Of course it didn't take much to taint such purity. But Todd had been lucky. Though in private he'd often been sour, envious and scornful, Maxine had successfully kept all that from the fans. Todd's image had remained damn near perfect. His only enemy was time.
And even that, in the end, wouldn't have mattered, if he'd allowed it to take its toll without shame. Look at Paul Newman, practically sainted at seventy. It would have been the same for Todd. People would have loved him as he grew old the way they loved certain songs: because he was part of who they were.
Maxine could have said all of this to him on the beach, if she'd been prepared to eat enough humble pie. Her words might even have persuaded him not to go into the water with Katya, and what a lot of grief that would have prevented.
But instead she'd been stupid and let the lie stand. And now they were here at the end of it all, and what had their petty warring earned them? Well, a lot of things she'd have preferred never to experience. Being out in the back yard with the ghosts, for one: that had been almost more than her sanity could endure. Seeing Sawyer torn apart that way was a horror she'd never be able to get out of her head. And then to make her way back through the undergrowth while some of his mutilators stalked her, sniffing after her as though they were dogs in heat and she the local bitch. There were no words for the horror of that.
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 toward 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 smelled 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.
Had Maxine been a deeper thinker she would perhaps have hesitated to kill the thing. But there'd never been any room for metaphysics in her life, and though she might once have heard in conversation that in some cultures a fly attending on a corpse must be treated reverentially, in case it carried the soul of the deceased, such possibilities were very remote from her way of thinking.
She put her foot down on the upturned fly without a moment's hesitation, and headed back into the kitchen.
TWO
The tiled room was hazy when Tammy stepped inside. Though the walls were now quite solid—she could see the grout between the tiles, and the cracks on the surfaces of the tiles—there was a dense, cold fog in the place which made deep breathing difficult, and seeing any great distance more difficult still.
The air smelled rank; like a very intense mildew. Apparently one of the illusions the room had been capable of creating was the illusion of smell. There had been the fragrance of greenery in here when she'd last entered; the smell of rain on leaves, and damp earth, and the pungent aroma of horse manure from a dump left by one of the Duke's horses. But apparently all that had been masking the real smell of the place, which was this smothering fungoid stench.
She advanced cautiously, fearful of suddenly encountering somebody in the fog, and not leaving herself time to retreat. She could hear the ghosts now and again; their howls and their complaints strobed through the fog-thickened air, making it hard for her to judge their distance. For safety's sake she kept one of the walls in sight to her left, as a point of reference.
It possessed only a shadow of its former genius for deception. The landscape that had once seemed so real was now reduced to outlines. Even these were not complete. In some places they had deteriorated to near-abstractions, in others they'd gone entirely. But then in other places there were still large expanses of paintwork intact, where she could make out the whole visual structure of a picture. In one place there were tufts of grass and small white flowers that, spreading from the bottom of the walls across the ground, created the illusion that the visitor was walking over fertile ground. In another, rocks and boulders were strewn about, some cracked open by ambitious shrubs which had settled in their cracks as seeds. And more distantly, here and there she could still see copses and forests, roads and rivers, which cloud-shadows had once passed over most convincingly; and beasts had haunted; and men lived and died in.