immediate vicinity of the house, and were coming closer to her. Some were zigzagging through the trees, as though they were engaged in a game of some kind. What sort of creatures were these, she wondered, that capered like children playing, but had such luminescence about them?
She stumbled on another two or three steps, but her body wasn't going to carry her much further, she knew. It was only a matter of time before she fell down again; and she knew that next time she wouldn't have the strength to pick herself up.
Then, very close by, she heard the sound of something moving through the thicket. She looked in the direction of the sound. An animal, perhaps? A coyote, or—
'Tammy?'
She held her breath, not quite daring to believe that she recognized the voice.
'It's Willem,' he said.
Her legs almost gave out from sheer gratitude. He came out of the bushes and caught hold of her before she fell.
'I'm heavy,' she warned him.
'I'm strong,' he said.
So she let him take her weight, sinking against his chest. As she relinquished herself to him she heard a little girl somewhere nearby, sobbing pitifully. She was about to ask who the hell it was making such a noise when she realized it was her own voice.
'It's all right,' Zeffer said. 'I'm here now. Everything's going to be fine.'
She wasn't sure that she believed him; it sounded like a bad piece of dialogue to her. But this was no time to be judgmental. He'd come to look for her, and she was grateful. She put her head on his chest, like a B-movie heroine snatched from the jaws of death, and laughing, then sobbing, then laughing again, let him put his arms around her, and rock her awhile.
SEVEN
Finally, it had not been Todd who'd lost control, but her other lover.
'I can't . . . back . . . much longer,' he said.
The girl was beyond giving even the most rudimentary instructions: she lay in a daze of pleasure, her legs hoisted up by Todd so that he could see the wonderful machinery of their interconnected anatomies.
'Are you ready?' the other man said to him. His face was liquid shadow, his eyes wild.
'You say the word.'
'Lift her legs higher.'
Todd did as he was instructed, noticing as he did so that their game had brought all the other games in the immediate vicinity to a halt. Everyone was watching the spectacle, their gazes ravenous.
The girl's eyes were closed but there was no doubt that she had achieved, and was sustaining, some state of sexual Nirvana. There was a Gioconda smile on her wet lips, and when on occasion her lids did flutter open, only the whites of her eyes were visible.
The girl's other lover had one hand on her face, a thumb pressed between her lips, but his other hand was gripping the muscle that ran from Todd's nape to his shoulder, gripping it so hard it hurt. Todd was glad of the pain. It was just enough to keep him distracted from emptying himself.
The man's eyes opened wide. 'Oh yeah!' he bellowed, and Todd came the closest he'd ever come to feeling another man's orgasm.
The girl opened her eyes, and looked at Todd. 'You too,' she said.
'No,' said another voice.
Todd looked up. It was Katya who had spoken. She was looking at him with an appreciative smile on her face. Clearly she'd enjoyed watching the menage-a-trois. But it was clear she now wanted Todd to leave the game.
'Gotta go,' he said to the girl.
She put her hand down between their legs, as though to hold him inside.
'Sorry,' he said, and pulled out of her.
As he stood up there was a light patter of applause from the vicinity of the bower.
'Quite the performer,' Katya said as she stood up. She had his pants. He started to put them on, pressing his dick out of sight.
'You can come back and find them again another night,' Katya said as she hooked her arm through Todd's and escorted him away from the place.
It seemed the scene in the night-blooming jasmine had begun a chain reaction among the ghosts. As they walked through the warm darkness he saw orgiasts on every side, involved in pleasuring themselves and one another. Clothes had been shed in the grass or hung in the branches like Halloween spooks; kisses were being exchanged, murmurs of passion. As he'd already discovered, death had done nothing to dim the libidos of these people. Though their dust and bones lay in cold tombs and mausoleums across the city, their spirits were very much in heat here. And, as Katya had told him, nothing was forbidden. It was only curious to see so many familiar faces among the orgiasts. Faces he associated with everything but this: comedians and adventurers and players of melodrama. But never naked; never aroused. And again, as had been true in the bower, what he would have turned away from in revulsion in the company of the living, intrigued and inflamed him here, among the famous dead. Was that Cary Grant with his trousers around his ankles; and Randolph Scott paying tribute below? Was that Jean Harlow lying on one of the lower boughs of a tree, with her foot running up and down the erection of a man standing devotedly by? There were others, many others, he only half-recognized, or didn't recognize at all. But Katya supplied names as they wandered back to the house: Gilbert Roland and Carole Lombard, Frances X. Bushman and Errol Flynn. A dozen times, seeing some coupling in progress, he wanted to ask, was that so-and-so? Three or four times he did. When the answer was consistently yes, he gave up asking. As for what was actually going on, well the pictures in the Pool House had given him a good idea of how wild things could get, and now he was seeing those excesses proved in the flesh, for just about every sexual peccadillo was being indulged somewhere in the Canyon tonight. Nor did Todd discount the possibility that even more extreme configurations than those he could see were going on in the murk between the trees. Given what he'd ended up doing after only a short night here, imagine the possibilities an occupant of the Canyon might invent with an indeterminate number of nights to pass: knowing you were dead but denied a resting-place?
What new perversions would a soul invent to distract itself from the constant threat of
At last the crowd of fornicators thinned, and Katya led him—by a path he hadn't previously seen, it being so overgrown—back to the big house.
'What I am about to show you,' she warned him as they went, 'will change your life. Are you ready for that?'
'Is it something to do with why you're here?'
'Why
'Then show me,' he said. 'I'm ready.'
She took a tighter hold of his hand. 'There's no way back,' she warned him. 'I want you to understand that.
He glanced over his shoulder at the party-goers cavorting between the trees. 'I think that was true a long time ago,' he said.
'I suppose it was,' Katya replied, with a little smile, and led him out of the darkened garden and back into her dream palace.
EIGHT
'I'm hungry,' Tammy told Zeffer. 'Can't we get some food from the house before we leave?'
