Kilroy Was Here!

By Jay Rayl

Myth, magician, miracle worker?
Who was Kilroy?
During The Second World War, a simple little cartoon popped up all over Europe and the South Pacific in the form of a silly piece of innocent graffiti. It was found scratched on the walls of bathrooms, barracks and bordellos; it found its way onto the armor of Sherman tanks, shell casings and ship’s hulls. Men from all branches of the service considered it their good fortune if they were to come across that whimsical declaration ‘Kilroy Was Here!’ And though no such person ever really existed, Kilroy soon became a symbol to every allied serviceman that this imaginary G.I. was always there: looking over them, a lucky rabbit’s foot, a talisman guaranteeing victory and the promise of a safe trip home. Many a man went into battle with this mythical Kilroy marching right beside him. And with that belief, no young soldier ever really died alone.
Within this premise, Sheppard ‘Shep’ Pence, one of Hollywood’s legendary directors, has set out to put the vast tapestry of World War Two onto Technicolor film. Assembling a cast of thousands around the cameo appearances of this central hero, Kilroy, talk around town has it that Shep Pence has written a script that pays homage to the real life heroes of the great conflict in ‘graphic detail and heart felt dialogues’. Once the greatest director of his time, he now seems to be back on track to give the public just what it wants and save his faltering career and a studio struggling through the lean times and the changing tastes of a transforming moviegoer.
And what if some battlefield heroics credited to this mythical soldier seem a bit farfetched: stories of this Kilroy pulling men from the wreckage of a burned-out tank, and then the very same day and a thousand miles away leading men out of an enemy infested jungle. Indeed, whether carrying the wounded back from behind enemy lines or boosting morale after an ill-fated mission with a harmless prank, one thing could always be certain, Kilroy was here!
“There has to be something of magic, this is Hollywood.” The director defends. “After all, for some, he was the one soldier most talked about, the one soldier most often looked for.
Then one day, shortly before filming is to begin, Mr. Shep Pence receives a visitor.
A visitor who knows something about the real Kilroy: the myth, the magician, the miracle worker?
-A man once left for dead and then returned to life.
-A man who has been given a second chance.
-A second chance to change the world.

And it will soon become evident that this Kilroy, fulfilling a two thousand year old prophecy, is not the man anyone ever expected.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jay Rayl
• Release date: May 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311162472

Jay Rayl

Besides an author of novels, short stories and poetry, Jay Allen Rayl has enjoyed working as an amateur filmmaker, in the theater as an actor and stage director of dramas, comedies and musicals, as well as an award-winning photographer and artist.His short feature From Another Dream was screened at the Orange County Amateur Film-makers Showcase in 1975.Prior to that, he enjoyed performing character roles in college productions and then in community theater, where he went on to direct such shows as Blithe Spirit, The Man Who Came To Dinner, My Fair Lady, Oklahoma and Camelot.His literary works can be sampled and purchased at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Smashwords. Some of those titles include Raising Lazarus, Kilroy Was Here, The Minerva Vendettas and The Evening Meal.When not engaged in painting, photography or writing, the author enjoys the diversion of sitting down at the piano with a go at Chopin or Rachmaninov, or simply picking up his classical guitar and playing the likes of Tarrega or Ponce.But literature continues to be his primary focus.Currently, he is working on a collection of miniatures under the title of The Penny Epics, which can be enjoyed on his website at JayRayl.comTitles include:The Girl With The Flaxen Hair- A novelKilroy Was Here!- A novelThe Evening Meal- A short storyThe Sensibility Of The Silly Sevens- A short storyA Love Affair So Late In Life- A short storyMarevedova And The Size-Nine Enigma- A short storyUnwriting The Chisel'd Script- A short storyThe Minerva Vendettas- A short story

Book preview

1- A Return To Life

‘Kilroy was nobody. He had gone unnoticed these twenty-some years; he had been silent when called upon and invisible when sought out.’

‘Everyone was dead!

Good and dead.’

They had died fighting.

They had died with their boots on.

Fighting and with their boots on, just as all good soldiers had always been told they should die.

But the truth of the matter was something altogether quite different.

For in reality, they had simply died, inglorious and unblessed, as allied soldiers fighting on some high desert stretch of unremarkable terrain in what we now call The Second World War.

