A Graveyard for Lunatics

“No, mine!”

“Both!”

Roy laughed, truly happy, and held out a big fat copy of You Can’t Go Home Again.

“He was wrong,” said Roy, quietly.

“Yes,” I said, “here we are, by God!”

I stopped. For just beyond this meadowland of sets, I saw the high graveyard/studio wall. The ghost of a body on a ladder was there, but I wasn’t ready to mention it yet. Instead, I said: “How you doing with your Beast? You found him yet?”

“Heck, where’s your Beast?”

That’s the way it had been for many days now.

Roy and I had been called in to blueprint and build beasts, to make meteors fall from outer space and humanoid critters rise from dark lagoons, dripping clichés of tar from dime-store teeth.

They had hired Roy first, because he was technically advanced. His pterodactyls truly flew across the primordial skies. His brontosaurs were mountains on their way to Mahomet.

And then someone had read twenty or thirty of my Weird Tales, stories I had been writing since I was twelve and selling to the pulp magazines since I was twenty-one, and hired me to “write up a drama” for Roy’s beasts, all of which hyperventilated me, for I had paid my way or snuck into some nine thousand movies and had been waiting half a lifetime for someone to fire a starter’s gun to run me amok in film.

“I want something never seen before!” said Manny Leiber that first day. “In three dimensions we fire something down to Earth. A meteor drops—”

“Out near Meteor Crater in Arizona—” I put in. “Been there a million years. What a place for a new meteor to strike and …”

“Out comes our new horror,” cried Manny.

“Do we actually see it?” I asked.

“Whatta you mean? We got to see it!”

“Sure, but look at a film like The Leopard Man! The scare comes from night shadows, things unseen. How about Isle of the Dead when the dead woman, a catatonic, wakes to find herself trapped in a tomb?”

“Radio shows!!” cried Manny Leiber. “Dammit, people want to see what scares them—”

“I don’t want to argue—”

“Don’t!” Manny glared. “Give me ten pages to scare me gutless! You—” pointing at Roy—“whatever he writes you glue together with dinosaur droppings! Now, scram! Go make faces in the mirror at three in the morning!”

“Sir!” we cried.

The door slammed.

Outside in the sunlight, Roy and I blinked at each other.

“Another fine mess you got us in, Stanley!”

Still yelling with laughter, we went to work.

I wrote ten pages, leaving room for monsters. Roy slapped thirty pounds of wet clay on a table and danced around it, hitting and shaping, hoping for the monster to rise up like a bubble in a prehistoric pool to collapse in a hiss of sulfurous steam and let the true horror out.

Roy read my pages.

“Where’s your Beast?” he cried.

I glanced at his hands, empty but covered with blood-red clay.

“Where’s yours?” I said.

And now here it was, three weeks later.

“Hey,” said Roy, “how come you’re just standing down there looking at me? Come grab a doughnut, sit, speak.” I went up, took the doughnut he offered me, and sat in the porch swing, moving alternately forward into the future and back into the past. Forward—rockets and Mars. Backward—dinosaurs and tarpits.

And faceless Beasts all around.

“For someone who usually talks ninety miles a minute,” said Roy Holdstrom, “you are extraordinarily quiet.”

“I’m scared,” I said, at last.

“Well, heck.” Roy stopped our time machine. “Speak, oh mighty one.”

I spoke.

I built the wall and carried the ladder and lifted the body and brought on the cold rain and then struck with the lightning to make the body fall. When I finished and the rain had dried on my forehead, I handed Roy the typed All Hallows invitation.

Roy scanned it, then threw it on the porch floor and put his foot on it. “Somebody’s got to be kidding!”

“Sure. But … I had to go home and burn my underwear.”

Roy picked it up and read it again, and then stared toward the graveyard wall.

“Why would anyone send this?”

“Yeah. Since most of the studio people don’t even know I’m here!”

“But, hell, last night was Halloween. Still, what an elaborate joke, hoisting a body up a ladder. Wait, what if they told you to come at midnight, but other people, at eight, nine, ten, and eleven? Scare ’em one by one! That would make sense!”

“Only if you had planned it!”

Roy turned sharply. “You don’t really think—?”

“No. Yes. No.”

“Which is it?”

“Remember that Halloween when we were nineteen and went to the Paramount Theatre to see Bob Hope in The Cat and the Canary and the girl in front of us screamed and I glanced around and there you sat, with a rubber ghoul mask on your face?”

“Yeah.” Roy laughed.