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The Nature of the Beast

Mark Bourne

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* * * *

“The Nature of the Beast” originally appeared in Mars Dust and Magic

Shows (Scorpius Digital Publishing, 2001), and is reprinted here in a

revised version with the author’s permission.

* * * *

“Film director John Huston said, ‘Hollywood has always been a cage ... a cage to

catch our dreams.’ Mr. Huston didn’t direct the movie in this story, but it’s got

Hollywood in it, and bigger cages and dreams than even he might have imagined.”

* * * *

THE BEAUTIFUL YOUNG WOMAN stands lashed spread-eagle between twin

stone pillars. Her torn dress hangs from her body. She screams and writhes. The

monster comes. It removes her bonds and takes her away. This has happened to

her exactly the same way, again and again uncountable times, for more than

seventy years.

The unrepentantly old woman sat in the audience, watching digitally restored

black-and-white images in the darkness. Some scenes up on the screen didn’t match

her memories. Others matched too well. The dinosaurs had been there, of course.

But more of them. In real life the pterosaur had simply threatened her on that jungle

precipice, snapping and screeching but not clutching her in its claws—how

ridiculous—to carry her off. The tyrannosaur stank of rotted meat before it was

killed, but a movie can’t make you smell that. Nor can it recreate the torment of men

dying half-way around the world—the sound a spine makes when snapped between

a saurian’s jaws, or the cries men make when tossed into a chasm alive with moving

horrors. Or the feel of a giant black hand surrounding you. The cold wind at the top

of the world’s tallest man-made summit. Roaring aeroplanes and machine guns. The

colors of a final dawn reflected in vast, wet eyes. Eyes reflecting greater rage and

pain and sadness than any mere person could know.

She watched, disturbed at the depictions of all those Negroes, and Charlie, the

freighter Venture ’s Chinese cook. They didn’t fit how she recalled them. But these

enactments were devised in an even more racist time, by men with the power to

diminish what we said disturbed us. Even the white men up there only clumsily

mimicked what she knew to be the truth. Any two-dimensional image reduces its

subject to an immeasurably thin slice of reality. She was up there too, and as she sat

there in the darkness she felt sliced, reduced to mere light and shadow. Flattened, as

if in a cartoon.

In the darkness she smiled at the irony: the only character on that screen

manifesting any human depth and dimension, the only one who seemed real in every

way that was important, was a promethean being fashioned from an 18-inch metal

skeleton padded with foam rubber and cotton and covered with rabbit skins for fur.

The reality was too grand, too magnificent, too disturbingly real to resurrect any

other way. That matched her memories precisely.

The motion picture ended. The screen ascended into the ceiling above the

stage, and the old woman, white-haired and ancient-faced yet straight-backed and

poised (“handsome” was the word The New Yorker used), squinted into the

spotlights aimed at her podium. She stood motionless as the applause from the

standing ovation fell away to echoing scattered claps, like twigs snapping in that

dense, primordial island jungle seventy years ago. Or seventy million. Out there in

that darkness of the Columbia University auditorium sat a thousand people in suits

and evening dresses and whatever students wore these days. Each had paid a

ridiculous amount of money to sit there and hear her. She could see no farther than

the first few rows, though she felt the eyes focused on her from every part of the

hall. To her left, a camera flash exploded, its owner disregarding the rules she had

specified before agreeing to speak here, her first public appearance in seven

decades. A security guard ushered the photographer out a side door. Only when the

door had closed behind the photographer did she begin.

“Thank you,” she said. Who would have thought that she would be standing

here, back in Manhattan after all these years? Last year, when the invitations and

entreaties from the university began arriving at her mansion in Brazil, she threw them

out. Neither a “commemorative retrospective” nor an honorary doctorate sparked

enough interest within her to end a lifetime of intensely guarded privacy. Why she

later retrieved one letter from the trash bin, then answered it: that’s a mystery she still

pondered. She had begun writing a speech for this event in an attempt to address

that mystery for herself. But after page one it had rambled into meaningless

ruminations about change and time and the alleged value of human conscience and

guilt and—She tore it up and didn’t begin another.

