Coldheart Canyon

PART ELEVEN. THE LAST CHANCE

ONE

News, like a life-form, is divided into orders and classes and kinds. Thus, what was deemed worthy of note on the front page of Variety (the grosses of Todd Pickett's last four pictures, the fact that his agent Maxine Frizelle had been present at the death-scene, some sketchy details about the history of the house in the Canyon) was not thought appropriate for the front page of the LA Times (the fact that there were multiple bodies at the scene, suggesting some vague connection with the horrors of the Manson Murders; a brief synopsis of Todd's career; elsewhere, an obituary, and elsewhere again a sincere, if hastily edited, appreciation of Pickett's contribution to cinema); none of which was again deemed appropriate for The National Enquirer, which put together a special edition centered on the deaths of Todd, Gary Eppstadt and -- as they put it -- 'the unfortunate, unnamed, victims who were pulled down into the same spiral of decadence and death that claimed the Hollywood power-players', but padded the issue out with the Old Faithfuls: Haunted Hollywood, The Tragic Deaths of the Young and the Beautiful-Marilyn; James Dean; Jayne Mansfield- 'Doomed Souls Who Paid The Ultimate Price For Fame!'; and all this gutter journalism of a high order by comparison with the real bottom-feeders, the journalists of The Globe, who printed, amongst countless lurid absurdities which they had clearly invented at their editorial meetings, a number of facts that were paradoxically closer to the truth of the events than anything in any other newspaper or magazine. Given their notoriously low standards of veracity, however (The Globe's editors considered crudely-doctored pictures of Pyramids hovering over the Pentagon hard news), the publication of these reports made the truest parts of the story unprintable in any other journal. The facts became tainted by association; poisoned, in fact. If it appeared in The Globe, how could it be true?

The only items of the story that appeared in every location were those that were related to the hard facts of death in Tinseltown.

Todd Pickett, everyone agreed, had been on some kind of downward spiral. The cause might be disputed, but the fact that he was no longer the Most Beautiful Man in the World (People Cover, Jan. 1993) or the Most Successful Male Star of the Year (ShoWest, five years running), was not. In the eternal game of snakes-and-ladders that was Hollywood, Todd Pickett had done all the climbing he was ever going to do. If he'd survived, it would all have been downhill from here.

There was in fact a widely-held opinion which stated that in dying young-even dying violently-Todd had made the best career move of his life. He'd gone while the going was relatively good; and in a fashion that would assure his name was never forgotten.

"For Todd Pickett fans the world over," Variety opined, "today's tragic news brings the curtain down on a stellar career filled with glorious moments of pure cinematic magic. But there must be many of those admirers who are relieved that their hero will never disappoint them again. His run of spectacular successes (all of which were produced by Keever Smotherman, who died less than a year ago at the age of forty-one), was plainly drawing to an end. All that remained was the sad, and regrettably all-too-common spectacle of a great star eclipsed."

TWO

Tammy saw that word everywhere now: eclipsed. It sat hidden in otherwise innocent sentences, waiting to mess with her mind. The instant she saw it she was back in the Devil's Country, staring up at the shape of that black moon obscuring the face of the sun. She could feel the contrary winds against her face. She could hear the sound of horses' hooves, or worse, the wailing of Qwaftzefoni.

When that happened, she would have to put down whatever it was she was reading that had concealed the treacherous word and direct her attention back to the real world: the room in which she was sitting, the view through the window, the weight of the flesh on her bones.

Of course, the word wasn't the only trap. Though she'd come back to the house on Elverta Road and valiantly tried to pick up the rhythm of her briefly forsaken life, she knew it would be a long time until the bad times passed away. She'd simply seen too much; and the threads of what she'd seen were intimately woven into the world she'd returned to. Though she'd put all the objects around the house that were connected to Todd (and there were a lot of them) away in the big front bedroom with the rest of her memorabilia, out of sight was not out of mind. She knew she was going to have to deal with all that stuff in a more thorough way before too long; and the prospect weighed heavily upon her.

Meanwhile, she was alone in the house. Just under three weeks after her return to Sacramento, Arnie had announced that he was moving out in order to move in with Maureen Ginnis, a bottle-blonde who worked as a dispatcher at the FedEx offices at the airport. In a way, Tammy was glad. She knew Maureen a little, and she was a nice woman; a better match for Arnie than Tammy had ever been. And having the house to herself -- knowing that when she got up in the morning she didn't need to see anybody or speak to anybody if she didn't want to (and there were days, sometimes four or five in a row, when her mood fell into a kind of trough, and she was so sluggish she could barely keep her eyes open; then others when she would turn on the television and some stupid quiz show would make her bawl like a baby) that made the craziness she felt itching inside her a little easier to cope with, because she didn't have to conceal it from anyone. She could just take the phone off the hook, lock the doors, draw the drapes and act like a crazy lady.

She got a bad cold a couple of weeks after Arnie left, and bought up a cabinetful of over-the-counter cold, flu, congestion and expectorant medications. They usually made her feel so dopey that she avoided taking them, but in her present situation it scarcely mattered if she felt half-comatose. Having bought the medicines she dosed herself to the gills with cure-all syrups the color of fancy French liqueurs, and went to bed in the middle of the afternoon to sweat it out. It was a bad move. She woke about one in the morning from a dream in which she'd been lying in bed with the goat-boy clamped to her breast, suckling noisily. She could smell the meaty sweetness of her breast-milk as it seeped from the corner of his hairy mouth, and heard the long middle nail of his foot catching on the comforter as he jerked around in animal bliss.

With the weird logic of dreams she had very reasonably told Qwaftzefoni that she felt feverish and he would have to stop. She had pulled him off her breast with some difficulty, only to discover that he had hold of her hand, the sharp nail of his thumb pressed hard against the pulsing vein in her wrist as though threatening to pop it at a moment's notice. Then he had guided her palm down to the clammy place beneath the curve of his stomach, where his prodigiously veined prick stuck out from folds of infant fat. She felt a row of tiny objects down the underside of his shaft.

"They're black pearls," he said, before she asked the question. "They'll increase your pleasure."

In her fever-dream, she barely had time to register what the little bastard was proposing before he was climbing up onto her, her tit spurting in his fist as he milked her, her screams going for nothing. In the hellish heat of the room the spilt milk went bad in a heartbeat, souring on the sheets. It stank as if they'd been soaked in vomit, the stench rising around her with physical weight, as though it might smother her.

She had begged for the goat-boy to leave her alone, but he clutched her hand so tight she was afraid he'd break the bones if she didn't obey him. So she had taken hold of his pearl-lined ding-a-ling and proceeded to jerk it.

"You want it over with quickly?" he had said to her.

"Yes ... " she had sobbed, hoping he'd let her go. Men knew how to do it better than women anyway. Arnie had always turned up his nose at the offer of a hand-job. "You never do it right. I'd prefer to do it myself." But there were no easy get-outs here.

"Then stay still!" the goat-boy had said, flipping over backwards, still keeping his grip on her fountaining breast, but relinquishing the enforced masturbation for a grosser game. He was straddling her head now, his thick little legs just long enough to raise the cushy divide of his ass six or seven inches above her nose. The coarse hair on his goaty legs pricked her face. It thickened around his buttocks, and he'd long since given up trying to clean it. The stench made her gag.

"Open your mouth. Put out your tongue."

She could bear it no longer. She reached up and grabbed his balls hard, throwing the little fuck forward, so that he was sprawled on the milk-soaked bed. Then she lifted his tail and started to beat his ass with her palm, for all the world like a mother chiding a monstrous child. He started to sob, and shit, the groove of his buttocks filling up with the turd he would have dumped on her face if he'd had the chance. She was past caring about how dirty her hands were. She just kept beating the little fucker, until he had no more tears left, and he was reduced to hiccups.

No, the hiccups weren't his, they were hers.

Her eyes fluttered open. The fever had broken, and she was alone in a bed that was damp with all the sweat she'd shed, but otherwise sweet-smelling. The cretinous horror she'd brought from the Devil's Country was gone; shit, hair and all.

She got up out of bed and flushed all the medicines down the toilet, determined to let the flu pass from her system of its own accord. She was crazy enough, without the aid of medication.

THREE

"Jerry."

"Tammy. My dear. Whatever happened to you? I wondered when you were going to call."

"You could have called me."

"Well, to be perfectly honest," he said, "I didn't want to trouble you. Unlike me, you've got a life to live."

"Well actually, Arnie left me."

"Oh, I am sorry."

"Don't be. It's for the best."

"You mean it?"

"I mean it. We weren't meant for one another. It just took us a long time to find out. What about you?"

"Well, since we made the news I've been invited out to a few more fancy dinners than I used to be. People are curious. So they wine me and dine me and then they casually interrogate me. I don't mind, really. I've met a lot of people, mostly young men, who have a faintly morbid interest in what went on up in the Canyon, which they pass off as an interest in me. I play along. I mean, why not? At my age, you don't argue. Interest is interest."

"And what do you tell them?"

"Oh, bits and pieces. I've got quite adept at figuring out who can take what. You know, the ones who say tell me everything are the ones who go clammy when they're told -- "

"Everything?"

"No. Never everything. I don't think anybody I've met is ready for everything."

"So how do people respond?"

"Well, they're usually ready for something fairly wild. If they sought me out in the first place it's because they know something. They've heard some rumor. Some little piece of gossip. So it keeps the conversation interesting. Now: you. What about you? Have you been sharing our adventures with anybody?"

"No."

"Nobody?"

"No. Not really."

"You should, you know. You can't keep it all bottled up. It's not healthy."

"Jerry, I live in Rio Linda, Sacramento, not Hollywood. If I started spouting off about going to the Devil's Country my neighbours would probably never talk to me again."

"Would you care? Be honest."

"Probably not."

"What about Rooney?"

"Who?" Tammy frowned.

"Rooney. The detective who interviewed us, remember? Over and over."

"His name was Rooney? I thought it was Peltzer."

"No, that's one of Maxine's lawyers. Lester Peltzer."

"Okay. So Peltzer's a lawyer, and Rooney's who?"

"You haven't heard from him? He's the Detective at the Beverly Hills Police Department who first talked to us. Have you been checking your messages?"

She hadn't but she said she had.

"Strange," Jerry said. "Because he's called me six or seven times, pressing me for details. Then I called the Department, replying to one of his calls, and you know what? He was fired two weeks ago."

"So why's he calling you?"

"I think the sonofabitch is writing a book."

"About what happened to us?"

"I guess we'll find that out when it's published."

"He can do that?"

"Maybe he'll change the names. I don't know."

"But it's our story. He can't go round telling our story."

"Maybe we should all talk to Peltzer and see if we can stop him."

"Oh God," Tammy said softly. "Life used to be so simple."

"Are you having a hard time?" Jerry said.

"Yeah. I guess. No, what am I saying? I'm having a horrible time. Really bad dreams."

"Is that it? Dreams? Or is there more?"

She thought about her reply for a moment, wondering if she should share the problems she'd been having, with him. But what was the point? Though they'd been through hell together she didn't really know him all that well. How did she know he wasn't planning to write a book too? So she said: "You know all things considered, I'm doing just fine."

"Well that's good," Jerry said, sounding genuinely pleased. "Have the reporters stopped bothering you?"

"Oh I still get the occasional journalist on the doorstep, but I had one of those little spy-hole things put in the door, and if I think he looks like a reporter than I just don't open the door."

"Just as long as you're not a prisoner in your own house."

"Oh Lord, no," she lied.

"Good."

"Well ... I should let you go. I've got a thousand -- "

"One other thing."

"Yes."

"This is going to sound a little wacko."

"Oh. Okay."

"But I wanted to tell you about it. Just ... for old times' sake, I suppose."

"I'm listening."

"You know we never really discussed what happened to us in the house."

"No. Well I figured we all knew -- "

"I didn't really mean what happened to everybody. I meant you and me, down in that room. You know that there was a lot of power in those tiles. Visiting the Devil's Country kept Katya looking perfect all those years ... "

"What are you getting to?"

"As I said, it's going to sound wacko, but I guess we're both used to that by now, yes?" He took a deep breath. "You see, I had prostate cancer; inoperable. The doctors gave me nine months to a year to live. That was December of last year. Christmas Eve, actually."

"God, Jerry, I'm so sorry."

"No, Tammy, you're not listening. I said, I had a tumor."

"What?"

"It's gone."

"Completely?"

"Every detectable trace. Gone. The doctors can't believe it. They've done the scan five times to be absolutely sure. And now - finally -- they are absolutely sure. Jerry Brahms' brain tumor has disappeared, and according to them that simply can't happen. Ever."

"But it has."

"It has."

"And you think it's got something to do with us being in the room?"

"Put it this way: I went into that house with a malignant tumor, and when I came out again the tumor had gone. What can you say about a thing like that? It's either a coincidence or it's a miracle."

"And you think it's a miracle?"

"You know what?" He paused. "Now I am going to sound wacko, but I prefer to think of it as Katya's last present to me."

"She didn't seem the gift-giving type."

"You only saw the darkness, Tammy. There was another side to her. I think there always is, don't you? There's always some light in the darkness, somewhere."

"Is there?" Tammy replied. "I guess I'm still looking."

FOUR

Tammy desperately wanted to believe that she had indeed profited somehow from the madness-inducing journey she'd taken through the wilds of Coldheart Canyon. She didn't need anything as monumental as Jerry's healed tumor; just some modest sign to prove to her that, despite all the death and the suffering she'd witnessed, some palpable good had come of it.

Every waking hour her thoughts circled on what she'd experienced, looking for some sign of hope. Not miracles, just hope. A light in the darkness; a reason to live. But the more she searched, the more absurd the search seemed to be.

Common sense told her she should venture out into the world and start trying to live a normal life again. Perhaps if she joined a couple of women's clubs, or maybe even tried to find herself a lover-anything to change her focus; get her out of her head and back into a normal way of thinking. But she always found some reason to put off anything too adventurous. It was almost as though she'd used up her capacity for adventure during her time in the Canyon. Her trips into the dangerous territory over her front door step became briefer and briefer by the way. She started to get panicky when she got into her car, and the panic escalated so quickly that by the time she got to the end of the block she often had to turn round and head straight back home again. Going to the market had become impossible; she took to ordering essential food-stuffs by phone, and when the supplies arrived she'd make the exchange with the delivery guy as short as possible. She'd just take the stuff, pass over the money, and close the door, often not even waiting for the change.

She realized that this odd behaviour was beginning to get her a reputation around the neighborhood. More than once she peeped out between the closed drapes and saw that people were lingering outside her house, some on the sidewalk, some in cars, pointing or staring. She'd become, she supposed, the local eccentric; the woman who'd come back from the wilds of Hollywood in a state of mental derangement.

All of this, of course, only added to her spiraling sense of anxiety, mingled with more than a touch of paranoia. If she answered the door to the delivery boy and caught sight of somebody in the street outside she naturally assumed the passer-by was spying on her. At night she heard noises on the roof and woke more than once certain that one of Katya's los ninos had found its way to Rio Linda and was scrambling over the eaves, trying to get down to her bedroom window.

In saner moments (which became fewer and fewer), she knew all this was nonsense. But the very fact that she had saner moments implied that she was slowly giving herself up to lunacy. It was all very fine for Jerry Brahms to talk about having his cancer cured by the power of the room (and maybe he had; she didn't discount the possibility), but she felt as though whatever she'd been given in the Devil's Country it was affecting her mind not her body, and it was not doing anything remotely healing. Quite the reverse. It was deconstructing her grip on reality, piece by piece. Some days when she woke the dreams remained attached to her all day like pieces of lint. She'd go through her waking hours in a half-stupefied state, coming into rooms and not knowing why she was there; leaving them again and remembering, then forgetting as she turned round. She was in a constant state of exhaustion. Her lids were like lead. Once, in the middle of the day, she found herself on her hands and knees in the bathroom, working at the tiles with her bare hands and Ajax, attempting to remove some spidery sketches of a certain country that she'd daydreamed into creation. Another time, she'd gone into the kitchen to find the faucet running, and a shape in the sink that looked like a piece of roadkill; a matted pelt, two rows of sharpened teeth set between black leathery lips. The force of the hot water slowly turned the cadaver over and showed her the broken head of something she'd seen in the Canyon, or in her dreams of the Canyon, foul beyond words.

She turned off the faucet. Steam rose from the mouth of the thing, like a last breath. Then it melted, fur and teeth and all, and was gone down the plug-hole.

"Hmm," she said to herself, unimpressed by this ugly little show. Somehow she'd always imagined madness to be a more dramatic thing than this. Again the movies had it wrong. There was no grandeur in it; no exquisite folly. Just a pile of teeth and dirty fur in the kitchen sink.

That said, she knew that her mental decline was gathering speed. She needed to do something about it soon, or this journey she was taking was going to take her away from herself completely. She would be a blank-eyed thing sitting at the kitchen table, wiped clean by banalities.

FIVE

While Jerry was giving thanks for his new life, and Tammy was dealing with the grim illusions in her kitchen sink, Maxine was in a very different frame of mind. Her injuries were remarkably slight, given all that she'd gone through. Within a week she was physically ready to return to her offices and attempt to pick up business. But most of the calls she got in the first week weren't business calls at all but gently inquiring conversations that rapidly gave way to interrogation. It seemed as though everyone in Hollywood wanted to know about events at the house in Coldheart Canyon.

In truth, she had no desire to tell her story to anyone, not even her closest friends. Ghosts and rooms laid with tile providing visions of another world-this was not the stuff she could have shared with any of her contemporaries without being mocked. But she had to say something, or she was going to start making even more enemies than she already had. So she concocted a version of events without supernatural elements. In the censored version, Todd had indeed been hiding away because of work done to his face (it was no use lying about that any longer: he'd admitted to the surgery at her party), and there he'd been stalked and finally-sadly-murdered by his stalker. Most of the people she talked to accepted this bowdlerized version of events, at least for the duration of the conversation. But those few loyal sources she still had around town reported something very different back to her. Everyone had their own version of what had happened in Coldheart Canyon, ranging from the ludicrous to the actionable, and they were spreading it around freely. Whatever the version of the story-and they ranged from murder mystery to ghost-stories-they had this in common: Maxine was the villain.

She was to blame for knowingly putting her innocent client in a house that was haunted; she was to blame for not warning him that a close friend was a murderer (this version had started in The Enquirer, and required another star as murderer. The Enquirer, of course, claimed to know who it was, and would soon be in a position to reveal the name of the guilty party. What they could already say with confidence was that Maxine Frizelle had known of the plan against Todd's life, but simply hadn't taken it seriously). She, in short, was the reason he was dead. It seemed that nothing she could say or do persuaded people that this wasn't the case. Years of resentment towards her surfaced now as her enemies elaborated version after version of what had gone on in the Canyon, each one less flattering to Maxine than the one before.

She eventually gave up attempting to put people straight on such matters. People would believe what the hell they wanted to anyway. She'd learned that after twenty-two years in the business. You could sometimes guide people's opinions, but if they didn't want to buy what you had to sell you could shout yourself hoarse trying to make them do it and it would never work.

After a few days of fruitless endeavor she became curiously immune to all the gossip flying around, and just got on with trying to get to see some new talent. She was an agent without a major client, which meant that as far as the town was concerned there was no reason to take her calls, especially as she wasn't playing ball and offering up the inside scoop on what a psychic hired by the Fox Channel to wander round the Canyon called 'the most haunted piece of real estate in Hollywood.'

In other words, everybody knew there was more to this-a lot more than they had been told so far-and it was only a matter of time before somebody started to talk.

That somebody was Patrick Rooney, the detective at the Beverly Hills Police Department who'd done the initial work on the Pickett case. At fifty-eight he was very close to retirement, and was looking at a life on a middle-ranking detective's pension. Life would not be lush, he knew. Although he didn't have an expensive life-style he had all the normal outgoings: alimony, a mortgage, car payments (he ran three cars, one of his few concessions to self-indulgence), plus a well-stocked bar and a habit of smoking between forty and fifty cigarettes a day. He'd already calculated the dip in his standard of living he'd have to take when he left the force. It was going to be substantial.

But here-dropping into his lap like a gift from God-was the answer to all his problems. He'd been told the story first by the Lauper woman, and later by Maxine Frizelle. Though their accounts had been outlandish, to say the least, they had also been remarkably consistent. Something weird had happened up in the Canyon and whether it was true in part or not at all scarcely mattered. What mattered to Rooney was that people loved this kind of thing. There was profit to be made here. Enough to make his retirement look a lot more cozy.

He began to make surreptitious copies of the interviews and smuggle them out of the station, with an eye to assembling them all into book form. It wasn't hard to do; if he asked for copies of a record in order to advance some particular aspect of the case then nobody challenged the request. In a short time he had amassed at home eleven bulging files of material on the 'Canyon' case: enough to start editing and collating.

What he needed was a point of view, other than his own. After all, he wasn't at the heart of all this: he was simply an onlooker, coming in after the drama was over. What his book needed was an insider whose story would become its backbone. He decided to approach Maxine Frizelle.

"You want to do what?"

"I'm going to write a book about events in Coldheart Canyon, as everyone insists on calling it. I was hoping I could count on your involvement. Your point of view, Miss Frizelle, would make the book a good deal stronger."

"You've had all the facts you're going to get from me, Detective."

"Wait, wait!" Rooney said. "Before you put the phone down on me, think about it. Todd Pickett was your client for how long?"

"Eleven years."

"So think of this as your chance to set the record straight once and for all. The good, the bad and the ugly."

"If I were ever to choose to set the record straight, Mr. Rooney, it would not be with a cop as a co-author."

"Oh, I wasn't going to write any of this. I was going to get a ghost-writer in to do that."

"Then I'm really missing something here, Rooney," Maxine said, summoning up her most withering tone. "What exactly is your contribution to this project?"

"My experience of almost four decades in the LAPD. I worked on the Manson case -- "

"This is nothing like Manson. Not remotely -- "

"Will you let me finish? I'm not saying the cases are identical. But we still have a lot of parallels. The brutal deaths of several high-profile Hollywood people, all with some connection to the occult."

"Todd never had anything to do with that kind of thing. And you can quote me."

"Well somebody in that house did. I have copies of photographs of every inch of the place. There are occult symbols hammered into all the thresholds, did you know that? Several symbols -- probably East European in origin -- were removed from the area around the back door around the time Mr. Pickett died. He may even have been responsible for their removal. Do you have any comment to make about any of that?"

"Yes. It's preposterous. And if you try to tie Todd to any of that kind of stuff you're going to be in deep trouble."

"That's a risk I'm willing to take. But I am going to write the book, Ms. Frizelle, with or without your assistance."

"I doubt you can do that, Rooney. You got that information because you were a cop. You can't go using it to make money."

"I wouldn't be the first and I won't be the last," Rooney said. "Frankly, I don't see what the hell your problem is, unless you were planning to do it yourself. Is that it? Am I rainin' on your parade here?"

"No. I have no intention of writing my own version of events."

"Then help me do mine," Rooney said, his tone perfectly reasonable. "I'll throw a piece of the action your way if that's what this is about. How does five percent sound?"

"Don't make this any worse than it already is. I don't want your blood money. Have a little decency, for God's sake. Todd is dead. So are a lot of other people. This isn't the time to be thinking about making a profit."

"I'm not going to do a hatchet job on him. I swear. Your ex-client's reputation is perfectly safe with me. Okay, so I hear he did a few drugs. A lot of coke, I hear, especially when he worked with Smotherman. And the plastic surgery. Again, no big deal. I mean, I'll have to write about it, but I won't make him look bad. I promise you."

"Why the hell would I rely on your promises, Rooney?"

There was a brief silence.

"So that's a no?" Rooney finally said.

"Yes. That's a big, fat no."

"Well, don't say I didn't ask."

"And for the record, Mr. Rooney, let me say this: if you do want to try and write this book, you go ahead and try. I promise you will have so many lawyers crawling up your ass you'll think they're breeding up there."

"Very nice. Very ladylike."

"Nobody ever mistook me for a lady, Rooney. Now get the hell off my phone. I need to call my lawyer."

SIX

The call from Rooney stirred Maxine up. She contacted her lawyer, Lester Peltzer, as she said she would, and organized a conference call with several other lawyers in town whom she respected, so that everyone could give her the benefit of their very expensive opinion. Unfortunately, they all agreed on one thing: she didn't have a hope in hell of stopping Rooney going ahead. When the book was written and being set for publication, that was a different matter, one of the lawyers pointed out. If he wrote something libelous, then they could go after him, and if it was obvious that he'd got access to police files then LAPD Internal Affairs might get riled up and take him to court. But there was no guarantee. The LAPD had a lousy record when it came to policing themselves.

"So right now he's free to say whatever he wants to say?" Maxine raged. "Just for profit?"

"It's the Constitution," one of the lawyers pointed out.

"It's not against the law," Maxine's lawyer pointed out lightly. "You've made a good deal of money yourself over the years."

"But I didn't lie to do it, Lester."

"All right, Maxine, don't get your blood pressure up. I'm merely pointing out that this is America. We live and die by the rule of Mammon." He drew a deep breath; put on his most rational tone. "Maxine, ask yourself whether taking this guy to court over some book that'll be off the shelves in two, three months is worth your time and temper. You may end up giving him more publicity by suing him than he would ever have got if you hadn't. You'll make an issue of it and suddenly everybody's buying his damn book. I've seen it happen so many times ... "

"So you're saying I should let him do it?" Maxine said. "Let him write some shit about Todd -- "

"Wait, wait," Lester said. "In the first place, you don't know he's going to write shit. Maybe he'll be respectful. Todd was a very popular actor. An American icon for a while."

"So was Elvis," Maxine pointed out. "It doesn't mean some sonofabitch didn't write about every dirty little secret Elvis ever had. I know, because I read the book."

"So what are you afraid of?"

"That the same will happen to Todd. People will write bullshit, and in the end it'll be the bullshit that's remembered, not the work."

