Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

FIVE

Eppstadt was in the Devil's Country. A fine drizzle, almost a mist, was drooping from the bloated clouds; it came in soft waves against his face, cooling his flushed skin. If he doubted the reality of this place, its chill seemed designed to undo his doubt.

He hated the idea that what he was witnessing was real; doing so violated all his logical faculties. But what was the alternative? That he'd slipped and fallen, and was now lying at the bottom of the stairs in a semi-comatose state, imagining all this? It was a pretty solution, but as he had no way of knowing whether it was true or not, his only option was to find Joe and get the hell out of here before the place began to get even crazier than it already was. The less he knew about this country—the less its grotesqueries lodged in his psyche—the happier the rest of his life would surely be.

With that thought he began a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree scanning of the landscape, calling Joe's name as he did so. His din (even his simple presence) was enough to stir life in the bushes and trees. He felt himself watched by several species of unlikely animal, their eyes huge and luminous, their postures, and in some cases the details of their physiognomies, vaguely human, as though this twilight world had witnessed all kinds of criminal couplings.

Finally, he heard a response from Joe.

"Who's there?"

"Eppstadt."

"Come over here. Quickly. You gotta help me."

He followed the sound of the man's shouting. There was a small copse ahead, and Joe had clambered a few feet into a tree by means of a crude wooden ladder which had been propped against one of the trunks.

"What the hell are you doing?" Eppstadt wanted to know.

Joe simply repeated his plea: "You gotta help me."

"There's no time, Joe," Eppstadt said. "You've got to come back with me. Right now. Christ, I sent you down to close the door. Why'd you come in?"

"For the same reason you did," Joe said. "I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Are you going to help me or not?"

Eppstadt had pressed his way into the midst of the thicket as he and Joe spoke, snagging his suit on the briars that grew in profusion here several times as he did so. The tableau that now came into view appalled him.

There was a man crucified among the higher branches of the tree Joe had climbed, the deed done with both rope and nails. Joe had already managed to remove a couple of the nails (spattering his arms and face with blood in the process) and was now pulling at the knotted rope with his teeth. He was desperate to get the man down from the tree, and he had reason. The branches around the man's head were bustling with birds, the Devil's Country's version of carrion-crows: bigger, crueler versions. They'd clearly made several assaults on the man's face already. There were deep gouges around the victim's sockets where the birds had gone after his eyes. Blood from the wounds poured down his face. He might have resembled Christ but for the brightness of his blonde hair, which fell in dirty curls to his shoulders.

"I need a stone!" Joe yelled down at Eppstadt.

"What for?"

"Just find me a fucking stone, will you?"

Eppstadt didn't like to take orders—especially from a waiter—but he saw the urgency of the situation, and did as he was asked, looking around until he laid his hands on a long, sharp stone, which he passed on up to Joe. From his perch on the ladder, Joe took aim at the closest of the carrion crows. It was a good throw. The stone struck the most ambitious of the flock—who had apparently decided to come in for the kill—and messily smashed open the bird's head, but its companions did not fly off, as Joe had hoped. They simply retreated up the tree a branch or two, squawking in fury and frustration, while the dead bird dropped from the perch.

As if awoken from a grateful sleep by the din of the birds, the crucified man raised his head, and opened his mouth. A black snake, no thicker than a baby's thumb, slid out from between his lips in a thin gruel of blood, spittle and bile. The snake dangled from the man's lower lip for a few moments, hooked by its tail. Then it fell to the ground, a foot from Eppstadt.

He stepped away in disgust, throwing a backward glance at the door, just to reassure himself that his means of escape from this insanity was still in view. It was. But the snake had changed his perspective on this mercy mission.

"The guy's on the way out," Eppstadt said to Joe. "You can't do anything for him."

"We can still get him down."

"And I'm telling you he's beyond help, Joe. Look at him."

