Clive Barker - Coldheart Canyon

"Okay," Maxine said, "but stay in shouting distance."

"I will. And if I don't find anything down there I'll come straight up and find you."

Maxine started up the stairs two at a time. "I'm not spending another hour after dark in this Canyon," she called as she went.

She watched Tammy descend as she ascended, and then, when the turn in the stairs put them out of sight of one another, she concentrated her attentions on the doorway in front of her. The landing she was crossing was creaking with every footfall: no doubt the damage the ghosts had done up here was as thorough as it had been below. God knows how profoundly they'd affected the sub-structure of the place. Another reason-if any were needed-to be out of here quickly. She'd read her Poe; she knew what happened to houses as psychotic as this had been. They came tumbling down. Their sins finally caught up with them and they collapsed on themselves like tumorous men, burying anyone and everyone who was stupid enough to be inside when the roof began to creak.

"Tammy!"

"I can hear you."

"The place is creakin' up here. Is it creakin' down there?"

"Yep."

"So let's make this short an' sweet, huh?"

"We already agreed -- "

"Even shorter and sweeter."

Maxine had reached the door of the master bedroom. She knocked, lightly at first. Then she called Todd's name. There was no reply forthcoming so she tried the handle. The door was unlocked. She pushed it open. It grated over a scattering of dirt; and there was the sound of several irregular shaped objects rolling behind it. She investigated. Besides the dirt there were some rocks behind the door, and several clods of earth, some with grass attached. Somebody appeared to have hauled a sack of earth up from the garden and it had split open behind the door.

"Todd?" she called again.

This time there was a mumbled reply. She stepped into the room.

The drapes were almost completely drawn, keeping out nine-tenths of the sunlight. The air smelt stale, as though nobody had opened the door in days, but it also smelt strongly of fresh dirt. She studied the gloom for a little time, until she saw the figure sitting up on the bed, his knees raised under what she took to be a dark coverlet. It was Todd. He was naked from the waist up.

"Hello, Maxine," he said. There was neither music nor threat in his voice.

"Hello, Todd."

"Couldn't stay away, huh?"

"Tammy's with me," she said, shifting the blame.

"Yes, I heard her. And I expected her. No. Half-expected her. But I didn't expect you. I thought it was all over with us once I was dead. Out of sight.

"It's not as simple as that."

"No, it isn't is it? If it's any comfort, it's true in both directions."

"You think about me?"

"You. Tammy. The life I had. Sure. I think about it all the time. There isn't much else to do up here."

"So why are you up here?"

He moved in the bed, and there was a patter of dirt onto the bare boards. What she'd taken to be a blanket was in fact a pyramid of damp earth, which he'd piled up over the lower half of his body. When he moved, the pyramid partially collapsed. He reached out and pulled the dirt back towards him, so as not to lose too much over the edge of the bed.

His body, she saw, looked better than it had in years. His abdominals were perfectly cut, his pectorals not too hefty, but nicely defined. And his face was similarly recovered. The damage done by time, excess and Doctor Burrows' scalpels eradicated.

"You look good," she said.

"I don't feel good," he replied.

"No?"

"No. You know me. I don't like being on my own, Maxine. It makes me crazy." He wasn't looking at her any longer, but was rearranging the mound of dirt on his lap. His erection, she now saw, was sticking out of the middle of the dirt.

"I wake up with this," he said, flicking his hard-on from side to side with his hand. "It won't go down." He sounded neither proud of the fact, nor much distressed by it: his erection was just another plaything, like the dirt heaped over his body.

"Why did you bring half the back yard up here?"

"Just to play," he replied. "I don't know."

"Yes you do," she said to him.

"Okay I do. I'm dead, right. Right?"

"Yeah."

"I knew it," he said, with the grim tone of a man who was having bad news confirmed. "I mean, I knew. As soon as I looked in the mirror, and I saw I wasn't fucked up anymore, I thought: I'm like the others in the Canyon. So I went out to look for them."

"Why?"

"I wanted to talk to somebody about how it all works. Being dead but still being here; having a body; substance. I wanted to know what the rules were. But they'd all gone." He stopped playing with himself and stared at the sliver of light coming between the drapes. "There were just those things left -- "

"The children?"

"Yeah. And they were droppin' like flies."

"We saw. They're all around the house."

"Ugly fucks," Todd said. "I know why too."

"Why what?"

"Why they were droppin'."

"What?"

He licked his lips and frowned, his eyes becoming hooded. "There's something out there, Maxine. Something that comes at night." His voice had lost all its strength. "It sits on the roof."

"What are you talking about?"

"I don't know what it is, but it scares the shit out of me. Sitting on the roof, shining."

"Shining?"

"Shining, like it was a piece of the sun." He suddenly started to make a concentrated effort to bury his erection, like a little boy abruptly obsessed with some trivial ritual: two handfuls of dirt, then another two, then another two, just to get it out of sight. It didn't work. His cock-head continued to stick out, red and smooth. "I don't want it to see me, Maxine," he said, very quietly. "The thing on the roof. I don't want it to see me. Will you tell it to go away?"

She laughed.

"Don't laugh at me."

"I can't help it," she said. "Look at you. Sitting in a sackful of dirt with a hard-on talking about some light -- "

"I don't even know what it is," he said. Maxine was still laughing at the absurdity of all this. "I'll tell Tammy to do it," he said. "She'll do it for me. I know she will." He kept staring at the crack of light between the drapes. "Go and get her. I want to see her."

"So I'm dismissed, am I?"

"No," he said. "You can stay if you want or you can go if you want to. You've seen me, I'm okay."

"Except for the light."

"Except for the light. I'm not crazy, Maxine. It's here."

"I know you're not crazy," Maxine said.

He looked straight back at her for the first time. The light he'd been staring at had got into his eyes somehow, and was now reflected out towards her-or was that simply the way all ghosts looked? She thought perhaps it was. The silvery gaze, that was both beautiful and inhuman.

"I suppose we both could be dreaming all this," he went on. "They don't call these places dream palaces for nothing. I mean ... I was dead, wasn't I? I know, I was dead. That bitch killed me ... " His voice grew heavy, as he remembered the pain of his final minutes; not so much the physical pain, perhaps, as the pain of Katya turning on him, betraying him.

"Well, for what's it's worth," Maxine said, "I'm sorry."

"About what?"

"Oh, a thousand things. But mainly leaving you when I did. It was Tammy who pointed it out. If I hadn't gone and left you, perhaps none of this would have happened."

"She said that to you?" Todd replied, with a smile.

"Yep."

"She's got a mouth on her when something strikes her."

"The point is: she was right."

Todd's smile faded. "It was the worst time of my life," he said.

"And I made it worse."

"It's all right," he said. "It's over now."

"Is it really?"

"Yes. Really. It's history."