Lester was usually quick with an answer, but this silenced him. Finally, he said: "Okay, let me ask you something. Do you think there's anything Rooney knows-as a matter of fact-which could be really destructive to Todd's long-term reputation?"

"Yes. I do. I think -- "

"Don't," Lester said. "Please. Don't tell me. Right now, I think it might be simpler for everyone if I didn't know."

"All right."

"Let's all go away and think about this, Maxine. And you do the same thing. I can see your concern. You've got a legacy here you want to protect. I think the question is-do you do that best by drawing attention to Rooney with a lawsuit, or by letting him publish and be damned?"

The phrase caught Maxine's attention. She'd heard it before, of course. But now it had new gravity, new meaning. She pictured Rooney publishing his book, and then having his soul dragged away to the Devil's Country for his troubles.

"Publish and be damned?" she said. "You know, that I could maybe live with."

Tammy hadn't seen a human face, real or televised, in four days; not even heard a voice. The Jacksons, her next-door neighbours, had gone off for a long weekend the previous Thursday, noisily departing with the kids yelling and car doors being slammed. Now it was Sunday. The street was always quiet on Sunday, but today it was particularly quiet. She couldn't even hear the buzzing of a lawn-mower. It was as though the outside world had disappeared.

She sat in the darkness, and let the images that had been haunting her for so long tumble over and over in her head, like filthy clothes in a washing machine, over and over, in a gruel of grey-grimy water; the madness she'd seen and heard and smelled; over and over. The trouble was, the more she turned it all over, the dirtier the washing became, as if the water had steadily turned from gray to black, and now when she got up to go to the bathroom, or to climb the stairs, she could hear it sloshing around between her ears, the muck of these terrible memories, darkening with repetition.

So this was what it was like to be crazy, she thought. Sitting in the darkness, listening to the silence while you turned things over in your mind, going to the kitchen sometimes and staring into the fridge until she'd seen everything that was in there, the rotted things and the unrotted things, then closing it again without cleaning it out; and going upstairs and washing the bathroom floor then going to lie down and sleeping ten, twelve, fourteen hours straight through, not even waking to empty your bladder. This is what it was. And if it didn't go away soon, she was going to be a permanent part of the madness; just another rag turning in the darkness, indistinguishable from the things she'd worn.

Over and over and --

The telephone rang. Its noise was so loud she jumped up from the chair in which she was sitting and tears sprang into her eyes. Absurd, to be made to weep by the sudden sound of a telephone! But the tears came pouring down, whether she thought she was ridiculous for shedding them or not.

She had unplugged the answering machine a while ago (there'd been too many messages, mostly from journalists) so now the phone just kept on ringing. Eventually she picked it up, more to stop the din than because she really wanted to speak to anyone. She didn't. In fact she was perfectly ready to pick up the receiver and just put it straight down again, but she caught the sound of the woman at the other end of the line, saying her name. She hesitated. Put the receiver up to her ear, a little tentatively.

"Tammy, are you there?" a voice said. Still Tammy didn't break her silence. "I know there's somebody on the line," the woman went on. "Will you just tell me, is this Tammy Lauper's house?"

"No," Tammy said, surprised the sound her own voice made when it finally came out. Then she put the receiver down.

It would ring again, she knew. It was Maxine Frizelle, and Maxine wasn't the kind of woman who gave up easily.

Tammy stared at the phone, trying to will the damn thing from ringing. For a few seconds she thought she'd succeeded. Then the ringing started again.

"Go away," Tammy said, without picking up the receiver. The syllables sounded like gravel being shaken in a coarse sieve. The telephone continued to ring. "Please go away," she said.

She closed her eyes and tried to think of the order in which she would need to put the words if she were to pick up the receiver and speak to Maxine, but her mind was too much of a mess. It was better not to even risk the conversation, if all Maxine was going to hear in Tammy's replies was the darkness churning around in her washing-machine of a head.

All she had to do was to wait a while, for God's sake. The telephone would stop its din eventually. Maybe five more rings. Maybe four. Maybe three-

At the last moment some deep-seated instinct for self-preservation made her reach down and pick up the receiver.

"Hello," she said.

"Tammy! That is you, isn't it?"

"Maxine. Yes. It's me."

"Good God. You sound terrible. Are you sick?"

"I've had the flu. Really badly. I still haven't got rid of it."

"Was that you when I called two minutes ago? I called two minutes ago. It was you, wasn't it?"

"Yes it was. I'm sorry. I'd just woken up and as I say, I've been so sick ... "

"Well you sound it," Maxine said, in her matter-of-fact manner. "Look. I need to talk to you urgently."

"Not today. I can't. I'm sorry, Maxine."

"This really can't wait, Tammy. All you have to do is listen. The flu didn't make you deaf, did it?"

This drew a silent smile from Tammy; her first in days. Same old Maxine: subtle as a sledgehammer. "Okay," Tammy said, "I'm listening." She was surprised at how much easier it was to talk once you got started. And she had the comfort that she was talking to Maxine. All she'd have to do, as Maxine had said, was listen. "Do you remember that asshole, Rooney?"

"Vaguely."

"You don't sound very sure. He was the Detective we talked to when we first went to the police. You remember him now? Round face, no hair. Wore too much cologne."

For some peculiar reason it was the memory of the cologne, which had been sickly-sweet, which brought Rooney to mind. "Now I remember," she said.

"Well he's been on to me. Did he call you?"

"No."

"Sonofabitch."

"Why's he a sonofabitch?"

"Because the fuckhead's got me all stirred up, just when I was beginning to put my thoughts in order."

Much to Tammy's surprise, she heard a measure of desperation in Maxine's voice. She knew what it was because it was an echo of the very thing she heard in herself, night and day, awake and dreaming. Could it be that she actually, had something in common with this woman, whom she'd despised for so many years? That was a surprise to say the least.

"What did the sonofabitch want?" she found herself asking. There was a second surprise here. Her mouth put the words in a perfectly sensible order without her having to labor over it.

"He claims he's writing a book. Can you believe the audacity of the creep -- "

"You know, I did know about this," Tammy said.

"So he talked to you."

"He didn't, but Jerry Brahms did." The conversation with Jerry came back to her remotely, as though it had happened several months ago.

"Oh good," Maxine said, "so you're up to speed. I've got a bunch of lawyers together to find out if he can do this, and it turns out-guess what?-he can. He can write what the hell he likes about any of us. We can sue of course but that'll just -- "

"-give him more publicity."

"That's exactly what Peltzer said. He said the book would last two months on the shelves, three at the outside, then it would be forgotten."

"He's probably right. Anyway, Rooney's not going to get any help from me."

"That's not going to stop him, of course."

"I know," Tammy said, "but frankly -- "

"You don't give a damn."

"Right."

There was a pause. It seemed the conversation was almost at an end. Then, rather quietly, Maxine said: "Have you had any thoughts at all about going back up to the Canyon?"

There was a second pause, twice, three times the length of the first, at the end of which Tammy suddenly found herself saying: "Of course."

It felt more like an admission of guilt than a straight-forward reply. And what was more, it wasn't something she'd consciously been thinking about. But apparently somewhere in the recesses of her churned-up head she'd actually contemplated returning to the house.

"I have too," Maxine confessed. "I know it's ridiculous. After everything that happened up there."

"Yes ... it's ridiculous."

"But it feels like ... "

"Unfinished business," Tammy prompted.

"Yes. Precisely. Jesus, why didn't I have the wit to call you earlier? I knew you'd understand. Unfinished business. That's exactly what it is."

The real meat of this exchange suddenly became clear to Tammy. She wasn't the only one who was having a bad time. So was Maxine. Of all people, Maxine, who'd always struck Tammy as one of the most capable, self-confident and unspookable woman in America. It was profoundly reassuring.

"The thing is," Maxine went on, "I don't particularly want to go up there alone."

"I'm not even sure I'm ready."

"Me neither. But frankly, the longer we leave it the worse it's going to get. And it's bad, isn't it?"

"Yes ... " Tammy said, finally letting her own despair flood into her words. "It's worse than bad. It's terrible, Maxine. It's just ... words can't describe it."

"You sound the way I look," Maxine replied. "I'm seeing a therapist four times a week and I'm drinking like a fish, but none of it's doing any good."

"I'm just avoiding everybody."

"Does that help?" Maxine wanted to know.

"No. Not really."

"So we're both in a bad way. What do we do about it? I realize we're not at all alike, Tammy. God knows I can be a bitch. Then when I met Katya-when I saw what kind of woman I could turn into-that frightened me. I thought: yuck, that could be me."

"You were protecting him. You know, in a way, we both were."

"I suppose that's right. The question is: have we finished, or is there more to do?"

Tammy Jet out a low moan. "Do you mean what I think you mean?" she said.

"That depends what you think I mean."

"That you think he's still up there in the Canyon? Lost."

"Christ, I don't know. All I know is I can't get him out of my head." She drew a deep breath, then let the whole, bitter truth out. "For some stupid reason I think he still needs us."

"Don't say that."

"Maybe it's not us," Maxine said. "Maybe it's you. He had a lot of feelings for you, you know."

"If that's you trying to talk me into going back to the Canyon, it's not going to work."

"So I take it you won't come?"

"I didn't say that."

"Well make up your mind one way or another," Maxine replied, exhibiting a little of the impatience which had been happily absent from their exchange thus far. "Do you want to come with me or not?"

The conversation was making Tammy a little weary now. She hadn't spoke to anybody at such length for several weeks, and the chat-welcome as it was-was taking its toll.

Did she want to go back to the Canyon or not? The question was plain enough. But the answer was a minefield. On the one hand, she could scarcely think of any place on earth she wanted to go less. She'd been jubilant when she'd driven away from it with Maxine and Jerry; she'd felt as though she'd escaped a death-sentence by a hair's-breadth. Why in God's name would it make any sense to go back there now?

On the other hand, there was the issue she herself had raised: that of unfinished business. If there was something up there that remained to be done then maybe it was best to get up there and do it. She'd been hiding away from that knowledge for the last several weeks, churning her fears over and over, trying to pretend it was all over. But Maxine had called her bluff. Maybe they'd called each other's: admitted together what they could not have confessed to apart.

"All right," she said finally.

"All right, what?"

"I'll go with you."

Maxine breathed an audible sigh of relief. "Oh, thank God for that. I was afraid you were going to freak out on me and I was going to have to go up there on my own."

"When were you planning to do this?"

"Is tomorrow too soon?" Maxine said. "You come to my office and we'll go from there?"

"Are you going to ask Jerry to come with us?"

"He's gone," Maxine replied.

"Jerry's dead?"

"No, Key West, He's sold his apartment and moved, all in a week. Life's too short, he said."

"So it's just the two of us."

"It's just the two of us. And whatever we find up there."

SEVEN

On several occasions in the next twelve hours Tammy's resolve almost failed her and she thought about calling and telling Maxine that she wouldn't be coming to Los Angeles after all, but though her courage was weak it didn't go belly up. In fact she arrived at Maxine's office twenty minutes earlier than they'd arranged, catching Maxine in an uncharacteristic state of disarray, her hair uncombed, her face without blush or lipstick.

She'd lost weight; shed perhaps fifteen pounds courtesy of the Canyon. So had Tammy. Every cloud had a silver lining.

"You look better than you sounded," Maxine said. "When we first started talking I thought you were dying."

"So did I, on and off."

"It was that bad, huh?"

"I locked myself in my house. Didn't talk to anyone. Did you talk to anybody?"

"I tried. But all people wanted to know about was the morbid stuff. I tell you, there's a lot of people who I thought were friends of mine who showed their true colors over this. People I thought cared about Todd, who were about as crass as you can get. 'Was there a lot of blood?' That kind of thing."

"Maybe I did the right thing, locking myself away."

"It's certainly given me a new perspective on people. They like to talk about death: as long as it's not theirs."

Tammy took a look around the office while they chatted. It was very dark, very masculine: antique European furniture, Persian rugs. On the walls, photographs of Maxine in the company of the powerful and the famous: Maxine with Todd at the opening of several of his movies, Maxine with Clinton and Gore at a Democratic fundraiser, when the President-elect still had color in his hair, and a reputation to lose; Maxine with a number of A-list stars, some of whom had fallen from the firmament since the pictures had been taken: Cruise, Van Damme, Costner, Demi Moore, Michael Douglas (looking very morose for some reason), Mel Gibson, Anjelica Huston, Denzel Washington and Bette Midler. And on the sideboard, in Art Nouveau silver frames, a collection of pictures which Maxine obviously valued more highly than the rest. One in particular caught Tammy's eye: in it Todd was standing along side a very sour, very old woman who was ostentatiously smoking a cigarette.

"Is that Bette Davis?"

"Five months before she died. My first boss, Lew Wasserman, used to represent her."

"Was she ever up in the Canyon, do you think?"

"No, I don't think Bette's ghost is up there. She had her own circle. All the great divas did. And they were more or less mutually exclusive. At a guess a lot of Katya's friends had an interest in the occult. I know Valentino did. That's what took them up there at the beginning. She probably introduced them to it all very slowly. Maybe tarot cards or a ouija board. Checking out which ones were in it for the cheap thrills and which ones would go the distance with it."