There did indeed seem little purpose in laboring to depose the man; he was obviously close to death. His eyes had rolled back beneath fluttering eyelids, showing nothing but white. He was attempting to say something, but his mind and his tongue were beyond the complex business of speech.

"You know what?" Eppstadt said, glancing around the landscape. "This is a set-up." There were indeed dozens of hiding places for potential attackers—human or animal—within fifty yards of them: rocks, holes, thicket. "We should just get the hell out of here before whoever did this to him tries the same on us."

"Leave him, you mean?"

"Yes. Leave him."

Joe just shook his head. He had succeeded in getting this far, and wasn't going to give up now. He pulled on the rope that held the man's right hand. The arm fell free. Blood pattered on the leaves over Eppstadt's head, like a light rain.

"I'm almost done," Joe said.

"Joe, I—"

"Get ready," Joe said again, leaning across the victim's body to untie the other hand. "You're going to have to catch him," he warned Eppstadt.

"I can't do that."

"Well who else is going to do it?" Joe snapped.

Eppstadt wasn't paying attention, however.

He'd heard a noise behind him, and now he turned to find that a freakish child, naked and runty, had appeared from somewhere, and was looking up at him.

"We've got company," he said to Joe, who was still struggling to free the crucified man's other hand.

When Eppstadt looked back at the freak, it had approached a few steps, and Eppstadt had a clearer view of it. There was something goatish in the gene-pool, Eppstadt decided. The child's bandy legs were sheathed with dirty-yellow fur, and his eyes were yellow-green. From beneath the pale dome of his belly there jutted a sizable erection, which was out of all proportion to the rest of his body. He fingered it idly while he watched.

"Why are you taking the man down?" he said to Joe. Then, getting no answer from Joe, directed the same question at Eppstadt.

"He's in pain" was all Eppstadt could find to say, though the phrase scarcely seemed to match the horror of the victim's persecution.

"That's the way my mother wants him," the goat-boy said.

"Your mother?"

"Lil-ith," he said, pronouncing the word as two distinct syllables. "She is the Queen of Hell. And I am her son."

"If you're her son," Eppstadt said, playing along for time until a better way to deal with this absurdity occurred, "then it follows, yes . . . she would be your mother."

"And she had him put up there so I could see him!" the goat-boy replied, the head of his pecker echoing his own head in its infuriated nodding.

The angrier he became, the more the evidence of his extreme inbreeding surfaced. He had a hare-lip, which made his outrage harder to understand, and his nose—which was scarcely more than two gaping wet holes in his face—ran with catarrhal fluids. His teeth, when he bared them, were overlapped in half-a-dozen places, and his eyes were slightly crossed. In short, he was an abomination, the only perfect piece of anatomy he'd inherited was that monstrous member between his legs, which had lost some of its hardness now, and hung like a rubber club between his rough-haired legs.

"I'm going to tell my mother about you!" he said, stabbing a stunted forefinger in Eppstadt's direction. "That man is a crinimal."

"A crinimal?" Eppstadt said, with a supercilious smirk. The idiot-child couldn't even pronounce the word correctly.

"Yes," the goat-boy said, "and he's supposed to hang there till the birds pluck out his eyes and the dogs eat out his end tails."

"Entrails."

"End tails!"

"All right, have it your way. End tails."

"I want you to leave him up there."

During this brief exchange, Eppstadt's gaze had been drawn to the goat-boy's left foot. The nail of his middle toe had not been clipped (he guessed) since birth. Now it looked more like a claw than a nail. It was six, perhaps seven, inches long, and stained dark brown.

"Who the hell are you talking to?" Joe yelled down from the top of the ladder. The density of the foliage made it impossible for him to see the goat-boy.

"Apparently he's up there as a punishment, Joe. Better leave him there."

"Who told you that?"

Joe came down the ladder far enough to have sight of the goat-boy. "That?"

The boy bared his teeth at Joe. A dribble of dark saliva came from the corner of his mouth and ran down onto his chest.

