The Star Stalker

by Robert Bloch

  I nodded. “Here, wait a minute until I close up this place.” I switched off the lights on the lot outside. Keeley sat there, watching me. God knows what he was thinking. I had my own thoughts at the moment.

  Curiously enough, I wasn’t thinking about myself or what he’d just told me. I was thinking about Dawn—out there in Pasadena, hanging up the wash every week, watching the model shipbuilder, looking after the kid. Must be about two years old now. Funny to think of Dawn with a kid. Funnier still to think of I’ll always love you—never forget that. But it was all true, it was all real, and it wasn’t so funny that I couldn’t take a drink on it.

  I did. I took several, and Jackie Keeley joined me. We sat there in the dark for a while, until we’d killed the pint. It was after nine, so I drove him home in my car.

  It turned out he lived way up near the Reservoir, and somehow I found myself taking a route up Mulholland Drive. Mulholland Drive, with the lights glittering below and the new convertibles parked in the darkness (Dawn, where are you now, do you remember, do you still share it?) and the night air was cool across my burning cheeks.

  “Let’s stop for a minute,” I said. “Take a look down there.”

  “Sure.” We climbed out, walked along the rim overlooking Wonderland. At first glance, nothing seemed to have changed. Then I noted the new neon, the increased brilliance, the enlarged arc of the sweeping spread stretching before us.

  “Growing fast,” I murmured.

  “That’s right.” Jackie Keeley teetered on the edge. I joined him, my arm unobtrusive on his shoulder.

  “Don’t worry.” He chuckled. “I’m not going to fall. Just faking—you know.”

  “Of course. It’s a reflex, isn’t it? I’ve been thinking over what you said, Jackie, about the old days. And I can’t agree with you. We were all faking, weren’t we? Fooling ourselves, because none of it was true.”

  “Oh yes it was.” The small face was earnest. “Don’t ever let them tell you differently. It was true, every bit of it. That’s the way it happened.”

  “But it doesn’t seem true any more. Even after a few years—”

  “Of course it doesn’t. There’s been so many jokes about illiterate producers, we’re beginning to forget they actually existed. So many wisecracks about the great director with his megaphone that it’s just a stock gag—but did they ever see DeMille?”

  Keeley nodded up at me. “Yes—God help us—it was all true. But none of it was real. That’s your secret. True, but not real.”

  He was quite sober now. “What the hell,” he said. “It doesn’t matter one way or the other. In a couple of years, we and everything we did will be museum pieces. Radio’s the big thing nowadays and then we’ll be having this other stuff they talk about, where you see pictures right in your home—television, isn’t it?” he grinned. “No sense making a fuss over it. Only it’s hard to admit that your whole life, everything you ever did and believed in doing, isn’t important any more.”

  I smiled back at him. “Don’t you ever think that,” I told him. “It was important, and it will be, again. Some day men will look back. Some day men will go to the old films to recreate a culture, read the history of an era from its movies. There are newspapers and books and written records, but they’re cold and dead. The movies live on. It’s all there, if only you look; all that you can ever hope to know—a mirror of the manners, the modes, the mores of a people. The foolish ones won’t see it, of course. They’ll laugh and pass by, and think themselves sophisticated because they have eyes only for tomorrow.”

  Keeley shook his head. “I wish I could believe you.”

  “I mean it. The silent movies were America, for that dazzling decade from 1919 to 1929. They’re as much a part of our way of life as the cowboys and the pioneers. Some day there’ll be legends about them, and folk heroes. Fairbanks and Tom Mix, Chaplin and The Great Profile and America’s Sweetheart. And even twenty years from now, when the flapper is forgotten, women will remember Clara Bow and men will speak of Garbo as a goddess glimpsed in youth. And as the years roll on, the stories will grow. About the Great Goldwyn, and the unconquerable Erich von Stroheim; the heroes and heroines of the good old days. First will come scoffing, then reminiscence, then the myth. Silence is golden, and the movies were our golden age.”

  “I wish you could have said that at Harker’s funeral,” Keeley murmured.

  “I didn’t have to. He knew. And it didn’t really matter that he died, or any of the others. Because they all left something behind. The things men create from their imagination.

  “Yes, we’ll die, too, Jackie. But we’re the lucky ones. We’ve preserved something after all, preserved it on film, for generations to come. What we lost won’t matter then. It’s what we saved that really counts. And we saved our dreams.”

  We took a long look, a last look at all the lights, then climbed back into the car and started down the dark road ahead.

  Fadeout

  to

  THE END

  Table of Contents

  Back Cover

  Preview

  Titlepage

  Copyright

  Dedication

  REEL ONE: Once Upon a Time—

  Prologue

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  REEL TWO: Came the Dawn—

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  REEL THREE: The Plot Thickens

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT