Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

FOUR

They were too late. It had been twilight when they'd entered the Pool House. Now it was night. But that wasn't the only change that had taken place in the time they'd lingered there. The air Todd breathed when he stepped outside again was something more than a little colder, a little darker, than it had been. Though there was no wind (at least the trees weren't moving), still he felt movement around and against him; a delicate touch on his arm, on his shoulder, something touching the back of his head. He looked at Katya. There was precious little light out here, but he could see her face with curious clarity, almost as though it were lit from within. Her expression was one of considerable pleasure.

"Say hello, Todd . . ." she told him.

"Who to?"

"Oh come on. Stop pretending to yourself. You know they're here."

There was something brushing his cheek, lightly. He flicked it away, as though it might be a moth, though he knew it wasn't.

"I don't understand what's going on," he said, his words a kind of plea. He'd thought earlier that he could do without answers; that having her here was enough. Now he was discomfited again; he wanted some explanations for these mysteries, which multiplied every time he turned round. First Katya and her stories of the Gaming Room, then the guest-house and the life-masks and the posters, then the bath, and the Terror. Now this: the Pool House and its history of debaucheries, locked away for posterity; and as if all that weren't enough, they'd stepped out into these moth-wing touches against his cheek, his arm, his groin. He wanted to know what it all meant; but he was afraid of the answer. No, that wasn't it. He was afraid he already knew the answer.

"You don't need me to tell you what's going on here," Katya said, echoing his thoughts. "You can feel them, can't you?"

Oh God, yes, he could feel them. These weren't moths or mosquitoes around him. They were people. People, hidden in the air.

"Say it."

"Ghosts."

"Yes. Of course. Ghosts."

"Oh, Jesus."

"The Canyon's full of ghosts."

"I don't believe in ghosts."

"You don't have to believe," she said. "It's nothing to do with believing or not believing. They're here. All around you. Just let yourself see them. You know they're here."

Of course he knew. In his gut, he'd known all along there was some mystery like this waiting in the wings. And what Katya said about belief was right. Whether he believed in the Life Everlasting or not was a grand irrelevance. The dead were here. He could feel their fingers, their breaths, their stares. And now, as they pressed closer, he began to see them. He had to work up some spit before he could speak again.

"Why can I see you and I'm only now seeing them?" he asked.

"Because I'm not dead, Todd. And if you're very good, in a little while I'll show you why. You're going to like it too. My special room—"

At the mention of the room, the air, or rather those who moved invisibly through it, became agitated. The number of touches that Todd felt doubled, tripled. Apparently Katya felt them too, and she was somewhat irritated by them.

"Calm down, calm down," she said.

There were subtle smears of light in front of Todd, as though the emotion the ghosts were feeling—spurred by Katya's mention of the room— was causing them to show themselves. He thought he saw a face in one of the smears, or some part of a face: a row of perfect teeth; the gleam of a bright blue eye. The more he thought he saw, the more there was to support his suspicion. The smears grew more cogent, painting the forms of faces and shoulders and hands. They lasted only a little time—like fireworks, bursting into glorious life, then dying away—but each time one was ignited its life lasted a little longer, and the form it etched in the darkness made more sense to him.

There were people everywhere around him. Not just a few. Dozens of them; the ghosts of parties past, lining up to touch the living.

"You begin to see them, don't you?" Katya said.

"Yes," he replied breathlessly. "I do ... begin ... to see them."

"Pretty people."

More than pretty. Beautiful; and in many cases famous. One woman— was it Jean Harlow?—wandered in front of him with her glittering dress torn away to expose her breasts. She'd come and gone so quickly it was hard for Todd to be sure, but she seemed to have bite-marks on her flesh, clustered around her nipples. She'd no sooner passed from sight than two figures, tied together with ropes that went from neck to neck, came into view. Both were male. Both were naked. Both shone with a mixture of sweat and blood. This would have been distressing enough; but it was their smiles, their lunatic smiles, which made Todd flinch.

