“Power. I loved it. Stockbrokers, big corporate men, all that crap. Incredible. I was drunk! I loved running the studio, making decisions, and all done without board meetings. All with mirrors, echoes, shadows. Do all the films that should have been done years ago, but never were! Rebuild me, my universe! Reinvent, recreate my friends, my creatures. Make the studio pay in cash as well as flesh and lives and blood. Figure who was most responsible for trashing my life, then, then, one by one, squash the nitwits, mash the cohorts of the ignorant and the yes-men to the twits. The studio had run me; now I ran the studio. God, no wonder Louis B. Mayer was insufferable, the Warner Brothers shooting powdered film clips up their veins all night. Until you’ve run a studio, buster, you don’t know what power is. You not only run a city, a country, but the world beyond that world. Slow motion, you say; people run slow. Fast, you say; people leap the Himalayas, flop in their graves. All because you chopped the scenes, ran the actors, told the starts, guessed the ends. Once I got in, I was high on Notre Dame every night laughing at the peasants, diminishing the giant runts who had hurt my pals and killed the gyroscope that always spun in my chest. But now the gyroscope whirred again, lopsided crazy, off its pivot. Look out there, at what I did, almost everything torn down. The Beast started, but I finished it. I knew if I didn’t stop I’d be carted off to a madhouse-dairy to be milked for paranoia. That, and the Beast dying, pleading for one last go with the priest and the bells and candles and confessionals and: forgive. I had to give him back his studio so he could give it back to you.”
Roy slowed, licked his dreadful lips, and was silent.
“There’s one thing, several things, not clear—” I said.
“Name them.”
“How many people did Arbuthnot kill in the past few days. And how many people did—” I had to stop, for I could not say it.
Roy said it for me: “How many did Roy Holdstrom, Beast Number Two, spoil?”
I nodded.
“I didn’t kill Clarence, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”
“Thank God.”
I swallowed hard and at last said: “At what point—oh, God—when—?”
“When what?”
“At what hour … on what day … did Arbuthnot stop …. and you take over?”
Now it was Roy’s turn, behind the murdered face, to swallow. “It was Clarence, of course. In the catacombs, I heard voices on the phone systems, at every tomb intersection. Voices in the tunnels themselves. One way or another lifting the receivers, or hiding alert, I pulled back or followed the shadows moving to bury. I knew Clarence was due for burial, five minutes after the Beast’s rampage at his apartment. I saw and heard, at a distance, Doc hustling through the tunnels, taking Clarence to some damned lost crypt. I knew then they’d soon find I was alive, if they didn’t suspect already. I wonder, did they ever check the incinerator to find not my real bones but my mock-up skeleton? And next: you! You knew Clarence. They might have seen you at his place, or at my apartment. If they added it up they’d have buried you alive. So, you see, I had to take over. I had to become the Beast.
“Not only that, I shut down the studio, to test my power, to see if they jumped at my voice, did what I said. With the studio emptying out it made it easier to kill the villains, take care of my possible assassins.”
“Stanislau Groc?” I said.
“Groc … ? Yeah. He got us into this in the first place. Hired me for starters, because I could freshen up creatures, just as he tarted up old dead Lenin. Put a bug in Arbuthnot’s ear to hire you, maybe. Then made the body that was propped on the wall to scare the studio folks and Arbuthnot, then invited us to the Brown Derby for the bestial revelation. Then when I made the clay Beast and frightened everyone, shook them down for cash.”
“You killed Groc, then?”
“Not quite. I had him arrested at the gate. When they brought him to Manny’s empty office and left him alone and the mirror swung back, he just up and died when he saw me there. Doc Phillips now, ask me about him.”
“Doc Phillips?”
“After all, he cleared away my so-called ‘body,’ right? Him and his eternal pooper-scoopers. I met up with him in Notre Dame. Didn’t even try to run. I pulled him up with the bells. I just wanted to scare him. Get him up high and shake until, like Groc, his heart stopped. Manslaughter, not murder. But, being pulled up, he got tangled, got frantic, all but hung himself. Did I do it? Am I guilty?”
Yes, I thought. And then: no.
“J. C.?” I asked, and held my breath.
“No, no. He climbed up on the cross two nights ago and his wounds just didn’t shut. His life ran out of his wrists. He died on the cross, poor man, poor drunken old J. C. God rest him. I found him and gave him a proper resting place.”
“Where are they all? Groc and Doc Phillips and J. C.”
“Somewhere. Anywhere. Does it matter? It’s all bodies out there, a million of ’em. I’m glad one of them isn’t—” he hesitated—“you.”
“Me?”
“That’s what finally made me cease and desist. About twelve hours ago. I found I had you on my list.”
“What!?”
“I found myself thinking, If he gets in the way, he dies. That put an end to it.”
“Christ, I should hope so!”