“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 Doré, 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 maître 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.”
“How come I feel ashamed?” I sat back down, heavily, and would not look at Roy’s pad.
“Because you’re not him and he’s not you. Thank God and count his mercies. What if I tear this up and we leave? How many more months do we search to find something as sad, as terrible as this?”
I swallowed hard. “Never.”
“Right. This night won’t come again. Now just sit still, eat, and wait.”
“I’ll wait but I won’t be still and I’m going to be awfully sad.”
Roy looked at me straight. “See these eyes?”
“Yes.”
“What do you see?”
“Tears.”
“Which proves I care as much as you do, but can’t help myself. Simmer down. Drink.”
He poured more champagne.
“It tastes awful,” I said.
Roy drew and the face was there. It was a face that was in an entire stage of collapse; as if the occupant, the mind behind the apparition, had run and swum a thousand miles and was now sinking to die. If there was bone behind the flesh, it had been shattered and reassembled in insect forms, alien facades masked in ruin. If there was a mind behind the bone, lurking in caverns of retina and tympanum, it signaled madly from out the swiveling eyes.
And yet, once the food was placed and the champagne poured, Roy and I sat riven by the bursts of incredible laughter that ricocheted off the walls behind the screen. At first the woman did not respond but then as the hour passed, her quiet amusement grew almost to match his. But his laughter at last sounded true as a bell, while hers risked hysteria.
I drank heavily to keep myself in place. When the champagne bottle was emptied, the maître d’ brought another and waved my hand away as I groped for my empty wallet.
“Groc,” he said, but Roy did not hear. He was filling page after page of his pad, and as the time passed and the laughter rose, his sketches became more grotesque, as if the shouts of pure enjoyment drove his remembrance and filled a page. But at last the laughter quieted. There was a soft bustle of preparatory leavetaking behind the screen and the maître d’ stood at our table.
“Please,” he murmured. “We must close. Would you mind?” He nodded toward the door and stood aside, pulling the table out. Roy stood up. He looked at the Oriental screen.
“No,” said the maître d’. “The proper order is you depart first.”
I was halfway to the door and had to turn back. “Roy?” I said. And Roy followed, backing off as if departing from a theatre and the play not over.
As Roy and I came out, a taxicab was pulling up to the curb. The street was empty save for a medium-tall man in a long camel’s-hair coat standing with his back to us, close to the curb. The portfolio tucked under his left arm gave him away. I had seen that portfolio day after day in the summers of my boyhood and young manhood in front of Columbia studios, Paramount, MGM, and all the rest. It had been filled with beautifully drawn portraits of Garbo, Colman, Gable, Harlow, and at one time or another a thousand others, all signed in purple ink. All kept by a mad autograph collector now grown old. I hesitated, then stopped.
“Clarence?” I called.
The man shrank, as if he didn’t wish to be recognized.
“It is you, isn’t it?” I called, q
uietly, and touched his elbow. “Clarence, right?”
The man flinched, but at last turned his head. The face was the same, with gray lines and bone paleness to make it older.
“What?” he said.
“Remember me?” I said. “Sure you do. I used to run around Hollywood with those three crazy sisters. One of them made those flowered Hawaiian shirts Bing Crosby wore in his early films. I was in front of Maximus every noon in the summer of 1934. You were there. How could I forget. You had the only sketch of Garbo I ever saw, signed—”
My litany only made things worse. With every word, Clarence shrank inside his big camel’s-hair coat.
He nodded nervously. He glanced at the door of the Brown Derby nervously.
“What’re you doing here so late?” I said. “Everyone’s gone home.”
“You never know. I got nothing else to do—” said Clarence.
You never know. Douglas Fairbanks, alive again, might stroll along the boulevard, much better than Brando. Fred Allen and Jack Benny and George Burns might come around the corner from the Legion Stadium, where the boxing matches were just over, and the crowds happy, just like the old times, which were lovelier than tonight or all the nights to come.
