A Graveyard for Lunatics (27 page)

She put the car in whiplash. Our heads obeyed.

Crumley unlocked his front door.

“Okay. Spread out!” he growled. “What time is it?”

“Late,” said Henry. “Night-blooming jasmine gets outa hand round about now.”

“Is that true?” yelled Crumley.

“No, but it sure sounds nice.” Henry beamed at an unseen audience. “Fetch the beer.”

Crumley handed the beers around.

“There’d better be gin in this,” said Constance. “Hell. There is!”

I plugged in my projector, sprocketed Roy Holdstrom’s film, and we turned out the lights.

“Okay?” I clicked the projector switch. “Now.”

The film began.

Images flickered on Crumley’s wall. There were only thirty seconds’ worth of film, and fairly jumpy, as if Roy had animated his clay bust in only a few hours instead of the many days it usually took to position a creature, take its picture, reposition it, and snap another frame, one at a time.

“Holy Jesus,” whispered Crumley.

We all sat stunned by what jumped across Crumley’s wall.

It was Beauty’s friend, the thing from the Brown Derby.

“I can’t look,” said Constance. But she looked.

I glanced at Crumley and felt as I had felt as a child, with my brother, seated in the dark theatre as the Phantom or the Hunchback or the Bat loomed on the screen. Crumley’s face was my brother’s face, back thirty years, fascinated and horrified in one, curious and repelled, the sort of look people have when they see but do not want to see a traffic accident.

For up on the wall, real and immediate, was the Man Beast. Every contortion of the face, every move of the eyebrows, every flare of the nostrils, every motion of the lips, was there, as perfect as the sketches that Doré made when he came home from a long night’s prowl in the cinder-dark smokestack lanes of London, with all the grotesques stashed behind his eyelids, his empty fingers itching to grab pen, ink, paper, and
begin
! Even as Doré had, with total recall, scribbled faces, so Roy’s inner mind had photographed the Beast to remember the slightest hair moving in the nostrils, the merest eyelash in a blink, the flexed ear, and the eternally salivating infernal mouth. And when the Beast stared out of the screen, Crumley and I pulled back. It saw us. It dared us to shriek. It was coming to kill.

The parlor wall went dark.

I heard a sound bubble through my lips.

“The eyes,” I whispered.

I fumbled in the dark, rewound the reel, restarted it.

“Look, look, oh, look!” I cried.

The camera image closed in on the face.

The wild eyes were fixed in a convulsive madness.

“That isn’t a clay bust!”

“No?” said Crumley.

“It’s Roy!”

“Roy!?”

“In makeup,
pretending
to be the Beast!”

“No!”

The face leered, the live eyes rolled.

“Roy—”

And the wall darkened a final time.

Even as the Beast, met in the heights of Notre Dame, with the same eyes, pulled back away and fled…

“Jesus,” said Crumley at last, looking at that wall. “So that’s what’s running loose in graveyards these nights!”

“Or Roy, running loose.”

“That’s nuts! Why would he do that?!”

“The Beast got him in all this trouble, got him fired, got him almost killed, what better to do than imitate him, be him, in case anyone saw. Roy Holdstrom doesn’t
exist
if he puts on the makeup and hides.”

“It’s still nuts!”

“Nuts all his life, sure,” I said. “But now? For real!”

“What’s he gain from it?”

“Revenge.”

“Revenge?!”

“Let the Beast kill the Beast,” I said.

“No, no.” Crumley shook his head. “To hell with that. Run the film again!”

I ran it. The images streamed up and down our faces.

“That’s not Roy!” said Crumley. “That’s a clay bust, animated!”

“No.” I shut off the film.

We sat in darkness.

Constance made strange sounds.

“Why,” said Henry, “know what that is? Crying.”

“I’m afraid to go home,” said Constance.

“Who said you had to?” said Crumley. “Grab a cot, any room, or the jungle compound.”

“No,” murmured Constance. “That’s
his
place.”

We all looked at the blank wall where only a lingering retinal image of the Beast faded.

“He didn’t follow us,” said Crumley.

“He might.” Constance blew her nose. “I won’t be alone in some damned empty house by a damned ocean full of monsters tonight. I’m getting old. Next thing you know I’ll ask some jerk to marry me, God help him.”

She looked out at Crumley’s jungle and the night wind stirring the palm leaves and the high grass. “He’s there.”

