"Ghosts."
"Yes. Of course. Ghosts."
"Oh, Jesus."
"The Canyon's full of ghosts."
"I don't believe in ghosts."
"You don't have to believe," she said, "It's nothing to do with believing or not believing. They're here. All around you. Just let yourself see them. You know they're here."
Of course he knew. In his gut, he'd known all along there was some mystery like this waiting in the wings. And what Katya said about belief was right. Whether he believed in the Life Everlasting or not was a grand irrelevance. The dead were here. He could feel their fingers, their breaths, their stares. And now, as they pressed closer, he began to see them. He had to work up some spit before he could speak again.
"Why can I see you and I'm only now seeing them?" he asked.
"Because I'm not dead, Todd. And if you're very good, in a little while I'll show you why. You're going to like it too. My special room -- "
At the mention of the room, the air, or rather those who moved invisibly through it, became agitated. The number of touches that Todd felt doubled, tripled. Apparently Katya felt them too, and she was somewhat irritated by them.
"Calm down, calm down," she said.
There were subtle smears of light in front of Todd, as though the emotion the ghosts were feeling -- spurred by Katya's mention of the room -- was causing them to show themselves. He thought he saw a face in one of the smears, or some part of a face: a row of perfect teeth; the gleam of a bright blue eye. The more he thought he saw, the more there was to support his suspicion. The smears grew more cogent, painting the forms of faces and shoulders and hands. They lasted only a little time -- like fireworks, bursting into glorious life then dying away -- but each time one was ignited its life lasted a little longer, and the form it etched in the darkness made more sense to him.
There were people everywhere around him. Not just a few. Dozens of them; the ghosts of parties past, lining up to touch the living.
"You begin to see them, don't you?" Katya said.
"Yes," he replied breathlessly. "I do ... begin ... to see them."
"Pretty people."
More than pretty. Beautiful; and in many cases famous. One woman -- was it Jean Harlow? -- wandered in front of him with her glittering dress torn away to expose her breasts. She was come and gone so quickly it was hard for Todd to be sure, but she seemed to have bite-marks on her flesh, clustered around her nipples. She'd no sooner passed from sight than two figures, tied together with ropes that went from neck to neck, came into view. Both were male. Both were naked. Both shone with a mixture of sweat and blood. This would have been distressing enough; but it was their smiles, their lunatic smiles, which made Todd flinch.
"Sal and Jimmy," Katya said. "They fool around like that all the time. It's a little lynching game."
He pulled his hand out of hers. "This is too much."
"It's all right," she said. "There's nothing to be afraid of."
He waved them away, like a child trying to ward off nightmares. "I don't want to see them."
Laughter came out of the darkness to meet his demand. The ghosts were apparently much amused. Their laughing made faces blossom all round him. Several he could name: famous beauties, returned to their perfection this bizarre after-life, as though they'd remembered themselves as their public would have willed them to be. Merle Oberon and George Sanders, Mary Pickford and Veronica Lake.
Todd started to retreat up the lawn, still waving them off. The phantoms came in giddy pursuit.
"All right, enough!" Katya yelled at them. "I said enough!" Her word was apparently law, even in such stellar company as this. The laughter rapidly subsided, and the divine faces stopped pressing toward him.
He took the moment to hasten his retreat, turning his back on the assembly and hurrying back in what he hoped was the general direction of the house. His thoughts were in chaos. It seemed at that moment that his life since Burrows had been one long downward spiral into a kind of insanity.
"Wait, love!" Katya had come after him, her voice as pliant as ever. She caught up with him.
"I'm losing my mind," he murmured. His hands went to his face, pressing his fingers into his tender flesh, as though the pain might help drag him back from the brink.
"You're not crazy, you're just seeing things clearly for the first time."
"Well I don't want to see them."
"Why not? Isn't it reassuring to know that death means nothing? That there's life after death? Pleasure after death."
"Pleasure. You call that -- " He glanced back at the Pool House, where he'd seen the excesses of so many of these people, recorded for posterity.
"We had no shame then. We have even less now."
As if to prove Katya's point there was an eruption of libidinous laughter from somewhere nearby, and Todd followed the sound to see a woman tied up in the trees, naked but for a long string of pearls which ran like converging rivulets between her breasts. Her wrists were bound together, and her arms lifted high above her head, so that she hung, her pale body shaped like a bow, her toes grazing the ground. It was she who was laughing, despite the apparent vulnerability of her situation. There was a man on the ground between her legs, licking the base of her feet, while another, standing behind her and massaging her breasts, bit into the tender flesh of her shoulder and neck. The hands went from her breasts down to her groin, and parted her lips of her pussy, from which came a shimmering arc, raining down onto the man adoring at her feet.
The recipient began to masturbate, obviously moved to fever-pitch by the shower.
Aware of Katya's gaze, Todd glanced over at her.
"Would you like to fuck her?" she said.
The girl was beautiful, with long red hair and that frothy laugh of hers, which sounded so very much more innocent than what she was up to.
"She's yours if you want her. Ava!"
The girl looked up.
"This is Todd," Katya said.
"Hello, Todd."
"Go on," Katya said. Don't worry: I'm not going to get jealous. I'd like to see how you give pleasure to a woman."
Despite the hint of judgment in this remark, Todd might have taken the opportunity to have the woman if the man at Ava's feet hadn't suddenly began to moan, and raising his hips off the ground ejected a copious load of semen. The sight of this eruption was enough to keep Todd at bay.
"Another time," he said to Ava, moving away.
She called after him, but he didn't look back.
"There's plenty more where she came from," Katya said, catching up with him. Her hand casually brushed the front of his pants, as though to make the point that she knew he was aroused. "You should go to one of them," she said.
"Why?"
"Just to see what it's like ... "
"Fucking a ghost?"
"If you want to put it that way."
"I don't know. It's weird. I'm not sure -- "
Her hand went back to his hard-on. "Yes you are. You love the idea."
Her hand went from his groin to his wrist, which she caught hold of, drawing him away from Ava into a kind of bower lined with honeysuckle and night-blooming jasmine, their mingled perfumes so strong they were practically intoxicating. It was darker here than it had been under the trees where Ava hung, but Todd could see bodies on the ground, in various combinations of coupling. Somebody reached down from a branch overhead, and ran his or her fingers through Todd's hair; someone else came up behind him and pulled his shirt out from his trousers. Again, he looked for Katya; and again found her close by, smiling.
"Katya?"
A girl's voice, off to the right, and Todd saw a naked young woman being carried towards Katya on the shoulders of three men, one at her head, the other two supporting her knees, in such a way as to hold her legs wide open. Even in the dim light Todd could see what a gloriously tender sight the girl presented. She had been shaved between her legs, making her look even younger than she was, which was surely less than twenty.