Leiber stood there in the middle of the lawn. His Rolls-Royce was pulled up, its motor running silent and deep, and not a tremble in the frame.
“Well?” shouted Manny.
“We’re having a conference!” Roy said easily. “We want to move in here!”
“You what?” Manny eyed the old Victorian house.
“Great place to work,” Roy said, quickly. “Office for us up front, the sunporch, put in a card table, typewriter.”
“You got an office!”
“Offices don’t inspire. This—” I nodded around, taking the ball from Roy—“inspires. You should move all the writers out of the Writers’ Building! Put Steve Longstreet over in that New Orleans mansion to write his Civil War film. And that French bakery just beyond? Great place for Marcel Dementhon to finish his revolution, yes? Down the way, Piccadilly, heck, put all those new English writers there!”
Manny came slowly up on the porch, his face a confused red. He looked around at the studio, his Rolls, and then at the two of us, as if he had caught us naked and smoking behind the barn. “Christ, not enough everything’s gone to hell at breakfast. I got two fruitcakes who want to turn Lydia Pinkham’s shack into a writers’ cathedral!”
“Right!” said Roy. “On this very porch I conceived the scariest miniature film set in history!”
“Cut the hyperbole.” Manny backed off. “Show me the stuff !”
“May we use your Rolls?” said Roy.
We used the Rolls.
On the way to Stage 13, Manny Leiber stared straight ahead and said, “I’m trying to run a madhouse and you guys sit around on porches shooting wind. Where in hell is my Beast!? Three weeks I’ve waited—”
“Hell,” I said reasonably, “it takes time, waiting for something really new to step out of the night. Give us breathing space, time for the old secret self to coax itself out. Don’t worry. Roy here will be working in clay. Things will rise out of that. For now, we keep the Monster in the shadows, see—”
“Excuses!” said Manny, glaring ahead. “I don’t see. I’ll give you three more days! I want to see the Monster!”
“What if,” I blurted suddenly, “the Monster sees you! My God! What if we do it all from the Monster’s viewpoint, looking out!? The camera moves and is the Monster, and people get scared of the Camera and—”
Manny blinked at me, shut one eye, and muttered: “Not bad. The Camera, huh?”
“Yeah! The Camera crawls out of the meteor. The Camera, as the Monster, blows across the desert, scaring Gila monsters, snakes, vultures, stirring the dust—”
“I’ll be damned.” Manny Leiber gazed off at the imaginary desert.
“I’ll be damned,” cried Roy, delighted.
“We put an oiled lens on the Camera,” I hurried on, “add steam, spooky music, shadows, and the Hero staring into the Camera and—”
“Then what?”
“If I talk it I won’t write it.”
“Write it, write it!”
We stopped at Stage 13. I jumped out, babbling. “Oh, yeah. I think I should do two versions of the script. One for you. One for me.”
“Two?” yelled Manny. “Why?”
“At the end of a week I hand in both. You get to choose which is right.”
Manny eyed me suspiciously, still half in, half out of the Rolls.
“Crap! You’ll do your best work on your idea!”
“No. I’ll do my damnedest for you. But also my damnedest for me. Shake?”
“Two Monsters for the price of one? Do it! C’mon!”
Outside the door Roy stopped dramatically. “You ready for this? Prepare your minds and souls.” He held up both beautiful artists’ hands, like a priest.
“I’m prepared, dammit. Open!”
Roy flung open the outside and then the inside door and we stepped into total darkness.
“Lights, dammit!” said Manny.
“Hold on—” whispered Roy.
We heard Roy move in the dark, stepping carefully over unseen objects.
Manny twitched nervously.
“Almost ready,” intoned Roy across a night territory. “Now …”
Roy turned on a wind machine, low. First there was a whisper like a giant storm, which brought with it weather from the Andes, snow murmuring off the shelves of the Himalayas, rain over Sumatra, a jungle wind headed for Kilimanjaro, the rustle of skirts of tide along the Azores, a cry of primitive birds, a flourish of bat wings, all blended to lift your gooseflesh and drop your mind down trapdoors toward—
“Light!” cried Roy.
And now the light was rising on Roy Holdstrom’s landscapes, on vistas so alien and beautiful it broke your heart and mended your terror and then shook you again as shadows in great lemming mobs rushed over the microscopic dunes, tiny hills, and miniature mountains, fleeing a doom already promised but not yet arrived.
I looked around with delight. Roy had read my mind again. The bright and dark stuff I threw on the midnight screens inside my camera obscura head he had stolen and blueprinted and built even before I had let them free with my mouth. Now, turnabout, I would use his miniature realities to flesh out my most peculiar odd script. My hero could hardly wait to sprint through this tiny land.
Manny Leiber stared, flabbergasted.
Roy’s dinosaur land was a country of phantoms revealed in an ancient and artificial dawn.
Enclosing this lost world were huge glass plates on which Roy had painted primordial junglescapes, tar swamps in which his creatures sank beneath skies as fiery and bitter as Martian sunsets, burning with a thousand shades of red.
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