"Clever."

"Oh she was clever. You can never take that away from her. Right in the middle of this man's city, where all the studio had men at the top, she had her own little dominion, and God knows how many people wrapped around her little finger."

"It sounds like you admire her a bit."

"Well I do. I mean she'd broken every commitment, and she didn't give a shit. She knew what she had. Something to make people feel stronger, sexier. No wonder they wanted to keep it to themselves."

"But in the end it drove some of them crazy. Even the ones who thought they could take it."

"It seems to me it affected everyone a little differently. I mean, look at us. We got a taste of it, and it didn't suit us too well."

"I should tell you, I thought I was heading for the funny farm."

"You should have called me. We could have compared notes."

"My mind was just going round and round. Nothing made sense any more. I was ready to do myself in."

"I don't want to hear that kind of talk," Maxine said. "The fact is: you're here. You survived. We both did. Now we have to do this one last thing."

"What if we get up there and don't find anything?"

"Then we just leave and get on with our lives. We forget we ever heard of Coldheart Canyon."

"I don't think there's very much chance of that, somehow."

"Frankly, neither do I."

It was hot. In the Valley, the temperature at noon stood at an unseasonal one hundred and four, with the probability that it would climb a couple of degrees higher before the day was out. The 10 freeway was blocked for seven miles with people trying to get to Raging Waters, a water-slide park which seemed like a cooling prospect on a day like this, if you could only reach the damn thing.

Later that afternoon in a freak mirror-image of the fire at Warner's, there was a small conflagration at a warehouse in Burbank, which had been turned into a mini-studio for the making of X-rated epics. By the time the fire-trucks had wound their way through the clogged traffic to reach the blaze, there'd already been five fatalities: a cameraman and a ménage-à-trois whose versatility was being immortalized that afternoon, along with the male star's fluffer, had all been cremated. There was very little wind, so the sickly smell of burning flesh and silicon lingered in the air for several hours.

Even if that particular stench didn't reach the Canyon, there were plenty that day that did. Indeed it seemed the Canyon had become a repository for all manner of sickening stenches in the weeks since its sudden notoriety, as though the rot at its heart was drawing to it the smell of every horror in the heat-sickened city. Every unemptied dumpster that concealed something for forensics to come look at; every condemned apartment or lock-up garage where somebody had died (either accidentally or by their own hand) and had not yet been discovered; every pile of once-bright flowers collected from the fresh graves of Forest Lawn and the Hollywood Memorial Cemetery, and were now piled high in the corner, along with their tags carrying messages of sympathy and expressions of loss, rotting together; all of it found their way into the cleft of the Canyon, and clung to the once healthy plants, weighing them down like a curse laid on the air itself.

"It's so damn quiet," Tammy said as she got out of Maxine's car in front of what had once been Katya Lupi's dream palace.

There were a few birds singing in the trees, but there wasn't much enthusiasm in their trilling. It was too hot for music-making. The birds themselves sat in what little shade they could find beneath the leaves, and stayed still. The only exception to this were the falcons, which rode the rising tides of heat off the Canyon, their wings motionless, and the ravens, who dipped and banked as they chased one another overhead, landing in argumentative rows on the high walls around the house.

The dream palace itself was in a shocking state, the damage the ghosts had done to the vast chamber on which the house sat throwing the whole structure into an accelerated state of decay. The once-magnificent facade, with its highlights of Moroccan tile, had not only cracked from end to end but had now fallen forward, exposing the lath-and-timber below. The massive door-which Tammy had imagined belonging to an Errol Flynn epic-had split in three places. The metal lock, which had been as vast and medieval as the rest of the thing, had been removed, sawn away by a thief with an electric saw. He'd made an attempt to take the antique hinges too, but the size of the job had apparently defeated him

Tammy and Maxine squeezed through the mass of debris which had gathered behind it. The turret into which they stepped was still intact, all the way up to its vault, with its painted images of once-famous faces peering down. But the plaster on which the fresco had been made was now laced with cracks, and cobs of the design had fallen away, so that the vault looked like a partially-finished jigsaw. Underfoot, the missing pieces: fragments of Mary Pickford's shoulder and Lon Chancy Sr.'s crooked smile.

"Is this earthquake damage?" Maxine said, looking up at the turret. There were places where the entire structure of the turret, not just the inner, painted layer, but the tiles too, had dropped out of place, so that the Californian sky was visible.

"I don't see why the house would survive all these years of earthquakes without being substantially damaged, and then practically come apart in a 6.9."

"It's weird," Maxine agreed.

"Maybe the ghosts did it?"

"Really? They got up there?" she said, pointing at the vault.

"I bet you they got everywhere. They were pretty pissed off."

Tammy stepped into the kitchen and had her thesis proved correct. The kitchen had been comprehensively ripped apart; shelves torn down, cutlery pulled out of drawers and scattered around. Plates smashed, frying pans used to beat at the tiled work-surfaces so that they were shattered. Food had been pulled out of the fridge and deep-freeze, both of which stood open-rotted fruit and uncooked steaks scattered around, broken bottles of beer and cartons of spoiled milk. Everything that could be destroyed had been destroyed. The tops of the faucets had been twisted off, and water still gurgled from the open pipes, filling up the clogged sink until it overflowed, soaking the floor.

But all this was cosmetic. The ghosts had been working on the structure too, and they'd had the supernatural strength to cause considerable damage. Ragged holes had been made in the ceiling, exposing the support beams, some of which-through a massive effort by the phantom demolition team-had been unseated and pulled through the plaster facade, jutting like vast broken bones.

Tammy waded through the filthy water to the second door, and opened it. A scummy tide had proceeded her out into the passageway where Todd had died. It was considerably darker than the kitchen. She instinctively reached round and flicked on the light. There was a sharp snap of electricity in the wall. The lights came on, flickered for a moment, then went out again. After a beat there was another noise in the wall, and an eruption of sparks from one of the light fixtures further down the wall. She thought about trying to switch the electricity off, but that didn't seem very smart under the circumstances: she was standing in half an inch of water with the power crackling in the walls. Better just leave it alone.

The only reason she'd come out here was to be certain that the place where Todd had lain had been cleaned up. In fact, it hadn't been touched. The water from the kitchen had not reached as far as the spot where he had died, so the pools of blood that had come from his body were now dry, dark stains on the floor. There were other stains, too, where his body had lain, that she didn't want to think too much about.

Further down the passageway, beyond the bloodstains, was the back door and the threshold where she'd dug out the icons. The nerves in the tips of her fingers twitched as she thought about those terrible minutes: hearing Todd and Katya fighting in the kitchen, while the ghosts waited on the threshold, bristling but silent; waiting for their moment. Her heart quickened at the thought of how close she'd come to losing the game she'd played here.

Something crunched beneath her sole, and she stepped aside to find one of the icons was lying on the tile. She bent down and picked it up. There was nothing left of the force it had once owned so she pocketed it, as a keepsake. As she was doing so she caught sight of a body lying outside, in the shadows of the Noahic bird-of-paradise trees.

"Maxine!" she called, suddenly alarmed.

"I'm coming."

"Be careful. Don't touch the light switches."

As soon as she heard Maxine's footsteps splashing through the kitchen, Tammy ventured to the threshold, and stepped over it. The greenery smelt pungent back here; she was reminded of those dark, swampy parts of the Canyon where she'd almost lost her life during her night journey. The swamp had crept closer to the house it seemed; there were mushrooms and fungi growing out of the wall, and the Mexican pavers were slick with green algae underfoot.

"What's wrong?" Maxine wanted to know.

"That." Tammy pointed to the body, which lay face down in the middle of a particularly fertile patch of fungi. Tammy wondered if perhaps he'd been trying to make a meal of them, and died in mid-swallow, poisoned.

"Help me turn him over," Tammy said.

"No thanks," Maxine said. "I'm as close as I need to get."

Undaunted, Tammy went down on her haunches beside the body, pressing her fingers into the damp, sticky groove between the body and the tiles upon which it lay. The corpse was cold. She lifted it up an inch or two, peering down to see if she could get a better glimpse of the dead man. But she couldn't make out his features. She would have to turn the cadaver over. She pushed harder, and hoisted the body onto its side. Rivulets of pale maggots poured from its rot-bloated underbelly. She let it fall all the way over, lolling on the ground.

Not only was it not a man, it was not strictly speaking, a human being but one of what Zeffer had called the children, the hybrid minglings of ghost and animal. This one had been a female: part coyote, part sex-goddess. It had six breasts, courtesy of its bestial side, but two of them had gone to jelly. The four that remained however, were as lush as any starlet's, adding a touch of surrealism to this otherwise repulsive sight. The creature's head was a mass of wormy life, except-for some reason-its lips, which remained large, ripe and untouched.

"Who is it?" Maxine hollered from the interior of the house.

"It's just an animal," Tammy said. "Sort of. The ghosts fucked the animals. And sometimes the animals fucked the ghosts. And these things, the children, were the result."

Obviously Maxine hadn't known about this little detail because a look of raw disgust came over her face.

"Jesus. This place never fails to ... " She finished the sentence by shaking her head.

Tammy wiped her hands on her jeans and surveyed the steps that led down to the garden.

"There's more of them down here," she called back to Maxine.

"More?"

By the time Maxine's curiosity had overcome her revulsion and she'd reached the first body, Tammy had already moved on to the second, third and fourth, then to a group of four more, all lying on the steps leading down to the lawn or at the bottom, and all in roughly the same position, face down, as though they'd simply fallen forward. It was a curiously sad scene, because there were so many different kinds of animals here: large and small, dark and striped and spotted; lush and bony.

"It looks like Jonestown," Maxine said, surveying the whole sorry sight.

She wasn't that far off the mark. The way bodies had all dropped in the grass, some lying alone, others in groups, looking as though they might have been hand in hand when the fatal moment came. It had the feel of a mass suicide, no question. Had the sun been on them directly, no doubt the stench would have been nauseating. But the air was cool beneath the heavy canopy; the smell was more like that of festering cabbages than the deeper, stomach-turning stench of rotting flesh.

"Why so few flies?"

Tammy thought on this for a moment. "I don't know. They weren't properly alive in the first place, were they? They had ghosts for fathers and animals for mothers. Or the other way round. I don't think they were flesh and blood in the same way you and I are."

"That still doesn't explain why they came here to die like this."

"Maybe the same power that ran through Katya and the ghosts ran through them too," Tammy said. "And once it was turned off -- "

"They came back to the house and died?"

"Exactly."

"And the dead?" Maxine said. "All those people. Where did they go?"

"They didn't have anything to keep them here," Tammy said.

"So maybe they're out wandering the city?" Maxine said. "Not a very reassuring thought."

As Maxine talked, Tammy plucked some large leaves from the jungle all around, and then went back amongst the corpses, bending to gently lay the leaves-which she'd chosen for their size-over the faces of the dead.

Maxine watched Tammy with a mingling of incomprehension and awe. It would never in a thousand years have occurred to her to do something like this. But as she watched Tammy going about this duty she felt a surge of simple affection for the woman. She'd endured a lot, and here she was, still finding it in her heart to think of something other than her own comfort, her own ease. She was remarkable in her way: no question.

"Are you done?" she asked, when Tammy was all but finished.

"Almost," she said. She bowed her head. "Do you know any prayers?"

"I used to, but ... " Maxine shrugged, empty-handed.

"Then I'm just going to make something up," Tammy said.

"I'll leave you to it then," Maxine said, turning to go.

"No," Tammy said. "Please. I want you to stay here with me until I'm finished."

"Are you sure?"

"Please."

"Okay," Maxine said.

Tammy bowed her head. Then after taking a few moments to decide what she was going to say, she began. "Lord," she said. "I don't know why these creatures were born, or why they died ... " She shook her head, in a kind of despair, though whether it was about the words or the situation she was attempting to describe, Maxine didn't know; perhaps a little of both. "We're in the presence of death, and when that happens we wonder, it makes us wonder, why we're alive in the first place. Well, I guess I want to say that these things didn't ask to be alive. They were born miserably. And they lived miserably. And now they're dead. And I'd like to ask you, Lord, to take special care of them. They lived without any hope of happiness, but maybe you can give them some happiness in the Hereafter. That's all. Amen."

Maxine tried to echo the Amen, but when she did so she realized that these hesitant, simple words coming from so unlikely a source, had brought on tears.

Tammy put her arm around Maxine's shoulder. "It's okay," she said.

"I don't even know why I'm crying," Maxine said, letting her head drop against Tammy's shoulder while the sobbing continued to wrack her. "This is the first time I've cried like this, really cried, in Lord knows how long."

"It's good to cry. Let it come."

"Is it really good to cry?" Maxine said, recovering herself slightly, and wiping her nose. "I've always been suspicious when people say crying's good for you."

"Well it is. Trust me."

"You know, Tammy, I don't know if anyone has ever told you this, but you're quite an amazing lady."

"Oh really?" she said. "Well that's kind of you. It's not the sort of thing Arnie used to say."

