A Graveyard for Lunatics

4

I sat up half the night looking around at my ordinary living room with ordinary furniture in a small safe bungalow house on a normal street in a quiet part of the city. I drank three cups of hot cocoa but stayed cold as I threw images on the walls, shivering.

People can’t die twice! I thought. That couldn’t have been James Charles Arbuthnot on that ladder, clawing the night wind. Bodies decay. Bodies vanish.

I remembered a day in 1934 when J. C. Arbuthnot had got out of his limousine in front of the studio as I skated up, tripped, and fell into his arms. Laughing, he had balanced me, signed my book, pinched my cheek, and gone inside.

And, now, Sweet Jesus, that man, long lost in time, high in a cold rain, had fallen in the graveyard grass.

I heard voices and saw headlines:

J. C. ARBUTHNOT DEAD BUT RESURRECTED.

“No!” I said to the white ceiling where the rain whispered, and the man fell. “It wasn’t him. It’s a lie!”

Wait until dawn, a voice said.