I was silent. Speak up! Yes.
Good. When he saw I was dying, really dying in the tomb and that he was dying from the cancer I had given him, and the game wasnt worth the candle, he had the decency to let me go. The studio he had run, I had run, had come to a dead jolting halt. We both had to set it in motion again. Now, next week, turn all the wheels. Start back on The Dead Ride Fast.
No, I murmured.
Damn it to hell! With my last breath Ill come choke the life out of you. It will be done. Say it!
It, I said at last, will be done.
And now the last thing. What I said before. The offer. Its yours if you want it. The studio.
Dont
Theres no one else! Dont turn it down so quickly. Most men would die to inherit
Die, is right. Id be dead in a month, a wreck, drinking, and dead. You dont understand. Youre the only son I have.
Im sorry thats true. Why me?
Because youre a real honest-to-God idiot savant. A real fool, not a fake one. Someone who talks too much but then you look at the words and theyre right. You cant help yourself. The good things come out of your hand into words.
Yes, but I havent leaned against the mirror and listened to you for years, like Manny.
He talks but his words dont mean anything.
But hes learned. He must know how to run things by now. Let me work for him!
Last chance? Last offer? His voice was fading. And give up my wife and my writing and my life?
Ah, whispered the voice. And a final Yes Adding: Now, at last. Bless me, father, for I have truly sinned.
I cant.
Yes, you can. And forgive. Thats a priests job. Forgive me and bless me. In a moment itll be too late. Dont send me to everlasting hell!
I shut my eyes and said, I bless you. And then I said, I forgive you,
though, God, I dont understand you!
Who ever did? he gasped. Not me. His head slumped against the panel. Much thanks. His eyes closed in outer space where there is no sound. I added my own track. The sound of a mighty gate closing on oblivion, tomb doors banging shut.
I forgive you! I shouted at the mans terrible mask.
I forgive you my voice echoed back from high in the empty church. The street was empty.
Crumley, I thought, where are you? I ran.
There was a last place I had to go.
I climbed the dark interior of Notre Dame.
I saw the shape fixed out near the top rim of the left tower, with a gargoyle not too far away, its bestial chin resting on its horny paws, gazing out across a Paris that never was.
I edged along, took a deep breath, and called: You ? and had to stop. The figure seated there, its face in shadow, did not move.
I took another breath and said, Here.
The figure straightened. The head, the face, came up into the dim glow of the city.
I took a last breath and called quietly, Roy?
The Beast looked back at me, a perfect duplicate of the one that had slumped in the confessional a few minutes ago.
The terrible grimace fixed me, the terrible raving eyes froze my blood. The terrible wound of mouth peeled and slithered, insucked and garbled a single word: Yesssssss.
Its all over, I said, my voice breaking. My God, Roy. Come down from here.
The Beast nodded. Its right hand rose up to tear at the face and peel away the wax, the makeup, the mask of horror and stunned amaze. He worked at his nightmare face with a clawing downpull of fingers and thumb. From beneath the shambles, my old high school chum looked back at me.
Did I look like him? asked Roy.
Oh, God, Roy. I could hardly see him for the tears in my eyes. Yes! Yeah, muttered Roy. I kind of thought so.
God, Roy, I gasped, take it all off! I have this terrible feeling if you leave it, itll stick and Ill never see you again!
Roys right hand impulsively jerked up to rake his horrid cheek. Funny, he whispered, I think the same.
How did you come to fix your face that way? Two confessions? You heard one. Want another? Yes.
Have you become a priest, then?
Im starting to feel like one. You want to be excommunicated? From what?
Our friendship?
His eyes quickened to watch me. You wouldnt!
I might.
Friends dont blackmail friends about their friendship. All the more reason to talk. Start.
Inside his half-torn-away mask, very quietly, Roy said:
It was my animals that did it. No one had ever touched my darlings, my dears, ever. I gave my life to imagine them, shape them. They were perfect. I was God. What else did I have? Did I ever date the class girl gymnast and cheerleader? Did I have any women in all those years? Like hell. I went to bed with my brontosaurus. I flew nights with my pterodactyls. So imagine how I felt when someone slaughtered my innocents, destroyed my world, killed my ancient bedmates. I wasnt just mad. I was insane.
Roy paused behind his dreadful flesh. Then he said: Hell, it was all so simple. It fell together almost from the start, but I didnt say. The night I followed the Beast into the graveyard? I was so in love with the damned monster. I was afraid youd spoil the fun. Fun!? And people dead because of
it! So when I saw him go in his own tomb and not come out, I didnt say. I knew youd try to put me off, and I had to have that face, my God, that great terrible mask, for our epic masterpiece! So I shut my trap and made the clay bust. Then? Almost got you fired. Me? Off the lot! Then, my dinosaurs stomped on, my sets trampled, my hideous Beast sculpture hammered to bits. I went berserk. But then it hit me: there was only one person who could have destroyed it.
Not Manny, nor anyone we knew. The Beast himself! The guy from the Brown Derby. But how would he know about my clay bust? Someone tell him? No! I thought back to the night I followed him into the graveyard, near the studio. Lord, it had to be! Into the tomb and somehow under the wall, into the studio late nights where, by God, he saw my clay replica of his face and exploded.
I did a lot of crazy planning, dear God, right then. I knew that if the Beast found me I was dead. So, I killed myself! Threw im off the scent. With me supposedly dead, I knew I could search, find the Beast, get revenge! So I hung myself in effigy. You found it. Then they found and burned it, and that night I went over the wall. You know what I found. I tried the tomb in the graveyard, found the door unlocked and went in and down and listened behind the mirror in Mannys office! I was stunned! It was all so beautiful. The Beast was running the studio, unseen.
So dont kill the son of a bitch, but wait and grab his power. Not kill the Beast but be the Beast, live the Beast! And then, my God, run twenty-seven, twenty-eight countries, the world. And at the proper time, of course, come out, be reborn, say I had wandered off in amnesia or some damn-fool story, I dont know, I wouldve thought of somethingand the Beast was running down, anyway. I could see that. Dying on his feet.
I hid and watched and listened and then poleaxed him in the film vaults under the studio, halfway to the tombs. The makeup! When he saw me standing there in the vaults he was so damned shocked I had my chance to knock him down, lock him in the vaults. Then I went up to test the old power, my voice behind the glass. I had heard the Beast talking in and outside the Brown Derby, and then in the tunnel and behind the office wall. I whispered, I muttered, and, hell! The Dead Ride Fast was back on schedule. You and me rehired! I got ready to rip off the makeup and come back out as me, when a thing happened.
What?
I found that I liked power. What?!
Power. I loved it. Stockbrokers, big corporate men, all that crap. Incredible. I was drunk! I loved running the studio, making decisions, and all done without board meetings. All with mirrors, echoes, shadows. Do all the films that should have been done years ago, but never were! Rebuild me, my universe! Reinvent, recreate my friends, my creatures. Make the studio pay in cash as well as flesh and lives and blood.
Figure who was most responsible for trashing my life, then, then, one by one, squash the nitwits, mash the cohorts of the ignorant and the yes-men to the twits. The studio had run me; now I ran the studio. God, no wonder Louis B. Mayer was insufferable, the Warner Brothers shooting powdered film clips up their veins all night. Until youve run a studio, buster, you dont know what power is. You not only run a city, a country, but the world beyond that world. Slow motion, you say; people run slow. Fast, you say; people leap the Himalayas, flop in their graves.
All because you chopped the scenes, ran the