"I really think we should just get going . . ." Eppstadt said.

"Not until this poor sonofabitch is down from here," Joe said, returning up the ladder. "Fucking freak."

"This isn't our business, Joe," Eppstadt said. There was something about the way the air was roiling around them; something about the way the clouds churned overhead, covering the already depleted light of the sun, that made Eppstadt fearful that something of real consequence was in the offing. He didn't know what this place was, or how it was created; nor, at that moment, did he care. He just wanted to be out through the door and upstairs again.

"Help me!" Joe yelled to him.

Eppstadt went to the bottom of the ladder and peered up. The crucified man had dropped forward over Joe's broad shoulder. Even in his semi-comatose state he could still beg for some show of compassion. "Please . . ." he murmured. "I meant no offense . . ."

"He wouldn't fuck my mother," said the goat-boy, by way of explanation for this atrocity. He was just a foot or two behind Eppstadt, staring up at Joe and the man he was attempting to save. He turned briefly; surveyed the sky. The wind was getting gusty again, slamming the door and then throwing it open.

"She's coming," the goat-boy said. "Smell that bitterness in the air?"

Eppstadt could indeed smell something; strong enough to make his eyes water.

"That's her," the goat-boy said. "That's Lilith. She's bitter like that. Even her milk." He made an ugly face. "It used to make me puke. And me? I love to suckle. I love it." He was getting hard again, talking himself into a fine little fever. He put his thumb in his mouth, and pulled hard on it, making a loud noise as he did so. He was every inch an irritating little child, excepting those inches where he was indisputably a man.

"I'd put him back if I were you," he said, pushing past Eppstadt to stand at the bottom of the ladder.

Eppstadt's gaze returned to the heavens. The sky was the color of cold iron, and the bitterness the child had said was his mother's stench was getting stronger with every gust of the cold wind. Eppstadt looked off into the distance, to see if there was any sign of an arrivee on the winding roads. But they were almost deserted. The only person on any of the roads right now was a man some two or three miles away, who was lying sprawled, his head against a stone. Eppstadt had no logical reason to believe this, but he was somehow certain the man was dead, his brains spattered on the stone where he laid his head.

Otherwise, the landscape was empty of human occupants.

There were plenty of birds in the air, struggling against the increasingly violent gusts to reach the safety of their roosts; and small animals, rabbits and the like, scampering through the whipping grass to find some place of safety. Eppstadt was no nature-boy, but he knew enough to be certain that when rabbits were making for their bolt-holes, it was time for human beings to get out of harm's way.

"We've got to go," he said to Joe. "You've done all you can."

"Not yet!" Joe yelled. The wind was strong enough to make even the heavy branches of the tree sway. Dead leaves were shaken down all around.

"For God's sake, Joe. What the fuck is wrong with you?"

He took a step up the ladder and caught hold of Joe's belt. Then he tugged. "You're coming, or I'm going without you."

"Then go—" Joe began to say. He didn't finish because at that instant the ladder, which was presently bearing the weight of Eppstadt, Joe the Samaritan, and the crucified man, broke.

Eppstadt was closest to the ground, so he sustained the least damage. He simply fell back on the sharp stones in which the copse and its briar thicket were rooted. He scrambled to his feet to find out what had happened to the other two men. Both had fallen among the thorns, the crucified man spread-eagled on top of Joe. Only now were the man's wounds fully displayed. Besides the peckings around his eyes, there were far deeper wounds—certainly not made by birds—in his chest. Somebody had had some fun with him before he was nailed up there, cutting star-patterns around his nipples.

Joe struggled to get himself out from under the man, but his flailing only served to catch him in the thorns.

"Help me," he said, throwing his hand back over his head toward Eppstadt. "Quickly. I'm being pricked to death here!"

