“Will we?”
“Oh,” he cried, face blazing with revelation. “Yeah!”
“Is that all you got to say? Not what went on in the graveyard, not what you saw? Just, oh yeah?”
“Oh,” said Roy, turning to gaze back across at the graveyard. “Yeah.”
The church lights in the tiled patio went out. The church was dark. The street was dark. The lights on the face of my friend were gone. The graveyard was filled with night shadowing toward dawn.
“Yeah,” whispered Roy.
And drove us toward home.
“I can hardly wait to get to my clay,” he said.
“No!”
Shocked, Roy turned to look at me. Rivers of street light ran over his face. He looked like someone underwater, not to be touched, reached, saved.
“You telling me, positively, I can’t use that face for our film?”
“It’s not just the face. I got this feeling … if you do it, we’re dead. God, Roy, I’m really scared. Someone wrote you to come find him tonight, don’t forget. Someone wanted you to see him. Someone told Clarence to come there tonight, too! Things are running too fast. Pretend we were never at the Brown Derby.”
“How,” asked Roy, “could I possibly do that?”
He drove faster.
The wind ripped in the windows, tore at my hair and my eyelids and my lips.
Shadows ran across Roy’s brow and down his great hawk’s nose and over his triumphant mouth. It seemed like Groc’s mouth, or The Man Who Laughs.
Roy felt me looking at him and said: “Busy hating me?”
“No. Wondering how I could have known you all these years and still not know you.”
Roy lifted his left hand full of the Brown Derby sketches. They flapped and fluttered in the wind outside the window.
“Shall I let go?”
“You know and I know, you got a box-brownie in your head. Let those fly and you got a whole new roll, waiting, behind your left eyeball.”
Roy waved them. “Yeah. The next set will be ten times better.” The pad pages flew off in the night behind us.
“Doesn’t make me feel any better,” I said.
“Does me. The Beast is ours now. We own him.”
“Yeah, who gave him to us? Who sent us to see? Who’s watching us watching him?”
Roy reached out to draw half a terrible face on the moisture inside the window.
“Right now, just my Muse.”
Nothing more was said. We rode in cold silence, all the rest of the way home.
17
The telephone rang at two in the morning.
It was Peg, calling from Connecticut just before dawn.
“Did you ever have a wife, named Peg,” she cried, “left home ten days ago for a teachers’ conference in Hartford? Why haven’t you called?”
“I did. But you weren’t in your room. I left my name. Christ, I wish you were home.”
“Oh, dear me,” she said slowly, syllable by syllable. “I leave town and right off you’re in deep granola. You want mama to fly home?”
“Yes. No. It’s just the usual studio junk.” I hesitated.
“Why are you counting to ten?” she asked.
“God,” I said.
“There’s no escaping Him or me. You been dieting like a good boy? Go drop a penny in one of those scales that print your weight in purple ink, mail it to me. Hey,” she added, “I mean it. You want me to fly home? Tomorrow?”
“I love you, Peg,” I said. “Come home just as you planned.”
“But what if you’re not there when I get there? Is it still Halloween?”
Women and their intuition!
“They’ve held it over for another week.”
“I could tell by your voice. Stay out of graveyards.”
“What made you say that!?”
My heart gave a rabbit jump.
“Did you put flowers on your parents’ graves?”
“I forgot.”
“How could you?”
“Anyway, the graveyard they’re in is a better graveyard.”
“Better than what?”
“Any other, because they’re there.”
“Put a flower for me,” she said. “I love you. Goodbye!”
And she ran down the line in a hum and a quiet roar and was gone.
At five in the morning, with no sun in view, and with the cloud cover from the Pacific in permanent position over my roof, I blinked at the ceiling and arose and found my way, without my glasses, to my typewriter.
I sat in the gloom before dawn and wrote: “RETURN OF THE BEAST.”
But had he ever been away?
Hadn’t he moved ahead of me everywhere in my life, calling me on with whispers?
I typed: “CHAPTER ONE.”