"Sal and Jimmy," Katya said. "They fool around like that all the time. It's a little lynching game."

He pulled his hand out of hers. "This is too much."

"It's all right," she said. "There's nothing to be afraid of."

He waved them away, like a child trying to ward off nightmares. "I don't want to see them."

Laughter came out of the darkness to meet his demand. The ghosts were apparently much amused. Their laughing made faces blossom all round him. Several he could name: famous beauties, returned to their perfection in this bizarre after-life, as though they'd remembered themselves as their public would have willed them to be. Merle Oberon and George Sanders, Mary Pickford and Veronica Lake.

Todd started to retreat up the lawn, still waving them off. The phantoms came in giddy pursuit.

"All right, enough!" Katya yelled at them. "I said enough!"

Her word was apparently law, even in such stellar company as this. The laughter rapidly subsided, and the divine faces stopped pressing toward him.

He took the moment to hasten his retreat, turning his back on the assembly and hurrying back in what he hoped was the general direction of the house. His thoughts were in chaos. It seemed at that moment that his life since Burrows had been one long downward spiral into a kind of insanity.

"Wait, love!" Katya had come after him, her voice as pliant as ever. She caught up with him.

"I'm losing my mind," he murmured. His hands went to his face, pressing his fingers into his tender flesh, as though the pain might help drag him back from the brink.

"You're not crazy, you're just seeing things clearly for the first time."

"Well I don't want to see them."

"Why not? Isn't it reassuring to know that death means nothing? That there's life after death? Pleasure after death."

"Pleasure. You call that—" He glanced back at the Pool House, where he'd seen the excesses of so many of these people, recorded for posterity.

"We had no shame then. We have even less now."

As if to prove Katya's point there was an eruption of libidinous laughter from somewhere nearby, and Todd followed the sound to see a woman tied up in the trees, naked but for a long string of pearls which ran like converging rivulets between her breasts. Her wrists were bound together, and her arms lifted high above her head, so that she hung, her pale body shaped like a bow, her toes grazing the ground. It was she who was laughing, despite the apparent vulnerability of her situation. There was a man on the ground between her legs, licking the base of her feet, while another, standing behind her and massaging her breasts, bit into the tender flesh of her shoulder and neck. The hands went from her breasts down to her groin, and parted the lips of her pussy, from which came a shimmering arc, raining down onto the man adoring at her feet.

The recipient began to masturbate, obviously moved to fever-pitch by the shower.

Aware of Katya's gaze, Todd glanced over at her.

"Would you like to fuck her?" she said.

The girl was beautiful, with long red hair and that frothy laugh of hers, which sounded so very much more innocent than what she was up to.

"She's yours if you want her. Ava!"

The girl looked up.

"This is Todd," Katya said.

"Hello, Todd."

"Go on," Katya said. "Don't worry: I'm not going to get jealous. I'd like to see how you give pleasure to a woman."

Despite the hint of judgment in this remark, Todd might have taken the opportunity to have the woman if the man at Ava's feet hadn't suddenly begun to moan, and raising his hips off the ground ejected a copious load of semen. The sight of this eruption was enough to keep Todd at bay.

"Another time," he said to Ava, moving away.

She called after him, but he didn't look back.

"There's plenty more where she came from," Katya said, catching up with him. Her hand casually brushed the front of his pants, as though to make the point that she knew he was aroused. "You should go to one of them," she said.

"Why?"

"Just to see what it's like . . ."

"Fucking a ghost?"

"If you want to put it that way."

"I don't know. It's weird. I'm not sure—"

Her hand went back to his hard-on. "Yes you are. You love the idea."

Her hand went from his groin to his wrist, which she caught hold of, drawing him away from Ava into a kind of bower lined with honeysuckle and night-blooming jasmine, their mingled perfumes so strong they were practically intoxicating. It was darker here than it had been under the trees where Ava hung, but Todd could see bodies on the ground, in various combinations of coupling. Somebody reached down from a branch overhead, and ran his or her fingers through Todd's hair; someone else came up behind him and pulled his shirt out from his trousers. Again, he looked for Katya; and again found her close by, smiling.

