate of the studio, the hearse whispered out. Empty. Like a long autumn wind it drifted off, around, and back to Death’s country. “Jesus Christ! Just like I guessed!” Roy steered but stared back at the empty street. “I’m beginning to enjoy this!” We moved along the street in the direction from which the hearse had been coming. Fritz Wong marched across the alley in front of us, driving or leading an invisible military squad, muttering and swearing to himself, his sharp profile cutting the air in two halves, wearing a dark beret, the only man in Hollywood who wore a beret and dared anyone to notice! “Fritz!” I called. “Stop, Roy!” Fritz ambled over to lean against the car and give us his by now familiar greeting. “Hello, you stupid bike-riding Martian! Who’s that strange-looking ape driving?” “Hello, Fritz, you stupid …” I faltered and then said sheepishly, “Roy Holdstrom, world’s greatest inventor, builder, and flier of dinosaurs!” Fritz Wong’s monocle flashed fire. He fixed Roy with his Oriental-Germanic glare, then nodded crisply. “Any friend of Pithecanthropus erectus is a friend of mine!” Roy grabbed his handshake. “I liked your last film.” “Liked!” cried Fritz Wong. “Loved!” “Good.” Fritz looked at me. “What’s new since breakfast!” “Anything funny happening around here just now?” “A Roman phalanx of forty men just marched that way. A gorilla, carrying his head, ran in Stage 10. A homosexual art director got thrown out of the Men’s. Judas is on strike for more silver over in Galilee. No, no. I wouldn’t say anything funny or I’d notice.” “How about passing through?” offered Roy. “Any funerals?” “Funerals! You think I wouldn’t notice? Wait!” He flashed his monocle toward the gate and then toward the backlot. “Dummy. Yes. I was hoping it was deMille’s hearse and we could celebrate. It went that way!” “Are they filming a burial here today?” “On every sound stage: turkeys, catatonic actors, English funeral directors whose heavy paws would stillbirth a whale! Halloween, yesterday, yes? And today the true Mexican Day of Death, November 1st, so why should it be different at Maximus Films? Where did you find this terrible wreck of a car, Mr. Holdstrom?” “This,” Roy said, like Edgar Kennedy doing a slow burn in an old Hal Roach comedy, “is the car in which Laurel and Hardy sold fish in that two reeler in 1930. Cost me fifty bucks, plus seventy to repaint. Stand back, sir!” Fritz Wong, delighted with Roy, jumped back. “In one hour, Martian. The commissary! Be there!” We steamed on amidst the noon crowd. Roy wheeled us around a corner toward Springfield, Illinois, lower Manhattan, and Piccadilly. “You know where you’re going?” I asked. “Hell, a studio’s a great place to hide a body. Who would notice? On a backlot filled with Abyssinians, Greeks, Chicago mobsters, you could march in six dozen gang wars with forty Sousa bands and nobody’d sneeze! That body, chum, should be right about here!” And we dusted around the last corner into Tombstone, Arizona. “Nice name for a town,” said Roy. 10 (#ulink_d023d58f-8e26-5b0b-a766-a3b8768f9cb3) There was a warm stillness. It was High Noon. We were surrounded by a thousand footprints in backlot dust. Some of the prints belonged to Tom Mix, Hoot Gibson, and Ken Maynard, long ago. I let the wind blow memory, lifting the hot dust. Of course the prints hadn’t stayed, dust doesn’t keep, and even John Wayne’s big strides were long since sifted off, even as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John’s sandal marks had vanished from the shore of the Sea of Galilee just one hundred yards over on Lot 12. Nevertheless, the smell of horses remained, the stagecoach would pull in soon with a new load of scripts, and a fresh batch of riflemen cow pokes. I was not about to refuse the quiet joy of just sitting here in the old Laurel and Hardy flivver, looking over at the Civil War locomotive, which got stoked up twice a year and became the 9:10 from Galveston, or Lincoln’s death train taking him home, Lord, taking him home. But at last I said, “What makes you so sure the body’s here?” “Hell.” Roy kicked the floorboards like Gary Cooper once kicked cow chips. “Look close at those buildings.” I looked. Behind the false fronts here in Western territory were metal welding shops, old car museums, false-front storage bins and— “The carpenters’ shop?” I said. Roy nodded and flivvered us over to let the dog die around the corner, out of sight. “They build coffins here, so the body’s here.” Roy climbed out of the flivver one long piece of lumber at a time. “The coffin was returned here because it was made here. Come on, before the Indians arrive!” I caught up with him in a cool grotto where Napoleon’s Empire furniture was hung on racks and Julius Caesar’s throne waited for his long-lost behind. I looked around. Nothing ever dies, I thought. It always returns. If you want, that is. And where does it hide, waiting. Where is it reborn? Here, I thought. Oh, yes, here. In the minds of men who arrive with lunch buckets, looking like workers, and leave looking like husbands or improbable lovers. But in between? Build the Mississippi Belle if you want to steamboat landfall New Orleans, or rear Bernini’s columns on the north forty. Or rebuild the Empire State and then steam-power an ape big enough to climb it. Your dream is their blueprint, and these are all the sons of the sons of Michelangelo and da Vinci, the fathers of yesterday winding up as sons in tomorrow. And right now my friend Roy leaned into the dim cavern behind a Western saloon and pulled me along, among the stashed facades of Baghdad and upper Sandusky. Silence. Everyone had gone to lunch. Roy snuffed the air and laughed quietly. “God, yes! Smell that smell! Sawdust! That’s what got me into high school woodshop with you. And the sounds of the bandsaw lathes. Sounded like people were doing things. Made my hands jerk. Looky here.” Roy stopped by a long glass case and looked down at beauty. The Bounty was there, in miniature, twenty inches long and fully rigged, and sailing through imaginary seas, two long centuries ago. “Go on,” Roy said, quietly. “Touch gently.” I touched and marveled and forgot why we were there and wanted to stay on forever. But Roy, at last, drew me away. “Hot dog,” he whispered. “Take your pick.” We were looking at a huge display of coffins about fifty feet back in the warm darkness. “How come so many?” I asked, as we moved up. “To bury all the turkeys the studio will make between now and Thanksgiving.” We reached the funeral assembly line. “It’s all yours,” said Roy. “Choose.” “Can’t be at the top. Too high. And