Coldheart Canyon

PART TEN. AND THE DEAD CAME IN

ONE

They came almost silently at first, and cautiously, as though even now they suspected Katya had laid some trap to catch them once they were inside the house. But as soon as four or five of them were safely over the threshold, and it became obvious that there were no traps, their silence erupted into a horrid din of triumph, and their caution turned into an ungainly torrent of desperate spirits, all struggling to get through the door at the same time.

Though Tammy's consciousness was still slippery, she had enough strength left to protect her face from the feet of those coming through, rolling herself into a semi-fetal position to avoid the worst.

There were so many revenants, and the door through which they were attempting to pass was so narrow, that impatience soon ignited amongst the crowd. Arguments became physical assaults, as the stronger pushed the weaker aside so they could be the first down the stairs, the first through the door that would take them into the Devil's Country. Tammy had her hands over her face, but between her fingers she saw Katya put up a vain protest against this invasion. She shouted something, but it was lost in the din of triumph and argument. A moment later, she was too was lost, as the wave of exiles threw themselves against her and carried her away. This time Tammy did hear her, though it was not a word she uttered but a scream, a furious scream.

They were in her dream palace --

These things, which had once been her friends, her beautiful friends, the virile and the beautiful deities of a lost Golden Age, reduced by hunger and despair to the filleted, smeared, wasted dregs of humanity now bore her away.

The noises they made as they came -- and came, and came -- were some of the most distressing sounds Tammy had ever heard.

Slaughterhouse shrieks and plague-pit moans, chattering and curses that were more like the din out of a padded cell than anything that should have come from an assembly of once-sophisticated souls.

Finally, however, the noise and the kicking of her body by passing feet, slowed and ceased.

The procession of the dead had passed over the threshold, along the corridor and into the house. It had taken perhaps five minutes to get the entire assembly inside. Now they were gone. The passageway was deserted, except for Tammy and Todd.

Tammy waited another minute or two before gathering the strength to unknot her weary limbs and roll herself over. She gave thanks, as she did so, to her mother, of all people, who had been an unpleasant piece of work (especially in her latter years) but had possessed the constitution of a horse, which Tammy had inherited. Most of the women Tammy knew would not have survived the brutal physical assaults and violations that had punctuated the adventures of her last few days. Thanks to Momma, Tammy had.

She fixed her gaze on Todd, who had apparently also survived both Katya's attack and the revenants' tide.

He was half-sitting, half-slumped, against the wall further down the passageway, staring at the alcove from which he'd grabbed the antique pitcher. His breathing was ragged, but at least he was still alive. It was a short drive to Cedars-Sinai from here, if she could get help to carry him to the car.

She crawled over to him. He was doing nothing to staunch the wounds (Katya had stabbed him at least twice, possibly three times); the blood was pulsing out of him. He saw her coming from the corner of his eye. Very slowly, he turned his head towards her. "You let them in," he said.

"Yes. I let them in."

"You ... had it planned all along then?"

"Not really. It was Zeffer's idea."

He made a long, soft moan, as he saw the neatness of this. Zeffer, the first exile from the dream palace; Zeffer, who'd been the bitch-goddess's dog, finally become her undoer. And Tammy, his agent.

"So you were in this together," he said.

"I'll tell you about it later. Right now we should get out of here."

He made a very small, very weary shake of his head. "I don't think ... I'll be going anywhere anytime soon."

"She meant to kill me. And I'm afraid ... she has. She knew in the end I'd sided with you. And that meant I'd betrayed her."

"You didn't -- "

"Yes, I did. I knew the last thing she wanted was that the ghosts get in." He shook his head, his eyes sliding closed. "But I had to. It was the right thing." He opened his eyes again, and looked down at the blood. "And her killing me, that was right, too."

"Christ, no ... "

"It's all ... ended up ... the way it should."

"Don't say that," Tammy murmured. "It's not over yet." She pushed herself up onto her knees, then grabbed hold of the edge of one of the alcoves, and hauled herself to her feet. The numbness was passing from her hands. Now they simply tingled, as though they'd been trapped under her while she slept.

From outside, she heard the sound of footsteps, and she looked round to see Maxine stumbling up the steps from the garden, in a state of total disarray. In any other circumstance, Tammy might have found the sight funny; Maxine's clothes were torn, her face scratched and grimy. But right now she was just one more victim: of Katya, of the house, of the Canyon.

"My God," she said, seeing Todd sitting there, the blood pooling on the floor. "What the hell happened?"

"Katya." Tammy said. It was all the explanation she had energy for.

Once over the threshold, Maxine closed the door and locked it, her hands trembling.

"There's things out there -- "

"Yes, I know."

"They killed Sawyer."

For a moment it looked as though she was going to succumb to tears, but she fought them off, and came along the passageway, her expression turning from one of imminent tears to shock.

