“Is it that bad, Henry?”
“Bad leaning into worse, but that’s okay. It’s time to move on, anyway. Every five years, just pack your toothbrush, buy new socks and git, that’s what I always say. You got a place to put me, boy? I know, I know. It’s all white out there. But, hell, I can’t see, so what’s the difference?”
“I got a spare room in my garage, where I type. It’s yours!”
“God, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost coming up fast.” Henry sank back in his chair, feeling his mouth. “Is this a smile or is this a smile? Only for two days!” he added, quickly. “Got a sister’s no-good husband driving from New Orleans to carry me home. So I’ll get off your hands—”
He stopped smiling, and leaned forward.
“Armpits somewhere again? Out in that world?”
“Not quite armpits, Henry. Something like.”
“Not too much like, I hope.”
“More,” I said, after a beat. “Can you come with me, right now? I hate to rush you, Henry. And I’m sorry to take you out at night.”
“Why, son,” Henry laughed gently, “night and day are only rumors I heard once, as a child.”
He stood, groped around.
“Wait,” he said, “till I find my cane. So I can see.”
54
Crumley and blind Henry and I arrived near the graveyard at midnight.
I hesitated, staring at the gate.
“He’s in there.” I nodded toward the tombstones. “The Beast ran there the other night. What do we do if we meet him?”
“I haven’t the faintest goddamn idea.” Crumley stepped through the gate.
“Hell,” said Henry. “Why not?”
And he left me behind in the night, on the empty sidewalk.
I caught up with them.
“Hold on, let me take a deep breath.” Henry inhaled and let it out. “Yep. It’s a graveyard all right!”
“Does it worry you, Henry?”
“Hell,” said Henry, “dead folks ain’t nothing. It’s live ones ruin my sleep. Want to know how I know this ain’t just a plain old garden? Garden’s full of flower mixes, lots of smells. Graveyards? Mostly tuberoses. From funerals. Always hated funerals for that smell. How’m I doing, detective?”
“Swell, but …” Crumley moved us out of the light. “If we stand here long enough, someone’ll think we need burying and do the job. Hup!”
Crumley walked swiftly away among a thousand milk-white tombstones.
Beast, I thought, where are you?
I looked back at Crumley’s car and suddenly it was a dear friend I was leaving a thousand miles back.
“You haven’t told yet,” said Henry. “Why’d you bring a blind man to a graveyard? You need my nose?”
“You and the Baskerville Hound,” Crumley said. “This way.”
“Don’t touch,” said Henry. “I got a dog’s nose, but my pride is all cat. Watch out, Death.”
And he led the way between the gravestones, tapping right and left, as if to dislodge big chunks of night or strike sparks where sparks never struck before.
“How’m I doin’?” he whispered.
I stood with Henry among all the marbles with names and dates and the grass growing quietly between.
Henry sniffed.
“I smell me one big hunk of rock. Now. What kind of Braille is this?”
He transferred his cane to his left hand while his right hand trembled up to feel the chiseled name above the Grecian tomb door.
His fingers shook over the “A” and froze on the final “T.”
“I know this name.” Henry spun a Rolodex behind his white billiard-ball eyes. “Would that be the great, long-gone proprietor of the studio across the wall?”
“Yes.”
“The loud man who sat in all the boardrooms and no room left? Fixed his own bottles, changed his own diapers, bought the sandbox, two and one half, fired the kindergarten teacher age three, sent ten boys to the nurse, age seven, chased girls at eight, caught ’em at nine, owned a parking lot at ten, and the studio on his twelfth birthday when his pa died and left him London, Rome, and Bombay? That the one?”
“Henry,” I sighed, “you’re marvelous.”
“Makes me hard to live with,” admitted Henry, quietly. “Well.”
He reached up to touch the name again and the date underneath.
“October 31st, 1934. Halloween! Twenty years gone. I wonder how it feels, being dead that long. Hell. Let’s ask! Anyone think to bring some tools?”
“A crowbar from the car,” said Crumley.
“Good …” Henry put out his hand. “But for the helluvit—” His fingers touched the tomb door.