people are lazy. So—this one.” I nudged the nearest coffin with my shoe. “Go on,” urged Roy, laughing at my hesitance. “Open it.” “You.” Roy bent and tried the lid. “Damn!” The coffin was nailed shut. A horn sounded somewhere. We glanced out. Out in the Tombstone street a car was pulling up. “Quick!” Roy ran to a table, scrabbled around frantically, and found a hammer and crowbar to jimmy the nails. “Ohmigod,” I gasped. Manny Leiber’s Rolls-Royce was dusting into the horse yard, out there in the noon glare. “Let’s go!” “Not until we see if—there!” The last nail flew out. Roy grasped the lid, took a deep breath, and opened the coffin. Voices sounded in the Western yard, out there in the hot sun. “Christ, open your eyes,” cried Roy. “Look!” I had shut my eyes, not wanting to feel the rain again on my face. I opened them. “Well?” said Roy. The body was there, lying on its back, its eyes wide, its nostrils flared, and its mouth gaped. But no rain fell to brim over and pour down its cheeks and chin. “Arbuthnot,” I said. “Yeah,” gasped Roy. “I remember the photos now. Lord, it’s a good resemblance. But why would anyone put this, whatever it is, up a ladder, for what?” I heard a door slam. A hundred yards off, in the warm dust, Manny Leiber had got out of his Rolls, and was blinking into the shade, around, about, above us. I flinched. “Wait a minute—” Roy said. He snorted and reached down. “Don’t!” “Hold on,” he said, and touched the body. “For God’s sake, quick!” “Why looky here,” said Roy. He took hold of the body and lifted. “Gah!” I said, and stopped. For the body rose up as easily as a bag of cornflakes. “No!” “Yeah, sure.” Roy shook the body. It rattled like a scarecrow. “I’ll be damned! And look, at the bottom of the coffin, lead sinkers to give it weight once they got it up the ladder! And when it fell, like you said, it would really hit. Look out! Here come the barracudas!” Roy squinted out into the noon glare and the distant figures stepping out of cars, gathering around Manny. “Okay. Let’s go.” Roy dropped the body, slammed the lid and ran. I followed in and out of a maze of furniture, pillars, and false fronts. Off at a distance, through three dozen doors and half up a flight of Renaissance stairs, Roy and I stopped, looked back, craned to ache and listen. Way off, about ninety to a hundred feet, Manny Leiber arrived at the place where we had been only a minute ago. Manny’s voice cut through all the rest. He told everyone, I imagine, to shut up. There was silence. They were opening the coffin with the facsimile body in it. Roy looked at me, eyebrows up. I looked back, unable to breathe. There was a stir, some sort of outcry, curses. Manny swore above the rest. Then there was a babble, more talk, Manny yelling again, and a final slam of the coffin lid. That was the gunshot that plummeted me and Roy the hell out of the place. We made it down the stairs as quietly as possible, ran through another dozen doors, and out the back side of the carpenters’ shop. “You hear anything?” gasped Roy, glancing back. “No. You?” “Not a damn thing. But they sure exploded. Not once but three times. Manny, the worst! My God, what’s going on? Why all the fuss over a damned wax dummy I could have run up with two bucks’ worth of latex, wax, and plaster in half an hour!?” “Slow down, Roy,” I said. “We don’t want anyone to see us running.” Roy slowed, but still took great whooping-crane strides. “God, Roy!” I said. “If they knew we were in there!” “They don’t. Hey, this is fun.” Why, I thought, did I ever introduce my best friend to a dead man? A minute later we reached Roy’s Laurel and Hardy flivver behind the shop. Roy sat in the front seat, smiling a most unholy smile, appreciating the sky and every cloud. “Climb in,” he said. Inside the shed, voices rose in a late-afternoon uproar. Someone was cursing somewhere. Someone else was criticizing. Someone said yes. A lot of others said no as the small mob boiled out into the hot noon light, like a hive of angry bees. A moment later, Manny Leiber’s Rolls-Royce streamed by like a voiceless storm. Inside, I saw three oyster-pale yes-men’s faces. And Manny Leiber’s face, blood-red with rage. He saw us as his Rolls stormed past. Roy waved and cried a jolly hello. “Roy!” I yelled. Roy guffawed, said, “What came over me!?” and drove away. I looked over at Roy and almost exploded myself. Inhaling the wind, he blew it out his mouth with gusto. “You’re nuts!” I said. “Don’t you have a nerve in your body?” “Why should I,” Roy reasoned amiably, “be scared of a papier-m?ch? mockup? Hell, Manny’s heebie-jeebies make me feel good. I’ve taken a lot of guff from him this month. Now someone’s stuck a bomb in his pants? Great!” “Was it you?” I blurted, suddenly. Roy was startled. “You off on that track again? Why would I sew and glue a dimwit scarecrow and climb ladders at midnight?” “For the reasons you just said. Cure your boredom. Shove bombs in other people’s pants.” “Nope. Wish I could claim the credit. Right now, I can hardly wait for lunch. When Manny shows up, his face should be a riot.” “Do you think anyone saw us in there?” “Christ, no. That’s why I waved! To show how dumb and innocent we are! Something is going on. We got to act natural.” “When was the last time we did that?” Roy laughed. We motored around behind the worksheds, through Madrid, Rome, and Calcutta, and now pulled up at a brownstone somewhere in the Bronx. Roy glanced at his watch. “You got an appointment. Fritz Wong. Go. We should both be seen everywhere in the next hour except there.” He nodded at Tombstone, two hundred yards away. “When,” I asked, “are you going to start getting scared?” Roy felt his leg bones with one hand. “Not yet,” he said. Roy dropped me in front of the commissary. I got out and stood looking at his now-serious, now-amused face. “You coming in?” I said. “Soon. Got some errands to run.” “Roy, you’re not going to do something nutty now, are you? You got that faraway crazed look.” Roy said, “I been thinking. When did Arbuthnot die?” “Twenty years ago this week. Two-car accident, three people killed. Arbuthnot and Sloane, his studio accountant, plus Sloane’s wife. It was headlined for days. The funeral was bigger than Valentino’s. I stood outside the graveyard with my friends. Enough flowers for the New Year’s Rose Parade. A thousand people came out of the service, eyes running under their dark glasses. My God, the misery. Arbuthnot was that loved.” “Car crash, huh?” “No witnesses. Maybe one was following too close, going home drunk from a studio party.” “Maybe.” Roy pulled at his lower lip, squinting