Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

EIGHT

Fearing the worst, Todd let out a yell, and started racing across the muddy, bloody ground to do whatever he could to stop the goat-boy attacking Tammy. But before he could get there she had taken matters into her own hands. She let the last of the six buttons slip, and her blouse fell open, unveiling her breasts. The sight of them literally stopped the Devil's child in his tracks. He opened his mouth and drool ran from it.

Tammy was smart enough not to reject this sign of adoration, however crude. Instead, she opened her arms, inviting him into her embrace. Todd would have betted against the wisdom of this. The goat-boy was no sentimentalist. He wanted to play rough. But had he made that bet, he would have lost it.

The Devil's child fell to his knees, laughing. Then he crawled—yes, crawled—into Tammy's arms. His hands went greedily up to one of her breasts, and he held the unwieldy bubble of flesh before his eyes for a moment of devotion. His mouth was slick and wet; the saliva glinted off his terrible teeth.

"Please God . . ." Todd murmured.

It was very possibly the strangest sensation of Tammy's thirty-four years, the feeling of the Devil's child's mouth around her left nipple. There had been a moment—as he closed his mouth around her—when it had crossed her mind that she should be afraid; that with one chomp he could give her an instant mastectomy if he so chose. But somehow she knew he would not. He was in love with her breasts. Instead he worshiped them, in his way. Though his mouth was tight around her flesh, she felt not so much as the lightest of scratches from those shark-like teeth. In fact she suspected he'd somehow sheathed them, the way a snake sheathed its fangs, because as he sucked and sucked all she felt was a slightly guilty rush of pleasure as his suction drew the blood to the nipple, and the flesh surrounding the nipple, sensitizing the entire area.

Then, as though all this weren't peaceful and domestic enough, the Devil's child closed his eyes, his fat little hands holding the source of his bliss, and Tammy gently rocked him in her arms.

Goga had been searching for Lilith's child for many centuries now, under a sky that—though it was sometimes cloudy, sometimes clear—always showed the sun eclipsed. He had no real idea of how long his imprisonment in the Devil's Country had lasted; his mind had long ago lost any grasp on the passage of time. He and his men had passed the centuries in a kind of fugue state. Sometimes, when they rested and ate what they'd hunted—rabbit on occasion, or venison, or wild pig—they would talk about what had happened to them that day on the hunt, and where they now were. It was the Duke's opinion that this was not a real place at all, but a kind of dream that the Devil was dreaming, and they were trapped in it. How else to explain the curious limitations of their condition? The same ships forever heading toward the horizon; the same roads haunted by the same beasts; the same sun in the same heaven, half-blinded by the same black moon?

But in the last few days—if days and nights could truthfully be said to pass here—there had been signs that things were changing in what had been hitherto a virtually changeless place. There had always been strangers coming and going (trapped, the philosophizing Duke surmised, in the same infernal dream where they found themselves). But whereas in the past visitors had little or no effect upon the world they were wandering through, the trespassers of recent times had not been quite so guileless or so lucky. Several had perished in the region around the forest.

And now—as if all this were not strange enough—a new spectacle, stranger by some measure than all that had preceded it:

Sitting beside the road—nursing the object of their long search as though he were a commonplace baby—was a bare-breasted woman.

The Duke dismounted a few yards from where Tammy sat in the dirt, rocking the goat-boy in her arms. His lieutenants had dismounted several horse-lengths away, and were now creeping around the nursing woman, swords drawn.

Tammy saw all of this, but she registered nothing—not a word, not the raising of a finger—for fear of alerting the contented child to the fact that his time in this idyllic state was about to end.

Very cautiously, the Duke approached the woman and child, beckoning to his men to take their final positions. One of the men had brought a wooden box; clearly his own crude handiwork which he now opened and positioned behind the pair.

The goat-boy didn't open his eyes, but he pulled his mouth away from Tammy's breast long enough to say: "You don't all have to creep around like that. I know what you're up to." He'd no sooner spoken than his interest in the Duke's men was forgotten again and he was back to stroking the ample flesh in front of him. "Beautiful," he said to Tammy. "Do you have names for your tits?"

"Names?" Tammy said. "Actually, no."

"Oh you should. They're amazing." He kissed them, first left, then right, then left again, tender, affectionate kisses. "May I name them myself?" He asked this question with the greatest delicacy, stumbling over the words. Plainly the last thing he would have wished to do was cause offense.

"Of course," she said.

"I may? Oh thank you. Then this must be Helena, who I sucked on, and this one I'll call Beatrice." He looked at Tammy, framed by her breasts. "And you? Who are you?"

"Tammy."

"Just Tammy?"

"Tammy Jayne Lauper."

"I'm Qwaftzefoni," the goat-boy said. "Are you on the run from somebody, Tammy?"

"I was, I suppose, in a way."

"Who?"

"My husband, Arnie."

"He doesn't appreciate you?"

"No."

The goat-boy began to lick Helena and Beatrice, again big sloppy tonguings that made Tammy shudder with pleasure.

"No children?" he said in the middle of a stroke.

"No. Arnie can't . . ."

"But you could, Tammy." He laid his head against her pillows. "Believe me, I know about these things. You're fertile as the Nile. As soon as you get pregnant these beautiful mammaries will become milk-machines. And your children will be strong and healthy, with strong, healthy hearts, like you." Finally, he opened his eyes just a slit, his gaze first settling on her face then slipping sideways, to get a glimpse of the cage. "So what's your opinion? " he said to her.

