Ray Bradbury - A Graveyard for Lunatics

I remembered that when we were both thirteen King Kong fell off the Empire State and landed on us. When we got up, we were never the same. We told each other that one day we would write and move a Beast as great, as magnificent, as beautiful as Kong, or simply die.

“Beast,” whispered Roy. “Here we are .”

And we pulled up near the Brown Derby, a restaurant with no huge Brown Derby on top, like a similar restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard, five miles across town, capped with a derby large enough to fit God at Easter, or any studio bigwig on Friday afternoon. The only way you knew this Brown Derby was important was by the 999 cartoon-caricature portraits on every wall inside. Outside was quasi-Spanish nothing. We braved the nothing to step in and face the 999.

The maitre d’ of the Brown Derby lifted his left eyebrow as we arrived. A former dog lover, he now only loved cats. We smelled funny.

“Of course you have no reservations?” he observed, languidly.

“About this place?” said Roy. “Plenty.”

That rippled the fur on the maitre d’s neck, but he let us in anyway.

The restaurant was almost empty. People sat at a few tables, finishing dessert and cognac. The waiters had already begun to renapkin and reutensil some of the tables.

There was a sound of laughter ahead, and we saw three women standing near a table, bending toward a man who was obviously leafing out cash to pay the night’s bills. The young women laughed, saying they would be outside window-shopping while he paid up, then, in a flourish of perfume, they turned and ran past me and Roy, who stood nailed in place, staring at the man in the booth.

Stanislau Groc.

“God,” cried Roy. “You/”

“Me?!”

Groc’s eternal flame snapped shut.

“What are you doing here?” he exclaimed.

“We were invited.”

“We were looking for someone,” I said.

“And found me and were severely put out,” observed Groc.

Roy was edging back, suffering from his Siegfried syndrome, dearly remembered. Promised a dragon, he beheld a mosquito. He could not take his eyes off Groc.

“Why do you look at me that way?” snapped the little man.

“Roy,” I warned.

For I could see that Roy was thinking my thought. It was all a joke. Someone, knowing that Groc ate here some nights, had sent us on a fool’s errand. To embarrass us, and Groc. Still, Roy was eying the little man’s ears and nose and chin.

“Naw,” said Roy, “you won’t do .”

“For what ? Hold on! Yes! Is it the Search ?” A quiet little machine gun of laughter started in his chest and at last erupted from his thin lips.

“But why the Brown Derby? The people who come here are not your kind of fright. Nightmares, yes. And myself, this patchwork monkey’s paw? Who could I scare?”

“Not to worry,” said Roy. “The scare comes later, when I think about you at three A.M.”

That did it. Groc ripped off the greatest laugh of all and waved us down in the booth.

“Since your night is ruined, drink!”

Roy and I glanced nervously around the restaurant.

No Beast.

When the champagne was poured, Groc toasted us.

“May you never have to curl a dead man’s eyelashes, clean a dead man’s teeth, rewax his beard, or rearrange his syphilitic lips.” Groc rose and looked at the door through which his women had run.

“Did you see their faces?” Groc smiled after them. “Mine! Do you know why those girls are wildly in love with me and will never leave? I am the high lama of the Valley of the Blue Moon. Should they depart, a door would slam, mine, and their faces fall. I have warned them also that I have hooked fine wires below their chins and eyes. Should they run too far too fast to the end of the wire—their flesh would unravel. And instead of being thirty, they would be forty-two!”

“Fafner,” growled Roy. His fingers clutched the table as if he might leap up.

“What?”

“A friend,” I said. “We thought we might see him tonight.”

“Tonight is over,” said Groc. “But stay. Finish my champagne. Order more, charge me. Would you like a salad before the kitchen shuts?”

“I’m not hungry,” said Roy, the wild disappointed Shrine Opera Siegfried look in his eyes.

“Yes!” I said.

“Two salads,” Groc said to the waiter. “Blue cheese dressing?”

Roy shut his eyes. “Yes!” I said.

Groc turned to the waiter and thrust an unnecessarily large tip into his hand.

“Spoil my friends,” he said, grinning. Then, glancing at the door where his women had trotted out on their pony hooves, he shook his head. “I must go. It’s raining. All that water on my girls’ faces. They will melt! So long. Arrivederci!”

And he was gone. The front doors whispered shut.

“Let’s get out. I feel like a fool!” said Roy.

He moved and spilled his champagne. He cursed and cleaned it up. I poured him another and watched him take it slowly and calm down.

Five minutes later, in the back of the restaurant, it happened.

The headwaiter was unfolding a screen around the farthermost table. It had slipped and half folded back together, with a sharp crack. The waiter said something to himself. And then there was a movement from the kitchen doorway, where, I realized, a man and woman had been standing for some few seconds. Now, as the waiter realigned the folding screen, they stepped out into the light and hurried, looking only ahead at that screen, toward the table.

“Ohmigod,” I whispered hoarsely. “Roy?”

Roy glanced up.

“Fafner!” I whispered.

“No.” Roy stopped, stared, sat back down, watching as the couple moved swiftly. “Yes.”

But it was not Fafner, not the mythological dragon, the terrible serpent, that quickened himself from kitchen to table, holding his lady’s hand and pulling her along behind him.

It was what we had been looking for for many long weeks and arduous days. It was what I might have scribbled on paper or typed on a page, with frost running up my arm to ice my neck.

It was what Roy had been seeking every time he plunged his long fingers into his clay. It was a blood-red bubble that rose steaming in a primeval mud pot and shaped itself into a face.

And this face was all the mutilated, scarred, and funeral faces of the wounded, shot, and buried men in ten thousand wars since wars began.

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.