Coldheart Canyon (82 page)

“It doesn’t have any bottom floor left, Todd. Katya’s guests dug it all up.”

He turned to the bed, and started to pull armfuls of the dirt off the sheet.

“What are you doing?”

“Persuading you to stay,” he said, still pulling at the earth. When he had almost all the dirt removed from the bed he pulled the sheet out and went around the other side of the bed, throwing the corners of the sheet into the middle, and then bundling up both sheet and dirt. He pushed the bundle off the bed, and got up onto the clean mattress, sitting with his head against the board, and his legs crossed. His balls were tight and shiny. His dick was hard as ever. He gave her a lascivious grin.

“Climb aboard,” he said.

Here, she thought, was an invitation in a million. And there would have been a time, no doubt, when she would have swooned at the very idea of it.

“I think you should cover yourself up,” Tammy said, keeping the tone friendly, but firm. “Haven’t you got a pair of pants you can wear?”

“You don’t want this?” he said, running his fingers over the smooth head of his cock.

“No,” she said. “Thank you.”

“It’s because I’m dead, isn’t it?”

She didn’t reply to him. Instead she wandered through to the closet—which was enormous; barely a tenth of it was filled—and started to go through the trousers and jeans on the hangers, and found an old, much-patched pair of jeans, their condition suggesting that he was fond of them, because he’d had them fixed so often.

As she pulled them off the hanger she heard a sound on the roof, like something scraping over the Spanish tiles.

“Did you hear that?” she called through to Todd.

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her, she made her way back into the bedroom. Todd was no longer on the bed. He had snatched the dirt-stained sheet up off the floor and had wrapped it haphazardly around his body, the result being something between a toga and a shroud, and was now crawling around in the corner of the room in this bizarre costume, his eyes turned up toward the roof.

He beckoned Tammy over, putting his forefinger to his lips to ensure her silence. There were more noises on the roof; scraping sounds that suggested the animal, whatever it was, had some considerable bulk.

“What is it?” she said. “That’s not a bird.”

He shook his head, still staring up at the ceiling.

“What then?”

“I can’t see what it is, it’s too bright.”

“Oh so you
have
looked.”

“Yes of course I’ve looked,” he said, very softly. “Shit, this always happens. It’s like they’re its chorus.”

He was referring to the coyotes, which had begun a steady round of almost panicked yelpings from the other side of the Canyon. “Whenever the light appears, the damn coyotes start up.”

He had begun to shudder. Not from the cold, Tammy thought, but from fear. It crossed her mind that this was very far from the conventional image of ghost-hunting. The phantom naked and afraid; her proffering a pair of jeans to cover him up.

“It’s come here for me,” Todd said, very quietly. “You know that.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because I can feel it. In my chest. And in my balls. The first time it came here it actually got into the house. I was asleep, and I woke up with this terrible ache in my balls. And that”—he pointed down between his legs—“was so hard it hurt. I was terrified. But I yelled at it to go away, and off it went. I think I must have startled it.”

“How many times has it been back since that first time?”

“Six or seven. No, more. Nine, ten times. Sometimes it just waits in the garden. Sometimes it sits on the roof, like it is now. And then once it was in the pool.”

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“There’s no water in the pool.”

“No, I know. It was lying at the bottom, not moving.”

“And you couldn’t see any shape in it?”

“No, no shape. I mean, do angels even have shapes?”

“An angel? That’s what you think it is?”

“I’m pretty sure. I mean, it came to get me. And I
am
dead. So that’s why it’s hanging around. And it almost had me once—”

“What happened?”

“I looked at it. And my head started to fill up with all these memories.

Things I hadn’t thought about for years and years, literally. Me and Donnie as kids. Cincinnati. Nothing important. Just things you might think of in a daydream. And it said to me—”

“Wait. It speaks? This thing speaks?”

“Yes. It speaks.”

“What sex is it?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes it sounds more like a guy . . .” He shrugged.

