“It’s so damn quiet,” Tammy said as she got out of Maxine’s car in front of what had once been Katya Lupi’s dream palace.
There were a few birds singing in the trees, but there wasn’t much enthusiasm in their trilling. It was too hot for music-making. The birds themselves sat in what little shade they could find beneath the leaves, and stayed still. The only exception to this were the falcons, which rode the rising tides of heat off the Canyon, their wings motionless, and the ravens, who dipped and banked as they chased one another overhead, landing in argumentative rows on the high walls around the house.
The dream palace itself was in a shocking state, the damage the ghosts had done to the vast chamber on which the house sat throwing the whole structure into an accelerated state of decay. The once-magnificent facade, with its highlights of Moroccan tile, had not only cracked from end to end but had now fallen forward, exposing the lath-and-timber below. The massive door-which Tammy had imagined belonging to an Errol Flynn epic-had split in three places. The metal lock, which had been as vast and medieval as the rest of the thing, had been removed, sawn away by a thief with an electric saw. He’d made an attempt to take the antique hinges too, but the size of the job had apparently defeated him
Tammy and Maxine squeezed through the mass of debris which had gathered behind it. The turret into which they stepped was still intact, all the way up to its vault, with its painted images of once-famous faces peering down. But the plaster on which the fresco had been made was now laced with cracks, and cobs of the design had fallen away, so that the vault looked like a partially-finished jigsaw. Underfoot, the missing pieces: fragments of Mary Pickford’s shoulder and Lon Chancy Sr.’s crooked smile.
“Is this earthquake damage?” Maxine said, looking up at the turret. There were places where the entire structure of the turret, not just the inner, painted layer, but the tiles too, had dropped out of place, so that the Californian sky was visible.
“I don’t see why the house would survive all these years of earthquakes without being substantially damaged, and then practically come apart in a 6.9.”
“It’s weird,” Maxine agreed.
“Maybe the ghosts did it?”
“Really? They got up there?” she said, pointing at the vault.
“I bet you they got everywhere. They were pretty pissed off.”
Tammy stepped into the kitchen and had her thesis proved correct. The kitchen had been comprehensively ripped apart; shelves torn down, cutlery pulled out of drawers and scattered around. Plates smashed, frying pans used to beat at the tiled work-surfaces so that they were shattered. Food had been pulled out of the fridge and deep-freeze, both of which stood open-rotted fruit and uncooked steaks scattered around, broken bottles of beer and cartons of spoiled milk. Everything that could be destroyed had been destroyed. The tops of the faucets had been twisted off, and water still gurgled from the open pipes, filling up the clogged sink until it overflowed, soaking the floor.
But all this was cosmetic. The ghosts had been working on the structure too, and they’d had the supernatural strength to cause considerable damage. Ragged holes had been made in the ceiling, exposing the support beams, some of which-through a massive effort by the phantom demolition team-had been unseated and pulled through the plaster facade, jutting like vast broken bones.
Tammy waded through the filthy water to the second door, and opened it. A scummy tide had proceeded her out into the passageway where Todd had died. It was considerably darker than the kitchen. She instinctively reached round and flicked on the light. There was a sharp snap of electricity in the wall. The lights came on, flickered for a moment, then went out again. After a beat there was another noise in the wall, and an eruption of sparks from one of the light fixtures further down the wall. She thought about trying to switch the electricity off, but that didn’t seem very smart under the circumstances: she was standing in half an inch of water with the power crackling in the walls. Better just leave it alone.