They ran the first film test on the animated monster a week later.
When it was over. Clarence sat in darkness and nodded imperceptibly.
‘Better. But…more horrorific, bloodcurdling. Let’s scare the hell out of Aunt Jane. Back to the drawing board!’
‘I’m a week behind schedule now,’ Terwilliger protested. ‘You keep coming in, change this, change that, you say, so I change it, one day the tail’s all wrong, next day it’s the claws—’
‘You’ll find a way to make me happy,’ said Clarence. ‘Get in there and fight the old aesthetic fight!’
At the end of the month they ran the second test.
‘A near miss! Close!’ said Clarence. ‘The face is just almost right. Try again, Terwilliger!’
Terwilliger went back. He animated the dinosaur’s mouth so that it said obscene things which only a lip reader might catch, while the rest of the audience would think the beast was only shrieking. Then he got the clay and worked until 3 A.M. on the awful face.
‘That’s it!’ cried Clarence in the projection room the next week. ‘Perfect! Now that’s what I call a monster!’
He leaned toward the old man, his lawyer, Mr Glass, and Maury Poole, his production assistant.
‘You like my creature?’ He beamed.
Terwilliger, slumped in the back row, his skeleton as long as the monsters he built, could feel the old lawyer shrug.
‘You seen one monster, you seen ’em all.’
‘Sure, sure, but this one’s special!’ shouted Clarence happily. ‘Even I got to admit Terwilliger’s a genius!’
They all turned back to watch the beast on the screen, in a titanic waltz, throw its razor tail wide in a vicious harvesting that cut grass and clipped flowers. The beast paused now to gaze pensively off into mists, gnawing a red bone.
‘That monster,’ said Mr Glass at last, squinting. ‘He sure looks familiar.’
‘Familiar?’ Terwilliger stirred, alert.
‘It’s got such a look,’ drawled Mr Glass in the dark, ‘I couldn’t forget, from someplace.’
‘Natural Museum exhibits?’
‘No, no.’
‘Maybe,’ laughed Clarence, ‘you read a book once, Glass?’
‘Funny…’ Glass, unperturbed, cocked his head, closed one eye. ‘Like detectives, I don’t forget a face. But, that Tyrannosaurus Rex—where before did I meet him?’
‘Who cares?’ Clarence sprinted. ‘He’s great. And all because I booted Terwilliger’s behind to make him do it right. Come on, Maury!’
When the door shut, Mr Glass turned to gaze steadily at Terwilliger. Not taking his eyes away, he called softly to the projectionist, ‘Walt? Walter? Could you favor us with that beast again?’
‘Sure thing.’
Terwilliger shifted uncomfortably, aware of some bleak force gathering in blackness, in the sharp light that shot forth once more to ricochet terror off the screen.
‘Yeah. Sure,’ mused Mr Glass. ‘I almost remember. I almost know him. But…who?’
The brute, as if answering, turned and for a disdainful moment stared across one hundred thousand million years at two small men hidden in a small dark room. The tyrant machine named itself in thunder.
Mr Glass quickened forward, as if to cup his ear.
Darkness swallowed all.
With the film half finished, in the tenth week, Clarence summoned thirty of the office staff, technicians and a few friends to see a rough cut of the picture.
The film had been running fifteen minutes when a gasp ran through the small audience.
Clarence glanced swiftly about.
Mr Glass, next to him, stiffened.
Terwilliger, scenting danger, lingered near the exit, not knowing why; his nervousness was compulsive and intuitive. Hand on the door, he watched.
Another gasp ran through the crowd.
Someone laughed quietly. A woman secretary giggled. Then there was instantaneous silence.
For Joe Clarence had jumped to his feet.
His tiny figure sliced across the light on the screen. For a moment, two images gesticulated in the dark: Tyrannosaurus, ripping the leg from a pteranodon, and Clarence, yelling, jumping forward as if to grapple with these fantastic wrestlers.
‘Stop! Freeze it right there!’
The film stopped. The image held.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Mr Glass.
‘Wrong?’ Clarence crept up on the image. He thrust his baby hand to the screen, stabbed the tyrant jaw, the lizard eye, the fangs, the brow, then turned blindly to the projector light so that reptilian flesh was printed on his furious cheeks. ‘What goes? What is this?’
‘Only a monster, Chief.’
‘Monster, hell!’ Clarence pounded the screen with his tiny fist. ‘That’s me!’
Half the people leaned forward, half the people fell back, two people jumped up, one of them Mr Glass, who fumbled for his other spectacles, flexed his eyes and moaned, ‘So that’s where I saw him before!’
‘That’s where you what?’
Mr Glass shook his head, eyes shut. ‘That face, I knew it was familiar.’
A wind blew in the room.
Everyone turned. The door stood open.