one eye at me. “But what if there’s more to it? Maybe, this late in time, someone’s discovered something about that crash and is threatening to spill the beans. Otherwise why the body on the wall? Why the panic? Why hush it up if there’s nothing to hide? God, did you hear their voices back there just now? How come a dead man that’s not a dead man, a body that’s not a body, shakes up the executives?” “There must’ve been more than one letter,” I said. “The one I got, and others. But I’m the only one dumb enough to go see. And when I didn’t spread the word, blurt it out today, whoever put the body on the wall had to write or call in today to start the panic and send in the funeral hearse. And the guy who made the body and sent the note is in here right now, watching the fun. Why … why … why … ?” “Hush,” said Roy, quietly, “hush.” He started his engine. “We’ll solve the half-ass mystery at lunch. Put on your innocent face. Make like na?ve over the Louis B. Mayer bean soup. I gotta go check my miniature models. One last tiny street to nail in place.” He glanced at his watch. “In two hours my dinosaur country will be ready for photography. Then, all we need is our grand and glorious Beast.” I looked into Roy’s still burning-bright face. “You’re not going to go steal the body and put it back up on the wall, are you?” “Never crossed my mind,” said Roy, and drove away. 11 (#ulink_2b43d0a9-27ec-5147-b43a-ea9ee4f8747f) In the middle of the far-left side of the commissary there was a small platform, no higher than a foot, on which stood a single table with two chairs. I often imagined the slavemaster of a Roman trireme warship seated there crashing down one sledgehammer, then another, to give the beat to the sweating oarsmen locked to their oars, obedient to panics, pulling for some far theatre aisle, pursued by maddened exhibitors, greeted on shore by mobs of insulted customers. But there never was a Roman galley coxswain at the table, leading the beat. It was Manny Leiber’s table. He brooded there alone, stirring his food as if it were the split innards of Caesar’s fortuneteller’s pigeons, forking the spleen, ignoring the heart, predicting futures. Some days he slouched there with the studio’s Doc Phillips, testing new philtres and potions in tapwater. Other days, he dined on directors’ or writers’ tripes as they glumly confronted him, nodding, yes, yes, the film was behind schedule! yes, yes, they would hurry it along! Nobody wanted to sit at that table. Often, a pink slip arrived in lieu of a check. Today as I ducked in and shrank inches wandering through the tables, Manny’s small platform place was empty. I stopped. That was the first time I had ever seen no dishes, no utensils, not even flowers there. Manny was still outside somewhere, yelling at the sun because it had insulted him. But now, the longest table in the commissary waited, half full and filling. I had never gone near the thing in the weeks I had worked in the studio. As with most neophytes, I had feared contact with the terribly bright and terribly famous. H. G. Wells had lectured in Los Angeles when I was a boy, and I had not gone to seek his autograph. The rage of joy at the sight of him would have struck me dead. So it was with the commissary table, where the best directors, film editors, and writers sat at an eternal Last Supper waiting for a late-arriving Christ. Seeing it again, I lost my nerve. I slunk away, veering off toward a far corner where Roy and I often wolfed sandwiches and soup. “Oh, no you don’t!” a voice shouted. My head sank down on my neck, which periscoped, oiled with sweat, into my jacket collar. Fritz Wong cried, “Your appointment is here. March!” I ricocheted between tables to stare at my shoes beside Fritz Wong. I felt his hand on my shoulder, ready to rip off my epaulettes. “This,” announced Fritz, “is our visitor from another world, across the commissary. I will guide him to sit.” His hands on my shoulders, he forced me gently down. At last I raised my eyes and looked along the table at twelve people watching me. “Now,” announced Fritz, “he will tell us about his Search for the Beast!” The Beast. Since it had been announced that Roy and I were to write, build, and birth the most incredibly hideous animal in Hollywood history, thousands had helped us in our search. One would have thought we were seeking Scarlett O’Hara or Anna Karenina. But no … the Beast, and the so-called contest to find the Beast, appeared in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. My name and Roy’s were in every article. I clipped and saved every dumb, stillborn item. Photographs had begun to pour in from other studios, agents, and the general public. Quasimodos Numbers Two and Three showed up at the studio gate, as did four Opera Phantoms. Wolfmen abounded. First and second cousins of Lugosi and Karloff, hiding out on our Stage 13, were thrown off the lot. Roy and I had begun to feel we were judging an Atlantic City beauty contest somehow shipped to Transylvania. The half-animals waiting outside the sound stages every night were something; the photographs were worse. At last, we burned all the photographs and left the studio through a side entrance. So it had been with the search for the Beast all month. And now Fritz Wong said again: “Okay. The Beast? Explain!” 12 (#ulink_b6215aba-0233-5e07-9ed5-a0b142a37874) I looked at all those faces and said: “No. No, please. Roy and I will be ready soon, but right now …” I took a fast sip of bad Hollywood tap water, “I’ve been watching this table for three weeks. Everyone always sits at the same place. So-and-so up here, such-and-such over across. I’ll bet the guys down there don’t even know the guys over here. Why not mix it up? Leave spaces so every half hour people could play musical chairs, shift, meet someone new, not the same old guff from familiar faces. Sorry.” “Sorry!?” Fritz grabbed my shoulders and shook me with his own laughter. “Okay, guys! Musical chairs! Allez-oop!” Applause. Cheers. Such was the general hilarity as everyone slapped backs, shook hands, found new chairs, sat back down. Which only suffered me into further confused embarrassment with more shouts of laughter. More applause. “We will have to seat this maestro here each day to teach us social activities and life,” announced Fritz. “All right, compatriots,” cried Fritz. “To your left, young maestro, is Maggie Botwin, the finest cutter/film editor in film history!” “Bull!” Maggie Botwin nodded to me and went back to her omelet, which she had carried with her. Maggie Botwin. Prim, quiet lady, like an upright piano, seeming