And finally, this. Coming back inside the house to find Todd as near dead as made no difference, his face covered in wounds, his body all cut up. The emergency services were on their way, but even if the Canyon had been easy to find, which of course it wasn’t, she didn’t have much hope that they’d make it in time to help him.
He made a noise, his eyes fluttering.
“Can you hear me, Todd? There’s an ambulance on its way.”
For a moment his eyes opened a little wider, and he seemed to be making an effort to concentrate on the face in front of him.
“It’s Maxine,” she said. “Remember me?”
There was no recognition in his eyes. His breathing, which had steadily become shallower, was now so shallow she could scarcely see his chest rising and falling.
She dropped her head towards his, and spoke softly into his ear, as if to a child.
“Please don’t go,” she said to him. “You’re strong. You don’t have to die here if you don’t want to.”
He opened his mouth a little; his breath smelt metallic, as though he’d just swallowed a mouthful of old pennies. She thought he intended to tell her something, and put her ear to his lips. His mouth continued to move, but no sound came out, except the wet sounds of his throat and tongue working. She was bent forward for perhaps half a minute, hoping for something from him, but the posture was making her back creak, so she sat up again.
In the fifteen seconds it took her to lift herself up from her bowed position and sit up straight, the man she was tending died.
It was only when she started to speak to him — just repeating his name, in the hope that she might get some response from him — that she realized every trace of animation had gone out of him.
Very tenderly, she put her hand up to Todd’s battered face, and touched his cheek. Many times over the years she’d gone on set to find that the makeup people had given him swellings or wounds that had looked grotesquely realistic. But they’d always been ‘movie wounds’; however bloody they got-and however much he was supposed to have suffered in their getting-they were never disfiguring. The Todd Pickett whom audiences had come to see, with his blue-green eyes, his dark, lush hair, his symmetry — his smile — none of that was ever spoiled.
But this, lying before her, this was a different spectacle entirely. Once she had closed his eyes, there was nothing left visible of the Todd Pickett the world had loved.
She extricated herself from beneath his corpse with some difficulty. It bothered her to be leaving his body just sprawled here in the passageway in such an undignified manner, but she didn’t know what else to do. She needed to find Tammy, Jerry, and a vodka, not necessarily in that order. Anyway, she thought, as she looked down at the corpse, what the hell did Todd care where he was lying? He was gone, hopefully about some better business than the rest of the ghosts who lingered around this damnable house.
The thought of them — of the undeniable fact of them, which she’d witnessed just a few minutes before — made her heart quicken. If the dead lived on after their demise, did that mean that was Todd’s spirit in the vicinity right now, hovering around before he decided where he was headed?
She could feel herself blushing with self-consciousness, wondering what she’d done in the few minutes since his passing that he might have witnessed. Had she said anything asinine; or let go of some gas, in her nervousness?
Feeling a little foolish, but knowing she couldn’t take a step without speaking, she said:
“Todd? Are you here?”
Then she waited, looking around.
A fly had buzzed in from the back yard where the door was still open, and it now landed in the pooling blood between Todd’s legs, where it supped eagerly.
She bent down and shooed it away. It rose giddily into the air, as though stupefied by the sheer scale of the feast that lay below. She swatted at it with the back of her hand and, to her surprise, she struck it. Down it went on its back, its buzz suddenly manic, as it careened around on the tile beside Todd’s body.