Ray Bradbury
http://blogs.myspace.com/mysteryal
Tyrannosaurus Rex
1962
He opened a door on darkness. A voice cried, "Shut it!" It was like a blow
in the face. He jumped through. The door banged. He cursed himself quietly. The
voice, with dreadful patience, intoned, "Jesus. You Terwilliger?"
"Yes," said Terwilliger. A faint ghost of screen haunt-ed the dark theatre
wall to his right. To his left, a cigarette wove fiery arcs in the air as
someone's lips talked swiftly around it.
"You're five minutes late!"
Don't make it sound like five years, thought Terwilliger. "Shove your film
in the projection room door. Let's move."
Terwilliger squinted.
He made out five vast loge seats that exhaled, breathed heavily as
amplitudes of executive life shifted, leaning to-ward the middle loge where,
almost in darkness, a little boy sat smoking.
No, thought Terwilliger, not a boy. That's him. Joe Clar-ence, Clarence the
Great.
For now the tiny mouth snapped like a puppet's, blow-ing smoke. "Well?"
Terwilliger stumbled back to hand the film to the pro-jectionist, who made
a lewd gesture toward the loges, winked at Terwilliger and slammed the booth
door.
"Jesus," sighed the tiny voice. A buzzer buzzed. "Roll it, projection!"
Terwilliger probed the nearest loge, struck flesh, pulled back and stood
biting his lips.
Music leaped from the screen. His film appeared in a storm of drums:
TYRANNOSAURUS REX: The Thunder Lizard.
Photographed in stop-motion animation with miniatures
created by
John Terwilliger. A study in life-forms on Earth one billion
years before Christ.
Faint ironic applause came softly patting from the baby hands in the middle
loge.
Terwilliger shut his eyes. New music jerked him alert. The last titles
faded into a world of primeval sun, mist, poisonous rain and lush wilderness.
Morning fogs were strewn along eternal seacoast where immense flying dreams and
dreams of nightmare scythed the wind. Huge triangles of bone and rancid skin, of
diamond eye and crusted tooth, pterodactyls, the kites of destruction, plunged,
struck prey, and skimmed away, meat and screams in their scissor mouths.
Terwilliger gazed, fascinated.
In the jungle foliage now, shiverings, creepings, insect jitterings,
antennae twitchings, slime locked in oily fatted slime, armour skinned to
armour, in sun glade and shadow moved the reptilian inhabitors of Terwilliger's
mad remem-brance of vengeance given flesh and panic taking wing.
Brontosaur, stegosaur, triceratops. How easily the clum-sy tonnages of name
fell from one's lips.
The great brutes swung like ugly machineries of war and dissolution through
moss ravines, crushing a thou-sand flowers at one footfall, snouting the mist,
ripping the sky in half with one shriek.
My beauties, thought Terwilliger, my little lovelies. All liquid latex,
rubber sponge, ball-socketed steel articula-ture; all night-dreamed,
clay-molded, warped and welded, riveted and slapped to life by hand. No bigger
than my fist, half of them; the rest no larger than this head they sprang from.
"Good Lord," said a soft admiring voice in the dark.
Step by step, frame by frame of film, stop motion by stop motion, he,
Terwilliger, had run his beasts through their postures, moved each a fraction of
an inch, photo-graphed them, moved them another hair, photographed them, for
hours and days and months. Now these rare im-ages, this eight hundred scant feet
of film, rushed through the projector.
And lo! he thought. I'll never get used to it. Look! They come alive!
Rubber, steel, clay, reptilian latex sheath, glass eye, porcelain fang, all
ambles, trundles, strides in terrible prides through continents as yet unmanned,
by seas as yet un-salted, a billion years lost away. They do breathe. They do
smite air with thunders. Oh, uncanny!
I feel, thought Terwilliger, quite simply, that there stands my Garden, and
these my animal creations which I love on this Sixth Day, and tomorrow, the
Seventh, I must rest.
"Lord," said the soft voice again.
Terwilliger almost answered, "Yes?"
