A Graveyard for Lunatics (33 page)

“You’ve come,” gasped the voice, “to run the studio?”

Me! I thought. And the voice sounded syllable by syllable:

“—No one now is right for the job. A world to own. All in a few acres. Once there were orange trees, lemon trees, cattle. The cattle are still here. But no matter. It’s yours. I give it to you—”

Madness.

“Come see what you’ll own!” His long arm gestured. He touched an unseen dial. The mirror behind the desk slid wide on a subterranean wind and a tunnel leading down into the vaults.

“This way!” whispered the voice.

The shape elongated, turning. The chair swiveled and squealed and suddenly there was no shadow in or behind the chair. The desk lay as empty as the decks of a great ship. The uneasy mirror drifted to shut. I jumped forward, afraid that when it slammed the dim lights would extinguish and I would be drowned by the dark air.

The mirror slid. My face, panicked, shone in its glass.

“I can’t follow!” I cried. “I’m afraid!”

The mirror froze.

“Last week, yes, you should have been,” he whispered. “Tonight? Pick a tomb. It’s mine.”

And his voice now seemed the voice of my father, melting in his sickbed, wishing the gift of death but taking months to die.

“Step through,” the voice said quietly.

My God, I thought, I know this from when I was six. The phantom beckoning from behind the glass. The singer, the woman, curious at his soft voice, daring to listen and touch the mirror, and his hand appearing to lead her down to dungeons and a funeral gondola on a black canal with Death at the steering pole. The mirror, the whisper, and the opera house empty and the singing at an end.

“I can’t move,” I said. It was true. “I’m afraid.” My mouth filled with dust. “You died long ago…”

Behind the glass, his silhouette nodded. “Not easy, being dead, but alive under the film vaults, off through the graves. Keeping the number of people who
really
knew small, paying them well, killing them when they failed. Death in the afternoon on Stage 13. Or Death on a sleepless night beyond the wall. Or in this office where I often slept in the big chair. Now…”

The mirror trembled; with his breath or with his hand, I could not say. Pulses jumped in my ears. My voice echoed off the glass, a boy’s voice: “Can’t we talk
here
?”

Again the melancholy half-sighed laugh. “No. The grand tour. You must know everything if you’re going to take my place.”

“I don’t
want
it! Whoever
said
?”

“
I
said. I
say
. Listen, I’m good as dead.”

A damp wind blew, smelling of nitrate from the ancient films and raw earth from the tombs.

The mirror slid open again. Footsteps moved off quietly.

I stared through into the tunnel half lit by mere firefly ceiling lights.

The Beast’s massive shadow drifted on the incline going down, as he turned.

He gazed at me steadily out of his incredibly wild, incredibly sad eyes.

He nodded down the incline at darkness. “Well, if you can’t walk, then run,” he murmured.

“From
what
?”

The mouth munched wetly on itself and at last pronounced it: “Me! I’ve run all my life! You think I can’t follow? God! Pretend! Pretend I’m still strong, that I still have power. That I can kill you.
Act
afraid!”

“I am!”

“Then run! God damn you!”

He raised one fist to knock shadows off the walls.

I ran.

He followed.

It was a dreadful pretend pursuit, through the vaults where all the film reels lay, toward the stone crypts where all the stars from those films hid, and under the wall and through the wall, and suddenly it was behind, and I was ricocheted through catacombs with the Beast flooding his flesh at my heels toward the tomb where J. C. Arbuthnot had never lain.

And I knew, running, it was no tour, sweet Jesus, but a destination. I was not being pursued but herded. To what?

The bottom of the vault where Crumley and blind Henry and I had stood a thousand years ago. I jolted to a halt.

The sarcophagus platform steps waited, empty, in place.

Behind me I felt the dark tunnel churn with footfalls and the fire bellows roar of pursuit.

I jumped on the steps, reaching somehow to climb. Slipping, crying insipid prayers, I groaned to the top, cried out with relief, and shouted myself out of the sarcophagus, onto the floor.

I hit the tomb door. It burst wide. I fell out into the graveyard and stared wildly along through the stones at the boulevard, miles off and empty.

“Crumley!” I yelled.

There was no traffic, no cars parked.

“Oh, God,” I mourned. “Crumley!
Where
?”

Behind me there was a riot of feet clubbing the tomb entry. I whirled.

The Beast stepped into the doorway.

He was framed in moonlight. He stood like a mortuary statue reared to celebrate himself, under his carved name. For one moment he seemed like the ghost of some English lord posed on the sill of his ancient country gatehouse, primed to be trapped on film and immersed in darkroom acid waters to rise phantom-like as the film developed in mists, one hand on the door hinge to his right, the other upraised as if to hurl Doom across the cold marble gameyard. Above the cold marble door I once again saw:

ARBUTHNOT.

