That was a film, Constance! And you think this is real?
Constance shuddered. I longed for the old Rattigan who laughed all the time. I saw something just now, up on the belltower.
Maybe its J. C. I said. While the others are ransacking Calvary, why dont I take a look?
I thought you were afraid of heights?
I watched the shadows run up along the facade of Notre Dame.
Damn fool. Go ahead. Get Jesus down, murmured Constance, before he stays like a gargoyle. Save Jesus.
Hes saved!
A hundred feet off, I looked back. Constance was already warming her hands at a hearth of Roman legionnaires.
I lingered outside Notre Dame, afraid of two things: going in and going up. Then I turned, shocked, to sniff the air. I took a deeper breath and let it out. Good Grief. Incense! And candle smoke! Someones beenJ. C.?
I moved through the entryway and stopped. Somewhere high in the strurworks, a great bulk moved.
I squinted up through the canvas slats, the plywood fronts, the shadows of gargoyles, trying to see if anything at all stirred up there in the cathedral dark.
I thought, Who lit the incense? How long ago did the wind blow the candles out?
Dust filtered in a fine powder down the upper air.
J. C. ? I thought, If you fall, who will save the Saviour? A silence answered my silence.
So
Gods number one coward had to hoist himself, ladder step by ladder step, up through the darkness, fearful that any moment the great bells might thunder and knock me loose to fall. I squeezed my eyes shut and climbed.
At the top of Notre Dame I stood for a long moment, clutching my hands to my heartbeat, damned sorry to be up and wanting to be down there where the great spread of Romans, well-lit and full of beer, stormed through the alleys to smile at Rattigan, the visiting queen.
If I die now, I thought, none of them will hear. J. C., I called quietly into the shadows. Silence.
I rounded a long sheet of plywood. Someone was there in the starlight, a dim shape seated with his legs dangling over the carved cathedral facade, exactly where the malformed bellringer had sat half a lifetime ago.
The Beast.
He was looking out at the city, at the million lights spread across four hundred square miles.
How did you get here, I wondered. How did you get past the guard at the gate or, no, what? over the wall! Yes. A ladder and the graveyard wall!
I heard a ballpeen hammer strike. I heard a body dragged. A trunk lid slammed. A match lighted. An incinerator roared.
I sucked my breath. The Beast turned to stare at me.
I stumbled and almost fell off the cathedral rim. I grappled one of the gargoyles.
Instantly, the Beast sprang up. His hand seized my hand.
For a single breath we teetered on the cathedral rim. I read his eyes, fearful of me. He read mine, fearful of him.
Then he snatched his hand back as if burned with surprise. He backed off swiftly and we stood half-crouched.
I looked into that dreadful face, the panicked and forever imprisoned eyes, the wounded mouth, and thought:
Why? Why didnt you let me go? or push me? You are the one with the hammer, arent you? The one who came to find and smash Roys terrible clay head? No one but you could have run so wild! Why did you save me? Why do I live?
There could be no response. Something clattered below. Someone was coming up the ladder.
The Beast let out a great heaving whisper: No!
And fled across the high porch. His feet thudded the loose planks. Dust
exploded down through the cathedral darkness.
More climbing noises. I moved to follow the Beast at the far ladder. He looked back a final time. His eyes! What? What about his eyes?
They were different and the same, terrified and accepting, one moment focused, one moment confused. His hand swung up on the dark air. For a moment I thought he might call, shout, shriek at me. But only a strange choked gasp unraveled from his lips. Then I heard his feet plunging down step by step away from this unreal world above to a more terribly unreal world below.
I stumbled to pursue.
My feet shuffled dust and plaster of paris. It flowed like sand seeping through an immense hourglass to pile itself, far below, near the baptistery font. The boards under my feet rattled and swayed. A wind flapped all the cathedral canvas around me in a great migration of wings, and I was on the ladder and jolting down, with each jolt a cry of alarm or a curse trapped in my teeth. My God, I thought, me and him, that thing, on the ladder, running away from what?
