A Graveyard for Lunatics

?Move out, then, for Christ?s sake!?

Manny charged at him with one fist raised, but the door slammed, the runt was gone, so Manny had to turn and direct his explosion at us.

?I?m having your final checks made up, ready for Friday afternoon. Deliver, or you?ll never work again, either of you.?

Roy said quietly, ?Do we get to keep it? Our Green Town, Illinois, offices? Now that you see these results you got from us fruitcakes??

Manny paused long enough to look back at the strange lost country like a kid in a fireworks factory.

?Christ,? he breathed, forgetting his problems for a moment, ?I got to admit you really did it.? He stopped, angry at his own praise, and shifted gears. ?Now cut the cackle and move your buns!?

And?bam! He was gone, too.

Standing in the midst of our ancient landscape, lost in time, Roy and I stared at one another.

?Curiouser and curiouser,? said Roy. Then, ?You really going to do it? Write two versions of the script? One for him, one for us??

?Yep! Sure.?

?How can you do that??

?Heck,? I said, ?I been in training for fifteen years, wrote one hundred pulp stories, one a week, in one hundred weeks, two script outlines in two days? Both brilliant? Trust me.?

?Okay, I do, I do.? There was a long pause, then he said, ?Do we go look??

?Look? At what??

?That funeral you saw. In the rain. Last night. Over the wall. Wait.?

Roy walked over to the big airlock door. I followed. He opened the door. We looked out.

An ornately carved black hearse with crystal windows was just pulling away down the studio alley, making a big racket with a bad engine.

?I bet I know where it?s going,? said Roy.

8

We drove around on Gower Street in Roy?s old beat-up 1927 tin lizzie.

We didn?t see the black funeral hearse go into the graveyard, but as we pulled up out front and parked, the hearse came rolling out among the stones.

It passed us, carrying a casket into the full sunlight of the street.

We turned to watch the black limousine whisper out the gate with no more sound than a polar exhalation from off the northern floes.

?That?s the first time I ever saw a casket in a funeral car go out of a cemetery. We?re too late!?

I spun about to see the last of the limo heading east, back toward the studio.

?Too late for what??

?Your dead man, dummy! Come on!?

We were almost to the cemetery back wall when Roy stopped.

?Well, by God, there?s his tomb.?

I looked at what Roy was looking at, about ten feet above us, in marble:

J. C. ARBUTHNOT, 1884-1934 R.I.P.

It was one of those Greek-temple huts in which they bury fabulous people, with an iron lattice gate locked over a heavy wood-and-bronze inner door.

?He couldn?t have come out of there, could he??

?No, but something got on that ladder and I knew his face. And someone else knew I would recognize that face so I was invited to come see.?

?Shut up. Come on.?

We advanced along the path.

?Watch it. We don?t want to be seen playing this stupid game.?

We arrived at the wall. There was nothing there, of course.

?Like I said, if the body was ever here, we?re too late.? Roy exhaled and glanced.

?No, look. There.?

I pointed at the top of the wall.

There were the marks, two of them, of some object that had leaned against the upper rim.