“I know,” I whispered.
“How could you!?”
“I guessed.”
“Guessed!? What? The whole crazy, damned thing? Halloween? Twenty, oh God, twenty years ago?!”
He breathed heavily, waiting.
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Well, well.” The Beast remembered. “Prohibition over but we ran the booze in from Santa Monica, through the tomb, down the tunnel, for the hell of it, laughing. Half of the party on the graves, half in the film vaults, lord! Five sound stages full of yelling men, girls, stars, extras. I only half remember that midnight. You ever think how many people, crazy, make love in graveyards? The silence! Think!”
I waited while he moved remembrance back in years. He said:
“He caught us. Christ, there among the tombstones. Graveyard keeper’s hammer, beat my head, my cheek, my eye! Beating! He ran with her. I ran screaming after. They drove. I drove, God. And the smashup and, and—”
He sighed, waiting to slow his heart.
“I remember Doc carrying me to the church, first! and the priest in a frenzy of fear, and then to the mortuary. Get well in tombs! Recover in graves! And the next morgue slab over, damned dead, Sloane! And Groc! trying to fix what couldn’t be fixed. Poor bastard Groc. Lenin was luckier! My mouth moving to say cover up, do it! Late. Empty streets. Lie! Say I’m dead! My God, my face! No way to fix! My face! So say I’m dead! Emily? What? Mad? Hide Emily! Cover up. Money, of course. Lots of money. Make it look real. Who’ll guess? And a shut-coffin funeral, with me nearby, all but dead in the mortuary, the Doc nursing me for weeks! My God, what madness. Me feeling my face, my head, able to yell ‘Fritz’ when I saw him. ‘You! Take charge!’ Fritz did! A maniac-at-work. Sloane, dead, get him out! Emily, poor, lost, mad. Constance! And Constance walked her off to the Elysian Fields. What they called that row of drunk/mad/dope convalescent sanitariums, where they never convalesced and weren’t sanitary, but there they went, Emily going nowhere and me raving. Fritz said shut up, and them crying, all looking at my face as if it was something from a meat grinder. I could see my horror in their eyes. Their look said, dying, and I said, like hell! and there was Doc the butcher and Groc the beautician, trying at repairs, and J. C. and Fritz at last said, ‘That’s it! I’ve done all I can do. Call a priest!’ ‘Like hell!’ I cried. ‘Hold a funeral, but I won’t be there!’ And all their faces turned white! They knew I meant it. From the mouth, this ruin: a crazed plan. And they thought: If he dies, we die. For you see, Christ Almighty, for us it was the greatest film year in history. Mid-Depression, but we had made two hundred million and then three hundred million, more than all the other film studios combined. They couldn’t let me die. I was hitting a thousand over the fence. Where would they find a replacement? Out of all the fools and jerks, idiots and hangers-on? You save him, I’ll fix him! Groc told the butcher, Doc Phillips. They midwifed me, rebirthed me away from the sun, forever!”
Listening, I remembered J. C.’s words: “The Beast? I was there the night he was born!”
“So Doc saved and Groc sewed. Oh, God! but the faster he mended, the faster I burst the seams, while they all thought, If he dies, we sink. And me now wanting to die with all my heart! But lying there under all the tomato paste and torn bone, the old groin itch for power won. And after some hours of falling toward death and climbing back, afraid to ever touch my face again, I said: ‘Announce a wake. Pronounce me gone! Hide me here, get me well! Keep the tunnel open, bury Sloane! Bury me with him, in absentia, with headlines. Monday morning, God, Monday I report for work. What? And every Monday from now on and on. And no one to know! I don’t want to be seen. A murderer with a smashed face? And fix an office and a desk and a chair and slowly, slowly, over the months, I’ll come closer, while someone sits there, alone, and listens to the mirror and, Manny, where’s Manny? You listen! I’ll talk through the beams, whisper through the cracks, shadow the mirror, and you open your mouth and I talk through your ear, through your head, and out. You got that? Got it! Call the papers. Sign the death certificates. Box Sloane. Put me in a mortuary room, rest, sleep, getting well. Manny. Yes? Fix the office. Go!’
“And in the days before my funeral, I shouted and my small team listened and got quiet and nodded and said yes.