Perhaps the article in the Times had been correct: she simply wished to

re-introduce herself to a world she had forsaken long ago, and to do so before it was

too late.

She delivered a brief speech, which the audience absorbed with expected

deference. She paused to wipe her brow with a tissue and sip from the glass of water

provided by the eager graduate student assigned to dog her heels for the duration of

her visit. That was her cue to the university’s president, who announced that it was

now time for a brief Q&A session. The lights came up on the audience.

She pointed to a young woman, possibly one of the paleontology students,

standing in the tenth row. “Ms. Darrow?” said the girl. “Is it true that this is the first

time you’ve seen the film King Kong ? And does it dramatize the reality of the events

well, in your opinion?”

Reality does not come with an orchestral score. Or convenient jump cuts to

avoid scenes that tell too much of the story. That final long night in Manhattan

had been amputated to twenty minutes of screen time. The movie’s final line of

dialogue, perhaps the most contemptible ever spoken in the history of moving

pictures, had made the old woman shut her eyes and tighten her hands into fists.

“It was beauty killed the beast.” But she had expected it. Everyone knew how this

picture ended. Few knew what had not been allowed onto the screen. Not that it

made a difference in the end. Few things ever do, really.

Her voice resonated clearly from the speaker system. “Yes, this is the first

time I’ve viewed this motion picture. I saw no point in doing so before now. As to

how well it matches my own recollections: in my mind I still see the island jungle as

horrifying and alien, and as the most vibrant, colorful place on Earth, full of exotic

smells and ten thousand other things now lost to us. New York City I’ll always think

of as what you just saw: rapid images in shades of gray.”

* * * *

By Autumn 1931, the Great Depression had grayed out the world utterly.

Ash-gray streets walled in ghost-gray people who stood without cheer or pride or

hope in long bread lines. For an unimaginable $20 a week, the remaining elite could

enjoy the privileges of a room at the Barbizon-Plaza and look down on the ghetto

Hooverville shanties cobbled up in Central Park. The newly opened Empire State

Building remained half-empty, yet it towered above the geometric jungle of granite

buildings and hard, sharp angles. Except for her coat—holes at its elbows and its

hem fraying more every day—Ann had acquired no clothing since the night she

finally sneaked away from the dark, cold family house, the tyrannical danger of her

father, and the docile impotence of her mother. The coat was a gift from a

melancholy reverend, the only man who had demanded nothing in return for his

charity. Gray like the sheet of newspaper blowing across the sidewalk the first time

she got caught stealing days-old fruit from a sidewalk vendor. A defeated, starving,

failed thief at 18, Ann had already learned what the world was: flat and colorless and

not at all sympathetic. Like pictures in a movie.

* * * *

“Of course I recognize the need for—” Something in her throat made her

pause. She blinked and it was gone. “—artistic license. I lived those events, after all.

Besides, since then I’ve learned that real life is too realistic to sell sufficient numbers

of tickets on its own.” She fooled them with a grin, and the audience laughed with

her. “Next question.” She pointed into the forest of raised hands. “You, sir, with the

yellow tie.”

The man stood. “What do you think of Fay Wray’s portrayal of you?”

I hate it . “Well, I must say that the dear girl screamed more eloquently than I

ever could.” A smattering of applause. They were in the palm of her hand.

She pointed to a portly older man raising his hand from the expensive-ticket

section. “Yes, Mr. Burns.”

The man stood, smiled. “Why is it, Ann,” he said, “that you became a recluse

shortly after your discoverer, Carl Denham, went to jail? And why did you leave

your fiancee, Ship’s Mate Jack Driscoll, standing at the altar?”

