“Coward, crap!” He banged down the phone. “Horse handler!”
“Horse what?”
“That’s all I’ve been all week. Waiting for you to be shoved up a chimney or dropped downstairs. A horse handler. That’s the guy who held the reins when General Grant fell off his horse. Gumshoeing obits and reading old news files is like laying a mermaid. Time to go help my coroner.”
“Did you know the word ‘coroner’ only means ‘for the crown’? A guy who did things for the king or queen? Corona. Coronet. Crown. Coroner.”
“Hot damn! I gotta call the wire services. Gimme that phone!”
The phone rang. We both jumped.
“Don’t answer,” said Crumley.
I let it ring eight times and then ten. I couldn’t stand it. I picked it up.
At first there was only the sound of an electric surf somewhere off across town, where unseen rains touched implacable tombstones. And then …
I heard heavy breathing. It was like a great dark yeast, miles away, sucking air.
“Hello!” I said.
Silence.
At last this thick, fermenting voice, a voice lodged inside nightmare flesh, said: “Why aren’t you here?”
“No one told me,” I said, my voice trembling.
There was the heavy underwater breathing like someone drowning in his own terrible flesh.
“Tonight,”the voice faded. “Seven o’clock. You know where?”
I nodded. Stupid! I nodded!
“Well …”drawled the lost deep voice, “it’s been a long time, a long way … around … so …”The voice mourned. “Before I quit forever, we must, oh we must … talk …. ”
The voice sucked air and was gone.
I sat gripping the phone, eyes tight.
“What the hell was that?” said Crumley, behind me.
“I didn’t call him,” I felt my mouth move. “He called me!”
“Gimme that!”
Crumley dialed.
“About that sick leave …” he said.
70
The studio was shut stone-cold, stripped down dark and dead.
For the first time in thirty-five years, there was only one guard at the gate. There were no lights in any of the buildings. There were only a few lonely lights at the alley intersections leading toward Notre Dame, if it was still there, past Calvary, which was gone forever, and leading toward the graveyard wall.
Dear Jesus, I thought, my two cities. But now, both dark, both cold, no difference between. Side by side, twin cities, one ruled by grass and cold marble, the other, here, run by a man as dark, as ruthless, as scornful as Death himself. Holding dominion over mayors and sheriffs, police and their night dogs, and telephone networks to the banking East.
I would be the only warm and moving thing on my way, afraid, from one city of the dead to the other.
I touched the gate.
“For God’s sake,” said Crumley, behind me, “don’t!”
“I’ve got to,” I said. “Now the Beast knows where everyone is. He could come smash your place, or Constance’s, or Henry’s. Now, I don’t think he will. Someone’s made the final trackdown for him. And there’s no way to stop him, is there? No proof. No law to arrest. No court to listen. And no jail to accept. But I don’t want to be trashed in the street, or hammered in my bed. God, Crumley, I’d hate the waiting and waiting. And anyway, you should have heard his voice. I don’t think he’s going anywhere except dead. Something awful has caught up with him and he needs to talk.”
“Talk!” Crumley shouted. “Like: hold still while I bash you!?”
“Talk,” I said.
I stood inside the gate, staring at the long street ahead.
The Stations of the Cross:
The wall I had run from on All Hallows Eve.
Green Town, where Roy and I had truly lived.
Stage 13, where the Beast was modeled and destroyed.
The carpenters’ shop, where the coffin was hid to be burned.
Maggie Botwin’s, where Arbuthnot’s shadows touched the wall.
The commissary, where the cinema apostles broke stale bread and drank J. C.’s wine.
Calvary Hill, vanished, and the stars wheeling over, and Christ long since gone to a second tomb, and no possible miracle of fish.
“To hell with that.” Crumley moved behind me. “I’m coming with.”