“So it was Doc to save my life, Groc to fix a face that could never be fixed, Manny to run the studio, but with my orders, and J. C. simply because he was there that night and was the first to find me bleeding, and the one who rearranged the cars, made the crash look accidental. Only four people knew. Fritz? Constance? In charge of cleaning up, but we never told them I survived. The other four got five thousand a week forever. Think! Five thousand a week, in 1934! The average wage then was fifteen lousy bucks. So Doc and Manny and J. C. and Groc were rich, yes? Money, by God, does buy everything! Years of silence! So it was all great, all fine. The films, the studio, from then on, growing profits, and me hidden away, and no one to know. The stock prices up, and the New York people happy, until—”
He paused and gave a great moan of despair.
“Someone discovered something.”
Silence.
“Who?” I dared to ask in the dark.
“Doc. Good old surgeon general Doc. My time was up.”
Another pause and then:
“Cancer.”
I waited and let him speak when he could gather his strength.
“Cancer. Which of the others Doc told, who can say. One of them wanted to run. Grab the cash and vanish. So the scares began. Frighten everyone with the truth. Then—blackmail— then ask for money.”
Groc, I thought, but said: “Do you know who it was?”
And then I asked: “Who put the body up on the ladder. Who wrote the letter so I came to the graveyard? Who told Clarence to wait outside the Brown Derby so he could see you? Who inspired Roy Holdstrom to make the bust of the possible monster for an impossible film? Who gave J. C. overdoses of whiskey hoping he would run wild and tell everything? Who?”
With each question, the huge mass beyond the thin panel moved, trembled, took in great soughs of air, sighed it out, as if each breath was a hope for survival, each exhalation an admission of despair.
There was a silence and then he said: “When it all began, with the body on the wall, I suspected everyone. It got worse. I ran mad. Doc, I thought, no. A coward, and too obvious. He had, after all, found and told me my illness. J. C.? Worse than a coward, hiding in a bottle every night. Not J. C.”
“Where’s J. C. tonight?”
“Buried somewhere. I would have buried him myself. I set out to bury everyone, one by one, get rid of anyone who tried to hurt me. I would have smothered J. C. as I did Clarence. Killed him as I would have killed Roy, who, I thought, killed himself. Roy was alive. He killed and buried J. C.”
“No!” I cried.
“There are lots of tombs. Roy hid him somewhere. Poor sad Jesus.”
“Not Roy!”
“Why not? We’d all kill if we had the chance. Murder is all we dream, but never do. It’s late, let me finish. Doc, J. C., Manny, I thought, which would try to hit me and run? Manny Leiber? No. A phonograph record I could play any time and hear the same tune. Well then, at last—Groc! He hired Roy, but I thought to bring you in for the grand search. How was I to know the final search was for me!? That I would wind up in clay! I went, oh, quite insane. But now—it’s over.
“Running, shouting, mad, I suddenly thought: too much. Tired, so damned tired from too many years, too much blood, too much death, and all of it gone and cancer now. And then I met the other Beast in the tunnel near the tombs.”
“The other Beast?”
“Yes,” he sighed, his head touching the side of the confessional. “Go get him. You didn’t think there was just me, did you?”
“Another—?”
“Your friend. The one whose bust I destroyed when I saw that he had caught my face, yes. The one whose cities I trampled underfoot. The one whose dinosaurs I degutted … H
e’s running the studio!”
“That … that’s not possible!”
“Idiot! Fooled us. Fooled you. When he saw what I had done to his beasts, his cities, the clay bust, he went mad. Made himself up as the walking horror. The terrible mask—”
“Mask—” My mouth jerked.
I had guessed but refused the guess. I saw the film face of the Beast on Crumley’s wall. Not a clay bust animated, frame by frame, but—Roy, made up to resemble destruction’s father, chaos’s child, annihilation’s true son.
Roy on film, acting out the Beast.
“Your friend,” gasped the man behind the grille, over and over again. “God, what an act. The voice: mine. Spoke through the wall behind Manny’s desk and—”
“Got me rehired,” I heard myself say. “Got himself rehired!?”
“Yes! How rich! Give him the Oscar!”
My hand raked the grille.