By the audience’s reaction, the man had just shat on the Vatican floor.

* * * *

She was alone near the 21st Street Mission when the Carl Denham of

Hollywood found her, fed her, and became her savior. His clean and pressed suit

made her clothes look all the more shabby and unworthy. He was attractive and

spoke well. And much older, maybe even 40, but not slow and soggy like other

older men. There was no doubt that he was well-fed; still, he was as smart and crisp

as a tall stack of new ten-dollar bills. He smelled of fresh sheets and good

aftershave.

“You’re a little thing,” he said. They chatted, just chat, harmless conversation,

for a few minutes. He seemed to listen hard to how she talked. After a while that

made her uncomfortable so she shut up. He hailed a taxi cab and guided her into it.

She didn’t know where he was taking her, but she had a good idea what would be

coming next. So she’d fallen this far. But even that was better than starving to death

in some alley. “You’re a looker,” he said. “There’s something about you I like.” He

didn’t say another word until the taxi took them to a restaurant he said was one of

his favorites. There a man in a nice suit greeted him by name and ushered them to a

small table. Mr. Denham looked her over like a jeweler appraising a rough stone.

“You’re like, like a little animal. That’s it! A scared, meek animal lost in a world too

big for her. That’s what I need for my next picture! Have you ever wanted to be an

actress?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. It was awfully easy to talk to him somehow. “I once did

some work as an extra out on Long Island for a picture.” It wasn’t quite a lie. The

producer had run out of money so the picture never finished. The last movie she’d

seen was a Marx Brothers that took place on a cruise ship. It was the funniest picture

she had ever seen, and the idea of an ocean cruise stayed with her ever since.

Mr. Denham nodded. “That’s good. Can you read a script?”

She turned away from him, chewed the restaurant steak he was paying for,

and placed the fork on the table. Which side, left or right, was it supposed to go on?

Not knowing that embarrassed her. “A little. I wanted to finish school. My parents

didn’t—”

“Your parents? Do you have family who need to give you permission?”

She hadn’t thought of them as “family” since she was twelve. “I have an

uncle. Somewhere. I’ve never met him.” Father’s older brother. Supposed to be a

lot like the hateful bastard. As a boy he taught Father how to castrate farm animals,

something Father talked about with sickening relish. “No. No one.”

“So will you do it?”

Ann looked at her shoes beneath the nice table. They were almost worn

through, so she crossed her ankles to hide them. He promised her clothes. New

clothes she didn’t have to accept from charity. Probably the sort of clothes Father

would not approve of. She mumbled. “I don’t know.”

Denham gestured with effortless authority, and a waiter brought her chocolate

mousse in a tall, beautiful glass goblet. She looked away from it. This man had

money. And influence. Control over his life. Things she’d only fantasized about. He

made pictures about far-away places, with big game hunters and ferocious animals.

He owned, they said, the most famous trophy room in Hollywood, full of wonderful,

scary animal heads and other things. California was a free and sunny place, that’s

what they said. A place to escape, to get what she wanted most: freedom from

poverty and the powerlessness that comes with it. Control. And he was very nice,

not like men in this city. His promises sure did sound sincere. He really liked her and

didn’t even try to touch her.

“Think about it, Ann!” His voice was a first-class train speeding west.

“Money, adventure, fame! And a long sea voyage that begins at six in the morning!

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this life, Ann, it’s this: face your fears. It’s the

only way to conquer them.” Then he said the words that finished opening her to him.

“You can trust me.”

She did. Completely and willingly. It was the first truly impulsive thing she

ever did, and that scared her and thrilled her at the same time. Beneath the table, she

uncrossed her ankles. Mrs. Carl Denham of Hollywood. Wouldn’t that show the

hateful bastard?

* * * *

“I suggest, Mr. Burns,” said Ms. Ann Darrow, the most famous witness to the

October 1931 incidents that had changed—or ended—so many lives, “that you rent

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