“What is there that is so beautiful about a perfect Beast? Why do boys and men answer to it?
“What is there that runs us in fevers for half a lifetime with Creatures, Grotesques, Monsters, Freaks?
“And now, the mad wish to pursue and trap the most terrible face in the world!”
I took a deep breath, and dialed Roy’s number. His voice was underwater, far away.
I said: “It’s all right. Anything you want, Roy. It’s okay.”
And hung up and fell back in bed.
I stood outside Roy Holdstrom’s Stage 13 the next morning and read the sign he had painted.
BEWARE. RADIOACTIVE ROBOTS.
MAD DOGS. INFECTIOUS DISEASES.
I put my ear to the Stage 13 door and imagined him in that vast silent cathedral darkness, fiddling away at his clay like an awkward spider, trapped in his own love and the birthings of his love.
“Go to it, Roy,” I whispered. “Go to it, Beast.”
And walked, while I was waiting, through the cities of the world.
18
And walking, thought: God, Roy’s midwifing a Beast that I fear. How do I stop shaking and accept Roy’s delirium? How do I run it through a screenplay. Where do I place it? In what town, what city, somewhere in the world?
Lord, I thought, walking, now I know why so few mysteries have been written in American settings. England with its fogs, rains, moors, ancient houses, London ghosts, Jack the Ripper? Yes!
But America? There’s no true history of haunts and great hounds. New Orleans, maybe, with enough fogs, rains, and swampland mansions to run up cold sweats and dig graves, while the Saints march forever out. And San Francisco where the foghorns rouse and die each night.
Los Angeles, maybe. Chandler and Cain country. But …
There was only one true place in all America in which to hide a killer or lose a life.
Maximus Films!
Laughing, I turned at an alley, and walked through a dozen backlot sets, making notes.
England hid here and far Wales and moorish Scotland and raining Eire, and the ruins of the old castles, and the tombs in which dark films were vaulted and ghosts ran in creeks all night down projection room walls, gibbering their chops as night watchmen passed singing funeral hymns, riding old deMille chariots with smoke-plumed steeds.
So it would be tonight as the phantom extras banged the time clocks out, and the tombyard fog sifted in over the wall from the lawn sprinklers tossing cold beads on the still day-hot graves. Any night here you could cross London to meet the Phantom switchman, whose lantern fired the locomotive that shrieked at him like an iron fort and rammed Stage 12 to melt down into the pages of an old October issue of Silver Screen.
So I wandered the alleys, waiting for the sun to sink and Roy to step forth, hands bloody with red clay, to shout a birth!
At four o’clock I heard distant rifle fire.
The gunshots were Roy whacking a croquet ball back and forth across a Number 7 backlot meadow. He slammed the ball again and again, and froze, feeling my gaze. He lifted his head to blink at me. His look was not that of the obstetrician but a carnivore that has just killed and eaten well.
“I did it, by God!” h
e cried. “Trapped him! Our Beast, your Beast, mine! Today, the clay, tomorrow the film! People will ask: Who did that! Us, son, us!”
Roy clenched his long bony fingers on the air.
I walked forward slowly, dazed.
“Trapped? My God, Roy, you still haven’t told. What’d you see when you ran after him the other night!?”
“In time, pal. Look, I finished half an hour ago. One look and you’ll beat your typewriter to death. I called Manny! He’ll see us in twenty minutes. I went nuts, waiting. I had to come bang the balls. There!” He struck another mighty blow, a croquet ball flew. “Someone stop me before I kill!”
“Roy, calm down.”
“No, I’ll never calm down. We’ll make the greatest horror film in history. Manny will—”
A voice yelled: “Hey, what’re you two doing here?”
Manny’s Rolls-Royce, a traveling white theatre, glided by, purring under its breath. Our boss’s face glared out one small theatre window.
“Do we have a meeting or no?!”
“Do we walk or ride?” Roy said.
“Walk!”
The Rolls glided away.
19
We took our time walking to Stage 13.
