A Graveyard for Lunatics. Ray Bradbury

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      “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.

      Then, the strange ruined man was gone, the screen up in place, as Roy’s hand came out of his pocket with his small sketch pad and pencil and, still staring at the screen as if he could x-ray through it, never looking at his hand as it drew, Roy outlined the terror, the nightmare, the raw flesh of destruction and despair.

      Like Doré, long before him, Roy had the swift exactitude, in his traveling, running, inking, sketching fingers, that required only a glance around at London crowds and then the turned faucet, the upside-down glass and funnel of memory, which spurted out his fingernails and flashed from his pencil as every eye, every nostril, every mouth, every jaw, every face, was printed out fresh and complete as from a stamped press. In ten seconds, Roy’s hand, like a spider plunged in boiling water, danced and scurried in epilepsies of remembrance and sketch. One moment, the pad was empty. The next, the Beast, not all of him, no, but most, was there!

      “Damn!” murmured Roy, and threw down his pencil.

      I looked at the Oriental screen and then down at the swift portrait.

      What lay there was close to being a half-positive, half-negative scrawl of a horror briefly glimpsed.

      I could not take my eyes away from Roy’s sketch, now that the Beast was hidden and the maître d’ was taking orders from behind the screen.

      “Almost,” whispered Roy. “But not quite. Our search is over, junior.”

      “No.”

      “Yes.”

      For some reason I scrambled to my feet. “Goodnight.”

      “Where you going?” Roy was stunned.

      “Home.”

      “How СКАЧАТЬ