And yet, they had not thought about dying that morning when they rolled out across the vast alluvial vales that make up the Algerian wasteland, a light tapestry of wadi and winter-land oases. They had not thought that on such a day when a warmer, unsuspecting morning wind seemed to blow all the way from home somewhere in the New World, that every horror warfare could promise would be coldly handed to them like an unsought gift from some unwelcome stranger.

They had not thought that their luck would run out today.

But it did.

By mid-day, the weather had changed and they were all chilled to the bone.

And by a rainy and cold late-afternoon, in the middle of nowhere with nothing to speak of and nothing to show for it, everyone was dead.

‘Good and dead.'

All thirteen of them. Indeed, an unlucky number.

All thirteen.

Everyone.

And everyone was Second Lieutenant Robert Thomas Maxwell, the tall string-bean of a guy who now looked, by any measure, much shorter, lying face down in his own blood. A guy who had come from big city life in Chicago with every intention of going back to a law firm that had once said they just couldn't live without him.

Everyone was Sergeant Billy Lee Stevens, ‘Moose-jaw’ as his men called him, whose wife had just had twin boys, and who might have had a professional football career had not the war come along and set him on his back with a rusty bayonet thrust cruelly into his rotund torso.

Everyone was Lou C. Grisholm, a blues pianist and composer who always knew, given enough time, that he had at least one great song in him.

And everyone was also Kilroy. Private Kilroy. P.F.C. Frederick Lawrence Kilroy.

‘Just Kilroy.’

And Kilroy?

Well, Kilroy was nobody.

Kilroy didn’t have anyone waiting for him. No girlfriend to go back to, no law firm dying to hire him. Kilroy had no kin to speak of, no fortune to lay claim to and no dream waiting to be fulfilled.

No song in his heart.

He had gone unnoticed these twenty-some years; he had been silent when called upon and invisible when sought out.

He was character-less in a world full of characters; emotion-less in a world driven by passion.

He had not been missed then and he would not be missed now.

And he too was dead. Good and dead.

On this afternoon in early March of 1943, near a place called El Hadjira, with a storm at their backs, these thirteen men had met their German counterparts in this North African campaign and were greatly outmanned and eventually, sorely outgunned.

And now, bent against surrender at any cost, everyone was dead.

All thirteen, an unlucky lot: a band of unrepentant men.

Their bodies, now left to the intent of a lonesome landscape, were scattered over a flat half acre in a mud that was tempered by a cold driving rain and sadly colored by the steel gray shadows from cloud-shifted light.

Bodies that were now like disfigured stone works, sinking down into the wet earth of some distant, foreign desert, littered the landscape.

Bodies that, though seeming in a lapse of slow motion, were, in fact, quite still.

And it was in all of this, that P.F.C. Frederick Lawrence Kilroy, ‘Just Kilroy’, lay there until the latter part of that afternoon.

The rain had finally slowed.

The mud was starting to harden.

The loud noises of battle had long softened into the stillness of death.

The empty breathings of a raw, stiff wind ran off to the South and quickly faded into silence.

Nothing moved.

Nothing.

Everyone was dead.

And then something happened . . .

Something magical.

Something unbelievable.

Something that many claimed had happened before, but, in fact, had probably not.

Kilroy, good and dead, suddenly moved.

At the very point of a narrow shaft of bright light, it was just a single finger that lifted ever so slightly. But when one comes back from the dead, sometimes all it takes is the faintest of heartbeats or the slightest of breaths.

Or even just one finger.

A ripple of rainfall ran quickly across his body, tapping out a staccato dirge on the metal of his battle helmet and then this part of the storm started to move off. The moistened earth, encrusted across the face of his dog-tags, dissolved under the brief onslaught of rainwater exposing the stamped lettering of his full legal name.

The rain now had passed.

A broad shaft of golden sunlight again fell briefly across his profile and then was gone.

It was once again a shadow-land.

Then Kilroy opened but one eye.

A slow eddy of warm air swirled about his head. The rumble of mountain thunder, doubling for breathing, could be faintly heard far off in the distance.

Kilroy drew a long breath that reclaimed all the lost years of an untimely death.

The layer of mud that had tied him to the ground, a crusty brown blanket thrown over this corpse, cracked along its edge and released a warrior who had just moments ago been, in fact, quite dead; good and dead.

He stirred under the weight, and then, using his unusually long and thin fingers, began to slowly lift himself off the killing fields he had been so unceremoniously sent to.

First, he managed to struggle just to one knee with the heavy shards of dried earth sliding away like the shedding of old snakeskin.