"This is beautiful footage, Mr.Clarence," the voice went on.
"Maybe," said the man with a boy's voice.
"Incredible animation."
"I've seen better," said Clarence the Great.
Terwilliger stiffened. He turned from the screen where his friends lumbered
into oblivion, from butcheries wrought on architectural scales. For the first
time he examined his possible employers.
"Beautiful stuff."
This praise came from an old man who sat to himself far across the theater,
his head lifted forward in amaze toward that ancient life.
"It's jerky. Look there!" The strange boy in the middle loge half rose,
pointing with the cigarette in his mouth. "Hey, was that a bad shot. You see?'
"Yes," said the old man, tired suddenly, fading back in his chair. "I see."
Terwilliger crammed his hotness down upon a suffoca-tion of swiftly moving
blood.
"Jerky," said Joe Clarence.
White light, quick numerals, darkness; the music cut, the monsters
vanished.
"Glad that's over." Joe Clarence exhaled. "Almost lunchtime. Throw on the
next reel, Walter! That's all, Ter-williger." Silence. "Terwilliger?" Silence.
"Is that dumb bunny still here?"
"Here." Terwilliger ground his fists on his hips.
"Oh," said Joe Clarence. "It's not bad. But don't get ideas about money. A
dozen guys came here yesterday to show stuff as good or better than yours, tests
for our new film, Prehistoric Monster. Leave your bid in an envelope with my
secretary. Same door out as you came in. Walter, what the hell you waiting for?
Roll the next one!"
In darkness, Terwilliger barked his shins on a chair, groped for and found
the door handle, gripped it tight, tight.
Behind him the screen exploded: an avalanche fell in great flourings of
stone, whole cities of granite, immense edifices of marble piled, broke and
flooded down. In this thunder, he heard voices from the week ahead:
"We'll pay you one thousand dollars, Terwilliger."
"But I need a thousand for my equipment alone!"
"Look, we're giving you a break. Take it or leave it!"
With the thunder dying, he knew he would take, and he knew he would hate
it.
Only when the avalanche had drained off to silence behind him and his own
blood had raced to the inevitable decision and stalled in his heart, did
Terwilliger pull the immensely weighted door wide to step forth into the
terri-ble raw light of day.
Fuse flexible spine to sinuous neck, pivot neck to death's-head skull,
hinge jaw from hollow cheek, glue plas-tic sponge over lubricated skeleton, slip
snake-pebbled skin over sponge, meld seams with fire, then rear upright
triumphant in a world where insanity wakes but to look on madness -
Tyrannosaurus Rex!
The Creator's hands glided down out of arc-light sun. They placed the
granuled monster in false green summer wilds, they waded it in broths of teeming
bacterial life. Planted in serene terror, the lizard machine basked. From the
blind heavens the Creator's voice hummed, vibrating the Garden with the old and
monotonous tune about the footbone connected to the... anklebone, anklebone
con-nected to the... legbone, legbone connected to the... knee-bone, kneebone
connected to the...
A door burst wide.
Joe Clarence ran in very much like an entire Cub Scout pack. He looked
wildly around as if no one were there.
"My God!" he cried. "Aren't you set up yet? This costs me money!"
"No," said Terwilliger dryly. "No matter how much time I take, I get paid
the same."
Joe Clarence approached in a series of quick starts and stops. "Well, shake
a leg. And make it real horrible."
Terwilliger was on his knees beside the miniature jun-gle set. His eyes
were on a straight level with his produc-er's as he said, "How many feet of
blood and gore would you like?"
"Two thousand feet of each!" Clarence laughed in a kind of gasping stutter.
"Let's look." He grabbed the liz-ard.
"Careful!"
"Careful?" Clarence turned the ugly beast in careless and nonloving hands.
"It's my monster, ain't it? The con-tract-"
"The contract says you use this model for exploitation advertising, but the
animal reverts to me after the film's in release."
"Holy cow." Clarence waved the monster. "That's wrong. We just signed the
contracts four days ago -"
"It feels like four years." Terwilliger rubbed his eyes. "I've been up two
nights without sleep finishing this beast so we can start shooting."
