Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

FOUR

Tammy desperately wanted to believe that she had indeed profited somehow from the madness-inducing journey she'd taken through the wilds of Coldheart Canyon. She didn't need anything as monumental as Jerry's healed tumor; just some modest sign to prove to her that, despite all the death and the suffering she'd witnessed, some palpable good had come of it.

Every waking hour her thoughts circled on what she'd experienced, looking for some sign of hope. Not miracles, just hope. A light in the darkness; a reason to live. But the more she searched, the more absurd the search seemed to be.

Common sense told her she should venture out into the world and start trying to live a normal life again. Perhaps if she joined a couple of women's clubs, or maybe even tried to find herself a lover—anything to change her focus; get her out of her head and back into a normal way of thinking. But she always found some reason to put off anything too adventurous. It was almost as though she'd used up her capacity for adventure during her time in the Canyon. Her trips into the dangerous territory over her front doorstep became briefer and briefer by the day. She started to get panicky when she got into her car, and the panic escalated so quickly that by the time she got to the end of the block she often had to turn round and head straight back home again. Going to the market had become impossible; she took to ordering essential food-stuffs by phone, and when the supplies arrived she'd make the exchange with the delivery guy as short as possible. She'd just take the stuff, pass over the money, and close the door, often not even waiting for the change.

She realized that this odd behavior was beginning to get her a reputation around the neighborhood. More than once she peeped out between the closed drapes and saw that people were lingering outside her house, some on the sidewalk, some in cars, pointing or staring. She'd become, she supposed, the local eccentric; the woman who'd come back from the wilds of Hollywood in a state of mental derangement.

All of this, of course, only added to her spiraling sense of anxiety, mingled with more than a touch of paranoia. If she answered the door to the delivery boy and caught sight of somebody in the street outside she naturally assumed the passer-by was spying on her. At night she heard noises on the roof and woke more than once certain that one of Katya's los niños had found its way to Rio Linda and was scrambling over the eaves, trying to get down to her bedroom window.

In saner moments (which became fewer and fewer), she knew all this was nonsense. But the very fact that she had saner moments implied that she was slowly giving herself up to lunacy. It was all very fine for Jerry Brahms to talk about having his cancer cured by the power of the room (and maybe he had; she didn't discount the possibility), but she felt as though whatever she'd been given in the Devil's Country it was affecting her mind, not her body, and it was not doing anything remotely healing. Quite the reverse. It was deconstructing her grip on reality, piece by piece. Some days when she woke the dreams remained attached to her all day like pieces of lint. She'd go through her waking hours in a half-stupefied state, coming into rooms and not knowing why she was there; leaving them again and remembering, then forgetting as she turned round. She was in a constant state of exhaustion. Her lids were like lead. Once, in the middle of the day, she found herself on her hands and knees in the bathroom, working at the tiles with her bare hands and Ajax, attempting to remove some spidery sketches of a certain country that she'd daydreamed into creation. Another time, she'd gone into the kitchen to find the faucet running, and a shape in the sink that looked like a piece of road-kill; a matted pelt, two rows of sharpened teeth set between black leathery lips. The force of the hot water slowly turned the cadaver over and showed her the broken head of something she'd seen in the Canyon, or in her dreams of the Canyon, foul beyond words.

She turned off the faucet. Steam rose from the mouth of the thing, like a last breath. Then it melted, fur and teeth and all, and was gone down the drain.

"Hmm," she said to herself, unimpressed by this ugly little show. Somehow she'd always imagined madness to be a more dramatic thing than this. Again the movies had it wrong. There was no grandeur in it; no exquisite folly. Just a pile of teeth and dirty fur in the kitchen sink.

That said, she knew that her mental decline was gathering speed. She needed to do something about it soon, or this journey she was on was going to take her away from herself completely. She would be a blank-eyed thing sitting at the kitchen table, wiped clean by banalities.