taller than she was because of the way she sat, rose, and walked, and the way she held her hands in her lap and the way she coifed her hair up on top of her head, in some fashion out of World War I. I had once heard her on a radio show describe herself as a snake charmer. All that film whistling through her hands, sliding through her fingers, undulant and swift. All that time passing, but to pass and repass again. It was no different, she said, than life itself. The future rushed at you. You had a single instant, as it flashed by, to change it into an amiable, recognizable, and decent past. Instant by instant, tomorrow blinked in your grasp. If you did not seize without holding, shape without breaking, that continuity of moments, you left nothing behind. Your object, her object, all of our objects, was to mold and print ourselves on those single bits of future that, in the touching, aged into swiftly vanishing yesterdays. So it was with film. With the one difference: you could live it again, as often as need be. Run the future by, make it now, make it yesterday, then start over with tomorrow. What a great profession, to be in charge of three concourses of time: the vast invisible tomorrows; the narrowed focus of now; the great tombyard of seconds, minutes, hours, years, millennia that burgeoned as a seedbed to keep the other two. And if you didn’t like any of the three rushing time rivers? Grab your scissors. Snip. There! Feeling better? And now here she was, her hands folded in her lap one moment and the next lifting a small 8-millimeter camera to pan over the faces at the table, face by face, her hands calmly efficient, until the camera stopped and fixed on me. I gazed back at it and remembered a day in 1934 when I had seen her outside the studio shooting film of all the fools, the geeks, the autograph nuts, myself among them. I wanted to call out, Do you remember? But how could she? I ducked my head. Her camera whirred. It was at that exact moment that Roy Holdstrom arrived. He stood in the commissary doorway, searching. Finding me, he did not wave but jerked his head furiously. Then he turned and stalked out. I jumped to my feet and ran off before Fritz Wong could trap me. I saw Roy vanishing into the Men’s outside, and found him standing at the white porcelain shrine worshiping Respighi’s Fountains of Rome. I stood beside him, noncreative, the old pipes frozen for the winter. “Look. I found this on Stage 13 just now.” Roy shoved a typewritten page onto the tile shelf before me. The Beast Born at Last! The Brown Derby Tonight! Vine Street. Ten o’clock. Be there! or you lose everything! “You don’t believe this!” I gasped. “As much as you believed your note and went to the damn graveyard.” Roy stared at the wall in front of him. “That’s the same paper and typeface as your note? Will I go to the Brown Derby tonight? Hell, why not? Bodies on walls, missing ladders, raked-over prints in grass, papier-m?ch? corpses, plus Manny Leiber screaming. I got to thinking, five minutes ago, if Manny and the others were upset by the scarecrow dummy, what if it suddenly disappeared, then what?” “You didn’t?” I said. “No?” said Roy. Roy pocketed the note. Then he took a small box from a corner table and handed it to me. “Someone’s using us. I decided to do a little using myself. Take it. Go in the booth. Open it up.” I did just that. I shut the door. “Don’t just stand there,” called Roy. “Open it!” “I am, I am.” I opened the box and stared in. “My God!” I cried. “What do you see?” said Roy. “Arbuthnot!” “Fits in the box real nice and neat, huh?” said Roy. 13 (#ulink_e072bbeb-6b00-5f14-b763-8085bfdbd728) “What made you do it?” “Cats are curious. I’m a cat,” said Roy, hustling along. We were headed back toward the commissary. Roy had the box tucked under his arm, and a vast grin of triumph on his face. “Look,” he said. “Someone sends you a note. You go to a graveyard, find a body, but don’t report it, spoiling whatever game is up. Phone calls are made, the studio sends for the body, and goes into a panic when they actually have a viewing. How else can I act except out of wild curiosity. What kind of game is this? I ask. I can only find out by countermoving the chesspiece, yes? We saw and heard how Manny and his pals reacted an hour ago. How would they react, I wondered, let’s study it, if, after finding a body, they lost it again, and went crazy wondering who had it? Me!” We stopped outside the commissary door. “You’re not going in there with that!” I exclaimed. “Safest place in the world. Nobody would suspect a box I carry right into the middle of the studio. But be careful, mate, we’re being watched, right now.” “Where?!” I cried, and turned swiftly. “If I knew that, it would all be over. C’mon.” “I’m not hungry.” “Strange,” said Roy, “why do I feel I could eat a horse?” 14 (#ulink_d9167e45-e9c5-5599-a04e-2e1a0a831f00) On our way back into the commissary I saw that Manny’s table still stood empty and waiting. I froze, staring at his place. “Damn fool,” I whispered. Roy shook the box behind me. It rustled. “Sure am,” he said gladly. “Move.” I moved to my place. Roy placed his special box on the floor, winked at me, and sat at the far end of the table, smiling the smile of the innocent and the perfect. Fritz glared at me as if my absence had been a personal insult. “Pay attention!” Fritz snapped his fingers. “The introductions continue!” He pointed along the table. “Next is Stanislau Groc, Nikolai Lenin’s very own makeup man, the man who prepared Lenin’s body, waxed the face, paraffined the corpse to lie in state for all these years in the Kremlin wall in Moscow in Soviet Russia!” “Lenin’s makeup man?” I said. “Cosmetologist.” Stanislau Groc waved his small hand above his small head above his small body. He was hardly larger than one of the Singer’s Midgets who played Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz. “Bow and scrape to me,” he called. “You write monsters. Roy Holdstrom builds them. But I rouged, waxed, and polished a great red monster, long dead!” “Ignore the stupefying Russian bastard,” said Fritz. “Observe the chair next to him!” An empty place. “For who?” I asked. Someone coughed. Heads turned. I held my breath. And the Arrival took place. 