Clarence brushed this aside. "To hell with the contract. What a slimy
trick. It's my monster. You and your agent give me heart attacks. Heart attacks
about money, heart attacks about equipment, heart attacks about -"
"This camera you gave me is ancient."
"So if it breaks, fix it; you got hands? The challenge of the shoestring
operation is using the old brain instead of cash. Getting back to the point,
this monster, it should've been specified in the deal, is my baby."
"I never let anyone own the things I make," said Ter-williger honestly. "I
put too much time and affection in them."
"Hell, okay, so we give you fifty bucks extra for the beast, and throw in
all this camera equipment free when the film's done, right? Then you start your
own company. Compete with me, get even with me, right, using my own machines!"
Clarence laughed.
"If they don't fall apart first," observed Terwilliger.
"Another thing." Clarence put the creature on the floor and walked around
it. "I don't like the way this monster shapes up."
"You don't like what?" Terwilliger almost yelled.
"His expression. Needs more fire, more... goombah. More mazash!"
"Mazash?"
"The old bimbo! Bug the eyes more. Flex the nostrils. Shine the teeth. Fork
the tongue sharper. You can do it! Uh, the monster ain't mine, huh?"
"Mine." Terwilliger arose.
His belt buckle was now on a line with Joe Clarence's eyes. The producer
stared at the bright buckle almost hyp-notically for a moment.
"God damn the goddam lawyers!"
He broke for the door.
"Work!"
The monster hit the door a split second after it slammed shut.
Terwilliger kept his hand poised in the air from his over-hand throw. Then
his shoulders sagged. He went to pick up his beauty. He twisted off its head,
skinned the latex flesh off the skull, placed the skull on a pedestal and,
pains-takingly, with clay, began to reshape the prehistoric face.
"A little goombah," he muttered. "A touch of mazash."
They ran the first film test on the animated monster a week later.
When it was over, Clarence sat in darkness and nod-ded imperceptibly.
"Better. But... more honorific, bloodcurdling. Let's scare the hell out of
Aunt Jane. Back to the drawing board!"
"I'm a week behind schedule now," Terwilliger protest-ed. "You keep coming
in, change this, change that, you say, so I change it, one day the tail's all
wrong, next day it's the claws -"
"You'll find a way to make me happy," said Clarence. "Get in there and
fight the old aesthetic fight!"
At the end of the month they ran the second test.
"A near miss! Close!" said Clarence. "The face is just almost right. Try
again, Terwilliger!"
Terwilliger went back. He animated the dinosaur's mouth so that it said
obscene things which only a lip read-er might catch, while the rest of the
audience thought the beast was only shrieking. Then he got the clay and worked
until 3 A.M. on the awful face.
"That's it!" cried Clarence in the projection room (he next week. "Perfect!
Now that's what I call a monster!"
He leaned toward the old man, his lawyer, Mr.Glass, and Maury Poole, his
production assistant.
"You like my creature?" He beamed.
Terwilliger, slumped in the back row, his skeleton as long as the monsters
he built, could feel the old lawyer shrug.
"You seen one monster, you seen 'em all."
"Sure, sure, but this one's special." shouted Clarence happily. "Even I got
to admit Terwilliger's a genius!"
They all turned back to watch the beast on the screen, in a titanic waltz,
throw its razor tail wide in a vicious har-vesting that cut grass and clipped
flowers. The beast paused now to gaze pensively off into mists, gnawing a red
bone.
"That monster," said Mr.Glass at last, squinting. "He sure looks familiar."
"Familiar?" Terwilliger stirred, alert.
"It's got such a look," drawled Mr.Glass in the dark, "I couldn't forget,
from someplace."
"Natural Museum exhibits?"
"No, no."
"Maybe," laughed Clarence, "you read a book once, Glass."
"Funny..." Glass, unperturbed, cocked his head, closed one eye. "Like
detectives, I don't forget a face. But, that Tyrannosaurus Rex where before did
I meet/urn?"
