Page 114 (1/2)

“Okay?” I clicked the projector switch “Now”

The filan

Ies flickered on Crumley’s wall There were only thirty seconds’ worth of film, and fairly jumpy, as if Roy had animated his clay bust in only a few hours instead of the many days it usually took to position a creature, take its picture, reposition it, and snap another frame, one at a time

“Holy Jesus,” whispered Crumley

We all sat stunned by what jumped across Crumley’s wall

It was Beauty’s friend, the thing from the Brown Derby

“I can’t look,” said Constance But she looked

I glanced at Crumley and felt as I had felt as a child, with my brother, seated in the dark theatre as the Phantom or the Hunchback or the Bat loomed on the screen Crumley’s face was my brother’s face, back thirty years, fascinated and horrified in one, curious and repelled, the sort of look people have when they see but do not want to see a traffic accident

For up on the wall, real and immediate, was the Man Beast Every contortion of the face, every move of the eyebrows, every flare of the nostrils, every motion of the lips, was there, as perfect as the sketches that Doré ht’s prowl in the cinder-dark srotesques stashed behind his eyelids, his ein! Even as Doré had, with total recall, scribbled faces, so Roy’s inner htest hairin the nostrils, the merest eyelash in a blink, the flexed ear, and the eternally salivating infernal mouth And when the Beast stared out of the screen, Crumley and I pulled back It saw us It dared us to shriek It was co to kill

The parlor ent dark

I heard a sound bubble through my lips

“The eyes,” I whispered

I fumbled in the dark, rewound the reel, restarted it

“Look, look, oh, look!” I cried

The cae closed in on the face