?God, Roy,? I gasped, ?take it all off! I have this terrible feeling if you leave it, it?ll stick and I?ll never see you again!?
Roy?s 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??
?I?m starting to feel like one. You want to be excommunicated??
?From what??
?Our friendship??
His eyes quickened to watch me.
?You wouldn?t!?
?I might.?
?Friends don?t 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 wasn?t 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 didn?t say. The night I followed the Beast into the graveyard? I was so in love with the damned monster. I was afraid you?d 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 didn?t say. I knew you?d 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 Manny?s office! I was stunned! It was all so beautiful. The Beast was running the studio, unseen. So don?t 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 don?t know, I would?ve thought of something?and 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 you?ve run a studio, buster, you don?t 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 actors, told the starts, guessed the ends. Once I got in, I was high on Notre Dame every night laughing at the peasants, diminishing the giant runts who had hurt my pals and killed the gyroscope that always spun in my chest. But now the gyroscope whirred again, lopsided crazy, off its pivot. Look out there, at what I did, almost everything torn down. The Beast started, but I finished it. I knew if I didn?t stop I?d be carted off to a madhouse-dairy to be milked for paranoia. That, and the Beast dying, pleading for one last go with the priest and the bells and candles and confessionals and: forgive. I had to give him back his studio so he could give it back to you.?
Roy slowed, licked his dreadful lips, and was silent.
?There?s one thing, several things, not clear?? I said.
?Name them.?
