They pulled her hair, so that it came out at the roots. They ripped at her smooth, sweet flesh, that showed no sign of the toll the years had taken on the rest of the world. They bit off her nipples, they tore off her labia, like shreds offender meat, and shoved the pieces down her throat to silence her.
Death had not made them kind. Time had not made them kind. Years of sitting in the Canyon — the Santa Anas in one season, rain in another, crucifying heat in another: none of it had made them kind.
They pulled at her as though she was a perfect little doll that they’d been given, and were now fighting over. The trouble was, she wasn’t designed for such careless handling. She tore too quickly.
In a matter of seconds what had once been Katya Lupi was a ruin: they broke her arms so that the bones poked through; they tore at her sex so that the gaping, lipless slit ran halfway up her stomach. She had spat out her labia and now attempted to call them by name, to eke out a little mercy.
But they had none to give.
They had planned this martyrdom for years; each playing his or her horrid part. Someone got their fingers beneath the skin of her face and worked it off, inch by ghastly inch, leaving only the pinkness of her eyelids in a mass of red muscles. Two others (women, working together in smiling harmony) unseated her breasts from the bone, so that they hung down like sacs of fat, while the blood poured from the wounds where her nipples had been.
And then-perhaps sooner than they’d wanted or planned-her body gave out.
Her shrieks ceased. Her death-dance ceased.
She hung in their arms like something that had once made sense but would never make sense again.
Just to be sure there was no more fun to be had with her, Virginia Maple, who’d been the second victim of the scourge of stars that had began with the death of Rudolph Valentino, drove her hand into the dead woman’s mouth, and with the strength death and hatred had lent her, clawed out a fistful of the woman’s brains, which she threw at the tiles.
There it spattered, holding for a moment before sliding to the ground. Meanwhile someone else had gone in through her womb and pulled out her innards, like a magician’s colored handkerchiefs coming one after the other (yellow, purple, red, brown), the coils of her guts, her stomach, and all the rest attached with loose strings of tissue and fat.
Tammy saw it all.
It was a good deal more than she wanted to see; but no less than her eyes could take in. Not once did she look away, though every second that it continued she told herself she should do so, because this was just a common atrocity now. It was nothing to look at, and nothing to be proud of to be looking.
But when it was over, and the ghosts dragged Katya’s disemboweled remains away into the fog, to put to whatever grotesque purpose their anger still demanded, she at least knew that the bitch was finally dead. She voiced that opinion, and of course Jerry-never one to sweeten things unnecessarily-replied:
“Things are never the way you think they’ll be in Coldheart Canyon. We’ll see how dead she really is.”
When they went upstairs, Maxine was in the kitchen, squatting in the corner with a blank expression on her face. She looked extremely weary, as though the toll of recent events had taken fifteen years off her life. She wouldn’t get up, so Jerry went down on his haunches and started to quietly talk to her.
Finally she spoke. She’d had every intention of coming downstairs to help them, she told him, tears streaming down her face, but then the noises started, those terrible noises, and she could no longer bring herself to do it. She went on in the same fashion for a while, circling on herself.
“Why don’t you try and get her to get up?” Tammy suggested to Jerry. Then she went to pay her respects to Todd.