Then, with the conviction of a new man, mythically re-born, he rose off the desert floor, lifting bird-like and set free to take flight and soar.

Among all the dead bodies that lay around him, Kilroy rose to his feet; and standing upon this desolate plain, he took on the look of a lone standard bearer holding his ground long after the battle had been lost and the fallen all-to-soon forsaken.

A defiant firebrand steadfast in the face of death itself.

Then the clouds parted. The sun came out to stay and a shaft of brilliant white light ringed with the halo of the spectrum cut across the gray silhouette of P.F.C. Frederick Lawrence Kilroy.

Just Kilroy.

But now a new Kilroy.

Whether born or re-born, whether resurrected or re-cast, something was different.

Very different.

Among all these dead bodies the battle had now been won.

A miracle had been enacted and all, all thirteen would soon come to be saved.

No one would die today.

Not one, nor an even dozen more.

Kilroy was here!

2- The Storyteller

‘What if this small man who stood before me was himself nothing more than a ghost, come from the past. Nothing more than that. And that if I should reach out and take his hand, mine would pass through nothing other than the dim light of that phantom.’

Kilroy Was Here!

The bright white paper glowed with a faint blue fluorescence that bled towards the edges of the bold lettering of black ink on the title page.

Shep Pence ran his pale fingers ever so gently around the edges of every letter of that phrase. Then he turned to the last page of the thick shooting script.

The End

Those two words were like a closed door that had been locked from the outside and the key deliberately thrown away.

No one was about to change that. Not even him. Especially him.

He was trapped.

And being trapped as he was both frightened and angered him as well. He was not accustomed to feeling quite this helpless.

Shep then glanced up from that final page and looked directly across his desk at the short elderly man who sat before him. The gentleman, as Shep Pence respectfully saw him, was dressed in a weathered tweed jacket and dark khaki pants. He wore a wide, out-of-date striped tie and behind his gold, wire-rim glasses, large dull eyes stared intently back at the film director.

Shep Pence had a strange feeling about this visitor.

It seemed to him that he had met this man before, perhaps not so long ago. Perhaps in the distant past.

He wasn’t sure.

But how could he not remember? Such a character was as out of place and out of time as anything Shep could imagine at the moment. In fact, this man seemed at least a half-century out of date, struck from an old movie still, maybe even, at best, from the early days of the big studios’ golden era.

But then again, this was Hollywood, where everything in a sense was out of date and out of place. After all, this was the land of make-believe. And what could be more make-believe than for one, anyone, to be somewhere other than where they should be, and in a time they were never really intended for.

Such was the singular nature of this place, this ‘Old Hollywoodland’: where some might even say far too often ‘mimicked life and mocked history’.

The director dropped his gaze slightly. And that’s the whole story?

The elderly gentleman, Englishman being evident, thought to add something, but decided against it.

Shep Pence ran his fingers across the final page of his film script and then whispered half to himself, Everyone was dead. Good and dead.

That’s right, Mr. Pence. That’s exactly what he said. The elderly gentleman gestured to the Manila envelope he held in his hand. He was very certain about that.

Who could believe such a story, Mr. Leland? Why should I believe you? No one else has.

That’s right, Mr. Pence, you have no real reason to believe me. I haven’t had any takers for the last fifty years. Why now, I suppose? I have to agree, it is rather fantastic. The elderly gentleman ran his thumb over the flap of the large envelope. Just like something out of a movie.

Shep abruptly closed the script and pushing it towards the edge of the desk, rose and walked over to the large studio windows at the far side of his office.

The elderly stranger, a Mr. Jonas Leland, sliding to the edge of his seat, ran his fingers quickly over his thin lips and then placing the Manila envelope on the edge of the large desk, tentatively reached out for the film script. Shep Pence, hearing the movement, turned slowly back to the gentleman, who immediately pulled his hand away and eased back into the heavy oaken chair.

Indeed, why should I believe you? Under the warm yellow light of a nearby floor lamp, an old-style record player's turntable slowly revolved. Irritated by the motion of the record that had finished playing minutes earlier, the director brusquely shut off the power, pulled the classic vinyl disk off and slipped it back into its cardboard sleeve. He glanced at the title on the jacket briefly, Strauss's Eine Alpensinfonie, and then carefully he set it away on a nearby bookcase, at last lowering the clear plastic cover of this vintage record player.