“I don’t know.”

“I’m sorry. I interrupted you. What did it say?”

“Oh. It said:
all this is waiting for you
.”

“ ‘All this,’ meaning what?”

“All the memories, I suppose. My past. People. Places. Smells. You know how sometimes you wake up from a dream and it’s been so
real
, so strong, everything in the real world seems a bit unconvincing for the first half-hour? Well, it was like that after I saw the memories. Nothing was quite real.”

“So why the hell are you fighting it? It doesn’t want to hurt you.”

“I’ll tell you why I’m fighting. Because it’s a one-way street, Tammy. I go with the light, there’s no way back.”

“And is being here so wonderful?”

“Now don’t—”

“I mean it.”

“Don’t argue with me,” he said. “I’ve thought about this a lot. Believe me. It’s
all
I’ve thought about.”

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“So what do you want to do?”

“I want you to stay right here with me until the damn thing goes away.

It won’t try any tricks if you’re here.”

“You mean giving you the memories?”

“It’s got others. Once it appeared on the lawn looking like Patricia, my mother. I knew it wasn’t really her, but it’s crafty that way. You know, she was telling me to come with her, and for just a few seconds—”

“It had you fooled?”

“Yeah. Not for long, but . . . yeah.”

At this juncture there was a rapping sound on the door. Todd jumped.

“It’s only Maxine,” Tammy said, getting up, and turning from Todd.

He caught hold of the jeans she was carrying, not because he wanted to wear them but to stop her escaping him.

“Don’t answer it,” he said. “Please stay here with me. I’m begging you, stay:
please
.”

She held her breath for a moment, listening for the presence on the roof.

It was no longer audible. Had the creature—whatever it was—simply departed, or was it still squatting up there, biding its time? Or—a third possibility, just as plausible as the other two—was she falling for some fictional fear that Todd, in his confused, post-mortem state, had simply created out of thin air? Was she just hearing birds on the roof, skittering around, and letting his imagination work her up into a frenzy about it?

“Put your jeans on,” she said to him, letting go of them.

“Tammy. Listen to me—”

“I am listening,” she said, crossing to the door of the bedroom. “Put your jeans on.”

She heard the rapping sound again. This time she thought perhaps she’d been wrong. It wasn’t Maxine at all. It was somebody outside the house beating on the front door.

She went to the bedroom door and cautiously opened it. She was in time to see Maxine retreating across the hallway from the front door.

“What is it?” she whispered. Maxine looked up at her; by the expression on her face something had unsettled her. “I heard this knocking.

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Went to the door. And, Tammy, there was a
light
out there, shining in through the cracks in the door.”

“So he’s not having delusions,” Tammy said.

She headed downstairs to comfort Maxine. As she did so she reported what she’d just heard Todd tell her. “Todd said there was something out there waiting for him. That’s his turn of phrase:
waiting for him
. Apparently it sits on the roof a lot.” She put her hand on Maxine’s trembling shoulder. “Are you okay?”

“I am now. It just freaked me out.”

“So you didn’t open the door?”

“Well you can’t open it, can you? It’s cracked. But it’s not much protection.”

“Stay here.”

So saying, Tammy crossed the hallway, gingerly slid through the broken door and stepped out onto the doorstep.

“Oh Jesus, be careful,” Maxine murmured.

“There’s nothing,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

Maxine stepped out through the cracked door and they stood together on the step.

The last light of the afternoon had by now died away; but the moon had risen and was shedding its brightness through the trees to the right of the front door.

“Well, at least it’s a beautiful evening,” Maxine remarked, staring up at the light coming between the branches.

Tammy’s thoughts were elsewhere. She stepped out of the house and onto the pathway. Then she turned around, running her gaze back and forth along the roof, looking for some sign,
any
sign whatsoever, of the creature that had made the noise up there. As far as she could see, the roof was completely deserted.

