The Golden Boy was lying where he’d fallen, more or less; looking peaceful, more or less. Eyes closed, mouth open; blood shining on the ground around his head.
During the early years of her infatuation, Tammy had dreams in which she would touch him. There’d been nothing sexual in these touches; or at least nothing explicitly so. Just his being there in an ordinary room, and saying to her, it’s okay, you can come over here, you can touch me. That had been the sum of it.
She’d always woken from those dreams with such a profound yearning in her heart: a yearning to confirm his existence in her waking world, simply by one day getting the chance to really touch him. Just to know that he wasn’t simply a game played with light, but a real thing, of flesh and blood.
Now here she was, and here he was, and she could touch him all she liked, but nothing on earth could have persuaded her to do so.
What she’d been looking for in that touch was no longer there to be found. He’d gone, and what remained, as she’d just seen in the room below (yellow, purple, red), was not worth her attention.
She turned from his corpse, fighting the instinct to say goodbye to it, and finally-unable to resist the force of instinct-saying it anyway. Then she returned to the kitchen where she found that Jerry had succeeded in coaxing Maxine to her feet, and was now rummaging in the fridge for something cold for her to drink.
“I’m afraid there’s only beer,” he said. “Oh no, wait. There’s some milk here too. You want some milk?”
“Milk,” she said, her eyes suddenly brightening, like a child’s eyes. “Yes. A glass of milk.”
Jerry carefully poured a brimming glass for her, and she drank it down, staring out of the window between gulps. “As soon as you’re ready,” Jerry prompted her, “we should go. Yes?” She nodded as she drank.
There were new dins from below, suggesting that the ghosts were up to fresh mischief. Nobody wanted to be around when they finally tired of their labors downstairs, and decided to ascend.
“Eppstadt?” Maxine said, her mind apparently sharpened by the milk. “What happened to Eppstadt?”
“I told you,” Tammy reminded her.
“Oh yes. He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Yes, he’s dead.”
“And the waiter?”
“Joe?”
“Yes, Joe.”
“He’s dead too.”
There was a long silence between them then, while Maxine emptied her glass, which gave Tammy an unhappy moment to picture the bodies that were littered around the house. Todd in the hallway, Sawyer somewhere in the garden, Joe the Waiter and Eppstadt in the bowels of the house; and Katya? Many places, by now.
“We should be thankful,” Jerry said.
“For what?” Maxine wanted to know.
“For getting out of here alive.”
“Let’s be thankful when we see Sunset Boulevard,” she said, a little of the old Maxine showing, “not before.”
The noise in the house was still escalating as they left, and when Tammy looked back she saw that there was a crack over the front door, two inches wide, which zigzagged all the way up to the eaves, like a bolt of black lightning.
They got into Tammy’s car, and drove down the hill. Maxine’s spurt of fortitude gave out halfway down, and she began to cry pitifully, but Tammy was having none of it.
“Shush,” she said, half gently, half not. “We’re not having any of that, you hear? It’s over, Maxine. It’s over.”
Of course that wasn’t strictly true. Her mind turned to the creatures she’d encountered in the Canyon during the night; the children. What would happen to them? And what other perverse miracles had the Devil’s Country worked upon the anatomies of those who’d ventured there? She vaguely wondered if perhaps she or Jerry, both of whom had spent some considerable time in that godless place, would have something to show for their presence there. She would have to watch herself closely, at least for a while.
By now they were almost at the bottom of the hill.
“We have to go and report all this to the police,” Tammy said. “Together.”