Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

ONE

They came almost silently at first, and cautiously, as though even now they suspected Katya had laid some trap to catch them once they were inside the house. But as soon as four or five of them were safely over the threshold, and it became obvious that there were no traps, their silence erupted into a horrid din of triumph, and their caution turned into an ungainly torrent of desperate spirits, all struggling to get through the door at the same time.

Though Tammy's consciousness was still slippery, she had enough strength left to protect her face from the feet of those coming through, rolling herself into a semi-fetal position to avoid the worst.

There were so many revenants, and the door through which they were attempting to pass was so narrow, that impatience soon ignited among the crowd. Arguments became physical assaults, as the stronger pushed the weaker aside so they could be the first down the stairs, the first through the door that would take them into the Devil's Country. Tammy had her hands over her face, but between her fingers she saw Katya put up a vain protest against this invasion. She shouted something, but it was lost in the din of triumph and argument. A moment later, she too was lost, as the wave of exiles threw themselves against her and carried her away. This time Tammy did hear her, though it was not a word she uttered but a scream, a furious scream.

They were in her dream palace—

These things, which had once been her friends, her beautiful friends, the virile and the beautiful deities of a lost Golden Age, reduced by hunger and despair to the filleted, smeared, wasted dregs of humanity, now bore her away.

The noises they made as they came—and came, and came—were some of the most distressing sounds Tammy had ever heard.

Slaughterhouse shrieks and plague-pit moans, chattering and curses that were more like the din out of a padded cell than anything that should have come from an assembly of once-sophisticated souls.

Finally, however, the noise and the kicking of her body by passing feet, slowed and ceased.

The procession of the dead had passed over the threshold, along the corridor and into the house. It had taken perhaps five minutes to get the entire assembly inside. Now they were gone. The passageway was deserted, except for Tammy and Todd.

Tammy waited another minute or two before gathering the strength to unknot her weary limbs and roll herself over. She gave thanks, as she did so, to her mother, of all people, who had been an unpleasant piece of work (especially in her latter years) but had possessed the constitution of a horse, which Tammy had inherited. Most of the women Tammy knew would not have survived the brutal physical assaults and violations that had punctuated the adventures of her last few days. Thanks to Momma, Tammy had.

She fixed her gaze on Todd, who had apparently also survived both Katya's attack and the revenants' tide.

He was half-sitting, half-slumped, against the wall further down the passageway, staring at the alcove from which he'd grabbed the antique pitcher. His breathing was ragged, but at least he was still alive. It was a short drive to Cedars-Sinai from here, if she could get help to carry him to the car.

She crawled over to him. He was doing nothing to stanch the wounds (Katya had stabbed him at least twice, possibly three times); the blood was pulsing out of him. He saw her coming from the corner of his eye. Very slowly, he turned his head toward her. "You let them in," he said.

"Yes. I let them in."

"You . . . had it planned all along then?"

"Not really. It was Zeffer's idea."

He made a long, soft moan, as he saw the neatness of this. Zeffer, the first exile from the dream palace; Zeffer, who'd been the bitch-goddess's dog, finally become her undoer. And Tammy, his agent.

"So you were in this together," he said.

"I'll tell you about it later. Right now we should get out of here."

He made a very small, very weary shake of his head. "I don't think . . . I'll be going anywhere anytime soon. She meant to kill me. And I'm afraid . . . she has. She knew in the end I'd sided with you. And that meant I'd betrayed her."

"You didn't—"

"Yes, I did. I knew the last thing she wanted was that the ghosts get in." He shook his head, his eyes sliding closed. "But I had to. It was the right thing." He opened his eyes again, and looked down at the blood. "And her killing me, that was right, too."

"Christ, no . . ."

"It's all.. . ended up... the way it should."

"Don't say that," Tammy murmured. "It's not over yet." She pushed herself up onto her knees, then grabbed hold of the edge of one of the alcoves, and hauled herself to her feet. The numbness was passing from her hands. Now they simply tingled, as though they'd been trapped under her while she slept.

She heard the sound of footsteps outside, and she looked round to see Maxine stumbling up the steps from the garden, in a state of total disarray. In any other circumstance, Tammy might have found the sight funny; Maxine's clothes were torn, her face scratched and grimy. But right now she was just one more victim: of Katya, of the house, of the Canyon.

