A Graveyard for Lunatics (13 page)

Oh, no, I whispered. It
can’t
be!

It
was
.

I imagined Roy’s arrival, his shock, his outcry, his smothering despair, then his rage, with new despairs to drown and win after his call to me. Then his wild search for rope, twine, wire, and at last: downslung and drifting peace. He could not live without his wondrous midges and mites, his sports, his dears. He was too old to rebuild it all.

“Roy,” I whispered, “that
can’t
be you! You always wanted to
live
.”

But
Roy’s body turned slowly, shadowed and high.
My Beasts are slain
, it said.

They were never
alive
!

Then, whispered Roy,
I
was never alive.

“Roy,” I said, “would you leave me
alone
in the world!?”

Maybe.

“But you wouldn’t let someone hang you!?”

Perhaps.

And if so, how come you’re still here? How come they haven’t cut you
down
?

Which means?

You’re freshly dead. You haven’t been found. I’m the first to see!

I ached to touch his foot, his leg, to be
sure
it was Roy! Thoughts of the papier-mache man in the coffin shot through my head.

I inched my hand out to touch… but then…

Over by his desk was the sculpture platform on which had been hidden his last and greatest work, the Beast, the Monster from the midnight Derby, the Creature who went in churches beyond the wall and across a street.

Someone had taken a ballpeen hammer and struck it a dozen blows. The face, the head, the skull, were banged and smashed until only a shapeless mound remained.

Jesus God, I whispered.

Was this the final crime that made Roy self-destroy?

Or had the destroyer, waiting in the shadows, struck Roy unaware amidst his ruined towns, and hanged him on the air?

I trembled. I stopped.

For I heard the stage door spring wide.

I pulled off my shoes and ran, quietly, to hide.

It was the surgeon-medico-physician, the high-noon abortionist, the needle-pushing defrocked high-priest doctor.

Doc Phillips glided into the light on the far side of the stage, glancing about, seeing the ruin, then finding the hanged body above, he nodded, as if this death were an everyday calamity. He stepped forward, kicking the ruined cities as if they were mere garbage and irrelevant trash.

Seeing this, I coughed up a curse. I clapped my hand to my mouth and jerked back in shadow.

I peered through a crack in the set wall.

The doctor had frozen. Like a buck in a forest clearing, he peered around through his steel-rimmed glasses, using his nose as well as his eyes. His ears seemed to twitch on the sides of his shaven skull. He shook his head. He shuffled, shoving Paris, knocking London, arriving to reach and examine the terrible hanged thing in midair…

A scalpel flashed in his hand. He seized a prop trunk, opened it, shoved it under the hanged body, grabbed a chair, stepped up on it, and slashed the rope above Roy’s neck.

There was a dreadful crash when Roy hit the trunk bottom.

I coughed up my grief. I froze, sure that this time he had heard and would come, a cold steel smile in his hand. I gripped my breath tight.

Leaping down, the doc bent to examine the body.

The outside door banged wide. Feet and voices echoed.

The cleanup men had arrived, and whether this was their regular time, or if he had called them to work, I did not know.

Doc slammed the lid, hard.

I bit my knuckles and jammed my fingers in my mouth to muffle my terrible bursts of despair.

The trunk lock snapped. The doctor gestured.

I shrank back as the team of workmen crossed the set with brooms and shovels to thrust and toss Athens’ stones, Alhambra’s walls, Alexandria’s libraries and Bombay’s Krishna shrines into a dumpster.

It took twenty minutes to clean and cart off the lifework of Roy Holdstrom, taking with it, on a creaking trolley, the trunk in which, crumpled and invisible, lay my friend’s body.

When the door slammed a last time, I gave an agonized shout of grief against the night, death, the damned doctor, the vanishing men. I ran with fists to strike the air and stopped, blind with tears. Only when I had stood shaking and weeping for a long while did I stop and see an incredible thing.

There was a stack of interfaced doorway facades leaned against the north wall of the stage, like the sills and doors through which Roy and I had plunged the day before.

In the center of the first doorway was a small familiar box. It looked as if it had been left by accident. I knew it was there as a gift.

Roy!