Terwilliger was gone.
They found Terwilliger in his animation studio cleaning out his desk, dumping everything into a large cardboard box, the Tyrannosaurus machine-toy model under his arm. He looked up as the mob swirled in, Clarence at the head.
‘What did I do to deserve this!’ he cried.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Clarence.’
‘You’re sorry?! Didn’t I pay you well?’
‘No, as a matter of fact.’
‘I took you to lunches—’
‘Once. I picked up the tab.’
‘I gave you dinner at home, you swam in my pool, and now this! You’re fired!’
‘You can’t fire me. Mr Clarence. I’ve worked the last week free and overtime, you forgot my check—’
‘You’re fired anyway, oh, you’re really fired! You’re blackballed in Hollywood. Mr Glass!’ He whirled to find the old man. ‘Sue him!’
‘There is nothing,’ said Terwillinger, not looking up any more, just looking down, packing, keeping in motion, ‘nothing you can sue me for. Money? You never paid enough to save on. A house? Could never afford that.
A wife? I’ve worked for people like you all my life. So wives are out. I’m an unencumbered man. There’s nothing you can do to me. If you attach my dinosaurs, I’ll just go hole up in a small town somewhere, get me a can of latex rubber, some clay from the river, some old steel pipe, and make new monsters.
I’ll buy stock film raw and cheap. I’ve got an old beat-up stopmotion camera. Take that away, and I’ll build one with my own hands. I can do anything. And that’s why you’ll never hurt me again.’
‘You’re fired!’ cried Clarence. ‘Look at me. Don’t look away. You’re fired! You’re fired!’
‘Mr Clarence,’ said Mr Glass, quietly, edging forward. ‘Let me talk to him just a moment.’
‘So talk to him!’ said Clarence. ‘What’s the use? He just stands there with that monster under his arm and the goddam thing looks like me, so get out of the way!’
Clarence stormed out the door. The others followed.
Mr Glass shut the door, walked over to the window and looked out at the absolutely clear twilight sky.
‘I wish it would rain,’ he said. ‘That’s one thing about California I can’t forgive. It never really lets go and cries. Right now, what wouldn’t I give for a little something from that sky? A bolt of lightning, even.’
He stood silent, and Terwilliger slowed in his packing. Mr Glass sagged down into a chair and doodled on a pad with a pencil, talking sadly, half aloud, to himself.
‘Six reels of film shot, pretty good reels, half the film done, three hundred thousand dollars down the drain, hail and farewell. Out the window all the jobs. Who feeds the starving mouths of boys and girls? Who will face the stockholders? Who chucks the Bank of America under the chin? Anyone for Russian roulette?’
He turned to watch Terwilliger snap the locks on a briefcase.
‘What hath God wrought?’
Terwilliger, looking down at his hands, turning them over to examine their texture, said. ‘I didn’t know I was doing it, I swear. It came out in my fingers. It was all subconscious. My fingers do everything for me. They did this.’
‘Better the fingers had come in my office and taken me direct by the throat,’ said Glass. ‘I was never one for slow motion. The Keystone Kops, at triple speed, was my idea of living, or dying. To think a rubber monster has stepped on us all. We are now so much tomato mush, ripe for canning!’
‘Don’t make me feel any guiltier than I feel,’ said Terwilliger.
‘What do you want, I should take you dancing?’
‘It’s just,’ cried Terwilliger, ‘he kept at me. Do this. Do that. Do it the other way. Turn it inside out, upside down, he said. I swallowed my bile. I was angry all the time. Without knowing. I must’ve changed the face. But right up till five minutes ago, when Mr Clarence yelled, I didn’t see it. I’ll take all the blame.’
‘No,’ sighed Mr glass, ‘we should all have seen. Maybe we did and couldn’t admit. Maybe we did and laughed all night in our sleep, when we couldn’t hear. So where are we now? Mr Clarence, he’s got investments he can’t throw out.
You got your career from this day forward, for better or worse, you can’t throw out. Mr Clarence right now is aching to be convinced it was all some horrible dream. Part of his ache, ninety-nine per cent, is in his wallet.
If you could put one per cent of your time in the next hour convincing him of what I’m going to tell you next, tomorrow morning there will be no orphan children staring out of the want ads in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. If you would go tell him—’
‘Tell me what?’
Joe Clarence, returned, stood in the door, his cheeks still inflamed.
‘What he just told me.’ Mr Glass turned calmly. ‘A touching story.’
‘I’m listening!’ said Clarence.
‘Mr Clarence.’ The old lawyer weighed his words carefully. ‘This film you just saw is Mr Terwilliger’s solemn and silent tribute to you.’
‘It’s what?’ shouted Clarence.
Both men, Clarence and Terwilliger, dropped their jaws.
The old lawyer gazed
