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“Crumley!” I said.
Crumley led me out to his car.
We rode across town. I couldn’t get my teeth unclenched to speak. I held so hard to my knees that the circulation ran dead.
At the studio gate I told Crumley, “Don’t wait. I’ll call in an hour and let you know …”
I walked away and bumped into the gate. I found a phone booth near Stage 13 and ordered a taxi to wait outside Stage 9, a good one hundred yards away. Then I walked through the doors of Stage 13.
I stepped into darkness and chaos.
25
I saw ten dozen things which were a devastation to my soul.
Nearby, the masks, skulls, jackstraw legbones, floating ribs, skull faces of the Phantom had been uprooted and hurled across the stage in frenzies.
Further over, a war, an annihilation, had just fallen in its own dusts.
Roy’s spider towns and beetle cities were trodden into the earth. His beasts had been eviscerated, decapitated, blasted, and buried in their own plastic flesh.
I advanced through ruins, scattered as if a night bombing had rained utter destruction upon the miniature roofs, turrets and Lilliputian figurines. Rome had been smashed by a gargantuan Attila. The great library at Alexandria was not burned; its tiny leaflet books, like the wings of hummingbirds, lay in drifts across the dunes. Paris smoldered. London was disemboweled. A giant Napoleon had stomped Moscow flat forever. In sum, five years’ work, fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, had been wasted in, what? Five minutes!
Roy! I thought, you must never see this!
But he had.
As I advanced across the lost battlefields and strewn villages I saw a shadow on the far wall.
It was a shadow from the motion picture The Phantom of the Opera when I was five. In that film some ballerinas, backstage, twirling, had frozen, stared, shrieked, and fled. For there, hung like a sandbag from the flies, they saw the body of the night watchman, slowly swaying, high in the stage flies. The memory of that film, that scene, the ballerinas, the dead man hung high in shadows, had never left me. And now, at the far north side of this s
ound stage, an object drifted on a long spider line. It shed an immense, twenty-foot darkness on the empty wall, like a scene from that old and frightening picture.
Oh, no, I whispered. It can’t be!
It was.
I imagined Roy’s arrival, his shock, his outcry, his smothering despair, then his rage, with new despairs to drown and win after his call to me. Then his wild search for rope, twine, wire, and at last: downslung and drifting peace. He could not live without his wondrous midges and mites, his sports, his dears. He was too old to rebuild it all.
“Roy,” I whispered, “that can’t be you! You always wanted to live.”
But Roy’s body turned slowly, shadowed and high. My Beasts are slain, it said.
They were never alive!
Then, whispered Roy, I was never alive.
“Roy,” I said, “would you leave me alone in the world!?”
Maybe.
“But you wouldn’t let someone hang you!?”
Perhaps.
And if so, how come you’re still here? How come they haven’t cut you down?
Which means?
