They moved without mishap to the gate; paused there to be sure the coast was clear and then moved on-again without incident-out into the street. Nobody said a word.
If the silence of the natural world had been uncanny from the balcony it was ten times stranger now they were out on the road, where there would usually be a chirping carpet laid out all around them, and trilling songs in the darkened canopy. But here, now, nothing. It made what was already strange enough, stranger still. It was as though every living thing from the most ferocious coyote to the tiniest flea, was intimidated silence and stillness by the scale of power in their midst. The only things foolish enough to move were these three human beings, stumblings through the darkness.
All was going well until Tammy caught her foot in a pothole and fell sideways. Todd was there to catch her, but he wasn’t quick enough to stop the short cry of alarm that escaped her as she slipped. It was the loudest thing that had been heard in the Canyon in a long while; its echo coming back off the opposite wall.
She silently mouthed the word damn; then, taking a deep breath, she went to the car, adrenaline making her a little more efficient than she might have been otherwise, and opened the door. The car announced that there was a door open with an irritating little ping, ping, ping. Well, hell, it scarcely mattered now. They were committed to this. The angel was already pricking up its ears, no doubt. “Get in,” she hissed.
Todd ducked into the back. Maxine opened the passenger door and slid in with something less than grace. Then she slammed the door so hard it was probably audible in Santa Barbara. “Sorry,” she slurred. “Force of habit.”
Todd leaned over from the back seat and put his hand on Tammy’s shoulder.
“Give it all you’ve got,” he said.
“I’ll do what I can,” she said, and slipped the key into the ignition. Even as she was instructing her fingers to turn the key, the moon came out above Coldheart Canyon. Except, of course, that it wasn’t the moon, it was the messenger of God, roused from its meditations, and climbing a silent ladder into the dark air over their heads. “Fuck and double fuck,” Todd said.
It moved straight towards the house, and-perhaps because the evening was a little damp, and the marine layer had come in off the ocean-it had collected around it a cloak of mist. Now, instead of simply being a light, it looked like a cloud with a white fire burning at its core; trailing a tail like a comet.
Tammy wasn’t intimidated. She turned on the car engine. It roared, reassuringly loud.
“Handbrake!” Maxine said. “Handbrake!”
“I’ve got it,” Tammy said. She took off the handbrake, and put the vehicle into gear. Then she slammed her foot down, and they took off.
“Todd!” she yelled over her shoulder. “I want you to keep an eye on that sonofabitch for me.”
Todd was already doing just that, peering out of the back window. “It’s still above the house,” he reported. “Maybe it thinks we’re still in there.”
“I don’t think it’s that dumb somehow,” Maxine said.
Tammy drove the car up the street, and around two wide curves, before she found a place where it was possible to turn round. It was a squealing, messy five or six point turn in the narrow street, and the last maneuver delivered the back end of the car into the shrubbery. No matter, Tammy hauled the wheel round and accelerated. Todd went to the other side of the back seat, and looked out.
“Huh,” he said.
“What?”
“The damn thing still hasn’t moved.”
“Maybe it’s lost interest,” Tammy said.
It was a forlorn hope, of course, scarcely worth voicing. But every moment the thing failed to come after them was blessed.
“By the way,” she said, as she turned the first wide corner south of the house, “I got a little taste of what that thing does to you, Todd — ”
“You mean the memories?”
“Yeah.”
“Did it freak you out?”