"Wait ... " she said. "Is that Todd?"

Was he that unrecognizable? Tammy thought. It seemed he was. In the hours since Maxine had last set eyes on him Todd taken a hell of a beating. By the sea, by Eppstadt, by Katya. Now he looked like a boxer who'd gone twenty rounds with a man twice his strength: both his eyes puffed up, his lower lip was swollen and jutting, his whole face a mass of colors, bruises old and new, cuts old and new, all spattered with dried mud.

Looking at him afresh, with Maxine's appalled gaze, Tammy realized that she could have shown this poor broken face to a thousand members of the Todd Pickett Appreciation Society and not a single one would have known who they were looking at; and that probably included herself. How far they'd all fallen; the Gods and their admirers both.

"We have to get an ambulance up here," Maxine said. She bent down to speak to Todd. "We're getting an ambulance."

"No," he said weakly, lifting his hand, "Stay with me."

Maxine looked at Tammy, who gave her a small nod. Maxine took hold of Todd's hand.

"What happened to Eppstadt?" Maxine asked.

"Last time I saw him he was in Hell," Tammy replied.

There was something rather satisfying about being able to say that, even if she didn't really know what they'd all experienced behind that door downstairs. Whatever it was, it was real. Her breast still tingled from the goat-boy's suckling.

"And the woman? Katya?"

"I don't know where she went. But if you'll take care of Todd, I'd like to find out."

Todd gave his own, misshapen reply to this suggestion. "Be ... careful."

As he spoke he raised his free hand in Tammy's direction. It was impossible to interpret the expression on his face, but the fact that he was afraid for her spoke volumes. And she in her turn was afraid; afraid that if she didn't find some excuse to leave now, she'd be left here watching him die.

She pressed his fingers, and he returned the pressure, "It's good," he said. "Better see. That bitch."

She nodded, and headed off back down the passageway. As she went she heard Maxine dialing 911 on her portable phone, which had apparently survived the traumas of her journey through the wilderness behind the house.

There was a calamitous din corning from the centre of the house. It sounded as though a hurricane had been loosed down there, and was moving from room to room, getting stronger as its frustration mounted.

Tammy went to the stairwell and stood there for a few moments, letting the tears fall. Why not? Why the hell not? What crazy person wouldn't weep, when they'd turned over the rock of the world, and they'd seen what was there, crawling around: the dead, the nearly dead, and the sorrow of every damn thing.

It wasn't just Todd she was weeping for. She was shedding a tear, it seemed, for everyone she'd ever known. For Arnie, for God's sake, who one night had told her how his grandfather, Otis, when he was in his cups, would burn the eight-year-old Arnie's knuckles with cigarettes 'for the fun of it', and how Arnie had said it was good they'd never have children because he was afraid he'd end up doing the same.

For the dead who'd waited outside this insane asylum for so long, waiting for their chance to get back over the threshold, and now they were in, they weren't happy, because what they'd come in search of was gone. That was their noise, she knew, their fury, circling below; their frustration, mounting with every turn.

For Todds and all the imperfect people who'd loved him because they'd thought he was made of purer stuff than they. All the worshippers who'd sent him messages through her, begging him just to drop them a note, pick up the phone, tell them that he knew they existed.

She'd been one of those people herself, once upon a time.

In a way she'd been the worst of them, in fact, because although she'd got so close to understanding the ways of this grotesque town, and known it was a crock of deceits and stupidities, instead of turning her back on it all, burning Todd's pictures and getting herself a life worth living, she'd let herself become a propagator of the Great Lie. She'd done it in part because it made her feel important. But more because, she'd wanted Todd to be the real thing, the dream come true, alive in the same imperfect world she'd lived in, but better than that dirty, disappointing world. And having once decided to believe that lie, she had to keep on believing it, because once he fell from grace, there was nothing left to believe in.

It'll all end in tears, as her mother had been wont to say, and Tammy had despised the woman for her lack of faith in things; for her cynical certainty that everything was bound to sorrow. But in the end she'd been right. Tammy was standing in the creaking, raging ruins of that terrible truth: tears on her own face, shed for just about everything she'd ever known.

She wiped her cheeks, and looked down the stairwell. The last time she'd looked she'd seen Jerry sprawled at the bottom; another one of Katya's victims. But now he was gone. She didn't want to call his name. That risked drawing Katya's attention and, if she was in the vicinity, Tammy had already had enough of her to last several lifetimes.

She ventured cautiously down the stairs, holding the banisters with both hands. The wood reverberated beneath her palms, shaken by the noise of the dead.

About halfway down she felt a rush of icy air erupt from the stairwell, and a heartbeat later a flood of forms returned from the passageway that led to the Devil's Country. The revenants -- or at least some of them -- were coming back the way they'd come.

Tammy let go of the banister and threw herself against the wall as half a dozen of the phantoms came roaring up the stairs.