"Who cares?" Clarence sprinted. "He's great. And all because I booted
Terwilliger's behind to make him do it right. Come on, Maury!"
When the door shut, Mr.Glass turned to gaze steadily at Terwilliger. Not
taking his eyes away, he called softly to the projectionist, "Walt? Walter?
Could you favour us with that beast again?"
"Sure thing."
Terwilliger shifted uncomfortably, aware of some bleak force gathering in
blackness, in the sharp light that shot forth once more to ricochet terror off
the screen.
"Yeah. Sure," mused Mr.Glass. "I almost remember. I almost know him. But...
who?"
The brute, as if answering, turned and for a disdainful moment stared
across one hundred thousand million years at two small men hidden in a small
dark room. The tyrant machine named itself in thunder.
Mr.Glass quickened forward, as if to cup his ear.
Darkness swallowed all.
With the film half finished, in the tenth week, Clarence summoned thirty of
the office staff, technicians and a few friends to see a rough cut of the
picture.
The film had been running fifteen minutes when a gasp ran through the small
audience.
Clarence glanced swiftly about.
Mr.Glass, next to him, stiffened.
Terwilliger, scenting danger, lingered near the exit, not knowing why; his
nervousness was compulsive and intu-itive. Hand on the door, he watched.
Another gasp ran through the crowd.
Someone laughed quietly. A woman secretary giggled. Then there was
instantaneous silence.
For Joe Clarence had jumped to his feet.
His tiny figure sliced across the light on the screen. For a moment, two
images gesticulated in the dark: Tyrannosaurus, ripping the leg from a
Pteranodon, and Clar-ence, yelling, jumping forward as if to grapple with these
fantastic wrestlers.
"Stop! Freeze it right there!"
The film stopped. The image held.
"What's wrong?" asked Mr.Glass.
"Wrong?" Clarence crept up on the image. He thrust his baby hand to the
screen, stabbed the tyrant jaw, the lizard eye, the fangs, the brow, then turned
blindly to the projector light so that reptilian flesh was printed on his
furious cheeks. "What goes? What is this?"
"Only a monster. Chief."
"Monster, hell!" Clarence pounded the screen with his tiny fist. "That's
me!"
Half the people leaned forward, half the people fell back, two people
jumped up, one of them Mr.Glass, who fum-bled for his other spectacles, flexed
his eyes and moaned, "So that's where I saw him before!"
"That's where you what?"
Mr. Glass shook his head, eyes shut. "That face, I knew it was familiar."
A wind blew in the room.
Everyone turned. The door stood open.
Terwilliger was gone.
They found Terwilliger in his animation studio clean-ing out his desk,
dumping everything into a large card-board box, the Tyrannosaurus machine-toy
model under his arm. He looked up as the mob swirled in, Clarence at the head.
"What did I do to deserve this!" he cried.
"I'm sorry, Mr.Clarence."
"You're sorry?! Didn't I pay you well?"
"No, as a matter of fact."
"I took you to lunches -"
"Once. I picked up the tab."
"I gave you dinner at home, you swam in my pool, and now this! You're
fired!"
"You can't fire me, Mr.Clarence. I've worked the last week free and
overtime, you forgot my check -"
"You're fired anyway, oh, you're really fired. You're blackballed in
Hollywood. Mr.Glass!" He whirled to find the old man. "Sue him!"
"There is nothing," said Terwilliger, not looking up any more, just looking
down, packing, keeping in motion, "nothing you can sue me for. Money? You never
paid enough to save on. A house? Could never afford that. A wife? I've worked
for people like you all my life. So wives are out. I'm an unencumbered man.
There's nothing you can do to me. If you attach my dinosaurs, I'll just go hole
up in a small town somewhere, get me a can of latex rubber, some clay from the
river, some old steel pipe, and make new mon-sters. I'll buy stock film raw and
cheap. I've got an old beat-up stop-motion camera. Take that away, and I'll
build one with my own hands. I can do anything. And that's why you'll never hurt
me again."
"You're fired!" cried Clarence. "Look at me. Don't look away. You're fired!