"Katya?"

A girl's voice, off to the right, and Todd saw a naked young woman being carried toward Katya on the shoulders of three men, one at her head, the other two supporting her knees, in such a way as to hold her legs wide open. Even in the dim light Todd could see what a gloriously tender sight the girl presented. She had been shaved between her legs, making her look even younger than she was, which was surely less than twenty.

"Lick me, Katya," she said, her voice dreamy. "Will you please? Nobody does it to me like you. Lick me deep."

Katya glanced round at Todd.

"Do you mind?"

"Help yourself," he replied, as though the girl were a plate set before her.

Katya smiled, her hands going up to the insides of the girl's thighs, venturing up to the spot where they met but then before they quite reached the place and offered any satisfaction, retreated again. It was a tantalizing game, and it drove the girl crazy with anticipation.

"Oh please," she said. "Please, Katya, please."

Todd stepped a little to the side so as to have a better view of what was unfolding here. Katya had very quickly bared her breasts, so that now, as she approached the divide of the girl's legs, her nipples stroked her partner's thighs. Her hands were delicately parting the girl's labia, as though investigating the most exquisite of flowers.

Todd could feel the blood thumping at his groin. Was there no end to Katya's capacity to surprise him? Whenever he thought he was beginning to get a grasp of the woman, she changed the rules in some subtle fashion and found a new way to astonish him. Was this really the same woman he'd discovered in bed a while ago, looking like a disheveled angel?

Katya glanced back at him one last time—just to be sure that he was indeed watching her—then she applied her mouth to the girl's flesh.

The recipient of this tonguing let out a long, contented sigh, stretching out on her bed of hands, opening her legs a little wider. Katya proceeded to press deeper into her, advancing with lickings and nibblings, occasionally seeming to murmur against the woman's sex. The girl was no longer relaxed. She had grabbed fistfuls of the hair of the men who supported her knees, pulling herself up almost into a sitting position one moment then falling back, her body convulsed with little shudders, her tiny nipples hard, her flat belly shiny with sweat.

Katya slowly escalated the sensations she was inducing in the woman's body until her victim (there was no other word for it) was thrashing and sobbing beneath the tiniest of touches.

Somewhere in the midst of this, another occupant of the bower, on her knees in the shadows beneath the spread-eagled girl, came forward and freed Todd's erection from his pants. He didn't attempt to dissuade her. The girl took him into her throat and kept him there. The mingling of the sight of Katya working on the girl and this new sensation was almost too much for him. He had to gently ease himself out of the girl's mouth so as not to lose control too quickly.

She seemed to get the message because she crawled away, beckoning him to follow. He pulled off his shoes and socks, and then hauled down his trousers, stepping out of them as he followed. He doubted Katya had noticed what he was up to: she was too deeply engaged in driving her partner to distraction: the girl's sobs of pleasure were the loudest sound in the vicinity.

At ground level, beneath the spread shadow of the ecstatic girl, was a sub-world of shadowy bodies, touches and whispers. There were probably a dozen men and women down here, variously intertwined. Todd felt their hands at his backside, his face, his erection; heard an appreciative coo from someone who weighed the mass of his balls (a man's palm there, surely; but he was past caring); and the girl who'd beckoned to him grazing his lips with hers, saying something he couldn't catch.

He lost sight of her for a little while, then he heard her ahead of him, gasping with delight. Somebody had got his hands on her before him. He felt a spasm of possessiveness, and crawled on, over a couple of sweating bodies, to catch up with her. He'd got it into his head that the nameless girl was his for the having, and he wasn't about to be denied her.

