A Graveyard for Lunatics (Crumley Mysteries 2)

And Fafner was dead, the magic sword deep in his heart. Siegfried yelled in triumph. Roy leaped to his feet, cursing the stage, and ran out.

I found him in the lobby muttering to himself.

“Some Fafner! Christ! My God! Did you see?!”

As we stormed out into the night, Siegfried was still screaming about life, love, and butchery.

“Poor bastards, that audience,” said Roy. “Trapped for two more hours with no Fafner!”

And here he was now, swinging quietly in a glider swing on a front porch lost in time but brought back up through the years.

“Hey!” he called, happily. “What’d I tell you? My grandparents’ house!”

“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.