Ray Bradbury - A Graveyard for Lunatics

“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!”

“I thought, Wait, he had nothing to do with this whole dumb show. He didn’t put the crazy horses on the carousel. He’s your pal, your friend, your buddy. He’s all that’s left of life. That was the turnaround. The road back from madness is knowing you’re mad. The road back means no more highway, and you can only turn. I loved you. I love you. So I came back. And opened the tomb and let the true Beast out.”

Roy turned his head and looked at me. His gaze said: Am I on report? Will you hurt me for what I have hurt? Are we still friends? What made me do whatever I did? Must the police know? And who will tell them? Must I be punished? Do the insane have to pay? Isn’t it all a madness? Mad sets, mad lines, mad actors? Is the play over? Or has it just begun? Do we laugh now or weep? For what?

His face said, Not long from now the sun will be up, the two cities will start, one more alive than the other. The dead will stay dead, yes, but the living will repeat the lines they were still saying just yesterday. Do we let them speak? Or do we rewrite them together? Do I make the Death that rides fast, and when he opens his mouth will your words be there?

What — ?

Roy waited.

“Are you really back with me?” I said.

I took a breath, and went on. “Are you Roy Holdstrom again and will you just stay that way and not be anything else but my friend, from now on, yes? Roy?”

Roy’s head was down. At last he put out his hand.

I seized it as if I might sway and fall to the streets of the Beast’s Paris, below.

We held tight.

With his free hand, Roy worked at the rest of his mask. He balled the substance, the torn-away wax and powder and celadon scar in his fist and hurled it from Notre Dame. We did not hear it land. But a voice, startled, shot up.

“God damnl Hey!”

We stared down.

It was Crumley, a simple peasant on the Notre Dame porch below. “I ran out of gas,” he called. “I kept going around the block. And then: no gas.”

“What,” he shielded his eyes, “in hell’s going on up there?”

Arbuthnot was buried two days later.

Or rather reburied. Or rather, placed in the tomb, carried there before dawn by some friends of the church who didn’t know who they carried or why or what for.

Father Kelly officiated at the funeral of a stillborn child, nameless and so not recently baptized.

I was there with Crumley and Constance and Henry and Fritz and Maggie. Roy stood far back from us all.

“What’re we doing here?” I muttered.

“Just making sure he’s buried forever ,” observed Crumley.

“Forgiving the poor son-of-a-bitch,”. Constance said, quietly.

“Oh, if people out beyond knew what was going on here today,” I said, “think of the crowds that might come to see that it’s over at last. Napoleon’s farewell.”

“He was no Napoleon,” said Constance.

“No?”

I looked across the graveyard wall where the cities of the world lay strewn-flat, and no place for Kong to grab at biplanes, and no dust-blown white sepulcher for the tomb-lost Christ, and no cross to hang some faith or future on, and no—

No, I thought, maybe not Napoleon, but Barnum, Gandhi, and Jesus. Herod, Edison, and Griffith. Mussolini, Genghis Khan, and Tom Mix. Bertrand Russell, The Man Who Could Work Miracles, and The Invisible Man. Frankenstein, Tiny Tim, and Drac—

I must have said some of this aloud.

“Quiet,” said Crumley, sotto voce .

And Arbuthnot’s tomb door, with flowers inside, and the body of the Beast, slammed shut.

I went to see Manny Leiber.

He was still sitting, like a miniature gargoyle, on the rim of his desk. I looked from him to the big chair behind him.

“Well,” he said. “ Caesar and Christ is done. Maggie’s editing the damn thing.”

He looked as if he wanted to shake hands, but didn’t know how. So I went around, collected the sofa cushions, like in the old days, piled them, and sat on them.

Manny Leiber had to laugh. “Don’t you ever give up?”

“If I did, you’d eat me alive.”

I looked beyond him to the wall. “Is the passage shut?”

Manny slid off the desk, walked over, and lifted the mirror off its hooks. Behind it, where once the door had been, was fresh plaster and a new coat of paint.

“Hard to believe a monster came through there every day for years,” I said.

“He was no monster,” said Manny. “And he ran this place. It would have sunk long ago without him. It was only at the end he went mad. The rest of the time he was God behind the glass.”

“He never got used to people staring at him?”

“Would you? What’s so unusual about him hiding out, coming up the tunnel late at night, sitting in that chair? No more stupid or brilliant than the idea of films falling off theatre screens to run the world. Every damn city in Europe is starting to look like us crazy Americans, dress, look, talk, dance like us. Because of films we’ve won the world, and are too damn dumb to see it. All that being true, what, I say, is so unusual about the given creativity of a man lost in the woodwork?!”

I helped him rehang the mirror over the fresh plaster.

“Soon, when things calm down,” said Manny, “we’ll call you and Roy back and build Mars.”

“But no Beasts.”

Manny hesitated. “We’ll talk about that later.”

“ Unh-unh ,” I said.

I glanced at the chair. “You gonna change that?”

Manny pondered. “Just grow my behind to fit. I been putting it off. I guess this is the year.”

“A backside big enough to tackle the New York front office?”

“If I put my brains where my butt is, sure. With him gone I got a lot to shoot for. Want to try it?”

I eyed the chair for a long moment.

“Naw.”

“Afraid once you sit you’ll never get up again? Get your can out of here. Come back in four weeks.”

“When you’ll need a new ending for Jesus and Pilate or Christ and Constantine or—”

Before he could pull back, I shook his hand.

“Good luck.”