A Graveyard for Lunatics (32 page)

Silence. Then:

“Wonderful. All first years… The studio grew. He built. Blueprints. Called himself Explorer. Chart maker. By thirty-five. He said. Wanted the world inside… walls. No travel. Hated trains. Cars. Cars killed his father. Great love. So, see, lived in a small world. Grew smaller, the more cities, countries he built on lot. Gaul! His. Then… Mexico. Islands off Africa. Then… Africa! He said. No need travel. Just lock himself inside. Invite people. See Nairobi?
Here
! London? Paris?
There
. Built special rooms each set to stay. Overnight: New York. Weekends: Left Bank… wake to Roman Ruins. Put flowers. Cleopatra’s tomb. Behind the fronts of each town put carpets, beds, running water. Studio people laughed at him. Didn’t care. Young, foolish. He went on building. 1929, 1930! ’31, ’32!”

Across the room, Crumley raised his eyebrows at me. Lord! I thought I had hit on something new, living and writing in my grandparents’ Green Town house!!

“Even a place,” murmured Emily Sloane, “Like Notre Dame. Sleeping bag. So high up over Paris. Wake early to sun. Crazy? No. He laughed. Let
you
laugh. Not crazy… it was only later…”

She sank under.

For a long while we thought she had drowned for good.

But then I chimed the bell again and she gathered her invisible knitting to stitch with her fingers, looking down at the pattern she wove on her breast.

“Later on… it… truly… mad.

“I married Sloane. Stopped being secretary. Never forgave. He kept playing with great toys… he said he still loved me. And then that night… accident. It. It. It happened.

“And so… I died.”

Crumley and I waited for a long minute. One of the candles went dark.

“He comes to visit, you know,” she said at last to the fading sound of more candles flickering out.

“He?” I dared to whisper.

“Yes. Oh, two… three… times… a year.”

Do you know how many years have passed? I wondered.

“Takes me out, takes me out,” she sighed.

“Do you talk?” I whispered.

“He does. I only laugh.
He
says… He says.”

“What?”

“After all this time, he loves me.”

“You say?”

“Nothing. Not right. I made… trouble.”

“You see him clearly?”

“Oh, no. He sits out in no light. Or stands behind my chair, says love. Nice voice. The same. Even though he died and I’m dead.”

“And whose voice is it, Emily?”

“Why…” she hesitated. Then her face lit. “Arby, of course.”

“Arby… ?”

“Arby,” she said, and swayed, staring at the last lit candle. “Arby. Made it through. Or guess so. So much to live for. The studio. The toys. No matter me gone. He lived to come back to only place he loved. So he made it even after the graveyard. The hammer. The blood. Ah, God! I’m killed.
Me
!” She shrieked and sank down in her chair.

Her eyes and lips sealed tight. She was done and still and back to being a statue forever. No bells, no incense would stir that mask. I called her name, softly.

But now she built a new glass coffin and shut the lid.

“God,” said Crumley. “What have we done?”

“Proved two murders, maybe three,” I said.

Crumley said, “Let’s go home.”

But Emily didn’t hear. She liked it right where she was.

And at long last the two cities were the same.

If there was more light in the city of darkness, then there was more darkness in the city of light.

The fog and mist poured over the high mortuary walls. The tombstones shifted like continental plates. The drywash catacomb tunnels funneled cold winds. Memory itself invaded the territorial film vaults. Worms and termites that had prevailed in the stone orchards now undermined the apple yards of Illinois, the cherry trees of Washington, and the mathematically trimmed shrubs of French chateaus. One by one the great stages, vacuumed, slammed shut. The clapboard houses, log cabins, and Louisiana mansions dropped their shingles, gaped their doors, shivered with plagues and fell.

In the night, two hundred antique cars on the backlot gunned their engines, smoked their exhausts, and gravel-dusted off on some blind path to motherlode Detroit.

Building by building, floor by floor, lights were extinguished, air conditionings stifled, the last togas trucked like Roman ghosts back to Western Costume, one block off this Appian Way, as the captains and the kings departed with the last gate guards.

We were being pushed into the sea.

The parameters, day by day, I imagined, were shutting in.

More things, we heard, melted and vanished. After the miniature cities and prehistoric animals, then the brownstones and skyscrapers, and with Calvary’s cross long gone, the dawn tomb of the Messiah followed it into the furnace.

At any moment the graveyard itself might rupture. Its disheveled inhabitants, evicted, homeless at midnight, seeking new real estates across town at Forest Lawn, would board 2 A.M. buses to terrify drivers as the last gates banged shut and the whiskey-film vault-catacomb tunnel brimmed with arctic slush reddened in its flow even as the church across the street nailed its doors and the drunken priest fled to join the maitre d’ from the Brown Derby up by the Hollywood sign in the dark hills, while the invisible war and the unseen army pushed us farther and farther west, out of my house, out of Crumley’s jungle clearing, until at last, here in the Arabian compound with food in short supply but champagne in large, we would make our last stand as the Beast and his skeleton army shrieked down the sands to toss us as lunch to Constance Rattigan’s seals, and shock the ghost of Aimee Semple McPherson trudging up the surf the other way, astonished but reborn in the Christian dawn.

That was it.

Give or take a metaphor.

Crumley arrived at noon and saw me sitting by the telephone.

“I’m calling for an appointment at the studio,” I said.

“With who?”

“Anyone who happens to be in Manny Leiber’s office when that white telephone on the big desk rings.”

“And then?”

“Go turn myself in.”

Crumley looked at the cold surf outside.

“Go soak your head,” he said.

“What’re we going to do?” I exclaimed. “Sit and wait for them to crash the door or come out of the sea? I can’t stand the waiting. I’d rather be dead.”

“
Gimme
that!”

Crumley grabbed the phone and dialed.

When answered, he had to control his yell: “I’m all well. Cancel my sick leave. I’ll be in tonight!”

“Just when I need you,” I said. “Coward.”

“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
noddedl

“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.

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.