"My God," she said, seeing Todd sitting there, the blood pooling on the floor. "What the hell happened?"

"Katya . . ." Tammy said. It was all the explanation she had energy for.

Once over the threshold, Maxine closed the door and locked it, her hands trembling.

"There's things out there—"

"Yes, I know."

"They killed Sawyer."

For a moment it looked as though she was going to succumb to tears, but she fought them off, and came along the passageway, her expression turning from one of imminent tears to shock.

"Wait . . ." she said. "Is that Todd?"

Was he that unrecognizable? Tammy thought. It seemed he was. In the hours since Maxine had last set eyes on him Todd taken a hell of a beating. By the sea, by Eppstadt, by Katya. Now he looked like a boxer who'd gone twenty rounds with a man twice his strength: both his eyes puffed up, his lower lip swollen and jutting, his whole face a mass of colors, bruises old and new, cuts old and new, all spattered with dried mud.

Looking at him afresh, with Maxine's appalled gaze, Tammy realized that she could have shown this poor broken face to a thousand members of the Todd Pickett Appreciation Society and not a single one would have known who they were looking at; and that probably included herself. How far they'd all fallen; the gods and their admirers both.

"We have to get an ambulance up here," Maxine said. She bent down to speak to Todd. "We 're getting an ambulance."

"No," he said weakly, lifting his hand. "Stay with me."

Maxine looked at Tammy, who gave her a small nod. Maxine took hold of Todd's hand.

"What happened to Eppstadt?" Maxine asked.

"Last time I saw him he was in Hell," Tammy replied.

There was something rather satisfying about being able to say that, even if she didn't really know what they'd all experienced behind that door downstairs. Whatever it was, it was real. Her breast still tingled from the goat-boy's suckling.

"And the woman? Katya?"

"I don't know where she went. But if you'll take care of Todd, I'd like to find out."

Todd gave his own, misshapen reply to this suggestion. "Be ... careful."

As he spoke he raised his free hand in Tammy's direction. It was impossible to interpret the expression on his face, but the fact that he was afraid for her spoke volumes. And she in her turn was afraid; afraid that if she didn't find some excuse to leave now, she'd be left here watching him die.

She pressed his fingers, and he returned the pressure. "It's good," he said. "Better see. That bitch."

She nodded, and headed off back down the passageway. As she went she heard Maxine dialing 911 on her portable phone, which had apparently survived the traumas of her journey through the wilderness behind the house.

There was a calamitous din coming from the center of the house. It sounded as though a hurricane had been loosed down there, and was moving from room to room, getting stronger as its frustration mounted.

Tammy went to the stairwell and stood there for a few moments, letting the tears fall. Why not? Why the hell not? What crazy person wouldn't weep, when they'd turned over the rock of the world, and they'd seen what was there, crawling around: the dead, the nearly dead, and the sorrow of every damn thing.

It wasn't just Todd she was weeping for. She was shedding a tear, it seemed, for everyone she'd ever known. For Arnie, for God's sake, who one night had told her how his grandfather Otis, when he was in his cups, would burn the eight-year-old Arnie's knuckles with cigarettes "for the fun of it," and how Arnie had said it was good they'd never have children because he was afraid he'd end up doing the same.

For the dead who'd waited outside this insane asylum for so long, waiting for their chance to get back over the threshold, and now they were in, they weren't happy, because what they'd come in search of was gone. That was their noise, she knew, their fury, circling below; their frustration, mounting with every turn.

For Todd, and all the imperfect people who'd loved him because they'd thought he was made of purer stuff than they. All the worshipers who'd sent him messages through her, begging him just to drop them a note, pick up the phone, tell them that he knew they existed.

She'd been one of those people herself, once upon a time.

In a way she'd been the worst of them, in fact, because although she'd got so close to understanding the ways of this grotesque town, and known it was a crock of deceits and stupidities, instead of turning her back on it all, burning Todd's pictures and getting herself a life worth living, she'd let herself become a propagator of the Great Lie. She'd done it in part because it made her feel important. But more because she'd wanted Todd to be the real thing, the dream come true, alive in the same imperfect world she'd lived in, but better than that dirty, disappointing world. And having once decided to believe, she had to keep on believing it, because once he fell from grace, there was nothing left to believe in.