"Gone ... " she heard one of them saying, its voice a mournful howl, " ... gone ... "

More revenants were emerging from the Devil's Country now, all in a similar state of fury. One of them began to dig at the ground at the bottom of the stairs with his bare hands, attacking the boards with such violence they cracked. Then he tore them up, obviously looking for what was already lost.

Tammy stayed glued to the wall, and in that state slid down to the bottom of the flight, to see if she could spot Jerry. Zeffer's body had been shoved aside by the passage of the ghosts, and lay face down in the corner of the stairwell. Looking in the other direction she saw that the door to the Devil's Country was throwing itself open and closed, slamming with such violence that its framework had cracked. So had the plaster overhead. The light had dropped out of its fixture, and was dangling, along with a clod of plaster, from a bare wire, describing a figure of eight in the air as it swung.

It wouldn't have been Tammy's first preference to venture any closer to the slamming door than she'd already come but as she'd left the responsibility of Todd with Maxine, she knew it fell to her to protect Jerry.

The ghosts wouldn't hurt her, she hoped, as long as she didn't get in their way. She'd done nothing to harm them. If anything, she should be their heroine. But in their present state of high frustration she wasn't sure they knew the difference between those who were on their side and those who weren't. They simply wanted to know where their long-awaited paradise had gone. Apparently some of them were certain it had been removed to some other part of the house to trick them: hence this crazy tearing up of the floor, and smashing of the walls. It was here somewhere, and they were going to tear up the fabric of the house until they found it.

Two of these berserkers emerged from the room, their faces smears of fury, and raced past her up the stairs. She waited until they'd disappeared and then she went to the door. With the light swinging giddily overhead the passageway pitched like a fun-house ride. She closed her eyes to snatch a much-needed moment of stillness, then opened them, and without waiting for the door to stop its lunatic slamming, she pushed it open and stepped into the space that had once been called the Devil's Country.

Maxine had had occasion to lie to Todd many times over the course of their working life together, but she had never lied more profoundly than when she'd told him -- that day she'd announced she was no longer working for him -- that there were more like him available on every plane. The image of hordes of potential Todd Picketts just waiting to be picked out of the hopefuls who flew into LAX every hour had been cruel nonsense. Sure, there were always good-lookers in any bunch; sometimes beauties. And sometimes -- though very rarely -- a beauty had some innate talent. But very few who came to Tinseltown hoping to snatch the brass ring had what the young Todd had possessed: the kind of effortless charm that an entire generation, men and women both, could fall in love with. He'd been that rarest of things: a universal object of desire.

Of course it didn't take much to taint such purity. But Todd had been lucky. Though in private he'd often been sour, envious and scornful, Maxine had successfully kept all that from the fans. Todd's image had remained damn near perfect. His only enemy was time.

And even that, in the end, wouldn't have mattered, if he'd allowed it to take its toll without shame. Look at Paul Newman, practically sainted at seventy. It would have been the same for Todd. People would have loved him as he grew old the way they loved certain songs: because he was part of who they were.

Maxine could have said all of this to him on the beach, if she'd been prepared to eat enough humble pie. Her words might have even persuaded him not to go into the water with Katya, and what a lot of grief that would have prevented.

But instead she'd been stupid and let the lie stand. And now they were here at the end of it all, and what had their petty warring earned them? Well, a lot of things she'd have preferred never to have experienced. Being out in the back yard with the ghosts, for one: that had been almost more than her sanity could endure. Seeing Sawyer torn apart that way was a horror she'd never be able to get out of her head. And then to make her way back through the undergrowth while some of his mutilators stalked her, sniffing after her as though they were dogs in heat and she the local bitch. There were no words for the horror of that.

And finally, this. Coming back inside the house to find Todd as near dead as made no difference, his face covered in wounds, his body all cut up. The emergency services were on their way, but even if the Canyon had been easy to find, which of course it wasn't, she didn't have much hope that they'd make it in time to help him.

He made a noise, his eyes fluttering.

"Can you hear me, Todd? There's an ambulance on its way."

For a moment his eyes opened a little wider, and he seemed to be making an effort to concentrate on the face in front of him.

"It's Maxine," she said. "Remember me?"

There was no recognition in his eyes. His breathing, which had steadily become shallower, was now so shallow she could scarcely see his chest rising and falling.

She dropped her head towards his, and spoke softly into his ear, as if to a child.

"Please don't go," she said to him. "You're strong. You don't have to die here if you don't want to."

He opened his mouth a little; his breath smelt metallic, as though he'd just swallowed a mouthful of old pennies. She thought he intended to tell her something, and put her ear to his lips. His mouth continued to move, but no sound came out, except the wet sounds of his throat and tongue working. She was bent forward for perhaps half a minute, hoping for something from him, but the posture was making her back creak, so she sat up again.

