Read Online A Graveyard for Lunatics by Ray Bradbury - Free Book Online Page A

laughing he would gasp and die. Always the happy bark, the fixed grin.
    “Yes?” he asked, seeing that I was studying his teeth, his lips.
    “What’s there so funny to laugh at,” I said, “always?”
    “Everything! Did you ever see a film with Conrad Veidt—?”
    “The Man Who Laughs?”
    That stopped Groc in mid-dust. “Impossible! You lie!”
    “My ma was nuts for films. After school, she’d pick me up from first, second, third grade to go see Pickford, Chancy, Chaplin. And… Conrad Veidt! The gypsies sliced his mouth so it could never stop smiling all the rest of his life, and he falls in love with a blind girl who can’t see the awful smile and he is unfaithful to her but, scorned by a princess, crawls back to his blind girl, weeping, to be comforted by her unseeing hands. And you sit in your aisle seat in the dark at the Elite Cinema and weep. The End.”
    “My God!” exclaimed Groc, and almost not laughing. “What a dazzling child you are. Yes!” He grinned. “
I
am that Veidt character, but I was not carved into smiles by gypsies. Suicides, murders, assassinations did it. When you are locked in a mass grave with ten thousand corpses and fight upward for air in nausea, shot to death but not dead. I have never touched meat since, for it smells of the lime pit, the carcass, and the unburied slaughter. So,” he gestured, “fruit. Salads. Bread, fresh butter, and wine. And, along the way, I sewed on this smile. I fight the true world with a false mouth. In the face of death, why not these teeth, the lascivious tongue, and the laugh? Anyway,
I
am responsible for
you
!”
    “Me?”
    “I told Manny Leiber to hire Roy, your tyrannosaurus buddy.
    And I said we needed someone who wrote as well as Roy dreamed.
Voilà! You!
”
    “Thanks,” I said, slowly.
    Groc preened over his food, glad that I was staring at his chin, his mouth, his brow.
    “You could make a fortune—” I said.
    “I already do.” He cut a slice of pineapple. “The studio pays me excessively. Their stars are always booze-wrinkling their faces, or smashing their heads through car windows. Maximus Films lives in fear that I might depart. Nonsense! I will stay. And grow younger, each year, as I cut and stitch, and stitch again, until my skin is so tight that when I smile my eyes pop! So!” He demonstrated. “For I can never go back. Lenin chased me out of Russia.”
    “A dead man chased you?”
    Fritz Wong leaned forward, listening, mightily pleased.
    “Groc,” he said, gently, “explain. Lenin with new roses in his cheeks. Lenin with brand-new teeth, a smile under the mouth. Lenin with new eyeballs, crystal, under the lids. Lenin with his mole gone and his goatee trimmed. Lenin, Lenin. Tell.”
    “Very simply,” said Groc, “Lenin was to be a miraculous saint, immortal in his crystal tomb.
    “But Groc? Who was he? Did Groc rouge Lenin’s smile, clear his complexion? No! Lenin, even in death, improved
himself
! So? Kill Groc!
    “So Groc ran! And Groc today is where? Falling upward… with
you
.”
    At the far end of the long table, Doc Phillips had come back. He advanced no further but, with a sharp jerk of his head, indicated that he wanted Groc to follow.
    Groc took his time tapping his napkin on his little rosebud smile, took another swig of cold milk, crossed his knife and fork on his plate, and scrambled down. He paused and thought, then said, “Not
Titanic
, Ozymandias is more like it!” and ran out.
    “Why,” said Roy, after a moment, “did he make up all that guff about manatees and woodcarving?”
    “He’s good,” said Fritz Wong. “Conrad Veidt, small size. I’ll use that little son of a bitch in my next film.”
    “What did he mean by Ozymandias?” I asked.

16
    All the rest of the afternoon Roy kept shoving his head into my office, showing me his clay-covered fingers.
    “Empty!” he cried. “No Beast!”
    I yanked paper from my typewriter. “Empty! Also no Beast!”
    But at last, at ten o’clock that night, Roy drove us to the Brown Derby.
    On the way I read aloud the