She wasn't hard to find. In fact she found him: catching hold of his hand and drawing him toward her. The shadow of Katya's sobbing victim spilled across much of her body, but her face lay clear of it, and Todd saw that this girl who'd gobbled him down so gluttonously looked barely old enough to be out of her parents' charge. She was dark: dark skin, dark hair, dark eyes. And she was already lying back on a bed of bodies. She pulled him eagerly toward her and cupped his face with her hands, bringing his mouth to hers. There was some confusion of bodies around and beneath her, but he was too turned on to pay much attention to such details. He kissed the girl (wondering, indeed half-hoping, that Katya had paused in her ministrations to see what he was up to; wishing she'd feel just a little pang of jealousy), and the girl returned his kiss, lavishly.

Was there something in her kiss—some subtle tang to the juices of her mouth, some coldness to her lips—which would have given away the fact that she was a spirit? Not that he could tell. If anything she was hotter than most women he'd been naked with; almost feverish. And despite the fact that his eyes had for so long failed to see the ghosts in the Canyon, she—and all of those around him—now seemed absolutely solid.

His dick had lost none of its rigidity through this fumbling pursuit; the fact that the air was humid and pungent with the heat given off by these spirit-forms only aroused him more. Katya had prepared him well, with her talk of shamelessness. He wanted the girl, and she wanted him: what else mattered?

He put the head of his cock into her. She lifted her legs a little, to help him. There was undoubtedly somebody else beneath her, but he or she didn't seem to care that he was kneeling on them.

"All the way," she insisted.

He slid into her, as she instructed, all the way to the root, and began to work his hips against her.

Her cunt was as agile as her throat; he felt a counter-rhythm moving beneath his dick, passing through the lower half of her vulva. The sensation was like nothing he'd ever experienced before; after just a few strokes he was brought to the edge. He slowly pulled out of her, to be sure he didn't ejaculate too quickly.

"You like that?" she said, putting her hand down between her legs, and guiding him back in.

"Yes. I like it a lot."

"Good."

"But go slowly. Please."

He let her take him inside again and she threw back her head, expelling a sigh of satisfaction.

"Go on," she said, her eyes fluttering closed. "All the way. Both of you."

Both? he thought, raising his head from her breast.

And as he formed the question he felt an arm, twice, three times as thick as hers, and deeply muscled, reach over and grab his neck.

He lifted his head as best he could, and saw the face of a man over the girl's shoulder. She was apparently lying on him, her back against his chest. He was black, and handsome, even in the shadows.

"She's good," he said, smiling. "Yeah?"

Tentatively Todd reached down into the moist muddle between their legs. He felt himself, hard as ever; and then, further back, buried in the girl's ass, the other man's dick. So that was what he had been feeling as he moved inside her. It wasn't a muscular contraction; it was the black man sliding in and out of her. In any other situation he would have been repulsed; would have pulled out and retreated. But this was the Canyon;

Katya's Eden without the serpent. The part of him that would have been revolted had been sweated out of him. It only made him harder thinking about the woman being sandwiched between him and the other man; the fine sheath of her muscle dividing the two of them. He brought his hand up from the swamp between their legs and grabbed hold of the black man's wrist, tightening the three-way knot.

The man laughed.

"You like that?" he said.

"I like that."

"Good," he said, licking the girl's neck, but keeping his eyes fixed hungrily on Todd. "'Cause we like to get real crazy."

Todd had found the rhythm of this now; and together they played her until she started to scream with ecstasy.

Somewhere in the midst of this, the girl Katya was pleasuring began to utter gut-wrenching cries. A little time later Katya must have had mercy on her, and allowed her to be carried off, because when Todd was next getting close to coming (for the fifth or sixth time) he looked away from the blissed-out faces beneath him, and saw Katya sitting among the jasmine and the honeysuckle, with a young man lying naked at her feet, covering them with reverential kisses.

She was watching Todd, her expression inscrutable. Somebody lit a cigarette for her. Todd smiled at her, and then—before she could choose to either return the smile or ignore it—he fell back into the bliss of his ménage-a-trois, thinking that if this was what sex with the dead was like, then the living had a lot to learn.