Only then did the noises and the deep-earth motion finally subside and die away. What was left, from far off, was the sound of car alarms.
“Everybody okay?” Eppstadt said.
“I’ll never get used to those damn things,” Jerry said.
“That was a big one,” Eppstadt said. “6.5 at least.”
“And it went on, and on … ”
“I think we should just get the hell out of here,” Joe said.
“Before we go anywhere,” Eppstadt said, venturing into the kitchen, “we wait for any aftershocks. We’re safer inside than out there right now.”
“How do you figure that?” Joe said, following Eppstadt into the kitchen.
It was chaos. None of the shelves had come off the walls, but they’d been shaken so violently they’d deposited their contents on the tiled floor. A cabinet holding booze had been shaken down, and several of the bottles broken, filling the air with the sharp tang of mingled liquors. Eppstadt went to the refrigerator-which had been thrown open by the quake, and had half its contents danced off the shelves-and found a can of Coke. He cracked it carefully, letting its excitability fizz away by degrees, then poured it as though this sickly soda was a hundred year old brandy, and drank.
“Better,” he said.
“I’ll take one of those,” Joe remarked.
“What colour do I look?”
Scowling, Joe kicked his way through the fractured crockery to the refrigerator, and got himself a Coke.
“What the hell happened to Maxine?” Eppstadt wondered.
“She went out back with Sawyer,” Joe said, averting his face from a fan of erupting Coke.
Eppstadt went out into a passageway that led down to an open door, kicking a few pieces of fallen plaster out of the way as he went.
“Maxine!” he called. “Are you okay?”
There was no reply.
Without waiting for anyone to join him, he headed down to the back door. There was more plaster dust underfoot, and several large cracks in the walls and ceiling. Unlike other areas of the house this portion looked less solid to his eye, and very much less elegant. A hurried later addition, he guessed, and probably more vulnerable to shocks than the older parts of the house. He called out for Maxine again, but again there was no reply forthcoming. He wasn’t surprised. The area just outside the door looked squalid; large masses of rotted vegetable matter covered the walkway on the other side of the threshold, giving off a sickly stench. The foliage overhanging the area was so thick that the area was practically benighted.
He went to the threshold, intending to call for Maxine again, but before he could do so he heard the sound of low, sibilant laughter. Since childhood he’d always been certain that laughter heard in his vicinity was laughter heard at his expense, and even though his therapist had worked hard for sixteen years to dissuade him of this neurosis, it lingered. He narrowed his eyes, trying to make sense of the shadows beneath the trees; dividing form from apparition. Obviously, the laughter had a source, perhaps more than one. He just couldn’t make it out.
“Stop that,” he ordered.
But the laughter continued, which enraged him. They were laughing at him, he was certain of it. Who else would they be laughing at? Bastards.
He stepped over the threshold, ready to sue. The air was cold and clammy. This wasn’t a very pleasant house, he’d decided very quickly, and this was a particularly unpleasant corner of it. But the laughter continued, and he couldn’t turn his back on it, not until he’d silenced it.
“Who the hell are you?” he demanded. “This is private property. You hear me? You shouldn’t even — ”
He stopped now because there, in the shadow of a humongous Bird of Paradise tree, he made out a human form. No, two. No, three. He could barely see their features, but he could feel the imprint of their stares upon him.
And then more laughter, mocking his protests.
“I’m warning you,” he snapped, as though he were talking to children. “Get away from here. Go on! Get away!”
But instead of stopping, the addled laughter grew louder still, and its owners decided to step out from under the shade of the Bird of Paradise. Eppstadt could see them more dearly now. They were indeed trespassers, he guessed, who’d been up here partying the night away. One of them, a very lovely young woman (she couldn’t have been more than seventeen, to judge by the tautness of her skin) was bare-breasted, her brunette hair wet and pressed to her skull. He vaguely thought he knew her; that perhaps as a child actress she’d been in a movie he’d produced over at Paramount, or during his earlier time at Fox. She was certainly developing into a beautiful woman. But there was something about the way she stepped out of the shadows-her head sinking down, as though she might at any moment drop to the ground and imitate some animal or other-that distressed him. He didn’t want her near him, even with her tight skin, her lovely nubs of nipples, her pouty lips. There was too much hunger in her eyes, and even if he wasn’t the focus of that appetite, he didn’t want to be caught between such a mindless hunger and its object of desire, whatever it might be.