It was an autumn evening and it was getting dark earlier these days. Shep Pence looked back over towards the desk where his script lay. In a dimly lit room, the glow of heavy bond, bright white paper seemed to make the bold letters stand out even more now. From all the way across the room, Shep could easily make out this lettering. And even the smaller print was plainly visible: An original screenplay by Sheppard M. Pence. 2012.

The year smartly notated at the bottom of the page in the Roman numerals of MMXII.

Mr. Leland. I’ve spent three years researching and writing this script. I’ve even had the advice of scholars helping me with it at times. Believe me, I’ve become something of an expert on the subject. I assure you, no such Kilroy ever existed. It was a harmless prank; a piece of wartime graffito that made an appearance in just about every combat theater of the allied campaign. A comical little cartoon sketch slapped on some latrine walls to lighten the spirits of our fighting men. A shipwright’s jesting mark. A legend perpetrated for its own sake. A ruse. You can find all that documented in any of the less-elitist encyclopedias. There was no Kilroy. There never was any such person as a Kilroy. Certainly not the Kilroy you suggest.

That’s what I supposed as well, Mr. Pence. But I know what I heard. I know what I was told. And I know what I believe.

That was a long time ago, Mr. Leland. At least fifty years since the end of the war. Shep crossed back over to the desk and sat on its corner, just a few feet from Leland. Are you sure, sir? All due respect, it’s been a long time. Could you have dreamed this up? Could you have imagined such a thing? Time and memory do have a way of whittling away at us.

I’m not a storyteller, Mr. Pence. The elderly gentleman was noticeably offended. I have no interest in anything like a book, or anything else. And I certainly have no interest in ruining your movie. I don’t want anything for this. But when I read what you were doing, the film you were making; well, I just thought you might be interested and ---

I don’t doubt your sincerity, Mr. Leland. I certainly don't think you're lying to me. Your letter convinced me of that, otherwise, I wouldn't have consented to even see you at all. That’s not the issue here. However, the documents you have shown me are still the stuff of legend. Just one more Kilroy tall tale, one I don’t think that I can use. Not now, anyway. Shep Pence checked his watch. It was getting late. Besides, the script is finished, Mr. Leland. The studio is not going to buy any changes at this time. We’re ready to begin filming. We have a schedule to keep. And I’m afraid, sir, I am a little pressed for time myself. He whisked the script from the edge of the desk and slipped it into the top drawer. Shep felt, for all intents, it might be better if kept out of sight.

I haven’t made anything up, Mr. Pence. The elderly gentleman pulled himself back into his seat. He knew he was being asked to leave, but he also felt he had to make his point. He hadn’t come all this way to simply leave now without, at least, showing some of his conviction. I’ve made nothing up.

I don’t suppose you have, sir. Shep quickly tapped the intercom. Phyl! He spoke firmly towards the mic. Phyl! But no one responded. Leland was startled by the sudden action and nervously ran his hands across the arms of his chair.

The low steady drone of the intercom belied what Shep Pence thought should happen. Usually, Phyl was at her desk.

Shep waited several seconds for a response from his personal secretary, but there was still nothing.

Come on, Phyl. Shep muttered.

The director’s voice was agitated, almost angry. Mr. Leland jumped slightly again at this. He certainly had not meant to make Mr. Shep Pence angry.

But the director wasn’t angry, just bewildered. Bewildered by the gentleman who sat directly across from him. Where had he seen this man before?

‘I should know this man. How could I not remember.’

Shep tapped the intercom again. Phyl?

Then the sympathetic voice worked its way back through the low drone.

Is there something wrong, Shep? Nothing else, just that.

Shep didn't know quite how to respond. Was there something wrong? There shouldn’t be. Phyl? Shep stumbled. Could you come in here for a minute.

He then released the switch and the intercom went dead.

The room was silent again.

From somewhere well beyond the confines of his spacious office, the director suddenly heard the sound of a distant and rather lonely oboe. He knew what it was and who was responsible for the melancholy solo. ‘The day’s production must be wrapping things up.’ Thought the director.

He then wondered if Mr. Leland had also heard the music.

How could he not.

But the elderly gentleman just sat there seemingly lost in thought. And it struck Shep that this man now appeared to him one at the end of a very long journey. The gentleman looked tired and much older now, and a little less familiar. ‘Journey’s end.’ Unlike himself who was still but at the start.

Shep knew he had a long way to go. 'A very long way to go.'

