A Graveyard for Lunatics (3 page)

“Yes, Unterseeboot Kapitan, you
big
bastard, sir.”

As I biked off, he gave me a shove. But it was not a shove to hurt, only the quietist old philosopher’s push, to help me go.

I did not look back.

I feared to see
him
looking back.

“Good God!” I said. “He made me
forget
!”

Last night. The cold rain. The high wall. The body.

I parked my bike outside Stage 13.

A studio policeman, passing, said, “You got a
permit
to park there? That’s Sam Shoenbroder’s slot. Call the front office.”

“Permit!” I yelled. “Holy Jumping Jesus! For a
bike
?”

I slammed the bike through the big double airlock door into darkness.

“Roy?!” I shouted. Silence.

I looked around in the fine darkness at Roy Holdstrom’s toy junkyard.

I had one just like it, smaller, in my garage.

Strewn across Stage 13 were toys from Roy’s third year, books from his fifth, magic sets from when he was eight, electrical experiment chemistry sets from when he was nine and ten, comic collections from Sunday cartoon strips when he was eleven, and duplicate models of Kong when he turned thirteen in 1933 and saw the great ape fifty times in two weeks.

My paws itched. Here were dime-store magnetos, gyroscopes, tin trains, magic sets that caused kids to grind their teeth and dream of shoplifting. My own face lay there, a life mask cast when Roy Vaselined my face and smothered me with plaster of paris. And all about, a dozen castings of Roy’s own great hawk profile, plus skulls and full-dress skeletons tossed in corners or seated in lawn chairs; anything to make Roy feel at home in a stage so big you could have shoved the
Titanic
through the spaceport doors with room left over for
Old Ironsides
.

Across one entire wall Roy had pasted billboard-sized ads and posters from
The Lost World, Kong
, and
Son of Kong
, as well as
Dracula
and
Frankenstein
. In orange crates at the center of this Woolworth dime-store garage sale were sculptures of Karloff and Lugosi. On his desk were three original ball-and-socket dinosaurs, given as gifts by the makers of
The Lost World
, the rubber flesh of the ancient beasts long melted to drop off the metal bones.

Stage 13 was, then, a toy shop, a magic chest, a sorcerer’s trunk, a trick manufactory, and an aerial hangar of dreams at the center of which Roy stood each day, waving his long piano fingers at mythic beasts to stir them, whispering, in their ten-billion-year slumbers.

It was into this junkyard, this trash heap of mechanical avarice, greed for toys, and love for great ravening monsters, guillotined heads, and unraveled tarbaby King Tut bodies, that I picked my way.

Everywhere were vast low-lying tents of plastic covering creations that only in time would Roy reveal. I didn’t dare look.

Out in the middle of it all a barebone skeleton held a note, frozen, on the air. It read:

That was the name of the producer of King Kong.

I looked around at the tarpaulins. The unveiling! Yes!

I ran, thinking: What does he mean? My grandparents? Waiting? I slowed down. I began to breathe deeply of a fresh air that smelled of oaks and elms and maples.

For Roy was right.

You can go home again.

A sign at the front of outdoor set number two read: FOREST PLAINS, but it was Green Town, where I was born and raised on bread that yeasted behind the potbellied stove all winter, and wine that fermented in the same place in late summer, and clinkers that fell in that same stove, like iron teeth, long before spring.

I did not walk on the sidewalks, I walked the lawns, glad for a friend like Roy who knew my old dream and called me to see.

I passed three white houses where my friends had lived in 1931, turned a corner, and stopped in shock.

My dad’s old 1929 Buick was parked in the dust on the brick street, waiting to head west in 1933. It stood, rusting quietly, its headlights dented, its radiator cap flaked, its radiator honeycomb-papered over with trapped moths and blue and yellow butterfly wings, a mosaic caught from a flow of lost summers.

I leaned in to stroke my hand, trembling, over the prickly nap of the back-seat cushions, where my brother and I had knocked elbows and yelled at each other as we traveled across Missouri and Kansas and Oklahoma and…

It wasn’t my dad’s car. But it
was
.

