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It was Peg, calling from Connecticut just before dawn.
“Did you ever have a wife, named Peg,” she cried, “left home ten days ago for a teachers’ conference in Hartford? Why haven’t you called?”
“I did. But you weren’t in your room. I left my name. Christ, I wish you were home.”
“Oh, dear me,” she said slowly, syllable by syllable. “I leave town and right off you’re in deep granola. You want mama to fly home?”
“Yes. No. It’s just the usual studio junk.” I hesitated.
“Why are you counting to ten?” she asked.
“God,” I said.
“There’s no escaping Him or me. You been dieting like a good boy? Go drop a penny in one of those scales that print your weight in purple ink, mail it to me. Hey,” she added, “I mean it. You want me to fly home? Tomorrow?”
“I love you, Peg,” I said. “Come home just as you planned.”
“But what if you’re not there when I get there? Is it still Halloween?”
Women and their intuition!
“They’ve held it over for another week.”
“I could tell by your voice. Stay out of graveyards.”
“What made you say that!?”
My heart gave a rabbit jump.
“Did you put flowers on your parents’ graves?”
“I forgot.”
“How could you?”
“Anyway, the graveyard they’re in is a better graveyard.”
“Better than what?”
“Any other, because they’re there.”
“Put a flower for me,” she said. “I love you. Goodbye!”
And she ran down the line in a hum and a quiet roar and was gone.
At five in the morning, with no sun in view, and with the cloud cover from the Pacific in permanent position over my roof, I blinked at the ceiling and arose and found my way, without my glasses, to my typewriter.
I sat in the gloom before dawn and wrote: “RETURN OF THE BEAST.”
But had he ever been away?
Hadn’t he moved ahead of me everywhere in my life, calling me on with whispers?
I typed: “CHAPTER ONE.”
“What is there that is so beautiful about a perfect Beast? Why do boys and men answer to it?
“What is there that runs us in fevers for half a lifetime with Creatures, Grotesques, Monsters, Freaks?
