Ray Bradbury: A Graveyard for Lunatics

I felt the same thrill I had felt when, in high school, Roy had taken me home and I had gasped as he swung his garage doors wide on, not automobiles, but creatures driven by ancient needs to rise, claw, chew, fly, shriek, and die through all our childhood nights.

And here, now, on Stage 13, Roy’s face burned above a whole miniature continent that Manny and I were stranded on.

I tiptoed across it, fearful of destroying any tiny thing. I reached a single covered sculpture platform and waited.

Surely this must be his greatest beast, the thing he had set himself to rear when, in our twenties, we had visited the primal corridors of our local natural history museum. Surely somewhere in the world this Beast had hidden in dusts, treading char, lost in God’s coal mines under our very tread! Hear! oh hear that subway sound, his primitive heart, and volcanic lungs shrieking to be set free! And had Roy set him free?

“I’ll be goddamned.” Manny Leiber leaned toward the hidden monster. “Do we see it now ?”

“Yes,” Roy said, “that’s it.”

Manny touched the cover.

“Wait,” said Roy. “I need one more day.”

“Liar!” said Manny. “I don’t believe you got one goddamn bastard thing under that rag!”

Manny took two steps. Roy jumped three.

At which instant, the Stage 13 set phone rang.

Before I could move, Manny grabbed it.

“Well?” he cried.

His face changed. Perhaps it got pale, perhaps not, but it changed.

“I know that.” He took a breath. “I know that, too.” Another breath; his face was getting red now. “I knew that half an hour ago! Say, god damn it to hell, who is this!?”

A wasp buzzed at the far end of the line. The phone had been hung up.

“Son of a bitch!”

Manny hurled the phone and I caught it.

“Wrap me in a wet sheet, someone, this is a madhouse! Where was I? You!”

He pointed at both of us.

“Two days, not three. You damn well get the Beast out of the catbox and into the light or—”

At which point the outer door opened. A runt of a guy in a black suit, one of the studio chauffeurs, stood in a glare of light.

“Now what?” Manny shouted.

“We got it here but the motor died. We just got it fixed.”

“Move out, then, for Christ’s sake!”

Manny charged at him with one fist raised, but the door slammed, the runt was gone, so Manny had to turn and direct his explosion at us.

“I’m having your final checks made up, ready for Friday afternoon. Deliver, or you’ll never work again, either of you.”

Roy said quietly, “Do we get to keep it? Our Green Town, Illinois, offices? Now that you see these results you got from us fruitcakes?”

Manny paused long enough to look back at the strange lost country like a kid in a fireworks factory.

“Christ,” he breathed, forgetting his problems for a moment, “I got to admit you really did it.” He stopped, angry at his own praise, and shifted gears. “Now cut the cackle and move your buns!”

And—bam! He was gone, too.

Standing in the midst of our ancient landscape, lost in time, Roy and I stared at one another.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” said Roy. Then, “You really going to do it? Write two versions of the script? One for him, one for us ?”

“Yep! Sure.”

“How can you do that?”

“Heck,” I said, “I been in training for fifteen years, wrote one hundred pulp stories, one a week, in one hundred weeks, two script outlines in two days? Both brilliant? Trust me.”

“Okay, I do, I do.” There was a long pause, then he said, “Do we go look ?”

“Look? At what ?”

“That funeral you saw. In the rain. Last night. Over the wall. Wait.”

Roy walked over to the big airlock door. I followed. He opened the door. We looked out.

An ornately carved black hearse with crystal windows was just pulling away down the studio alley, making a big racket with a bad engine.

“I bet I know where it’s going,” said Roy.

We drove around on Gower Street in Roy’s old beat-up 1927 tin lizzie.

We didn’t see the black funeral hearse go into the graveyard, but as we pulled up out front and parked, the hearse came rolling out among the stones.

It passed us, carrying a casket into the full sunlight of the street.

We turned to watch the black limousine whisper out the gate with no more sound than a polar exhalation from off the northern floes.

“That’s the first time I ever saw a casket in a funeral car go out of a cemetery. We’re too late!”

I spun about to see the last of the limo heading east, back toward the studio.

“Too late for what?”

“Your dead man, dummy! Come on!”

We were almost to the cemetery back wall when Roy stopped.

“Well, by God, there’s his tomb.”

I looked at what Roy was looking at, about ten feet above us, in marble:

J. C. ARBUTHNOT, 1884-1934 R.I.P.

It was one of those Greek-temple huts in which they bury fabulous people, with an iron lattice gate locked over a heavy wood-and-bronze inner door.

“He couldn’t have come out of there, could he?”

“No, but something got on that ladder and I knew his face. And someone else knew I would recognize that face so I was invited to come see.”

“Shut up. Come on.”

We advanced along the path.

“Watch it. We don’t want to be seen playing this stupid game.”

We arrived at the wall. There was nothing there, of course.

“Like I said, if the body was ever here, we’re too late.” Roy exhaled and glanced.

“No, look. There.”

I pointed at the top of the wall.

There were the marks, two of them, of some object that had leaned against the upper rim.

“The ladder?”

“And down here .”

The grass at the base of the wall, about five feet out, a proper angle, had two half-inch ladder indentations in it.

“And here. See?”

I showed him a long depression where the grass had been crushed by something falling.

“Well, well,” murmured Roy. “Looks like Halloween’s starting over.”

Roy knelt on the grass and put his long bony fingers out to trace the print of the heavy flesh that had lain there in the cold rain only twelve hours ago.

I knelt with Roy staring down at the long indentation, and shivered.

“I—” I said, and stopped.

For a shadow moved between us.

“Morning!”

The graveyard day watchman stood over us.

I glanced at Roy, quickly. “Is this the right gravestone? It’s been years. Is—”

The next flat tombstone was covered with leaves. I scrabbled the dust away. There was a half-seen name beneath. SMYTHE. BORN 1875-DIED 1928.

“Sure! Old grandpa!” cried Roy. “Poor guy. Died of pneumonia.” Roy helped me brush away the dust. “I sure loved him. He—”

“Where’re your flowers?” said the heavy voice, above us.

Roy and I stiffened.

“Ma’s bringing ’em,” said Roy. “We came ahead, to find the stone.” Roy glanced over his shoulder. “She’s out there now.”

The graveyard day watchman, a man long in years and deep in suspicion, with a face not unlike a weathered tombstone, glanced toward the gate.

A woman, bearing flowers, was coming up the road, far out, near Santa Monica Boulevard.

Thank God, I thought.

The watchman snorted, chewed his gums, wheeled about, and strode off among the graves. Just in time, for the woman had stopped and headed off, away from us.

We jumped up. Roy grabbed some flowers off a nearby mound.

“Don’t!”

“Like hell!” Roy stashed the flowers on Grandpa Smythe’s stone. “Just in case that guy comes back and wonders why there’re no flowers after all our gab. Come on!”