A Graveyard for Lunatics (Crumley Mysteries 2)

“Okay?” I clicked the projector switch. “Now.”

The film began.

Images flickered on Crumley’s wall. There were only thirty seconds’ worth of film, and fairly jumpy, as if Roy had animated his clay bust in only a few hours instead of the many days it usually took to position a creature, take its picture, reposition it, and snap another frame, one at a time.

“Holy Jesus,” whispered Crumley.

We all sat stunned by what jumped across Crumley’s wall.

It was Beauty’s friend, the thing from the Brown Derby.

“I can’t look,” said Constance. But she looked.

I glanced at Crumley and felt as I had felt as a child, with my brother, seated in the dark theatre as the Phantom or the Hunchback or the Bat loomed on the screen. Crumley’s face was my brother’s face, back thirty years, fascinated and horrified in one, curious and repelled, the sort of look people have when they see but do not want to see a traffic accident.

For up on the wall, real and immediate, was the Man Beast. Every contortion of the face, every move of the eyebrows, every flare of the nostrils, every motion of the lips, was there, as perfect as the sketches that Doré made when he came home from a long night’s prowl in the cinder-dark smokestack lanes of London, with all the grotesques stashed behind his eyelids, his empty fingers itching to grab pen, ink, paper, and begin! Even as Doré had, with total recall, scribbled faces, so Roy’s inner mind had photographed the Beast to remember the slightest hair moving in the nostrils, the merest eyelash in a blink, the flexed ear, and the eternally salivating infernal mouth. And when the Beast stared out of the screen, Crumley and I pulled back. It saw us. It dared us to shriek. It was coming to kill.

The parlor wall went dark.

I heard a sound bubble through my lips.

“The eyes,” I whispered.

I fumbled in the dark, rewound the reel, restarted it.

“Look, look, oh, look!” I cried.

The camera image closed in on the face.

The wild eyes were fixed in a convulsive madness.

“That isn’t a clay bust!”

“No?” said Crumley.

“It’s Roy!”

“Roy!?”

“In makeup, pretending to be the Beast!”

“No!”

The face leered, the live eyes rolled.

“Roy—”

And the wall darkened a final time.

Even as the Beast, met in the heights of Notre Dame, with the same eyes, pulled back away and fled ….

“Jesus,” said Crumley at last, looking at that wall. “So that’s what’s running loose in graveyards these nights!”

“Or Roy, running loose.”

“That’s nuts! Why would he do that?!”

“The Beast got him in all this trouble, got him fired, got him almost killed, what better to do than imitate him, be him, in case anyone saw. Roy Holdstrom doesn’t exist if he puts on the makeup and hides.”