You're fired!"
"Mr.Clarence," said Mr.Glass, quietly, edging forward. "Let me talk to him
just a moment."
"So talk to him!" said Clarence. "What's the use? He just stands there with
that monster under his arm and the goddam thing looks like me, so get out of the
way!"
Clarence stormed out the door. The others followed.
Mr.Glass shut the door, walked over to the window and looked out at the
absolutely clear twilight sky.
"I wish it would rain," he said. "That's one thing about California I can't
forgive. It never really lets go and cries. Right now, what wouldn't I give for
a little something from that sky? A bolt of lightning, even."
He stood silent, and Terwilliger slowed in his packing. Mr.Glass sagged
down into a chair and doodled on a pad with a pencil, talking sadly, half aloud,
to himself.
"Six reels of film shot, pretty good reels, half the film done, three
hundred thousand dollars down the drain, hail and farewell. Out the window all
the jobs. Who feeds the starving mouths of boys and giris? Who will face the
stock-holders? Who chucks the Bank of America under the chin? Anyone for Russian
roulette?"
He turned to watch Terwilliger snap the locks on a brief-case.
"What hath God wrought?"
Terwilliger, looking down at his hands, turning them over to examine their
texture, said, "I didn't know I was doing it, I swear. It came out in my
fingers. It was all sub-conscious. My fingers do everything for me. They did
this."
"Better the fingers had come in my office and taken me direct by the
throat," said Glass. "I was never one for slow motion. The Keystone Kops, at
triple speed, was my idea of living, or dying. To think a rubber monster has
stepped on us all. We are now so much tomato mush, ripe for can-ning!"
"Don't make me feel any guiltier than I feel," said Terwilliger.
"What do you want, I should take you dancing?"
"It's just," cried Terwilliger. "He kept at me. Do this. Do that. Do it the
other way. Turn it inside out, upside down, he said. I swallowed my bile. I was
angry all the time. With-out knowing, I must've changed the face. But right up
till five minutes ago, when Mr.Clarence yelled, I didn't see it. I'll take all
the blame."
"No," sighed Mr.Glass, "we should all have seen. Maybe we did and couldn't
admit. Maybe we did and laughed all night in our sleep, when we couldn't hear.
So where are we now? Mr.Clarence, he's got investments he can't throw out. You
got your career from this day for-ward, for better or worse, you can't throw
out. Mr.Clarence right now is aching to be convinced it was all some horri-ble
dream. Part of his ache, ninety-nine per cent, is in his wallet. If you could
put one per cent of your time in the next hour convincing him of what I'm going
to tell you next, tomorrow morning there will be no orphan children staring out
of the want ads in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. If you would go tell him
-"
"Tell me wW?"
Joe Clarence, returned, stood in the door, his cheeks still inflamed.
"What he just told me." Mr.Glass turned calmly. "A touching story."
"I'm listening!" said Clarence.
"Mr.Clarence." The old lawyer weighed his words care-fully. "This film you
just saw is Mr.Terwilliger's solemn and silent tribute to you."
"It's what?" shouted Clarence.
Both men, Clarence and Terwilliger, dropped their jaws.
The old lawyer gazed only at the wall and in a shy voice said, "Shall I go
on?"
The animator closed his jaw. "If you want to."
"This film -" the lawyer arose and pointed in a single motion toward the
projection room - "was done from a feeling of honour and friendship for you, Joe
Clarence. Behind your desk, an unsung hero of the motion picture industry,
unknown, unseen, you sweat out your lonely little life while who gets the glory?
The stars. How often does a man in Atawanda Springs, Idaho, tell his wife, 'Say,
I was thinking the other night about Joe Clarence - a great producer, that man'?
How often? Should I tell? Nev-er! So Terwilliger brooded. How could he present
the real Clarence to the world? The dinosaur is there; boom! it hits him! This
is it! he thought, the very thing to strike terror to the world, here's a
lonely, proud, wonderful, awful symbol of independence, power, strength, shrewd
animal cunning, the true democrat, the individual brought to its peak, all
thunder and big lightning. Dinosaur: Joe Clarence. Joe Clar-ence: Dinosaur. Man
embodied in Tyrant Lizard!"