In the fifteen seconds it took her to lift herself up from her bowed position and sit up straight, the man she was tending died.

It was only when she started to speak to him -- just repeating his name, in the hope that she might get some response from him -- that she realized every trace of animation had gone out of him.

Very tenderly, she put her hand up to Todd's battered face, and touched his cheek. Many times over the years she'd gone on set to find that the makeup people had given him swellings or wounds that had looked grotesquely realistic. But they'd always been 'movie wounds'; however bloody they got-and however much he was supposed to have suffered in their getting-they were never disfiguring. The Todd Pickett whom audiences had come to see, with his blue-green eyes, his dark, lush hair, his symmetry -- his smile -- none of that was ever spoiled.

But this, lying before her, this was a different spectacle entirely. Once she had closed his eyes, there was nothing left visible of the Todd Pickett the world had loved.

She extricated herself from beneath his corpse with some difficulty. It bothered her to be leaving his body just sprawled here in the passageway in such an undignified manner, but she didn't know what else to do. She needed to find Tammy, Jerry, and a vodka, not necessarily in that order. Anyway, she thought, as she looked down at the corpse, what the hell did Todd care where he was lying? He was gone, hopefully about some better business than the rest of the ghosts who lingered around this damnable house.

The thought of them -- of the undeniable fact of them, which she'd witnessed just a few minutes before -- made her heart quicken. If the dead lived on after their demise, did that mean that was Todd's spirit in the vicinity right now, hovering around before he decided where he was headed?

She could feel herself blushing with self-consciousness, wondering what she'd done in the few minutes since his passing that he might have witnessed. Had she said anything asinine; or let go of some gas, in her nervousness?

Feeling a little foolish, but knowing she couldn't take a step without speaking, she said:

"Todd? Are you here?"

Then she waited, looking around.

A fly had buzzed in from the back yard where the door was still open, and it now landed in the pooling blood between Todd's legs, where it supped eagerly.

She bent down and shooed it away. It rose giddily into the air, as though stupefied by the sheer scale of the feast that lay below. She swatted at it with the back of her hand and, to her surprise, she struck it. Down it went on its back, its buzz suddenly manic, as it careened around on the tile beside Todd's body.

Had Maxine been a deeper thinker she would perhaps have hesitated to kill the thing. But there'd never been any room for metaphysics in her life, and though she might once have heard in conversation that in some cultures a fly attending on a corpse must be treated reverentially, in case it carried the soul of the deceased, such possibilities were very remote from her way of thinking.

She put her foot down on the upturned fly without a moment's hesitation, and headed back into the kitchen.

TWO

The tiled room was hazy when Tammy stepped inside. Though the walls were now quite solid -- she could see the grout between the tiles, and the cracks on the surfaces of the tiles -- there was a dense, cold fog in the place which made deep breathing difficult, and seeing any great distance more difficult still.

The air smelt rank; like a very intense mildew. Apparently one of the illusions the room had been capable of creating was the illusion of smell. There had been the fragrance of greenery in here when she'd last entered; the smell of rain on leaves, and damp earth, and the pungent aroma of horse manure from a dump left by one of the Duke's horses. But apparently all that had been masking the real smell of the place, which was this smothering fungoid stench.

She advanced cautiously, fearful of suddenly encountering somebody in the fog, and not leaving herself time to retreat. She could hear the ghosts now and again; their howls and their complaints strobed through the fog-thickened air, making it hard for her to judge their distance. For safety's sake she kept one of the walls in sight to her left, as a point of reference.

It possessed only a shadow of its former genius for deception. The landscape that had once seemed so real was now reduced to outlines. Even these were not complete. In some places they had deteriorated to near abstractions, in others they'd gone entirely. But then in other places there were still large expanses of paintwork intact, where she could make out the whole visual structure of a picture. In one place there were tufts of grass and small white flowers that spreading from the bottom of the walls across the ground, creating the illusion that the visitor was walking over fertile ground. In another, rocks and boulders were strewn about, some cracked open by ambitious shrubs which had settled in their cracks as seeds. And more distantly, here and there she could still see copses and forests, roads and rivers, which cloud-shadows had once passed over most convincingly; and beasts had haunted; and men lived and died in.

The hues of all these fragments of the Country had faded, needless to say, burned away by the unveiled sun. All the richness of the rendering, all the detail of the painters' craft, was lost. What remained was almost as simple as the outlines in a child's coloring book.

Once in a while, as she walked, the fog would become a little thinner overhead, and she'd catch a glimpse of the ceiling. It was in much the same state as the walls and floor. The outlines of cloud formations were still visible, but without the brushwork and colour to lend them life they looked even more abstracted than the landscape: just meaningless shapes.

Only the sun, whose appearance had begun the process of destruction, retained some lifelike qualities. The brightness it shed was sickly however, as though it was blazing too brightly to stay aloft and alight for long, and would soon be consumed by its own fever.