And because of this, Shep opened the desk drawer and pulled the script back out and set it on the desk again. He wanted to remind himself that this script was done. That at least the first step had been taken. He wanted Mr. Leland to see that as well. Shep tapped the top of the title page several times to punctuate this very point. However, Leland did not even look at the script this time. Instead, he just pulled his tweed jacket a little more tightly around him and then looked on out the window.

The distant sound of the lonesome oboe stopped.

Shep smiled slightly.

Then the director wondered, what was it that kept him from flat-out asking this Mr. Leland to leave? He had to be mistaken. Surely they had never met before, neither recent nor remote.

And yet, was this meeting of theirs an intrusion or an opportunity?

Shep eased himself deeper into the large leather chair and slowly leaned back, folding his hands in a prayer-like fashion. The script was done. In fact, it was overdue. Any changes would be out of the question. And yet, how could he ignore the elderly gentleman sitting before him? What if what he said was true? Even a little bit of it. Wouldn't this change everything? Wasn't this just the kind of thing any good director lived for? Wasn't that his job as filmmaker? Even as storyteller?

‘To embrace the unpredictable.’

Though he was in the business of make-believe, wasn’t the best of make believe when truth itself became stranger than fiction?

‘Just imagine. Kilroy, presumed a legend, was, in truth, a real person?’

If nothing else, it was quite a story.

Shep picked up the pencil and with his thumbnail worked the point to a sharpness fit for the art of finer annotation. Then he looked again at the title page and was reminded who he was and what he was contracted for. He had a film to make. That was his job. He wouldn’t be allowed to stop production now for any type of rewrite, least of all a major revision. A star had been contracted, actors had been cast; the production was funded, the 'film-stock' was loaded and the crew was ready to hit the road. They were on a tight schedule and tomorrow was going to be a busy day. That’s just how Hollywood worked now. That was the kind of job he was expected to do. It was this way of doing business that had made the studio a success, that had made him famous.

'And yet . . .', Shep thought. 'Wasn’t something like this just what all directors should hope for.’

Had this director become so unwavering in the journey he was on?

Had he become completely blind to a new opportunity set before him.

What is it, Shep?

I’m sorry, Phyl. You been standing there long?

Not too long.

Shep wondered just how long she had been standing there. How long had he drifted away? He seemed to do that sort of thing more and more these days. Sit on down. Shep gestured Phyl into a chair directly next to Mr. Leland as he pulled himself out of his comfortable position and sat at the edge of his seat. I want you to listen to something. Go ahead, Mr. Leland. Tell Ms. Lillith exactly what you said to me. I want to see what she thinks.

Everything, Mr. Pence?

If you wouldn’t mind, Mr. Leland. Everything. Phyl here knows as much about my movies as anyone else. I run everything past her. I want to get her take on this.

Phyl studied Mr. Leland closely now, wondering what exactly this elderly English gentleman had to do with Shep Pence’s latest project. What was so important to gain such an exclusive audience and to engage so much of the director’s valuable time?

Please, start by telling Ms. Lillith what you were doing right after the war.

Well, it was actually just before the war had ended, in Berlin. The gentleman amended. I was with the British Division 296, in charge of repatriating German POWS from several of the hospitals around the capital. I was in the psychiatric ward. Most of the men I had to deal with suffered the usual shell shock, nightmares, you know, and other psychological traumas. Most. But there was this one particular Nazi commander who was there under unusual circumstances. A Col. Alfred Stenner. His case was a bit special; a bit strange. Strange and more than suspect. He, this Colonel Stenner, would always keep insisting that he had seen a ghost.

Phyl laughed slightly. A ghost?

Shep Pence laughed slightly too.

I know, of all things, a ghost. Sounds pretty ridiculous. I laughed too when I first heard it. What nonsense. Was this a real case I had to deal with? I mean, why bother. Made me understand what he was doing there. Made me wonder what I was doing there. But then I ran across something that, well, how might I say it, wiped the smile right off my face. Leland looked at Ms. Lillith and questioned whether he should continue.

Please, Mr. Leland. Phyllis suppressed her natural inclination. I’m sorry. Please, go on.