Mr.Glass sat down, panting quietly.
Terwilliger said nothing.
Clarence moved at last, walked across the room, circled Glass slowly, then
came to stand in front of Terwilliger, his face pale. His eyes were uneasy,
shifting up along Terwilliger's tall skeleton frame.
"You said that?' he asked faintly.
Terwilliger swallowed.
"To me he said it. He's shy," said Mr.Glass. "You ever hear him say much,
ever talk back, swear? anything? He likes people, he can't say. But, immortalize
them? That he can do!"
"Immortalize?" said Clarence.
"What else?" said the old man. "Like n statue, only moving. Years from now
people will say, 'Remember that film. The Monster from the Pleistocene?' And
people will say, 'Sure! why?' 'Because,' the others say, 'it was the one
monster, the one brute, in all Hollywood history had real guts, real
personality. And why is this? Because one genius had enough imagination to base
the creature on a real-life, hard-hitting, fast-thinking businessman of A-one
caliber.' You're one with history, Mr.Clarence. Film librar-ies will carry you
in good supply. Cinema societies will ask for you. How lucky can you get?
Nothing like this will ever happen to Immanuel Glass, a lawyer. Every day for
the next two hundred, five hundred years, you'll be starring some-where in the
world!"
"Every day?" asked Clarence softly. "For the next -"
"Eight hundred, even; why not?"
"I never thought of that."
"Think of it!"
Clarence walked over to the window and looked out at the Hollywood Hills,
and nodded at last.
"My God, Terwilliger," he said. "You really like me that much."
"It's hard to put in words," said Terwilliger, with diffi-culty.
"So do we finish the mighty spectacle?" asked Glass. "Starring the tyrant
terror striding the earth and making all quake before him, none other than
Mr.Joseph J. Clarence?"
"Yeah. Sure." Clarence wandered off, stunned, to the door, where he said,
"You know? I always wanted to be an actor!"
Then he went quietly out into the hall and shut the door.
Terwilliger and Glass collided at the desk, both clawing at a drawer.
"Age before beauty," said the lawyer, and quickly pulled forth a bottle of
whiskey.
At midnight on the night of the first preview of Monster from the Stone
Age, Mr.Glass came back to the studio, where everyone was gathering for a
celebration, and found Terwilliger seated alone in his office, his dinosaur on
his lap.
"You weren't there?' asked Mr.Glass.
"I couldn't face it. Was there a riot?"
"A riot? The preview cards are all superdandy extra plus! A lovelier
monster nobody saw before! So now we're talking sequels! Joe Clarence as the
Tyrant Lizard in Re-turn of the Stone Age Monster, Joe Clarence and/or
Тугаnnosaurus Rex in, maybe, Beast from the Old Country -"
The phone rang. Terwilliger got it.
"Terwilliger, this is Clarence! Be there in five minutes! We've done it!
Your animal! Great! Is he mine now? I mean, to hell with the contract, as a
favour, can I have him for the mantel?"
"Mr.Clarence, the monster's yours."
"Better than an Oscar! So long!"
Terwilliger stared at the dead phone.
"God bless us all, said Tiny Tim. He's laughing, almost hysterical with
relief."
"So maybe I know why," said Mr.Glass. "A little girl, after the preview,
asked him for an autograph."
"An autograph?"
"Right there in the street. Made him sign. First auto-graph he ever gave in
his life. He laughed all the while he wrote his name Somebody knew him. There he
was, in front of the theatre, big as life. Rex Himself, so sign the name. So he
did."
"Wait a minute," said Terwilliger slowly, pouring drinks. "That little
girl...?"
"My youngest daughter," said Glass. "So who knows? And who will tell?"
They drank.
"Not me," said Terwilliger.
Then, carrying the rubber dinosaur between them, and bringing the whisky,
they went to stand by the studio gate, waiting for the limousines to arrive all
lights, horns and annunciations.