I let my eyes drift up to find the ninth greatest wonder of the world:

My grandma and grandpa’s house, with its porch and its porch swing and geraniums in pink pots along the rail, and ferns like green sprinkler founts all around, and a vast lawn like the fur of a green cat, with clover and dandelions studding it in such profusion that you longed to tear off your shoes and run the whole damned tapestry barefoot. And—

A high cupola window where I had slept to wake and look out over a green land and a green world.

In the summer porch swing, sailing back and forth, gently, his long-fingered hands in his lap, was my dearest friend…

Roy Holdstrom.

He glided quietly, lost as I was lost in some midsummer a long time back.

Roy saw me and lifted his long cranelike arms to gesture right and left, to the lawn, the trees, to himself, to me.

“My God,” he called, “aren’t we—
lucky
?”

Roy Holdstrom had built dinosaurs in his garage since he was twelve. The dinosaurs chased his father around the yard, on 8-millimeter film, and ate him up. Later, when Roy was twenty, he moved his dinosaurs into small fly-by-night studios and began to make on-the-cheap lost-world films that made him famous. His dinosaurs so much filled his life that his friends worried and tried to find him a nice girl who would put up with his Beasts. They were still searching.

I walked up the porch steps remembering one special night when Roy had taken me to a performance of
Siegfried
at the Shrine Auditorium. “Who’s
singing
?” I had asked. “To hell with singing!” cried Roy. “We go for the Dragon!” Well, the music was a triumph. But the Dragon? Kill the tenor. Douse the lights.

Our seats were so far over that—oh God!—I could see only the Dragon Fafner’s left
nostril
! Roy saw nothing but the great flame-thrown smokes that jetted from the unseen beast’s nose to scorch Siegfried.

“Damn!” whispered Roy.

And Fafner was dead, the magic sword deep in his heart. Siegfried yelled in triumph. Roy leaped to his feet, cursing the stage, and ran out.

I found him in the lobby muttering to himself.

“Some
Fafner
! Christ! My God! Did you see?!”

As we stormed out into the night, Siegfried was still screaming about life, love, and butchery.

“Poor bastards, that audience,” said Roy. “Trapped for two more
hours
with no
Fafner
!”

And here he was now, swinging quietly in a glider swing on a front porch lost in time but brought back up through the years.

“Hey!” he called, happily. “What’d I
tell
you? My grandparents’ house!”

“No,
mine!
“

“Both!”

Roy laughed, truly happy, and held out a big fat copy of You
Can’t Go Home Again
.

“He was wrong,” said Roy, quietly.

“Yes,” I said, “here we
are
, by God!”

I stopped. For just beyond this meadowland of sets, I saw the high graveyard/studio wall. The ghost of a body on a ladder was there, but I wasn’t ready to mention it yet. Instead, I said: “How you doing with your Beast?
You found
him yet?”

“Heck, where’s
your
Beast?”

That’s the way it had been for many days now.

Roy and I had been called in to blueprint and build beasts, to make meteors fall from outer space and humanoid critters rise from dark lagoons, dripping cliches of tar from dime-store teeth.

They had hired Roy first, because he was technically advanced. His pterodactyls truly flew across the primordial skies. His bron-tosaurs were mountains on their way to Mahomet.

And then someone had read twenty or thirty of my Weird Tales, stories I had been writing since I was twelve and selling to the pulp magazines since I was twenty-one, and hired me to “write up a drama” for Roy’s beasts, all of which hyperventilated me, for I had paid my way or snuck into some nine thousand movies and had been waiting half a lifetime for someone to fire a starter’s gun to run me amok in film.

“I want something never
seen
before!” said Manny Leiber that first day. “In three dimensions we fire
something
down to Earth. A meteor drops—”

“Out near Meteor Crater in Arizona—” I put in. “Been there a million years. What a place for a
new
meteor to strike and…”

“Out comes our
new
horror,” cried Manny.

“Do we actually
see
it?” I asked.

“Whatta you
mean
? We
got
to
see
it!”

“Sure, but look at a film like
The Leopard Man
! The scare comes from night shadows, things unseen. How about
Isle of the Dead
when the dead woman, a catatonic, wakes to find herself trapped in a tomb?”

