You’re freshly dead. You haven’t been found. I’m the first to see!
I ached to touch his foot, his leg, to be sure it was Roy! Thoughts of the papier-mâché man in the coffin shot through my head.
I inched my hand out to touch … but then …
Over by his desk was the sculpture platform on which had been hidden his last and greatest work, the Beast, the Monster from the midnight Derby, the Creature who went in churches beyond the wall and across a street.
Someone had taken a ballpeen hammer and struck it a dozen blows. The face, the head, the skull, were banged and smashed until only a shapeless mound remained.
Jesus God, I whispered.
Was this the final crime that made Roy self-destroy?
Or had the destroyer, waiting in the shadows, struck Roy unaware amidst his ruined towns, and hanged him on the air?
I trembled. I stopped.
For I heard the stage door spring wide.
I pulled off my shoes and ran, quietly, to hide.
26
It was the surgeon-medico-physician, the high-noon abortionist, the needle-pushing defrocked high-priest doctor.
Doc Phillips glided into the light on the far side of the stage, glancing about, seeing the ruin, then finding the hanged body above, he nodded, as if this death were an everyday calamity. He stepped forward, kicking the ruined cities as if they were mere garbage and irrelevant trash.
Seeing this, I coughed up a curse. I clapped my hand to my mouth and jerked back in shadow.
I peered through a crack in the set wall.
The doctor had frozen. Like a buck in a forest clearing, he peered around through his steel-rimmed glasses, using his nose as well as his eyes. His ears seemed to twitch on the sides of his shaven skull. He shook his head. He shuffled, shoving Paris, knocking London, arriving to reach and examine the terrible hanged thing in midair. …
A scalpel flashed in his hand. He seized a prop trunk, opened it, shoved it under the hanged body, grabbed a chair, stepped up on it, and slashed the rope above Roy’s neck.
There was a dreadful crash when Roy hit the trunk bottom.
I coughed up my grief. I froze, sure that this time he had heard and would come, a cold steel smile in his hand. I gripped my breath tight.
Leaping down, the doc bent to examine the body.
The outside door banged wide. Feet and voices echoed.
The cleanup men had arrived, and whether this was their regular time, or if he had called them to work, I did not know.
Doc slammed the lid, hard.
I bit my knuckles and jammed my fingers in my mouth to muffle my terrible bursts of despair.
The trunk lock snapped. The doctor gestured.
I shrank back as the team of workmen crossed the set with brooms and shovels to thrust and toss Athens’ stones, Alhambra’s walls, Alexandria’s libraries and Bombay’s Krishna shrines into a dumpster.
It took twenty minutes to clean and cart off the lifework of Roy Holdstrom, taking with it, on a creaking trolley, the trunk in which, crumpled and invisible, lay my friend’s body.
When the door slammed a last time, I gave an agonized shout of grief against the night, death, the damned doctor, the vanishing men. I ran with fists to strike the air and stopped, blind with tears. Only when I had stood shaking and weeping for a long while did I stop and see an incredible thing.
There was a stack of interfaced doorway facades leaned against the north wall of the stage, like the sills and doors through which Roy and I had plunged the day before.