Eppstadt approached the thicket and was about to take hold of Joe's hand when two of the largest wounds on the crucified man's chest gaped, and the flat black heads of two snakes, each ten times the size of the serpent that had slipped out of his throat, pressed their blood-soaked snouts out of the layers of flesh and yellow fat, and came slithering out of his torso. One of them trailed a multitude of what Eppstadt took to be eggs, suspended in a jellied mass of semi-translucent phlegm.

Eppstadt stepped away from the thicket, and from Joe. The serpents crisscrossed as they emerged, their beady white eyes seeking out some new warm place to nest.

"Are you going to help me or not?" Joe said.

Eppstadt simply shook his head.

"Eppstadt!" Joe wept. "For God's sake get me out."

Eppstadt had no intention of getting any closer to the snakes than he already was: but the goat-boy had no such scruples. He pushed past Eppstadt and grabbed hold of Joe's outstretched hand. His strength, like his member, was out of all proportion to his size. One good haul, and he had Joe halfway freed from the thorn bushes. Joe screamed as his back was scored by the thorns, which had been pressed deep into his flesh by the weight of the man on top of him.

"Ah now, shut up!" the goat-boy yelled over Joe's complaints. Hanging out of the thicket, poor Joe looked half-dead. The pain had made him vomit, and it was running from the side of his mouth. His demands had become pitiful sobs in the space of a few seconds. Horrified though he was—and guilty too (he'd come down here to help Joe; and now look at him)—Eppstadt still couldn't bring himself to intervene. Not with the snakes raising their heads from the body in which they'd nested, still eager for another victim.

Ignoring Joe's weak protests, the goat-boy pulled on him a second time, and then a third, which was the charm. Joe fell free of the thicket, landing heavily on his pierced back. Sheer agony lent him the strength to throw himself over onto his stomach. His back was nearly naked; the violence of the goat-boy's haulings had torn open his shirt. He lay face down in the dirt, retching again.

"That'll teach you," the goat-boy said. "Playing with crinimals! You should get some of your own!"

While he was addressing Joe in this witless fashion, Eppstadt chanced to look up at the man still sprawled on the bed of thorns. The two snakes had slithered over his chest and were now entwined around his neck. He was too close to death to even register this last assault. He simply lay there, eyelids fluttering over sightless eyes, while the life was throttled out of him.

"See that?" the goat-boy said. "So much for you and your tricks. Now I lost my toy and your little friend is dead. Why couldn't you stay out of it, huh? He was mine!" The boy's fury had him jumping up and down now. "Mine! Mine! Mine!"

And suddenly he was up on Joe's back, dancing a tarantella on the mess of thorns and wounds and blood. "Mine! Mine! Mine!"

It was a show of petulance; no more nor less. Joe rolled over and threw the boy off. Then he started to get to his feet. But before he could do so, the goat-boy came at him, his step still reminiscent of some peculiar little dance.

"Get up!" Eppstadt yelled to Joe, not certain what the goat-boy was up to, but certain it was mischief. "Quickly!"

Despite his agonized state, Joe started to push himself off his knees. As he did so the goat-boy made a high slashing kick. Joe's hand went up to his neck, and he fell back in the dirt.

The foot which had struck Joe was the one with the long middle nail, and what had looked to Eppstadt like a glancing blow had in fact slashed open Joe's windpipe.

Both Joe's hands were at his neck now, as blood and air escaped his throat. He turned his gaze toward Eppstadt for a moment, as though the Head of Paramount might know why Joe was lying in the dirt of a place he couldn't even name while his last breath whined out between his fingers.

Then the look of incomprehension went out of his eyes, to be replaced with a blank stare. His hands dropped away from his neck. The whining sound died away, and he rolled forward. All the while the goat-boy went on dancing, out of pure pleasure.

Eppstadt didn't move. He was afraid to draw the murderer's attention. But then the boy seemed to take it into his half-witted head to go find some other plaything, and without looking back at Eppstadt again, he ran off, leaving Joe dead in the dirt and the man who'd come to save him alone in the darkening air.