drams of self-pity, as the house I lived in, the house I'd shared with Eleanor until I'd fooled around one too many times and she'd stopped telling me it was okay and packed up and moved to Venice.
It's so easy to break things that it seems like it should be easier to put them back together. Once, when I was a kid, I was showing one of my mother's prize Irish crystal vases to a pretty classmate, feeding her wide-eyed awe by making up stories about the craftsmen who cut every facet by hand and died prematurely from inhaling glass. In my eagerness to get to the punch line, I dropped the vase. It broke into only three pieces, but I spent the entire afternoon sitting on the floor with a tube of glue, and the cracks were the first thing my mother saw when she got home that evening. The lesson didn't take. I'd broken a lot of things since.
Alice sputtered resentfully when I cut the engine at the bottom of the driveway. The rain drummed giant fingers on the thin Detroit tin of Alice's roof. It was like sitting in a big beer can.
Rain stopped for Eleanor, but I was too much of a realist to expect it to stop for me. I opened the door and hunched over, reducing the surface area vulnerable to the wet.
The smell hit me even before I got out of the car. It rolled at me out of the sagebrush, a concentration of corruption so vile that it should have been incandescent, like swamp gas. Its source, whatever it was, was dead beyond the resurrection dreams of even the most fervent born-again Christian. I forgot the rain altogether and clawed my way up the muddy driveway. At the top of the hill I realized that I'd been holding my breath and drew several shuddering breaths of clean, rainwashed air. Against my better judgment I raised my arm to my nose and sniffed my sleeve. The smell had impregnated the cloth.
Then I noticed that the kitchen light was on.
I hadn't left it on.
One of the design quirks of the shack I rent from Mrs. Yount is that there are absolutely no windows you can look through from the outside. They're all about eight feet above ground level. That's charming when you want privacy, which I usually did. Now, standing in the downpour, I considered the drawbacks. The one that immediately occurred to me was sudden death.
The house is heated by a wood-burning stove, and a wood-burning stove requires a woodpile. I went to the woodpile and selected a sodden piece of oak, about the length of my arm and just slender enough to wrap my hand around. The rain had become an ally: it muffled the sound of my approach. Even the sucking sounds I made as I pulled my shoes out of the mud were probably inaudible to anyone inside.
A foot at a time, I reached the door. I stood in front of it for what seemed like an hour. Just as I was about to convince myself that I had left the kitchen light on, I heard footsteps on the wooden floor inside. A shadow passed in front of the opaque glass in the door, heading for the kitchen.
I hefted the wood in my hand to make sure I had the balance right, and waited. Footsteps again. The shadow passed across the door again, and I threw myself against it and lurched across the threshold, the piece of wood lifted high above my head.
Roxanne, wearing my heavy woolen bathrobe, whirled and shrieked like the heroine in a forties horror flick. Then she registered who I was, lowered her hand from her mouth, and said, 'Simeon, how nice. You've brought in some firewood.'
Half an hour later, with wine warming our insides and wet wood sputtering in the stove, we fell asleep.
I woke up even more reluctantly than usual and stumbled to the bathroom. Roxanne, once again, was long gone, but the smell of coffee permeated the house. The rain had apparently stopped, and sun streamed improbably through the windows.
Since hot water in Topanga takes approximately the same time to arrive as the Ice Age did in Europe, I turned the shower on and snapped the door shut before I took a stance at the washbasin to scrape what tasted like several past lifetimes off my teeth. My toothbrush seemed too heavy to lift. When I looked at my face in the mirror, rabid foam dripped from my chin. I couldn't bear to look at myself, so I shaved from memory and stepped into the shower.
The water was exactly body temperature. Uncannily body temperature. Feeling vaguely uneasy, I began to scrub. I looked down and saw the streams running off my body turning a brownish-red rust color. Then the water stopped altogether and I looked up.
Blood gouted out through the shower head. Dark, thick, precisely body temperature, it poured forth, splashing off my shoulders and splattering the shower tiles in crimson Rorschach patterns. I leapt back, and it squished beneath my bare feet.
I heard my scream echo wildly. I tried to push the shower door open. It was stuck. I threw a shoulder, streaming with blood, against it. Nothing.
Someone was outside, holding it closed.
I hammered against it. It didn't give. The blood stopped flowing. Against all my better judgment I looked to see why. White worms, thin, pallid, not really white but a sickly pale gray, squeezed themselves through the holes in the shower head and began to dangle down toward me. I grabbed at the edge of the shower door and hurled myself into it. It opened an inch and then slammed shut again and I found myself looking down, staring transfixed at what had caught in the door.
Long blond hair.
Angel Ellspeth's hair.
The worms touched my shoulder.
The odor of death filled the shower.
The worms grasped me more tightly, their gaping mouths opening wide, gripping my shoulder, pulling me up, up toward the shower head.
'Simeon,' they said in a girlish voice.
I tried to shake myself free. They hung fast. I closed my eyes.
'Simeon,' they said. 'Something stinks.'
I opened my eyes, swallowed, and looked at Roxanne.
'It's really bad,' she said, looking down at me. She was wrapped in my robe. 'Are you awake, or what?'
'I'm awake,' I said. I was also sweating. 'What in God's name is it?'
'Well,' she said in the gray light of a rainy morning, 'I'm no expert, but my guess is that something's dead.'
Chapter 15
It took two toots from the truck's horn to tell me he'd arrived. I hoisted my steaming coffee mug, wrapped my leaky raincoat around my bare and unsteaming body, and headed down the driveway. Roxanne was gone but the rain was still with us.
About an hour before, at Roxanne's urging and jacked up by three cups of her coffee, I'd gone reluctantly down to check out the smell. If Roxanne hadn't been watching from the top of the driveway I'd have yielded to nausea and gone back up the hill to tell her a lie. She was watching, though, and I had a sacred masculine tradition of stupidity to uphold.
If the smell had been music it would have been Mahler. There was a rich, overripe majesty to it that actually made it difficult to tell whether it was getting stronger or weaker. Looking for its source was like trying to spot a candle after being blinded by a flashbulb. With every synapse in my nervous system screaming retreat in a hysterical falsetto, I forced myself into the bushes above the driveway.
And there it was, about five feet up the hill, a shapeless blob of blond fur: someone's beloved Fluffy the Cat. Around what once had been its neck was a pink collar that had been described to me in heartrending detail, making me surer than I wanted to be that it was, to be precise, Mrs. Yount's Fluffy the Cat. I didn't think she'd want her back. So I'd discreetly heaved the coffee and most of last night's hamburger onto the wet earth, feeling protected by the bushes from Roxanne's prying eyes. Then, bathed in chill sweat, I'd clambered back up the driveway with a ghastly semblance of jauntiness to figure out what to do.
Coyotes team up to take cats. One of them had probably chased poor old Fluffy into the underbrush and directly into a circle of teeth and claws. Cats must taste terrible, because they hadn't bothered to eat her. Fluffy had been deteriorating for about ten days while Mrs. Yount waited for me to turn something up, and I drove up and