"Well then, Arnie was a fool," Maxine said, recovering a little of her old edge.

"Are you ready to go back inside now?" Tammy said, a little embarrassed by Maxine's compliment.

"Yeah. I guess so."

They made their way through the dead to the steps, and started to climb. As they did so it occurred to Maxine that in laying the leaves on the dead, and offering up a prayer on their behalf, Tammy had brought the idea of forgiveness into Katya Lupi's loveless domain. It was probably the first time the subject had been broached in this vicinity in three-quarters of a century. Katya hadn't seemed too big on forgiveness. You erred against her, you suffered for it; and you kept suffering.

"What are you thinking about?" Tammy asked her.

"Just this place." Maxine looked up at the house, and turned to take in the rest of the Canyon. "Maybe the tabloids had it right."

"About what?"

"Oh you know: the most cursed piece of real estate in Hollywood."

"Bullshit," Tammy said.

"You don't think that room downstairs was made by the Devil, or his wife?"

"I don't want to know who made it," Tammy said. "But I know who fed it; who made it important. People. Just like you and me. Addicted to the place."

"That makes sense."

"Places can't be good or bad," Tammy said. "Only people. That's what I believe."

"Did that make you feel better, by the way? What you did out there?" Tammy smiled.

"Bit crazy, huh?"

"Not at all."

"You know, it did make me feel better. Much better. Those poor things didn't have a hope."

"So now, we can go look for Todd?" Maxine said. "And if we don't find him in -- " Tammy looked at her watch "-shall we say, fifteen minutes, we give it up as a bad idea? Agreed?"

"Agreed."

"Where do you want to look first?" Tammy said. "The master bedroom," Maxine replied. "Whenever things didn't go well, he used to go to his bedroom and lock the door."

"Funny, Arnie would do the same."

"You never told me anything about Arnie," Maxine said, as she led the way through the chaos of the kitchen to the hallway.

"There wasn't that much to tell. And there's even less now he's gone."

"Do you think he'll come back?" "I don't know," Tammy said, sounding as though she didn't care that much. "Depends on whether his new woman puts up with him or not."

"Well, put it this way: do you want him back?"

"No. And if he tries to make nice, I'm going to tell him to go fuck himself. Excuse my French."

They stepped out into the hallway. "You want to go up there first?" Tammy said. "He was your friend, or client, or whatever." Maxine looked doubtful. "Go on," Tammy urged her. "You go on up and I'll try downstairs."

"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."

"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.

Every now and again something on a higher floor would creak or grind, or somewhere in the darkness around her she'd hear a patter of dry plaster-dust. Then the creaking would stop, the pattering would stop, and her heart would pick up its normal rhythm again.

Of one thing she was pretty certain: there were no ghosts here. They'd wreaked their comprehensive havoc and gone on their melancholy way, leaving the house to creak and settle and eventually, when it could no longer support its own weight, collapse.

She'd seen enough. She moved back to the doorway and returned through it to the stairs, climbing over the rubble onto the lowest step. The staircase swayed ominously as she heaved herself onto it, and she saw that it had become disconnected from the wall a few feet up and was therefore 'floating', a fact she had failed to grasp during her descent. She ascended with a good deal more caution and reached the relatively solid ground at the top of the stairs with an inwardly spoken word of thanks.

The door to the master bedroom was open, she saw. A moment later, Maxine emerged and beckoned for her to come up.

"Todd's here and he wants to see you," she explained.

"Is he all right?" Tammy asked, fully realizing, even as she said this, that it was a damn-fool question to ask about a man who'd been recently murdered.

By way of reply Maxine made a strange face, as though she didn't have the least clue what the man in the master bedroom was up to.

"You should just come up and see for yourself," she said.

As they crossed on the stairs Maxine took the opportunity to whisper: "I hope to hell you can make more sense of him than I could."

"Hello, Tammy."

Todd was lying in the bed, with a pile of dirt covering his lower half. There was dirt on the floor too; and on his hands.

"You're a mess," she remarked brightly.

"I've been playing in the mud."

"Can I open the drapes a little, or put on a lamp? It's really gloomy in here."

"Put on a lamp if you really must."

She went to the table in the corner and switched on the antiquated lamp, doing so tentatively given her problem with the electricity on the lower floor. Then she went to look out of the narrow gap between the drapes. Maxine had been right; the evening was coming on quickly. Already the opposite side of the Canyon was purple grey, and the sky above it had lost all its warmth. There were no stars yet, but the moon was rising in the north-eastern corner of the Canyon.

"Don't look out there," Todd said.

"Why not?"

"Just close the drapes. Please."

She obviously wasn't quite quick enough for him, because he sprang out of bed, scattering dirt far and wide. His sudden movement startled her a little. It wasn't that she was afraid of him exactly; but if death emphasized people's natural propensities, as it seemed it did, then there was a good chance he'd be wilder in death than he had been alive. He took the drape from her hand-snatched it, almost-and pulled it closed.

"I don't want to see what's out there," he said. "And neither do you."

She looked down at his groin. How could she help herself? He was as hard as any man she'd laid eyes on, his dick moving even though he was standing still, bobbing to the rhythm of his pulse.

It would be ridiculous, she thought, not to mention it. Like his standing there with a pig under his arm, and making no reference to that.

"What's that in honour of?" she said, pointing down at the pulsing length. "Me?"

"Why, would you like it?"

"It's covered in dirt."

"Yeah." He took hold of the lower four inches of his dick and began to brush the soil off the top four, twisting his dick round (in a manner that looked painful to Tammy) so that he could fetch out the particles of dirt in the ridges of his circumcision scar.

"I didn't think I'd see you again," he said, as he worked. He let his dick go. It thumped against his belly before settling back into its head-high position. "I was beginning to think this was my only friend," he said. He knocked his dick sideways with a little laugh.

"I'm sorry," Tammy said. "I wasn't feeling well enough to come before now."

Todd wandered back over to the bed and sat down on the edge of the mattress. More dirt fell onto the floor. He folded his arms, bunching the muscles of his shoulders and chest.

"Are you mad at me?" she said.

"A little, I guess."

"Because I didn't visit?"

"Yeah."

"I wouldn't have made very good company. I thought I was going crazy."

"You did?" He was interested now. "What happened?"

"I locked myself up in my house. I wouldn't see anybody. I was just about ready to kill myself."

"Oh shit," he said. "There's no reason to do that. All the bad times are over, Tammy. You can go off and live your life."

"What life? I don't have a life," she sighed. "Just that stupid little home filled with Todd Pickett memorabilia."

"You could sell it all."

"I'm going to, trust me. Maybe take a cruise around the world."

"Or better still, stay up here with me."

"I don't think -- "

"I mean it. Stay here."

"Have you been downstairs?"

"Not recently. Why?"

"Because this house is going to fall down, Todd. Very soon."

"No it isn't," he said. "Did you know there are dozens of small earthquakes in California every day? Well there are. And this place is still standing."

"It doesn't have any bottom floor left, Todd. Katya's guests dug it all up."

He turned to the bed, and started to pull armfuls of the dirt off the sheet.

"What are you doing?"

"Persuading you to stay," he said, still pulling at the earth. When he had almost all the dirt removed from the bed he pulled the sheet out and went around the other side of the bed, throwing the corners of the sheet into the middle, and then bundling up both sheet and dirt. He pushed the bundle off the bed, and got up onto the clean mattress, sitting with his head against the board, and his legs crossed. His balls were tight and shiny. His dick was hard as ever. He gave her a lascivious grin.

"Climb aboard," he said.

Here, she thought, was an invitation in a million. And there would have been a time, no doubt, when she would have swooned at the very idea of it.

"I think you should cover yourself up," Tammy said, keeping the tone friendly, but firm. "Haven't you got a pair of pants you can wear?"

"You don't want this?" he said, running his fingers over the smooth head of his cock.

"No." she said. "Thank you."

"It's because I'm dead, isn't it?"

She didn't reply to him. Instead she wandered through to the closet, which was enormous; barely a tenth of it was filled, and started to go through the trousers and jeans on the hangers, and found an old, much-patched pair of jeans, their condition suggesting that he was fond of them, because he'd had them fixed so often.

As she pulled them off the hanger she heard a sound on the roof, like something scraping over the Spanish tiles.

"Did you hear that?" she called through to Todd.

There was no answer from the room next door. Bringing the jeans with her she made her way back into the bedroom. Todd was no longer on the bed. He had snatched the dirt-stained sheet up off the floor and had wrapped it haphazardly around his body the result being something between a toga and a shroud, and was now crawling around in the corner of the room in this bizarre costume, his eyes turned up towards the roof. He beckoned Tammy over, putting his forefinger to his lips to ensure her silence. There were more noises on the roof; scraping sounds that suggested the animal, whatever it was, had some considerable bulk.

"What is it?" she said, "That's not a bird."

He shook his head, still staring up at the ceiling.

"What then?"

"I can't see what it is, it's too bright."

"Oh so you have looked."

"Yes of course I've looked," he said, very softly. "Shit, this always happens. It's like they're its chorus."

He was referring to the coyotes, which had begun a steady round of almost panicked yelpings from the other side of the Canyon. "Whenever the light appears, the damn coyotes start up."

He had begun to shudder. Not from the cold, Tammy thought, but from fear. It crossed her mind that this was very far from the conventional image of ghost-hunting. The phantom naked and afraid; her proffering a pair of jeans to cover him up.

"It's come here for me," Todd said, very quietly. "You know that."

"How can you be sure?"

"Because I can feel it. In my chest. And in my balls. The first time it came here it actually got into the house. I was asleep, and I woke up with this terrible ache in my balls. And that -- " he pointed down between his legs "-was so hard it hurt. I was terrified. But I yelled at it to go away, and off it went. I think I must have startled it."

"How many times has it been back since that first time?"

"Six or seven. No, more. Nine, ten times. Sometimes it just waits in the garden. Sometimes it sits on the roof, like it is now. And then once it was in the pool."

"There's no water in the pool."

"No, I know. It was lying at the bottom, not moving."

"And you couldn't see any shape in it?"

"No, no shape. I mean, do angels even have shapes?"

"An angel? That's what you think it is?"

"I'm pretty sure. I mean, it came to get me. And I am dead. So that's why it's hanging around. And it almost had me once -- "

"What happened?"

"I looked at it. And my head started to fill up with all these memories. Things I hadn't thought about for years and years, literally. Me and Donnie as kids. Cincinnati. Nothing important. Just things you might think of in a daydream. And it said to me -- "

"Wait. It speaks? This thing speaks?"

"Yes. It speaks."

"What sex is it?"

"I don't know. Sometimes it sounds more like a guy ... " He shrugged. "I don't know."

"I'm sorry. I interrupted you. What did it say?"

"Oh. It said: all this is waiting for you."

"'All this,' meaning what?"

"All the memories, I suppose. My past. People. Places. Smells. You know how sometimes you wake up from a dream and it's been so real, so strong, everything in the real world seems a bit unconvincing for the first half-hour? Well, it was like that after I saw the memories. Nothing was quite real."

"So why the hell are you fighting it? It doesn't want to hurt you."

"I'll tell you why I'm fighting. Because it's a one-way street, Tammy. I go with the light, there's no way back."

"And is being here so wonderful?"

"Now don't -- "

"I mean it."

"Don't argue with me," he said. "I've thought about this a lot. Believe me. It's all I've thought about."

"So what do you want to do?"

"I want you to stay right here with me until the damn thing goes away. It won't try any tricks if you're here."

"You mean giving you the memories?"

"It's got others. Once it appeared on the lawn looking like Patricia, my mother. I knew it wasn't really her, but it's crafty that way. You know, she was telling me to come with her, and for just a few seconds -- "

"It had you fooled?"

"Yeah. Not for long, but ... yeah."

At this juncture there was a rapping sound on the door. Todd jumped. "It's only Maxine," Tammy said, getting up, and turning from Todd. He caught hold of the jeans she was carrying, not because he wanted to wear them but to stop her escaping him.

"Don't answer it," he said. "Please stay here with me. I'm begging you, stay: please."

She held her breath for a moment, listening for the presence on the roof. It was no longer audible. Had the creature-whatever it was-simply departed, or was it still squatting up there, biding its time? Or-a third possibility, just as plausible as the other two-was she falling for some fictional fear that Todd, in his confused, post-mortem state, had simply created out of thin air? Was she just hearing birds on the roof, skittering around, and letting his imagination work her up into a frenzy about it? "Put your jeans on," she said to him, letting go of them. "Tammy. Listen to me -- "

"I am listening," she said, crossing to the door of the bedroom. "Put your jeans on."

She heard the rapping sound again. This time she thought perhaps she'd been wrong. It wasn't Maxine at all. It was somebody outside the house beating on the front door.

She went to the bedroom door and cautiously opened it. She was in time to see Maxine retreating across the hallway from the front door.

"What is it?" she whispered. Maxine looked up at her; by the expression on her face something had unsettled her. "I heard this knocking. Went to the door. And, Tammy, there was a light out there, shining in through the cracks in the door."

"So he's not having delusions," Tammy said.