And still she walked, with the wall on her left, certain that she'd soon come to the corner of the room. But the journey went on, and on, much to her astonishment. The room must truly have been enormous, as Zeffer had boasted. She remembered the pride on his face when he'd described how they'd built the room. How the tiles had been numbered so that they could be put up in the exact order he'd found them in. Only now, with the deceptions of the room removed, did she better understand why he'd felt such pride. The achievement had been substantial. Lunatic, but substantial.

Finally, the wall turned a corner, leading away from her, which was a surprise. She began to wonder if this search wasn't becoming foolhardy. How much further should she explore, hugging the wall for security's sake but getting further and further away from the door? Should she take a chance and step out into the dark, featureless fog, hoping her sense of direction would guide her back to the place she'd come from? No, that wasn't sensible. She decided on the more conservative option. She simply turned on her heel and, putting the wall that had been on her left on her right, returned the way she'd come. Her only concession to risk was to venture perhaps six or seven yards from the wall, which put it at the limit of her sight, given the density of the mist. In this manner she proceeded tentatively back the way she'd come.

The trek back to the door was not the uneventful journey the outward bound trip had been. She'd taken perhaps five strides from the turnabout spot when she heard the whooping clamor of ghosts, and a body of them -- smeared together in their grief, melded, it seemed, into one furious being -- appeared from the fog. Their faces were bitter: turned down mouths and burning, cold blue eyes like the luminous eyes of deep-sea fish.

She'd not been terrified of them at the threshold, but she was terrified now. Not because they would see her and recognize her and blame her for the absence of their consolation, but because they could catch her up in their momentum, and carry her away with them. She instinctively dropped to the ground as they approached, and they moved on past her, wailing and cursing. She heard cracking sounds as they passed by, and when they'd gone she saw that the tiles which they'd passed over had shattered.

She stayed pressed on the ground, while the fog roiled around her, afraid that they'd come back.

They didn't return, thank God; but it was clear that this wasn't a safe place to be. She could hear other packs of ghosts roving around in the fog, making their own terrifying din. The fog, she assumed, had delayed their full realization that this place was a shadow of its former self. That was why some of them kept on searching, hoping that the power they'd fed on in the good old days was still here somewhere. Of course it was not; and by degrees the bitter word was spreading, so that each of the groups searching the room slowly grasped the disastrous truth. And as soon as they did they went crazy.

"Tammy?"

She looked up. Close to the ground the fog thinned somewhat, and she could see twice as far as she could see when standing. And there, at the limit of her vision, lying on the ground like her (and probably for the same reason) was Jerry Brahms.

"Oh thank God ... "

There was a dark smear on his face, which she guessed was blood. Otherwise, he seemed to be all right. He crawled towards her on his belly, like a soldier under fire. As she approached she saw that the smear was indeed blood, its source the patch of skin which Katya had torn out of his scalp. When he reached her he caught hold of her hand.

"My dear, thank the Lord you're still alive. I feared the worst, I truly did. Somebody let the ghosts in."

"That was me."

"In God's name why?"

"Because Todd wanted me to," she said. It wasn't the whole truth, of course, but it was enough for now.

"Where is Todd?"

She looked away from him, just for a moment. It was all she needed to do.

"Oh Lord, no. Not my Todd."

"She stabbed him -- "

"Katya stabbed him? Why?"

"It's too complicated ... "

"Well, later then. Where's Katya now?"

"I think she's in here somewhere."

"So why did you come down?"

"Why'd you think? To find you."

"Oh you sweet ... " He grasped her hand hard.

"Now can we please go? " she said.

"Do you know the way to the door?"

She glanced over her shoulder. The wall she'd strayed from was still visible. "Yes. I think so. Back to the wall. Make a right. And then we follow it until we reach the door, which will be on the left."

"Very organized."

"I hope I'm right," Tammy said. She started to get to her feet. Jerry tried to persuade her back down on the ground.

"I'm too big to be crawling around like this." she said.

Jerry nodded. "And you know what? I'm too old," he said. "If she sees us, she sees us. Yes?"

He scrambled to his feet, and together they headed back to the relative security of the wall. There were noises from every direction. Some were the -- by now -- familiar cries of frustrated ghosts; but there were now also sounds of mounting destruction. The revenants were venting their fury by taking the room apart. Tammy could hear them tearing at the walls, bringing down waves of tiles. And after the shrill crash of breaking tiles came the deeper din of wood beams being smashed, timber wrenched from timber with the squeal of unseated nails.

Tammy and Jerry stayed close to the wall; but the air was quickly filling with particles of dust, which suggested the destruction was getting closer to them. It was impossible to tell from which direction: perhaps from all.

"May I?" Tammy said, slipping her hand into Jerry's.

"Be my guest."

