A Graveyard for Lunatics

I wrote ten pages, leaving room for monsters. Roy slapped thirty pounds of wet clay on a table and danced around it, hitting and shaping, hoping for the monster to rise up like a bubble in a prehistoric pool to collapse in a hiss of sulfurous steam and let the true horror out.

Roy read my pages.

?Where?s your Beast?? he cried.

I glanced at his hands, empty but covered with blood-red clay.

?Where?s yours?? I said.

And now here it was, three weeks later.

?Hey,? said Roy, ?how come you?re just standing down there looking at me? Come grab a doughnut, sit, speak.? I went up, took the doughnut he offered me, and sat in the porch swing, moving alternately forward into the future and back into the past. Forward?rockets and Mars. Backward?dinosaurs and tarpits.

And faceless Beasts all around.

?For someone who usually talks ninety miles a minute,? said Roy Holdstrom, ?you are extraordinarily quiet.?

?I?m scared,? I said, at last.

?Well, heck.? Roy stopped our time machine. ?Speak, oh mighty one.?

I spoke.

I built the wall and carried the ladder and lifted the body and brought on the cold rain and then struck with the lightning to make the body fall. When I finished and the rain had dried on my forehead, I handed Roy the typed All Hallows invitation.

Roy scanned it, then threw it on the porch floor and put his foot on it. ?Somebody?s got to be kidding!?

?Sure. But? I had to go home and burn my underwear.?

Roy picked it up and read it again, and then stared toward the graveyard wall.

?Why would anyone send this??

?Yeah. Since most of the studio people don?t even know I?m here!?

?But, hell, last night was Halloween. Still, what an elaborate joke, hoisting a body up a ladder. Wait, what if they told you to come at midnight, but other people, at eight, nine, ten, and eleven? Scare ?em one by one! That would make sense!?

?Only if you had planned it!?

Roy turned sharply. ?You don?t really think???

?No. Yes. No.?

?Which is it??

?Remember that Halloween when we were nineteen and went to the Paramount Theatre to see Bob Hope in The Cat and the Canary and the girl in front of us screamed and I glanced around and there you sat, with a rubber ghoul mask on your face??

?Yeah.? Roy laughed.

?Remember that time when you called and said old Ralph Courtney, our best friend, was dead and for me to come over, you had him laid out in your house, but it was all a joke, you planned to get Ralph to put white powder all over his face and lay himself out and pretend to be dead and rise up when I came in. Remember??

?Yep.? Roy laughed again.

?But I met Ralph in the street and it spoiled your joke??

?Sure.? Roy shook his head at his own pranks.

?Well, then. No wonder I think maybe you put the damn body up on the wall and sent me the letter.?

?Only one thing wrong with that,? said Roy. ?You?ve rarely mentioned Arbuthnot to me. If I made the body, how would I figure you?d recognize the poor s.o.b. ? It would have to be someone who really knew that you had seen Arbuthnot years ago, right??

?Well??

?Doesn?t make sense, a body in the rain, if you don?t know what in hell you?re looking at. You?ve told me about a lot of other people you met when you were a kid, hanging around the studios. If I?d made a body, it would be Rudolph Valentino or Lon Chaney, to be sure you?d recognize ?em. Correct??

?Correct,? I said lamely. I studied Roy?s face and looked quickly away. ?Sorry. But, hell, it was Arbuthnot. I saw him two dozen times over the years, back in the thirties. At previews. Out front at the studio, here. Him and his sports cars, a dozen different ones, and limousines, three of those. And women, a few dozen, always laughing, and when he signed autographs, slipping a quarter in the autograph book before he handed it back to you. A quarter! In 1934! A quarter bought you a malted milk, a candy bar, and a ticket to a movie.?

?That?s the kind of guy he was, was he? No wonder you remember him. How much?d he give you??

?He gave me a buck twenty-five, one month. I was rich. And now he?s buried over that wall where I was last night, isn?t he? Why would someone try to scare me into thinking he?d been dug up and propped on a ladder? Why all the bother? The body landed like an iron safe. Take at least two men, maybe, to handle that. Why??

Roy took a bite out of another doughnut. ?Yeah, why? Unless someone is using you to tell the world. You were going to tell someone else, yes??