A Graveyard for Lunatics (4 page)

“That’s the kind of guy he was, was he? No wonder you remember him. How much’d he give you?”

“He gave me a buck twenty-five, one month. I was
rich
. And now he’s buried over that wall where I was last night, isn’t he? Why would someone try to scare me into thinking he’d been dug up and propped on a ladder? Why all the bother? The body landed like an iron safe. Take at least two men, maybe, to handle that. Why?”

Roy took a bite out of another doughnut. “Yeah, why? Unless someone is using
you
to tell the world. You
were
going to tell
someone
else, yes?”

“I might—”

“Don’t. You look scared right now.”

“But why should I be? Except I got this feeling it’s more than a joke, it has some
other
meaning.”

Roy stared at the wall, chewing quietly. “Hell,” Roy said at last. “You been back over to the graveyard this morning to see if the body is
still
on the ground? Why not go see?”

“No!”

“It’s broad daylight. You chicken?”

“No, but…”

“Hey!” cried an indignant voice. “What you two saps
doing
up there!?”

Roy and I looked down off the porch.

Manny Leiber stood there in the middle of the lawn. His Rolls-Royce was pulled up, its motor running silent and deep, and not a tremble in the frame.

“Well?” shouted Manny.

“We’re having a conference!” Roy said easily. “We want to move
in
here!”

“You
what
?” Manny eyed the old Victorian house.

“Great place to work,” Roy said, quickly. “Office for us up front, the sunporch, put in a card table, typewriter.”

“You
got
an office!”

“Offices don’t inspire. This—” I nodded around, taking the ball from Roy—”inspires. You should move
all
the writers out of the Writers’ Building! Put Steve Longstreet over in that New Orleans mansion to write his Civil War film. And that French bakery just beyond? Great place for Marcel Dementhon to finish his revolution, yes? Down the way, Piccadilly, heck, put all those new English writers there!”

Manny came slowly up on the porch, his face a confused red. He looked around at the studio, his Rolls, and then at the two of us, as if he had caught us naked and smoking behind the barn. “Christ, not enough everything’s gone to hell at breakfast. I got two fruitcakes who want to turn Lydia Pinkham’s shack into a writers’ cathedral!”

“Right!” said Roy. “On this very porch I conceived the scariest miniature film set in history!”

“Cut the hyperbole.” Manny backed off. “Show me the
stuff
!”

“May we use your Rolls?” said Roy.

We used the Rolls.

On the way to Stage 13, Manny Leiber stared straight ahead and said, “I’m trying to run a madhouse and you guys sit around on porches shooting wind. Where in hell is my Beast!? Three
weeks
I’ve waited—”

“Hell,” I said reasonably, “it takes time, waiting for something really new to step out of the night. Give us breathing space, time for the old secret self to coax itself out. Don’t worry. Roy here will be working in clay. Things will rise out of
that
. For now, we keep the Monster in the shadows, see—”

“Excuses!” said Manny, glaring ahead. “I don’t see. I’ll give you three more days! I
want
to see the Monster!”

“What if,” I blurted suddenly, “the Monster sees
you
! My God! What if we do it all from the Monster’s viewpoint, looking out!? The camera moves and is the Monster, and people get scared of the Camera and—”

Manny blinked at me, shut one eye, and muttered: “Not bad. The
Camera
, huh?”

“Yeah! The Camera crawls out of the meteor. The Camera, as the Monster, blows across the desert, scaring Gila monsters, snakes, vultures, stirring the dust—”

“I’ll be damned.” Manny Leiber gazed off at the imaginary desert.

“I’ll be damned,” cried Roy, delighted.

“We put an oiled lens on the Camera,” I hurried on, “add steam, spooky music, shadows, and the Hero staring
into
the Camera and—”

“
Then
what?”

“If I
talk
it I won’t
write
it.”

“Write it,
write
it!”

We stopped at Stage 13. I jumped out, babbling. “Oh, yeah. I think I should do
two
versions of the script. One for you. One for me.”

“Two?” yelled Manny. “Why?”

“At the end of a week I hand in
both
. You get to choose which is right.”

Manny eyed me suspiciously, still half in, half out of the Rolls.