"About what?"

"Should I give myself up, or let the chase go on?"

"What happens if you give yourself up?"

"I go home. With my mother, Lilith. Back to Hell."

"Isn't that where you should be?"

"Yes, I suppose so. But how would you feel if I said you should be back with Arnie?"

"Oh no . . ."

"So, you understand," he said, running an appreciative palm over the smooth globes, then putting his head down between them, his chin in the groove. "Sometimes you just have to get away, at least for a while. But you know, now that I lie here, I think, maybe it's time to give up. I've been running for years. Never let anybody lay a finger on me. Until you." His voice, already low, went to a barely audible whisper, almost a hiss. "Are they very close now?" he said.

"Yes," she told him. "They're very close."

He toyed with her hardened nipple. "If I give myself up, what will happen?"

"I think we'll all leave this country, one way or another."

"And ... in your opinion . .. would that be such a bad idea?"

"No," she told him. "In my opinion it would be a very good idea."

"And they won't hurt me?"

"They won't hurt you."

"You promise?"

She looked into his eyes, brown into gold. "I promise they won't hurt you."

"All right," he said, lifting his arms up and putting them round her neck. "It's time we put an end to this. But first you have to kiss me."

"According to who?"

"According to me."

She kissed his grizzled lips. And as she did so, he leapt out of her arms, as though he'd been slick with butter; a jump that carried him three or four feet above her head.

"Prindeți-l!" the Duke yelled.

His men weren't about to come so close to their quarry and lose him again. They each caught hold of an arm and leg of the child, and carried him, squealing more like a pig than a goat, to the wooden crate.

Before they could get him safely locked away, however, there came a shout from Eppstadt. "Where are you going with that thing?" he demanded.

"They're taking it away," Todd explained.

"Oh, no they're not. Absolutely not. I saw it commit murder. I want to see it tried in a court of law."

He started toward the two men who had taken hold of the creature. The Duke, sword drawn, instantly came to stand between them.

Tammy, meanwhile, even before she'd buttoned herself up, was ready to add her own voice to the argument. "Don't you interfere," she told Eppstadt. "You'll fuck up everything."

"Are you crazy? Well, yes, why am I asking? Of course you're crazy. Letting that thing suck on you that way. You obscene woman."

"Just do it!" Todd urged the men, hoping his miming of the boy's imprisonment would help the men understand his meaning.

It did. While the Duke held Eppstadt at swordpoint, his men put the goat-boy into the crate, the wooden bars of which were decorated with small iron icons, hammered into the timber. Whatever their meaning, they did the trick. Though Qwaftzefoni was easily strong enough to shake the crate apart he did not so much as lay his hands on the bars, but sat passively in his little prison, awaiting the next stage of the proceeding.

The Duke issued a new round of orders, and the men lifted the crate onto the back of one of the horses, and started to secure it there.

While they did so the Duke made a short, but apparently deeply sincere, speech to Tammy, thanking her, she assumed, for her part in this dangerous enterprise. All the while he kept an eye on Eppstadt, and with his sword ready should the man attempt to interfere. Eppstadt was obviously equally aware that the Duke meant business, even if he didn't understand the exchange, because he kept his hands raised throughout, and his mouth shut.

Todd, meanwhile, stood watching the sky. There was, it seemed, a subtle change in the configuration of the heavens. The moon was very slowly moving off the face of the sun.

Suddenly, there was a shriek from one of the Duke's men. The goat-boy had found a place where his hand and arm could fit through the bars without touching the icons, and using a moment of the man's distraction, had reached out and was digging his short-fingered hand into the meat around the man's eye. He had firm hold of it; firm enough to shake the man back and forth like a puppet. Blood gushed from the place, splashing against the goat-boy's palm and running down his victim's face.

The horse on which the crate was set reared up in panic, and the crate, which had not yet been firmly fixed to the saddle, slid off. The creature did not let go of his victim. He hung on to the man's face as the crate crashed to the ground. It did not break open, as no doubt the goat-boy had hoped; and in a fit of frustration he started to tear the man's flesh open still further.

The Duke was swift. He came to the place in two strides and with a single swing of his sword separated the goat-boy's hand from his wrist. The creature let out a sickening, shrill wail.

Tammy—who'd watched all this in a state of horrified disbelief (how could this cruel monster be the same childish thing she'd had sucking on her moments ago?)—now covered her ears against the noise of both victims, man and boy. Though she'd muted the scene she couldn't take her eyes off it: the hunter, dropping to his knees with the child's hand still fixed in his face like some foul parasite; the goat-boy in his crate, stanching his stump with his other hand; the Duke, wiping the blood off his blade—

There was a short moment of calm as the goat-boy's sobs became subdued and the wounded man, having pulled the hooked finger out of his flesh, covered his wound with a cloth, to slow the flow of blood.

The calm lasted no more than twenty seconds. It was broken by a grinding sound in the earth, as though a machine made of stone and iron was on the move down there.

"What fresh hell is this?" Jerry murmured.

Tammy's eyes were on the crate, and its contents. The goat-boy had given up all his complaints, and was peering between the bars with his mouth open and slack. He knew exactly what was about to happen.

"Earthquake?" Eppstadt said.

"No," Tammy replied, reading the look on the goat-boy's face. "Lilith."