I shook my head. “No. You want to wait around for weeks or months, trying to find the Beast? He’d hide from you. He’s open to me now, maybe to tell all about the people who have disappeared. You going to get permits to open a hundred graves across the wall? You think the city will hand you a spade to dig for J. C., Clarence, Groc, Doc Phillips?! We’ll never see them again unless the Beast shows us. So go wait by the front gate of the graveyard. Circle the block eight or ten times. One exit or another, I’ll probably come screaming out, or just walking.”
Crumley’s voice was bleak. “Okay. Get yourself killed!” he sighed. “Naw. Damn. Here.”
“A gun?” I cried. “I’m afraid of guns!”
“Take it. Put the pistol in one pocket, bullets in the other.”
“No!”
“Take it!” Crumley shoved.
I took.
“Come back in one piece!”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
I stepped inside. The studio took my weight. I felt it sink in the night. At any moment, all the last buildings, gunshot like elephants, would fall to their knees, carrion for dogs, and bones for night birds.
I went down the street, hoping Crumley would call me back. Silence.
At the third alley, I stopped. I wanted to glance aside toward Green Town, Illinois. I did not. If the steam shovels had demolished and the termites eaten its cupolas, bay windows, toy attics, and wine cellars, I refused to see.
At the administration building a single small outside light glowed.
The door was unlocked.
I took a deep breath and entered.
Fool. Idiot. Stupid. Jerk.
I muttered the litany as I climbed up.
I tried the doorknob. The door was locked.
“Thank God!” I was about to run when—
The tumblers clicked.
The office door drifted open.
The pistol, I thought. And felt for the weapon in one pocket, the bullets in the other.
I half stepped in.
The office was illuminated only by a light over a painting on the far west wall. I moved across the floor, quietly.
There were all the empty sofas, empty chairs, and the big empty desk with only a telephone on it.
And the big chair, which was not empty.
I could hear his breathing, long and slow and heavy, like that of some great animal in the dark.
Dimly I made out the massive shape of the man lodged in that chair.
I stumbled over a chair. The shock almost stopped my heart.
I peered at the shape across the room and saw nothing. The head was down, the face obscured, the big arms and pawlike hands stretched out to lean against the desk. A sigh. In-breath, out-breath.
The head and the face of the Beast rose up into the light.
The eyes glared at me.
He shifted like a great dark yeast settling back.
The massive chair groaned with the shape’s turning.
I reached toward the light switch.
The wound-that-was-a-mouth peeled wide.
“No!” The vast shadow moved a long arm.
I heard the phone dial touched once, twice. A hum, click. I worked the switch. No light. The locks in the door sprang in place.
Silence. And then:
There was a great suction of breath, a great exhalation: “You came … for the job?”
The what?! I thought.
The huge shadow leaned across the dark. I was stared at, but saw no eyes.
“You’ve come,” gasped the voice, “to run the studio?”
Me! I thought. And the voice
sounded syllable by syllable:
“—No one now is right for the job. A world to own. All in a few acres. Once there were orange trees, lemon trees, cattle. The cattle are still here. But no matter. It’s yours. I give it to you—”
Madness.
“Come see what you’ll own!” His long arm gestured. He touched an unseen dial. The mirror behind the desk slid wide on a subterranean wind and a tunnel leading down into the vaults.
“This way!” whispered the voice.
The shape elongated, turning. The chair swiveled and squealed and suddenly there was no shadow in or behind the chair. The desk lay as empty as the decks of a great ship. The uneasy mirror drifted to shut. I jumped forward, afraid that when it slammed the dim lights would extinguish and I would be drowned by the dark air.
The mirror slid. My face, panicked, shone in its glass.
“I can’t follow!” I cried. “I’m afraid!”
The mirror froze.
“Last week, yes, you should have been,” he whispered. “Tonight? Pick a tomb. It’s mine.”
And his voice now seemed the voice of my father, melting in his sickbed, wishing the gift of death but taking months to die.
“Step through,” the voice said quietly.
My God, I thought, I know this from when I was six. The phantom beckoning from behind the glass. The singer, the woman, curious at his soft voice, daring to listen and touch the mirror, and his hand appearing to lead her down to dungeons and a funeral gondola on a black canal with Death at the steering pole. The mirror, the whisper, and the opera house empty and the singing at an end.