“Cut it,” said Crumley. “We don’t know if we were followed through that graveyard tunnel to that office. Or who slammed the tomb door. Could’ve been the wind.”

“It always is…” Constance shivered like someone coming down with a long winter’s illness. “Now what?” She sank back in her chair, shuddering, clutching her elbows.

“Here.”

Crumley laid out a series of photocopies of newspapers on the kitchen table. Three dozen items, large and small, from the last day in October and the first week in November 1934.

“
ARBUTHNOT, STUDIO MAGNATE, KILLED IN CAR CRASH
” was the first one. “C. Peck Sloane, associate producer at Maximus studio, and his wife, Emily, killed in same accident.”

Crumley tapped the third article. “The Sloanes were buried the same day as Arbuthnot. Services in the same church across from the graveyard. All buried in the same graveyard, over the wall.”

“Where’d the accident happen?”

“Three in the morning. Gower and Santa Monica!”

“My God! The corner of the graveyard! And around the block from the studio!”

“Awfully convenient, right?”

“Saved travel. Die outside a mortuary, all they do is cart you in.”

Crumley scowled at another column. “Seems there was a wild Halloween party.”

“And Sloane and Arbuthnot were there?”

“Doc Phillips, it says here, offered to drive them home, they’d been drinking and refused. The doc drove his own car ahead of the other two cars, to clear the way, and went through a yellow light. Arbuthnot and Sloane followed, against the red. An unknown car almost hit them. The
only
car on the street at 3 A.M.! Arbuthnot’s and Sloane’s cars swerved, lost control, hit a telephone pole. Doc Phillips was there with his medical kit. No use. All dead. They took the bodies to the mortuary one hundred yards away.”

“Dear God,” I said. “It’s too damn neat!”

“Yeah,” mused Crumley. “A helluva responsibility for the pill-pushing dopester Doc. Coincidence, him at the scene. Him in charge of studio medicine
and
studio police! Him delivering the bodies to the mortuary. Him preparing the bodies for burial as funeral director? Sure? He had stock in the graveyard. Helped dig the first graves in the early twenties. Got ’em coming, going, and in between.”

Flesh really does crawl, I thought, feeling my upper arms.

“Did Doc Phillips sign the death certificates?”

“I thought you’d never ask.” Crumley nodded.

Constance, who had sat frozen to one side, staring at the news clippings, spoke at last, from lips that barely moved: “Where’s that bed?”

I led her into the next room and sat her on the bed. She held my hands as if they were an open Bible and took a deep breath.

“Kid, anyone ever tell you your body smells like cornflakes and your breath like honey?”

“That was H. G. Wells. Drove women mad.”

“Too late for madness. God, your wife’s lucky, going to bed nights with health food.”

She laid herself down with a sigh. I sat on the floor, waiting for her to close her eyes.

“How come,” she murmured, “you haven’t aged in three years, and me? a thousand.” She laughed quietly. One large tear moved from her right eye and dissolved into the pillow.

“Aw, shit,” she mourned.

“
Tell
me,” I prompted. “Say it. What?”

“I was there,” Constance murmured. “Twenty years ago. At the studio. Halloween night.”

I held my breath. Behind me, a shadow moved into the doorway, Crumley was there, quiet and listening.

Constance stared out past me at another year and another night.

“It was the wildest party I’d ever seen. Everyone in masks, nobody knowing who or what was drinking which or why. There was hooch on every sound stage and barking in the alleys, and if Tara and Atlanta had been built that night they would have burned. There must have been two hundred dress and three hundred undress extras, running booze back and forth through that graveyard tunnel as if Prohibition was in full swing. Even with hooch legal, I guess it’s hard to give up the fun, yes? Secret passages between the tombs and the turkeys, like the flop films rotting in the vaults? Little did they know they’d brick the damn tunnel up, a week later, after the accident.”

The accident of the year, I thought. Arbuthnot dead, and the studio gun-shot and dropping like a herd of elephants.

“It was no accident,” whispered Constance

Constance gathered a private darkness behind her pale face.

“Murder,” she said. “Suicide.”

The pulse jumped in my hand. She held it, tight.

