There was a calamitous din corning from the centre of the house. It sounded as though a hurricane had been loosed down there, and was moving from room to room, getting stronger as its frustration mounted.
Tammy went to the stairwell and stood there for a few moments, letting the tears fall. Why not? Why the hell not? What crazy person wouldn’t weep, when they’d turned over the rock of the world, and they’d seen what was there, crawling around: the dead, the nearly dead, and the sorrow of every damn thing.
It wasn’t just Todd she was weeping for. She was shedding a tear, it seemed, for everyone she’d ever known. For Arnie, for God’s sake, who one night had told her how his grandfather, Otis, when he was in his cups, would burn the eight-year-old Arnie’s knuckles with cigarettes ‘for the fun of it’, and how Arnie had said it was good they’d never have children because he was afraid he’d end up doing the same.
For the dead who’d waited outside this insane asylum for so long, waiting for their chance to get back over the threshold, and now they were in, they weren’t happy, because what they’d come in search of was gone. That was their noise, she knew, their fury, circling below; their frustration, mounting with every turn.
For Todds and all the imperfect people who’d loved him because they’d thought he was made of purer stuff than they. All the worshippers who’d sent him messages through her, begging him just to drop them a note, pick up the phone, tell them that he knew they existed.
She’d been one of those people herself, once upon a time.
In a way she’d been the worst of them, in fact, because although she’d got so close to understanding the ways of this grotesque town, and known it was a crock of deceits and stupidities, instead of turning her back on it all, burning Todd’s pictures and getting herself a life worth living, she’d let herself become a propagator of the Great Lie. She’d done it in part because it made her feel important. But more because, she’d wanted Todd to be the real thing, the dream come true, alive in the same imperfect world she’d lived in, but better than that dirty, disappointing world. And having once decided to believe that lie, she had to keep on believing it, because once he fell from grace, there was nothing left to believe in.
It’ll all end in tears, as her mother had been wont to say, and Tammy had despised the woman for her lack of faith in things; for her cynical certainty that everything was bound to sorrow. But in the end she’d been right. Tammy was standing in the creaking, raging ruins of that terrible truth: tears on her own face, shed for just about everything she’d ever known.
She wiped her cheeks, and looked down the stairwell. The last time she’d looked she’d seen Jerry sprawled at the bottom; another one of Katya’s victims. But now he was gone. She didn’t want to call his name. That risked drawing Katya’s attention and, if she was in the vicinity, Tammy had already had enough of her to last several lifetimes.
She ventured cautiously down the stairs, holding the banisters with both hands. The wood reverberated beneath her palms, shaken by the noise of the dead.
About halfway down she felt a rush of icy air erupt from the stairwell, and a heartbeat later a flood of forms returned from the passageway that led to the Devil’s Country. The revenants — or at least some of them — were coming back the way they’d come.
Tammy let go of the banister and threw herself against the wall as half a dozen of the phantoms came roaring up the stairs.
“Gone … ” she heard one of them saying, its voice a mournful howl, ” … gone … ”
More revenants were emerging from the Devil’s Country now, all in a similar state of fury. One of them began to dig at the ground at the bottom of the stairs with his bare hands, attacking the boards with such violence they cracked. Then he tore them up, obviously looking for what was already lost.