“Crap! You’ll do your
best
work on
your
idea!”

“No. I’ll do my damnedest for you. But also my damnedest for
me
. Shake?”

“
Two
Monsters for the price of one? Do it! C’mon!”

Outside the door Roy stopped dramatically. “You
ready
for this? Prepare your minds and souls.” He held up both beautiful artists’ hands, like a priest.

“I’m prepared, dammit. Open!”

Roy flung open the outside and then the inside door and we stepped into total darkness.

“Lights, dammit!” said Manny.

“Hold on—” whispered Roy.

We heard Roy move in the dark, stepping carefully over unseen objects.

Manny twitched nervously.

“Almost ready,” intoned Roy across a night territory. “Now…”

Roy turned on a wind machine, low. First there was a whisper like a giant storm, which brought with it weather from the Andes, snow murmuring off the shelves of the Himalayas, rain over Sumatra, a jungle wind headed for Kilimanjaro, the rustle of skirts of tide along the Azores, a cry of primitive birds, a flourish of bat wings, all blended to lift your gooseflesh and drop your mind down trapdoors toward—

“Light!” cried Roy.

And now the light was rising on Roy Holdstrom’s landscapes, on vistas so alien and beautiful it broke your heart and mended your terror and then shook you again as shadows in great lemming mobs rushed over the microscopic dunes, tiny hills, and miniature mountains, fleeing a doom already promised but not yet arrived.

I looked around with delight. Roy had read my mind again. The bright and dark stuff I threw on the midnight screens inside my camera obscura head he had stolen and blueprinted and built even before I had let them free with my mouth. Now, turnabout, I would use his miniature realities to flesh out my most peculiar odd script. My hero could hardly wait to sprint through this tiny land.

Manny Leiber stared, flabbergasted.

Roy’s dinosaur land was a country of phantoms revealed in an ancient and artificial dawn.

Enclosing this lost world were huge glass plates on which Roy had painted primordial junglescapes, tar swamps in which his creatures sank beneath skies as fiery and bitter as Martian sunsets, burning with a thousand shades of red.

I felt the same thrill I had felt when, in high school, Roy had taken me home and I had gasped as he swung his garage doors wide on, not automobiles, but creatures driven by ancient needs to rise, claw, chew, fly, shriek, and die through all our childhood nights.

And here, now, on Stage 13, Roy’s face burned above a whole miniature continent that Manny and I were stranded on.

I tiptoed across it, fearful of destroying any tiny thing. I reached a single covered sculpture platform and waited.

Surely this must be his greatest beast, the thing he had set himself to rear when, in our twenties, we had visited the primal corridors of our local natural history museum. Surely somewhere in the world this Beast had hidden in dusts, treading char, lost in God’s coal mines under our very tread! Hear! oh hear that subway sound, his primitive heart, and volcanic lungs shrieking to be set free! And had Roy set him free?

“I’ll be goddamned.” Manny Leiber leaned toward the hidden monster. “Do we see it
now
?”

“Yes,” Roy said, “that’s it.”

Manny touched the cover.

“Wait,” said Roy. “I need one more day.”

“Liar!” said Manny. “I don’t believe you got one goddamn bastard thing under that rag!”

Manny took two steps. Roy jumped three.

At which instant, the Stage 13 set phone rang.

Before I could move, Manny grabbed it.

“Well?” he cried.

His face changed. Perhaps it got pale, perhaps not, but it changed.

“I know that.” He took a breath. “I know that, too.” Another breath; his face was getting red now. “I knew
that
half an hour ago! Say, god damn it to hell, who is this!?”

A wasp buzzed at the far end of the line. The phone had been hung up.

“Son of a bitch!”

Manny hurled the phone and I caught it.

“Wrap me in a wet sheet, someone, this is a madhouse! Where was I? You!”

He pointed at both of us.

“Two days, not three. You damn well get the Beast out of the catbox and into the light or—”

At which point the outer door opened. A runt of a guy in a black suit, one of the studio chauffeurs, stood in a glare of light.

“Now what?” Manny shouted.

“We got it here but the motor died. We just got it fixed.”

“Move out, then, for Christ’s sake!”

