'It's
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
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.
The hues of all these fragments of the Country had faded, needless to say, burned away by the unveiled sun. All the richness of the rendering, all the detail of the painters' craft, was lost. What remained was almost as simple as the outlines in a child's coloring book.
Once in a while, as she walked, the fog would become a little thinner overhead, and she'd catch a glimpse of the ceiling. It was in much the same state as the walls and floor. The outlines of cloud formations were still visible, but without the brushwork and color to lend them life they looked even more abstracted than the landscape: just meaningless shapes.
Only the sun, whose appearance had begun the process of destruction, retained some lifelike qualities. The brightness it shed was sickly, however, as though it were blazing too brightly to stay aloft and alight for long, and would soon be consumed by its own fever.
And still she walked, with the wall on her left, certain that she'd soon come to the corner of the room. But the journey went on, and on, much to her astonishment. The room must truly have been enormous, as Zeffer had boasted. She remembered the pride on his face when he'd described how they'd built the room. How the tiles had been numbered so that they could be put up in the exact order he'd found them in. Only now, with the deceptions of the room removed, did she better understand why he'd felt such pride. The achievement had been substantial. Lunatic, but substantial.
Finally, the wall turned a corner, leading away from her, which was a surprise. She began to wonder if this search wasn't becoming foolhardy. How much further should she explore, hugging the wall for security's sake but getting further and further away from the door? Should she take a chance and step out into the dark, featureless fog, hoping her sense of direction would guide her back to the place she'd come from? No, that wasn't sensible. She decided on the more conservative option. She simply turned on her heel and, putting the wall that had been on her left on her right, returned the way she'd come. Her only concession to risk was to venture perhaps six or seven yards from the wall, which put it at the limit of her sight, given the density of the mist. In this manner she proceeded tentatively back the way she'd come.
The trek back to the door was not the uneventful journey the outward bound trip had been. She'd taken perhaps five strides from the turnabout spot when she heard the whooping clamor of ghosts, and a
