“If you were an angel, my love,” Maxine said, “God would be in a lot of trouble.”
This won a laugh out of Tammy. “All right, you’ve heard my theories.”
“I think you’re both right,” Todd said. “If the light wanted to come inside the house it could. It did once, remember? But I think between my not wanting to go and the smell of what this house has seen, it’s probably figured it’ll wait. Sooner or later the house is going to start falling down. And then I’ll come out and it’ll have me.”
“That’s why we should surprise it,” Tammy said. “Go now, while it’s least expecting anyone to leave.”
“You don’t know what it’s expecting,” Maxine put in. “It could be listening to every damn word we say, as far as you can tell.”
“Well I’m going to try for it,” Todd said, pushing his gun into his trousers, muzzle to muzzle. “If you don’t want to come, that’s fine. Maybe you could just divert it somehow. Give me a chance to get to the car.
“No, we’re going,” Tammy said, speaking on behalf of Maxine, whose response to this was a surrendering shrug.
“It is preposterous,” she pointed out however. “Who the hell ever outran an angel?”
“How do we know?” Todd said, “Maybe people do it all the time.”
They stood together at the door and listened for twenty, twenty-five minutes, seeing if there was some pattern to the motion of the light. In that time it went up onto the roof twice, and made half a circuit of the house, but then seemed to give up for no particular reason. It made no sound. Nor did its light at any point seem to alter in intensity. It was-perhaps predictably-constant and patient, like a hunter sitting by a burrow, knowing that sooner or later its occupant must show its nose.
About nine fifteen or so, Tammy went up to the master bedroom to scan the view across the Canyon and down towards Century City. She’d scoured the kitchen for dried goods and tinned goods that had survived either the ghosts’ rampages or the passage of time and had found many tins had been punctured, and the food inside was rotten; but she collected up a few cans of edible stuff: baked beans, peaches, hot dogs in brine. And then, after some digging around, found an opener, and made up a plate of unlikely gastronomic bed-fellows; and took them upstairs to the balcony.
The Canyon had gone pin-drop quiet. If she hadn’t already known they had an agent of Creation’s Maker in their vicinity, the spooked silence of every cicada, coyote and night bird would have confirmed the fact. It was eerie, standing there, watching the dark hollow of the Canyon, and the few stars that were visible above it, and listening to the empty dark. She could hear the click of the fork against her teeth, the noise of her throat as it swallowed the beans and bites of hot-dogs.
“I used to love hot-dogs,” came a voice from the dark room behind her. It was Todd. “You know, ordinary food. I never really got a taste for the more sophisticated stuff.”
“You want some of this?” she asked him, glancing round as she proffered the plate.
“No thanks,” he said. “I haven’t really got an appetite anymore.”
“Maybe ghosts aren’t supposed to eat.”
“Yeah that’s what I figured,” he replied, coming out onto the balcony. Then, “Do you think they fuck? Because if they don’t I’m going to have to find some other way to get this down.” He glanced down at the lump beneath his bath-towel.
“Cold showers.”
“Yeah.” He chuckled. “Everything comes full circle, doesn’t it? Cold hot-dogs for you. Cold showers for me. Nothing really changes.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “This isn’t normal for me. Conversations with-if you’ll excuse the phrase-dead movie stars in million dollar houses … ”
“-with an angel waiting on the front door step) — ”
“Right.”
She’d finished her ad hoc meal, and went back into the bedroom to set he plate down. While she was doing so she heard Todd call her name, very softly.