Manny charged at him with one fist raised, but the door slammed, the runt was gone, so Manny had to turn and direct his explosion at us.

“I’m having your final checks made up, ready for Friday afternoon. Deliver, or you’ll never work again, either of you.”

Roy said quietly, “Do we get to keep it? Our Green Town, Illinois, offices? Now that you
see
these results you got from us fruitcakes?”

Manny paused long enough to look back at the strange lost country like a kid in a fireworks factory.

“Christ,” he breathed, forgetting his problems for a moment, “I got to admit you really
did
it.” He stopped, angry at his own praise, and shifted gears. “Now cut the cackle and move your buns!”

And—bam! He was gone, too.

Standing in the midst of our ancient landscape, lost in time, Roy and I stared at one another.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” said Roy. Then, “You really going to do it? Write two versions of the script? One for him, one for
us
?”

“Yep! Sure.”

“How can you
do
that?”

“Heck,” I said, “I been in training for fifteen years, wrote one hundred pulp stories, one a week, in one hundred weeks, two script outlines in two days?
Both
brilliant?
Trust
me.”

“Okay, I do, I do.” There was a long pause, then he said, “Do we go
look
?”

“Look? At
what
?”

“That funeral you saw. In the rain. Last night. Over the wall. Wait.”

Roy walked over to the big airlock door. I followed. He opened the door. We looked out.

An ornately carved black hearse with crystal windows was just pulling away down the studio alley, making a big racket with a bad engine.

“I bet I know where it’s going,” said Roy.

We drove around on Gower Street in Roy’s old beat-up 1927 tin lizzie.

We didn’t see the black funeral hearse go into the graveyard, but as we pulled up out front and parked, the hearse came rolling out among the stones.

It passed us, carrying a casket into the full sunlight of the street.

We turned to watch the black limousine whisper out the gate with no more sound than a polar exhalation from off the northern floes.

“That’s the first time I ever saw a casket in a funeral car go
out
of a cemetery. We’re too late!”

I spun about to see the last of the limo heading east, back toward the studio.

“Too late for what?”

“Your dead man, dummy! Come on!”

We were almost to the cemetery back wall when Roy stopped.

“Well, by God, there’s his tomb.”

I looked at what Roy was looking at, about ten feet above us, in marble:

It was one of those Greek-temple huts in which they bury fabulous people, with an iron lattice gate locked over a heavy wood-and-bronze inner door.

“He couldn’t have come out of there,
could
he?”

“No, but something got on that ladder and I knew his face. And someone else
knew
I would recognize that face so I was invited to come see.”

“Shut up. Come on.”

We advanced along the path.

“Watch it. We don’t want to be seen playing this stupid game.”

We arrived at the wall. There was nothing there, of course.

“Like I said, if the body was ever here, we’re too late.” Roy exhaled and glanced.

“No, look. There.”

I pointed at the top of the wall.

There were the marks, two of them, of some object that had leaned against the upper rim.

“The ladder?”

“And down
here
.”

The grass at the base of the wall, about five feet out, a proper angle, had two half-inch ladder indentations in it.

“And here. See?”

I showed him a long depression where the grass had been crushed by something falling.

“Well, well,” murmured Roy. “Looks like Halloween’s starting over.”

Roy knelt on the grass and put his long bony fingers out to trace the print of the heavy flesh that had lain there in the cold rain only twelve hours ago.

I knelt with Roy staring down at the long indentation, and shivered.

“I—” I said, and stopped.

For a shadow moved between us.

“Morning!”

The graveyard day watchman stood over us.

I glanced at Roy, quickly. “Is this the right gravestone? It’s been years. Is—”

The next flat tombstone was covered with leaves. I scrabbled the dust away. There was a half-seen name beneath. SMYTHE. BORN 1875-DIED 1928.

“Sure! Old grandpa!” cried Roy. “Poor guy. Died of pneumonia.” Roy helped me brush away the dust. “I sure loved him. He—”

“Where’re your flowers?” said the heavy voice, above us.

Roy and I stiffened.

“Ma’s bringing ’em,” said Roy. “We came ahead, to find the stone.” Roy glanced over his shoulder. “She’s out there now.”