“How did he—”
“Take over? Where was the seam, the crease, the boundary? Met him under the wall, between the vaults face to face! Oh, damn that bright son of a bitch. I hadn’t seen a mirror in years. Then, there I was, standing in my own path! Grinning! I struck to smash that mirror! I thought: illusion. A ghost of light in a glass. I yelled and hit, off balance. The mirror lifted its fist and struck. I woke in the tombs raving, behind bars, put in some crypt and him there, watching. ‘Who are you?!’ I shouted. But I knew. Sweet vengeance! I had killed his creatures, smashed his cities, tried to smash him. Now, sweet triumph! He ran yelling back at me: ‘Listen. I’m off to rehire myself ! And, yes! give myself a raise!’ He came twice a day with chocolate to feed a dying man. Until he saw I was truly dying and the fun was lost for him as well as me. Maybe he found that power doesn’t stay power, stay great and good and fun. Maybe it scared, maybe it bored him. A few hours ago, he unlocked my bars and led me up for that call to you. He left me to wait for you. He didn’t have to tell me what to do. He just pointed down the tunnel toward the church. Confession time, he said. Brilliant. Now he’s waiting for you in a final place.”
“Where?”
“Damn it to hell! Where’s the one and only place for such as me, and such as he has become?”
“Ah, yes,” I nodded, my eyes watering. “I’ve been there.”
The Beast slumped in the confessional.
“That’s it,” he sighed. “This last week I hurt many people. I killed some, and your friend the rest. Ask him. He went as mad as I. When this is over, when the police ask, put all the blame on me. No need for two Beasts when one should do. Yes?”
I was silent.
“Speak up!”
“Yes.”
“Good. When he saw I was dying, really dying in the tomb and that he was dying from the cancer I had given him, and the game wasn’t worth the candle, he had the decency to let me go. The studio he had run, I had run, had come to a dead jolting halt. We both had to set it in motion again. Now, next week, turn all the wheels. Start back on The Dead Ride Fast.”
“No,” I murmured.
“Damn it to hell! With my last breath I’ll come choke the life out of you. It will be done. Say it!”
“It,” I said at last, “will be done.”
“And now the last thing. What I said before. The offer. It’s yours if you want it. The studio.”
“Don’t—”
“There’s no one else! Don’t turn it down so quickly. Most men would die to inherit—”
“Die, is right. I’d be dead in a month, a wreck, drinking, and dead.”
“You don’t understand. You’re the only son I have.”
“I’m sorry that’s true. Why me?”
“Because you’re a real honest-to-God idiot savant. A real fool, not a fake one. Someone who talks too much but then you look at the words and they’re right. You can’t help yourself. The good things come out of your hand into words.”
“Yes, but I haven’t leaned against the mirror and listened to you for years, like Manny.”
“He talks but his words don’t mean anything.”
“But he’s learned. He must know how to run things by now. Let me work for him!”
“Last chance? Last offer?” His voice was fading.
“And give up my wife and my writing and my life?”
“Ah,” whispered the voice. And a final “Yes …” Adding: “Now, at last. Bless me, father, for I have truly sinned.”
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. And forgive. That’s a priest’s job. Forgive me and bless me. In a moment it’ll be too late. Don’t send me to everlasting hell!”
I shut my eyes and said, “I bless you.” And then I said, “I forgive you, though, God, I don’t understand you!”
“Who ever did?” he gasped. “Not me.” His head slumped against the panel. “Much thanks.” His eyes closed in outer space where there is no sound. I added my own track. The sound of a mighty gate closing on oblivion, tomb doors banging shut.
“I forgive you!” I shouted at the man’s terrible mask.
“I forgive you …” my voice echoed back from high in the empty church.
The street was empty.
Crumley, I thought, where are you?
I ran.
72
There was a last place I had to go.
I climbed the dark interior of Notre Dame.
I saw the shape fixed out near the top rim of the left tower, with a gargoyle not too far away, its bestial chin resting on its horny paws, gazing out across a Paris that never was.
I edged along, took a deep breath, and called: “You … ?” and had to stop.
The figure seated there, its face in shadow, did not move.
I took another breath and said, “Here.”
The figure straightened. The head, the face, came up into the dim glow of the city.
I took a last breath and called quietly, “Roy?”
The Beast looked back at me, a perfect duplicate of the one that had slumped in the confessional a few minutes ago.
