"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."

"I was so tired," Maxine said.

"I know. Tired of me and tired of who you'd become, yes?"

"Yes."

"I don't blame you. This town fucks people up." He was looking at her with that luminous gaze, but it was clear his thoughts were wandering. "Where's Tammy, did you say?"

"She went downstairs."

"Will you please go get her for me?"

"Oh please now, is it?" she said, smiling. "You have changed."

"You know what starts to happen if you stay here long enough?" he said, apropos of nothing in particular.

"No, what?"

"You start to have these glimpses of the past. At least I do. I'm sitting here and suddenly I'm dreaming I'm on a mountain."

"On a mountain?"

"Climbing, this sheer cliff."

"That can't have been a memory, Todd. Or at least it can't have been a real mountain. You hated heights, don't you remember?"

He took his gaze off her and returned it to the crack between the drapes. Plainly, this news made him uncomfortable, questioning as it did the nature of his recollections.

"If it wasn't a real mountain, what was it?"

"It was a fake, built on one of the soundtracks at Universal. It was for The Big Fall."

"A movie I was in?"

"A movie. A big movie. Surely you remember?"

"Did I die in it?"

"No, you didn't die in it. Why do you want to know?"

"I was just trying to remember last night, what movies I'd made. I kept thinking if the light has to collect me, and I have to leave, and I have to tell it what movies I made -- " He glanced at the wall beside the bed where he'd scrawled a list -- in a large, untutored scrawl -- of some of the titles of his films. It was by no means comprehensive; proof perhaps of a mind in slow decay. Nor were the titles he had remembered entirely accurate. Gunner became Gunman for some reason, and The Big Fall simply Fallen. He also added Warrior to the list, which was wishful thinking.

"How many of my pictures did I die in then?"

"Two."

"Why only two? Quickly,"

"Because you were the hero."

"Right answer. And heroes don't die. Ever, right?"

"I wouldn't say ever. Sometimes it's the perfect ending."

"For example?"

"A Tale of Two Cities."

"That's old. Anyway, don't quibble. The point is: I don't care about what the light wants. I'm the hero."

"Oh, I get where this is headed."

"I'm not going, Maxine."

"Suppose it wants to take you somewhere better?"

"Like where?"

"I don't know.

"Say it. Go on. You see ... you can't even say it."

"I can say it. Heaven. The afterlife."

"Is that where you believe it wants me to go?"

"I don't know where it wants you to go, Todd."

"And I'm never going to find out because I'm not going to go. I'm the hero. I don't have to go. Right?"

What could she say to this? He had the idea so very firmly fixed in his head that it wasn't going to be easily dislodged.

"I suppose if you put it that way," she said, "you don't have to go anywhere you don't want to."

He put his heel behind a small portion of dirt and pushed it off the edge of the bed. It rattled as it rained down on the bare boards.

"It's all bullshit anyway," he said.

"What's bullshit?"

"Movies. I should have done something more useful with my life. Donnie was right."

"Donnie?"

"Yes." He suddenly looked hard at her. "Donnie was real, wasn't he? He was my brother. Tell me I didn't dream him."

"No, you didn't dream him."

"Oh good. He was the best soul I ever met in my life. Sorry, but he was.

"No, he was your brother. It's good you love him."

"Hmm." A silence; a long silence. Then: "Life would be shit if I'd just dreamed him."

NINE

At the bottom of the stairs Tammy discovered that the entire sub-structure of the house -- the floor once occupied by the Devil's Country -- was now reduced to heaps of rubble, with a few support pillars here and there, which were presumably the only things keeping the house from collapsing upon itself completely. Seeing the tenuous state of things, Tammy was tempted to go straight back upstairs to warn Maxine, but then she figured that there was probably no tearing urgency. The house had managed to stay upright in the weeks since the ghosts had wreaked this havoc, and wasn't likely to collapse in the next five minutes: she would risk looking around for a little while, just to be sure she'd understood as much of this mystery as was comprehensible before she turned her back on it forever.

The last few steps of the stairway had been torn away by the revenants' assault, but there was a heap of its own rubble directly beneath it, so it wasn't much of a leap for her. Even so, she landed awkwardly, and slid gracelessly down the side of the heap, puncturing her ankles and calves on the corners of the shattered tiles. She stumbled away from the bottom of the stairs and through the doorway, the naked framework of which was still standing, surprisingly enough, though the walls to the right and left of it were virtually demolished, and the ceiling brought down, exposing a network of pipes and cables. There was very little light, beyond the patch in which she stood, which had leaked in from the turret. Otherwise, it was murky in every direction. She strayed a little distance from the doorway, taking care not to hobble herself on a larger piece of masonry, and careful too not to lose her bearings.