“Holy Moses!” he exclaimed.
The door drifted open on oiled hinges. Not rusted! Not squealing! Oiled!
“Sweet Jesus! Open house!” Henry stood quickly back. “You don’t mind, since you got the faculties—you first.”
I touched the door. It glided further into shadow.
“Here.”
Crumley brushed past, switched on his flashlight, and stepped into midnight.
I followed.
“Don’t leave me out here,” said Henry.
Crumley pointed, “Shut the door. We don’t want anyone seeing our flash—”
I hesitated. I had seen too many films where the vault doors slammed and people were trapped, yelling, forever. And if the Beast was out there now—?
“Christ! Here!” Crumley shoved the door, leaving the merest quarter-inch crack for air. “Now.” He turned.
The room was empty, except for a large stone sarcophagus at its center. There was no lid. Inside the sarcophagus there should have been a coffin.
“Hell!” said Crumley.
We looked down. There was no coffin.
“Don’t tell!” said Henry. “Lemme put on my dark glasses helps me smell better! There!”
And while we stared down, Henry bent, took a deep breath, thought about it behind his dark glasses, let it out, shook his head, and snuffed another draught. Then he beamed.
“Shucks. Ain’t nothin’ there! Right?”
“Right.”
“J. C. Arbuthnot,” murmured Crumley, “where are you?”
“Not here,” I said.
“And never was,” added Henry.
We glanced at him quickly. He nodded, mightily self-pleased.
“Nobody by that name or any other name, any time, ever here at all. If there had been, I’d get the scent, see? But not so much as one flake of dandruff, one toenail, one hair from one nostril. Not even a sniff of tuberose or incense. This place, friends, was never used by a dead person, not for an hour. If I’m wrong, cut my nose off!”
Ice water poured down my spine and out my shoes.
“Christ,” muttered Crumley, “why would they build a tombhouse, put no one in, but pretend they did?”
“Maybe there never was a body,” said Henry. “What if Arbuthnot never died?”
“No, no,” I said. “The newspapers all over the world, the five thousand mourners. I was there. I saw the funeral car.”
“What did they do with the body then?” Crumley said. “And why?”
“I—”
The tombhouse door slammed shut!
Henry, Crumley, and I shouted with the shock. I grabbed Henry, Crumley grabbed us both. The flashlight fell. Cursing, we bent and knocked heads, sucked breaths, waited to hear the door locked on us. We blundered, tussling at the flashlight and then swiveling the beam toward the door, wanting life, light, the night air forever.
We hit the door in a mob.
And, God, it was really locked!
“Jesus, how do we get outa this place?”
“No, no,” I kept saying.
“Shut up,” said Crumley, “let me think.”
“Think fast,” said Henry. “Whoever shut us in is gone for help.”
“Maybe that was just the caretaker,” I said.
No, I thought: the Beast.
“
No, gimme that light. Yeah. Hell.” Crumley directed the beam up and around. “All outside hinges, no way to get to them.”
“Well,” Henry suggested, “I don’t suppose there’s more than one door to this place?”
Crumley flashed his light at Henry’s face.
“What’d I say?” said Henry.
Crumley took the flashlight off Henry’s face and moved past him, around the sarcophagus. He flashed the beam up and down the ceiling, the floor, then along the seams and around the small window in back, so small no more than a cat could slide through.
“I don’t suppose we can yell out the window?”
“Whoever came to answer I wouldn’t want,” observed Henry.
Crumley swung his flash, turning in circles.
“Another door,” he kept saying. “Must be!”
“Must!” I cried.
I felt the fierce watering in my eyes and the awful dryness in my throat. I imagined heavy footsteps rushing among the tombstones, shadows come to batter, shades running to smother, calling me Clarence, wishing me dead. I imagined the door burst wide and a ton of books, signed photos, signature cards, flooding to drown us.
“Crumley!” I grabbed the flash. “Give me that!”
There was only one last place to look. I peered into the sarcophagus. Then I peered closer and exhaled.
