"It's weird," Maxine agreed.
"Maybe the ghosts did it?"
"Really? They got up there?" she said, pointing at the vault.
"I bet you they got everywhere. They were pretty pissed off."
Tammy stepped into the kitchen and had her thesis proved correct. The kitchen had been comprehensively ripped apart; shelves torn down, cutlery pulled out of drawers and scattered around. Plates smashed, frying pans used to beat at the tiled work-surfaces so that they were shattered. Food had been pulled out of the fridge and deep-freeze, both of which stood open—rotted fruit and uncooked steaks scattered around, broken bottles of beer and cartons of spoiled milk. Everything that could be destroyed had been destroyed. The tops of the faucets had been twisted off, and water still gurgled from the open pipes, filling up the clogged sink until it overflowed, soaking the floor.
But all this was cosmetic. The ghosts had been working on the structure too, and they'd had the supernatural strength to cause considerable damage. Ragged holes had been made in the ceiling, exposing the support beams, some of which—through a massive effort by the phantom demolition team—had been unseated and pulled through the plaster fagade, jutting like vast broken bones.
Tammy waded through the filthy water to the second door, and opened it. A scummy tide had preceded her out into the passageway where Todd had died. It was considerably darker than the kitchen. She instinctively reached round and flicked on the light. There was a sharp snap of electricity in the wall. The lights came on, flickered for a moment, then went out again. After a beat there was another noise in the wall, and an eruption of sparks from one of the light fixtures further down the wall. She thought about trying to switch the electricity off, but that didn't seem very smart under the circumstances: she was standing in half an inch of water with the power crackling in the walls. Better just leave it alone.
The only reason she'd come out here was to be certain that the place where Todd had lain had been cleaned up. In fact, it hadn't been touched. The water from the kitchen had not reached as far as the spot where he had died, so the pools of blood that had come from his body were now dry, dark stains on the floor. There were other stains, too, where his body had lain, that she didn't want to think too much about.
Further down the passageway, beyond the bloodstains, was the back door and the threshold where she'd dug out the icons. The nerves in the tips of her fingers twitched as she thought about those terrible minutes: hearing Todd and Katya fighting in the kitchen, while the ghosts waited on the threshold, bristling but silent; waiting for their moment. Her heart quickened at the thought of how close she'd come to losing the game she'd played here.
Something crunched beneath her sole, and she stepped aside to find one of the icons was lying on the tile. She bent down and picked it up. There was nothing left of the force it had once owned so she pocketed it, as a keepsake. As she was doing so she caught sight of a body lying outside, in the shadows of the Noahic Bird of Paradise trees.
"Maxine!" she called, suddenly alarmed.
"I'm coming."
"Be careful. Don't touch the light switches."
As soon as she heard Maxine's footsteps splashing through the kitchen, Tammy ventured to the threshold, and stepped over it. The greenery smelled pungent back here; she was reminded of those dark, swampy parts of the Canyon where she'd almost lost her life during her night journey. The swamp had crept closer to the house, it seemed; there were mushrooms and fungi growing out of the wall, and the Mexican pavers were slick with green algae underfoot.
"What's wrong?" Maxine wanted to know.
"That." Tammy pointed to the body, which lay face down in the middle of a particularly fertile patch of fungi. Tammy wondered if perhaps he'd been trying to make a meal of them, and died in mid-swallow, poisoned.
"Help me turn him over," Tammy said.
"No thanks," Maxine said. "I'm as close as I need to get."
Undaunted, Tammy went down on her haunches beside the body, pressing her fingers into the damp, sticky groove between the body and the tiles upon which it lay. The corpse was cold. She lifted it up an inch or two, peering down to see if she could get a better glimpse of the dead man. But she couldn't make out his features. She would have to turn the cadaver over. She pushed harder, and hoisted the body onto its side. Rivulets of pale maggots poured from its rot-bloated underbelly. She let it fall all the way over, lolling on the ground.
Not only was it not a man, it was not, strictly speaking, a human being but one of what Zeffer had called the children, the hybrid minglings of ghost and animal. This one had been a female: part coyote, part sex-goddess. It had six breasts, courtesy of its bestial side, but two of them had gone to jelly. The four that remained, however, were as lush as any starlet's, adding a touch of surrealism to this otherwise repulsive sight. The creature's head was a mass of wormy life, except—for some reason—its lips, which remained large, ripe and untouched.
"Who is it?" Maxine hollered from the interior of the house.
"It's just an animal," Tammy said. "Sort of. The ghosts fucked the animals. And sometimes the animals fucked the ghosts. And these things, the children, were the result."
Obviously Maxine hadn't known about this little detail because a look of raw disgust came over her face.
"Jesus. This place never fails to . . ." She finished the sentence by shaking her head.
Tammy wiped her hands on her jeans and surveyed the steps that led down to the garden.
"There's more of them down here," she called back to Maxine.
"More?"
By the time Maxine's curiosity had overcome her revulsion and she'd reached the first body, Tammy had already moved on to the second, third and fourth, then to a group of four more, all lying on the steps leading down to the lawn or at the bottom, and all in roughly the same position, face down, as though they'd simply fallen forward. It was a curiously sad scene, because there were so many different kinds of animals here: large and small, dark and striped and spotted; lush and bony.
"It looks like Jonestown," Maxine said, surveying the whole sorry sight.
She wasn't that far off the mark. The way bodies had all dropped in the grass, some lying alone, others in groups, looking as though they might have been hand in hand when the fatal moment came. It had the feel of a mass suicide, no question. Had the sun been on them directly, no doubt the stench would have been nauseating. But the air was cool beneath the heavy canopy; the smell was more like that of festering cabbages than the deeper, stomach-turning stench of rotting flesh.
"Why so few flies?"
Tammy thought on this for a moment. "I don't know. They weren't properly alive in the first place, were they? They had ghosts for fathers and animals for mothers. Or the other way round. I don't think they were flesh and blood in the same way you and I are."
"That still doesn't explain why they came here to die like this."
"Maybe the same power that ran through Katya and the ghosts ran through them too," Tammy said. "And once it was turned off—"
"They came back to the house and died?"
"Exactly."
"And the dead?" Maxine said. "All those people. Where did they go?"
"They didn't have anything to keep them here," Tammy said.
"So maybe they're out wandering the city?" Maxine said. "Not a very reassuring thought."
As Maxine talked, Tammy plucked some large leaves from the jungle all around, and then went back among the corpses, bending to gently lay the leaves—which she'd chosen for their size—over the faces of the dead.
Maxine watched Tammy with a mingling of incomprehension and awe. It would never in a thousand years have occurred to her to do something like this. But as she watched Tammy going about this duty she felt a surge of simple affection for the woman. She'd endured a lot, and here she was, still finding it in her heart to think of something other than her own comfort, her own ease. She was remarkable in her way: no question.