Suddenly he sprang with a chuckling snarl from the shadows of the corner and crouched in front of me. Then he straightened up and his hideously made-up face turned down like that of a tragic clown.
“Did you see the movie, Ernst?”
He nodded, then sat on the bed. “I saw it yesterday.” He bent over, his hairy fists were clenched and I heard a terrible suppressed sobbing in him. At last he lay down on the bed, his eyes closed, and gradually his breathing became quieter.
I poured him a drink and held him up in a sitting position.
“Try to forget it,” I said lamely.
“They laughed,” he said. “They did it deliberately, didn’t they?”
I nodded.
“But why? Why?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess they just don’t care any more.”
“That close-up, Fred. It was deliberately done that way. The lighting. They deliberately highlighted my mouth so that — my teeth—”
“I know,” I said.
“They could have hidden it. I didn’t have the money to get new teeth. I covered it up with acting — if they hadn’t deliberately made me a clown.”
“I know, I saw it.”
“Count Dracula — with no teeth,” He tried to laugh. He pushed me away and stood up. “Even an acting genius could not sustain the illusion of the walking dead — without teeth.”
I put my hand on his shoulder. “You’ve got to forget Ballew and his picture, Ernst. Listen, I’ve still got some connections in this damned town if I want to use them. I can get you a decent part—”
He turned and looked at me. “I waited for the cycle to come back. I waited a long time. I almost couldn’t wait that long.” He sighed.
He went over to the bureau and switched on a small bulb over the mirror. His shadow suddenly lunged up the wall and across the ceiling.
“But I’m too old to last very much longer, Fred. And now this thing Ballew did to me, it’s all over the country. Ernst Von Kroft, the greatest monster of them all—”
He slammed his hand on top of the bureau. “Could you forget it, Fred?”
I poured myself a shot of bourbon.
Not so long ago I would have said, what the hell difference did it make? But I couldn’t say that now. Ballew had canceled out Von Kroft’s entire lifetime as an artist, buried him as a grotesque buffoon.
He walked over to me and now I could see that his face had changed. His jaws were filled out. Then he snapped his teeth together.
“Cheap set of dentures,” he said, turning back to the mirror. “I bought them with what Ballew paid me. I do not believe I appear to be quite so amusing now.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think you’re amusing at all.”
“You think I’m indulging in self-pity?”
“No.”
He poured a glass half full of bourbon and drank it down, then poured again.
“Take it easy,” I said.
“An excellent vascillator,” he said. “Good for old blood vessels and constricting passageways of life.”
He bent toward the mirror and snapped his new dentures together.
I was pretty loaded by the time he dragged the theatrical trunk from under the bed and opened it. It smelled oddly of moth balls, dust, greasepaint, and powder. A display of jars, boxes, wax, wigs, whiskers, fangs, claws, clubfeet, hairy hands, eyeballs, appeared, until the room resembled a disordered window in a waxworks.
He was almost enthusiastic as he worked without benefit of mirror. The make-up kit was on the chair and he squatted on his heels in the moonlight by the open trunk and started first on his face. Wax, wigs, whiskers, fangs, claws, clubfeet followed, hairy hands, a gnarled hunch to strap on his back, a patch over his eye, another glass eye set in the plastiflesh high up on his head. He didn’t appear to confine himself to one role, but plucked many out of his memory, combining bits and pieces with fantastic skill.
When he finally stood up I could hear his quick breaths.
“What’s the idea?” I asked.
“I used to live the part,” he said. He went to the window. The full moon rose slowly behind the silhouettes of blue-black palms and turned the dryness of the vacant lot into a pool of glass.
“I can feel the moonlight burning coldly in my skin and it strangely warms the blood.”
He turned and looked at me. “Only a silver bullet can kill them, Fred, and they stay young forever.”
Then with amazing swiftness for an old man he jerked the door open and was out in the hall.
“Ernst,” I yelled. I went down the hall and down the stairs after him. Once he looked back up at me as he ran, one red-veined eyeball seeming to weep and laugh. Then he was moving in the gait of a loping half-beast as his hairy knuckles brushed the floor.
From the porch I called to him again, but he didn’t stop. I heard him howl. I staggered after him across the vacant lot. Once he halted and peered down the street, while his head shifted from side to side and his arms hung loosely. Then he ran on and I lost sight of him half a block from the studio where Ballew was shooting the third picture.
Ballew wasn’t in his office. A night watchman just going on duty said everybody had knocked off until morning, but that Ballew was out on the set somewhere with Morty.
Yes, he’d just let Von Kroft in. He was over there somewhere, the guard said, pointing toward the shadowy pile of props and rotting sets. “He said he’d left something on the set and come back to get it.”
Then we heard a scream from somewhere among the shadowy sound stages. The guard stared and swallowed. “That sounded kinda real, didn’t it?”
“It did,” I said. “You’d better call the cops.”
This time I was lost even longer than before. I was loaded, and it was dark. I crawled around in what turned out to be the remains of an old windjammer, and the deck was so rotten I fell through it. The hold was swarming with rats. I kicked my way out through the side, and ended up wandering around through papier-mache caverns.
I finally came to the graveyard set, the same one we had used for I Was a Juvenile Delinquent Vampire. I found Morty in the bottom of a grave — he was moaning with a broken jaw. His skin looked blue under the floodlight and his T-shirt was ripped open. He tried to say something but no words dribbled out — just sounds. Then he pointed feebly toward the gibbet.
Sirens screamed as I went over there. The dummy was swaying a little, turning slowly, but there was no wind.
I found Von Kroft under the gibbet. His whiskers and false eyes were gone. The strap had torn loose and his hump had fallen through his torn shirt. A false foot and a hairy, six-fingered glove lay a few feet away. He sat there, staring up into the glaring floodlight as if it were a full moon, and his dentures shone in a frozen smile. I was glad that he was dead.
I’ve often wondered if he knew what really happened, or if he thought this was his last horror movie — a real one, with no laughs.
The cops arrived and I pointed up to where Ballew was hanging as a replacement for the dummy. They cut him down. They asked me questions, and I told them all I knew.
“What a horrible damned thing,” one of the cops said as a flashbulb went off, then another.
“I don’t think so,” I said, or that’s what I recall saying, though I don’t know if I really did say it. “Von Kroft believed the cycle was coming back, but I don’t think it ever will.”
I guess I was thinking about what someone had said once — about the final horror being the realization that there is no horror. The real thing isn’t funny — it isn’t funny at all — and I guess everybody needs a laugh these days.