“Look!” I said. “Those,” I pointed. “God, I don’t know, hollows, indentations, slants, whatever. I never saw things like that in a tomb. And there, look, under the seam, isn’t there light coming from under? Well, hell! Wait!”
I leaped up on the rim of the sarcophagus, balanced and looked down at the even, measured forms at the bottom.
“Watch it!” cried Crumley.
“No, you!”
I dropped down onto the sarcophagus bottom.
There was a groan of oiled machinery. The room shook when some counterbalance shifted beneath.
I sank down as the sarcophagus floor sank. My feet melted in darkness. My legs followed. I was tilted at an angle when the lid stopped.
“Steps!” I cried. “Stairs!”
“What?” Henry groped down. “Yeah!”
The sarcophagus bottom, laid flat, had looked like a series of half-pyramids. Now that the lid angled, they were perfect steps into a lower tomb.
I took a quick step down. “Come on!”
“Come on?!” said Crumley. “What in hell’s down there?”
“What in hell’s out there!”I pointed at the slammed outer door.
“Damn!” Crumley leaped up to fetch Henry. Henry sprang up like a cat.
I stepped down a slow step, trembling, waving the flashlight. Henry and Crumley followed, cursing and blowing air.
Another flight of steps fused with the sarcophagus lid to lead us down another ten feet into a catacomb. When Crumley, last, stepped off, the lid whispered high, banged shut. I squinted at the shut ceiling and saw a counterweight suspended in half light. A huge iron ring hung from the bottom of the vanished staircase. From below, you could grab, use your weight, and yank the stairs down.
All this in a heartbeat.
“I hate this place!” said Henry.
“How would you know?” said Crumley.
Henry said: “I still don’t like it. Listen!”
Upstairs, the wind, or something, was shivering the outside door.
Crumley grabbed the flashlight and swung it around. “Now I hate this place.”
There was a door in the wall ten feet off. Crumley gave it a yank and a grunt. It opened. With Henry between we hustled through. The door slammed behind. We ran.
Away from, I thought, or toward the Beast?!
“Don’t look!” shouted Crumley.
“Whatta you mean, don’t look?” Henry thrashed the air with his cane, clubbing the stone floor with his shoes, ricocheting between us. Crumley, in the lead, yelled, “Just don’t is all!”
But I had seen as we ran, colliding with walls, crashing through a territory of bone heaps and skull pyramids, broken coffins, scattered funeral wreaths; a battlefield of death; cracked incense urns, statue fragments, demolished icons, as if a long parade of doom had, in mid-celebration, dropped its shrapnels to flee, even as we fled with one light caroming off green-mossed ceilings and poking in square holes where flesh had vanished and teeth smiled.
Don’t look!? I thought. No, don’t stop! I all but knocked Henry aside, drunk with fright. He whipped his cane to crack me in place and pumped his legs like a sighted fiend.
We blundered from one country to another, from a file of bones to a file of tins, from vaults of marble to vaults of concrete and suddenly we were in old-silent-black-and-white territory. Names flashed by with film titles on stacked reel canisters.
“Where in hell are we?” panted Crumley.
“Rattigan!” I heard myself gasp. “Botwin! My God! We’re in—Maximus Films! over, under, through the wall!”
And we were indeed in Botwin’s film basement and Rattigan’s underworld, badly lit photo-landscapes they had traveled in 1920 and ’22 and ’25. Not burial boneyards but the old film vaults Constance had named as we rambled. I glanced back in darkness to see real bodies fade even as the film ghosts surged round. Titles sluiced by: The Squaw Man, The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, The Black Pirate. Not only Maximus films, but other studios’ films, borrowed or stolen.
I was torn. One half fleeing the dark soil behind. One half wanting to reach, touch, see these ancient shadow ghosts that had haunted my childhood to hide me in everlasting matinees.
Christ! I yelled but did not yell. Don’t leave! Chaney! Fairbanks! The man in that damned iron mask! Nemo under water! D’Artagnan! Wait for me! I’ll be back. If I live, that is! Soon!
All this a babble of fright and frustration, a surge of instant love and instant fear to smother the stupid babble.