The door was in sight now, and though the din was sickening, Tammy dared to think they might get out of this alive, with a little luck.

No sooner had it crossed her mind than there was a massive disturbance in the fog close by -- so large a disturbance that the fog actually parted like a pair of drawn drapes.

Tammy dragged Jerry back the way they'd come, two or three steps, no more.

As she did so the ghosts came out of the gaping fog, and flung themselves at the wall around the door. They tore at it -- and at the wall surrounding it -- with such force that part of the ceiling above the door came crashing down. Pieces of shattered tiles, splintered wood and plaster flew in all directions. Tammy and Jerry turned away and shielded their faces. A barrage of shards peppered their backs.

When the noise of the demolition ceased and Tammy looked back, a haze of plaster dust had replaced the fog. She inhaled and it caught in her throat, reducing her to a coughing, tearful mess. Jerry was in the same, or worse, condition.

Tammy spat out a mouthful of the white soot, and wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. Not the smartest thing to do. She felt plaster particles scrape between her irises and her lids; a new flood of tears came. As she wiped them away she felt Jerry catch hold of her arm, seizing her so hard that she stopped coughing, and blinked the tears out of her eyes to cleanse them. Then she looked round at him.

The ghosts who'd demolished the wall were now tearing at the exposed sub-structure of the wall, reducing it to sprinters. But it wasn't the scene of destruction Jerry was looking at. He was staring ahead back, towards the centre of the room.

"She always knew how to make an entrance," he whispered.

Tammy followed his gaze.

The drapes of mist were beginning to close again slowly. But walking up between them, like a diva preparing to take her place centre-stage, and armed for this final scene with the knife she'd used to stab Todd, was Katya Lupi.

THREE

"Hello, Tammy," she said. "I suppose you thought you were going to get out of here alive. Well you're not. Sorry to disappoint you."

"Enough's enough, Katya," Jerry said, doing his best to sound authoritative.

"Oh you know me better than that, Jerry," Katya replied. "Enough's never been enough for me." She looked at Tammy. "Did he tell you I took his virginity? No? He didn't. Well I did. He was a sad little thirteen year old, with a dick about as big as this." She waggled her pinkie. "Do I exaggerate, Jerry?"

She went on, her tone darkening, Jerry said nothing. "All that I've done for you, and you're ready to creep away, ready to leave me alone. That's all you men ever do, isn't it? You creep away."

"Not Todd," Tammy said. "Todd wanted to trust you."

"Shut up. You couldn't possibly understand what was between us." She pointed the bloody knife at Jerry. "But you. You understood. You knew how I'd been deserted in the past."

This was the big scene, Tammy thought; no doubt about that. And she was playing it for all she was worth, as though she could finally be absolved of all she'd done, in the name of deserted womanhood.

"You're pathetic!" Tammy cried. "Why don't you do something useful with that knife and slit your fucking wrists!"

"Oh no. This isn't the end for me," Katya replied calmly. "This is the end for him. And for you -- " She poked the knife in Tammy's general direction, "Your miserable lives are certainly over. But not me. I was always a chameleon. Wasn't I, Jerry? From picture to picture, didn't I change?" He didn't reply to her, but she pressed the point, as though she simply sought verification of the truth. "Well didn't I?" she said. "Grant me that much."

"Yes ... " he said, as though to silence her.

"So I'll change again. I'll go out into the world and I'll be somebody new. There's a whole new life, still waiting to be lived."

"Not a hope in Hell," Tammy said.

"What?"

"Let it go, Tammy," Jerry said.

"Why? She may look like a million dollars but she's just a slice of the same stale ham that she ever was. You know what? I love movies. Even the silent ones. Like Broken Blossoms. I love Broken Blossoms. It still makes me cry. There's some heart in it. Something real. But your ... flicks?" She laughed, shaking her head. "They're dead. You see, that's the paradox. Mary Pickford's gone, and Fairbanks and Barrymore. They're all gone. But they live on because they made people laugh and cry. Whereas you? You're alive, and the shit you made isn't worth a damn."

"That's not true," Katya said. "Jerry, tell her."

"Yes, Jerry," Tammy said, quietly. "Tell her."

"The truth is that you're not remembered quite as well as I may have -- "

"Let's not tell any more lies," Tammy said grimly. She looked at Katya. "Nobody knows who the fuck you are."

Katya looked at Tammy for a moment, and then back to Jerry, who shook his head.

"If they knew," Tammy said, "don't you think somebody would have recognized you, when you came to get Todd?"

Katya looked down at the cracked floor. She was absolutely still, except for her right hand, which was idly judging the heft of the knife. When she looked up again, her face carrying a radiant smile.

"All right. Enough recriminations. We've said our hard words. Now we must begin to forgive."

Tammy looked at her with incredulity. How many faces did this woman have? "There's going to be no forgiving here," she said.