“Yeah,” she nodded, “suicide and murder. We never found out how, why, or what. You saw the papers. Two cars at Gower and Santa Monica, late, and no one to see. All the masked people ran off in their masks. The studio alleys were like those Venetian canals at dawn, all the gondolas empty, and the docks littered with earrings and underwear. I ran, too. The rumors later said Sloane found Arbuthnot with Sloane’s wife out back or over the wall. Or maybe Arbuthnot found Sloane with his own wife. My God, if you love another man’s wife and she makes love to her own husband at a lunatic party, wouldn’t that drive you mad?! So one car tailgates another at top speed. Arbuthnot after the Sloanes at eighty miles an hour. Rear-ended them at Gower, rammed them into a pole. The news hit the party! Doc Phillips, Manny, and Groc rushed out. They carried the victims into the Catholic church nearby. Arbuthnot’s church. Where he put money as his fire escape, his escape from hell, he said. But it was too late. They died and were taken across the street to the mortuary. I was long since gone. At the studio the next day Doc and Groc looked like pallbearers at their own funerals. I finished the last scene of the last film I ever made by noon. The studio shut down for a week. They hung crepe on every sound stage and sprayed fake clouds of fog and mist in every street, or is that true? The headlines said the three of them were all happy drunk, going home. No. It was vengeance running to kill love. The poor male bastards and the poor lovesick bitch were buried across the wall where the hooch once ran, two days later. The graveyard tunnel was bricked up and—hell,” she sighed, “I thought it was all over. But tonight, with the tunnel open, and Arbuthnot’s fake body on that wall, and that terrible man with the sad, mad eyes in your film, it’s started again. What’s it all mean?”

Her clock ran down, her voice faded, she was going to sleep. Her mouth twitched. Ghosts of words came out, in bits and pieces.

“Poor holy man. Sap…”

“What holy man sap?” I asked.

Crumley leaned forward in the doorway.

Constance, deep under, drowning, gave answer:

“… priest. Poor crock. Dumped on. Studio barging in. Blood in the baptistry. Bodies, my God, bodies everywhere. Poor sap…”

“St. Sebastian’s?
That
poor sap?”

“Sure, sure. Poor him. Poor everyone, “murmured Constance. “Poor Arby, that sad stupid genius. Poor Sloane. Poor wife. Emily Sloane. What was it she said that night? Going to live forever. Boy! What a surprise to wake up nowhere. Poor Emily. Poor Hollyhock House. Poor me.”

“Poor what was that again?”

“Hoi…” Constance’s voice slurred… “ly… ock… House…”

And she slept.

“Hollyhock House? No film by that name,” I murmured.

“No,” said Crumley, moving into the room. “Not a film. Here.”

He reached under the night table and pulled the telephone directory out and turned the pages. He ran his finger down and read aloud:

“Hollyhock House Sanitarium. That’s half a block over and hah
⁰
a block north of St. Sebastian’s Catholic church, yes?”

Crumley leaned close to her ear.

“Constance,” he said. “Hollyhock House. Who’s there?”

Constance moaned, covered her eyes, and turned away. To the wall she addressed some few final words about a night a long time ago.

“… going to live forever… little did she know… poor everyone… poor Arby… poor priest… poor sap…”

Crumley arose, muttering. “Hell. Damn. Sure. Hollyhock House. A stone’s throw from—”

“St. Sebastian’s,” I finished. “Why,” I added, “do I have this feeling you’ll be taking me there?”

“You,” Crumley said to me at breakfast, “look like death warmed over. You,” he pointed his buttered toast at Constance, “look like Justice without Mercy.”

“What do
I
look like?” asked Henry.

“Can’t see you.”

“Figures,” said the blind man.

“Clothes off,” said Constance, dazed, like someone reading from an idiot board. “Time for a swim. My place!”

We drove to Constance’s place.

Fritz telephoned.

“Have you got the middle for my film,” he cried, “or was it the beginning? Now we need a redo of the Sermon on the Mount!”

“Does it
need
redoing?” I almost yelled.

“Have you looked at it lately?” Fritz, over the phone, did his imitation of Crumley pulling out his last strands of hair. “Do it! Then write a narration for the whole damn film to cover the ten thousand other pits, pimples, and rump-sprung behinds of our epic. Have you read the
whole
Bible, lately?”

“Not exactly.”

Fritz tore some more hair. “Go skim!”

“Skim!?”

“Skip pages. Be at the studio at five o’clock with a sermon to knock my socks off and a narration to make Orson Welles spoil his shoes! Your Unterseeboot Kapitan says:
Dive
!”