She headed downstairs to comfort Maxine. As she did so she reported what she'd just heard Todd tell her. "Todd said there was something out there waiting for him. That's his turn of phrase: waiting for him. Apparently it sits on the roof a lot." She put her hand on Maxine's trembling shoulder. "Are you okay?"

"I am now. It just freaked me out."

"So you didn't open the door?"

"Well you can't open it, can you? It's cracked. But it's not much protection."

"Stay here."

So saying, Tammy crossed the hallway, gingerly slid through the broken door and stepped out onto the doorstep.

"Oh Jesus, be careful," Maxine murmured.

"There's nothing," she said.

"Are you sure?"

Maxine stepped out through the cracked door and they stood together on the step.

The last light of the afternoon had by now died away; but the moon had risen and was shedding its brightness through the trees to the right of the front door.

"Well, at least it's a beautiful evening," Maxine remarked, staring up at the light coming between the branches.

Tammy's thoughts were elsewhere. She stepped out of the house and onto the pathway. Then she turned around, running her gaze back and forth along the roof, looking for some sign, any sign whatsoever, of the creature that had made the noise up there. As far as she could see the roof was completely deserted.

"Nothing," she said to herself.

She glanced back at Maxine, who was still staring up at the moon. She was alarmed to see that the sight of the moonlight seemed to have brought Maxine to tears.

"What's wrong?" she said.

Maxine didn't reply. She simply stared slackly up at the tree. A few leaves fluttered down from the branches where the moonlight was sourced, and to Tammy's amazement the light began to slowly descend.

"Oh fuck," Tammy said very softly, realizing that this was not the moon.

Todd had been right. There was some entity here, its outer form consisting of raw light, its core unreadable. Whatever it looked like, it apparently had eyes, because it could see them clearly; Tammy had no doubt of that. She felt its scrutiny upon her. Not just upon her, in fact, in her. She was entirely transparent to it; or so she felt.

And as its study pierced her, she felt it ignite other images in her mind's eye. The house on Monarch Street where she was born appeared in front of her, its presence not insistent enough to blot out the world in which she was standing, but co-existing with it, neither sight seeming to sit uncomfortably beside the other. The door of the Monarch Street house opened, and her Aunt Jessica, her father's sister, came out onto the stoop. Aunt Jessica, of all people, whom she hadn't thought about in a very long time. Jessica the spinster aunt, smiling in the sunshine, and beckoning to her out of the past.

Not just beckoning, speaking.

"Your papa's at the fire station," she said, "Come on in now Tammy. Come on in."

She'd not liked Aunt Jessica over-much, nor had she had any great fear of her father. The fact that Aunt Jessica was there on the stoop was unremarkable; she used to come over for supper on every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, often taking care of Tammy and her brothers when Tammy's parents went out to see a movie or go dancing, which they'd liked to do. Even the line about Papa being at the fire station carried no especial weight. Papa was always at the fire station for one thing or another, because he wasn't just a fireman, he was the union organizer, and a fierce advocate for better pay and conditions. So there had always been meetings and discussions, besides his diurnal duties.

In short, the memory carried no particular measure of significance, except for the fact that it was a memory of hers, and that somehow this creature-angel or whatever it was-had got into her head to set it in motion. Was its purpose that of distraction? Perhaps so; being so perfectly commonplace. Tammy could slip into its embrace without protest, because it evoked neither great joy or great regret. It was just the past, there in front of her: momentarily real.

She thought of what Todd had said, about how the angel had appeared as his mother. Somehow the way Todd had described the process it had sounded altogether more sinister than this: more like a trap for his soul.

"Tammy?"

"Yes, I see it," she said to Maxine.

"What do you see?" Maxine said.

"It's just my Aunt Jessica -- "

"Well if I were you I'd look away," Maxine advised. Tammy didn't see why it was so important that she looked away.

"I'm okay, just watching," she said.

But Maxine had taken hold of her arm, and was gripping it so hard that it hurt. She wanted to turn and tell the woman to let go of her, but it was easier said than done. The image of the clapboard house on Monarch Street had in fact caught her up in its little loop. It was like a short length of film, running round and round.

The door would open, Aunt Jessica would beckon and speak her three lines:

"Your papa's at the fire station. Come on in, Tammy. Come on in."

Then she'd beckon again and turn round to step back into the house. The door would close. The dappled sunlight, falling through the branches of the old sycamore just to the right of number 38 Monarch Street, would move a little as a gust of summer wind passed through its huge, heavy branches. Then, after a beat, the door would open once again, and Auntie Jessica would reappear on the stoop with exactly the same smile on her face, exactly the same lines to speak.

"Look away," Maxine said again, this time more urgently.

The urgency got through to Tammy. Maybe I should do as she says, she thought; maybe this little picture-show isn't as innocent as it seems. Maybe I'm going to be stuck in this loop with the door and Jessica and the shadows coming through the sycamore forever.

A little spasm of panic rose in her. She made a conscious effort to avert her eyes, thinking of what Todd had said. But her mind's eye had become glued to the scene the angel had conjured, and she couldn't shake herself free of it. She forced herself to close her eyes but the loop was still there behind her eyelids. Indeed it carried more force there because it had nothing to compete with. She began to shake.

"Help me ... " she murmured to Maxine.

But there was no answer forthcoming.

"Maxine?"

There were beads of brightness in the image she could see in her mind's eye, and they were getting stronger. In spite of her panicked state, Tammy didn't have any difficulty figuring out what they signified. The angel was getting closer to her. It was using the cover of the looped memory to approach her, until she was within reach of it.

"Maxine!" she yelled, "Where the hell are you?"

In her mind's eye, the green door on Monarch Street was opening for perhaps the eleventh or twelfth time: smiling Aunt Jessica appearing to beckon and speak-

"Maxine?"

"Your papa's at the fire station -- "

"Maxine!"

She'd gone; that was the bitter truth of it. Seeing the angel approaching, and unable to pull Tammy out of its path, she'd done the sensible, self-protecting thing. She'd retreated.

The light in the scene on Monarch Street was getting brighter with every passing moment. She could feel its corrosive energies on her skin. What would the angel's luminescence do to her if it touched her? Cook her marrow in her bones? Boil away all her blood? Oh, God in Heaven. This wasn't a game: it was life or death. She had to find something to break the loop, before the light of the angelic projector got so hot it cremated her.

There was to be no help from Maxine, that was clear; so she was left with Todd. Where had he been the last time she'd seen him? Her thoughts were now so chaotic she couldn't even remember that.

No, wait; he'd been upstairs, hadn't he? She couldn't picture him (the loop was too demanding, the brightness too sickeningly strong: it overwhelmed every other image in her head, real or imagined) but she remembered that he'd been up in the master bedroom.

Oh, and he'd been naked. She remembered that too. Todd the naked ghost, slapping his hard dick around as though it was a toy that he'd suddenly discovered was unbreakable. For a moment the image of Jessica on the doorstep juddered, as though the sprockets had become caught in the gate for a moment. Her mind had found a tool to thrust into the mechanism. Actually, Todd's tool, bobbing at his groin, giving her its slit-eyed gaze.

Yes! She could almost see it-

Aunt Jessica's smiling image juddered a second time, then the brightness behind the picture started to press through her eyes, burning away the pupils, making her look momentarily demonic.

"Yoyo yoyo you-your-Papas-as-as-as-atat-atat-atat-the-the-the-the -- "

The woman was jerking round like a puppet being manipulated by someone in the early stages of a grand mal. The loop flipped back, and she was beckoning again, with the first syllable of her speech caught on her tongue.

Tammy ignored it. She had Todd's beautiful rod in her mind's eye, and it was strong enough to break the Angel's back.

"Go away," she told Aunt Jessica.

"Yo-yo-yo-yo -- "

"I said: Go away!"

There it was now: Todd's erection, clear as day. She made an intellectual assessment of it, to give solidity to the memory. It was a good eight inches long, circumcised, with a slight left-hand drift.

The light behind Aunt Jessica grew blindingly bright, burning away not only the old lady's figure, but the stoop and the summer tree. The image of Todd's manhood was getting stronger all the time, as though Tammy's pulse beats were feeding it blood; fattening it, glorifying it.

The angel's brilliance still made her skin itch, but she had the better of it now. Two, three more seconds and Monarch Street had disappeared completely, overtaken by the image of Todd's manhood.

"Maxine!" she yelled again.

There was still no reply. She put her head down, so when she opened her eyes she would be staring at the ground not at the angel's light. She half-expected to see Maxine sprawled on the ground at her feet, overcome by the angel's power. But no. There was nothing below her but the cracked pathway that led from the front door.

She turned on her heels and lifted her gaze a little. The front door was open; the light the angel shed washed the entire scene before her, taking its colour out, and throwing Tammy's shadow up against the wall.

She felt a perverse imperative to glance back over her shoulder; to put the weapon she'd summoned to the test one more time. But she persuaded herself from such nonsense, and stumbled back the way she and Maxine had come just a little while before.

Even before she reached the steps she heard Maxine sobbing inside. Enraged that she'd been left to face the enemy alone, but at least grateful that Maxine was alive, she climbed the steps, pushed the cracked front door closed as far as it would go, and went back into the house.

Maxine was sitting on the stairs, shaking.

On the floor above, Todd had just emerged from the master bedroom. He'd put on the jeans Tammy had fetched for him, and he was carrying a large gun.

"It won't do you any good," Tammy said, slamming the door behind her.

"I'm sorry," Maxine said, "I left you out there."

"So I noticed."

"I was yelling for you to come, but you wouldn't move. And that thing was just getting closer and closer."

"It wants me. It doesn't want you two."

"Well then," Tammy said, staring at the front of Todd's straining jeans and giving up a silent prayer to the efficacy of their contents. "We have two options. We either give you to the angel, and let it take you wherever the hell it intends to take you -- "

"Oh God no. Please. I don't want to go with that thing. I'd rather die."

"Stop waving the gun around and listen to me, Todd. I said we had two options."

"What's the other one?"

"We make a run for it."

TEN

It wasn't really a choice, given their circumstances.

They had to make a run for it, and the way Tammy looked at it, the sooner they did so the better for everybody. The angel could afford to play a waiting game, she assumed. Did it need nourishment? Probably not. Did it sleep or take private little moments in which to defecate? Again, probably not. It could most likely afford to lay siege to the house for days, weeks, even months, until its victims had no strength left to outwit it or outmaneuver it.

Maxine had gone to the guest bathroom to wash her ashen face. She didn't look much better when she got back. She was still pale and shaking. But in her usual straightforward manner she demanded that everyone agree to what was being contemplated here, in words of one or, at most, two syllables.

"Let's all get this straight," she said. "The thing outside is definitely an angel. That is to say, an agent of some divine power. Yes?"

"Yes," Todd said. He was sitting at the top of the stairs, only partially visible in the light from the dining room, which was the only light that now worked.

"And why's it here? Exactly. Just for the record."

"We know why it's here, Maxine," Tammy said.

"No, let's just be very clear about this. Because it seems to me we are playing with fire. This thing, this light -- "

"It wants my soul," Todd said. "Is that plain enough for you?"

"And you," Maxine said, glancing at Tammy to see how she was responding to all this, "are blithely suggesting we try and outrun it?"

"Yes."

"You're crazy."

Before Tammy could reply, Todd put in a final plea. "If we fail, we fail But at least let's give it a try."

"Frankly, I realize I'm outvoted on this, but I think this is insane." Maxine said. "If you really believe in your immortal soul, Todd, why the hell aren't you letting this divine agent come and get you?"

"I'm not saying I don't believe in my soul. I do. I swear I do. But you know me: I've never trusted agents," he chuckled, "Joke. Maxine, lighten up. It was a joke."

Maxine was not amused.

"Suppose it's the real thing," she said. "Suppose it's God, looking at us. At you."

"Maybe it is. But then again, maybe it isn't. This Canyon's always been full of deceits and illusions."

"And you think that's what it is?"

"I don't know. I just don't trust it. I'd prefer to stick around here a little longer than go off with it."

"Here? You want to stay in this dump? Todd, it's not going to be standing for more than another week."

"So maybe I'll set off across America, I don't know. I just got nothing to do. Even though I'm dead."

"And suppose we're pissing off higher powers?" Maxine said. "Have you thought about that?"

"You mean God? If God really wants me, He'll find a way to get me. Right? He's God. But if He doesn't ... if I can slip off and enjoy myself for a few years ... "

Maxine threw a troubled glance at Tammy. "And you go along with all this?"

"If Todd doesn't feel -- "

"You were the one saying prayers out there."

"Let me finish. If Todd doesn't feel he's lived his full life, it's his choice."

"The point is: you've had all the life you're going to get," Maxine said to him. Then to Tammy, "We're talking to a dead man. Something we would not be doing outside Coldheart Canyon."

"Things are different here ... " Todd murmured, remembering what Katya had told him.

"Damn right they are," Maxine said. "But the rules of this place end somewhere north of Sunset. And it's only because of the power that was once in this house that you're getting a chance to play this damn-fool game with God."

"A game with God," Tammy said, so quietly Maxine barely heard what she'd said.