I kept watching Roy to see if I could get a hint of what he had been up to in the long night. Even when we were boys, he rarely showed his true feelings. He’d fling his garage doors wide to show me his latest dinosaur. Only when my breath exploded did he allow himself a yell. If I loved what he had made, it didn’t matter what anyone else said.
“Roy,” I said, walking. “You okay?”
We found Manny Leiber fuming outside Stage 13. “Where the hell you been!?” he cried.
Roy opened the door of Stage 13, glided in, and let the heavy door slam.
Manny glared at me. I jumped forward and pulled the door open for him.
We stepped into night.
There was darkness except for a single light bulb, hung above Roy’s armatured clay-modeling stand, sixty feet across a desert floor, a semi-Martian landscape, near the shadowed Meteor Crater.
Roy peeled off his shoes and darted across the landscape like a ballet master, fearful of crushing a fingernail tree here, a car as big as a thimble there.
“Get your shoes off!” he shouted.
“Like hell!”
But Manny yanked off his shoes, and tiptoed across the miniature world. Much had been added since dawn; new mountains, new trees, plus whatever lay waiting beneath the wet cloth under the light.
We both arrived, in our stocking feet, at the armatured stand. “Ready?” Roy searched our faces with his lighthouse eyes.
“Dammit to hell, yes!” Manny snatched at the moist towel.
Roy knocked his hand away.
“No,” he said. “Me!”
Manny pulled back, blushing with anger.
Roy lifted the moist towel as if it were a curtain rising on the greatest show on earth.
“Not Beauty and the Beast,” he cried, “but The Beast that is Beautiful!”
Manny Leiber and I gasped.
Roy had not lied. It was the finest work he had ever done, a proper thing to glide from a far-traveling light-year ship, a hunter of midnight paths across the stars, a dreamer alone behind his terrible, awful, most dreadfully appalling mask.
The Beast.
That lonely man behind the Oriental Brown Derby screen, laughing, on what seemed a hundred nights ago.
The creature who had run away on the midnight streets to enter a graveyard and stay among the white tombs.
“Oh, my God, Roy.” My eyes filled with tears shocked free by the impact, as fresh and new as when the Beast had stepped forth to raise his riven face into the night air. “Oh, God—”
Roy was staring with wild love at his wondrous work. Only slowly did he turn to regard Manny Leiber. What he saw stunned both of us.
Manny’s face was white cheese. His eyes swiveled in their sockets. His throat croaked as if a wire choked his neck. His hands clawed his chest as if his heart had stopped.
“What’ve you done!” he shrieked. “Jesus! My God, oh Christ! What is this? Tricks? Jokes? Cover it up! You’re fired!”
Manny hurled the damp towel at the clay Beast.
“It’s crap!”
With stiff, mechanical movements, Roy covered the clay head. “I didn’t—”
“You did! You want that on the screen? Pervert! Pack your things! Get out!” Manny shut his eyes, shuddering. “Now!”
“You demanded this!” said Roy.
“Well, now I demand you destroy it!”
“The best, my greatest work! Look at it, dammit! It’s beautiful! It’s mine!”
“No! The studio’s! Dump it! The film is scrubbed. You’re both fired. I want this place empty in an hour. Move!”
“Why,” asked Roy, quietly, “are you overreacting?”
“Am I?”
And Manny plowed across the stage, his shoes tucked under his arm, smashing miniature houses and scattering toy trucks as he strode.
At the far stage door he stopped, sucked air, glared at me.
“You’re not fired. You’ll get a new job. But that son of a bitch? Out!”
The door opened, let in a great Gothic-cathedral spray of light, and slammed shut, leaving me to survey Roy’s collapse and defeat.
“My God, what’ve we done! What the hell?” I shouted to Roy, to myself, to the red clay bust of the Monster, the discovered and revealed Beast. “What!?”
Roy was trembling. “Jesus. I work for half a lifetime to do something fine. I train myself, I wait, I see, at last I really see. And the thing comes out of my fingertips, my God, how it came! What is this thing here in the damn clay? How come it gets born, and I get killed?”