I got nothing else to do. Yes.
“Yeah,” I said. “You never know. Don’t you remember me at all? The nut? The super-nut? The Martian?”
Clarence’s eyes jerked around from my brows to my nose to my chin, but not to my eyes.
“N-no,” he said.
“Goodnight,” I said.
“Goodbye,” said Clarence.
Roy led me away to his tin lizzie and we climbed in, Roy impatiently sighing. No sooner in than he grabbed his pad and pencil and waited.
Clarence was still at the curb, to one side of the taxi, when the Brown Derby doors opened and the Beast came out with his Beauty.
It was a fine rare warm night or what happened next might not have happened.
The Beast stood inhaling great draughts of air, obviously full of champagne and forgetfulness. If he knew he had a face out of some old long-lost war, he showed no sign. He held on to his lady’s hands and steered her toward the taxi, babbling and laughing. It was then that I noticed, by the way she walked and looked at nothing, that—
“She’s blind!” I said.
“What?” said Roy.
“She’s blind. She can’t see him. No wonder they’re friends! He takes her out for dinners and never tells her what he’s really like!”
Roy leaned forward and studied the woman.
“My God,” he said, “you’re right. Blind.”
And the man laughing and the woman picking up and imitating the laughter, like a stunned parrot.
At which moment, Clarence, his back turned, having listened to the laughter and the onrush of words, turned slowly to regard the pair. Eyes half shut, he listened again, intently, and then a look of incredible surprise crossed his face. A word exploded from his mouth.
The Beast stopped his laughter.
Clarence took a step forward and said something to the man. The woman stopped laughing, too. Clarence asked something else. Whereupon the Beast closed his hands into fists, cried out, and lifted his arms into the air as if he might pound Clarence, pile-drive him, into the pavement.
Clarence fell to one knee, bleating.
The Beast towered over him, his fists trembling, his body rocking back and forth, in and out of control.
Clarence cried out and the blind woman, reaching out on the air, wondering, said something, and the Beast shut his eyes and let his arms drop. Instantly, Clarence leaped up and ran off in the dark. I almost jumped to go after him, though for what reason I did not know. The next instant, the Beast helped his blind friend into the taxi, and the taxi roared off.
Roy jumped the starter and we roared after.
The taxi turned right at Hollywood Boulevard, and the red light and some pedestrians stopped us. Roy gunned the engine as if to clear a path, cursed, and finally, when the crosswalk was empty, ran the red light.
“Roy!”
“Stop calling my name. Nobody saw us. We can’t lose him! God, I need him! We got to see where he goes! Who he is! There!”
Up ahead, we saw the taxi making a right at Gower. Up ahead, also, Clarence was still running but did not see us as we passed.
His hands were empty. He had dropped and left his portfolio behind outside the Derby. How long before he misses it, I wondered.
“Poor Clarence.”
“Why ‘poor’?” said Roy.
“He’s in this, too. Otherwise, why was he outside the Brown Derby? Coincidence? Hell, no. Someone told him to come. God, now he’s lost all those great portraits. Roy, we got to go back and save them.”
“We,” said Roy, “got to go straight on ahead.”
“I wonder,” I said, “what kind of note Clarence got? What did it say to him?”
“What did what say?” said Roy.
Roy ran another red light at Sunset in order to catch up with the taxi, which was halfway to Santa Monica Boulevard.
“They’re headed for the studio!” said Roy. “No.”
For the taxicab, when at Santa Monica, had turned left past the graveyard.
Until we reached St. Sebastian’s, just about the least-significant Catholic church in L.A. Suddenly, the taxi swung left down a side street just beyond the church.