“I can’t move,” I said. It was true. “I’m afraid.” My mouth filled with dust. “You died long ago …. ”
Behind the glass, his silhouette nodded. “Not easy, being dead, but alive under the film vaults, off through the graves. Keeping the number of people who really knew small, paying them well, killing them when they failed. Death in the afternoon on Stage 13. Or Death on a sleepless night beyond the wall. Or in this office where I often slept in the big chair. Now …”
The mirror trembled; with his breath or with his hand, I could not say. Pulses jumped in my ears. My voice echoed off the glass, a boy’s voice: “Can’t we talk here?”
Again the melancholy half-sighed laugh. “No. The grand tour. You must know everything if you’re going to take my place.”
“I don’t want it! Whoever said?”
“I said. I say. Listen, I’m good as dead.”
A damp wind blew, smelling of nitrate from the ancient films and raw earth from the tombs.
The mirror slid open again. Footsteps moved off quietly.
I stared through into the tunnel half lit by mere firefly ceiling lights.
The Beast’s massive shadow drifted on the incline going down, as he turned.
He gazed at me steadily out of his incredibly wild, incredibly sad eyes.
He nodded down the incline at darkness. “Well, if you can’t walk, then run,” he murmured.
“From what?”
The mouth munched wetly on itself and at last pronounced it: “Me! I’ve run all my life! You think I can’t follow? God! Pretend! Pretend I’m still strong, that I still have power. That I can kill you. Act afraid!”
“I am!”
“Then run! God damn you!”
He raised one fist to knock shadows off the walls.
I ran.
He followed.
71
It was a dreadful pretend pursuit, through the vaults where all the film reels lay, toward the stone crypts where all the stars from those films hid, and under the wall and through the wall, and suddenly it was behind, and I was ricocheted through catacombs with the Beast flooding his flesh at my heels toward the tomb where J. C. Arbuthnot had never lain.
And I knew, running, it was no tour, sweet Jesus, but a destination. I was not being pursued but herded. To what?
The bottom of the vault where Crumley and blind Henry and I had stood a thousand years ago. I jolted to a halt.
The sarcophagus platform steps waited, empty, in place.
Behind me I felt the dark tunnel churn with footfalls and the fire bellows roar of pursuit.
I jumped on the steps, reaching somehow to climb. Slipping, crying insipid prayers, I groaned to the top, cried out with relief, and shouted myself out of the sarcophagus, onto the floor.
I hit the tomb door. It burst wide. I fell out into the graveyard and stared wildly along through the stones at the boulevard, miles off and empty.
“Crumley!” I yelled.
There was no traffic, no cars parked.
“Oh, God,” I mourned. “Crumley! Where?”
Behind me there was a riot of feet clubbing the tomb entry. I whirled.
The Beast stepped into the doorway.
He was framed in moonlight. He stood like a mortuary statue reared to celebrate himself, under his carved name. For one moment he seemed like the ghost of some English lord posed on the sill of his ancient country gatehouse, primed to be trapped on film and immersed in darkroom acid waters to rise phantom-like as the film developed in mists, one hand on the door hinge to his right, the other upraised as if to hurl Doom across the cold marble gameyard. Above the cold marble door I once again saw:
ARBUTHNOT.
I must have half cried aloud that name.
At that he fell forward as if someone had fired a starter’s gun. His cry spun me to flounder toward the gate. I caromed off a dozen gravestones, scattered floral displays, and ran, yelling, on a double track. Half of me saw this as manhunt, the other as Keystone farce. One image was broken floodgate tides lapping a lone runner. The other was elephants stampeding Charlie Chase. With no choosing between maniac laughters and despairs, I made it down brick paths between graves to find:
No Crumley. An empty boulevard.
Across the street, St. Sebastian’s was open, lights on, the doors wide.
J. C., I thought, if only you were there!
I leaped. Tasting blood, I ran.
