NINE
At the bottom of the stairs Tammy discovered that the entire sub-structure of the house — the floor once occupied by the Devil’s Country — was now reduced to heaps of rubble, with a few support pillars here and there, which were presumably the only things keeping the house from collapsing upon itself completely. Seeing the tenuous state of things, Tammy was tempted to go straight back upstairs to warn Maxine, but then she figured that there was probably no tearing urgency. The house had managed to stay upright in the weeks since the ghosts had wreaked this havoc, and wasn’t likely to collapse in the next five minutes: she would risk looking around for a little while, just to be sure she’d understood as much of this mystery as was comprehensible before she turned her back on it forever.
The last few steps of the stairway had been torn away by the revenants’ assault, but there was a heap of its own rubble directly beneath it, so it wasn’t much of a leap for her. Even so, she landed awkwardly, and slid gracelessly down the side of the heap, puncturing her ankles and calves on the corners of the shattered tiles. She stumbled away from the bottom of the stairs and through the doorway, the naked framework of which was still standing, surprisingly enough, though the walls to the right and left of it were virtually demolished, and the ceiling brought down, exposing a network of pipes and cables. There was very little light, beyond the patch in which she stood, which had leaked in from the turret. Otherwise, it was murky in every direction. She strayed a little distance from the doorway, taking care not to hobble herself on a larger piece of masonry, and careful too not to lose her bearings.
Every now and again something on a higher floor would creak or grind, or somewhere in the darkness around her she’d hear a patter of dry plaster-dust. Then the creaking would stop, the pattering would stop, and her heart would pick up its normal rhythm again.
Of one thing she was pretty certain: there were no ghosts here. They’d wreaked their comprehensive havoc and gone on their melancholy way, leaving the house to creak and settle and eventually, when it could no longer support its own weight, collapse.
She’d seen enough. She moved back to the doorway and returned through it to the stairs, climbing over the rubble onto the lowest step. The staircase swayed ominously as she heaved herself onto it, and she saw that it had become disconnected from the wall a few feet up and was therefore ‘floating’, a fact she had failed to grasp during her descent. She ascended with a good deal more caution and reached the relatively solid ground at the top of the stairs with an inwardly spoken word of thanks.
The door to the master bedroom was open, she saw. A moment later, Maxine emerged and beckoned for her to come up.
“Todd’s here and he wants to see you,” she explained.
“Is he all right?” Tammy asked, fully realizing, even as she said this, that it was a damn-fool question to ask about a man who’d been recently murdered.
By way of reply Maxine made a strange face, as though she didn’t have the least clue what the man in the master bedroom was up to.
“You should just come up and see for yourself,” she said.
As they crossed on the stairs Maxine took the opportunity to whisper: “I hope to hell you can make more sense of him than I could.”
“Hello, Tammy.”
Todd was lying in the bed, with a pile of dirt covering his lower half. There was dirt on the floor too; and on his hands.
“You’re a mess,” she remarked brightly.
“I’ve been playing in the mud.”
“Can I open the drapes a little, or put on a lamp? It’s really gloomy in here.”
“Put on a lamp if you really must.”
She went to the table in the corner and switched on the antiquated lamp, doing so tentatively given her problem with the electricity on the lower floor. Then she went to look out of the narrow gap between the drapes. Maxine had been right; the evening was coming on quickly. Already the opposite side of the Canyon was purple grey, and the sky above it had lost all its warmth. There were no stars yet, but the moon was rising in the north-eastern corner of the Canyon.