The taxicab stopped about a hundred yards down the side street. Roy braked and curbed. We saw the Beast take the woman in toward a small white building obscured by night. He was gone only a moment. A door opened and closed somewhere, and the Beast returned to the taxi, which then glided to the next corner, made a swift U-turn and came back at us. Luckily, our lights were out. The taxi flashed by. Roy cursed, banged the ignition, revved the car, made a calamitous U-turn of his own, with me yelling, and we were back at Santa Monica Boulevard, in time to see the taxi pull up in front of St. Sebastian’s and dislodge its passenger, who then fled up the walk into the lit entry of the church, not looking back. The taxi drove away.
Roy glided our car, lights out, into another dark place under a tree. “Roy, what’re you—?”
“Silence!” hissed Roy. “Hunch. Hunch is everything. That guy no more belongs in a church at midnight than I belong in the burlesque chorus—”
Minutes passed. The church lights did not go out.
“Go see,” suggested Roy.
“Go what?”
“Okay, I’ll go!”
Roy was out of the car, shucking his shoes.
“Come back!” I yelled.
But Roy was gone, in his stocking feet. I jumped out, got rid of my shoes, and followed. Roy made it to the church door in ten seconds, me after, to flatten ourselves against an outside wall. We listened. We heard a voice, rising, falling, rising.
The Beast’s voice! Urgently spelling calamities, terrible commitments, dreadful errors, sins darker than the marble sky above and below.
The priest’s voice gave brief and just as urgent answers of forgiveness, predictions of some better life, where Beast, if not reborn as Beauty, might find some small sweet joys through penance.
Whisper, whisper, in the deeps of the night.
I shut my eyes and ached to hear.
Whisper, whisper. Then—I stiffened in disbelief.
Weeping. A wailing that went on and on and might never stop.
The lonely man inside the church, the man with the dreadful face and the lost soul behind it, let his terrible sadness free to shake the confessional, the church, and me. Weeping, sighing, but to weep again.
My eyelids burst with the sound. Then, silence, and—a stir. Footsteps.
We broke and ran.
We reached the car, jumped in.
“For Christ’s sake!” hissed Roy.
Shoving my head down, he crouched. The Beast was out, running alone across the empty street.
When he reached the graveyard gate, he turned. A passing car fixed him as with a theatre’s
spotlight. He froze, waited, then vanished inside the graveyard.
A long way off, inside the church doors, a shadow moved, the candles went out, the doors shut.
Roy and I looked at each other.
“My God,” I said. “What sins could be so huge that someone confesses them this late at night? And the weeping! Did you hear? Do you think—he comes to forgive God, for handing him that face.”
“That face. Yeah, oh, yeah,” said Roy. “I got to know what he’s up to, I can’t lose him!”
And Roy was out of the car again.
“Roy!”
“Don’t you see, dummy?” cried Roy. “He’s our film, our monster! If he gets away?! God!”
And Roy ran across the street.
Fool! I thought. What’s he doing?
But I was afraid to yell so long after midnight. Roy vaulted over the graveyard gate and sank down in shadow like someone drowning. I shot up in my seat so hard I hit my head on the car roof and collapsed, cursing; Roy, dammit. Dammit, Roy.
What if a police car comes now, I thought, and asks me, What you up to? My answer? Waiting for Roy. He’s in the graveyard, be out any second. He will, will he? Sure, just you wait!
I waited. Five minutes. Ten.
And then, incredibly, there came Roy back out, but moving as if he had been electroshocked.
He walked slowly, a sleepwalker, across the street. He didn’t even see his own hand on the car door handle, turning it to let him in. He sat in the front seat of the car, staring over at the graveyard.
“Roy?”
He didn’t hear.
“What’d you see over there, just now?”
He didn’t answer.
“Is he, him, it, coming out?”
Silence.
“Roy!” I hit his elbow. “Speak! What!”
“He,” said Roy.
“Yes?”
“Unbelievable,” said Roy.
“I’d believe.”
“No. Quiet. He’s mine now. And, oh God, what a monster we’ll have, junior.” He turned to look at me at last, his eyes flashlights, the soul burning out of his cheeks and coloring his lips. “Won’t we have a film, pal?”