"Will you shut up," Katya snapped, passing her hand over her brow. The smile dropped away for a moment, and there was a terrible vacuity in its place. As though the masks, however many there were, concealed nothing at all.

But she put the smile on again, a little more tentatively, and looked at Jerry.

"I'm in need of your help," she said. "Your help and your forgiveness. Please." She opened her arms. "Jerry. For old times' sake. I gave you a life. Didn't I? Being up here with me, wasn't it something to live for?"

Jerry took a long time to answer. Then he said: "You smell of death, Katya."

"Please. Jerry. Don't be cruel. Yes, I've hurt a lot of people. I realize that. Nobody regrets that necessity more than I do. But right from the beginning, I was trapped. What could I do? Zeffer was the one who brought the Hunt into this house, not me. I knew nothing about it. How can I be blamed for that?"

"I think they blame you," Jerry said, nodding past Katya at the now-stilled fog; or rather, at what it concealed.

At some point in this exchange, the revenants had left off their demolition, their fury momentarily calmed as they listened to Katya's self-justification. Many of them had been physically intertwined earlier, but they had separated themselves from one another, and, shrouded by the fog, listened to the woman play her parts.

"They were your guests," Jerry said to Katya. "Some of them were great actors."

"If they were so great, why did they become addicted so easily?"

"So did you," he reminded her.

"But the room was mine. They were just people who just passed through. Yes, some of them were casual friends. Some of them were even casual lovers. But once they were dead? They were nothing.

"I knew you were going to say that eventually." Tammy said. "You selfish bitch."

"Jesus," Katya said. "I have heard enough of you."

She lifted her knife and came at Tammy. In two seconds she would have had the blade buried in Tammy's heart, but before she could reach her target somebody stepped out of the mist, and knocked the knife from her hand. It spun on the tile, but Katya was quick. She ducked down and snatched it up again, her gaze going to the figure who had stepped into her path.

He had opened his arms, as though to formally present himself to her.

"Rudy?" she said.

The man in front of her bowed his gleaming head.

"Katya," he replied.

Tammy couldn't see his face but she thought there some sorrow in the syllables; whether for her, or for himself, who could say?

He'd no sooner spoken than from another spot, close to the door, somebody else spoke her name. This second voice was heavier than Valentino's; there was more anger in it than melancholy. "Remember me?" he said. "Doug Fairbanks?"

Katya turned, "Doug? I didn't realize you were here too."

"And me?" came a third voice, this time a woman.

"Clara?" Katya said.

"Of course."

The speaker walked up to Katya as she spoke, her stride remarkably confident. She was a shadow of her former self, but Tammy would still have recognized the face of Clara Bow. The bee-stung lips. The high, curved brows. The wide eyes, once filled with innocent high-spirits. But not now. Now they burned.

Katya glanced over her shoulder. "Please, Clara," she said, "Don't come so close."

"Why should you care how close we get?" Clara Bow said.

"Yes," came a fourth voice, "You're not to blame, remember?"

"Anyway," came a fifth voice, "we're nothing."

"Nothing," said a sixth voice. And a seventh.

Katya turned, swinging her weapon in a wide arc. Even so, it missed its several marks. The ghosts were too quick for her; she was sluggish, even in her fury. Besides, Tammy thought, what possible harm could a kitchen knife do upon these creatures? Yes, they had a corporeal existence; no question of that. But they were -- as far as she understood it -- spirit presences made of ether and memory. These people couldn't die. They were already dead; long, long dead.

And they were assembling now in even greater numbers, having apparently given up on looking for the Devil's Country.

It was gone; the evidence of which was the fading lines on the walls of this melancholy chamber. All that remained by way of satisfaction, if that was the word, was to punish the woman who had kept them outside in her joyless Canyon for so many seasons, holding on to the hope that they would one day be let back in to the house to satisfy their craving for the solace of their addiction.

Katya was well aware that she was in jeopardy, and hopelessly outnumbered. While still holding the knife she raised both hands in a vague gesture of surrender.

The dead seemed not to care. Their pale faces, which had always looked impersonal, were now -- in the presence of the woman who had once been their confidante -- assembling fragments of forgotten particularities. It was like a room full of Alzheimer's patients, recovering in the presence of some person they'd known well what they'd previously lost: themselves. Their eyes, which had been little more than lights in their heads, took on a specific shape and color. Their mouths, which had been slits, bloomed into sensuality.

Tammy didn't think any of these reconfigurations were good news for Katya. Unobtrusively, she caught hold of the back of Jerry's shirt, and gently eased him out of Katya's immediate vicinity.

She moved him not a moment too soon.

An instant later one of the ghosts came barreling out of the mist and caught hold of Katya. Tammy didn't see the attacker's face, but she heard the guttural cry which escaped him as he swung his captive around to face the fog.