"What?"

"I was just saying: a game with God. I didn't think you'd care about something like that. Aren't you an atheist?"

"Once, I might have -- "

Todd stood up. "Hush. Hush."

The women stopped talking. Todd looked up towards the vault of the turret, with its holes that showed the night sky.

"Stay very still," he said.

As he spoke, the light came over the top of the turret, its motion eerily smooth and silent. Three beams of its silvery luminescence came in through holes in the roof. They slid over the walls, like spotlights looking for a star to illuminate. For a moment the entity seemed to settle directly on lop of the turret, and one of the beams of light went all the way down the stairwell to scrutinize the debris at the bottom. Then, after a moment's perusal, it began to move off again, at the same glacial speed.

Only when it had gone completely, did anybody speak again. It was Maxine who piped up first.

"Why doesn't it just come in and get you?" she said. "That's what I can't figure out. I mean, it's just a body of light. It can go anywhere it chooses, I would have thought. Under the door. Down through that hole -- " she pointed up to the turret. "It's not like the house is burglar-proof."

Tammy had been thinking about that very question. "I think maybe this place makes it nervous," she said. "That's my theory, for what it's worth. All the evil this house has seen."

"I don't think angels are afraid of anything," Maxine said.

"Then maybe it's just repulsed. I mean, it's like a dog, right, sniffing out souls? Its senses are really acute. Think how this place must stink. Especially down there." She glanced down the stairwell, where the angel's light had lingered for a moment before moving on. "The Devil's Country was down there. People suffered, died, horrible deaths. If I was an angel, I'd stay out."

"If you were an angel, my love," Maxine said, "God would be in a lot of trouble."

This won a laugh out of Tammy. "All right, you've heard my theories."

"I think you're both right," Todd said. "If the light wanted to come inside the house it could. It did once, remember? But I think between my not wanting to go and the smell of what this house has seen, it's probably figured it'll wait. Sooner or later the house is going to start falling down. And then I'll come out and it'll have me."

"That's why we should surprise it," Tammy said. "Go now, while it's least expecting anyone to leave."

"You don't know what it's expecting," Maxine put in. "It could be listening to every damn word we say, as far as you can tell."

"Well I'm going to try for it," Todd said, pushing his gun into his trousers, muzzle to muzzle. "If you don't want to come, that's fine. Maybe you could just divert it somehow. Give me a chance to get to the car.

"No, we're going," Tammy said, speaking on behalf of Maxine, whose response to this was a surrendering shrug.

"It is preposterous," she pointed out however. "Who the hell ever outran an angel?"

"How do we know?" Todd said, "Maybe people do it all the time."

They stood together at the door and listened for twenty, twenty-five minutes, seeing if there was some pattern to the motion of the light. In that time it went up onto the roof twice, and made half a circuit of the house, but then seemed to give up for no particular reason. It made no sound. Nor did its light at any point seem to alter in intensity. It was-perhaps predictably-constant and patient, like a hunter sitting by a burrow, knowing that sooner or later its occupant must show its nose.

About nine fifteen or so, Tammy went up to the master bedroom to scan the view across the Canyon and down towards Century City. She'd scoured the kitchen for dried goods and tinned goods that had survived either the ghosts' rampages or the passage of time and had found many tins had been punctured, and the food inside was rotten; but she collected up a few cans of edible stuff: baked beans, peaches, hot dogs in brine. And then, after some digging around, found an opener, and made up a plate of unlikely gastronomic bed-fellows; and took them upstairs to the balcony.

The Canyon had gone pin-drop quiet. If she hadn't already known they had an agent of Creation's Maker in their vicinity, the spooked silence of every cicada, coyote and night bird would have confirmed the fact. It was eerie, standing there, watching the dark hollow of the Canyon, and the few stars that were visible above it, and listening to the empty dark. She could hear the click of the fork against her teeth, the noise of her throat as it swallowed the beans and bites of hot-dogs.

"I used to love hot-dogs," came a voice from the dark room behind her. It was Todd. "You know, ordinary food. I never really got a taste for the more sophisticated stuff."

"You want some of this?" she asked him, glancing round as she proffered the plate.

"No thanks," he said. "I haven't really got an appetite anymore."

"Maybe ghosts aren't supposed to eat."

"Yeah that's what I figured," he replied, coming out onto the balcony. Then, "Do you think they fuck? Because if they don't I'm going to have to find some other way to get this down." He glanced down at the lump beneath his bath-towel.

"Cold showers."

"Yeah." He chuckled. "Everything comes full circle, doesn't it? Cold hot-dogs for you. Cold showers for me. Nothing really changes."

"I don't know," she said. "This isn't normal for me. Conversations with-if you'll excuse the phrase-dead movie stars in million dollar houses ... "

"-with an angel waiting on the front door step) -- "

"Right."

She'd finished her ad hoc meal, and went back into the bedroom to set he plate down. While she was doing so she heard Todd call her name, very softly.

She went back out onto the balcony.

"What is it?"

"Look."

She looked, following the direction of his gaze. There was a glow of light in the densely-forested cleft of the Canyon. It looked as though it had settled in the fork of a tree.

"I guess Raphael must have got bored."

"Is that his name? Raphael?"

"I don't know. It's just the only angel's name I know. Angels aren't my strong point. His real name's probably Marigold. The point is: it's wandered off. We should go while we've got the opportunity. It may not stay down there very long."

"Right. I'll go and find Maxine."

"Wait," Todd said, catching hold of her arm. "Just one thing before you

"What's that?"

"I want your honest opinion ... "

"On what?"

"Do you think she's right? Am I screwing with my immortal soul, trying to escape this thing?"

"You know, I was wondering about that when I was eating my hot-dogs. My Aunt Jessica was a church-lady all her life. She used to go and arrange the flowers on the altar three times a week. And she used to say: God sees everything. This was when I was a little girl and she thought I'd been naughty. God sees everything, she'd say, wagging her finger. So you can't ever hide from Him. I think He can hear us right now. And at least she would have believed He was."

"And you?"

"Who knows? I used to believe her. And I suppose there's a little part of me that still thinks wherever I am, whatever I'm doing-good, bad or indifferent-God's got His eye on me. Or Her eye."

"So ... "

"So if He doesn't want something to happen He can stop it."

"Oh, we're back to that. If God doesn't want me to get out of here, He'll make sure I don't."

"Right."

Todd allowed a little smile to creep onto his face. He looked like a mischievous six-year-old. "So what do we think when we see that ... " He nodded to the light in the distance. "Isn't it like it's looking the other way?"

Now Tammy smiled.

"Maybe," she said. "Maybe God's saying: I'll give you a chance. Just this once."

Todd leaned forward and kissed Tammy on the cheek. "Oh I like that," he said. "Just this once."

"It's just a theory."

"It's all I need right now."

"So you want to go?"

He paused a moment and studied the light in the Canyon below. The angel had apparently paused down there, either to contemplate the loveliness of Creation, or to fall asleep for a while. Whatever the reason, it was no longer moving.

"If we're going to go," Todd said, "this is the time. Agreed?"

"Agreed."

"I'll go get dressed."

They found Maxine (who had in turn found a bottle of vodka, and had drunk a third of it on an empty stomach, which wasn't perhaps good for her state of mind, but what the hell? It was done). Tammy explained to her what she and Todd had seen from the balcony, and that it was time to try and make a getaway. Pleasantly lubricated by the vodka, Maxine was ready for an escape, in fact she was first to the door, bottle in hand, remarking that the sooner they were all out of this fucking house the better for everyone.

Tammy led the way, clutching Maxine's car-keys tightly in her palm, to keep their merest tinkle from reaching the ears of the angel. The Canyon was now completely dark. Even the few stars that had been lit overhead earlier were now covered by cloud, as though-Tammy thought-the angel had extinguished them. It was the kind of notion she wouldn't have given room to on any other night but this, in any other place but this; but who knew where the bounds of possibility lay tonight? It was ridiculous, in a way, to imagine that an angel could blow out stars. But wasn't it equally bizarre that there should be a dead man walking in her footsteps, planning to outrun heaven? Incident by incident, wonder by wonder, her adventures in the Canyon had escalated in outlandishness; as though in preparation for this night's excesses. First the ghosts and their children then the Devil's Country; now this.

They moved without mishap to the gate; paused there to be sure the coast was clear and then moved on-again without incident-out into the street. Nobody said a word.

If the silence of the natural world had been uncanny from the balcony it was ten times stranger now they were out on the road, where there would usually be a chirping carpet laid out all around them, and trilling songs in the darkened canopy. But here, now, nothing. It made what was already strange enough, stranger still. It was as though every living thing from the most ferocious coyote to the tiniest flea, was intimidated silence and stillness by the scale of power in their midst. The only things foolish enough to move were these three human beings, stumblings through the darkness.

All was going well until Tammy caught her foot in a pothole and fell sideways. Todd was there to catch her, but he wasn't quick enough to stop the short cry of alarm that escaped her as she slipped. It was the loudest thing that had been heard in the Canyon in a long while; its echo coming back off the opposite wall.

She silently mouthed the word damn; then, taking a deep breath, she went to the car, adrenaline making her a little more efficient than she might have been otherwise, and opened the door. The car announced that there was a door open with an irritating little ping, ping, ping. Well, hell, it scarcely mattered now. They were committed to this. The angel was already pricking up its ears, no doubt. "Get in," she hissed.

Todd ducked into the back. Maxine opened the passenger door and slid in with something less than grace. Then she slammed the door so hard it was probably audible in Santa Barbara. "Sorry," she slurred. "Force of habit."

Todd leaned over from the back seat and put his hand on Tammy's shoulder.

"Give it all you've got," he said.

"I'll do what I can," she said, and slipped the key into the ignition. Even as she was instructing her fingers to turn the key, the moon came out above Coldheart Canyon. Except, of course, that it wasn't the moon, it was the messenger of God, roused from its meditations, and climbing a silent ladder into the dark air over their heads. "Fuck and double fuck," Todd said.

It moved straight towards the house, and-perhaps because the evening was a little damp, and the marine layer had come in off the ocean-it had collected around it a cloak of mist. Now, instead of simply being a light, it looked like a cloud with a white fire burning at its core; trailing a tail like a comet.

Tammy wasn't intimidated. She turned on the car engine. It roared, reassuringly loud.

"Handbrake!" Maxine said. "Handbrake!"

"I've got it," Tammy said. She took off the handbrake, and put the vehicle into gear. Then she slammed her foot down, and they took off.

"Todd!" she yelled over her shoulder. "I want you to keep an eye on that sonofabitch for me."

Todd was already doing just that, peering out of the back window. "It's still above the house," he reported. "Maybe it thinks we're still in there."

"I don't think it's that dumb somehow," Maxine said.

Tammy drove the car up the street, and around two wide curves, before she found a place where it was possible to turn round. It was a squealing, messy five or six point turn in the narrow street, and the last maneuver delivered the back end of the car into the shrubbery. No matter, Tammy hauled the wheel round and accelerated. Todd went to the other side of the back seat, and looked out.

"Huh," he said.

"What?"

"The damn thing still hasn't moved."

"Maybe it's lost interest," Tammy said.

It was a forlorn hope, of course, scarcely worth voicing. But every moment the thing failed to come after them was blessed.

"By the way," she said, as she turned the first wide corner south of the house, "I got a little taste of what that thing does to you, Todd -- "

"You mean the memories?"

"Yeah."

"Did it freak you out?"

"No. It was just sort of banal, really. It has a memory of my Aunt Jessica -- "

"It's coming."

"Oh shit!"

Tammy glanced in her rear view window: nothing. Looked over her shoulder: nothing.

"I don't see it!"

"It's after us."

"I don't see it!"

She caught a glimpse of Todd's face in the mirror, his eyes turned directly upwards; and she knew where it was. The next moment there was a light on the road all around the car, as though a police helicopter had appeared over the ridge with a spotlight, and caught them in it.

There was a turn up ahead. She took it at sixty-five miles an hour, wheels shrieking, and for a moment the cloud overshot the road, and she was driving in near darkness. Losing the light so suddenly left her utterly disorientated and she took the next curve, which came fifteen yards after the previous one, so tightly that the lefthand side of the car was clawed by twigs and branches. Todd whooped.

"Hell, woman! You're quite a driver! Why didn't you tell me?"

"You never asked!" Tammy said, steering the car back into the middle of the road.

"We could have gone drag-racing together. I always wanted to find a woman I could go drag-racing with."

"Now you tell me."

Another curve came up, as tight as the one before. But this time she took it without any problem. They were halfway down the hill by now, and Tammy was beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, they were going to reach Sunset Boulevard without their pursuer catching up with them.

"If we do get to Sunset," she said, "what happens then? Do you think the damn thing will give up?"

She'd no sooner spoken than the light reappeared on the street ahead of them. It was no longer hovering in the air above the street but had descended to block the road from one side to the other.

