She let out a light laugh, which was surely artificial, but nevertheless passed for the real thing well enough. He responded by licking the passage of flawless skin up to her throat, wetting it until it shone. Her nipples, aroused by his touch, were hard. Her eyes flickered closed, murmuring something in Romanian; words of appreciation to judge by their tone. Encouraged he moved his mouth down from her throat to her left breast; and as he did so he slipped his arms beneath her legs, and lifted her up.
The ghosts still assembling behind her raised their heads, watching her elevation.
She was laughing for real now, her head thrown back in abandon. Navarro was no longer licking her; he was putting all his effort into lifting her up, higher and higher still, until Katya and her laughter and her shining breasts were above his head.
Katya opened her eyes. The laughter suddenly passed away from her face, as she realized what he'd done. Again, she spoke in Romanian, but this time the words were not so appreciative. Nor did she have long to speak them, before Navarro threw her to the assembled crowd.
She seemed to hang for a long moment in the space between her deliverer's arms and the hands of those who were ready and eager to receive her.
Then she fell.
Down, down into their open arms; down to be caught by her dead, patient friends, who'd waited so very long to enjoy her hospitality again, and had been so bitterly disappointed.
Finally, after all these years-all her cruelties, all her games, all her indifference-they had her.
She screamed as they laid their cold hands on her flesh; shrieked like a little girl being violated. They ignored her protests, as she had ignored them over the years.
They pulled her hair, so that it came out at the roots. They ripped at her smooth, sweet flesh, that showed no sign of the toll the years had taken on the rest of the world. They bit off her nipples, they tore off her labia, like shreds offender meat, and shoved the pieces down her throat to silence her.
Death had not made them kind. Time had not made them kind. Years of sitting in the Canyon -- the Santa Anas in one season, rain in another, crucifying heat in another: none of it had made them kind.
They pulled at her as though she was a perfect little doll that they'd been given, and were now fighting over. The trouble was, she wasn't designed for such careless handling. She tore too quickly.
In a matter of seconds what had once been Katya Lupi was a ruin: they broke her arms so that the bones poked through; they tore at her sex so that the gaping, lipless slit ran halfway up her stomach. She had spat out her labia and now attempted to call them by name, to eke out a little mercy.
But they had none to give.
They had planned this martyrdom for years; each playing his or her horrid part. Someone got their fingers beneath the skin of her face and worked it off, inch by ghastly inch, leaving only the pinkness of her eyelids in a mass of red muscles. Two others (women, working together in smiling harmony) unseated her breasts from the bone, so that they hung down like sacs of fat, while the blood poured from the wounds where her nipples had been.
And then-perhaps sooner than they'd wanted or planned-her body gave out.
Her shrieks ceased. Her death-dance ceased.
She hung in their arms like something that had once made sense but would never make sense again.
Just to be sure there was no more fun to be had with her, Virginia Maple, who'd been the second victim of the scourge of stars that had began with the death of Rudolph Valentino, drove her hand into the dead woman's mouth, and with the strength death and hatred had lent her, clawed out a fistful of the woman's brains, which she threw at the tiles.
There it spattered, holding for a moment before sliding to the ground. Meanwhile someone else had gone in through her womb and pulled out her innards, like a magician's colored handkerchiefs coming one after the other (yellow, purple, red, brown), the coils of her guts, her stomach, and all the rest attached with loose strings of tissue and fat.
Tammy saw it all.
It was a good deal more than she wanted to see; but no less than her eyes could take in. Not once did she look away, though every second that it continued she told herself she should do so, because this was just a common atrocity now. It was nothing to look at, and nothing to be proud of to be looking.
But when it was over, and the ghosts dragged Katya's disemboweled remains away into the fog, to put to whatever grotesque purpose their anger still demanded, she at least knew that the bitch was finally dead. She voiced that opinion, and of course Jerry-never one to sweeten things unnecessarily-replied:
"Things are never the way you think they'll be in Coldheart Canyon. We'll see how dead she really is."
When they went upstairs, Maxine was in the kitchen, squatting in the corner with a blank expression on her face. She looked extremely weary, as though the toll of recent events had taken fifteen years off her life. She wouldn't get up, so Jerry went down on his haunches and started to quietly talk to her.
Finally she spoke. She'd had every intention of coming downstairs to help them, she told him, tears streaming down her face, but then the noises started, those terrible noises, and she could no longer bring herself to do it. She went on in the same fashion for a while, circling on herself.
"Why don't you try and get her to get up?" Tammy suggested to Jerry. Then she went to pay her respects to Todd.
The Golden Boy was lying where he'd fallen, more or less; looking peaceful, more or less. Eyes closed, mouth open; blood shining on the ground around his head.
During the early years of her infatuation, Tammy had dreams in which she would touch him. There'd been nothing sexual in these touches; or at least nothing explicitly so. Just his being there in an ordinary room, and saying to her, it's okay, you can come over here, you can touch me. That had been the sum of it.
She'd always woken from those dreams with such a profound yearning in her heart: a yearning to confirm his existence in her waking world, simply by one day getting the chance to really touch him. Just to know that he wasn't simply a game played with light, but a real thing, of flesh and blood.
Now here she was, and here he was, and she could touch him all she liked, but nothing on earth could have persuaded her to do so.
What she'd been looking for in that touch was no longer there to be found. He'd gone, and what remained, as she'd just seen in the room below (yellow, purple, red), was not worth her attention.
She turned from his corpse, fighting the instinct to say goodbye to it, and finally-unable to resist the force of instinct-saying it anyway. Then she returned to the kitchen where she found that Jerry had succeeded in coaxing Maxine to her feet, and was now rummaging in the fridge for something cold for her to drink.
"I'm afraid there's only beer," he said. "Oh no, wait. There's some milk here too. You want some milk?"
"Milk," she said, her eyes suddenly brightening, like a child's eyes. "Yes. A glass of milk."
Jerry carefully poured a brimming glass for her, and she drank it down, staring out of the window between gulps. "As soon as you're ready," Jerry prompted her, "we should go. Yes?" She nodded as she drank.
There were new dins from below, suggesting that the ghosts were up to fresh mischief. Nobody wanted to be around when they finally tired of their labors downstairs, and decided to ascend.
"Eppstadt?" Maxine said, her mind apparently sharpened by the milk. "What happened to Eppstadt?"
"I told you," Tammy reminded her.
"Oh yes. He's dead, isn't he?"
"Yes, he's dead."
"And the waiter?"
"Joe?"
"Yes, Joe."
"He's dead too."
There was a long silence between them then, while Maxine emptied her glass, which gave Tammy an unhappy moment to picture the bodies that were littered around the house. Todd in the hallway, Sawyer somewhere in the garden, Joe the Waiter and Eppstadt in the bowels of the house; and Katya? Many places, by now.