Katya struggled, but he had her arms pinned behind her, and despite her considerable strength, he was the stronger. "Fuck you, Ramon!" she screamed.

She made a second attempt to wrest herself free of Navarro's grip, and by sheer vigour succeeded in liberating one of her arms; the one with the knife. She then stabbed wildly at the man who had hold of her: Ramon Navarro. The knife slid into his side, and there it lodged.

Before she could retrieve it he had caught hold of her flailing arm and had pinned it again. Though he had very firm hold of her she still continued to struggle and curse, giving up on English in favour of Romanian. And then, after perhaps thirty seconds of Romanian curses, she gave up completely, and fell silent.

For a moment Tammy thought Navarro had killed her, her silence was so sudden and complete. But-as had always been the case in this house-the truth was not so simple.

The curtain of fog shifted, as though several breezes had pierced it at the same moment. And then, like a troupe of actors appearing to take their final bow, the rest of the revenants began to appear from the mist; four, five, six, seven, eight, ten, twelve-

Their eyes were on Katya; all of them, on Katya. Now she began to struggle with fresh fervor, her movements chaotic and panicky, like those of a trapped animal. Much to Tammy's surprise, Navarro let her go. She turned on him, instantly, reaching for the knife that was still protruding from his side. But before she could catch hold of it he reached out and grabbed the front of Katya's dress. Then he pulled, tearing the light pink fabric away from her body and exposing her breasts. The look on her face changed, her fury apparently mellowing. Navarro bent forward and put his face between her breasts.

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.

"We should be thankful," Jerry said.

"For what?" Maxine wanted to know.

"For getting out of here alive."

"Let's be thankful when we see Sunset Boulevard," she said, a little of the old Maxine showing, "not before."

The noise in the house was still escalating as they left, and when Tammy looked back she saw that there was a crack over the front door, two inches wide, which zigzagged all the way up to the eaves, like a bolt of black lightning.

They got into Tammy's car, and drove down the hill. Maxine's spurt of fortitude gave out halfway down, and she began to cry pitifully, but Tammy was having none of it.

"Shush," she said, half gently, half not. "We're not having any of that, you hear? It's over, Maxine. It's over."

Of course that wasn't strictly true. Her mind turned to the creatures she'd encountered in the Canyon during the night; the children. What would happen to them? And what other perverse miracles had the Devil's Country worked upon the anatomies of those who'd ventured there? She vaguely wondered if perhaps she or Jerry, both of whom had spent some considerable time in that godless place, would have something to show for their presence there. She would have to watch herself closely, at least for a while.

By now they were almost at the bottom of the hill.

"We have to go and report all this to the police," Tammy said. "Together."

"Now?" Maxine said. "I couldn't possibly."

"We have to, Maxine. There are bodies up there. We don't want to be accused of murder."

"They're going to think we're all crazy," Maxine commented.

"Well, that's easily solved," Jerry said. "We'll bring them up here, and they can see it all for themselves. That'll change their minds."

"Suppose they do think we're responsible?" Maxine said. "People like to point fingers in this damn town."

"Well they won't be pointing any fingers at us," Tammy said. We'll explain."

"Explain?" Maxine said, "How the hell will we ever explain?"

"We'll start at the beginning and go on until we're done. We've got nothing to hide."

"There'll be no end to it," Maxine said. "Now Todd's dead, the press is going to be all over us. They're going to be digging up every sordid little story about him, whether it's true or not. They'll print any piece of garbage that floats down the sewer. It's going to go on for months. And you think in the middle of all this the truth is going to be heard? Forget it. It's going to be a circus."

"You don't have to be a part of the circus," Jerry said. "None of us do. We can just say no, and walk away. Let them write whatever they want to write. They're going to do it anyway."

"True enough," Maxine sighed. "I just wanted to try and guard his reputation."

"Maybe if you'd guarded him a little better when he was still around we wouldn't be in this mess," Tammy said. She caught Maxine's reflection in the mirror; the corners of her mouth turned down in misery. "I'm sorry," Tammy said. "Maybe that was a bit sharp."

"No," Maxine replied. "I let him down. He needed me and I walked in the opposite direction. Mea culpa."

"What does that mean?"

"I'm responsible?" Maxine said. "And I am. Don't think I don't know it."

Her reply brought an end to the exchange. They drove on in silence until they reached Langley Road, which in turn brought them on to Doheny Drive, and finally down onto Sunset Boulevard.

It was a busy intersection, the lights slow. They had to wait through three changes, creeping closer to the main tide of traffic; but there was a simple contentment for all three in sitting in the car and watching the buses and the messenger bikes and the Beverly Hills' Rolls Royces drive on past. Life going on, in other words, in its usual way. People going east, people going west, all oblivious to the fact that just a short drive from this loud, bright place was a cleft in the rock of the City of Angels which was deep enough to conceal miracles.