It'll all end in tears, as her mother had been wont to say, and Tammy had despised the woman for her lack of faith in things; for her cynical certainty that everything was bound to sorrow. But in the end she'd been right. Tammy was standing in the creaking, raging ruins of that terrible truth: tears on her own face, shed for just about everything she'd ever known.

She wiped her cheeks, and looked down the stairwell. The last time she'd looked she'd seen Jerry sprawled at the bottom; another one of Katya's victims. But now he was gone. She didn't want to call his name. That risked drawing Katya's attention and, if she was in the vicinity, Tammy had already had enough of her to last several lifetimes.

She ventured cautiously down the stairs, holding the banisters with both hands. The wood reverberated beneath her palms, shaken by the noise of the dead.

About halfway down she felt a rush of icy air erupt from the stairwell, and a heartbeat later a flood of forms returned from the passageway that led to the Devil's Country. The revenants—or at least some of them— were coming back the way they'd gone.

Tammy let go of the banister and threw herself against the wall as half a dozen of the phantoms came roaring up the stairs.

"Gone . . ." she heard one of them saying, its voice a mournful howl, ". . . gone . . ."

More revenants were emerging from the Devil's Country now, all in a similar state of fury. One of them began to dig at the ground at the bottom of the stairs with his bare hands, attacking the boards with such violence they cracked. Then he tore them up, obviously looking for what was already lost.

Tammy stayed glued to the wall, and in that state slid down to the bottom of the flight, to see if she could spot Jerry. Zeffer's body had been shoved aside by the passage of the ghosts, and lay face down in the corner of the stairwell. Looking in the other direction she saw that the door to the Devil's Country was throwing itself open and closed, slamming with such violence that its framework had cracked. So had the plaster overhead. The light had dropped out of its fixture, and was dangling, along with a cloud of plaster, from a bare wire, describing a figure eight in the air as it swung.

It wouldn't have been Tammy's first preference to venture any closer to the slamming door than she'd already come but as she'd left the responsibility of Todd with Maxine, she knew it fell to her to protect Jerry.

The ghosts wouldn't hurt her, she hoped, as long as she didn't get in their way. She'd done nothing to harm them. If anything, she should be their heroine. But she wasn't sure that in their present state of high frustration they knew the difference between those who were on their side and those who weren't. They simply wanted to know where their long-awaited paradise had gone. Apparently some of them were certain it had been removed to some other part of the house to trick them: hence this crazy tearing up of the floor, and smashing of the walls. It was here somewhere, and they were going to tear up the fabric of the house until they found it.

Two of these berserkers emerged from the room, their faces smears of fury, and raced past her up the stairs. She waited until they'd disappeared and then she went to the door. With the light swinging giddily overhead the passageway pitched like a fun-house ride. She closed her eyes to snatch a much-needed moment of stillness, then opened them, and without waiting for the door to stop its lunatic slamming, she pushed it open and stepped into the space that had once been called the Devil's Country.

Maxine had had occasion to lie to Todd many times over the course of their working life together, but she had never lied more profoundly than when she'd told him—that day she'd announced she was no longer working for him—that there were more like him available on every plane. The image of hordes of potential Todd Picketts just waiting to be picked out of the hopefuls who flew into LAX every hour had been cruel nonsense. Sure, there were always good-lookers in any bunch; sometimes beauties. And sometimes—though very rarely—a beauty had some innate talent. But very few who came to Tinseltown hoping to snatch the brass ring had what the young Todd had possessed: the kind of effortless charm that an entire generation, men and women both, could fall in love with. He'd been that rarest of things: a universal object of desire.

Of course it didn't take much to taint such purity. But Todd had been lucky. Though in private he'd often been sour, envious and scornful, Maxine had successfully kept all that from the fans. Todd's image had remained damn near perfect. His only enemy was time.

And even that, in the end, wouldn't have mattered, if he'd allowed it to take its toll without shame. Look at Paul Newman, practically sainted at seventy. It would have been the same for Todd. People would have loved him as he grew old the way they loved certain songs: because he was part of who they were.

Maxine could have said all of this to him on the beach, if she'd been prepared to eat enough humble pie. Her words might even have persuaded him not to go into the water with Katya, and what a lot of grief that would have prevented.