I glanced up to see the gargoyles lost to view and I was alone, descending in darkness, thinking: What if he waits for me, down there?
I froze. I looked down.
If I fall, I thought, itll take a year to reach the floor. I only knew one saint. His name popped from my lips: Crumley!
Hold tight, said Crumley, a long way off. Take six deep breaths.
I sucked in but the air refused to go back out of my mouth. Smothered, I glanced at the lights of Los Angeles spread in a four-hundred-mile bed of lamps and traffic, all those people multitudinous and beautiful, and no one here to help me down, and the lights! street by street, the lights!
Far out on the rim of the world, I thought I saw a long dark tide move to an untouchable shore.
Body surfing, whispered Constance.
That did it. I jolted down and kept moving, eyes shut, no more glances into the abyss, until I reached and stood, waiting to be seized and destroyed by the Beast, hands outraised to kill, not save.
But there was no Beast. Just the empty baptismal font, cupping a half pint of cathedral dust, and the blown candles and the lost incense.
I looked up a last time through the half facade of Notre Dame. Whoever was climbing had reached the top.
Half a continent away, a mob on Calvary hill let go like a Saturday-afternoon football reunion.
J. C., I thought, if youre not here, where?
Whoever had been sent to search Calvary hadnt searched very well. They had come and gone and the hill lay empty under the stars. A wind prowled through, pushing dust ahead of it, around the bases of the three crosses that, for their presence, felt as if they might have grown there long before the studio was built around them.
I ran to the bottom of the cross. I could see nothing at the top, the night was dark. There were only fitful gleams of light from far off where Antipas ruled, Fritz Wong raved, and the Romans marched in a great cloud of beer from the Makeup Buildings to the Tribunal Square.
I touched the cross, swayed, and called up, blindly: J. C.! Silence.
I tried again, my voice trembling.
A small tumbleweed blew by, rustling. J. C.! I almost yelled.
And at last a voice came down out of the sky.
Nobody by that name on this street, up this hill, on this cross, the voice murmured, sadly.
Whoever you are, dammit, come down!
I groped up trying to find rungs, fearful of the dark around me. Howd you get up there?
Theres a ladder and Im not nailed in place. Just holding on to pegs and theres a little footrest. It is very peaceful up here. Sometimes I stay nine hours fasting for my sins.
J. C.! I called up, I cant stay. Im afraid! Whatre you doing? Remembering all the haylofts and chicken feathers I rolled in, said J. C.s
voice in the sky. See the feathers falling down like snowflakes? When I leave here I go to confession every day! I got ten thousand women to unload. I give exact measurements, so much backside, bosom, groan, and groin, until the priest grabs his seething armpits! If I cant climb a silk stocking, Ill at least get a clerics pulse so hyperventilated he ruptures his turn-around collar. Anyway, here I am, up, out of harms way. Watching the night that watches me.
Its watching me, too, J. C. Im afraid of the dark in the alleys and Notre Dame, I was just there.
Stay outa there, said J. C., suddenly fierce.
Why? You been watching its towers tonight? You see something? Just stay outa there, is all. Not safe.
I know, I thought. I said, looking around suddenly, What else you see, J. C., night or day up there?
J. C. glanced swiftly off at the shadows.
What, his voice was low, would there be to see in an empty studio, late? Lots!
Yes! J. C. turned his head south to north and back. Lots!
On Halloween night I plunged onyou didnt happen to see I nodded north some fifty yardsa ladder on top of that wall? And a man trying to climb?
J. C. stared at the wall. It was raining that night. J. C. lifted his face to the sky to feel the storm. Whod be nuts enough to climb up there in a storm?
You.
No, said J. C. Im not even here now!
He put his arms out, grasped the crossbars, leaned his head forward and shut his eyes.
J. C., I called. Theyre waiting on set seven! Let them wait.
Christ was on time, dammit! The world called. And He arrived!
You dont believe all that guff, do you?
Yes! I was astonished with what vehemence I exploded it upward along his limbs to his thorn-crowned head.
Fool.
No, Im not! I tried to think what Fritz would say if he were here, but there was only me,
