Page Seventeen III: The Return of the King

Was it possible, Jeremy asked himself, that such an object existed? It was certainly not probable. The Beverly Pantheon lacked all verisimilitude, was something entirely beyond his powers to invent. The fact that the idea of it was now in his mind proved, therefore, that he must really have seen it. He shut his eyes against the landscape and recalled to his memory the details of that incredible reality. The external architecture, modelled on that of Boecklin’s ‘Toteninsel’. The circular vestibule. The replica of Rodin’s ‘Le Baiser,’ illuminated by concealed pink floodlights. With its flights of black marble stairs. The seven-story columbarium, the endless galleries, its tiers on tiers of slab-sealed tombs. The bronze and silver urns of the cremated, like athletic trophies. The stained glass windows after Burne-Jones. The texts inscribed on marble scrolls. The Perpetual Wurlitzer crooning on every floor. The sculpture…

I knew nothing of these goings-on when Sam Yudenow employed me as manager of the Fowler’s End Pantheon.

“Sometimes men digging there unearth bodies of mammoths in a perfect state of preservation, fresh enough to eat after a hundred centuries in the everlasting refrigerator of the frost.”

Along the way I met another young man, exactly my age, with exactly the same love, if not to say lust. For those prehistoric creatures paced his days, and stirred his nights. The young man’s name was Ray Harryhausen. He was building, and animating with stop-motion 8 mm film, a family of dinosaurs, in his backyard garage. I visited the family often, handled the beasts, talked for hours, many nights in many years, with my friend, and we agreed: he was to grow up and birth dinosaurs, I was to grow up and dialogue them. And it came to pass.

Those animals certainly can travel!

‘Are there many antelope here too?’ I asked.

From then on, the author’s typewriter keys invariably fuse in a lump of hot metal and it’s all over but the shouting of the culprit and “Look, men: one hundred breezy photos!” Back in his stash, his roscoe safely within reach, Dan Turner lays his weary noggin on a pillow, resting up for the November issue. And unless you’re going to need me for something this afternoon, I intend to do the same. I’m bushed.

You have been reading seven paragraphs from seven of the page seventeens contained in some books I have about me.

After Many a Summer by Aldous Huxley; Fowler’s End by Gerald Kersh; Frozen Beauty, from Nightshades and Damnations by Gerald Kersh; Introduction to Dinosaur Tales by Ray Bradbury; Rhinoceros, from Rhinoceros, The Chairs, The Lesson by Eugene Ionesco; The Bridge in the Jungle by B. Traven; Somewhere a Roscoe…. from The Most of S.J. Perelman by S.J. Perelman.