A Graveyard for Lunatics

?In time, pal. Look, I finished half an hour ago. One look and you?ll beat your typewriter to death. I called Manny! He?ll see us in twenty minutes. I went nuts, waiting. I had to come bang the balls. There!? He struck another mighty blow, a croquet ball flew. ?Someone stop me before I kill!?

?Roy, calm down.?

?No, I?ll never calm down. We?ll make the greatest horror film in history. Manny will??

A voice yelled: ?Hey, what?re you two doing here??

Manny?s Rolls-Royce, a traveling white theatre, glided by, purring under its breath. Our boss?s face glared out one small theatre window.

?Do we have a meeting or no?!?

?Do we walk or ride?? Roy said.

?Walk!?

The Rolls glided away.

19

We took our time walking to Stage 13.

I kept watching Roy to see if I could get a hint of what he had been up to in the long night. Even when we were boys, he rarely showed his true feelings. He?d fling his garage doors wide to show me his latest dinosaur. Only when my breath exploded did he allow himself a yell. If I loved what he had made, it didn?t matter what anyone else said.

?Roy,? I said, walking. ?You okay??

We found Manny Leiber fuming outside Stage 13. ?Where the hell you been!?? he cried.

Roy opened the door of Stage 13, glided in, and let the heavy door slam.

Manny glared at me. I jumped forward and pulled the door open for him.

We stepped into night.

There was darkness except for a single light bulb, hung above Roy?s armatured clay-modeling stand, sixty feet across a desert floor, a semi-Martian landscape, near the shadowed Meteor Crater.

Roy peeled off his shoes and darted across the landscape like a ballet master, fearful of crushing a fingernail tree here, a car as big as a thimble there.

?Get your shoes off!? he shouted.

?Like hell!?

But Manny yanked off his shoes, and tiptoed across the miniature world. Much had been added since dawn; new mountains, new trees, plus whatever lay waiting beneath the wet cloth under the light.

We both arrived, in our stocking feet, at the armatured stand. ?Ready?? Roy searched our faces with his lighthouse eyes.

?Dammit to hell, yes!? Manny snatched at the moist towel.

Roy knocked his hand away.

?No,? he said. ?Me!?

Manny pulled back, blushing with anger.

Roy lifted the moist towel as if it were a curtain rising on the greatest show on earth.

?Not Beauty and the Beast,? he cried, ?but The Beast that is Beautiful!?

Manny Leiber and I gasped.

Roy had not lied. It was the finest work he had ever done, a proper thing to glide from a far-traveling light- year ship, a hunter of midnight paths across the stars, a dreamer alone behind his terrible, awful, most dreadfully appalling mask.

The Beast.

That lonely man behind the Oriental Brown Derby screen, laughing, on what seemed a hundred nights ago.

The creature who had run away on the midnight streets to enter a graveyard and stay among the white tombs.

?Oh, my God, Roy.? My eyes filled with tears shocked free by the impact, as fresh and new as when the Beast had stepped forth to raise his riven face into the night air. ?Oh, God??

Roy was staring with wild love at his wondrous work. Only slowly did he turn to regard Manny Leiber. What he saw stunned both of us.

Manny?s face was white cheese. His eyes swiveled in their sockets. His throat croaked as if a wire choked his neck. His hands clawed his chest as if his heart had stopped.

?What?ve you done!? he shrieked. ?Jesus! My God, oh Christ! What is this? Tricks? Jokes? Cover it up! You?re fired!?

Manny hurled the damp towel at the clay Beast.

?It?s crap!?