Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

TWO

So it was.

The sun was now over halfway uncovered, and with every passing moment the landscape it had lit with so miserly a light for the better part of four hundred years was growing brighter. The thinnest clouds—those most susceptible to heat—had already evaporated. Now the cumulus were in retreat, showing a bank of blue through which clusters of falling stars came blazing down, as though to celebrate the passing of the Hunt. Some of the braver beasts in this extraordinary landscape—creatures that had lived contentedly in the perpetual twilight but were curious to see what change the sun would bring—were venturing out of their dens and caves and squinting up at the spectacle overhead. A lion blessed with wings strong enough to carry it aloft rose from its imperial seat among the branches of a Noahic oak, as though to challenge the sun itself. It was instantly overcome by the incandescence that filled the heavens, and tumbled back to earth, shedding feathers the size of swords.

Jerry saw the lesson clearly enough. "It's all going to change very quickly now," he said.

There was indeed a general sense of panic in the landscape. Every species that had learned to prosper in the silver-dim light was in a sudden terror, fearful that whatever the sun was shedding—light, heat or both— it would be their undoing. In every corner of this painted world, creatures were scuttling and scampering, fighting over the merest sliver of shadow. It was not just the lion that had been brought down. Several flocks of birds, confounded by the sudden blaze, panicked in mid-flight, and descended in squawking confusion. On the roads, wild dogs went noonday crazy, and set on one another's throats in bursts of overheated rage; the air was suddenly populated with myriad tiny gnats and dragonflies, which rose from the grass in such swarming abundance they could only have been born that moment, their eggs cracked by the abrupt rise in temperature. And where there were flies, of course, there were fly-catchers. Rodents leapt up out of the grass to feed on the sudden bounty. Lizards and snakes swarmed underfoot.

It was an astonishing transformation. In the four or five minutes since the child had been passed back to his mother and the Duke's curse had been lifted, the landscape through which Goga and his men (their flesh and bones now indistinguishable from the swampy earth in which they'd lain down to die) had ridden had undergone a sea-change: falling stars and falling lions, the air filled with the flutter of a million dragonflies and the howling of a thousand sun-blinded dogs; trees coming into sudden blossom, their buds so fat and fruitful they exploded like little bombs, so that a blizzard of petals drenched the air with perfume.

And in the same moment as the dragonflies rose up, and the trees blossomed, Death caught a million throats, and with howls and shrieks and crazed cavorting, the Reaper claimed both the common dog and the fanciful beasts Lilith had hatched to make the Hunt more purgatorial for her victims. The chicken that had laid eggs filled with serpents was devoured by its brood in its dotage. A lizard with a dragonfly still fluttering in its jaws was taken by a beast only Lilith could have conjured: its back a shameless homage to the cunt, from its glorious labial head to the enormous golden eye buried in its depths like an opulent egg.

A thousand thousand witnesses could not have catalogued what happened to the Devil's Country in those minutes. An army of chroniclers could not have caught a quarter of the stories here; they came and went too fast: birth, death and the madness between filling the senses to overflowing.

At the door, Tammy had time to wonder if perhaps Eden had been like this. Not the calm hand of a placid creator moving over the dappled grass of paradise and leaving the lion, the lamb and all that lived in between where it passed, but rather this: the sun turned up as though by an impatient cook, frying life into being, in one frenzied, blazing carnival, its most exquisite beasts no more likely to survive the heat than its basest creations. Beauty of no importance, in the heat of the moment; nor poetry; nor intelligence. Just things rising and falling without judgment or consideration; the loveliest of beings dying before they had time to speak, while veils of flies descended to pump their eggs into the bed of their quickened rot.

No wonder Lilith had said, so knowingly, that God sat perfectly well with her. Hadn't she been his first female creation; the bride for Adam which Yahweh had rejected? Hers the first womb, hers the first egg, hers the first blood shed in pain because a man had made it so.

Tammy looked to see if she could catch a glimpse of the woman one last time, with this new notion in her head.

But the air between where she stood and where the Queen of Hell had been standing was a maze of petals, flies, birds, seeds, scales and flakes of cooked corruption. Lilith was out of sight, and Tammy knew that if she was lucky she would never have occasion to look into the woman's eyes again.