I heard the great clumsy thud of shoes behind, and the gasping breath of a half-blind terrible man.
I reached the door.
Sanctuary!
But the church was empty.
Candles were lit on the golden altar. Candles burned in the grottos where Christ hid so as to give Mary center stage amidst the bright drippings of love.
The doors to the confessional stood wide.
There was a thunder of footfalls.
I leaped into the confessional, slammed the door, and sank, hideously shivering, in the dark well.
The thunder of footsteps—
Paused like a storm. Like a storm, they grew calm and then, with a weather change, approached.
I felt the Beast paw at the door. It was not locked.
But I was the priest, was I not?
Whoever was locked in here was most holy, to be reckoned with, spoken to, and stay … safe?
I heard this ungodly groan of exhaustion and self-doom from outside. I shuddered. I broke my teeth with prayer for the merest things. One more hour with Peg. To leave a child. Trifles. Things larger than midnight, or as great as some possible dawn …
The sweet smell of life must have escaped my nostrils. It came forth with my prayers.
There was a last groan and—
God!
The Beast stumbled into the other half of the booth!
His cramming and forcing his lost rage in shuddered me more, as if I feared that his terrible breath might burn through the lattice to blind me. But his huge bulk plunged to settle like a great furnace bellows sighing down on its creases and valves.
And I knew the strange pursuit was over, and a final time begun.
I heard the Beast suck breath once, twice, three times, as if daring himself to speak, or fearful to speak, still wanting to kill, but tired, oh God, at last tired.
And at last he whispered an immense whisper, like a vast sigh down a chimney: “Bless me, father, for I have
sinned!”
Lord, I thought, dear God, what did priests say in all those old films half a lifetime ago? From stupid remembrance, what!? I had this mad desire to fling myself out to sprint down the middle of nothing with the Beast in fresh flight.
But as I seized my breath, he let forth a dreadful whisper:
“Bless me, father—”
“I’m not your father,” I cried.
“No,” whispered the Beast.
And after a lost moment, added: “You’re my son.”
I gave a jump and listened to my heart knock down a cold tunnel into darkness.
The Beast stirred.
“Who …” pause “. . . do you think …” pause “. . . hired you?”
Dear God!
“I,” said the lost face behind the grille, “did.”
Not Groc? I thought.
And the Beast began to tell a terrible rosary of dark beads, and I could not but slowly, slowly sink back and back until my head rested on the paneling of the booth, and I turned my head and murmured:
“Why didn’t you kill me?”
“That was never my wish. Your friend stumbled on me. He made that bust. Madness. I would have killed him, yes, but he killed himself first. Or made it look as if. He’s alive, waiting for you …. ”
Where!? I wanted to shout. Instead I said: “Why have you saved me?”
“Why … One day I want my story told. You were the only one,” he paused, “. . . who could tell it, and tell it … right. There is nothing in the studio I do not know, or out in the world I do not know. I read all night long and slept in snatches and read more and then whispered through the wall, oh, not so many weeks ago: your name. He’ll do, I said. Get him. That is my historian. And my son.
“And it was so.”
His whisper, behind a mirror, had given me nomination.
And the whisper was here now, not fourteen inches off, and his breath pulsing the air like a bellows, between.
“Sweet Jerusalem’s bone-white hills,” said the pale voice. “I hired and fired, all and everyone, for thousands of days. Who else could do it? What else had I to do but be ugly and want to die. It was my work that kept me alive. Hiring you was a strange sustenance.”
Should I thank him? I wondered.
Soon, he almost whispered. Then:
“I ran the place at first, secondhand, behind the mirror. I knocked Leiber’s eardrums with my voice, predictions on markets, script editings, scanned in the tombs, and delivered to his cheek when he leaned against the wall at two A.M. What meetings! What twins! Ego and super-ego. The horn and the player of the horn. The small dancer. But I the choreographer under glass. My God, we shared his office. He making faces and pretending great decisions, I waiting each night to step forth from behind to sit in the chair by the empty desk with the single phone and dictate to Leiber, my secretary.”