15 (#ulink_cb3ae9fd-9ce2-54b4-b075-8f8a511c82ef) This last one to arrive was a man so pale that his skin seemed to glow with an inner light. He was tall, six feet three I would imagine, and his hair was long and his beard dressed and shaped, and his eyes of such startling clarity that you felt he saw your bones through your flesh and your soul inside your bones. As he passed each table, the knives and forks hesitated on their way to half-open mouths. After he passed, leaving a wake of silence, the business of life began again. He strode with a measured tread as if he wore robes instead of a tattered coat and some soiled trousers. He gave a blessing gesture on the air as he moved by each table, but his eyes were straight ahead, as if seeing some world beyond, not ours. He was looking at me, and I shrank, for I couldn’t imagine why he would seek me out, among all these accepted and established talents. And at last he stood above me, the gravity of his demeanor being such it pulled me to my feet. There was a long silence as this man with the beautiful face stretched out a thin arm with a thin wrist, and at the end of it a hand with the most exquisitely long fingers I had ever seen. I put my hand out to take his. His hand turned, and I saw the mark of the driven spike in the middle of the wrist. He turned his other hand over, so I could see the similar scar in the middle of his left wrist. He smiled, reading my mind, and quietly explained, “Most people think the nails were driven through the palms. No. The palms could not hold a body’s weight. The wrists, nailed, can. The wrists.” Then he turned both hands over so I could see where the nails had come through on the other side. “J. C.,” said Fritz Wong, “this is our visitor from another world, our young science-fiction writer—” “I know.” The beautiful stranger nodded and gestured toward himself. “Jesus Christ,” he said. I stepped aside so he could sit, then fell back in my own chair. Fritz Wong passed down a small basket full of bread. “Please,” he called, “change these into fish!” I gasped. But J. C., with the merest flick of his fingers, produced one silvery fish from amidst the bread and tossed it high. Fritz, delighted, caught it to laughter and applause. The waitress arrived with several bottles of cheap booze to more shouts and applause. “This wine,” said J. C., “was water ten seconds ago. Please!” The wine was poured and savored. “Surely—” I stammered. The entire table looked up. “He wants to know,” called Fritz, “if your name is really what you say it is.” With somber grace, the tall man drew forth and displayed his driver’s license. It read: “Jesus Christ. 911 Beachwood Avenue. Hollywood.” He slipped it back into his pocket, waited for the table to be silent, and said: “I came to this studio in 1927 when they made Jesus the King. I was a woodworker out back in those sheds. I cut and polished the three crosses on Calvary, still standing. There was a contest in every Baptist basement and Catholic backwash in the land. Find Christ! He was found here. The director asked where I worked? The carpenter’s shop. My God, he cried, let me see that face! Go put on a beard! ‘Make me look like holy Jesus,’ I advised the makeup man. I went back, dressed in robes and thorns, the whole holy commotion. The director danced on the Mount and washed my feet. Next thing you know the Baptists were lining up at Iowa pie festivals when I dusted through in my tin flivver with banners “THE KING IS COMING,” “GOING ON BEFORE.” “Across country in auto bungalow courts, I had a great ten-year Messiah run, until vino and venality tattered my smock. Nobody wants a womanizing Saviour. It wasn’t so much I kicked cats and wound up other men’s wives like dime-store clocks, no, it was just that I was Him, you see?” “I think I see,” I said gently. J. C. put his long wrists and long hands and long fingers out before him, as cats often sit, waiting for the world to come worship. “Women felt it was blasphemy if they so much as breathed my air. Touching was terrible. Kissing a mortal sin. The act itself ? Might as well leap in the burning pit with an eternity of slime up to your ears. Catholics, no, Holy Rollers were worst. I managed to bed and breakfast one or two before they knew me, when I traveled the country incognito. After a month of starving for feminine acrobats, I’d run amok. I just shaved and lit out across country, pounding fenceposts into native soil, duck-pressing ladies left and right. I flattened more broads than a steamroller at a Baptist skinny dip. I ran fast, hoping shotgun preachers wouldn’t count hymens and hymnals and wallop me with buckshot. I prayed ladies would never guess they had enjoyed a laying on of hands by the main Guest at the Last Supper. When I wore it down to a nubbin and drank myself into a stupor, the studio’d pick up my bones, pay off the sheriffs, placate the priests in North Sty, Nebraska, with new baptismal fonts for the birth of my latterday kids, and tote me home to a cell on the backlot, where I was kept like John the Baptist, threatened with losing both my heads until they finished one last fish fry at Galilee and one more mystery tour up Calvary. Only old age and a dilapidated pecker stopped me. I was sent out to the bush leagues. Which was great for I ravened for leagues of bush. There was never a more woman-oriented man than this lost soul you see here. I was undeserving to play J. C. when, in thousands of theatres across country, I saved souls and lusted for dessert. For many years I have solaced myself not with bodies but with bottles. I’m lucky Fritz renovated me for this new film, in long shots, with tons of makeup. That’s it. Chapter and verse. Fade out.” Applause. The whole table clapped hands and called praise. Eyes shut, J. C. bowed his head, left and right. “That’s quite some story,” I murmured. “Don’t believe a word of it,” said J. C. The applause stopped. Someone else had arrived. Doc Phillips stood at the far end of the table. “My God,” said J. C. in a strong, clear voice. “Here’s Judas now!” But if the studio doctor heard, it was not evident. He lingered, studying the room with distaste, fearful of encounters. He resembled one of those lizards you see on the edge of a primeval forest, glinting his eyes around, terribly apprehensive, sniffing the air, touching the wind with probing claws, lashing his tail in little twitches, doom in all directions, no hope, only nervous response, ready to spin, rustle, run. His gaze found Roy and for some reason fixed on him. Roy sat up, stiffened, and smiled a weak smile at the doc. My God, I thought, someone saw Roy stealing off with his box. Someone— “Will you say grace?” called Fritz. “The Surgeon’s Prayer— O Lord, deliver us from doctors!” Doc Phillips glanced away as if only a fly had touched his skin. Roy collapsed back in his chair. The doc had come, out of habit. Beyond the commissary, out there in the bright high-noon sun, Manny and a few