Read Quicker Than the Eye for Free Online

voice!"
    "You're drunk and doing this because you know I'm a nut for them."
    "No, no. Come, Zelda. Listen. Tell!"
    Maybe half an hour later, Bella heard the old tin lizzie rattle up the alley behind the apartments. It was a car Zelda, in her joy at visiting silent-movie theaters, had bought to lug herself around in while she wrote about the past, always the past, and steaming into Cecil B. DeMille's old place or circling Harold Lloyd's nation-state, or cranking and banging around the Universal backlot, paying her respects to the Phantom's opera stage, or sitting on Ma and Pa Kettle's porch chewing a sandwich lunch. That was Zelda, who once wrote in a silent country in a silent time for  Silver Screen.
    Zelda lumbered across the front porch, a huge body with legs as big as the Bernini columns in front of St. Peter's in Rome, and a face like a harvest moon.
    On that round face now was suspicion, cynicism, skepticisms, in equal pie-parts. But when she saw Bella's pale stare she cried:
    "Belle! "
    "You see  I'm  not  lying!" said Bella.
    "I see!"
    "Keep your voice down, Zelda. Oh, it's scary and strange, terrible and nice. So come on."
    And the two women edged along the walk to the rim of the old hill near the old steps in old Hollywood, and suddenly as they moved they felt time take a half turn around them and it was another year, because nothing had changed all the buildings were the way they were in 1928 and the hills beyond like they were in 1926 and the steps, just the, way they were when the cement was poured in 1921.
    "Listen, Zelda.  There!"
    And Zelda listened and at first there was only a creaking of wheels down in the dark, like crickets, and then a moan of wood and a hum of piano strings, and then one voice lamenting about this job, and the other voice claiming he had nothing to do with it, and then the thumps as two derby hats fell, and an exasperated voice announced:
    "Here's  another  fine mess you've got us in."
    Zelda, stunned, almost toppled off the hill. She held tight to Bella's arm as tears brimmed in her eyes.
    "It's a trick. Someone's got a tape recorder or-"
    "No, I checked. Nothing but the steps, Zelda, the steps!"
    Tears rolled down Zelda's plump cheeks.
    "Oh, God, that  is  his voice! I'm the expert, I'm the mad, fanatic, Bella. That's Ollie. And that other voice, Stan! And you're  not  nuts after all!"
    The voices below rose and fell and one cried: "Why don't you do something to  help  me?"
    Zelda moaned. "Oh, God, it's so  beautiful."
    "What does it mean?" asked Bella. "Why are they here? Are they really ghosts, and why would ghosts climb this hill every night, pushing that music box, night after night, tell me, Zelda, why?"
    Zelda peered down the hill and shut her eyes for a moment to think. "Why do  any  ghosts go anywhere? Retribution? Revenge? No, not  those  two. Love maybe's the reason, lost loves or something  Yes?"
    Bella let her heart pound once or twice and then said, "Maybe nobody  told  them."
    "Told them  what?"
    "Or maybe they were told a lot but still didn't believe, because maybe in their old years things got bad, I mean they were sick, and sometimes when you're sick you forget."
    "Forget  what!?"
    "How much we loved them."
    "They  knew!"
    "Did  they? Sure, we told each other, but maybe not enough of us ever wrote or waved when they passed and just yelled  'Love!' you  think?"
    "Hell, Bella, they're on TV every  night!"
    "Yeah, but that don't count. Has anyone, since they left us, come here to these steps and  said?  Maybe those voices down there, ghosts or whatever, have been here every night for years, pushing that music box, and nobody thought, or tried, to just whisper or yell all the love we had all the years. Why not?"
    'Why not?" Zelda stared down into the long darkness where perhaps shadows moved and maybe a piano lurched clumsily among the shadows. "You're right."
    If I'm right," said Bella, "and you say so, there's only one thing to do-"
    "You