Well, it was several months after the war. Leland continued. With the repatriation over, I was assigned to sort out some ‘dead’ records the Nazi’s had left behind. As luck would have it, one day I came across a report by my old ward, Col. Stenner. It was actually a rather detailed account of an incident his division had had in North Africa around March of ’43. It seems they ran into a small squad of Americans who for some unknown reason to him, refused to surrender. It was right outside of El Hadjira, in Algeria. They, the Americans, had been separated from their unit. On top of that, it seems their equipment had broken down, they were low on ammo and had run out of food. And yet they still refused to surrender. Eventually, the German division had no other choice but to take them out. Leland quickly referred to a document he carefully pulled from the Manila envelope. ‘…They died impressively.’ The colonel wrote. ‘But nonetheless, everyone was dead. Good and dead.’ In effect, it’s what the commander’s log implicitly stated. ‘Gut und tot!’ His exact words. ‘Good and dead.’

Died impressively?

That’s what he logged as well. And with honor. So honorably, in fact, that he took the time to record the names of the dead. An uncommon practice. He even took the time to look upon the face of each of the dead. Of the thirteen, one P.F.C. Frederick Lawrence Kilroy was listed. And beside his name, a notation: ‘eyes wide open.’ Perhaps our Mr. Kilroy, Mr. Pence.

What makes you think so? Phyl queried.

Because Col. Stenner had seen a ghost. That’s what put him in the hospital. He was so very sure of that. After Stenner was captured, he was detained just outside Palermo. It was there, well, it was there he saw Kilroy again. As he put it, ‘I wasn’t punch-drunk or crazy and it was in broad daylight. I couldn’t have been mistaken. There he was, leaning against a lamppost on some dusty street corner, backdropped by a group of twelve men waiting in the shadows. The private looked me straight in the eye and just grinned. He seemed to know who I was. I certainly knew who he was. I wasn't about to forget someone like Kilroy. Not those eyes and not after what had happened.' I asked him time and time again if he was sure, and he didn't have the slightest doubt. He had remembered Kilroy because the name had struck him as grimly comical. And, of course, there were the eyes. Even though he seemed unsteady on that final point, for it was he, personally, who had pulled shut the dead man's eyes; he was, nonetheless, convinced. Kilroy was here.

Shep ran his fingers again over the title of the script. He snickered and his lips rolled the words between them, ‘Kilroy Was Here!’

And just who was this Kilroy?

Kilroy: as the subject of here-say, his was the story of the mythical G.I., the phantom soldier of the Second World War who’s sketched caricature cropped up on barracks, bordellos and bathrooms all across the front lines of the allied campaigns, making appearances on land, at sea and in the air. He was the one G.I. that countless rumors had circulated from one regiment to the next. A talisman in the fashion of a tall tale. He had been credited with miracles and he had been belittled as a knave for his many pranks. It was the stuff of legends and just plain good movie-script material. It was a story that could be played as comedy or drama, tragedy or farce. But none of it was ever real. It was just another twentieth-century myth; a uniquely American myth, both sacred and sacrilegious.

And because of that, the story of Kilroy was just the thing that Shep Pence felt he could sink his teeth into; just the ticket for his own brand of movie making. The fantastic, the make-believe, such films were his signature piece. He had had high hopes for this story. He could put a little of everything in it, stir the pot and spawn a hit.

Shep picked up the pencil off the desk and began nervously scratching around the title, hardly a reverent attitude to display on the eve of production of his seventh film.

Sheppard M. Pence: Oscar nominee, Oscar winner.

He had built himself an enviable reputation as a master of the adventure and fantasy film. His work had had more than just the touch of the fantastic, the magical, the sensational. They were fast on spectacular action and eye-popping on special effects. They were something everyone could enjoy, young and old alike. He had never concerned himself with too much reality. ‘The truth be damned!’ he once quipped after a final take. In addition to his popularity, he had mustered that coveted award and even managed a good fortune. 'Written and Directed by Shep Pence' had meant money in the bank for countless producers, starlets and stuntmen alike. He was a sure thing on the stock exchange. A master of his craft.

Indeed, he was a good pretender. That was his job. That’s what he was paid for. When you made movies you had to be a good pretender.

He absolutely loved to pretend.

But things had changed, he could not pretend otherwise. And because of that, his last two films received some harsh criticism and the public had stayed away. Critics had written that his stories had become mere pretense, romantic and even a little trite. That his brand of fantasy was a bit hard to swallow in times like these. It appeared the fantastic had fallen out of favor with film-goers as well. When there had been a trend for more violence and realism, Shep Pence had preferred keeping the blood and guts just out of camera range. He refused to use the language of a street thug, and he still liked happy endings. More of that slice-of-life cinematique was called for now and Shep Pence had failed to take heed. Now the buzz around town was that he was washed up. That another failure and he would be retiring at the tender age of fifty-something. That he just didn’t have it anymore.