other fleas were doing backflips of anger and frustration. And the doc had come here to get away from it or search for suspects, I could not tell which. But there he was, Doc Phillips, the fabulous physician to all the studios from the early handcranked cameras to the advent of shrieks and screams in sound to this very noon when the earth shook. If Groc was the eternal jolly Punch, then Doc Phillips was the glum curer of incurable egos, a shadow on the wall, a terrible scowl at the back of theatre previews, diagnosing sick films. He was like those football coaches on the sidelines of victorious teams, refusing to flash their teeth just once in approval. He spoke not in paragraphs or sentences, but clips and chops of shorthand prescription words. Between his ayes and nays lay silence. He had been on the eighteenth green when the head of Skylark Studios sank his last putt and dropped dead. It was rumored he had sailed off the California coast when that famous publisher threw an equally famous director overboard to “accidentally” drown. I had seen pictures of him at Valentino’s bier, in Jeanne Eagels’s sickroom, at some San Diego yacht race where he was carried as sunstroke protection to a dozen New York movie moguls. It was said he had happy-drugged a whole studio star system and then cured them in his hideaway asylum somewhere in Arizona, near Needles. The irony of the town’s name did not go unsaid. He rarely ate in the commissary; his glance spoiled the food. Dogs barked at him as if he were an infernal mailman. Babies bit his elbows and suffered stomach cramps. Everyone flinched and pulled back at his arrival. Doc Phillips fastened his glare here and there along our group. Within instants, some few of them developed tics. Fritz turned to me. “His work is never done. Too many babies arrived early behind Stage 5. Heart attacks at the New York office. Or that actor in Monaco gets caught with his crazy operatic boyfriend. He—” The dyspeptic doctor strode behind our chairs, whispered to Stanislau Groc, then turned quickly and hurried out. Fritz scowled at the far exit and then turned to burn me with his monocle. “Oh master futurist who sees all, tell us, what the hell is going on?” The blood burned in my cheeks. My tongue was locked with guilt in my mouth. I lowered my head. “Musical chairs,” someone shouted. Groc, on his feet, said again, his eyes on me, “Chairs. Chairs!” Everyone laughed. Everyone moved, which covered my confusion. When they had done with churning in all directions, I found Stanislau Groc, the man who had polished Lenin’s brow and dressed his goatee for eternity, directly across from me, and Roy at my side. Groc smiled a great smile, the friend of a lifetime. I said, “What was Doc’s hurry? What’s going on?” “Pay no attention.”Groc calmly eyed the commissary doors. “I felt a shudder at eleven this morning, as if the rear of the studio had struck an iceberg. Madmen have been rushing around ever since, bailing out. It makes me happy to see so many people upset. It makes me forget my melancholy job of turning Bronx mud ducks into Brooklyn swans.” He stopped for a bite of his fruit salad. “What do you guess? What iceberg has our dear Titanic struck?” Roy leaned back in his chair and said, “There’s some calamity at the prop and carpenters’ shop.” I shot Roy a scowl. Stanislau Groc stiffened. “Ah, yes,” he said slowly. “A small problem with the manatee, the woman’s figure, carved from wood, to go on the Bounty.” I kicked Roy under the table, but he leaned forward: “Surely that wasn’t the iceberg you mentioned?” “Ah, no,” said Groc, laughing. “Not an Arctic collision but a hot-air balloon race, all the gas-bag producers and yes-men of the studio are being called into Manny’s office. Someone will be fired. And then—” Groc gestured toward the ceiling with his tiny doll hands—“falling upward!” “What?” “A man is fired from Warner’s and falls upward to MGM. A man at MGM is fired and falls upward to 20th. Falling upward! Isaac Newton’s reverse law!” Groc paused to smile at his own wit. “Ah, but you, poor writer, will never be able, when fired, to fall upward, only down. I—” He stopped, because … I was studying him as I must have studied my grandfather, dead forever, in his upstairs bedroom thirty years ago. The stubble on my grandpa’s pale waxen skin, the eyelids that threatened to crack and fix me with the angry glare that had frozen Grandma like a snow queen in the parlor for a lifetime, all, all of it as clean and clear as this moment with Lenin’s necrologist/cosmetician seated across from me like a jumping jack, mouse-nibbling his fruit salad. “Are you,” he asked, politely, “looking for the stitch marks over my ears?” “No, no!” “Yes, yes!” he replied, amused. “Everyone looks! So!” He leaned forward, turning his head to left and right, skinning his hairline and then his temples. “Lord,” I said, “what fine work.” “No. Perfect!” For the thin lines were mere shadows, and if there were fleabite stitch scars, they had long since healed. “Did you—?” I said. “Operate on myself ? Cut out my own appendix? Perhaps I am like that woman who fled Shangri-La and shriveled into a Mongol prune!” Groc laughed, and I was fascinated with his laughter. There was no minute when he was not merry. It was as though if he ever stopped laughing he would gasp and die. Always the happy bark, the fixed grin. “Yes?” he asked, seeing that I was studying his teeth, his lips. “What’s there so funny to laugh at,” I said, “always?” “Everything! Did you ever see a film with Conrad Veidt—?” “The Man Who Laughs?” That stopped Groc in mid-dust. “Impossible! You lie!” “My ma was nuts for films. After school, she’d pick me up from first, second, third grade to go see Pickford, Chaney, Chaplin. And … Conrad Veidt! The gypsies sliced his mouth so it could never stop smiling all the rest of his life, and he falls in love with a blind girl who can’t see the awful smile and he is unfaithful to her but, scorned by a princess, crawls back to his blind girl, weeping, to be comforted by her unseeing hands. And you sit in your aisle seat in the dark at the Elite Cinema and weep. The End.” “My God!” exclaimed Groc, and almost not laughing. “What a dazzling child you are. Yes!” He grinned. “I am that Veidt character, but I was not carved into smiles by gypsies. Suicides, murders, assassinations did it. When you are locked in a mass grave with ten thousand corpses and fight upward for air in nausea, shot to death but not dead. I have never touched meat since, for it smells of the lime pit, the carcass, and the unburied slaughter. So,” he