Roy shuddered. He raised his fists, but there was no one to strike. He glanced at his prehistoric animals and made an all-sweeping gesture, as if to hug and protect them.
“I’ll be back!” he cried hoarsely to them and wandered off.
“Roy!”
I followed as he blundered into daylight. Outside, the late-afternoon sun was blazing hot, and we moved in a river of fire. “Where you going?”
“Christ knows! Stay here. No use you getting dumped on! This is your first job. You warned me last night. Now I know it was sick, but why? I’ll hide somewhere on the lot so that tonight I can sneak my friends out!” He looked longingly at the shut door behind which his dear beasts lived.
“I’ll help,” I said.
“No. Don’t be seen with me. They’ll think you put me up to this.”
“Roy! Manny looked as if he could kill you! I’m calling my detective pal, Crumley. Maybe he can help! Here’s Crumley’s phone number.” I wrote hastily on some crumpled paper. “Hide. Call me tonight.”
Roy Holdstrom leaped into his Laurel and Hardy flivver and steamed toward the backlot at ten miles an hour.
“Congratulations,” someone said. “you silly goddamn son of a bitch!”
I turned. Fritz Wong stood in the middle of the next alley. “I yelled at them and at last you have been assigned to rewrite my lousy film God and Galilee. Manny just ran over me in his Rolls. He screamed your new job at me. So …”
“Is there a monster in the script?” My voice trembled.
“Only Herod Antipas. Leiber wants to see you.”
And he hustled me along toward Leiber’s office.
“Wait,” I said.
For I was looking over Fritz’s shoulder at the far end of the studio alley and the street outside the studio where the crowd, the mob, the menagerie gathered every day, forever.
“Idiot!” said Fritz. “Where are you going?”
“I just saw Roy fired,” I said, walking. “Now I need to get him rehired!”
“Dummkopf.” Fritz strode after me. “Manny wants you now!”
“Now, plus five minutes.”
Outside the studio gate, I glanced across the street.
Are you there, Clarence? I wondered.
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20
And there indeed they stood.
The loonies. The jerks. The idiots.
That mob of lovers worshiping at studio shrines.
Much like the late-night travelers that had once jostled me along to haunt the Hollywood Legion Stadium boxing matches to see Cary Grant sprint by, or Mae West undulate through the crowd like a boneless feather boa, or Groucho lurk along by Johnny Weissmuller, who dragged Lupe Velez after him like a leopard pelt.
The goons, myself among them, with big photo albums, stained hands, and little scribbled cards. The nuts who stood happily rain-drenched at the première of Dames or Flirtation Walk, while the Depression went on and on even though Roosevelt said it couldn’t last forever and Happy Days would come again.
The gorgons, the jackals, the demons, the fiends, the sad ones, the lost ones.
Once, I had been one of them.
Now, there they were. My family.
There were still a few faces left from the days when I had hid in their shade.
Twenty years later, my God, there stood Charlotte and her ma! They had buried Charlotte’s dad in 1930 and taken root in front of six studios and ten restaurants. Now a lifetime later, there was Ma, in her eighties, stalwart and practical as a bumbershoot, and Charlotte, fifty, as flower-fragile as she had always seemed to be. Both were frauds. Both hid boilerplates behind their rhino-ivory smiles.
I looked for Clarence in that strange dead funeral bouquet. For Clarence had been the wildest: lugging huge twenty-pound photo portfolios from studio to studio. Red leather for Paramount, black for RKO, green for Warner Brothers.
Clarence, summer and winter, wrapped in his oversize camel’s-hair coat, in which he filed pens, pads, and miniature cameras. Only on the hottest days did the wraparound coat come off. Then Clarence resembled a tortoise torn from its shell and panicked by life.
I crossed the street to stop before the mob.
“Hello, Charlotte,” I said. “Hiya, Ma.”
The two women stared at me in mild shock.