The terrible grimace fixed me, the terrible raving eyes froze my blood. The terrible wound of mouth peeled and slithered, insucked and garbled a single word: “. . . Yesssssss.”
“It’s all over,” I said, my voice breaking. “My God, Roy. Come down from here.”
The Beast nodded. Its right hand rose up to tear at the face and peel away the wax, the makeup, the mask of horror and stunned amaze. He worked at his nightmare face with a clawing downpull of fingers and thumb. From beneath the shambles, my old high school chum looked back at me.
“Did I look like him?” asked Roy.
“Oh, God, Roy.” I could hardly see him for the tears in my eyes. “Yes!”
“Yeah,” muttered Roy. “I kind of thought so.”
“God, Roy,” I gasped, “take it all off! I have this terrible feeling if you leave it, it’ll stick and I’ll never see you again!”
Roy’s right hand impulsively jerked up to rake his horrid cheek.
“Funny,” he whispered, “I think the same.”
“How did you come to fix your face that way?”
“Two confessions? You heard one. Want another?”
“Yes.”
“Have you become a priest, then?”
“I’m starting to feel like one. You want to be excommunicated?”
“From what?”
“Our friendship?”
His eyes quickened to watch me.
“You wouldn’t!”
“I might.”
“Friends don’t blackmail friends about their friendship.”
“All the more reason to talk. Start.”
Inside his half-torn-away mask, very quietly, Roy said:
“It was my animals that did it. No one had ever touched my darlings, my dears, ever. I gave my life to imagine them, shape them. They were perfect. I was God. What else did I have? Did I ever date the class girl gymnast and cheerleader? Did I have any women in all those years? Like hell. I went to bed with my brontosau
rus. I flew nights with my pterodactyls. So imagine how I felt when someone slaughtered my innocents, destroyed my world, killed my ancient bedmates. I wasn’t just mad. I was insane.”
Roy paused behind his dreadful flesh. Then he said:
“Hell, it was all so simple. It fell together almost from the start, but I didn’t say. The night I followed the Beast into the graveyard? I was so in love with the damned monster. I was afraid you’d spoil the fun. Fun!? And people dead because of it! So when I saw him go in his own tomb and not come out, I didn’t say. I knew you’d try to put me off, and I had to have that face, my God, that great terrible mask, for our epic masterpiece! So I shut my trap and made the clay bust. Then? Almost got you fired. Me? Off the lot! Then, my dinosaurs stomped on, my sets trampled, my hideous Beast sculpture hammered to bits. I went berserk. But then it hit me: there was only one person who could have destroyed it. Not Manny, nor anyone we knew. The Beast himself! The guy from the Brown Derby. But how would he know about my clay bust? Someone tell him? No! I thought back to the night I followed him into the graveyard, near the studio. Lord, it had to be! Into the tomb and somehow under the wall, into the studio late nights where, by God, he saw my clay replica of his face and exploded.
“I did a lot of crazy planning, dear God, right then. I knew that if the Beast found me I was dead. So, I ‘killed’ myself! Threw ’im off the scent. With me supposedly dead, I knew I could search, find the Beast, get revenge! So I hung myself in effigy. You found it. Then they found and burned it, and that night I went over the wall. You know what I found. I tried the tomb in the graveyard, found the door unlocked and went in and down and listened behind the mirror in Manny’s office! I was stunned! It was all so beautiful. The Beast was running the studio, unseen. So don’t kill the son of a bitch, but wait and grab his power. Not kill the Beast but be the Beast, live the Beast! And then, my God, run twenty-seven, twenty-eight countries, the world. And at the proper time, of course, come out, be reborn, say I had wandered off in amnesia or some damn-fool story, I don’t know, I would’ve thought of something—and the Beast was running down, anyway. I could see that. Dying on his feet. I hid and watched and listened and then poleaxed him in the film vaults under the studio, halfway to the tombs. The makeup! When he saw me standing there in the vaults he was so damned shocked I had my chance to knock him down, lock him in the vaults. Then I went up to test the old power, my voice behind the glass. I had heard the Beast talking in and outside the Brown Derby, and then in the tunnel and behind the office wall. I whispered, I muttered, and, hell! The Dead Ride Fast was back on schedule. You and me rehired! I got ready to rip off the makeup and come back out as me, when a thing happened.”