Don’t look at the beauties, I thought. Remember the dark. Run.
And, dear God, don’t stop!
Our echoes caught up with us in a triple rush of panic. We all yelled and streamed in a solid mass the last thirty yards or so, Crumley churning like a crazed ape with his flashlight, Blind Henry and me collapsing with him against a final door.
“God, if it’s locked!”
We grabbed.
I froze, remembering old films. Crack the door: a deluge drowns New York, sucks you in salt tides down cisterns. Crack the door and hell fires blast you to mummified bits. Crack the door and all of time’s monsters grip you with nuclear claws and hurl you down a pit with no end. You fall forever, screaming.
I sweated the door handle. Guanajuato rustled behind the panel. That long tunnel in Mexico waited where I had once run a gauntlet of horrors, the 110 men, women, and children, tobacco-dried mummies yanked from their graves to stand in line and wait for tourists and the day of judgment.
Guanajuato here?! I thought. No!
I pushed. The door drifted away on absolutely silent oiled hinges.
There was a moment of shock.
We stumbled in, gasping, and slammed the door.
We turned.
There was a big chair nearby.
And an empty desk.
With a white telephone in the middle of the desk.
“Where are we?” said Crumley.
“By the way he’s breathing, the child knows,” said Henry.
Crumley’s flashlight played over the room.
“Holy Mother of God, Caesar, and Christ,” I sighed.
I was looking at—
Manny Leiber’s chair.
Manny Leiber’s desk.
Manny Leiber’s telephone.
Manny Leiber’s office.
I turned to see the mirror that hid the now invisible door.
Half drunk with exhaustion, I stared at myself in that cold glass.
And suddenly it was—
Nineteen twenty-six. The opera singer in her dressing room and a voice behind the mirror urging, teaching, prompting, desiring her to step through the glass, a terrible
Alice … dissolved in images, melting to descend to the underworld, led by the man in the dark cloak and white mask to a gondola that drifted on dark canal waters to a buried palace and a bed shaped like a coffin.
The phantom’s mirror.
The phantom’s passage from the land of the dead.
And now—
His chair, his desk, his office.
But not the phantom. The Beast.
I knocked the chair aside.
The Beast … coming to see Manny Leiber?
I stumbled and backed off.
Manny, I thought. He who never truly gave, but took, orders. A shadow, not a substance. A sideshow, not a main attraction. Run a studio!? No. Be a phone line over which voices passed? Yes. A messenger boy. An errand boy fetching champagne and cigarettes, sure! But sit in that chair? He had never sat there. Because … ?
Crumley shoved Henry.
“Move!”
“What?” I said, numbly.
“Someone’s gonna bust through that mirror, any minute!”
“Mirror!?” I cried.
I reached out.
“No!” said Crumley.
“What’s he up to?” asked Henry.
“Looking back,” I said.
I swung the mirror door wide.
I stared down the long tunnel, astounded at how far we had run, from country to country, mystery to mystery, along twenty years to now, Halloween to Halloween. The tunnel sank through commissaries of tinned films to reliquaries for the nameless. Could I have run all that way without Crumley and Henry to flail away shadows as my breath banged the walls?
I listened.
Far off, did doors open and slam? Was a dark army or a simple Beast in pursuit? Soon, would a death gun discharge skulls, blow the tunnel, ram me back from the mirror? Would—
“God damn!” said Crumley. “Idiot! Out! ”
He knocked my hand down. The mirror shut.
I grabbed the phone and dialed.
“Constance!” I yelled. “Green Town.”
Constance yelled back.
“What’d she say?” Crumley peered into my face. “Never mind,” he added, “because—”
The mirror shook. We ran.
55
The studio was as dark and empty as the graveyard over the wall.
The two cities looked at each other across the night air and played similar deaths. We were the only warm things moving in the streets. Somewhere, perhaps, Fritz was running night films of Galilee and charcoal beds and evocative Christs and footprints blowing away on the dawn wind. Somewhere, Maggie Botwin was crouched over her telescope viewing the bowels of China. Somewhere, the Beast was ravening to follow, or lying low.