I lunged forward to stand, looking down, and
touch
the box.
Whisper
—
tap
.

Whatever lay inside
rustled
.

Are you
in
there, body from the ladder on the wall in the rain?

Whisper-tap-murmur.

Damn it! I thought, won’t I
ever
be rid of you!?

I grabbed the box and ran.

I reached the outer door and threw up.

Eyes shut, I wiped my mouth, then opened the door slowly. Far down the alley the workmen turned a corner toward the carpenters’ shop and the big iron incinerator.

Doc Phillips, behind them, gave silent directions.

I shivered. If I had arrived five minutes later, I might have come at the very moment
he
had found Roy’s body and the destroyed cities of the world. My body would have gone into the trunk with Roy’s!

My taxi was waiting behind Stage 9.

Nearby was a phone booth. I stumbled in, dropped a coin, called the police. A voice came on saying, “Yes? Hello, yes, hello, yes!”

I swayed drunkenly in the booth, looking at the receiver as if it were a dead snake.

What could I say? That a sound stage was cleared and empty? That an incinerator was probably burning right now, long before patrol cars and sirens could help?

And then what? Me, alone here with no armor, no weapons, no proof?

Me fired and maybe dead and over that wall to the tombs on permanent loan?

No!

I gave a shriek. Someone battered me with a hammer until my skull was red clay, torn like the flesh of the Beast. Staggering to get out, I was yanked to strangle on my own fright in a coffin locked, no matter how I banged the glass.

The phone-booth door flew wide.

“You were pushing the wrong
way
!” my taxi driver said.

I gave some sort of crazy laugh and let him lead me out.

“You forgot something.”

He brought me the box, which had fallen in the booth.

Whisper-rustle-tap.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “
Him
.”

On the way out of the studio, I lay down on the back seat. When we got to the first outside street corner, the driver said, “Which way do I turn?”

“Left.” I bit the back of my wrist. The driver was staring into his rear-view mirror.

“Jesus,” he said, “you look awful. You gonna be sick?”

I shook my head.

“Someone die?” he guessed.

“Dead, yes.”

“Here we are. Western Avenue. I go north?”

“South.” Toward Roy’s apartment way out at Fifty-fourth. What then? Once inside, mightn’t I smell the good doctor’s cologne hanging in the hall like an unseen curtain? And his workmen, down a dark corridor, carrying things, waiting to lug me away like a piece of wrecked furniture?

I shivered and rode, wondering if and when I would ever grow up. I listened to my insides and heard:

The sound of breaking glass.

My parents had died a long time back and their deaths seemed easy.

But Roy? I could never have imagined a downpour of fright like this, so much grief you could drown in it.

Now I feared to go back to the studio. The crazed architecture of all those countries nailed together, now falling to crush me. I imagined every southern plantation, each Illinois attic crammed with maniac relatives and smashed mirrors, every closet hung with tenterhooked friends.

The midnight gift, the toy box with the papier-mache flesh and death-maddened face, lay on the taxicab floor.

Rustle-tap-whisper.

A thunderclap shook my chest.

“No, driver!” I said. “Turn
here
. To the ocean. To the sea.”

When Crumley opened his front door, he examined my face and wandered off to the telephone.

“Make that
five
days’ sick leave,” he said.

He came back with a full tumbler of vodka and found me sitting in the garden taking deep breaths of good salt air, trying to see the stars, but there was too much fog moving in over the land. He looked at the box on my lap, took my hand, placed the vodka in it and guided it to my mouth.

“Drink that,” he said, quietly, “then we’ll put you to bed. Talk in the morning. What’s that?”

“Hide it,” I said. “If someone knew it was here, we might both disappear.”

“But what is it?”

“Death, I guess.”

Crumley took the cardboard box. It stirred and rustled and whispered.

Crumley lifted the lid off the carton and peered down in. Some strange papier-mache thing stared back up at him.

Crumley said, “So that’s the former head of Maximus Studios, is it?”

“Yes,” I said.

Crumley studied the face for another moment and nodded quietly. “That’s death, all right.”

He shut the lid. The weight inside the box shifted and whispered something like “sleep” in its rustling. No! I thought, don’t
make
me!

