“Please.” she said to him again, “I just want to get back into the house. You have to help me.”
“I’m in no condition — ” he started, looking up at her to try and communicate with the expression just how dire he felt, but the few words he’d begun to say were enough to bring about a sudden and calamitous change in her.
She let out a shriek of frustration and rage, volume and shrillness uncanny. He felt his gorge rising, and as the woman’s din reached its inhuman height, he puked up what was left of his dinner.
The worst was over now; but there was more to come from the woman outside. Feeling his stomach settling, he chanced a look up at her. It was an error. She was still letting out the remnants of that godless shriek of hers, and it seemed — at least to Marco’s sickened and bewildered eyes — that the noise was taking some grotesque toll on her body. Her face — which had been so beautiful just minutes before — had become a grey, smeared form: her forehead swollen so that she looked cretinous, her eyes pulled into empty slits, her mouth running with saliva from its turned down corners. Her oversized shirt of hers had fallen open to reveal breasts that were gray scraps of dead flesh, hanging on the cage of her bones. Beneath them, he seemed to see her innards in frenzied motion, as though she had snakes nesting in her.
It was too much for Marco’s already traumatized senses. He didn’t give any further thought to finding Todd — Christ, Todd was probably part of this insanity.
With his heels sliding in the mess he’d made, he hauled himself to his feet — half expecting the abomination on the other side of the threshold to come after him. But for some reason she kept her distance, her transformation now so far advanced she was completely unrecognizable as the woman he’d first laid eyes on.
He retreated down the passageway — still assuming this nightmare might come after him. But she matched his retreat with one of her own, melting into the shadows. Marco wasn’t reassured. She’d probably gone to find others; he didn’t want to be here when they came back. He raced into the kitchen and picked up his car keys, which were on the table. He gave a moment’s consideration to the possibility of lingering to wash his face and hands (maybe even to changing his puke-splattered shirt), but he decided to forego cleanliness in favour of making a fast exit.
He drove down the serpentine road that led out of the Canyon as if he were being pursued by a horde of demon-women, and without even thinking about it took the same route he’d taken with Todd countless times: up onto Mulholland Drive. He opened the window as he drove, so as to have a sobering breeze blowing against his face, but it had very little effect. There was too much alcohol in his blood, and too much panic inflaming that alcohol, to make him a safe driver on such a notoriously tricky and dangerous stretch of road. He didn’t care. He just wanted to put some distance between himself and that damn Canyon as fast as possible.
On one of the hairpin bends his clammy hands slid on the wheel, and he momentarily lost control of the car. He was a good enough driver — even in his present state — to recover quickly, and things might have been fine had another speed-freak not come barreling round the corner in the opposite direction. The other driver took quick evasive action, and was away round the bend before Marco lost what little control he had. The wheel slipped through his hands, and his drink-slurred foot was too slow on the brake to stop the car from skewing round, squealing loudly. There was no barrier between the road and the drop; not even a wooden fence. The front half of the vehicle went over the edge, and there it lodged for a moment, finely balanced between solid asphalt and oblivion. Marco muttered a little prayer, but God wasn’t listening. The car tripped forward and slid off the road into darkness. It was a straight drop of perhaps forty or fifty feet.