gestured, “fruit. Salads. Bread, fresh butter, and wine. And, along the way, I sewed on this smile. I fight the true world with a false mouth. In the face of death, why not these teeth, the lascivious tongue, and the laugh? Anyway, I am responsible for you!” “Me?” “I told Manny Leiber to hire Roy, your tyrannosaurus buddy. And I said we needed someone who wrote as well as Roy dreamed. Voil?! You!” “Thanks,” I said, slowly. Groc preened over his food, glad that I was staring at his chin, his mouth, his brow. “You could make a fortune—” I said. “I already do.” He cut a slice of pineapple. “The studio pays me excessively. Their stars are always booze-wrinkling their faces, or smashing their heads through car windows. Maximus Films lives in fear that I might depart. Nonsense! I will stay. And grow younger, each year, as I cut and stitch, and stitch again, until my skin is so tight that when I smile my eyes pop! So!” He demonstrated. “For I can never go back. Lenin chased me out of Russia.” “A dead man chased you?” Fritz Wong leaned forward, listening, mightily pleased. “Groc,” he said, gently, “explain. Lenin with new roses in his cheeks. Lenin with brand-new teeth, a smile under the mouth. Lenin with new eyeballs, crystal, under the lids. Lenin with his mole gone and his goatee trimmed. Lenin, Lenin. Tell.” “Very simply,” said Groc, “Lenin was to be a miraculous saint, immortal in his crystal tomb. “But Groc? Who was he? Did Groc rouge Lenin’s smile, clear his complexion? No! Lenin, even in death, improved himself ! So? Kill Groc! “So Groc ran! And Groc today is where? Falling upward … with you.” At the far end of the long table, Doc Phillips had come back. He advanced no further but, with a sharp jerk of his head, indicated that he wanted Groc to follow. Groc took his time tapping his napkin on his little rosebud smile, took another swig of cold milk, crossed his knife and fork on his plate, and scrambled down. He paused and thought, then said, “Not Titanic, Ozymandias is more like it!” and ran out. “Why,” said Roy, after a moment, “did he make up all that guff about manatees and woodcarving?” “He’s good,” said Fritz Wong. “Conrad Veidt, small size. I’ll use that little son of a bitch in my next film.” “What did he mean by Ozymandias?” I asked. 16 (#ulink_5ae77016-8dee-5db5-9d16-fee3b14e41cd) All the rest of the afternoon Roy kept shoving his head into my office, showing me his clay-covered fingers. “Empty!” he cried. “No Beast!” I yanked paper from my typewriter. “Empty! Also no Beast!” But at last, at ten o’clock that night, Roy drove us to the Brown Derby. On the way I read aloud the first half of “Ozymandias.” I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert … Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed. Shadows moved over Roy’s face. “Read the rest,” he said. I read: And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away. When I finished, Roy let two or three long dark blocks pass. “Turn around, let’s go home,” I said. “Why?” “This poem sounds just like the studio and the graveyard. You ever have one of those crystal balls you shook and the snow lifted in blizzards inside? That’s how my bones feel now.” “Bushwah,” was Roy’s comment. I glanced over at his great hawk’s profile, which cleaved the night air, full of that optimism that only craftsmen seem to have about being able to build a world just the way they want it, no matter what. I remembered that when we were both thirteen King Kong fell off the Empire State and landed on us. When we got up, we were never the same. We told each other that one day we would write and move a Beast as great, as magnificent, as beautiful as Kong, or simply die. “Beast,” whispered Roy. “Here we are.” And we pulled up near the Brown Derby, a restaurant with no huge Brown Derby on top, like a similar restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard, five miles across town, capped with a derby large enough to fit God at Easter, or any studio bigwig on Friday afternoon. The only way you knew this Brown Derby was important was by the 999 cartoon-caricature portraits on every wall inside. Outside was quasi-Spanish nothing. We braved the nothing to step in and face the 999. The ma?tre d’ of the Brown Derby lifted his left eyebrow as we arrived. A former dog lover, he now only loved cats. We smelled funny. “Of course you have no reservations?” he observed, languidly. “About this place?” said Roy. “Plenty.” That rippled the fur on the ma?tre d’s neck, but he let us in anyway. The restaurant was almost empty. People sat at a few tables, finishing dessert and cognac. The waiters had already begun to renapkin and reutensil some of the tables. There was a sound of laughter ahead, and we saw three women standing near a table, bending toward a man who was obviously leafing out cash to pay the night’s bills. The young women laughed, saying they would be outside window-shopping while he paid up, then, in a flourish of perfume, they turned and ran past me and Roy, who stood nailed in place, staring at the man in the booth. Stanislau Groc. “God,” cried Roy. “You!” “Me?!” Groc’s eternal flame snapped shut. “What are you doing here?” he exclaimed. “We were invited.” “We were looking for someone,” I said. “And found me and were severely put out,” observed Groc. Roy was edging back, suffering from his Siegfried syndrome, dearly remembered. Promised a dragon, he beheld a mosquito. He could not take his eyes off Groc. “Why do you look at me that way?” snapped the little man. “Roy,” I warned. For I could see that Roy was thinking my thought. It was all a joke. Someone, knowing that Groc ate here some nights, had sent us on a fool’s errand. To embarrass us, and Groc. Still, Roy was eying the little man’s ears and nose and chin. “Naw,” said Roy, “you won’t do.” “For what? Hold on! Yes! Is it the Search?” A quiet little machine gun of laughter started in his chest and at last erupted from his thin lips. “But why the Brown Derby? The people who come here are not your kind of fright. Nightmares, yes. And myself, this patchwork monkey’s paw? Who could I scare?” “Not to worry,” said Roy. “The scare comes later, when I think about you at three A.M.” That did it. Groc ripped off the greatest laugh of all and waved us down in the booth. “Since your night is ruined, drink!” Roy and I glanced nervously around the restaurant. No Beast. When the champagne was poured, Groc toasted us. “May you never have to curl a dead man’s eyelashes, clean a dead man’s teeth, rewax his beard, or rearrange his syphilitic lips.” Groc rose and looked at the door through which his women had run. “Did