We talked in the morning.

At noon, Crumley dropped me in front of Roy’s apartment house out at Western and Fifty-fourth Street. He examined my face carefully.

“What’s your name?”

“I refuse to identify myself.”

“You want me to wait?”

“You go on. The sooner you walk around the studio and check things out, the better. We shouldn’t be seen together, anyway. You got my list of checkpoints and the map?”

“Right here.” Crumley tapped his brow.

“Be there in an hour. My grandma’s house. Upstairs.”

“Good old grandma.”

“Crumley?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you.”

“It won’t get you into heaven.”

“No,” I said. “But it got me through the night.”

“B.S.,” said Crumley, and drove away.

I went inside.

My hunch last night had been right.

If Roy’s miniature cities had been devastated, and his Beast pounded back to bloody clay…

There was a smell of the doctor’s cologne in the hall…

The door to Roy’s apartment was ajar.

His apartment was eviscerated.

“My God,” I whispered, standing in the middle of his rooms looking around. “Soviet Russia. History rewritten.”

For Roy had become an unperson. In libraries, tonight, books would be torn and sewn back together, so that the name of Roy Holdstrom would vanish forever, a sad rumor lost, a figment of the imagination. No more.

No books remained, no pictures, no desk, no paper in the trash can. Even the toilet roll in the bathroom had been stripped. The medicine cabinet was Mother Hubbardbare. No shoes under the bed. No bed. No typewriter. Empty closets. No dinosaurs. No dinosaur drawings.

Hours before, the apartment had been vacuumed, scrubbed, then polished with a high-quality wax.

A fury of rage had fired the sound stage to bring down his Babylon, Assyria, Abu Simbel.

A fury of cleanliness here had snorted up the last dust of memory, the merest breath of life.

“My God, it’s awful, isn’t it?” The voice spoke behind me.

A young man stood in the door. He was wearing a painter’s smock, much used, and his fingers were smudged with color, as was the left side of his face. His hair looked uncombed and his eyes had a kind of animal wildness, like a creature who works in the dark and only on occasion comes out at dawn.

“You better not stay here. They might come back.”

“Hold on,” I said. “I know you, yes? Roy’s friend… Tom…”

“Shipway. Better get out. They were crazy. Come on.”

I followed Tom Shipway out of the empty apartment.

He unlocked his own door with two sets of keys. “Ready? Set! Go!”

I jumped in.

He slammed the door and lay against it. “The landlady! I can’t let her see!”

“See?!” I looked around.

We were in Captain Nemo’s undersea apartments, his submarine cabins and engine rooms.

“Good God!” I cried.

Tom Shipway beamed. “Nice, huh?”

“Nice, hell, it’s incredible!”

“I knew you’d like it. Roy gave me your stories. Mars. Atlantis. And that thing you wrote on Jules Verne. Great, huh?”

He waved and I walked and saw and touched. The great red-velvet-covered Victorian chairs, brass-studded and locked to the ship’s floor. The brass periscope shining down out of the ceiling. The huge fluted pipe organ, center stage. And just beyond, a window that had been converted into an oval submarine porthole, beyond which swam tropical fish of various sizes and colors.

“Look!” said Tom Shipway. “Go on!”

I bent to peer into the periscope.

“It works!” I said. “We’re under water! Or it seems! Did you do all this? You’re a genius.”

“Yeah.”

“Does… does your landlady know you’ve done this to her apartment?”

“If she did, she’d kill me. I’ve never let her
in
.”

Shipway touched a button on the wall.

Shadows stirred beyond in the green sea.

A projection of a giant spider loomed, gesticulating.

“The Squid! Nemo’s antagonist! I’m stunned!”

“Well, sure! Sit down. What’s going on? Where’s Roy? Why did those bums come in like dingos and leave like hyenas?”

“Roy? Oh, yeah.” The weight of it knocked me back. I sat down, heavily. “Jesus, yes. Roy. What happened here last night?”

Shipway moved around the room quietly, imitating what he remembered.

“You ever see Rick Orsatti sneaking around L.A. years ago? The racketeer?”

“He ran with a gang…”