But instead she'd been stupid and let the lie stand. And now they were here at the end of it all, and what had their petty warring earned them? Well, a lot of things she'd have preferred never to experience. Being out in the back yard with the ghosts, for one: that had been almost more than her sanity could endure. Seeing Sawyer torn apart that way was a horror she'd never be able to get out of her head. And then to make her way back through the undergrowth while some of his mutilators stalked her, sniffing after her as though they were dogs in heat and she the local bitch. There were no words for the horror of that.

And finally, this. Coming back inside the house to find Todd as near dead as made no difference, his face covered in wounds, his body all cut up. The emergency services were on their way, but even if the Canyon had been easy to find, which of course it wasn't, she didn't have much hope that they'd make it in time to help him.

He made a noise, his eyes fluttering.

"Can you hear me, Todd? There's an ambulance on its way."

For a moment his eyes opened a little wider, and he seemed to be making an effort to concentrate on the face in front of him.

"It's Maxine," she said. "Remember me?"

There was no recognition in his eyes. His breathing, which had steadily become shallower, was now so shallow she could scarcely see his chest rising and falling.

She dropped her head toward his, and spoke softly into his ear, as if to a child.

"Please don't go," she said to him. "You're strong. You don't have to die here if you don't want to."

He opened his mouth a little; his breath smelled metallic, as though he'd just swallowed a mouthful of old pennies. She thought he intended to tell her something, and put her ear to his lips. His mouth continued to move, but no sound came out, except the wet sounds of his throat and tongue working. She was bent forward for perhaps half a minute, hoping for something from him, but the posture was making her back creak, so she sat up again.

In the fifteen seconds it took her to lift herself up from her bowed position and sit up straight, the man she was tending died.

It was only when she started to speak to him—just repeating his name, in the hope that she might get some response from him—that she realized every trace of animation had gone out of him.

Very tenderly, she put her hand up to Todd's battered face, and touched his cheek. Many times over the years she'd gone on set to find that the makeup people had given him swellings or wounds that had looked grotesquely realistic. But they'd always been "movie wounds"; however bloody they got—and however much he was supposed to have suffered in their getting—they were never disfiguring. The Todd Pickett whom audiences had come to see, with his blue-green eyes, his dark, lush hair, his symmetry—his smile—none of that was ever spoiled.

But this, lying before her, this was a different spectacle entirely. Once she had closed his eyes, there was nothing left visible of the Todd Pickett the world had loved.

She extricated herself from beneath his corpse with some difficulty. It bothered her to be leaving his body just sprawled here in the passageway in such an undignified manner, but she didn't know what else to do. She needed to find Tammy, Jerry and a vodka, not necessarily in that order. Anyway, she thought, as she looked down at the corpse, what the hell did Todd care where he was lying? He was gone, hopefully about some better business than the rest of the ghosts who lingered around this damnable house.

The thought of them—of the undeniable fact of them, which she'd witnessed just a few minutes before—made her heart quicken. If the dead lived on after their demise, did that mean that was Todd's spirit in the vicinity right now, hovering around before he decided where he was headed?

She could feel herself blushing with self-consciousness, wondering what she'd done in the few minutes since his passing that he might have witnessed. Had she said anything asinine; or let go of some gas, in her nervousness?

Feeling a little foolish, but knowing she couldn't take a step without speaking, she said: "Todd? Are you here?"

Then she waited, looking around.

A fly had buzzed in from the back yard where the door was still open, and it now landed in the pooling blood between Todd's legs, where it supped eagerly.

She bent down and shooed it away. It rose giddily into the air, as though stupefied by the sheer scale of the feast that lay below. She swatted at it with the back of her hand and, to her surprise, she struck it. Down it went on its back, its buzz suddenly manic, as it careened around on the tile beside Todd's body.

Had Maxine been a deeper thinker she would perhaps have hesitated to kill the thing. But there'd never been any room for metaphysics in her life, and though she might once have heard in conversation that in some cultures a fly attending on a corpse must be treated reverentially, in case it carried the soul of the deceased, such possibilities were very remote from her way of thinking.

She put her foot down on the upturned fly without a moment's hesitation, and headed back into the kitchen.