Some disagreed, some still stood behind him, a few. But Shep Pence still heard the voice of the critics long after his supporters had gone silent.

John Robert Hightower II of Hightower Pictures was still one of those few supporters. But he had a studio to run and times were lean for the movie biz. The track record for a Shep Pence film could still probably bring in an audience, albeit, an older one. But as studio chief, Hightower, along with the studio productions department were forced to stipulate certain conditions if Mr. Shep Pence was going to be bankrolled for another film of any kind.

And that’s how Kilroy was born. ‘Kilroy Was Here!‘ Kilroy was to be something of a compromise: a touch of the fantastic and whimsical with a heavy dose of wartime reality; a very heavy dose.

From this Shep would make a start of things. The funny little cartoon of that mythical G.I. could be a thread to tie together what would otherwise be a series of hard looks into the horrors and heroics of world warfare. Kilroy, be it cartoon or caricature, could play the part of comic relief that all tragedy relies on, spelling audiences with a string of tall tales ranging from the levity of one-liners on the battle-lines to the elaborate pranks of a beleaguered warrior on a four-day furlough. And everywhere Kilroy would leave his mark, on the perforated rolls of rough paper to the graffiti of the cartoon scratched on the tractor tread of an armored tank.

They might allow Shep to sidetrack a bit into the fantastic, but only a bit. It still had to be fashioned in the guise of fact. If it strayed into a bit more fiction than fashionable, well, that could be redressed.

After all, it was still a movie; if it just looked real, it was real.

Some types of fiction were still in fashion.

And so, with those stipulations, Shep had conceded. Under those conditions, he had begun work.

At first, the script came easily, and the film's treatment and the rough sketches of the storyboard sent to Hightower met with the chief's enthusiastic approval. Shep Pence was giving them what they wanted: conflict, characterization, catharsis were in top form at every turn of the page. Plenty of soul searching and plenty of battlefront veracity. This was the war story the studio had called for. But when Shep had wished for that touch of fantasy, the studio opted for more realism. Where he wanted the fanciful and free-wheeling, they insisted on the factual and not the far-fetched. And Hightower had seen to this with session after session of script consultations with a committee of staff writers. And so, before long it seemed to Shep that too many hands had worked this piece of stone. He was but just one of the storytellers. It would still be Shep Pence’s name on the screen, ‘written and directed by’, but only if he didn’t let things get out of hand. Only if he played by the rules.

And playing by the rules meant ‘no changes’.

And there was definitely no place in the rule-book for something like this: the elderly gentleman sitting across from him with the fantastic proposition that Kilroy had indeed been a real person of remarkable portent; not just a pretense that found his form drawn into the likeness of a cartoon, but something more, much more.

Something, well, something you’d only see in a movie.

But how could Shep allow himself to believe such a story?

How could he ignore it?

Couldn’t he just pretend he had never met Mr. Leland, never heard such a proposition? Ignore the story? After all, he was good at pretending. He made movies.

As Phyl listened to Leland, Shep again flipped to the last page of the manuscript on his desk, and taking his sharpened lead pencil, circled several times those two simple words, The End. Then he flipped the entire script shut, revealing the bold lettering of the title;

KILROY WAS HERE!

An original screenplay . . .

Two very different pages.

He couldn’t help but think that both pages were something of a lie.

Leland finished and sat there looking first at Phyl and then over to Shep Pence.

Phyl picked up the script and brandished it before the elderly gentleman. It’s an interesting story, Mr. Leland. But this script is finished. Right now Mr. Pence has another story to tell.

I understand. But I thought you ought to know. I thought you would be interested.

What I really find interesting, Mr. Leland, is why you felt so compelled to come all this way to tell this story, especially now. Phyl pressed him further. What’s in it for you? What really brought you here, Mr. Leland?

I don’t know what you mean? I suppose I had to come. I’ve carried this with me for a long time. When someone told me what Shep Pence was doing here in Hollywood, what your next film was going to be, well, I thought you should hear about this.

Leland stood, and reaching into the Manila envelope, pulled a small folded piece of paper. He opened it and setting it on the desk, smoothed it out with a few strokes of his