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“And now, the mad wish to pursue and trap the most terrible face in the world!”
I took a deep breath, and dialed Roy’s number. His voice was underwater, far away.
I said: “It’s all right. Anything you want, Roy. It’s okay.”
And hung up and fell back in bed.
I stood outside Roy Holdstrom’s Stage 13 the next morning and read the sign he had painted.
BEWARE. RADIOACTIVE ROBOTS.
MAD DOGS. INFECTIOUS DISEASES.
I put my ear to the Stage 13 door and imagined him in that vast silent cathedral darkness, fiddling away at his clay like an awkward spider, trapped in his own love and the birthings of his love.
“Go to it, Roy,” I whispered. “Go to it, Beast.”
And walked, while I was waiting, through the cities of the world.
18
And walking, thought: God, Roy’s midwifing a Beast that I fear. How do I stop shaking and accept Roy’s delirium? How do I run it through a screenplay. Where do I place it? In what town, what city, somewhere in the world?
Lord, I thought, walking, now I know why so few mysteries have been written in American settings. England with its fogs, rains, moors, ancient houses, London ghosts, Jack the Ripper? Yes!
But America? There’s no true history of haunts and great hounds. New Orleans, maybe, with enough fogs, rains, and swampland mansions to run up cold sweats and dig graves, while the Saints march forever out. And San Francisco where the foghorns rouse and die each night.
Los Angeles, maybe. Chandler and Cain country. But …
There was only one true place in all America in which to hide a killer or lose a life.
Maximus Films!
Laughing, I turned at an alley, and walked through a dozen backlot sets, making notes.
England hid here and far Wales and moorish Scotland and raining Eire, and the ruins of the old castles, and the tombs in which dark films were vaulted and ghosts ran in creeks all night down projection room walls, gibbering their chops as night watchmen passed singing funeral hymns, riding old deMille chariots with smoke-plumed steeds.
So it would be tonight as the phantom extras banged the time clocks out, and the tombyard fog sifted in over the wall from the lawn sprinklers tossing cold beads on the still day-hot graves. Any night here you could cross London to meet the Phantom switchman, whose lantern fired the locomotive that shrieked at him like an iron fort and rammed Stage 12 to melt down into the pages of an old October issue of Silver Screen.
So I wandered the alleys, waiting for the sun to sink and Roy to step forth, hands bloody with red clay, to shout a birth!
At four o’clock I heard distant rifle fire.
The gunshots were Roy whacking a croquet ball back and forth across a Number 7 backlot meadow. He slammed the ball again and again, and froze, feeling my gaze. He lifted his head to blink at me. His look was not that of the obstetrician but a carnivore that has just killed and eaten well.
“I did it, by God!” h
e cried. “Trapped him! Our Beast, your Beast, mine! Today, the clay, tomorrow the film! People will ask: Who did that! Us, son, us!”
Roy clenched his long bony fingers on the air.
I walked forward slowly, dazed.
“Trapped? My God, Roy, you still haven’t told. What’d you see when you ran after him the other night!?”
“In time, pal. Look, I finished half an hour ago. One look and you’ll beat your typewriter to death. I called Manny! He’ll see us in twenty minutes. I went nuts, waiting. I had to come bang the balls. There!” He struck another mighty blow, a croquet ball flew. “Someone stop me before I kill!”
“Roy, calm down.”
