A Graveyard for Lunatics

I grabbed the box and ran.

I reached the outer door and threw up.

Eyes shut, I wiped my mouth, then opened the door slowly. Far down the alley the workmen turned a corner toward the carpenters? shop and the big iron incinerator.

Doc Phillips, behind them, gave silent directions.

I shivered. If I had arrived five minutes later, I might have come at the very moment he had found Roy?s body and the destroyed cities of the world. My body would have gone into the trunk with Roy?s!

My taxi was waiting behind Stage 9.

Nearby was a phone booth. I stumbled in, dropped a coin, called the police. A voice came on saying, ?Yes? Hello, yes, hello, yes!?

I swayed drunkenly in the booth, looking at the receiver as if it were a dead snake.

What could I say? That a sound stage was cleared and empty? That an incinerator was probably burning right now, long before patrol cars and sirens could help?

And then what? Me, alone here with no armor, no weapons, no proof?

Me fired and maybe dead and over that wall to the tombs on permanent loan?

No!

I gave a shriek. Someone battered me with a hammer until my skull was red clay, torn like the flesh of the Beast. Staggering to get out, I was yanked to strangle on my own fright in a coffin locked, no matter how I banged the glass.

The phone-booth door flew wide.

?You were pushing the wrong way!? my taxi driver said.

I gave some sort of crazy laugh and let him lead me out.

?You forgot something.?

He brought me the box, which had fallen in the booth.

Whisper-rustle-tap.

?Oh, yeah,? I said. ?Him.?

On the way out of the studio, I lay down on the back seat. When we got to the first outside street corner, the driver said, ?Which way do I turn??

?Left.? I bit the back of my wrist. The driver was staring into his rear-view mirror.

?Jesus,? he said, ?you look awful. You gonna be sick??

I shook my head.

?Someone die?? he guessed.

?Dead, yes.?

?Here we are. Western Avenue. I go north??

?South.? Toward Roy?s apartment way out at Fifty-fourth. What then? Once inside, mightn?t I smell the good doctor?s cologne hanging in the hall like an unseen curtain? And his workmen, down a dark corridor, carrying things, waiting to lug me away like a piece of wrecked furniture?

I shivered and rode, wondering if and when I would ever grow up. I listened to my insides and heard:

The sound of breaking glass.

My parents had died a long time back and their deaths seemed easy.

But Roy? I could never have imagined a downpour of fright like this, so much grief you could drown in it.

Now I feared to go back to the studio. The crazed architecture of all those countries nailed together, now falling to crush me. I imagined every southern plantation, each Illinois attic crammed with maniac relatives and smashed mirrors, every closet hung with tenterhooked friends.

The midnight gift, the toy box with the papier-mache flesh and death-maddened face, lay on the taxicab floor.

Rustle-tap-whisper.

A thunderclap shook my chest.

?No, driver!? I said. ?Turn here. To the ocean. To the sea.?

When Crumley opened his front door, he examined my face and wandered off to the telephone.

?Make that five days? sick leave,? he said.

He came back with a full tumbler of vodka and found me sitting in the garden taking deep breaths of good salt air, trying to see the stars, but there was too much fog moving in over the land. He looked at the box on my lap, took my hand, placed the vodka in it and guided it to my mouth.

?Drink that,? he said, quietly, ?then we?ll put you to bed. Talk in the morning. What?s that??

?Hide it,? I said. ?If someone knew it was here, we might both disappear.?