you see their faces?” Groc smiled after them. “Mine! Do you know why those girls are wildly in love with me and will never leave? I am the high lama of the Valley of the Blue Moon. Should they depart, a door would slam, mine, and their faces fall. I have warned them also that I have hooked fine wires below their chins and eyes. Should they run too far too fast to the end of the wire—their flesh would unravel. And instead of being thirty, they would be forty-two!” “Fafner,” growled Roy. His fingers clutched the table as if he might leap up. “What?” “A friend,” I said. “We thought we might see him tonight.” “Tonight is over,” said Groc. “But stay. Finish my champagne. Order more, charge me. Would you like a salad before the kitchen shuts?” “I’m not hungry,” said Roy, the wild disappointed Shrine Opera Siegfried look in his eyes. “Yes!” I said. “Two salads,” Groc said to the waiter. “Blue cheese dressing?” Roy shut his eyes. “Yes!” I said. Groc turned to the waiter and thrust an unnecessarily large tip into his hand. “Spoil my friends,” he said, grinning. Then, glancing at the door where his women had trotted out on their pony hooves, he shook his head. “I must go. It’s raining. All that water on my girls’ faces. They will melt! So long. Arrivederci!” And he was gone. The front doors whispered shut. “Let’s get out. I feel like a fool!” said Roy. He moved and spilled his champagne. He cursed and cleaned it up. I poured him another and watched him take it slowly and calm down. Five minutes later, in the back of the restaurant, it happened. The headwaiter was unfolding a screen around the farthermost table. It had slipped and half folded back together, with a sharp crack. The waiter said something to himself. And then there was a movement from the kitchen doorway, where, I realized, a man and woman had been standing for some few seconds. Now, as the waiter realigned the folding screen, they stepped out into the light and hurried, looking only ahead at that screen, toward the table. “Ohmigod,” I whispered hoarsely. “Roy?” Roy glanced up. “Fafner!” I whispered. “No.” Roy stopped, stared, sat back down, watching as the couple moved swiftly. “Yes.” But it was not Fafner, not the mythological dragon, the terrible serpent, that quickened himself from kitchen to table, holding his lady’s hand and pulling her along behind him. It was what we had been looking for for many long weeks and arduous days. It was what I might have scribbled on paper or typed on a page, with frost running up my arm to ice my neck. It was what Roy had been seeking every time he plunged his long fingers into his clay. It was a blood-red bubble that rose steaming in a primeval mud pot and shaped itself into a face. And this face was all the mutilated, scarred, and funeral faces of the wounded, shot, and buried men in ten thousand wars since wars began. It was Quasimodo in his old age, lost in a visitation of cancer and a prolongment of leprosy. And behind that face was a soul who would have to live there forever. Forever! I thought. He’ll never get out! It was our Beast. It was all over in an instant. But I took a flash photo of the creature, shut my eyes, and saw the terrible face burned on my retina; burned so fiercely that tears brimmed my eyes and an involuntary sound erupted from my throat. It was a face in which two terribly liquid eyes drowned. A face in which these eyes, swimming in delirium, could find no shore, no respite, no rescue. And seeing that there was nothing to touch which was not reprehensible, the eyes, bright with despair, swam in place, sustained themselves at the surface of a turmoil of flesh, refused to sink, give in, and vanish. There was a spark of the last hope that, by swiveling this way or that, they might sight some peripheral rescue, some touch of self-beauty, some revelation that all was not as bad as it seemed. So the eyes floated, anchored in a red-hot lava of destroyed flesh, in a meltdown of genetics from which no soul, however brave, might survive. While all the while, the nostrils inhaled themselves and the wound of mouth cried Havoc, silently, and exhaled. In that instant I saw Roy jerk forward, then back, as if he had been shot, and the swift, involuntary motion of his hand to his pocket. Then, the strange ruined man was gone, the screen up in place, as Roy’s hand came out of his pocket with his small sketch pad and pencil and, still staring at the screen as if he could x-ray through it, never looking at his hand as it drew, Roy outlined the terror, the nightmare, the raw flesh of destruction and despair. Like Dor?, long before him, Roy had the swift exactitude, in his traveling, running, inking, sketching fingers, that required only a glance around at London crowds and then the turned faucet, the upside-down glass and funnel of memory, which spurted out his fingernails and flashed from his pencil as every eye, every nostril, every mouth, every jaw, every face, was printed out fresh and complete as from a stamped press. In ten seconds, Roy’s hand, like a spider plunged in boiling water, danced and scurried in epilepsies of remembrance and sketch. One moment, the pad was empty. The next, the Beast, not all of him, no, but most, was there! “Damn!” murmured Roy, and threw down his pencil. I looked at the Oriental screen and then down at the swift portrait. What lay there was close to being a half-positive, half-negative scrawl of a horror briefly glimpsed. I could not take my eyes away from Roy’s sketch, now that the Beast was hidden and the ma?tre d’ was taking orders from behind the screen. “Almost,” whispered Roy. “But not quite. Our search is over, junior.” “No.” “Yes.” For some reason I scrambled to my feet. “Goodnight.” “Where you going?” Roy was stunned. “Home.” “How you going to get there? Spend an hour on the bus? Sit down.” Roy’s hand ran across the pad. “Stop that,” I said. I might as well have fired off a gun in his face. “After weeks of waiting? Like hell. What’s got into you?” “I’m going to throw up.” “Me, too. You think I like this?” He thought about it. “Yeah. I’ll be sick, but this first.” He added more nightmare and underlined the terror. “Well?” “Now I’m really scared.” “Think he’s going to come out from behind the screen and get you?” “Yes!” “Sit down and eat your salad. You know how Hitchcock says, when he finishes having the first artist draw the setups for the scenes, the film is finished? Our film is done. This finishes it. It’s in the can.” Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/rey-bredberi/a-graveyard-for-lunatics/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.