“Nothing,” she said to herself.

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was alarmed to see that the sight of the moonlight seemed to have brought Maxine to tears.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

Maxine didn’t reply. She simply stared slackly up at the tree.

A few leaves fluttered down from the branches where the moonlight was sourced, and to Tammy’s amazement the light began to slowly descend.

“Oh fuck,” Tammy said very softly, realizing that this was not the moon.

Todd had been right. There
was
some entity here, its outer form consisting of raw light, its core unreadable. Whatever it looked like, it apparently had eyes, because it could see them clearly; Tammy had no doubt of that. She felt its scrutiny upon her. Not just upon her, in fact,
in
her. She was entirely transparent to it; or so she felt.

And as its study pierced her, she felt it ignite other images in her mind’s eye. The house on Monarch Street where she was born appeared in front of her, its presence not insistent enough to blot out the world in which she was standing, but co-existing with it, neither sight seeming to sit uncomfortably beside the other. The door of the Monarch Street house opened, and her Aunt Jessica, her father’s sister, came out onto the stoop. Aunt Jessica, of all people, whom she hadn’t thought about in a very long time.

Jessica the spinster aunt, smiling in the sunshine, and beckoning to her out of the past.

Not just beckoning, speaking.

“Your papa’s at the fire station,” she said. “Come on in now, Tammy.

Come on in now.”

She’d not liked Aunt Jessica over-much, nor had she had any great fear of her father. The fact that Aunt Jessica was there on the stoop was unremarkable; she used to come over for supper on every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, often taking care of Tammy and her brothers when Tammy’s parents went out to see a movie or go dancing, which they’d liked to do. Even the line about Papa being at the fire station carried no especial weight. Papa was always at the fire station for one thing or CC[348-676] 9/10/01 2:29 PM Page 628

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another, because he wasn’t just a fireman, he was the union organizer, and a fierce advocate for better pay and conditions. So there had always been meetings and discussions, besides his diurnal duties.

In short, the memory carried no particular measure of significance, except for the fact that it was a memory of hers, and that somehow this creature—angel or whatever it was—had got into her head to set it in motion. Was its purpose that of distraction? Perhaps so; being so perfectly commonplace. Tammy could slip into its embrace without protest, because it evoked neither great joy nor great regret. It was just the past, there in front of her: momentarily real.

She thought of what Todd had said, about how the angel had appeared as his mother. Somehow the way Todd had described the process it had sounded altogether more sinister than this: more like a trap for his soul.

“Tammy?”

“Yes, I see it,” she said to Maxine.

“What do you see?” Maxine said.

“It’s just my Aunt Jessica—”

“Well if I were you I’d look away,” Maxine advised. Tammy didn’t see why it was so important that she look away.

“I’m okay, just watching,” she said.

But Maxine had taken hold of her arm, and was gripping it so hard that it hurt. She wanted to turn and tell the woman to let go of her, but it was easier said than done. The image of the clapboard house on Monarch Street had in fact caught her up in its little loop. It was like a short length of film, running round and round.

The door would open, Aunt Jessica would beckon and speak her three lines:

“Your papa’s at the fire station. Come on in now, Tammy. Come on in now.”

Then she’d beckon again and turn round to step back into the house.

The door would close. The dappled sunlight, falling through the branches of the old sycamore just to the right of number 38 Monarch Street, would move a little as a gust of summer wind passed through its huge, heavy CC[348-676] 9/10/01 2:29 PM Page 629

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branches. Then, after a beat, the door would open once again, and Auntie Jessica would reappear on the stoop with exactly the same smile on her face, exactly the same lines to speak.

“Look away,” Maxine said again, this time more urgently.

The urgency got through to Tammy.
Maybe I should do as she says,
she thought;
maybe this little picture-show isn’t as innocent as it seems. Maybe I’m
going to be stuck in this loop with the door and Jessica and the shadows coming
through the sycamore forever.