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“Takes me out, takes me out,” she sighed.
“Do you talk?” I whispered.
“He does. I only laugh. He says … He says.”
“What?”
“After all this time, he loves me.”
“You say?”
“Nothing. Not right. I made … trouble.”
“You see him clearly?”
“Oh, no. He sits out in no light. Or stands behind my chair, says love. Nice voice. The same. Even though he died and I’m dead.”
“And whose voice is it, Emily?”
“Why …” She hesitated. Then her face lit. “Arby, of course.”
“Arby … ?”
“Arby,” she said, and swayed, staring at the last lit candle. “Arby. Made it through. Or guess so. So much to live for. The studio. The toys. No matter me gone. He lived to come back to only place he loved. So he made it even after the graveyard. The hammer. The blood. Ah, God! I’m killed. Me!” She shrieked and sank down in her chair.
Her eyes and lips sealed tight. She was done and still and back to being a statue forever. No bells, no incense would stir that mask. I called her name, softly.
But now she built a new glass coffin and shut the lid.
“God,” said Crumley. “What have we done?”
“Proved two murders, maybe three,” I said.
Crumley said, “Let’s go home.”
But Emily didn’t hear. She liked it right where she was.
68
And at long last the two cities were the same.
If there was more light in the city of darkness, then there was more darkness in the city of light.
The fog and mist poured over the high mortuary walls. The tombstones shifted like continental plates. The drywash catacomb tunnels funneled cold winds. Memory itself invaded the territorial film vaults. Worms and termites that had prevailed in the stone orchards now undermined the apple yards of Illinois, the cherry trees of Washington, and the mathematically trimmed shrubs of French châteaus. One by one the great stages, vacuumed, slammed shut. The clapboard houses, log cabins, and Louisiana mansions dropped their shingles, gaped their doors, shivered with plagues and fell.
In the night, two hundred antique cars on the backlot gunned their engines, smoked their exhausts, and gravel-dusted off on some blind path to motherlode Detroit.
Building by building, floor by floor, lights were extinguished, air conditionings stifled, the last togas trucked like Roman ghosts back to Western Costume, one block off this Appian Way, as the captains and the kings departed with the last gate guards.
We were being pushed into the sea.
The parameters, day by day, I imagined, were shutting in.
More things, we heard, melted and vanished. After the miniature cities and prehistoric animals, then the brownstones and skyscrapers, and with Calvary’s cross long gone, the dawn tomb of the Messiah followed it into the furnace.
At any moment the graveyard itself might rupture. Its disheveled inhabitants, evicted, homeless at midnight, seeking new real estates across town at Forest Lawn, would board 2 A.M. buses to te
rrify drivers as the last gates banged shut and the whiskey-film vault-catacomb tunnel brimmed with arctic slush reddened in its flow even as the church across the street nailed its doors and the drunken priest fled to join the maître d’ from the Brown Derby up by the Hollywood sign in the dark hills, while the invisible war and the unseen army pushed us farther and farther west, out of my house, out of Crumley’s jungle clearing, until at last, here in the Arabian compound with food in short supply but champagne in large, we would make our last stand as the Beast and his skeleton army shrieked down the sands to toss us as lunch to Constance Rattigan’s seals, and shock the ghost of Aimee Semple McPherson trudging up the surf the other way, astonished but reborn in the Christian dawn.
