It was Quasimodo in his old age, lost in a visitation of cancer and a prolongment of leprosy.
And behind that face was a soul who would have to live there forever.
Forever! I thought. He’ll never get out!
It was our Beast.
It was all over in an instant.
But I took a flash photo of the creature, shut my eyes, and saw the terrible face burned on my retina; burned so fiercely that tears brimmed my eyes and an involuntary sound erupted from my throat.
It was a face in which two terribly liquid eyes drowned. A face in which these eyes, swimming in delirium, could find no shore, no respite, no rescue. And seeing that there was nothing to touch which was not reprehensible, the eyes, bright with despair, swam in place, sustained themselves at the surface of a turmoil of flesh, refused to sink, give in, and vanish. There was a spark of the last hope that, by swiveling this way or that, they might sight some peripheral rescue, some touch of self-beauty, some revelation that all was not as bad as it seemed. So the eyes floated, anchored in a red-hot lava of destroyed flesh, in a meltdown of genetics from which no soul, however brave, might survive. While all the while, the nostrils inhaled themselves and the wound of mouth cried Havoc, silently, and exhaled.
In that instant I saw Roy jerk forward, then back, as if he had been shot, and the swift, involuntary motion of his hand to his pocket.
Then, the strange ruined man was gone, the screen up in place, as Roy’s hand came out of his pocket with his small sketch pad and pencil and, still staring at the screen as if he could x-ray through it, never looking at his hand as it drew, Roy outlined the terror, the nightmare, the raw flesh of destruction and despair.
Like Doré, long before him, Roy had the swift exactitude, in his traveling, running, inking, sketching fingers, that required only a glance around at London crowds and then the turned faucet, the upside-down glass and funnel of memory, which spurted out his fingernails and flashed from his pencil as every eye, every nostril, every mouth, every jaw, every face, was printed out fresh and complete as from a stamped press. In ten seconds, Roy’s hand, like a spider plunged in boiling water, danced and scurried in epilepsies of remembrance and sketch. One moment, the pad was empty. The next, the Beast, not all of him, no, but most, was there!
“Damn!” murmured Roy, and threw down his pencil.
I looked at the Oriental screen and then down at the swift portrait.
What lay there was close to being a half-positive, half-negative scrawl of a horror briefly glimpsed.
I could not take my eyes away from Roy’s sketch, now that the Beast was hidden and the maître d’ was taking orders from behind the screen.
“Almost,” whispered Roy. “But not quite. Our search is over, junior.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
For some reason I scrambled to my feet. “Goodnight.”
“Where you going?” Roy was stunned.
“Home.”
“How you going to get there? Spend an hour on the bus? Sit down.” Roy’s hand ran across the pad.
“Stop that,” I said.
I might as well have fired off a gun in his face.
“After weeks of waiting? Like hell. What’s got into you?”
“I’m going to throw up.”
“Me, too. You think I like this?” He thought about it. “Yeah. I’ll be sick, but this first.” He added more nightmare and underlined the terror. “Well?”
“Now I’m really scared.”
“Think he’s going to come out from behind the screen and get you?”
“Yes!”
“Sit down and eat your salad. You know how Hitchcock says, when he finishes having the first artist draw the setups for the scenes, the film is finished? Our film is done. This finishes it. It’s in the can.”