The memory of that film, that scene, the ballerinas, the dead man hung high in shadows, had never left me. And now, at the far north side of this sound stage, an object drifted on a long spider line. It shed an immense, twenty-foot darkness on the empty wall, like a scene from that old and frightening picture.
Oh, no, I whispered. It cant be! It was.
I imagined Roys 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 cant be you! You always wanted to live.
But Roys 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 wouldnt let someone hang you!? Perhaps.
And if so, how come youre still here? How come they havent cut you down?
Which means?
Youre freshly dead. You havent been found. Im 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 Roys 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, Alhambras walls, Alexandrias libraries and Bombays 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 friends 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. Whispertap. 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, wont 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 Roys body and the destroyed cities of the world. My body would have gone into the trunk with Roys!
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 Roys apartment way out at Fifty-fourth. What then? Once inside, mightnt I smell the good doctors 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 well put you to bed. Talk in the morning. Whats 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 thats the former head of Maximus Studios, is it? Yes, I said.
Crumley studied the face for another moment and nodded quietly. Thats death, all right.
He shut the lid. The weight inside the box shifted and whispered something like sleep in its rustling. No! I thought, dont make me!
We talked in the morning.
At noon, Crumley dropped me in front of Roys apartment house out