I must have half cried aloud that name.

At that he fell forward as if someone had fired a starter’s gun. His cry spun me to flounder toward the gate. I caromed off a dozen gravestones, scattered floral displays, and ran, yelling, on a double track. Half of me saw this as manhunt, the other as Keystone farce. One image was broken floodgate tides lapping a lone runner. The other was elephants stampeding Charlie Chase. With no choosing between maniac laughters and despairs, I made it down brick paths between graves to find:

No Crumley. An empty boulevard.

Across the street, St. Sebastian’s was open, lights on, the doors wide.

J. C., I thought, if only
you
were there!

I leaped. Tasting blood, I ran.

I heard the great clumsy thud of shoes behind, and the gasping breath of a half-blind terrible man.

I reached the door.

Sanctuary!

But the church was empty.

Candles were lit on the golden altar. Candles burned in the grottos where Christ hid so as to give Mary center stage amidst the bright drippings of love.

The doors to the confessional stood wide.

There was a thunder of footfalls.

I leaped into the confessional, slammed the door, and sank, hideously shivering, in the dark well.

The thunder of footsteps—

Paused like a storm. Like a storm, they grew calm and then, with a weather change, approached.

I felt the Beast paw at the door. It was not locked.

But I was the priest, was I not?

Whoever was locked in here was most holy, to be reckoned with, spoken to, and stay…
safe
?

I
heard this ungodly groan of exhaustion and self-doom from outside. I shuddered. I broke my teeth with prayer for the merest things. One more hour with Peg. To leave a child. Trifles. Things larger than midnight, or as great as some possible dawn…

The sweet smell of life must have escaped my nostrils. It came forth with my prayers.

There was a last groan and—

God!

The Beast stumbled into the other half of the booth!

His cramming and forcing his lost rage in shuddered me more, as if I feared that his terrible breath might burn through the lattice to blind me. But his huge bulk plunged to settle like a great furnace bellows sighing down on its creases and valves.

And I knew the strange pursuit was over, and a final time begun.

I heard the Beast suck breath once, twice, three times, as if daring himself to speak, or fearful to speak, still wanting to kill, but tired, oh God, at last tired.

And at last he whispered an immense whisper, like a vast sigh down a chimney: “Bless me, father, for I have sinned!”

Lord, I thought, dear God, what did priests say in all those old films half a lifetime ago? From stupid remembrance, what!?

I had this mad desire to fling myself out to sprint down the middle of nothing with the Beast in fresh flight.

But as I seized my breath, he let forth a dreadful whisper:

“Bless me, father—”

“I’m not your father,” I cried.

“No,” whispered the Beast.

And after a lost moment, added: “You’re my son.”

I gave a jump and listened to my heart knock down a cold tunnel into darkness.

The Beast stirred.

“Who…” pause “… do you think…” pause “…
hired
you?”

Dear God!

“I,” said the lost face behind the grille, “did.”

Not
Groc? I thought.

And the Beast began to tell a terrible rosary of dark beads, and I could not but slowly, slowly sink back and back until my head rested on the paneling of the booth, and I turned my head and murmured:

“Why didn’t you kill me?”

“That was never my wish. Your friend stumbled on me. He made that bust. Madness. I would have killed him, yes, but he killed himself first. Or made it look as if. He’s alive, waiting for you…”

Where!? I wanted to shout. Instead I said: “Why have you saved me?”

“Why… One day I want my story told. You were the only one,” he paused, “… who could tell it, and tell it… right. There is nothing in the studio I do not know, or out in the world I do not know. I read all night long and slept in snatches and read more and then whispered through the wall, oh, not so many weeks ago: your name. He’ll do, I said. Get him. That is my historian. And my son.

“And it was so.”

His whisper, behind a mirror, had given me nomination.

And the whisper was here now, not fourteen inches off, and his breath pulsing the air like a bellows, between.

“Sweet Jerusalem’s bone-white hills,” said the pale voice. “I hired and fired, all and everyone, for thousands of days. Who else could do it? What else had I to do but be ugly and want to die. It was my work that kept me alive. Hiring you was a strange sustenance.”

Should I thank him? I wondered.

Soon, he almost whispered. Then:

“I ran the place at first, secondhand, behind the mirror. I knocked Leiber’s eardrums with my voice, predictions on markets, script editings, scanned in the tombs, and delivered to his cheek when he leaned against the wall at two A.M. What meetings! What twins! Ego and super-ego. The horn and the player of the horn. The small dancer. But I the choreographer under glass. My God, we shared his office. He making faces and pretending great decisions, I waiting each night to step forth from behind to sit in the chair by the empty desk with the single phone and dictate to Leiber, my secretary.”

“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, re-birthed 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!’