Tammy slammed on the brakes, but as she did so a sliver of the angel's light came through the windshield to meet her mind, its freight familiar from their previous encounter. The road ahead of her was instantly erased, replaced with the facade of the house on Monarch Street. She heard Maxine, somewhere to her right, let out a yell of panic, and then felt her reaching over to wrest control of the car from her. There was a brief, chaotic moment when Tammy's panic overwhelmed the angel's gift of memory, and she saw, to her horror, that the car had swerved off the road and was speeding into the dense thicket that grew between the trees. The image lasted for a moment only. Then it was gone, the approaching trees, Maxine's fumbling hands, her curses: all of it erased.

In its place, Tammy was standing at the door of her Aunt Jessica's house, in the dappled sunlight, and Aunt Jessica was telling her that her papa had gone down to the fire station --

The car struck a tree, and the windshield smashed, but Aunt Jessica smiled on. They hit another tree, and another, though Tammy saw none of it. She didn't hear the splinter of wood, or the shrieks from Maxine. Nor did she hear the din of tearing metal as a door was torn off. Her foot was still jammed on the brakes but they didn't seem to be slowing the vehicle's momentum. What eventually brought the car to a halt was a boulder, which lifted it up and threw it over on its left side.

At the instant of impact the angel's vision faltered again, and Tammy saw the world as it really was-a blur of tumbling trees and raining glass. She saw her arms in front of her, her white-knuckled hands still seizing the wheel. She saw blood on her fingers, and then a little storm of shredded leaves coming in through the broken window, their sweetness reminding her, even in the midst of this chaos, of quieter times. Mown lawns on a Sunday afternoon; grass in her hair when she'd been play-wrestling with Sandra Moses from next door. Pieces of green memory, which flickered into her mind's eye between the tumbling view through the windshield and the last, brief appearance of Aunt Jessica's doorstep.

She knew it was the last because this time, as the car came to a halt, and Tammy slumped in her seat, her consciousness decided to forsake the pain of her broken bones (of which there were many) or the sound of Maxine's screaming (of which there was much) and just go away into the reassuring gloom of Aunt Jessica's house.

"Why did you not come when I called?" Aunt Jessica demanded. Kindly though she was, she didn't like to be disobeyed.

Tammy looked at the woman through her eleven-year-old's eyes, and fumbled for an answer to the old lady's question. But nothing she could say to Jessica would make any sense, now would it? Canyon, car, angel, crash. How could she possibly understand?

Anyway, Aunt Jessica didn't really want an answer. She had her niece inside the house where she wanted her, and that was all that was really important. Tammy walked down the hallway, into this brown comfortable memory, and let Aunt Jessica close the door behind her, so that the screaming and the raining glass and the world turned upside down could be forgotten, and she could go wash her hands before sitting down to a plate of Aunt Jessica's special meatloaf.

ELEVEN

It was night in Coldheart Canyon, and though it was the wrong season for the Santa Anas proper to be blowing, the wind that came up about a quarter to midnight was warm for a night in early spring. It carried away the smell of burned rubber and spilled gasoline; it even took away the stench of the vodka-laced vomit Maxine had ejected. With the vodka out of her system, she found she could think a little better. With trembling fingers she unfastened her seat-belt and fell through the open door, out of the seat in which she'd been hanging and on to the grass.

She lay there for a long time, alternately sobbing and being stern with herself. Luckily-if this can be said to be luck-she'd had two previous experiences with car wrecks, the second of which had been substantially worse than this one, in that it had happened on the 101 in the middle of the morning rush, and involved nineteen vehicles and eight fatalities (one of them a passenger in the same stretch limo in which Maxine had been travelling). She had suffered a hairline skull fracture, a dislocated shoulder, and back problems that her chiropractor had blithely announced would be with her for the rest of her life.

Unless she was very much mistaken, she was not in anything like as bad a condition after this little fun-ride as she'd been on that occasion. Shaken up, yes; dizzy, sick and a little hysterical, certainly. But when she finally crawled away from the car, and got to her feet, she was pleased to discover that she could stand up quite well, and that nothing hurt with that piercing hurt that suggested something had been broken or punctured.

"You must have had an angel watching over you."

She looked round at the wit who'd spoken. It was Todd. He was close to the car, trying to wrench open the door on the driver's side.

"Is Tammy still in there?" Maxine said.

"Yeah. I'm afraid she is."

"How does she look?"

"How the hell do I know?" Todd remarked. "It's too dark to see."

Yes, it was dark. And though that wasn't good for finding out how Tammy was doing, it did suggest the absence of their pursuer.

"It's still here," Todd said, "Just in case you were wondering."

"Where?"

He pointed up. Maxine followed his finger. The angel's light brightened the high branches of a nearby pine. It wasn't as steady as it had been up at the house. In fact, it was fluttering nervously, which made Maxine picture a flock of luminous birds up there, all shaking out their feathers after a rainstorm, and hopping from bough to bough in their agitated state.

"Hey you!" Maxine yelled up at the light, too frustrated and angry to care about the protocol of what she was doing. "Tammy could be bleeding to death in there. How about a hand down here?"

"I don't think it's interested in helping anyone but me. I had to beg it to let me get you two sorted out before it ... you know ... came and took me."

"You mean you talked to it?"

"Yeah. While you were unconscious."

"And you promised -- "

"I promised I'd go with it, as soon as you two were safe. That was the deal."

"Huh. You made a deal with an angel."

"What else was I going to do? I had to do something. And it was my stupidity that got us into this mess." He put his head through the broken window. "At least she's still breathing. But she's also bleeding."

He lifted his hands and displayed his palms for Maxine. They were blood-soaked.

"Oh God."

"You know what?"

"What?"

"You're going to have to go for help. Because that sonofabitch isn't going to let me out of its sight. Can you do that?"

"Can I walk? Yes I can walk. Can I walk as far as Sunset?" She drew a deep breath. "I don't know. I can try."

"Okay then. You go get someone to help Tammy. And for God's sake be quick about it. I don't think she's got much time. I'll stay here with her. Not that I've got much choice."

"A deal's a deal."

"A deal's a deal."

"Have you got a cigarette?"

Todd stood up and dug in his jeans pocket. "Yep." He pulled out a crushed packet, and examined its contents. "Two Marlboro Lights. One each."

"Matches?"

"Never without." He came over to Maxine, and gave her the better preserved of the cigarettes.

"You light it," she said.

He put both the cigarettes in his mouth and lit them from a single flame. Then he handed Maxine's back to her.

"Didn't somebody do that in a movie?" he said.

"God, you are an ignoramus. Yes, of course. Paul Henreid, in Now, Voyager. I showed it to you."

"Yeah," he smiled. "I remember. Maxine Frizelle's Ten Favorite Moments."

She drew on the cigarette, and started to walk back along the path carved through the thicket by the car, to the street.

"Hurry." Todd said.

Tammy ate her meatloaf in silence, thinking of nothing in particular. Aunt Jessica busied herself in the kitchen, coming in now and again to be sure that Tammy was eating all her vegetables. If the plate wasn't cleaned, there'd be no dessert. No pie or cake. Aunt Jessica wasn't a very good cook but she knew what her niece liked. Pie and cake, preferably with ice cream.

"You're going to be a big girl," she said to Tammy when she brought through the slice of peach cobbler and ice cream. "Big all over. And that can get a girl into a lot of trouble."

"Yes, Auntie."

"Especially with the boys."

"I know, Auntie."

"So you have to be extra careful. Boys take advantage of big girls, and I don't want to see you hurt."

"I won't let them, Auntie."

"Good," Aunt Jessica said, though she didn't sound much convinced. Back into the kitchen she went, leaving Tammy to enjoy her cobbler a la mode.

The first couple of mouthfuls tasted good. She ate them thinking of nothing in particular. The clock ticked on the mantelpiece. Aunt Jessica's canary chirped in its cage.

She took a third mouthful. For some reason it didn't taste as good as the first two; almost as though there was a piece of bad fruit in it. She put her napkin up to her mouth and spat out whatever it was, but the taste of dirt, and the gritty texture of it, remained on her tongue and in her throat.

She put down her spoon, and put her fingers into her mouth.

"Wait ... " somebody said.

It wasn't Aunt Jessica who spoke to her, however. It was a man's voice. A gentle man.

"There's ... something ... in my mouth ... " she said, though she wasn't quite sure who she was talking to.

"Dirt," the man told her. "It's just dirt. Can you spit it out? Spit hard."

She glanced back towards the kitchen. Aunt Jessica was at the sink, washing pans. She wouldn't approve of Tammy spitting in the house.

"I should go outside," she said.

"You are outside," the man replied.

As he spoke to her she felt the room lurch sideways-the table, the mantelpiece, the canary in his cage.

"Oh no -- " she said. "What's happening?"

"It's all right," the man said, softly.

"Auntie!" she called.

"No, honey. I'm not your auntie. It's Todd. Now spit. You've got dirt in your mouth."

The world lurched again, only this time there was somebody's arms to catch her, and she opened her eyes to see the face of the handsomest man in the world looking down at her. He was smiling.

"There you are," he said. "Oh thank God. I thought I'd lost you."

As the last morsels of Aunt Jessica's peach cobbler melted away she remembered where she was and how she'd got here. The angel on the road, the trees, the car overturning and glass shattering.

"Where's Maxine?"

"She's fine. She went to get help. But she's been away a long time so I had to drag you out of there myself. It took a little doing. But I did some bandaging. There was a first aid kit in the trunk. I got the bleeding to stop."

"I was eating peach cobbler."

"You were hallucinating is what you were doing."

"Only there was dirt in it." She spat, with as much gusto as she could manage. It made her body hurt to do it, though. Her stomach, her head. She winced.

"You did good," Todd said, "Maxine got out with scrapes."

"It was pure luck," she said. "I was driving too fast, and that damn angel got in my way." She dropped her voice. "Did it leave?"

Todd shook his head, and directed her attention up at the tree where the angelic presence still sat. It was quite composed now. It had made its arrangements, and it was waiting.

"I'm afraid it's going to want me to go with it very soon," he said. "I promised I'd go."

"You did?"

"You didn't try and make a run for it?"

"How could I? You were in there, hurt. I couldn't just run out on you."

"But you might have escaped."

"Ha. You know, I think I did," he said.

"I don't understand."

"Oh ... not quite the way I thought I was going to. But I escaped being a selfish fuck-up." He looked into her eyes. "You think I would have had an angel come to fetch me before I met you? No way. It would have been straight down to hell for Todd Pickett."

He was making a joke of it, of course; but there was something here that came from his heart. She could see it in his eyes, which still continued to stare deep into hers. "I want to thank you," he said, leaning down and kissing her cheek. "Maybe next time round it'll be our turn, eh?"

"Our turn?"

"Yeah. You and me, born next-door to one another. And we'll know."

"I want you to stop this now," she told him gently. There were tears blurring her vision, and she didn't like that. He'd be gone soon enough, and she wanted to have him in focus for as long as possible.

He looked up. "Uh-oh. I hear the cavalry," he said. Tammy could hear them too. Sirens coming up from the bottom of the hill. "Sounds like I should make my exit," Todd said. The sirens were getting louder. "Damn. Do they have to come so quick?" There were tears in his eyes now, dropping onto Tammy's cheek. "Shit, Tammy. I don't want to go."

"Yes, you do," she said. She fumbled for his hand, and finding it, squeezed it. "You've had a good time. You know you have."

"Yeah. Oh yeah. I've had a great time."

"Better than most."

"True enough."

The light was descending from the tree, and for the first time-either because the angel was close to finishing its business, or because Tammy herself was hovering on the edge of life-she saw the contents of the light more clearly. There was no attempt to confuse her with memories now; no Monarch Street, no Aunt Jessica at the door. There was a human shape neither male nor female, standing in the light, and for a moment, as it came to stand behind Todd, she thought it was Todd-or some other face of his, some gentle, eternal face that no camera would ever capture, nor words would ever show.

He stroked her face with the back of his fingers, and then he stood up.

"Next time," he murmured.

"Yeah."

Then his smile, that trademark smile of his which had made Tammy weak with infatuation when she'd first seen it, dimmed a little; its departure not signifying sadness, only the appearance of a certain ease in him, which his smile had concealed all these years. He didn't need to try so hard any longer. He didn't need to charm or please.

She tried to catch his eye one last time-to have one last piece of him, even now. But he was already looking away; looking at where he was really headed.

She heard him speak one last time, and there was such happiness in his voice, she began to cry like a baby.

"Dempsey?" he said. "Here boy! Here!"

She turned her head towards the light, thinking she might glimpse him even now, but as she did so, she heard-or thought she heard-the angel utter a word of its own; a seamless word, like a ribbon wrapped around everything she'd ever dreamed of knowing or being. It wasn't loud, but it erased the sound of the sirens, for which she was grateful; then it moved off up into the darkness of the Canyon.

Knowing she was safe in the hands of those who would take care of her, and one, Maxine, who loved her, she followed the ribbon of the word up the flanks of Coldheart Canyon, skimming the darkened earth.

And as the woman and the word passed over the ground together, the creatures of the Canyon forgot their fear. They began to make music again; cicadas in the grass, nightbirds in the trees; and on the ridge, the coyotes, yapping fit to burst. Not because they had a kill, but because they had life.