“Yep.”
“So let’s make this short an’ sweet, huh?”
“We already agreed — ”
“Even shorter and sweeter.”
Maxine had reached the door of the master bedroom. She knocked, lightly at first. Then she called Todd’s name. There was no reply forthcoming so she tried the handle. The door was unlocked. She pushed it open. It grated over a scattering of dirt; and there was the sound of several irregular shaped objects rolling behind it. She investigated. Besides the dirt there were some rocks behind the door, and several clods of earth, some with grass attached. Somebody appeared to have hauled a sack of earth up from the garden and it had split open behind the door.
“Todd?” she called again.
This time there was a mumbled reply. She stepped into the room.
The drapes were almost completely drawn, keeping out nine-tenths of the sunlight. The air smelt stale, as though nobody had opened the door in days, but it also smelt strongly of fresh dirt. She studied the gloom for a little time, until she saw the figure sitting up on the bed, his knees raised under what she took to be a dark coverlet. It was Todd. He was naked from the waist up.
“Hello, Maxine,” he said. There was neither music nor threat in his voice.
“Hello, Todd.”
“Couldn’t stay away, huh?”
“Tammy’s with me,” she said, shifting the blame.
“Yes, I heard her. And I expected her. No. Half-expected her. But I didn’t expect you. I thought it was all over with us once I was dead. Out of sight.
“It’s not as simple as that.”
“No, it isn’t is it? If it’s any comfort, it’s true in both directions.”
“You think about me?”
“You. Tammy. The life I had. Sure. I think about it all the time. There isn’t much else to do up here.”
“So why are you up here?”
He moved in the bed, and there was a patter of dirt onto the bare boards. What she’d taken to be a blanket was in fact a pyramid of damp earth, which he’d piled up over the lower half of his body. When he moved, the pyramid partially collapsed. He reached out and pulled the dirt back towards him, so as not to lose too much over the edge of the bed.
His body, she saw, looked better than it had in years. His abdominals were perfectly cut, his pectorals not too hefty, but nicely defined. And his face was similarly recovered. The damage done by time, excess and Doctor Burrows’ scalpels eradicated.
“You look good,” she said.
“I don’t feel good,” he replied.
“No?”
“No. You know me. I don’t like being on my own, Maxine. It makes me crazy.” He wasn’t looking at her any longer, but was rearranging the mound of dirt on his lap. His erection, she now saw, was sticking out of the middle of the dirt.
“I wake up with this,” he said, flicking his hard-on from side to side with his hand. “It won’t go down.” He sounded neither proud of the fact, nor much distressed by it: his erection was just another plaything, like the dirt heaped over his body.
“Why did you bring half the back yard up here?”
“Just to play,” he replied. “I don’t know.”
“Yes you do,” she said to him.
“Okay I do. I’m dead, right. Right?”
“Yeah.”
“I knew it,” he said, with the grim tone of a man who was having bad news confirmed. “I mean, I knew. As soon as I looked in the mirror, and I saw I wasn’t fucked up anymore, I thought: I’m like the others in the Canyon. So I went out to look for them.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to talk to somebody about how it all works. Being dead but still being here; having a body; substance. I wanted to know what the rules were. But they’d all gone.” He stopped playing with himself and stared at the sliver of light coming between the drapes. “There were just those things left — ”
“The children?”
“Yeah. And they were droppin’ like flies.”
“We saw. They’re all around the house.”
“Ugly fucks,” Todd said. “I know why too.”