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And now the light was rising on Roy Holdstrom’s landscapes, on vistas so alien and beautiful it broke your heart and mended your terror and then shook you again as shadows in great lemming mobs rushed over the microscopic dunes, tiny hills, and miniature mountains, fleeing a doom already promised but not yet arrived.
I looked around with delight. Roy had read my mind again. The bright and dark stuff I threw on the midnight screens inside my camera obscura head he had stolen and blueprinted and built even before I had let them free with my mouth. Now, turnabout, I would use his miniature realities to flesh out my most peculiar odd script. My hero could hardly wait to sprint through this tiny land.
Manny Leiber stared, flabbergasted.
Roy’s dinosaur land was a country of phantoms revealed in an ancient and artificial dawn.
Enclosing this lost world were huge glass plates on which Roy had painted primordial junglescapes, tar swamps in which his creatures sank beneath skies as fiery and bitter as Martian sunsets, burning with a thousand shades of red.
I felt the same thrill I had felt when, in high school, Roy had taken me home and I had gasped as he swung his garage doors wide on, not automobiles, but creatures driven by ancient needs to rise, claw, chew, fly, shriek, and die through all our childhood nights.
And here, now, on Stage 13, Roy’s face burned above a whole miniature continent that Manny and I were stranded on.
I tiptoed across it, fearful of destroying any tiny thing. I reached a single covered sculpture platform and waited.
Surely this must be his greatest Beast, the thing he had set himself to rear when, in our twenties, we had visited the primal corridors of our local natural history museum. Surely somewhere in the world this Beast had hidden in dusts, treading char, lost in God’s coal mines under our very tread! Hear! oh hear that subway sound, his primitive heart, and volcanic lungs shrieking to be set free! And had Roy set him free?
“I’ll be goddamned.” Manny Leiber leaned toward the hidden monster. “Do we see it now?”
“Yes,” Roy said, “that’s it.”
Manny touched the cover.
“Wait,” said Roy. “I need one more day.”
“Liar!” said Manny. “I don’t believe you got one goddamn bastard thing under that rag!”
Manny took two steps. Roy jumped three.
At which instant, the Stage 13 set phone rang.
Before I could move, Manny grabbed it.
“Well?” he cried.
His face changed. Perhaps it got pale, perhaps not, but it changed.
“I know that.” He took a breath. “I know that, too.” Another breath; his face was getting red now. “I knew that half an hour ago! Say, god damn it to hell, who is this!?”
A wasp buzzed at the far end of the line. The phone had been hung up.
“Son of a bitch!”
Manny hurled the phone and I caught it.
“Wrap me in a wet sheet, someone, this is a madhouse! Where was I? You!”
He pointed at both of us.
“Two days, not three. You damn well get the Beast out of the catbox and into the light or—”
At which point the outer door opened. A runt of a guy in a black suit, one of the studio chauffeurs, stood in a glare of light.
“Now what?” Manny shouted.
“We got it here but the motor died. We just got it fixed.”
“Move out, then, for Christ’s sake!”