“Radio shows!!” cried Manny Leiber. “Dammit, people want to see what scares them—”

“I don’t want to argue—”

“Don’t!” Manny glared. “Give me ten pages to scare me gutless! You—” pointing at Roy—”whatever he writes you glue together with dinosaur droppings! Now, scram! Go make faces in the mirror at three in the morning!”

“Sir!” we cried.

The door slammed.

Outside in the sunlight, Roy and I blinked at each other.

“Another fine mess you got us in, Stanley!”

Still yelling with laughter, we went to work.

I wrote ten pages, leaving room for monsters. Roy slapped thirty pounds of wet clay on a table and danced around it, hitting and shaping, hoping for the monster to rise up like a bubble in a prehistoric pool to collapse in a hiss of sulfurous steam and let the true horror out.

Roy read my pages.

“Where’s your Beast?” he cried.

I glanced at his hands, empty but covered with blood-red clay.

“Where’s yours?” I said.

And now here it was, three weeks later.

“Hey,” said Roy, “how come you’re just standing down there looking at me? Come grab a doughnut, sit, speak.” I went up, took the doughnut he offered me, and sat in the porch swing, moving alternately forward into the future and back into the past. Forward—rockets and Mars. Backward—dinosaurs and tarpits.

And faceless Beasts all around.

“For someone who usually talks ninety miles a minute,” said Roy Holdstrom, “you are extraordinarily quiet.”

“I’m scared,” I said, at last.

“Well, heck.” Roy stopped our time machine. “Speak, oh mighty one.”

I spoke.

I built the wall and carried the ladder and lifted the body and brought on the cold rain and then struck with the lightning to make the body fall. When I finished and the rain had dried on my forehead, I handed Roy the typed All Hallows invitation.

Roy scanned it, then threw it on the porch floor and put his foot on it. “Somebody’s got to be kidding!”

“Sure. But… I had to go home and burn my underwear.”

Roy picked it up and read it again, and then stared toward the graveyard wall.

“Why would
anyone
send this?”

“Yeah. Since most of the studio people don’t even know I’m
here
!”

“But, hell, last night
was
Halloween. Still, what an elaborate joke, hoisting a body up a ladder. Wait, what if they told
you
to come at midnight, but
other
people, at eight, nine, ten, and eleven? Scare ’em one by one! That would make sense!”

“Only if
you
had planned it!”

Roy turned sharply. “You don’t really think—?”

“No. Yes. No.”

“Which is it?”

“Remember that Halloween when we were nineteen and went to the Paramount Theatre to see Bob Hope in
The Cat and the Canary
and the girl in front of us screamed and I glanced around and there you sat, with a rubber ghoul mask on your face?”

“Yeah.” Roy laughed.

“Remember that time when you called and said old Ralph Courtney, our best friend, was dead and for me to come over, you had him laid out in your house, but it was all a joke, you planned to get Ralph to put white powder all over his face and lay himself out and pretend to be dead and rise up when I came in. Remember?”

“Yep.” Roy laughed again.

“But I met Ralph in the street and it spoiled your joke?”

“Sure.” Roy shook his head at his own pranks.

“Well, then. No wonder I think maybe you put the damn body up on the wall and sent me the letter.”

“Only one thing wrong with that,” said Roy. “You’ve rarely mentioned Arbuthnot to me. If I made the body, how would I figure you’d recognize the poor s.o.b. ? It would have to be someone who really knew that you had seen Arbuthnot years ago, right?”

“Well…”

“Doesn’t make sense, a body in the rain, if you don’t know what in hell you’re looking at. You’ve told me about a lot of other people you met when you were a kid, hanging around the studios. If
I’d
made a body, it would be Rudolph Valentino or Lon Chaney, to be sure you’d recognize ’em. Correct?”

“Correct,” I said lamely. I studied Roy’s face and looked quickly away. “Sorry. But, hell, it
was
Arbuthnot. I saw him two dozen times over the years, back in the thirties. At previews. Out front at the studio, here. Him and his sports cars, a dozen different ones, and limousines, three of those. And women, a few dozen, always laughing, and when he signed autographs, slipping a quarter in the autograph book before he handed it back to you. A quarter! In 1934! A quarter bought you a malted milk, a candy bar, and a ticket to a movie.”