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All this in a heartbeat.
“I hate this place!” said Henry.
“How would you know?” said Crumley.
Henry said: “I still don’t like it. Listen!”
Upstairs, the wind, or something, was shivering the outside door.
Crumley grabbed the flashlight and swung it around. “Now I hate this place.”
There was a door in the wall ten feet off. Crumley gave it a yank and a grunt. It opened. With Henry between we hustled through. The door slammed behind. We ran.
Away from, I thought, or toward the Beast?!
“Don’t look!” shouted Crumley.
“Whatta you mean, don’t look?” Henry thrashed the air with his cane, clubbing the stone floor with his shoes, ricocheting between us. Crumley, in the lead, yelled, “Just don’t is all!”
But I had seen as we ran, colliding with walls, crashing through a territory of bone heaps and skull pyramids, broken coffins, scattered funeral wreaths; a battlefield of death; cracked incense urns, statue fragments, demolished icons, as if a long parade of doom had, in mid-celebration, dropped its shrapnels to flee, even as we fled with one light caroming off green-mossed ceilings and poking in square holes where flesh had vanished and teeth smiled.
Don’t look!? I thought. No, don’t stop! I all but knocked Henry aside, drunk with fright. He whipped his cane to crack me in place and pumped his legs like a sighted fiend.
We blundered from one country to another, from a file of bones to a file of tins, from vaults of marble to vaults of concrete and suddenly we were in old-silent-black-and-white territory. Names flashed by with film titles on stacked reel canisters.
“Where in hell are we?” panted Crumley.
“Rattigan!” I heard myself gasp. “Botwin! My God! We’re in—Maximus Films! over, under, through the wall!”
And we were indeed in Botwin’s film basement and Rattigan’s underworld, badly lit photo-landscapes they had traveled in 1920 and ’22 and ’25. Not burial boneyards but the old film vaults Constance had named as we rambled. I glanced back in darkness to see real bodies fade even as the film ghosts surged round. Titles sluiced by: The Squaw Man, The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, The Black Pirate. Not only Maximus films, but other studios’ films, borrowed or stolen.
I was torn. One half fleeing the dark soil behind. One half wanting to reach, touch, see these ancient shadow ghosts that had haunted my childhood to hide me in everlasting matinees.
Christ! I yelled but did not yell. Don’t leave! Chaney! Fairbanks! The man in that damned iron mask! Nemo under water! D’Artagnan! Wait for me! I’ll be back. If I live, that is! Soon!
All this a babble of fright and frustration, a surge of instant love and instant fear to smother the stupid babble.
Don’t look at the beauties, I thought. Remember the dark. Run.
And, dear God, don’t stop!
Our echoes caught up with us in a triple rush of panic. We all yelled and streamed in a solid mass the last thirty yards or so, Crumley churning like a crazed ape with his flashlight, Blind Henry and me collapsing with him against a final door.
“God, if it’s locked!”
We grabbed.
I froze, remembering old films. Crack the door: a deluge drowns New York, sucks you in salt tides down cisterns. Crack the door and hell fires blast you to mummified bits. Crack the door and all of time’s monsters grip you with nuclear claws and hurl you down a pit with no end. You fall forever, screaming.
I sweated the door handle. Guanajuato rustled behind the panel. That long tunnel in Mexico waited where I had once run a gauntlet of horrors, the 110 men, women, and children, tobacco-dried mummies yanked from their graves to stand in line and wait for tourists and the day of judgment.
Guanajuato here?! I thought. No!
I pushed. The door drifted away on absolutely silent oiled hinges.
There was a moment of shock.
We stumbled in, gasping, and slammed the door.
